salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

One of my customer’s sales management team were recently summoned to a European conference where new solution sales techniques were passed down from a central corporate training resource.  One particular topic I know they all liked was about talking credible numbers when it came to benefits.

All too often, their reps (known as account managers) would talk in telephone numbers about what wonderful pots of gold would be at their end of their purchase order rainbow.  Yet it seems that many a buyer has grown weary of yet another cleverly produced spreadsheet detailing how hundreds of thousands of cash can be released onto their bottom-line.  Rather than talk Zim dollars, it can often be the smallest of improvements that catches the eye and wins the day.

They called this ”The Power Of One”.  They also believe it also suits buyers who’s natural currency is not cash, but rather prefer percentages.  There is of course a dominant school suggesting you simply must bring everything down to the stark pounds-shillings-pence amount - I heartily go along with this - yet it’s how such a figure is arrived at that could be the ‘power of one’.  How much extra credibility attaches to your proposal if you say it derives from a simple “1%” improvement in a particular area?  It is, my friends suggest, a powerful argument which benefits from an air of believability.

The majority of sales teams I help are not the cheapest in their space.  For some, far from it, and they take on the perennial struggle of having to justify themselves against a large hole in the floor through which their competition’s price has just dropped.

Many a salesteam comes up with their own quirky ways of trying to overcome the inevitable price objection in such circumstances.  And here’s two disasters I became privy to at a sales meet I attended recently:

Handle I

Rep: Our product is like a BMW, Audi or Mercedes.  It’s a touch more money because it is better quality, lasts longer and easier to use and maintain.  After all, would you drive a bog-standard Ford Mondeo?

Prospect: I do drive a Mondeo….

Handle II

Rep: Panasonic faxes are way better than Amstrad’s.  I mean, come on, would you really put an Amstrad hifi in your living room?

Prospect: Yes, I’ve got one….

ouch!

Commissioned recently by a leading manufacturer/distributor of hydraulic kit to help stimulate sales of a new kind of filtration product, I rolled up my sleeves only to learn that none of the sales team were really selling it.  Over the past 18 months or so, only 6 examples of ‘wins’ could be fully traced.  Knowing this would raise alarm bells for their management, I wondered how I could add value to their planning, whilst also not setting myself up for being a messenger that got shot!

So to let the sales manager shine, I attempted to unravel his issues using the 5 Whys technique.  It’s a decent technique to help get to the core of an issue.  The idea is that if you ask “Why?” five times, relating each subsequent ‘why’ to an issue from the previous answer, then by the fifth answer, you’ve a clear idea of one potential remedy.  Like any such technique, it’s not an exact science (there’s always a few candidates for that of “right answer”) but it does prove a useful guide.  Here’s an edited version of how one solution was proffered:

Why are sales less than hoped for?
When initially mentioned on calls by sales people, a lukewarm response typically resulted.

Why are responses lukewarm?
It can be considered that they’ve already got a supplier that they’re relatively happy with and to change could cause them hassles with cross-referencing part numbers and changing stock systems etc.

Why aren’t these ‘hassle’ ’perceptions tackled?
No need to push again if other products can make targets, and as the Sales team are generally more comfortable with other, traditional products, as befits their background, they focus on those at the expense of the new product discussions.

Why isn’t focus maintained on the new products?
After having one conversation about it with no joy, why revisit or re-pitch? Especially if apprehension bubbles under about perceived lack of new product knowledge – and discussing them could introduce a customer to possible gaps in our range/knowledge/capability.

Why is “re-visiting” an issue?
Despite the new products being considered an everyday item, they still need several conversations to bear any fruit and momentum inevitably ebbs.  To embed this into sales peoples routines, focus should be introduced so that you can monitor how key conversations are going, their impact and progression……

Here’s a tale from a successful small software house.  They’ve around 200 customers, and operate on three continents.  When making first appointments on the phone, conducting them in person, and responding after by mail, they like to use quotes their customers give them, saying how wonderful they are.  They have amassed around 100 such quotes.

So, a rep has caught a suspect on the phone, is thinking of preparing for a meeting, or rushes to finish a proposal.  How can they get access to the jewellery case of quotes to find their gem of credibility?

Well, all the quotes are held on a central server’s shared drive.  Each has its own word document, named by customer name, person name and date.  Unsurprisingly, with a hundred in there, it’s proving unmanageable.  Someone fairly senior took it upon themselves to take action.  Being technically proficient, they began to create an Access database.  After a decent amount of work on it, they abandoned this idea, thinking it’d put off the rep users in the field.  So someone more junior was tasked with creating a spreadsheet.  But then the spreadsheet had a large number of cells left empty, exposing gaps in the ‘database’.  Surely the sales people would fill these in…? 

After all this time and effort, a solution is still far away.  Every sales team I come across can talk you through a similar story of woe.  Whatever the solution, it never involves the sales people having to input, and neither does it involve being a once-off project.

Encouraging greater propensity to continue buying is a topic I constantly grapple with in my selling.  Most of my clients buy my services month after month.  This means the longer I keep them as happy customers, the longer they put food on my plate at a decent margin.  Reading the blog from (of all things) a new media lecturer, I came across his newly articulated wisdom:

“Customer loyalty increases exponentially relative to the degree to which you make them feel important.”

He concluded, following some ropey experiences himself, that the key to customer longevity was to treat them like VIPs.  It’s a cracking little pointer and one I must resolve to apply with rigour and vigour.

