Sales Laundry

Archive for the ‘Sales Training’ Category

As a sales person you need to read “What does better mean?” It is a very short article by Seth Godin that will take you one minute at the most to learn a lesson it took me a long time to figure out.

 His message is aimed at marketing types, but the message hit me right between the eyes in its simplicity.

 Which is better Microsoft Office or Open Office?  Google or Live?  Firefox or Chrome?  Coke or Pepsi?  McDonalds or Burger King?  Best Buy or Circuit City?  Ok, winner declared on that last one.

 While you may be selling version 2.0 or version 10, just because Marketing, the CEO, you, your Sales Manager, your mother and the mailman all say it is better absolutely does not mean that it actually IS better to the one person that matters.  That would be the one making the purchase.

 So the next time you find yourself thinking  “How could they not see that our solution was OBVIOUSLY better?” you should have a better answer as to what went wrong than the one you have today.

 You thought you were selling something that was obviously better, you just did not make sure it was obviously better to the buyer.

In the battle of which is better, the buyers “better” always wins.

As a little boy I had a bicycle that looked like Evel Knievel’s motorcycle, at least to my young eyes. More than anything I wanted to go as fast as Evel did on his great jumps, but no matter how fast I peddled I could not achieve Evel speed. Heck, I could not even outrun the neighbor’s sheep dog with his perpetual desire to tear off my leg and eat my bicycle tire.

Then one day my brilliant friend Billy explained leverage to me with a single gesture. He pointed to a radio tower on top of a huge hill near our neighborhood.

Sitting atop the hill and looking down the road as it curved out of sight near the bottom, I still remember being very excited.  I was ready to swallow my fears and fly down that hill in a speedy white blur in my quest to be like Evel Knievel, a man I later discovered was in the Guinness Book of World Records for having 37 broken bones among other things.) I was so excited I never stopped to figure out how I was going to slow down once I achieved the Speed of Light before crashing through the dead end barriers at the bottom of the hill. My mother would have been horrified.

With a grin and a degree of terror I started peddling. Very shortly the leverage provided by the downhill slope pushed the speed of my bicycle beyond my ability to peddle any faster. I simply could not keep up. I was no longer the engine for my bicycle, I was merely a passenger experiencing a fantastic white knuckle ride.

I am not sure if it was the blazing speed or the sheer terror of the thrill ride, but somehow I failed to make the curve in the road half way down the hill and went zooming down a rocky cactus filled trail, straight through the trees, eating pine needles and small branches until I hit a very large rock which separated me from my bicycle seat and turned me into a rolling human boulder for the last 50 yards or so as my bicycle somehow managed to pass me, stay on two wheels and smash into the back of a house at the bottom of the hill.

Needless to say I lived. That was my first lesson in leverage. Lose focus for even a second and all that leverage you built will throw you in the bushes (scare a Chihuahua and smash a potted plant or two.)

My second lesson came later as I learned how to Sell Down Hill and multiply my own sales efforts to reach sales numbers I could not reach on ability alone.

What is “Sales Leverage” or “Selling Down Hill?”

Sales Leverage is art of making every subsequent sale easier than the last at an ever increasing rate of speed.

How do you “Sell Down Hill,” or use “Sales Leverage?”

Sales Leverage is accomplished by selling a product and using any or all “multipliers” like the buyer himself, his reputation, his influence in the market, his reference, publicity or message to sell the next product in that same market a little bit easier.

Sell a product into two different silos of customers and the two sales can’t help one another. Sell a product to two people in the same market with the same problem and you can leverage those sales to help you find the third. The recognition from the first two sales, used correctly, can act as a small multiplier for the third sale in the same group, solving a similar problem.

Simple Example of Leverage: Say you are selling paint. You sell a can of paint to a local portrait artist and a second artist, seeing the beautiful work of the artist that bought the paint, comes to you to buy a can of his own. You have established some leverage.

Example of a Sale with No Leverage: You sell a can of paint to a local portrait artist. Later you sell a can of paint to a house painter. You get no leverage because the reputations and opinions of the respective customers do not matter to one another.

Staying tightly focused in one niche will provide additional benefits that can also act as business multipliers in their own right. Achieve dominance in a niche and your margins improve and you establish an expertise gap between yourself and your competitors that do not share your focus.  Your expertise in one niche will allow you to expand organically into new markets as customers flock to your expertise, and eventually your name will become synonymous with your niche in your market.

