salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Tescopoly Sales Dominance

November 27, 2008 at 1:18 pm · Filed under reviews

I’m quite a fan of Gerry Robinson. I thoroughly enjoyed his attempts at improving a tiny corner of the manifestly unfit for purpose NHS. Possibly because it confirmed my existing prejudices from personal suffering through their ineptitude, and I blogged on his trials here and here.

So I was pleased to trip over his latest foray into telly, starting with an interview with the head of global retail colossus, Tesco. Unfortunately, it was half-an-hour of disappointment. I’m not sure it would even count as decent advertising for the chain. It certainly wouldn’t count as giving accurate insight into what makes their boss, Terry Leahy, tick.

After joining them as a graduate, his stellar career appears to have been shaped by becoming part of the first ever marketing team at HQ. Just at a time when the then chief, a person who’s later attempts at cricket administration were in sharp contrast to the success of his former firm, Ian McLaurin, saw the value in meticulous examination of individual line data of buying patterns.

So the first lesson for the would-be successful salesperson is forensic analysis of buying data. This intrigued me. Mainly because I’ve been involved with several, and by that I mean at least one hundred, companies that had seen the value of such pursuit. And yet all but a handful miserably fail. The blame lies everywhere. But a part of it can often be laid at the salesrep’s door. And where this is the case, shamefully, they simply can’t be bothered to do the work.

One teasing quote you did pick up was from John Sainsbury, founder of a competitor UK behemoth. “Retail Is Detail”. And with that in mind, when Tesco first attacked the notoriously treacherous US market, they lived with American families to assess their buying habits and mocked up a store. They made out it was for a Hollywood film set and got people to shop around it to garner feedback. They preferred to listen to their customers, rather than find holes in competitive offerings.

The final insight was in the closing remarks. The subject humbly acknowledged that businesses could never be numero uno forever, it was therefore the job of management to prolong the good times to the max. As such he reflected, “you should always have a mountain to climb, I’m more comfortable climbing the mountain than sitting on top of it”.

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Gladwell’s Culture Matters

November 26, 2008 at 2:50 pm · Filed under reviews

On Monday night I went to one of Malcolm Gladwell’s two back-to-back London talks as part of his new book promotion. His challenge to get you thinking in different ways is laudable. And deservingly lucrative. He’s sure to have his third successive best-seller, as a broadsheet reviewer concurs, and it did inspire me to think over what could I preach on that could similarly fill 4,000 theatre seats at £25 a pop. I’m sure his cut of the £100k revenue from this single night’s work would keep food on his table for a while. Perhaps the only criticism is, that at a smidgen over an hour, it didn’t perhaps represent the best value for money I’ve ever had at a live gig.

Delivery

Nevertheless, he chose to delve into one key chapter in his book that talks about why aeroplanes fall out of the sky. A word first though, on his delivery. His self-effacing manner is a winner with an English audience. Softly spoken, using his hands demonstrably but without aggression, and a rhythm to his quiet tones that ensured you remained focussed. He also used the great tactic of starting each ’section’ by outlining a ‘problem’. He set the framework for the puzzle he was then set to solve over the next ten minutes or so. A great way of maintaining attention.

Small Steps To Disaster

For us solution sellers, the key lessons are in why disasters occur in what are judged to be complex situations. Think about any big, complex deal you’re working on. The good news is that a single destructive, catastrophic event is not going to happen. The reasons why planes crash are because an average of 7 small things go worng. Each in isolation is inconsequential, but combine them, and Boom. That feels eerily similar to what happens when a deal goes South.

Environmental Factors

Is the weather the chief contributor to a crash? Well, not really. Bad weather is only present in roughly half of all crash situations. What about being behind schedule? Again, 52% of all crashes we’re told take place when the plane’s running late. And how about the relationship between pilot and co-pilot? 44% of the time, disaster strikes when the pair are flying together for the first time. So, on their own, inconclusive. But. When these three states all hit in one go? Goodnight. And we were treated to an in depth account of just such a time for a Columbian jet ditching 16 miles short of JFK in 1990. Combine these factors and enough doubt, headache, fatigue, uncertainty and mistakes crop up to fatally damage the entire enterprise. A telling message for anyone managing a complex sale.

