salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

London’s Management Today mag for me frustratingly falls between two stools.  In that desolate middle ground, neither broadsheet nor tabloid, it simply doesn’t have the calibre of journalism associated with the wittiest of redtopping or well-contended quality. 

What it should do, is use my old firm fave, Newsnight as a model, although a top-drawer general current affairs show, the vibe would work wonders for biz-issues only.  If only Evan Davis could be editor one month…..

You’ll see for yourself it does have the odd gem, but you’ll doubtless get bored wading through the bubble-gum before finding it.

One such sparkler came to me from two separate articles in an old forgotten issue, for when (like I do) you sell to salespeople.  Know when a CEO is falling asleep through your presentation?  Or when you’re trying to get some sales-denier colleague to sign-off on something for you?  Allow me to paraphrase from two heavyweights, to ram home the importance of investing in sales:

ex-ICI chief & ‘Troubleshooter’ (sir) John Harvey-Jones

‘the failing of European firms is their reluctance to treat sales as a profession’

Guru #1 Peter Drucker

‘the sole aim of a business is to create a customer’

On the packed 0730 flight which started to bring me home, from Melbourne to Sydney, I had the pleasure to sit next to a fella that through googling I now know to be Duncan McRae.  I had no idea who he was, but any true rugby fan will know him as a Saracens, Waratahs and Gloucester fly-half over the past few years.

Now retired, he kindly hepled me stave off debilitating jet-lag with genial discussions on all sorts of mainly sport and Cape Town related topics.  Duncan’s new role is helping an Aussie bookie entertain their high-roller clients.  This interested me as hospitality in this industry is easy.  People bet on sport, so take them to an Ashes test, with breakfasts including speak-sets from the likes of Kim Hughes & Gladstone Small.  But how do other trades select an appropriate jolly?

I sell to salespeople as you probably know, so I racked my brains, and came up with offering my customers a freebie sales masterclass kind of session from someone sales guys would like to listen to about influencing and so forth.

One sweet anacdote Duncan shared with me was when lived in Cheltenham, his neighbour was a bloke called Geoff.  Six months on they’d become friendly and one day, Duncan asked Geoff, ‘what’s with this funny number plate you’ve got on your car?’ 

GH 66

Geoff replied ‘I scored a hat-trick in a World Cup Final, in 1996′

:-)

Spent an interminable number of hours on planes recently as I went to Melbourne to watch England’s total Ashes humiliation.  Awesome time though.  One of the many movies I watched was on Qantas’ cool on-demand service that every airline should adopt.  It’s the 60-min slide show by Clinton’s VP, Al Gore, screaming of the calamitous effects our carbon-addiction will bring.

And of course, it struck me that there were a couple of useful techniques any sales presentation could glean from his delivery, so I got to thinking, this needs a salespodder review to pass on pointers…

Graphs In Two 

Overall, the use of graphs in general was excellent I thought.  Potentially baffling science info was condensed, with the focus being on all the startling outlier vlaues, that is spikes or residuals that rammed his points home.  And he always revealed the graphs gradually, so that at the very least, you saw one diagram with a normal set of images, then he’d add on later the punch, the ending where the wild stats come from.

Use Of Humour

Interesting one this, as throughout the whole show, he only cracked 4 or 5 funnies.  Although he starts with a gag (about once being America’s next President), it is indeed a useful reminder that presenters do not have to be stand-ups to deliver riveting content.

Exposing False Choices

Apart from the incessant barrage of doomsday graphs, lighter images neatly kept the flow engaging.  One such fine example was where a Bush administration dweeb was trying to justify internally, why this issue was a non-starter.  The picture he used was of a pair of scales.  On one, was a stack of six gold bars, on the other, the entire planet.  The inference was clearly that you can’t have both our lovely planet and economic prosperity.  Gore nicely belittled this view, and such a picture of scales I think is a cracker to get across the reality of inequitable choices in any business presentation.

Overcoming Intransigence

How much do we hate and suffer from when someone buyer-side digs in their heels because they fear any changes resulting from our wares will hurt them, when the facts are the entire business will benefit?  Here’s a terrific quote from some fella named Upton Sinclair to use to expose such wankers:

“it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it”

Barriers To Change

And another issue we sales people have to deal with regularly, when buyers are extremely (and naturally wrongly) change-averse.  Create a discussion around these two equations for glory:

Old Habits + Old Technologies = Predictable Consequence

whereas….

those same Old hard-to-change Habits + New Technologies = Dramatically Altered Consequences

and he used the analogy of warfare to ram this home, with how levels of advancing technological take-up changed warfare forever, from spears to guns to the A-bomb.

