Gee, how much more bad news do we need?

I think it's great for news stations and newspapers. I know I can't help looking at the Wall Street Journal site five times day to see how much the Dow Jones is down but I also know that is NOT helping me sell more.

I'm also pretty sure a lot of us sales people are feeling pretty worried/scared right now.

"Is my company going to cut some jobs soon?" "Don't companies often lay off their sales people first?" Most of us know cutting sales people during a downturn is a big mistake (and we don't even know if this is a real downturn yet). Companies that don't market during a recession are in a really weak position when things start to improve. But even though CEOs know this they often still cut sales people because they feel compelled to cut costs in the short term and don't care about two years hence - basically because they need to save their jobs.

But the longer I spend in the “sales industry” the clearer it is to me that highly-skilled sales people are in short supply. I believe this will continue to be the case even if we go into fairly deep recession. Every company I talk to seems to want more sales people and even if some companies start cutting back and not hiring sales people, sales talent will always be in demand.

Hence, if you are committed to being a professional sales person and want to stay with it as your career, I predict you will have no problem finding a job even if things get “dark” with the economy. But how about making your journey through the tough economy easy - or at least easier?

Too much of the time sales people “fly totally solo”. This fits the cliché of the sales person as the “lone wolf” hunting for meat. But does this cliché really make sense when you need all the help you can get to sell in a market where buyers have less budget to spend? I don’t think so.

Consider the other sales people in the world. They likely feel just as concerned as you about the future. Why not reach out to them and start building support structures for yourself? How about starting to connect with other sales people to partner up on business development and knowledge sharing? Form your own "sales team".

If you are a sales person, you have a complicated and challenging job. Trying to do it all alone, especially in a downturn, is a huge burden. Why not share the load with others? Why not build yourself a team to help you sell (a lot) even during tough times. Even wolves work together when necessary.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The sky is falling.

Well, the stock market and many of the great behemoth financial firms that I have sold to over the last dozen years are. Let's say many of us are not in the most upbeat mood right now.

And how does this "macro economic tension" tend to show up in sales organizations? Concern over making our numbers. And that concern over making numbers makes tense sales people. Tense sales people that tend to put too much pressure on their prospects to sign on the dotted line.

People love to buy but they hate to be sold. Sales cycles don't really exist what really exists is a buying cycle. In our world of so many options for the buyer, we need to face facts that it's the buyer who controls the "sales process" not the seller.

The sales person's job (actually the whole company behind the sales person) is to be in-sync with buyer at whatever point the buyer is in the buying cycle. A typical buying cycle might look like this: (1)recognition of a need, (2) seek out options, (3) discuss/evaluate options and (4) buy.

A sales person who tries to close the buyer when they are not in phase 4 of the buying cycle will annoy the prospect/buyer and won't get a deal. But that's what "old school selling" tells us to do "always be closing". Watch out because as the pressure mounts on us sales executives to close more the opposite is happening for the buyer. As the market fear grows buyers will be thinking "should I really pull the trigger on this spend or should I hold off". The last thing that will help a cautious buyer commit is a pushy sales person!

What's a sales person to do?

Calm down. Don't try to close everything in sight. Stay in-sync with your prospects. Make sure you know where they are in the buying cycle. Act accordingly. If they are just starting to look at options, get them the information they need to understand and evaluate your offering.

And...prospect. Yes, whenever things get tougher in the economy sales people need to be able to put more leads into their sales funnel. You will need more prospects because either some deals will drop out due to budgets being cut etc. or some of the deals that survive will move more slowly to close than you originally thought.

You will need to "diversify" your sales pipeline as the market gets more volatile just as an investor diversifies their stock portfolio. You will want more prospects in your sales pipeline than when times were "easy". Preferably prospects from lots of different companies and industries so your risks of being clobbered by any one company's or any one industry's budget cuts are reduced.

So as things get tougher don't become a closer. Become an opener.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

My first job out of business school was working for a junk mail company (one of the biggest in the world in fact by number of letters sent). An unexpected part of the culture of this "junk mail" company was that everyone was extremely analytical and scientific. Perhaps not the first thing you think of when you see a piece of junk mail.

