The single most common mistake that organisations make is promoting their number one salesperson into the role of sales manager, thereby depriving themselves in a single stroke of their best producer and hamstringing their sales force with an ineffective manager.

The skills required for managing, mentoring and developing a sales team, are totally different from those required for selling.

As a result, it’s not uncommon to find newly promoted sales managers who regret having taken a management position and may even leave to get back into sales.

Insufficient Time for Sales Team Development:
The majority of sales managers – new and experienced alike – say they do not have sufficient time to train and develop their sales teams. They are so focused on sales results – and so accustomed to achieving success through their personal pursuit of those results – that they overlook their greatest potential source of power, the power to increase sales performance by developing their people.

Providing Development for Sales Managers:
Successful Sales Directors ensure that some sort of training and development program is in place to help sales managers continually improving the way they coach and develop their team. Equally important, top-performing Sales Directors look for ways to provide sales managers with the resources they need to perform effectively. This may mean, for example, giving managers tools with which to identify each individual salesperson’s strengths and development areas, providing them with an easy-to-use framework to address development areas, and putting a process in place that helps their team to implement new skills.

Opportunity to Make a Difference:
Every sales manager has a powerful role to play in developing and supporting their team members’ potential so that an increasing emphasis is placed on performance management to enable more salespeople to achieve more of their potential. We have identified the eight most common reasons why salespeople fail i.e.

Wrong or no selection process = The wrong person for the position

Wrong or no training = Insufficiently developed

Wrong or no planning = Expected to do all of their own planning

Wrong or no supervision = Left without competent supervision

Wrong or no motivation = Not properly motivated to meet objectives

Wrong or no stimulation = Not stimulated by appropriate incentives

Wrong or no evaluation = Not regularly appraised against a set of agreed objectives

Wrong or no executive action = Not adequately supported by a competent manager

The Sales Manager has control over all of these factors, including the final one!

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the world economy heads unceasingly down how will CEO's and VPs of sales know if their sales force is struggling because of the economy, their product or because, well, their sales team is "rubbish" (or excellent)?

Time and time again I see the same "dance" where companies hire sales people or VPs of sales, believing they have hired a "rock star" and then a year later fire them. This is a tremendous waste of time, effort and money. And how do CEOs decide to get rid of sales people or sales VPs? They look at the revenue goal they set these people and if they missed the number significantly, they "shoot" them. That's about as far as the performance analysis goes in most situations.

Why is such a big decision made on so little data? Well, mostly because so little data on sales exists or at least so little data is in the hands of most CEOs in the vast majority of companies.

Most companies have a lot more visibility into what their accounting department does than their sales force. Sales people are still allowed to run around in the field with little measurement. The argument that "sales is an art" is thrown up as defense by sales people who don't want to be measured. "How can you measure what we do?"

But in my opinion measurement has to happen. Sales does have some elements you may call art but also more elements that will benefit from science. And by applying scientific approaches we can measure many parts of the sales process and (yes even) people.

So how do you know if your sales force is "rubbish" (or great)? Compare it against some standards. Measure different elements of your sales process and people and compare them to other companies’ results. In other words: benchmark.

On November 17, I will be interviewing the authors of a new book all about sales benchmarking. The authors have gathered together a database of information on sales metrics from hundreds of companies, giving us for the first time I know of, some hope of benchmarking our own sales forces. Figuring out how they are doing versus our competitive set and diagnosing the specific bottlenecks and problems in our process and people. I'll be posting details about how to access the interview shortly.

I hope this is the beginning of making sales force performance measurable in a much more scientific and detailed way. We need to reduce the pattern of hire and fire of sales people and sales VPs based on a very limited understanding of what they do.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Building a highly productive, modern sales organization requires increasing specialization - and frankly, it's a big reason salesforce.com has such an amazing sales organization. Though they take it to the extremes - you wouldn't believe the number of different kinds of sales groups, inside and out, that salesforce.com has :)

One of the biggest sources of lost productivity is the practice of lumping a mix of different responsibilities (such as raw web lead qualification, cold prospecting, closing, account management...) into one general "sales" role.

Issues contributed to by lumping

• Lack of focus: Salespeople juggle too many responsibilities, reducing their ability to get things done. Salespeople have a reputation for being ADD - how does adding more responsibilities help that? For example, qualifying web leads is a much lower value distraction for salespeople from managing current clients. And managing a large current client base is a distraction from closing new clients!
  
