salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

A kind of semi-review this, as just before popping towards Covent Garden for drinks with some pals, I was rewarding myself for doing all the must-send mails by the end of the week by reading news items on the web.  One of them lead me to http://www.quirkology.com/.  The review of the book introduced all sorts of stuff, but I immediately saw potential sales value in research on which “Lonely Hearts” Personal Ads worked wonders.

Apparently (!) these are typically 25 words only.  Whether your audience are boys or girls, research shows there is an undisputed winning formula.  It introduces the “70:30 Rule”.  You must spend 70% of the time talking about yourself, and only 30% about your intended soulmate.

How often have you agonised over an email to a suspect that’s giving you the run around?  This could be an ideal approach   Next time someone’s shown interest, yet seems to be trying to give me the slip, I’m going to write an email like a “Personal”; 25 words, 18 about me, 7 about them…… (sounds tough!)

Looking forward to hopefully starting a project with an industrial parts distributor/manufacturer based in Sheffield, I met the top sales person Tuesday.  One interesting topic was how to gain more share of each third-party distributor’s spend on their kinds of products.

An instructive example was with one distributor that took advantage of deferred payment on initial, first-time stock.  Their start-off order effectively gave them a year’s worth of inventory.  And then when it came to pay, they started to play up, constantly asking for more they were untitled to.

Everyone must have plenty of examples of where you give an inch, yet the other side takes a mile.  This organisation’s approach has just altered as a result, and now they say a firm, but polite “no” to any such suggestions.

I’m reminded of the mentality of people who never change their terms until a relationship has fully formed.  It’s kind of like the opposite to those annoying banks and mobile phone providers, when they offer new customers ridiculous deals but don’t match them for long-time customers.  And it seems like a great way to foster genuine, mutually beneficial long-term conduct.

Heading back to London on the train, read a fascinating architectural critic’s account of the March 2008 opening Heathrow Terminal 5 in London’s Times newspaper.  By his account, it’s set to be fabulous, on-time and on budget.

Deep within the lengthy article were some wonderful comparisons between this huge (£4.4bn - 5,000 workers) construction project and an abject failure at nearby Wembley Stadium.  Depending on who you believe, it’s at best two years late, and generously reporting, three-times budget.

What struck me is how we as sales professionals help people buy our wares every single day.  Yet the potential purchaser buys with far, far less regularity than that.  So why is it that when a sales seems like it’s going off-track, we often miss the chance to ‘educate’ the buyer on best-practice?

A couple of cracking quotes I’ll present here.

[a purchase and implementation/delivery] involves a series of decisions which must be taken in strict order. Failure to do so causes delays, and delays cause other delays. “It’s all down to the organisational qualities and the decisions taken by the client. When clients know what they want, and they get the right team and take the right decisions at the right time, it all goes like clockwork.”

[a quality buying outfit] put one [person managing] the job, and he told the [suppliers/advisers] exactly what was wanted. “Decisions have to be taken on a weekly basis. You start messing around and the whole thing unravels.”

And then there was the Wembley builder being caught out by (among several other things) rising steel costs it couldn’t pass on - so if there’s something that can change, the risk of which can be shared, then flag it up front and make a plan.

The mention of IBS may send a teenager into fits of sniggers, but in the context of sales, I discovered the other day it can stand for Initial Benefit Statement.

Hanging around in a conference room for a meeting to start, I couldn’t help but notice a few sheets left lying about by the previous occupants.  They’d been involved in a sales course with one topic on how to ensure you can introduce worthy “Talking Points” into any conversation.  Such Talking Points should be structured around an Initial Benefit Statement.

They were tasked with putting three columns on a sheet of paper under the headings Product, Features, Benefits.  So simply take a product and write down something interesting to say about it, both feature- & benefit-wise.

Not a bad approach I thought, as it’s simple and if you get it right, the one you trot out should encourage hours of endless conversational fun, leading the prospect to let on just how much your wonder-offering will change their lives.

Met a thoroughly engaging chap today at what’s evolved from an office stationers to become a £200m powerhouse.  He’d previously spent twelve years working for Coca-Cola in just about every sales role imaginable.  We got to discussing what was best-practice for reps to tap into and he gave a fascinating insight into what successful reps at Coke did if sales weren’t rolling in as healthily as they thought should be.

“The answer’s in the outlet” refers to realising you couldn’t do anything from endless phone calls or studying data on print-outs for hours on end.  You simply had to visit the store yourself and try and make sense of things.

And in most cases, the display wasn’t quite right, or not in the agreed, right, place, such as wrong gondola or what have you.

A cracking reminder that the only place you can ultimately make a difference sometimes is at the coal face.

An unashamed cricket fan, I’ve suffered from England coach Duncan Fletcher’s misguided thinking since that bizarre Oval Test last year.  His demise took place this week, with his replacement promoted from within the current international set-up.  I wish Peter Moores all the very best, and in the dozens of web pieces about his promise, one stood out for me by his former colleague at Sussex Robin Martin-Jenkins at The Times.

