The Sales Café

Everyone's got a LinkedIn account, right? If you are a sales executive and you don't, then hasten to LinkedIn right now and create one. I'll wait.

Let's face it, LinkedIn is the ultimate personal sales tool - meaning, it's an incredible tool for selling yourself and networking with business contacts. It's definitely the best resource and reference aid when you are job hunting. It's different from most social media outlets in that it's about social business - connecting with your industry and corporate contacts, rather than your family and friends.

As of May 2010, LinkedIn boasts more than 66 million members, with nearly 34 million in the U.S. alone. (See more stats here.) That's a big number, but I am often surprised at how many sales executives don't have LinkedIn accounts, or just don't use the accounts they've set up.

If you have put off creating one until now, you must be thinking either (a) it's too difficult to maintain or (b) you are too high up in the corporate ladder or too established in your current position to need one. Both are not true. It's very easy to maintain a LinkedIn account and it's becoming too vital as a tool in your networking belt to eschew. What's difficult is putting it to good use on a consistent basis even when you're not looking for a new job.

It takes only a little extra effort to get the most from LinkedIn. The key is automating your account so that all you really have to do is just keep adding contacts.

After the initial steps of creating your LinkedIn account [which are:  signing up, adding your resume highlights, posting your photo (yes, you really need a head shot), and connecting with as many of your contacts as you can find on the site], here are three actions that will propel you to the next level of LinkedIn.

1. Broaden your network. LinkedIn provides excellent statistics on your existing network of contacts. When you see a summary of your network, you get an instant picture of where you've focused in your career and an idea of where you might want to expand moving forward. You don the same with your business, right? To find the stats on your network, go to your list of Contacts and then click on the Network Statistics link.
2. Join groups. A LinkedIn Group keeps you connected in subtle ways. I get automatic email updates from my list of LinkedIn Groups. It's a quick reference to what people are talking about and what topics are hot within those groups.
3. Add your blog feed. This is an excellent way to add personality and thought leadership [industry buzz word] to your profile. I use a LinkedIn application called Blog Link. Every time I post to any of the blogs I write, the app automatically updates my profile.

There are so many more things you can do to become a LinkedIn power user - even beyond having hundreds of contacts in your network. These three steps will get you started.

Why bolster your LinkedIn? Because today, building your online presence is more important than it once was to build your local presence. What's the first thing you do when you're interested in working with or buying something from someone? It most likely involves Google. In the business world, it really should include LinkedIn.

Yes, I have a LinkedIn account and No, I don't use it enough. Connect with me on LinkedIn and then join me for the next few months in working just a little harder to get the most from using it. If you do, you'll be able to read the updates on my progress right from your news feed, automatically.

While wrestling with your personal social media strategies, ponder this: over the past 18 months, your opportunity as a salesperson to influence the early stages of a buyer's shopping experience has changed radically. Most of your one-to-one prospecting tools (especially cold calling and event networking) are practically useless.

Let's think about recent history for a moment.

I am a salesperson of a certain age (meaning in my mid 50s). I began my B-to-B selling career in 1983, right at the tail end of the three-martinis-for-lunch era. Until about 1982, business buyers expected to be entertained, and a salesperson needed to possess charm, fortitude and an expense account just to get into the game in a serious way. Not being much of a drinker, I was lucky to miss all of that.

As the economy recovered from an awful recession and companies re-engineered for a new era, buyers found themselves doing two people's jobs and had little time for lunch, let alone blowing their minds out for the afternoon. Today that same buyer (be they VP of Sales, CIO, or Staffing Manager) does five people's jobs and barely has time to return a phone call!

In the early to mid-1980s, we entered a twenty-year period that witnessed the professionalization of salespeople. Until roughly 2007, to be a salesperson meant you needed to fill yourself with unbelievable amounts of information to prove to the busy buyer that you could improve their world. You needed to do this in five minutes or less before they would begin to tell you their problems. Charm barely or rarely got you in the door. You needed to arm yourself with product and technical knowledge, competitive and business acumen, team building and leadership skills. You also needed to be a strategist, a consultant, a PowerPoint expert, a great speaker, and a pithy inventor of high-impact value propositions and elevator speeches. Salespeople learned to become knowledge workers, technocrats, leaders, managers, field generals, and politicians. Charm and humor were still required.

