salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Just done some impromptu training-cum-problem solving on a cold-call quandry.  Remember the old days?  A pats used to run along the lines of ’send me your brochure’, then every time you’d ring back, you’d get ‘I’ve not had chance to read it yet, but I will then give you a call’.  Utter Rubbish.

Today’s version is ‘I’ve still not looked at your website… let me do so… allow me to make my own decision… I’ll then call you… blah blah fob off yuk’.

I think the essence of handling this (given that my guys are talking to 35+ yr old decision makers) could be that a website is ‘…simply a new kind of brochure.  By it’s very nature it’ll be seen by many people.  It’s fairly generic in its writing.  You could spend half-an-hour scrolling through it, before finding one line that was the real deal for you in terms of making a difference to your ambitions.  You could miss that vital link, or click right past it.  It’s difficult to make a decison off the web alone, so here’s one question….’

And then I posed a key question to which the answer will hopefully be “yes please!” and we nail the meet.  One of my guys latched onto this immediately and then in the role play confirmation/practice that followed went on like this, “it’s like how disappointed my sister was when she chose a pair of purple shoes on the net, when she got them the suede wasn’t at all like the photo made out and she wished she’d have seen them in the flesh”.  Lovely.

Establishing rapport with a prospect is of course essential.  Making someone feel comfortable with you is a vital pre-requisite towards getting an order, especially if you’re not the cheapest player in town.

But trying to work out how to initiate such front talk can be tricky the first time in someone’s company.  Fewer desks these days have the kids pics and drawings adorning them.  I once had the gift of spying a Man Utd calendar on the wall and wailed my disapproval at how genetics had landed me with a less silverwared club to many smiles all round.  And if you meet rather in a conference room, then there’s precious little to go on.

So, what else can you do to make the start of your meeting different?  A highly engaging chap at drinks distributor Matthew Clark once told me to knock over your coffee.  I was out dining with pals in Cape Town, when one told me about her day, being trained in the joys of teamwork.  People, she was told are more likely to work well together when they share some common ground.  You should apparently home in on these and use them to your advantage.  She explained that the big three areas that help people bond are; humour, sport, music.

Now, I was always taught to avoid making jokes until the prospect has, so as to gauge their comedy leanings.  As for sport, I’ve not met many women in business that are interested in this, and it’s often amazed me how many fellas make statements like “I’m not into football at all” as the whole country goes beserk over a metatarsel.

So that leaves music.  I personally can (and do) talk about music for hours.  Being essentially a pop-tart, this has proved reliably fertile ground for establishing rapport on many occasions.  Yet how could you bring it into the frame early? 

My instant thoughts were simple.  Drop my ipod on the table as I prepare my kit and see if there’s a bite.  If not, feign searching for a pen, so you have to fish your headphones out of your jacket pocket.  If the nibble proves elusive still, make sure a CD (ask someone older if in the dark) falls from your day book.  And so on!  Just a thought

Thoroughly enjoyed speaking to a rep at one of my customers today called Sam.  I always chuckle along during our chats on the phone.  Especially when like just now he’s in gale-swept freezing Leeds and I’m in 30°C Cape Town He certainly sounded like he’s on a role.  Coming joint top last year, he’s off to Australia on their Ambassador Club reward trip and he’s taking a 24-year old Danish lass he met recently.  Considerably his junior I might add.

He had an issue with cheaper kit being offered to some of his customers.  It was cheaper for a reason of course; it was inferior.  He uses the ‘personal reputation’ story and seems to work quite well. He always states that if an empolyee makes a bad decision with regards to new equipment, they are always remembered for the bad decision they made, never for saving a few pounds.

Are you as a buyer, happy to take the risk of something new and all the associated pitfalls pointed out, or simply ask the boss for an extra few quid, but know and be safe in the knowledge that for the next few years, it’ll cause you no grief?

It’s so rare that when it happens I’m compelled to celebrate.  Someone in retail knows how to sell.  Gavin is the kind of South African that gives you hope the country can in fact survive the lunacy endemic in the current regime and give rise to a true rainbow nation.  I think I was Cafe Sofia’s first ever customer.  The owner is a large Bulgarian, one of around 1,500 he says that came over the to Cape Town recently.  The community must reside far away though as mainly tourists tend to use the cafe.  I enjoy lunching on their eclectic tapas, and there’s a pasta I like at nights.

Gavin said to me the other day, “you always have the same thing, you must try something different today”.  I pointed out that the reason why I re-order, is because I like it, so why bother trying something else?  He insisted, and recommended some lamb dish.  I acquiesced.  It was a good choice.

Gavin made sure I was aware of this.  It was a great display of retail selling.  And it can so easily be applied in particular to wholesale distribution, or indeed any environment where you receive on-going trade.

How often do you hear concepts like ‘add a line’ or ‘try something new today’, yet rarely see them in practice?  What Gavin had done, is make me more of a loyal customer by expanding the range of products I would select, giving him the chance at more revenue.  And at the same time, make me think he was treating me as a valued customer and individual.  Heart-warming.

One of my cold-callers is having success by explaining what we do, through stating what we do not do.  All our suspects run sales teams.  They often (mischievously) claim to receive hundreds of calls a day trying to woefully peddle them stuff they already have and don’t need replacing.