I’ve mentioned before that business/sales people are always trying to take tips from sporting motivation, and this article gives a couple of cracking insights.  If you’re a sales manager, they include:

• identify whether everyone is giving to or taking from the energy of the team - if someone’s taking energy away from your organisation, let them know they must sort themselves out (a great quote around this is “You’re just neutral . . . which is even worse in my book.” )
• think of instilling intensity, passion & drive and ensure no-one is ambivalent about their role and the company
• introduce a new vocabulary of intensity, honesty and belief
• introduce innovation and energy, even thinking about things like ‘warm-up drills’ so people don’t go through the motions before a call (I loved this insight, as how many times do you go on a call with someone and only discuss it as you rock up to the punter’s car park?!)
• challenge sales people to be mountain people, not valley dwellers - and make them givers not takers

Enjoyable night out yesterday around London’s Shepherd’s Market (between Hyde Pk Corner & Green Pk tubes) with my pal, Richard.  He works for a pub operator, being area manager for a few (usually trendy) juicers.  He got to talking about his day, moaning he’d actually been required to do some work for a change and visited a couple of “dull” performing pubs near Muswell Hill.

His aim was to somehow invigorate the owners, by all accounts verging on clapped-out, to pull in more business.  He started off with one by trying to involve him, saying “any ideas for pulling in more trade?”.  And the answers were uselss; quiz night, race night, karaoke.

So Rich changed tack.  He explained putting his hand in pocket for cash to help was an option, if decent ideas were forthcoming, so “what can WE do to get more sales?”.  And he continued to emphasise the “we”.

It was then suggested ‘ask the bar staff?’.  Although notoriously dis-interested in anything other than their knocking-off time, one of them mentioned she was a singer in a band, and she’d always considered the bar a potentially decent venue.

Latching on to this, knowledgeable of the resurgent live music scene in London, Rich wondered what the others thought. They all liked the idea.  One snag though, he explained, we’d need to spruce the place up a bit.  Rich knew this was always near-impossible to get a bar’s staff to do, as the spec required was a trauma of an unpopular job.  But what do you know?  They willingly volunteered to get involved and so a pub will hopefully soon get a new lease of life.

Amazing what you can ’sell’ when involving people….

Came across the Global Entrepreneurial Monitor through Newsnight, with a researcher pointing out why UK had some way to go in fostering dynamism in this sector.  A couple of the stats made me think about all those meetings you have when you’re pitching something ‘new’, where people seem interested, yet nothing ever gets bought.

I wondered if there isn’t actually a way to determine someone’s propensity to give something new a try (other than the classic Moore 1990, Rogers 1962 framework).

Fear Of Failure

It appears that Brits are twice as likely to be put off starting a new business because of their ‘fear of failure’.  So maybe finding how people match this is a way forward.

Type Of Work

In addition, if the job they do is closer connected to your ambitions, you could get a result.  Apparently the numbers involved in ’start-up activity’ are 1 in 25 throughout both France & Germany.  In the UK it’s 1 in 16.  The oft-quoted crucible for this, America, enjoys 1 in 10.  Yet amazingly, China tops the charts with a dazzling 1 in 6 workers apparently working within start-ups.

Can’t kids be incredibly cruel?  The kinds of abuse and torment metered out in playgrounds by people under three feet high can be astounding.  Usually, the nightmare stops before long trousers become the order of the day.

Monday was another crazily hot day in London; it’s August in April right now.  After a call near Windsor I caught the train back into Town and read an article in the Times supplement left lying around the carriage.  As it made a pleasant change from the rubbish freesheets, I tucked in.

The author, a Stanford professor no less, gives 12 behaviours that mean you’re an office foul play victim.  It’s as if you’re still being set upon at break-time:

1 Personal insults. 2 Invading one’s personal territory. 3 Uninvited physical contact. 4 Threats and intimidation, both verbal and non-verbal. 5 Jokes and teasing used as insult-delivery systems. 6 Withering e-mails. 7 Status slaps intended to humiliate their victims. 8 Public shaming. 9 Rude interruptions. 10 Two-faced attacks. 11 Dirty looks. 12 Treating people as if they are invisible. 

Now, think of the interactions within a sales team.  I have witnessed all of the above dozen, inside sales meetings, in corridors outside the bear pit, during one-on-one meetings with management.  It strikes me that these twelve are standard fare for sales managers and mis-guidedly politicking colleagues.  There’s so many things you can be pulled up for, even if you’re spanking your numbers, that many of the aforementioned no-nos can raise their ugly head.

The winning rep’s trick is to be thick-skinned, and concentrate on writing business.  And this should help not only halting the undesirable events described, but also prevent any of them morphing into tactics that obstruct your ambitions.

Yes, yes, I know this is jokespam, but what the hell.  One of my muppet pals sent me this, despite my telling him not to include me in such nonsense emails.  It reminded me that fairly regularly customers of mine (all sales people) send me right dodgy stuff.  It’s as if ‘appropriate terms of internet use’ policies never existed.  After the twin towers fell, one important VP forwarded me on a picture of Bush & Bin Laden doing a bit more than merely kissing to make up, and plenty more memorable images were provided by a NYC customer of mine to describe why Tiger Wood’s game had gone off the boil, courtesy of his wife…  anyway, for those of you interested:

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?

Here’s a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And,

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that While Hard Work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, it’s the Bullshit and Ass-kissing that will put you over the top.