One of my recent customers is an extremely forward thinking company from the sales systems and support perspective.  Even down to one of their top reps demanding they ran a sales blog of success.  That very same fella, John from East Anglia described one of the facets to his account management ethos.

They’d historically only been measured on new business, so traditional farming techniques tended by most to get ignored.  Their customers would have a time horizon for using the services, then get all the attention just before ‘renewal’ time.  And keeping the client from avaricious competitor claws then proved tricky.

John took notice of a survey, done he thought about ten years ago by Yellow Pages.  They asked their customers what they thought of their customer service.  The main answer was that “you only speak to us when you want to sell us something”.  And of course that was true, as calls came when it was time to once again get their big ad prominently displayed in the book.  The immediate reaction was along the lines of, well, we’re not a charity, but they did resolve to make their approach a little ‘softer’.

They found that when they contacted their customers to offer advice or help answer queries proactively, the reaction was then, “they called me and didn’t try and sell me something!”.  John’s adaptation of this was that rather than call on accounts once a year, he tried to do it quarterly, and saying something simply like, “the things that’ve crossed my desk recently that made me think of you include….”  And he left them to think about them without appearing to ‘sell’, and he felt that when selling was required, the client was much more receptive to speaking with him.

Everyone is familiar with return on investment (RoI) selling.  The principle is simple, buy and you’ll either save yourself cash unnecessarily being wasted at present, or make money many times over what you paid from extra opportunity.

I find myself constantly referring to RoI when I’m pitching, as I tend to tell long stories about the results clients enjoy from my services.  Yet I’ve just realised how ‘old hat’ mentioning RoI could possibly be.

This is because I just came across a phrase that replaces saying the term RoI.  Instead, you can talk about how you are “selling money at a discount”.

In days of yore, accountants hoped to get a return on something within a period of years.  Nowadays, any purchase is under real pressure to deliver money back instantly.  Talking about how your, for instance, ten grand offering can bring extra revenue of five k a month, means the sixty grand more sales over the year will have only cost ten, so that’s selling money at a discount.

A sales guy at a customer of mine articulated this issue to me beautifully the other day.  A relationship proved to be healthy by the placing of an order for our wonderful piece of kit can deteriorate without us knowing post-sale.  Setting expectations whilst prospecting can prevent this. 

Guiding the customer through their upcoming experience in detail can enable our relationship to stay on track.   The ‘user’ receives initial installation, basic usage guidance, proper training, and is then left with a manual.

The ‘dissatisfaction dip’ is where a week or two after all this, memory naturally fades, so at best only (say) 40% of all the instruction can be recalled.  Frustration can all so easily set in.  They know they’ve forgotten something and realise they need to delve deeper into the manual for themselves, but are reluctant to do so.

Don’t let this develop into such a ’dissatisfaction dip’, otherwise they’ll resort back to their old ways of doing things.  Tell them all of the above, then say “This is the time to give me a call” and future sales will be yours.

I was lucky enough to just take on a team of Italians in a football friendly that I’ve played against twice before over in Rome.  This time the match was at Leyton Orient’s training facilities in North London.

With a large squad, banter was flowing before the game with us all excited.  Me and my fellow veterans got to joking with the youngsters about the make-up of the Bench.  A couple of years earlier, we played a game and in our changing room, the previous occupants (a rugby XV) had left their game plan papers plastered on the wall.  One of them bore the big-lettered title ‘Impact Players’.  In the olden days, this meant ’substitutes’.  And no-one likes being a sub.  Ever since, we’ve used the term collectively ourselves, as at the time it ensured much hilarity.  But now I can see how such ’spin’ is actually a cracking device.

B2B solution selling by definition involves talking to several people prospect-side, at many different levels.  What can often separate a winner rep from an also-ran, is how your own personnel resources are marshalled.  Who will you bring off the bench to make an impact, at what time, and with whom must they talk?

The best ‘impact players’ for me have always been outright tekkies.  Such people earn the instant trust of the buyers.  Tending to show initial nerves, their impressive knowledge soon garners respect.  The insight they gain, conversations they kick-off and the previously closed doors they open, can usually mean the difference between winning and losing.

The more impact players you can draw on and the more you bring them onto your pitch, the greater the likelihood of your sales success.

Twice this week I’ve been out in Cape Town.  To Beuna Vista with my mate Brandon in Green Point, and Caveau next to Newlands rugby stadium with a crowd of us.  Beuna Vista has always been a favourite haunt of mine, and I meet Bran many Monday’s there when I’m in town.  The service is typically (whichever race is behind the bar, a thing which all Seffers lamentably have hang ups about) sensational.  Yet this week it was shocking.  It’s sometimes when things don’t happen you notice the difference.  There was:

• no chat about how the drinks were going
• no suggestions of trying different types and brands
• no prompting to look at the food menus
• no handing of plates personally when food arrives
• no proactive asking for next drinks (in fact the total opposite with long waits)
• no eye contact when being served

The two fellas were simply taking the piss.  I’d have been better served by a vending machine and my future custom is in jeopardy.

Then there was my visit to Caveau and more pleasing encounter with a black lad who’s name I didn’t catch, and a white lass called Cindy.  We selected a couple of certain reds, only to find that they’d no stock.  Immediately, alternatives were suggested.  Furthermore, Cindy went on to say that she thought they were such worthy replacements, that if we didn’t like it she’d give us one of the 65 glasses of wine options for free.  We were sold (& the wine was good too).  How often do you here from marketers that the total guarantee is a winner, yet in B2B it hardly gets used like Cindy did to great affect here.