Monday, November 17, 2014

CSC Graduates Participate in Expert Super-Seller™ Panel at Sales Association Annual Conference

Graduates of the Consultative Sales Certification (CSC) program contributed to an expert sales panel discussion during The Sales Association’s Annual Conference in Denver Colorado on November 13, 2014. The panel, Stories from Super-Sellers™ highlighted the successes and best practices of top performing sales and service professionals.

“We refer to CSC graduates as Super-Sellers™ because they have proven consistency and performance in eight consultative sales competencies. While they have all mastered each of these, every sales professional brings unique insights and field application of these skills,” said Jeff Arnold, Executive Director of The Sales Association.

Moderated by Marcia Gauger, CLO of DVR Learning, LLC and co-developer of the Consultative Sales Certification program and Tom D’Agostino, CSC Coach and Chief Training Officer of The Consultative Sales Academy, the panelists shared personal stories of how they build strategic relationships, grow sales opportunities and overcome challenges in dynamic sales environments.

“You have to come to client meetings with a point of view,” said panelist Rick Batia, Vice President of Sales, Mach 1 Global. “The days of just stopping in are long gone.” Batia shared best practices that he instills with his sales team such as using online tools like Newsie and Google Alerts to stay on top of what is changing and relevant to client businesses. “That way, you can bring insights to your clients that really add value and help them solve significant business challenges.”

Consultative Sales Certification is offered as a Sales Association member benefit. Graduates have not only demonstrated capability in eight core consultative sales competencies, but have also committed to excellence in each. CSC graduates subscribe to consultative selling and see themselves as advisors, seeking first to understand. This goes beyond understanding basic needs. They seek to understand their customer’s core business, their goals and vision and the motivation for each influencer. They position their solutions according to the impact on the business and address the individual motivation for each buying influencer.

“While training is a key component of the program, it is application and performance that matters,” says Gauger. “We have proven that sales and service performance is best enhanced when you concentrate on one competency at a time, deliberately apply the concepts during interactions with customers and receive coaching.”

“My environment is very technical and as an engineer, I never considered myself to be a salesperson,” said Richard Bowers, Technical Sales, Sandvik Coromant, Canada. “Now, I can say that sales is the career path that I am actively pursuing. Through this program I have learned that selling is a very teachable and learnable process. This has made a tremendous difference in my ability to read my customers and modify my sales approach according to what best appeals to each.”

Other panelists included Yvette Cheesebrew, Regional Sales Manager, Mach 1 Global and Jeff Rohr, Media Consultant. Cheesebrew shared the importance of communicating as a team and including inside sales and other operations team members in account planning in order to provide holistic solutions to clients. “I grew up in operations and am acutely aware of the importance of training all team members on consultative selling skills. I have learned that everyone, even the most veteran sales people have opportunities to grow.”

With a background in complex sales and strategic negotiations, Rohr emphasized the need to develop strong business relationships and partnerships with clients, “Especially with long sales cycles, you have to get creative and really listen to the customer to keep driving the sale forward.”
In addition to the panelist discussion, several recent CSC graduates were honored including Rob Spangler, Director of the Sales Association who was awarded his certification at the event.


Pictured left to right: Rob Spangler, CSC and Chief Operating Officer-The Sales Association; Jeff Arnold, President-The Sales Association; Jeff Rohr, CSC and VP of Sales Media Consultant; Marcia Gauger, CLO DVR Learning; Yvette Cheesebrew, CSC and Regional Sales Manager-Mach 1 Global; Tom D’Agostino, CSC Coach and Chief Learning Officer – Consultative Sales Academy; Richard Bowers, CSC and Technical Sales Representative-Sandvik Coromant Canada; Rick Batia, CSC and VP of Sales-Mach 1 Global.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Sandvik Sales Team Members Awarded Sales Association Certification

On May 16th, 2014, 19 members of the Sandvik Coromant sales departments from eight countries and nine different time zones were awarded Consultative Sales Certification™ (CSC) in a virtual graduation ceremony.  “This was not just an online meeting, but an actual graduation ceremony with presentations from students, faculty and awarding of diplomas”, said Jeff Arnold, Executive Director of the Sales Association who delivered the commencement address during the event.

The graduates have demonstrated the required knowledge and on the job application to achieve this prestigious certification.

CSC Program Administrator Marcia Gauger states “While training is a key component of the program, actual application and performance are what matter. Through our research we have proven that sales and service performance is enhanced when you concentrate on one competency at a time, deliberately apply the concepts learned during interactions with customers (real life role play) report on your experiences and receive coaching and feedback.”


