M3Planning

Establishing the bar of excellence so others could raise it

Company: Miller Heiman

Industry: International — Sales Training

Miller Heiman has been defining and documenting successful selling for more than 30 years. With core programs for managing complex sales, they provide a common language and common-sense approach to sales management for organizations around the globe.

Service: Market Research

Need:  In order to become more customer-focused and not just product-focused, Miller Heiman wanted to know the "Best Sales Practices" of world-class organizations, and then share those findings with their customers and others in the marketplace who are looking to improve their sales performance.

Solution:  Create a market research program with a bilingual component to collect, analyze and interpret data. Integral to the program’s design was producing results that could drive strategic development and not just be another report. To accomplish this goal the survey had to do more than just create numbers but provide insight as what to do with those numbers once you have them. The results of the 2012 study can be downloaded here.

Deliverables:

• Generate interest in the survey
• Develop new survey questions every year that are relevant to market trends (30% new questions each year)
• Run the initial analysis and interpretation of the survey
• Review analysis and recommendation with executive team to determine the key points
• Roll-out executive summary which then drives the executive team’s keynote speeches for the year
• Produce the "Sales Best Practices" report
• Other Annual projects:
  • Development of the Sales Performance Index
  • Individual Miller Heiman client benchmark projects

Result:  The project has become an essential element to maintain Miller Heiman’s competitive advantage as the thought leader in international sales training. The study is entering its ninth year with over 25,000 multi-national participants since its launch. The project has been written up in Entrepreneur Magazine. August 2004, p55. (Miller Heiman). The interpretation of the market research not only produces the "Sales Best Practices" but drives strategic development throughout the year providing fresh, cutting-edge content for executive keynote speeches.