Brandon Hall Group Executive Interview with Ryan Kubacki

 

Ryan Kubacki, President, Holden International

Ryan Kubacki was recruited to Holden International in 2006 to solidify Holden’s position as the world’s leading sales effectiveness consulting firm specializing in competitive sales strategy. As President, Mr. Kubacki leads the firm’s strategy, team, research, and resources, as it helps client organizations “outsell their competition,” building upon the more than 600,000 sellers it has trained in 25 countries since its founding in 1979.

Mr. Kubacki is a recognized expert in winning competitive sales deals and spends a large amount of time working with clients around the world, conducting both keynote speaking and leading “must win” competitive deal coaching clinics for large pursuits. Mr. Kubacki is working on a new book about competitive sales strategy based on a 12 year research project of 28,000 enterprise sellers and over 1,000 deal coaching sessions.

Prior to joining Holden, Mr. Kubacki was at Microsoft Corporation, where he held sales and marketing leadership roles in both the field and headquarters. As Business and Marketing Officer for U.S. Central Region, he directed sales operations and field marketing for an 18-state region with a $1.4 billion quota. Before Microsoft, Mr. Kubacki was Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Calypso Systems, a Microsoft Gold Managed Partner. Mr. Kubacki started his career at A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting company, where he specialized in sales and marketing effectiveness.

Mr. Kubacki received an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree in government from Harvard College. He and his wife Jana and their three children live in Naperville, IL. Mr. Kubacki serves as Vice President on the Development Board of Saints Peter and Paul School, is active on the Harvard Club of Chicago Schools and Scholarship Committee, is a member of the Corporate Directors Club, and coaches youth sports for the Naperville Park District.

How have the objectives for sales training evolved for companies over time?

The sales profession over the past ten years has gone through a transformation. For prospects and customers, the only way to really learn about a company’s products and services was to have a sales person call on you. Sales professionals were considered information providers for product specifications and service offerings. The selling aspect of a sales professional’s job was not to focus on “closing” an individual but rather providing enough information about the features and benefits of a product or service to convince the prospect or customer that they should buy it.

In today’s environment, the landscape has completely changed for the sales professional. With the launch of the Internet, prospects and customers can now perform extensive research on products and services on their own. The information on the Web is not only a place to learn about all the details of a product or service but to learn about current user experiences with the product or service. Blogs and consumer websites are abundant and the information they provide goes beyond what most sales professionals can or in some cases want to provide.

Sales professionals in the Information Age need to become business advisors rather than information providers to prospects and clients. Sales professionals need to shift from selling their products and services to selling solutions that address their prospect and client challenges and unmet needs. The ability to develop a deep understanding of your prospect or customer is the key to being successful. With deep understanding comes insight and wisdom about your prospects and clients. From here, a sales professional can take a more consultative approach with their prospects and clients and work with them to provide highly targeted solutions that specifically address the critical success factors for a client or prospect.

Sales professionals must be very proficient at collecting data and information regarding their prospects and clients. They must be able to build a knowledge continuum that provides a constant source of greater insight and understanding into the business challenges and opportunities that are facing their prospects and clients. Secondly, a sales professional needs to find purpose in the data and information and relevant value that can provide wisdom about their prospects and clients. This wisdom becomes the springboard for the business advisory relationship with their prospects and clients. The continual application of this wisdom is what wins over prospects and solidifies client relationships.

I know what I just explained is what should be happening in the market but I am uncertain as to how much has really changed. I believe that many companies are still probably focused on training their sales teams to provide data and information about their products and services as the fundamental elements of their sales strategy rather than empowering their sales teams to be true business advisors. I strongly feel that sales training should be all about becoming a business advisor to prospects and clients because that is what will give a sales team and their company the ultimate competitive advantage in the market place.

Sales professionals need to learn to use insight and wisdom to drive business opportunities. Growth is harder than ever to come by and winning deals has become extremely competitive. Taking physical share away from the competition is tough. Therefore, you need to position yourself to win deals by stating your competitive advantages and how your solution is better than your competitor’s idea.

Companies need to train their sales professionals to effectively compete in the market place. Most sales training today only provides features and benefits positioning. Sales training needs to evolve into building competitive strategies that expose the vulnerability of the competition, which allows the sales professional to take the deal away from their competitors. The more mature an industry is the more this type of selling strategy is essential to being successful.

