salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales » 2008

Healthy 5-a-Day

October 23, 2008 at 10:41 am · Filed under rant

Those battling to prevent an obesity epidemic currently promote the virtues of having 5 portions of fruit and veg each and every day. The results are self-evidently staggering for your overall health and Body Mass Index should you keep to just such a routine.

Inspired by this dramatically positive impact, the politically orientated London think-tank Foresight set about creating a similar regimen to precipitate mental wellbeing and happiness. What struck me immediately is that such thinking can easily be extended to the world of sales. Here are the 5 ‘happy’ Musts:

Connect
Activity
Curiosity
Learning
Giving

It doesn’t take a quantum leap to attach sales actions to each of those. For instance, the first is all about seeking and making more social connections. It’s simple to see the parallels between people in general being happier with the more people that they interact with, and the larger the network the salesperson administers to the point of having a huge funnel which leads to a healthy order book and commission statement.

So the obvious jumps out. What are the 5 “fruit ‘n veg” a rep must eat each day to stay healthy?

Taking the Foresight Five as our cue, here’s an idea for starters…

Connect: Engage a brand new prospect

Activity: Genuinely progress a current opportunity

Curiosity: Open dialogue with people beyond the apparent buying cycle somewhere

Learning: Sharpen a particular sales skill of your own

Giving: Allow your expertise to benefit an existing client in some way

(nb: ‘closing’ isn’t there as a discrete action of course, because it’s all about the process, rather than the outcome)

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Where’s Your Local?

October 22, 2008 at 6:18 pm · Filed under rant

I spend a fair amount of my time helping sales people make the most of their latest new product. There’s no doubt that technological advances such as the immediacy of and permanent connection to email is contributing towards making us intolerant of patience.

Where once it would be quite sufficient to inch gently forward in pursuit of progress, nowadays if movement does not appear within ten seconds flat, panic sets in.

I’ve frequently found myself counselling against such a mindset from taking hold. Examples I’ve used in the past relate to the best ways to wean children on to healthy foods and how the best retail shop assistants behave. This morning a wonderful new example struck me as I walked into a cafe close by.

Upon entrance, the giggle of young Eastern European girls that wait the tables said ‘hello’, then one simply spoke to me with the words of my most regular order there. With a smile, I said that’d be ‘great’, and promptly sat down.

It occured to me that since their recent lick of paint, I’ve used the place a couple of times a week at unusual times. After dabbling with a variety of drink/snack combos, I have indeed settled on a particular order. I’m now welcomed as a ‘regular’, with the extra smile and chat that entails.

I consequently feel most comfortable in there now. Yet here’s the rub for sales people. This didn’t happen overnight. Vendor and Client took a while to reach this state. As many as half-a-dozen times of repeating a similar experience.

Persuading someone to take a punt on your new wares will never happen overnight, so prepared for the whole journey, not simply taking the first step.

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Avoiding Torrid Times

October 21, 2008 at 10:58 am · Filed under crm

I had a long chat the other day with a fella that ran a dozen reps in the field. The team were smilingly talked of as ’long in the tooth’. This time last year, he finally opted (using his words) to switch from manually kept sales records to an electronic database. He described the ensuing transition as “almost torrid, definitely hard” before allowing himself congratulations that after a full year, his charges were eventually engaging as instructed.

Upon further investigation, this state was exposed as a mirage. I asked him how he’d got to such a pleasant position. Firstly, he said a major reason for perseverence was due to his own IT resource producing the system. The benefit to him was that this meant it was “free”. Strange (wildly incorrect) logic I thought, but there you go.

Then he said that it was reducing reporting to a minimum that was the key. Whereas they’d started off asking for chapter and verse on each visit, he subsequently realised that it was counter-productive asking for full details of an hour-long call.

Resistence was compounded with the upgrade of a sales analysis tool that was made available ‘mobile’ in the field. This initiative was quickly shelved as being too time-consuming (and possibly intrusive).

Only once he settled for a one-line description and notice of next action did he achieve the buy-in and take-up required.

I’m certain he missed several tricks here, as the implication was that he’d practically given up on further recording efforts. His tone was very much that the level of intel held was a bare minimum, but he’d resigned himself to let the salesteam get away with it because “they aren’t losing me any business”.

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A 1 in 7 Cross-Sell

October 20, 2008 at 12:13 pm · Filed under grapevine

I found myself in the bedlam that is Hamleys Regent St toy store on a half-term Saturday. Battling my way through to the tills, I plonked my fancy dress party accessories for that evening on the counter with a sense of relief. The bill came to £32.98. Only half concentrating on what was a typical card transaction, I barely registered that the young chap that served me grabbed something from behind him and started talking.

