Sales Laundry

Posts Tagged ‘Leads’

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

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

NOTE:  This article was written by Alex Kjerulf on his site PositiveSharing.com.  It is a point of view you don’t hear very often and worth the read so I tacked it on the wall here.  

When the customer isn’t right – for your business

One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.

She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.

Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’

In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’

The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:

1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service

Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim – ironically because it leads to bad customer service.

Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

 

1: It makes employees unhappy

Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around “From Worst to First,” a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim “the customer is always right” didn’t hold sway at Continental.

In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Here’s how he puts it:

When we run into customers that we can’t reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees . . .

We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When it’s a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?

You can’t treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them . . . If they think that you won’t support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment.

So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers, where the “always right” maxim squarely favors the customer – which is not a good idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees.

Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. But trying to solve this by declaring the customer “always right” is counter-productive.

2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage

Using the slogan “The customer is always right” abusive customers can demand just about anything – they’re right by definition, aren’t they? This makes the employees’ job that much harder, when trying to rein them in.

Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keepthem coming back.

3: Some customers are bad for business

Most businesses think that “the more customers the better”. But some customers are quite simply bad for business.

Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story:

One of our service technicians arrived at a customer’s site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer.

When he’d finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customer’s contract.

Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. Note that it was not even a matter of a financial calculation – not a question of whether either company would make or lose money on that customer in the long run. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right.

4: It results in worse customer service

Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second – Put your people first and watch’em kick butt.

Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because:

• They care more about other people, including customers
• They have more energy
• They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with
• They are more motivated

On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that:

• Employees are not valued
• That treating employees fairly is not important
• That employees have no right to respect from customers
• That employees have to put up with everything from customers

When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible – the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: corteous on the surface only.

5: Some customers are just plain wrong

Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows:

Herb Kelleher [...] makes it clear that his employees come first — even if it means dismissing customers. But aren’t customers always right? “No, they are not,” Kelleher snaps. “And I think that’s one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people.’”

If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethune’s book “From Worst to First”:

A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passenger’s child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kid’s father and asked him to put away the hat. “No,” the guy said. “My kid can wear what he wants, and I don’t care who likes it.”

The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendant’s duties. The guy better put away the hat.

He did, but he didn’t like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasn’t hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didn’t want to see him and I didn’t want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means we’ll take him where he wants to go. But if he’s going to be rude and offensive, he’s welcome to fly another airline.

The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service.

So put your people first. And watch them put the customers first.

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.

From my experience, most companies don’t know their sales department is dead until they begin to smell the corpse and see their sales numbers fall off a cliff into Lake Competitor.

 It has been my job from time to time over the years to identify sales issues, diagnose sales health and return these sales organizations to top form.  As a result, I have learned where to look for the signs of decay.  Here is a rough version of the roadmap I use to find the problems.

Sales Metrics

 How are the Sales Managers measuring their existing sales team’s performance?  More often than not, I find that the sales organization as a whole is only using one sales metric consistently, final sales numbers. 

You can’t steer a dog by its tail and if you try you will eventually end up stepping in it.  The same is true of the Sales department.

 The final sales numbers should not be a measurement tool because it is too late at that point to do anything about it.  Final sales numbers are only a gauge, measuring your sales success for one moment in time.  No different than a customer survey or comment card after a sale measures overall customer service on a single sales transaction.

 A good sign would be to see multiple sales metrics in place and seeing Sales Managers actually use them to manage their business.  (CRM packages setup and used properly are a great source of information assuming the stored information is current, complete and accurate.)

The Sales Managers

 If the metrics are out of whack or missing I look for the Sales Manager to understand how he is managing his team and how he reviews his sales pipeline.

 Typically I find that a struggling sales department has a Sales Manager that is spending too much time looking at the bottom of the sales funnel or has never been trained how to  measure his team’s performance.

The Forecast

 The next stop is the individual forecasts of the sales team, present and past if available.  I want to understand how leads are collected and the process determining how a lead is converted to an opportunity and how it moves its way through the system toward a close.  I want to know what specific information a sales representative used to rank every opportunity on his or her forecast.

Usually this will tell me there is no consistent process for converting leads in place and the present standard is a combination of guess work and wishful thinking.

 I also want to understand what they are selling and equally important, what they are not selling and why.  This helps me understand what other departments outside of sales I need to visit.

Sales Training Process

 A look at sales training is next on my list.  How are the sales representatives being trained?  What methodology are they using?  How do they get trained on new offerings?  How have they been trained to manage opportunities through the pipeline?

The Services, Support & Systems Engineers

 Next I want to meet with the services manager. I want to understand how he decides what he will train his staff on, how they maintain certifications, how skill sets are allotted to the various offerings the company sells, and if there is communication with Sales to keep them in lock step with what Sales is actually selling. 

The Marketing Department

 The marketing department, if there is one, is next.  I want to compare the message Sales is sending with the message Marketing is sending.  I also want to understand how they coordinate their efforts in the end goal of bringing in more business.

C-Level Executives

 I want to understand the overall company direction.  What are the company objectives?  What are the company commitments to vendors and distribution relationships?  What is the company sales message? Etc.

Summary

 Decay in a sales organization can come all the way from the top, manifested in bad policies or poor communication that puts various departments in isolated silos.  From my experience it is the well connected CEO, or oddly enough the lowly Sales Manager that is in the best place to diagnose these problems internally.

 In the early days I only looked at the Sales department but as I worked through the challenges I began to expand my scope because many of the problems manifesting themselves in Sales I found were created by seeming innocuous decisions made in other parts of the company.

