salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

I came across the latest edition of the American mag, Selling Power, which always has a section on tools.  This issue looked at how emerging trends were changng the sales process.  Most sales people dislike their crm, partly as it adds to their admin burden and they feel a slave to their computer. 

All the vendors are after extra hooks around the edges of what they provide as basics, diaries and tracking of what’s going on with prospect opportunities.  One particular trend emerging involves automating expensive and copyrighted account management processes.  Another, I’m all in favour of.

It’s being dubbed PCD; personalised content delivery.  Apparently research suggests 40% of a sales person’s time is spent finding, assembling and customising content to send to individual customers/prospects.  Anything aimed at reducing the time spent on composing the ideal email, proposal or presentation has got to be a winner.

So, the message is ‘look out for PCD’

I was annoyed with myself on Monday, when I was discussing plans with a prospect. We got to talking about their recently launched new products. They were rightly excited about them, and I wanted to know more, so started asking about each. Yet I couldn’t for the life of me remember one of their product’s names. And the pause whilst I struggled got my goat. I should have remembered the name, and hated looking as though I wasn’t all that interested, contrary to my true feelings.

It’s often the case that there’s lots of info to remember about a prospect; listings of things important to them, or a run-down of their issues. And it pays to impress them with your retained knowledge, as well as being able to recall for the benefit of maximising the conversation. In the past, with more than a few items to remember, I’ve resorted to mnemonics. That’s where you remember the initial letter of each point and make a word out of it to trigger recall of all info.

Then I watched a re-run of Derren Brown’s The Heist. His shows are awesome to watch, although prepare to cower behind the sofa on occasions! I saw him live in London last year and it was great, apart from I do hate seeing people hypnotised without their consent. His website won a ‘webby’ last year for best TV related site. Anyway, in one segment preparing for The Heist, he got a random list of 20 words shouted out, wrote them straight away on a flip-chart from 1 to 20, then with his back to easel, could answer correctly any word once prompted with their corresponding number. He then taught the 13 people in the room to recall the list themselves in just ten minutes. And weeks later, they could still remember the whole list.

So, undoubtedly the same technique would really help me recall vital intel on a sales call. He used the Linking Technique. It involves creating a vivid story that reminds you of everything. I’m going to give it a go next time I want to recall a crucial list, and here are the web resources that’ll get me there:

Project Happy Child
Memletics high performance learning
Interpreter hints

Here’s a neat way of gaining crisp focus on what you currently, and hope to, sell to your customers.  I came across it just now with one of my prospects having used it as part of a training initiative, aimed at embedding a new way of thinking about opportunities into their sales culture.

The principle is simple.  If you want to sell more to a customer, it pays to have appropriate focus.  Why put in loads of effort, yet only make the same money back?

Each sales wheel has just three spokes.  Here are the simple steps to give you clarity:

1. So first draw a circle (your ‘wheel’) on a piece of paper.
2. Take a single customer and decide what their total spend, in cash terms, is (or can be) on all the products they buy that you can supply, and write the value outside your ‘wheel’.
3. Imagine the sales wheel is a pie chart, how would you draw the pie slice that represents their total spend with you?  Put these in as the first two spokes of the wheel.  This area is known as the Customer Segment, and put the cash amount in it.
4. The rest of the wheel, must therefore represent all the extra spend that you want to get your hands on.  Yet to gain this tight focus talked about earlier, and maximise chances of getting into this spend, it’s best to split this up in two.  So next, think of the specific areas of spend you want to target immediately, and put in your spoke and add the cash amount.  This part is the Product Segment.
5. The final area of three shows the Market Segment.  This is all other spend that we’re going to focus on another time.  Again write in the money.
6. The idea being, you now develop just two strategies for the year ahead: 1) how to defend my Customer Segment.  2) how to grow into the Product Segment. 

And this focus I reckon will pay off.

A sales campaign we are running came close to climax this week. The final issue appeared to be the MD’s reluctance to sign-off on lots of money across several prospective projects, of which one was ours. Our Champion then offered to remove one of the projects to reduce the aggregated figure, and make the new amount more palatable.

He described this to me as “classic hurt & rescue”. Which naturally got me thinking. I understood what he meant straight away; from his perspective something along the lines of start high, knowing you can come back down and still get most of what you want, and from the other party’s as lessening the pain. It’s true sales is such an exciting arena in part because every day you genuinely learn something. And as this encapsulation of the slant was new to me, I thought it merited further investigation.

And I came across this great site, for more on hurt and rescue read on how to push someone into the water, then throw them a rope.

A friend of mine, Julian Lebray, who’s a bit of a sales winner sent me some analysis yesterday.  Unfortunately he supports Man City, but leaving that aside, his firm’s training company investigated why the best sales guys were the best.  They came up with the two different types of approaches used by winners and also-rans:

I must say that although for many, this doesn’t say anything radically new, I like it as in every sales situation, do you always nail each of the 8 above correctly?  The answer is probably not, so well worth taking on board in this framework.

