salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

The time-stealer that is rolling TV news served me up a preview of the women’s golf open from Sunningdale.  Not in the remotest bit interested, my ears alerted when hearing that England World Cup winning coach Clive Woodward was overseeing the path of a promising 20-year old from near Derby, Melissa Reid.

Sir Clive knows a thing or two about getting the elite to perform.  His current job is doing just this for Olympic competitors.  But let’s not forget the shambles that was his kiwi Lion’s tour.  And what about his legacy at Southampton FC?  Anyway, he should acknowledge his experience on what does, and does not, precipitate success.

He has always been an advocate of surrounding (some used to say suffocating) his charges with legions of experts.   Along with Clive and her Manager, Team Melissa feature this dirty dozen, the first five being Doctors:

1. Health
2. Nutrition
3. Visual performance
4. Physiology
5. Kinesiology
6. Fitness
7. Performance movement
8. Motor skills
9. Performance analysis
10. Performing under pressure
11. Golf swing
12. Performance director

Melissa is all for it.  She’s been quoted approvingly, “Everyone out here is talented, so to get ahead you have to have an edge, to be different. Clive’s idea is that if you put together a team of experts around an athlete they can use their talent to greatest advantage. Talent is not enough.”

In the clip I saw, she talked of her most important discovery being one of dedication.  She was unaware of the sheer scale of the permanent level of hard work required on her part to become a champion.  A level of commitment that pretty much everyone else in life shies away from.

And I thought of how true this is for sales people.  And more so yet for sales teams.  I talk to hundreds of external sales people each year.  Having had a quick sift through my files, I believe that less than one in ten on-the-roaders engage in anything to improve their results beyond speaking to colleagues.  Whether listening to “tapes” in the car or studying a book on sales, the excuses I’ve heard for not doing so include “they’re all too American”, “I haven’t the time” and even “I don’t have to bother with that”.

It would be a simple addition to the next sales meeting get-together to hold a plenary.  Get someone holding the marker pen, and have the rest shout out ideas for the selling equivalent of Melissa’s dozen experts.  Then you can make a plan for getting them to have consistent, long-term dealings with the team.

If you’re a rep ploughing your lonely furrow, then who do you want to tap into?  Make your own list, approach them and make your plan.

I receive email’s from America’s Selling Power magazine that I often save up for a coffee break and click on their newsletter.  It tends to have a handful of articles and usually one will jump out at me and provide five minutes of thought provoking material and insight.

I’ve blogged before about my affection for Selling Power, especially as all attempts at anything remotely similar in England have floundered.  Their video resource is now burgeoning with circa 5-minute talking heads.  You can forgive the lack of depth they reach because of the way they tend to be structured to have, for example, a book author explain the 4 main facets of their tome.  This let’s you know quickly what they feel important and gives a springboard for when their ideas tempt you elsewhere.

To give you an example of how beneficial just five minutes can be, the clip I watched just now highlighted the CEO of Miller Heiman, Sam Reese.  In just 300 seconds, he suggested these five reasons and characteristics that allow the mere 6% of all sales teams to stand out from the pack as ‘winners’:

• leverage real best-practice of top performers
• work closely with strategic accounts when they conduct their own product and strategic planning
• detailed prospecting and business development plans, not leaving anything to chance
• understand why they win and lose deals to the extent that they make a science of it
• provide plenty of ‘C Level’ (eg: Board member) support to their salesforce, both internally and in front of clients

Then for good measure, he added a couple of extra asides that determine success:

• deploy key scenarios that determine passage through the ‘partition gates’ between escalations of their funnel
• realise that lack of access to senior decision makers is the most common reason for losing accounts

As a footnote, although no details were forthcoming on how that tiny 6% were isolated as the ‘winners’, as that equates to roughly just 1 in every 14 sales teams, there must be great scope for looking at how the aforementioned seven activities can help raise you above the pack.

I recently happened upon an interview with Jeff Randall, presently offering ballsy right-of-centre opinion for The Telegraph and a lively weekly Sky News show.  He recounted the tale of his disastrous first outside broadcast, live from in front of the Bank of England, distracted by a pair of passing abusive shouting young ladies.  It prompted him to ask the peerless Andrew Marr for advice.  He suggested you should fill your mind solely with two thoughts; the main point you want to make, and a back-up point in case the first gets forgotten (or of course, already mentioned).

