Sales 2.0

A Buyer Tells How to Sell Him

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I saw this post from Ed Sim that succinctly sums up some basic principles for running sales meetings.

I want to point this post out because it was written from the buyer’s perspective.  Ed is a VC. His post is a set of guidelines to help technology firms when pitching to him for investment. However, the rules he sets out apply equally to when you are selling your technology to IT buyers.  I have paraphrased his rules below and added some of my own commentary.

Notice the repeated theme of engaging your prospect in a conversation not being a “talking head”.  Successful sales meetings should be discussions, with the prospect doing 70-80% of the talking.  If you leave a sales meeting having done most of the talking, then you will be lucky to ever from that prospect again.

Basic Guidelines for a Sales Meeting

  1. Be flexible: have an agenda but listen to your audience and guide the conversation from their reactions
  2. Have a well-honed elevator pitch (you usually need this to get the meeting in the first place)
  3. The Slide Deck: make it short and sweet
  4. Listen and ask questions: have a conversation!
  5. The Demo: have proof that your solution works and have plans to deal with the inevitable glitches that occur with demos
  6. Next steps: never forget to ask about the next steps, You cannot move a sale forward without next steps.
  7. Pre-Meeting Research: research the individual and the firm before the meeting – so you can ask intelligent questions

Ed’s post is written by a buyer of technology who by his own account has experienced many poor sales presentations.  Follow the simple rules above and you can stand out from 80% of your competition.

What’s Old is New

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How many emails did you get this week?  How many hand-written notes or letters did you receive?

I suspect most people have no idea what the answer is to question #1 since the number is so large.  I suspect the answer to question #2 is zero but no greater than one.

We are all grappling with breaking through the “marketing noise” today but as more and more of this noise moves into electronic media, like email and (yes) blogs, there is an opportunity opening up.  It’s the opportunity of old fashioned media like letters, note cards and faxes.

Here’s the story of purportedly the world’s greatest sales man from the Guerilla Marketing for Consultants blog.  The secret to the world’s greatest sales man was that he sent lots of postcards!  And here’s a recent success story from a small business owner who used hand-written notes to prospect, from the Duct Tape Marketing blog, he generated ten leads from twenty hand-written notes!

So if you want to break through the noise out there and connect with new people or keep-in-touch with existing contacts, it just might be time to pick up your old fountain pen…

Have a Purpose for Your Next Sales Call

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There seems to be a fair bit of confusion on how to effectively run a sales call (meeting).  A couple of years ago my partner, John Orvos, introduced me to a very simple format for running sales meetings that I now use every time I am in front of a prospect.  The format is:

  • Introduction
  • Purpose
  • Needs discovery

There a few stages after “needs discovery” to take you to the ultimate close but I usually find in selling complex solutions that these stages have to be tackled in subsequent meetings.  Therefore for the first meeting all I need to remember are the three points above.

Introduction
The introductory phase of the meeting should be pretty short with most prospects (at least in the North East corridor).  This section involves some small talk to warm up (two minutes literally in New York!) and a very brief reminder of what your company does and what your prospect does.  This section should be kept brief because it not that important.

Purpose
Once the initial introduction is complete you need to state the purpose for the meeting.  “As I understand it we are meeting today to discuss…XYZ…Is that correct?”  Usually the prospect will just say “Yes”

The reason stating the purpose of the meeting is important is that it naturally gives you control of the meeting. In ninety percent of meetings it will allow you to start asking questions rather than have the prospect bombard you with questions that are often designed to find weaknesses and risks in your offering.

Needs Discovery
Once you have taken control of the meeting you can naturally slip into asking questions to unearth the needs of the prospect.  The correct questions to ask are another large subject altogether. In fact, enough to fill a book! And The book on this subject is Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling. (I can cover some of the basics on these questions in a future post).

So the next time you go on a sales call remember to state the purpose for the meeting.  It will get you off the “back foot”…which those who play cricket know is a good thing.

Sales Pros – How are your Writing Skills?

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I have been reviewing resumes recently for sales positions at one of my clients and I cannot believe how poorly written some of them are.  About a third of the resumes contain glaring and repeated spelling and grammatical mistakes.

The two most extreme examples of poorly written resumes went far beyond pure mistakes in English:

  • Example 1: I received a resume that was a template where the candidate had not completed the customization.  So it literally said “I feel I am a good fit for [fill in the job]” (and the words “fill in the job” were actually in the resume), then it went on to say “because of my skills in [fill in the skills]”
  • Example 2: I received a resume that had come from LinkedIn so I went to the candidates LinkedIn profile.  In the person’s profile a found the candidate had only one endorsement (testimonial).  And the testimonial read “John, I do not remember you, so how can I give you a testimonial”

I am a pretty forgiving person but how in good conscience could I proceed with interviewing these people? As a Sales VP I cannot escape the vision of these individuals sending out emails and marketing materials to my prospects!

So sales people, when you are (a) applying for a job or (b) sending out communication to your prospects and clients, please make sure that your correspondence does not contain any glaring errors in content, logic, grammar or spelling.

Sales people do not have to be the “Bard” of their company but they do need to get the basics of communication right!

The “S-Myth”

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The cover story from June’s issue of Sales and Marketing Management magazine is making me feel uneasy (a paid subscription is needed to access this article). It’s not so much the explicit subject of the article – which is about hiring – but the implicit idea that companies should only be looking for sales stars – the article is entitled “Star Search”.

I believe there is a “sales star myth” in existence…It seems to be a common perception in the technology industry that sales managers and CEO’s should only be trying to find “sales stars” or “top guns” to work in their sales force.

Companies are spending months on the hiring process and then frequently experiencing huge disappointment with their eventual hire(s).  Frequently turning around and firing these same people within a year.

I am not that surprised.  Having met hundreds of sales people in the technology industry, I can honestly count on one hand the people who have struck me as “stars”.

So what’s the solution?

I suggest VP’s and CEO’s start thinking more realistically about sales people.  Sales is a job just like any other (I like to say just like accounting!)  Selling is a process. 

In his classic book the “E-Myth” Michael Gerber shows entrepreneurs that they need to break their businesses down into documented business processes so that they can be run by people other than the entrepreneurs themselves. 

Sales managers and CEO’s need to start thinking this way. The upshot of Michael Gerber’s system is that you can staff your business with “ordinary people” who run the great system you developed.  The same is true in sales.

So think about developing sales processes for your firm…You won’t have to spend all your time searching for mythical “sales stars”; you will greatly reduce staff turnover; and you may dramatically grow revenue as well!

Are Your Sales People Just Going through the Car Wash?

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I often ask sales people what sales methodology they use…and I often get greeted by a blank stare. 

So then I ask which sales training they took over their career is the one they use on a day-to-day basis.  The answer to this question is often a list of four to five, often well known, training courses…

Then the sales person usually tells me they don’t really use any of them…

In my opinion this is not good news for the company these sales people work for.  If you, like me, believe that sales is a process, you want your sales people to have a process. The goal of sales training is to change behaviors and to pass on a sales process to attendees so that they are more effective in selling in the field.

Research conducted by the Huthwaite Group (authors of SPIN Selling) concluded that 87% of skills are lost within 4 weeks of sales training if no reinforcement is carried out.  If skills are lost, behavior will not change and sales people will keep doing things “by their gut” – often in a fatally flawed manner.

So next time you consider sales training, make sure you factor in ways to reinforce the learning that takes place in the classroom, either through formal reinforcement sessions or on-the-job coaching.  Otherwise, your sales people will come out of the training class looking like “shiny cars that just went through the car wash” but they will not improve their sales results.