Every restaurant’s fully booked tonight and all I hear on the radio is soppy love songs.  Thankfully the usually banal chat by the djs is a bit better today.  I’m in Cape Town and on my drive to work this morning, both Kfm and 5fm had a kind of anti-valentine’s theme going.  Every woman on, said that they didn’t like Valentine’s day because it meant men had an excuse not to be romantic any other times of the year and felt gestures today are staged.  And the male djs wasted no time in saying he wouldn’t like to be the guy that forgot something today

This also reminded me of the UK supermarket chain Asda (part of Wal-Mart) selling their 8 pence cards yesterday because they claimed research showed 19 out of 20 women preferred gifts all year round as opposed to just today.

Anyhow, rather than get hung up on another ‘hallmark holiday’, these themes made me think of the time I had to deliver a ‘christmas hamper’ to a reluctant prospect one christmas eve.  It was all a bit embarrassing, as it almost came across as a trick (which of course it was) and yet we hadn’t even begun a business relationship.  The idea was we always gave prospect’s this treatment (we didn’t).

Yet giving gifts in business can be a great idea.  Other cultures I know from friends give gifts.  One of my cutomer’s used to rib me about always being in S Africa when it was freezing in London, so I once took the client one of my fave bottles of wine from here, and he loved it.  It only cost me a few quid, but the fact that I thought about it, brought it back all that way and explained all about it was a super gesture.  For the record, he is Mark Kelly, who likes Chianti, so I got him a bottle of Beyerskloof Pinotage.  Yum.  If he signs an order soon, he’ll be treated to a Pinot next

The moral is I guess, a little gesture out of the blue, with thought clearly evident, can go a long way.

(And for those of you interested, I’ve saved you the trouble; here’s why it all began…)

I got passed on the vendor’s eye view of what is going on in this industry the other day.   Thanks again to an acquaintance of Paul Magee, apparently….

“crm is like teenage sex; everyone’s talking about it, yet hardly anyone is actually doing it, and those that are, aren’t doing it very well”

And I thought how right this is.  Even the new ‘daddy’ on the street, salesforce.com, are said to be losing customers at the same, if not accelerated pace as everyone else.  Examples of sales chiefs losing their jobs over a botched crm implementation are legendary.  Yet I recall a Forrester research document a couple of quarter’s ago that claimed:

“On-demand computing is taking off in companies ranging from smaller businesses moving off ACT! or Excel to divisions of enterprises that are dissatisfied with their inflexible, corporate IT-controlled on-premise system.”

Leading to their poll results showing around one-quarter of large companies, almost one-third of medium-sized ones and one-fifth of small businesses were imminently buying new software for their sales efforts.

So I thought it’s about time I looked further into what the deal is with sales software.  For my part, as I sell into salesteams, over the past couple of years I’ve seen so many expensively assembled solutions lose their compliance with the emergence of ad hoc spreadsheet processes.  No software seems immune, with this applying to the big boys at the high-end, including SAP & Siebel, through the medium players, Saratoga & Pivotal, right down to the smaller solutions like ACT & Goldmine.  So guys, I’m on the look-out for anyone that has a spreadsheet process that’s grown up alongside of, or because of, a sexy system you’ve got in place….

I got an email today from some occupational psychologists I’m thinking of using for team building in Cape Town.  Their Chrizelda has me on the monthly mail which each time sends another snippet of pyscho-chat. 

Not a bad idea I thought.  Why don’t we send all our prospects some latest news in an unobtrusive, informative way….?  Which got me remembering that an old mentor of mine, Kevin McGirl told me how every two weeks, when he was selling computers in the early 80s in Loughborough, the boss used to make sure all the reps were in the office and faxed off a sheet of company good news to all their prospects.  He used to reckon it helped.  But then, he said the same thing about the Friday afternoon pub-culture prevalent back in those dark days   Anyhow, I must resolve to send out emails on tidbits to all our prospects…and not the usual marketing miss-the-point-sterile-can’t-upset-anyone-stuff…  all I need now is resource to do it!

For the record, the purpose of Chrizelda’s monthly mail was Einstein apparently said “the thinking that got you into a situation, cannot get you out of it“.  Which in itself is always worth remembering.

Tom Hopkins, not so much a Sales Guru - more a Sales God!

‘How To Master The Art Of Selling’ is an unashamed Airport Book, being very anecdotal and conversational in its approach. Yet this book was originally out in 1982. Any book that stands the test of time must surely be a classic.

It doesn’t really have a logical flow to it, but that surprisingly won’t bother the reader. All you need to do is open up at any page and read away until you get loads of ideas for your own daily sales grind.