A company I know have just appointed a new guy to their sales helm.  I’ve heard plenty about his lack of talent, so we’ll wait for the results which at some point will tell their story either way.

One of his early initiatives was to encourage more cold-calling by his reps.  They traditionally rely more on marketing-stoked leads, rather than self-generated activity.

His trick is to get reps into a room together, with prepared index cards that have prospect details hand-written upon them.  The names come from previous enquirers that fizzled away.

When you get a ‘result’ (in this case a potentially re-invigorated ‘lead’ from a contact for a new pipeline opportunity) you walk up to a table and pick a random playing card from a few face-down decks.  You then get to write your name on it and place your card on one of a number of hooks.  As success hopefully grows, you can only place your card if it outscores one already there.

At the end of the session, all those with the highest cards in place win an extra prize, typically something like shopping vouchers, bottles of vino, you know the type.

Over a coffee this afternoon, I decided to read the emailed newsletter from one of my suppliers for a change.  Y’know the thing?  You get sent them regularly, but never bother reading them.  I s’pose the difference with this one was that it came this time from their joint MD, whom I happened to meet briefly in Cape Town earlier this year.

He began with a rant (a man after my own heart, then) about “the customer is not always right”, with the delicious intro of “in a service industry, and by that I mean an industry where the customer has a longer term relationship with the supplier than buying a chocolate bar, this mantra has developed into an auto-response to any tricky situation, reached without thought.”

And he gave a cracking example of where in a swish restaurant someone sent a hollandaise sauce back, the eventual returning message being the chef says ‘your problem’, and a 40-cover booking was unknowingly lost.

His solution is for more communication even when, as in the above case, hiding in the kitchen seems the comfortable way forward. This approach builds a better relationship from trust and understanding of each other’s viewpoints, to “a long term and loyal customer who gives us the benefit of the doubt”.

A potentially attractive new opportunity has recently surfaced through one of my customers.  In the old days, we used to do a whole bunch of sales-related activities that added significant value to our clients, such as attending sales meetings and making consultant-type recommendations on how they could sell more.  We never charged for this, making it all part of the service.  As we managed to shrink-wrap our service over the years, this type of activity disappeared from our cutomer interactions.

Yet, one customer asked me whether we could do something similar, and through the discussion, I suggested it would naturally carry a charge.  They accepted this and asked what it would be.  I didn’t have a clue really, so said I’d confirm when the spec was more fully developed.

Intriguingly, I came across this advice from the UK’s chartered institute of marketing.  It suggests that as you’re likely to do on average 100 fee paying days work a year, you should charge per day 1% of what you expect to earn, or previously earnt.

In my case, the answer is made easier, as I can surely charge out for this premise, at a rate of 1% of the top-salesperson’s OTE inside my client.  The great thing then is that I can build in some kind of annuity function, so this gets presented as a monthly amount for a number of months to make the overall figure appear smaller.  All I need to do now is get the job and see about expanding the idea to provide the concept as a new product.  How exciting!

(As a postscript, I understand from the guys I deal with inside my customers - all people that head up sales teams - that the current typically quoted rate for a day’s ’sales consultancy’ is around £500-600, and a day’s training part/all of your team can be upto £2,000)

Logged on this morning and got an email from a prospective supplier.  Market-initiators Webex provide web-conferencing, and I’ve dabbled with their services (which are pretty good) in the past although for my game, a face-to-face is essential.

So they sent me this mail below.  And it gave me a load of ideas on how I can send offers/incentives to my prospects/customers.  How many does it give you?

Subject: End-of-Year Offer

Unallocated Budget for 2006? New Initiatives Starting in January?

Take Advantage of [our] End-of-Year Promotions!!

I wanted to alert you early to an end-of-year promotion. Starting now, [we’re] offering a number of incentives that would enable you to purchase …. at a reduced commercial rate and delay paying until January 2007. Alternatively, if you have unallocated budget for 2006, we can arrange a package that would enable you to utilise this budget for 2007 services.

