salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Renewing Dampened Enthusiasm

October 9, 2008 at 12:21 pm · Filed under rant

We’ve all been there. You’ve a new idea that you’re convinced your bosses will love. A new product you know will change your customer’s life. Excitedly, you deliver an impassioned pitch. Their response? Yawns, at best. Demoralisation crushes your pride.

There are countless examples of world-beating pitches falling on a staggering amount of deaf ears. How many record companies turned down the Beatles? Isn’t it the case that JK Rowling got turned down by a dozen publishing houses before going on to sell 325m books over the next decade? I even learned recently that Hewlett-Packard no less, surely famed for innovation and RnD, turned down a design for a personal computer. Not just once, but five times. What happened to the person who’s idea it was? They left to pursue their idea themselves by forming a company called Apple. The rest, as they say….

Next time someone pours cold water on an idea of yours, as well as readying yourself for the long haul, tell them these (of many) wonderful words, courtesy of Albert Einstein:

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”

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+15% Credit Crunch Impact

October 8, 2008 at 1:14 pm · Filed under rant, anti-biscuit dunking

Listening to BBC Radio 4 most mornings recently, they’ve an innovative approach to consistent programming. Eight o’clock, Business Editor Robert Peston talks you through constructing your own gallows. Quarter-past eight, a pair of luminaries recommend their take on which rope makes the sturdiest knot and how to tie the most effective noose in it. 8:24, six minutes of adverts for ‘wonderful’ programmes to look forward to elsewhere around the network.

Normally a pretty positive person, this repetition is getting a bit much for me. A former Chief Investment Officer of Baring Asset Management (Michael Hughes) passed on sobering facts. There have been (a remarkable) 42 banking crises since 1970. That’s more than one a year around the globe. The average impact has been to reduce GDP by 13%. He intimates that this one is worse than ‘average’. At any rate, does this mean that if our selling numbers currently add up to 100, then pretty soon they’ll drop to 87? If we’re hitting “8″, then are they destined to fall to “7″?

Of those with the binoculars looking for golden skies, retail giant BHS’s boss, Philip Green, reminds us that (even though his latest profits have dropped) we need a little perspective. Business will not disappear, he reminds us.

So how will this effect the solution selling rep? The low-hanging fruit has clearly all been picked. One mindset is to overshoot last year’s results. If previously you could reach 100, and this year doing the same would lead to 87, then perhaps now, simple maths tells us we must focus on how to sell 115.

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Giving Up On CRM Adoption?

October 7, 2008 at 10:11 am · Filed under rant, crm

I read my latest Selling Power newsletter on crm last night. They mentioned a piece of PR they’d received from the boss of a crm vendor. It was satisfying that they disagreed with a third of what he set out in order to raise adoption of crm systems.

Back in the cowboy days of the Nineties, my exasperation with reps not using the software I was repping (and passionate about to the point of possibly being in need of medical attention) prompted my then superior (the Founder) to stun me. Don’t bang your head against a brick wall, he intoned. They’ve paid for it, we’ve done all we can to help them use it. So what if the reps spurn it? Microsoft have made billions shafting their customers so where’s our problem?

Well, thankfully times have changed. Firms no longer pay huge sums upfront for software. The ability to ‘rent’ databases that require potentially no internal IT resource has meant many companies are trying a new system with every new regime, or even financial year, to pinpoint one that works for them.

Of course, as the industry knows, none of the systems ends up working for them. Crm adoption is on the floor. It was heartening to note that Selling Power shared my experience that salesreps cannot be told that they’d only get commission if the crm was filled-in (”Coercion creates resistance”). They prefer to see extra bonuses for such diligence.

But then, I wondered if anyone had ever mapped crm adoption? When on-demand pioneer Salesforce announced their ‘adoption dashboard’, they must have realised it would expose them. I wonder what “safeguards” they built in?

The last person running a salesteam that I spoke to expressed the usual laments about paltry crm usage. He had 8 reps on the road. I suggested it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Of those 8, I suggested 2 would be addictive users. Another 2 would have never even logged on (although the likelihood bizarrely was that these were 2 of the top reps so maybe there wasn’t a huge problem!) and the other 4 could be nagged, chased and tazered into using it and when they did, at least the bare miniumum would go typed in. He acknowledged how accurate my numbers were. I wonder whether these are the same the world over?

This is a chap that switched recently from Salesforce to NetSuite. So I guess he’s paying around £400 a month. How does he evaluate if he’s getting value for money? I bet he doesn’t have to. Because even in these downturn times such an amount will forever be below the radar, as whenever the bean counters question it, they’ll simply be told they have to have it…

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By How Much Are Buyers Liars?

October 2, 2008 at 11:19 am · Filed under rant

I think every salesperson goes through this rite of passage. You’re told that you are going to win a deal by the prospect. You proudly, maybe even smugly, pass on the good news to your boss, your peers, your support staff, your spouse, your pet. Then what? Jupiter mis-aligns with Saturn, a butterfly flaps skywards in the Amazon, el Nino starts early, a pig sprouts wings as seen on youtube. The order never materialises.