Wow, what a change! Most of you readers weren't conscious of this change because you've spent most or all of your career practicing within that environment.

Today, our selling world is changing again. The proliferation of social media and the maturation of Web research tools has truly empowered the business shopper. By the time your prospect returns your phone call or email, they've checked you, your company, your competition, your competition's salespeople, and perhaps even your friends out. They've educated themselves about your product or service and the differences between you and everybody else. What does this mean?

Marketing is the art of communicating and influencing "one to many." The digital universe provides a multitude of channels that allow for easy consumption of product and personal information. Today, the buyer might not allow you in the door until they've completed their research. Does this mean that salespeople are now relieved of the need to know it all before the buyer will talk to us? Not really.

We either need to learn how to partner very closely with our marketing department or become our own marketing department. Our personal and product appeals need to be cleverly crafted and widely placed so that when the buyer is shopping, they can find us.

We are truly selling in a marketer's world.

Emma Watson, who plays Hermione in the Harry Potter series of movies, has cut off all her hair. (See it here.) No, it's not big news for most of the world (it did make waves, however, in the Washington and Huffington Posts), but for some it could be a great opportunity. Consider hair salons, hair product developers and fashion designers, among others, who can capitalize on her brave (and successful, I think) new choice. (Although the fashion house Burberry, which recently dropped Ms. Watson as a spokesperson, decided not to bank on the new 'do.) Trend spotters in these businesses should be questioning: Is pixie-short hair a next wave in beauty and fashion? And, better, how can we use it to improve sales?

In the old days of the newspaper business, it took three instances or examples of something to make a trend. During story pitching sessions, if we could come up with three anecdotes to defend a trend piece, we were gold and could write the story. (In dull news weeks, let's just say we writers would get very creative with our examples.)

A trend is a "general direction in which something is developing or changing." Trends can mean big business - a spike in sales and possibly millions of dollars - when you tap into a truly new development or idea that changes lives. While we sat in conference rooms battling out the question of the next new thing, business watchers today have the comfort of their own Internet access device to track the events that could bring in the next new thing.

Trends aren't necessarily permanent and can sometimes be short-lived. A savvy business person who spots a possible trend will experiment rather than plan. Even if it is a short trend, you can make money by just doing something creative at that moment. If you're lucky, the trend is longer and you get in early on change and make it big.

You are already using the best tool for trendspotting. The next step is to tap into your inner journalist to take notes and create quick, short plans to generate activity. Find a news item similar to a celebrity hairstyle in your market and do some research. Has anything piqued your interest lately? Listen carefully. Are several of your customers commenting on similar situations that might trigger an opportunity for your business?

Social media can help you reach into your customer base to listen to true trends. Once considered a trend in itself, social media is more than that, it offers a paradigm shift in the way we conduct business. It's the trends within social media that provide short spurts of opportunity.

The key point to keep in mind is that trends are the result of change, and trends always change. Social media is here to stay, but the trends within social media (think MySpace) spike and change. Waves come and go at the ocean shore just like they do in the marketplace. It's recognizing the difference between an overall shift and then spotting the trends within the movement that help build business plans.

So find your own Emma Watson example, plus two others if you're old school like me [I did:  Cate Blanchett, Carey Mulligan and others], and you have a trend to track and to capitalize on, and that chance to be creative in the moment.

Here's something simple: how to read your customer's mind. Can you read it with certainty? Of course not. But can you read it with some insight? Absolutely.

Think about this for a moment: many of us rely on good psychics and fortune tellers who are right often enough to make a better living than most ordinary people. They're called stock analysts and brokers. When they're really good, we can make a fortune, or at least quite a few bucks on their predictions. How do they do it? There's nothing like a couple of well placed questions coupled with very good observation skills to predict the future.

