The labyrinthine machinations of buyers’ systems can scupper many a well-meaning salesperson’s ambitions.

I have been reminded recently that there are typically two major times when they can obstruct selling plans; at the very beginning and the very end of a campaign.

Almost before you start, lurking in the background there may well be an approval procedure to either confirm you as a possible supplier, or to verify that the project itself actually can exist.

And when you are expecting that final green light, the number of forms that need to be signed with the requisite signatories can also derail many hours, days, weeks or months of hard work.

It’s just a fact of selling life that many a rep tries to pull a fast one around such processes. Whatever stories you may hear, you should be driven by the code that short-cuts do not work. Getting any and all such stipulations out in the open as early as possible is I’m afraid to say the percentage-game way of ensuring that you never have egg (or for that matter a rampaging boss) all over your face.

I was party to a fascinating exchange yesterday. At the end of a meeting a company had delivered all that was required of it to signal the end of one phase of a project, allowing a pause before possible authority to embark on the next stage. This accepted delivery would also trigger a final payment.

Despite it being acknowledged that all had been provided as contractually agreed, due to some (random) buyer-side protocol compliance, a further piece of documentation was requested. Take the added time and effort to provide this, it was said, and final approval would follow.

It reminded me of so many sales tales where even though the task is properly completed, new requirements extend the job - and prolong the wait for deserved payment.

The phrase ‘project creep’ grew up to describe when thi can happen during a project. It’s where new requirements appear and the client requests them to be done. Typically, as they crop up way before any deadline, they are agreed upon (often in writing with addendums to briefs) so that everyone knows the project will extend and costings alter accordingly.

As the term suggests, such new requirements then continue to occur. The old brief ‘creeps’ upwards and outwards towards a totally different project at the logical extreme.  They tend to be relatively small requests, but the combined impact of their ‘creep’ can be huge further along the road.

When it appears right at the end of a project though, project creep can be devastating. In my experience, contracts go without amendment at this stage, Expectations fall out of kilter with realities and perhaps most crucially, one request morphs into two, three, and sometimes many more. All of which can have dramatic and detrimental effects on both parties (but alas, usually it’s the supplier that unfairly faces meltdown).

So, how do you avoid such potential destruction?

Well, one irony is that many vendors encourage project creep. A belief prevails that, managed appropriately, it can lead to more revenue and closer integration between you and your client, way less likely to be open to competitive penetration.

Yet my experience leans more towards the frustrating slippage and relationship damage that it causes. When there is an obvious and definite milestone it must be made explicit that any final task as referred to earlier will either:

1. incur a charge (provided your legals have made you water-tight to ask for this),
2. be provided once payment is lodged,
3. be presented on explicit condition that funds will immediately flow upon receipt.

Of course, the likelihood is that managed incorrectly, the gap between you and your money will grow.

After blogging the other day someone’s observation that determination trumps all, I came across a study of teacher effectiveness on the thoroughly engaging Heath Brothers blog (the guys that wrote Made To Stick).

Whilst teachers are of course hardly the natural bedfellow of the salesperson, they could comfortably be viewed as requiring a certain sales acumen. After all, they must present, all the time, and they need to gain the attention of their audience and motivate them to act.

Contrary to the expectations of the surveyors, neither previous similar experience nor the expressions of constant personal learning proved relevant.

The over-riding trait found to predicate success was perseverance. And even further;

“perseverance — not just an attitude, but a track record”

Demonstrations of definitive thinking can enrage me when it comes to presenting figures.

My recent work helping to craft business plans reminds me that the kinds of projected costs and revenues they deduce ought not be presented as absolutes. This also holds true for their sibling data, any sales proposal’s savings and returns.

I was reminded of my other pet hate in this regard by a quote from a journalist interviewing one of the few people to predict our global financial meltdown, Dr Doom:

“Like many economists, Roubini does not talk in absolute predictions. It is all about what could happen in worse case scenarios.”

