Oracle Proclaims the New Ten Commandments of Technology Sales and Marketing

The market slowdown has hightened the issue of sales and marketing for many technology companies, drawing attention to cracks and weakeness that have existed for some time, but are all the more important given the present market slowdown. With this in mind we took a look at what some of the big vendors are doing, in particular at Oracle.

Universal Issues in Technology Marketing.

Guess what? The key sales and marketing related issues facing technology companies in the British Isles are also being faced by a big vendors such as Oracle. Specifically:

- Selling business results, not technology

- Selling to C level as opposed to simply IT managers

- Building relationships, as opposed to transactional selling

- Integrating sales and marketing

New Approach to Marketing & Sales Delivers Results for Oracle.

We have entered a new and exciting era in terms of B2B sales and marketing and, if the results at Oracle are anything to go by, it has the potential to boost aspects of sales and marketing performance by up to 40%.

In a Moses on the mountain moment, some years back, Bill Carper a senior director of global marketing for Oracle Corp., outlined the company's new consultative selling model that integrates sales and marketing.

At its core is selling to C Level

managers that don't know what solution they need, or what that solution is, but want to optimize their business performance.

The new approach to sales and marketing is required because these senior managers want to be informed, but not sold to.

The focus is on information, consultation and engagement (especially at C level). It also entails helping managers to understand the impact on their organization not just the applications, or technologies.

The New 10 Commandments.

1. Though shalt better understand your target market and how to reach it. Oracle enlisted its own CFO to sit down with his peers and talk about compliance issues that they were facing. This enabled them to tailor their message and approach.

2. Thou shalt target specific verticals and other segments - tailoring the approach to each in turn.

3. Though shall build one to one relationships organisation wide at the most senior levels, creating organisation-level marketing plans that target not just one individual manager, but all those involved or affected in an organization (particularly at C level).

4. Thou stalt get the message right:

- Focus on business needs and

solutions and create messaging that resonates with a particular pain point.

- Make sure your messaging is consistent online and offline.

- Make sure that it's relevant to the account, industry and role.

- Talk about something other than your company.

- Don’t focus on your product, but on the need and the results that can be achieved.

5. Thou shalt establish credibility using third-party association/validation.

6. Thou shalt use a sales system, or database. You need to have a single, consistent system to manage and track each one to one contact with a customer across the sales cycle/buying process.

7. Thou shalt look to influencers, enlisting them as advocates to generate awareness, interest, and add credibility to build demand. That may be subordinates in an organization or peers -- or a third party outside the company, including Trade associations and luminaries.

8. Thou shalt provide valuable information and insights to your target customers. For example, in a recent compliance campaign Oracle did a series of Webcasts through Forbes.com's CEO Portal. What made them special – well it was two hours of useful information, with no sales pitch at all.

9. Thou shalt integrate sales and marketing toward shared goals – as a marketer that may mean you need to swallow your pride. Back up your sales team with supportive marketing (e.g. events, whitepapers, etc.).

10. Thou shalt be prepared to walk away from accounts that just won’t work, spending your time and money somewhere else.

References, Sources & Credits:

Sales and Marketing? No, Consulting, Steve Hall

B2B Marketing Ideas from Siebel and Oracle on B2B Marketing, Garrett French

SALES SUPERSTARS: Do you have a Ronaldo on your sales team?

At a time when Spanish Soccer Team Real Madrid has paid a total of 130 million in transfer fees for superstars Ronaldo and Kaka, we turn our attention to the superstars of selling and ask what are they worth?

What about the sales superstars?

Manchester United has parted ways with leading goalscorer Ronaldo in return for £75 million from Real Madrid, setting a new transfer fee record. Ronaldo has been the clubs most talented player, scoring a total of 118 goals in 292 football games (that is the equivalent of a 40% conversion rate, I guess). But, what about the unnaturally gifted in selling? Is there such a thing as the sales superstar and what exactly would such a stellar performer be worth?

Do you have a Ronaldo on your sales team?

Some salespeople are superstars, always hitting their numbers and never failing to perform. But, what makes a superstar? Are they hired from the outside to boost sales performance, or can they be home grown from within? Can every salesperson become a superstar, or is this title reserved for a small chosen few? We set about answering some of these questions, setting out some of the typical answers and subjecting them to scrutiny.

Transfer Fees in Selling

First let us talk about transfer fees for salespeople. Everybody knows that the rates of turnover are high, especially for new hires. As many as 2 out of 3 new recruits in sales stay for no more than a few quarters.