What does this have to do with selling? Everything, really. The art of successful selling - and it most definitely is an art when it's successful - relies heavily on the skills of questioning and observation. We know that these are two pillars of selling, but what about before the sale, or aside from actual customer conversations?

Today, I'm going to focus on the most difficult customer mind-reading skill. This is the skill of preparation: studying public information, recognizing patterns, and making intelligent deductions (guesses) that more often than not allow you to peer into the mind of your customer before you ever meet them.
First, how do you prepare for a sales call? Do you psyche yourself up with positive self-talk? Do you spend your time on LinkedIn figuring out who the person is you're meeting and who you might know in common? Do you read 10-Ks and 10-Qs, shareholder letters and websites, competitive analysis and news reports?

Let's hope you're doing all of this and not winging it out there with all the other amateurs. Seriously - you are meeting at the buyer's pleasure, hoping to discover their needs and interests, so that you can earn the right to talk about your solutions. You need to be in the zone. You need to be on-message. And you need to be prepared. This is especially true during the opening minutes of an interaction with a buyer.

Download your customer's 10-Ks, 10-Qs and annual reports. In the management discussions and shareholder letters you will find your customer's view of the road behind and the road ahead - recent and long-term results, and short- and long- term goals. Did you know that you can also find out what your customer gets paid to do? Download the proxy statement and read the compensation committee report.

Now for the mind-reading part. What do the top executives get paid to do? What executive team (plus the direct reports, and the folks who report to those direct reports) ever focuses on anything other than what they get paid to do? The first answer gives you a significant glimpse into the mind of your customer. The second helps you check your assumptions.

While you're psyching yourself up and trolling LinkedIn for your next call, spend the time to research the public reporting and answer those two questions. Use your answers to prepare how you will explore your customer's interests when you meet them.

I'm interested to know how this works for you on your next few sales calls. If it does anything less than focus you and your customer on what's important to them and doesn't cause a few of your competitors to melt into the woodwork, I'll be very surprised.

Welcome to the Sales Cafe, our new name for the Random Thought Generator. Until now, this blog focused, as the title implied, on ideas of interest we wanted to work out in writing. The purpose of the Sales Cafe is to focus on sales and the universe that surrounds the people who practice and manage it. This is where we spend much of our time as well. 

We aim to fill a tall order here. The blogsphere does not lack for sales blogs, but then the real world doesn't lack for cafes. Everybody has their favorites and some of them have something special going for them. That's what we hope to build; someplace special where you can stop in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for thought provoking information. Think of it as your drive-in, take-out sales blog, where you can come by to learn something, change something or try something. 

Our writers sell, market, manage, and consult for a living. They practice in very interesting and challenging environments, large and small, simple and complex, mainstream and cutting edge. We think there's a lot to share. Between us, we've covered just about every industry and just about every position in sales and marketing, so we think the perspectives will be refreshing and most of all get you to think. 

Here at ELA, we're driven by our mission to make people smarter about their business, and we hope on your trips through the Sales Cafe you will walk out feeling smarter than when you came in.

Today, Erik Sherman writes about Apple's success with the iPad on BNET.com and we think it's a perfect example of the Outside→In™ approach in action:

 Apple's iPad Is Wildly Successful Because... Apple Actually Thinks About Users

Though Mr. Sherman is referring to product development, Apple's combination of development and marketing translates to an enormous rate of sales for the company. He lists some of the reasons for Apple's home run with the iPad:

"Apple succeeds because it delivered the following:

• an easy interface
• uncomplicated operation
• relatively light weight
• long battery life"

It's not the first time Apple has struck a chord with consumers. (How many iPods do you have in your home? At last count, there are 5 in mine.) It's amazing what can happen when you listen to your customers--in this case, an entire marketplace--and act accordingly. Eventually, we will all be working on Pads, whether they carry the Apple logo or not.

By Jim Horan

It must be something about my background or upbringing. When I hear “supervision” and “accountability,” I go to the negatives. When I think of supervision, I think of hall monitors, playground supervisors and prison guards. When I think of accountability, I think of disappointment, warnings, bruised egos, reprimands, enforcement, retribution and big brother.

