This is one I’ve seen several times over my (getting long) career. Someone is one of the top performers in a sales team and they still get sacked. How is this possible?
The trick is be super customer-focused and take the opposite approach when dealing with people in your own company.
The person that achieves this trick often says “I’m too busy selling to deal with the political nonsense in my company.” [Read more…]
A great point highlighted on the Linkedin Sales Blog. I hope to be saying more about this soon. I’ve used this approach for some of my own startup gigs. It works.
Designing your go-to-market plan based on relationships versus ZIP codes is a really smart move for most companies these days. [Read more…]
In the end the limit to your sales success will be time. If you had an infinite amount of time, you would make an infinite amount of sales. But you don’t.
Here’s a useful post from Hubspot on some ways not to spend your day.
Biting your nails. Chewing with your mouth open. Speaking before you think. This is the kind of stuff we usually think about when we think of “bad habits.”
But what about the bad habits that are hurting your performance at work?
There’s a whole host of things many of us are guilty of doing every single day that research shows ends up really hurting our productivity. And the more aware you are of how these things are affecting your productivity, the more proactive you can be at taking responsibility for your choices.
So, ask yourself: Are you guilty of any of these bad habits? If so, it may be time to cut it out.
I love the concept of this post from Patrick Cahill on the Hubspot Inbound Sales blog.
It seems totally sensible to me that sales people should A/B test their calls the same way marketers A/B test web pages, emails etc. etc.
In fact sophisticated marketers live by A/B testing so why wouldn’t sales people learn this too.
The improvements are not necessarily one time either but they can compound. If you keep improving using an A/B approach you could dramatically improve your company (or team’s) sales. Something to think about…
After examining data from hundreds of thousands of dials, it turns out that voicemail can be adjusted, tweaked, and tested to improve response rates.
While there are many variables, these are “Three S’s” you can look at when testing voicemail messaging at a high level:
- Structure: How you’re saying it
- Subject: What you’re saying
- Star: Who’s saying it
This post is going to be biased. Sorry.
I’m a big fan boy of David Meerman Scott dating back to his (in my opinion) classic book The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I read that book in 2008 and it rocked my world. Now he’s got a new book focused on sales, The New Rules of Sales and Service.
David pretty much defined content marketing about the same time Hubspot were thinking that way and now Hubspot is a newly-minted public company. He was the keynote speaker at Hubspot’s first Inbound conference. A couple of weeks ago I went to the 2014 version of Inbound with about 10,000 other people and was thrilled to not only attend David’s talk but get him to do an interview about his new book and his thoughts on social selling.
Here’s top 5 points from that interview. Some of these points may seriously imact your sales career.
David says we are halfway through a 40-year revolution brought on by the Internet. He says in the future people will look back at this time period and see it as the era of massive change, something like the industrial revolution.
He believes companies and sales people need to wake up to the fact that buyers are now in control of the purchasing process and act accordingly.
One upshot of that is that he sees sales people as having to become providers of useful content as a means to being found and as a way to be always be helpful to prospects and buyers.
I asked David what a sales person should do in a company that has not yet embraced these new behaviors (social selling). For example, a company that still insists on cold calling and judges reps by the number of calls made per day etc. Sound familiar?
David’s answer is sales people have 3 choices:
(1) Don’t do anything. Knuckle down to how things are and keep your head down. You won’t be great in this new world of buyer-lead sales but maybe you’ll keep your job.
(2) Become the agent of change. Try to move your company to the new sales model. This is very risky but you will be doing the right thing for company and yourself in the long run—but you may lose your job as you will be “fighting the system”.
(3) Leave and go find a company that has its act together on social selling
Changing existing companies is bloody hard (OK, David said “very very hard”).
It’s easier for a brand new startup to establish its sales and marketing processes the right way, changing existing processes and structures even just a little is really hard.
David points out the main champions of the sales status quo are your sales managers.
Most sales managers, directors and VPs came up through the ranks. They were once top sales people. They figured out what worked in selling. They want that stuff repeated by their reps today.
Here’s the problem: times have changed. Buyers have changed. Selling has changed. And many sales managers have NOT changed.
They want things done the “right way” from what they know. Unfortunately what was right when they sold is now wrong.
CRM is the second biggest problem. Up to this point most CRM systems really just help sales managers get reports. What they don’t do is help sales people sell.
The reporting and structure of these CRM’s is based on the traditional way of selling, e.g. how many cold calls did you make today. These CRM’s have old sales processes “baked” into them, encouraging you to sell the old way.
Fortunately new CRM’s are on the way—check out Hubspot’s brand new CRM and Nimble. (I’m not so sure that new sales managers are on the way. Let me know.)
This point actually is etched into my mind. I may go on about this a lot in future posts here.
David states that every company needs at least one “customer expert”.
He believes the customer expert should probably reside in the marketing department. Marketing people should dedicate themselves as a primary job function to understanding their buyers—in a lot of detail. They should spend plenty of time and effort researching your buyers needs, behaviors, mindset etc.
What’s so eye opening for me about this is that now I realize that so many of the revenue problems I’ve had over the last 20 years of sales and marketing really started by not understanding our buyers well enough.
You can be amazing at sales (or marketing) but unless you intimately understand your buyers you’re going to run uphill forever.
I’ll stop for now on this point but it’s so fundamental that I recommend writing it on a Post-It note and affixing it to your monitor or getting a tatt.
