I’ve seen all sorts of marketing mistakes over my career (and committed many of them myself). In general, I think the most costly mistakes have to do with personnel. Hiring the wrong person costs a fortune, not only in training and rehiring, but also both in opportunity cost and credibility. Hiring people who are both a cultural fit and excellent at what they do is an art that is only improved through experience. And yes, recruiters can help with the process, as long as they are themselves good hires and not simply trying to fill a position with a warm body.

But hiring is more of a general management function and not necessarily a marketing mistake per se. In marketing, the most common mistake I see is around differentiation. Companies just don’t dig deep enough to understand and support their differentiation strategy. Let me give you a few examples that I found just by running a Google search for Clinical Research Organizations:

• So what makes us different? We’ve structured our organization into five distinct business units: Early Phase, Phase II/III, Late Phase, Medical Device and Pharmaceutics.

• Our steady but measured growth has been fundamental to maintaining our reputation for commitments to timelines, quality of clinical service offerings, and budgets. Our clinical research expertise include Phase I-IV studies for Rx, OTC, Device, and Generic products. We have worked with a wide array of clients including large pharmaceutical companies, established biotechs, and start-up drug development organizations.

• We are committed to providing clients with critical thinking, customer service and quality deliverables. Our 25+ years of experience allows us to optimize each investigational product’s chance for success. We are dedicated to ensuring that each clinical trial is executed to the highest possible standards.

• We invented a new way to deliver services called Right-Sized™ Clinical Research Solutions. That means you get the right mix of resources, at a fixed price, to fit your specific trial or registry needs. Not more. Not less. And our contract services are amplified by our proprietary eClinical technology – TEMPO™.

Why say what everyone else is saying, when you can create your own unique space in which to sell your products and services? How much easier is it to sell for a CRO that can articulate that clear competitive advantage, rather than one who sounds like every other CRO?

So while I’ve seen plenty of marketing mistakes around inconsistent branding, campaigns that don’t properly measure results, and ineffective advertising, the most common mistake I see is the lack of a differentiation strategy. For me, differentiation is the cornerstone upon which all other marketing activities sit. Get it right, and it makes every other marketing task easier. Ignore it, or do it wrong, and everything else is difficult.

Like many such questions, the answer depends on the size of your company and the stage of growth. For early-stage companies, there is so much work that needs to be done to understand the market and to develop a messaging platform that resonates for the target audience. Because this work is critical for both the sales and the marketing departments, I believe it can be beneficial to have one person manage both areas.

The messaging and differentiation need to be tested and re-tested in these early days. The sales people are on the front lines, getting this feedback on a regular basis, and need to be able to share this information quickly with the marketing team. Having a VP of Sales and Marketing who is talking to both areas can help with creating this closed-loop process.

As the company grows, it becomes harder to effectively manage both areas for a couple of reasons. The sales and marketing executives need to go deeper in their areas to be increasingly effective. By that, I mean that they need to have a complete grasp of the strategic and tactical avenues available to them to take a $5MM company to $20MM, then to $100MM. It is rare to find someone who has that depth of experience in both the sales and the marketing disciplines.

But if you can find the right person, having both roles under one leader can help in one other key way. In many organizations there is finger-pointing and division between sales and marketing. The more you can help these two important departments to feel responsible to each other, the better the integration and the more successful the top-line efforts. Having the same leader over both areas can help to build a bridge and can emphasize the importance of the departments working together.

Obviously, as the company grows it also becomes more difficult to manage larger numbers of employees. I’ve seen it way too often that an executive or manager is tasked with leading too many direct reports, particularly in smaller companies. The truth is, you can’t effectively manage more than five direct reports. It takes too much time to give each employee the mentoring, guidance and feedback they need (and deserve). Particularly in Sales, there is a point of diminishing returns when trying to manage larger numbers of direct reports. Add in marketing staff on top of that and you are short-changing both departments.