Avoid Mitigation

A wonderful explanation of the different ways people can suggest something was perhaps the biggest sales takeaway. He ran through six ways of asking for action. At the top was the direct command. (my example: “Sign here”). All the way down to the (weak) hint. (”We’ve got really simple order papers”). The hierarchy goes something like:

Command
Crew Obligation
Crew Statement
Queries
Preferences
Hint

Pages 7 and 8 of this pdf describes these in this context further (and two more useful ones; Self-Directives & Permission-Seeking Questions). I daresay you can read the book to have a fuller explanation of these. Yet the findings are obvious. You risk not get things done as you want, the farther down the list you drop. You can work out fairly easily sales situations for any of these. For starters, here’s a few simple ‘closes’ as my initial stab:

Communication Style	Sales Close Example
Command	“sign here, here, and here”
Crew Obligation	“I think we need to get this in writing”
Crew Suggestion	“let’s go through the paperwork now
Query	“you planning to sign?”
Preference	“I think going ahead now would be good”
Hint	“getting this process moving before month-end works well”
Self-Directive	“I’m going to put you down for some now”
Permission-Seeking	“you want me to kick this off for you?”

Of course, a sale isn’t quite the same thing as life-and-death decisions in a frenzied cockpit, but even so, it’s a neat reminder of how you can remove all ambiguity from the final procedure.

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Crawling For Crumbs

October 18, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under reviews, grapevine

There’s yet another reality show on telly devoted to business. Seeking to emulate success scaled by The Apprentice, Natural Born Sellers you’d have thought, by dint of title alone, would be terrific.

Unfortunately, everything that makes the siralun show win has been jettisoned in this effort. Schedulers have already lost faith, shoving it backwards close to oblivion after only two weeks (a metaphor for our times I’m afraid, as even The Apprentice took a couple of seasons to break through). The two primary mistakes are swapping teamworking for individual endeavour and the lack of any charismatic mentor input. Despite his billion in the bank, this show’s business bigwig plays the role of afterthought, rather than driving force and a cash-only prize just seems misgiuded.

As you’d expect, juicy editing exposes most selling attempts as coming off a training course circa-1987. This makes objective comment tricky. The youngest of the contestants was thrown out thinking he was gifted, yet each time he was shown in action, the words you heard almost to exclusion of anything else were “I” and “me”. It is the lack of rectification of this type of misjudgement that condemns the show to a early telly grave.

For the selling skill observer, the main triumph involved a piece of applied learning. The week’s challenge had two strands; sell £135k worth of limos from an exhibition stand, and add to that by selling tickets for the post-exhibition bash.

All the reps tried to shift tickets before the show started. Despite the presence of bikini-clad assistance, enthusiasm waned and they considered the rewards small beer when set against the limo lure. All but one gave up on the tickets. The logic of this lone wolf was basically “what the last two weeks taught me is that all the little extras count”. In other words, she reckoned if no-one sold any limos, she’d win if she could sell the most tickets. Her masterstroke was to call local strip clubs and ask if she could pop along and flog some tickets. Out till 2am, she racked up sales.

Despite her consequential flaws, this plan did indeed make her safe. When summing up to help the winner decide ‘eviction’ (another mistake by the producers) the referee seized upon this. He told the eventual loser that sales wasn’t just about being blinded by the big deals, and that to win you must “take all the crumbs from the table”. He’d ignored the small sales at his peril. It was also to the show’s loss that he’d gone. As a character he was one of just two that’d ensure viewers engage (the other being our lap-dance queen). And they kissed goodbye to his initiative. His efforts at cold-calling from his hotel room, having pinched a business phone directory, prior to the exhibition should have been a major part of what the competition was about.

Finally, perhaps the one thing that surely had to be rammed down the watching public’s throat was left unheralded. The winner was the least pushy of the lot. Who wants truth to interfere with stereotypes? For the purist, it’s all downhill from here I fear.

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Groundswell Selling

September 18, 2008 at 11:06 am · Filed under reviews

As part of my current product development, I’ve taken to reading books to further my knowledge. One I picked up from an airport bookshelf had an intriguing title, “groundswell, winning in a world transformed by social technologies” yet thoroughly uninspiring green cover with concentric circles emanating from the word ‘groundswell’.

The simple approach to the cover turns out to be a masterstroke. It matches the brilliance of the summaries contained within that explain how firms adopt ‘web 2.0′ capabilities to achieve stellar performance.