If you find yourself obsessed with accountability and supervision, I question five things:

1. Did you hire the right people?
2. Do your managers know how to lead?
3. Are you focusing on the right things?
4. Does everyone in your business understand who the customer is and what benefit the customer is expecting from your products and services?
5. Does everyone in your organization understand his or her role, responsibilities and outcomes?

These are big questions. Few of us, if pushed to answer honestly, would be able to give a resounding yes to all of them. So the question is, do you have processes to assess these issues, and action plans for continuous improvement? If not, are you just hoping the problems will go away?

So how do we manage a sales force we don’t see eight hours a day? What is the proper role of supervision and accountability in this 21st century?

My philosophy is simple: Help people be the best they can be and find the right work! I believe when people find the right work, in the right environment, properly encouraged and supported, they need little supervision. They manage themselves and hold themselves accountable to a much higher standard than you or I ever would. Your top producers do this; you just wish everyone did.

This type of relationship, in my opinion, starts with ensuring the people you select truly understand the nature of the work they are going to do and know it’s a good fit for them. How do you do that? Explain the job, the role, the work. Explicitly describe who your business serves and what your clients expect. Be very clear about the outcomes and results you expect, and share stories about people who have been successful and why.

Now here is a radical suggestion! When you think you have found the right person and you’re ready to make an offer, ask him or her to write a business plan — concise and to the point — for the new job. Buy a day’s worth of his or her time at market rates, and don’t be cheap.

Here is what you will learn from this process. The individual will either embrace this process or not. That alone will tell you a lot. When you read the plan, you will learn if he or she heard, understood, agreed and knew how to pursue the opportunity. You will also learn a lot about how he or she thinks and plans to act. You will be able to make a much more informed decision about whether this person is a good fit for your company. And you will have a much better idea of how much energy you will have to spend supervising and holding this individual accountable.

Enforcement is a drag; leave it to the police! Encouraging, supporting and watching your people grow and prosper is the ultimate work. Make better hires, and maybe “supervision” and “accountability” will drop from your vocabulary.

Jim Horan is the president and CEO of The One Page Business Plan Company.

Organizational silos. Every company - even relatively small ones - have them. And they can be insidiously destructive, resulting in behaviors or results that are inconsistent with the overall goals of the company, and almost certainly not aligned with delivering maximum value to customers. 

A simple example is the all-too-common customer "tell your entire life story again" experience when being transferred from the customer service center (set up to handle sales level issues) to the technical support organization.

You know the drill. You just finished plowing through the bewildering choices in the automated telephone system, supplying a myriad of product numbers, contact info, etc., and after all your efforts, you finally get transferred to the tech support team. The person who answers is very cordial and sounds genuinely interested in solving your problem, but quickly states, "Before we get started, can I get a few basic pieces of information?" Naturally, the questions she poses to you are the same ones you just supplied to the automated system. Sound familiar? Ah, the power of silos.

If such obvious hand-off issues are so prevalent, what causes them, and, more importantly, how can they be fixed? 

One of the biggest enablers of corporate silos is the relentless drive for measureable results, which drives management teams to set clearly defined metrics fully owned by a single executive or department. The trouble is, most interactions with customers cannot be handled by a single department, and that is when the silos begin to rear their ugly head in front of the customer.

The simple solution?  Walk a mile in your customer's shoes! 

This is easier said than done, however, since each functional organization is typically ‘maxed out' already, doing their best to perform against their own silo metrics.  And, to make matters worse, it is rare to find a single organization or manager that owns the entire customer experience until you get to the CEO, which is clearly too late.

Let's look at how one Global 100 computer manufacturer successfully broke though its own silo problem and set industry-wide advances in motion. A major business unit of this company produced desktop computer systems aimed at fairly technical customers such as research labs, testing facilities and scientific universities. Given the technical background of the target audience, little attention was paid to "ease of use," and a typical system would arrive at the customer site spread across seven separate boxes, with more than a dozen user manuals. The customer was expected to assemble all the components correctly to make the entire system work. Not too surprisingly, the company began to see a drop-off in market share as users began to share their customer experience frustrations on the company's technical forum website.