Interestingly, it is at the very small and very large companies that the VP of Sales and Marketing position makes the most sense. At the small end, for the reasons we discussed before. At the large end, because then you can afford to hire experts to individually manage the sales team and the marketing team and who can “go deep” in each respective area, leaving the top executive to focus on big picture items. Often at small-growing-to-medium companies, there isn’t the luxury of hiring these experts, because the emphasis is on cash conservation.

When I was at an eClinical technology company during their rapid growth stage, we spent a lot of time in the sales and marketing departments focusing on differentiation. We started out talking about the fact that we were the only eClinical technology that had integrated EDC (electronic data capture) with eDiaries (for patient reported outcomes) and IVR (interactive voice response) technology to provide a complete set of patient clinical data. When this competitive advantage began to fade, as all competitive advantages eventually do, we had to focus on something different, so we did market research and discovered that ease of use was a competitive advantage. We coined the tagline, “Making eClinical Easy.”

But creating a tagline is the easy part, creating true competitive advantage is how great companies are built. For us, ease of use meant more than just having technology that was easy, it meant that every interaction the customer had with us needed to be easy. From contracts to support to implementation. We did this specifically because our research had told us the importance of the clinical site in the value chain between the sponsor (drug company), the CRO (contract research organization), and all the other outsourced vendors. Our theory was that if the clinical site was happy, the sponsor would be happy.

Once we had identified that competitive advantage, we started to look at every process in our organization to identify how we could make things smoother for our clients, but specifically for the clinical site.

I thought of this experience in light of the recent articles on clinical sites having trouble with EDC technology. This a full five years after we had identified it as a competitive advantage. I wondered if no one else had identified it as a competitive advantage, or if it is just too hard to focus a company around creating true differentiation.

In my experience, there are few companies that do a really good job of creating differentiation. This is perhaps more true among CROs than in just about any other industry segment I’ve consulted with over the years. Look at the marketing material from ten mid-tier CROs and you’ll see the exact same words used over and over again. And while it is perhaps worse in this segment of the life sciences, it is true of almost every industry I’ve consulted in. Executives, by and large, don’t understand the link between marketing messages, brand, positioning, and actions. And they really don’t understand just how important this differentiation is to closing sales. A salesperson that can clearly articulate his company’s differentiation is twenty times more effective than a salesperson that doesn’t have differentiation (or can’t articulate it).

One CRO/technology company that has done this better than most is Clinipace. I’ve had several discussions with their CEO about differentiation and while I didn’t always like their emphasis on price as a differentiator, what they figured out was that the clients who fit their ideal customer profile actually prefer transparency in pricing. So they used that effectively and are now figuring out other ways to differentiate. Must be working because they were recently named to a list of companies to watch in our region.

I came across another life sciences company recently that has a ton of potential. They’ve also been named one of the up and coming companies in our region. And yet, they haven’t spent time working on how to clearly articulate their competitive advantages. Their technology is excellent, but it is a relatively new approach. That means they have to educate the market to a degree, because prospects aren’t used to solving the problems they have with this type of technology. In that type of a go-to-market scenario, it is exceedingly important that the company can clearly articulate its advantages over the status quo. Yet, as I looked through their marketing material, I found five different tag lines in use below their logo. If they don’t know who they are or what their competitive advantage is, how will their prospects?

Companies that have a clear competitive advantage and can articulate that effectively through their marketing and sales, tend to rise to the top in market share. Interestingly, the competitive advantage doesn’t have to be one thing, it can be several things.

A few years ago, I was working with a company in the education space that brought teachers from around the world to lead K-12 classrooms. We weren’t the only company that brought in teachers from other countries. In fact, there were other companies that had more teachers for critical shortage classrooms like math and science. We had some of those math and science teachers, but we also brought in teachers in less needed subject areas like English, Social Studies, History and Art. In the last year I worked with them, we had over 1700 teachers in the US, more than three times our nearest competitor.

