The Sales Café

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.

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.

In sales, leads are everything. Who can forget the fighting over the leads in the cult sales film Glengarry Glen Ross? Everyboday wants leads.

But what makes a lead a lead? Most define leads as potential buyers and part of the first step in the sales process. With the proliferation of virtual sales, I think the high expectations of online sales have diluted the definition of a lead. A marketing lead is not a sales lead. It could evolve into a definite prospect, but it takes a few steps to do that.

Someone who visits your Web site is not necessarily a lead. In a brick and mortar world, when people walk into a store, just wanting to look, it doesn't mean they are sales leads. Sure, it's one step above window shopping, but they may not be ready or even interested in buying then. I consider this the early stage of SHOP in the four phases of customer buying.

It works the same in the virtual world. Think of how many times you've wandered through a Web site, just to check out the site. Are you a lead? Not necessarily. Depending on your intentions, it's the next few interactions that qualify you as a lead. Downloading a free paper, adding yourself to the mailing list, interacting on the site and responding to any calls to action, those are moves that move you along the lead continuum.

Unless you are just checking out the competition (and who hasn't downloaded the competition's latest intellectual property (IP)?, if you are that interested in the product or services, you are now a sales lead. You can expect to get a call from a sales person or, at the very least, an email discreetly probing about your intentions, moving you further along in the SHOP phase of the customer cycle and then into BUY.

By Elisabeth Watson

“Your hold time will be approximately 87 minutes.”

Who likes to hear that? Certainly not your customers.

We spend so much time (or we should) on training customer service people or sales reps or both. We study our potential customers’ responses to every possible method of engaging with them. We tweet, we follow, we friend, we call, we don’t call, we do whatever we think is possible to convert a prospect to a customer.

And then we put them on hold.  Or process their return in 4-6 weeks. Or refer their questions to someone who has no understanding of the product or how they use it.  After the romance of the sales cycle, that is more than a little abrupt.

We’ve done the hard part, convincing someone to buy from us, but then we often drop the ball. Revenues, especially new revenues, are the Holy Grail and it’s easy to forget that the cheapest and the easiest sales come from our existing customers.  And no matter how relevant our collateral or how effective our message, referrals are our most credible sales resource. It’s vital that we make it easy for our customers to pass along those referrals, long after they’ve signed the contract and committed to our products and services.

So how do we ensure that our customers have a great experience throughout the lifecycle?  By applying that old management adage, what gets measured gets done.  We need to evaluate each aspect of the customers’ experience from their perspective and look at how it impacts the customer experience—from that first call through every interaction.  We forget that our cost centers touch the customer, too. As Nigel Blair-Johns, Operations Manager at HP often reminds me, “Paying the bill is part of the customer experience.”  If our invoices are inaccurate or not timely, paying us can cost the customer money, not to mention frustration.

I know, I know, you can’t spend money and time on those cost centers. You need to focus on revenue. This economy is brutal.  I understand.  But.  Yes, but.  You can start with something as simple as your attitude.  Look at each of your processes from your customer’s perspective.  Just for a minute, stop channeling your accountant and consider ALL of your organization’s customer touch points.  Are any of those customer experiences less than great?  If so, that experience is hurting your customer retention, not to mention your brand.

Are you thinking that good service costs more than bad service?  Maybe, maybe not.  A customer-focused invoicing process, supported by reasonable technology, might mean fewer interactions, electronic funds transfers, and improved DSO (Days Sales Outstanding). That translates into lower costs and faster access to cash, which will enable you to return to channeling your accountant.

Reviewing, analyzing, and updating your processes, in the context of your customer experience, could not only improve your top line, but will help your bottom line as well.  What if you cut your fulfillment and invoicing costs by 20%?  What if accounts receivable process made your cash available 3 days sooner?  What if you cut an FTE from your invoice processing staff?  Or redeployed that FTE from problem resolution to reporting or fulfillment?  What if you could cut your accounting error management by 5%? That would be good news, but what’s even better?  Lots of pleasant encounters with—and, maybe even a few referrals from—those people you worked so hard to sell, your customers.