• Talent development: It's challenging to bring in raw talent and develop them with a progressive career path. This is unfortunate, because homegrown talent usually ends up being the best! (also see "Where do I hire great salespeople?")
  
• Metrics: It's harder to break out and keep track key metrics (inbound leads, qualification and conversion rates, customer success rates...)
• Problem-solving: When things aren't working, lumped responsibilities obscure what's happening and make it more difficult to isolate and fix issues with accountable follow through.

The four core functions / themes

Here are four basic themes (I say 'theme' because even each of these functions can be sub-divided even further as your organization gets bigger):

1. "Inbound" Lead Qualification: Commonly called Market Response Reps, they qualify marketing leads coming inbound through the website or 800#. The sources of these leads are either marketing programs/SEO or organic word-of-mouth. Presentation: Inbound Lead Management Best Practices
   
   
2. "Outbound" Prospecting/Cold Calling 2.0: Commonly called Sales Development Reps or New Business Development Reps, they prospect into lists of target accounts to develop incremental new sales opportunities that don't already exist, that require a lot of proactive work. These outbound reps qualify their new sales opportunities and then pass them to Account Executives to close. Presentation: Introduction to Cold Calling 2.0
   
   
3. Account Executives: Quota-carrying closers, either inside or in the field. As a best practice, even when a company has an Account Management/Customer Success function, Account Executives should stay engaged with a new customer past the close and until they are deployed/launched. Also see "Sell To Success (The All-Natural Close)"
   
   
4. Account Management / Customer Success: client deployment and success, ongoing client management and renewals. In today's world of frictionless karma, someone needs to be dedicated to making customers successful - and that is NOT the salesperson!

When to specialize?
I frequently hear "we're too small to specialize yet". Every company is so different, it's tough to generalize. One rule of thumb is: "sooner than you think"...even if you just have a handful of Account Executives. A second rule of thumb I like is the 80/20 rule - when your reps, as a group, are spending more than 20% of their time on a non-core function (web lead qualification, cold account prospecting, account management), break out that function into a new role. Yes, I said 20%!

Here are a couple examples. Regardless of how many Account Executives (AEs) you have, if you're getting a couple of hundred inbound leads per month you should have or planning to have an inside Market Response Rep qualifying them for the AEs. Or if you already have 3-4 AEs, rather than making your next hire another AE, consider an outbound Sales Development rep who can spend 100% of their time working to feed the AEs.

Questions? I'll answer in the comments
This is really just a first introduction to the topic - we could drill ad naseum into the mechanics, metrics, comp, career paths... (as I said, nauseum) of the different groups and how the relate to each other. If you have specific questions, post them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.

Puzzle pieces
You'll have to pick and choose which puzzle pieces here are right for you, and how they fit into your business. My rule of thumb from experience is the 80/20 rule: 80% of the puzzle pieces here can should be plugged into your business, and 20% shouldn't or should be heavily customized.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 06:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love getting and answering questions, as it helps shape my thoughts into useful forms to share. Here's a recent answer I posted on ExpertCEO (a private online community for CEOs), to a question that was along the lines of...

"Do you have any advice for a company with a strong services practice that has sold mostly through partners in the past, but who is now looking to build their own Sales Machine? Any advice would much appreciated."

That's a pretty broad question, so here's a broad answer. principles I feel would help anyone get going in the right direction:

1) Be PATIENT. Developing a sales engine that predictably generates revenue can take 12-24+ months, depending on the state of your company. Even any one new program in b2b sales can take 3-6 months to be defined, show measured progress, and become integrated & habitual (i.e. machine-like).

2) Experiment. With everything. Constantly.

3) No one-offs! (Unless it's an experiment to learn something for the future). It's not worth doing if it's not repeatable. One-off efforts, even for a quick payoff, are a distraction from focusing your energy on sustainable efforts.

4) If it doesn't exist in your CRM system, it doesn't exist. (Sales)people must be comp'd only off data in the CRM system. Reports must be run totally in salesforce.com/CRM, whenever possible. Etc. [Update: thank you Ken Rudin of for the comment below, I agree the data just needs to be in a system and accessible. I should have said here that reports must not be in Excel whenever possible!]

5) Can you sketch out how things work on a flow chart? Even simply, on paper or a whiteboard? If not, that's a problem. What's the desired outcome, and process that leads to that outcome? Is it being done ad-hoc today? Sketching it out is the first step to bringing some order to the process...and thus outcome.