So, there is no question but that sales force turnover is expensive. In fact we would suggest that the cost of a salesperson walking, or being pushed is 2-3 times his, or her annual salary. That is the equivalent of paying a pretty big transfer fee, but without getting anything in return.

Some people are better at selling than others, right?

Well, it is certainly true that the gap between the highest and lowest performing sales person in any organization is great. Indeed, it can be as much as 75%. Certainly not every salesperson gets to play in the premier league.

One sales superstar is worth 10 ordinary salespeople, right?
Well, that level of analysis is a little simplistic and could be dangerous. After all, finding a sales superstar is not easy. Most organizations cannot afford to hire a superstar salespeople, and those who can end up recruiting several average performers before finding their star. Therefore the reality is that most organisations must must aspire to develop sales champions from their existing ranks of full forwards, centre halves and so on.

Great salespeople are born not made, right?

The naturally gifted salesperson is a common misconception. Yes, there are certain personal characteristics and traits that are inherently beneficial in selling, but we firmly believe that sales stars are not born, but made.

We believe that sales is an equal opportunities employer. Everybody can sell and sell well, with the discipline to learn and apply the right strategies, skills and techniques. In the increasingly complex world of B2B sales, great salespeople are the result of great effort on their own part, as well as their organisations.

Would you rather have a great salesperson or a great sales manager?

The formula was hire a great salesperson, set the incentives and stay out of his, or her way. If he, or she does not perform find a replacement and fast. The management of sales people started and stopped at the setting of incentives. Well that just does not work.

We have seen time and time again that the ordinary salesperson can achieve superstar levels of performance if he/she received the right coaching and support.

Similarly, the average sales person who applies the right sales process can frequently win 'man of the match'. That is the opposite of the traditional view in selling where there has been too much focus on people and not enough on process, technique, or skill. The salesperson was expected to work his, or her magic on the customer, as opposed to following a process, or working within a framework.

One Superstar is Not Enough – Selling Requires a Team Effort

Traditionally, the salesperson was seen as a lone ranger, riding off into the sunset alone and coming back some time later with the order in hand. Now the approach has very much shifted to a team based approach to selling.

It is teams that win matches, not superstars. However the exalted sales superstar can be a reluctant team player. He, or she may be reluctant to pass to colleagues, either the information, or the credit. However, in complex B2B sales just as teams are involved in the buying organisation, a myriad of skills and talents are required in the sales effort. So the salesperson must orchestrates the efforts of a team, that includes technical, support, financial and other players on both sides.

Once a Superstar, Always a Superstar?

The premier league salesperson on

moving to another industry, company, or market can quickly face relegation. For example, we have worked with a number of salespeople who previously belonged to the Golden Circle of a major global vendor, but on moving to a newer and smaller enterprise struggled to perform.

There is no universal standard for a

sales superstar, it is highly context dependent and a wide range of environmental factors are at play, including the role, the levels of sales and marketing support, the organisational culture, etc.

There is no ideal salesperson and the failure to appreciate this is where the problem begins. Different sales organizations and different sales situations require different personalities and skills. There is no template for the universal superstar salesperson, or no magic formula, or set of ingredients.

The right salesperson depends on the requirements of the role, for example:

- Different skills are required for consultative, as opposed to transactional s

elling, and for B2B versus B2C.

- Different behaviours, attitudes and skills are required for selling to senior executives in big organisations, as opposed to lower levels, or smaller ones.

- Different skills are required for selling new products, or technologies, as opposed to existing ones and for selling to new, as opposed to existing customers

Creating A Sales Superstar

If the world is full of average salespeople, how can they be transformed into superstars, or at least be enabled to perform at their best?

Well our research shows that incentives and remuneration are not the enough. Nor is training, particularly once off training interventions. If you are going to be a Ronaldo, you will need to have a Ferguson as your leader and coach. That is because coaching is clearly the number one factor in determining salesperson performance. Added to this is process and systems, proposition and strategy, of course.

In Conclusion.

If you have got a Ronaldo on your sales team, great, hold onto him, or her for as long as you can. However, if your salespeople have more natural, as opposed to unnatural levels of ability you can still get into the finals. Either way attention to those fundamentals of sales strategy, teamwork, coaching and process is vital.

Sales Success: Are You A Road Warrior?

When it comes to selling is your organisation a road warrior, or simply just road weary? Well, to help you find out, we talked to one road warrior, the MD of an organisation that has come from the margins to the top of its industry in just 6 years.