It is also the first time that I can recall actually having met someone cited in such an auspicious tome. With just half-a-dozen pages left in this Harvard Business Press publication, the example of Stormhoek came up. This is a wine farm close to Paarl, about an hour out of Cape Town. Amazingly, on my most recent trip there I met the two fellas that run it at a local Facebook get-together I fell across in the usually lacklustre Long Street Cafe. They insisted I try their latest award-wining Pinotage. From what I recall, their story and people have moved on quite a bit since the stage the book reached, but little did I know then that the original team had got to selling $10m a year through embracing the ‘groundswell’. An incredible amount for a small start-up Saffer operation in such a fiercely competitive and seemingly saturated global market.

Anyhow, with the thrust of the book aimed at how you create genuine communities to further your ambitions, you’d think there wouldn’t be a lot in it for the standalone salesrep. But you’d be wrong. If you have anything at all to do with account management, then I reckon there’s a stunning insight for you.

Authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff advocate thinking of five strategies (listen, talk, energise, support, embrace) and with each they put forward their ideal web 2.0 tool (such as reviews, blogs, forums, Q&As, wikis).

One of their most striking pronouncements, is that as of 2007 (p45) around half of all internet users engaged on some level with social apps. Whether they simply browsed others’ conversations, right through to creating millions of pixels worth of content, that’s an undeniably huge number.

Of course, as an individual rep the practicalities of benefitting from this throw up barriers. Especially if you spend half your life on the road. Yet taking this willingness of consumers to communicate with their suppliers, it is possible to begin a small project that leverages such findings without recourse to technology.

People like to be asked their opinion. So, (verbally) ask them direct what it is they really love about your product/service. If they were in charge of it, what would they change/introduce/work on? And delve deeper into this. Amass all the responses. Then document them and send off to all your personal clients. Get them to vote on which are the best ideas, what are the priorities as they see them. Come up with a ranking.

Collate this in your spare time, then present to Management. Get them to implement something, preferably what’s top of the list. Then pass on the good news to your very own little community. And watch the follow-on sales soar.

If your bosses black-ball your efforts, polish that CV and seek out a new employer, pronto. This stuff really is that fundamental.

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Do You Share The Millionaire Secrets?

September 17, 2008 at 10:59 am · Filed under rant, reviews

Americans. Is it true that the only people that love them are themselves? Despite their generally mystifying and atrocious self-help industry, I came across a promising ‘web channel’ called Big Ideas and a clip from Marci Shimoff. Tangentially related to selling I admit, she quotes research to illuminate the 5 ways of thinking that separates millionaires from the proles. Watch the 5 minute vid, as it expands wonderfully on the bullet-topics of

1) Dare to Be Happy

2) Don’t Believe Everything You Think

3) Use the Power Formula: Intention / Attention / No Tension

4) Let Your Passion Lead—Have The Guts to Go With Your Gut

5) Don’t Catch the ‘NO’ Cold

I’m happy to say that I took a couple of juicy morsels from this short burst of energy. Do we really have 60,000 thoughts a day? And are 80% truly negative? Are we really the ‘average’ of the five people we knock about with the most? How did the creators of the now 100m selling motivational book series ‘Chicken Soul For The Soul‘ stay upbeat when only the 144th publisher approached finally agreed to run with their idea?

These are definitely stats worth trotting out to make a point next time someone piddles on your latest new idea

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A Smile And A Shoeshine

September 10, 2008 at 2:03 pm · Filed under reviews

In a remarkable career progression, one-time fabric rep Laurie Taylor became a sociology Professor. As such, he created a ½hr documentary on BBC Radio 4 about the perceptions of travelling salesmen (the iPlayer link will likely disappear in a week, so to hear again, you may need to try searching the BBC site under ‘a smile and a shoeshine’ or ‘laurie taylor’). He clearly has affection for his subject, seemingly bemoaning the low esteem (euphemistically labelled “ambivalence”) the rep suffers in the UK & Europe. Especially when compared to the reverence in which reps are held in America. He finds a Harvard Prof who puts this down in part to the travelling peddlers’ role in creating the country, and how people relied on them for new wares to forge their new lives and even hear the latest news.

‘Bob’ is an English academic book rep. He fell into a life on the road by accident, drawn by the allure of an expense account and company car. You get the impression from him that he believes the bad press comes from too many people immorally selling one-off products where you see the buyer only at that time, whereas true reps have to be honest and live on what they’ve sold previously. There’s a delicious phase where the presenter goes on a live call with Bob, and somehow they manage to sell. Our Laurie is pitching a book he knows nothing about, despite his lofty standing, which is wonderfully exposed when the prospect asks for more info on the author. After much giggling and apparent ‘BS’, Laurie is given an order. Perhaps we should go into every call with a BBC documentary crew!