It only makes sense to have your past sales helping you make new ones, especially at a time when sales can be hard to come by.

As always, I look forward to your own thoughts.

Image courtesy of gettyimages

Two minutes into a conversation with a good friend, who works for a major national insurance provider, our casual banter took a sharp turn into a series of rants about the technology industry, incompetent sales professionals, ignorant project managers and grossly inadequate deployment teams.

 I had some time to spare so I just listened until finally she took a deep breath, blinked, looked up at me and said “Sorry about that.”

 Two years ago her company decided to gut their technology infrastructure and start over with a major ERP software package.  The plan was to completely integrate their organization in one mass of technology and human efficiency.  Unfortunately, two years later it was still a work in progress, and missed milestones were being measured in quarters, not days or weeks.

 I am certain the account management team thought they had struck gold landing this marquis account, and were already looking for ways to leverage this win into their next opportunity.  In actuality, all they have really struck is one big fat nerve that has an entire organization throwing them under the bus at every opportunity. 

 So what turned a fantastic win for the sales team and the entire company into a life sucking vortex?

In a word, implementation.

 When the implementation team began mapping the existing processes in the organization to mirror in the software they made one fundamental mistake that derailed the entire project on day 1. 

 They built their process map primarily from the information collected from executive and departmental management not the actual people doing the work.  The only input from the front line users came by way of survey forms.

 If they would have interviewed the front line team members and mapped their work processes then confirmed with management and integrated new efficiencies, moving to pilot phase and final implementation would have been a much simpler affair.

 So what is the lesson?  Account Managers, stay engaged until deployment is complete because you have a vested interest in things going well as a hunter or farmer.  What should have been a great sales win leading to many more for this team is instead a disaster they cannot shovel dirt over fast enough.  The next big mistake would be to bury this, you should parade this “loss” and the lessons learned, but that is a different post.

 Sales Managers, the impact of this cluster will never show up directly on a forecast, but it can be an invisible force working against your team morale, your ability to leverage future sales, and your reputation.  Watch for the signs as you performance manage your sales team, evaluate their forecasts and committed numbers for the next few quarters.  I would advise pushing for bigger committed numbers over the next several quarters to counter any fallout or delays this black eye might introduce.

 For the implementation side?  Simple analogy.  Design the new wrench based on what the guy who actually uses the wrench says he needs, not what his manager, a guy that will never use the wrench, says he needs. 

Image courtesy of http://www.all4humor.com

I was reading an interesting article this morning on child behavior, more specifically why toddlers don’t necessarily do what they are told. According to the research, three year olds don’t think like the rest of us.

For everyone older than three, if you realize it is cold outside you can think ahead and grab your coat before you head out the door. The three year old, however, has a different mental process. The three year old HAS to run outside, experience the cold, retrieve the memory of where his coat is, and then go get it.

As I continued to think, though, the article gave me a potential explanation for some curious customer interactions I have seen over the years.

I have seen clients trust their Account Managers recommendation enough to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hardware and software, but then slash the recommended implementation and training budget thus hobbling the deployment before it even begins.

Curiously, what were two of the top 5 things customers were most unhappy about after their deployments?  Perceived poor implementation and insufficient end user training.

Why does your customer “hear” you and order the hardware and software but then selectively ignore you on the topics of implementation and training?

In short, because the customer, like the three year old, either can’t register what you are saying,  does not have the frame of reference on which to fully comprehend the question, let alone make an informed decision or just does not trust your recommendation in this area. He may very well have to experience the pain, then seek the remedy.

More specifically in these instances, I see two possibilities.

Your client does not take your recommendation because you have not established an unwavering trust in the areas of implementation and training to override his lack of understanding of the potential ramifications.

Or.

Because you are perceived as an expert in hardware and software, an area where the client acknowledges he has little knowledge, but are also perceived as less than an expert, or worse yet, a corporate shill, in implementation and training, where the client may feel he has some relevant expertise.

The resolution is similar for both.

Put the same level of planning and forethought into discussing the training and implementation as you put into the discussion about your core offering. When you do discuss training and implementation, discuss hard numbers from other similar implementations, with references if necessary, to build the same level of trust you built on your core offering.

Give me your thoughts on this “Theory of 3.”

Image courtesy of http://seo2.0.onreact.com/

I got this email today from one of the LinkedIn groups I am associated with trying to sell me outsourced services for my business.  I opened it up, read the first three lines and deleted it.