The reason for our competitive advantage wasn’t just that we were highly selective and only brought in less than 5% of the teachers that applied to our program. Yes, quality of the teachers mattered, but it was only one of our competitive advantages. You see, we also made sure that we had a complete turnkey service. We actually trained the teachers how to drive in the U.S. We leased them cars. We provided them with health insurance. We taught them how to handle the discipline and administrative functions that are unique to U.S. school systems. It was this combination of services that provided us with the competitive advantage that led us to be market leaders. We made it simple for school districts to hire our teachers.

Competitive advantage is an area that too many companies ignore at their own peril. As we always say in marketing, if you don’t define who you are, your competitors will do it for you. For those of you who think you don’t have any competition, you aren’t looking hard enough. Building competitive advantage is a trait that executives should ingrain in their teams, not just in the sales and marketing areas, but in the entire company.

]]> http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/08/01/building-your-competitive-advantage/feed/ 0 http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/25/measuring-salespeople-in-a-bad-economy/ http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/25/measuring-salespeople-in-a-bad-economy/#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:17:51 +0000 admin http://salespop.biz/?p=97 A friend of mine at a small CRO (contract research organization) asked me recently about how to measure sales performance in a down economy. She wondered if the measurements should change when the economy goes south. I thought it would be interesting to put it in the blogosphere and see what kind of comments we get here.

My first question back to her was to ask if the targets had changed. What I find, particularly in smaller organizations, is that forecasts are built based on a combination of what you’ve done in the past and what your board expects you to do in the future, as opposed to being built based on what you know from your clients. This approach to forecasting fails to look at how current conditions may impact your market and sets a team up for failure. (Note: revenue is more predictable the larger the organization grows and becomes a much more important activity as public scrutiny of your results grows.)

In the life sciences, forecasting revenue is typically easier than forecasting new contract awards, because clinical trials have a fairly predictable time span and revenue is earned as work is done over the life of the trial. Contract awards are typically much harder to predict in the life sciences because the trial start date is variable depending on feedback from regulatory agencies on the protocol, site selection, and sometimes even funding. Most salespeople I know in the life sciences are compensated based on the new contract awards, which is also, most commonly, the number used for their measuring stick.

Salespeople are accountable for their number and should drive what that number will be for the upcoming year. In order to build an accurate forecast, salespeople should be spending time at the end of the year with every client and near client. Look at their pipeline and see what work they’ll need to support hitting their goals. As an example, if they are a development company with five indications in active trials, find out what new trials will be starting, if the trials are funded, and which ones they’ll be doing in-house versus outsourcing. This is the basis for a more accurate forecast. Then look at how many new clients you’ll get from various sources. Use both historical data and current trends to predict this as accurately as possible. If you signed five new clients the past year, but the signs are that funding will be cut and fewer trials will be run, look at a number between three and five for the current year. Add in any new products, services or price changes that you know will affect the forecasting period.

That’s the start of a more accurate forecast, but that really only answers part of the question raised at the beginning of this blog. The real question is, do you measure salespeople differently in a bad economy than in a good economy? While having an accurate forecast, based in reality is an important part of the answer to that question, it isn’t the whole answer.

I believe that the number of new clients added, the amount of new contract awards won, are valid metrics. However, they only measure the end goal. I know, some people believe that the final score is all that matters, but I don’t happen to be one of those people. As a sales leader, I’m much more interested in whether my team is doing the things we know they have to do to win new business. Particularly in the life sciences sale, there are so many things that are out of a salesperson’s hands, but what they can control are the things they need to be measured on. You can’t make a client buy because you need the sale, but you can make sure you are in front of them when they are ready to buy.

A salesperson can be measured on getting the right information to drive the sale forward. Have they identified everyone involved in the buying decision? Have they identified and mitigated the risks for the buyer? Are they preparing for their meetings in the right way? Are they involving the right people from your organization at the right time? All of these things are harder to measure than whether they hit their number, but they are more important in identifying whether your salesperson is effective or not.

