salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Anyone following the remarkable world of ‘arrers’ will be aware that they’ve had in their midst for the past twenty years their own ‘Don’, ‘Tiger’ & ‘Daley’.  The player that always takes the major title when push comes to shove.  Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor though, suffered a recent slump.  No World Final appearance and shoddy league showings.

After getting back to something approaching his old dominating form, I saw an interview with him asking how he’d reversed the decline.  He explained that he’d forgotten how much work he needed to be putting in to stay at the top.  He had to go back to “living like a monk”, putting aside everything else for a regime of “dedication”.  He even quoted grainy black-and-white footie legend Stanley Matthews, who when asked why he went out running at 5am answered it was because his “opposition wasn’t”.

With the annual Snooker-fest completed recently, this also reminded me of their greatest ever talent saying similar words each time he falls of the rails and scrabbles back to the top.

I’ve a brand new product to sell at present, and I’m currently facing up to the fact, that the only way it’s going to be a success, is by following this self-same formula to make it happen.

I met up with a pal of mine for a couple of cheekies in a new Soho juicer the other night.  Inevitably, as it was a school-night, we spent a few moments banishing the evils of the day.  We soon discovered that we were both exhibiting an alarming tendency to put-off doing particular tasks, opting instead to read a few news articles on the web.

Rarely before being prone to such abandonment, I was keen to snap out of any such current slide.  My mate is a lawyer, one so eminent that he actually earns his corn defending other lawyers.  He reckoned we were showing ‘task avoidance & procrastination’.  A fair point.

He further suggested a remedy.  Each time you know that you’re putting something off, write down a list of why what else you do is more important, and why what you’ve let slip is no longer top priority.  Apparently it makes for pretty grim reading and ensures you get back on track.  So there you have it, those unappealing emails about price rises, tricky objection handling and admin can now earn their rightful place above celeb gossip and sporting analysis.

As a salesrep at heart, I’m always likely to chase the latest prospect action rather than whatever may have been number one on my to do list.  I recognise this as a potential barrier to success.  My time in Cape Town meant I was delighted to find a download from the Uni of the Western Cape that sums up approaches to this extremely well.

With a new product to pitch, I’m keen to know what issues are currently relevant to my chosen target market; sales teams.  I deduced that one way of researching this, was to check out online job ads for new reps.  My reasoning was that with a cheeky half-hour of surfing, I might uncover either general themes or specific requirements that describe ‘now’, beyond the inevitable “exciting new opportunity…” kind of flannel.

Whilst doing this, one of the recruitment sites tempted me with sample interview questions.  They offered 3 multiple choice options for you to illuminate an example of where you’d done something to increase a new product’s sales.  Two of the possibles were of the ‘make and monitor lots of calls’ meat-and-potato variety.  The third featured a story about how a ‘buy more and get discount elsewhere’ voucher scheme was concocted.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out which answer would show the requisite innovative sales thinking, especially when this latter one was the only option that included a stated sales increase (of “60%”!).

But of course, there is a strong message in this discovery.  With a new campaign to muster, I myself have been thinking of ‘offers’.  My preferred route so far revolved around a free small-scale trial with a specific outcome isolated.  After all, we all know the success probability of an unannounced call-reach-pitch-objection handle-close routine is low.  Yet this process prompted me to conjure more (better) alternative offers.  And I’m making sure they genuinely intrigue and add value to prospects.

Entertaining chat with a customer in the ‘report writing’ software space this morning.  Their main business development honcho was bemoaning how England was going down a useless voicemail culture route.  Apparently less people that lead sales teams are answering their phones in person lately, just like in America.

He went through the motions of leaving messages about how much more sales they could make, only to get a return call rate of (in his estimation) 1 in 50.  That’s 2%.

