The Top Sales Lead Management Solutions

Transcription

It Pays to Play
p. 28
®
SOLUTIONS FOR SALES MANAGEMENT
collaboration
management
Get it
together
for better
sales
p. 44
How to
Sell the New
Purchasing
Manager
p. 50
Sales
Contest
Now Open
p. 64
The Top
Sales Lead
Management
Solutions
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World War II Conferences
of the Allies at Fairmont Le
Château Frontenac, Québec,
1943–1944
Drafting the United Nations
Charter at The Fairmont
San Francisco, 1945
John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s
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The Queen Elizabeth,
Montréal, 1969
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Le Château Montebello,
Québec, 1981
Photo: The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver
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• Post-Training Secret
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NEW BLOG
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Gerhard Gschwandtner
E DIT ORIA L
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editorial
What Makes Sales Relationships Work?
At the April Sales Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, during
the private dinner organized for all speakers, we discussed
sales relationships. While everyone there agreed that relationships are vital to creating sales, the consensus was that there is
no formal body of knowledge that explains how relationships are formed, what makes them grow, what causes them
to fizzle, and what leads to the creation of value. One speaker
called relationships “the soul of business.” Below is a summary of the excellent ideas – and there was no shortage of
them – shared by 18 sales leaders who continually contribute to the selling profession.
1. Good salespeople bring positive energy to a relationship. We can choose to be energy givers or energy takers.
2. Trust hinges on the willingness to deliver on promises.
Once trust is lost, relationships cannot survive.
3. A relationship’s value depends on the customer’s perception of value, not on the salesperson’s definition of value.
4. To the customer, the top value drivers are integrity,
authenticity, and consistency.
5. Effective relationship builders are willing to listen to
better understand customer challenges. They ask questions
that lead to consultative conversations, which open doors to
greater opportunities.
6. The salesperson’s courage to resolve the difficult situations customers face enhances relationships. One speaker
called this “the ability to put oneself in harm’s way.”
7. The quality of the relationship with the customer is
determined by the quality of the relationship between the
sales manager and salesperson. Sales managers exemplify a
company’s corporate culture.
JEFF WEINER
8. Relationships are enhanced by the salesperson’s ability to
communicate in compelling and creative ways. One sales leader
explained how he uses video email prior to a customer visit and
follows up with a video email immediately after the call. Video
email is six times more effective than standard email.
9. Relationships demand a long-term investment. Without it, there is no ROI. One of the speakers shared that
“there is no return on ignoring [the customer].”
10. There is a difference between a transaction and a relationship. Transactions create one-time value; relationships
create long-term value and a stable business foundation.
11. Relationships grow through differentiation and the willingness to contribute beyond what is expected. “There is no
traffic jam on the extra mile,” commented another speaker.
12. Good salespeople use smart social-media strategies to
enhance customer relationships. They make it their business to stay connected to their customers through Twitter,
Facebook, and LinkedIn.
gerhard gschwandtner, publisher
[email protected]
twitter: gerhard20
blog: sellingpower.typepad.com
SELLING POWER MAY/JUNE 2010
9
fast track
to the top
Ship Shape
Sam Sigholz, Sales Associate, uShip
Career history: Nearly eight years at Hoover’s Inc.
Current responsibilities: Helping to build a
B2B sales team to expand uShip’s domestic
and international operations.
About uShip: Founded in 2004,
uShip connects people looking to ship
unusual freight – motorcycles, golf
clubs, pianos, etc. – with transport
companies that place competing
bids to win a customer’s business.
Company stats: uShip has helped
broker more than $140 million in
shipping contracts and currently
has more than one million site listings. Profits earned in 2009 were
between $5 million and $7 million,
double the previous year’s earnings.
On uShip’s shipping list: Stephen Colbert’s desk, from The Colbert Report and auctioned for charity on eBay for $14,800, to be
shipped from New York City to Lawrence, KS,
via uShip’s own charitable delivery program,
Highway to Help.
How Sigholz got hired: “I read an article
about uShip in our local paper and became very
interested in it. For a year [the company and I] exchanged emails about establishing a sales team.”
Why he made the switch: “I really like the challenge of something new and to look back and say I
was responsible for the growth of a team. When I
started at Hoover’s, we had fewer than twenty
salespeople. When I left, we had about two
hundred reps. At some point, [working
with Hoover’s] got too comfortable. I was
ready for a new challenge.”
Selling challenge: “It’s a challenge to
get our mostly blue-collar transporters to
think about going online and using a com-
10
puter. One big area of our sales is heavy equipment, like
cranes, and so many of those people are used
to being wined and dined by
a sole service provider.”
Selling benefit: “Once
people hear about our
service and start to use
it, they love it.”
Company culture: “It’s a great,
start-up atmosphere. We have a
chef who prepares healthy meals
and snacks, and every first Friday
of the month we go out or do a
team-builder, like paintball, as a
company. We’ll also do volunteer
work, like with Habitat for Humanity. And I’ve actually been
assigned a mentor by one of the
senior leaders to guide my professional development. I’m extremely excited to be here.”
“I really like the
challenge of something new and to look
back and say I was
responsible for the
growth of a team.”
– SAM SIGHOLZ
Future career plans: “If we’re
successful getting this two-man
[sales] team going, then ideally we’ll
hire some more reps, and hopefully
I can take the next step to manager
and progress from there. There’s
lots of opportunity for growth.”
Check out uShip’s blog, “Ship
Happens,” at www.uship.com/
– LISA GSCHWANDTNER
blog.
WYATT MCSPADDEN
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MERCURY
FREE
©2010 CASIO AMERICA, INC.
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
essentials
“The skills we learned during the tough
times and the focus we’ve brought to our
sales process has allowed our team to be
so much better than it used to be.”
Cloud Burst
Technology companies have had a tough
run these past two years. The recession
has squeezed IT budgets, causing a global retraction in IT spending. Though the
market is now showing signs of recovery,
the effects of the recession will linger. So
what do you do when you’re a technology
company looking to build market share
at a time when everyone is fighting over
a smaller pie?
If you’re salesforce.com, you make some
major, strategic changes to the way you sell.
Michael Basch is a seven-year veteran of
salesforce.com and currently area vice
president of corporate sales. He says a focal
point of his career has been hiring top
enterprise-software sales talent, building
teams capable of “execution excellence.”
Basch says his company has responded to the challenge of selling in a recessionary economy by deploying three key
sales-related strategies:
1. Targeting the C-suite. Salesforce.com
is cultivating relationships with C-level
executives with the goal of partnering to
solve their business issues. The timing
for this strategy has been good, as technology is evolving rapidly and many
executives are looking for guidance in
this area. For instance, many executives
“have heard about cloud computing and
are looking for a partner to guide them
through how it can benefit them on a
very strategic level,” says Basch. “This
12
has enabled us to move from just another technology vendor to a partner.”
2. Expanding the footprint. Salesforce
.com is expanding its footprint beyond its
traditional user base – sales and marketing people – and targeting new organizations and users with new products. Its
Service Cloud (support) and Custom
Cloud (Force.com platform), for instance,
have enabled salesforce.com to expand
beyond the sales and marketing teams to
all employees in a company, and they’ve
opened the
doors so that the
QUICK TIP
vendor’s reps
Read “Strategic
can have much
more strategic Advantage” at www
conversations at
.sellingpower.com/
higher levels. mayjun10 for tips on
R e p s h a v e executing a strategy
turned to the
that gets results.
company’s internal champions
who have already experienced success with
salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud (sales force
automation) for sponsorship in other
areas of the organization.
3. Measuring performance. Salesforce
.com is now “rigorously” managing the
performance of its sales teams, says
Basch. “With the breadth of our product
offerings and changing market conditions, we need to scrutinize the key success factors related to their performance,”
LAUGHING STOCK/CORBIS
Salesforce.com deploys three umbrella strategies
to weather the economic storm
Virtue is more clearly shown in the performance of fine
overview
Not familiar with salesforce.com?
Here’s a brief overview:
The company, founded in San
Francisco in 1999 by Marc Benioff,
whose aim was to make enterprise
software as easy to use and accessible as such consumer Websites as
Amazon.com, is a Software-as-aService (SaaS) customer relationship
management (CRM) provider. The
company’s top three verticals are
financial services, high tech, and
media and telecom. For fiscal year
2009, it reported approximately
$1.077 billion in revenues. Salesforce.com employs 3,814 people.
he explains. “This means setting clear
expectations of what we are measuring,
using salesforce.com to measure, and
being prescriptive on a plan to improve if
a member of our sales team is not meeting those expectations.”
One of those key success factors is a sales
rep’s ability to originate business – a new
skill requirement for salesforce.com’s reps.
Basch points out that a year or two ago, reps
could “execute [salesforce.com’s] playbook”
using the leads that came into the pipeline
through marketing. Today, things are different. To reach their sales goals now, salesforce.com’s reps must originate many of
their own deals, which in turn has required
focused training in this area.
Basch says salesforce.com’s plan going
forward is to stay on its new course, continuing to strengthen its team’s skills in
areas such as prospecting and executive
targeting – areas the CRM provider sees as
being crucial to the future of sales success.
“The skills we learned during the tough
times and the focus we’ve brought to our
sales process has allowed our team to be so
much better than it used to be,” Basch concludes. “The new skill sets and focus have
become a way of life” – one that salesforce.com hopes will allow it to grab bigger
shares of the market as IT spending begins
to recover.
– HEATHER BALDWIN
actions than in the non-performance of base ones. – Aristotle
13
essentials
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
“Before we get started, I promise not to bore you with a long
presentation. I’m sure I can do it with a short one.”
Funny You Should Say That
A professional comedian provides tips for leveraging the power of humor in selling
The traveling salesman has long been a
staple of joke tellers. But while providing
others with a convenient source of ready
humor, salespeople have just as frequently employed humor to their own advantage, whether to break the ice with
prospects, build rapport, or foster longterm and mutually beneficial customer
relationships. That’s the upside.
THE DANGER OF WINGING IT
As a former improvisational comedian and
author of Sell It with Humor (Burtwithau
Publishing, 2009), Burt Teplitzky points
out that humor in sales can be a doubleedged sword. Used properly, it can work
wonders to break down barriers. But if it’s
used improperly? Well, let’s just say an illadvised joke is a great way to get yourself
thrown out of a customer’s office. Which is
why Teplitzky suggests that, contrary to
traditional sales teaching, salespeople
should never try to tell jokes off the cuff
when speaking to customers.
“Ad-libbing is for professionals,” he says,
“and even they don’t always get it right. You
can really distance yourself from an audience when you think something off the
top of your head is really funny. We’ve all
faced that situation in which you wind up
saying something awkward and it turns
into a Seinfeld episode.”
LEAVE ’EM LAUGHING – OR GROANING
Instead, Teplitzky suggests splicing canned
humor – cribbed from joke books or speaking guides – into your sales presentations,
even if the jokes are, as he describes them,
“groaners.” The key is to be self-deprecating, he says, and to communicate that you
don’t take yourself too seriously. One joke
14
he likes to use in front of customers pokes
fun at his own presentation.
“I might open with a line such as,
‘Before we get started, I promise not to
bore you with a long presentation. I’m sure
I can do it with a short one.’ Now a line like
that would never work in a comedy club,”
he says, “but in an environment where
people are glad for any release, they appreciate the humor, even if it’s a groaner, and
then you go on to make your point.”
LEAD WITH YOUR GUT?
Tony Bell, district sales manager for
Coca-Cola in Tampa, agrees that sharing
a laugh with a prospect may be the best
way to build relationships, but he prefers
to rely on his selling instincts to decide
when humor makes sense.
“True salespeople know whether they can
use humor based on gut instinct,” Bell says.
“In a lot of cases, you want to steer clear of
humor because it’s not appropriate. But in
other situations, humor can help you
change the flow of a conversation. If you’re
not making any headway on a call, even if
you don’t know the person very well you can
throw a little humor in, get the customer to
laugh, and that may open things up.”
FUNNY YOU SHOULD STATE
THAT OBJECTION
Timing is, of course, the key to humor, and
the same is true in selling. And one point
in the sales process at which humor plays a
timely role, Teplitzky says, is during objection handling, particularly if a sales rep can
use humor to deflect objections before they
even come up.
“If your product has selling points that
are not as strong as a competitor’s, you
might address [those points] in advance
with humor and dismiss them,” he says.
“So for example, Henry Ford used to say
that customers could have a Ford in any
color they wanted, as long as it’s black.”
Most salespeople are well aware of the
objections they’re likely to face, Teplitzky
says, and should prepare a range of funny,
proven responses that deal with each one.
On a sales call during which the customer
will likely bring up the competition,
Teplitzky says he might respond with the
following: “We know we have competitors, but we really are the industry leader,
with fifty years of experience. In fact, we
recently interviewed a manager from
another company who wanted to work for
us. He took an aptitude test and failed. He
actually got a zero. When he heard his
score, he said, ‘I don’t deserve a zero,’ and
our manager said, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s
the lowest score we have.’
“With a joke like this, you’re not attacking anybody,” Teplitzky explains. “You’re
putting it out there that you’re the leader
and your competitors don’t measure up,
but you’re doing it with humor. I
wouldn’t attack competitors individually
because that makes the customer stick
up for them, but this way you make the
customer laugh, and then you move on.”
WHAT’S YOUR LINE?
Jani Campbell, a commercial-vehicle sales
specialist with Unitrin Property & Casualty
Insurance, admits to trotting out a favorite
line whenever the independent agents she
calls on mention turning to a competitor for
writing lines of business that Unitrin also
represents. “This competitor is known
everywhere,” she says. “The company does a
If you want to be a big company tomorrow, you have
Burt Teplitzky, former
improvisational
comedian and author
of Sell It with Humor.
to start acting like one today. – Thomas Watson
15
essentials
lot of marketing – billboards, TV ads, you
name it. And sometimes customers will say
to me, ‘I hate using this company, but I have
to in some cases when I can’t find anyone
else.’ And my spiel is to say back, ‘You need
to do more business with us, because we
write those same things, and friends don’t
let friends write [that competitor’s name].”
In just a few words, Campbell says, this
joke communicates volumes about all the
downsides to working with this giant competitor while simultaneously reinforcing an
almost conspiratorial us-versus-them bond
between Campbell and her customers.
Tony Bell admits that, while he generally
prefers to use uncontrived humor during a
sales call, he does have one joke he frequently employs to address the common “I’m
happy with my current supplier” objection.
“If a customer is just blowing me off,”
he says, “telling me he or she is happy with
the way things are, I’ll say, ‘That’s fine. I’ve
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
been with Coke for eighteen years, and I
have eighteen more years before I retire, so
I’ll just see you once a month for the next
eighteen years and we’ll go from there.’
Customers will usually chuckle because
[my response is] not expected. And then
the floodgates open and they start talking.”
Even if his joke doesn’t get the desired
result on that call, Bell says, he keeps at
it, and during the next visit he’ll respond
to “I’m not interested” with, “That’s fine.
I’ve got seventeen years and eleven
months left. I’ll see you next month.”
“They can’t help but laugh and will
soon open up to you, most likely the next
time you walk in the door,” he says.
TOO MUCH OF A FUNNY THING
Bell cautions that selling with humor, as
with all things, only works in moderation. Some salespeople he’s worked with
take the comedy routine too far, he says.
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
“These are the salespeople who are
always joking; everything out of their
mouths is a wisecrack or a funny story,”
he says. “They just don’t know when to
stop and sometimes don’t even realize
that they’re offending the customer.”
