Centralizing Sales in EMEA — A Solid Trend

This post was contributed by Sherry Paterra, general manager of Phone Works, who works with our largest global clients that are transforming their sales models to take advantage of Sales 2.0 practices and technology. She was recently at an off-site client meeting in the UK, which inspired her to share her thoughts.

We’ve seen the centralization of EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) inside sales organizations by our technology clients increasing since 2009, and my recent trip gave me some new insights into this trend.

What are the economics behind this decision?

C-level executives are generally in agreement on the rationale:

1. Transition poorly performing sales teams to a more metrics-driven culture.
2. Realign field sales and inside sales ratios and headcount to implement a SaaS-based selling model, which is predominately phone-based with field overlay; to decrease the cost of sales across remote or lower-margin accounts; and to test a lower-cost sales model for SMB (Small and Medium-sized Business) and channel segmentation.
3. Reduce field headcount to support a hybrid sales model of inside sales reps handling field visits, determined by customer requirements.
4. Accelerate EMEA sales productivity and revenue gains due to consolidated management and a metrics-driven operating culture.

The transition and implementation is often complex and not always easy.

What are best practices emerging from the leaders of US-headquartered companies centralizing EMEA inside sales?

• Senior-level executive teams comprising a mix of US-based and EMEA experience.
  US-born executives know the cadence and value of inside sales to a field organization.  EMEA-based managers understand language and cultural barriers and opportunities critical to accelerating EMEA-based selling.
• More complex compensation planning.
  European countries each have a salary/commission ratio. Therefore, a centralized location must carefully evaluate skill requirements, create job descriptions and define compensation bands that allow management to attract the right quality and quantity of local talent.
• Language and culture come first, followed by product specialization.
  Inside sales teams are organized by country/language first, followed by product specialization within each country group if required. Dedicated technical support is available to assist the team, so inside sales can have a consultative business discussion across a broader product portfolio.
• Field–phone ratios are realigned.
  Most new EMEA inside sales organizations test and support the hybrid rep model: 90% of selling is completed inside, while 10% of opportunities may require a face-to-face visit by an inside sales rep. Clear rules of engagement exist to identify how best to support the cultural/business need for face-to-face meetings while managing budget and margins. Field reps are realigned to larger thresholds and higher ASP.
• Site-selection teams study a variety of factors.
  In addition to pure cost, site selection should also consider the availability of applicable multi-lingual sales talent, accessibility from corporate and whether individuals will be willing to relocate there. Most countries have development agencies that are available to provide location statistics and help with maneuvering around the local rules and requirements.
• New SaaS-based CRM apps, Sales 2.0 tools and Playbooks become standard.
  Strategically, centralizing sales in EMEA provides for testing a new global sales footprint with a smaller, more contained financial impact. The new organization contains and measures the benefits of transitioning to a new CRM, Sales 2.0 tools and use of cloud-based Playbooks and onboarding practices.

Have you had similar experiences in centralizing inside sales organizations in EMEA or elsewhere? What best practices have you noted?

Tags: EMEA, inside sales

Sales 2.0 Leaders Interview Series: Prospects Quadrupled with Sales 2.0

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders. This is the first excerpt from my interview with Ned Trainor, president and co-founder of BuildSite, an online product database used by the construction industry.

Ned launched sales in a traditional way in an attempt to meet with the manufacturers who would be his advertising customers. When results didn’t meet expectations, he began working with my company, Phone Works, to design a new way for BuildSite to engage customers by phone and online, track every prospect contact and close sales without leaving the office.

Anneke: How have you morphed your business model?

Ned: We had a 1.0 approach to selling: If you keep hitting them hard enough, and we all work harder, we’re going to get there. We knew we had to find the early adopters, so we needed to put a lot more customers in the funnel at the top to get really qualified good ones out the bottom. We were also somewhat resource-constrained.

Phone Works contributed a professional approach to sales management, as well as to actually selling. We’re putting as many as four times as many prospects in the top of the funnel as before. We’re using Salesforce.com as more than a contact manager. We’ve adopted Phone Works’ 7-touch sales process, which keeps the sales funnel full of qualified opportunities and does an effective job of getting the word out and then reinforcing it.

