Sales Laundry

Archive for April, 2009

Reading the book The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership, by James Hunter this past weekend, I ran across two simple company organization charts that brought me back to a previous post on customer service and posed an interesting question I want to get your thoughts on.

 

Who do we really serve in our businesses?

A current trend in sales organization design is to be customer centric.  The customer centric sales model puts the customer at the center of the sales process in an effort to align customers’ needs and buying preferences with the way we design our sales tools and create value.

Add this to our “quality customer service” initiatives, “the customer is always right” statements, and customer service surveys that were once rare, but now seem to have attached themselves via URL to the bottom of every major grocer, retailer and restaurant chain’s receipts in recent memory.

All of this makes sense to me, especially today when it has become clear the power of knowledge once wielded by sales teams has shifted decidedly in favor of the customer researching via the Internet.  Coupled with that, customers continue to benefit from splintered product categories offering more product choices, wider selections, and more competitors fighting for dollars.

 

On this information alone I would have declared the customer “King”, but then I saw this:

 

 

It looks to me like to a large extent our Employees are serving our Supervisors who are serving our Middle Managers who are serving our Vice Presidents, who are serving the CEO, who is presumably serving the Board and the shareholders/investors.  The remarkable part is, by design, either everyone has their back to the customer or the customer is actually supposed to serve the company!

If customers are truly our focus, or as a corollary, if we should focus on serving our employees so that they will serve our customers, shouldn’t the model look more like this?

 

 

With this model, the CEO serves his customers, the Vice Presidents, who are in turn serving the Middle Managers, serving Supervisors who are focused on the health and wellbeing of the Employees so they can give their undivided attention to serving the Customer.

 It was wisely said a long time ago that a man cannot serve two masters.  So who do you serve?

 Are we serving the management team that writes our checks or the people that give the management team the money to make sure our checks don’t bounce?

Opportunities pop up from time to time to make small seemingly unperceivable cuts in product quality that will bring more profit to the bottom line.

 The problem with that strategy is that in the “everyone connected to everyone” information age we live in today, we notice these things and we tell others.

1937 Disney created a masterpiece in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .

1959 Disney released Sleeping Beauty. 

1967 Disney released the Jungle Book.

1970 Disney released Aristocats , their first release after Walt Disney died.

1973 Disney released Robin Hood.  

1991 Disney released Beauty and the Beast 

 

…and in 2009 someone noticed something odd, built a video clip to capture it, and we all began to talk about it.

A global brand made a decision to cut a few corners many years ago that today seems a bit unbelievable and more than a little disappointing.  Will we still go to the theme parks?  Yes, because for most of us, the value of watching our children immerse themselves in the “Disney experience” means more to us than knowing our own childhood experiences were a little more smoke and mirrors than even the adult in us could have predicted.

While the cut in quality may not result in significant sales loss or lower than expected revenues, it will certainly move at least a few Mousekateers to lower their opinion of Disney and hang up their mouse ears. 

 

Why is product knowledge training painful on so many levels?

 

 Customers don’t want it unless it is in context to their situation.  Sales professionals don’t want to spend their time learning volumes of information they are never going to use.  Vendor representatives and Sales Managers don’t want to build the training materials or dedicate time to conducting the training, and no one wants to pay for it, citing cost or the money wasted when a trained sales professional leaves the company.

 So how could we make the transfer of product knowledge better for everyone involved?

 

What if we changed the way we train new sales professionals?  Teaching them about the industries and customers our products serve.  Teaching them the most common issues our products and services fix and teaching them the specific questions to ask to uncover prospect problems and questions to ask that point to a feature or competitive advantage for our product.

 We could teach some product basics, but no hard core product knowledge.

 

 What if we built product knowledge into an application accessibly via laptop, the web, or mobile phone that had all the data aligned by questions we train on and sorted/searchable by keyword, question, problem, solution, specific question, industry or application?

Pay once for building the application and maybe for loading updates, instead of paying to load every new sales professional and subsequently reload every sales persons head with knowledge with every model transition and new product rollout.

 The sales professional still learns the product information but learns it dynamically, as he is asked for it.  Learning this way also lets him/her associate the question, the context and the answer together in a meaningful way that completes the leap from raw product to actionable customer benefiting knowledge aiding in sales efforts.

