Sales Laundry

Posts Tagged ‘ERP’

How much time does your sales team spend on revenue producing activities?

 According to CSO Insights in their Optimization:2007 Survey Results and Analysis report the actual amount of time a sales person is actively engaged in selling averaged just under 36%.  My own experience would suggest that sales professionals’ time spent on revenue producing activities is closer to 30%.  The best run sales organizations that I have experience with engage in revenue producing activities, at best, no more than 50% of the time.

 If you don’t know where your sales team stacks up, it is time to measure.  If you find your sales team is engaged in revenue producing activities at or below 25% of the time, then there is a distinct possibility that you could almost double your revenue producing activities and lower your Cost of Sales considerably.

 

 If you find you have room for improvement, here are some of the most common things that eat a sales professional’s time.

 Building Proposals/Quotes – Look to offload this function to a non-sales role or to a low cost sales role where the proposal building experience could be used as a training tool.  If that does not make sense for your business, build common templates and boilerplate text to simplify the process as much as possible.  Think about your likelihood of winning a project vs. the amount of time you are going to spend on the RFP.

 Lead Generation – The same CSO Insights survey highlighted the fact that 18% of a sales professional’s time is spent generating leads.  This subtopic is worthy of several posts in and of itself.  If leads are being generated for sales within your organization, look at the quality and quantity of those leads.  A large quantity of poor leads is almost worse than no leads at all.

 Sales Meetings – Many sales meetings continue well beyond their expiration date. Is there a defined agenda for each meeting?  What items could be better communicated in a less time consuming way?  What items could be eliminated completely?  Eliminating four hours of meetings could give you 10% of your week back.

 Managing the Internal Sales Process – In the early days of my B2B sales career I spent as much as five hours a week walking a signed proposal through our internal processes, getting items ordered, following up on backordered items the order desk failed to tell me about, making sure all of the items arrived, setting up delivery, coordinating installation, making sure we invoiced for the correct items/amounts, making sure we had applied payments correctly to make sure my commission check would be correct and assisting with collections when it became necessary.

 Map your own internal processes and look for ways to streamline your workflow and get sales disengaged as much as possible from this process.

 CRM Software Data Entry/Retrieval – CRM software, when designed well CRM can be a fantastic tool.  Designed poorly, it can be an agony inducing, time sucking vortex that is worn like a boat anchor around the entire sales teams neck.  

 Work with your sales professionals and watch how valuable data is recorded and retrieved.  Look at the areas they use most frequently and the specific steps they go through to get to that data.  Does that process make sense?  If not, do your own ROI calculation on getting customizations done vs. the sales time lost.

 One Software-as-a-Service CRM package I have personal experience with could waste as much as five or ten seconds on every click as data moved back and forth across the web.  In my own pursuit of efficiency, I found that I was losing up to half an hour a day to those delays.

 Expense reports and other administrative paperwork – Look at all of the reports and paperwork you ask your sales professionals to create and ask yourself two questions.  Do we really need this report?  Does it make sense that our revenue producers are spending time on this as opposed to selling?  If it makes sense, great!  Carry on.  If not, look for ways to improve or eliminate the process.

 One more point before we wrap it up.  Finding, offloading or eliminating these non-revenue producing tasks is only half the battle.  Before you begin, establish a baseline of calls/meetings and other revenue producing events so you have a gauge on which to measure your progress. 

 Recovering five to ten hours a week for each sales professional to spend on revenue producing activities is only beneficial if they actually spend that time on revenue producing activities.  From my experience, you will need to break out your training hat and work with what could be up to 40% of your sales staff on the best ways to use the “extra” time.

 Every time I have done this exercise I have been amazed by some of the low value tasks that eat up enormous amounts of time and unnecessarily increasing my Cost of Sales.

 One more last, last point.  To maximize the benefits of this process, do not let this exercise turn into a micro management tool.  Remember your end objective is to increase “customer-facing revenue producing time” not “looking over my shoulder, wondering who is watching me time.”

 We have barely scratched the surface here but I hope this gets you thinking, measuring and doing.  If you have a “best practice” that helps you measure your revenue producing activity percentage or keeps you or your sales team engaged in revenue producing activities, I would love to hear about it.  As always, give me your thoughts and let’s get smarter together.

 Click here to learn more about CSOInsights and their annual studies.

Photo courtesy of http://fasteddie.wordpress.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:  Channel Sales & Direct Sales Teams:  What are your thoughts on best practices for structuring a sales team that maximizes sales for both groups and minimizes/avoids conflicts.

A:   I don’t know your specific industry,  but my experience comes from technology, so that is how I have framed my comments.  Here are my general thoughts:

The Direct Sales Team

 Dividing the loyalties of your direct sales team between their own numbers and helping out the channel sales organizations can be a recipe for disaster.  If times get tight, I have seen direct guys pull all sorts of tricks to take a juicy channel deal direct.  The hedge to that is a partner deal registry and clear rules of engagement, neither of which is ever a bad thing.  On the other side I have seen channel partners act like blood sucking leaches, draining a manufacturer of resources and continually begging for leads.  It can get ugly either way.

