Metz, The Social Concept

Sales 2.0 Chat: Miller Heiman's Richard Blakeman on Strategic Selling & The Social Customer

March 9, 2010

“The behavior that [a consumer brand like] Abercrombie wants is ‘who’s gonna want it where, by when’ If [they] don’t have that framework, then all of the social data is noise.” – Rich Blakeman, Miller Heiman

About a year ago, I lost a consulting bid proposal that I made to a small apparel company. My dad , a management consulting veteran, took a look at my 13-page whopper of a proposal, and said, “Adam, your proposal format is way too long. What’s your sales strategy, here, anyway?”

I realized, at that point, that I didn’t really have a formal sales strategy. And that made me realize that my proposals were also about 10 pages too long (they’re now about 2.5 pages). My dad sat me down at the dining room table of his Palo Alto home, and made me read over his old “blue sheets” and “green sheets” that he got from Miller Heiman strategic selling seminars over the years. My mind was blown. I had no idea that there were little sheets of paper that made total sense of the strategic sale.

I was pretty excited to sit down with Rich Blakeman, Miller Heiman’s VP of Sales. Blakeman’s a classic MidWestern sales exec – very relaxed, a 20-year IBM sales vet, and an all-around strategic selling smart-guy – the kind of guy you’d love to have retrain all of your sales managers.

Prior to the Sales 2.0 conference, I was honestly expecting an a sales performance company like Miller Heiman to take more of a backseat role in the Sales 2.0 and sCRM evolutions, so I’ve been really pleased to see the brand aggressively pursuing Sales 2.0 conferences, and inventing very utilitarian CRM integrations for Salesforce Microsoft Dynamics, SalesLogix, SugarCRM and OracleOnDemand.

“My mantra,” Blakeman said, “has been insuring that we’re not your father’s sales performance company. But there’s a double-edged sword there.”

“One side of that sword is that we’re one of the few people on the planet whose stuff absolutely works and have tens of thousands of companies who can speak to it working,” Blakeman said.

I realized that only about 50% of the vendors at Sales 2.0 could actually say that, assuredly.

“I think of companies like Google and Starbucks; the challenge for us is not around the methodology but around the adoption and behavior characteristics in a different world. People are saying things about you and your product, whether you know it or not,” Blakeman said.

And then, he jumped into my questions about social customer management without any hesitation. It was awesome. This isn’t something you see too often from senior sales executives. (He’s on Twitter , but hasn’t tweeted since October, as of this writing.)

“Our brand gives it a framework and a context that provides a common language and a common approach,” Blakeman said. “One of the things that seems to disappear sometimes, around sales tools and processes, is when we move out to the consumer, we’ve got all of these scatter diagrams around how people think, and act and feel.”

Blakeman cautions against chasing the end consumer unless brands have a strategic schema to support customer demand.

“You can’t act on that stuff unless you have a a common language to use to talk about it and a framework to act on it,” he said.

“The behavior that [a consumer brand like] Abercrombie & Fitch wants is ‘who’s gonna want it where, by when’ If [they] don’t have that framework, then all of the social data is noise.”

I asked Blakeman to take it back to my blue sheets and green sheets (the ones my dad used to win deals at Arthur D Little and SRI, back in the ’80s and ’90s) – what are strategic sales professionals supposed to do in order to use them in the Sales 2.0 social-sale environment?

The first part of [Sales 2.0] is [the question] ‘Where does all this ‘stuff’ collide?’ Blakeman asks.

“It first collides at the sales rep. What do they want? They want to make more money.In order to make more money, the sales rep needs more selling time. He really needs more things that are going to impact his customers in a positive way,” Blakeman said, referencing how Sales 2.0 technologies like SFA (sales force automation systems) increase selling time.

“This presents a great opportunity,” Blakeman said, “the intersection of sales process and sales tools – the point where rep meets customers. I’ve got a selling strategy in my blue sheet. My boss cares about my strategy for forecast reasons. All of those same things are critical as a part of my selling strategy. Likewise, all of the people who are involved – it best be inside my single source of truth.”

That single source of truth, for the brand, and for the customer, is the social CRM. And the only way to get sales reps to want to use is to make sure that they derive value every time they use the system, and that they never have to touch the same piece of data twice.

“We just make this simple but elegant integration,” Blakeman said. “We integrate the selling process and the sales-call process so that the Sales rep never has to touch a piece of data twice, or do a process twice.”

When a sales manager receives a call from a rep, asking for support on a sales call, they don’t need to have the rep put on a “fire drill”, justifying reasons for the call.

“We’re trying to get the rep to have more selling time, and give him tools to close more business. And management is going to have all of the information that they need to manage the business with,” Blakeman said.

That said, Blakeman warns today’s sales managers against asking Gen Y or Millenial sales reps to change behavior around the social customer, without bringing the organizational supports to completely embrace the social customer.

“Companies ask their sales and marketing force to change the way they do business,” Blakeman said.

“The rep says, ‘You’ve asked me to be different – what are you doing now?’ Here’s the challenge with the millenial work force: they don’t have time or patience for poor change management. This is not a company-for-life environment.”

Those are prescient words from a sales leader who’s seen a few technologies come and go in strategic sales.

By my estimation, it would be foolhardy to question Miller Heiman’s relevance, at this point, because somebody’s gotta keep the smarts, and the heart, in this game.

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