salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

I was reminded of something quite essential yesterday when meeting a potential new prospect for the first time.   Although a difficult chap to generate any bonhomie and genuine rapport with, one insight he did offer was what he expects of his team.

During the twelve years he’d worked in and managed photocopier sales people, he worked out what activity needs to be hit to make your targets crumble.

He reckoned that 250 dials each week were necessary to create 5 new business opportunity appointments.  1 in 16 dials generated a contact, which meant roughly 1 in 3 of those contacted would see them.

The point of this, is that if you know your own hit-rates, I believe you’re more likely to improve your results.  The old adage of ‘only if it’s measured, can it be improved’ stems back from the 50s obsession with Statisical Process Control, and often cited as the Deming-inspired ethos behind Japan’s rise to economic prowess.

Interestingly, I was once in a large sales conference with almost a hundred sales guys at Cheltenham Race Course for an IT security operation, and a fella there subsequently became a good pal of mine, a highly talented and worldy-wise guy called Brendan Gillies.  The (politically, if not salesy, astute) VP of Sales asked who knew what their average order value and average sales cycle time was.  Only Brendan stuck up his hand.  And he was Number One.

Cheney Terror 

Thanks once again to Channel 4 News (along with Newsnight whenever Paxo’s the host, the outstanding news sources on the net/telly from London, and heaven sent for me when I’m abroad and need my video news-fix from something other than pants CNN-clones).  American vice-pres, oil barron Dick Cheney coined a phrase that if a terror attack was 1% possible, then it had to be treated as 100% likely.

This made me think about something that I’m going through with my new sales guys, trying to explain that you need to think of all the reasons why someone won’t sign-up.  A classic example was just this morning when one of my guys passed me on an email they sent saying basically, ‘mister prospect, you’ve promised me several times you’d do what we agreed, and now you ain’t, do it, do it, do it’.  A better way forward exists I feel.  Think of the scenarios that have prevented them from coming through, be sympathetic towards them by offering them up to the prospect with ways to save face and continue towards a signature.  Thinking of all the reasons a deal won’t come home keeps you sharp and removes complacency.

Woodward World-Beating

Another 1% doctrine, came from how the England rugby team bagged the world cup in Sydney 2003.  Coach Clive Woodward decided his way forward was to ID 100 things they did, and improve each of them by one percent.  This could easily apply to improving personal sales performance.  What are all the things you do?  Pitching each product, your company, objection handling every question, writing proposals.  There’s loads.  Can you raise each one’s game 1%?

While searching for help on the rather unappealing topic of statutory sick pay, I came across some sales tips from a general business advice website.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a fairly common-sense and clearly knowing selection of planning advice.  The part that particularly caught my eye were the stats at the bottom, only 1 in 5 calls produce & 85% of leads are from a 3rd party and ensuring you make people decide on something.

http://www.is4profit.com/busadvice/checklists/coldcall.htm

Having managed to sell beyond the shores of my birthplace, I’ve long held the belief that if you can sell in Blighty, you can make it anywhere.  The reason for this, is that the people left behind on our tiny islands tend to be, unlike the winners that colonised the globe, totally unreceptive to new ideas.

One manifestation of this comes with initial qualification.  Picture the scene, you think you’ve ID’d a suitable prospect, so give them a call to find out the name of the right person to approach.  In more than half the occasions in the UK, when asking for a name, the receptionists will say “we don’t give out names”, as it’s “not company policy”.

This has wound me up for years.  The first time I tried to sell in South Africa, I selected 10 suitable firms from the web.  I called all ten up to find the name of their head of sales.  In the UK, around 4 would tell me.  In this case, it was all 10 that happily supplied names.

There is a way around such nonsense.  You can ask to speak to a department direct, and hope a random person will furnish further.  You can try a high-ranking PA.  Or indeed, if you sell to sales teams like I do, you can speak to the sales people, and at the very worst, ask how they would handle such an objection

And this reminds of me of a time I myself was involved in buying some software for my business.  No-one seemed to split the final two vendors up.  When my opinion was canvassed, I was satisfied either could do the job, so to decide I called both up.  I asked whoever picked up the phone for the name of the person heading up sales there.  One said “no names, company policy”, the other kindly gave the details.  Guess which supplier won the order.

Met a fella earlier today in charge of releasing new products to a hopefully ravenous sales team.  He’d enjoyed a career of 16 years mainly involved with getting new products out.  One constant was not positive.  Every time a new product was launched, it was either:

• released to the salesforce to a fanfare, yet no-one felt comfortable selling it
• no-one knew about it being available and it died a death

Both ways, the impact was less than hoped for.  One way of trying to overcome this, was an idea he’d picked up from guys at Shell.  It was always to release a new product with a SRIP; sales ready implementation pack.

It doesn’t seem to have a brand new approach to what gets communicated, but it is different in how communication takes place.  The point is that everything a sales person needs to know is in one official release of info.  Typically, they get a glossy brochure, a sheet of tech-specs, new order forms and a demo.  In-depth insight into what it’s all about seems to be in the SRIP.