 Then I decided to pull it back out and see if I could improve on the efforts of the original sales person and make a sales lesson out of it.  I am ignoring the spelling/gramatical mistakes as I am not an English teacher, I am a VP of Business Development.  The names have been changed to protect the sales or marketing knucklehead that wrote it. 

 

The Original – feel free to skip ahead as I could not get past the first 3 lines of this email on my first pass.

 HEADLINE: For Possible Business Collaboration / Oppurtunities

 Dear Mr.Val, 

I represent ABC Company, an offshore based services outsourcing Organization. We help our world-wide clients with our outsourced services such as;

Global HR Services – All Technologies, All Business Domains, All Business skills, At all levels of expertise & Knowledge.
- Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO),
- Worldwide Contractor staffing – Offshore/Remotely working resources/Onsite resources
- Online/Remote/Onsite Training & Development -Technology & non Technology training, e-learning courses development & Administration, Monitoring & Managing Training needs etc.
- Payroll Processing
- Employee records maintenance, & verifications
- Travel &, Accommodation
- HR policies & strategies
- Market /Competitor research
- Employees Compensation & Benefits
- Performance Appraisals processing, Administration & Management.

In addition, ABC Company helps worldwide organizations in the following areas;
1. Information Technology services (IT solutions development, customization, integration, Migration, upgrading, Implementation, Maintenance, Support etc. – All Technologies & Business Domains

2. Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO services – (a) Engineering – Mechanical, Civil, Architectural, structural b) Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO – all skills) c) Technical Writing & Communications d) Remote infrastructure Management (RIM – Monitoring & Managing any IT resources remotely, Technical Help desk, Systems & Database Administration, support, e) Animation, 2D, 3D modeling etc.)

3. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO – Document processing, Data entry, help desk, Data analytics, Data/market/IP research, Billing, verifications, Transcriptions etc, Outbound/Inbound Calling services etc – All Business domains and skills)

4. Bioinformatics (Contract/Collaborative Research & Development, Consulting, Life Sciences Software Applications & Tools, Data Mining/Data Analysis, Data & Applications Integration. Clinical Trial I/Medical informatics, LIMS, Internet/Intranet Applications, Multimedia & Virtual Reality Applications, Education & Training)

We have seen the following benefits accruing to our clients from our services;

1. We have a large team of highly qualified, experienced, talented, efficient, young and enthusiastic resources to support your organization in any of the areas shown above.
2. Our teams work as an extended team of onsite teams of our customers, thereby adding more strength and bandwidth and increase your teams’ skills and servicing capabilities.
3. Our resources can work on a 24x7x365 basis; our turn-around time for our service is very short. In most cases, the output will be in your inbox when you reach office the next day morning
4. We help our customers in cost savings of as much as 30-60% on case to case basis
5. We can provide our resources in good numbers at a short notice, and quickly ramp-up to meet your business needs.
6. Our clients save the hassles of constantly searching around for resources, every time, a task needs to be accomplished.
7. Our teams bring to the table, a very strong technical & English Communication (verbal & written) skills, highly professional & helping attitude, business ethics, services delivery expertise & commitment

I would be very glad to know, if ABC Company can be of any help and support to your organization or any of your client organizations, in any of the areas shown above please. I appreciate your time.

My Version

HEADLINE:  Are You Running Your Business or is Your Business Burying You?

 ABC Company helped me save my business!  ABC helped me identify why my operations costs were increasing even as our sales were slowing down.  ABC handles the backend of my operation so I can focus on bringing in new sales.

 Jay Richards, JR Enterprises (VIDEO CLIP:  Jay talks about ABC Company)

 Val,

Imagine I gave you a magic wand that let you eliminate every aspect of your business that you don’t enjoy, or that just seems to take your focus away from the things you feel you need to be doing.

 How much better would your business be if you enjoyed everything you did and had the time to focus on growing your business?

 What could you do if all of that extra weight was lifted off your shoulders?

 My name is Val King and I specialize in helping guys like you offload all the excessive weight that keeps your business from soaring.

 It is not magic, though, it’s our business. 

 Here are the Top 5 things our customers typically ask us to offload for them.

 Human Resources.

Payroll.

Insurance & Benefits Programs.

IT Services & Help Desk.

Billing & Collections.

Call me at 800-xxx-xxxx and let’s identify the Top 5 things weighing down your business.

If it makes sense, I will offload your Top 5 list for Free for a few weeks so you can experience our brand of magic and experience the impact you can have on your business once that excess weight is gone.