One of the areas we focused on most was lists. We were forever testing different lists. And in a lot of detail. “People who subscribe to Magazine X versus people who bought product Y”. We were always looking for small statistically significant differences in response that would indicate consumer interest in our offer from a particular list. If we found interest from that group, we would invest more next time in mailing to more people on that list.

Around about 1998 or so I started meeting people who wanted to promote their business via email. I went to several meetings back then of a marketing group discussing how to best use email. At the time the discussions were very primitive to my ear as a "junk mailer". People seemed to be sending email to anyone without much of a plan. The concept of testing each list did not seem to exist. Fast-forward to 2008 and email marketers are completely different. Email marketing has become extremely analytical. Testing everything is accepted as the smart thing to do if you are an educated e-marketer.

Now think about sales people prospecting. What are we doing when we prospect? We are using the telephone (primarily) to contact people who are not expecting our call. Sound a bit like "junk mail"? In my opinion absolutely! The only difference is we are using the telephone not an envelope.

So if prospecting is like "junk mail" then shouldn't sales people, sales managers & CEO's be obsessed with the lists they call like direct mailers and e-mailers are? Shouldn't they be testing their lists looking for even the smallest indication of above average interest?

Many sales organizations today are prospecting by starting at "A" in Hoovers and working their way down. They are "boiling the ocean". They are not testing their lists. They are not being analytical. They are not looking for small clues of statistically-significant difference in interest amongst targets.

They are not being smart!

The "junk mail" business is a well-established business with over 100 years of experience. Maybe it's time sales people "junked" some of their prospecting habits and learned something from these marketers.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sales people should minimize the number of people they call. Yes, I said minimize. One of the biggest challenges for sales people is time management. As a sales person you should be calling people who you can convert into customers. You need to focus your efforts on a well-qualified list of people.

In our "real world lab", which is our own telesales team, we constantly track data to try to answer questions like "how many times should I call a prospect?" (questions with answers I always think should be common knowledge but just don't seem to be). Here's some of our latest observations from this "lab":

Six Calls
I've recently written about how sales people need to find a balance in their prospecting between calling too little and calling too much.

Research has shown that many sales people call once or twice but that contacts need to see your name at least 7-8 times before they start to "warm up" to your brand. On the other hand, we have noticed from our own prospecting data that calling over 10 times tends to leave sales people with a list of contacts who have been filtered out to be the ones who are hard to reach (the kind who put their phone constantly on "do not disturb").

So we've come up with our latest "rule of thumb" that six (6) calls is about the right number to make to a cold prospect (someone you have never spoken to). Once we've tried six phone calls we will put them back into the "nurturing process".

Ninety Days
What about people who have shown some interest?

I have also noted in the past that sales people tend to cling onto opportunities/people way too long. They also tend to assign way too high a probability to deals coming out of these prospects in their sales reports.

In our team our latest observation is that a lot of the higher-end products and services we sell have a 90-day sales cycle. What we mean by this is that by going through historical data we noticed that prospects that did turn into clients almost always did so within 90-days of our first conversation with them. Only prospects who never closed kept us coming back for longer than 90-days. So we learned from this that we could pretty much kill off anyone that had been lingering in our pipeline for much more than 90 days.

Put 'em Back in the Greenhouse
So what happens to all these prospects we give up on? We put them back into the "nurturing process".

And yes, there are a ton of people in the "nurturing process"...and not that many in our true sales process. But that allows our sales people to focus. That means we have a decent chance of calling people when we are supposed to and spending time handling issues that come up.

Meanwhile we use cheaper means like email and mail to stay-in-touch with everyone in the "nurturing process" (sales people are expensive!) We don't discard people who fit our prospect profile. But we don't burn sales people's time on them either. If you have a marketing department, these people become the responsibility of the marketing department. Research shows there's plenty of future business in this list of people so don't lose them. These people are your future hot prospects they are just not-ready-to-buy-yet.

Six calls. Ninety days. Or put 'em back in the greenhouse to grow into prospects who are ready-to-buy. What do you think?

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This post continues my efforts to bring you the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events. This is Part 9 of the series (the preceding parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8)

In the first eight parts of this "mini sales training" I have covered preparation (hugely overlooked) and in prospecting so far I have covered: using a multimedia prospecting approach, how to keep yourself motivated, being organized and how to sound right on the phone. Now I'd like to talk about taking "an account approach" to your prospecting.