Immediate attempts were initially made to "fix" the problems, but a traditional (silo) approach was used, holding each functional executive accountable for fixing his or her specific piece of the puzzle. No appreciable progress was made on turning around the sagging sales until the business unit executive in charge of the P&L for the overall system made a bold move.

The executive presented each of his senior managers a personal challenge. He instructed the executives to place an order for a system, just like a customer would, have the system delivered to their homes, and then assemble the system without any external help. Out of a staff of 11 senior managers only 2 were successful in getting the system up and running at their homes. Many encountered errors in original order configuration, resulting in the delivery of a system that was missing critical components. Others had more luck, and all the right pieces did arrive. However, that is when the organizational silo effects became apparent. Out of the seven boxes that arrived, there was no box or manual marked "Open Me First." In addition, each component came with multiple cables, but no overarching picture showing where each cable was supposed to go. In short, a frustrating experience for even the most technically inclined customer.

As a result of this eye-opening exercise, each unit leader was able to witness first-hand the negative impact of optimizing business processes by silo. Implemented changes included using "Read Me First" shipping documents, plus the now ubiquitous color coded cabling and connectors. Within six months, market share not only recovered to previous levels, but grew by 2 percentage points.

The moral of the story?  Take a walk in your customer's shoes every once in a while if you want to quickly identify where to apply your energy.

Setting up a Business Architecture helps solve unwanted mysteries

How well an organization performs in and across locations or departments can be a mystery to many. Business leaders have to assume that each person is doing their job well and that local leaders will course correct when that is not the case. However, there is a nagging awareness that something important - something slithering in the dark spaces beween the departments - could raise its ugly head and cause corporate misery. Rather than hope an antidote will be available when needed, you can dig deep inside the organization before a crisis hits and take positive action to prevent these kinds of unfortunate surprises. 

Using the following checklist is the first step in creating a Business Architecture that will help identify hidden issues and immediately improve system-wide best practices. 

Do you know the answers?

1. Aim for the future:  What’s changing and how does that impact your business?
2. Identify the big changes:  What do we have to do to be successful in the future & how is that different than today?
3. Pinpoint focus:  What are the few key things we have to do to move to our future state?
4. Prioritize actions:  What are we working on today and how does that relate to what we will need to do?
5. Measure effect:  How will we know if we are making progress to our desired state? What can we measure?
6. Repeat:  Change is the only constant. Repeat the five steps to make sure you are adaptive to the inevitable changes.    
   

Once you've tackled these questions, assign a dollar value for each answer or situation. How much does your organization stand to lose or gain if the worst or best were to happen? 

Set up a structure using Business Architecture

The first way to put your arms around these issues is to map your business and create an architectural plan. Business architecture explains the structure of an organization in terms of its capabilities, governance structure, business processes, and business information. The business capability is what the organization does; the business processes are how the organization executes its capabilities. The business architecture takes into account all of an enterprise's external stakeholders (including customers, suppliers and regulators) and captures all pertinent and critical data and information.

A business architecture helps you understand the impact that change has on the business environment. Ensuring harmony between goals and objectives, programs and initiatives, and the underlying information systems and processes enables managers to adapt to dynamic - and inevitable - business change.

Example: Preventing micro-managment after a merger

Organizational leaders often micro-manage, not because of character flaws, but because they don't know what's going on. An incoherent structure, misaligned processes, and poor reporting systems try even the best managers.

In a post-merger environment, these problems are magnified. Very often, the goals for the newly combined organization are stated before the path to reaching them is built. The leaders of the acquiring company manage without knowing exactly what the workers from acquired company do. New managers don't know what the new reports are doing - and the new reports don't want to tell the new managers what they are doing! Both sides are afraid for their jobs. 

Creating a post-merger business architecture provides managers with a deep current understanding of the business - the "as-is" state, and tools to visualize and create the path towards "to-be" state: what the teams do, the processes they use, how current workflow affects other areas of the business, the results produced by the work processes, and how processes and people are managed. 

With a deeper understanding of the business and how it runs, leaders and managers can make rational decisions without having to micro-manage. 

