Author: Jay Mitchell

accoutability

The tough leader myth is outdated

July 5, 2018
Jay Mitchell

When we think the word “boss” or “leader,” we conjure an image of a tough individual who is focused on results and expects us to achieve them. Yet in our modern world, executives across departments, across countries, are foregoing this idea of leader to maintain a more positive image and perception with their employees.

No one wants to be thought of as the bad guy or gal.

And while connecting with employees and team members, showing them respect and providing them positive reinforcement and confidence is a real part of the effective leadership equation, primarily at the onset of a project, none of it means anything without follow-through. And by “follow-through” I mean accountability.

A Workforce Without Accountability Does Not Work

According to a Harvard Business Review report, one out of every two managers fails at accountability. It is one of the single greatest neglected behaviors of executives around the world and across executive levels. In fact, in the same report, the researchers shared that 46% of leaders rated “too little” for a category of “Holds people accountable and are firm when they don’t deliver.”

“And I expect to see this happen by August…” is met with crickets by August and shrugged shoulders by all involved.

While employees may feel less afraid of their bosses with lax follow-through, they also will fall into a place of mediocrity and complacency. They will not fight against failures or obstacles with ingenuous solutions. They will not be afraid of letting the company down and watching revenue performance tank. The risks for them are not apparent. What is the worst that can happen, they think.

The answer to that question is that overall performance will take a hit and revenue performance will dip — and negative revenue performance affects everyone in an organization.

The Positive Effects of Accountability

Accountability may label a leader as tough or harsh. An accountable leader may not be invited to weekend barbeques or asked to lunch. President Truman once said, “If you want a friend … get a dog.” Leaders are not called to be friends; an accountable executive is one who leads a team to success even if things are hard or if obstacles jump in the way of a goal.

In the coming posts this month, we will discuss how to achieve accountability (hint, you must hold yourself accountable too) and share examples of what can be if you practice a culture of accountability.

In the meantime, if you are interested in implementing an accountability strategy at your organization, contact us.

gdpr

How to react to the aftermath of the GDPR

June 28, 2018
Jay Mitchell

No matter how hard we try to see into the future, to prepare for market shifts and new requirements, some things can come at us like a plummeting piece of sky.

This is how many organizations may have felt about the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its aftermath.

What is the GDPR?

You have surely heard these four letters, by worried marketing departments and consumers bogged down by “updated terms and privacy” emails.

GDPR is a European Union regulation regarding data privacy rules and how organizations can use European citizens’ information, in which ultimately EU individuals now have more rights about how companies can use their personal data.

The major upset right now for companies all across the world: If an EU individual has not made a purchase with an organization, the organization must ask for that individual to opt-in to receive its emails — or else face penalties up to 20 million euros or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.

While this is a European Union–specific regulation, it does affect companies worldwide that are doing business with EU citizens, and it even protects European citizens living abroad.

The regulation was approved back in April 2016, so why is it that data analytics company SAS found only 49% of companies worldwide were prepared to comply with the now-past May 25, 2018, deadline?

When the Cadence of Business Reviews Is Disrupted

Earlier this month, I shared how important it was for business leaders to create a cadence of business reviews to always keep a pulse on their business.

To many, the GDPR mandate did not fit into this regular cadence, but it is in fact one of the reasons having regular meetings is so important: to prepare for and to react to laws and regulations companies have little to no control of, among other factors.

Beyond preparing for and complying with the GDPR regulations, now many companies could benefit from regular business reviews as it concerns their email marketing strategies and how they are communicating with EU consumers.

Since GDPR implementation in May, digital marketing agency Huge found about 28% of Americans have been ignoring these emails and 23% have actually used them to unsubscribe.

According to Transparency Market Research, email marketing is projected to be worth $22.16 billion worldwide by 2025, and a large majority of companies use email to reach customers and prospects.

With such steep fines, some companies have taken a sweeping approach with their email marketing strategies and have been wary of email.

What Companies Can Do About the Effects of GDPR

While GDPR is a complex set of regulations, companies can work hard now to comply and still connect with buyers.

  1. Understand the law.
    To react and charge ahead, it is worth understanding at least the basic tenets of the new law. Appoint someone to act as the expert within your company or even turn to experts outside your company for governance and direction.
  2. Know your audience.
    If your company is not doing business with any EU companies, then GDPR is no headache to you. But chances are your business works with both US and EU businesses. If this is the case, start segmenting your email lists to note which are US and which are EU (i.e. which need to be GDPR-compliant).
  3. Continue to review.
    Talk about GDPR in your business reviews. Pay attention to the impact it is having on marketing and sales, and be prepared to start strategizing creative ways to respond.

