A short personal response to Josh Greenbaum’s SAP FKOM blog


Well known analyst Josh Greenbaum posted 2 blogs with his views on how SAP sales reps should be selling to customers .

The New Year in SAP-land: Selling Customer Success (Part I)

The New Year in SAP-land: Selling Customer Success (Part II)

I absolutely enjoyed reading it – and want to make a few minor comments , strictly in a personal capacity . I don’t work in sales at SAP – I am on the engineering side of the house , but I work closely with sales all the time . But please don’t consider it as some kind of official SAP response . I am just typing as fast as I can on my phone in response to tweets from Josh and Jon Reed .

1. Relationships – do they matter ?

Josh starts off slightly dinging the idea of relationship based sales . I disagree with that position All business is done between people and for sales to move away from transactional realms to transformative realms – a strong relationship is a must .

The IBM quote of no one getting fired for hiring them – IBM didn’t earn that with clever marketing . IBM earned it with the blood , sweat and tears of its employees trying their best to do what is right for their customers . When I worked there , I have had CXOs tell me that “one reason we hire you is that we know that you will do right by us if things go bad in a project”.

This is true with SAP too – no one just listens to a transformative message and then writes a check . You have to work really hard to build a relation with key people at the customer to earn your seat at the table to tell them that story.

2. Quota vs Customer’s long term interests

I don’t think these are mutually exclusive things. And when they are – I won’t hold the sales people accountable – I hold the managers accountable .

Sales people have little to no choice in determining quota – that is done by sales leaders . So telling them to not worry about quota is essentially telling them that they can’t worry about putting food on the table for their families . That will not go anywhere in terms of getting another behavior . The possible course of action is that the quotas are set realistically and rewards being set on not just quota but on other things like customer satisfaction scores etcetera . Again – I agree with Josh , just want to point out that sales people cannot act on that message directly . This can happen only top down for the most part – and not bottom up .

3. Sell own services VS Partner services

I think this is a sure shot recipe for disaster . The SI ecosystem gets a bad name because of a few high profile projects that turned into disasters . What does not get mentioned in news is that vast majority of SI projects are successful . And when things fail – it is seldom that it is the SI that caused the failure by themselves . Most of the time the customer and SAP would also have done something to contribute .

SAP can never scale enough to cater to all service requirements . So it is in SAP’s best interests to make sure that SI partners get a good share of that business . SAP has an excellent services arm , but most projects need non SAP skills too to make them work . And the SI partners usually have plenty of expertise there .

SAP is primarily a software company – and what I would rather see is an acceleration on engineering efforts to make sure that customers don’t need as much services to use our products . But where services are required – I think it is best to either partner with other SIs or let the customer pick the best SI , including SAP services .

SI partners have fantastic relations at several customers . By partnering instead of competing all the time , SAP gets to leverage those relationships . Channel is good business for SAP – and SIs are important part of the channel business . Many SIs are also resellers .

4. Selling training and education

Quite agree with Josh here . Training should be part of every deal in my opinion too . However , my wish is that ultimately the software should not need any training to use it in vast majority of cases . That onus should be on engineering to make sure we build products that need less and less of training .

5. Don’t sell mobile , cloud etc

Again, completely agree – what an organization needs is a business strategy and not a mobile or cloud strategy . However , most customers start small and will have to satisfy themselves that the software works well before they think of transformative use cases . Selling cloud and mobility licenses are an integral part of helping those customers without bleeding the profitability in short term .

Ideally , the sales should be of solutions – not individual technology products . But that is again something that lies with product and solution management . Sales can only work with things they have in the bag . And when the SKU list is vast – no one in sales can realistically figure out what solutions are possible by combining all the cool toys . That means some portfolio rationalization needs to take place – which is not controlled by sales people .

Apart from these small points , I am more or less in great agreement with Josh . SAP and other technology vendors should change how they sell . It won’t happen over night and it won’t happen without customers changing their buying habits too . As I have always maintained – the sole judge of innovation is customer , and not vendors or analysts. All I can hope as an SAP employee is that customers continue to trust SAP in 2014 just like they did for last four decades .

It is hard being a sales leader


Off late, I have run into a lot of highly stressed out sales leaders – at work, at airport lounges and at assorted other places including at customer sites. It is real hard being a successful sales leader.

In most jobs, if you do well in current role – you are generally setting up yourself well for your next higher role. But I doubt that is true in sales . Many of the best sales people I know made mediocre sales leaders when they got promoted. And some of the top notch sales leaders I know today were just about average sales people in their prior life. While such things do happen in other job functions too – I have a strong feeling that sales kind of bucks the general trend.

To begin with – many organizations do not start grooming sales people into sales leaders early. They like sales people to be laser focused on quota and will not recognize the other skills they will need as they move up the chain. And compared to a developer or a finance person or something at the same level, the remuneration for a young sales person doing well in their job is pretty high. So the behavior patterns needed for narrow objectives of the organizations are rather strongly reinforced early in their life. I think this is also the reason why several successful sales people like to continue as individual contributors and not get promoted to leaders.

A developer who grows into an architect or development manager or a VP of development is not expected to code at that point. But  sales leaders have to occasionally take matters into their own hands and sell directly. That is not really the hard part – the real hard part is to resist the temptation of taking matters to their own hands too often in sales situation.