Val 

 ABC Company manages all of the time consuming aspects of my business that I hated.  Our business is growing again and I spend my days doing what I love.  Thanks ABC.

 Dave Johnson, Johnson Medical (VIDEO CLIP:  Dave talks about ABC Company)

LESSONS LEARNED

The original email reads like a laundry list, these guys are into everything from 3d animation to Life Sciences and Bioinformatics.  They list a lot of capabilities but this sales guy has no idea what my problems are, so he just lists everything they do in this email to make sure they cover every sales base possible.

LESSON:  Research your customer and avoid firing a shotgun email like this one.  Narrow your focus to what you are absolutely best at. 

The intent of this extensive list of services is to show me that they can help me in many different areas of my business with a huge stack of sales offerings and services.  However, I read this feeling that they could not possibly do all of this well.  I have no way of knowing which sales offering is their strongest, nor do I want to take the necessary time it would take to figure it out, so my instinct is to hit the delete key.

LESSON:  Avoid the temptation to send out a laundry list disguised as a marketing email.  It weakens your message and erodes some of your credibility.

The original email establishes no credibility for this company.  I have never heard of them and the only person telling me how great they are is the sales guy.

LESSON:  If the only person saying your company is good is the sales person then no one is saying anything good about your company as far as I am concerned as a customer.  Use legitimate references I can call or for a bigger bang for the buck, use video references I can watch.

There is no tie to what any of these services do for me, the guy that is supposed to pay for this fabulous service.  The sales professional should paint some sort of picture of how my life as the business owner or how my company might be better if I just offload this stuff to them.

LESSON:  It is your job as the salesperson or as the organization sending the email to explain to me how I will benefit from your product.  If you don’t make that connection, don’t expect me to respond.

There is too much text in this flippin’ email (and probably this post.)  The text is small, there are acronyms all over the place (RPO, KPO, LPO, RIM, and LIMS.)

LESSON:  Be as short and concise as possible as you are imposing on my time with your email and use language that is plain and free from industry jargon.

They use the work “all” eight times in the email.  Example:  ”Global HR – ALL Technologies, ALL Business Skills, at ALL levels of experience and knowledge”

LESSON:  Horsefeathers.  I don’t believe it.  I will delete it.  

There are 7 stated benefits for me the customer.  Some are ridiculous adjective fests…

Benefit 1:  Large team that is highly qualified, experienced, talented, effiecient, enthusiastic and as if that was not enough they are also described as being young.  I don’t know about you, but I feel better already. 

Some are not benefits to me at all; they are minimum standards like…

Benefit 7:  Our teams bring very strong technical and English communication skills.  

LESSON:  It is only a benefit if it benefits me.  Write your email as if you are standing in my shoes, not trying to talk me out of them.

This was the closing line.  “I would be very glad to know if ABC Company can be of any help and support to your organization…in any of the areas shown above…  I appreciate your time.”

When I read this closing line what I get out of this email and what the salesman wants me to get out of this email are clearly two different things.  I am sure the salesman would like me to look at the list like some sort of ala carte menu, make a few selections and get back to him so he can work up a quote.

What I read is that the salesman at ABC Company is too lazy to figure out what my business is or what I do all day.  He has effectively hit me with a list of SIC codes and a Scan-Tron asking me to color in the little circle next to my selection with a #2 pencil and get back to him.

LESSON:  Figure out what I need to buy before you try to sell me something.  It seems to work better that way.  If you are going to be lazy and not do the research then don’t send the email at all.

 

Got a suggestion of your own to improve on my improvement?  See another lesson here worth covering?  Add a comment.

“Cleaverly disguided” photo – courtesy of  http://rlv.zcache.com

“English photo” courtesy of - http://www.flickr.com/photos/40741986@N00/399082864

“2 shoes” photo – courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/conqenator/2952567054/ 

 

My 8 year old daughter has some basic responsibilities around the house.  One of which is to keep the bathroom she uses cleaned up  (i.e. cleaning up the toothpaste that gets loose from a wild night of bedtime brushing, rounding up rowdy bath toys, swapping clean towels for the dirty ones, etc.)

One day, with inspired motivation, my daughter decided it was time to give the bathroom a serious cleaning to the standard set by her mother and well beyond the mundane challenges of wrestling with escaped toothpaste.

Once she completed the task to her satisfaction she flew through the house, rattling the stairs on her descent like a herd of stampeding cattle on her way to tell us of her accomplishment.

