Chris Whyatt thinks...

The origins of Get to Great™

2009-11-06T09:12:10+00:00

Get to Great™ can be traced back to 2001, when Chris Whyatt, its creator, was leading a project for Lotus / IBM to improve their bid win ratio. Chris realised Lotus needed to understand their current capabilities and define their aspirations before he could start to close the agreed gaps. Taking inspiration from the Capability Maturity Model, Chris built a five-level capability model covering the 12 critical success factors in improving bid capability. The subsequent project delivered a step change in bid win ratio from around 10% to circa 90%!

Chris subsequently used the same approach on similar projects for organisations as diverse as SAP, BNFL, Castle Care, HP, Getronics, Adobe, and Davis Langdon, all of which delivered significant step change in bid win ratios.

Upon successful completion of a project for Microsoft in late 2006, Jon Hughes (now with Integralis) suggested that a Sales Readiness model would be the next logical step; this was duly created with input from Jon and his team. All that was needed was an ‘umbrella’ name to cover the methodology, and Chris chose and trademarked Get to Great™ to reflect the nature of the desired outcome of a customer engagement.

Chris and Get to Great™ became part of Mentor Group in late 2008, heralding the creation of several new Business Development and Leadership & Management models, the most recent being Employee Engagement.

An open invitation to a Mentor Get to Great briefing

2009-07-23T11:08:03+01:00

Our customers are telling us that they need to deliver 20% more with 20% less, and therefore they need to transform their approach to leadership, sales, customer service, as well as other aspects of their business. As ‘do nothing’ is not an option, what you ‘do’ has to be done quickly and effectively, and deliver real, tangible benefits.

We would like to offer you the opportunity to assess your approach to two of these subjects – Leadership and Sales Readiness – and to discuss, with like-minded people from a variety of industries, how to approach making the changes your assessment highlights in order to transform your business.

Mentor Group is holding a series of Get to Great™ Breakfast Briefings in London and the Thames Valley between 8am and 10am on the following dates:

Bracknell at the Coppid Beech Hotel on Friday 25^th September, Tuesday 13^th October, Friday 20^th November and Tuesday 8^th December
London at Intellect Russell Square on Tuesday 22^nd September, Wednesday 14^th October, Thursday 29^th October, Tuesday 5^th November, Thursday 19^th November, Wednesday 25^th November
Watford at Watford F.C. Elton John Suite on Wednesday 16^th September

This free event offers attendees the opportunity to address the following questions:

Does your Leadership culture foster positive talent management?

· Leadership Culture - Does your organisation have a defined leadership culture and how well is it communicated and understood?

· Talent Identification & Recruitment – How well does your organisation identify internal and recruit external talent for future Leadership requirements?

· Leadership Development Delivery - How well does Leadership Development activity reflect the requirements of the organisation?

· Senior Management Commitment - How committed are Senior Management to the development of current and future Leaders of the organisation?

These questions are just part of the Get to Great™ Leadership model

How ‘sales ready’ is your organisation?

· Understanding your Market - How well does your organisation understand the current and potential drivers in its target market, the requirements of current and future customers’, and the competitive threat?

· Qualifying Opportunities - How well does your organisation make the decision to qualify and invest in opportunities throughout the sales process?

· Reviewing & Learning - How well does your organisation review and learn from the success or otherwise of individual opportunities?

· Delivering the Promise - How well does your organisation implement, manage, support and monitor the solution sold in order to meet the customer’s expectations?

· Defining, Communicating & Measuring Success - How well are individual and company goals, targets and objectives defined, communicated, understood, measured and reviewed?

These questions are just part of the Get to Great™ Sales Readiness model

If you and/or a colleague would like to attend this free event please let me know, or just drop me an e-mail and I will be happy to give you a call to tell you more about Mentor Group and Get to Great.

A false economy or a great idea - you tell me?

2009-07-01T16:48:35+01:00

I attended the Summer BBQ of the UK APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals) this evening, having played in their golf day that afternoon.

I spoke with several 'old' friends and was distressed to find that they had been made redundant by their employers in order to 'save money'.

"So who is going to produce the proposals and respond to the PQQs, the RFIs, the RFPs and the ITTs then?" I asked.

"The sales people" was the answer I heard again and again.

Now in my 'logical' world, if a sales person is doing the above they are not out selling, so there will be less sales activity, less sales, less money and so on. I also believe that a trained bid professional is perhaps better equiped to do this job than most sales people, and therefore the proposal produced by the sales person will take longer and may not be as good as the one done in partnership with the bid professional.

So, a false economy or a great idea?

Is your organisation 'sales ready'?

