I often blog about one fundamental mistake both much sales management and practically all crm systems make. They fail to distinguish between activity and results.

My experience is that when confronted with a choice, most sales management structures veer towards ‘activity’ as their primary driver. My firm view is that this is wrong. Outcomes all the way for me should be at the heart of how you manage. It may be considered by some as mere semantics yet its nuance is, I believe, critical.

To use one of several crm/management examples available, this means you need to home in on what is happening next, rather than what has happened, which is all too typical. And erroneous.

Yes of course, monitoring activity does have a worthy place, but my point is that when it becomes the main means of assessment, you get sent down the wrong route.

In the parlance of the UK’s National Health Service, this concerns the focus on either processes or outcomes.

In July recently the new coalition government set out its stall for yet more (albeit much needed) reform of the NHS. Reading through a transcript of the statement to the House was fascinating. Here’s a key passage:

For too long, processes have come before outcomes, as NHS staff have had to contend with 100 targets and over 260,000 separate data returns to the Department each year.

We will remove unjustified targets and the bureaucracy which sustains them. In their place, we will introduce an Outcomes Framework to set out what the service should achieve, leaving the professionals to develop how.

We should have clear ambitions, and our approach to this will be set out shortly in a consultation document. For example, our aims could be: to achieve one and five year cancer survival rates above the European average; to minimise avoidable hospital acquired infections; to increase the proportion of stroke victims who are able to go home and live independently.

How similar to inappropriate sales reporting does this sound? Lots of targets (mainly unjustified), too many data returns required, unnecessary bureaucracy, no clear ambitions.

Process targets introduced in the past famously include the length of waiting times for certain procedures, regardless of the effectiveness of the eventual treatment. I plainly applaud this new outcomes slant, yet when is an outcome not a outcome?

Number of calls, size of prospect bank and performance against quota are three major process metrics. All have merit yes, but what happens on these calls? What type of prospect are they? How sustainable (growable, repeatable even) is the year-to-date figure?

These are all difficult to measure. This should not mean that they are jettisoned from the discussion though. Far from it.

Distinguish well between process and outcome pointers and you will undoubtedly improve your results.

Salespeople I know tend to like business reality shows as they often revolve around selling situations. The Apprentice is probably the daddy, with Dragons’ Den not far behind. It is from this latter stable that I came across a winner’s story as documented in The Telegraph.

I think most sales people love to hear of entrepreneurial success, especially when it’s an against-the-odds tale. Can there be more of such an example than a young single Mum going into to the pudding trade? The fact that she started out on her kitchen table with apparatus costing only around forty quid makes it even tastier.

Before the Dragon boost, she secured £20,000 of funds and sold 12,000 units through health shops. Taking knowledge from her parents in that marketplace, one delicious quote runs,

she had no qualms about knocking on doors. “I think it’s my drive and my passion. I have not had any knock-backs yet, touch wood. Although it has been hard and I am no good at sales”

I wonder precisely what she would term a “set-back”?

No good at sales, yet surely her list of selling achievements pre-Dragons is impressive:

• £6,000 government funding awarded
• local manufacturer took up her cause
• regional buying event take-up from largest chain
• contract signed with Europe’s largest ice-cream maker

And all this whilst raising her son and continuing her part-time bar job.

From a strategy point of view, she reckoned that going after the distributors was what helped her quicken results. And the most telling characteristic was revealed when one of the investors put down success to her “steeling determination“. Let’s hope that none of us misplace ours.

If any sellers are feeling down on their luck right now, perhaps the final paragraph will provide a pleasant push,

Ms Henshaw said the state of the economy has not figured at all in her thinking. “I don’t really follow the economy. I just went for it,” she said.

“When I had this idea I had nothing to lose. I didn’t own my own home, I am a single mum, and I had saved up that money and thought I would just go for it.”