The 7 touches work. We were doing touch 1, and then a month later we’d have touch 1.5, but we never had a deliberate planned approach to selling. Now, I call this person, I send an e-mail, and then I follow up in two weeks, and we leave some voice-mail messages, and we make many phone calls. Suddenly you catch him off-guard on Friday afternoon, and he’s actually interested in talking to you: “Oh yes, I’ve gotten your material. I actually would like to have a conversation.”

The other thing we’ve done is that we’ve almost completely stopped using PowerPoint, which is great. In our “pre–Phone Works era,” as we call it …

Anneke: Is that like the prehistoric era?

Ned: It was back when man had a lot more hair. We had clubs. I swear, that’s kind of how we went out there. If we hit them hard enough, we could get it — but you could only get one animal out of the herd at any given time, so we kind of descend on this one customer, and if we can close these people, we’ll make the quarter — and then we’ll go on and do it again.

So we adopted the 7 touches, and we upgraded our collateral substantially. We had another year of experience with our advertising, so we had the ability to do a true media kit with all the metrics an advertiser is looking for.

Our prior approach was we would get an appointment with a prospect and then we would do a PowerPoint presentation of 20-something slides. We would do the talking, and they would do the listening. We’d say, “Any questions?” and there would be a few, but it wasn’t very engaging, and I found it boring. I think the people on the other end of the line did, too.

Now we send the media kit, and we send a lot of physical collateral out. We mix it up. We send e-mail, and we send them a package, and we have our little BuildSite “Stimulus Package” with a $5 Starbucks card. It adds very little to our cost of sales, and everybody loves it.

… We send out our physical collateral, and then we have a follow-up discussion with them. We just engage in a conversation, which is really the goal of 2.0 selling. We chat them up, so it gives us a lot more time to listen to what their concerns and goals are, and what they’re looking for. We do the research in advance, so we’ve read their corporate materials. We can meet them on their own turf.

It’s better for our customers, and it’s a lot more engaging.

Read the full interview with Ned Trainor in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: inside sales, Sales 2.0

Inside Sales and Field Sales Harmony

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders, which will appear in my next book. This excerpt is from my interview with Bill Donellan, vice president of the Americas sales teams for i2, a company that provides intelligence and investigation software for law-enforcement, intelligence, military and commercial organizations.

Anneke: No new Sales 2.0 project is flawless. What were some of your mistakes, challenges or failures?

Bill: We’ve had a lot of challenges as we transformed our marketing. That’s been a big challenge for our inside sales team, because there has been a gap in lead-generation activity.

Also, while the inside sales team has kept the outside reps focused on large opportunities by handling our smaller transaction sales, opportunities in that size range decreased in the past year. With greater focus on larger deals, our outside reps are building bigger deals based on solution selling. Examples include how we position all our products around high growth areas such as fraud and cyber.

Anneke: Did your field sales organization readily accept inside sales?

Bill: (laughs) Field sales reps can’t appreciate inside sales until they’ve had a chance to work with good inside sales reps. Not everyone has had that opportunity, because not every company has a top-notch inside sales team. Besides that, many field sales reps don’t always want to delegate tasks, which makes it challenging for them to work in a team-selling environment. Phil (i2′s VP of the State and Local sales team) and I had to manage through the process and reassure the reluctant members of field sales that it was OK for inside reps to touch the customer first. We got everyone on the phone together to talk about what each sales rep, inside and outside, was doing on every account. Outside reps had to learn that the burden was on them to help their inside teammate come up to speed and let them take ownership — and that it would benefit them in the long run.

Anneke: How did management support the success of inside sales?

Bill: We had to monitor the program closely, listen in on phone calls and coach everyone through the value-selling process. And we had to ensure we had the right comp plans.

Anneke: What are the key things to get right with compensation plans?

Bill: Comp plans shouldn’t create competition in a team environment. They need to reinforce the goals of the program and the company.