She was grinning ear to ear, beaming with pride and self satisfaction as she talked about how she cleaned the bathroom the way Mommy did it, not just the kid way.

At my daughter’s announcement, my wife was off like a herd of equally shocked and stampeding cattle, make that graceful gazelles, to survey the damage in the upstairs bathroom.

I knew what was coming next.  Ten seconds later, with precision matched only by the Master Clock at the U.S. Naval Observatory, I heard it.

My daughters name was called with a stern tone and frequency formally set aside by the FCC for the exclusive use of angry mothers.  When I was a boy this broadcast typically originated from my front porch and could be heard for blocks in all directions.

I watched my daughters face, beaming with pride mere seconds ago, register a look of shock and horror, as if she had just watched me punt Fluffy the cat over the back fence. 

We resolved the issue and restored order, but suffice to say my daughter would have rather been airborne with Fluffy than make the death march to her mother upstairs.

Given some time to think and laugh about the situation I began to draw some parallels to managing sales professionals. 

We continually reinforce the idea that our daughter should stretch herself; try new things and new foods for that matter.  We tell her don’t be afraid to fail, that is how you learn. 

We tell our sales representatives the same thing and have for years, give or take the “try new foods” part.

My daughter took our direction.  My daughter felt she had mastered the basics and was ready to stretch.  She felt she could do more and had the desire to prove it even if it meant breaking a rule or two in the process.

Was she rewarded for her attempt to stretch herself and hit the higher standard?  No, just the opposite in fact, being blasted for the final result somewhere shortly after I heard my wife exclaim “You put bleach, where???”

In trying to do more she found herself in more trouble than she would have been in for doing nothing or just meeting the standard set before her that she found unacceptably low.

A great opportunity to reinforce her positive behaviors (even if the end result was wildly off target,) show some appreciation for the effort and initiative, and coach her on some specifics to help her improve next time were lost.

Instead, she could have walked away with an attitude of “My work is not appreciated.  I tried my best.  Fine, from now on I am just doing the basics, it is not worth it to do anything more.”

I am not suggesting that the final results are unimportant.  What I am stating is that the final result, while being very important, is not the only measurement that counts in developing a sales organization.

Handled correctly, these opportunities can truly help you develop the middle 60% of your sales team and help some middle performers move to top performer status. 

Handled poorly, the same sales professional that dared to stretch himself to achieve can become an uninspired team member doing the minimum, working themselves out of your organization, and increasing churn.

Look beyond the end result.  Reinforce the right behaviors even if they deliver the wrong result.

After being whacked upside the head by my daughters misguided initiative the lesson seems clear, minus the small stars floating in a circle above my head.

 As a manager you can make a huge impact in your sales organization by taking a step back, recognizing not just the end result, but the behaviors that led to that end result and carefully selecting the tools and response that will help you develop your sales organization without gutting personal initiative or weeding out their desire for growth.

Image courtesy of cutiepie-photography.com

 

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.

Q:  Help!  I am marketing a new sports bat training device through independent sales reps, sales are improving, but slowly, and I need to speed up the process.  Any suggestions?

  

A:  Congratulations on getting from patent to production.  That is no small accomplishment. 

It sounds like sales are happening, but each sale is happening in a vacuum, and not having much of an impact on overall sales velocity. 

Pick a niche in your target market. Maybe it is college baseball, high school baseball, or pro, maybe it is rehab facilities, or possibly coaches, and put your available resources toward owning that niche (ala Crossing the Chasm) to begin to create some leverage out of each sale, that will make the next sale just a little bit easier. 

That should start to give you the multiplier on existing sales you are looking for. 

The next key is finding the right individuals in your selected niche that can add another multiplier to your existing sales with their credibility and influence. 

Look at that niche market and find the people who have influence over the potential customers in that niche. Instead of focusing your sales on anyone that will buy one, focus on the handful of guys that carry enough influence to multiply the leverage benefit of each individual sale. 

Where do you find these guys? Look at trade organizations, governing organizations, boards of directors and consultants for major baseball sporting goods manufacturers. Or it could be as simple as finding that old guy that everybody knows who has been around the game forever and knows everybody who is or was anybody in the game. Look to one of the statesmen of the game along the lines of the late Buck O’Neil as a fine example. 

I would also look to entrepreneurial ex-baseball players with hall of fame reputations. Look for the guys that are out of the game, have the contacts you need and are building business empires of their own. Nolan Ryan is one that comes to mind. 

I had to make a lot of assumptions here, but I hope that helps.