 If your sales department is inconsistent, struggling or darn near dead, look at the quality and quantity of your leads, analyze your forecast, focus on managing the top of the sales funnel and take this list and use it to find the root cause of your problem, don’t get caught up treating symptoms.

 

Discussion boards are rife with comments from business owners lamenting the problems they have experienced on their quest to find an exceptional sales professional.  Arguably, a person that is exceptional should, by definition, be hard to find.

 So how DO you find the right sales guy for your company?  Begin by defining your sales process and the role you need this new sales professional to fill.

 This is ONE aspect, mind you.  Future posts will define other aspects selecting and building a solid sales team for your business.

 I use the terms “hunter” and “farmer” in this post, I assume most are familiar with the terms, but just in case, here is a brief definition:

 Hunter – a sales person engaged in finding new opportunities with new clients.

Farmer – a sales person engaged in managing existing client relationships.

 

Sales Intern – Free to low paid position, the primary reward for this position being the resume worthy experience and references the position can provide.

 Hire for:  sales lead data entry, basic sales contact management, assist with proposal development, general support host for in office lunch meeting, answer the phones, take some messages, general sales gopher.

 

Telemarketer – Typical entry level position with higher than average turn over and typically the lowest rung on the sales job ladder.  Could be home based, office based or outsourced to a 3^rd party call center.

Role:  Sometimes Farmer; Rarely Hunter/Farmer; Typical Hunter

 Hire for:  Hire a telemarketer if you have plenty of leads, you just need someone to call them.  Hire this person to do simple product driven sales, call to set appointment, research, sales or service add-on’s, follow up or act in a supporting sales role or layer of marketing for a larger sales organization.

 

Inside Sales – Home based or office based sales professional of entry or mid-level career experience.

Role:  Typically Farmer; Sometimes Hunter/Farmer; Rarely Hunter

 Hire for:  Hire a person for this role as a training ground to develop future outside sales professionals.  Hire a person in this role to assist an outside sales team, cold call, develop leads, manage an existing client base, develop proposals, do sales follow up calls, or as your primary selling organization if you do not need to build strong client relations or an outside sales presence.  In many instances this role is blended with aspects of telemarketing.

 

Account Manager/Executive – Like the Inside Sales Representative, typically home based or office based sales professional of entry or mid-level career experience with minimal to no activities supporting other sales teams.

 Role:  Typically Farmer; Sometimes Hunter/Farmer; Sometimes Hunter

  Hire for:  Hire for this role if you need someone to manage all aspects of the sales process that can be accomplished bound to a desk.  A person in this role can work in support of an outside account manager(s), or be your primary sales weapon if you product or services can be sold without the need for an outside sales presence.

    

Account Manager/Executive – Outside Sales – Like the Account Manager, except working a defined territory, visiting a prospects place of business.  Typically mid to senior level experience.

 Role:  Sometimes Farmer; Sometimes Hunter/Farmer; Often Hunter

 Hire for:  Hire for this role if you need someone to engage with your client at their place of business, at networking events, seminars, trade shows or other external promotional events.  The person engaged in this role is typically a hunter.  In many cases these individuals are responsible for finding their own leads, sometimes this role is supported by an Inside Account Manager or Inside Sales person.  Sometimes leads for this individual are driven by Telemarketers as well.

 

 Business Development Executive – Can be another name for an Inside/Outside Account Manager but is a title typically reserved for those engaged in activities beyond selling a set product to a set market.  Typically mid career to senior level experience.

 Role:  Rarely Farmer; Sometimes Hunter/Farmer; Often Hunter 

Hire for:  Hire for this role if you need someone to create new lines of business, new markets for existing products, new applications for existing products or new partnership opportunities.  As with an Outside Account Manager, in many cases these individuals are responsible for finding their own leads and are sometimes supported by an inside sales staff. 

 

Sales Overlay/Subject Matter Expert – Role typically defined as a single product champion within a multi- product sales organization.  Typically mid to senior level experience.

 Role:  Specialist; Supporting Hunter/Farmer

 Hire for:  Hire for this role if you need to focus attention on one product line, if one product line is vastly more complex or difficult to sell than other offerings, or if there are too many products for your primary sales organization to promote consistently.

 

Sales Engineer/Subject Matter Technical Expert – Role

 Role:  Specialist; Supporting Hunter/Farmer 

Hire for:  Hire someone for this position if your sales cycle involves engaging with customer side technical teams to discuss technical aspects that are beyond the depth of what you expect your traditional sales team to address.

 

Sales Manager – Role responsible for managing single or multiple teams of the sales professionals comprised of one or multiple sales roles.

 Role:  Primarily Manager, Sometimes Farmer; Sometimes Hunter/Farmer; Rarely Hunter

 Hire for:  Hire someone for this role to manage an existing sales team, hire, train, develop, coach, motivate, teach, possibly set compensation models, manage forecasts and pipeline activity, possibly set strategy and marketing direction.

 

 Director of Sales – Role responsible for managing multiple sales managers within an organization.  Can set overall strategy and tactics 

Role:  Manager

 

 VP of Sales/Business Development – Title is in some cases interchangeable with Director of Sales.  Can manage multiple business units, sales directors, and sales management teams. 

 Role:  Manager

 Hire for:  Executive level position providing front line sales experiences with executive management team.  Sets overall sales strategy and company targets for the entire sales organization.

 

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The title or role of the sales professional is only one aspect you need to keep in mind when hiring the right sales professional for your organization.  Just make sure you understand the sales role you need to fill so you can identify the sales qualities you need to look for in your interview process.

 If you have a question, ask.  If you need a little more assistance, email me at val @ saleslaundry.com

Image courtesy of  http://stillhiring.ie

 

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.