I found this startlingly good advice when applied to those moments in sales meetings when all falls silent and insight is expected to gush forth from your lips.  How often do you curl up inside as someone waffles away, utterly directionless, in such position?

If you add to this the concept that we are way more influential when asking questions, then having your pair of points ready in such a format can make you the real winner when called upon.

Aka, doubt is our friend.  I heard these words in a drama from the mouth of a lobbyist.  There are two viewpoints I’ve encountered in selling that I deplore. 

Overwhelmingly, it is nearly always the case that I bewail how anyone that promotes the status quo can live with themselves.

Blatant scaremongering is tantamount to bullying and can never win long-term.

We’ve probably all heard of FUD.  Fear Uncertainty Doubt.  The creed from post-war IBM, since ingrained in every market leader more deeply than the ‘Reverand’ Moon could ever hope.  “Nobody got sacked for buying Big Blue….”  How would you expect a prospect faced with a tricky choice to react after being taken to one side and whispered that?

Yet there is a place, that stops short of the damage the aforementioned bombast can cause, where Doubt can be an essential tool.

In my solution selling remit, I often battle with people not wanting to change.  Trying something new fills them with the fear.  (Often the fear that they’d actually have to do some proper work.)  They mistakenly reason, why take a risk, however small, if it could lead to career demise? 

Yet illuminating the path to Doubt could lead the way.  What could happen if the world moved around whilst your prospect stayed static?  What pressures would start to bite?  How much worse off would your prospect be tomorrow? 

So, make sure you ask about such scenarios when the need arises.

I don’t know about you, but I’m quite proud of my education.  There’s a part of me that enjoys using unusual words.  I don’t do this to patronise, but to add illumination.  The other day I prompted a pal to ameliorate a situation, and he remarked on what a good word it was.  The problem is that this can cause problems in selling.  You might think that using acronyms and jargon would be a good thing.  Beware.  These cause similar train smashes.

I’ve spent time lately assessing various cold-call approaches for a recent product innovation.  For a while, I road-tested one that featured the phrases “micro-management” and “crm”.  Y’know, I can hear you whince as I write.  My product is neither of these yet I thought conveying knoweldge of them as issues would support my story.  In reality though, as soon as those words registered with my prospect, it was Game Over.

I was reminded of a meeting I had as a buyer to further a separate endeavour.  The person pitching kept talking about “monetising” a certain asset.  Such phraseology was too abrupt and ugly, and anti my mindset, so I drifted away.

It was a stark reminder of several things (not least of which is that all people that run sales teams hate talking about changing crm).  Prime among them though, was that whatever you’re trying to get across, it must be in their language, not yours, to stand any chance of ears pricking up in your direction.

Occasionally I meander through the online broadsheet small business guides, and one such journey the other evening stumbled across an English perspective on the Elevator Pitch.  First things first, it’s a Lift.  Why use 4 syllables when just one alone is perfectly sufficient?

Credit to The Times for shedding light on this technique’s importance.  When trained by Americans myself many years ago, the ability to deliver a killer 30-second pitch was both critical and highly regarded. 

The article referenced here suggests a quartet of essential elements:

1. An overview of what the business does / sells (although don’t go into too much detail)
2. What your main market is (who you sell to, what industry you are in, what sort of market share you have)
3. What your clients / customers experience as the key benefits of your products / service
4. Your main competitive advantage / Unique Core Differentiators (what makes you different and better than the competition)

I still create to this day such a pitch for each new product/angle in case I bump into someone worthy.  The key I’ve found is to be able to deliver it in sub-30-seconds in terms directly aimed at the listener, with a Close tagged on to the end of course.

It also goes without saying that the ‘benefit’ part should be specific, attainable and absolutely financial, as the example they list is weak given its reliance on pappy percentages.

We’ve all been there.  You excitedly book in a first meeting with a brand new prospect on the phone.  It’s in your diary for a few weeks.  You fire off confirmation of time, place and agenda.  You make other plans fit around the date.  Then inexplicably, when you call up for directions or such like, no-one’s heard of you.

Just now I’ve had a similar case.  My tele-seller originally booked in a new meeting at the end of Feb.  She proudly told me of the appointment.  The date though, was in June.  I explained that in my experience, any meeting slated for anytime beyond the next fortnight always gets canned.  Always.  I suggested she call back, explain this politely, and bring it forward.

