2010 May Archive - Salespodder: because today’s salespeople should be tomorrow’s chief execs

May 9, 2010 0

1:18 Poolside Pres Prep

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I delivered a draft presentation the other day. I had a 24 page document to condense into less than ten minutes. Thankfully for the draft run-through, I only needed to talk, not talk along to slides.

An aligned point is that I was impressed that we’d managed to gain a trial audience. As any seasoned presenter will tell you, preparation is the overwhelming key to quality delivery. The ability to have this and glean feedback is vital. Also the right panel make-up coupled with a willingness to thoroughly explain their advice is a great qualifier.

I had roughly three hours. So I sat around the hotel pool and worked out a structure.

After 2½ hours, I’d managed three successful walks around the pool, each one speaking out loud, from memory, without notes for the eight minutes my spiel would take in the Boardroom.

I wondered whether this was a typical ratio? Eight minutes speaking taking one hundred and fifty minutes of preparation to nail off pat. 8:150, or roughly 1 to 18. If it is, then for every ten minutes of pitching in front of a screen to an assembled audience, you’d need to set aside an uninterrupted three hours to fully prepare.

An additional point concerns content leakage. After a lag of just 3 hours, I conducted my run-through. As I successfully sat down after, I was aware I’d dropped a couple of bullets. I estimated these at around 15 seconds talk-time. This would suggest that my speech had not quite settled deeper than my short-term memory, a point to bear in mind if you can’t get to practice close up to your moment.

May 4, 2010 0

Appointment Booking Themes

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I witnessed someone make a few calls, the aim of which was to get a meeting with people that worked in the public sector apportioning grants. The caller was fortunate that the calls were far from cold. Yet listening to a person that’d never made a cold call in their life before made me realise how universal the structure of a successful call really is.

The three parts I heard were Recognition, Pitch, Objection handle-close.

How much easier is the call when as you introduce yourself, there’s that knowing sigh of understanding, familiarity in a sense, whilst you explain who you are and where you’re from?

After this comes a pitch. Why are you calling and what do you want? This should be snappy. The old rules of length apply - the time it takes for a lighted match flame to reach your forefinger and thumb still holds true.

Most people I overhead said yes straight away, but one did throw up an objection, trying to avoid having a meeting. As with many such hurdles, the objection referred to a different situation, and when that distance was explained, the meeting was booked.

One final point was how the use of flexibility helped with the close. Not quite the classic alternative closing, but at least, the caller was keen to fit in with the other party when it came to selecting dates.

May 3, 2010 0

Scoping Budget?

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How serious is your prospect about your project? The one that you’ve busily sacrificed anything from your once-hectic social calendar to the long-forgotten blissful balance of your treasured personal relationship to help make happen?

How about testing their true intentions by surreptitiously pressing them around project scoping funds?

Late last year, someone in the primary trades mentioned that for big-ticket greenfield projects, it was commonplace for the potential investor to invest up-front from one or two million on a project where the total costs were anywhere between twenty and thirty million. This would typically involve the first formally completed draft business plan.

That worked out as roughly a twentieth of total cash being spent in feasibility first, including outline planning. This 5% figure cropped up in another meeting I had just gone by. An expert in funding brownfield ventures (where expansion or replication of existing capability was sought) also revealed to me that they budget for 5% of total budget costs to be needed for “scoping”.

This reminded me of my early days in selling IT. What a great qualification conversation I could have had with prospects. If their ITT stipulated budget was a hundred grand, what were they planning to use the five grand scoping pot for? In that sphere, as nearly all of my prospects were CFOs, it could have set me (even further!) apart quite considerably.

When a prospect baulks at a pre-sale activity (if one isn’t on the immediate horizon then get creative!) that involves them putting their hand in their pocket, this line of questioning could well smoke out true objections or the real lie of the land.

May 3, 2010 0

Following ‘Here’s The Idea’

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I’ve spent much of today honing three different types of exec summary for a business plan I’ve helped craft. Inspired to check the web for any extra pointers, I came across the NY Times’ Corner Office. In particular, a 4-page interview with some American chief exec which includes this delightful segment:

Q. Is there a magic number of points for a business plan?

A. I’m not sure there’s a magic number, per se. I’d divide the page in quadrants: Market, Financial, Product and People. And if I can’t simply put what needs to be done on one page, I probably haven’t thought through it very well.

There’s a great saying: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” I find that in business a lot people take the time to write the really long letter, but they don’t take time to write the short one, and it even applies to doing investments.

When one of our guys is presenting an investment, you always kind of know they have it if they can explain it very quickly. And if it takes a really long time and you’re into the square root of the price of oil in Uzbekistan, you probably know that it’s gotten too complicated, and that’s when I start asking questions — when people start having trouble simply saying, “Here’s the idea.”

I often blog about parallels between business plan construction (which along with strategic sales plans is something I occasionally get paid for) and sales proposals. This aforementioned experience seems to suggest a wonderful discipline to employ on your pitch. Yes, you may have a lovingly created tree trunk of a Prop doc, but how quickly can someone not involved in its scripting ‘get it’ once you start explaining it?

As an aside, there’s also a delicious insight into determining how switched on someone is later in the article. If you can work out a key question for them (in sales management for instance it could be ‘how are you going to hit your numbers’, but you could similarly think up a decent one for just about any role) then their reaction is the tell. Three possibilities are discussed here;