 This would certainly put an end to the problem of having a sales professional full of product information with either no training or ability to ask good questions and make the product knowledge useful. 

 This could shorten the onboarding/ramp up time for a new sales professional.

 

Would it work?

 The smoke test would be if the sale tool was able to find, gather and serve up information quickly enough, and in a meaningful way while the sales professional sat across from the prospect.

 Give me your thoughts?  Does this exist somewhere? How does your company load product information into your head?  Is it effective? 

Image courtesy of liq.wa.gov

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of.  If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

 

Question:  What is the most effective form of prospecting for business machine outside sales?

 I am new to outside sales and my company does not provide much training.  They had me watch some Tom Hopkins videos from the 1980’s, but there was nothing on prospecting. There also are no senior sales people from whom I could get information on what has worked for them. 

The company I work for is a multi-line dealership; we focus mainly on X Brand and Y Brand copiers, although we sell several other brands and types of equipment.  We have small business customers to global oil companies.  My plan is to get as many new customers as possible, but the cold calling (door to door) I have done hasn’t generating any positive results. I am in a very competitive market with 7 other copier dealerships in a city of approximately 300,000 people.

A) What is the most effecting form of prospecting? 

B) What questions should I ask potential clients when prospecting? 

C) Is a script really necessary when cold calling and if so how do I write one that doesn’t make me sound like every other salesman?

  

Answer:  A) The most effective form of prospecting is using referrals. Outside of that, the best form is the warmest form of prospect you can get. (People you know, friends of people you know, contacts from reference accounts with your company, etc.)  A cold phone call, or as is typical in my area for business machine salesmen, a cold walk in the door is the most difficult. 

B) The questions you should ask depend heavily on the client and what problems you are trying to solve.

C) A GOOD script can be very beneficial in giving you a repeatable process. What is in the script and how you say the script will determine if you sound like every other salesman?  Here is one good cold call approach.

 

It looks like you have some transactional customers or customers that understand your products and shop mainly on price and you have some consultative customers that might be looking for your assistance to help them develop some solutions to their problems with document security, workflow, document management, etc.

 For this discussion, I am focused more on the transactional customers and some ideas to get in the door.

 In general, if you know where you are going to be cold calling the next day, I would spend some time the night before looking these companies up on the internet, reading any press releases or news about them or anything on the person you might want to meet with so you can come in with an idea of what they do and how you might be able to help their business, as opposed to just stumbling in and hoping for the best.

 Here are some ideas that might help you stand out…

 Looking for angry copier stories

 Create a contest every week or every month, looking for the best angry copier stories and give gift certificates, dinner for 2, toner, spa treatment, etc. as prizes.

 Take a pocket tape recorder or a Snap HD camcorder, depending upon you budget and your ability to pull it off, and walk into these businesses telling them you are looking for angry copier stories of the worst, meanest, paper eating, toner spewing, cranky, always needing repairs copiers in town.

 Record their stories, and get the details on the copier you need to help sell them a new one (brand, age, clicks, monthly repair bills, how often it breaks, etc.)

 Ask for referrals to other people they know that have angry copiers.

 To make it fun, go in with a couple of photos of beater copiers with good stories about them if asked.

 Every week/month go back and award the certificate to the place with the worst copier, take a photo/video and put it on your website so your contest can build a little credibility.

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 Talk to security guards or building management of larger office buildings and see if they will let you set up a show in some vacant space.  Offer up a 1 day rental of the space as a last resort.

 Go around to every office in the building with a flyer letting them know there will be a show on a certain date and time.  If you have the budget, cater in lunch, if not provide snacks, door prizes or some compelling reason to show up.

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 Put ads in the paper/Craigslist and sell your trade in copiers.  Use this as a lead source.

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 Look for good copier technicians.  While cold calling, tell them you are trying to locate good copier technicians and wondered if their guy was any good. Find out who he is, who he works for and a number if you can. Then ask questions about him like, when he fixes your copier, does it stay fixed? How often does he have to come back out? Etc. 

