salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Of interest to anyone in the UK that sells, would you believe it, there’s now a pop-idol-meets-big-brother-cum-survivor-stroke-apprentice style reality tv show for us in the offing.  Under the snappy headline Commission Impossible, there’s an application form to fill in to help get whittled down to one of eight that appear on the telly.

Beware though, as applications close on 15 June, so not long to go.  In addition, there are 15 questions that require some creative thought.  From my professional standpoint, my favourite question is “How would you sell a glass of water?”.  Feel free to comment away your pitch

As happy as I am to see selling promoted on primetime tv, I have obvious reservations about what’s forthcoming.  Judging by the questions, you can only infer that the producers are after highly and aggressively competitive people, that’ll back-stab, stitch up, sell their granny and generally behave in underhand ways to provide ‘compelling’ entertainment from human misery and conflict.  So I suspect ’selling’ may lamentably take a back seat in proceedings, especially given the rather transparent question on the form “What are your trade selling techniques and how low would you go to ensure a sale or are you always honest?”

Anyway, at the very least, I relish seeing what sales ‘tasks’ they get the contestants to perform and gleefully report back!

Another addition to the sales software/crm space, this time from Entelegen.  Their blurb on what they term ’sales pursuit’ software was eventually fascinating, as it says what every sales person already knows; crm is rubbish ….. but we wish it wasn’t.

They have a six-point pitch built around sales team best-practices.  The first two almost led me to bin their glossy (don’t rob reps of time & focus on full chain of sales effort) but on persevering, found these four gems, startling in their admission:

1. Avoid analysis paralysis – don’t worry about how another department might be ‘touched’ by what you plan, as if you do you’ll lose your job as nothing will happen
2. Face reality – “you can’t automate sales forces”, they don’t do repetitive tasks, they distil complex info
3. Build a winning methodology – build a repeatable sales process that captures the info your top performers grab as they advance deals
4. Motivate and serve the user – dashboards that show performance in obvious graphical ways are the winner as reps are target-driven

Discussing the merits of running a ‘lifestyle business’ over the weekend, when you know you could make more money working for yourself alone, reminded me of a conversation I had earlier this year.  After a thoroughly enjoyable lunch in glorious 36° sunshine in Cape Town’s Northern Suburbs, a good pal of mine asked me about my current business plans.  He runs a successful transactional intranet outfit himself, and was wondering what my grand scheme was.  I outlined some of the growth I aimed to accomplish throughout the year, and he asked me what I thought was wrong with a so-called ‘lifestyle business’ approach, and recounted this fable….

A successful fella (probably a stockbroker from New York) found himself walking along a beach somewhere in Europe (Greece, perhaps, after concluding a deal nearby and about to return home).  He saw a fisherman bring his boat ashore, and step out with a handful of fish over his shoulder.  It struck the Yank that the boat could carry plenty more fish than the mere string-load evident.  So the two men got chatting…..

“Fishing not so good today?” enquired the Seppo, “fishing was fine” answered the trawler.  “So how come so few fish?” the American quizzed, “these are all I need,” the fisherman contentedly smiled and continued, “I keep a few for myself to feed my family, give a couple to my neighbour - he can’t fish for himself unfortunately - hand one to the school for their lunch, and take the last couple to market and sell”.

The American was aghast.  “You know what you need to do,” and you could feel a tide of passion about to well up. “Next time you go out, fill your boat with fish, you can fit ten-times the amount in your vessel.  You sell all the excess at the market and start to make way more money.  Then in a short while, you can afford to buy a bigger boat, catch yet more fish, make even more money going to market.  Then you can take someone on to help you run the boat.  In time, you’ll gain another boat, and train up someone to run that for you.  The profits from the extra market sales will mean you can buy a whole fleet of boats.  Then you can buy an even bigger one, and start deeper sea trawling.  Before long, you’ll be able to buy a processing plant, and make yet more money still, often cutting out any middlemen.  You’ll find more markets further afield, and eventually build a storage plant too, so your fish get sold around the globe.  You’ll make millions, and then you can retire.”