A salesperson can’t control if one of their prospects suddenly has four of their five indications put on hold because funding has evaporated and the prospect has to focus on the most important study. But they can control whether they know about this in time to recover from it, and they can be positioned so that when those other studies do go live, they stand a chance of winning them.

So my answer to my friend is that, no I don’t think how a salesperson is measured should change depending on the economy. I always believe that salespeople should be measured on doing the right things repeatedly in order to win business. But I do think that targets need to be adjusted based on what real information you have on the clients and the market.

For those of you who live under a rock, LeBron James held an hour-long, primetime television special this past week to tell the world that he was dissing his home town of Cleveland and taking his basketball skills to Miami. Rather than tell his team face-to-face, he opted for the public spectacle. It was so poorly handled that it made many of those who love him on the basketball court turn away from their television in shame for him. And then his former team’s owner, Dan Gilbert, posted a letter on the Cleveland Cavalier’s site saying that LeBron was a coward and that he quit on the team — all of which may be true, but came off like the tantrum of a spoiled child.

So why I am I worried about the effect this will have on my profession? Because here you had two businessmen (yes, LeBron is more business than basketball) that are in the wealthiest one-percent of all the people in the world. You just know they have teams of PR professionals working for them and have spent countless hours in media training, yet it wasn’t enough to circumvent this meltdown. And I guarantee you that their PR professionals are the best that money can buy.

Now, I can see Dan Gilbert ignoring the advice of his PR team in publishing that letter. More than once I’ve been overruled when advising a CEO (much to their chagrin later). But I don’t believe for a minute that the television special was LeBron’s idea. That came from his management team. And they did a terrible job preparing him. The reasons he gave for leaving, even if true, came off as so selfish. And he just wasn’t polished. He stumbled for words and didn’t sound like a billion dollar brand, he sounded like an uneducated egoist.

So is this just a case of “everyone makes mistakes?” Or is the state of the PR profession really in this bad of shape? I think what it really shows is the disconnect between brand and message. Throughout my career I’ve watched people try to build a brand that doesn’t match what their words or actions are saying. It never works.

LeBron’s brand is about fun, athletic endeavor. He dances during games. His commercials use puppets. His dunks are highlight reel spectaculars. Why showcase him in a setting that was somber, had no athleticism, and that focused on the negative side to his brand. You see, to be a top-notch athlete requires a self-serving attitude. You must forego many of the things that people associate with generosity, like family, self-sacrifice, and compassion. You are trained that to be the best, you must focus exclusively on what is best for you, and develop an instinct for the competitive kill.

The message was delivered in a way that only focused on the negative aspects of his brand and that didn’t allow him to shine a light on the positive aspects. It’s like a company who has built their brand around customer service being a part of a panel on disruptive technologies. Even if they have good technology, the panel doesn’t serve the purpose of advancing the positive aspects of their brand.

So in the end, I think LeBron’s decision was completely valid and fitting with his brand. But the way he chose to share his decision was a huge mistake. And his PR and management team should have known better. Yes, it was a tremendous opportunity to be able to highlight LeBron in a nationally televised special, but they neglected to ask the more important question: Will it highlight him in a positive or a negative way?

Of course, in all of this discussion we should not forget those masters of PR at BP. Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, has been conspicuously bereft of common sense. One can only hope that his PR advisors have been giving good advice that, for some reason, he just isn’t taking. If on the other hand they are not being proactive enough in handling this crisis situation, they should be fired.

It’s been a couple of interesting weeks to be a part of the PR world. One isn’t sure whether to bury a head in the sand or start really playing up the other aspects of one’s consultancy.