Part 2 of the strategy is calling up the technicians and taking them to lunch if you can, and offer up referral fees for leads to where the broken beat up copiers are in town, regardless of brand.

Part 3 of this strategy is building up a short list of the best copier repair guys in town that you can (as an option) refer people to the best of the best if they are under contract for multiple years with a competitor.

Part 4, which is a bit out there, would be to setup a separate web page with reviews and rankings of the local copier repair guys. Advertise the URL to the people you talk to and let them give their feedback to help other office managers find and pick the best repair guys to keep their equipment running. Of course the site should be branded with your information all over the place to remind them of who is providing them with this fantastic information.

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Simple cost per page demonstration.  I don’t know what the numbers are today, but the last time I was looking at a copier it cost me 25 cents for every page that came out of an inkjet printer, a nickel for every page that came out of a laser printer and a little under a penny for every page that came out of a copier.

If the numbers still work, you could walk in and put a penny on the counter and a quarter, and when they ask what you are there for, point to the coins and say you are there to show them how to save 24 cents every time they push print.

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 Sponsor events that help show off your products. Help charities print flyers, contact the local dog catcher and offer to print flyers for lost family pets for free, print Christmas programs for churches, help the Girl Scouts sell some cookies. Provide volunteers/staffers with your card and put a small tagline on the bottom of every document you can print if you think you can pull it off. “Brochure printing provided by Dave T. Smith over at XXX Office Machine Co. 555-555-5555”

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A critical metric is contract expiration date, so set up events or put your dollars to work supporting other events and provide a service or something of value that would make someone want to go to the trouble of finding their contract expiration date and give it to you. Maybe free coffee and doughnuts, maybe a raffle, a free car wash on Saturday morning, etc.

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 Build a transactional referral program. On the bottom of every invoice, business card, mailer, technician work order, etc. include a flyer or information asking for referrals.

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Build a relationship referral program. Talk to your existing client base, your insurance agent, your barber, and anyone else that has been happy with your service and ask them if they would bring a friend or meet you for lunch with them, or introduce you at one of the events mentioned above.

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Analyze your territory and find the community leaders and active voices in the community and get your equipment in their hands as a trial or a demo where it makes sense. These could be civic organization leaders, church leaders, politicians, local media, school boards, etc. The point is to find the people that influence others in your community and get some of your equipment in their hands and point to them/use them as references.

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 Don’t know if it will fly in your business, but you might try offerings free contract audits. Help people out by evaluating their existing copier contracts making sure they are getting a fair deal, understand their usage guidelines, and know their expiration dates, etc., regardless of the brand. Make it a valuable service for them, not just a sales pitch. Maybe partner with a local leasing company to do an independent review or to look at aspects you might not be familiar with. Of course that leasing company should be using your equipment.

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Stay in contact with everyone you meet.  The number one car salesman in the world mailed out cards to everyone he met every month to make sure he stayed on the top of their heads when they started thinking about buying a new car. Read about him here…
http://tinyurl.com/d9kk2b

 Good Selling!

This week I have been doing some consulting with an east coast firm trying to help them out of a death spiral brought on by a perfect storm-like set of circumstances.

Reviewing the company data, this company built a high quality sales force that frankly I would love to have working for me. This company has amazing reference stories and some raving fans as customers that are more than happy to share their stories on the company’s behalf. While not a major household brand, this company has been involved in building some major sales initiatives and major technology deployments for some instantly recognizable brands.

So what happened?

This company lost some of its swagger and part of its identity over the past year as the economic downturn forced some key clients to close. Some projects lost funding, some account losses were a surprise, and everything negatively impacted cash flow. Compounding the issues are a handful of slow and no-pay accounts that are eating up cash reserves.

But none of those issues were the big problem, only symptoms leading to the problem they have today.

The real underlying problem is that the events that occurred put management in unfamiliar territory, second guessing every decision to the point of making no definitive decisions, and the lack of decisions degraded the situation into one of chaos.

There is nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the business that their existing sales team and customer base cannot help them work through, but they have to make the decision to move forward.

 

The company reached a point where it could not get out of its own way.

 

The more I thought about this company and their problem, the more I thought that there was a message here worth sharing with all of you.