“Retire?” puzzled back the fisherman, “and then what’ll I do?”  “Simple”, replied the chuffed American, “you’ll be able to fish everyday”. 

“But I do that already…..”

So, next time someone questions why bother with progress, you can pick the holes out of this tale

People that ’sell’ for a living, particularly those male in gender, like to be spurred on by what motivates sporting heroes.  I came across another couple of gems from cricket legend Viv Richards yesterday.  When interviewed by Mark Nicholas as rain prevented England polishing off the Windies on the 3rd day’s play he talked about how their current crop of under-performing, less skillful team members could improve their mental approach.  Many of his points can be applied to how you approach selling - here’s a sample from the man that if Botham referred to as “the king”, then must surely have been truly spectacular:

“cricket is a simple, simple game”, you tend to come unstuck when you try an over-complicate it, make it simple and you will succeed

“you can have talent, but you must work on it”, never rest on your laurels

“there’s nothing wrong with looking someone in the eye and letting them know what you will accomplish, you might be dealt nasty cards ocassionally, but if you let them know you always back youself and deliver, there’s nothing wrong with that”, Viv was often accussed of an arrogance due to his determined swagger and often outrageous shot selection, but he reckons if you believe you are good enough, don’t be afraid to let people know - of most relevance to your relationship with that sales manager getting on your wick, I suspect, to get him to back you more….

Anyone remember “TQM”?  If you do, relax, Total Account Management in the terms I’ve recently discovered it has nothing to do with such early-90s Quality drives.  ‘Phew’ I can hear you sigh.  Steady on, though, as some TQM problem solving techniques are awesome and deserve a second-chance…..but I digress…..

Two of my customers have recently implemented training programmes.  They’re in completely unrelated fields and at opposite ends of the price spectrum for average order values.  Yet they’re both in B2B solution selling and gave the current drive the self-same name; “TAM”.  And their definitions are remarkably similar:

customer one - how can we find and exploit every single sales opportunity within an account?

customer two - how can we ensure we talk about every single product/service grouping we offer and penetrate an account with as many as possible to lock out competition?

When I hunt down more answers, I’ll pass them on, but in the meantime the biggest issue they’re focussing on is how to extend their net so they talk to more individuals within such target accounts, typically occupying roles they’ve previously not been hot at establishing relationships with….

Recently I’ve come across a spate of sales teams whose leadership is exasperated by the lack of extra sales key new product launches have brought in.  It’s a long-known problem, classically referred to as “sales substitution”.  This has two strands, the one I’ll deal with here typically runs as follows:

glitzy launch of new product to salesteam, financial incentives offered, management say sell it on pain of death, reps decide it’s all a bit too complicated, happy to still hit their numbers with the rest of their kit bag, so stay in their old comfort zone, new product doesn’t fly off the shelf, management jumps off roof, bitter recriminations follow…

I hate this scenario.  So was delighted to read about (albeit monolithic torpid laggards) BT’s push into broadband services achieving a degree of success.  They describe two types of services; old & new wave.  After just a few quarters as the graph shows, the New Wave accounts for a whopping 36% of business.  One posssible way of looking at this, is that 1 out of every 2.8 orders is now for New Wave products.

What the article does not state, is how the sales teams responsible embraced the New Wave, but you can still pick out the bones and persuade any dissenting sellers why the ‘feared future’ is worth pursuing.  In other words, if you’re launching a new product, this is a great example to explain why you can’t afford not to board the train.  Imagine you don’t join the pagent, in just a few months you’ll only be doing two-thirds the business you’re doing now…..

