salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Relaxing last night, I watched a BBC4 half-hour history of the typewriter.  Now, I can imagine you reading that and wondering what on earth I might find stimulating in any way about such a topic.  Well, having learnt to touch-type (fairly slowly) when at college (a skill now dormant I lament to say) encouraged by my good pal at the time (Doctor) Dylan Jones-Evans and his little coloured stickies that obscured the keyboard’s letters, I can admit to a touch of fascination about how come the keys were laid out in what can only be described as a bizarre fashion.

‘Qwerty’ to us all, means the configuration with which we’re all familiar.  Yet it just seems so inefficient.  Why for instance, is the ‘a’ always pressed by my weakest and least responsive digit (left-hand little pinkie)?  It turned out the reason for the qwerty arrangement was because the one tried first, a simple alphabetical ordering, created jamming of the mechanics that placed ink on paper.  This necessitated a way of keeping the most commonly used letters apart.  Qwerty was, it seems, a randonmly arrived at solution to overcome mechanical difficulties. 

Having nothing to do with user efficiency, an alternative configuration was created.  It was known as ‘dhiatensor’.  The keys were still laid out in the three rows common to us, but crucially, the bottom row went in this arrangement from left to right.  The reasoning was that an incredible 80% of all words typed can be made from these 10 letters (this was a fact I disputed until I thought about how few options my predictive texting coughs up on even the smallest of words).  The other bonus was that an operator’s fingers were required to cover less distance than on qwerty set-ups, so user-efficiency was dramatically improved.

Consequently two alternatives were now vying for the medal of ’standard’.  Betamax & VHS, Mac versus Windows, I hear you cry, and of course, you could name many more instances where the universally considered ‘best’ solution somehow failed to take the title.

So, how did cumbersome, irksome qwerty win?  Well, I have often been in scenarios where I have battled in blind benchmark tests against one other shortlisted competitor.  I have never experienced a “fair” such contest.  And if you sell the type of product where benchmarking can sway the decision, this story should be used to your advantage.

The two formats agreed to a shoot-out.  They would each take on the same piece of work, and whichever machine produced the output quickest, would win out.

The qwerty crew prepped liked crazy.  Their chosen operator had memorised the keys, and had learned to, in effect touch type whilst reading the copy.  (Back in these days of yore, everyone two-fingered typed.)  The dhiatensor operative, relied on their tried and trusted method of looking at the keys.  This simple tactic allowed the inferior methodology to ‘win’.  (And who’s to say that qwerty weren’t party to the text too).  The benchmarking had been rigged.

Incensed by this injustice (although secretkly being impressed at the victor’s planning and salesmanship) I researched qwerty alternatives for a better solution (even for my current 4-finger approach) and found that windows enables you to switch your keys to something known as the “dvorak” configuration.  There’s even youtube clips to walk you through it.  Time to allocate some time next weekend to get a fork out and flip up all those keys, after all, think of the conversations I can now start with prospects to begin to distinguish myself!

We all know what a To Do list is. Whether we write one down, tap it into our crm, use some freebie web or google app to hold it, or keep it in our heads, there’s always a ton of priorities and things to do.

Yet here’s a challenging assertion from prolific business author and speaker Tom Peters.  It’s the To Don’ts that are more important.  If you can focus on what you shouldn’t be doing, you’ll free up more time to be effective in the things that matter, the things you’re measured on.

When coming across this I could already hear reps sighing ‘why am I doing this report?’, ‘why am I working on this account?’, ‘why should I fill out this form?’, ‘why am I stuck in this meeting?’ and ‘why I am involved in this post-deal fire-fighting?’

But beware, he reckons this skill is tricky, as explained on slides 53 & 54 on his pdf.

Here’s an example of what a text book cannot teach, and only experience can.  I rocked up at a prospect the other day.  At the annointed hour, I was in attendance.  The person with whom I’d hoped to meet however, was not even in the building.

I suspect what transpired was a simple diary mix-up.  It could have been our side, it could have been theirs.  Who knows.  The meeting’s now re-scheduled for a couple of weeks.

My appointment maker insisted she’d sent a confirmation email (duly forwarded onto me) and never received any contrary communications.  Yet when she subsequently spoke to the no-show, she accepted full culpability.  “It must have been all my fault…” etc etc.

She did well to re-arrange and I explained that in future admitting to something that is simply not down to you, is absolutely not what you should do in such instance.  I can see why the obvious natural reaction is often tempered.  After all, where will saying “I cannot believe you didn’t bother to show up, how unprofessional is that! How would you feel if one of your prospects was similarly disrespectful?” get you.  Of course, I don’t necessarily advocate that kind of confrontation.

I would though, advise that if you are not to blame, then don’t act as if you are.  Even if you feel it’ll smooth your path towards what you want.  You didn’t mess up, so maintain the high ground.  And this can be done, crucially, without rubbing the other party’s nose in it.  Remember, if you’re ever going to have a commerical relationship, it’ll surely be along the lines of equal partners.  So be polite, but firm.  By all means have the conversation which seeks to identify from where the mix-up emanated, but draw a swift line under it, and pin down your required next action.

Going blame-side always puts you on the back-foot.  Equally, playing the blame-game gets you nowhere.  Acting in a positive, professional manner gets you on that all-important even footing.  After all, we all make mistakes, don’t we?