When things go wrong we can get caught up in self-analysis that leads to paralysis, trying to figure out what we did wrong or what went wrong with the business model that shook the very foundations of the company.

 

Stop looking at the storm surrounding you and start looking at the vehicle that is going to get you out of it.

 

If you find a hole in your boat, fix the hole, don’t sink while trying to figure out how to build a whole new boat while at sea, in a storm. Have some faith in what you have built, have faith in the preparation you have put in, and in the proven processes that you have in place.

 

Assess problems for what they are, not the horrors that they might become.

 

Focus on your training. Focus on your experience. Focus on what’s right about what you are doing. I meet so many amazing people running great little companies that have taken for granted how talented they really are.

Are the times real scary for some? Yes. Are these challenges going to kill you? Only if you let them.

Inspire your team and stay focused. Don’t let a short term crisis force you to take your eye off your objectives. Set the vision. Choose a course of action, then do something really crazy like actually taking that course of action and begin building the momentum you will need to overcome every set of obstacles between you and your objectives.

 

A related story about Thomas Edison¹

1914 could have been called a difficult year for Thomas Edison.

 With the onset of World War One, Edison found himself in danger of being compelled to close his phonograph record factory.  Edison needed carbolic acid to make the records, and was the largest user of carbolic acid in the United States.  Edison’s primary supply was imported from England and Germany, and both countries had placed an embargo on carbolic acid because it was in great demand for making explosives.

 With no other sufficient supply available, Edison was faced with one of two choices.  Close the factory or invent something that could solve the problem.

 Edison chose the latter and invented an alternative method for making carbolic acid synthetically and put crews to work twenty four hours a day to build a carbolic acid production facility.  By the eighteenth day the factory was producing carbolic acid, within four weeks it was turning out a ton of it per day.

 Crisis averted, but the year was not yet over.

On December 9, 1914, a sixty-seven year old Edison watched as fire fighters fought a blaze that destroyed Edison Industries with a total loss exceeding $2 million and most of Edison’s life’s work.  Edison was only insured for $238 because the buildings were constructed of concrete and at the time were thought fireproof.  

Charles Edison, former Governor of New Jersey, tells of his concern as he looked for his father during the blaze.  “My heart ached for him, no longer a young man, everything being destroyed.”  Then he says, “My father spotted me and he called out, ‘Charles, Charles, run get your mother.  She will never see anything as beautiful as this fire as long as she lives.”

The next morning, Edison surveyed his charred dreams and crushed hopes.  As he stood amid the disaster, Edison was quoted as saying, “There is great value in disaster.  All our mistakes are burned up.  Thank God we can start anew.”

Edison followed up that statement with a decision to move forward, and a vision of what needed to be done.  Three weeks after the fire Edison Industries was manufacturing phonographs.  By December 31st of the following year, 1915, Edison had sold 95,889 phonographs on his way to what would become 845,228 phonographs sold and over 48,000,000 records.²

1.Thomas Edison story from Van Ekeren, Glenn The Speaker’s Sourcebook. New Jersey. Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1988.

2. Edison Industries sales figures from Meadowcroft, W.H. “Quantity of Disc Phonographs and Disc Records Sold.”

Radio-Phonograph Division Accounting Department Report (April 9, 1929) reprinted in The Edison Discography (1926-1929) available from Mainspringpress.com.

 

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“The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.”

Theodore Rubin

“The man who makes no mistake does not usually make anything.”

Edward Phelps

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way”

Ted Turner

Image courtesy of jonwashburn.com

Who is managing your sales force, your Sales Manager or your compensation plan?

If you said your compensation plan, the good news is you are in the majority. The bad news is your sales could likely improve 15-20% with a solid Sales Manager steering the ship.  Neil Rackham , in his book Rethinking the Sales Force: Redefining Selling to Create and Capture Customer Value, would say 17%.

When I find a Sales Manager that is giving honest effort but is not effective, it is usually because of one of these reasons.

