salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

A pal of mine used to be a buyer (I know, how could I…) and I was asking him his thoughts on what people might think in terms of a buying process for a product of mine.

As we chatted, he revealed his pet hate with reps.  He’d often need to conduct beauty pagents with several vendors (those were the days) and at the end of each meeting, he’d purposely give each rep a list of pretty much the same things to get back to him with.

These were pretty banal.  Particular brochures, lead time stats, price books, customer list.  The usual flannel.

Yet he was flabbergasted at how the seemingly most simple of requests would go undone.  He always favoured reps that said they’d do something, and did it.  Preferrably quickly.  Wouldn’t we all…

Over lunchtime earlier today I caught itinerant self-publicist and seemingly self-styled ‘entrepreneur’s entrepreneur’, Richard Branson, plugging his latest book on a radio show.  And in these selling-squeeze times, I was reminded of a wonderful piece of advice I was given at the start of my sales career (when my elders and betters suspected me of running around like a giddy child in a sweet shop).

Branson was talking about how opportunities did indeed exist in the current climate, yet you must ensure that any downside to following such glory would not wipe out your overall endeavours.

In other words, be as certain as you can that chasing a shiny new revenue stream will not leave you without any cash at all, causing everything else to suddenly collapse, should it fail.

The advice metered out to me related to when I was excitedly rushing around planting seeds for the new wares that I was salivating about.  “Don’t forget to keep writing business”.  It was an eye-opener back then…

I suspect that virtually all of us are experiencing that the credit crunch is biting.  I had a couple of cheekies after stumps with a pal of mine Thursday night who’s responsibilities include managing financial risk and reducing borrowing costs for one of the most well-known global luxury retail brands.  We got to talking about what needed to happen to bring back the sunshine.

He gave me a fascinating insight into the decrees being cascaded throughout his organisation concerning purchases.

In general, there is no authority for new expenditure.  Hardly news for the typical solution salesrep there.

This though is news.  Anything where a process improvement is touted is to be ignored.  So, claiming you’ll shave or slash time from a process will get you nowhere.  The exceptions are twofold; equate an improvement to the direct and instant cutting of a ‘head’, or provide a tangible (ie: raw hard cash only) payback in less than just a couple of months.

And as a final pointer, if you really want to gain traction, offer an evaluation period as a deal-maker.

These tip-offs have certainly made me rethink about how I can get my own foot inside new doors.

A friend was telling me about his sales benchmarking sideline.  He offers clients a full competitive audit of their sales process, right through from initial enquiry to cancellation/returns.  He’d recently conducted some work in the vaguely entitled ‘virtual assistant’ space.

16 firms were contacted.  Just 5 emailed a response.  And only 1 gave him a phone call.

You’ve gotta say, on any measure, that’s shocking.  And then it got worse.  He was after telephone chats to check whether promises matched reality.  Everyone tried to avoid a real-life conversation, instead telling him to download from the website.  And when he did get a couple of people on the line, he deliberately said he was busy and suggested them to call back.

The time he chose was 8am the next morning.  Again, only one person tried to reach him at the allotted hour.

How does your enquiry handling machine stack up?

The regular gag of lament among sales trainers is to often mock Sales Management’s widely held view that the best form of ‘team bonding’ is to take the reps out for a slap-up beano.

If you’re in a team where this logic prevails, then perhaps you can take a leaf out of the legend that is Arsene Wenger’s book.  Although his Arsenal are not my footie side, they’ve been the one outfit I’ve always tried to watch since he took over.  Everybody I know, including several useful players I’ve had the privilege to line up alongside, feels the same.  And the amazement is usually how he manages to get such brilliant performance out of significantly younger and cheaper resource than the other big clubs.

One reason is his focus on the team ethic.  Today’s press all carry reports of a single sheet of paper that summarised a recent team meeting.  It somehow fell into a random hack’s grubby paws.  It is fascinating.  Here’s the most detailed report.

There are two summary points, followed by the 14 bullets below.  The selling question is twofold; which of these when applied could benefit your team, and how can you apply them?