Adam Gilchrist single-handledly changed cricket.  Very much for the better, I might add.  He built on the exceptional mid-90s groundwork of Alec Stewart to show how wicket-keepers should not only be expected to contribute valuable runs, but that they should also be readily accumulated at a fast pace in the then all-too-often torpid Test arena.

He just retired to trot off and receive the end-of-career rewards the Indian Premier League promises.  This tournament by the way is generally a good thing.  I regularly attend at least one English domestic Twenty20 match a season (following Warwickshire where possible although we always lose at home in our derby with Worcestershire for some reason) and I went to the inaugural World Cup in S Africa last year, which despite England’s appalling selection criteria and Collingwood’s surely complicit lap-dance club visit the morning of a key game, was utterly fantastic.  The IPL should not become another international tournament though, competing for diary time with the Future Tours Programme, which is where it’s headed.  That is bad and must be reined in.

So why the stream of cricket consciousness on my sales crusade?  Last night I tuned into to get an update on England in the first day’s play from Hamilton.  During the Lunch interval, Adam Gilchrist gave an interview.  For all his decent-bloke charms, Aggers makes a useless interviewer.  Despite Gilchrist wanting to chat away, he uncovered little.  What was revealed though gave a lovely selling reminder.

Gilchrist changed the game because he was never afraid to play true to his natural style.  If the ball was there to be hit, hit it he invariably would.  Which is how come a No.7 could finish with a Test average of 47 and the highest strike rate of all-time.  His philosophy was pretty much ‘never hesitate’.  If you do hesitate, he said, then you’d suffer.

It’s a fine mantra for sellers.  The number of times I’ve been adversely affected by not following my hunch on a campaign… aargh!  Make that phone call, ask that question, do what you feel best and succeed as well as ‘Gilly’.

Met a thoroughly engaging chap running the £109m salesteam at a major 30,000 industrial products supplier.   They seemed to be doing well according to the numbers.  Their crm though, has fallen in to disrepute.  Their main database was Pivotal.  They also had some data mining capability, including from Cognos.  As a business, they’re moving to a single global platform.  This means implementing JD Edwards financials during 2008.  I visibly whinced when I heard that.  The poor sales team will get nothing done for ages now.

Anyhow, ‘integrating’ JD Edwards and Pivotal is a stated aim of the project later in the year.  Yet presently, everyone’s stopped using their crm.  Sales Management’s plan is to re-introduce the system once said integration has taken place.  The reason why Management reckon the sales people no longer use Pivotal is because there’s nothing in it for them.  So when they do recommence with it, he aims to get them starting off by updating their database, so that HQ’s internal sales teams can start to build relationships with the road-based reps’ clients which should of course, lead to extra revenue for them.

It’s a laudable plan, and one I believe I can help him with better than with the current idea of getting some temps in to help.

I re-read this ‘book’ by John Simmons after discovering it in an old box full of heavy tomes skimmed through during my final stint of academia.  The far too many years that have since passed may have dulled the brain, for I never remembered this pamphlet.  I certainly hope I never paid the tenner that the back cover claims was its ticket price.

It’s not that a rubbish read follows.  More like it’s a total rip-off.  What you got for your cash was effectively a ten-slide business presentation with accompanying hand-out notes.  Not value for money at all.  And several pages in the style of Powerpoint might have seemed clever back then in the early-90s, but today?  Erh, no.

Still, in the time it takes to boil an egg, (re-?)read it I did, and was thankful for 3 useful pointers.  The author seems to have slithered up to dizzying heights in the dark arts of copywriting and thanks in particular a chap called Ogilvy. 

Do The Numbers

Entertainingly for us, Ogilvy made his name first as a door-to-door rep.  I no longer have the pages in front of me, so from memory the odd word may be lost, but the intro of his 12-page exhortation to sell-sell-sell a particular cooker back in the day (imagine if I’d have said ’stove’ hehehe) does put into beautiful context how you can rally troops (or indeed yourself) to get out there and find the ‘yeses’:

‘There are 12m households in the UK.  1m of them have cars.  Only 10k have Aga cookers.  Every home that can afford a car cannot afford not to have an Aga cooker.’

A quality call to arms indeed.  As soon as I read it I thought of the products each of my prospects must also have and conjured up metrics in similar veins.

Humanise Business Impacts

This was a neat take.  How often do you find yourself writing stuff that if you think about, sounds like it’s come from a technical manual?  Making the process appear ‘human’ is a winner.  The example he uses is how Bush beat Dukakis to the 88 American Presidency.  Dukakis wanted a “decent, compassionate America” whereas Bush talked of a “kinder, gentler America”.

Say It Out Loud

When last I bit my lip having to work for someone else, I remember being asked by my charges how I wrote such good sales letters.  Basking in the glow of recognition and putting such praise down solely to merit rather than ingratiation (of course!) I explained that I often read my prose out loud to see if it makes sense.  This hint wasn’t one I’d made up for myself mind you.  I got it from a mailshot writing seminar.  Simmons re-iterates this, and it’s a belter of a policy.  It’ll ensure you never write gobbledegook again.

So, the problem with this publication is not that the 3 points I took away were only average, simply that for a tenner these days you expect hundreds of gems, not just the odd couple you get from a make-weight presentation at the end of Sales Conference day whilst shuffling expectantly in your seat before the bar opens