1. The Sales Manager was your best sales professional and is still your best sales professional. Management? What management?
2. Most companies have a training program in place for new sales professionals and executive management, but few utilize any formal training for their Sales Managers. As a result, Sales Managers have no tools to help them manage the revenue production arm of the company, and run solely on gut instinct.
3. Sales Managers have a responsibility to complete a myriad of reports every week, with consequences for not getting them done. There is usually no compelling reason to make time for training or coaching exercises, and as such they don’t get done.
4. The Right Now. Sales performance is often measured on 30 day – 90 day increments on products and services with sales cycles that are much longer. No one dares to take their eye off the sales ball long enough to build in team development time.
5. The Sales Manager compensation model is out of line with company and/or the sales teams defined objectives.

Here are the first five tools I drop in my tool box when I am headed out to fix Sales Management related problems.

1. Put a “sales Manager” instead of a “Sales manager” in charge of your sales organization. Having the wrong person or personality type in the Sales Manager role is more often than not a significant part of the problem.
2. Train your Sales Manager. If you don’t have the budget, think of what an additional 15%+ in sales could do for your business.
3. Build training metrics into your Sales Manager performance measurements and make sure his/her workload will allow time to get the job done.
4. Build a model of continuous improvement into your sales process, making sure you do not shortchange your sales team’s growth and long term revenue potential for short term sales targets.
5. Align the Sales Manager job and compensation model with company goals to make sure a Sales Manager is watching and responding to the objectives and issues that are important to the company. Tie your Sales Managers compensation to the sales team and/or the sales professionals he is responsible for.

I want my Sales Manager to take care of his customers (the sales professionals he is responsible for) and keep the road clear of obstacles that might prevent them from doing their job.

I want my Sales Manager to be my eyes on the front line, making sure we are allocating our sales resources in the most efficient way possible to engage prospects and that he has and will use his authority to make necessary changes on the fly.

I want my Sales Manager continually engaged in enhancing or reinforcing the skill set of the sales team and identifying new ideas and best practices discovered by one sales professional and incorporating them into the entire sales team.

Put your Sales Manager to work growing your business instead of growing the stack of paper in your in-box. There is typically not another person in your organization that can have as much immediate impact for the dollar on your front line sales team as a well trained Sales Manager.

Have any Sales Management best practices or unique signs of spotting trouble?  I would love to hear them.

Image courtesy of  lumaxart

 

Note: This article was written by Chris Guillebeau.  I liked it, thought it was relevant to some of the experiences you have shared with me here,  so I am tacking it up for all to consume.

Regardless of what kind of work you do, it’s usually not difficult to set yourself apart by going beyond the status quo of being average.

All too many working environments are filled with all kinds of people who are just ambling through their jobs. Many don’t want to be there at all, and never miss a chance to let everyone know how much they’d rather be somewhere else.

Others are embarrassingly opportunistic, focused entirely on themselves and “what’s in it for them.” Their every move is built on pleasing the people they think will determine their future. Still others in most workplaces base their time and energy on the goal of just getting by. They do what they need to do, for the most part, but they rarely take risks and rarely excel.

Sadly, these characterizations are true even in a lot of “helping” professions– in academia, in non-profit organizations, in the clergy, and so on. Setting a goal of doing the least amount expected of you may have started in the corporate cubicle world, but the norms of mediocrity have since spread throughout most professions.

Fortunately, there is a clear alternative to ambling through your workday. The alternative is to be excellent, to make a huge difference in your working environment, help others do better, and increase your own workplace stock along the way.

Focus on these eight principles to become a superhero in pretty much any job:

Never turn down a project by saying, “That’s not in my job description.”

We’re often taught that high achievers carefully select the tasks and projects that they work on. This is true in the long run, but when you’re getting established somewhere, you shouldn’t be so selective. Instead, do the things that need to be done but that no one wants to do.

You can always point out later that you’ve done everything you’re supposed to do and a lot more, but don’t whine about your projects while they’re underway. If someone asks you to do something, it’s usually because they think you’ll do it well. Impress them and do it even better.

Focus externally and continually ask for feedback.

Ask your boss, your colleagues, and your subordinates the same question every couple of weeks: “What can I do better?” If they don’t give you a straight answer, they’re usually just being polite. Ask again.

Also ask all of these people, “How can I help you?” Spend time every day focusing on the people around you. Think about their needs and preemptively help them. Make it clear you’re not helping them so they can help you later; just make their lives easier and help them look good to others.

