salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

it’s long been my opinion that over-complication of forecasts is a disease eating away at proper sales management, whether by a rep themselves, or managers sifting through reams of spreadsheets.  A pal of mine, Brendan Gillies, a winner originally from Glasgow currently selling in LA, firmly believes there’s only two types of deal on a forecast; deals coming in this month, and those coming in next month.

I spoke earlier today to an excellent sales person in the document management solutions arena.  His name’s Dylan Jones.  His firm have only two categories of forecast deal (that get reported on using Saratoga’s Avenue crm incidentally) - proof there are similar believers out there.  They are:

Pool - anything you’re working on, that isn’t yet something you feel is about to come in, part of the ‘pool of opportunities’.

Revenue Checked - Your neck is well and truly on the line, and you really reckon these ones are coming home (or indeed already have for this current period).

Just seen programme two in Steve Coogan’s 1995 series Coogan’s Run.  It’s the one written by the awesome Father Ted creators about Gareth Cheeseman.  It was premonitorily called Dearth of a Salesman.  He’s a truly awful, egotistical self-centred salesman selling the “Lancelot 2000 soundcard”.  It’s comedy that anyone later into The Office would understand; big-time cringe-worthy in parts where you rush to get behind the sofa.  Here are just some of the things Cheeseman does during his 3-day stint at a Hotel conference sales event, that if you find yourself doing too, then you know you must have a long, hard word with yourself and change, sharpish:

1. Don’t drive a blue Ford Probe, and especially not with Robert Palmer playing loudly (although, rather concerningly, I’ve got his greatest hits on cd and think it’s a decent album)
2. When you’re preparing for a meeting, don’t spend 5 minutes in front of the mirror shouting “you’re the best, you’re number one, you’re a tiger, rrrrrrroooooaaaarrrr!” (although again, given its place, it can have merit surely?)
3. When giving a presentation with essentially drab technical information, do not slip in a slide of a scantily-clad beach babe
4. Don’t take Thomas Edison’s “lightbulb moment” as an inspirational example, thinking “where’s there’s darkness, there’s a need for light” and link it to Technology in general (”What is technology? Not an easy question”)
5. Avoid asking a specific member of the audience a question if you don’t know how they’ll answer it, so that discussions about having kids aren’t begun with a gay chap
6. Stop yourself from repeatedly asking your boss if there’s a spare place for the quarterly “Diamond Club Dinner”, the one for high performers, when you’re not one of them
7. Make sure when the prospect is ready to sign, even if as happened to Cheeseman it takes you by surprise, you have firstly a pen, and secondly, one that works
8. When you talk a prospect through the paperwork, with their pen hovering over it, don’t belittle the process by saying things like “and finally the big fella”, or pretending to be the voice of the contract and saying with a squeaky put-on voice, “please sign me, please sign me”

And in between all that, Cheeseman: got robbed by a “lady of the night” who painted a clown’s face on him; was distracted whilst delivering a pitiful presentation by a mother breast-feeding; got caught by the maid doing something best kept to private; persuaded two men to commit suicide (one of which was the formerly teetotal son of his big prospect) who never wanted to be a salesman anyway; and got punched in the nose by the woman who’s signature he finally required and of course, failed to collect.

Was with a guy today I’ve a lot of time for that has just become, after takeover fall-out, the Head of Sales for a £¼bn business.  One of his new teams, is a brand new part of the structure.  An idea transfered from his new American colleagues, it’s heralded by the grand sounding title of the Conversion Task Unit.  The concept is that these are the ’sales police’ that help people unclog bottlenecks in their pipeline.

One idea they’ve already implemented with some degree of success, is the ‘quick question’ email.  It’s all about getting to talk to a prospect that seems to have avoided you for longer than is comfortable.  It runs like this:

Subject Line 

Put as your subject line “Quick question”.  People are more likely to read this, than if you just mentioned your company name anywhere.

Message

As for the main body, “Sorry to bother you, as it’s been 3 weeks since we last spoke I was just checking whether you are still in the market for [whatever you sell] or whether I shouldn’t be bothering you.  If you are still looking, then please by all means suggest a suitable time for us to talk once more.”….is the general gist.

Results

And through this stab-in-the-dark, during the first two months of using it, they realised they got a 25% response rate.  And they were rightly delighted to get the 1 in 4 respondents moving ahead on or falling from their pipelines.

I’ve a pal who’s a demon cold caller.  His name is Chris Howard.  He works out of an office in a lovely part of England slap bang in the middle of the Cotswolds.  He’s really into listening to self-help tapes focusing on selling skills.  I often think the main reason he listens to them is to remind him, after a bad day, that he can still do it and is better than some of the clowns making money from selling CDs.

Coincidentally, he shares his name with a sales “guru”.  The other Chris Howard is an American sales trainer, and part of his portfolio is a 2-CD set recorded at one of his seminars, called Skyrocket Your Sales.  Plainly intrigued by mere name alone, I said I’d listen to it.