One crucial time when salespeople
need to stop being funny, Teplitzky says,
is during the approach to the close.
Humor sets up the close, he says, but it
won’t win you the business on its own.
“No customer is going to jump up and
say, ‘You were so funny! We enjoyed this;
now give me eight of them.’ That doesn’t
happen,” he says. “But after you’ve anticipated and addressed objections with
preplanned humor, you can turn old
school and ask for the business. Humor
will actually make the sales process
friendlier and less adversarial. But at the
end you still have to ask for the order.”
– MALCOLM FLESCHNER
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essentials
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
SALESTRAINING
“If you can anticipate objections, you can prevent them
from occurring,” says best-selling author Jeffrey Gitomer in
The Sales Bible: The Ultimate
Sales Resource (Collins, 2008).
“Prevent objections by discussing them in your presentation
before the prospect has a
chance to voice them. Prevention is the best medicine to
cure objections.”
Gitomer suggests the following
process to prevent objections:
1. Identif y all possible
objections.
2. Write them down.
3. Script responses to and
closing questions for each.
4. Develop sales tools that
enhance and support every
response.
“Such items
as testimonial letters,
testimonial
videos, comp a r i s o n
charts, and
supporting
documentation
can
enhance the
objection-toclose process,” says Gitomer. Share
stories about other customers
who had similar problems and
how you handled them.
5. Rehearse the scripts during role play.
6. Tweak the scripts.
7. Make final revisions based
on real-world situations.
8. Keep the documents in a
master notebook. Gitomer suggests giving all co-workers a
copy of this notebook. It can
even be used as a training manual for new salespeople.
– Renee Houston Zemanski
18
Linked to Sales
When sales training exists in a vacuum, that’s exactly the result your training will get – nothing. But
according to Jason Robinson, EMEA practice leader of SEC Solutions, a best-practice, research-consulting
firm focused on sales and marketing excellence, if you explicitly link your training content to a performance
outcome, your reps will most likely retain the information. And the more training they retain and use,
the more likely you’ll get a return on your training investment in the form of closed sales.
“No matter how individuals learn, they are all motivated in a similar way,” says Robinson.
“Link the objective you are trying to convey to individual performance improvement; connect the dots
from behavior to outcome. This will create an environment where reps are much more receptive to
the training they receive.”
Organize and Reap the Rewards
“Selling is a complicated process that often requires you to stay close to large
numbers of customers over long periods of time,” say Edward R. Del Gaizo, PhD;
Seleste Lunsford; and Mark Marone, PhD, in their book, Secrets of Top Performing Salespeople (McGraw-Hill, 2004). “To do it well, it’s important to be systematic and organized – and that means keeping good records that go beyond
standard contact-management systems.”
The authors suggest creating a file for each of your prospects and clients.
Include the following in the file:
Customer or prospect reactions during your meetings or phone calls
Agreed-upon next steps
Notes on what’s important to each customer or prospect (Tip: You can even write
down personal details, such as prospects’ favorite teams or restaurants, how many
children they have, or how they like their coffee.)
News articles, industry reports, press releases, or any other kind of news documents
that pertain to each customer or prospect
Make sure that you study your customers and organize all contact information,
important documents, and notes. It can go a long way toward your sales success.
CJ BURTON/CORBIS
Defense Prevention
If you chase two rabbits, both will escape. – Chinese proverb
CJ BURTON/CORBIS
CLOSE THE SALE, OPEN THE RELATIONSHIP
So much of professional sales training is focused – and for
good reason – on what to do leading up to the sale, that
many representatives are left to their own devices to figure
out what to do after completing a sale. But as author and
noted sales trainer James W. Pickens points out in The One
Minute Closer: Time-Tested, No-Fail Strategies for Clinching
Every Sale (Hachette Book Group, 2008), salespeople need
to consider what they plan to do after that initial contract is
signed to cement the deal and lay the foundation for a
long-term relationship with the new client. Pickens recommends a four-point, post-sale checklist.
1. Pipe down. Even the most experienced salespeople can
fall prey to the urge to “talk beyond the sale” and risk saying something about the product or service that the customer won’t want to hear. If, after sealing the deal, the
customer does have additional questions, listen closely and
then respond by inquiring, “Why do you ask?” Having
isolated the concern, be concise and straightforward, but
don’t go into the kind of detail that could provide any reason to undo the deal.
2. Thanks are in order. When you express your appreciation for the customer’s business, don’t be effusive. A controlled “Thank you for your business; I appreciate your
trust,” conveys the message that you have made many similar deals in the past and have plenty more ahead of you.
3. With the stroke of a pen… After inking your deal with
What’s in a name? A 35 percent markup. – Vince Thurston
the new customer, offer your pen to the customer as a token
of your appreciation. Naturally, it has to be a pen of some
value, one that the customer will use and enjoy owning. No
company logos or product information on it – just a simple,
elegant pen. This gesture serves a number of purposes:
m*UjTBOVOFYQFDUFEBDUPGHFOFSPTJUZBOELJOEOFTTUIBU
the customer may not have experienced before.
m*UHJWFTUIFUXPPGZPVBDPOWFSTBUJPOUPQJDPOXIJDIUP
pass the time while the contract is being drawn up.
m*UHJWFTUIFDVTUPNFSTPNFUIJOHUPGPDVTPOPUIFSUIBO
the cost of your product or service.
4. Revisit the “why.” Maintaining the same casual tone
you used when saying, “Thank you,” go ahead and ask the
customer why he or she bought from you. The customer
will likely answer by highlighting two or three benefits
your product offers but will also probably leave out a few
others. Go ahead and fill in the blanks, reminding the customer of your solution’s additional benefits. This will serve
to reinforce and support the customer’s buying decision.
A customer who has just made a substantial buying decision may need a little hand-holding. Reassure your newly
minted customers, keep giving them your undivided attention (as opposed to going around high-fiving your office
mates), and then walk them out of the office all the way to
their cars before saying goodbye.
– Malcolm Fleschner
19
essentials
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
Post-Training Secret
YOUR SELLING
TIME IS MONEY IN
THE BANK
If you work an eight-hour day, five
days a week, your total number of
selling days comes to 244 per year
(or 1,952 hours, including all salesrelated activities). If your annual
sales volume is $50,000, one extra
hour of selling can be worth
$25.61. That makes one extra hour
per week for 52 weeks worth
$1,332. In five years, it’s worth
$6,660. In 10 years, that extra
hour per week is worth $13,318.50.
Assume your annual sales are
$150,000. Find one extra hour of
selling time each week, and you’ll
most likely increase your sales
volume by $3,996 in a year,
$19,978 in five years, and
$39,957 in 10 years.
To see how much an extra hour
of selling time is worth to you,
see the chart below.
Sales coaching after training is just as important as the training itself, says one
best-practice, research-consulting firm focused on sales and marketing excellence. According to research completed by SEC Solutions, 30 days after training,
reps only retained 13 percent of the information received during the training
event. In the study, the retention rate jumped to 88 percent when a similar group
of reps were coached on the content following the training event.
“Using weekly meetings or one-on-one coaching sessions to reinforce the training content is an excellent way to help reps retain the information,” says Robinson. And the more they retain and use, the higher their closing ratios will be.
Your sales will increase even
more with just two extra hours
per week, totaling up to an extra
104 hours of selling time.
Year’s
Hour’s
104 Hours
Sales
value
(1 year)
$50,000
$ 25.61
$2,664
75,000
38.42
3,996
100,000
51.23
5,328
200,000
102.46
10,656
300,000
153.69
15,984
*year = 244 eight-hour workdays
No matter what your current
level of sales, one extra hour of
selling time a week can add up to
success. – Selling Power Editors
20
CJ BURTON/CORBIS
Year’s
Hour’s
52 Hours
Sales
value
(1 year)
$50,000
$ 25.61
$1,332
75,000
38.42
1,998
100,000
51.23
2,664
200,000
102.46
5,328
300,000
153.69
7,992
*year = 244 eight-hour workdays
How to Deliver Bad News
No sales rep wants to disappoint a customer with bad news. But sometimes there’s no choice. When that
happens, here are some rules to follow to break bad news so it has less bite.
It’s important to prepare and use the appropriate language to convey bad news, says Ben Shaktman,
founder and president of Shaktman Associates, a company that helps high-level corporate executives
improve the way they make presentations. “Put yourself in your clients’ shoes and think about how they will
receive the bad news,” he says. “Tell them what [their problems] are going to cost them in dollars, time,
and business. Follow up by presenting what steps your company will take to help mitigate those costs.”
If you can offer help at the same time that you’re sharing bad news, you can lessen the blow and help
the customer convey the news down the line to others who may be impacted.
Other tips Shaktman shares:
Present positive news with the bad news.
Use positive rather than negative language. For example, use the phrase “make good,” instead of
“cover your losses.”
Don’t sugarcoat the information.
Share the facts.
Be prepared for the reaction.
Get away from blame. “Instead, come up with a solution and tell clients that you want to do
everything you can to make this work for them,” says Shaktman.
You must be worthy of the best, but not more worthy than the rest. – Denis Waitley
CJ BURTON/CORBIS
REDIRECT YOUR DIRECT-MAIL OR EMAIL EFFORTS
Given the virtual tsunami of emails, phone calls, instant
messages, text messages, snail mail, tweets, faxes, and
singing telegrams customers are bombarded with each
day, it may seem that there’s just no way to break through
the noise to grab your prospects’ attention. Mitch Carson,
author of The Silent Salesman: Guaranteed Strategies for
Increasing Sales and Profits Using Promotional Products
(John Wiley & Sons, 2009), can certainly empathize.
That’s why he dedicates an entire chapter of his book to
case studies in direct-mail successes – amusing, outlandish, creative, and provocative pieces of mail designed to
pique customers’ interest and then deliver a potent selling
message that opens a potentially lucrative dialogue.
Some of Carson’s more compelling (but easily adaptable) examples include the following:
1. Lottery-Ticket Mailer
Attention grabber: A customized, winning, scratch-off lottery ticket offering a free gift from your company enclosed
Letter heading: “Don’t gamble with your company’s future!”
Sample tie-in sales pitch: Too many companies gamble with
their future by using unproven, inefficient, and costly vendors who roll the dice with other companies’ business. To
redeem your winning scratch-off ticket, call us today!”
Letter closing: “You’re already a winner! Call us to redeem
your prize today!”
2. Piggy-Bank Mailer
Attention grabber: A small piggy bank in the package
Letter heading: “Here’s advice you can take to the bank –
and you don’t have to wait until pigs fly!”
Sample tie-in sales pitch: Using our company’s consulting
services, customers have uncovered significant missedrevenue opportunities, found seemingly minor but meaningful competitive advantages, and excised unnecessary
budget items for substantial cost savings, all without
breaking the bank.
Letter closing: “Invest just a few minutes of your time today,
I’m tired of dreaming. I’m into doing at the moment. – Bono
and you’ll likely see dividends in the thousands of dollars
in just a matter of months!”
3. Magnifying-Glass Mailer
Attention grabber: A magnifying glass included in the packet
Letter heading: “Before you make a decision, be sure to read all
the fine print! NOT ALL SERVICE COMPANIES ARE ALIKE!”
Sample tie-in sales pitch: Our customers have found that it
helps to have an outsider take a closer look at their company’s bottom line, where we’ve discovered countless cost
savings, magnified profit opportunities, and solved the
mystery of long-term customer satisfaction.
Letter closing: “We’re eager to help. Put us on the case today!”
4. Million-Dollar-Bill Mailer
Attention grabber: A phony million-dollar bill in the envelope
Letter heading: “Feel like a million bucks!”
Sample tie-in sales pitch: When you look good, you feel good,
and vice versa. Our company makes customers feel good
with the peace of mind that comes from reliable service, a
100 percent on-time delivery guarantee, and doing business
with a company that’s been professionally certified.
Letter closing: “Call us to start feeling like a million bucks today!”
5. X-Ray Mailer
Attention grabber: Official-looking envelope with the words,
“X-ray film: Please do not bend,” printed on the outside.
Letter heading: “Please hold this x-ray up to the light to see
your prescription.” (The letter can be printed on a transparency to resemble an X-ray.)
Sample tie-in sales pitch: In today’s economic climate, companies need to closely examine every expenditure to maximize impact and reduce all unnecessary costs. Let us X-ray
your cash outlay to expose waste, highlight savings opportunities, and uncover ways to generate additional income
from every outgoing dollar.
Letter closing: “Don’t get zapped by higher costs in a down
economy.”
– Malcolm Fleschner
21
essentials
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
“I expect them to
get up in the
morning fired up
with clear ideas
and goals.”
Give It a Whirl
Managing the enterprise sales force
means communicating and motivating,
providing technology resources, and
working with channel partners. Sam
Abdelnour, Whirlpool’s vice president of
sales in North America, manages a sales
force of 700. He worked his way up at
Whirlpool, where he has been employed
for 32 years, including 10 years in his
current position.
Whirlpool’s sales force is organized by
channels. Some cover such big-box
accounts as Sears, Lowe’s, Best Buy, and
Home Depot, and some traditional channels cover independent and small retailers, new families, and homes. “Around
500 or 600 sales reps are in the marketplace, with the rest in our headquarters,”
Abdelnour explains.
Each channel has a general manager
who reports to Abdelnour. Big-box teams
align with their customers’ buying staff,
with one person each assigned to the buyer,
the marketing person, the supply-chain
manager, and so forth. The traditional
channel has 500 reps working out of their
homes. These reps call on customers by
walking floors and visiting warehouses.
GOALS, GOALS, GOALS
Abdelnour sets monthly, quarterly, and
annual sales and market-share goals for
q continued on page 24
22
SIMON D. WARREN/CORBIS
How Whirlpool’s sales force
works with channel partners to
maintain and build sales
A gem is not polished without rubbing, nor
a man perfected without trials. – Chinese proverb
23
essentials
q continued from page 22
all reps. “Unless you track market share,
you do not know how well you are doing
against the competition,” he emphasizes.
Channel managers hold conference calls
with reps every week, and Abdelnour
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
both product and sales-skill training.
Employees take lessons online and are certified after successful completion. In addition,
200 Whirlpool reps train partner reps faceto-face in the early mornings before stores
open or at conferences nearby.
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
The Real Whirld program, now 10
years old, helped Abdelnour recruit a
more diverse sales force; 60 percent are
women or minorities, aligned with the
demographics of channel partners and
ultimate consumers. And Real Whirld
Whirlpool recruits most new reps from colleges or
related sales-education programs. Recruits are trained and
brought on board using a unique program, Real Whirld.
holds a quarterly, two-hour conference
call with the entire sales force. During
those calls, he stresses two or three objectives for the coming quarter, seeking
tight focus on a few goals rather than on
a lengthy list of objectives.
The first part of the quarterly call is
conducted by phone, with slides shown
on a company Website so reps can follow
the presentation. The last half hour is
dedicated to taking questions from the
field, and anyone whose question is not
answered can contact Abdelnour by
email or voicemail afterward. Twice a
year, Abdelnour meets all his reps faceto-face – and they meet each other – at
national conferences.
“Salespeople have to be self motivators. I
expect them to get up in the morning fired
up with clear ideas and goals,” Abdelnour
explains. Nevertheless, channel and regional managers must keep things moving forward for their teams. Abdelnour
participates briefly in weekly channel calls
to make sure this is happening.
“The teams help motivate each other.