 

If you are struggling with low email opt-in rates and more, please contact us to discuss how to best move forward.

business review

The cadence of business review success

June 7, 2018
Jay Mitchell

The best business leaders have a pulse on their company at all times. They know what is working to meet their goals — and more importantly, they know what needs to be adjusted.

The business review, whether weekly, quarterly, mid-year, annually or a balance of all the above, allows a leader to maintain this omniscient awareness, as well as allows them to share the current business status and needs with the rest of the company.

A regular cadence of business review means no surprises at period-end. As they saying goes, “you cannot expect what you do not inspect”.

The Cadence of the Business Review

There is no one prescription for the right amount of business reviews. It differs between participants, framework, frequency, market and client situations.

The key is to establish a cadence of business reviews with the right mix of people, at various frequencies to discuss pertinent business information.

A business leader who brings their teams together often to report on wins, losses, opportunities and obstacles is not micromanaging but rather keeping a finger on the pulse, so they can move the business forward intelligently – helping their team overcome obstacles while also holding parties accountable for the outcomes.

Think about it this way: When you are going on a vacation, you have chosen a destination for a particular date — your goal. You can study and route the easiest, least expensive, fastest way to reach your goal, but invariably when you head toward your destination you will encounter unexpected challenges along the way. Heavy rain delays your travel. Road construction slows you down. Traffic congestion bogs down the intended route. You must keep one eye on the road and the other eye on the map to navigate around the obstacles and stay course for your vacation goal.

You need to know where you are to know where are going.

What a Business Review Might Comprise

When determining your cadence of business reviews, you will need to decide:

  • Frequencies
  • Participants
  • Durations
  • Framework of Review

And once you have decided these things, make them part of a regular routine.

A monthly business review may look something like this:

  • Participants: Sales leader, marketing leader
  • Length: 1-2 hours
  • Framework: Review successes from previous month; examine status of opportunities; review coming month’s activities; summarize coming month’s marketing and business development activities; recap monthly goals and tasks

While a quarterly business review may involve:

  • Participants: Sales leader(s), account executives, solution consultant(s), marketing
  • Length: 1-2 days
  • Framework: Review regional performance; discuss success factors to achieve annual performance goals; review individual account executive businesses; examine regional marketing activities for current quarter; summarize regional current quarter plan; conduct sales enablement and solution assessments

If you are interested in an outside eye to help determine the cadence of business review that would best benefit your business and your revenue performance, contact me.



{B2B News Network} The economy isn’t what you think: How to sell to today’s underperforming businesses

June 1, 2018
Jay Mitchell

Many of us like to think the economy has recovered and is flourishing after the recession. While various aspects have improved, a study we have conducted at Mereo for the past four years appears to say something many others are not—businesses are not thriving.

Mereo’s annual revenue performance index of Fortune 500, Global 500 and Russell 2000 companies for the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years uncovered similar trends to reports of previous years — which has been trending similarly since the recessionary period of 2007 and 2008 —underperformance on the top-line.

There was some improvement in performance from last year but still a relatively small percentage of companies can claim strong revenue performance. For instance, nearly 48% of Fortune 500 companies actually shrank last year (compared with 51% the year before) and nearly 67% of Global 500 companies shrank (as compared with 73% the year before). The somewhat brighter area was in mid-size companies, where a comparatively small 29% of companies shrank this past year.

Thinking about strong growth defined as over 5% revenue growth, we found that only 17% of the Global 500 companies, 25% of Fortune 500 companies and 47% of mid-size companies met this hurdle.

So for the fourth year in a row mid-size companies outperformed their larger counterparts, while the Global 500 performed the worst.

While this news seems dismal, it offers insights and opportunities to B2B sellers.

Visit B2B News Network for four tips for B2B sellers in today’s economic climate…

 

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Sustainable sales enablement depends on accountability

May 29, 2018
Jay Mitchell

Your sales team connects your company to its clients, your solution to their pain. The rest of your workforce helps sales find better-fitting clients, better-connect to those clients, and better-serve those clients with relevant messaging and products.

We discussed what sales enablement does and what it does not do earlier this month, but today I am going to answer how you — whether you are the CEO, CSO, CPO, CMO, CRO, etc. — can ensure sales enablement works toward your revenue performance (i.e. your bottom line) for the long haul.

Introspective Accountability

As a business leader, you help encourage that the cogs in the sales enablement team continue spinning. The tiniest shortcoming from yourself or an employee threatens to upset the whole sales enablement machine and to hurt your revenue performance.