Within the opening bars of CD1, I was already exasperated.  I’m really not a fan of the Tony Robbins ‘I can change your life’ end of the market.  I’m sure for some it is wonderful.  Fine, let them enjoy.  And straight away I thought this fella was going down the same route.

His first story was about someone selling him a suit.  It was in Brisbane.  And for the notoriously ill-travelled American’s, he pointed out “Brisbane, Australia”.  Thanks, Chris.  Now the first part of this, is that he never made any reference to Australia, or something quirky and relevant about being in Brisbane again, so in my experience he was making an amateur atempt to sound glam in front of his fee-paying audience.  And then he went on to talk about how they ‘breathed in unison’.  Nice.  It took all my willpower to keep the CD on I can tell you.

And then it went from dodgy to dangerous.

He started talking about what we’d learn.  And would you believe, one huge plank revolved around hypnotism.  He was going to teach us how to sell more by hypnotising prospects?  You have got to be joking.  Forget it.  So I skipped those tracks, no thank you.

And at last, if you could stomach the first half-hour, amazingly, there were a few good sales tips.  And here they are:

SOAR to Riches - Chris Howard has the handy mnemonic s.o.a.r. to remind you what questions you need to ask at information gathering time.  I thought this was actualy kinda neat, it stands for:

situation - the current situation, what’s going on now, ‘fill in picture & build rapport showing you care’

objective - what do you want?, ‘fill in the blanks of where they wanna be’

antecedent - barriers; strange use of the word, as if he’s delved into a thesaurus and tried to find a word beginning with ‘a’ that’s a synonym for barriers/hurdles/obstacles so he can make the word ’soar’ happen, as technically, antecedent doesn’t mean what he forces it to mean here.  He means finding what’s preventing them from getting to where they want to be.  Maybe something like ‘avert’ or ‘avoidance’ is along more apt lines?

reward - what’s it worth to you fixing all this?

Cialdini - part of his establishment of ‘reward’, our Chris talks glowingly about this psychologist who wrote a book about the science of persuasion.  The power of a “contrast frame”, comparing two things to make one seem even better, he cites as fundamental in ramming home how the value of your proposal matches the need so well.   And this is apparently only one of six patterns of influence. “what would it be worth to you to solve that problem” is the key question here for him.

Anchoring - I’ve come across something similar before, an anchor is a stimulus that helps bring back a certain response.  And he quotes the famous Pavlov dog experiments, where eventually the sound of a tuning fork makes them salivate expecting food.

4 indicators of rapport - I found this interesting, as it breaks down how you can judge rapport is going.  The four stages for Chris Howard are: 1) a feeling inside of connection, 2) a colour shift from lighter to darker like blushes, 3) familiarity statements that make them seem they know you already, and 4) when you’re leading them and they follow things like your body language.  And the first 3 lead up to number 4.

Fearing an onslaught of hypnotripe, I’ll muster up all my reserves of determination, and listen to CD2 soon….

Met a complete (and to his credit, self-confessed) non-sales person today at a first meeting, who’d somehow been put in charge of a small sales team.  They sell Microsoft CRM software as part of their ‘business solutions’ offerings.  It turns out that to keep their status as a MS reseller, they must obtain a case study from every customer delivery.

I read through a handful, and they seem the usual bland, not really insightful, marketing-type productions.  Four generic headings (Customer Profile, Business Challenge, Solution, Benefits) with the typical “weren’t the supplier lovely” quote from the horse’s mouth, which doesn’t say anything.

The one good thing about the process, is that the reseller is made to produce them, so at least the discipline is there.  Although the downside is that they fail to document the real intel that’ll have the most decent impact, so really are a waste of time.  And of course, who wants to buy Microsoft’s business apps anyway?

It’s not often you learn from a TV Cop show.  The one thing about the genre, is that there’ve been so many, that anything that gets made these days has to have a highly original angle.  The Beeb’s latest effort is New Tricks.  About retired old policeman forming a team to solve ancient unsolved mysteries.  Typically one of them knows something about the background to the case, and between them they all re-visit and solve.

I’m not keen on watching telly when I should be doing other things, but there are times when you just have to veg.  And on one such occasion I came across this show, and a little gem it proved to be.  The first episode I discovered, saw the oldies forced onto a creative thinking course.

The techique they were trying to master was known as “scamper”.  And seems a classic about how to think up new uses or new methods of doing things.  A Mnemonic, each word describes a thought process that can help ID a new angle:

S - Substitute - components, materials, people

C - Combine - mix, combine with other assemblies or services, integrate

A - Adapt - alter, change function, use part of another element

M - Modify - increase or reduce in scale, change shape, modify attributes (e.g. colour)

P - Put to another use

E - Eliminate - remove elements, simplify, reduce to core functionality

R - Reverse - turn inside out or upside down.

A quick tap into Google throws up loads more on this, including info from Mindtools.  Worth trying next time you need a new angle.