Business mysteries are dangerous and certainly unwanted. With a business architecture in place, leaders can know what is happening throughout the business, how managers and workers are addressing challenges, and how to create successful solutions.

During economic meltdowns like the one we are currently experiencing, it is tempting for organizations to turn all attention to tactical execution, dropping any activities that are not expected to specifically generate short-term revenues.  Take strategic planning, for example. Even during “good times,” many managers view strategy development with a high degree of suspicion . . . and for good reason, I might add! 

I can recall many instances in my own experience where, after being instructed to spend quality time crafting a strategic direction and setting stretch goals to grow my division’s business, I ended up receiving what felt like a predetermined budget that totally ignored all the energy my team had put into analyzing the market and articulating a specific strategic plan of attack. So, it is not surprising that when the economy is at a generational low point, many managers are even less inclined to spend any cycles thinking strategically.

However, this is precisely when strategic planning is most critical, because only by preparing for an uncertain future will organizations be positioned to successfully ride the next set of waves that are not yet visible on the horizon.

Am I advocating that managers take their eye off the ball of running the current business and just “go think big thoughts” instead?  Certainly not!  Planning is not an either/or proposition and does not have to be an arduous and long process. But, it does require some concerted energy. The good news is that the slower pace of today’s marketplace provides a perfect opportunity to carve out some time to look beyond the daily grind of making a quick buck.  

To keep the process of planning from mushrooming into an all-consuming exercise, here are a few key principles I have found to lead to successful planning outcomes:

• Simplicity.  Although setting strategy in the 21st century depends on an increasingly complex set of variables, it is still possible (and desirable) to complete the planning cycle in a short period of time, so that more of the organization’s energy is spent on executing the plan, not just thinking about it.
  

• Focus.  In my experience working inside leading Global 100 high tech companies, this seems to be the hardest rule to follow.  It is so tempting to fall into the trap of thinking, “We have the best and brightest executive team, thus our company can successfully execute on all 28 of our breakthrough objectives.”  Yeah, right. That may sound good when it is spun to a group of market analysts, but just try to find an employee or channel partner who can remember that many “critical” objectives, much less act upon them! Winning organizations articulate a crystal clear vision of the desired future, and then a handful of critical objectives to get them there.
  

• Agility.  This was the mantra of the last decade, yet most companies still have no process to accommodate a change of strategy mid-stream.  If you want to test the agility of your company, just ask the following question, “What is the process to reallocate significant resources to a new strategic priority after budgets have been distributed for the fiscal year?”
  

• Alignment.  This principle takes the most effort, but can also result in the biggest payback. Alignment starts with being absolutely in tune with your target customers, understanding their critical business problems, and how you help your customers solve them. (Somehow, you knew I would get around to my baseline mantra of being focused Outside->In™, didn’t you?) Once each organization is aligned with its set of customers, the next step is to drive alignment within the company, across the silos. This is where the real magic occurs. By driving alignment around a focused set of objectives across disparate functional organizations, you put all the wood behind the arrow, which can differentiate your organization from the rest.
  

There are several effective approaches to building a strategic plan, so my recommendation is to find a methodology that includes many of the attributes discussed above, and that is compatible with your company culture and decision making process.  But whatever you do, make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to use planning as a strategic weapon to lead your organization out of the recession at the front of the pack!

If you have discovered a planning process that you found particularly useful, I would love to hear from you.  Just post a comment.

For readers in the Bay Area, I would like to alert you to a great opportunity to learn more about planning and innovation from thought leader and best-selling author Geoffrey Moore*, on Tuesday evening, January 26, 2010, in Menlo Park, CA. Hosted by the Association for Strategic Planning (ASP), this interactive discussion will include Mr. Moore’s latest thinking on strategic alignment and the dialog that needs to take place at every level of an organization for success in the current economic environment.  Don’t miss this rare opportunity to spend time with Geoffrey Moore in an intimate setting.

Register here.

*Best-selling author of:
Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution,
Crossing the Chasm,
Inside the Tornado,
The Gorilla Game,
Living on the Fault Line