6) Focus on results rather than activity (ex: number of qualified opportunities created per month is much more meaningful than number of sales calls made)

7) Track fewer, more important metrics. It's easy to go way overboard in building reports and dashboards. Work with your team to prioritize metrics. Think in handfuls, not dozens.

8) Special attention on batons that cross functions. Whenever a process crosses teams (marketing to sales, or sales to professional services, or...), a baton is passed, and you have all the ripest conditions for problems.

9) Babysteps! Consistently try lots of little improvements. If you keep at them, they'll add up to big changes over time. (Remember the patience part?)

Additional posts
A few other blog posts that help illustrate the kind of thinking it takes to build a sales machine:

• The Joy of Weekly Pipeline Metrics
• Waterfall Metrics
• Stop Measuring Calls Per Day
• The Problems with "Lumping"; Separate the Four Core Sales Functions

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No, rather most salespeople prefer to disguise themselves behind euphemisms such as: “Sales Engineer”, “Account Executive”, “Technical Consultant” etc. But nowadays we have to accept that we all sell everyday - doctors, lawyers, estate agents, architects and politicians. The fact remains that anyone who is in business has to sell themselves and their products - and the so called “Captains of Industry” - Branson, Roddick, Marshall, Hanson, Gates, Dell and Co. are thought to be amongst the best salespeople in the world.

It therefore follows that the quality and success of our salespeople will ultimately determine the success of our business: Certainly the world has become more competitive and in order to survive and prosper we need to continually expand and develop the skill sets of our sales teams.

Sir John Harvey-Jones said “Most companies fail not in their attempts to be innovative or creative. In this country most of them fail because they undervalue the importance of professional selling”

Unfortunately, the task of selling never becomes any easier and as competition continues to intensify, sales people will face issues that can be extremely difficult to deal with e.g. decreased product uniqueness, increased competition within ‘safe’ markets, longer sales cycles and shorter product life spans. Every organisation that intends to survive in the re-engineered environment, which arrived with the new millennium, must, in my view, respond to those realities.

In summary: Our commercial functions, particularly the sales team, represent our forward line, if they are not scoring regularly we cannot possibly achieve our overall commercial objectives – i.e. nothing happens until somebody sells something and all  that investment in costly accounting software, new office equipment, expensive IT systems etc. will count for nothing. We can therefore say with complete confidence, that selling really is the key factor in the total marketing process.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

More than any other corporate discipline, salespeople second guess their current role constantly. I’m not talking about whether or not they want to quit their current position (that’s everybody). I mean they question if they want to get out of the whole sales racket altogether. Even seemingly seasoned (the George Hamilton look-alikes with the Rolex) will admit that they would love to go back to school and become a teacher, open a restaurant, crew a crabbing boat, whatever. For those people who are still young enough to do something about it, the ones that have their fantasies of joining the circus get in the way of closing deals, allow me to focus you with a few quick pros and cons of being in sales.  Who knows--I might help cull a few of you jugglers out of the woods quicker or rein a natural hunter back in.

Cons of being a salesperson

The number: It won’t go away, not even when you sleep or drink yourself into vaudeville. It gets harder all the time. You don’t get a pass for being old. Or new. It might as well be your prison number that you answer to at company meetings because your relationship to quota is WHO YOU ARE. You are the only person who has to care about everyone else’s job, because they all get paid whether the deal goes through or not.

Your boss: For some reason it is a rule that your manager, your VP, your CEO, your company owner or someone above you in the corporate monkey tree will be diametrically opposed to you in outlook, work ethic, technical ability, looks, etc. For me there was always some process whip-dick who wanted to see the easygoing jokester fail.

The customer: The inescapable reality in sales is that you are totally subservient to the people that will eventually mumble their consent to your proposal. No matter what kind of Far Side cartoon character you are dealing with it is your job to smile your way into their head and get the deal. They set the rules and your only reward for one failed (or Pyrrhic victory) relationship is another one on the spreadsheet. I still have a fantasy of jumping up in the middle of a call, letting everything I really think come spilling out and singing that “Anything you can do I can do better” song in full punk rocker roar.

Pros of being a salesperson

The number: Hitting that number frees you from all the chains of corporate life. Executive management LOVES you. HR shreds your file. PTO days don’t apply to you- and you work your own hours. It is the way that salespeople become the best paid people in the organization. Nobody can look elsewhere for who is number one because it is right there in black and white- I’m the best, so suck it. It is the closest you can get to being a celebrity or athlete.