People buy from people. Trite but true, whether it's B-to-B, B-to-C, complex or simple business relationships. Successful salespeople never lose sight of that little fact. Talk to one and ask them. Look in the mirror and ask yourself!

What complicates things is how many options there are for meeting people, from Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to plain old networking meetings held by local organizations, and everything in-between. Perhaps no matter how much your company spends on marketing, sooner or later, the buyer is going to check YOU out, on their own, without your knowledge. They want to see if you're the kind of person they want to do business with.

Knowing that, how will you position yourself? Do you want to portray a conservative persona on LinkedIn and a cool one on Facebook? Would you rant on Twitter or "keep your powder dry" knowing that your potential customer might be shopping you instead of your company? One thing is for sure, when everybody shops the Web, your presence is required and your privacy is not the buyer's concern. 

Companies spend an enormous amount of energy and money trying to control the buyer-seller conversation on their websites. However the trip shoppers take, of their own choosing, on their way to a buying decision tells us an interesting story. When we analyze the traffic on our own site, we see people moving from the home page to the blog, to the team page and then out of the site, moving on definitely to LinkedIn and probably to Facebook or Twitter. I think this is common.

So, the moral is YOU, whether you are the owner, CEO, VP Sales, or an account executive, may have more to do with how enticing your product or service looks to the buyer than any feature, benefit or research paper that the marketing department can come up with.    

ELA's lead generation survey results are in!  Nearly all respondents are from or with sales organizations where they are responsible for the relationship or partnership with their customers. Everyone expects salespeople to generate new leads, every month.

The best return on time invested included local networking/public speaking and asking for referrals.  Over 80% thought the lead generation approach used was vital or important to developing trust.

Respondent advice on lead generation ideas sorted into four primary buckets.

• 1) Reward lead generation activity as part of overall sales process
• 2) Focus on the Customer in all interactions
• 3) Be professional including making and keeping commitments to prospects
• 4) Always provide value by knowing your product and value proposition

Since relationships are based on trust, then the lead generation approaches like asking for referrals, networking, and public speaking must cultivate trust between the prospect and the sales person.  Let's create a list of tips for each approach that are both effective and build trust.  I will post a short ELA RTG blog entry on each approach over the next few weeks.  You can enhance the approach by adding your comments and ideas. 

Thank you to all who participated.

• One plant has great product.
• Another plant has great product and is always reliable.
• Plant number three has great product, is reliable, and competitively priced.
• The fourth plant has great product, is reliable, competitively priced and helps your business succeed through service that makes you more competitive.
• Our final plant option has great product, is reliable, competitively priced, helps your business succeed through service that makes you more competitive AND doing business with them is easy and fun.

The subject of demonstrating our product or service always burns in the back of our minds, especially with something as inherently useful as the great solution we sell. A picture is worth a thousand words! We want to show people how their lives will be easier, or more successful. We want to be of service. The question we want to answer today is…..When do you do it? (I’m not going to tell you how, since you already know how.)

I have a recent experience to share with you. I had been working with a business development guy for a while who told me he could bring me qualified leads. We discovered together that nobody in his “Rolodex” owed him any favors, so he tried one last tack with me: “Let’s get everybody to experience a demo of the One Page Business Plan and we’ll generate leads that way.” Well, I like to talk about my stuff as much as the rest of you do, and I don’t do public speaking engagements, so I went along with this as an experiment. In the first quarter of this year, we ended up with about 10 demos to “qualified leads.”

How many systems did we sell, do you think? One - we got lucky! (How many of you are lucky all the time?) Why did they buy? Actually it wasn’t the demo. We knew ahead of time that our client was having difficulty integrating new companies he purchased, and so we tapped into his personal motives.

How many of you are old enough to remember that cars used to last about 2-3 years before you had to trade them in, either because they were junk or because they were so boring that you couldn’t stand them anymore? How many of you still have that occasional itchy Saturday where you go out and kick tires and shop, or in my case pretend to shop for a car? Why do you do this? Do you ever not buy a car when you do this? Do you ever buy a car and why do you buy a car? Did you ever buy a car off of eBay or without driving it first? Did the salesperson—who couldn’t figure out what to ask you—ever suggest that you should go for a test drive? Do you buy then?