 I would seriously consider putting a dedicated sales resource in your office supporting your channel partners exclusively. 

 You need your channel organization to spend the time and money needed to get trained up on your products and dedicate enough mindshare to them to get them heard above the noise of their other offerings.

 Use your internal dedicated sales resource to go on sales calls with them and help them put sales proposals together and nudge them along the sales funnel.  Force the dedicated channel sales representative to drive all revenue through the partners.  That way you have someone other than your Channel Manager working in the channels best interests on a daily basis.  Put a smart sales person in that role that can leverage the legitimate leads and deals that he uncovers in his patch into incentive for the partners to get up to speed and stay current.  You can use the leads to reward those partners that are moving the needle for you, for priming the pump for new partners or as needed to help steer your channel sales force.

 This dedicated sale representative can also be a good entry level sales position for your company in more established territories that you can develop into a direct role if the compensation model works like that for you.  That way they have your channel supporting them a bit as they come up to speed so you don’t have the huge dips in productivity when a new guy takes over a territory.

 Your dedicated sales representative should support your best partners and their best reps to keep the pipeline full, then spend time working your best partners second tier reps, other partners and finding new partners that are not going to stomp all over one another in a given geography.  Cut the bottom 20% of your partners and all those 1-off deal guys that pop up.

 

The Channel Sales Team

 Channel organizations are often times the whipping boys of the direct sales team and feel they drive product sales but have no real line of communication with the manufacturer to discuss strategy or to communicate feedback they get from the field.  Listen to your channel.  Typically the top 20% of the reps at the top 20% of your channel partners are driving the majority of your business.  You need to talk to them and understand their challenges with your organization if you want the real scoop.  The execs are usually not as helpful in the day to day stuff and Sales Managers are sometimes in the weeds because they were great reps that got promoted without any training.

 Give the channel a mechanism to register their deals and be protected from your direct reps.  Give them ready access to sales and support until they have their own resources trained and representing your brand well in the field.

That is about 1% of the topic.  You can check out The VAR Guy for dedicated blogging on technology channel sales.

Remember when you only had to find and fill a Need to get a sale?

 Remember the good ol’ days when the sun was shining and everyone including our clients were augmenting their budgets with bags full of cash that randomly fell out of the backs of garbage trucks, freely spending bucket loads of money on big, medium and small needs alike? 

Me either, but don’t tell the new guys.

Today, clients aren’t spending their money so freely and sales are down, but the good news is we are saving a lot of money on printer ink because these forecasts are just so much shorter.  Apparently the majority of our clients do not have any needs that need filling right now, so what is an enterprising Sales Representative to do?

 Stop looking for needs.  Start looking for agony with flaming critical, heart ripping consequences.

 Corporations are the legal equivalent of people, so if it helps, look at them that way to get a better understanding of how to approach them.  Think “injury” here.  

You can live without a Band-Aid, it may not be as neat and tidy, but you can live.  Think bigger.  Start looking for companies in Intensive Care Units, needing your product in order to survive.  Those needs will get addressed, because if they don’t fix them, they die or face catastrophic game changing consequences.

 “But Val, I sell fly swatters, if they don’t buy my product the worst thing that happens is there are a few more flies buzzing around, how does that help me?”

 Maybe you change your message from “Get rid of an annoying pest” to “Avoid diseases that flies transfer from dung heaps and decaying matter to your food that can lead to kidney failure in young children, seizures in toddlers, or in some cases, death*.”

 If your customer’s are not buying, it is because the need your product is filling is not a real or percieved priority right now.  Change the priority, change their perception, find a client with a bigger need you can fill, or find something else to sell.    

Want another example?  Look at what Kellogg is doing to reposition Mini-Wheats.

If you are stuck and can’t think of any deeper problems, add a comment and I will give you my best ideas, otherwise watch for a post in the near future that will detail a step by step process to help you find those deeper problems.   

 

*I am not making this stuff up.  Read Diseases from House Flies.

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

 

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 important are relationships in selling? Are they the only reason people buy, a prerequisite or not that big of a deal?  I understand that some customer’s do make a buying decision in our favor, but is it the 80/20 rule or relationships?

A:  A relationship could be critical to your success or of absolutely no value.  In my opinion it depends on where the customer places value in a given situation.

For example, I have bought products from sales professionals that brought a lot of knowledge I valued, but did not like them or care to see them again.  The value of their knowledge drove the transaction, not the relationship.

 I have bought products from sales professionals that I had a great relationship with where the product was average to not as good, in retrospect, I suppose because I placed more value on extending the relationship than I did the product.

 I have also bought products that I was enamored with and placed so much value in having that I bought them regardless of the sales process/relationship or the professional.

 So, speaking just for myself, a strong enough desire for the product, or the value I place in that product, can render a relationship unimportant to me.  (Unless I think I am going to need support or handholding to get the full value out of the product.)

 Otherwise, the importance I place on a relationship is directly proportional to my perceived need for that relationship in finding, acquiring and implementing the end product or service.

 Hope that makes sense.  It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.

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 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/