Your boss: When you crush your numbers, you don’t have a boss.Your manager needs to just stay out of your way.There is no comparison in any other department. The top sales guy trumps the VP. He gets to slap the CEO’s bald head and call him “Woody” to his face. True story--I once laid down on the stage and fell asleep while a new president was grilling the rest of the company. I was closing deals--so he wasn’t talking to me.

The customer: I’m all about new people. Go ahead, jump in the cliché Conga line and say I’m a people person. Success in sales is directly attributable to how many people you can meet and move toward your goal. You are not allowed to sit at your desk and only deal with the same set of tired people (all former and present co-workers of mine obviously not included). The salesperson is constantly learning -and being entertained- and can make his own schedule. Customers are the path to freedom.

That’s right, the pros are the cons. Decide which they are for you and get out now or get back to work.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 10:36 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)

I was recently asked, "If you were mentoring a new salesperson, what would be your top five sales tips and how did you learn those?" 

Good question! It really got me thinking. There are so many things I'd like to tell a new seller. But what are the most important? What things could I recommend that would have the highest impact on success?

After serious deliberation, here are my thoughts ...

1. Focus on making a difference.

Nobody cares about your product, service or solution. That's the hardest thing for sellers to realize. All they care about is the difference you can make for their organization.

For example, today I sell sales training. If I'd call a VP of Sales and mention that, they'll tell me their not interested. However, once I changed my focus to the tangible outcomes they'd get from using my sales training, the door opened wide. After all, they were extremely interested in shortening their sales cycle, reducing the ramp up time for new hire sales reps and driving revenue growth.

2. Slow down to speed up your sales.

This was one of the hardest things for me to learn. When I first started selling, I was so eager to be successful. I tried to wow my prospects with my great product knowledge. I closed often and early. But the more I tried to rush things, the more resistant to moving forward my prospects became. They'd throw out obstacles and objections that I couldn't overcome. When I learned to slow down, parcel information out over multiple meetings, and simply advance the sales process one step at a time, suddenly my sales increased.

When you're scared about not getting the business, your prospects can intuitively sense your fear. One of the major symptoms is rushing the sales process.

3. Pay the price of admission. Do precall research!

To get into big companies, you can't make a 100 cold calls saying the same thing to everyone. Several years ago corporate decision makers stopped answering their phones and rolled all calls to voicemail. They delete most message within seconds because they sound like salespeople making their pitch.

I discovered that the only way to capture the attention of these corporate decision makers was to create a very personalized message based on in-depth research in their firm. Once I started doing this, I started setting up meetings.

4. Create an account entry campaign.

It takes 7-10 contacts to crack into a corporate accounts these days. Most sellers give up after 3-5 attempts. If you want to set up a meeting with a corporate decision maker, plan multiple touches from the onset. It takes a while to break through their busy-ness and register on their Richter Scale, but it can be done.

You can use multiple formats in your campaign too: voicemail, email, direct mail, invitations to teleseminars, and more.

5. Analyze your sales approach from your customer's shoes.

It's not important what you say. The only thing that matters is what your customer's hear. For example, when I was trying to reach a decision maker a while back, I decided to leave the message on my own voicemail first to see how I sounded. When I listened to my message, I was appalled. I sounded pathetic! So I worked on scripting my message and kept calling myself over and over till I finally created something I would respond to if I were the prospect.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Right, well now you're reading this, this is actually about the role of women in the sales profession.

This post is inspired by a conversation I had with Jill Konrath last week. Jill is not only one of the very top sales experts out there, she is also the organizer of the new Sales Shebang conference and community for smart, savvy women in B2B sales.

Jill's passion for the Sales Shebang was born because she recognized how much saleswomen needed strong female role models, as well as an opportunity to connect with like-minded women.

In the emerging "Sales 2.0 community" we've been focusing a great deal recently on tools and process for sales -- how Web 2.0 technology is changing sales. But businesses are made up of people not just tools and processes. If companies don't get the people element right, and don't motivate those people well, tools and processes won't do them much good at all.

If you look back as little as 20 years, you will see women have made a huge difference to the global economy already. But these changes are not over. Take a look at the way Google has designed its culture and benefits to attract the absolute best-and brightest employees.

Firms that want the best sales people better realize that they need the best women sales people too. Sales 2.0 firms need to design their work environments and cultures to cater to women's needs. They better think about issues like flexible work times, arrangements for child care and ample maternity leave. And they better not set a culture that feels like an "old boys' club" where women are not equal partners and don't get equal respect.