I have frequently seen sales people focusing all their prospecting energy on one person in a target company. This typically manifests itself in the CRM system as lots of calls to the same person without getting through. The sales person (usually correctly) starts to feel like they are wasting their time calling this person.

I am in favor of persistent prospecting. Too many sales people give up after one (or two) calls to a contact. But continually calling the same person over-and-over-and-over-again is a problem too. What you tend to find in this situation is (a) you manage to annoy your prospect, (b) they start to recognize your caller ID and don't pick up (even if you block your caller ID, they recognize "it's that blocked caller ID again") or (c) you are focusing your effort on a person who almost never picks up their telephone (their phone is always on "Do Not Disturb").

Some great research conducted by MarketingSherpa showed how many people are involved in buying a sophisticated product over $25,000 in price (in the case of this research the product was technology but I believe the research findings apply to all sophisticated business-to-business products):

- Firm Size, 100-500 employees: 7 decision-makers
- Firm Size, 501-1,000 employees: 14 decision-makers
- Firm Size, over 1,000 employees: 21 decision-makers

The fact that lots of people are involved in buying your product or service means that any one of these people may be a good point-of-entry into a company for you. After all, last time they bought this kind of product that person was involved in the decision-making process.

This means even if your target firms are small, 100-500 employees in size, there are roughly 7 people you can target to get that first elusive meeting or conversation. If the firms you call are 500-1,000 employees in size, there are roughly 14 people you can call. And if you are calling on Fortune 1000 firms, a whopping 21 targets.

So if you are not getting anywhere with the person you are calling, brainstorm a bit. Who else could be involved in buying your product or service? Ask anyone you can at the target company what kind of people get involved in looking at this kind of product (executive assistants are usually the ones to ask). Or try to partner up with a sales rep from another non-competitive firm and ask them what kind of people buy this product at your target firm or any firms that are similar to your target.

Think about how to grow your prospect list at your target accounts. Don't trap yourself by your prospecting approach.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This post continues my efforts to bring you the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events. This is Part 8 of the series (the preceding parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7)

In the first seven parts of this "mini sales training" I have covered preparation (hugely overlooked) and in prospecting so far I have covered: using a multimedia prospecting approach, how to keep yourself motivated and being organized. Now I'd like to talk about sounding right.

I've listened to a bunch of calls recently made by our own telesales team and our clients. It's a more revealing process than I initially expected. When you are doing your own prospecting you don't hear how you really sound. Just like seeing yourself in photos or on video, listening to yourself can be quite shocking and revealing.

What struck me from listening to calls is that some people sound like they are executives and some people don't. Some people sound like they are in the right place and some people sound like they are not. Some people sound like they are calling to transact business and others sound like they are pleading for a favor.

When someone is calling you for the first time, you (the prospect) are looking for "clues" as to what to do. Is it important? Is this somebody important? Is this call worth my time and attention? (Or if you are an executive assistant, should I put this call through)?

Human beings are incredibly good at processing non-verbal information. The sound (tone, speed etc) of your voice is processed extremely quickly by the prospect to try to make a determination as to who you are (note: calling from a noisy call center is a major clue you are not important). Obviously, you want to sound like you are important.

Your voice gives away a lot more about your inner thoughts than most of us would like to admit. So first of all, it's very important that you actually believe in what you are selling! If you don't, you are likely to start sounding like you are pleading for help.

Assuming you do believe in your product or service, you may still need to practice conveying this strongly in the "heat of battle" when prospecting. A little self-programming may be needed. Speaking from personal experience, what I find useful is to review all the positive results our service/product has brought to clients, including reading our testimonials and case studies and focusing on the benefits contained in those documents. This helps me get in a positive frame of mind. Then just keep repeating this exercise over-and-over again every time you prospect (daily if that's your prospecting routine) -- repetition is key to self-programming.