I’ve blogged before about experienced people (usually bean counters) no longer really believing a business case - despite claiming to unlock an incredible upsides or minimise an horrific downside - typically because the outcome is framed so dramatically as to render it unrealistic in the eyes of a hardened executive.

I’ve seen many such a proposal that I knew could have benefited from showing a range of around their purported extreme as opposed a definitive ‘we will make/save you X million’.

In both aforementioned scenarios, the tactic of sensitivity analysis requires deployment. Propose your figures within a range and despite any instincts you may have that they’ll come across as perhaps a touch woolly, they are more likely to gain general acceptance.

Watching CNBC’s Planet of the Apps I was intrigued by the inner workings and motivation of people in the latest goldrush. One company was inventing an app for tracking your expenses. Such apps are nothing new of course - I came across a web-based expenses solution a few years ago that was founded way back in 2000, and is still going strong today - but the race to be the first on the iphone seems hot (despite the programme’s assertion that the real money is in games!).

Anyway, from scratch to submission the team had a target of eight weeks. They made it (and gained the green light from Apple) and put down part of their success to developing ’screen trees’.

Every single page that the user could see was mocked up at the start. This focused on the user-experience in a way that matched it to the app’s capabilities.

This naturally got me thinking. Couldn’t you do something similar for your ideal sales campaign? In fact, mapping each requisite stage of the sale should surely be a fundamental part of any sales process?

Your very own ‘Sales Tree’ would show all the meetings, activities and outcomes that need to happen (or that you know when they happen you are more likely to win) and let you judge each campaign against the desired progress.

Here’s one problem I can encounter when working to maximise sales of a client’s latest new product.  The glamour and glitz of Launch is greeted with dark mutterings inside closed huddles of salespeople bemoaning the product’s shortfalls as catastrophic.

When has each aspect of a new product launch pleased every single salesperson?  Without full product buy-in, it’s an obvious jump to realise that active promotion will flounder.

With confidence lacking, salespeople can come across as shills when pitching.  Here’s a few definitions from around the web for a shill:

• a decoy who acts as an enthusiastic customer in order to stimulate the participation of others
• a person paid to endorse a product favourably, while pretending to be impartial
• an associate of a person selling goods or services or a political group, who pretends no association to the seller/group and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer

Wikipedia notes that they appear primarily in auctions (false bidders to drive up the price), gambling (house players encouraging others to join in), consumer websites (fake positive reviewers) and journalism (slanting opinion as fact).

The fabled “pet customer”, who can always be relied upon to deliver a glowing reference for you and are genuine Ambassadors for your brand, are often missing for brand new products.

So in solution sales, a shill in this sense can be the existence of an imagined testimonial.  This includes claims for what the product will bring.  They are based on fiction, rather than fact, hope rather then recorded results.

The trouble is, many new product launches do not have processes in place to either gain immediate (preferably pre-launch) clients of this nature, or fail to put in place the mechanisms to capture why any early adopters jump willingly on-board.

The problem comes when letting a salesperson loose on a new product with such stories filling their head, especially when they don’t truly believe.  They find themselves performing the role of “shill”.  Whilst they may not be out to deliberately mislead or deceive, it leads down only one road.  The prospect either never gets to hear an appropriate pitch or when they do, is subconsciously disinclined to consider the proposal at that time.

At the heart of solutions here, is the traditional way products are launched to salesteams.  It goes without saying that the most commonplace approaches, that of the 1-hour presentation at the latest sales meeting or sending the ‘marketing pack’ out with the incentive scheme, require evolving into a managed programme of events and milestones…

For over ten years, I’ve made a living (sometimes in full, other times partly) from capturing and sharing across sales teams deals that they win.

My specific slant was always twofold; collect and codify any genuine best-practice that should be incorporated into any such similar deal, and pinpoint and promote any key messages that every single prospect in a similar position needs to hear.

A dozen different ways of slicing a success evolved, and each could be diced by a myriad of defining characteristics dependent upon individual circumstance.

