I spoke to an old compadre of mine that I’ve not seen for a few years the other night. I was delighted to hear his selling enthusiasm remain sky high, as he raced home to do a WebEx call with a prospect in a timezone 9 hours behind.  WebEx was the early player in ‘webconferencing’, deemed such a fine idea that Cisco paid $3.2bn for them a couple of years back.  Their kit enables any two people to look at the same screen, wherever they may be on the planet. It’s allegedly ideal for demonstrating software. He adopted WebEx in preference to Microsoft’s NetMeeting.

The benefit of this across continents was clear, but a throw-away aside he made about no longer wasting time by flying/driving a few hours there and back, especially to a prospect ultimately going nowhere, got me thinking.

My friend feels that 95% of his first prospect meets are now WebEx, coming from a base of zero three years back. Does this mean that complex solution selling is being turned into a telesales endeavour? And if so, then surely there’s huge ramifications?

It seems altered close routines now apply in my friend’s world. Web conferencing is an opening tool, rather than a closing one. Anything that aids qualification is definitely to be applauded. On the grounds that a top salesperson should always seek to qualify out at each stage, rather than stretch the facts to keep a deal on the forecast, the key issue revolves around what commitment you need from the prospect to continue.

Of course, solution selling is not about persuading people to do the unwanted. So perhaps the lesson to learn from the rise of webcam encounters today, is simply to qualify harder. Think more about what your preferred, or optimum, second meeting looks like, and laser in on making that happen.

If it’s a winner to have a series of discussions with lots of separate people in a number of different meeting rooms, then tee them up. If the next step is to create some kind of ‘champion test’ activity, then put it in play. If it’s to propose a statement of requirements (SOR) with the budget holder, then get crafting. Whatever it is, make sure that pre-meeting meeting works for you.

My own experience of video conferencing is primarily with software demos. I didn’t like it. The best demo is always one where you show as little as possible. Indeed, I used to take pride in making progress towards the eventual order by only showing a single screen. An online forum renders this exalted state virtually unattainable.

I realise in current climes the pressure to avoid distant, speculative face-to-face trips is high, but I still think that video/web conferencing should be used better to extract, rather than deliver information. It is a qualifier rather than a pitch medium. You should introduce yourself through it, not talk resolutions.

In summary, here’s a starting point of an outline checklist should you be about to embrace webconferencing:

• detect where and how your sales process may change
• pinpoint how a real world meeting and cyberspace encounter will differ
• re-draw up your ‘next actions’ most likely to precipitate eventual success
• re-assess your qualification criteria and routines
• work on setting a prospect’s expectations more explicitly
• ask existing customers if they’ve experienced the medium and what they thought of using it
• if in account management, try out with a client first, on a non-essential task

Here’s a steer from a recent Selling Power article. The writer contends that the following five traits identify a world class selling operation. How do you fare on these?

Buyer Enablement - your focus is client goals rather than sales cycle gateways
Outbound Lead Ratios - your leads are in the main not brought in by the reps in the field but by support efforts
Pipeline Ratios - a touch ambiguous perhaps, but you should apparently have way more in the funnel than your target
crm/sfa Utilisation - they find that winners “boast a 70 percent higher utilization of these systems than average organizations”
Sales Rep Training - and here they provide an incredible 160% more than their also-ran brethren

I feel certain they’ve left out a couple of other equally significant biggies though. Clearly the presence, adherence to and matching of a repeatable sales process cannot be under-estimated. Likewise the cultural impact that living a shared vision creates is a must in every team that is going somewhere special. This may be because their list as presented seems to show more a tactical rather than strategic bent. Still, it’s a pretty good starting point for analysis.

I realised a flaw in crm systems today. For the cynics out there I guess there’ll hardly be a shock reaction to that statement, but there are salespeople that love their recording tools, so please bear with me.

I was party to a conversation where a senior exec was clearly frustrated that they weren’t being told what was happening with a particular endeavour.

The way they got this across was a peach. It took me back a few years and I loved it.

In this instance, even the minutiae of the process was being shrouded, whereas in my experience it is the detail that is focused on upon, with way to much irrelevant reporting rather than imparting the theme that matters. Nevertheless, it was wonderful insight.

The reason given for wanting to know was basically that they could get asked at anytime by vested interests (any involved party, within or without) what is going on with that initiative, and they’d look (and feel) stupid if they could not provide a plausible view.

Wouldn’t it be terrific if your crm could provide that simple soundbite-style status for Executive recital? Especially without having to rely on the salesperson to input such headline. What a great report that’d be for your boss’s boss and for the salesperson to show progress outside of canned ‘gateway’ or percentage likelihood measures.

I chuckled the other day, after work in a cafe unable to avoid hearing rantspam by a local. He was moaning about a company he’d thought of working for. The job it seemed, was as a commission-only financial advisor.

He rocked up to their premises. It was a prestigious address, a property apparently worth ‘many millions’.

Next door was an equally renowned household name. What did you see when you first visited the neighbours? A wonderful gleaming water-feature. What greeted you at the door of the prospective employer?

Weeds.