I have seen several examples of firms that have plenty of women sales people but they have not instilled a culture that meets women's needs. Examples where male bosses see the time off a woman takes to have a child as lost revenue and are basically annoyed by the perceived threat to their career goals. Where companies have a strict 9-5 code and parents cannot have the flexibility to pick their kids up from school. Well guess what? The most talented women sales people will always be in demand. So if you're company acts like this the best sales talent will one day get up and leave.

If you ignore women as the power that they are in sales, and will be even more so, expect to be trampled by your competition. Women are a big part of the Sales 2.0 future. Don't get stuck in the Sales 1.0 world (invented circa 1880.)

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"We need a culture that values selling," is a phrase bantered about when organizations are perceived to be getting in the salesperson’s way. But how do you change an existing culture (whatever it may be) to a sales culture? Most organizations believe that if the CEO and VP of Sales communicate the importance of selling with enough conviction it will convince the rest of the organization to rally around anything sales related. In short, they hope the culture will adapt.

While some of this may work, today's organization simply doesn't have the time. And it's never a good idea to bet your future on hope. While something like a “culture of sales” may lie in the abstract, it is ultimately linked to discrete sales processes.

Demystifying Culture
In their book, Execution, authors Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, define culture as the sum of an organization's shared values, beliefs and norms of behavior. It is the goal of GE, for example, to be either first or second in each business they operate. That translates into behaviors that make up GE's culture, or "way of operating."

When Do Cultures Need to Change?
CEOs set out to change cultures when their renewed vision for competitiveness is inhibited by the values and beliefs of their people. Hence, GE's CEO Jeffrey Immelt believes that, in today's global economy, the key to being number one or two is more about innovation, versus the existing culture, which believes it's all about grinding costs down and increasing share through acquisition. Immelt's new initiatives reward behavior differently. Sure, costs and margins are hugely relevant, but an executive's ability to innovate has taken on a much different level of appreciation in Immelt's new GE.

The Intersection of Culture and Process
Getting people to behave, in a style that supports an executive vision takes more than posters, town meetings and pep talks (which is what most companies try). With every desired cultural attribute, such as "we're sales oriented" lies a series of processes and behaviors that need to be deliberately put into place.

Having worked at both Digital and HP I speak from my own experience. Digital had a strong cultural value of "making your numbers" and missing them wasn't tolerated. Near the end, when executives were presiding over dwindling numbers, the culture didn't change. And neither did the numbers (except that they went down). The pressure on numbers encouraged sales people to sell - including products that customers often didn't need. At HP, satisfied customers was an overriding cultural value. If you blew out your numbers, but had unhappy customers (or co-workers that disliked working with you), you received a bad performance review. If you delivered happy, loyal customers, but missed your numbers, you didn't necessarily get a bad report card. You got advice and guidance on how to get more happy customers.

So before you roll out an internal communications campaign to rally the troops around a new set of desired values, identify the behavior (and processes) that connect your idea of cultural nirvana to a working engine with the cogs and wheels it needs to properly deliver. Redefine reward structures. Map processes around your new vision of what it means to be competitive. Then get the communications campaign rolling. Without process, you have nothing to communicate other than a nice dream.

For some addtional insight on the relationship between culture and execution, I highly recommend the aforementioned book, appropriately titled, Execution, by Bossidy and Charan.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are several excerpts from an article by Bill Brooks, CEO of The Brooks Group, a sales management and training firm, The Ten Dumbest Things Salespeople Do:

The truth is, knowing what not to do in sales is just as powerful as knowing what to do. I’ve assembled a list of ten of the dumbest things salespeople do — things that are virtually guaranteed to totally and completely de-rail your selling career.

1. They don’t become students of their craft - These salespeople begin strong selling careers, and they really get into it — but then they go to sleep at the switch and forget to do things like read industry publications or new books by sales masters. They don’t go to sales seminars, listen to audios or view videos on sales-related topics. In short, these salespeople don’t constantly re-invigorate themselves.

2. They don’t “narrowcast” their offering - This means that they don’t become specialists at a particular type of market, or at delivering a specific type of product; they stay generalists.

3. They fail to position themselves correctly - The way people position themselves determines how their prospects and customers see them. In short, people pay attention to people whom they perceive as having something important to say to them.

4. They fail to prospect - This is huge. The biggest cause of failure in sales is having an inadequate supply of qualified prospects. How do you get prospects? Like I said above — host informational sessions for prospective clients, send mailings with targeted lists, speak at association meetings, host user’s groups, or offer a webinar.