I am confident you will find [us] to be a beneficial solution and look forward to designing a plan that works for you and your organisation.

Had an enjoyable cheeky pint or three with a pal of mine last night who I’m happy to say is a youthful, successful software salesman for IBM.  On two occasions he reminded me of a wonderful technique to use when confronted with an intransigent or provocative question.  To have this ability come naturally is a winner.  The old adage is that you should forget pitching as a sport, as salespeople are exponentially more influential when asking questions.  Here’s two examples that flowed last night:

a) from an interview: 

Interviewer (who’s clearly trying to be an objectionable human being!) questioning fella having run a decent business for a year then decided to divest out: “why should I take on a failed businessmen?”

Answer: “who would you rather have on your team, someone that’s taken a bold step and proved they’ll put in the effort alongside you, or someone that doesn’t know what taking a risk is all about nor ever pushed themselves as far as possible?”

b) when asked for repaying cash from someone you do not actually owe money to:

Advisor: “for all the hassle this is causing, why don’t you just pay the money, as it’s not that much after all, is it?

Answer: “what would you do, pay the money and be annoyed with yourself, or respect your own principles and make sure that someone who doesn’t deserve something doesn’t get something for nothing?”

The point of these tales, is that by asking a question giving two alternatives can at the very least, stimulate a debate along your preferred agenda, and at best, gain ultimate acceptance for your contention.

I’ve spent far too much time lately hanging around at the behest of the world’s most inefficient organisation, the NHS.  Every British politician you hear talk about our health service says all the staff are wonderful and it’s the envy of the world.  What a load of bollocks.  There’s only so much you can take of hearing such tripe, when the reality is far too many staff don’t give a toss about their patients.  The administrators are clueless, and most medical staff are hamstrung by poor administration or their own desire to get you in and out as quickly as possible, with the optimum remedy being inaction.  Why does an MRI scan take over 3 months, then the appointment to discuss it as long again?  It’s a disgrace.

Anyway, as you can imagine, most magazines left lying around in such waiting areas are not my normal reading matter.  I picked up one, called Eve, and started reading about how American Dr Martin Slegiman achieved huge success in making people happier.

This got me thinking about a customer of mine, where several of the reps used to be customer service orientated, and some are feeling (deliberate) discomfort about being thrust into a pure selling environment.

He identified four traits he calls ‘heart’ and ’signature’ strengths, which if you work on yourself will make you happy:

1. Gratitude (show sincere gratitiude that makes people take note)
2. Vitality (display a genuine infectious enthusiasm and throw yourself into something)
3. Hope (have faith in future & plan for it)
4. Love (both given and received)

Now, as you’ll know, I’m not really into pop-psychology self-help nonsense, but at least with a couple of these, if a down-in-the-dumps rep thinks about them, then they’ll likely turn things around.

With a decent glass of Piemonte vini rossi, I was happily snug in a Torino bar around midnight and glanced over to see a copy of the International Herald Tribune.  Make no mistake about it, this paper is useless.  So many have tried to make an ‘international newspaper’ and failed miserably, and this is no exception.  Why anyone other than a yank would read it is beyond me (as is why any American would read it themselves funnily enough!). 

So it was with pleasant surprise I happened across an article syndicated I think from the New York Times writer Thomas Homer-Dixon; the end of ingenuity.  It was a great example of opinion writing, mainly concerned with at what point does the development of previously unviable ways of producing oil, actually become viable.  This concept revolves around knowing the ‘EROI’; energy return on investment.  In essence, the debate raging is about how to prioritise new methods of searching out fuel.

And this got me thining.  I sell (fantastic) stuff to salesforces.  And the one time I get pressured, is when at a customer, a new broom arrives from outside.  They’ll often say things like “for that money I could get another salesguy”, hoping for an ego-massaging, kudos-enriching discount.  Naturally, none is forthcoming.

So in future, I’ll be able to talk about RoI in the context of EROI.  This means that most things in my client-universes have an easy-to-attribute figure (how ever rough it may be).  So figures such as how much a sales person should bring in are knowns - I’ll often here numbers here stating that anywhere between 4 & 10 times the package should be sold in terms of margin.  Yet at what point do you look to create more balance and further margin-enhancing tactics?  The idea is simply to get them to buy-in to my agenda, and this tangent will hopefully get them intellectually turned on