As the job-hunter put it,

if you don’t care enough about the weeds outside your front door then how much will you look after your staff?

In his opinion, workers would suffer the same shoddy treatment as the entrance.

And he probably has a point.

What are the giveaway tells that could portray (betray, even) your handling of customers? What does a prospect see when first dealing with you? Do they see weeds or a water feature?

I’ve as yet not seen a full episode of American sitcom How I Met Your Mother. But I have stumbled across the closing seconds of one. The scene was set in an office, and the character Ted Mosby was being given a pep talk by a lady that I think was called Robin. Sitting at his desk, he was moaning.

Ted: I’m having a staring competition with the phone and losing

Robin: aw, you can take that thing

You gather that he was struggling to make cold calls to set up his embryonic design business. He immediately began to dial. Robin exits, stage right. He then spoke into the phone with a surprisingly upbeat and professional, rather than the prior misery-laden demeanour, something like this,

Ted: Hi, I’m Ted Mosby from Mosby Design wondering if you have any design needs at the moment?

As he speaks, Robin rushes back in, mobile glued to her ear.

Ted: Do I sound confident?

Robin: Yeah, now make some real calls!

Cue canned laffs. Ted had only managed to call his friend, not a prospect.

What about the message contained here? Forget the ineffective pitch script, it’s the fact that cold-callers stare at their phones and don’t pick them up.

A got a copy of a wobbly scanned page of type from the hands of salespeople I know depicting this very problem. It’s about beating this so-called Approach Anxiety.

There’s a few risque gags (it sounds like it’s aimed at, ahem, male dating tips) yet some of the statements are remarkably relevant to phone phobia. Here’s a flavour.

“psychologically speaking, it’s less a fear of approaching than a fear of rejection”

“failure is not being rejected, it’s never getting in position to be rejected”

One line I really liked was,

let go of your outcome

Your goal is not to make a sale. Far from it. It’s to have a conversation. How difficult can that be? With the right mindset and framework, it’s a piece of cake.

How not to pitch. I watched an American called Eric Daniels on newsbites yesterday. He had reason to be cheerful.

The banking giant he currently runs was bailed out by the UK Government to the tune of £20bn. A welcome change in fortune is signified by a last year loss of £4bn switching to a first-half profit this of £1.6bn.

Yet as I watched, I was gobsmacked. How can someone with so little presence, such inability to get a point across, and using so much gobbledegook, hold such an exalted post?

The Skynews footage is a masterclass. In how not to talk. Thankfully, I was not the only one to spot this.

Philip Aldrick in his Telegraph report, rues his “mangled management speak”. Mocking his choice of syntax, he particularly rounded on words such as “outcomes” and ”optionality“.

It appears that Mr Daniels is camera shy. But is that an acceptable excuse for not getting your message across well?

You can see the full interview here. You’ll note, if you can stand all thirteen minutes, that pretty much any soundbite you could extract would lack the clarity required.

Doing the rounds on London promo-telly sofas over the previous weekend was Paul McKenna (wikipedia & own site).

Regular readers of my blogs will note that whilst I am fervently not in the camp of self-help guru sycophancy, I am however fascinated by how they get their ideas across. In the main it is their pitching skill and raw selling power that intrigues me, rather than any wares they may peddle.

This chap in question appears undeniably successful. In the slot I caught, his prime thrust was to target the doubters. The way he handled this was a lesson to anyone ever faced with a disbelieving prospect, incredulous at the seemingly outrageous claims of your marketing hype. Here’s a flavour, scribbled in haste as he spoke

“It works for 7 out of 10 people.”

“It doesn’t work for everyone.”

“Most people don’t believe it’ll work for them, but are open to it.”

“You don’t have to really believe, but as long as you’re open to it …”

“Anyone who says they’ve a 100% success rate hasn’t got enough clients”

His fellow comfy couch dwellers melted towards him. You could feel the warmth generated by his disarming, yet powerful approach. “Relax and be imaginative” he gently implored. A masterclass in deflective persuasion. And easily adapted to any roaraway product pitch.

Charles van Commenee is considered something of a hard task master. He’s the Dutchman who guided Denise Lewis to Heptathlon Olympic Gold in Sydney. In return, she named him ”Volcano”. He’s currently the British athletic team’s head honcho. With a haul of 19 medals from last week’s European Championships, he ended underachieving barren years and surpassed the target set. All good on the road to London 2012.

Asked about his role in the success, Van Commenee insisted it was “minor”, but added: “It is quite simple. Remind them (athletes) what it takes to win, to be successful.”

“It’s about taking accountability for successes and also for failure in order to learn from that. It’s not only with the athletes, it is all the staff, the medical staff, the coaching staff, the people in the office.”

This last sentence is a cracker. In all the sales outfits I’ve known, hardly any would match up to that image. Think of all the support staff. How many of them are brought into the fold in this way? Even among the sellers themselves, how many times can you hear groans and undermining grumbles in the corridors and at the bars of sales meetings?

If you run a team, from the largest of corporate sales operations to the smallest of bid-team, you need to get everyone taking responsibility. Constant reminders of the process targets and focusing on what needs to be improved seem a pair of ideas that result in success.