Wonderful tales of the power of such intel, effortlessly caught and spread, constantly reached me. Over time, it was less the big numbers that made me most proud, but the small. To me, that’s when I really sensed a change of behaviour had occurred which, in most cases is fundamental and difficult to pull off.

By way of example, one such case involved a salesperson that learned about a new technique that one of his colleagues (and one he did not personally know) used to good affect, and tried to give it a go. Pretty soon, he’d nailed his first sale from it. It may have only netted him £800, but he’d changed what he’d been doing for almost twenty years and now saw a whole new light. Shinier, brighter and longer lasting. Wonderful.

Yet however sweet such victories, my lament is that they tended to be fewer than they should have been. All sorts of reasons abound for this. One for instance, is simply that most salesreps appear conditioned to ignore the experience and advice of anyone else in the field. Think about that statement. Anyway, I came across someone that had set up a spreadsheet to capture Won Sales Analysis.

If you are one of the tiny minority of salespeople that understand the huge value of this, then you’ll no doubt lap it up. What I found annoying corroborating about it though, was the author’s finding that no-one cares about such an activity. This view can be inferred from the observation from the number of pages coughed up by his three googlings;

500,000  -  sales analysis

90,000  -  lost sales analysis

100  -  won sales analysis

I’ve blogged about this kind of gripe before, and notwithstanding the pedantry which would in my opinion erroneously suggest that ’sales analysis’ by grammatical default includes won sales when I believe it really concerns data analysis, perhaps this highlights something that sets apart the achievers from under-achievers.

Olympic gold medal champion Chris Boardman passes on long-distance cycling tips to a beginner in The Telegraph. A pair of points fascinated me about these. The first was how adaptable and relevant many of the headline hints are to solution selling. The second the very fact that such a top ten can actually be created and should be done so for any sales operation. Taking the former upfront, here’s a summary of Boardman’s Ten:

Train, train and train some more	Lower gears
Practise seated climbing	Make use of the groups
Good shorts and chamois cream	Sunscreen and a cape
Pace yourself	Do it in company
Eat and drink little and often	Post-race plans

As for the second point, at the very least such a top ten can remind yourself of the things you  want to be doing in your personal sales improvement plan, and could even form a template for your overall campaign-by-campaign sales process.

How long should a salesperson stay in a role? It’s an issue which can vex the best of us. I remember blogging about this very thing over three years ago. Whether sales rep, manager or overall boss, one commonplace argument is that three years is ideal. The first year you’re busy changing everything that’s gone before (for the better I trust), the second year you show stellar progress, and the third you consolidate. After that, the theory goes, it’s time to move on.

Reading about what commentators make of the dire public finances with which the new UK Government have been saddled, I came across the concept of “kitchen-sinking“. Attributed to financial observers two decades past (although you can’t help but smile at the alternate battle-of-sexes etymology), it seems to mean you tell all and sundry the full unadulterated horrors of the situation, blame everything on the previous occupants of your post and vigorously use your honeymoon period to act like a crazed axe-wielding maniac to ring whatever changes are needed.

Juicy phrases evoking images of ’skeletons in the cupboard’ and ‘being handed a hospital pass’ from your predecessor can clearly get you a long way, but, and it is a big but, you must remember that your performance will be judged in the self-same terms. Sounds like the new Chancellor is creating his own yardsticks, so it might be possible to create your own, hopefully more favourable scorecard too.

I feel this approach does though have merit. Imagine you’re a new account manager. Your new patch has several ‘under-performing’ accounts. What is their to lose from meeting with them face-to-face and get all the dirty washing out upfront? The grimier the better, obviously, not forgetting to tell everyone back at base. Then work to become the hero who truly cleans up.

I came across this fascinating statement from the website of a chap that in part funds businesses:

“Two startups want to hire me. Which should I choose?
The one with the most determined and smartest founders (in that order) is the more likely to succeed.”

Yes! It’s so true, isn’t it? The people, ventures, ideas that win through are not necessarily the ‘best’. They’re the ones with most determination behind them. And the same runs true for sales campaigns and sales people.