Our team becomes stronger by:

* Displaying a positive attitude on and off the pitch

* Everyone making the right decisions for the team

* Have an unshakeable belief that we can achieve our target

* Believe in the strength of the team

* Always want more - always give more

* Focus on our communication

* Be demanding with yourself

* Be fresh and well prepared to win

* Focus on being mentally stronger and always keep going until the end

* When we play away from home, believe in our identity and play the football we love to play at home

* Stick together

* Stay grounded and humble as a player and a person

* Show the desire to win in all that you do

* Enjoy and contribute to all that is special about being in a team - don’t take it for granted

Two separate experiences have reminded me of the difficulties that surround not just engaging an audience, but of actually maintaining their interest.  In one paper this morning, a “communications consultant” trots advice out for Gordon Brown.  As one of the most woeful, uncharismatic and convulted speakers imaginable, poor old Gordon could do with advice from any quarter.

Of course, grabbing and then holding attention can only be built upon the fundamental pillar of supreme message quality.  And Gordon will never be able to call upon that.  But the key advice offered is to pause every five words.  I’ve always realised that pausing is a highly effective tool, but did not quite grasp precisely how frequent it should really be.

Then yesterday I enjoyed lunch with a barrister friend of mine.  Completely independently, we got to discussing techniques for influencing the dutiful civic dozen.  One cracking story from many moons ago concerned a long-since retired wig called Bob Watson.

When he was either unsure of, or required to rally, a jury’s call, as he stood to begin his closing argument, he’d accidentally ‘break’ his spectacles.  After a brief interlude of bedlum, he’d continue to speak.  It could take half-an-hour for him to make his final case.  During this entire time, he’d be fiddling with his broken glasses.  As he concluded, he would manage to successfully ‘fix’ them.

He believed that throughout, the jurors were transfixed on his repair efforts, and as a result, uniquely concentrated on what he was saying.  He apparently considered that this helped present many a victorious defence.

As part of my current product development, I’ve taken to reading books to further my knowledge.  One I picked up from an airport bookshelf had an intriguing title, “groundswell, winning in a world transformed by social technologies” yet thoroughly uninspiring green cover with concentric circles emanating from the word ‘groundswell’.

The simple approach to the cover turns out to be a masterstroke.  It matches the brilliance of the summaries contained within that explain how firms adopt ‘web 2.0′ capabilities to achieve stellar performance.

It is also the first time that I can recall actually having met someone cited in such an auspicious tome.  With just half-a-dozen pages left in this Harvard Business Press publication, the example of Stormhoek came up.  This is a wine farm close to Paarl, about an hour out of Cape Town.  Amazingly, on my most recent trip there I met the two fellas that run it at a local Facebook get-together I fell across in the usually lacklustre Long Street Cafe.  They insisted I try their latest award-wining Pinotage.  From what I recall, their story and people have moved on quite a bit since the stage the book reached, but little did I know then that the original team had got to selling $10m a year through embracing the ‘groundswell’.  An incredible amount for a small start-up Saffer operation in such a fiercely competitive and seemingly saturated global market.

Anyhow, with the thrust of the book aimed at how you create genuine communities to further your ambitions, you’d think there wouldn’t be a lot in it for the standalone salesrep.  But you’d be wrong.  If you have anything at all to do with account management, then I reckon there’s a stunning insight for you.

Authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff advocate thinking of five strategies (listen, talk, energise, support, embrace) and with each they put forward their ideal web 2.0 tool (such as reviews, blogs, forums, Q&As, wikis).

One of their most striking pronouncements, is that as of 2007 (p45) around half of all internet users engaged on some level with social apps.  Whether they simply browsed others’ conversations, right through to creating millions of pixels worth of content, that’s an undeniably huge number.

Of course, as an individual rep the practicalities of benefitting from this throw up barriers.  Especially if you spend half your life on the road.  Yet taking this willingness of consumers to communicate with their suppliers, it is possible to begin a small project that leverages such findings without recourse to technology.

People like to be asked their opinion.  So, (verbally) ask them direct what it is they really love about your product/service.  If they were in charge of it, what would they change/introduce/work on?  And delve deeper into this.  Amass all the responses.  Then document them and send off to all your personal clients.  Get them to vote on which are the best ideas, what are the priorities as they see them.  Come up with a ranking.