Here are some of the road warrior attitudes and behaviours that has helped this organisation grow, so let us see if they characterise your company:

1. In the world of sales there are road warriors and desk junkies and we all know which ones a sales manager wants to have on his team. The difference between the two is a reflection of so many things, confidence, committment and ambition just to name a few. Getting out in to the market and keeping your company in front of customers and prospects may mean lots of air miles, hotel nights and worn shoe leather, but there is no other way.

2. Obsession and focus - if you believe you have the right solution you need absolute determination to leave your mark on your industry. On a prospect by prospect basis you must be determined and never give up. If you do not, you leave the door open for another solution provider to come in and benefit from all your hard work.

3. You have to take the longer term view. Would you continue selling and developing relationships in an account for over three years without a result, or would you walk away? Say, you lost the deal to a competitor, would you shun the lost prospect and move on? I have a feeling most of you reading this piece would say 'yes'. Well this highly successful company did not. They took rejection on the chin, keeping in contact, making the calls and maintaining the relationship. Yes, privately they complained of competitors playing dirty, but continued to make it easy for the customer to interact with their global teams. Finally, when there was a change of operations director in the account, the company seccured a lucrative and strategic piece of business. It took a long time, but it did pay-off.

4. Solving a problem often isn’t enough - we are all told our solutions must have a strong value proposition, but for the road warrior that is sometimes just not enough. If you are going to sell successfully your solution must be absolutely compelling, solving an immediate problem for the customer. And the bigger and more immediate the problem, the better - one that affects your customer across multiple locations and geographies.

5. Me too solutions won’t work in a market that you are trying to penetrate for the first time. Your competitive advantage has to be more than marginal, because established local competition will need to be dislodged if you are to succeed. Road warriors believe in changing the game to win win, impacting on customers and their problems in a new and innovative way.

6. Hiring the right sales person – Road warriors want to hit the ground running and that means having the right people in place. However, we have all heard the dreaded stories of hiring sales people and then losing, or firing them months later. Who is to blame? The sales person, or the manager? Well the advice from our road warrior, a company which has grown a substantial sales force is – take your time, make sure you have confidence you can win and deliver business in the geography before putting an experienced sales person on the ground. Then when they are in place support them thoroughly. Their success and yours are the one.

7. CEO’s must sell - If you are a CEO reading this piece, listen up, you must sell, you must make calls and position your company with new customers. You must also help your sales people open doors, advance sales cycles and win business.

You need to be a road warrior too!. You need to make sure your customers and prospects feel they can meet you anytime, if you have to get on a plane and travel half way around the world for a meeting at 12 hours notice you do it.

In the road warrior organisation, selling is not below the CEO, nor is it an affort to his/her ego. A team based approach characterises all successful sales organisations and the CEO has a particularly important role to play on that team. He, or she can talk CEO to CEO, and can often ask questions that sometimes a sales person just won’t get an answer to.

8. Being Top Dog. Everybody cannot win the customer's business, indeed with corporate customers reducing their number of suppliers being at the top of the pile is a requirement for the road warrior organisation. Supplier concentration is a fact, not just a sales person’s excuse and it has implications for us all. It creates more pressure and adds more complexity to the sale, causing many smaller companies to complain about a Big vendor bias in many customer organisations. Again the road warrior mentality is essential if your company is going to compete in the same league as the big boys in terms of service and credibility.

9. Being local. Think globally act locally was a popular phrase a number of years ago. For the upstart competing against the global vendor it has a particulary important meaning. Lets take just one example, pointed out by our road warrior - proposal delivery. Some people are still emailing proposals to their customers, but not this company it delivers them in person, making sure your customer sees them as local even if the proposal has been developed at the company headquarters thousands of miles away.

These insights remind me of a quote from Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s a Separate Piece – “The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as a blessing or a curse”. You need your team to adopt a road warrior mentality.

John & Ray – accelerate sales, sales insights, sales activity

Struggling to sell IT during a recession - So you cannot close deals without getting in front of the customer? Wrong!

If closing in the present market environment is an accomplishment, then closing without being able to meet face to face with the potential customer is a supreme art.

We have been lucky enough to work with some of the top sales professionals in the world - one of whom last week closed a $500,000 deal without any face to face time with the customer.

Interested in finding out how it was done we interviewed the lady in question, gathering many valuable insights in the process.

Question: So how did you do it, we were trained in solution selling and it requires lots of face time?

Answer: There is no doubt selling a software solution over the phone is challenging. It takes longer to build rapport selling over the phone. What you might achieve in one face to face meeting will take at least 6 phone calls.

Question: How long did you think it would take to build rapport?

