salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

I’ve always considered the proposal review meeting an essential part of decent-ticket solution sales.  Getting key execs on board and putting yourself ahead of the pack is a must, and showing your in-depth understanding of where they want to go and how your usps alone can take them there is vital.

I remember having a talk with a fella that developed some kind of email-data search system, aimed at ensuring no-one ever ‘lost’ data.  He remarked how when you send a pdf summary after a meeing, the other person would never read it.  He probably took my silence as agreement, yet if it’s important enough, you talk them through it face-to-face, don’t you, and it’s another winning stage of the sales campaign.

Anyway, this sprang to mind as I just had a call with an excited rep recounting how he’d snared a whole month’s quota in one deal.  He did a few things to precipitate this but one I liked was when he arrived at the prospect offices to have his proposal review meeting.

He instantly made a joke of them not actually reading his comprehensive paper, guessing that they’d skipped all the way to the penultimate page to just look at the prices.  Apparently they laughed and said ‘of course!’ so he began to talk them through each section.  It clearly helped to set him apart and he won the order.

I just had a thoroughly enjoyable chat on the phone with a new rep at one of my customers.  After several years selling internet services in both America and England, followed by a two-year stint selling art with his wife, he’s back in the corporate saddle and loving every minute.

His enthusiasm is sky-high and has a patch that appears largely uncultivated for far too long.  As I remember from my own similar experience over a decade ago, this presents both opportunity and threat.  Images of felling all before you on virgin turf are tempered by the disgruntlement of uncared-for punters.

He has faced a barrage of negativity, ranging from outright hostility to casual dismissal.  In each case, he wisely plays the newbie card to elicit a fair hearing.  The one killer line I’ve heard him use is along these lines:

“Everything you’ve just told me runs contrary to what I was told during my induction.  As I’m no expert yet, how about we bring in our experts on a conference call to discuss these issues in detail?”

It’s allowed him to prosper time and time again, and with a simple tweak to rather refer to ‘refresher training’, it could work in just about any given situation for us all.

I spoke to client of mine the other day who was frustrated.  They felt (in England at any rate) the irrepsonsbile media were stoking the fires to talk ourselves into recession.  He felt that this was encouraging his customers to say to him, at ‘renewal’ time, ‘yes, we’d like to sign up for another year, but, y’know the credit crunch and all that, so can you reduce your rates’.  They apparently give no other reason for demanding a decrease.

I asked him where he’d had this and managed to maintain his rates.  It happened where he had a strong relationship with someone that relied heavily on what he provided.  So, he manged to get them to fight his corner, basically saying, ‘how can we reduce anything for all this?’

So, the trick when faced with this, is to make sure you speak to everyone touched by what you do and build an emotional, as much as a financial case for continuing.  There is a danger, of course, that you’ll find people aren’t as enamoured with what you provide as you thought.  View this as an opportunity to get back in there and re-sell all-round, preferrably with even more.

Here’s a great line I got in an email from a customer.  We were talking about how to create a better style of Proposal generation for a breakthrough new product of theirs.

“…we can often win without a perfect [business] case. That said, a good case never lost a sale, and a weak case has often lost a strong opportunity.”

Something to bear in mind when you know you can save someone time or money, but never quite get around to precisely documenting where and by how much, or why only your USPs can make it happen.

One of my clients is having an overhaul of how they present Proposals to prospects.  They’re conscious that attempts at making production of such compelling sales collateral easy for reps have failed beforehand.

A previous English regime spent many long hours creating a standard document, from which a 71-page template emerged.  But the reps ended up either sending it almost in its entirety or not at all.  The will to continue ebbed away.

Then an American team tried a drag-and-drop approach.  But they found that too much resource was needed to create and maintain it, with the amount of “feeding and watering” required to keep it up-to-date too onerous.  This idea similarly faded away.

So, they’re trying again.  This time they’re focused on how to avoid making something generic.  The plan now is to create a kind of question route for a campaign that enables the Proposal to effortlessly follow.  The main types of discussion are aimed at identifying:

• why the project is important to the prospect
• why problems have arisen
• the people affected (whether they realise it or not)
• how all this can be improved and delivered
• the headline business growth/improvement figures

And the project name for this initiative? The Post-It Note Proposal.