There’s several interesting comments. Along with entertaing cultural references to movies Tin Men and Glengarry Glenn Ross (checkout snippets on youtube!) and writings by Orwell (Coming Up For Air) and Chaucer’s Pardoner that ’sells miracles’.

I found my favourite pair to be the assertion that reps think of themselves as Wild West frontiersmen, hence the reference to “territories” that we “manage”, and the recolleciton of actor Warren Mitchell, who played Arthur Miller’s rep Willy in “Death Of A Salesman”.

Mitchell was required to walk on stage carrying a couple of suitcases full of his wares. To understand better, he asked Miller what was in them. “Dreams, Warren. Dreams” came the reply, and all was explained.

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Selling Power Video

July 29, 2008 at 1:29 pm · Filed under reviews

I receive email’s from America’s Selling Power magazine that I often save up for a coffee break and click on their newsletter. It tends to have a handful of articles and usually one will jump out at me and provide five minutes of thought provoking material and insight.

I’ve blogged before about my affection for Selling Power, especially as all attempts at anything remotely similar in England have floundered. Their video resource is now burgeoning with circa 5-minute talking heads. You can forgive the lack of depth they reach because of the way they tend to be structured to have, for example, a book author explain the 4 main facets of their tome. This let’s you know quickly what they feel important and gives a springboard for when their ideas tempt you elsewhere.

To give you an example of how beneficial just five minutes can be, the clip I watched just now highlighted the CEO of Miller Heiman, Sam Reese. In just 300 seconds, he suggested these five reasons and characteristics that allow the mere 6% of all sales teams to stand out from the pack as ‘winners’:

leverage real best-practice of top performers
work closely with strategic accounts when they conduct their own product and strategic planning
detailed prospecting and business development plans, not leaving anything to chance
understand why they win and lose deals to the extent that they make a science of it
provide plenty of ‘C Level’ (eg: Board member) support to their salesforce, both internally and in front of clients

Then for good measure, he added a couple of extra asides that determine success:

deploy key scenarios that determine passage through the ‘partition gates’ between escalations of their funnel
realise that lack of access to senior decision makers is the most common reason for losing accounts

As a footnote, although no details were forthcoming on how that tiny 6% were isolated as the ‘winners’, as that equates to roughly just 1 in every 14 sales teams, there must be great scope for looking at how the aforementioned seven activities can help raise you above the pack.

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The Trouble With Words

March 3, 2008 at 7:45 pm · Filed under reviews

I re-read this ‘book’ by John Simmons after discovering it in an old box full of heavy tomes skimmed through during my final stint of academia. The far too many years that have since passed may have dulled the brain, for I never remembered this pamphlet. I certainly hope I never paid the tenner that the back cover claims was its ticket price.

It’s not that a rubbish read follows. More like it’s a total rip-off. What you got for your cash was effectively a ten-slide business presentation with accompanying hand-out notes. Not value for money at all. And several pages in the style of Powerpoint might have seemed clever back then in the early-90s, but today? Erh, no.

Still, in the time it takes to boil an egg, (re-?)read it I did, and was thankful for 3 useful pointers. The author seems to have slithered up to dizzying heights in the dark arts of copywriting and thanks in particular a chap called Ogilvy.

Do The Numbers

Entertainingly for us, Ogilvy made his name first as a door-to-door rep. I no longer have the pages in front of me, so from memory the odd word may be lost, but the intro of his 12-page exhortation to sell-sell-sell a particular cooker back in the day (imagine if I’d have said ’stove’ hehehe) does put into beautiful context how you can rally troops (or indeed yourself) to get out there and find the ‘yeses’:

‘There are 12m households in the UK. 1m of them have cars. Only 10k have Aga cookers. Every home that can afford a car cannot afford not to have an Aga cooker.’

A quality call to arms indeed. As soon as I read it I thought of the products each of my prospects must also have and conjured up metrics in similar veins.

Humanise Business Impacts

This was a neat take. How often do you find yourself writing stuff that if you think about, sounds like it’s come from a technical manual? Making the process appear ‘human’ is a winner. The example he uses is how Bush beat Dukakis to the 88 American Presidency. Dukakis wanted a “decent, compassionate America” whereas Bush talked of a “kinder, gentler America”.

