salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

A pal of mine runs an accountancy practice in England’s Second City.  I was explaining that I was doing a bit of cold-calling lately, and he told me of a similar approach he recently received.  It was from someone at Google.  He couldn’t recollect receving any communication signalling such an imminent call beforehand.  Google’s telesales rep pitched as follows:

“For just £200 I can make your name come top whenever someone types in ‘accountant birmingham’.”

There’s so much here to make you tear your hair out, it’s difficult to know where to begin.  It just doesn’t consider anything that the prospect might have as an ‘issue’.  Solution selling pitches are really only truly effective when they evoke a genuine need (latent or blatant).  So how on earth would being top of a search engine result page do that?  It’s a kind of old-school, feature-lead-with-half-an-advantage statement.

A superior alternative is exposed by the objection that killed the call, “our work comes from referrals and we’ve more work on our books than we can really handle, thank you.”

Arh, accountants, bless.  What’s the key reason why people advertise?  To gain fresh revenues for starters.  So surely identifying people that are keen to do this would be a better jumping in point.

Perhaps Google reps don’t have to work too hard for their money, but with a quick tweak, this one could do much better.

More footballing woes.  In 2006 England got lumbered with incompetent, Graham Taylor Mark 2, Steve McLaren.  How things could have been different though.  We almost landed Brazilian World Cup winner, then Portugal boss and now Chelsea-bound ‘Big Phil’ Scolari.  The man credited with making Arsenal such a business operation to be envied, David Dein, shared in yesterday’s Guardian (read in the delightful ‘Coffee @ Brick Lane’) fascinating insight from his close involvement with England’s ultimately unsuccessful approach to Scolari:

“My experience of doing deals in football is, if you want somebody, you never leave the scene until you have the guy signed up. Never let the guy leave the room. Once you do, somebody else will come in, the price will go up. When you are eyeballing somebody you have to keep that going, camp there, until you finish the deal. If you think you have a chance you put the lid on the bottle.”

“For some reason there was a gap of time given for him to make a decision, which was fatal. At that stage the Portugal prime minister got involved. Scolari’s kids at school got mentally attacked - ‘Your dad’s going to betray Portugal’. In the end the heat got so [high]. There was a gap in time where he went off the worm.”

How many times have you left a meeting spending the commission in your head, only to later lose out?  This is a great example of making sure you (to use footie parlance) ‘finish’.

A friend of mine is currently studying for a distance learning style degree around business finance.  She was getting the evident irritation with having to do a computer module off her chest, when during her explanation of computer crime categories, the salami technique was mentioned.

This is where small amounts of money are fraudulently diverted from a large number of accounts and their departure goes unnoticed.

I first came across this concept myself in 1983 through a terrfic London-based 4-part TV drama called The Consultant starring Hywl Bennett.

The principal got me thinking.  Not of underhand, shady malpractice you understand, but of how to apply such a concept legitmately in sellling.  I’ve often thought of campaigns I can run in the background that nudge up the total spend a client awards me by encouraging them to take a seemingly small additional product.  It’s often the case that if you select well, then the cumulative amount over the year can be equivalent to a complete and decent-sized customer.  Even perhaps the difference between a good year and a stellar one.  More salami please.

Blogging the other day on experiences with credit crunch thinking, I went on to explain what this means in the context of our sales plans with guys in one of my offices.

We discussed why business people would buy something.  The idea was to create a couple of simple lines that would hook a prospect in such credit crunch created cost-cutting climes.

As a lover of prospect theory, we concluded that one main reason is to stave off losses.

Then we agreed the old “WIIFM” maxim remains pertinent; making sure you let the prospect know exactly “what’s in it for me”.  Specifically, homing in on how their life will be made immeasurably easier by our wares.

For us, the questions we came up with meant finding out how much time was being spent by our target market on tasks that we know we can eradicate, whilst at the same time appealling to the natural tendency of such constituency to seek short-cuts and ‘delegate’.

First time around you often hear reps say “as requested, I’m calling back today, any news yet?” and take it from there. 

Although it must be said that this is a bit shoddy for a phone call premise, as the call should really be structured around some definitive next action. 

Nevertheless, when you find yourself off-guard saying this, the odds are that you’ll end up in the loop of repeated calls once a week/month/millennium asking “any news yet?” with the once-certain customer-in-waiting moving slowly back to vague prospect and beyond, both your forecasting reputation and commission statement in tatters.