Collate this in your spare time, then present to Management.  Get them to implement something, preferably what’s top of the list.  Then pass on the good news to your very own little community.  And watch the follow-on sales soar.

If your bosses black-ball your efforts, polish that CV and seek out a new employer, pronto.  This stuff really is that fundamental.

Americans.  Is it true that the only people that love them are themselves?  Despite their generally mystifying and atrocious self-help industry, I came across a promising ‘web channel’ called Big Ideas and a clip from Marci Shimoff.  Tangentially related to selling I admit, she quotes research to illuminate the 5 ways of thinking that separates millionaires from the proles.  Watch the 5 minute vid, as it expands wonderfully on the bullet-topics of

1) Dare to Be Happy

2) Don’t Believe Everything You Think

3) Use the Power Formula:  Intention / Attention / No Tension

4) Let Your Passion Lead—Have The Guts to Go With Your Gut

5) Don’t Catch the ‘NO’ Cold

I’m happy to say that I took a couple of juicy morsels from this short burst of energy.  Do we really have 60,000 thoughts a day?  And are 80% truly negative?  Are we really the ‘average’ of the five people we knock about with the most?  How did the creators of the now 100m selling motivational book series ‘Chicken Soul For The Soul‘ stay upbeat when only the 144th publisher approached finally agreed to run with their idea?

These are definitely stats worth trotting out to make a point next time someone piddles on your latest new idea

Over the past week the physicists on the Franco-Swiss border have achieved remarkable global media coverage.  The CERN labs, most famous it seems for giving us the internet, have just switched on their latest supergizmo.  When I first heard of it, I’m pretty sure its raison d’etre was to help find ‘free energy’.  Now all the talk is of bashing particles together to better understand the universe.  At least we all might benefit from this in two ways.  Firstly, the next generation of the web will be based on their “GRID” and be stupifyingly quick.  And second, all those flat-earth clowns that said there’d be a black hole created causing an the implosion of the planet have been proved wrong.

I just spent a thoroughly enjoyable weekend of R&R in Geneva, and would you know it, the CERN labs are almost next door to the airport there.

So, awareness of their ‘brand’ has surely never been higher.  And they’ve a souvenir shop.  But what a disaster.  No-one was buying anything.  The prices felt unusually good value, strangely un-Swiss in fact, with t-shirts being only a tenner in trusty Sterling.  But the ‘goodies’ on offer? … Well.

I’m constantly amazed at two facets of brand merchadising.  One is when all people do is grab a dozen of the seemingly obvious products (t-shirts, cricket caps, pens, sweatshirts, mouse mats, etc).  And the other is when they simply splash their logo on them (when will these people learn that the logo is NOT the brand).

Results end up exactly the same as for the rocket scientists.  Piddling sales from unexciting, limited choice with drab, uninspiring products and designs.  Which struck me as an incredibly wasted opportunity.  In fact, I spent the next hour in the pub riffing ideas about all the things they should be doing instead.  (Can you believe that there’s not even anywhere at the airport that offers a single CERN tee, but if you fancy a red and white abomination with a cow on it, feast yourself?)

And of course, it made me pause and wonder if in fact, I was guilty of similar misguided promotion.  Are my products where my customers would buy them?  Does my offering limit choice and look staid?  Is what I consider cutting-edge actually just going through the motions instead?  How should I be trying to stand out from the crowd?  This kind of chat can make you shudder a moment!

I was reminded recently of an all-too-often overlooked part of the sales cycle; implementation.  How often do we cringe when hearing of ’salesrep-sold-and-ran’ tales?  Ink barely dry, commission already spent, and the customer left in the lurch as a new set of faces takes over part-petrified, part-clueless?

The ’spin’ exponents, Huthwaite, advocate as part of their Major Account Selling Skills courses to think carefully about this.  Clients are often nervous.  They may have staked a lot on what you’ve sold them.  Reputations and cash could be on the line.  So understand this, and thoroughly hand-hold them through the immediate post-sale moments.

This doesn’t just mean be there at delivery time, or a few phone calls asking about the weather.

What might that mental agony be based on?  What is it they’re apprehensive about?  Where do they need to see promises delivered?  Find out, and make a plan to document how you provide answers to all such areas.  Better still, share this timeline with them beforehand and personally deliver it.