If you have an A team for sales, the chances are that they won’t sit patiently through a cadence call and take instructions and report status in a structured way. And many sales leaders are not very good at sales operations. It never ceases to amaze me on how long it takes for some of them to understand the need for good operations and hire a good COO . Good ops leaders are worth their weight in gold -once you find them, keep them close. However, you always need to watch out for where you draw the line on ops efficiency. End of the day – you need the sales to happen and reporting is an after effect. Don’t let controls screw up front line sales . It is a very hard balance to strike – especially for those sales leaders who totally hated controls when they were doing front line sales.

In  a big sale I did at IBM as an account partner – my deal strategy required a senior partner to come in as a “closer” to get the deal signed. I did not really need that given I had a great relation with the customer CIO and his staff, and we had done a good job in understanding each other. However, I was so tuned to having a closer in such big deals. Thankfully, when I pinged my boss to show up – he said ” this one is on you buddy, call me when you have it signed”. Words cannot express the sense of elation that balanced out my sense of panic. He was a senior guy and totally saw that the defined process is only a guideline – and I needed help in seeing that. Now, this is my guiding principle in any situation – sales or otherwise. Do not use “process” as a rigid mandate – use it only as a rough guiding principle. As long as you have the trust of the manager that you are ethical and responsible – you will have the support you need.

What is the most important asset for sales people? That would be the relations they have nurtured with customer contacts. This is also why a lot of Sales Force Automation systems get implemented by companies who want to keep that data. This is also the reason why most sales people do not care to put the information in these systems. It is hard to get the sales people to share those relationships. However, as a sales leader – your very success is dependent on your ability to share your relationships with your team so that they can go make the sale. This is the most counter intuitive thing for most sales leaders in their first leadership appointments.

As the size of the organization increases, there will be a number of over lay sales roles created to make sure there is sufficient attention on all important stuff. Too often – this results in lack of clarity and vast majority of leaders just become “checkers of the double checkers”. Eventually, everyone and no one is responsible for the actual sales or the lack there of. Over lay functions cannot be avoided when a company has a large number of products and vast geographic coverage for markets they serve. I have seen upwards of ten people “managing the spreadsheet” and “checking on status” for same sale in some situations in past life. It is a rough life to be at the receiving end of that mess. And this is only flavors of sales people. On top of that – there will be general managers of products, HR and assorted others who will need to be kept informed too. They cannot be blamed for asking “who is the customer here ? you folks or the company that actually is paying us?”.

Finally, there is the love-hate relationships with channels. Nothing demonstrates misaligned goals more than the goals set for direct sales and channel. Everyone loves channel up the chain – except the people held directly responsible for the quota for the same business. If you put direct sales and channel in conflict via goals and processes – you have no one else to blame for the resulting chaos. It is a hard lesson – with very few right answers. These are strategic goals to be set at the CEO level and lower level goals should be aligned perfectly to that strategy.

Despite all these things stressing them out day in and day out, all my buddies in sales leadership roles still keep their heads up and motivate (ok ok, occasionally even manipulate) their teams to achieve the big targets. I hope they have a less stressful 2014.

 

 

Acid test for leaders – a good night’s sleep!


How do we figure out if we are leading people as opposed to getting in their way ? Reason for the question is – if we can’t figure it out , we can’t change our course and do better .

Yet, being critical of oneself is the hardest thing to do – definitely the case for me,but also for many people I know .

I had a lot of discussion on the tactics of leadership with friends this week and I thought I will jot it down here , mostly for me to fix my own flaws as an aspiring leader .

My way of looking at this is rather tactical – And borderline selfish – I just try everything possible to stack the deck in my favor by doing a few things

1. Leadership thingy is mostly about people – not process . So the trick to being an effective leader is to carefully create the team you can lead well .

2. I need to be sure of one of two things at least – either I should get a clear direction of what is expected of my team AND/OR I should be empowered to figure out what needs to be done and get the minimum resources (people , time, money etc) to get things done . If these conditions are not met , I happily say NO to the assignment .

3. Try everything you can to get out of your team’s way once you set the goal . This is the hardest part for me – one way or other I always seem to get in the way – with good intentions, but with less than optimal results . If I am the smartest guy in the room over and over – it clearly shows I didn’t hire well , and hence I should worry -A LOT.

4. If/when my team has a hierarchy – then one of my big priorities is to make sure the managers get out of their people’s way too at the earliest . It is easy to delegate responsibility – the hard part is to delegate authority .

5. Encourage debate over elegance in meetings . It kills me to sit in meetings where everyone is asked to shut off phones etc and someone speaks with a set of slides and says this is a report out of past, and this is what we are going to do going forward . Such meetings absolutely kill me – and I prefer emails for such discussions . If people meet on phone or in person – they should be willing to challenge and be challenged . If not – don’t go to that meeting . I don’t go to many such meetings – and if I do, I get out the soonest I can.

6. Watch out for the team and build a culture where they watch out for you and each other .This perhaps I should have put higher on the list . If people won’t watch out for each other – it is hard to be a good team . This doesn’t happen in large teams – and hence my preference for small teams working together for short duration and then dispersing to form other teams . In almost all cases – small action is better than grand strategies .

But all things said , I have an acid test for leadership . The comfort I like the most in my life is to get a good night’s sleep . So if I don’t get that – I usually know something is not quite right .

Finally , celebrate success at every possible point . Negativity is easy – takes no effort and it takes a lot to get out of it . Celebrating small successes along the way keeps everyone closely knit – and it helps get a good night’s sleep .