Graduates have not only demonstrated capability in eight core consultative sales competencies, but have also committed to excellence in each.  CSC graduates subscribe to consultative selling and see themselves as advisors, seeking first to understand.  This goes beyond understanding basic needs.  They seek to understand their customer’s core business, their goals and vision and the motivation for each influencer.  They position their solutions according to the impact on the business and address the individual motivation for each buying influencer.  And, they position value according to each.   Building Value only works if it matters to each particular customer.  They understand the personal motivation and business impact and use this to position solutions. 


“My biggest gain was confidence. I have been in sales for five years and technically I was fine,” said Richard Bowers, a Sandvik Sales Productivity Engineer -Canada in his graduation address to the group.  “This was just one eye-opener after another. Every module was directly relevant to what I do every day.  At the end of the day, I am selling the same things, but now I present and communicate more effectively, have built better relationships with my internal and external customers, negotiate better and just approach my whole territory more efficiently.”


According to Emerson Aparecido, Sandvik Coromant – Argentina, “CSC is a complete program – it provides skills for how to plan and think before you act. CSC program provides global skills in terms of understanding customer needs, how to help customers with their accomplishments, how to handle complicated negotiations. Even though we have excellent value that we offer, if we don’t know how to address it, unfortunately we may not get the desired outcomes. I really appreciated the group conferences where we share best practices with other participants and review exercises and coach feedback that is fundamental to enhance our knowledge and development.”


Sandvik Coromant is the world’s leading supplier of tools, tooling solutions and know-how to the metalworking industry. With extensive investments in research and development they create unique innovations and set new productivity standards together with their customers. These include the world's major automotive, aerospace and energy industries. Sandvik Coromant has 8,000 employees and is represented in 130 countries and over 1,000 sales professionals.


The Sales Association is the premier professional society dedicated specifically to sales and business development professionals. For more information visit www.salesassociation.org.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

The Components of a Metric-based Strategic Account Plan


Strategic Account Business Plan TemplateWhen setting out to write or optimize a strategic account plan (the playbook for managing strategic customers / key accounts) to some, a reasonable first step may be searching the web for a strategic account plan template or for examples of actual account plans used by organizations in your industry or other reputable B2B sales organizations.  Microsoft Office Templates is one top-ranked resource in Google results for ‘strategic account plan’ where a standard ‘strategic account business plan template’ is provided. At the time of this post it has been downloaded over 200,000 times! 

The number of downloads suggests that a significant volume of sales and account professionals have needed a guide on developing an account plan for their business and perhaps, are even using this type of static template as their means to define their intent on meeting customers’ needs.  When you’re managing a customer of this magnitude, simply put– they deserve more than blanks filled out in a cookie-cut form.

When it comes to managing a ‘strategic’ customer, (an account that has been segmented by criteria to be managed strategically as such), you need an account plan that performs more than as a report on static facts, objectives and your organization’s intent to meet the customer’s known needs.  In order to manage the health and profitability of the account you need metrics and measurements that will enable the account team to identify opportunities and define strategy to expand profit margins, grow revenues, and develop a loyal, committed, and prosperous strategic account.

World-class Fortune 1000 and mid-tier suppliers with dependent, committed customers won’t share their account plan for reasons that keep them and their customers competitive— and if they did, it may not be one you’d want to borrow from necessarily!  As an adviser to prominent companies on sales and account management strategy, we can’t give away our clients proprietary secrets to strategic account management success, but we can provide you with a guide on developing a best-in-class metric-based strategic account plan.  Here’s how:

The Chapman Group has defined the components and metrics you’ll need to develop a Strategic Account Plan in this concise 2-page guide: The Components of a Metric-based Strategic Account Plan

We’ve also covered the mechanics necessary to drive and perform the right decisions and the right actions with the metric-based strategic account plan in a podcast titled Executing the Strategic Account Plan.

Click to play the podcast here:  http://chapmanhq.com/executing-the-strategic-account-plan-sam-best-practices/

Follow the best practices in the guide and in Executing the Strategic Account Plan so you can optimize your strategic accounts to realize exponential success in the growth of your strategic accounts’ relationships, revenues, and profits.

The Chapman Group
8955 Guilford Road, Suite 150
Columbia, MD 21046
Phone: 800.755.1905
http://chapmanhq.com/