Mistake #8 — Blaming Your Sales Team Instead of Your Marketing

As much as I harp on demanding personal accountability from your salespeople, I also see far too many companies that ask too much of their sales team. They require them to be lead generators, marketers, PR people, event coordinators, technical sales engineers, database administrators, proposal writers and contract managers. This isn’t realistic. To have an effective sales team, you need your team to prioritize sales activities. And you need your marketing team to do their job, which is to build awareness, differentiation, and leads.

When I see sales teams that are underperforming, I always check the company’s marketing first. Is their messaging clear? Has awareness been built in the market? Is there true differentiation, or are they also-rans? Are they supplying leads to the sales organization and what is the quality of those leads?

Especially in tough economic times, marketing is often cut, while sales is unaffected. Often the opposite should happen. Focus on the marketing and use fewer salespeople when demand is down. Your salespeople will earn more and be happier, and you’ll be staking out market growth while your competition is staying neutral or moving backwards.

Your salespeople play an important role in the marketing of your products and services. They provide real-world feedback and can share reasons for wins and losses. They can test messaging and tell marketing what works and what doesn’t. But asking your salespeople to be marketers is not fair to them. And salespeople who agree to do it are shortchanging themselves. At the end of the day, they are measured on sales performance.

If your sales team is underperforming, ask yourself this question: Have you given them every tool they need to be successful? Focus first on how you are differentiating your company from all the competition. What can your salespeople say that is truly unique from what the competition is saying. Examine what your marketing team is doing to generate demand and to help the sales team build relationships with prospects. Look at your product demonstration and honestly evaluate the relative strength. Look at what part of the market you are targeting and determine if your ideal customer profile is appropriate. Then, you can start turning your eye towards your sales effectiveness.

]]> http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/10/the-last-of-eight-life-science-sales-mistakes-blaming-the-wrong-people/feed/ 0 http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/09/the-seventh-of-eight-life-science-sales-mistakes-implementing-a-crm-too-soon/ http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/09/the-seventh-of-eight-life-science-sales-mistakes-implementing-a-crm-too-soon/#comments Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:00:51 +0000 admin http://salespop.biz/wordpress/?p=75 In addition to neglecting the sales discipline as a trainable, repeatable process, there are several other mistakes life science executives make when creating and managing sales forces. In this eight-part series, we’re going discuss these mistakes and some strategies you can employ to avoid them.

Mistake #7 — Implementing a CRM Before a Sales Process

This time we’re going to look at a mistake that is really more common in young companies, or companies that are starting a sales department for the first time. I’m always amazed at how few small companies with sales teams of two to three people, actually implement a CRM system. The CRM system represents part of the intellectual capital of an organization. I’ve sold two companies based solely on the customer list, not because of technology or process patents.

The customer/prospect list is one of the most valuable assets of your company. It needs to be cared for, reviewed, and kept up. Too many small companies believe that salespeople will bring in their own rolodex and take that information with them when they leave. You can’t let that information leave your organization. For the same reason that I don’t believe salespeople should “own” the relationship with the customer, I don’t believe you should shortchange the importance of building your customer and prospect database.

I believe entering information into a CRM system is an essential part of the sales process. Not just for keeping track of customers, prospects and contact history, but to build forecasts and track opportunities. Inexpensive programs like ACT! will do in a pinch, but there are so many really good web-based programs such as Salesforce.com and Zoho, that can do even more and work really well for a traveling, dispersed sales organization.

While there is technology that can enormously help a sales team, such as a CRM system, it is important to have a sales process in place before implementing too much technology. First, because it is difficult to know what technology is best until you know what you need it to do. Will you have leads coming in that you need to distribute automatically? Are your territories geographically based or divided in some other manner? What do you consider a qualified lead versus a non-qualified lead? How do you determine whether an opportunity is a 40% chance of a win versus an 80% chance?

Going through a CRM setup before you answer many of these questions is a mistake. You’ll just end up reworking the CRM later, when you have many of these questions answered. If you don’t have someone familiar with setting up a sales process, hire a consultant to do it and then to oversee the set up of the CRM based on the process they set up.