5. They get in front of the wrong people - There’s an old statement that goes: “You can’t get rich selling to the wrong people.” It is best to be in front of people who: Can make a decision, have a need, have a perceived problem, or pain, and are willing to listen to you.

6. They listen to their peers - Listening to your peers often means you get too much negative input. It is important to understand that 80 percent of your peers are only delivering 20 percent of the results. And you know what? They’ve got nothing better to do than hope you’re not successful, either — so it’s not logical to accept their advice. Instead, listen to positive, upbeat advice that makes you feel good, and think clearly.

7. They don’t understand the economics of their product or service - Would you sell something for a buck and a half that cost you a buck? No you wouldn’t, but unfortunately several salespeople don’t understand value costing, and that’s exactly what they end up doing! These salespeople don’t truly understand what it costs to deploy their solutions in the field. They don’t understand the expense of telephones, manufacturing, advertising, marketing and promotion, so they end up giving the product or service away.

8. They mentally spend their income, before they earn it - If your pay plan is somehow designed to reward you for production or performance — not just a base salary for being around — listen to me. The sale is not made until you have received your commission check and it’s gone into the bank, and it’s cleared — only then is the sale consummated.

9. They fail to ask the right questions - In fact, they may have failed to ask questions at all. Or worse, they did ask questions, but didn’t listen to the answers.

10. They are either digitally compulsive or digitally impaired - In other words, they are so compulsive about digital technology that they spend all of their time on the Internet, or in sales force automation products. Either that, or they’re so impaired that they’re absolutely frozen about utilizing it. As simple, basic and fundamental as it sounds, the truth is — the most successful person is going to be the one who’s going to be in the middle. Bottom line: You should not be sitting in front of your computer screen all day long; you need to be eyeball to eyeball with prospects and customers.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery

Here is an article from Sales & Marketing Management's Management Advisor Newsletter, Plan a Successful Sales Meeting:

No one said sales meetings were supposed to be fun—you have to prepare in advance and take time away from clients to attend. Besides, you usually spend the duration day-dreaming anyway. When research shows that professionals feel 50 percent of meetings are a waste of time, you really can't blame your sales team for not being enthusiastic about your next gathering. But how can you get your reps to attend sales meetings without having to resort to begging?

Here are six tips to help you lead an effective and energetic meeting:

1. Set the Tone
There's more to a theme than just a few catchy words. A theme not only establishes the expectations for a sales meeting, but sets the tone and goals for the entire year. Making that theme meaningful can be the most important part of planning a sales event. Decide what message you want to send and what you want the meeting to accomplish. Also, be sure to introduce the theme early on to ignite focus and anticipation.

2. Kick It Off Right
Salespeople are active employees. They take the initiative every day to go out and take risks. It only makes sense that your sales meeting kickoff should actively involve your reps. Turning attendees into participants creates excitement. Start off with some light ice-breakers, and try techniques such as role playing to build team interaction.

3. Prevent Boredom
Make sure to engage your audience or you'll be getting those infamous blank stares. You can't maintain attention if all you're doing is talking at people. Try brainstorming activities or presenting skits in small groups. Also be sure to get feedback and suggestions as you go—it'll let attendees know their opinions have a place.

4. Let Them Shine
If you really want to engage your reps, make sure to use the meeting as a way to recognize your team's achievements. Throughout the meeting, find ways to acknowledge those who have gone above and beyond. Make them stand up and don't be shy with your praise. Salespeople tend to be egocentric, so the chance for peer recognition is highly valued.

5. Keep 'em Guessing
The quickest way to zap people's interest is to make meetings boring and run longer than expected. Keep reps motivated and focused for the duration with elements of surprise sprinkled throughout the meeting. They'll be much less likely to zone out if they're eager to see what's coming next. Try breakout sessions and alternating speakers to keep the momentum flowing.

6. Over But Not Out
It's done. Attendance was high, participants were enthusiastic and involved, and a wealth of new selling strategies took center stage. But was it a successful sales meeting? Post-meeting followup is important to keep the meeting in your reps' minds and to prepare for next time. Use a combination of ratings and open-ended questions when soliciting audience feedback for the most accurate results. Also, salespeople often thrive on competition, so by utilizing some mini-incentives or contests you can increase the amount of feedback you receive.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery

Here are several excerpts form an article by Bob Conlin, CMO at Centive, Sales Compensation Best Practices:

Sales compensation plans are one of the most powerful tools organizations have to affect sales performance. Properly designed and deployed, sales compensation plans drive superior performance and result in achieving and exceeding sales and revenue targets--without exceeding compensation budgets.