I was forced to watch an episode of the American CSI output Sunday.  It was the one set in Vegas.  In days of yore I loved watching all those really intelligent ‘new breed’ of detecting shows.  I refer to the ones that make the effort to go deeper, like Morse, Between The Lines, NYPD Blue, Cracker and latterly, Foyle’s War.  CSI I’m sure likes to think of itself in this mould, yet when watching it before, I always thought it was a little shallow, along with the intensity of the situations being dubious and relationships between protagonists unlikely.  Anyhow, watch I did and half-way in, an interrogation room scene with a red-herring suspect.

The suspect broke down in tears when mumbling through an “I’m a failure” monologue, after which the CSI boss replied,

“we are crime scene investigators - we are trained to ignore verbal testimony and focus solely on what is at the scene of the crime”

This instantly struck me as a key selling platform.  I was also reminded of some of my first ever telephone training.  On the phone, the majority of communication signals are lost, leaving only spoken words.  When with a prospect face-to-face you get so much more…. and yet how often do you let only the heard messages stick?

What are all the non-verbal things going on that should be telling you how you are doing?  The obvious one is body language.  Forests of books are dedicated to this, even making a science out of it in the NLP realms.

But what other things also go on you gloss over or miss?  One of the first ever deals I lost I knew beforehand was potentially slipping.  It was a £12k margin software deal, and learning from the loss was a key reason why I managed to get my close ratios to a 1 out of 1.7 rate.  At a Morse moment (y’know, aka the Columbo close, where he used to ask after he’d motioned to leave a room “by the way one final quick thing….”) I mentioned we were thinking of running a hospitality event at something the prospect had earlier discussed animatedly with me in a previous context.  His response was “that’s certainly something to think about”.  It startled me, as the disinterested way how he uttered it said to me he’d already decided to go elsewhere.  My point is that actions related to issues outside the obvious deal discussions can be important.  For instance, nowadays such actions go through email loads. 

What potential worth is it to become more ‘forensic’ on your qualification?  What else does the ’scene of the crime’ offer up as inspiration or evidence to further your cause?

The doyen of business reality telly has got to be ex-ICI Chairman John Harvey-Jones, with his awesome Troubleshooter series throughout the early Nineties.  Since then, several pop-tv shows have introduced helping businesses escape dire straits (like the aforementioned show), pitting contestants against one another for dream jobs, through to start-up funding gameshows.  And now we add another to the growing list from a runner-up on Alan Sugar’s Apprentice.

Its tabloid title, Badger Or Bust, gives an inkling as to the protagonist’s (Ruth Badger) approach.  Whilst frankly nowhere in the same league as industrialists and gurus to have performed a similar role before, you can wholesomely forgive her because she makes decent telly.  It is true that pretty much all of her advice could be dished out by anyone that had hit their targets two years running straight out of college.  The requisite depth for which I crave is sadly absent, but isn’t it funny what doors a prime time humiliation can open….  The episode I saw featured a caravan and trailer homes lot.  This was particularly interesting for two reasons; on her Apprentice torment, she took part in a second-hand car sales day and although made a couple of mistakes, did quite well proving that she had done that kind of thing before, and also, one of the very best fly on the wall docs ever on selling, The Real Swiss Toni (aka Would you buy a used car from this man?), took place in a similar environment.  So, what are the lessons you can take from this show even if you never saw it? 

Keep yourself disciplined – as the boss himself admitted, “when you’re busy you become less disciplined” just at the point you need more professionalism.  One way this manifested itself was a lack of any “sales boards”, where targets and achievements were kept up-to-date so instant snapshots could be gleaned.

Training is continual – the sales manager also acknowledged that he wasn’t spending enough time one-on-one with his three charges.  Role play and mystery shopping unearthed all sorts of deficiencies that he must address, like not asking how much money the prospect wished to spend, and when a budget was announced of £12,000, being shown product for less than £10,000 (!)

