salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

I often say that if you can sell in the UK, you can sell anywhere.  As a bunch, there are precious few dynamos around these islands, and the ones we’re lucky to produce tend to fly off and settle in far away climes.

Nowhere is this more stark than hearing reasons why people won’t take cold calls.  My Boiler Roomers call people that head up salesteams, typically known here as Sales Directors.  What is astounding, is that they all have several reps in the field themselves, all of whom are doing (or at least are expected to be doing!) what my appointment-makers are at; namely calling people to gain introductory forums.

So, let’s get this right.  These people demand their charges do this, yet when someone tries to engage them, rather than genuinely attempt to understand what benefit they could enjoy, they avoid any conversation at all.  It’s crazy.

In the past two days I’ve spent sitting in our office near one of my cold-call winners, I’ve heard these two exchanges:

Prospect (interrupting pitch nano-seconds in): “We don’t need your services, thanks”

Caller: “What is it about our services that you feel inappropriate at this time?”

Prospect: “We are all covered thanks”

Caller: “But I’ve not explained what we do yet, so how can you say you don’t need it?”

…..phone goes dead.

And the other stunner, was where a guy said “is it a government requirement I see you?”.  You couldn’t make this up.  I remember once myself being told by a guy that he received “thousands” of such cold calls. So I said, “fair enough, when was the last time you took one?”  He couldn’t answer.  If he hadn’t have put the phone down on me, what I was going to say was, “the reason I ask is won’t it help to establish why you would indeed take a cold call, so I can help you better enjoy the potential benefits I have to offer…” They should be ashamed of themselves.

It happens all too rarely, I bumped into a pal at a prospect yesterday.  Lovely to catch up, and it meant we cut straight to the chase.  He described the company as an “awesome commodity distribution operation”.

They’d just re-structured their salesteam, and one new charge is called Adam.  He excitedly told the Boss that he’d got 1,000 prospects.  Yet he hadn’t.  As my pal Simon pointed out, he only had a thousand names on a spreadsheet.  What he must do is stop prospecting from behind his laptop, and actually get out there and see people.

As Simon summarised, we need less “Laptop Larries”.

One of my valued customers runs a reseller event every year.  At each one an ‘inspirational’ speaker is duly booked.  This year’s was so good, most of the audience left the room wanting to join up.  He was a squadron leader with the Air Force’s elite flying display team; the Red Arrows.

He gave amazing insight into how they perfect performance.  After each ’show’, they invariably receive all the plaudits.  Yet they sit down and say to each other, what could you have done even better.  And they’ll say things like ‘I could have done this’, ‘alignment here could have been better’ and so on.  The point being, they strive for the impossibly good results.

I once saw a documentary on footie teams where the interviewer asked how often they sat through videos of games, and one player answered ‘only the ones we lose’.  How the Red Arrows expose this as flawed thinking…..

And a final footnote, what do you do when your ‘performance’ doesn’t matter or goes unnoticed?  Well, you know it does, and you seek to improve it nonetheless.  One example was where the team were doing a gig in Belfast.  On their way back to base in Lincolnshire, their flight plans were torn up, and they were asked to ‘fly-by’ the Millennium Stadium (formerly Cardiff Arms Park) for the Heineken Rugby European Cup Final.  Visibility was poor with low cloud cover, but they made sure they’d get right over the stadium.  When they landed, they patted each other on the back for a job well done…. only to discover that the low cloud produced rain, meaning the stadium roof was closed, so no-one saw their daredevil acrobatics!

Another day, another prospect, another first meeting and yet another guy saying they’ll not bother again with crm.

This time it was with the MD (and notional head of sales) of a trendy commercial lighting operation.  Four years ago they came to the UK from Denmark with one salesrep.  Today they have twelve.  Quite impressive.

To begin with they deployed Act.  Taken from their Sage (erp) reseller, they soon ditched it. This appears mainly due to the inability to make it function on pdas, and the ridiculous expense of customising.

Then this fella, Andy, explained that all he was losing was potential contact histories when reps moved on.  And in reality, when you think about it, that’s not a fat lot of info anyway, as new reps tend to start with a clean slate.

Furthermore, Andy was quite happy in the end for his guys not to ‘comply’, as being “maverick with freedoms” helped make them more successful.

Nothing new to those into their marketing ideas and all things ‘usp’, getting across what is unique is critical in the very first few seconds you speak to someone according to Richard Farleigh, he of Dragons’ Den fame and “prolific investor” in UK small/start-up firms.

I mention this, as I was waiting in reception of a leading builders merchants yesterday and a spangly new mag caught my eye, aimed at home-based and small office managers.  In what judging by the website may well have been their only ever edition, Farleigh says the essential things to think about getting across immediately are:

“what is unique about my product - why it can’t be copied easily.  Why I’d be good at it.”

And then I realised that when prospects ask me what I do, I often ably describe using lots of benefit/value statements, yet…..  I must resolve to say at the outset “…and what is so unique about what we do is…..”

There’s a ton of press in England right now about our epidemic of obese children.  They’re all spending too much time on the internet, playing computer games, doing zilch exercise, and eating chips, pizza and sweets.