During the gripping Wimbledon final yesterday, 4-time semi-finalist Tim Henman commentating made a fascinating observation when Nadal, so strong throughout, began to wobble when failing to cross the finsh line, twice over, surrendering chances uncharacteristically meekly to not win in three-straight then four.

He shared his experience of sports psychologists.  He’d heard them say “you can only stay in the present”.  The elaboration suggested that if you dwell on a blunder, no matter whether mildly irritating or truly disastrous, you won’t break free and ultimate success will prove elusive.

I myself have tried to heed such creed, especially after a phone call may have gone pear-shaped.  And although tough, I feel that it does work.

And it clearly did for Nadal, eventually.

On my mini-project to sell the first batch of a new product beyond my current client community, I’m trying all sorts of things.  I’m partly inspired by the words I remember from Brian Thomas at a direct marketing seminar in the mid-90s; “always be testing”.  It was a cute antidote to the sales mantra, ‘always be closing’.

When I wasn’t getting as much joy as I expected from my cold emails, and when one specific objection I considered irrelevant cropped up more than twice, I forensically assessed what I could change and began to test out alternatives.

Then I had a slight wobble.  What if I test a ‘wrong’ approach with someone that would have bought?  Am I best off sticking with the decent results I know I should get regardless?  Fortunately, my moment of doubt was fleeting.  As long as my overall performance stats were not worse than the line I anticipated, then such testing would, I believe, make my eventual results better.

And the proof came from getting said better results at the same time I came across words from Derek Sivers, founder of the first internet music distributor CD Baby.  He cites several successes, where independent artists have made a living off the back of his platform, even going on to get signed by a major label and becoming global #1 superstars.

His experience is that people that fret over what is the right way to go about things, delaying actions because they’re searching for the single ‘perfect’ way ahead, are less successful than people that don’t mind making mistakes.  He feels they ask themselves “let’s see what happens if…” and give something a whirl.

Well, actually Jermyn St, but a similar gig.  Albeit not as well established for bespoke as the world famous tailoring mecca Saville Row, the other side of Piccadilly in London’s West End, Jermyn St has become a fella’s smart-casual paradise.

I’m lovin’ as always Mary Portas’s BBC-broadcast turnarounds of ailing boutiques, and last night on iplayer I watched her most recent rescue.  To help a bloke clearly clueless about how to deal with browsers, she thrust upon him a masterclass from Jermyn St veteran ‘Roly’.  He ouzed manners and the ability to serve.  Although in a retail environment, a couple of his pointers I realised apply to the business to business solution sales arena where a tangible item is in the mix.

Respect: 

Firstly, he treated his product with the utmost respect.  It was never dropped or flopped onto the counter, but rather lovingly presented in a flowing way in front of the shopper.  He introduced wares in such a way that they commanded attention, presented as if on a shiny platter.  What a contrast to how often I’ve seen people take for granted their products, even making jokes at their expense.

Touch:

A more obvious one perhaps, but when showing a shirt, he ensured he eased it from its plastic wrappings to allow the client to touch it and ‘feel the quality’.  How often do you recognise that the best presentations are where the prospect actually starts using, touching, interacting with, your offering?

Thought-provoking positioning realities hit me whilst watching Jeff Randall on Sky News Monday night.  Although his forte is the written word rather than interviews, he did arrive at one spell-binding observation on British retailing 2008.

As consumers begin to listen to the self-fulfilling misery from financial banking-biased journos talking us ever-downwards, high street spending habits are demonstrably changing.

Recent winning figures come from the likes of Burberry, New Look & Primark.  The trend is that those doing well either push being cheap and cheerful, or aim to be luxury brands.  Success is to be found at the poles.

Is there a lesson here for us solution sellers in any slowdown?  I think there may well be.  For now, I shall never use any language that could be interpreted as positioning my products in the ‘middle ground’.  I shall not fall into the trap of being “stuck in the middle”, afraid to be premium, scared to box-shift.  I’ll either talk about being a cost-leader on something, or the premium-type provider.