Everyone has to do his or her job for us to
be successful,” he explains.
CONTESTS AND INCENTIVES
In addition to performance-based compensation, there are numerous sales
contests and incentives. Ten years ago,
there were more sales contests than there
are today, but Whirlpool now uses fewer
“rifle shots” to focus attention on the
most important sales goals, as the quarterly calls currently serve this purpose.
Training is a huge challenge, as Whirlpool must train not only its own reps but
the tens of thousands of salespeople at
channel-partner companies. Brand Academy, a proprietary online training system, is available to reps and partners for
24
All Whirlpool reps have notebook computers and cell phones, and many carry
personal digital assistants and BlackBerrys.
Customers are asked to cosign and grade
each rep’s visit so Whirlpool knows how
often reps see customers and how well
they serve them. This communication is
two-way: Reps use these tools to get
immediate responses to customer questions. “Nowadays, customers do not
expect reps to know all the answers, but
they do expect reps to have answers at
their fingertips,” Abdelnour says.
Whirlpool recruits most new reps from
colleges or related sales-education programs. Recruits are trained and brought
has two other major benefits: First, the
company has retained 80 percent of the
reps brought on board by the program.
Second, “the young group of salespeople
brings amazing energy to the others,”
Abdelnour says. “Some of our veteran
reps have taken a look at themselves and
asked, ‘What happened to me?’”
ACCURACY, TOOLS, AND
TIME MANAGEMENT
“Managers of a large sales force must
make their top-line sales forecasts much
more refined because that drives everything else,” says Ken Thoreson, managing partner of Acumen Management.
PA R T I A L C H E C K L I S T
Managing the Enterprise Sales Force
1. Robust CRM for tracking activities and sales at all levels
2. Web conferencing and other tools for direct communication to field
3. Regular face-to-face contact with the field force
4. Professional development covering all product and skill knowledge
5. Regular certification requirements
6. E-learning tools to economize on training time and expense
7. A rigorous selection process
8. Profile of ideal candidates to aid hiring efforts
9. Online assessments
10. Thorough “onboarding” process
11. Encouragement of time management
12. Firmly established priorities
on board using a unique program, Real
Whirld. They live, learn, and keep house
together in a nine-bedroom house dedicated to their new careers. When not
learning how to sell products during the
day, they use Whirlpool, Amana, and Maytag appliances to cook, clean, and wash.
They even serve meals to teams of Whirlpool reps on special nights.
Publicly owned firms must credibly forecast sales for their directors and the public, and production and distribution
departments also need accurate forecasts.
Thoreson says this requires a dashboard
and metrics, plus a solid CRM system to
understand how activities relate to sales
and what activities occur at the regional,
The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team. – John Wooden
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MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
PSYCHOLOGY
more training on corporate operations,
such as completing expense reports.
Extensive onboard training was once
common at large organizations but is
less so today. Thoreson recommends
extensive professional development with
annual certification in sales skills. These
skills must be specific because large
companies break the selling process into
smaller steps, focusing reps on the highest-value customer contacts.
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qcontinued from page 24
district, and even individual levels.
“You must use Web conferencing,
instant messaging, and other communications to motivate the entire sales
force.” Thoreson argues. “If you just
communicate to the next level down, the
message gets diluted.”
Video conferencing allows top management to communicate, motivate, and
talk about the competition. This method
of communication is essential to enforce
company policies on the kinds of commitment reps can make and what sort of
approvals they need.
An enterprise sales force requires
THE PERSONAL TOUCH
Maintaining personal contact is critical
when motivating an enterprise sales
force. “You do not want your salespeople
to feel like they are cogs in a machine,”
Thoreson stresses. Sales contests at
regional and national levels are common
because recognition is more important in
a large sales force.
Thoreson continues, “Bring people
together so they know each other and can
work together. That’s harder in a large
sales force.” The VP of sales must make
face-to-face contact at regional conferences to explain the vision and mission
SELLING SKILLS
and get reps excited.
Constant direct communication is tough.
“The top three challenges are time management, time management, time management,” Thoreson acknowledges. “But you
must make time, or you will get everything
filtered through middle managers.”
He urges sales leaders to spend no more
than 10 days a month at headquarters; the
rest of the time should be spent with major
prospects, field managers, and reps. “And
you must set quarterly and annual priorities, or you will get dragged into things that
do not advance the mission.”
Standardization around the ideal profile is essential in recruiting reps for a
large sales force. This means online
assessments and structured interviews.
Thoreson adds, “And make sure the
selection process is followed all the time,
not just 50 percent of the time.”
A large sales force also needs a “deselection” process with standards, metrics,
and firm decision points. Thoreson sums
it up neatly: “It is easy for a mediocre rep
to hide in a large organization.”
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Executive Viewpoint
L ORNA H EYNIKE , S ENIOR V ICE P RESIDENT
OF
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Lorna Heynike has more than 15 years of experience in developing and
marketing enterprise-class applications.
At Callidus Software, Lorna has led the effort to develop a series of
sales-performance and broader enterprise performance-management solutions.
She also spearheaded the development of Callidus’s cutting-edge line of SaaS
sales-performance products.
Prior to joining Callidus, Lorna worked for Oracle, where she managed
incentive compensation, marketing, and leads-management solutions.
Lorna holds an MBA from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh,
Scotland; an MSc from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland; and a BA
degree with honors from the University of California at Berkeley.
Selling Power magazine: Can sales really
look to marketing to drive revenue?
The worldwide recession has placed
sales leadership under unprecedented
pressure. In better economic times, sales
leaders can drive more revenue by
expanding coverage, but in today’s climate, sales is being asked to reduce
spend. As a result, sales leaders need to
look at the broader organization to drive
real improvements in their overall effectiveness. Marketing in particular is often
overlooked as an extension of the
broader sales function, primarily due to
the perceived and often real unequal
accountability assigned to the two
departments. Marketing needs to be
equally accountable for business results,
including bad quarters, declining win
rates, failure of new products, and customer renewals. Businesses with strong
sales and marketing alignment do, in fact,
grow significantly faster and have higher
customer loyalty relative to competitors.
SP: How do you make marketing
accountable to drive sales results?
The same principles that drive sales performance should be applied to the marketing department as well. That is,
setting tangible, measurable targets that
are meaningful to the employee and
drive the behavior that the business
needs. Salary-based compensation
should be balanced with more targeted
incentives based on specific revenue and
growth goals. This includes leveraging
quota-based bonuses, special incentives,
and quarterly-based MBO (management
by objective) incentive programs to focus
employees and teams on driving business
that is critical to the company’s growth.
SP: How do you apply this to a marketing organization?
To drive behavior alignment, businesses
should take the sales quota and work
backward to derive a weighted marketing
target. The first target should be based on
a metric directly validated by sales:
accepted opportunities. Take the sales
quota, derive the net new revenue share,
and then, based on average deal size,
derive the number of net new deals
required to meet quota. The acceptedopportunity target is a simple function
based on the number of new deals
required relative to the opportunity close
rate based on historical performance.
The second target should be based on
the actual pipeline value of accepted
opportunities. This helps focus marketing on higher-yield prospects. The third
target should be based on the percentage of conversion to deals. This helps
focus on driving strong win ratios and
higher-quality opportunities with a high
propensity to close. Holding budget
constant, deal conversion represents
the greatest potential for growth and
driving high effectiveness ratios.
At the same time, marketing leaders
need to ensure that focus remains on
customer renewals. Consider adding tar-
gets for retention percentage and account
growth with independent coverage.
SP: What does a sales leader need to
do to make this successful?
First, ensure that developing opportunities passed by marketing is linked into
regular pipeline reviews and coaching
programs. If you are asking the marketing department to deliver more highquality leads, then you must also drive
accountability in your organization to
develop them. This will also help drive
more funding for future demand-generation programs and sales campaigns. Second, support your marketing leadership
with hard data on opportunity quality.
Driving consistent qualification improvements will drive more deal conversions,
directly optimizing sales effectiveness.
Please contact Callidus Software at
[email protected], or call
1-866-812-5244 for a free evaluation
of your current pay-for-performance
practices and a review of how crossdepartment pay-for-performance
solutions can drive your sales growth.
essentials
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
“An orchestra
turned out to be
the perfect
metaphor for
business
organizations.”
Play Nice, Now
Symphony conductors rarely write business books, but Roger Nierenberg,
author of Maestro: A Surprising Story
About Leading by Listening (Portfolio
Hardcover, 2009), is no ordinary baton
wielder. While conducting orchestras in
America and Europe, Nierenberg began
to seek innovative ways to “get music to
new audiences and make it come alive
for people.” Initially, he wasn’t thinking
of that mission in relation to business,
but when he was invited to combine his
skills as conductor, teacher, and public
speaker by designing a musical presentation for a corporate group, it was a
unique chance to expand his horizons
and serve a new audience. The result was
The Music Paradigm, an innovative program that embeds business people within an orchestra. The program was not
only experiential but experimental, and
everyone involved found the results to be
“startling,” according to Nierenberg.
He continues, “An orchestra turned out
to be the perfect metaphor for business
organizations. People told me it was the
best leadership training they’d ever had.”
Since then, Nierenberg has shared his
message with bassoonists and businesspeople all over the world. He works with
musicians who are based in the city
28
ROBIN UTRECHT/EPA/CORBIS
How a symphony conductor
teaches a leadership and
cooperation message using an
orchestra as the medium
Being grown up means we can have our
During this workshop
titled “The Sound
of Working,” conductor
Roger Nierenberg
let managers sit next
to members of the
North Sea Philharmonic
Orchestra to learn
more about leadership
and working together.
own way – at our own expense. – Hal Rogers
29
essentials
where The Music Paradigm meeting is
being held, and to date he has presented
80 different orchestras – from Bangkok,
Oslo, and places in between – to attendees. Participants are taken into a room
and seated among the musicians of a
professional orchestra, an experience
that creates enough shock value to rattle
them out of their routine modes of
thought and behavior.
FRESH PERSPECTIVE
“Sitting inside an orchestra is a highly
charged experience,” reports David Fisher, a senior managing director with Bank
of America, who was cast in the role of
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
tom designed to meet the particular
objective of that meeting. Nierenberg has
a series of conversations with key executives weeks before the conference to
focus on the difficulties they face.
“Recently,” he says, “I was working
with a sales force that knew its people
were going to have to expand their
responsibilities – not just selling, but taking on leadership roles, as well. So we
created a program that focused specifically on leadership.
“When someone stands at the podium,
he or she feels the power of an orchestra
when it’s aligned and all the components
are working together. Then, in contrast,
more on leadership
Leaders are much like symphony conductors; their task is to bring a group of gifted
individuals into a unified whole. In order to orchestrate the ultimate in sales success,
remember these key notes from Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading by
Listening (Portfolio Hardcover, 2009) by Roger Nierenberg.
1. CONDUCTORS LISTEN: Listening is possibly the most underused tool in business.
Everything else stems from it, and it’s pointless to instruct your staff members to listen to each other when you don’t model the behavior yourself.
2. CONDUCTORS SEE “THE VIEW FROM THE PODIUM”: The difference between harmony and disharmony is having someone in management – you – with enough perspective to see how all the parts fit together.
3. CONDUCTORS UNDERSTAND “THE VIEW FROM THE SEATS”: Your job is to see the
big picture, but don’t expect the same from your team. Just as the French horns
can’t hear what the violins are doing, your sales team may not understand what’s
going on in marketing or customer service. Speak to each person in the language
he or she understands.
director when he experienced The Music
Paradigm with 200 of his managers.
“Roger does a wonderful job of bringing
people out of the audience into the experience, and when you present change in
a new, creative environment, it can take
hold in a fresh way.”
The goal of the workshop was to help
those managers – many of whom came
from banks brought together in a merger
– to begin to see themselves as a cohesive
team. “We wanted them to think consciously about how they were going to
interrelate when they left that room,”
Fisher says, “and we got that in spades.
Our team went on a two- to three-year run
of meeting goals after the experience.”
Every Music Paradigm session is cus30
the participant gets the chance to stand at
the podium and experience how confusion and dysfunction feels.”
NO ADVANCE NOTICE
Nierenberg doesn’t coach the musicians
in advance on how to behave, nor does
he lecture the businesspeople on what
lessons they should take away from the
exercise; he trusts that the experience
will speak for itself. “The metaphor of
organization as orchestra is so true and
powerful that you just can’t escape it,” he
says. “People leave the room with a real
openness, a new willingness to consider
other ways of relating to the other people
in the company.”
By having participants respond to
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
stimuli in the moment, says Nierenberg,
“they begin to understand which leadership behaviors lead to harmonious
results and which lead to the group’s
going out of tune. They discover their
own best ways to lead without someone
else having to instruct them.”
Nierenberg explains, “Most of the people who attend our sessions are already
very successful, and the moment you say
to a high achiever, ‘Look, you’re good at
this, but I’m going to help you do it better,’ you’re going to get a defensive reaction. You can bypass this reaction by
taking participants off the turf they would
normally feel compelled to defend.”
For precisely this reason, Douglas
Greene, executive vice president of Merck
Research Laboratories, calls Nierenberg’s
methods “nonthreatening.” Like many of
the companies who come to Nierenberg,
Merck had 3,000 people who were essentially in corporate silos, so they were a
natural fit for one of the key themes of
The Music Paradigm,“the view from the
podium.”
360° VIEW
“In organizations, most people only see
part of what is going on,” says Nierenberg. “In a big corporation, marketing
might not know what’s going on in sales.
We call this ‘the view from the chairs,’
since, in an orchestra, someone in the
French horn section will know what’s
going on among the French horns but
can’t necessarily hear the violins.”
Leaders, in contrast, experience “the
view from the podium.” “Leaders position themselves so that they can see how
all the parts fit together,” says Nierenberg. “They must understand and
acknowledge how a piece sounds from
the French horn section, from the violins, and how it sounds as a whole, and
the only way to get that perspective is
from the podium.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘We’ve all got to
work together.’ Everyone has heard that a
million times in business, but when
people stand on a podium, they suddenly
experience this reality vividly.”
The analogy has been absorbed into
the corporate culture at Merck so thoroughly that years after the experience
Greene reports that people still talk about
Higher Quotas Require Salespeople
Who Can Reach Higher
As a sales leader, you need your team to reach a higher quota. But, if your team is like most, only half of
your salespeople have the potential to reach their goals.
For nearly a half-century, Caliper has helped world-class sales organizations build quota-busting sales teams. How?
• We’ll take stock of your existing talent pool and identify what is keeping your average performers
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Don’t leave your sales talent improvement process to chance. Let Caliper help you build a winning sales team.
Download your free white paper “How Sales Leaders Create a Winning Sales Culture to Exceed Quota.”
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())(&'3+7)
q continued from page 30
“the view from the podium.” Developing
this broad view begins with a skill many
leaders lack: listening.
“Alignment can be achieved only when
all parties feel they can express their
point of view and it will be heard,” says
Nierenberg. “The most important way to
foster listening within an organization is
to model it yourself as the boss.”
The Music Paradigm has built a successful track record through sheer word
of mouth, but Nierenberg decided to
write Maestro because so many people
leaving his sessions suggested he do just
that. “There’s only so much time in a
performance setting,” he says, “and people were hungry for more. They were
also eager to share the experience with
their colleagues who hadn’t attended.”
ON A MISSION
Maestro’s main character is a boss on a
mission to make his team better. “He
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
thinks leadership is figuring out what
needs to be done and telling people how
to do it,” says Nierenberg, “and he’s surprised when this doesn’t get any traction
with his high-level, veteran sales team.
