salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Just a couple of days ago, I had the delightful experience of one of my tekkies showing sparkling sales skill.  And today I had a conversation with a fella of 20 years experience currently selling information to accountants.

Amazingly, he uses the same approach to uncovering requirements.  His similar chat goes:

“Let’s find out what’s crucial to you.  Think about:

what do you need,

what do you think might be of interest, and

then the blue sky … ignore all pricing issues and think of what in a perfect world you’d like”

And he went on to describe a cheeky four grand he’d just earned displacing his key competitor using this very same approach. 

Memories from a conversation with an MD of a datacomms type operation just now, are fresh with talk of Selling methodologies.  These guys have an American corporate HQ that have got them to spend money on Miller-Heiman’s strategic selling.  Part of the output included the famous ‘blue sheet’, which of course no-one now uses.

As his frustration cleary grew, he was explaining what was crucial to focus on with big potential projects, and it ran something like this:

“The key to success is in closing out your actions.  The reason why you win a major client is you do what you say you’re going to.”

He then gave the example of uncovering say, 3 pieces of information the buyer believes critical to make them more comfortable, and you go fetch. 

Here’s an awesome application of a solution selling technique that one of my young coders hit me with the other day.  And what a pleasure it was to hear.  Alex wanted to know more about a particular app we’re developing internally to help productivity benefit from web 2.0 capabilities.  How he began was a lesson to anyone selling something that needs detailed consideration.

He kicked off by saying this was simply an “informal requirements analysis“.  He went on, “as important stakeholders, you’ll know what you want the system to do“.  Then he broke down how we should consider our spec “into 3 levels; what you Need to have, what you Want, and what you’d really Like“.  He went on to explain the first category involved the essentials - those things core to the project.  And as you went through the sale, you moved towards nice-to-haves or luxuries.

Pretty impressive for a young lad recently out of college, and the discussions continued in a wonderfully promising fashion. 

Several templates are knocking about for how to conduct a first meeting in B2B solution sales.  I’ve always pretty much stuck to the one I first got taught way back in the day by two guys within 3 months of each other.  I was amazed at the time that they were the same.  One was by some fella employed by HP to teach their resellers, the other a proudly Welsh sole practitioner called Wynn Rees.  Although the odd tweak has naturally kicked-in since.

I was clearing out some papers to make room in a drawer the other night and came across a sheet of paper headed ‘Meeting Outline’.  I’ve no idea where it’s from, but I was intrigued it was different to what I do (probably why I kept it whenever I came across it).

Without going into too much detail, expect upto 60 minutes for this example of a pre-arranged solution-sale first call.  The flow can be slightly different dependent upon whether you’re sparking off discussions or a formal bid process is underway.  Yet the basics apply equally in each case.

The form I found includes a demo in the middle, which could just as easily be a description of what you offer, if other than software that seems to be the case here.

The first part is about developing, confirming and exploring a Mutual Agenda.  This is interesting emphasis, as typically this can get glossed over in just a couple of sentences.

The second involve Summarise Issues, standard requirements search time, with an entertaining aside to Map Goals.  I wonder if pulling this topic out on its own allowed for documentation with the prospect, and of timelines, players, etc?

After the demo section, Issues and Goals Confirmation occured, meaning anything cropping up during ‘demo’ (or description) can be aded to the mix, before the closing routines.

The ‘close’ element is also interesting because it’s split in two; Agreed Next Action is first then as a useful reminder, Diary Entry polishes everything off.

It looks like an experienced sales person has created this, as these aren’t headings I’d expect to see in ‘traditional’ sales training.  I say this as I can’t detect an underlying (almost academic) methodolgy beneath it, and also there’s no sub-headings for taxonomies that surely must exist under ‘Issues’ and ‘Actions’, which could mean the rep is familiar with options for these.

Still, a decent reminder of things you may want to add to your current ‘first call’ framework.

Someone showed me how they use Oracle’s Sales Online the other day.  Or more accurately, why they don’t bother with it.  Part of a $500m technology-related business, founded in Chicago back in 55, all their global reps are expected to use the system.  Yet none do.  Whenever the Brits moan about it, the response from Corporate is simply “it works in America”.  How helpful.

Then I saw the very front screen they log onto.  It was worse than a spreadsheet.  A very software-looking listing with columns for; opportunity name, value, status & likelihood.  The screen I was shown even had opportunities still live which had been won, and the most common value was virtually ubiquituous, $50,000, and every status was set to ‘open’.  They’d asked for a couple of mods, but 12 months later still no appearance.