For anybody who knows me or who has read much of my writing you will know I am a huge believer in testing. So in this case I believe it's critical to record a whole bunch of your calls and listen to how you sound. As I said earlier this is like looking at photographs of yourself. Usually what you hear is not what you expect. Listen and judge if you sound "executive". Do you sound like you belong? Do you sound like you should get an appointment with "Mr. CxO"? You need to. The person on the other end of the phone will be trying to figure that out.

Sounding right takes a lot of practice and working on yourself. But if your primary tool for starting the sales process is the telephone, it's a must. Prospects are listening to your voice as much as to what you say. Don't sound like you are pleading. "Dress" your voice for success!

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This post continues my efforts to bring you the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events. This is Part 7 of the series (the preceding parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6.)

In this post I'm still talking about prospecting as that is where most of us sales people feel the most pain. In the first six parts of this "mini sales training" I have covered preparation (hugely overlooked) and in prospecting so far I have covered: using a multimedia prospecting approach and how to keep yourself motivated. Now I'd like to talk about something boring: being organized!

Time Management: I believe a foundational skill for sales people is time management. If you can't manage your time, you won't find time to prospect. Sales people who cannot manage their time will always find something else to do. My friend John Orvos of SellMasters says you need to "build a fortress around your prospecting time." In other words schedule your prospecting time into your calendar first before anything else in your week. Try not to let anything else interfere with it. In most companies "you eat what you kill", if you don't make time for prospecting, you will starve!

Scheduling Follow-Up Calls: follow up is key in prospecting. The research out there clearly shows it takes a lot of "touches" to get through to a cold contact (a minimum of 7 but could be up to 20 or 30!) You need to use some kind of system (usually a CRM system) to keep track of the next follow-up call when (like most of us) you have hundreds if not thousands of contacts. Keeping your follow-up call times documented and organized so you call when you need to (or said you would) is critical to good prospecting.

Understand Your Priorities: some calls are more important than others, some contacts are warmer than others. Make sure you develop a system for tracking key priorities in your prospecting efforts. We use fields in our CRM system to identify the importance of contacts and accounts so we can quickly identify the high priority contacts and accounts in our large database. Keeping these priority fields current is critical so important contacts do not get lost in a "haystack" of low priority records.

Note Taking: CRM systems are pretty boring. But taking good notes on your interactions with prospects is very important if you "team sell". Team selling can be extremely powerful. It lets others come up with ideas you may have missed. But team members can only help you if you take enough notes for them to know what's going on with that contact/account. Make sure you keep good notes on all prospects. The benchmark we use for CRM notes is: can some other member of the team read your notes and get an accurate picture of the status of your work so far on that contact? If not, improve your notes.

As I've said before "sales is just like accounting". In prospecting this is so true. The details count a lot. The cliché of sales people is as loud backslappers buying drinks at the golf club. Great characters but lousy at administration...and details.

The reality in a "Sales 2.0 world" is that sales people need to be "boring" and not miss a detail -- or they will miss a deal.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a "Sales 2.0 world" sales and marketing are the same thing.

I'm a bit weird in that during my career I've spent several years in both marketing and sales (and studied marketing at Wharton but now "eat and drink" sales). My take away from being on both sides of the departmental divide is that this is a problem we have created for ourselves - it's not a fundamental one.

The problem usually starts when a growing company appoints its first head of marketing (if it has a head of sales) or its first head of sales (if it has a head of marketing). As soon as that happens it opens up the possibility of departments not being aligned.

To me sales and marketing are just different parts of the same function. The point for a business is to generate leads and close deals. Who cares who does that? As a CEO, I certainly don't, as long as we close deals then the accountant could do it as far as I'm concerned.

The biggest real divide I have seen between sales and marketing people is that sales people think everything can be done on the telephone and marketing people will use any mechanism possible before calling a prospect themselves. This is a bit of a strange differentiation in jobs isn't it?

As we move into a "Sales 2.0 world", we sales people are starting to be armed with the more advanced tools we need to deal with ever more difficult-to-reach buyers. But as we start to use these tools look what's happening: sales people are sending their own mass email (e.g. Sales Genius) and grabbing their own contact lists (e.g. Jigsaw), so sales people are doing the same thing as marketing people.

