salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Someone sent me a link to a summary of a book by Joe DiMisa, The Fisherman’s Guide to Selling: Reel in the Sale – Hook, Line and Sinker.  A typically American title you may think, it describes the six main activities/roles which each meeting must exhibit to be a ripper.

One that did catch my eye regarded (in American spelling I’m afraid!) having a “color commentator” on hand to add insights and stats to back-up what you want to say. 

This is an interesting term.  I’ve always achieved great success when taking into meetings someone so obviously subzero in terms of sales skills, but who’s technical brilliance the prospects immediately buy into and engage with.  Without reading our Joe’s tome, I can’t be sure he refers to this type of support, I hope he does though.  It’s a winner everytime.

In fact, one of my recent customer salesreps has produced outstanding results lately by letting a fella called Steve out of his usual dungeon-like habitat and talk technical with his prospect (accountants, no less) as he gets away with the ‘I can’t believe you’re not using this’ line that the rep gets shown the door if he uses.

So, in my experience, such a ‘colour commentator’ is brilliant when they have technical expertise and are not in any way ’salesy’.  Just remember to make sure they know when to stop talking and hand over to you, else the chat will go off into all sorts of unnecessary tangents.

One final point too, is that using a sales manager for this role always goes pear-shaped.  They talk too much, guaranteed, end up undermining your presence and never shake off the shackles of their sales responsibilites.  Avoid.

Here’s a fascinating subject brought to my attention by a fella called Tom at one of my recent customers.  He mentioned to me that he was dyslexic and not wanting to use that as an excuse, was eager to improve his note making skills and asked my advice.  I ventured that a lot of decent note taking was linked to fine-tuned listening skills….. 

Impact Words 

Many people stumble because they try and write down every word spoken to them.  This is clearly impossible.  So focus instead on “impact words”.  What are the words you regularly hear that when crop up, are vital to you piecing together consequent data?

Commonplace Words

Then there are all those ‘filler’ expressions that people say a lot but you don’t need to write in longhand.  The obvious example is the ampersand (&) symbol for ‘and’.  Should a course in short-hand have been sadly absent from your colleague curriculum, simply make your own up for other common words.  I use a ‘w’ with a horizontal line above it for ‘with’ for instance.  Other common words I get to hear are ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’ (or their synonyms), so I simply use a vertical arrow for these, with arrowhead at top/bottom dependent on required direction.

Clarify

You’re not the ‘expert’, the talker is, so don’t be ashamed to ask them to spell something, or repeat again to aid your understanding, whilst also giving you added time to note a key phrase down.  Interestingly I learned the other day that one of my clients won a national supplier agreement at a company called WSP by doing just this, so that one of their key presentations featured direct quotes relating to the scale of a problem from senior personnel.

I passed these hints on, and in reply, Tom sent me a cute finding from a 2006 Birmingham Uni study, which found that:

“as lnng as the fisdt and lsst lettr is coreht in wrding of a sntennnce the sentewnce is stwll posnlble to reed.”

Here’s a subject gaining plenty of web postings at the moment.  Marketing and Sales operations the world over are putting blogs online for their (often remote) colleagues to search out vital data and share experiences of the market place.

My very latest customer I just found bought my services after at one sales meeting, their top rep (called John) said they needed a place to ‘host’ all their successes and why they were happening, and he cited, apparently, his positive use of a Triumph blog in his hobby pursuit of motorbiking. 

None of the sales departments I support (all B2B-solution orientated) have travelled this road so far.  And I know why.  Reps are not the same as everyone else.  They will take, but not necessarily give.  In my experience, there is an indisputable 50-50 split, with half of guys engaging from day one, the other half always giving the lame excuse they haven’t got the time (or worse) for this type of initiative.  And if you’re aware of true crm compliance rates then this’ll not be news to you.

What you have to do, is do it for them.  That means populating it for them with intel that they’ve asked for, and then turn it into a proper application.  Both these go beyond the use envisaged for mere blogging right now, but can indeed be achieved…..

