Sales Laundry

Archive for March 7th, 2009

“I want to be a partner for my client not just a vendor.” – Joe Salesguy

I say “Prove it.”

“I am in it to help my customers business be successful.” – Joe Salesguy

“Yeah, right.”

“I do not have to understand my customers business in order to sell my product.” – Joe Salesguy

“Your right, but you might have to if you actually want him to buy from you.”

You cannot be a partner with your customer if you can’t understand life from your clients’ shoes because being a partner implies you bring a desired expertise to the table that is not only valued but preferred to other resources available to your customer.

If you do not understand your clients business, you are no different than every other Account Manager or Consultant that knocks on his door. You are indistinguishable. You look the same and smell the same as every other guy out there pitching similar gear.

Failing to understand your potential clients business makes you lazy, stupid, or ignorant. I can fix ignorant, the rest of you are on your own.

With the wealth of information at your WWW fingertips you should have a basic understanding of your clients business before making the call. With a little bit of reading you can even get up to speed pretty quickly on your clients industry and any news about his company in the last year.

If you want to be perceived as being smart, ask smart questions. Take some time to write down some questions ahead of time that will not only demonstrate you are not an idiot but will actually begin to give you a better understanding of the type of environment you client faces.

If you ask “So, what do you do here” you should be show the door with a size 10 footprint on your backside.

Want to know why the best reps in your office can actually get their clients on the phone when they call them? It’s because the client places some value in what that representative has to say.

Or, of course, there is always the possibility that the client could have just accidentally answered the wrong line.

Be helpful, be entertaining, add value if you want your client to consider you valuable.

Right now, think about what you typically say to a prospect in a first meeting. Gut check time. Would you really want to sit there listening to that for an hour?

If not, change what you say. Don’t be boring. Bring value or just don’t go.

The client gets absolutely no value out of the initial questions you ask on an account call.  He only tolerates the questions because he assumes there will be some value coming from your yapping at some point to make it all worth it.

Don’t disappoint.

If you have a story where you have legitimately brought the value, I want to hear it. If you have a story where you got schooled, but learned a good lesson, I want to hear that, too.

Several years ago, on one of my account calls I got an opportunity to tour the Kansas City General Motors plant. Trains brought raw steel in one end of the plant and through a maze of conveyors, yellow robots, and factory workers 95 new cars an hour rolled out the other end.

To me there are a lot of similarities between a manufacturing facility and a sales organization. Just like an assembly line, sales is a process that takes time to ramp up, to develop skills, time to develop relationships, and time to begin to deliver forecasted business.

From a standing start it can be painful to get sales teams in place and productive, but once the momentum turns in your favor a seasoned sales team can be a revenue generating fire hose. Just point, hang on, and let err rip!

For every management team out there with a sales cycle of any length, look at your sales team as a manufacturing facility and each rep as a little sales factory.

Sales factories do not need typically need much in the way of resources to be successful, but with some attention in some key areas, efficiency can be dramatically increased.

1. Sales needs raw materials in the form of leads. You can ask the sales factories to generate their own leads but understand that time unloading the train cars means less time being spent sending products out the door.

2. Tie marketing resources directly to sales efforts. Build email, direct mail, web, client testimonial videos and any other form of make sense marketing that will help the sales factories churn out revenue. The key here is to make sure the marketing message and the message the sales team is sending is at the very least the same and hopefully wildly complimentary of one another.

It would be a mistake to think of every marketing dollar spent as a dollar wasted. Marketing and advertising expenses, in some instances, can be directly offset by a reduction in the real cost of acquiring a new client by the sales department.

3. Analyze the activities of your sales team. Identify the non/low revenue generating activities that can be eliminated, ones that can be retasked to a more cost effective sales resource, or automated altogether.

For example, in one sales organization I noticed we were spending $27 on every email being sent by one particular rep.

Each email was extensively thought out with key phrases chosen beautifully but it was taking him over 30 minutes to craft each unique email.

Taking a step back and looking across the entire team, I found we were massively duplicating our efforts crafting emails. The messages were unique to the rep writing them, off message, and collectively eating 20% of almost every sales day, touching a painfully small portion of the market base.

The solution was to look at our outgoing emails, evaluate what the team was spending 80% of their time trying to communicate and crafting a variety of templates that were on message, could be personalized, and met with the approval of the sales team. Simple stuff, but that move effectively added half a sales rep to the team in terms of time and sales for nothing.

Look at your sales organization like it is an assembly line; make sure that internal processes and or inadvertent obstacles are not impacting your sales team’s acquisition of leads or the sales they are cranking out.

The last and most important thing I can say is do not do this in a vacuum.

Engage your sales team, solicit their feedback. Effective ways to get more sales are in their best interest as well. 

Negotiating a strong compensation package for yourself in any role, but especially business development, can be a two edged sword.

On one hand you have sliced yourself a nice slice of base with a healthy heaping of commission, but on the downside if you have trouble putting your money where your mouth is, your compensation package could make you a particular juicy target when your company is looking to trim the fat.

 What should you do about it?  You should avoid becoming a target in the first place

If your mouth and sales skills have landed a particularly rich compensation package above and beyond some of your peers you darn sure better produce to a standard beyond yours peers as well.

 You might also want to make sure the level of production you need hit is even possible with your existing sales methodology.

 Many years ago I made that mistake.  I managed to work myself into an exceptional compensation package, and managed to lose sight of reality just long enough to agree to some stratospheric sales targets.

 I completely missed the fact that using my current sales strategy those new targets were a mathematical impossibility.  In retrospect, if I could have suspended the rule that there are only 24 hours in a day or my occasional need for sleep and a good bath, I MIGHT have been able to pull it off.

 While I am smarter today, I am still not smart enough to bend time and space to meet my sales objectives.  Sure, I could have gone the safe route and negotiated a smaller compensation package but that would have taken a large degree of the challenge and fun out of the journey.

 Placed in that situation today I would work backward from my lofty goals and determine what changes I would need to make on a daily basis to make sure my goal was well in line at year end.   Those changes could be as simple as making a few more calls each day or as difficult as pulling a Tiger Woods and completely revamping my sales swing so to speak.

 Either way, the experience would make me better at what I do and earn me a heady title typically reserved for laundry detergent, such as “new and improved” or “new more powerful formula!“

  The only draw back I see from this line of thinking is that by hitting those crazy numbers, next years’ budget will be crazy number + 10% and it will be time to revamp that swing again.

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