I am a vuvu god! Bloody hell those things are annoying. They remove all perspective from a game inside the stadium, truly detracting from the experience of a football match. But when you’ve got one in your grasp, they are impossible to resist.

A young lady first offered me her vuvu (steady…) right opposite the stadium after the boredraw French Uruguayan affair. The bar was packed of course, and the constant drone of vuvus was like a jumbo circling directly overhead. Only louder. After a couple of blows from me, her vuvu remained strangely silent. I asked her to show me how she did it. She was hopeless at trying to explain. “Just blow” just isn’t an answer. I asked her to show me her lips doing the motion sans vuvu. Insight remained elusive.

And so, after another couple of games, my quest for vuvu tutelage continued to flounder. More locals, Dutchies and even Germans after having banished England all failed to show me the ropes, despite their own hard won ability to produce piercing parps.

It was reminiscent of the time I was around eleven years of age. The Music teacher pulled out his trumpet (…please). In scenes that today would send elf ‘n safety brigadiers apoplectic, each one of my classmates in turn tried a blow. Only two or three out of 30 managed to find a note. For a school founded literally hundreds of years before, it was a devastating indictment of educational malaise.

Why is it so difficult to explain how something (so simple) should be done?

Then a local girl from the Cape Flats, in the Mexican Shebeen no less. What a place. She was hardly five foot tall, yet created a bellow louder than an army could have mustered. A demonstration of the movement, expertly narrated, with follow-up analysis, slow-motion breakdown, and user involvement including finger on lips and cheek to gauge pressures.

It was a masterclass. And I got it. It really is, as the African name suggests, all about the ‘pump’. Surely a moment to treasure. Like first riding your bike without assistance.

I chanted the only way you could in such situation. The Full Metal Jacket way.

This is my vuvu. There are many like it but this one is mine. My vuvu is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my vuvu is useless. Without my vuvu I am useless….

Ending on a sad note, I have since been parted from my first ever vuvu. Apparently not everyone in a bar enjoys the sound in the wee small hours. Such is life. In the sunshine of another day though, it’s fascinating to reflect on how you get a training/teaching/coaching point across to a salesperson. Especially if that seller is your client-side champion.

Can you do it like my Capetonian heroine?

In March 2003 Calvin Klein sold his fashion empire for $400m. In the Red Bull lifestyle mag, I learned what drove him. Here’s the cracking insight which he credited with shaping his pricing policies;

As a young child he hung around his father’s grocery store in Harlem.

“I would see grapefruits … and some of them were 29 cents a pound and others were 49 cents.

I asked ‘What’s the difference between the two?’

My father said,

’some people like to pay 29 cents and other people like to pay 49 cents’ “

Offering a number of bundles can often make the difference in solution selling. In this instance, there are two. They appear to be the exact same product. I wonder if in reality though, they were? If indeed this was the case, then a sublime piece of marketing appeals solely to the mentality of the buyer.

Alternatively, the two bins could have been split according to all sorts of measures, such as colour, shape or size.

Either way it’s a telling reminder that, provided you don’t bedazzle the punter into decision blindness by offering too many options, offering just one extra choice, no matter how small the difference, can lead to greater profits.

At some stage everyone gets acquainted with the dilemma of how to respond to bad behaviour.  Faced with whether to rescue such fallings can cause sleepless nights when you feel that you might inadvertently be rewarding them and thereby encourage future failings of a similar nature, rather than stem their re-appearance.

A classic ‘moral hazard’ in sales often concerns how to treat a salesperson that’s way off quota.  If you pass on leads, add territory/opportunity, or keep them in post, then rather than raise their and the collective performance, you can instead let the rest deduce that they can get away with below par figures and the overall number drops.  Thus Sales Managers can be inclined to let someone swing in the hope that it avoids an under-performance disease spreading.

Yet there’s another selling moral hazard thrown up by the credit crunch-ed recession.