2009-06-03T21:36:51+01:00

Successfully selling your company’s capabilities to customers depends on many factors. I have spent a lifetime looking at this subject, focusing on what many people call sales readiness. Sales readiness is what underpins everything that sales and marketing does, including people, processes, and information. To help consider where you stand, I have broken it down into 5 segments and 13 key elements...

Getting ready

Fundamental to sales readiness is understanding your market; sounds simple doesn’t it, but these days ‘your market’ changes by the day, or even the hour. If you were dependant on the automotive industry six months ago you will be hurting now. When did your senior management team last spend a day reviewing their target market, its wants / needs, and what it will pay, as well as considering the ever changing competitive threat? If they haven’t done it in 2009 they are almost certainly out of touch.

If they do understand their market, they can be sure that what they sell and what they charge for it (aligned capability and pricing) are 100% aligned to that market, maximising their chances of making a sale, and a profit. If you don’t believe me, just look at the companies that have failed in the last year, and the way prices have dropped with so many types of products and services – market forces at work. An example of a company who have looked at their market and changed accordingly is Computacenter – almost unrecognisable from 5 years ago and adapting very well.

Now, to me, it all seems completely obvious and totally logical; but still companies don’t do it at all, or don’t do it very well, and pay the price on a daily basis. Why? Because it is easier to bury your head in the sand and just hope that things will right themselves on autopilot! As they say, if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

Experience shows that a structured approach, or sales process, greatly improves consistency of sales execution and outcomes. People who use the process improve their individual performance and effectiveness, and deliver results for the business. Sadly, many people believe that sales is an ‘art’ that doesn’t require structure, rather than a ‘craft’ that does; they are wrong. Just look at the world’s major corporations of the last 20 years, Nestle, BA, and IBM for example, and see what ‘structure’ did for them.

Finding business

Having established a solid foundation, you need to create opportunities to fill the pipeline. Demand generation has many sources; from major marketing campaigns to picking up the ‘phone and cold calling, but whichever your route of choice, it must be highly proactive, as it’s currently a buyer’s market. In today’s market ‘sweating’ your network of contacts, old and new, is a good place to start.

The continual qualification of opportunities is the next big area where we see huge scope for improvement on a daily basis; the more accurately this can be achieved, the lower the cost of sale or sales ‘overhead’. The big issue with qualification is that it is often subjective, whereas it should be applying logic, objectivity and historical information from your CRM system. Sadly, most sales organisations ignore the value of historical information, often not even capturing it; imagine Manchester United ignoring the video of last week’s performance when picking this week’s team – it would never happen. In my recent memory I can only think of one or two companies doing this even half decently, whereas it should be a top priority for everyone.

Winning business

Winning the business depends on developing a great win strategy, including the win price and your key differentiators, a ‘process’ made easier by the quality of relationship with the prospective customer. I wonder how many sales people could articulate a win strategy if put on the spot by their boss? Why is this? I believe that poor qualification causes sales people to be overloaded. If they could qualify harder and faster and create time to develop better win strategies, they would greatly improve their win ratio and reduce your cost of sale as a result.

At some point in the sale, prospective customers nearly always require proposals and/or presentations as a way of taking things forward, and these need to be customer focused, short, sharp and compelling. However, what we see is recycling in its worst possible form, in that sales people more often than not just resort to old proposals and presentations. The customer should rightly feel offended by this approach, as it is always obvious when it happens. It doesn’t take long to make the customer feel that the proposal or presentation was written for them, so why don’t you do just that?

Many sales organisations place a lot of emphasis on the negotiating and closing element of the sales process, and rightly so, as this is your chance to maximise profit and minimise risk. This can be best achieved by recognising a buyer’s personal wins, and doing some give and take, or trading variables, i.e. if you can I will etc. So why do sales people often give in so easily at the first sign of resistance? Probably one of two reasons; fear of losing credibility for underperformance or because their incentive scheme is revenue not margin focused. As they say, motivation drives behaviour.

Learning lessons

A few paragraphs ago I highlighted the criticality of historical information, and the issue arises again here. The single biggest point of failure we see in sales readiness is not capturing and applying the lessons learned from deals won and lost. This provides intelligence to inform every aspect of your approach to sales, marketing, product development and short, medium and long term business planning and strategy. If you take one thing from this article and apply it to your business, make it this.