The problem is that he doesn’t have the
authority because he hasn’t earned it. By
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
own view, and the mature leader develops enough imagination to place himself
in that chair.”
He recalls that as a young director, he
would often give “helpful” advice to
musicians and was surprised when they
reacted with anger and resentment. “We
“Leaders position themselves so that they
can see how all the parts fit together.”
watching a conductor, he realizes that he
is leaving a leadership vacuum because,
time and time again, he has missed
opportunities to listen.”
Nierenberg believes many bosses are
like Maestro’s hapless protagonist in that
they “issue directions without understanding that the people who have to
execute those directions are living in a
different reality.” As Nierenberg explains,
“From the chair, everyone has his or her
think there’s something wrong with the
players; why can’t they see it our way
and just do what we tell them to?” he
says. “The answer is that they’re not seeing what we’re seeing. A good conductor understands that this is part of
leadership – not just giving orders, but
making our directions read in a way that
makes sense to the people who will be
carrying them out.”
– KIM WRIGHT WILEY
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essentials
MANAGERS’ CORNER
TIPS
PSYCHOLOGY
SELLING SKILLS
Studies show
that the more
attentive and alert
you are, the more
information you
will retain.
Are You Listening?
Salespeople often think of themselves as
being good talkers instead of good listeners. The common misconception is that
selling is telling or telling is selling. The
truth is that more than 50 percent of selling is listening.
Many salespeople are never adequately
trained to listen. In addition, most people
view listening as the passive side of the
conversation; being in control means
being the speaker.
Of the many ways to increase your
sales performance, however, one of the
most significant is listening. Learn to
listen to your client. Take a break from
being the speaker. The following eight
steps will start you on your way to
becoming a better listener in a sales situation. The better your listening skills, the
more closing opportunities you will hear.
1. A good listener will repeat and clarify
information. A great deal of information is
lost through one-way communication. This
is common in sales and results in frequent
misunderstandings. Two-way communication is much better. Work with your client
in trying to put the most information to
use in the best possible way.
A deeper facet of communication, congruency, is also important. Congruency
provides two-way communication
through interaction between the speaker
and the listener, because the listener
34
TIM ROBINSON
Eight steps to positive listening
skills that can improve your sales
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as
learns to listen to the emotions to reach a
point of trust with the speaker. Many
salespeople deal with the same types of
people day in and day out. In order to
achieve congruency, repeat and clarify
information and also summarize points
for your client. This lets your client know
that you are paying attention and have
reached the same level of understanding
in the conversation.
2. A good listener listens to a client at the
optimal tension level. Stress is usually
measured on a bell-shaped curve of 0 to
100, with 0 as a very relaxed state and 100
as an anxiety state at which some people
may experience difficulty in thinking logically. The optimal listening tension is in the
30 to 40 range, where enthusiasm thrives.
You feel good when there is just enough
stress to cause you to produce and achieve.
A good way to keep yourself attentive,
gain more information, and be a better listener is to keep alert. Grip the edge of your
chair or stand up if possible. Studies show
that the more attentive and alert you are,
the more information you will retain.
3. A good listener exchanges information. Good salespeople know that you
can’t sell unless you find a need, and to
find a need you must know how to ask
questions. A good listener doesn’t ask too
many questions, however. Give prospects
the reasons why you want to know something. Simply give them past experiences.
good idea
Don’t just talk.
Exchange information.
Your chances of getting the right information will be greatly enhanced. You
will also develop trust and empathy with
your client.
4. A good listener adjusts to emotionladen words. You have a holding tank of
words that trigger emotions. These are
words that cause you to stop listening
and focus on a bad or good experience,
such as inflation, bills, vacation, interest
rates, etc. These words all conjure up
intense feelings. They also distract you
from your client’s needs. A good way to
avoid falling into the emotions that these
words evoke is to empathize with the client as to the reason he or she is using the
word. Listen to the usage of that word
what you become by achieving your goals. – Johann von Goethe
from the client’s point of view, instead of
reacting to it from your own.
5. A good listener hears the speaker
out. We all dislike being interrupted. We
all want to be heard and have a desire to
say what is on our minds. A lot of clients
go through the decision-making process
by thinking aloud and may not reach a
decision until they finish talking. How
many times have you cut in on clients,
interrupting them before they have completed their thoughts? Find out what
your client is trying to say first. When the
time comes for you to respond, let the
client catch his or her breath before you
speak. This gives your client the idea that
you are not only listening but also thinking about your response.
6. A poor listener listens to facts; a
good listener listens to emotions. Theoretically, 20 percent of communication
is strictly facts and 80 percent is emotion – the emotion that we all have and
put into every thought. If you are only
listening to the facts, you are only receiving 20 percent of the conversation. Listen for the emotions in your client’s
conversation, and you can receive the
entire message.
7. A good listener prepares for a conversation. Have an outline of previous
conversations in front of you when you
talk. It gives you a good idea of other
questions to ask and allows you to put
information into a logical and flowing
framework for ready referral. Keep eye
contact with the speaker. Taking your
eyes off your client to take notes is not
only discourteous, but it also loses the
rapport that you have built up.
8. A good listener adjusts thought
speed to speech speed. We speak at
approximately 200 words per minute.
We think four times as fast. A poor listener drifts off and easily becomes distracted. When you find yourself having a
hard time paying attention, try to anticipate what your client is going to say next.
Mentally summarize what has been said
up to that point. Keep a mental bank of
the main ideas that your client has made.
Being a good listener takes work and
practice. The end result of listening to
your clients’ real needs? You can establish a closer relationship through deeper
trust and understanding. This makes the
listening effort well worth your while.
– ABNER LITTEL
35
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A Hands-on Guide for Sales Managers
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JIM FRAZIER/CORBIS
Based on
a conversation
with
Ryan Kubacki
How to Use the New Intuitive Model to Sell
Ryan Kubacki of Holden International explains
The Changing Role of the
Sales Professional
Traditionally, the primary role of the sales professional has been to provide information. The
act of selling has consisted largely of providing
information to prospects and then, based on
this information, convincing them to buy. This
sales methodology worked because such information as product-configuration data was
scarce and difficult for customers to obtain.
Today, however, information is not just
plentiful but available directly to customers
in overwhelming amounts. As a result, customers no longer value sales professionals as
information providers. Not only are customers and prospects likely to be as well
informed as the person selling to them, but
they may actually resent being provided with
additional but unwanted information.
Sales professionals are moving away from
the information-provider role and instead
seek to be regarded as trusted advisors who
provide business value. This kind of sales
methodology requires less emphasis on the
gathering and dissemination of information
and more on creating insight and developing
the intuition that can help customers solve
knotty business problems.
This article is based on a
conversation with Ryan Kubacki,
president of Holden International,
a sales-consulting firm that
offers sales training,
software/e-learning, and sales
leadership/coaching. Kubacki
was formerly employed at the
Microsoft Corporation, where
he directed sales operations and
field marketing for an 18-state
region with a $1.4 billion quota.
He can be reached at
Holden International,
20 Executive Ct., Suite 1,
South Barrington, IL, 60010.
Tel: 847/852-2400
Web: www.holdenintl.com
The Changing Role of the
Sales Technology
Traditionally, sales technologies such as
CRM primarily helped companies track
opportunities. At the same time, corporate
37
train
FAQs
Q: How can I find the time to think strategically when I’m working at
full speed to close business?
A: It’s a matter of prioritization. If you are willing to spend the time to rethink
your approach, you’ll find that closing business will require less time, and the
amount of your average sale will go up.
Q: How can I convince my management to simplify our metrics?
A: The irrelevant metrics and associated data gathering were probably imposed in a
well-meaning if misguided attempt to improve productivity. If you’re going to ignore
them, you’ll need to consistently exceed your sales targets, at which point your
management will probably no longer care about those metrics because they’ll be
rendered largely irrelevant.
Q: Are you saying that we shouldn’t be presenting information to the customer?
A: Not exactly. Information still plays a role in providing credibility and background
to your insight and wisdom. The thrust of your interaction with the customer, however,
occurs at the higher level, where your business acumen is more important than the
fact at your fingertips.
Q: How does Sales 2.0 influence sales intuition?
A: Sales 2.0 is a tremendous opportunity for sellers who can make the transition
from information conveyer to trusted business advisor. Be forewarned, though:
Sellers who are not able to make the transition will further decrease their
effectiveness and relevance to the customer.
and competitive databases helped sales
reps and their marketing-support teams
build sets of information, such as buying guides, intended to help customers
make informed decisions. That information, often closely guarded, was a
key element of the sales professional’s
value to the customer.
Today, however, sales professionals
have many more sources of information than ever before. They can mine
CRM databases, contact databases,
news databases, social networks, and
so forth, in order to learn more about
competitors, prospects, and customers. But just as customers are likely to
be overwhelmed by information, sales
professionals now have so much data
at their fingertips that it’s often
unclear what data is important.
As a result, sales professionals
must move away from using information as a tactic and instead use it strategically. Under an intuitive sales
approach, conveying information
becomes less important than providing the customer with fresh insight
and perspective.
38
What Is Intuitive Selling?
To sell intuitively, sales professionals
must make the transition from information conveyer to trusted business advisor. An intuitive sales methodology does
not emphasize computer data and information, but human-generated insight
and wisdom based on that data and
information (see Quick Tips for Your
Next Training Session). This intuition
underpins everything that the sales rep
does, including account planning, making sales calls, developing opportunities,
and cultivating entire territories.
Here is a five-step program to implement an intuitive sales methodology:
Step #1: Adopt and coach a
strategic sales methodology.
Many sales-training programs emphasize a tactical approach, emphasizing
sales pitches, presentations, and closing
techniques that are better suited to the
information provider than to the trusted business advisor.
In order to sell intuitively, a sales
organization must adopt a sales methodology that emphasizes strategic sell-
ing behaviors, such as asking successful
questions, diagnosing and clarifying
customer needs, and thinking strategically about opportunities, accounts, and
territories. Ideally, it should provide a
vehicle and methodology for communicating insights in a manner that’s succinct and understandable to the
prospect. In addition, it should be simple enough that sales managers can
easily coach sales reps on the effective
use of the methodology in a variety of
selling situations.
Step #2: Implement dynamic
account planning.
Many sales processes involve the creation of an extensive document at the
beginning of the sales cycle, which collates all the available information about
an account in the hopes that some particular nugget might prove useful. It is
not unusual for teams selling to large
accounts to create account plans that
are dozens of pages long. Such documents are marginally useful because
they are too long to read and digest. In
addition, updating such a document is
so daunting, its users tend to simply
keep adding information as it’s gathered, regardless of whether that information is relevant.
In order to create the conditions in
which intuitive selling is possible, it’s
better to create a dynamic account plan
that’s short enough to be easily understood and, just as important, easily and
quickly updated. Such account plans
are usually two pages or fewer in length
and focus on only information that is
key to gaining insight into the account.
Step #3: Utilize software that
makes strategic thinking easier.
While it takes human intelligence to
distill insight from information, many
sales professionals lack the skill and
experience to determine what information is most important and therefore
most likely to lead to valuable insights.
Unfortunately, CRM, like traditional
account plans, tends to become a
repository for all available information,
rather than for the information that is
most relevant. If Sales 2.0 is implemented with the same “capture everything” attitude, technology such as
social media and sales portals can actuq continued on page 40
SALES MANAGER’S T R A I N I N G G U I D E
At Your Next Sales Meeting
Below are 14 practical steps to help your team sell intuitively.
This meeting should take about 30 minutes.
1. Prior to the meeting, write a case study on a typical
prospect. This should include a corporate history,
information about his or her organization, brief executive biographies, and at least a page of financial data.
Note: To facilitate this write-up, go to www.sec
.gov, click on “Search for Company Filings,” and locate
the 10-K report for a competitor of one of your larger
customers. Make copies of your case study to distribute to your team, as well as one copy for yourself.
2. Also prior to the meeting, create a slide on the
levels of business knowledge discussed in Quick
Tips for Your Next Training Session.
3. Set up the meeting room in classroom style.
Make sure that every participant (including yourself) will have a colored highlighting pen.
4. Open the meeting with enthusiasm. Explain that
the team will be learning how to sell intuitively by
using insight and wisdom, rather than information, to
develop the opportunity and move the sale forward.
5. Distribute the case study and give team members three to five minutes to read it. Ask each
team member to highlight the information he or
she believes is relevant to selling to that prospect.
Do the same with your own copy, but mark only
the three to five most important items, based on
your own judgment.
6. Once everyone is finished, ask the participants to
hold up their copies so that you can see how densely they’ve marked up the pages. Select the person
who has the most color on his or her case study
and ask why that person marked those items.
7. Afterward, show your own copy, pointing out
that you marked far less than almost everyone
else. Explain that you marked sparsely because,
in your judgment, those items of information were
most likely to underpin insights about the prospect’s business and company politics.
8. Show your team the first slide and explain the
basic difference between data, information,
insight, and wisdom. Explain how too much information can get in the way of uncovering insights
and hinder the wisdom to act on those insights.
9. Have your team reread the portions of the case
study that you deemed to be particularly important. Now ask everyone to come up with a compelling reason why that prospect (the firm) and a
particular individual (one of the people named in
the case study) would be interested in buying
your firm’s offering. Tell participants that they
have 10 minutes to complete this task.
10. While the participants are writing, use your
experience to write a single-sentence description
of why that individual at the prospect firm would
be interested in purchasing from your company.
Make the value proposition compelling, according
to your best guess at that individual’s personal
motivations, e.g., “The CFO will support the purchase because reducing costs will position him to
become CEO at a competitor’s firm.”
11. Ask a volunteer to read his or her compelling
reason to the rest of the participants. In the
unlikely case that the reason is short, i.e., a oneliner like yours, praise the participant and move
to another. Once you’ve got a long one, thank the
participants for sharing.
12. Read your own one-line description. Admit that
you’ve taken some latitude with the exercise to
make the point that insight is always succinct, even
when the information supporting it is exhaustive.
13. Give the participants a homework assignment
to go through the account plans of their three
largest opportunities and reduce them to two
pages or fewer. Ask them to include simple statements of what’s going on in the account, what’s
really important, and what they intend to do to
take advantage of it.
14. End the meeting by thanking the team for
participating, and commit to reviewing the participants’ plans one-on-one.
39
train
qcontinued from page 38
ally make this problem worse. The
sales team will become overwhelmed
with information, making it more difficult to focus on what’s likely to be
important to each customer.
Sales technology should be implemented in a way that helps sales teams
build insight, rather than simply collect
data. To do this, the software should
provide at least a basic level of automatic data analysis – extracting and
comparing what’s likely to be important
and hiding what’s likely irrelevant.
Step #4: Build time into the
schedule to think strategically.
Even with the assistance of software,
intuition and the building of plans to
take advantage of it require human
intelligence, creativity, and attention.
Unfortunately, many sales organizations (and indeed the people who work
in them) have adopted an extremely
proactive sales model that emphasizes
direct and frequent contact with the
prospect. This is often at the expense of
time that could be better spent in more
thoughtful activities, such as planning.
Ironically, when selling as a trusted
Quick Tips for Your Next Training Session
To sell intuitively, it helps to think about business knowledge as a knowledge
continuum. Holden International defines this knowledge continuum as a hierarchy,
with data at the lowest level and wisdom at the highest.