My personal perspective is that the blog approach I outline is suited for niche knowledge areas.  The main one being where non-prospect specific intel can be shared, that occurs and can be used, across each sales territory, either to give other reps confidence and/or selling ideas, or provide credibility when the prospects require proof you’ve achieved results for others.

At an internal sales meeting I attended last week at one of my customers, the boss asked why it was that the reps always talk about round figure discounts? Typically in increments of 2½ percent?

At the bottom of a quote is often a line something like “less discount – 15%”. Why is it never 14.289%? Wouldn’t a different figure give more credibility to a prospect? “I worked hard and managed to get you this….”  As it could be due to discount pool apportionment or raw materials costs, etc. 

Imagine if for every sale that normally attracts your commonplace ‘15%’, you preserved some margin in this way, what would it all add up to? A pretty decent number hopefully.

Back to my customer that has Saratoga’s Avenue gear, which all the reps naturally avoid using as much as they can.  This isn’t news.  Nor is it restricted to this one software vendor’s code. 

At a recent sales meeting of theirs I attended, they were all moaning about being asked to input the details of specific competitor presence within their target accounts.  When the boss ran a report to see where one particular competitor offering was in situ, he expected an answer in the thousands.  He got ‘21′.

The rapping of knuckles ensued, with protestations aplenty in return.  Then, the head honcho said something inspirational. 

“The definition of success for a crm is where it allows someone to work on accounts on your behalf, that soon introduces them into your funnel”

Silence.  Then they all committed to discover and input the relevant data.

One of my customer’s is at present trying to nail an objection that’s preventing some of their guys from prising open the door of potential new clients.  When cold-calling, they introduce themselves only to receive the ‘we’ve already got a supplier for that’ flea in the ear.

What Else?

I’ve always enjoyed two approaches to this one.  The first is by putting them off guard by saying, ‘glad you’re covered and happy”!  Then you go on to ask, “okay, fair enough, so I can update my database so you’re not called again, what are you really happy with about them?”

Usually, they’ll trot something out.  The key to success with this, is by asking “What else?” afterwards.  And keep on asking the question until they run out of ideas.  Then you can pounce. It’s a cracker.

Old Shoes

The second is the ‘old shoes’ analogy.  Probably used by people that still have a fondness for the quill, I have seen this work in a presentation once where a colleague of mine was up against a long-term incumbent.  He even bought in a pair of battered old shoes as a prop.

You go on and on about how comfy an old pair of shoes are, and why you know you must get a new pair, and once you do, after a day or two the new ones are as comfy as the old, yet don’t let the rain in, or make you look embarrassingly scruffy and the rest.

This is a subject to which I may well return, as I’m intrigued by this new evolution to strategic and growth initiatives.  In markets heading towards commoditisation, wrapping more value into or around the product/service you provide is a must.  Yet finding ways to do this are fiendishly difficult.

I was at a customer last Wednesday where they’ve set up a kind of in-house consultancy that helps bars/restaurants deliver greater value to customers.  Their explicit implication: “when you buy from us regularly, then this enviable resource is all yours”.  (It never gets given away free as part of pre-sales, ie: no consutlancy of any type is entered into before a signature even by way of extra incentive, which I believe is critical by the way)  It goes without saying no other competitor offers this, focused as they are on selling kit as cheap as chips, so their ‘value innovation’ is really setting them apart (as experts in their field) and even better, protecting margins.

And I’ll mention a story from a prospect that I’ve noted in passing recently in more depth too.  One of the items these particular guys provide are consumables to middlemen (resellers) that then go into their customers commercial vehicles.  They tend to come with their logo (as after all, the manufacturers) and the like on them.  So what they’ve started to do, is no longer be precious about their ego.  I bet marketeers are shuddering!  They offer to put their reseller’s details on the items instead.  This then encourages loyalty to the reseller and raises their profile.  Wonderful “ingredient branding”, and a beautiful piece of Value Innovation.  I hope they’re brilliantly successful.