Answer: Initially, I thought maybe 3-4 call but it takes six at least trust me and that is when the client has an explicit need.

Question: You couldn’t see the white of the buyer’s eyes. How did that affect the sales and buying process?

Answer: A number of points that were really important:

1. Questioning and checking was absolutely crucial. You have got to do a lot more checking by phone because you can’t see their eyes and can’t judge the body language.
2. We held lots of one hour conference calls. As we moved from one topic to another, we summarized actions and understanding of key points to ensure we were all on the same page. This is slightly different to a face to face scenario where you might summarise at the end of the meeting.
3. Every single phone call no matter how short was followed up by an email. We ensured the buying team felt they were the most important customer in the world to us. The immediate follow-ups were crucial to advancing the process. It made us seem closer to them.
4. Patience is a virtue they say, but even more so when testing tension for change/compelling reason when selling face to face. It’s a bit different over the phone you need to be more direct and explicit at times without being pushy. If you think you are going to come across as pushy you need to be willing to say “I recognise I might seem to be a bit pushy but”. Doing this makes sure there is no miscommunication.

Question: What about the time difference?

Answer: There was an 11 hour time difference at one stage. We worked to the customers schedule and time zone. We had a few calls at 12:00 at night and a few at 07:00 am. We never once mentioned the fact we were up late or early. The customer didn’t once mention the time difference. Why would they, or I?

Question: Were you asked to visit them?

Answer: Yes we were, but we made it quite clear form the first call that we could not travel. The customer understood our reason’s, and were happy with the process to engage via phone and webinar. We made sure people understood how we would work with them.

Question: What internal support did you have?

Answer: The sales team on this account included: our sales manager, pre-sales support person, our services director and my good self. The support provided to me was brilliant. This was a team sale. It could not have been done without the four of us.

Question: Selling in the current climate is tough; we all know that, are you doing anything radically different from same 24 months ago?

Answer: Understanding the financials behind any deal/potential project is more crucial than ever. In the past we worked hard at qualification, uncovering needs, building requirements and cost justifications. This took quite a long time, anywhere from 6-10 meetings with senior executives. Now I am putting indicative levels of investment for every potential project/deal on the table after the third meeting and maybe even after the second meeting.

Question: Does this not go against some of the principles of relationship selling and solution selling? I mean does this mot make you look pushy?

Answer: Business buyers realise they need to understand investment levels so an outline business case can be built early, they need to see if the numbers stack up as part of the early stage of their buying process. Experienced buyers and business executives will work with you to build the case for investment. They will work on the case with you. This is win:win, but assumes the buying team is working collaboratively with you.

Question: If there was one tip you would give someone starting out selling high value solutions what would it be?

Answer: Sit down with your financial controller and ask him to explain internal rate of return (IRR) and the cost of money to you. You need to understand these terms to be able to build a business case with your customer. Solving a customer’s point of pain is great but not enough in big organizations and in complex sales, every project needs to have a certain IRR now more than ever.

Question: Have you noticed any change in buyers?

Answer: Yes for sure, the serious buyers are more collaborative than they have ever been before. I have been selling software solutions for 20 years now and I have seen more business cases from customers in the past 12 months than I have in the whole of the previous 19 years of my career.

I hope you take something from this post.

John O’ Gorman – sales activity, sales effectiveness, sales process, sales skills

The Growth Guy – Interesting insights for those of us in sales

I met the Growth Guy Verne Harnish on Wednesday at a Mastering the Rockefeller Habits event. That was a great opportunity to compare the sales priorities and strategies being employed on both sides of the Atlantic in this time of economic turmoil.

No surprise, the list is almost identical. Just to show how identical I made a list of some of the points Verne raised:

• Forget selling benefits, restructure your benefit statements into messages that focus on loss avoidance. Present the opportunity that could be lost. Verne referenced a book called High Stakes Negotiation that I plan to read over the coming weeks.
  

• Never email a proposal, always arrange a time to review the proposal either face to face or over the phone, ideally face to face. I know some sales people find this one hard to swallow, but I can tell you from experience of working with hundreds of sales people this is an important point. The sales people who make sure they review proposals face to face win more.
  
  
• The single most important thing you can know about the person you are selling to is how their bonus plan will be measured. You don’t need the numbers you just need to know the areas he/she needs to affect.
  
  
• Avoid discounting, use a good, better, best approach. When you are asked for a discount ignore it. If that doesn’t work, be absolutely clear on your differentiation and points of value, then present options along the lines of a good, better, best approach. Make sure you go back to the people you sold your solution or service to and review the value with them. More often than not they will acknowledge the value you deliver. Remember buyers are being asked to call everyone not just you.
  

