I downloaded a frustratingly sparse and primitive white paper the other day on ’sales 2.0′ which, for all its banal pronouncements, did feature one juicy observation:

“Cold calling, qualification, appointment setting, and customer service are important steps in sales, but they are not the best use of highly paid sales reps’ time. Neither is filling out lengthy call reports or completing entries in an awkward and sometimes ineffective CRM system.”

There’s a good and a bad side to this though.  On the plus side, yes, it is a tacit admission (from a technology vendor no less) that technology isn’t necessarily the answer.  On the minus, it can smack of reps looking for any old excuse to not provide transparency on their activity and avoid their canvassing responsibilities.

One of the products I provide helps alleviate the non-compliance of sales reporting to unleash healthier knowledge that makes the killer info known only in one remote silo visible and actionable throughout the organisation.  And my experience tells me that up to half of salespeople go to extraordinarily obstructive lengths to avoid (cold-calling and) crm-filling.

The intriguing thing about my findings, is that the hypothesis of most sales 2.0 vendors, namely (to quote SalesGenius as one) that a “new generation of sales professionals [who] bring expertise with technologies such as instant messaging, social networks, search engines, and email to the workplace” shall produce an evolution of reps more willing to input detailed activity, is a myth.

If you are a sales manager, what encouraged you to document your activity and info when you were a rep?  If you’re a rep, then what do you hold in your personal system, the one that only gets seen on your laptop?

Start out from this micro level, and any macro-wide system is more likely to both gain accepted traction and promote the right kind of intel.

I recently came across these  review notes for a meeting ten short years ago.  The bite-sized book by American Spencer Johnson is widely known.  Here’s what I wrote back then:

Over 4 million people have apparently drank from the fountain of this guru’s knowledge.  That said, there are things to be irritated about here.

The 1984 notepad that spawned this phenomenon exhibits what I feel is an appalling style of delivery. If you’ve ever read a bedtime story to a toddler, you’ll see the same thing here, following as it does, a conversational journey a one-time winner in a rut undertakes to get back in the groove by visiting successful salesreps (who don’t actually ’sell’ in the traditional sense anyway).

Also, it is less directly aimed at career sellers, more so at anyone who feels that their general persuasion skills could be fine-tuned. That message is given very early on, probably to ensure extra buy-in from outside the sales community.

The key theme is that many can do the basics, but it’s the little things people do that make the real difference. These vital moments, surprise surprise, take just one minute to do in each sale.

Despite these dumbed down drawbacks, there are some useful tips to be had from the one-minute salesperson. A succession of worthy one-liners crop up around which the book is based.   Here are the pick:

• The One Minute Sales Person always “Stays On Purpose”, which means not simply aiming for goals, but look for something deeper that provides complete self-fulfillment (I know it sounds a bit passé and, well, American, but the message is clear that there is more to life than your pay packet).
• “Production minus Sales equals Scrap”
• You have to genuinely care about customers and their predicaments to get them to buy from you. Put yourself in their shoes.
• Draw out from prospects what they need - don’t tell them.
• “People buy how using your product will make them feel”
• There are 4 obstacles to winning business: No Trust, No Need, No Help & No Hurry.
• You shouldn’t focus your mind on just the sale, but how you will get Referrals once they’ve bought.
• “People hate to be sold, but they love to buy”
• Write down your goals. You get this repeated forever since the dawn of time, but we tend to agree that you should jot them down.
• “You don’t make the sale, they do”
• Salespeople come a cropper because they focus on what they want (to make the sale) rather than what the prospect wants (their life improved).
• The One Minute Sales Person uses the word “person” to remind you of the human aspects of selling.

News from a client of mine about how they successfully launched a new item during the past twelve months of torture.

Their new product was a piece of IT wizardry, typically bought through leasing, worth around €30k. In their own words, they decided to separate their sales potential into:

“first-run placements to get the technology out there”, and
“secondary placements against the competition”.

The pair of promotions that worked in gaining these first-run placements were simply:

1. a trade-in programme for early adopters only, and
2. a “1st Year Free” promotion

Talk of the huge sums of money on offer at the men’s tennis ATP World Tour finals ($1.6m to an undeafeted victor for a week’s work) reminded me of a reflective anecdote recounted by ubiquitous 80s snooker champ, Steve Davis.