To overcome this potential obstacle, she says, “let me reassure you we are not crm, we’re not training and we’re not recruitment…”

Her feminine charms seem to get a reprieve from Grim Reaper’s hung-up dialtone, and she can go onto say what it is we actually do offer.

It’s an interesting angle to begin a phone pitch, as the text books will claim you should have a snappy one-sentence description focusing on what you do ‘do’.  Yet I’ve heard this work first-hand, so who’s to say that if you reckon your own call target will hate to receive certain cold-calls, why not similarly assure them you are indeed ‘different’.

Here’s an interesting initiative from inside a customer of mine.  Their Sales Ops support has just gained an excitable fresh momentum from one of their best and longest serving reps being awarded a sabbatical, with nationwide remit to improve individual sales skills.

One of the first things he’s focused on is beating their single major competitor.  Keen on uncovering themes as to why they win out, particularly referencing accounts that switch to him, he wants documented a one-liner as to why they came over.  (Which we’re proactively capturing for them).

The immediate response is expected to ape ‘cos I’m a winner rep’ flannel, but upon further pressing, he expects to highlight quality intel on which to base his competitor elimination coaching.

A surprising source of interview tips came from daytime Goodhope FM this morning.  They wheeled an ‘expert’ in called (I think) Kashi to answer listener questions in-between snorily predictable synthetic R&B.  The two posers he spent longest on were:

Where do you see yourself in five years? and

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

He was at pains to point out the correct answer for the former was not to say ‘in your job’, and that handling the latter well would mean talking about no more than two strengths, then only one weakness, which you’ve actually managed since to turn into a strength.

Nothing earth-shattering there you’ll probably think.  But hang on a minute I thought, these are a couple of the most common interview questions…. they must have gotten popular for a reason.  Maybe they’re good questions, period.

As you may know, I sell to sales teams, so I wonder how asking their ‘chief’ where they see themselves in a couple of years may earn me a firmer footing?  And a simple ’swot’ style section may also enable focus on positives during a period of change that inevitably hears much about the negativity wishing to be erased….

One of my customer’s salesreps, Tony, was determined to impress upon me how appalled he is with buyers at the moment.  He sells engineering consumables, and his patch breaks down like this:

1600 - prospect companies with potential to buy

370 - customers, outfits that have bought

200 - number of organisations with a designated, ‘professional’ Buyer

So how many of these 200 buyers do you think see all prospective vendors?  Tony explained that “the number of dedicated buyers that say they’re not doing their job unless they religiously see everyone that thinks they have something to offer, and do see them, is only 2″.

Two.

Now, we can all think of the argument that if you saw every Tom, Dick & Harry, you’d never get any work done, but come on.  Tony reckons that of the other 99% of buyers, some take back-handers, others buy from friends only and the rest (the majority) shouldn’t be in their jobs.

I wonder what ‘buyers’ consider their role to be?  I’ve only ever come across a couple of Procurement Manager type people.  And I have to say, they exhibited a total lack of vision as to what was genuinely in the business interests of their companies.  The approach can be summed up neatly by the age-old saying ‘knowing the cost of everything, the value of nothing’.

A senior sporting administrator just swapped circket for football.  Richard Bevan is apparently adept at raising the influence and profile of a previsouly ignored constituency within a game.

When representing professional cricketers, he helped gain them extra clout in part through a type of Ambassador programme, whereby he could leverage chances to listen to and meet players.  Now he intends to do the same for football managers.  And the riches must surely be around the corner; what price a lunchtime session on selling a vision with Arsene Wenger, or leadership and motivation with Alex Ferguson?

On this subject of the universally admired, an interesting quote for us humble reps appeared:

“Bevan learnt in cricket how ‘names’ can help to secure business, estimating that 50 per cent of deals were sealed on an emotional level.”

So, contracts get signed half the time purely due to emotion?  I think many of us would go even further than this.  Isn’t the decision to buy always 100% an emotional one?

As an additional aside, you do hear from reps that have worked for huge concerns with a well-know, lauded Boss, that when introducing said celebrity to a sales campaign, they nearly always won the deal.  There are several blogosphere examples of people within Apple getting Steve Jobs to rock up, chat for an hour with a prospect, and despite not really talking turkey, winning a deal as a result.

I fondly remember my addiction to all things John Harvey-Jones in the early 90s.  The genre-starting Troubleshooter was essential viewing for anyone remotely interested in proper business.  His consultative successes soon racked up.  These included:

• Apricot Computers were told to ditch hardware and focus solely on software; next year profits were best in 27 year history
• Churchill Tableware should quadruple their design-spend and delegate executive responsibility;profits rose from £400,000 to £2 million in 12 months

Also refreshing, was his love of sales.  When his book Making It Happen recounts the two years spent selling during his formative ICI years, he insists that everyone in business must try their hand in a sales role at some stage.  How else could they claim to truly understand commerce?  A great comeback to have in your pocket methinks How many Board members do you know that have ever held (let alone reached) a sales target?

One great aspect of his turnaround cases, was that he managed to distill into one simple sentence what the company must do to not only stem their decline, but prosper too.

I must resolve to dig out my copy of the excellent Making It Happen and read it once more….