What’s this got to do with my sales-help crusade?  Well, an article in the Guardian I thumbed through recently mentioned a fascinating stat.  It sounds like worried dieticians ran ‘tasting sessions’ for children that turned their nose up at any food that wasn’t a tone of ‘brown’.

Perhaps by pitching it as a ‘you might like some stuff and find something new and cool, but then you might not’, it looks like they had success.  So much so, that after a few sessions, the guinea pigs were squabbling over who had the red pepper crudites first.

The researchers found that children take time to ‘accept’ a new taste.  The crying shame is, that most parents give up after the first, single attempt to introduce such healthiness.  You can picture it can’t you, ‘here’s some broccoli…. yum!’ says the mom, only for the kid to spit it out, never to be tried again, and even if they did like it, they wouldn’t let on.

Results showed worst-case anywhere between 10 and 14 tastes were needed to accept new food.

In the sales, or even sales management environment, how many of us would persevere this many times?  Keep re-presenting your ideas in a subtle non-threatening way, and glory will eventually come your way.

I’m a huge advocate of spreading good news.  Many sales teams get bogged down in mires of negativity, argument and insubordination.  Surely a better place to be is where everyone is aligned to similar initiatives, and focus on joined-up accomplishment.

Lamentably, this is rarely the case.  One guy (a prospect) I spoke to first thing this morning was moaning his charges were not compliant on anything.  From filling out their weekly sales reports, to pitching the latest whizz-bang product, they pretty much mulled along as they pleased.

Changing such a culture is a real toughie, but it can be done.  Even when the most non-compliant are the top performers.  One key is to do what an American crowd I once worked with called “closing the excuse department”.  I often hear managers say something like “you can’t force anyone to do something…”

Well, actually, you can.  What ‘negotiation’ can you deploy to get your point across?  One customer of mine recently refused to pay commission unless certain info was logged at lead discovery time.  Waiting until the order came in was too late.  A beaut.

At another customer, we’ve been trying to help them sell more of a superb, game-changing offering.  Many are struggling, yet we’ve just exposed that of the 50-odd team, 3 have added more than €600k of new opportunities to their funnel for it.  And it’s in part because they’ve engaged in the tool to help them do so.  What are the other guys up to, and how can they justify not getting on board?  Close that excuse department!

This phrase has always irritated the hell out of me.  When someone says this, it can often suggest the last thing they’re being is truthful.

Yesterday I managed to get hold of a chap that I’d been referred to by someone I’d met last week for the first time.  The pair concerned were both Ops Managers, so not my traditional beneficiaries (which are sales guys).  The first recognition I heard when on the phone, was an inaccurate description of what we do.  Anyone that’s ever expected a prospect to ’sell’ internally on their behalf will appreciate the likelihood of this (nigh on 100%) and it’s nornally pretty destructive.

I obviously sought to gently educate this view and put us in the correct light.  Then the guy (called Jeff) kept saying “to be honest…” and I knew I was onto a loser.

He couldn’t give a monkeys.  If I’d been offering gold bars, half-price, he wouldn’t have been open to that, either.  One of those guys.  Luckily I have a further route in through another guy, but this one, well, he just didn’t experience any pain, what with not being a salesy-person, so I wondered why I’d bothered.

Everything in his garden was rosy.  The sales guys (although mainly without laptops) had a spreadsheet they filled in a column of each week on activity, the boss kept in close contact, and they seemed to be doing alright.  Classic status quo chat that normally dooms businesses to failure.

So I did wonder why I put myself through this inevitable frustration, but there you go, live and learn and off to contact the boss, Graham, now and see what he’d like to improve and evolve with his charges….

Met a fella at a huge car parts distributor.  Good to meet him, as he’d risen to the top after starting out a van-driving sales rep aged just 17.  He mentioned a couple of stories where recently he’d needed to reprimand a couple of his reps.

Quality link-selling is a joy to behold.  How often do you discover only a fraction of your customers that buy one product, are not in fact, actually buying a complete no-brainer accompaniment.

Yet one example I learned of, was where apparently there’s a particular part on a car that when taken off (a ‘cat’ I think?) sometimes has an element or two break.  So when asked for a box of such parts, one rep always also (unprompted) provided an extra item, a kit with spare parts.

He was selling around ten of these (at around nine quid) every day.  None of them requested.  Yet each week, only one or two were being returned.  Incredible.  The rep reasoned that when a part eventually broke, the mechanic saw the repair kit, broke the seal, took out a tiny piece of it, “and the job’s a good’un”!

Been doing quite a bit of repping recently, and in an oil industry software supplier, heard a heart-warning tale of how ’service’ personnel were contributing to sales lead generation.

These technical guys were in and out of customers all the time, yet their golden knowledge wasn’t being leveraged properly.  They were clearly privvy to some spectacular intel, yet there was no mechanism for funnelling it into worthwhile channels.

The Sales Manager asked them to make sure when they were helping someone on-site, whether it be with installation, training or consultancy, to ask them which team they were in and who their team leader was.

The idea was to uncover a pathway to the as yet unopened doors for extra sales, by coming across new or potential ’users’ or people happliy affected by the kit, that could take more of it or associated services.

When this was explained, one such services person remarked, “great idea, I do love all this James Bond stuff!”   At last, the recognition we salespeople thoroughly deserve