Not much use and not much used.

And then I spoke to one of my long-time customer’s that I really think are moving in the right direction and have a lot of time for.  They use Saratoga’s Avenue.  Their head of sales dropped the bombshell that no-one uses it, and he was getting grief from HQ in Europe about it.  He responded he’d asked for a couple of mods, but 12 months later still no appearance.  Sounds familiar…

So I spoke to both chaps about their view of crm.  It’s heart-wrenching.  Along with me, they are both huge fans of what crm should accomplish.  Yet it never gets anywhere near success.  Martin summed it up really well something like this:

‘What sales guys need is a sales tool, and all they ever get is a management tool.  And the sales guys know this.  The only thing they get consistently asked for is their ‘number’, so the only thing they really ever input is what the finger-in-air value of deal will be and roughly when it’ll hopefully come in, so management can create a pipeline spreadsheet and everyone’s off their backs for another month.”

Well, there I was sitting at a desk near the front door of my Cape Town office, safely away from the Winter cold and rain talking away about a customer project, when in walked a women in a beret, with a huge black cotton holdall slung over her shoulder.

Unused to getting such visitors, my colleague and I looked up from our chat, to be greeted with “hello, relax, I’ve not got a bomb in my bag”.

After a stunned pause from us, she continued, trying to make pally small talk.  Always on the look-out for quality people in a place where recruiting is notoriously tricky, I hoped for a sign that the first gambit was a blip.  Unfortunately, it was merely a shape of things to come.

Over the next 15 seconds, I had the contents of her bag strewn across my desk.  Simply describing the name of items like a fuzzy-felt game and singing teddy bear left me bemused.  When everyone in the room explained they didn’t have children, we were chided for our lack of fecundity.

With that I politely sent her on her way.  When I first started to work, in my cub-rep days, I remember a fella occasionally leaving behind a box full of books and toys for people to thumb through for a week.  Amazingly people did buy the odd thing without any chat at all from him.  Thankfully, his sghostly presence meant he never dropped a line about a bomb.

Maybe my encounter says more about the state of S African economic reality.

If door-knocking techniques interest you, one of my earliest exposures to such fun and games came from a mate of mine originally from Andover that did a Summer selling books for Southwestern.  He came back from America a broken man!  Here’s a fascinating insight into their world from a US forum.

Sitting in yet another reception a Monday or two ago, I thumbed through the FT.  Isn’t it weird how you can tell an ‘old school’ company by the fact they have a pink-un at the ready, yet no-one ever reads it.  As an aside, how do you think FT ad sales people overcome the objection “you claim a couple of hundred thousand readers, but that’s bollocks isn’t it, as most of your rags go unread in dingy receptions…..”  Anyway, an article about Business schools teaching by example naturally caught my eye.

The talentless clowns at the Association of MBAs must have been piddling their pants when in 2002, Stanford prof Jeffrey Pfeffer stated an MBA was irrelevant to business success.  Finally accepting this, US biz schools started to undergo a potentially painful ‘change’ process.  The article referenced above explains how various schools achieved success.  I was immediately struck by how, for reps, there are two awesome messages:

Who’s Up For Change? - How often when you propose something new do you realise change is an obvious result?  Knowing most ‘influencers’ are anti-change, what can you do to expose the fact that change is good, and moreover change is wanted?  A tough call, but one place conducted a survey first (seeking to be ‘collaborative’) asking whether the school was ready for change - and an outstanding 82% said “yes!” (Canada - the Ivey school at the University of Western Ontario - Dean Carol Stephenson)

Overcome The Nos - Why let a ‘no’ get in your way, do things right and “It tells nobody ‘no’; it says ‘not now’.”  What a terrific message; alter the mindset of your prospect that options are either ‘yes’ or ‘not now’ and work on speeding the timeframe up.  (Dean Tom Campbell at Haas Business School in Berkeley in California)

As the name implies, this technique takes as its starting point where you want to go, and works backwards from it to pinpoint what needs to happen to get there.  A client of mine recently paid an external consultancy to work theirs out for them and make a plan.

Without boring you with the full details, for them it runs something like this.  They began by understanding the monthly target.  For their subscription-based service, this was £12k margin a month coming in from new subs with a minimum 12-month initial commitment.

Next, identify the Average Order Value.  Around £400 in this case.  By a touch of arithmetic bringing that lot together with calculated meetings figures, you can isolate how many appointments each individual rep must make each month to hit their numbers.