So recently he’s thought of changing tack, so we riffed a few ideas about together.  The conclusion was to go for something less obviously ’salesy’.  He believes that such prospects are well used to ‘I can change your life’ pitches on voicemail.  So to distinguish yourself in the first instance, he’s now set off to try being more business-sounding.  “Ideas around selling more of slower moving lines” for example being one method of entry.

Flying back from an awesome trip to Copenhagen, my pal in the adjacent seat reminded me of the perils of setting a sales target.  With a downturn inevitable in his technology-driven partly American marketplace, it turned out that his success in hitting 207% of his (profits-related) sales target the previous year, now gave him the ‘reward’ of a further significant quota increase even further beyond this.

As he spat several feathers whilst recounting the tale of how the news was broke, he then went on to illuminate that the person who set his targets also had others reporting into them.  What had effectively happened, was that as he’d has his number increased, so he’d raised everyone that fed into him to by 10%.  The problem was, that he was the only person likely to make money out of this.  Where’s the motivation in failing to make your 110, when he still makes 104 say across the board and looks like the star?

The final disgruntled line summed it up well, “you’d all want to feel you’re aligned behind the same number, wouldn’t you?”

I’ve teenage excitement coarsing through me at present due to a new product I recently conjured up.  My initial market research with existing customers received plenty of encouragement and take up.  The product can give salespeople on the road anywhere between 2 and 3 days extra selling time each month.  Now comes time to unleash it on a wider audience.  One which, of course, will neither know me nor want to speak with me.

So I set about thinking how to make my life easier.  I’ve a huge universe to go after.  Let’s say I kick-off with one hundred likely prospects.  How about a Direct Mail starting point?  I was fortunate to receive schooling on this art as part of my first ever role.  1½% response rates are typical from a bog-standard mail-out.  As an aside, I once met a fella through an acquaintance as we watched England hammer Holland 4-1 at Euro96 in a juicer off Leicester Square who pulled out a pic of his girlfiend.  A stunner.  I spluttered with incredulity.  It turned out his tactic was to give every single ”hot” girl he saw his business card (he was a bean counter) and await their call.  In around 5 years since leaving Uni, he dished out 200 or so.  4 subsequently phoned up.  That’s roughly the same response as standard DM.  He’d gone out with 2 of them, both for two years apiece.

If you tweak your letter, with things like a PS and Offer, then you can raise response beyond 5%.  The wonderful Crossing The Chasm concept suggests that around 1 in 6 people will entertain anything that is ‘new’.  So how can I combine this knowledge to easily get in front of 15 of my initial 100?

Well, my starting point will be a day’s effort to obtain the best email address through the Sales Dept PA, send my spiel aimed at those that’ll bite on all that is new and shiny, then call each one up.  In theory, every one in six I reach will agree to see me…

I can’t believe I’ve never thought of this before.  We’ve all heard of DM.  By whatever trendy sobriquet is popular at the time, communicating regularly with your customers is always a winner.  Yet how many of us as reps do this ourselves?

I overheard an informal coffee shop meeting the other day where the protagonists were discussing the importance of no longer being anal about what happens to their brand when communities of customers talk alongside it.  They touched upon examples (interestingly one related to a BBC Eastenders forum successfully ceasing to use paid moderators) which reminded me of music bloggers I read deciding which acts to see at an industry conference.

With literally hundreds of bands vying for airtime, one blogger when faced with two possible gigs, chose to see the ones that had sent her newsletters (regularly it turns out, over the past two years).

I then remembered the story told me by an old semi-mentor of mine, Kevin, of how every Friday afternoon he was ordered into the office so that, a) he’d stay out the pub, and b) he’d fax prospects a page of anything enticing.

With the advent of blogs, the ability to leverage glowing prose and insightful knowledge exponentially grows.  From now on, I must resolve to send a monthly email to each customer.  Who cares if they don’t read it, after it becomes habit, they’ll get the message.  And all this mail shall be about, is simply “what I’ve learned about your industry this month”.  Someone tell me this is a winner…