LEVEL 1: DATA. This level consists of points in a domain, the sort of material that’s
typically provided as the result of searching the Internet or various databases.
LEVEL 2: INFORMATION. At this level, the data has context and purpose. The data
points make sense in relation to each other and begin to tell a simple story.
LEVEL 3: INSIGHT. Human creativity begins to come into play. A human understands
and decides what’s important and what the information actually means.
LEVEL 4: WISDOM. Human creativity is now predominant. Based on experience and
insight, the human decides what needs to be done to accomplish a goal.
Envision success!
Shake off the strictures
of a sales effort lacking in
creativity and insight.
Read “Logic Plus Intuition
Can Solve Problems” at www
.sellingpower.com/mayjun10.
QUICK TIPS FOR YOUR NEXT SALES MEETING
Selling intuitively involves thinking about sales engagements in different and
often unconventional ways. Here are two examples:
CUSTOMER POLITICS
Tactical selling – The sales rep acquires or builds an organization chart showing roles and responsibilities and documents how purchasing decisions are
made. The rep then calls on the various powers that be who have official
authority, according to the organization’s structure and defined roles.
Intuitive selling – The sales rep looks for one or more influential bodies of
closely networked people who informally make the real decisions. (Holden
International calls such networks “power bases.”) At the center of this network
is a very powerful individual, but not necessarily at the top of the organization,
who can work in exception to company policy and is rarely surprised by
events. (Holden International calls this person a “fox.”) The reps find this
individual and work with him or her to develop and close the opportunity.
COMPETITIVE THREATS
Tactical selling – The sales rep writes a proposal, closely matching the prospect’s RFP, showing how the rep’s product is more likely than the competitors’ products to fulfill the prospect’s perceived requirements.
Intuitive selling – The sales rep works behind the scenes with a key influencer
to change the buying criteria so that the RFP, when issued or reissued, reflects
the strengths of the sales rep’s offering while simultaneously exposing the
weaknesses of the competitive offerings.
40
business advisor, it’s more important
that every contact with the prospect be
productive. That is only possible if the
sales professional has insight and intuition, both into the account (so that the
right people are involved in the meeting) and the prospect’s business (so
that the seller’s offerings are positioned
appropriately). This kind of deep understanding of a customer account cannot
be created on the fly. Digesting relevant
information, perceiving patterns, and
determining the unique approach that
will work in each unique selling situation require a sales professional’s time
and effort. Sales management must
provide sales professionals with enough
time to focus on planning, researching,
and thinking, rather than overvalue
constant contact with the customer.
Step #5: Only measure what’s
important and strategic.
Finally, sales organizations must
change the way they measure themselves. A major unintended consequence of the computerization of the
corporate world is that it’s now possible
to measure sales processes and activities in myriad ways. This, however, creates the danger that the sales team will
be flooded with metrics, most of which
are not going to be helpful in developing accounts and closing sales.
Specifically, sales organizations
should measure not only lagging indicators, such as final results, but also
leading indicators that are most likely to
distill information into insight, such as
time spent on research, coaching, and
– GEOFFREY JAMES
planning.
Close More Deals at
Higher Margins
The New Selling Power Sales Strategizer PRO
TM
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in war subdue
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Sun Tsu
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How it works:
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•
The benefits:
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Use it to dramatically improve your forecasting accuracy, prioritize your accounts, and avoid
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Test-drive the Selling Power® Sales Strategizer™ PRO today.
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By Malcolm Fleschner
ement
Get it together for better sales
DO YOU HAVE A DREAM SALES STORY? A tale of one opportunity
when, at every step of the way, your timing was impeccable, your analysis
of the customer’s complex problem was spot on, and your ingenious, wellcrafted solution was welcomed by a client so eager to get started that the
price tag became little more than an afterthought? Only one such story?
Well, you’ll have to do better than that to improve sales results today.
At one time, credit for that dream sale would fall almost entirely on the rep
– a tribute to one’s hard work, persistence, charisma, “closing prowess” – a
true triumph of individual effort. But in today’s sales environment, when a
single, complex sale often depends on multiple moving parts operating together
with the precision of a high-performance race car, the one-man show has
ceded ground to another critical element of sales success: collaboration.
During a 25-year, globe-spanning career, salesforce.com president of
worldwide sales and chief customer officer Jim Steele experienced dozens
of dream-sale successes. Reflecting on these experiences, he describes the
finely tuned, sales-collaboration process in almost reverent terms.
MIKE QUON/CORBIS
45
“When you have seamless teamwork,” he
says, “and you bring the best experts, the
best collateral and content, and the best
strategy in front of a customer, when the
bells and whistles all go off and everything
executes perfectly and you claim victory,
that’s just a beautiful thing.”
Steele says that when he meets with sales
leaders around the globe, he hears one common concern: how to take these all-tooinfrequent, seamless collaborative sales
experiences and institutionalize them to hit
that perfect selling stride every time instead
of just one time in ten or one in 100.
“I used to believe that sales was more art
than science,” he says, “but now I believe
that sales is something you can turn into a
science. There is a formula that works if
you bring all the right people together and
the right information is flowing to them.
That’s what collaboration is – making sure
that all the people who can are helping you
to get the deal done, and that means the
internal team as well as partners on the
outside, whether they are a third party
who’s helping you to win or your advocates
within the prospect organization.”
According to Morten Hansen, a UC Berkeley professor and author of Collaboration:
How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity
and Reap Big Results (Harvard Business
Press, 2009), the potential for collaborative
selling to take place depends greatly on
how a sales organization approaches its
customer relationships. “When you look at
these interactions, there is a collaboration
pyramid you can go through,” he says. “At
the very bottom, it is very transaction-oriented – request for proposal [RFP], pur-
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finesse their needs, there is some back-andforth, but it’s only a minimal level of collaboration. Many companies are stuck in this
middle level of the pyramid.”
The apex is where true, mutually beneficial collaboration with the customer takes
place, Hansen says. That’s where the salesperson is exploring for underlying pain
points – problems customers may not even
be aware of themselves and are certainly not
likely to express to the salesperson. At this
level, the customer’s expressed need represents just the launching point for a larger
examination aimed at uncovering more
deep-seated, systemic business concerns.
“When customers come to you with a
specific need, they’ve already identified
you as potentially addressing that need,”
Hansen says. “So if you sell routers, customers who believe they need routers
will come to you. But pain points are very
different. The pain point may not be
routers, it may be that the customer has a
lousy CRM system and believes that new
routers will make it better. To discover
those pain points, you need to live with
the customers, embed yourself with
them, be on their premises and collaborate on multiple levels. Only that way can
don’t know what the underlying needs are.
So if you’re selling into a manufacturing
plant, for example, then you have to get
inside and walk the factory floor, talk to the
foreman, talk to the manager running the
plant – gain as many access points as you
can. Admittedly, this can be a challenge,
but if you don’t ask, if you don’t try, you’re
not going to get in, either.”
By applying expertise and an outside
perspective to the challenges facing the
customer organization, a collaborative
salesperson can often craft a unique
response, the kind of solution that salespeople lower on the pyramid who are
going through the traditional RFP dance
would never devise. But as Hansen cautions, for this process to be successful,
there must also be effective internal collaboration within the selling organization.
“As you come up with these solutions,
you have to think differently. You need
colleagues to help you, you have to walk
across the organization, you have to call
in favors, and you need other people to
work with you,” he says.
Steele likens the job of the salesperson
leading this collaborative exercise to the
role played by a quarterback. Because just
as in football, he says, success in collaborative selling involves many different players
executing specific roles with precision timing, and just one missed assignment or
breakdown in communication can undermine the entire effort.
“Much like the QB, the rep is directing
everyone on the field, analyzing the
defense, taking in and synthesizing
information from the coaching staff,
looking to exploit any weaknesses,” he
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chase order, then quote. The customers
dictate what they want; they’re looking for
vendors, and you just have to provide a
quote. That’s the bottom of the pyramid,
where the collaboration is almost zero.”
On the next level of the pyramid, Hansen
says, the customer expresses a need and
then asks whether the vendor organization
can offer a solution or product spec. “Even
though the customers are not issuing RFPs,
[their requests are] still need-based, and the
customers are in the driver’s seat because
everything revolves around what they want,
or at least what they think they want,” he
says. “As you help them tweak, refine, and
46 !"#"!"#
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you understand what they’re actually
going through and craft a solution.”
Hansen acknowledges that this “archaeological” approach to selling, which has
sales professionals digging into customer
organizations to unearth pain points, represents a marked departure from traditional sales practices. But true collaboration
means breaking out of that comfort zone to
talk with people who would normally not
appear on the selling radar, he explains.
“You can’t limit yourself to talking to the
purchasing people,” he says, “because they
says. “You huddle up, set your plan, and
then execute. In the same way, salespeople have to quickly respond to the market
conditions that are changing in real time.
But unfortunately, today the way a lot of
sales organizations approach collaboration would be like the quarterback having
to hold a separate huddle with each of his
teammates before every play.”
And what’s the number one technological factor enabling all those extra
huddles? Email.
“Email is a terrible collaborative tool
because it’s point-to-point, and users are
forced to passively depend on someone
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relates to a customer situation,” Steele
says. “Plus, it’s a huge burden to search
for related material. Not to mention the
sheer volume involved. If you’re like me,
you receive three hundred to four hundred emails a day, of which only about
twenty actually matter.”
.,
Meanwhile, Steele says, email is only
being kept alive as a collaborative tool by
old-schoolers hopelessly clinging to yesterday’s communication methods. Every
year, he says, a new crop of young people
enters the workforce, young people who
consider email as quaint as a record
player, a manual typewriter, or a VCR.
“You talk to any fifteen to twenty-five
year old, none of them use email except
when he or she shows up at a job and is
forced to,” he says. “Social networking has
changed the way people collaborate.”
Partially in recognition of email’s shortcomings, Steele says, salesforce.com began
development of a more effective collaborative sales tool that would encourage a rapid,
targeted exchange of information among
key players within specified accounts. “Our
clients are always asking me how to get
information into the hands of their customer-facing people faster so that they can listen
to customers and then quickly devise solutions for them,” Steele says. “It’s all about
speed, about having that edge, and customers were saying, ‘It’s a real-time environment out there, and we’re still stuck in an
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email-based world where, unless you’re
copied on something or you think to ask
somebody, you can be in the dark about all
sorts of things going on in an account.’”
The salesforce.com solution, called Chatter, is a collaborative tool Steele refers to as
a “Facebook for the enterprise.” With Chatter, he says, everyone involved in an
account can share information and view
updates to any activities affecting that
account as they occur in real time. As a
result, he says, salespeople can make decisions based on the most current information possible, just like the quarterback who
can change a play at the line of scrimmage
if he spots a weakness in the defense.
“Here’s an example from my own
experience,” he says. “I was going to
meet with the CEO of a company in LA,
so I went on Chatter. Just like Facebook, it
asks, ‘What are you doing right now?’ So I
put in that I was on my way to LA to call on
this CEO, and within five minutes I received
a message from the VP of marketing, who
said, ‘I just met with those guys last week.
They have a really interesting scenario that I
think we have a great solution for,’ and he
attached a link with more details. Within an
hour, ten other people weighed in, which
gave me a terrific, cross-functional view of
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what was going on at this particular account
and a lot of great ideas for what I could talk
to the CEO about. During the meeting, it
made me look a lot smarter about what was
going on.”
'
Thanks to Chatter, Steele says, he can stay
informed about the top 20 or so strategic
accounts he follows without having to wait
for emails or needing to chase down team
members for updates. “Anything that’s
happening in the world with anyone on
this account, whether it’s a person trying to
collect a bill, a service person taking a support call from the customer, a milestone
we’ve hit, or any other activity, I get an alert
from the system that lets me know about
the status change,” he says. “I’m not relying on a person to tell me, and the result is
that people don’t get stuck in their own little bubbles. They now have the power to
collaborate across the company.”
In addition to internal collaboration,
technology today also plays a key role in
promoting effective collaboration with the
customer. Jeff Williams, the VP of sales
and development for FireEye, a malwareprotection systems company, and former
global vice president of sales for innovative technologies at Cisco Systems, raves
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about the way WebEx offers the ability to
“touch” the customer in a more powerful
way, frequently and with real data.
“By now prospects and vendors have
gotten used to WebEx,” Williams says.
“It’s extremely proficient. You’re on and
off within an hour compared to meeting
in person, which involves all that travel
time and expense; and the meetings usually run long, so there’s lost productivity
on the other end. Generally, we’ve driven
a model of using WebEx to qualify opportunities. In sixty minutes, you will know if
your technology solves the problem that
the customer is experiencing. So then it
makes sense to take the next step with an
in-person meeting or evaluation.”
In the past, once the decision to move
forward with an evaluation was made,
the fast-paced collaborative process
would often hit a patch of quicksand.
This was particularly true in the software
industry, Williams says, where companies typically mailed out boxes containing physical evaluation units for the
customer to install and, assuming the
installation worked, test out.
."
The downsides to this approach were
many, including the shipping costs, the
time and effort involved when a field tech
had to be sent to the customer’s location
to perform the installation and, perhaps
most important, the loss of control of the
sales process while the prospect took the
reins of the evaluation.
The solution at Cisco, Williams says,
has been to get rid of the boxes altogether
by replacing the physical evaluation units
with CloudShare, a Software-as-a-Service
solution that helps maintain the collaborative flow from the qualification step
through the evaluation. “The evaluation
is where the customer validates the product’s performance, efficacy, scalability,
and all the other things and says, ‘Is this
solution superior to my current solution,
and does it solve a real-world problem?’”
he says. “With CloudShare, we can automate the process and do a virtual evaluation that gets customers up and running
in a day, and they can’t tell the difference.
It’s a virtual image of the appliance.”
This is the point where the collaborative element kicks in, he says, as the seller organization virtually monitors and
manages the evaluation online. “You can
see when customers logged in, what features they tested, find out whether
they’re driving traffic through it, and so
on,” Williams explains. “So if there’s a
thirty-day evaluation and there’s no progress, you can call the customer and say,
‘Do you need help? Are you struggling?’
You couldn’t do that before. And as a
result, we reduced our sales cycle about
40 percent, which is huge, while our cost
structure went down 27 percent.”
While Hansen shares Williams’s and
Steele’s enthusiasm for technology’s role
in the collaborative sales process – well,
mostly, anyway – he cautions against
becoming so dependent on these tools that
the human element gets lost. “As a sales
guy,” he says, “today you can have eight
made more sense to provide sales compensation, bonuses, and other incentives
based on individual achievement. But for
today, he recommends a mix of group and
individual performance drivers.
“You might have an individual component that’s 50 percent of the compensation structure, and the other might be 50
percent based on what the group
achieves,” he says. “And that can be
tweaked to encourage cross selling, but
essentially what you’re looking for is a
way to reward salespeople for doing well
on their own, as well as for helping their
own competitive advantage can’t dillydally over purchasing decisions. “What
I’ve seen over the last two years is that
people want to drive down the decisionmaking time frame,” Williams says.
“There’s no question that vendors want a
shorter sales cycle, and they’re driving
their half of this collaboration because
they have smaller teams and are less
inclined to take in-person meetings, and
these new applications, such as salesforce
.com and Cloudshare, establish and promote a level of trust and collaboration that
were not here just a few years ago.”
"
"
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teleconferences with customers, when
before you might have only been able to do
one in-person meeting. That’s terrific. But
you can fall into the trap of overdoing it.