For example, companies like Proctor and Gamble and Coca Cola are highly successful because they differentiate themselves through a highly strategic marketing approach; they work at the enterprise level of their customers and develop brand value by showing them how their products help their customers to meet their business objectives. On the other hand, technology oriented companies are slow to adapt to this type of selling approach. Many companies in this sector still rely on innovation as their main selling strategy. Technology companies like many others need to evolve from selling their products to selling a solution. The great marketers like Proctor and Gamble and Coca Cola take it even a step further; they show how their solution not only helps the customer’s organization but how this solution will provide credibility and political advancement for the customer contact. These companies understand what their customer’s needs are and the political/career aspirations of their contacts. By providing solutions that align with both, a company will consistently close more business than any of their competitors.

What are the approaches that companies are taking today to sales training verses three years ago?

We are all facing a global recession and trying to adjust our selling strategies to this difficult time. As we discussed before, the main pressure point is that every deal is so much more competitive. Companies are learning that they must take a much more hands on approach to winning deals and re-engineer their training to provide not theory but to work on deals that are currently happening in the field and how to close them.

Our company works on actual deals that are being negotiated by our clients to provide highly relevant and immediately actionable advice and training to win deals. The strategy behind this approach is that sales teams are much more receptive to our training because we are directly helping them to close business which provides immediate value to them.

Many companies still believe that selling is an art and base their training on this philosophy. Selling is not an art and one of the big disconnects in training today is that when this approach is taken in training sessions, the concept is abstract, cannot be adequately described or illustrated by the trainer and in the end, none of the sales people understand it. The training is ineffective and unproductive.

Companies today need to provide training on clear cut strategies for sales professionals that quantifiably work and show that they are tangible and scalable to everyone on the sales team. If the training is effective then it should be coachable and therefore reproducible.

Do you believe sales training is adequately addressing the pressures companies are facing to grow their business in today’s business climate?

Doctors, lawyers and professionals with MBAs all learn the best practices and innovative approaches to their profession and develop competencies and skills that will serve them as they move through their careers. I attended Harvard and in my entire educational experience I never once heard anyone talk about selling. I spent a lot of time listening and learning about marketing but not selling. Sales professionals don’t have a lot of formal training like these individuals. The big mistake in selling is to think that just because you have the will to win that you know how to win.

I have watched companies try to use people with no sales background try to take a more scientific approach to selling and work through defining sales performance with a complex array of metrics to measure sales force effectiveness. I’ve seen individuals with finance backgrounds trying to train sales professionals by providing analytical and rigid approaches to systematically approaching their territory, prospects and clients as if the sales team were in some kind of school for selling skills. This approach does not work very well and is a waste of time and resources.

The sales force needs to be treated like a strategic weapon in a company’s arsenal. Sales professionals need and deserve highly specialized training that teaches them how to provide winning solutions to their prospects and customers that expose the competition’s weaknesses and allow them to take deals away from them.

What are the critical success factors for enhancing sales training effectiveness?

Too few companies realize that selling is a competency and the capability to sell effectively varies very specifically from one sales professional to another. Many companies still are using one approach to train all their sales professionals. Using the same training methodology for each member of your sales team is a mistake. You need to tier your sales team by capability and performance level and tailor your training to each one of these tiers. This approach to segmenting your talent is a best practice in sales training.

Another critical success factor for enhancing effective sales training is to appreciate that the sales team does not reside in your headquarters and therefore the ability to implement talent management initiatives is challenging and slow. Companies need to employ more advanced sales training processes and look outside their organization for best practices in training and talent management of their sales people. For example, when companies have to work on their strategy, they will turn to a company like McKinsey to help them formulate their strategic plan and ensure that they are incorporating all the latest business intelligence and innovative approaches. Training sales professionals is no different. You need to look outside your company to make sure you are providing best in class training to your sales team.

On average, thirteen percent of a company’s sales budget is spent on sales training. In today’s economic conditions, you need to maximize the return on investment in sales training. A critical success factor in driving sales force effectiveness is to make the most of your expenditures by concentrating all your resources on sales training that helps win deals and separates you from your competition. The philosophy a company needs to take with its training is that advanced sellers need advanced sales training. If you believe you have the best people in the field and they are a high performance team then your training needs to go to another level and focus on winning deals not selling products or services.