• As sale professional we have the toughest job in the world, no doubt. We have to face rejection more than any other profession in the world. I would suggest that up-to 70% of sales people stop communicating with a hand picked prospect after 3 or 4 attempts. Verne referenced research that shows you need to maintain a keep in touch mindset, reaching out to prospects up-to 15 times with relevant/insightful material. The KIT approach delivers sales.

• As sales managers, we need to be leaders and coaches. We need to sit with our sales people regularly. We need to talk to them about what they are learning in the filed from customers and prospects. Then we have got to remove the barriers they feel are in their way. I use the word feel because successful sales people sometimes put barriers in their way that are based on their feelings. Sales people attitude is everything. In fact 80% of the characteristics of effective sales people are attitude based. Worth a thought.

• Sales people need to read more. What was the last sales book you read? How many sales books did you red last year? Most sales people read on average one to two books a year. The best sales people read upto 12. They are always looking for new tips and techniques that will help them sell more professionally and more effectively. So you might want to pick up one of the best selling sales book in the US right now - The Ultimate sales machine.

• Marketing should not report to sales and most great marketers have an engineering mindset. Where does marketing report to in your company.

• How often do we seek feedback from the people we have sold to and delivered to? In my experience sales people rarely revisit customers to get feedback unless they are looking to cross sell or up-sell. Verne suggested 4 key questions we should ask our customers:

1. How are you doing
2. What is happening in the industry right now?
3. What have you heard about our competition?
4. How are we doing?

Whether you agree with these questions or not is not the point I guess. The point is customer feedback is crucial; it will help you identify patterns and real market needs. It will also help you understand what marketing and sales tactics your competition are adopting. And remember your competition are calling on you customers.

• Intense listening, asking interesting and relevant questions will position us ahead of our competition. Have you the intense listening skills required to sell in this environment?

I could probably keep writing for another few hours on all the points Verne Harnish highlighted, and do recommend next time Verne is in town you should take the day out to hear what he has to say. Thanks to O’ Kelly Sutton and 4^th Option for hosting the Verne event.

John O’Gorman - sales activity, sales growth, sales insights

The new business development equation

There is a new equation to calculate the rate of success you can expect to from your business development activities.  Well, it is actually not new at all, although for many people it is newly discovered. 

It states the obvious - new business generated is a function of the number of sales; calls, emails, letters and meetings.  It works on two levels:

First, the building of the sales pipeline is directly related to the volume of each of these elements.  Sales is not just a once off email, or meeting that is required to close a deal, but an ongoing and systematic process of calling, emailing, meeting, etc.

Second, the level of success with any prospect, or sales opportunity.  That means calling prospects and keeping in touch by email and letter, sending the occasional useful piece of information (a case study, white paper, etc.).   

Related posts:

Keep in touch.  Nobody gets left behind.  People are interested in people who are interested in them.  You cannot trust people you don’t know.  Relationship selling.

How tangible are the benefits of your solution?

Most salespeople struggle to move beyond adjectives in selling their solutions. This greatly limits their effectiveness.

Relying on adjectives, as opposed to more meaningful and tangible evidence of benefits, limits the impact of their proposition, in most cases making it almost indistinguishable from competitors. Here is an example:

Our customers achieve significant savings as a result of implementing our solutions…

That sounds pretty bland, right? It sounds like what most of your competitors would say. ‘Significant savings’ is vague and somewhat unconvincing. It does not grab attention, or represent a compelling reason to buy, or at least explore buying.

Now change the message slightly, as follows:

Our customers, including; companies A, B and C, have achieve savings of up to 20% as a result of implementing our solutions…

The impact is a lot greater, right? First off, there are companies mentioned, that adds credibility and 3^rd party validation. Then the benefit are tangibilized, even quantified. That tells customers exactly what to expect.

Now, many salespeople will say customers won’t believe the statistics (a point we discuss in another article). But, assuming that it is true and veritably so, that depends on how it is used. It should be merely a reference point, with the salesperson saying ‘…this is what other customers have achieved, we would be delighted to explore with you whether this can be achieved by you…’

It is also worth bearing in mind:

- That when you mention a statistic you have to be able to convincingly back it up, with reference to the experiences of your other customers and to a business model, or spreadsheet.

- Take care with the figure you use. Don’t use a figure that will sound incredible to the prospect, even if you need to pare your figure back a little.

