salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

One of my clients is having an overhaul of how they present Proposals to prospects.  They’re conscious that attempts at making production of such compelling sales collateral easy for reps have failed beforehand.

A previous English regime spent many long hours creating a standard document, from which a 71-page template emerged.  But the reps ended up either sending it almost in its entirety or not at all.  The will to continue ebbed away.

Then an American team tried a drag-and-drop approach.  But they found that too much resource was needed to create and maintain it, with the amount of “feeding and watering” required to keep it up-to-date too onerous.  This idea similarly faded away.

So, they’re trying again.  This time they’re focused on how to avoid making something generic.  The plan now is to create a kind of question route for a campaign that enables the Proposal to effortlessly follow.  The main types of discussion are aimed at identifying:

• why the project is important to the prospect
• why problems have arisen
• the people affected (whether they realise it or not)
• how all this can be improved and delivered
• the headline business growth/improvement figures

And the project name for this initiative? The Post-It Note Proposal.

Here’s a tale from a successful small software house.  They’ve around 200 customers, and operate on three continents.  When making first appointments on the phone, conducting them in person, and responding after by mail, they like to use quotes their customers give them, saying how wonderful they are.  They have amassed around 100 such quotes.

So, a rep has caught a suspect on the phone, is thinking of preparing for a meeting, or rushes to finish a proposal.  How can they get access to the jewellery case of quotes to find their gem of credibility?

Well, all the quotes are held on a central server’s shared drive.  Each has its own word document, named by customer name, person name and date.  Unsurprisingly, with a hundred in there, it’s proving unmanageable.  Someone fairly senior took it upon themselves to take action.  Being technically proficient, they began to create an Access database.  After a decent amount of work on it, they abandoned this idea, thinking it’d put off the rep users in the field.  So someone more junior was tasked with creating a spreadsheet.  But then the spreadsheet had a large number of cells left empty, exposing gaps in the ‘database’.  Surely the sales people would fill these in…? 

After all this time and effort, a solution is still far away.  Every sales team I come across can talk you through a similar story of woe.  Whatever the solution, it never involves the sales people having to input, and neither does it involve being a once-off project.

I am really made up that I’ve just hatched a new product idea, given the experiences from two of my customers recently.

Both have around 20 sales people in the UK, strewn all over the place.  One has Goldmine as their crm - the reps only use it when they want commissions as they ‘back-fill’ data into it then - and the other has always resisted getting the German parent’s system imposed and prefer to have nothing.

Both have more post-sales resource than pre-.  Yet both realised that a wealth of intel was being missed out on.  The post-sales experts were party to wonderful insights that the salespeople never got to build on or use.

The logical answer was to use existing systems to capture it.  But as you can imagine, trying to cobble a crm to capture this was a non-starter.  Then they tried to issue word docs to the post-sales people, so they could fill them out, and send them back into HQ.  Again, disaster.  Amazingly, installation and consultative service guys turned out to be as anti-filling in boxes on screens as their sales colleagues!  Does anybody, anyone at all, use sales software?!

Regardless of this, there is probably a ton of intel your post-sales guys gather, yet you never get to learn about it.  Don’t rely on some central function to unleash it.  Instead, make sure you create a routine to catch it yourself and keep to it so you become even more of a winner.

Been enjoying working with a fella called Mike Turner, who sounds like a bit of a guru on the evolution of sales support.  He likes to draw joined up sales intel thinking as a pawnbroker’s logo, namely three circles in a triangle configuration.

The first two are fairly commonplace, being a marketing support system meant to uncover opportunities and feed leads in to salesguys (a combination of in-house Business Intelligence and SAS software) linked to their activity tracker and forecast generator (customised Goldmine kit).

Then the third is all about how to share the multitude of anacdotel messages, intimate success stories and abundant tactical best-practices that occur in barely-reported isolation.  With the challenge to ensure this is presented in such a way that it becomes an integral part of each sales person’s routine.

They toyed with the idea of running a blog that anyone can input experiences into, then realising sales people might not input (!) considered utilising marketing resource to ‘manage’ the flow.  This option was similarly discounted due to inevitable role-erosion in the light of alternative task creep.

The solution will involve doing all of the donkey-work of intelligence capture for the sales people, and linking the three ’systems’ in such a way that they become inter-dependent so that every week you’ll want to produce something or interact with each one to ensure a deal progresses your way.

It’s a cracking idea and one I’m looking forward to reporting success on at a later date.

Here’s a subject gaining plenty of web postings at the moment.  Marketing and Sales operations the world over are putting blogs online for their (often remote) colleagues to search out vital data and share experiences of the market place.

My very latest customer I just found bought my services after at one sales meeting, their top rep (called John) said they needed a place to ‘host’ all their successes and why they were happening, and he cited, apparently, his positive use of a Triumph blog in his hobby pursuit of motorbiking. 

None of the sales departments I support (all B2B-solution orientated) have travelled this road so far.  And I know why.  Reps are not the same as everyone else.  They will take, but not necessarily give.  In my experience, there is an indisputable 50-50 split, with half of guys engaging from day one, the other half always giving the lame excuse they haven’t got the time (or worse) for this type of initiative.  And if you’re aware of true crm compliance rates then this’ll not be news to you.

What you have to do, is do it for them.  That means populating it for them with intel that they’ve asked for, and then turn it into a proper application.  Both these go beyond the use envisaged for mere blogging right now, but can indeed be achieved…..

My personal perspective is that the blog approach I outline is suited for niche knowledge areas.  The main one being where non-prospect specific intel can be shared, that occurs and can be used, across each sales territory, either to give other reps confidence and/or selling ideas, or provide credibility when the prospects require proof you’ve achieved results for others.