Feeling unusually half-empty after this weekend’s World Cup disgrace.  After all that, what a waster Sven’s been for England.  If we did on sales campaigns what he did (or more importantly did not) do, we’d have been long since sacked.

Best individuals don’t make the best team

In our case, you cannot play Lampard and Gerrard in the same XI.  The answer was glaringly obvious from the group stages.  Drop Lampard.  In my business a similar concept arose with trying too often to pitch our two most sexy offerings.  Yet all this can sometimes do is confuse the buyer.  Focus on one world-class offering first.  Then progress later.  The fulcrum is Gerrard.

Who scores?

Everyone said it at the time, and everyone bar Sven was right.  You cannot win a World Cup with 1 striker.  The 17-yr old never-played-in-the-Premierleague Walcott going was nonsense anyway, but considering neither of the preferred first were fit, and Crouch was a clear Plan B, it was pure folly.  You need people to put the ball in the onion bag.

Make changes early, and decisively

How many sales campaigns go perfectly from start to finish?  None.  And it’s the same with World Cup tournaments.  Frequent mistakes in not utilising Joe Cole enough, keeping Beckham on the park too long instead of Lennon, not reverting to a classic 4-4-2 with Hargreaves at the back of a diamond in midfield.  The errors are countless.  Changes should have been made at half-time, weren’t, and when they did occur, it was patently usually a wrong decision.  Lessons for us all there. 

The biggest waste of a salesperson’s time, is coming second.  Sven’s wasted all of our times.  Good riddance.

Learning about the First World War at school captured my imagination.   At The Somme, senseless slaughter along 40ks of frontline.  Almost one million combatants cut down.  One of the turning points in warfare.

Many sales texts historically feature hints from military strategies.  Indeed, the very word ‘campaign’, orignally from the French for ‘open field’ where most battles were fought in the middle ages, is a central one in sales thinking nowadays.  So many lessons come out of what happened from 1st July, 1916.

Whilst thinking of the leadership mistakes, and their subsequent rectification, I realised there were a couple of sales campaigns I’m involved with right now that could take a leaf out of the Somme tactics book, and with a clever rethink I reckon we could prevail.

Somme Mistakes

Excessive reliance on one initial tactic - The heavy artillery bombardment was meant to soften up the enemy German positions before our boys went over the top.  Yet the Germans built deep underground bomb-proof bunkers.  As soon as the whistles sounded, they took up their positions and cut down all that advanced.  Ever got the feeling your chosen initial tactic was not generating the required results?

Poor intelligence - The commanders didn’t have a proper view of what was going on.  How often have you clamoured for intel on exactly how a campaign is going?  Where can you get it from?

Unwillingness to alter the plan despite events - Commander Lieutenant-General Sir TLN Morland sat up an observation post 3 miles from the front with Reserves at his disposal.  He had several chances to send his men to build on initial success, but failed, wrongly thinking repeated assaults would win back the French town of Thiepval.  How often have you thought about re-sending the same old email just once more, and then lost the initiative on a deal to a competitor?

Somme Success

Decisions made as events unfolded - Captain TF Tweed of the Salford Pals was too intimidated to make a decision without recourse to HQ first time around.  Later leaders at the front line, under Herbert Shoebridge, had no such fears.  They could adapt to events, can you in the face of HQ meddling?

New tactic evolution - With the previously favoured softening up not working, the  “creeping barrage” artillery attack was developed.  This new use of weaponry meant soldiers could walk across No Mans Land behind a shield of shells landing in front of them as they progressed.  What evolution of a sales ploy can you think of?

The Tank’s first appearance - Fascinating one this, the tank was originally dissed as an idea by the top brass, yet Churchill (the legend) decided it must be developed so took it into the arms of the Admiralty (a ‘land-ship’, you see!) and it changed history.  The Germans had never seen anything like it, and although inevitable breakdowns and confusion occured, the brand new tank worked wonders.  A brand new arrow for your quiver exists somewhere….

Air observation - the problems of not knowing fully what was going on were eradicated by using planes to send back accurate reports.  How else can you gather vital intel?

Adapting lessons learned can certainly be applied to altering course in current sales campaigns.

I always maintain to newbie sales people that avoiding getting distracted by other reps performance is vital. 

They must remember in most sales teams different financial targets have evolved, often dependent on experience, markets and products, so someone pulling in a $10m deal cannot be compared to a starter dealing in $10k average order values.

Although everyone can have an easily grasped ‘performance against target’ percentage and see them plastered on intranets or daily spreadsheets sent out from HQ, in reality, the only competition you should concern yourself with, is your own performance against target.

My 2 boiler roomers in London are spending a lot of time on the phone, trying to book first appointments.  They’re dishing a lot of playful stick out to each other when one edges ahead in the bookings league.  And one asked me why they didn’t have an extra incentive to pull in more meetings, along the lines of extra money for a big night out.

My response was we could always alter the weekly salary amount.  How about the one who gets the most earns an extra 50 quid, with the other £50 less.  A draw means they stay as normal.

They didn’t seem too enthusaistic, but I quite like the sound of it….