Unfortunately, most companies fail to adequately test and model sales compensation plan variables and attainment scenarios. This failure is largely due to the inability of their current spreadsheet-based sales compensation management systems to easily create and effectively run models. Restricted by their inability to model plans and attainment scenarios, executives are often reluctant to make the significant plan changes needed to better align their sales team with corporate sales, revenue, and profit goals.

Best practice sales-compensation management calls for sales and finance executives to work with sales operations to build and model compensation plans, analyze and forecast related commission earnings at both a macro (plan) and micro (individual) level, and then choose those sets of plans that best fit corporate parameters for sales performance, revenue, and associated commission costs.

This best practice exercise begins with the requirement to leverage a sales compensation management system that supports the ability to easily build multiple compensation plan models. Spreadsheet-based systems typically do not meet this requirement; the complex macros and linked worksheets needed to support multifaceted sales compensation plans are too difficult and time-consuming to build within a desktop application. To be effective with this exercise, multiple models need to be analyzed. Spreadsheet-based systems do not easily support this best practice.

Multiple models are needed because executives need to evaluate a myriad of changes and options--for example changes to quotas, commission rates, territories, and organizational structures. Attainment levels also need to be modeled--for example, a company may expect sales and the revenues associated with those sales to increase in some areas or with certain product lines, and decrease in other areas or with other product lines. So not only do executives need to model multiple plans, they also need to run multiple attainment scenarios through each of the modeled plans. By modeling both plans and data, executives are empowered to evaluate results and implement the plans that best fit their organization's business model.

During the modeling phase, results should be analyzed at both the macro level (i.e., what are the total compensation costs associated with this modeled plan?) and the micro level (i.e., how will this plan affect the earnings for particular sales team member?). Good sales plans should result in attainment that follows a standard bell curve, with the majority of reps grouped near 100 percent quota attainment. However, bell curves don't reveal details, and you need to make sure that new plans won't negatively impact your top performers or unfairly reward poor performers.

After the right sales compensation plans are implemented, sales and finance executives should actively monitor actual attainment and commission costs and compare them to their modeled plans. Modeled versus actual analysis helps ensure that companies are in position to quickly react should unforeseen influences affect results. In fact, best practice sales compensation management calls for executives to run new models periodically during the year to reflect market influences that may not have been initially factored in.

By modeling commission plans and forecasting related costs, sales and finance executives gain confidence that their sales plans will drive superior performance at a reasonable cost. In many ways, a sales team is like a highly tuned race car; it can achieve amazing performance results, but can quickly skid out of control if not carefully monitored and tweaked when results don't meet expectations.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery

Here are several excerpts from a press release that references a recent study on sales recognition best practices:

Motivating sales people requires a mix of 60% tangible, 40% intangible incentives, according to data from research and consulting firm Best Practices, LLC.

Intangible rewards - that are clearly important to motivation - include special recognition by management at team meetings, praise in private and mails from direct managers. By contrast, tangible rewards are such items that can be touched or consumed such as gift certificates, trophies and plaques, and cash and dinner for two. A summary of the report "Best Practices in Sales Recognition Programs," can be found here.

The most frequently used tangible rewards are gift certificates, plaques and cash awards, followed by dinner for two. When asked if there was a ceiling on cash payouts, more than half (54%) of surveyed companies said there was.

This research (available as a fee download) profiles 84 companies across industries on the prevalence of intangible and tangible rewards as well as:

Tax implication of programs

Communication of programs, including website support

Presence of formal measurement of program

Lessons learned

"In this research, respondents strongly stated that a link exists between the motivation of staff, a system of rewards using tangible and intangible recognition and increased performance," said Jon Easter, director of Best Practices, LLC's Business Excellence Board.

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In Top 10 Sales Killers, Tom Hopkins shares the most common mistakes salespeople make:

Any veteran in business can tell you a story about the one that got away. Veterans who are successful in business today learned valuable lessons from those situations and, hopefully, never repeated them. As challenging as the business of selling might be for some, losing sales is unbelievably easy. Learn from the mistakes of others so you won't have many of the sad stories to tell.