Here are some strategies for holding yourself and your internal team accountable to sales enablement and revenue performance:

  • Keep dialogues with your team open about what is and what is not working in the buying journey.
  • Engage with your team and with other teams to discover insights and align messaging, efforts, etc.
  • Meet with clients to grow your first-hand knowledge about their current situation, desired outcomes, solution alternatives they are considering, how they are buying, etc.
  • Participate in sales trainings and reinforce the learnings with sales teams multiple times after those training sessions.
  • Talk to partner channels and listen to what clients are telling them about how your solution could help add additional value for the client.
  • Hold a quarterly sales council with your top sellers to discuss what they are hearing from buyers and what their sales team needs to succeed.

Extrospective Accountability

While the onus of your team’s accountability lies with you, there are a number of external factors you cannot very well control — but ones with which you must hold yourself and your team accountable to stay atop.

Here are some strategies for keeping ahead of external factors influencing your sales enablement efforts and sustainable revenue performance:

  • Talk to thought leaders, advisors, analysts, customers, client advisory boards and other outside influencers to get and keep a pulse of the market.
  • Ask tough questions, like “Are we meeting and exceeding client expectations?”
  • Look toward the future and honestly assess the pains your clients may experience, how your solutions may need to adjust to those changing demands and what other threats or opportunities may crop up.
  • Keep reviewing and adjusting your go-to-market strategy per the market and market forecasts.

It takes a leader who practices accountability for sales enablement to truly impact a company’s revenue performance. Be that leader. If you need assistance or a third party to hold you accountable, contact me.

 

Learn More About Our Sales Enablement Philosophy

sales enablement

Sales enablement and revenue performance

May 7, 2018
Jay Mitchell

Salespeople directly feed your revenue performance, and sales enablement feeds your salespeople. But who in your company feeds sales enablement?

The answer is everyone.

Sales enablement is not:

  • Sales training programs
  • Marketing content
  • Sales process
  • Client insights
  • Market pulse

Sales enablement is all of these components working together as a well-oiled machine.

It is each department of your business preparing your salespeople to meet the client face-to-face with relevant messaging, specific insights and sincere solutions. It is the salespeople preparing themselves with better skills, deeper knowledge and more. When your salespeople are enabled by the collective strength of the rest of your company, they are able to find the “moment of truth” conversations and excel in those dialogues with your buyers. These are the conversations that land deals and sustain your company’s revenue.

And sales enablement is just part of the whole equation.

sales enablement

To best serve your clients, you must leverage the interdependent operational disciplines of:

  • Demand progression
  • Solution marketing
  • Solution management
  • Sales operations
  • Sales enablement

Sales enablement in practice.

Ariba, a $450 million software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, lacked the support required to develop and enable their salespeople and had no consistency in sales process, which limited its ability to scale globally. Mereo principals helped reposition the company by partnering the marketing and sales departments, as well as the product team. Together, the teams gained a deeper and shared understanding of the buyers and embraced a compelling value proposition for those buyers. In the end, the global sales team was equipped not only with a compelling message but also a full package of sales tools to help them reach a “moment of truth” in the buying cycle. The result was a big lift in sales from 3% year over year in 2009 to a CAGR of 11% in the following three years.

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company success

The secret to making your employees value company success alongside their own success.

April 27, 2018
Jay Mitchell

When your employees see your company’s success as their own, they will work harder, work better and push themselves to achieve more time and again. This is all great but imagine how many companies actually reach this level of employee investment — few.

How can you encourage your employees to invest in your company’s success? It takes a three-part recipe of consistency, accountability and a sense of urgency.

  1. Consistency:

    Are you executing a consistent process? Is your leadership team delivering a consistent message? When leadership is consistent with process and messaging, your employees have greater confidence in your leadership and the company. Consistency fosters trust, enforces predictability and builds responsibility — which are pillars for excellence. When they can count on your actions and the company, they hold themselves more accountable, which brings us to…

  2. Accountability:

    Accountability is not top-down — it is a two-way street. Some leaders talk big but never back it up. Leaders need to hold themselves and their employees accountable, and employees likewise need to hold themselves and their leaders accountable. In the real world, accountability is also horizontal, that is professionals, teams and operational departments supporting one another and holding one another accountable to the dependencies. To achieve a culture of accountability, read up on the CEO of Vistage Sam Reese’s blog post, “Accountability Starts at the Top.”

  3. Urgency:     

    Inaction can be a trap hiding in the busyness of a packed calendar. Activity is great, but activity without purpose is false hope. That’s where urgency comes in. You need to create targets, goals and objectives with short-term and long-term deadlines. For example, your sales team needs to land so many new deals by quarter-end, or marketing needs to find X new quality leads by June. Without the urgency (which is underpinned by accountability and consistency), the targets slip and objectives are missed. And when these misses have implications for individuals, the team and the organization as a whole — that is something with which everyone can relate.