Silicon Valley and other vendors tend to
overstate the power of these tools. The
most important thing to get across is that
they don’t replace face-to-face interaction
with your customers, particularly in the
beginning. You develop the relationship
face-to-face, not over the phone, not online,
and you establish the trust and build the
rapport. Then these tools can help you augment the relationship.”
!
As companies shift their efforts to foster
increased collaboration, Hansen cautions
that they frequently encounter new,
sometimes unanticipated obstacles that
can derail the entire process. Lack of
leadership commitment, poorly communicated objectives, and even too much
collaboration are just a few he describes.
But in the sales environment, he says,
the greatest and most common obstacle
to effective collaboration is the traditional
sales-compensation structure.
“To collaborate, the members of your
team have to want to help each other,”
Hansen says. “But in many organizations, there is no incentive for people to
provide that help. In the case of salespeople, for whom individual performance is compensated, they may even be
competing against one another. So if
another sales representative comes looking for assistance, you may think, ‘Why
should I help you? You’re just trying to
take a piece of my pie.’”
This sort of countercollaborative compensation structure is a relic from another
era, Hansen suggests, a time when it
colleagues to succeed. There are a number of companies doing this, and it’s
quite effective.”
'."
These are all internal obstacles to collaborative selling, but what problems are
sales organizations likely to encounter on
the outside? Surely customers are raising
their own objections, jealously guarding
their information, drawing out the process, and otherwise gumming up the
collaborative works, right? Not so much,
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says Williams, who notes that customers
today are actually gung ho about the
opportunity to collaborate.
“I’ve been in sales for twenty years, and
during that time the landscape has
changed,” he says. “The down economy
has furthered this process because, frankly, companies are trying to drive expenses
out of their sales approach. Customers
don’t have as many IT staff, so they’re
looking for an efficient way to collaborate
with vendors. They simply can’t afford to
meet with every vendor on earth and do
physical evaluations, so that’s why they’re
embracing solutions like CloudShare.”
The hyperaccelerated advance of technology is also playing a role, Williams
says, by creating a newfound sense of
urgency. Customers seeking to gain their
Frankly, Hansen says, in the current
landscape, sales organizations don’t have
much choice in whether or not they
adopt a more collaborative sales strategy.
Customer needs, advancing technology,
the ongoing recession, and competitors
chomping at the bit simply won’t allow it.
(&
“When times are good and everybody is
selling, selling, selling, you can still get
away with operating at the bottom of the
pyramid,” he says. “But that was in 2006;
this is now. Customers are taking a hard
look, and they want something different.
Whether [this new sales strategy] goes by
such labels as ‘being more customer-centric,’ ‘having just one face to the customer,’
‘becoming co-innovators with customers,’
or ‘moving up the value ladder,’ it’s about
collaborating externally with the customer
and inside with the rest of your organization to make things happen.”
Williams agrees, adding that the effective path forward will likely involve synthesizing elements of the traditional
back and forth between salespeople and
customers with the new high-speed,
high-tech, collaborative dynamic. “It’s
all about balance,” he says. “There has
to be a healthy blend of enough local
field resources where you can go and
still establish that old-fashioned relationship with the customer. That is still
absolutely critical, and I make no claims
that it will ever go away. Strategic, largeenterprise customers will always want to
be handheld through the process. But
there has also been a paradigm shift,
and customers today are demanding
more collaborative tools. And they’re
getting them – if not from you, then
from your competitor.” •
!"#
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If you still view the purchasing manager as a basement dweller
who executes the buying decisions of others and whose chief aim
is to extract another 3 percent out of suppliers, it’s time to step
into the twenty-first century. Today’s purchasing managers often
sit within reach of the executive suite. They shoulder the responsibility of supplying the goods and services to meet an organization’s strategic objectives. They have letters behind their names
designating them as supply professionals. And their titles have
changed: Yesterday’s purchasing managers are today’s chief procurement officers and global supply-chain managers – titles that
reflect the more strategic nature of their roles.
In other words, if you’re still following the old Sales 101
advice and avoiding the purchasing department at all costs, you
are greatly increasing your risk of losing sales.
“Gone are the days of a purchasing professional’s sitting back
and passively receiving requisitions or consolidating purchase
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orders into blanket and system agreements,” wrote Joseph
Cavinato, director of the A.T. Kearney Center for Strategic Supply Leadership, in a 2001 white paper. “Now companies have
implemented a ‘supply’ philosophy, with high strategic value
and in which supply professionals identify, acquire, access,
position, and manage resources the organization needs or
potentially needs in the attainment of its strategic objectives.”
75(1'<
That trend, which has accelerated through the last decade, has
enormous implications for salespeople. Consider the healthcare industry: Doctors made the purchasing decisions, writing
what they needed on a prescription pad for the sales rep to take
to the purchasing department.
“Purchasing was a paper-pushing operation, and most relationships with suppliers were in individual departments,”
recalls Michael Bohon, managing director of HealthCare Solutions Bureau and a veteran of the procurement business. “We
just received requisitions to place the orders.”
52
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Today, the voice of procurement weighs heavily in buying decisions, and Bohon’s company is increasingly being called on to
help hospitals create a position for a supply-chain VP, who will
oversee the entire purchasing/logistics function. Doctors no
longer scribble orders for a product on a script pad; rather, they
must get that product onto a buying committee’s agenda, where
the opinions of supply professionals who understand the hospital’s big-picture financial goals carry weight equal to those of the
clinicians who will be using those products. Which means medical sales reps must now make it a priority to build relationships
not only with doctors, but with key procurement leaders, as well.
David Fritz, president of Growth Solutions Inc., a sales-effectiveness consulting firm based in Naperville, IL, works with a
medical-device company that understands this new reality. The
company’s reps often spend six to eight hours a day in surgeries
teaching physicians how to use their devices, and at one time,
those relationships were enough to cement future orders for
their products. Today, the supplier’s reps don’t leave the hospital
without also calling on the folks in procurement. They know that
if they don’t communicate their value and build relationships
there, too, they’ll be shut out of the next purchase decision.
The healthcare industry and companies that sell products
measured in units are not the only ones affected by this trend.
Even those in harder-to-measure professions such as business
services and sales consulting have been caught in the tsunami
of supply-chain influence on organizational purchasing strategies. Fritz’s own firm is one of them.
“Ten years ago, I never worked with purchasing,” he says, noting
that he always went directly to the head of sales or the president
of a business unit to close sales and execute contracts. Purchasing was an overlooked place in the back office where employees
fought to get staples and paper towels for cheaper prices.
&855(17/<
That was then. Today, says Fritz, procurement professionals
“facilitate the entire process” when it comes to making a purchase decision. They put together requests for proposals
(RFPs), issue requests for information (RFIs), and hammer out
the details of the contracts. Fritz now engages procurement as
part of his selling strategy, ensuring that he builds relationships
and communicates his value to procurement departments, just
as he does to heads of sales and division presidents.
John Holland, cofounder and principal of CustomerCentric
Selling, recently worked with a business-to-business services
organization that has experienced the same thing. “The trend
it’s seen is that procurement isn’t only involved earlier in the
decision, [but this team is] key in the buying committee,” says
Holland. “The salespeople don’t just view procurement as [the
department that] processes the order; they have to sell to procurement as related to the offering.”
In short, you can no longer afford to skirt this increasingly
important department. “Generally speaking,” says Growth
Solutions’ David Fritz, “any salesperson who ignores purchasing incurs a greater risk of losing the business than if he or she
views purchasing as a partner in the process.”
Sales Performance International (SPI) CEO Keith Eades
states it even more strongly: “It’s almost insane for sales organizations not to make procurement a part of their normal calling cycle or not target this department as people they need to
sell to. If you wait until the RFP comes out and that’s the only
time you talk to procurement, you’ll lose, statistically, more
than 90 percent of the time.”
If any of this comes as news, it’s probably because old perspectives, like old habits, die hard. The 1980s-era purchasing
manager was all about price – and he or she would be the first
to admit it. Carol Marks, VP of business management systems
at Industrial Distribution Group (IDG) in Belmont, NC, recalls
being interviewed for her first purchasing job nearly 30 years
ago. The interviewer explained that one of the job requirements
was the ability to beat up suppliers on price and asked if Marks
thought she could handle that.
“That was the mentality at the time,” she says. “The whole
trick was to outwit or out-negotiate the supplier. We were more
about order prevention than being recognized as an integral
part of the organization.”
Oh, how times change. Now Marks reports directly to the
president and CEO of her organization and serves as an executive advisor to him. She takes a holistic approach to cost-cutting
and builds strategic partnerships with suppliers.
Technology plays an important role in her efforts. For instance,
Marks’ enterprise resource planning software allows her to examine spend by category, not only on the price of a certain product,
but the freight associated with shipping it, the carrying cost of
maintaining it in inventory, the cost of disposing of it, and many
other cost points. For Marks and other supply professionals, price
is now only one of many variables in the cost/benefit equation –
and it’s not necessarily the most important one. She says it can
make sense to buy a higher-priced product if the total lifecycle cost
of that product is lower. And sometimes even a higher-cost product can be justified for safety reasons or revenue impact.
These are all elements of today’s much more complex buying equation – and they are elements salespeople need to
understand if they want to do business with organizations
employing sophisticated supply personnel.
675$7(*,&$//<
This is not to say that procurement should leap ahead of other
key players in the organization in terms of importance; you still
need to determine who the decision makers and key influencers
are. More and more, however, a procurement executive is likely
to have a loud voice in the final decision. Also, just as you would
research, say, a CEO’s or CIO’s hot buttons and come to a conversation prepared to discuss issues that are important to him or
her, so, too, do you need to understand what’s important to the
procurement professional and be prepared to discuss your offering in terms that will pique his or her interest.
SPI is doing just that. Its sales force now embraces procurement as a key player in the buying process, connecting with
this group early in the buying cycle, treating procurement personnel like businesspeople, and educating them on SPI’s value.
The strategy is paying off. SPI recently won a multimilliondollar opportunity, and CEO Keith Eades credits the salesperson’s work with procurement as a major contributor to the win.
“The role that purchasing team members are playing now is
probably broader, deeper, and has more influence than ever
before,” says Eades. “Rather than just administering a purchase,
they’re answering, ‘Does this solve the business problem? Does
it work? Is it right?’ And they’re staying involved longer after the
purchase. I would describe them now as more internal consultants to the business functions they’re supporting.”
So you may need to update your sales conversations to stand
apart from the crowd. As IDG’s Marks concludes, the most effective
salespeople arrive ready to communicate with her “businessperson
to businessperson, which takes a new set of skills, but ones that
will deliver what the future of purchasing and supply requires.” •
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High-Level
Access
By Renee Houston Zemanski
seat
How to get a
at
the decision-making table
IF YOU think you’re a consultant, a
trusted advisor, and a strategic partner and you’re still calling on midlevel managers, we’ve got news for
you: You are none of the above. But
here’s the real news: Sales managers
must find ways to get their people in
to see the top brass if they want to
see an improvement in sales results.
“Buying and selling have changed
dramatically,” says John McVeigh,
president of Canadian operations and
senior vice president of global sales
for OC Tanner Recognition Company
Ltd. (OCT), which delivers recognition strategies and programs to most
of the Fortune 100 companies. “The
last person executives want to see is a
salesperson. Clients are looking for
strategic advisors, and while a lot of
salespeople think they are strategic
advisors, what they’re really strategic
about is selling. It’s not the same.
Salespeople now have to have business acumen.”
!"#
$%&'!"#" 55
No Preconceptions Allowed
“Most salespeople go into a call with a preconceived idea of what
they want to sell,” continues McVeigh, who oversees 125 salespeople in North American, Canadian, and European regional
offices. “They’ll ask three or four open-ended questions, figure
out the clients’ pain, and then help them fix it; however, if they
want to gain a seat at the decision makers’ table, they need to
earn the right by understanding the clients’ industries and businesses and their challenges. Then they need to develop relevant
ideas to help them get to their key success initiatives.
“If you want your sales team to be an integral part of decision making and a true partner, you’ve got to make a total paradigm shift,” he
adds. “It takes patience. You need to comprehend how decisions get
made and who the decision makers are. It’s a different outlook.”
This new outlook steps away from the traditional role of sales,
as it shifts from the tactical and moves toward strategic planning.
According to Marc Miller, president of Sogistics, a business
development firm that specializes in sales-productivity improvement, in order to excel in sales today, you need to help grow a
customer’s bottom line. Only when the customer wins big can a
salesperson win big. Miller, also author of the aptly named book
A Seat at the Table: How Top Salespeople Connect and Drive Decisions at the Executive Level (Greenleaf, May 2009) and the best
seller, Selling is Dead: Moving Beyond Traditional Sales Roles and
Practices to Revitalize Growth (Wiley, 2005), says that many salespeople consider themselves consultative when they really aren’t,
and he blames this on a poor understanding of strategy.
Think Long Term
“Today’s salespeople are still stuck in the myopia of pain, problems, issues, and constraints,” says Miller. “They mistake strategic
value for product value. Comparing the two is akin to comparing
apples and oranges. Unfortunately, the sales-training world isn’t
helping. It’s going down a different path, and it’s leading to a point
where executives don’t want to meet with salespeople.”
Miller explains that this is why many top executives farm out
sales meetings to midlevel management. One problem: Midlevel
management doesn’t always know the macrostrategies, or midlevel managers only know them until year-end. Strategic selling
means you have to think two to three years out, says Miller.
To plan for the future, Miller says that you need to understand
the client’s organization and how it maintains a profitable
growth. Only then can you see whether you can add value.
That’s why Miller advises salespeople to stop selling.
“For sales revenues to lift, selling must end and helping must
begin,” he says. “Focus less on how you influence clients and
more on how you impact their businesses. Shift from competing
with other vendors to creating value for your client, and concentrate less on making a sale and more on making a difference.
“You’re not doing PowerPoint or any kind of presentation at
this level,” Miller continues. “You should be sitting down with
a blank sheet of paper ready to discuss strategy and asking
questions that make these executives think. Ask them how they
need to change in the future, and ask about their strategies,
innovations, and productivity. In a sense, ask them what they
want to be when they grow up. At the end of that call, if you’ve
stimulated discussion, you’ll get invited back.”
Disrupt the Flow
Miller says much of this sales strategy change has to do with
five “disruptive elements,” or “new realities,” in today’s business world: transparency, standardization, reverse engineering,
globalization, and divergent offerings. He describes transparency as the biggest of these.
“Organizations can find out about your competition immediately
by using a search-engine inquiry,” he explains. “Internet intellect is
now far superior to a salesperson’s research, so buyers are doing
their own research, which means they need salespeople even less.”
Dolf Kahle, CEO of Visual Marking Systems, a company that
designs, manufactures, and installs product identification such as
labels, nameplates, and signs, agrees. “The amount of work that
executives are expected to do today is double, even triple, of what it
used to be,” he says. “They don’t have time for salespeople to show
up at their doors and say, ‘Can I have a minute?’ You have to convince them you will bring something of value to the table, because
they can get information in a minute at their fingertips.”
So how do you gain access to the executives if executives don’t
want to see you and don’t want advice? Sometimes you can’t
start at the top; you have to work your way up. Just ask Mark
Woodka, former vice president of sales for BEA/Flashline,
(acquired by Oracle in 2008). Woodka remembers an opportunity with an airline reservation system company in which he
The Strategy
In his book A Seat
at the Table: How
Top Salespeople
Connect and Drive
Decisions at the
Executive Level
(Greenleaf, May
2009), Marc Miller
describes FOCAS as
a questioning model
designed to help
salespeople connect
with executives.