Sales Killer #1: Lack of professional appearance.
Sales Killer #2: Talking too much.
Sales Killer #3: Your vocabulary.
Sales Killer #4: Not investing time in building rapport.
Sales Killer #5: Lack of a qualification system.
Sales Killer #6: Not knowing when to stop presenting and close the sale.
Sales Killer #7: Ego.
Sales Killer #8: Not knowing how to close.
Sales Killer #9: Not paying attention to details.
Sales Killer #10: Poor fulfillment.

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Watch your prospect pipeline not just your revenue.

One of my favorite points from Ron Hubsher's "10 Sales Principles" event was that you need to keep close track of the number of deals in your sales pipeline and not judge the health of your sales efforts by this month's revenue numbers alone. 

Ron Hubsher pointed out that your prospect pipeline and your revenue are separated by your sales cycle.  Hence, if your sales cycle is three months, the health of your prospect pipeline today will determine the value of the deals you close in three months time.

Ron pointed out that companies often make the wrong marketing/prospecting investment decisions if they do not have a good handle on their prospect pipeline.  He used the example of a software company where this month's revenue was great so they eased back on their lead generation efforts only to find that their revenue in three months time was terrible.  Conversely they panicked when their monthly revenue was low and in fact their pipeline was healthy. (Note: click on the slide image to enlarge it and see the example.)

Companies need to have systems and processes in place so they can clearly understand the health of their prospect pipeline; otherwise, they will make bad marketing and sales investment decisions.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery

In The Leading Indicator of Sales Success, Chris Lytle, a Madison, Wis.-based sales trainer suggests that the number of prospects who have you on their calendars is a more accurate predictor of your sales success than the number of tasks on your to-do list. Here's some additional excerpts from the article:

Real prospects will put you on their calendars. People who tell you to call them “anytime on Thursday” are not actively engaging with you. The number of scheduled meetings is the missing metric. It doesn’t matter if you’re on their calendars for a face-to-face meeting, a phone conference or a Web conference. What matters is that it’s scheduled.

Start inspecting calendars instead of reading call reports. Count the number of scheduled meetings the salesperson went on for the last two weeks.

Look two or three weeks into the future to see how many scheduled meetings he or she has on the calendar. Increasing the number of scheduled meetings is the way to increase sales. It’s a more powerful and accurate metric than the old standby, the number of sales calls.

Sales pipeline angioplasty -

There are plenty of dead and dying deals in your salespeople’s pipelines. In medicine, angioplasty is a procedure that opens coronary arteries that have been clogged by fatty plaques caused by coronary artery disease.

Sales pipeline angioplasty is a procedure that eliminates dead opportunities that clog sales pipelines or that gets stalled prospects to reengage with you.

According to research conducted by CSO Insights, 90 percent of deals don’t close when projected and 54 percent of projected deals don’t close at all. Thirty-four percent go to a competitor and 20 percent go to no decision. Salespeople cling to accounts because they might call up and buy some day. At the same time waste time and energy pursuing dead deals.

Too many salespeople are busy chasing deals from people who have told them to “Call me next Thursday” or “Call me next quarter.” It’s a bad sign when your salespeople have long lists of people who have told them to call them later and short lists of scheduled meetings.

Prospects who are willing to schedule meetings are actively engaged in the buying process. Engaged customers do things for you within their own companies to move the buying process forward.

The magic e-mail -

Your salespeople all have prospects who have expressed interest, but are now disengaged. They have quit returning phone calls and e-mails for some reason. Get your salespeople to send this “Magic E-Mail.”

“Bob, I have you my list of people I’m waiting to hear back from. Am I still on your radar? You’re still on mine.”

Don’t ask Bob if something is wrong. Don’t ask if Bob has bought from someone else. Just ask if you’re still on his radar. This simple e-mail has helped me get a lot of deals moving forward again and get dead deals out of my pipeline.

Either way, you’ve performed pipeline angioplasty.

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Posted by Sales 2.0 at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery

Lori Richardson's Top Ten Symptoms of an Ineffective Sales Force post in her salesprocessdiva blog noted:

Here are ten symptoms that your sales force or sales efforts are not effective, per Ian Selbie of Power Marketing International:

Top Ten Symptoms of an Ineffective Sales Force:

1. Consistently not achieving assigned sales quotas
2. Lack of confidence calling at executive levels
3. An absence of account and / or opportunity planning
4. Poor understanding of your customer's business pain
5. Poor understanding of what the customer sees as value
6. Underestimating the competition
7. Pursuing deals blindly
8. Spending more time in the office than with customers
9. Spending more time using computer software than selling
10.Inaccurate revenue forecasting

Posted by bob cooley at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)