Their results were that 10 such successful meetings a week were required, based on a 38-week selling ‘year’, to bring in the requisite £12k of (recurring) margin a month.  So you can see that £12k of margin needs roughly 30 orders a month, and with most deals coming on the first or second call, factoring in this with the three-quarters of a year ethos they had, meant 10 signatures each working week.  Their sales support challenge is what can be done to make sure this happens.

This approach is a classic for determining activity levels.  Most telesales operations have something of this order.  Typically, you’ll know how many dials it takes to get what you’re after, and by simple maths you can work out what each one is worth for you. 

The first time I worked this out for a team I ran, their monthly sales target was £30k revenue (as it was in-house made software margin = revenue).  We worked out the commission that hitting this would provide, and calculated that each dial made was (rather spookily!) worth £6.66 …. who says we reps do the devil’s work….

There are really two ways to alter these numbers; either you put more in the top of the funnel, and/or you convert more at the bottom.  And that’s often sales management’s biggest task at its most simplest.

(nb: some decent analytical techniques like this one are explained simply by the UK’s JISC)

How many presentation skills training courses have you been on?  It’s possibly the most common kind of sales-y training non-reps go on.   There’s positively oodles of tips around the web, and to add to that surfeit, here’s three hints I took when hearing an explanation of just such a course, in this case aimed at IT propeller-heads trying to sell their ideas within oil behemoth Shell.

The 3 Second Pause

After you make a point you want to emphasise, you should pause for 3 seconds.  The idea is that for an audience to take long-term notice of your point, you must get through their mental filter.  This can be a barrier which stops things from progressing beyond a mere short-term memory to a long-term one.  And the theory is that pausing for 3 seconds will allow it to register in the long-term part of their brains.  Count out 3 seconds aloud . . . long time isn’t it?

Talk Over Their Heads

Not in the sense of talk technobabble or being condescending, but in where you fix your gaze.  Apparently you’ll get greater engagement if your sight line is just above the audience’s heads.

Trio Structure

Once, a long time ago, I had some pals that went on a presentation course working for a huge brewer and pub operator called Bass.  I remember being baffled that their trainer had recommended each slide should have 7 points on it.  In Shell’s case, their trainer suggested that each point must have 3 parts to its structure.  This sounds better than the Bass idea.

I guess this must be happening to several salesreps, and is likely to gather pace.  You’re supplying someone that all of a sudden, decides to take what you’ve been faithfully selling from a far flung land instead.

One of my customers told me today about a famous story within the label-printing industry, about a printer in Northern England that for years had supplied the labels to Heinz for possibly Britain’s most renowned FMCG food, their baked beans.  The price was 11 pence per thousand.  Then a quote came in from a Chinese-powered source at just 3 pence per thousand.  Wow.  A quarter of the price, and the business was switched.

Then another customer of mine told me he recently won an order for an engineering consumable, where the prospect had been taking them direct from China.  The snag for him though, was that he had to buy in larger quantities than he really wanted to, creating storage issues, and that there was a bit too much hassle in arranging every shipment.

In this latter case, the buyer was actually prepared to pay a touch more for local supply, with no hassle, and smaller (more instant) delivery sizes.

And it seems that UK printers are adopting a similar approach too.  To compete against outrageous price undercutting, they are moving towards selling smaller run sizes, the ease of making changes and modifications for the next delivery and one particular belter that worked for a Plymouth-based printer; playing the environmental card so that customers can be happy knowing something isn’t being shipped half-way round the world and keeps their carbon footprint lower.

I know a little something about offshoring from my own experiences.  When I investigated setting up a software factory in Bangalore, you could get a graduate for the eye-rubbing annual salary of $4k.  In London at the time, entry-level coders (youngsters without a degree) set you back around $27k.  Seven-times more.  And yet everyone I spoke to that had gone down the Indian route urged serious caution.  Apparently, once you factor in the management costs, impact of delays through having to explain instructions in intricate detail and the amount of re-work required due to a lack of job-imbued initiative, it was actually better to stay in London for most things.  And amazingly, I gather the situation is about the same even now, as any improvement in staff calibre is negated by the increased salaries they currently command.  (Which probably helps explain the trend, in England at any rate, to repatriate Indian operations)  This experience mirrors that of the first two above; the minute you want something veering away from commodity, local remains better, and furthermore, as local suppliers are aware of the Eastern promise, you can probably get one helluva price too….