As Sales 2.0 picks up, sales and marketing departments are going to look more-and-more alike. Maybe the big change will come when the first marketing person makes a cold call - a bit like the opening scene from the movie "2001 - A Space Odyssey". (By the way, please, email me if you know what the end of that movie means I'm still trying to figure it out).

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This post continues my efforts to bring you the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events.

In Part 1, 2, 3 & 4 I discussed how preparation is critical and went through some of the details of preparing what you are going to say and who you are going to contact. Then in part 5 I talked about multimedia prospecting. In this post I’d like to tackle attitude.

Prospecting is Like Golf
Do you play golf? Well if you ever have, you may have experienced what an incredibly frustrating and hard game it is. Strangely though it is the fact that it is hard that makes it so addictive to so many people. Ask any golfer and they will remember that one beautiful shot they hit. It's that one great shot (out of on average 100 other poor to average ones that keeps people coming back).

My experience is that prospecting is like golf in this way. It's very hard (and often frustrating). But that one sale you make is like that one beautiful golf shot. It feels really great. There's something about the thrill of that one "yes" in amongst those 100 "no's" that is addictive -- to me at least. It keeps me coming back.

Be Positive but Set Obtainable Goals
Now one of the things I notice about many golfers is that they are overly optimistic. They remember that one good shot and they suddenly think all their shots will be like that. It's not realistic. We are not all "Tiger". If you understand what really happens with your average golf shot, you actually end up playing better golf. Don't plan to hit a 250-yard drive when you average 180 yards. Some of playing better golf is about understanding the actual way you play not the way you dream the world should be. You should feel good when you drive the ball 190 yards (and really good if that happens to be a straight shot).

Similarly in prospecting, we sales people get sucked into a fantasy of thinking every call we make is going to be a sale. Sure having a positive attitude is great thing but setting yourself unrealistic goals will not keep you feeling positive ("stretch goals" are good but not crazy goals). Unrealistic goal setting will tear you down quickly. If in your normal prospecting campaigns you make one sale for every 100 calls, you should feel great if you make 50 calls and make a sale -- you are way ahead of your average. Feel great about that!

Go into your prospecting campaigns knowing how they really work -- not how they might work for "the world's greatest sales person with the world's greatest product" (aka Tiger Woods of sales - if there is such a fellow).

If you adopt a positive attitude based on reasonable goals and commend yourself every time you beat your average, I believe you will find prospecting more fun. You'll know what the "par" is for the tough course you are playing and you should pat-yourself-on-the-back every time you "hit a fairway" or sink a "four foot putt".

PS Apologies to all non-golfers: from my experience skiing works as a decent analogy here too or anything else that takes buckets of skill and practice to master…

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Good prospecting is boring. We've noticed over the last couple of weeks how true this is for our own telesales organization.

We had been on quite a "roll" securing new business and leads all over the place for our clients for a few months. Then we relaxed a bit, got a bit less detail-focused and "voila" things slowed up in the pipeline. So we spent the last couple of weeks looking into what was causing this slow down what we have found was details. It turned out small differences in how "type A" we were being really impacted our results.

Some specific areas that we found:

I've said before "sales is just like accounting". In prospecting this is so true.

The details count a lot. The cliché of sales people is as loud backslappers buying drinks at the golf club. Great characters but lousy at administration...and details.

The reality in a "Sales 2.0 world" is that sales people need to be "boring" and not miss a detail -- or they will miss a deal.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I went on a sales call a couple of weeks ago where the rep arrived and spread out about 15 products all across the prospect's desk. Then she just started talking (and talking) about the products.

All the poor prospect could say was "ah ha"..."ah ha" as the sales person kept talking and talking about the features of these products for about 20 minutes. I sat there and listened and had a very clear sense that the prospect was totally bored. (Heck, I was bored!)

Now I think back on this experience, one tip off was that the sales person was carrying a backpack full of product to the sales call. I was carrying one piece of paper, a pen and a Blackberry - all in my jacket pocket. Nothing in my hands at all.

Now I admit you can have a "wheely bag" full of products and still hold an excellent sales meeting. If you remember the products are only there to be used when appropriate. And appropriate is only to support a solution you have jointly developed with the prospect after plenty of questions to uncover their needs.