He was asked if he ever thought of the winner’s cheque during a match. In those heady days, prize-funds felt mind-bogglingly large, far in advance of any other sports, and seemed to exponentially increase with each tournament.

He replied that he did, once, early in his career. He looked at a pink he needed to sink to clinch a title. He recalled thinking to himself  ‘this is worth ten thousand pounds”. He missed the pot. And since then, he never let the money enter his head during a frame. He went on to become the most successful snooker player ever to hold a cue.

A thoroughly enjoyable meeting at a client the other day uncovered a remarkably simple approach to funnel management.

Selling a combination of fairly big-ticket items (mixing ‘hardware’ & ’software’), the typical account manager monthly revenue target is 50k.

Whilst obviously the main figure, there are two other numbers of prominence. How they watch them illuminate what appears a particularly effective approach to pipeline focus.

The first regards new additions to the funnel, and the second genuine progression through a specific gateway. This latter amount features when a deal has moved from general prospect to one where the buyer has acknowledged a purchase decision is officially being pursued.

The amounts are 100k in new additions, with a further 160k progressed.

In all, the trio of KPIs are:

50k - monthly sales achieved
160k - deal value genuinely progressed
100k - new forecast additions

They are easy to both understand and measure, which I reckon is the secret of their success. The company concerned weathered the downturn and are now on the up once more.

It is undoubtedly a worthwhile exercise to either revisit, or assess afresh, how our own success stacks up along similar lines. How enlightening is it to know how much need be added to your funnel to guarantee sustainable business, and what must be moved forward each month to a specific stage to support the same?

A cheeky little movie from 1987, it’s really a tale of the search for revenge between two guys that meet at the scene of a car prang.

Set in Baltimore, 1963, the backdrop is that all the players sell “aluminum siding” (metal paneling for a home’s exterior).

This gives plenty of comedy scope to see all the scams that such door-to-door salesreps can come up with.

Let’s look first at the scams which could ultimately be their potential undoing…

Life Magazine - Where prospects are suckered into thinking their home will be a ‘before’ picture in Life Magazine, with a much more beautiful, but strangely similar home, being the ‘after’.
The Model Home or The Factory Showcase - Where the prospect’s home can be singled out as a shining testimony to the allure of the product, used at will as a reference. For this, a kickback is given to the prospect every time a further sale is made as a result. There’s one cracking scene, where old-time legend ‘Mo’ even starts to place hundred dollar bills in the prospect’s palm!
This Job Is Free - When a sale is given away by one salesrep, only for his partner to knock on the ‘customer’s’ door a moment later, claiming the first guy is having some kind of nervous breakdown and if this form went back to the office, they’d end up without a job, home, food, wife, etc! As the prospect signed, they must want to buy, the only issue being the right price surely…?! “let’s see if we can sort something out”!
You’ve Won An Award - Prospects are hoodwinked into believing they’ve won a prize as “one of only 16 homes in the Baltimore area” to be singled out for free product! And of course, ‘only a nominal labour charge will be levied’. It turns out that this labour charge amounts to roughly the same as a typical job anyway!
Free Extras - One salesrep is known to have implied free storm windows will be included when they never are, another to give an extra $5,000 worth of goods, and one tries to close throwing in a free garden hose.
Short Yardstick - When measuring up for jobs, where the amount paid depends on the square footage coverage required, one salesrep was known to have used a yardstick that wasn’t the full 36 inches. When the measures were totted up, he’d then make extra.
Divide and Conquer - When the husband baulks at the cost, the wife being sold insists (”Honey…!”).

Where are the sub-titles saying ‘don’t try this at home’?  There are some wonderful insights into the mind of a salesrep, too:

• The understanding is that to make a decent living, you’ve got to get on the phone and develop leads yourself and canvass.
• They never put themselves in their buyers shoes like you should! The opening scene has “B.B.” (Richard Dreyfuss) squirming when in a Cadillac showroom when he thinks he’s being hustled. Later, “Tilly” (Danny DeVito) comes out of a call, failing to sign a deal, and says “I thought I had a couple tonight, but they just slipped away”. Win-win was clearly not around then!
• Salesreps are control freaks! B.B. confirms this when he says “I hate the fact I’m not in control of this stuff”.
• The sheer delight when a prospect calls in makes the whole slog worthwhile “I knew they’d call” (hurray!)
• Decent front talk cannot be underestimated.
• They do unfortunately not pitch benefits quite well enough for my money! Their patter is slick though, practised to naturally roll of the tongue. Advantages including “It won’t chip, peel, blister, crack, flake or rust in any way” and “the only maintenance you’ll need is to hose it down twice a year” are good starting blocks. We get better with “it provides much greater insulation which means that you save on heating bills”.
• Don’t forget to close - although the only one you really hear is “let’s do some business”! There must be more to selling than just closing then…
• Every time the salesreps make a point, whether in the diner or at home, they colour their ramblings with lots of examples, stretched out where able to paint vivid pictures.
• They like to determine who has the upper hand when they first meet face-to-face with a prospect, so one way is to light a cigarette, then drop their matchbox. If the punter picks it up, their eyes light up, if the punter waits for the rep to, they know they’re in for a long hard time!
• They know the value of opening the honesty door early. The trick they use is dropping a $5 dollar bill on the deck in the punter’s home. They spot it and say “hey, you’ve dropped $5!” If the punter says “thanks”, they are in. If the punter says “it’s not mine”, the rep replies “well, I know it’s not mine, you’d better have it!” Either way the punter nows thinks they are Honest Bobs!
• Good salesreps are apparently willing to gamble everything on ridiculous outcomes (two play pool for one’s wife!)

During a recent training event on how to deal with the most senior of people at your buyer organisation, part of the journey involved my asking of the assembled salesforce what each considered such a top person wanted to hear from a “rep”, the first time you met.  In their arena, when this occurs it typically lasts just five minutes.  The collective consideration stretched to twelve items.  How many do you think hit the nail on the head?

1. Differentiators
2. Trustworthiness
3. What you can do for me
4. Provide certainty
5. Client focus
6. Remove risk
7. Deliver on time
8. Tailor-made solution
9. Implementation ease
10. Won’t be let down
11. Make life easier
12. Provide personal recognition

Whilst several have merit, I feel the key concept is not on this list.

My experience of such situations (from both whom I’ve met when selling myself and my personal perspective when my organisation is buying something of substance) is that a certain ground-level of knowledge already exists.  In such forum your only task is to sell yourself.

The best way to do that is talk about the things that, either today or tomorrow, affect the way that the person you’re meeting thinks about their role.

Regardless of whether your product impacts on such areas, passing on expertise that you possess about how other people in similar positions are tackling today’s issues or planning for tomorrow’s is surely the number one way to gain traction. Whether global problems or industry-hot challenges, your insight into how other, similar people are reacting to them is the vital differentiator in the eyes of the Top Person.

My regular work that helps people no longer lose new product launch momentum, and sell such latest offerings more effectively than they may have experienced before, makes me interested in the concept of neophobia.

In my field this primarily refers to the way that salespeople often shy away from selling the most recently released products.  It has a mirror too.  Specifically, when buyers deliberately shun ‘breaking the habit’.  In context here this encompasses both active avoidance of switching supply or severe disinclination to take any latest new product pitched to them.

A classic, perhaps even the derivative, use of the term involves how to get kids to eat healthily.  As I elaborate in my free eBook on the pitfalls to avoid when selling a new product, such neophobic bevahiour can necessitate numerous attempts before they adopt a new taste.

So I enjoyed a sunny lunch sitting outside a Manchester eaterie with a friend well-versed in how many people that she knew were trying to get their offspring to eat more fruit and veg rather than burgers, chips and pop.

Evidently child psychologists have deduced the following:

When something is good for you, it takes 3 weeks to get into the habit, but just 3 days to break it.

When something is bad for you, it takes just 3 days to drop into that way, but 3 weeks to climb out of it.

I was immediately struck by how relevant this must be to the aforementioned sales scenarios we face.

If the expansion upon 3 weeks (21 days) is obviously having a conversation for each day, then what can they be?

What are the 21 separate pieces of interaction you must have with a prospect before they ‘change’, before they accept what you say about your new wares?
How do you monitor, manage and maintain them?
Who can you get to help you conduct some of them?
How set-up are you personally for the 21 transactions you need to create?
How can you keep up the will to pursue them even when the dark days make you feel like not bothering?