In age where brochureware gets binned quicker than you can say ‘marketing blurb’, we help many companies increase the effectiveness of their sales messages and materials. We are always surprised that our clients struggle most to provide any quantification of the benefits delivered for other customers.

Managers can easily provide long list of features and feature-led benefits, but succinct statements of the impact on key customer business metrics are a challenge. In our view this points to the need to get closer to their customers.

The conclusion: if you want to want to grab your prospects attention and keep them reading - quantify the results that your solutions have achieved for other customers. The rest of the sales process is then focused on the salesperson and prospect exploring how he/she can achieve the same, or a similar result.

Who is needed on your selling team? - 8 key roles

Sales as we know it has changed forever, gone are the days that 2 people can sell high value deals without help from domain, technology and delivery experts. This fact has implications for the sales and relationship competencies across your organisation.

We all know that buying teams are getting larger and decision making is more complex. But what about your selling team - has it changed accordingly?  Is your company adopting a team-based approach to sales?

What type of sales team is needed to close a €500,000 plus deal?

I was chatting with two successfull entrepreneurs yesterday about selling complex solutions into major organisations and we began to talk about the type of sales team needed to close big ticket deals. 

Based on our collective experience of over 50 years in business we identified a number of key roles critical to moving opportunities from leads to meetings to sales cycles to orders.

1. A sales person - who adopts an expert led and consultative selling approach 

2. A pre-sales support person who knows the domain

3. A product/market expert who can talk knowledgeably about the industry

4. A Product director -  who owns the technology vision and road map 

5.  A Senior developer who can be paired off with senior tech staff from the client/buying team

6. An account manager who can be introduced towards the end of the sales cycle who has delivered similar projects previously

7. An implementation/customer services driver to manage delivery, customer service and steering group reviews

8. The MD & maybe even chairman - to build confidence and add gravitas

The most successful organisations sales is everybody's job.  The organisations who are closing business are holding workshops and team meetings with their key staff to remind them of this. 

 

What buyers look for in a sales person

We were hosting a sales workshop recently with some senior account managers and project managers and they seemed surprised at the characteristics buyers look for from their partners and suppliers.

As a result I asked a director of IT who holds a size-able budget what characteristics he looked for in the vendors/service providers. His answer

• Expertise
• Listening skills
• Someone who isn't too pushy
• Someone who is willing to say they don't know the answer buts knows someone who doea
• People who follow up professionally

The message: people want to meet experts not know it alls, people who are confident in their ability and people who know what they don't know.

Intensity, Commitment and Enthusiasm

Yesterday, I overheard a coach shouting from the riverbank to his university rowing team afloat in the water. He recognized that they were tired, after all this was the fourth night in a row of intensive training for the amateur team. Then he counted down the weeks to a major tournament and assured them that victory if they maintained the present level of intensity and commitment. Suddenly I heard the voices of hundreds of sales managers.

Many people draw inspiration from sports, but what level of commitment did you, or your sales team bring to their work today? Was it the same level of intensity as expected from a victorious six nation's rugby team, or a world champion boxer? Did it flow from the top of the organisation to the bottom, impacting on customers, prospects and suppliers alike?

Many sporting coaches have brought their knowledge of human performance to business and they have brought the acronym ICE with them - that is intensity, commitment and enthusiasm. These characteristics are an essential to survival in today's turbulent markets:

Intensity – as if your job depended on it.

Commitment – as if you might not get the chance to do it again

Enthusiasm – as if you could not fail.

The era of full order books, RFPs and in-bound customer enquiries is at an end. The response is ICE in terms of selling. This is immediately evident in terms of levels of activity, professionalism and innovation in terms of sales and marketing. It can be quantified in terms of the number of; calls, emails, sales meetings, etc. with customers, past customers, prospects, contacts, etc.

Why Selling Is An Olympic Sport

Sales people are in the front line in this time of economic slowdown.  Well all know it is not going to be easy – in fact for many it is already providing to be a challenge of Olympic proportions. 

So, perhaps 'selling in the downturn' should be among those competitive sports included in the London  Olympics.  Here are some of the parallels:

1. Selling as in any competitive sport, requires discipline and stamina, strength and endurance.  A lot of hard work and preparation will go into that short moment on the track. Training and preparation is everything.

2. There will be bruises and the occasional injury along the way.  Sometimes, it will seem like you are constantly running up hill, where perseverance rather than skill counts most.  Other times you will be on a winning streak - in the zone / the sweet spot and at the top of your game.  It can switch between these at any time.

3. You will occasionally hit the wall, that may be a lost sale, or worst of all, perhaps, it may be a stalled sale.  The ability to motivate yourself to get back on the track is paramount.