Anneke: How long did it take for field sales and inside sales to work comfortably together?

Bill: It took two or three months. After that, field sales realized the value and was reassured the inside reps knew what they were talking about. With new field reps at Documentum (Bill’s former employer), it was the same: It took six months for the field to get comfortable with the inside group. Our goal in both companies was to find a way to work it out with no turnover.

Read the full interview with Bill Donellan in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: compensation, field sales, inside sales, lead generation, Sales 2.0

A Unique Understanding of Inside Sales Compensation: Take Our Survey

We’ve just released our annual survey covering compensation for inside sales professionals. The survey evolves every year with the help of our clients and the inside sales community, who review and edit the questions before we release it. It’s crucial to get the questions right, as an increasing number of companies start up or grow their own brand of phone and Web selling initiatives. Because we at Phone Works spend every day starting up, expanding, optimizing and testing inside sales groups of all sizes, we have a unique perspective on what inside sales professionals and their executive managers need to understand when budgeting and structuring incentive compensation. Asking, “What do your inside sides reps earn in base salary and commission?” is no longer a specific-enough question, as specialized roles emerge.  Consider, for example, the differences in hiring profiles, job requirements, objectives and compensation in the following positions:

• “hybrid” (inside/field) reps who spend most of their time “inside” but also travel when appropriate
• reps who engage, generate and qualify sales opportunities but do not close
• reps who manage a territory with a field rep partner and carry a team revenue quota
• reps who only sell new business or only sell to existing customers
• reps who only renew service agreements or subscriptions monthly, quarterly or annually
• VPs, directors or managers who have other managers reporting to them vs. a team of reps as direct reports

Take a look at the (free) compensation survey reports we’ve produced in the past. And if you want early results that will help you with end-of-year planning and budgeting, take this year’s survey now.

Tags: compensation, inside sales, survey

Sales 2.0 Leaders Interview – When Planets Align: Sales and Marketing

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders, which will appear in my next book. This is the second excerpt from my interview with Andrew “Birchy” Birch, CEO of Sungevity, a leading provider of home solar-energy systems.

Sungevity is creating Solar 2.0 through Sales 2.0, and proving it is possible to work for social change and make a profit. Birchy worked with my company, Phone Works, to test and implement a customer-focused inside sales system and successfully introduce the principles of Sales 2.0 to the solar-energy industry.

Anneke: A key theme in Sales 2.0 is sales and marketing alignment. Marketing programs really drive prospective customer interest in Sungevity’s options. How are marketing and sales working together?

Birch: A lot of solar companies have fantastic experience in installation and technology, but the majority aren’t as professional as they could be in marketing and integrating that into sales. We’ve hired great people with really strong marketing skills, and with [Phone Works’] help, we’ve implemented some of the best practices in the inside sales industry. It’s really about the people who do those jobs having that skill set; that hasn’t really happened in the solar industry to date.

Step one is the people, and step two is the process and what you’re actually doing. Our marketing campaigns tend to be more focused on the online segment, and we do a lot of PR just because this is such a fantastic story about positive change. We do high-impact things such as the White House campaign, and we emphasize that going green is now easy with a zero-cost solar system. We try to get that message out through non-conventional PR channels, as well.

That integrates to sales through our online design tool. Sales has to manage the volume going through the design phase and manage the quality, which is really key. Then sales obviously needs to have active communication on a daily and hourly basis, through the software, to see what’s coming down the funnel and make sure each of the sales people has a good pipeline of candidates.

Anneke: What would you say to a CEO who’s managing a more traditional business? Why even entertain Sales 2.0?

Birch: It seems very logical that all CEOs would be, first and foremost, focused on the customer. My belief, having implemented inside sales in this industry, which hadn’t really seen inside sales before, is that this is a fundamentally better customer experience, so it’s definitely worthy of testing. Thereafter, assuming that is correct, the economics will take care of themselves.

Read the full interview with Andrew “Birchy” Birch in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: inside sales, Sales 2.0, sales and marketing alignment