But as a practical tip to sales people who currently give product pitches and want to improve their sales meetings. Do this. Check your hands before you go to a sales meeting. If you have bags full of product or brochures in them, think twice. Try leaving all that stuff behind (or at least in your car).

Your job at a sales meeting is to ask questions and to listen. You don't need arms full of products or brochures to do that. Try going to your next sales meeting without this stuff. Try going naked!

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This post continues my efforts to bring you the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events.

In Part 1 I discussed how a Sales 2.0 sales process puts most of the emphasis on the early parts of the sales process. In Part 2 I described that preparation in the sales process is key and that preparation for prospecting breaks down into "what are you going to say?" and "who are you going to say it to?" In this installment I want to say more about "what are you going to say?"

The first part to figuring out "what are you going to say?" is figuring out "what you do". Sounds easy right? Well not quite. Let's add some constraints:

1. Answer the question "what do you do?" in seven words or less (well maybe you can have ten but not more)
2. Say "what you do" in words your grandmother can understand
3. Focus on your clients. Say what you do for them

I've worked with a lot of technology companies over the years and most of them have sucked at saying what they do. Generally they violated all these rules and had long-winded statements full of technical features that no prospect cared about, had the time to listen to or could understand.

When you first contact someone they are not interested in investing their valuable time in figuring out what your product of service can do for them. The only way you will gain their interest is by telling them what you can do for them, quickly and in words they can instantly understand.

Here's some examples of good answers to the "what do you do?" question from Richard Fouts (who usually gives this portion of our live sales training):

> We help you comfortably retire. (Fidelity)
> We protect companies, lives and reputations. (GE Insurance)
> We help companies do business online. (IBM)

So the first part of figuring out "what you should say" when prospecting is figuring out "what you do"...in a way that a prospect can hear.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm trying to bring you some of the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events.

As I said in my introductory post the Sales 2.0 process puts the emphasis on the front end of the sales process not the back end. The focus is on getting high quality leads that will close not on closing techniques supposed to turn poor prospects into clients (this does not work anyway!)

So let's start with the really important stuff: preparation (click on the diagram opposite to make it larger). Preparation is the "poor cousin" in so many sales people's skill sets. "Old school" sales managers get nervous if they feel their sales people are spending time on preparation. They just want sales people to dial as much as they can. But in the 21st century, calling busy executives with nothing to say is futile and depressing for sales people.

Companies and sales people need to spend time preparing. It's critical. Preparing (a) before they even get near a telephone and (b) preparing every time they make a call.

Upfront Preparation
Before a sales person ever gets near a telephone someone in their company, the CEO, marketing department or the sales person themselves needs to have really good answers to two very basic questions:

1. What are we going to say to prospects? (the "What")
2. Who exactly are those prospects? (the "Who")

Many companies, managers and ultimately sales people have really weak or fuzzy answers to these two questions. Well guess what? In 2008, you need to say something really good to exactly the right person to get any interest at all. If either of these points is badly defined, you're toast.

I've received a few email questions from readers that have been of the form "Prospects won't listen to me. What should I do?" The basic answer is to hammer out WHAT to say and WHO to say it to. It's much harder than you might initially think to get this right. But it's better (and more time efficient) than calling 500 people and getting zero interest.

I'll talk about the "WHAT" and the "WHO" in more detail in my next post.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A key difference between Sales 2.0 and Sales 1.0 (aka "old school selling") is where sales people should spend their time and energy in the sales process.

The graph opposite illustrates this point (click to enlarge). The graph shows the time and energy sales people need to put into the sales process graphed against the stages in the sales process. At a high level the four stages in the sales process are:

1. Prepare
2. Prospect
3. Progress (move opportunities towards closure)
4. Close

In Sales 1.0 (aka "old school selling") there is a lot of emphasis on closing techniques. In Sales 2.0 we find that closing is the easiest thing we do and requires almost no effort (often buyers actually ask us to sign a contract).

A the other end of the sales process "old school" sales books say almost nothing about preparation before prospecting. But we find in 2008 that it is hard to penetrate the noise in the market place and gaining a prospect's attention. As many authors on this website have pointed out busy executives have ZERO tolerance for generic cold calls. Prospecting efforts need to be highly customized. There's only one way to do that: preparation.