What do you do when a customer ’suggests’ you understand an imminent huge reduction in previously guaranteed supply, an interminably long delay to your latest project or the necessity to swallow a massive discount?  Especially when the hammer blow is supposedly softened by reference to the current economic climes…

Does acceptance leave you open to suffer yet more damage at a later date?  Is your policy of appeasement doomed to leave you making ever more devastating concessions?  How do you avoid the traps of such moral hazard?

The successful solutions I’ve seen are based on what happened in the UK a couple of years after the dotcom bubble burst and raw material metal prices soared, when construction activity was thought to be dropping by around ten percent.

The winners I knew defended margin and tried to lock-in supply.

In the case of maintaining a profit, the approach was to reduce provision commensurate with overall project caps, so that a fall in revenue did not lead to disappearing margin.  In other words, you can help with the topline being less, so long as the delivery is also less in line with it.

With trying to cement a supply arrangement, short-term special pricing was granted so long as an increase was enshrined in the contract for the subsequent year.  I was surprised at how the clients accepted a price rise next time round, but it did make for a simple conversation at that subsequent renewal time.

I happened to be chatting to a chap that had recently won a service contract. In neither a town nor sector renowned for its structure and process, the reason for his award appeared to be the pitching of his “Diamond Way”.

The man in question enjoyed the surname Diamond and used it to his branding advantage.

He was driven to this particular positioning by immense frustration with how his lacklustre competitor behaviour had made life difficult for him. Being tarred with the same useless brush made his selling an uphill battle.

Quotes he rattled off demonstrating the dissatisfaction felt throughout the client base of his industry included:

• suppliers playing all sorts of games
• wondering how on earth people stay in business
• they duck and dive you
• don’t answer their phone, messages or return calls

So he formulated his Diamond Way. He realised structure and process were the vital elements missing, so he created such.

He sought to provide confidence that specific activities would be done at specific times. Troubleshooting regimes were in place, accompanied by rosters to ensure checks are conducted daily, weekly, monthly or whenever for each individual item.

Of course, in solution selling much of the post-sale care will be ’sold’ by the eventual client managers. In my experience, carting along to a prospect a techie that strangely enjoy the darkened walls of their pod-dwelling existence can be a real winner. Even if, and often because of the fact that, they unknowingly dish a little bit of dirt.

For Account Managers, this kind of approach works wonders. The number of times I’ve seen a project derailed because thought’s not been given to who takes responsibility for a mess up is frightening. In which case, what usually happens is the issue gets escalated all the way up to the top of your client, who then bounces it across to the top of your organisation, before it cascades down traumatically to you. Hugely overblown and possibly fatally. And all so unnecessary. Worse still, the original salesperson gets dragged in to clear up the mess. With devastating consequences for your new business activity and targets.

As I blog this, here’s a manhunt for an armed killer on the run in England’s N East. He has apparently said that he “wants to go out in a blaze of glory”. I caught criminologist Jamie Wilson describe his state of mind on Sky News. His worried assessment included that he is:

• a paranoid narcissist,
• thinking superficially, shallowly,
• avoiding responsibility, projecting it on to others
• seeking to be the centre of attention
• looking for power and control denied him in other parts of life

Heading towards the denouement, the highest barrier to a safe conclusion (the alternative being more loss of life and what the Americans call ’suicide by cop’) is what he termed ‘foreshortened forward thinking’.

The expert was pleased that police messages emphasised the future and that the gunman had been assured that he had one, should things be resolved without recourse to further violence.

It’s all fascinating stuff, straight from the mouths of fictional on-screen mindreader Cracker and his ilk.

Buyers are not fugitive crazed murderers, of course. Foreshortened forward thinking though is a trait that I’ve been frustrated at encountering myself during sales campaigns.

Why do they only see what’s at the end of their nose? The inability to consider anything beyond next week can really grate. The most typical instance is in the difference between  what the thing they’re buying costs today, and how much it’ll cost once bought.