And the other element, is that a product is only ever piloted, rather than given to the entire team. So all the lessons from an initial few sales experiences can help mould success for everyone else.

Do you sell something that can be broken down into a small amount?  The classic is leasing or rental type sales.  Something where you can say it only costs x per minute.  The photocopier crowd have been doing it for years; “you gotta go for this, as it’s only 5 pence a click”.  Today on the news in London, there’s a big story about Charley Loafer Winsdor paying a £3.3m tax bill.  Immediately his team set out to put a positive spin on all things to do with this unelected relic that should be consigned to history’s dustbin, by saying what tremendous value he is.  Rubbish.  Anyway, to help ’sell’ him, they say he only “costs” each person in the UK 3½pence a year.  Making the amount seem triflingly small is a classic sales technique.

I was discussing with my Boiler Roomers how they could make describing what we charge easier.  Without going into potentially confusing detail, one of our products can be shown to cost £25 a week.  So we came up with this for next time a prospect asks for prices, thinking they’ll be hit with ‘bad news’, provided the atmosphere is conducive.  I gave them permission to whip a twenty and a fiver out their wallets, and place it on the middle of the table.  We’ll see how we get on…

I met a total tosspot yesterday.  Full of self-importance, a total absence of rapport establishment capability, and a complete disregard for what really makes a difference to his sales guys.  We shall refer to him as “Gav”.  And I reckon if I was one of the dozen or so guys reporting into him, he’d have my foot in his mouth sharpish.

I came out of the call with one of my Boiler Roomers, who remarked we should have a part of the wall back in the office where we put business cards of people who are idiots.  This would serve as a little reminder we are winners when something doesn’t quite go our way - to spur us on as we must strive to be better than total clowns we’d met.

This reminded me of an early- to mid-90s trick of the Nottingham office of recruitment animals, Austin Benn.  When they came across someone who’d been rude to them, the put-upon rep would make the mobile number available of said annoyance.  Whenever any of the team then felt the need to vent frustration, they’d select one of the numbers, make sure their outgoing number couldn’t be seen, call them up, and shout a tirade of unmentionables down the line.

Gav would probably take it as a compliment.

We were nattering away in the office, before I remembered to crack the whip and ensure the Greek galleon continued on it’s smooth course, about forgetting to do one vital thing on a sales campaign, and as a result going from hero to zero, with sales figures falling.

It reminded me of a story a fella that taught my pal Richie Hoare to fly in San Francisco passed on.  He’d also played for The Eagles (US national rugby team and had a few minutes running out at Twickenham).  Apparently, it’s not the newly qualified pilots that make the stupidest mistakes.  Often, you’ll get a pilot with hundreds of thousands of flying hours under their belt, and they’ll forget one of the most basic things; dropping the wheels when coming into land!  And a buzzer or the Tower will remind them bout their landing gear.

One of our Boiler Roomers, Marcus, comes from a derivatives background, and he reckons it’s the same with traders he saw in action.  The Number One person would all of a sudden have a stinker of a month.  And the reason was often they’d forgot, or tried to take a shortcut around, one thing they’d previously always done.  Typically this lack of concentration concerns a wrong stop-loss strategy, so they bail too late.

The message is clear, if you’re in a slight rut, it could well be because there’s one small thing you’re forgetting to do.  So, simply find it and make amends.

Interesting mini-objection handle, aimed at situations when people are being swayed by minutiae that is far too tekkie for your liking.  A fella called Steve Chuter, who sells awesome drinks dispense kit (at last, a 5-second pint at footie games!) passed me this neat little gem.

Often sales people get frustrated by technical people not seeing the big picture.  How can a decision be made upon the make-up of a minor component, when the bottom-line is we’d save them squillions?

When this crops up, simply point out that they wouldn’t buy a car because of the OEM that put together the carburettor, would you?  More likely you’d go on overall feel of driving, fuel consumption, or 0-60.  So let’s look at the bigger picture, after all it’s how everything hangs together…

One of the leaders of a customer’s sales team I’ve got to know recently has had an intersting career spanning the school of hard knocks and bruises that are photocopiers and recruitment.  Steve Chuter his name is and he has plenty of engaging anacdotes about life in such torrid industries.

One he told me the other day was from the 80s, about a branch of Canon selling copiers around Southampton.  In those days life was commission-only.  Most companies have a whiteboard with sales figures scrawled on it as they come in.  And everyone knows who’s sold what during the month.  What Canon did, was to have their salesboard show, not the value of a deal in revenue.  Nor did it detail the margin.

What they did, was to show each person’s individual commission.  Some month’s the discrepency between top and bottom was from £300 to £9,000.  Quite brutally exposing the winners from the losers.

I’ve never heard of this approach before, but there is something about it that gives me a wee twinkle in the eye…