Sales Laundry

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Big or small, we should all be actively working to prevent our products and services from sliding in importance for our consumers and being recategorized as a low priority as our customers retrench and re-shuffle priorities in this new economic climate.

What are you doing to raise your profile with your prospects and customers, compelling them to spend their hard earned dollars with you instead of sitting on the sidelines waiting for better days?

In this downturn, some huge companies are pushing new innovations to enhance the buying experience.  A few others are trying some far reaching ideas to connect with customers in a meaningful and personal way to gently nudge them into continuing to purchase their products.

Previously, I have written about what Kellogg’s is doing to make a bowl of breakfast cereal more important by tying breakfast cereal to our children’s education.  I have also written about Domino’s Pizzas use of technology to enhance the pizza delivery experience.

Today I noticed Microsoft paired itself with the infamous Jack Welch and Suzy Welch as co-hosts of a new online program (everybodysbusiness.msn.com) delving headlong into the problems faced by brand name (Hertz & Domino’s Pizza so far) businesses.  Jack and Suzy guide a diverse executive group in identifying some real challenges the company faces and then leverage the groups collective experience to find some legitimate solutions in a very candid way that makes you the viewer feel like you are sitting in the boardroom with them, watching and listening to an honest conversation you would otherwise never get to hear.

With the help of Jack and Suzy, Microsoft delivers valuable entertaining content that stands on its own, but still manages to drive the company message and squeeze in a stealth mini case study.  I for one am happy to report I did not feel like I had just swallowed a twenty minute Microsoft infomercial.

After watching this was I compelled to run out and setup a server farm driven by Microsoft products?  No, but I now understand in a subtle way that a lot of the technology Domino’s has in place across almost all of their stores, including their powerful online pizza delivery system is built on Microsoft technology, so Microsoft can probably handle the needs of my business.  I am not certain, though, how Microsoft fits into the Hertz solution by watching the show.

I just consumed a Microsoft case study reframed as (and rightly so) as a content rich business dialog with Jack Welch, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Enough about Kellogg’s, Domino’s, and Microsoft, how can we make your product a more compelling purchase?  What can we tie your offering to that enhances you brand and ultimately sales?  How can we take a product that has dropped in priority with your buyers and get them snapping up your goods again?

I know several of you out there, so I am going to offer up a few ideas that will hopefully get you and everyone else reading this to expand your thinking.

Mortgage Industry. – Could you put together real/virtual seminars providing honest advice and resources for people struggling to pay their mortgage and help them save their homes?

If you could help me keep my home, or cross the great divide from renting to home ownership, helping me avoid the pitfalls along the way, you would earn my loyalty in a way the cheapest mortgage rate on Bankrate.com never could.

Copier/Office Machine Industry. – Every business of any size has some form of copier they bought/leased, right?  Could you setup business forums introducing clients that could benefit by doing business with each other?  Could you setup a lead exchange program identifying a need at one client business and passing that information along to another client business to potentially fill that need?

Bringing my business real leads and I just might be more likely to accept a slightly higher price for my supplies.  Real leads would certainly inspire my loyalty more than a cold-call walk-in four-legged (the new copier sales guy and his Sales Manager, typically) sales call ever could.

Can you think bigger?

Annual charity drives to collect reams of paper for a local school district or charity organization in your region?  Could you put together a toner cartridge recycling program for your city?  Have a big service fleet of vehicles?  How about delivering or augmenting Meals on Wheels efforts?

What about every other business?

How can you raise your importance to your community and the need for your product?  What programs or partnerships could you put in place to positively change the perception of your business and its support of your community?

Think out loud about your business and how you can raise customer loyalty and the priority of the problems your product solves in your customer’s eyes.

Think until you hear a “Wow” in your head, then tell me about what you came up with and let me know if I can help.

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:  At what point does process become so overbearing that the sales person comes across as unnatural, insincere or insensitive? Conversely, at what point does style independence create disorder, chaos and inconsistency?

A:  A “Sales Process” should simply be a sales tool designed to get the greatest number of potential prospects successfully converted from “leads” to “landed” in the most efficient manner possible.

A “Sales Process” becomes overbearing at the precise point that it stops being a roadmap defining the most likely path for sales success and becomes an overriding dogma that must be adhered to regardless of customer, personality, situation or circumstance.

When adherence to the process becomes so important/rigid that the sales process itself becomes an impediment to the sales of the very product the process was built to serve, it is time for a change.