Build a strong team even if you’re not the boss, and be a leader no matter what your title is.

You don’t need to be in charge to be a team-builder. Just start doing it. Take notes at meetings and email them out to the participants. Begin asking follow-up questions: “Who will take responsibility for this? When will it be done?”

Leadership rarely involves telling people what to do. Instead, it’s usually about helping people and teams create synergy and accomplish great things by working together. You can do that without any title at all. When the time comes where you do need to tell someone what to do, they’ll listen to you if you have taken the time to build the team well.

You know you’ve been successful when people start looking to you for the answers even when more experienced or more senior people are around. If you’re not at a meeting and people notice your absence, that’s a good start. If they wait to begin the meeting until you can be located, that’s even better.

Propose and Support Amazing Ideas…

Think about how you can make your organization or your workgroup great. Think really big, but also think small—sometimes the most effective changes require relatively small shifts in behavior or perception. Ask others for ideas. Most people have them, but they often don’t know how to present them, or they feel shut down from a previous negative experience. Get the best ideas out of the best people, and start pitching for them.

…but don’t pitch your biggest ideas in a group meeting.

Your ideas will “travel” further if they have the support of others, and it’s much easier to get buy-in through individual meetings. This is why the “meeting before the meeting” is usually more important than the meeting. Test out your best ideas. Give them time to settle with others. Go to each key decision maker to share your idea before the real meeting starts.

Then at the meeting, introduce the idea by saying, “I mentioned this to a couple of people earlier…” Everyone you talked with earlier will feel validated that they were involved before the big meeting, so talk to as many people as possible.

After you’ve established some credibility, start a small but meaningful rebellion.

Make sure you pick something that is easy to win but still makes a positive difference for most of your colleagues. Good ideas are dress codes, mandatory but useless meetings, and any long-standing practices that don’t make sense. Start violating these norms, slowly but boldly. Because you’ve taken the time to establish credibility, your rebellion will be closely watched. And because you’ve picked something that’s easy to win but meaningful to others, you’ll have good support for it. After you achieve the change you were seeking, share the credit and plan your next rebellion.

Don’t get tangled up in long email threads.

Never be a slave to your Outlook folder. Check it twice a day, turn off the “ding” sound that alerts you to new mail, and set up an Action folder to process important items instead of continually looking through your Inbox. As an inexperienced leader who derived too much self-worth from my Outlook addiction, someone said to me once, “Chris, don’t try to be the fastest person to reply to these long email threads. Just take your time, listen to other people, and then contribute something meaningful.”

Work smarter and harder.

Yes, you should find ways to work smarter and avoid repetitive, monotonous tasks. But you should also work really hard. Show up early and leave late. After you’ve established some authority, you can get back to pacing yourself. It’s a lot better to have a reputation as a hard worker from the beginning. When you relax a little later, no one will notice.

If you feel threatened by someone, don’t show it.

Most people who lead by intimidation are quite insecure. Don’t reinforce their insecurity by pandering to it. Even when it’s working for them and you feel intimidated, never let them know. Instead, do your job, keep excelling, keep looking out for others, and eventually the tide will turn. You may even end up as their boss one day—it happens all the time.

***

These general tips below will also help:

Share Credit, Accept Blame. Many people try to pass the blame to others. It’s very different to say, it’s my fault. I’m sorry. Try sending an email with the subject “Hey everyone, I’m sorry” sometime and see what happens.

Compliment others every day. Do it by email, phone, notes, any way you can. Find out how people like to be complimented and do it the same way. Don’t make it trite. Most people know when you’re being genuine.

Go above and beyond. Deliver more than what’s expected. Don’t do it to be rewarded; do it because it really adds value.

***

Be excellent, and a remarkable thing will happen: by helping others look good and improving your overall environment, you’ll look good as well. You’ll do it without backstabbing and without doing stuff that has no real value. Instead, you’ll inspire others.

And then you’ll be a leader, just like John Quincy Adams said:

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

This is real leadership for any generation and any workplace. If you don’t yet know how you’ll change the world, this is a great way to start.

Image provided by allny.com