“I’m not sure you guys would be interested in this…”

He was pitching some electronic Hallowe’en gizmo called a Fright Light that produces ghoulish sounds and spooky lights. We could have it for half-price, £7.50. (I discovered later, qualification for this treat was through over thirty quid spent).

Chuckling, I turned down his kind offer. To his credit, even when I’d said no, he kept his smile and gushed with a couple more of the features. Intrigued though, I asked the lad how many he’d sold. He proudly told me “loads”. With further probing, I got him to calculate what the ratio of success was. His considered reply was that once out of every seven times someone had added the toy to their shopping.

The place was packed. I asked this near five o’clock. And judging by how he described what was the huge pile at the start of the day, and now was much smaller, the promotion had proved a winner.

So a cracking promotion for a half-price product, time- and event-specific, with a qualifying spend. What would bring your 1 in 7 success?

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Crawling For Crumbs

October 18, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under reviews, grapevine

There’s yet another reality show on telly devoted to business. Seeking to emulate success scaled by The Apprentice, Natural Born Sellers you’d have thought, by dint of title alone, would be terrific.

Unfortunately, everything that makes the siralun show win has been jettisoned in this effort. Schedulers have already lost faith, shoving it backwards close to oblivion after only two weeks (a metaphor for our times I’m afraid, as even The Apprentice took a couple of seasons to break through). The two primary mistakes are swapping teamworking for individual endeavour and the lack of any charismatic mentor input. Despite his billion in the bank, this show’s business bigwig plays the role of afterthought, rather than driving force and a cash-only prize just seems misgiuded.

As you’d expect, juicy editing exposes most selling attempts as coming off a training course circa-1987. This makes objective comment tricky. The youngest of the contestants was thrown out thinking he was gifted, yet each time he was shown in action, the words you heard almost to exclusion of anything else were “I” and “me”. It is the lack of rectification of this type of misjudgement that condemns the show to a early telly grave.

For the selling skill observer, the main triumph involved a piece of applied learning. The week’s challenge had two strands; sell £135k worth of limos from an exhibition stand, and add to that by selling tickets for the post-exhibition bash.

All the reps tried to shift tickets before the show started. Despite the presence of bikini-clad assistance, enthusiasm waned and they considered the rewards small beer when set against the limo lure. All but one gave up on the tickets. The logic of this lone wolf was basically “what the last two weeks taught me is that all the little extras count”. In other words, she reckoned if no-one sold any limos, she’d win if she could sell the most tickets. Her masterstroke was to call local strip clubs and ask if she could pop along and flog some tickets. Out till 2am, she racked up sales.

Despite her consequential flaws, this plan did indeed make her safe. When summing up to help the winner decide ‘eviction’ (another mistake by the producers) the referee seized upon this. He told the eventual loser that sales wasn’t just about being blinded by the big deals, and that to win you must “take all the crumbs from the table”. He’d ignored the small sales at his peril. It was also to the show’s loss that he’d gone. As a character he was one of just two that’d ensure viewers engage (the other being our lap-dance queen). And they kissed goodbye to his initiative. His efforts at cold-calling from his hotel room, having pinched a business phone directory, prior to the exhibition should have been a major part of what the competition was about.

Finally, perhaps the one thing that surely had to be rammed down the watching public’s throat was left unheralded. The winner was the least pushy of the lot. Who wants truth to interfere with stereotypes? For the purist, it’s all downhill from here I fear.

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Agility Quickens Kondratiev Winter’s Thaw

October 17, 2008 at 10:11 am · Filed under rant

I admit to being bowled over by the spooky accuracy of Kondratiev during an overwise painful series of economics lectures at Uni. He’s the Russian who unearthed the reasoning behind patterns of boom and bust that his disciples consider hard-wired inside trade cycles. You can read about him and the impacts of his theories all over the internet, because it seems, although a year or two later than critics argue should have been the case, we’re now heading unmistakably into his latest depressive Winter.

A co-student of mine at the time of first discovery just recounted a delightful tale of a train journey. By chance he met leading economist Angus Hone. Even more remarkably, my pal was preparing a presentation where he wanted to talk about Kondratiev Waves. The fellow traveller happened to notice and a couple of hours of lively debate ensued.