Someone sent me a link to a blog from August 04 that no longer seems to exist, extolling the virtues of sales team HQs starting up a blog.  The idea is that anyone can add anything and make info flow better around the whole team.  I don’t know from where this opinion heralds, but here it is anyway…..:

(quote)  One of the toughest groups to win over when deploying technology has always been the sales force. Let’s face it, sales folks are cut from a different mold and everyone has their own “modus operandi.”  So why are salespeople a good target for Blogs?

Here’s the short list:

1. Information at your fingertips …

2. You become the de facto destination for information…

3. Better distribution of your content…

4. Instant collaboration …

5. Branding …

6. Online Proposals …

7. Cross-selling opportunities …

8. Humanizing your company …

9. So when you’re “Googled”, you’re found…

10. Because your competitor is already using Blogs…

At my last company, we used a Sales Weblog to distribute competitive intelligence, partner/vendor information, and other general updates relevant to closing new business. Blogs are an easy way to digitize the information sales reps use the most. Think about how many times reps look for the latest Powerpoint, Proposal, spec sheet, etc. With a sales blog you have a central repository for the information and anyone can comment on it. That alone is very powerful when you consider the amount of collective knowledge it takes to win a new client.
And with the RSS feed, reps know when the site is updated. How many intranets can do that?  (unquote)

Now a number of interesting things occur to me, given my daily exposure to this arena.  The main one is that it’s difficult enough as it is to get reps to input data into crm and the like, so how much success is there going to be from expecting anyone to contribute experiences and insight through a blog?  If someone central gets to administer it, then there’ll be little difference between the intranet with a weekly email update sent and info disseminated along these lines, surely?

Ever since reading a couple of days ago about ‘sales knowledge management’ being a key issue for sales team leaders (the foot of this post), I’ve noted a couple of entertaining happenings about the drive to get best-practices spread across sales teams. 

At one label-printing outfit, they’re so used to sales guys not selling new stuff all that quickly, that they introduced a team full of marketers to constantly spread the word.  They called this their “Plus” team.  It all sounded like a step in the right direction, until I delved deeper, and the concept was indistinguishable from any normal marketing department remit, so yet again it was an example of a well-intentioned sales initiative that got hijacked by marketing ambitions…. 

And then there is a huge European paper and packaging distributor that have split their sales team up into three sectors.  One is aimed at automotive needs.  They’ve a whole bunch of new products that again, are new to the sales people and they decided to employ one euro-wide specialist to disseminate the valuable learnings as they occur.  The thing is though, that he’s being seen as nothing more than a ‘busy fool’, with precious little to show for twelve months of expensive efforts….

So, two different approaches, neither delivering.  Two immediate pitfalls present themselves; firstly, there’s a lack of mandating the sales people to engage with the acquired best-practice, and secondly, the way the intel is spread is one-to-one, in isolation, rather than becoming part of the fabric of the sales person routine.

The age old question How To Get More Leads, has been the starting point for increased revenue drives for nearly 30 years, but times now must change.  This is the message from a research paper by www.csoinsights.com I got sent by a currently courting salesforce.com.  They report salesrep productivity falling, sales activity sticking to the same old routines since the 70s and buying cycles changing with the advent of sophisticated pre-tender web-enabled research.

The new questions should be how to integrate people, process, technology and knowledge.  Focusing on new resources to be harnessed, true (preferably strategic) selling innovation, and make selling methods sustainable competitive advantage are all paramount today. 

The message in short, is that the objectives have remained the same for donkey’s years, and with results dropping off the graph, a significant change in approach is mandatory.  Some of the more entertaining findings are:

Ramp-up Time Worsens – in 03, almost 60% of all new reps were producing six months in.  By 06 the number had alarmingly halved.
Selling Time Falls – in 01, 38% of reps’ time was directly talking with prospects.  Despite increasing in the meantime, by 06, the proportion dropped a couple of points, to 36%.
When You Want Something Done…  Do It Yourself – over 40% of all leads are still generated by salesreps themselves.
Communications – the number of firms wanting to improve comms around the sales team has doubled in twelve months, and a huge chunk, an incredible half of all firms, hardly share or build upon any best-practice at all.
CRM Isn’t Ubiquitous – only one in two firms have a formalised crm in place, and of these a surprising third had hands in developing their own, and stunningly half had only got one going in the past two years.
Sales Knowledge Management’s Back On The Agenda – the top 3 priorities for intel improvement are where ‘How’ to do things is vital; best-practice from around the salesforce, competitor intel & shared (strategic) account plans.

I’m often asked what other sales teams do to enliven sales meetings.  Most follow a tried and trusted pattern; figures, roasting/champagne, admin, touch of training, marketing/production/operations update, specialist speaker.

I visited a product-labelling business last week where it was one of the occasions I wondered how on earth the fella got there.  He’d no ideas, no passion, no openness to new things.  We tossed around the subject of sharing best-practice.  He delighted in telling me they had a great process in place.

At sales meetings, everyone got “their ten minutes of fame”.  Sales people got to tell the rest about any new tactics or market knowledge they’d used or become aware of.  He reckoned it was super-successful.  I naturally enquired how much better still things would be if you could do this, rather than simply ten minutes a month, every single day.  And he clammed up.  The point is, this approach has nothing to do with best-practice or key message share.  It’s placed in totally the wrong context.  It’s seen as purely a recognition tool delivered as entertainment.  To be truly successful, such goals need to become part of the fabric of the team as an on-going frequently repeated procedure where results of intel shared are monitored, not a one-off talking-head backslap.