4. It is not just about a single race – but an unending series of competitions.  That means you cannot rest on your laurels for long, the moment of glory soon fades.  After all, you are only as good as your last sale.

5. Winning is everything, even second place is poor consolation.  If you are not winning then you are off the team and on the sidelines. 

6. It is a team sport.  Increasingly it is not just one person in the limelight.  Every champion owes shares his/her success with a support team of trainers, coaches and so on.  Team based selling requires a combined of skills and for each person to successfully pass the baton. 

7. It could be a marathon, it is not just a long race, but a series of short races one after the other.   With increasingly long sales cycles you cannot always see the finishing line.   Or it could be in the pool, as it can require holding your breath for long periods of time.

8. A great coach is a key ingredient of success, someone that can help people to perform at their best.  So too is effective team work and an evironment that not only rewards, but celebrates success.

 

Belief and conviction in your offering will affect your close rate

If you are responsible for selling, it really helps if you have total belief in the value your solution delivers. An obvious enough statement one might think. Well not so obvious, I can tell you from listening to vendors and service provider talk about their solutions lately. 

Consider these three questions

1. Do you have conviction when you talk about the value of your solution
2. Do you sound like you understand what it takes to deliver the solution/service you are offering
3. Do you sound like you understand how as a buyer I am feeling about the change required to implement your solution or take on your service offering
4. Are you passionate and enthusiastic about it

If you answer yes to all three great, if you can’t, you need to sit down and review the actual value delivered to clients in previous engagements. In my honest opinion, conviction and belief gets built with experience and real world / practical understanding of how others have gained value from your offerings no where else. 

And please remember, it’s not the value marketing tell you about that will help build conviction and belief into how you communicate your overall value, it’s the value customers talk about that counts, this implies extending relationships beyond the point of order.

Food for thought

Sales is everybody's job

Organisations, not just sales people, sell. Indeed, the most progressive organisations view business development, as everybody’s responsibility. For other companies that requires 4 significant organisational changes :

1. Getting Senior Management More Involved in supporting sales and an executive to executive (as opposed to sales person to executive) approach adopted. It is essential that in reviewing sales performance, setting financial targets and shaping business strategy that all senior management have had first hand exposure to the market. So, when is the last time the CEO, CFO, CTO, was in front of a customer, or a prospect?

2. Getting Sales and Marketing Working Together. That means overcoming the tensions that often arise, through improved communication and a more coordinated and sales-led approach. So, why isn’t marketing a full member of the sales team and why isn’t marketing measured in terms of leads generated and results achieved?

3. Grass roots involvement in business development. Account managers, project managers, customer support staff and just about everybody else has a role to play in maintaining and growing sales revenues. In the current economic climate this grass roots involvement is essential. But, how may senior staff have contacted a potential customer, attended a networking event, asked for a referral from a past customer, etc. in the past 6 weeks?

4. A team-based approach to sales. Just as purchase decisions are involving more people in the buying organisation, sales success requires the competences of a team, as opposed to just the individual. In fact there are up to 8 sales-related roles in your organisation.

Are there any obstacles in the way of individual sales people selling more?

What is getting in the way of each of your sales people selling more?  Many managers are afraid to ask this question fearing the result will  be a list of excuses. The result is the opposite however - once all potential barriers (real or imagined) are clearly identified they can be tackled head on.

The most common barriers are; the relationship with the manager, levels of marketing and support, changes in the market (e.g. competition), the sales message or proposition and inefficient sales systems.

Here is a list of the key areas in which sales people can be helped to sell more:

(a) Leadership
Including building trust and respect, better communication, involvement in decisions, lead by example, clarity of responsibilities and direction, consistency, etc.

(b) Support
Provide assistance in the following areas:
– Messaging (how to communicate a compelling proposition for the customer)
– Marketing support / materials / sales aides / build awareness / references
– Product / industry knowledge and market intelligence (including competitor analysis, etc.)
– Sales training and coaching
– Pre-sales support
– Delivery / implementation / customer service / account management
– Unrealistic or impossible sales targets ) / demands

(c) Free up more time for selling by reducing time spent on:
– lead generation
– sales reporting
– admin
– preparing proposals
– travelling
– other areas (e.g. product meetings, order fulfilment, etc.)

(d) Provide more and better leads:
– Assist the sales person to be more effective in generating more of his/her own leads (buying, or building lists, direct mail shots, marketing support, etc.) 
– Provide the sales person with more and better leads in order to support his/her own led generation, contacts, black book, introductions, etc.