Another factor to take into consideration is the generational make up of your sales team. Most companies are dealing with mid-millennium individuals with well developed technology backgrounds. Training these types of individuals requires a mix of modalities and the use of technology platforms to keep them engaged. I break up training delivery into two categories:

• Near transfer – this type of knowledge transfer can be done via the Web such as how to create a proposal; the training is low intensity and not that complex.
• Far transfer – knowledge transfer of this kind is too complex for the Web and the environment needs to be hands on and intensive such as learning how to win a deal; the best modality for this type of training is to work on real time deals happening in the field side by side with the sales professional.

I truly believe that a critical best practice is to develop sales professionals into deal consultants and abandon traditional forms of sales training. Our philosophy is to teach deal strategy. This entails training sales professionals on pre-deal strategy and tactics and how to negotiate to win the deal.

Our process is similar to the Kirkpatrick model but has three levels instead. Our model is not for everyone; we take a more a process driven approach.
We focus on the following in our program:

• Reaction and Relevance – we target each segment of sellers and train them on strategy, process and tactics at the territory, account and opportunity levels. We call this approach World- Class learning, which is a combination of live simulations and workshops using the far transfer approach we discussed earlier.

• Adoption and Behavior – this component assimilates the front line managers into our approach and ensures they are on board with our model. Working with the front line managers allows the right rules to be set in place and standardize approaches based on the type of deal being negotiated. In a sentence, this is a program designed to show the sales team how to win deals and communicate to clients on how they win as well by completing the deal.

• Measuring performance – we work with companies to set up key performance indicators to track improvements in close rates, sales cycles, cost of sales, prospect generation and other lead and lag indicators.

What are the key considerations in selecting a sales training consultant or company?

You need to find a company that has a competitive sales strategy focus. What I mean by this is that the company needs to be able to provide insight and coachability. A great sales training team will know how to develop sales professionals to be more prepared for deal negotiations by enhancing their ability to be insightful. Secondly, a sales training team must have a process where they can work with your best sellers to codify their high performance behaviors and then be able to transfer this knowledge and understanding to others on the sales team. I call this the coachability factor.

A great sales consultant or training team should be able to show you that you don’t have to measure performance of your top people with traditional lag indicators. Instead you can properly evaluate your top performers with lead indicators such as how well they understand their prospects, clients and competitors and their cognitive thinking skills for developing winning deal strategies. The bottom line is that you need a training firm that is process oriented and has a team of professionals that can bring a tremendous amount of practical field experience. It is important to note that whomever you choose for a training program, they will only be successful if you have a strong talent management plan in place that focuses on how to hold on to your top performers and consistently identifies and replaces your low level performers.

What advice can you offer to sales executives to help them better understand the needs of the customers and prospects?

My best advice is to always focus on insight and wisdom and not just data and information. Secondly, do everything you can to identify the key decision makers and focus all your efforts on building a winning strategy with them. We call these individuals “Foxes” and they are the true “Power Base” within an organization. These are the people you really need to worry about when trying to close a deal. They are the individuals that really influence what a company perceives it needs to meet its objectives. You need to fully support their vision for how the company will and should grow. You need to show how your solution brings value to them and the organization. Thirdly, you need to clearly differentiate yourself from the competition. You need to offer a solution that is unequivocally better than the competition.

Finally, you also need to focus on selling smarter rather than harder. For example, we were working with a sales team in an exercise where we gave them ten minutes to prepare for approaching a major prospect. In this case, the team did not have the luxury to prepare a forty page document that could be sent to the CEO for review which may or may not even address their needs. Instead, we wanted the team to uncover and focus on the “Foxes” in the organization. In this case the COO was identified as the key influencer. The COO’s “hot button” was an obsession with employee morale. The COO’s mission was to keep their company in the top ranking of best places to work. The team developed one sentence to send to the COO addressing their passion. The sentence they developed was “we can develop a unified communication strategy for your employees that will underscore why your company continues to be one of the best places to work anywhere.”

In the end you need to focus on training and development for sales professionals that promotes wisdom and insight, is coachable and scalable to all members of your team, enables the ability to identify key influencers within an organization and helps your people to develop succinct deal strategies that show how your prospects and clients will win by working with your company and not the competition.