The use of technology in the sales process is an important step, but you want to make sure that the technology reinforces the sales process, not diverts from it. Salespeople that are required to use the CRM and then do manual reports or spreadsheets to track their accounts will soon grow tired of the administrative requests. You want the technology to be a part of the sales process, not a burden over and above the process. Most importantly, you want your salespeople to be spending their time building relationships, not databases.

]]> http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/09/the-seventh-of-eight-life-science-sales-mistakes-implementing-a-crm-too-soon/feed/ 0 http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/08/the-sixth-of-eight-life-science-sales-mistakes-letting-salespeople-be-lone-wolves/ http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/08/the-sixth-of-eight-life-science-sales-mistakes-letting-salespeople-be-lone-wolves/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:00:04 +0000 admin http://salespop.biz/wordpress/?p=73 In addition to neglecting the sales discipline as a trainable, repeatable process, there are several other mistakes life science executives make when creating and managing sales forces. In this eight-part series, we’re going discuss these mistakes and some strategies you can employ to avoid them.

Mistake #6 — Letting Salespeople Be Lone Wolves

The complex sale is complex for a reason. The sales cycle is long. There are lots of people involved in the decision process. And there are many layers of an organization to navigate to get the right information. In the life sciences there is another consideration you must always keep in mind — most buyers don’t trust salespeople. For all of these reasons, it is a mistake to let your salespeople act as lone wolves.

The concept of team-based selling is really important in the complex sale. Having operational support, regulatory support and executive support in the life sciences sale is crucial. When a salesperson tries to handle the entire process themselves, they typically come up short of the competition.

There is value in integrating your outside sales team with your operational team, particularly if your salespeople are working out of their homes. There is so much good information that is can be lost when you strand your salespeople in the field and don’t have them regularly speak to and work with operational team leaders. Feedback from prospects and clients that is critical to developing new products and services can easily fall through cracks in the communication, unless you integrate your outside salespeople with other members of the team.

I have long supported a closed-loop process between operations, sales and marketing — where information comes in and is passed along among all involved parties. So the entire company is working for the customer, based on very real information that is coming in and shared among all departments.

The flip side to this level of involvement is that the salespeople need to do their jobs properly and not call in additional resource until justified. If the salesperson doesn’t yet understand the challenges in the prospect organization, they shouldn’t be using operational people to uncover that information. Instead, strategy should be developed as a team and shared among the entire team to help win business, but only after the salesperson has done their job to qualify, discover and prioritize the opportunity.

Mistake #5 — Thinking Technology Sells Itself

Over the course of my career, I’ve seen technology that sells itself occasionally. The iPhone is an example of a device that is so well-designed and so intuitive, that it does sell itself to a great extent. Even so, my wife wasn’t sold on the iPhone until I upgraded and gave her my old one. Now she admits it is the best phone she’s ever used. The point is, even technology that sells itself needs salespeople who can address less-eager areas of the target market.

The situation is different in the life sciences. Because of the risk-averse nature of buyers and the follow-the-leader mentality, few prospects want to be first to try a new technology. Even so, I’ve seen numerous executives in the life sciences who believe that all salespeople have to do is show prospects the technology and they will buy it. This is a trait particularly rampant in technology companies.

I consulted with one eClinical technology company a few years ago and no matter how much I tried to tell them not to sell the technology, they just didn’t get it. They were proud of their technology and thought it differentiated them. And perhaps it did. But differentiation is only worthwhile if the difference is something the market truly values.

Particularly in the life sciences, buyers rarely care about the technology, they care about cleaner and faster data. And even more than that, they care about safety. Why are such a huge number of clinical trials still run using paper? Because it is a known, safe choice. When risk mitigation is such a strong concern, you have to address that before you even start to address the benefits of your technology. Even when you can show that technology provides measurably better clinical results (better data), it is still an uphill battle to get many life science buyers to change from a tried and true method to a newer technology.