The non-event reasons can be manifold, but usually, if a meeting is for so far off, then it’ll get forgotten or squashed out.

When she got hold of the prospect and followed my advice, he actually laughed.  He totally accepted the logic and on the basis he had ‘changes’, ‘holiday’, or ‘busy-times’ afoot, brought in forward a touch.  Snag was though, only by a month.

Guess what happened when this morning, I called up for directions to get to my 3 o’clock on time…

There is a simple moral.  If a meeting’s worth having, then it’s worth having now.  Anything booked for longer than two-weeks ahead is a no-no.  The alternative close should at all times be adhered to along the lines of “when would suit you best, next week or the week after?”

Spoke with a pal of mine working inside the colossus that is IBM.  Salesteam morale has just taken a bit of a battering, as the structure of all sales contracts has just shifted due to economic slowdown fears.  Whilst Management claim the high-achievers will do better, the water-cooler chat is apparently far from favourable.  The upshot is that many feel that they’re doing not just the same work, but more (as targets rose from last year already) for less money.

They’ve altered the mix, so that base salaries are lowered, and the bonus elements are increased, whilst also making the accelerators simpler to reward over-performance.

My mate’s annoyance at this gave rise to his stipulation that every sales person should devote part of their time to cultivating an extended salesforce.  This’ll be nothing new to those invovled in managing channels of resellers, yet how many of us do so in informal ways?  His take was that you must seek out your own such relationships, rather than solely rely on marketing-driven, corporate initiatives.

Whatever your product or service, who else is selling to the same target market?  The same people?  The same kinds of firms?  The same users of similar brands?  If you can identify these, and be sure that they won’t be willling or able to ’steal’ your business, then sacrificing say 20 points on margin would be highly worthwhile to remove those dozen or so tasks that are incredibly time-consuming and unrewarding at the beginning of each sales cycle.  And it’ll be a lot easier to agree a seemingly one-off deal ’sweetener’ to a third-party introducer with your ‘powers-that-be’, than dredge through another reseller sign-up process

One of my customers was talking to me about how, with only one other player in his market space, he was never quite sure whether to ask if the competition were on the scene with a prospect.

My immediate reaction was ‘no!’, never allude the to opposition.  Best to focus on specific client requirements and show with enthusiasm how you uniquely, perfectly match them.

Interestingly, he stated his experience allowed him to agree with me, before saying that mega-corp Philips had initially taught him differently.

After his business degree (over twenty years ago) he went to sell for their data systems division and (wow, those were the days) was inducted with a six-month solid training course.  They were insistent that you aggressively clobber the competition, explicitly knocking them throughout a campaign.

The subsequent knowledge he gained led him to conclude such tactics were inappropriate when he realised two consequences emerged:

1. each time he aggressively closed on this basis, it was too soon for the client and they invariably cancelled, and
2. when faced with strong competition that you overtly created doubts about, the client would tend to select a third alternative instead

Political phrase de jour, nudge policies, took up residence in this week’s chattering class tv.  The theory is that (by implication, centre-left) governments have for years wasted their time telling people what to do.  Instead, they’re better nudging people in the required direction.  A recent success along such lines trumpets the smoking ban in pubs and restuarants in England, purporting to save the health service squillions among many benefits.  

Nudge policies are gaining airtime as UK Opposition leader Cameron agrees with how US Presidential candidate Obama wishes to try and reduce the social trauma of absent black fathers.

For definitive explanation, the way ‘nudging’ is being described by various commentators encompasses anywhere between a polite discouragement to continue with a certain behaviour, through to positive incentives to re-inforce the desired path, with the critical detail being that the old-style behaviour is not explicitly outlawed.

Everyone in sales recognises that if you ‘tell’ someone to buy, they probably won’t, yet we all have moments of madness when we regress back to playground tactics to try and get our way.

The reminder of a nudge policy is the antidote.  Take the example in selling of creating urgency.  The single most common such tactic I’ve personally seen in this case is the time conditional discount.  Yet doesn’t that amount to ‘tell’?  How can this be altered towards a ‘nudge’?  You could do it in such a way that the actual cash the incentive offered would cost is the same to you as the discount (and you could argue the opportunity cost is dwarfed), but the prospect would never need to know.  A nudge could be help like earlier delivery, implementation resource available sooner (and at a cheaper rate) or cash flow ease with a credit window, for example.