One big beef we often hear from sales is that they are often ‘let down’ by their company when it comes to delivering the promise sold to the customer. Failure to meet expectations has a huge impact on costs, reputation, referenceability, and the opportunity for more sales. The solution lies in a better working relationship between sales and delivery, including shared access to pipeline information, of which more later. Many years ago a factory manager showed me a faxed order he had just received from a sales person for twenty high value machines. Great news says I, bad news says he – nobody had told him it was coming and on Friday before he had laid off all the people capable of making them as well as returning all the unused sub-components to the manufacturers! Now the sales person was blaming HIM for failure to deliver the promise.

Measuring success

Underpinning sales readiness are the management information and reporting systems and processes that enable customer and pipeline data to be captured and utilised to the benefit of the business, both short, medium and long term. The term CRM is often used in this context, and rightly so, however, CRM is NOT just an IT system, but a way of life for organisations who want structure and control of their sales engine.

If sales readiness had bookends they would be understanding your market and defining, communicating and measuring success; which means how well an organisations defines what success looks like at an individual, team and company level, and how well this is communicated, understood, applied and measured – a big ask, but mission critical. Do you understand where your company is going, what your role is in that journey, how you can contribute, and how you will be rewarded? If not, I suggest you ask.

In this article I have explained the 13 elements of Sales readiness. How well do you measure up? You could find out by using our assessment methodology, Get to Great™, a simple and effective methodology that enables organisations to assess where they are now and where they need to be in any number of key business areas. For more info please look at www.mentorgroup.co.uk

A great sales story... or two in fact!

2009-03-20T13:42:11+00:00

Years ago I did some work on bids for Amdahl (manufacturers of IBM look-a-like mainframes) and the now-retired Sales Director (real old school, brilliant guy) told me this story.

He went to see the IT Director of a major IBM customer and took an Amdahl mug (the type you drink coffee from stupid!) and offered it to the guy. The guy was not impressed apparently!

"I've just saved you £1m" said my friend. "The next time your IBM salesman comes in have that mug on your desk."

If you need ask, your're not in sales.

The second story concerns Leo Quinn and his time at De La Rue. I was lucky enough to be invited to their annual sales conference in Dallas, having just finished the design and implementation of their Opportunity Management process for Cash Systems.

Leo joined De La Rue the day the conference started, so addressed an 'all hands' group of 200 people as the 'new boy'. Having introduced himself, Honeywell legacy etc, he asked the audience to 'raise their hands' if they were in sales. About 50% of hands went up.

Turning to the first person with their hand down he said "What do you do?". "I'm in support, I take calls from customers with problems and help to fix them on the 'phone or organise an engineer to visit them".

Turning to the next person, he asked the same question. "I'm in Finance, I chase customers for payment". The question and answer routine continued for a few more identical conversations.

Leo then repeated his first question - asking the audience to 'raise their hands' if they were in sales. About 100% of hands went up.

If you need ask, your're not in sales.

e-auctions - what are your experiences - good and/or bad?

2009-02-22T19:33:58+00:00

e-auctions have been about for at least 10 years and I hear mixed views on them, mainly from people who 'win' them but never get any business as a result. What do you think?

Tiger Woods is celebrating the birth of his second child and hopes to return to competitive golf within weeks.

2009-02-10T18:18:08+00:00

I bet he does...

Update on Get to Great models

2009-01-12T11:15:06+00:00

There are now six Get to Great models. They are:

Leadership - developed in partnership with Mentor Group
Sales Readiness
Account Management
Bid Capability
Project Management - developed in partnership with Mentor Group
Channel Management - developed with Jim Moffat of Smith-Iverson

Details can be obtained from me at chris@gettogreat.co.uk.

We want to develop more models but for now these six will keep us busy.

Get to Great Group on LinkedIn

2009-01-06T15:11:00+00:00

We have decided to create a Get to Great Group on LinkedIn so that interested parties can share news, ideas and information relating to Get Great, naturally.

If you would like to join the group please click here LinkedIn Get to Great Group. Nearly 40 people have joined in the first 24 hours, so it looks like it was a good idea.

2009 will be a challenge; but one thing is certain, if people do what they did before, they will get what they got before!

2008-12-23T10:04:00+00:00

It's been a while since I last posted so I thought I should do a new post and wish you the best for the Christmas and New Year break, and for 2009.

I was just replying to an email from my good friend Steven Feldman (a truly honourable man) and was prompted to add as a foot note:

"2009 will be a challenge; but one thing is certain, if people do what they did before, they will get what they got before!"

So, whatever your approach to busines or your job was 12 months ago, think again, 'cos it won't work next year. Your customer has had to change, so, by the same measure, must you.

2009 will be about one thing - Leadership - for the country, for the world, for your business, for mine.

Next year sees the launch of more Get to Great models - all developed in partnership with our partners at Mentor Group; and the first new model is Leadership naturally.