To try and break this rapidly downward spiral, three approaches can come into play (there can be some commonality between them too).  This is because if the deal was indeed ‘done’, then there’d be no hesitation, so something must have happened to stop our train in its tracks.  The aim must be to isolate what it might be, then create an action that overcomes it:

The Change - You were sure there was a great fit for their need and your product, if this has been dulled, then how come?

The Hurdle - With everything seemingly gung-ho to progress last time out, what obstacle has possibly appeared from nowhere to sidetrack the initiative?

The Omission - Thinking everything was considered in detail, has therefore something on reflection been missed from the proposal?

Some cheeky little spam sneaked its way through my mail filter to greet me with this delightful opening line:

Something I have kept close to me through 20 years in solutions selling is the rule “if there’s no need, there’s no lead.”

If a prospective customer cannot, or will not, share with you a problem they have, selling them a solution is impossible.

All it needed to say next was how you prise free the cards that are glued to their chest…

Glad to read a portrait of Lloyd Dorfman in the FT last week whilst early for an appointment at a client.  He founded Travelex as a single bureau de change 32 years ago, and in 05 sold 57% of his stake for over £1bn.  Most reps I know love such people, and try to model some of their behaviour.  So, here are the four points he feels predicate success:

1. be persistent - don’t take no for an answer
2. stick to what you know and who you know - by and large you should stay out of trouble.
3. conventional thinking will only ever produce conventional results
4. self-belief - through any business life there will be moments, however many business advisers you have around you, when the next challenge could be quite daunting, and you have to have self-belief to be up for that challenge

Something so simple I cannot believe it didn’t occur to me before.  In my current cold-calling crusade almost 25% of my sample’s receptionists wouldn’t pass on their firm’s ‘head of sales’ name, claiming some ridiculous policy or other.

In England, such people are usually referred to as Sales Directors.  So, almost absent-mindedly, I typed in my suspect company name into Google, followed by ’sales director’.  Amazingly, I seemed able to track down the very first unobtainable name followed by two more from the eight others I had a quick chance to check out just now.  I also then searched on @suspect.com to successfully find their email protocol Not bad going if I can gain intel on a third of my potentially ‘lost’ database that quick and easy.

postscript

Trying to get at these last few ‘no-namers’ is fairly traumatic.  Despite the probable Pareto supporters advice to move on from them, I just had a blitz of the dozen pains left.  I got their CEO name off the internet (all but one say who that particular individual is!) then asked to speak to their PA.  Now only 6 remain unaccounted for.

During a review meeting with a customer the other day, I learned that they’d recently had much success changing their approach to ‘appointment making’.  A new way was sought after instituting Calling Days that each rep underook from their home office.  The discovery that on average just 2 appointments were made each day was starkly at odds with expectations for more.

So Calling Days moved to a collective endeavour on site at each Regional Office.  The majority of reps can now regularly hit the key figure of 10 appointments each day.  Here’s how they now run:

Each person needs to bring a list of at least 100 phone numbers (they could also tap into a database created at HQ by telemarketers which apparently was of high data quality, with only 2 or 3 wrong details in over 3,000 records, which is of course a great help)

There are 4 Calling sessions during the day; 2 before lunch, two after.  The first of each pair lasts for 60 minutes, then a break, before a 75 minute session.

There are 3 Briefing sessions, one at the end of each of the first three.  They share experiences and try and work out what tactics and lines of approach are working well (or not so well!)

Their target suspects are people that would ordinarily be involved in ‘back office’ functions, so they are likely to be at their desks during most days.  The current result summary is impressive; 100 dials create 30 conversations with decision makers and they achieve 10 appointments from these.

There’s an impressive school of thought that if you’ve a complex point to get across, the winners do so by boiling everything down to terms a 5-yr old can understand.  Sales trainers often compel reps to imagine their dear old Granny.  If you can’t get her to catch your drift, then neither will prospects.  The ‘KISS’ mnemonic encapsulates this thinking, so that you remember to ‘keep it simple, stupid’. 

I recently came across a wonderful use of this thinking with a customer of mine constantly battling with one key competitor.  The products offered are naturally similar, but one aspect of differentiation has emerged with pricing models.  The one firm provides rigid packages yet at an overall saving, whereas the other allows for the client to build up an a la carte portfolio of product.

A case can be made for both approaches of course, but I did like the way one senior rep talked me through his ‘buying a car’ analogy.  He explained that when you buy a car, would you prefer to take the basic model, then add on the optional extras you want, or be told which bundle of trim and fancies you had to have, regardless of their ‘value’?  If you’ve an ipod, why have to take the 6-cd stacker?  And likewise, if say the ‘go faster’ stripe with rear spoiler fan may not be your thing, can’t you not bother?