There is nearly always a gap, usually a large one, between what the original signed order’s monetary value shows and the total figure including maintenance and upgrade costs over the period of usage. In short, these are often referred to as Day One Costs and Lifetime Costs.

According to the criminologist, the way around this is a twofold pincer movement.

Prolong, &

Talk futures

Firstly, the longer the period of time, the more likely it is that the penny will drop. Snap decisions lead to ill-judged decisions in this context.

Secondly, to take the focus off the present, you must try and drum home what a positive future will be about. For buyers, this is better, quicker and easier service with all the associated benefits these entail.

As the pop-sales sayings go:

quality, service, price - you can only ever choose any two, &

buy on price, pay twice

In today’s Indy a finding that will annoy many a sales manager. Not only those who suffer, but also those whom witness rudeness experience levels of under-performance in its aftermath. One deliberate, yet said in normal and un-angered speech, example of rudeness caused those who heard it perform badly afterwards:

“What is it with you? You arrive late, you are irresponsible, look at you, how do you expect to hold down a job in the real world?”

Now compare this statement with the rantings of sales management to which you may have been party recently. I’ve been inside several sales cultures where testosterone fuelled Boiler Room meets Wall Street publicly metered verbal batterings are commonplace.

Seems like such an approach is counter-productive. Nothing I’m sure that we didn’t already suspect. After all in my earliest of days, a mentor of mine once dismissively commented on another’s sales ‘motivation’,

“when have you ever responded positively to a bollocking?”

A wannabe web entrepreneur talked excitedly about a South African idea for funding such start-ups. Crowdfunding aims to be the continent’s first collaborative pool for such cash and expertise.

I was informed they have a specific approach to filtering business plans and ideas that come in to them.

Apparently, they do not want any numbers, nor projections. Instead, they want to know what the “big idea” is. The only extra info they want is who’s in your team and how far you may have already got.

no numbers

no projections

the big idea

team members

how far so far

Surfing through their info, it seems an endeavour in the early stages. Yet they expand on these. A few interesting quotes flow through for anyone writing a sales or business plan. These include:

If you are going to fail, do it fast

When I see and read an application for funding, it usually takes no more than 30 seconds for me to get a gut feel for it

And on the actual idea itself, you can read the detail of what they believe it must be;

really, really simple
clear solution to a clear problem
executable
launched small
scaled fast

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a lady that I do not know. Her name is Jane. I do though know her firm and have dealt with them for a few years now. She wrote to me (and several others) to inform me of her new type of services. What they are hardly matters, and she signed off;

“Please do not hesitate to contact me, my details are below.  My services are available immediately.”

My level of interest was not dismissive, but neither was it excited. Nevertheless, I emailed back. I asked for clarity on the pricing of her services.

Then nothing. Nada. Not a sausage. No reply whatsoever.

It’s conduct like this that gives us sellers such a bad rep. This episode upset me on so many levels I can hardly contain myself.

It is a classic buying tactic to try and throw salespeople off their guard by asking nonchalantly about price. The true mettle of the salesperson then comes through with how they handle this. Of course, you win when you tread the fine line between not giving away a specific price, but offering enough to start a conversation about individual requirements.

If Jane had have responded with a single price, then that may have been the end of our exchange anyway. A range being offered, then we might have progressed. Should she have tried to shift the goalposts ever-so-slightly, and engage me with what I may have been after, then I might indeed have opened up.

In any case, her initial email was wide of the mark. It’s a lesson in how not to approach via email. She went straight for the ‘close’. To me, this kind of process can only effectively start if the seller tries to create a conversation. Forget the pitch. Completely.

She solves a problem, so by all means mention it. Better still, if I’d like to learn more about what they do and how they do it, then tee up such response. Any exhortation to just ‘call’ will always surely precede silence.

And that’s not even going into the worse sin of all. Leaving a prospect email unanswered will never further your ambitions.