salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

For all you cold-callers out there, three objections have been around since the oldest profession established itself.  Everyone will recognise being fobbed off with rubbish like ’I'm too busy’, ’send me something’ or ‘phone me in a few months’.

There are lots of different ways of handling these, and in many cases, you’ll simply uncover a serial objector and hopefully earn their respect.

Remembering that I sell to sales people, one tactic I’ve just heard win through in my office today is to respond with a smile/chuckle;

“interesting, what would you expect one of your sales guys to say to that?!”

Anything that helps distinguish yourself from the hoardes of paparazzi-style cold-callers everyone (misleadingly) claim hound them each day, is a good thing and can earn the right to hold a proper conversation, like in this example above.

The first time I ever saw a pledge card was on a video during a lecture at Uni. A greying English corporate middle-manager was salivating on the virtues of Deming’s 14 points of quality. As a group of students, I sensed most found some of the ideas illuminating. Then to emphasise how the 14 were part of his/their inner fabric, he pulled out of his jacket pocket a laminated business card sized note, with the 14 points printed on. Everyone groaned with despair, I recall.

With the UK political top job changed 27 June, commentators have rushed to assess whether Blair was any good. Often they ask his (oft-ridiculed) ‘deputy’, John Prescott for his views. His stock answer is to waffle on about pride and pull out his ‘97 election winning pledge card, claiming all promises were met. (See below for both main British parties pledge examples.)

So, Pledge Cards - are they a good idea? If they are worthy, then how can they be applied to sales? I kind of think they are indeed a decent concept and can be applied. Companies race to ensure everyone has a business card. I know for my own sales team, several dozen business cards only cost around £50 every time someone new arrives, and to avoid the embarrassment of not having one is worth the price tag alone. But why not re-use the branding/design?

If you follow the mantra that every firm should be customer-focused, then what could be better than having a reminder on permanent show of why you exist, by printing the benefits you aim to unleash for your clients? And at fifty quid, it’s almost disposable, so you could re-write and evolve fairly regularly. I wonder how prospects would take to receiving 2 biz cards at introduction time, one with your name/number, the other with your ‘aims for customer achievements’? I’m tempted, and might even get some made up by my printers…..

And that’s not considering the power of having everyone’s bonus plan on a card in their purses/wallets next to their cash and other cards…..

Was in a customer near Shakespeare’s birthplace and met a decent chap called Richard now selling the best drinks dispense systems into the pub retail trade for the past seven months.  One of the sales teams aim is to talk business issues with senior execs rather than delivery ones with technical managers.  But how do you grab the attention of the Top Brass?

It’s an age-old sales conundrum.  He jokingly suggested calling up reception and saying “I’ve had a mobile message from (person’s name) but they must have been out of signal, can you give me their full number please…”

Such people often (although slightly less so each year) have ‘gatekeepers’.  One old-school tactic is to talk abut a specific technically-orientated product they offer.  For instance, find a complicated sounding offering they sell or use, and make a note of the full description.  Then call and when challenged say something like “it’s about your XYZ AB super123.89″. 

I’m currently helping a ten-strong sales team sell more of a new product, guaranteeing decent run-rate business.  Upon launch a few months ago, most of them didn’t manage to sell any to their distributors/resellers, so enthusiasm waned.

I just spoke to one of their guys that finally got success after 6 months of trying.  He had this one customer where he thought an opportunity existed.  The buyer there never gave him a definitive ‘no’, instead, he kept saying things like “I’ll think about it”, and “I'’ve been too busy to do anything on it”.

All the hoops he was given, he jumped through.  These included changing packaging, altering pricing structures and creating a bespoke order schedule.  And still his passion remained unrewarded by the buyer.

Eventually, he reckoned he got an order (worth roughly £5k to him) because it was the only way the buyer could think of to stop him talking about it!  During this 6-month campaign, he had face-to-face conversations 10 times, and spoke on the phone with the buyer a further 20.

It’s precisely this kind of persistence and determination that many sales people forget is required, whether at the start of their career or after many years of quota-busting experience.  If you have a product that may need 30 contacts with a prospect about over the next 6 months to sell, and you knew that up-front, wouldn’t you make sure you did what was necessary?

Learned something illuminating the other day, doing some work for one of my customers that sell to the oil industry. I enjoyed a long telephone conversation with a chap called Ceri, a PhD in geology no less.

What I learned, is that in the multi-million dollar science that is guestimating oil field reserves, when assessing how much black gold exists, there are two philosophies; siesmic and geologic. And like most times in life when two equally valid, yet opposing options exist, the disciples of each stick to their way as the ‘best’. Ceri considered the Geological method inferior as (compared to Seismic) it is:

• Data driven, potentially not always telling you what is going on
• Can under-estimate how much good quality rock you’ve got
• So potentially a pessimistic outcome
• Over-simplistic data can miss the geological tip-offs

And then a fascinating analogy struck me. I (and the vast majority of my customers/prospects) sell solutions. Typically this means an RoI must be established and accepted. Often, a huge amount of time is devoted to generating spreadsheets showing a cell, filled with a glorious coloured, emboldened figure ‘proving’ our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow exists. I wonder if this isn’t the Geological perspective? How often do you apply even weighting to the ‘proof’ as well as other facts? Such further data can be how precarious is our political stance, who likes us, does our face fit, can we create action? These ’siesmic’ attributes can serve us at least as well…..