Rather than selling technology or thinking that the technology will sell itself, your sales team needs to do a better job of understanding their clients’ business. They need to work to mitigate the risk associated with the products or services you sell. And they need to spend less time on a demo and more time on building trust and credibility with the client.

Rushing to the demo is a disease commonly associated with the technology salesperson. But until you’ve mitigated risk and understand what problems the buyer is trying to solve, you can’t give an effective demo. Like we discussed in Mistake #4, if you are measuring your sales team based on how many demonstrations they give, you are measuring the wrong things and asking your team to do something that only encourages poor sales behavior.

]]> http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/07/the-fifth-of-eight-life-science-sales-mistakes-thinking-technology-sells-itself/feed/ 0 http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/06/the-fourth-of-eight-life-science-sales-mistakes-measuring-the-wrong-things/ http://salespop.biz/index.php/2010/07/06/the-fourth-of-eight-life-science-sales-mistakes-measuring-the-wrong-things/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:00:12 +0000 admin http://salespop.biz/wordpress/?p=69 In addition to neglecting the sales discipline as a trainable, repeatable process, there are several other mistakes life science executives make when creating and managing sales forces. In this eight-part series, we’re going discuss these mistakes and some strategies you can employ to avoid them.

Mistake #4 — Not Measuring or Measuring the Wrong Things

There are two mistakes that are most often made around metrics. The first is not measuring at all. Those executives that believe sales will just happen, or that sales is an art that can’t be measured are fundamentally wrong. I believe that personal accountability may be even more important with salespeople than with other staff. Partly because they are often on their own out in the field and need some level of oversight to be managed appropriately. It is essential that you measure those things that show progress and improvement towards goals.

However, many times I see another mistake around metrics that is even more damaging to your top line growth. That is making the metrics onerous or too numerous, often resulting in metrics that are measuring the wrong behaviors.

I believe strongly in the concept that if you keep doing the right things repeatedly, you’ll have success. The challenge to this principle is that you must be certain that you are doing the right things, and you must be measuring those things correctly. Remember there is another principle that says if what you’re doing isn’t working, try something different. The real problem in the life sciences is that it takes so long to build relationships, that you have to give your strategy plenty of time to work. Changing after six weeks because you don’t see results yet is a recipe for failure.

The difficulty with metrics is that they need to measure real progress, not busywork. I don’t know how many times I’ve consulted with companies that were measuring the number of phone calls made, the number of demos given, the number of meetings set up. The only thing the number of phone calls made tells you is how busy the salesperson was. I suppose there is some limited value in knowing that, but I’ve always thought that if you hire good people, you don’t have to worry about them being busy. How much more valuable is it to know how many decision makers they talked to versus the number of calls they dialed? Talking to decision makers means they are being smart in their approach and that the messaging they are using is working.

As a sales leader, I’ve always cared more that my salespeople were being smart and figuring out who they needed to call and were actually getting through to them versus just knowing they got voicemail 45 times a day. And rather than measuring the number of meetings set up, look at how many meetings are set up with decision makers where they get a definitive commitment to either move forward or not coming out of the meeting.

I’ve also always liked to measure information gathering. I believe that information is the key to the complex sale. Are you measuring when your salespeople have identified the decision makers in the sales process? How about when they’ve identified an opportunity and it’s level of urgency? Are you measuring when they add new key titles to the CRM? When they meet face-to-face with people in the decision process for an opportunity that is closing in the next six months or less?

Executives fall back into predictable methods of measurements when things get stressful. When sales goals aren’t being hit, many executives (and board members) who have only passing experience with the complex sale, believe that more rigid measurement of busy work will get their salespeople active and drive new revenue. They want to measure those tangible things like phone calls, meetings, and demonstrations. But what they really need to be looking at even more closely is the effectiveness of their salespeople and their ability (and desire) to build relationships by providing value to prospects.