Say It Out Loud

When last I bit my lip having to work for someone else, I remember being asked by my charges how I wrote such good sales letters. Basking in the glow of recognition and putting such praise down solely to merit rather than ingratiation (of course!) I explained that I often read my prose out loud to see if it makes sense. This hint wasn’t one I’d made up for myself mind you. I got it from a mailshot writing seminar. Simmons re-iterates this, and it’s a belter of a policy. It’ll ensure you never write gobbledegook again.

So, the problem with this publication is not that the 3 points I took away were only average, simply that for a tenner these days you expect hundreds of gems, not just the odd couple you get from a make-weight presentation at the end of Sales Conference day whilst shuffling expectantly in your seat before the bar opens

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English ‘Torygraph’ Broadsheet Tips

July 26, 2007 at 11:20 am · Filed under reviews

Well, serendipity is a wonderful thing. There I was in my spare time, googling for some stuff on ‘peak limiting’ (it’s a music production thang) and amazingly I came across a wealth of sales intel from a bloke called Mike Southon, writing in Britain’s best-selling daily quality newspaper (the Telegraph, who’s business columnist Jeff Randall I’ve blogged about before as I’m quite a fan).

I’ve already read a few of the several pages he’s been awarded. As you can imagine, regular national press coverage on selling is something I warmly welcome. One interesting piece read so far is on his so-called “magic email“. There are several recommendations on the web for this kind of intro. He reckons he gets an impressive response of around 1 in 6¼ agreeing to a short meeting. You can easily read the detail for yourself, but it’s worth highlighting a summary:

Line 1 - something you notice/know about their company

Lines 2&3 - elevator pitch extolling passionately about what you do

Line 4 - proof of the above claims

Line 5 - close (what you propose or want to achieve)

and subject line: something compelling, his example is the weakest explanation of his recipe, but you’ll get the idea; “The Best Quality Widget-Sharpening Service in the South West”

I wondered too whether I could adapt the 25 words approach I blogged about before?!

One reason why I like this kind of thing is ‘cos I’ve been toying with solutions for this conundrum myself lately, and here’s part of a mail that earned me a first meeting recently, of which I think Mike would be pleased, although re-reading it now I know could cull a few words and make it flow better for next time:

“My purpose is to speak with you so that we can arrange a 20 minute meeting to determine how our breakthrough service can make your sales team even more effective by helping your sales initiatives. This is I’m sure not a definitive list, but should give ideas from my initial research for you:

Continued growth and maintaining a value-for-money portfolio
Dedicated account management to hopefully increase our share of customer spend
Keeping focus of what the sales team should be selling given vast array of products“

And financial proof followed. The email response (from the MD) was “call my PA to arrange a meeting”. Yum.

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Do You Use A ‘Colour Commentator’?

July 13, 2007 at 12:45 pm · Filed under academy, reviews

Someone sent me a link to a summary of a book by Joe DiMisa, The Fisherman’s Guide to Selling: Reel in the Sale – Hook, Line and Sinker. A typically American title you may think, it describes the six main activities/roles which each meeting must exhibit to be a ripper.

One that did catch my eye regarded (in American spelling I’m afraid!) having a “color commentator” on hand to add insights and stats to back-up what you want to say.

This is an interesting term. I’ve always achieved great success when taking into meetings someone so obviously subzero in terms of sales skills, but who’s technical brilliance the prospects immediately buy into and engage with. Without reading our Joe’s tome, I can’t be sure he refers to this type of support, I hope he does though. It’s a winner everytime.

In fact, one of my recent customer salesreps has produced outstanding results lately by letting a fella called Steve out of his usual dungeon-like habitat and talk technical with his prospect (accountants, no less) as he gets away with the ‘I can’t believe you’re not using this’ line that the rep gets shown the door if he uses.

So, in my experience, such a ‘colour commentator’ is brilliant when they have technical expertise and are not in any way ’salesy’. Just remember to make sure they know when to stop talking and hand over to you, else the chat will go off into all sorts of unnecessary tangents.

One final point too, is that using a sales manager for this role always goes pear-shaped. They talk too much, guaranteed, end up undermining your presence and never shake off the shackles of their sales responsibilites. Avoid.

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salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Archive for reviews

Tescopoly Sales Dominance

Gladwell’s Culture Matters

Crawling For Crumbs

Groundswell Selling

Do You Share The Millionaire Secrets?

A Smile And A Shoeshine

Selling Power Video

The Trouble With Words

English ‘Torygraph’ Broadsheet Tips

Do You Use A ‘Colour Commentator’?

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