It’s covered in detail
in the book, but here
is an abbreviated
version:
Fact questions
explain the facts of
the buyer’s current
situation. “What
differentiates
you from your
competitors?”
Objective questions
identify and explore
the buyer’s objectives
– goals, visions, and
aspirations. “If you
could only accomplish
two things this year,
what would they be?”
Concern questions
investigate the
prospect’s difficulties, concerns, and
problems. “What are
some of the more
interesting problems
you face because of
your position as a
thought leader in
your industry?”
Anchor questions
broaden the
discussion of issues
raised via concern or
objective questions,
helping an executive
see that narrow
problems often
have systemic
consequences. “Are
you concerned that
negative publicity in
that area might affect
your stock price?”
Solution questions
develop recognition of
your solution’s value.
“Would it be helpful
if we could reduce
turnover in that
division?”
and his team went through a discovery
number one selling tool is a flashlight;
Action Tip
process with midlevel managers to find
it’s not a product or a solution. We say,
out about the prospect’s previous soft‘We aren’t here to propose anything; we
Forget pain, problems,
ware issues.
just want to know what you are trying to
issues, and constraints.
“The team of people we talked with had
achieve. What are some of the things that
no idea why the software failed,” explains
you are doing to get there? Are these
Think ‘‘disruptive eleWoodka, now CEO of StaffKnex, a comthings working?’
ments’’: transparency,
pany that provides labor-optimizing tech“It’s a different way of selling,” he says.
standardization,
nology for employers with shift-based
“Strategy
and differentiation are the key
reverse engineering,
work schedules. “We asked them if our
levers, and if you get your salespeople to
globalization, and
survey team could survey the staff and
embrace them, they change everything.”
divergent offerings.
then correlate all the findings. All we
The OCT sales force tries to call as
That’s right – the 5
asked in return was to meet with the
high as possible, usually on the VPs of
‘‘disruptive elements.’’
senior executive after we received the
human resources, marketing, leaderresults. We didn’t charge the company for
ship development, and communication,
our time or the survey. Once we presented
but oftentimes reps end up meeting
the findings to the executive, she was
with CEOs. As a result, OCT’s sales
impressed and wanted the raw data. At this point, we had really have gone up 10 percent.
piqued her interest, and it led to a sale. We didn’t go in with the
Something else that’s critical to OCT’s success in sales is that
mind-set that we were going to sell something. We helped the the firm uses subject matter experts during meetings with execucompany understand its problems and identify solutions first.”
tives. “These experts support our sales team,” says McVeigh.
Like BEA/Flashline, Visual Marking Systems has to dig “Once our salespeople understand the needs, they call their
deeper to find out CEOs’ thoughts, opinions, and strategies for experts to speak specifically to certain business issues. This helps
the future, and Kahle admits it’s tough, especially in his indus- them gain credibility and gets them a seat at the table. Without
convince them
“You have to
you
will bring something of value to the table.”
try. “In our industrial market, we deal with many procurement
people, but if we want to meet with people who actually drive
the strategy, we have to do a lot of work,” he says. “We concentrate on demographics, what’s important to them, and what
differentiates us. Our industry has always been an afterthought,
but we are doing better at getting to the table by helping prospects think in a different way. We need clients to know that
graphics and design are important, because they are part of
their brand image; it’s what their customer sees first.”
A New Reality
Another new reality is what Miller calls procurement standardization. “Supply-chain management or procurement departments
are getting incredibly powerful in companies because they have
new tools, one of which is the Internet,” he explains. “They are
now using technology to play vendors against each other and drive
price down. Product and service lifecycles are shortening, along
with the profit-margin window. Technology also allows for reverse
engineering and copycat products, and it’s accelerating. These new
realities are impacting salespeople like a level-five hurricane.
“Because of this, companies are becoming total-solution
companies and need salespeople who are versed in the totalsolution world. Your ability to create demand for your solution
at executive levels becomes imperative,” adds Miller. He suggests working with your marketing department to develop
strategies that offer value and create demand for total solutions.
Get Out the Flashlight
No one knows about offering value better than OCT’s McVeigh,
whose sales team approaches each client in a nonassumptive way.
“We basically say, ‘We have no idea if we can help you, but let’s
see if we can add some value after we talk,’” he explains. “Our
this expertise, you are a seller of stuff and become a commodity.
Then clients will look at features, benefits, and costs, and that’s a
tough way to make a living. You’ll never get a seat at the table
with that approach; you’ll always be at a product level, and CEOs
don’t get involved at a product level.”
Expertise is only one part of the equation. You better have a
good reputation and an understanding of what’s important to
senior executives, says Miller.
“Senior executives talk to other senior executives,” he says.
“It’s all about association – marketing referrals and word of
mouth. It’s not a numbers game, it’s a quality game. It’s about
taking a smaller focus and working with twelve companies
instead of five hundred.”
Miller explains that there are four macrostrategies or decisions that senior executives have to make and advises that
salespeople get familiar with them:
1) Innovating. How can you help senior executives separate
and differentiate their company’s products and services?
2) Reaching customers. Can you help them reach their customers, and if so, how?
3) Being more productive with core offerings. “Many of their
innovations are maturing and commoditizing,” says Miller.
“You need to understand their strategies to optimize their core
cash-cow offerings.”
4) Outsourcing or eliminating. “Help them understand what
they should get rid of so that they can spend their money on
innovation and differentiation,” says Miller.
“Once you understand these decisions and understand that
you are in the results business and not the products-and-services
business, you can help companies strategize,” says Miller. “It’s
the only way you can make and sustain a relationship with
senior management and get a seat at the table.” •
!"#
$%&'!"#"
57
Products, Services, and Management Advice
new solutions
for managers
Ramp Up Your Leads
Any sale that finishes with a deal or longterm relationship begins with a lead.
How quickly and economically a company acquires leads can make the difference between missing or outperforming
a sales goal.
Leads come from a variety of sources.
Old paper lists were replaced first by CDs,
then by the Internet. Today’s prospecting
lists arrive digitally on any personal device,
and they are backed by extensive research
and validation. They are up-to-date and can
include amazingly rich information collected from thousands of business sources.
With digital prospect data, initial qualification can be easy and automatic. You
simply screen the list for companies
that mirror your best customers in size,
industry, location, or any other criteria.
Leads also arrive on your own Website,
and these leads are like gold, because
most Website visitors are already interested in your products. Modern software
can track these visitors, offer them more
information, check their reactions, and
score their likelihood of buying. If a prospect is hot, software can automatically
pass the lead to an inside sales rep, who
can start the conversation while the visitor is still on your Website. Or software
can begin lead qualification by offering
the prospect something useful in return
for answering a few simple questions.
Leads can also come from the Web in
another way: Applications can constantly
search the Web or digital business news
for the events that generate great leads in
your business, for example the creation
of new companies, mergers, or new
executive appointments.
And great leads still come from traditional sources, such as personal references and trade-show contacts. These
leads need to be digitized, entered into the
58
system that generates and tracks all those
other potentially lucrative digitized leads.
Wherever they come from, all leads
should be automatically scored before they
enter a central database or your customer
relationship management (CRM) system.
Scores reflect the likelihood, immediacy,
and potential value of a sale and should be
agreed to by sales and marketing. These
scores can be calculated from the data you
have already gathered and then revised
later as you receive more data.
Sales and marketing should collaboratively determine what happens next. The best
leads need to go to the field as quickly as
possible, with all the information available
on the lead. That means combining new
events or lead actions with any data already
available on the same company. This should
happen automatically. And all the data
should be accessible on the rep’s familiar
CRM screen so that he or she isn’t forced to
waste time searching in other systems.
The field rep should also be able to find
out if he or she knows any important execs
at the lead company. Software should
tell the rep who the company’s decision
makers are, where they worked before,
and where they went to school. Again, this
application for collecting all relevant information on each decision maker should
ideally work within the rep’s CRM system.
Results of the initial call go back into
the CRM system. This automatically beefs
up the information available on the lead
in the central database, perhaps changing
its status from a hot to a cold lead or from
an immediate to less immediate buying
decision. But whatever happens, the lead
is not simply dropped from the digital
funnel; it is retained until it is clear that
the lead is never going to be a sales prospect, which may take a long time.
Most leads start out in the nurturing
SELÇUK DEMIREL
How to make your lead-acquisition strategy
a performance payout
process, where they are assessed according
to scores and rules. Marketing automation
software should set a schedule and program for contacting each lead, or segments
of leads, that reflect the leads’ specific characteristics. The characteristics considered
might include company type; the kind of
products a prospect company might buy;
white papers, Webinars, or other marketing materials that might be of interest to a
prospect company; and how the prospect
would want to be contacted.
Marketing automation can send out
customized emails, brochures, and invitations to future events, live or on the Web.
inside
C O A C H I N G ..............................68
INCENTIVES ................,+,-,.-&
L E A D M A N A G E M E N T ..............58-59
T RAINING ....................,*#,+,,#,-
9+%-7(+2R-9)+&2'@(3-)>($3+7'3()
Contacts
Dow Jones
D&B
Jigsaw
Marketo
ZoomInfo
InsideView
OneSource
Salesgenie
Hoover’s
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
Company
Information
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
Deep Company
Information
x
Lead
Management
x
x
x
x
x
x
It can also set up a phone call according
to the management rules. The timing
should be determined by the prospect’s
buying cycle, not your company’s sales
cycle. Software tracks the contacts and
results. Did the lead download a white
paper, attend a Web conference, or ask
a question? These reactions adjust the
lead’s score in the funnel and will be used
to refine later approaches to the lead.
The whole process of collecting, contacting and managing leads must be as
automatic as possible in order to save
time and money. But it must also be as
discriminating and personal as possible
to imitate the steps your sales reps, support staff, and marketers would take if
they had the time. Fortunately, advancing technology is making this possible.
But best-practice lead management
requires more than technology: The relationship between the sales and marketing departments is especially crucial.
Information-technology experts can be
brought in to let sales and marketing
know what can be done to facilitate cooperation between the two teams, but the
big decisions will be made and mutually
arranged by sales and marketing leaders.
Top company execs must be absolutely
clear at the outset about what they want
the whole process to look like. The general rule is, reform the process before
you automate the process.
The potential gains from getting it all
right are huge: not just more leads, but
more time spent on the best leads. Contacting the right people at the right time is
another step toward the buying decision.
Personal calls and visits that are relevant
to the prospect’s business are smart uses
of the salesperson’s time. And doing the
homework prior to the visit means that your
pertinent marketing materials are read, not
tossed in the wastebasket. Once a company
gains experience with solid lead-management systems, it can turn the funnel into
a forecasting tool, producing the sales predictions that financial and operating execs
– HENRY CANADAY
hunger for.
To download a PDF of this article,
please visit www.sellingpower.com/
lead-gen-solutions.
59
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new solutions
for managers
training
Smooth Sale-ing
Family-owned, San Francisco-based Torani,
a flavored-syrup company with a taste for
success, wanted to tap new markets in 2010
by introducing its Real Fruit Smoothie. Torani
taught Starbucks how to make, and America
to love, flavored lattes in the 1990s. To build
on their past accomplishments, in 2009 Torani
applied for and won the 2009 Miller Heiman
Sales Team Makeover – co-sponsored by Selling Power, Hoover’s, and Genius.com – for
$100,000 worth of help from the sales experts
at Miller Heiman. How sweet is that?
Torani’s basic goals were to help reps start
making high-yield sales calls right away and
manage the funnel for future calls more efficiently. “We wanted to work differently with
customers and develop and excel in more
channels, like restaurants and retail,” summarizes Torani CEO Melanie Dulbecco.
The project kicked off in June 2009. “We
started by using Miller Heiman’s Sales Excellence Assessment tool for a full assessment of
sales behavior and identification of the skills
necessary for Torani to achieve its goals,”
explains Miller Heiman lead consultant Susan
Mahoney. “Additionally, we began an extensive
interview process with all functions of Torani’s
leadership team, including marketing, finance,
and operations, recognizing that in order
for true organizational change to occur, you
have to have buy-in and involvement from all
departments that it touches.”
The Miller Heiman consultants came up with
their first recommendations based on gaps identified in the assessment and recognition of Torani’s
unique cultural values. With a strong brand already
in place, the new product launch slated for early
2010 needed to be a smooth extension of the
company’s existing products and services.
Miller Heiman and Torani recognized that
their upcoming events, including a fall sales
meeting, were ideal occasions at which to
ensure all departments were on the same page.
Collaboration was critical to the new product
launch strategy. In December, Miller Heiman
facilitated two days of training on Conceptual
Selling with its Green Sheet tool for planning
calls, attended by cross-functional teams from
the sales, marketing, finance, research, and
product-development departments.
“When cross-functional teams are involved
in every step, the results are more consistent and sustainable,” Mahoney summarizes.
“Torani fully embraced this approach.”
64
contest
Miller Heiman is accepting entries
through the end of May for the 2010
Miller Heiman Sales Team Makeover.
For information on how to enter, visit
www.millerheiman.com/makeover.
Cross-functional training is Miller Heiman’s
standard approach. “In the past, training was
just about salespeople and the call,” Dulbecco
says. “Our work with Miller Heiman involved
marketing and the whole supply chain.”
Marketing VP Julie Garlikov agrees. “This
is logical. It means you approach everything
more strategically.” She and her six-member
marketing team actively participated in the
sales-training sessions.
Sales VP Eric Gould asserts that the call-preparation and strategic-planning training got the team
excited. “Miller Heiman taught us how to make a
detailed call plan and determine the appropriate
strategy for a specific opportunity, which was very
exciting to me,” said Gould. “I told the reps, ‘You’re
[learning] this twenty years before I did, and it will
help you during your entire careers.’”
Torani reps learned the new approach at
different paces, Gould acknowledges. “Some
took to it like ducks to water. But they are all
learning. You have to do this for three weeks
SELÇUK DEMIREL
new
solutions
for managers
for it to become habit.”
By the end of January, Torani reps had used
the new approach to make 80 calls. “We have
an exceptional number of preorders,” Dulbecco notes. “This will be our most successful
product launch, and the response from the
team is very strong.”
In February, two-day Strategic Selling training sessions, again for cross-functional teams,
were held for each salesperson’s most strategic opportunities. The focus was on identifying
and understanding key buying influences,
positioning themselves strategically in order
to win, and managing the sales opportunity
efficiently in order to shorten the sales cycle.
Part of Torani’s launch strategy is to claim
market share from competitors in both its current customer arena and in the new market of
major casual-dining chains.
The next step was to train frontline and
senior managers in Strategic Selling Funnel
Management. The program helped leadership
support the field by asking questions: Where
is the opportunity positioned in the funnel?
What actions has the customer demonstrated
that indicates the opportunity is ready to move
forward? What resources are necessary at this
stage to move forward? What is the probability
of this opportunity closing on a specific date?
“The result of the session was a defined
sales funnel with steps in the sales process and
customer and seller actions clearly identified,”
Mahoney says.
“The funnel will make my job a lot easier,” says Torani CFO Scott Triou. “I can tell
where we are and that the reps have done
the groundwork. This will lead to more accurate forecasts.”
To ensure that all elements were in place for
the new product launch and Torani reached its
goal to gain greater market share in a new prospect playground, Miller Heiman cemented the
processes by coaching managers to reinforce
Conceptual Selling and Strategic Selling.