It’s fine to recap the basics – I remember with misty eyes way back in the 90s running sales training over breakfast before my guys hit the cold call trail and catching them with a ‘pitch this product to me’ exercise.  How can I forget one session where the choice was a mobile phone, bottle of champagne, banana and condom where everyone messed up until Stuart Shenton played a blinder with the banana.  Sheer class he was with a simple single F-A-B sentence approach ending with “enabling you to hit your numbers!”  Anyway, Ms Badger did the same trick with phone, apple, handbag and brolly.  It’s a good way to sharpen up basic skills, although her ’sell the dream’ intonation is a touch corny.

Demo skills are critical – the 3 guys she was asked to turnaround were lazy, as evidenced by body language for instance, but when in the caravans, some truly shocking pointing took place rather than showing properly.  At the end one of the guys changed his behaviour so that he would focus on “what you do with it rather than what it’s made of”.

And as a footnote, here’s one tactic that whilst I clearly cannot condone, did bring a smile to my face….one rep put a couple of his business cards in a colleague’s card holder so he’d inadvertantly give them out, hopefully giving him more leads.

Many salesguys I meet love to talk about sportstars and their approaches.  And this week two attitudinal crackers surfaced as various seasons climax.

Dallaglio 

A couple of my mates were lucky enough to blag tickets for the Heineken Rugby European Cup final Sunday, and I was out watching (the woeful) FA Cup final the day before with them in a London juicer.

All the rugby chat was Leicester were overwhelming favourites.  Yet I view Wasps’ main man, Lawrence Dallaglio, as a colossus ever since seeing him take on the All-Blacks single-handedly at Twickenham when we drew 26-all.

In a pre-match interview last week I heard him say something like this.

“winning is all about belief, if you don’t believe you can win then you won’t, I look around our dressing room and I know that all of my players believe they can win”

Which contrasted bizarrely with their coach’s words, citing in none too enthusiastic tones that they were underdogs and given the opposition’s current stature, they’d enjoy their biggest ever victory if they caused an upset.  As for the game?  Well, Wasps took the game to their opponents and hammered them 25-9.

The sales moral unsurprisingly is, truly believe you will clinch the deal and you can make it happen.

Gerrard

The European Champions League final Wednesday, pits Liverpool against AC Milan once more.  If just half as good as Istanbul two years ago it’ll still be a belter.  One of my two current favourite players, Steve Gerrard (the other being Arsenal’s Thierry Henry by the way) has done plenty of media rounds during the build-up. 

He’s constantly asked about his reaction to how Milan’s bad-boy, Gattuso, has supposedly said he’ll nail Stevie G and stop him from playing.  Gerrard’s answer was a class act. 

“I’m worried about my own game and if I get that right, then we’ll see if he can stop me”

He’s focused solely on Liverpool and how they will prepare so that he himself performs to the best of his abilities.  He doesn’t take any notice whatsoever of any personal duel hype or whatever words emanate from the Italian camp.

Again, sales lesson bullet, don’t get wound up about the competition.

Things often happen in 3s don’t they?  At customers & prospects this very week, I’ve come across three separate instances of the same thing.  (I wrote about one in detail just a couple of days ago)

In each case, sales people have yelped in anguish about what happens when their ’spec sheet’ is placed in front of a decision maker hitherto not involved in their sale.  Both sheets are similar.  Both offerings can do the job.  Yet their competition is cheaper.  Guess what happens next….

The way each seller wanted to handle the situation was different.  Each of them though, realised by the time the visual comparison occured that things may have been left a little late.  Given two similar options, managers about to sanction spend are overwhelmingly likely to authorise the cheaper one.

In my examples encountered just now, they all wanted to make the quote look as different as possible way before the executive shoot-out.  And their way was to load in extra services and associate extra spend with way more extra return.

I was reminded of a wonderful quote from top fella Colin Chapman (he played footie for Chelsea & Bolton in the 70s and latterly has been an enthusiastic, highly successful sales person in the UK packaging industry):

“he who buy’s on price, pays twice”

So when you suspect such a biased pagent is possible later down the line, you could always find out buying history at your target prospect, and it won’t be long before you dredge up a whince-enducing tale of when buying the cheapest nearly brought them crashing to their knees.