Conversely, a “Sales Process” becomes ineffective at the precise point that it stops being a roadmap defining the best path to sales success and becomes an exercise in “style independence” with so loosely a defined process that the process again becomes an impediment to product sales.

The rigidity of the sales process needs to be tuned to the product being sold.  Very knowledgeable customers making repeat purchases of commodity items could benefit by a very clear and rigid (to the point of being automatic, even) process.  The floor of the NYSE being one example.

Products being sold to customers with varying depths of knowledge or with wide ranging customer specific variations and infrequent purchase patterns require a more broadly defined “guiding hand” type of sales process, where listening, asking situation specific questions and conversation become more important than blindly following a rote process.

A well defined sales process should be malleable enough to bend to the needs of the product being sold and potentially the personalities selling it, as the product moves through its life cycle, anything else adds unnecessary friction.

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: How do you sell technology at the C-level?

A: Selling technology to C-level executives is about understanding their business and, in particular, the specific problems they are facing well enough to be able to translate your technology into a compelling business case for the executive that they can readily understand and get behind.

Anything less or more complicated that leaves an executive feeling you are talking about things they don’t care about or are out of their area of expertise will earn you a one way ticket out or down the organization to make your case to a perceived subject matter expert.

If you don’t have that understanding about a company then you typically have to wade into lower levels of the organization to figure out what their specific problems are and how your brand of technology can address those issues and work your way up.

No one cares about the technology itself except for the gadget geeks and the guys that have to implement and support it for the most part.

The solution is what is being sold. The solution presented in company specific line of business terms is what is being sold at C-level.

I have responded to several variations to questions like “Is cold calling still effective?” with a range of answers.

My long standing official position has been that there is always going to be a right time and place for cold calling no mater how advanced LinkedIn, Face book, MySpace, Twitter, texting, email, mail, flares and smoke signals get as communication tools.

The last two months have proven my point.

Cold calling is simply a sales tool and that is how you should look at it. I am not suggesting you roll cold calling into your mix of sales tools by default, I am just saying you need to understand where and when cold calling fits and makes the most sense.

For the last few months I have been working on sales strategies for an energy company trying to figure out the best mix of tools to reach new customers for them. (Their customer being anyone using electricity with a superset of products where one or more energy source is deregulated.)

The company had a solid referral model in place and a secondary simple lead generation system. Missing from the equation were websites, newsletters, white papers, opt in communications and a strong lead development engine.

To the company’s credit though, they had spent a great deal of time refining the sales forms, sales process and field sales to its simplest form on their operating budget. The field sales tools were truly outstanding and visionary when compared to other large and small field sales forces I have worked with.

The referral model in place was exceptional with a close ratio of 1:2 calls. The quantity and location of the referrals led to a lot of time being wasted with travel no matter how efficiently the call plan was setup. To mitigate the lost time I employed an extremely simple cold call strategy.

For every referral business I visited, I would cold call, or walk in, five businesses in the immediate vicinity with the hopes of at least getting some new leads and at best signing up new customers.

The company’s products worked well with this strategy, requiring no up front commitment or cost, played on the customer’s curiosity, and in the end would almost definitely save them money with a sub 30 day ROI.

All that was needed was a good simple but short explanation of how a company could benefit by our services and the cold call strategy was ready to deploy.

Walking in anything from a local SMB business to a large name brand global organization, at random with no contact name, led to a close ratio of 1:10 calls. For the record, none of the large national/global companies were signed at the time of the cold call, but the process was effective for finding contacts, meeting assistants and doing general sales groundwork that may or may not have been possible with Hoovers or other online tools.

In this particular situation it was effective enough to help me meet an established reps quota my first month in a city I had never been to before and talking to people I never met.

The point is cold calling is still an effective tool. The most effective? No, not by a long shot, but one worth keeping in your bag when your product or sales process works in short, initial meeting types of sales engagements.

Being effective as a field sales representative, trying to beat your quota and break the compensation plan in your favor takes some intelligent work and careful use of your time. As a rule, random cold calling would not be a strategy I would employ or even recommend for those two endeavors unless it just flat out makes sense in your situation.

I know Gitomer and a whole host of sales gurus and probably more than a handful of you would/will say cold calling is for suckers. All I can say is that the last two months cold calling earned me more suckers than the number of days I have been walking on this planet with plenty left over for you, too.

Sometimes it’s good to be sucker.

Image courtesy of http://www.hitched.ca