I caught an American current affairs talk show from Sunday, Meet The Press. I was intrigued by observations from ‘presidential historian’ Doris Kearns Goodwin.

I found the transcript online (you’ll need to click on viewing more text at the foot then scroll down quite a way). What fascinated me was the parallel with solution selling in needing to demonstrate progress on a deal.

The discussion was about how a weak Obama could turn his poll fortunes around. Ms Goodwin sounds an ally;

You know, the incredible thing is, in 1934 FDR was in a similar condition with the economy.

People were saying it hadn’t recovered, that the economy was still stubbornly high unemployment … it was 20 percent;

yet, he persuaded the people that he was moving forward, he showed them where the successes were, and he gave them confidence in the future.

He won the midterm elections in 1934.

The message was clear. Show forward momentum on a deal and you’re more likely to prevail, both within vendor politics and buyer signatures. She then stunningly shared her insight on the (unwinnable?) war with yet more parallel tips;

On Afghanistan, we don’t have a sense of any kind of progress over there, which is a real problem.

Again, going back to my buddy FDR, the reason he invaded North Africa in 1942 was he had to show progress.

Eisenhower didn’t want him to do it, Marshall didn’t want him to do it … and Marshall finally later said, “I didn’t understand in a democracy the people have to be entertained.

Again, are you stalled on a deal? What can you do to try and show progress? Both for your internal and external audiences? She offers hints for Obama on his imminent hustings:

Why not have the police guys out there, the firefighters, the teachers, visually show the success.

He’s got to prove that the stimulus worked where it did work.

He’s got to prove that the bank bailout is being repaid by interest.

He’s got to prove the positives of health care, and he’s got to go into the districts, show the energy he did in the auto thing.

He was great there. He should just do that again and again.

Could you benefit from Doris’s thinking on your team?

A marketplace website began from S West London in 2006, and made £100,000. This year it’s set to top £14m, and for the first time make profit. ‘Not on the High Street‘ co-founder Holly Tucker took part in this 2′41” clip from Skynews. Her site seems to be a way of finding cool everyday items that appeal to the ladies and can’t be bought in a shop nearby.

I read recently that the record company boss who oversaw The Prodigy’s amazing rise put down their global success, in part, to never doing tv. Sometimes you wonder why anybody that’s achieved something appears on rolling news at all, given the interviewer starting point is always derogatory.

The questioner was clearly hunting two prey; the business relevance and banker (as lender) incompetence.

In this case, despite the good numbers, the first two questions were bordering on the offensive. Think of them as nasty objections.

Number one was along the lines of  ’aren’t you just an inferior eBay?’ Even accounting for the unnecessarily dismissive attack, watching the lady’s response, you can’t help but wonder at how a skilled salesperson would have handled it differently.

Tucked away on their website, here’s a pair of paragraphs that get close to what makes them unique,

So welcome to notonthehighstreet.com… and to hundreds of wonderfully creative, imaginative, high quality small businesses, selling thousands of gorgeous, unique, carefully made things. Things for your home, for your friends… and for you.

We believe that all of our partners have what’s known at NOTHS.com HQ as the “shop factor”: exquisitely gorgeous gifts and treats, beautifully presented and irresistible to our customers.

Yet it still doesn’t get away, or more pertinently, build upon the viewers existing knowledge of eBay. When you’ve a new product, piggybacking another, well-known player can be really useful. In this case, why bother pushing how different from eBay you are? Especially when your reason is actually vacant (”we are completely different”, “a shopping experience”).

Why wouldn’t something like ‘An eBay or Amazon style marketplace for fixed price quality gift and homeware made by local small business artisans following our core creative theme’ be acceptable to them I wonder? Given more time I could better this, especially using a favourite tool of mine which would mention two well-known names that you’re a cross between (like ‘if you could fill one basket from all the cool Greenwich Sunday Market stalls in one place on eBay’), but you get the idea hopefully.

Then there was slimy question two. Basically, ‘your products aren’t on the High St ‘cos they’re tat’. Again, largely unanswered (”best of British enterprise”) and another opportunity missed to put real daylight between them and any competition. The use of figures was a good idea, but never got rammed home (40 applicants a day, 95% rejected).

Then when put up as an anti-bank stooge, the travails were outlined before assessing that only venture capitalists could see and share their vision. This led to a whopping £7½m fund. But again, what is the vision! What was it that they bought into? This would have been so much more powerful, and followed her agenda rather than narky Sky journos.

In short, this interview only really had three parts. Two were ‘objections’ that they must encounter everyday. The handles must both be fine tuned. And I’d suggest put on their website in a why-we’re-different, why-we’ve-grown kind of way. Then there’s this vision thing. Securing VC is a positive reflection on the support and beliefs of the punters. I don’t think there’s anything bad in passing on that someone relatively important thinks the same way as they obviously do.

Whilst I’ve a lot of sympathy with this unfairly hounded entrepreneur, you must know your most hated objections. Craft a winning response. One that doesn’t say “yeah, but…”