A wizened old sage quietly remarks, “buyers are liars”. Lesson reluctantly learned, you realise that trust is foolish. From then on, you never accept what a prospect says at face value ever again. Ouch.

But by how much can you legitimately doubt what you are told? Well, it turns out that you are likely to suffer by being misled in at least 92% of cases via email. A study I just read over my morning cuppa, found that this is the amount of people that will fib on email. Wow.

In a we-must-have-a-moral-at-the-end-of-the-show-because-we’re-american kind of way, when you need someone to tell you something important, make sure you can see the whites of their eyes. And even then verify it through questioning everyone else you can think of.

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Fearlessness and Lack of Vanity

October 1, 2008 at 10:22 am · Filed under rant

Here’s a quote I read whilst surfing in front of the telly waiting for the Champions League game to start. It’s from a woman that married a man 11-years her senior with an insufferable reputation for social ineptitude. And then had four children with him over the next six years.

“He is blissfully unaware of the effect his words and actions have on other people. This means that he is unembarrassable. He is able to do many of the things he does … because he can accept being shot down or ridiculed in a way that most of us are too proud to cope with. It is also to do with a lack of fear. He doesn’t care as much as the rest of us about what people think. I like that fearlessness and lack of vanity … “

Yet it could so easily be used to describe a couple of demon cold-callers I’ve met in my time. And how impressive indeed such traits are in their hands…

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Purchasing Manager Frustration

September 30, 2008 at 11:06 am · Filed under rant

A pal of mine used to be a buyer (I know, how could I…) and I was asking him his thoughts on what people might think in terms of a buying process for a product of mine.

As we chatted, he revealed his pet hate with reps. He’d often need to conduct beauty pagents with several vendors (those were the days) and at the end of each meeting, he’d purposely give each rep a list of pretty much the same things to get back to him with.

These were pretty banal. Particular brochures, lead time stats, price books, customer list. The usual flannel.

Yet he was flabbergasted at how the seemingly most simple of requests would go undone. He always favoured reps that said they’d do something, and did it. Preferrably quickly. Wouldn’t we all…

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The Downside Torpedo

September 29, 2008 at 7:13 pm · Filed under rant

Over lunchtime earlier today I caught itinerant self-publicist and seemingly self-styled ‘entrepreneur’s entrepreneur’, Richard Branson, plugging his latest book on a radio show. And in these selling-squeeze times, I was reminded of a wonderful piece of advice I was given at the start of my sales career (when my elders and betters suspected me of running around like a giddy child in a sweet shop).

Branson was talking about how opportunities did indeed exist in the current climate, yet you must ensure that any downside to following such glory would not wipe out your overall endeavours.

In other words, be as certain as you can that chasing a shiny new revenue stream will not leave you without any cash at all, causing everything else to suddenly collapse, should it fail.

The advice metered out to me related to when I was excitedly rushing around planting seeds for the new wares that I was salivating about. “Don’t forget to keep writing business”. It was an eye-opener back then…

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Mystery Shopper Trap

September 25, 2008 at 11:35 am · Filed under rant

A friend was telling me about his sales benchmarking sideline. He offers clients a full competitive audit of their sales process, right through from initial enquiry to cancellation/returns. He’d recently conducted some work in the vaguely entitled ‘virtual assistant’ space.

16 firms were contacted. Just 5 emailed a response. And only 1 gave him a phone call.

You’ve gotta say, on any measure, that’s shocking. And then it got worse. He was after telephone chats to check whether promises matched reality. Everyone tried to avoid a real-life conversation, instead telling him to download from the website. And when he did get a couple of people on the line, he deliberately said he was busy and suggested them to call back.

The time he chose was 8am the next morning. Again, only one person tried to reach him at the allotted hour.

How does your enquiry handling machine stack up?

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Keeping Attention

September 22, 2008 at 2:39 pm · Filed under rant

Two separate experiences have reminded me of the difficulties that surround not just engaging an audience, but of actually maintaining their interest. In one paper this morning, a “communications consultant” trots advice out for Gordon Brown. As one of the most woeful, uncharismatic and convulted speakers imaginable, poor old Gordon could do with advice from any quarter.

Of course, grabbing and then holding attention can only be built upon the fundamental pillar of supreme message quality. And Gordon will never be able to call upon that. But the key advice offered is to pause every five words. I’ve always realised that pausing is a highly effective tool, but did not quite grasp precisely how frequent it should really be.

Then yesterday I enjoyed lunch with a barrister friend of mine. Completely independently, we got to discussing techniques for influencing the dutiful civic dozen. One cracking story from many moons ago concerned a long-since retired wig called Bob Watson.

When he was either unsure of, or required to rally, a jury’s call, as he stood to begin his closing argument, he’d accidentally ‘break’ his spectacles. After a brief interlude of bedlum, he’d continue to speak. It could take half-an-hour for him to make his final case. During this entire time, he’d be fiddling with his broken glasses. As he concluded, he would manage to successfully ‘fix’ them.

He believed that throughout, the jurors were transfixed on his repair efforts, and as a result, uniquely concentrated on what he was saying. He apparently considered that this helped present many a victorious defence.

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