The biggest single chunk of pages is devoted to Closing (about a sixth of the book). Unfortunately for me, I feel throughout the book, as much as a third would belong to what we today see as the self-help religion. If you accept this from the off, there are more than enough juicy selling tips to compensate for this.

It would be so easy to simply re-tread all Tom Hopkins’ ground here, so rather than waste this opportunity, here are the best bits that are either 1) ‘propriety’ nuggets that he appears the first to commit to paper, or 2) such fundamental, straightforward building blocks, you simply must be reminded of them.

• “SPR”. This stands for Stimulus - Pause - Response. The concept is that salesreps all too often make the mistake of diving straight in with a response, the moment the prospect finishes a point (the stimulus). Aligned with this, is the fact that you cannot ‘wing it’. You must Practice, Drill & Rehearse.
• Involvement Questions. Great questions to use, these are ones where the response from the prospect gets them talking about what they’ll be doing once they’ve bought, as they think as if they own the offering already.
• People buy irrationally, and each take-up decision is 100% emotional. So, “don’t sell logical, arouse emotions”.
• Avoid Rejection Words. Y’know the kind of trap here - you keep saying to prospects “it’ll cost you…”. The last thing they need to be told is that they have to physically part with cash! Tom Hopkins has some other worthy examples:
  

  Don’t say…	instead, use…
  COST, PRICE	INVESTMENT
  DOWN PAYMENT (DEPOSIT)	INITIAL INVESTMENT
  CONTRACT	AGREEMENT, PAPERWORK
  BUY	OWN
  PITCH, DEAL	YOUR OPPORTUNITY
  SIGN	ENDORSE, APPROVE THE FORM
  MONTHLY PAYMENT	MONTHLY INVESTMENT

• There are only two tried and tested ways of selling more. Either improve your close ratios, or speak to more prospects.
• It is essential to obtain the involvement and participation of prospects in sales. “A spectator sport buying is not”.
• When pitching, say what you’re about to go through, go through it, then summarise what’s just been gone through.
• Repetition sticks in. Don’t be afraid to hammer home something in this way.
• The longest anecdote in the entire book runs to nearly five pages. And it’s a belter! It involves a fella who sold the author $240K of property, which in those days must have been awesome. It extols the virtues of Planning. Most salesreps avoid extra preparation activities. In the main, they are the losers.
• “Qualification is the Key to Quota-Busting”.
• It’s true many salesreps squirm when asked the bottom-line. There is a great little technique to get the money issue out in the open. It’s rather annoying title is “The Triplicate Of Choice For Money”, but don’t let that put you off. You actually mention 3 lots of figures.
  1. Begin by stating a figure 20% above your price.
  2. Then give a range from 50% to 100% above your price.
  3. Then give your actual price last.
  So, this is how it’ll sound:
  ‘most people are prepared to invest (+ 20%), a fortunate few can invest between (+50% & +100%), and then there are those that can’t go over (actual).’
  Which category does the prospect think of themselves in? And boy, have you got just the thing for that range!
• There is a reminder that the most destructive silence can be the one where you fill the forms out in front of the prospect. Doing this in advance as much as possible would be the solution, although many salesreps are so superstitious can this catch on?!
• He introduces his own “clutch of moneygrabbers” that you must keep on doing, which include, cultivate referrals, sell add-ons wherever you can, try different bundled options, and always re-contact old prospects.
• Always keep on Closing. His own ‘research’ suggests even the greatest closers have to wait until their fifth atempt before getting the nod. I prefer to think by this he means, less that you keep on asking trite closing questions, but more that you are always heading towards what you want out of the transaction with your questioning.

I get to see training sessions of my customers fairly regularly. Most of which aim to have the impact Tony Robbins enjoys when smiling at himself in the mirror (what terrific teeth) yet end up having the sales uplift you’d enjoy if you gave your nearest competitor the wink on your best leads. One such client engaged in a touch of externally run training recently, and when one attendee, Mark Rushton, sent me a list of lessons learned I was initially sceptical. Yet it may just be that, like with all self-help, you only need take on board one mantra that resonates with you to make an improvement - what do you think to these?

1. Success is predictable - you just have to find the clues
2. Pride is the main reason people do not ask for help
3. You can’t do anything in your head without it affecting your body - and vice-versa
4. We naturally induce states of mind in others - don’t be a ‘mood hoover’ be a ‘mood booster’!
5. Think about the POSITIVE in all situations
6. You become the person of your consistent thoughts
7. Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself
8. The barrier to being successful is not something that exists in the real world; it is purely and simply composed of our own doubts about our ability
9. The best teacher is the customer
10. Try not to prejudge others - see it from their point of view and understand their fears and concerns
11. You can’t outperform the way you see yourself
12. The quality of a persons life can be measured in the quality of their communication with themselves and others
13. The quality and understanding of the message is measured in how it is received - not how it is sent
14. The person listening works a lot harder than the person talking
15. Be an ALL DAY person - not a morning or night person