Getting tactical, I asked David how a sales person could really hope to provide their buyers with content day-in-day out. (Assuming they lived in a “normal” company, i.e. without marketing supporting them with the right content and sales managers asking them to make cold calls every day.)
David’s recommendation is that you become a content curator (rather than a content developer). This means you don’t need to spend hours writing blog posts and ebooks. What you do need to do is go find great blog posts and ebooks that other people have written and then send these links to your prospects and clients.
Content curation is pretty much what I’ve done for the last 10 years with Sales 2.0 and I can attest that it works. People associate the value they are getting with the sender not just the author, so this approach seems to make total sense to me.
You may think David Meerman Scott is off his rocker with some of these suggestions but I believe he’s spot on.
It’s tough to bet against him. Just about everything he wrote in the “New Rules of Marketing & PR” 7 years ago are now standard operating procedure for marketers. It seems quite likely he can see the future of professional sales too. I’d bet on it!
Should you want to see the future of your sales career, I highly recommend picking up a copy of his book on Amazon here. It’s a fun read and cheaper than a crystal ball. Or check out David’s Slideshare below.
“Dude, the future of this startup is so bright you better bring shades.”
Startups are super exciting but they can turn a “rockstar sales person” into a “loser”. So if one of these “golden opportunities” comes your way, try to look carefully before you jump in. Here’s why.
Entrepreneurs by definition need to be super passionate about their product. They would not have a product if they were not. They believe down to their bones that what they are making is really needed in the world.
At launch it’s an essential trait to be so convinced that what you are doing is valuable that you keep plowing ahead no matter what. There are so many naysayers at the beginning of a company’s life that an entrepreneur must develop a super thick skin.
Most startups make their first sales through the founders. In fact when you boil it down they make their first sales through social selling. They use the founders’ networks (and/or those of their investors) to get warm introductions to accounts and greatly increase their sales chances.
Then at some point the founders’ networks are exhausted. This is often when the founders call in a “sales professional”. Maybe a chief sales guy or a VP of sales (usually the same function just a better title). It’s time to “scale their sales”.
Now I’ve been in this position. And there are a couple of problems: (1) reality and (2) expectations.
The reality is that at this stage most startup’s products have not yet been truly tested in the “open sea”. By using social selling (a great idea to get things off zero) the founders and investors gave themselves an extra sales advantage. Some of the people that bought from the startup’s founders bought the relationship more than the product. They wanted to help the founders out. Some of these people are really friends of the founders.
Sometimes the founders gave these early early clients incredibly good deals–like free–to make sure they got their “beta clients” in place.
The expectations placed on this first “professional sales guy” can be very different to the reality. The founders may think “hey we’ve done the hard work now. We have our first several clients in place and now it’s time to hit the ‘hockey stick’. We’ll bring in this sales superstar dude and we can light this thing up”.
Think this sounds extreme?
Well if you’ve not been there, you may, but I’ve here a few times.
My founders were really disappointed that the new sales star did not sell some major deals in the first 3-4 weeks. For those of us on the sales side you will know 3-4 weeks can go by in the blink of an eye. 3-4 weeks go by while you’re still learning your product and your market never mind filling your sales pipeline. (For tips on ramping up your sales knowledge as fast as you can grab Jill Konrath’s new book, Agile Selling. Still it will take you more than two days to ramp up!)
The problem for many startup is they missed a step.
Hiring a sales dude to scale up your sales is not the next move is a setp has been missed. And in the situations I’ve seen this step was missed out.
The step that was missed was testing and refining the company’s message, target market and conversion of interested prospects into customers. This step could ideally happen in parallel to the founders making their initial sales. But in the situations I’ve seen the sales person is brought in before this testing and refinement was complete (or even started).
I’m reading 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall. In this book Perry recommends testing your product messaging and conversion first on Google Adwords. He lists scaling up with sales people has step #6 out of 10.
Pity I did not read this book a few years ago before I become the first sales dude at a couple of startups. I could have saved myself a lot of stress. In both situations the product and messaging was not refined enough for anybody to sell successfully.
Not to belittle our profession (as you know I think it’s one of the more complex and taxing professions available) but we sales people are really messengers. Our job is to efficiently communicate our company’s message to prospective clients and then help them make a decision on whether to buy our product.
In my opinion our job is not to make “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”.
It’s not our job to build the product. It’s not our job to adapt the product to the market. It’s not our job to “pivot” the company when the market says it does not want our offering. It’s not our job to figure out the messaging for our product so the market understands how it helps them. It’s not our job to produce collateral that clearly communicates the message. It’s not our job to build websites, landing pages, white papers, blog posts or other content marketing to engage prospects with our message.
And yet, in the startups I was involved with I got dragged into discussions and projects in all these areas.
I got dragged in because our product and message needed fixing. And if we did not fix these issues we could not sell our product. So I had no choice. But the time taken to fix these issues killed sales time.
The reality was the company and product were not ready to “throw the fuel on the fire” that having a dedicated sales person implied. There were too many unknowns in the approach. Adding a full time sales person just created more noise not more sales.
So if you have the chance to join a startup as the first sales rockstar dude, I recommend you check they are ready for you. It’s better to check this out before you jump in. Sometimes a startup’s future is quite cloudy and you might need an umbrella not a pair of shades.