To summarise from memory, Spring surpasses Winter only after a clearout of all that caused the bad-times. Traditionally, this has been wrapped up by war. It’s difficult to know what war could clense our current smog riven air. Iraq is considered too regional, Afghanistan too permanent, Terror too remote. Perhaps the war is rather to be waged against Carbon, Want or even Trade. Whichever, two other factors intrigue further. One is that the levels of debt must be reduced. Hello credit crunch. This typically means for instance that reserves pay off what’s owed more than getting re-invested in growth. The other is that new technologies are either born, or created through convergence of previously unconnected ones, to be game-changers that fuel the ability to grow.

This is why some thought in error that the late 90s ushered in a ‘Spring’ when telecoms and computing bred the internet. There are many contenders for the new technology that will push us to Spring this time around. Biotech is the most talked up. Fossil fuel replacements, nanotechnolgy and even the resurgence of virtual reality all feature.

Yet according to Angus Hone, this Winter will apparently be shorter than expected. It seems he feels that developments in IT alone will enable companies to become more “agile”. This will quicken the lengthening of the days.

It’s a fascinating perspective. For the solution-selling salesperson this is a brilliant concept to build on. As purse strings are held tighter, people may well indeed only invest in our wares if we can talk of such improvements. Where can my product provide greater agility? How much more agile can it make them? “Agility” is surely an aspiration I must introduce, and splatter liberally throughout, all my pitches from now on…

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Calculating Reduced Worth At The End Of The Day

October 16, 2008 at 10:46 am · Filed under rant

Here’s an unpleasant retail experience from a surprisingly mild Autumnal day in central London. Heading back to my desk during the afternoon, I walked by a deli-patisserie that I often pass. Combining the knowledge that I’ve only ever been an occasional customer with my desire to stop giving as much cash as possible to ‘The Man’ (particularly Starbucks, Nero’s, Costa, Eat, Pret) I went in to buy myself a couple of naughty treats.

Now I must admit I can be partial to those chocolate, caramel, biscuit slabs so was delighted to see one left at such late hour. The poor thing resembled the last chicken on the supermarket shelf though. It had clearly endured a couple of scraps during the day and consequently was battered and bruised around the edges, culminating with a chunk missing. I spotted the opportunity for some good-natured bargaining.

Of the two young Polish ladies serving, only one currently brandished the requisite English skills to understand my smiling request, “as it’s broken, what will you knock off the price to sell it to me?”

The shrug I received back was simply, “I’m sorry…” What was she apologising for? I investigated by continuing, “it’s not all there is it … so what is it worth now?”

It then became evident that her ’sorry’ meant No Deals.

We were still smiling at each other, and there was nothing but positive feelings in the exchange. Yet what an opportunity missed up. They’d never sell that last one. What would happen to it at the end of the day, I wondered. My disappointment grew. Yes, I’d failed to encourage the server to see the win-win outcome, but surely it was their loss. A loss then compounded by my walking out the shop empty-handed. After all, it’s difficult to buy anything when the one thing you’d settled on seems no longer attractive.

Still smarting, as I trundled back, I couldn’t help lamenting this as a metaphor for failed selling in my B2B lands. I’m sure many such solution-sellers could apply the remedies to this situation to their ambitions. Here’s just the first one I thought of.

When I was at Uni, a flatmate of mine was addicted to curry. He still is. It wasn’t the prettiest of sights to greet me first thing in the morning. I regularly shuffled towards the cereal only to notice him in bedraggled boxer shorts and t-shirt that seemed both too small and suffered at the hands of moths, cooking up his breakfast curry. When I asked him how come he made so much of the stuff and seemed to be re-heating it up all week, he promised to show me. The next Saturday afternoon, I traipsed with him off to the local market. He waited patiently. We’d been there ages and he’d bought nothing. Then, suddenly, one butcher started shouting out price cuts. Within ten minutes, they were all at it. My pal compared all the end-of-day slashes, and bought up enough chicken to feed the entire Uni for little more than the price of a round.

I was once given word that part of my performance would be related to how much Services I sold. Post-sale techie days were never pushed vigorously, mainly because either a) the client baulked at our per diem rate, or b) the line of least resistence is to avoid combining opex & capex budget requests. I also resented the fact that I wasn’t allowed to discount such days, and when my boss did on my behalf, the lost margin came out of my commission.

Yet now I see the light. I could have worked out who was in during the last week of a Month (or even better, a Quarter) and called up all my clients to tease them with a special rate. I could have lent it greater appeal and credibility by drawing a calendar onto a fax in those days too, with who was available and what their skill-set was. A kind of stock clearance, everything must go, one-time-only gig.

And of course, two further benefits would arise. You’d avoid canabalising Service revenue, because you could pitch one-day for something one-off that wouldn’t ordinarily get done. And you can bet that once back in at some of your customers, the Service person would invariably trip over other opportunities for you.

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Archive for October, 2008