Prospecting in a Sales 2.0 world is not one cold call to a prospect then give up. It's a campaign to get in -- a campaign that uses multi-media to get through. The telephone is central to this campaign but it's not limited to this tool. Sales 2.0 prospecting uses telephone, email, ground mail, fax, Fedex, gifts, books and more, as appropriate to the importance of the prospect to you.

So like so many things in sales, we find what actually works today is "upside down" from the sales lore of "old school selling". Put your effort and time in upfront and closing deals will be easy.

Note: I will be saying more about each part of the sales process in future posts. The picture in this article is the slide I use to introduce our live Sales 2.0 talks. I want to bring our website readers the tools that we present in that talk over the next couple of months.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Do you really want to get that meeting?

For most companies the biggest bottleneck in the sales process these days is getting into that executive meeting. But how often do we really earn the right to get that meeting?

As a sales person in a "Sales 2.0 world" there are many, many tools and techniques available to us to increase our chances of getting a meeting. From my observation most sales people and sales organizations do not use 10% of these. And some sales people just cold-call with no research and no customization of their pitch - dumb (and largely unforgivable if you know what resources are out there).

Here are some tools available to us that can be used to increase the likelihood of getting a meeting:

• Hoovers, OneSource etc: get the basic information on the company: company description, senior executives, revenue, profit and annual report. You know the drill (I hope!)

• Jigsaw, Spoke: dive a little deeper on contacts. Find middle managers responsible for the area(s) you sell to

• LinkedIn: invest some time building your network in LinkedIn and you can get referrals to executives in the area you want or close enough to help you with coaching on the account. Even if you aren't closely linked to your prospects you can find some great bio information here

• InsideView, Google News: use something -- whether it's a sophisticated Sales 2.0 tool like InsideView or a free service liked Google News to watch for "trigger events". Don't you want to be there when a new CMO starts at your target account? How about when your prospect launches a new product?

These are just some of the tools out there that you can use now. Use the information from these tools to customize your pitch to executives. Show them you have done your homework.

Earn the right to get in!

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been talking to a few business owners this week about how to develop their business. We've talked extensively about prospecting and it keeps striking me that the #1 ingredient to successful prospecting for them is going to be the quality of their prospect list.

A little while back I may have picked your value proposition as the #1 ingredient in a successful prospecting program but now I put the prospect list first and the value proposition second (but of course both better be really good or your conversion/sales stats are going to suck!)

The tough part about having a great list of people to call is it takes a lot of work. A great list is like love - you can't buy it! Going out to list brokers or online systems (even the "Sales 2.0" ones like Jigsaw or Spoke) won't get you a list that will perform that well (although you can start there). Lists need a ton of cleaning and nurturing -- constantly.

Only after you've spent a lot of time and effort defining the profile of who you need to call. And spent tons of time on cleaning your list. And then spent ages on calling people and nurturing the heck out of them, will you have a list that you will start to appreciate...your "house" list.

You can't buy a list that will work well. You have to develop it with love!

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of great posts by the usual suspects (for great posts on sales subjects), Jill Konrath and Jim Logan, reminded me that sales people should not think like sales people.

We've all heard the terms "consultative selling" and "solution selling" but we often forget to practice what we believe.  Both these philosophies implore us to offer solutions to our clients and prospects not push product.  But sometimes we just get carried away and start harping on about how great we and our products are.

Start thinking like a consultant or a business person trying to help a peer and now you have the right mindset for solution (or consultative) selling.  Consultants and business people prepare for meetings, they research markets, they develop ideas and they write thought leadership pieces.

In all the markets I experience there are always more suppliers than there are clients.  Sales people need to stand out from the crowd.  One way still open to us is to think like consultants or business people and add our own personal value to our prospects.

Jim Logan says:

Corporate executives, business owners, investors, and senior management rarely have time for sales people; they always have time for businesspeople. The reason is businesspeople address issues of their primary concern - enabling business. Salespeople generally talk about their products and services.

Jill Konrath says:

Stop putting on your sales hat! Stop thinking of yourself as a seller. You are a business improvement specialist. As a result of your work to improve your customer's operation, they will buy your product or service. Sales is the outcome of what you do, but it is not your purpose.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)