(e) Sales systems
The effective use of a good sales system (SFA/CRM) allows sales people to reduce reporting time, improve levels of personal organisation and increase sales effectiveness (conversion rates).

Yet, most sales people don't use a sales database, or at least don't use it fully. They regularly complain that sales databases, or systems that are cumbersome, slow, lacking in functionality (e.g. mail, calendar, etc.) and containing out-of-date information.

– Upgrade, or replace the system to ensure full usability and functionality
– Provide more training and user support
– Provide administrative support (including purging the system of redundant information, etc.)
– Make use of the system compulsory (linking it to payment of commissions, etc.)

(f) Strategic issues, dealing with the following objections:
– Competitive advantage (from pricing to product comparison)
– The market place is in a state of change (e.g. a downturn, etc.)
– We are not well known in the marketplace
– We need to build our brand, or change our reputation
– We need more / better reference sites / customers
– We need to re-examine the markets we are serving (geographic, sectoral, etc.)

Sales Success - the cost of bad leadership

A good leader can transform ordinary sales people into champions; a bad one will hold everybody back.

Job related performance and satisfaction  (we sometimes forget that the two are inextricably linked) depends more on the quality of the manager than almost anything else.

Leadership, empowerment, coaching and motivation are not soft stuff, they have the potential to boost the performance of individuals and teams by as much as one third.

A major office supplies company had long suffered from poor leadership at the top and a culture organization-wide of:
• Excessive bureaucracy
• Poor communication
• Limited innovation
• A culture of blame
• Poor teamwork

There was confusion about the lines of communication, with sales people going over the head of the sales director and to have decisions reversed by the CEO. Levels of trust were low owing to u-turns on previous commitments made by management regarding commission payments.

There was no documented sales plan, no mechanisms to review performance and no written job descriptions, or contracts of employment. Sales meetings were both irregular and Ineffective.

How to calculate the cost? Well, the company was hemorrhaging customers and sales at a rate of up to 15% annually.

The series of changes culminated in each sales person developing and agreeing their own individual sales plan. The results were important, however when the manager was moved aside the performance of the team soared to new levels.

Do you really know what your sales people are thinking?

Most managers are reluctant to ask their sales people what they need to succeed.

One manager employed a confidential online questionnaire to find that 65% of his sales team identified lead generation, administrative requirements, customer support and sales collateral as barriers to their success.

Rather than viewing the responses as a series of excuses, the manager seized the opportunity to drive sales forward.

The result was a number of quit pro quo commitments by the manager, including specific actions to generate more leads, create new collateral, etc.

In return the sales team committed to increasing the levels of sales activity and effectiveness, as well as to the consistent use of the company's sales database.  Levels of sales activity rose swiftly, with many more potential customers being meet.  Everybody won - he company got strong revenue growth and the sales people morecommissions.

Understanding sales team performance

It is too easy to point the finger at an under-performing sales person and miss the bigger issue in terms of organisational sales performance and potential. The former is generally a symptom rather than a cause.

So, to really understand the performance of a sales person, a sales team, or a sales organization look at it in 4 dimensions:

1. From the top down, in terms of the; leader, team and the individual sales person

2. Across the different stages of the sales process: Leads, meetings, cycles, orders and repeat orders

3. In terms of skills, behaviors and attitudes as they are today and what is required into the future

4. In the context of the key elements of sales effectiveness - that is sales; systems, structures, processes and plans

10 ways to increase the effectiveness of your sales team

Where do managers concerned with improving sales performance turn?  Here are the top 10:

1. Run a sales campaign (providing the impetus of specific sales campaigns supported by marketing initiatives)
   
   
2. Implement a sales systems (making target lists, sales planning, reporting and administration, as well as marketing much more efficient and allowing metrics regarding activity and effectiveness to be easily tracked across the sales team)
   
   
3. Revise your sales process (pre-qualification, more systematic needs analysis, relationship building, etc.)
   
   
4. Improve your sales structures (incl. incentives, meetings, reviews, etc.)
   
   
5. Providing better leadership and more coaching in the field
   
   
6. Provide sales / marketing / telesales support (including list building, generating awareness/enquiries, appointment setting, etc)
   
   
7. Provide some sales training – building confidence and skill, as well as product and industry knowledge
   
   
8. Segment your market (targeting specific niches or segments in a tailored and effective manner)
   
   
9. Revise your sales materials / collateral (updating tired sales aides, brochures, web pages, etc.)
   
   
10. Revisit your sales proposition (putting a new more compelling angle on the message for the customer)