What are the top dangers sales operations face today?  According to 2,663 such organisations polled recently, they are these 5:

1. Poorly defined sales process
2. Individual skill shortages
3. Unfocussed sales activity
4. Self-limiting belief prevails
5. Management not nurturing

I see all of the above inside the sales teams I support and pitch to.  Yet I’m surprised at this listing, as it’s nowhere near specific enough.  It’s like going to the quack and as you sit down, they say “Arh! You must have a pain!” and you gratefully take your leeches home thinking they’re a genius.  I’m sure the full report has deeper insight, but for now, consider this prose:

Issue Number 1: A poorly defined sales process that wasn’t being followed by frontline sales teams which dilutes sales revenues

What?  This is the original ’selling’ text (I summarised for the above bullets).  These guys are in sales, right?  Why bother restricting yourself to the discipline of 4-words-max for a headline, when you plainly can use 17.  Leaving the presentation to one side, next there’s the message.  A “poorly defined sales process” is one thing to report, but no-one’s ever said that to me when pouring their heart out.  What they do say though, are things like “it’s really tough to get a second meeting”, “we get often pipped at the post” or “Purchasing Dept involvement is our death knell”.  And I feel the subject matter would both benefit from, and warrants, such further exploration.  For my tuppence worth, try some of these puppies from a straw-poll sample size of around twenty Heads of Sales that have confided these in me lately as their current major dangers:

• New product push flounders
• No/wildly inaccurate forecasting
• Too much discounting
• Vital intel not spread/shared
• Unaligned crm
• Not enough opportunities open
• Hunting-Farming imbalance

This is such an age-old problem, yet I cannot recall ever speaking to someone who had a genuine answer to it.  The scenario is, you’re selling to one person and things are not necessarily going your way.  So you must talkto their boss.  What do you do?

a) go over their head and risk pissing them off

b) get them to go on your behalf, and expect them to be able to do your job for you

Neither route is satisfactory of course.  The text books implore you to take the first contact at the high level and earn your licence to roam, so the channel is always open should things stall.  Yet this isn’t always an option.  Think for instance, of when the dancing monkey is the one inviting you in, and the organ-grinder sits twenty floors above them.

One aim can be to arrange a joint approach, which needs quite a bit of hard-talking, as it still requires someone to make the call to secure the meet, so you’re kind of back to square one.  Coaching the oily-rag can help, as can permission to call the engineer following say a mail from said rag.

Recent exposure to photocopier resellers flags up a tool to jemmy open this door.  Have you a return on investment Ready Reckoner?  You can use it to verify there is a significant pot of gold at the bottom of your rainbow, and leverage the quest for findings, or indeed the figures themselves to gain that vital ‘big boss’ meeting.

In my experience, going over someone’s head unannounced hardly ever works.  The best bet is to prime your champ that the inevitable initial response will be ‘no!’, so manage expectations around a campaign of actions, rather than solitary isolated request.

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I recently discovered a chap I befriended when he was a client of mine many moons ago was now at the sales helm of Europe’s largest lighting manufacturer/distributer.  I caught up with top fella Brian and was delighted to hear him in fine fettle.

We naturally got to comparing his past and present outfits, as over a beer we regularly used to mock his old employer’s lack of IT nous.  He was extolling the virtues of his bespoked crm package, emanating from Germany, where every quote is registered and each opportunity dutifully progressed.

And the one thing he’d just done was give his (around 100) reps in the field 3G cards.  The idea is they’ll be more likely to input crucial data when waiting for ten minutes in a car park, rather than rely on feeling like it when arriving home, confronted by a million and one distractions later that night.

It’s interesting that everyone accepts that if you don’t jot something down, you will forget about it.  It is impossible for us reps to remember every conversation we have, every promise of delivery made, every proposition suggested and every date we’re supposed to call back.  Yet I bet it’s a relative stroll for a crm vendor or internal IT department to write a mobile device-friendly input routine that allows for whatever the 4 or 5 key elements you want to capture to be documented the instance they occur…..(and avoid the typing by toothpick barrier). I feel a product coming on

On 18 June 07, reports emerged that Britain’s highest paid civil servant quit his £290k a year post trying to implement the world’s largest non-military IT project.  The incredible price tag of £12bn is meant to bring modernisation to the UK’s useless “free” health service.  I read this on the same day that (the excellent clinician) Dr Guilhoff told me waiting times for new outpatients at the Chelsea & Westminster hospital was a mind-boggling 7 (yes, seven) months.  Here’s a cracking quote from London’s Times about Richard Granger’s views:

“Confronted with what he saw as the intransigence of the medical profession and the determination of IT suppliers to make high profits at the taxpayers’ expense whatever their performance, Granger tried to introduce a tough competitive climate for the contractors.

His metaphor for the project was a sledge being pulled by huskies. Those who fell by the wayside would be “chopped up and fed to the other dogs” to ensure that those who survived worked harder.”

I’ve a lot of sympathy for this view.  Upon reading this I was instantly struck by the veracity of this analogy and how rarely such outright hostility in the supplier-customer relationship can have been so public.  From a sales person’s perspective, it’s a belter of an example to use with buyers that are giving you grief and you cannot accept their reasoning, to try and move them towards a more productive win-win mentality as however merited the above thinking, it will (lamentably and surely) not alone precede success.