If the entire company fails to invest themselves in the company’s revenue performance, things will not run as they should. Though there is more to a company than revenue performance, all of those other things work together to influence the state of the company’s healthy growth. And when employees understand that, they have a better, more straightforward goal to get behind — because your company’s revenue performance success is every employee’s revenue performance success.



{B2B News Network} Instead of trying to keep up with martech solutions, CMOs should . . .

April 16, 2018
Jay Mitchell

There are more than 5,000 martech solutions available today, a nearly 40% increase in just a year (Chief Marketing Technologist Blog).

Tomorrow, there will be more. The next day, more.

For many chief marketing officers and CEOs alike, this constantly growing landscape can leave many feeling like they are behind, like they are missing out on opportunities and channels for success.

And the truth is:

You will fall behind with marketing technology.

Technology currently evolves faster than the capability of any human being. That will not change in the near future. Even if you are an early adopter, there is no way you can adopt all the new martech solutions entering the marketplace today — nor should you. Accept that you will not keep up with the technology.

Instead, focus on the current marketing technologies you have in place.

You have already invested in technology solutions. You have already worked – or are neck-deep in embedding – these martech solutions into your business framework. Rather than investing in new technologies that would disrupt what headway your team has been making, consider how you could invest in your people to learn how to use the tools more effectively and efficiently. Consider adjusting your annual marketing meetings to quarterly marketing meetings, where you look at metrics and decide whether or not the tools are doing their job — and the people using them are able to do theirs.

When you consider new technology, look at it through a lens of value to the client.

New martech solutions can promise you the world. Ease. Increased this. Inflated that. Better, better, better.

As a B2B leader, you have a responsibility to best serve your clients. Ask yourself, will this new marketing technology help me reach my clients right where they are? Will it better serve them? Will it help my team better serve them?

And remember, if you are a marketing executive, your clients are both the end customer as well as internal teams, like sales.

Read the full article at B2B News Network…

 

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revenue performance

Revenue Performance Concerns Every Employee

April 5, 2018
Jay Mitchell

Revenue performance is not just for the C-suite of leaders in a business-to-business organization. More so, it does not involve just sales or marketing, though sales and marketing are core pillars upholding the company’s revenue performance.

Every single person in a company has a stake in revenue performance — and they all play a part.

Like the old adage says: “Nothing happens until someone sells something.”

This essentially means that every single person is either assisting sales or is selling to the customer. You need finance to help determine the price. You need the marketing and product teams to develop a compelling value proposition. You need human resources to help hire the best people to connect with your customers. You need sales to lead the sales pursuits. And that is just scratching the surface.

Think about revenue performance in terms of building a tractor on an assembly line. There are dozens upon dozens of people who put their hands on that machine, from turning a screw to cutting a part to painting the metal, to testing and fulfillment. If one of those people failed to participate and fulfill their role, the tractor would fall apart on the customer. But when everyone works together, the tractors smoothly roll into the customers’ fields and the company makes money — thanks to everyone’s united efforts.

Likewise, when every single person in your organization starts to think in terms of revenue performance and adjusts their efforts and actions based on that, your entire organization aligns on a goal everyone benefits from reaching.

 

LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW TEAMS ACROSS YOUR ORGANIZATION CAN ENABLE SALES

sales training

The missing link in your sales enablement: Measurable goals and actionable change

March 22, 2018
Jay Mitchell

All sales enablement initiatives begin with good intentions. Yet, the training elements of these programs often become boxes that need to be checked, as fast as possible, by any means possible, for as cheap as possible.

  • Watch this video. Check.
  • Complete this many hours of training by Friday. Check, check.
  • Participate in this online training. Check, check, check.

Online sales training seems cost-effective and efficient in the short-term. But instead of a sales training program that will create change and improvement, your sales team winds up rushing through these online programs, often multi-tasking as they half participate and half check their email on their phones.

No one gets their hands dirty implementing the training. No one tries on the training. It goes in through their eyes (and their ears if you are lucky) and disappears as soon as the computer shuts down for the evening.

Sales training programs are part of sales enablement.

In a large organization, you as a leader must approach learning and development with this key question: How do we provide an environment that supports ongoing job and skill improvement?

To answer this question, you must understand your purpose.

  1. Understand your team’s and your organization’s weaknesses and opportunities.
  2. Create clear goals for the sales enablement programs and the training components of those programs.
  3. Include how you will measure whether or not those goals have been reached, in specific time frames.
  4. Incorporate a blend of online, in-person, listening and hands-on training programs.

Training and growth will not happen overnight.

Put in place practices for ongoing growth and employee development and incorporate methods to measure what your team is learning and how that is impacting your revenue performance.