Torani’s lengthy tenure in the beverage
industry proves it’s a company with a good
track record and lasting power. But aside from
that, the organization’s willingness to build on
its hard-earned success makes the company
something of a role model for others. “The aim
is to take a good team and make it great,”
– HENRY CANADAY
Gould summarizes.
*Strategic Selling, Conceptual Selling,
Strategic Selling Funnel Management, and
Sales Excellence Assessment are registered
trademarks of Miller Heiman.
Give so much time to the improvement of yourself
that you have no time to criticize others.
Christian D. Larson
incentives
Any Way You Likey at Nike
The best sports equipment, clothing,
and shoes can make a welcomed gift for
a rep who wants to stay in shape even
when he or she is on the road. And Nike
has plenty of options for securing its
famous items and making them a bit
more special: Top reps can customize
their Nike prizes by becoming a part
of the design process at NIKEiD.com.
Reps can choose Nike footwear in their
favorite colors, pick special widths for
comfort, and obtain left and right shoes
of different sizes if that makes running
more comfortable.
For more information, visit www
– HENRY CANADAY
.nikeid.com.
incentives
Canon’s One-Stop Shop
Canon USA is a one-stop shop for many a
road-weary warrior. Canon has the latest
digital cameras for capturing images of
new acquaintances and exotic sights. Its
EOS Digital SLR camera line offers high
quality and convenience for experts and
amateurs alike. When it is time to show
the pictures to family and friends, Canon’s REALiS SX7 Mark II Multimedia LCOS
Projector delivers photos and video with
fine details and exceptional color reproduction. Or if a sales hero just wants to show his trophy images around the office, he can use
Canon’s Pro9500 Mark II Photo Printer, with its 10 pigment-based ink colors.
– HENRY CANADAY
For more information, visit www.usa.canon.com.
65
new solutions
for managers
training
The 9 Top Companies to Train Your Sales Team Better
Action Selling
Specialties: Managing the buyer/seller relationship, sales-call planning, questioning and
presentation skills, and gaining commitment.
Preparatory assessment: Determines which
skills need improving, develops customized
recommendations on how to improve, assesses
how sales reps compare to one another,
determines ROI for further training.
Steps: Prepare, train, reinforce, assess, certify.
Training delivery: Workshop conducted by a
certified Action Selling facilitator.
Emphasis: Long-term learning reinforcement
that transfers newly learned skills into
sustainable field success.
Markets served: North America.
Length of time in business: 20 years.
Website: www.actionselling.com
Richardson
Specialties: Opportunity generation,
territory and pipeline management, time
management, strategic prospecting, social
and business networking, selling through channel partners, consultative selling, real-deal
coaching, selling to executives, telephone
selling, cross selling, sales presentations,
team selling, negotiations, virtual teams, customer care, internal collaboration, becoming
a trusted advisor, key-account networking,
strategic-account management, gaining
referrals, and accessing decision makers.
Preparatory assessment: SkillGauge, an
on-demand assessment of sales behavior
using multiple ratings and self-rating of
individual sales skills.
Steps: Diagnose, design, train, coach,
reinforce.
ValueSelling Associates
Specialties: Customer retention, interpersonal
communication skills, negotiating, persuasive
presentations, prospecting and qualifying,
sales writing, selling to executives, team
selling, telephone effectiveness, and time
and productivity management.
Training delivery: Classroom training,
e-learning, and consulting.
and South Africa, including instruction in
Chinese, Korean, Japanese, English, German,
Italian, and Spanish.
Website: www.valueselling.com
Acclivus
Length of time in business: 20+ years.
ValueSelling is sustainable; salespeople love
it, so they actually use it.
Specialties: Consultative B2B selling,
consultative selling by telephone and email,
strategic sales presentations, interaction for
call centers, transaction sales for call centers,
getting the meeting, sales negotiation,
customer service, major account planning and
strategy, territory planning and management,
and time and opportunity planning.
Website: www.richardson.com
Markets served: North America, Europe, Asia,
Preparatory assessment: VitalSigns, a
Training delivery: Blended solutions,
including more than 50 hours of e-learning.
Emphasis: Deep and long-term relationships with
global clients across all major business sectors.
Markets served: 63 countries, in 21 languages.
66
Emphasis: Global reach with a local presence; uses its own process to sell its training,
which is easy to implement and execute,
pragmatic, and repeatable.
SELÇUK DEMIREL
new
solutions
for managers
Web-based assessment of mission-critical
skills with results reported in 48 hours.
Emphasis: Solutions curriculum aligns sales,
support, and service professionals worldwide;
also, a fully integrated curriculum designed
to help account teams build strong relationships, produce better results for customers,
and generate predictable, profitable revenue.
Training delivery: Classroom instruction.
Markets served: More than 80 countries.
reinforcing what was learned so that change
becomes long lasting. All programs can include
handbooks, assessments, and diagnostics to
track the effectiveness of each program.
management, professional prospecting skills.
Training delivery: Seminars and teleworkshops.
Emphasis: Programs adapted to the needs of
the organization and contrasting cultures.
Markets served: English-speaking audiences.
Website: www.profitbuilders.com
Think! Inc
Website: www.acclivus.com
Specialty: Negotiation.
Carew International
Specialties: Dimensions of professional selling, profit dimensions, advanced positional
selling, target-account strategies, building customer equity, and performance management.
Preparatory assessment: HR Chally assessments.
Emphasis: Changes the skills, attitude, and
success of every person who participates;
transforms attitudes and behaviors of every
graduate; trains through transformational
experiences that build personal commitment
to new skills.
Participants regularly describe programs as
life changing. Clients average 30 percent
increased revenue and profits compared
with competition.
Training delivery: Seminars.
Markets served: Global.
Website: www.carew.com
Profit Builders
Specialties: Permission-based prospecting,
cold-calling and prospecting strategy,
time management for salespeople and
managers, turning prospects into clients,
selling skills for nonselling professionals,
cooperative leadership, permission-based
selling, and results-oriented communication.
Emphasis: A comprehensive follow-up
program with coaches and trainers conducted
on site, through teleconferencing, or via the
Web for all training and coaching programs.
Participants can strengthen newly developed
skills and receive personalized coaching,
Emphasis: A hybrid, quick-strike negotiation
consulting and training firm that specializes
in actionable business results and focuses on
simplicity, execution, and ROI; custom-built
solutions; and constant and systematic
innovation, testing, and entrepreneurialism.
Street-level customer business results and
internal satisfaction take precedence over
short-term cash flow.
Training delivery: Live workshops for
instruction of cross-functional teams and
organization-wide negotiation initiatives.
Website: www.e-thinkinc.com
AchieveGlobal
Specialties: Professional sales coaching,
account management, sales-call management, professional selling skills, professional
selling skills online, professional selling skills
for doctors, professional telesales skills,
advanced selling techniques, professional
sales presentations, professional sales negotiations, selling in a competitive world, market
Steps: Define desirable results; direct practices
and processes; develop the capability of individuals, processes, and systems; deliver results.
Training delivery: Classroom, but many
components are also available through
synchronous and asynchronous Web-based
delivery options.
Market served: Global; more than 1,800
employees in 42 nations; can customize
programs in more than 30 languages
and dialects.
Website: www.achieveglobal.com
The TAS Group
Specialties: Sales-force automation with
Dealmaker and Dealmaker Genius; workshops run by sales-performance experts;
Dealmaker’s Virtual Learning System (DVLS),
which enables managers and reps to improve
performance through learning, reinforcement,
certification, and coaching; sales-knowledge
portal, which shares best practices in blogs,
streaming movies, audios, worksheets, and
other documents; DVLS certification engine
for learning and testing; customized curricula
tailored for continued learning and coaching;
and sales tips and in-depth problem analysis.
Training delivery: Via the Internet.
Website: www.thetasgroup.com
– HENRY CANADAY
incentives
Can You Hear Me Now?
Nothing frustrates road warriors more than having to search for
wireless hot spots in strange towns while trying to stay in touch
with home or the home office. Why not take a load off their minds
by rewarding them with Sprint’s MiFi 2200 by Novatel? Sprint’s Now
Network ensures that your reps will never have to look for hot spots
again. And the MiFi 2200 can connect up to five laptops or other devices,
including cameras and MP3 players. It’s secure and password protected, and
it offers one-touch setup so reps will not have to waste time while on the road.
– HENRY CANADAY
For more information, visit www.sprint.com.
67
new solutions
for managers
incentives
On the Go
For reps who must take volumes of both
business and personal files on the road,
Seagate’s FreeAgent Go portable hard
drive could be a very rewarding choice.
FreeAgent stores up to 640 gigabytes
of documents, presentations, pictures,
videos, music, and any other digital files.
Its easy-to-use software keeps files safe
with automatic backup and encryption.
And reps can synchronize content with
their office and home computers so
that FreeAgent always has current files.
A convenient desktop dock lets users
pop their drive into FreeAgent without
any cabling. All this in an ultraslim, sixounce package for easy carrying.
.seagate.com.
– HENRY CANADAY
incentives
Image Makers
Whether sales travelers want to show
the family where they have been or take
family pics along with them, Nikon’s
D3000 digital SLR camera would make a
fine prize for their extra efforts. Retailing
for about $500, the D3000 takes superb
photographs but is very easy to use.
Nikon’s intelligent guide mode lets even
coaching
The High-Tech Coach
Coaching sales reps may well be one of
the most crucial functions of sales management – potentially worth up to 20
percent in additional sales productivity,
according to experts. But sales managers
often apply traditional coaching erratically
because companies rarely capture, record,
and deploy effective coaching consistently.
Hit or miss just doesn’t cut it.
But with the set of tools ForceLogix
offers, sales managers can now automate
one of the toughest jobs many sales managers face: coaching their sales reps.
The ForceLogix Enhanced Coaching
solution delivers a multilingual coaching process that is easy to customize and
set up across the entire sales force. In
addition to ensuring consistent coach68
ing, the application evaluates and ranks
each salesperson based on customerspecific skills and expectations. Ride-along
observations can be captured when they
happen, and 360-degree feedback lets
reps know exactly where they stand with
customers and managers and thus where
they need to focus.
This digital coaching tool integrates
seamlessly with Forcelogix’s SalesForce
Optimizer, which lets managers decide
at any time which activities and skills
are most essential for each rep to master. It enables managers to track these
skills and activities so they can work on
a specific improvement plan for each rep
over time. Moreover, reps can track their
own progress toward goals so they can
self-manage much of the necessary work.
– HENRY CANADAY
inexperienced photographers get great
snapshots by optimizing the settings for
just the kind of results the user wants. A
three-inch LCD screen makes it easy to
compose and review the image and then
retouch it without using a computer.
.nikonusa.com.
– HENRY CANADAY
SELÇUK DEMIREL
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new solutions
for managers
incentives
A Stable Motivation Platform
To paraphrase an old saying, nothing
succeeds like good motivation. Problem
is, how do you come up with the best
motivation for everyone on your team?
It’s a bit of a puzzle, but here are some
good ground rules.
Assuming a company has solid sales
potential, getting a cash-comp plan right
is the first step to higher sales. Most
experts recommend that managers review
cash-comp plans regularly but not fundamentally alter them often. This means
looking at territory assignments to make
sure they are challenging but achievable.
Managers should want the majority of
reps “in the money,” with a reasonable
chance of making their goals.
Second, the metrics of cash compensation should keep reps pointing toward
the goals most essential to the company,
whether they are increasing sales or profit,
adding new customers, or retaining old
ones. Keep cash comp simple, however,
with no more than three metrics – and
preferably fewer – to focus reps’ attention.
Third, when company goals are complex
and unstable, make optimum use of noncash incentives. These can point salespeople
to goals not included in cash comp, such as
executing successful product launches or
meeting short-term sales goals. They can
also provide trophy and recognition value
and excite competitive salespeople.
Rewarding reps with such items as
70
merchandise, gift cards, and travel is
usually part of any successful sales strategy. Indeed, studies consistently find that
once the cash-comp plan is solid, spending 5 to 7 percent of the compensation
budget on noncash motivators gets more
results than adding more cash.
Fourth, design incentive plans with
three things in mind: the company and
its key objectives, what excites individual
reps, and administering and communicating the incentive program to maximize
its effects. Set overall goals based on key
objectives, then translate them into goals
for each division, team, or rep. Choose
between a program in which each rep
competes against a set goal and one in
Let the big winners
tell stories about how they
achieved their goals.
need to run the program well.
Talk to your reps about what they
would like to win, or consult with incentive firms. Usually, the best incentive
prizes are the hottest items in consumer
markets. A far-flung, diverse sales force
may want many different prizes to pick
from or the flexibility of gift cards.
Launch the program with both dazzle
and clarity. Reps need to understand immediately what they will get and how to get it.
Then communicate constantly during the
program. Let reps know how they are doing,
what they or their peers have won, and how
much more they have to do to catch up to a
goal or a competitor. Most incentive firms
have dedicated Websites and email functions to make this communication easy,
affordable, and fun. A telephone call from a
top exec can be a nice congratulatory touch.
When prizes are awarded, make the presentation as personal and impressive as you
can. Salespeople spend lots of lonely hours
which reps compete against each other.
The first program motivates all reps and
makes it easier to budget. The second taps
more effectively into competitive instincts.
If you go with a contest, consider splitting
prize spending between top and also-ran
rewards to keep everyone in the chase.
Figure out the company’s gains in
revenue and profit if the program works,
then determine how much you can
spend on the whole incentive program.
Split this incentive budget between the
prizes and purchasing what you will
on the road and tough hours with customers. They appreciate the recognition of
managers and peers when they get back to
the home office or attend annual meetings.
Let the big winners tell stories about how
they achieved their goals so that they can
help motivate others for the next contest.
Finally, review and assess the program:
Were goals achieved? Did the budget hold
up as expected? Ask everybody involved,
winners and also-rans, for suggestions on
how to make the next incentive program
– HENRY CANADAY
better.
SELÇUK DEMIREL
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To bring anything into your life, imagine that it’s already there.
Richard Bach
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I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots
in my career. I’ve missed almost
300 games. Twenty-six times,
I’ve been trusted to take the gamewinning shot and missed. I’ve failed
over and over and over again in my
life, and that is why I succeed.
Michael Jordan
A store’s best advertisement is
the service its goods render, for
upon such service rest the future,
the goodwill, of an organization.
James Cash Penney
Imagination is more important than
knowledge. For knowledge is limited,
whereas imagination embraces the
entire world, stimulating progress,
giving birth to evolution.
Albert Einstein
Success is not built on success.
It’s built on failure. It’s built
on frustration. Sometimes it’s
built on catastrophe.
Sumner Redstone
…I view this year’s failure as next
year’s opportunity to try it again.
Failures are not something to
be avoided. You want to have them
happen as quickly as you can so you
can make progress rapidly.
Gordon Moore
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If you do build a great experience,
customers tell each other about that.
Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos
A customer is the most important
visitor on our premises. He is not
dependent on us; we are dependent
on him. He is not an interruption
in our work; he is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider in our
business; he is part of it. We are not
doing him a favor by serving him; he
is doing us a favor by giving us an
opportunity to do so.
Mahatma Gandhi
The real source of wealth and
capital in this new era is not
material things. It is the human
mind, the human spirit, the
human imagination, and our
faith in the future.
Steve Forbes
All the breaks you need in life
wait within your imagination.
Imagination is the workshop of
your mind, capable of turning
mind energy into accomplishment
and wealth.
Napoleon Hill
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