Usually not.

You see, when we don’t know what’s driving a customer and we can’t figure out what to ask them to get to their interest, we tap into the lizard-brain part of our inner sales personality and start doing demos. It’s the old, “I have a hammer in my hand, and everything out there looks like a nail.” I would submit to you that doing demos drives away more prospects than it attracts. Why is this? Why wouldn’t your amazing solution just make people start drooling over the prospect of doing business with you? In general, it’s because you’re out of phase with the buyer. Specifically, you haven’t identified what the prospect needs and wants yet and cannot appeal to their task motives, and, more importantly, their personal motives.

Now, today I’m not going to teach you how to sell. If you want to gather up your colleagues and friends, we’ll run the best sales class you’ve ever attended since that’s part of what we do for a living. But, I am going to teach you something really handy that will help you determine when it’s the best time to do a demo.

Take out a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle from top to bottom. Now on each half of the page – that’s left and right half – divide each section with another line drawn from top to bottom. You should have 4 columns? Does anybody have 3?

At the top of the first column, write SHOP. Top of the second, write BUY. Top of the third, write USE. Top of the fourth, write DISPOSE. I’ve been using this tool for years. It comes from Wilson Learning’s Differentiating Business Solutions and originally from Barbara Bund’s Winning and Keeping Industrial Customers.

Customers travel through these four distinct phases in usage: Shop-Buy-Use-Dispose. Each of the phases has distinct characteristics and many steps. The customer determines their behavior either by following a plan or following their nose. The more complex the purchase or corporate bureaucracy, the more steps in each of these phases. It is important to remember to conduct your demos based on where in the cycle the customer is, not where you, the seller, are.

Shop is all the steps a customer takes before selecting a vendor or making a buying decision.

• Seeing what’s out there – Web site search and visit
• Vague notion of a problem – Web site search and visit
• Comparing vendors – Web site visitDo not demo for any of these steps. It is a waste of time. You should focus instead on relating, demonstrating propriety & competence, and overcoming the buyer’s lack of trust. Technology won’t do this for you. More Shop steps include:
• Discovery – do not demo during discovery! Focus on the buyer’s interests, not on solutions. And please don’t use a demo to help a customer self-determine a solution. What little control you have will evaporate in a wisp of smoke.
• Advocating – Now you can demo your product or service as part of showing someone how your solution will solve their problems. At this point, the customer has shown some level of commitment to you as either the person they’re primarily interested in, or the process is down to two people. The solution is not just your product, it’s you and your product!

Buy is all the steps between making that decision and taking delivery. There is little need to demo at this phase.

Use is everything between taking delivery and either using up or completing the usage of the product or service. Here you would use a demo your product or service to expand usage to other people or departments.

Dispose is all the steps a customer takes when they have either used up the product or service or decides it no longer works for them. If you have a licensed or perishable product or service, you might demo to induce repurchase by the customer - but only after you have conducted a thorough discovery!

The lesson here is that all customers or potential customers are in one of these phases at all times. Doing product demos out of phase, for the wrong reason, in the wrong way, and most importantly, in the absence of a defined business problem, leaves everything totally to chance, luck, and probably does little to engender trust between you and the buyer. It will also short circuit the discovery process which, by the way, benefits the customer just as much as it benefits you.

When you demo out of phase, you leave it to your product to create the trust for you and very few products sell themselves. This reduces your close ratio – and as salespeople, we should care about improving our close ratio because it lowers our cost of sales.

On the positive side, and this is what I want to leave you with, understanding how customers buy and where they are in the cycle informs you, among other things, of when and what type of demo to conduct. An early shopper can easily go to your Web site on their own and take a quick trip through, or attend a talk that you’re giving. You can follow that up with an email or phone call while they’re warming up. Remember, they are just shopping; you are just marketing. A late phase shopper can more easily make an informed decision about the solution you’re offering if your demo is on-target with their task and personal motives. Someone who is in the Use phase of another process or product might benefit from a demo of some sort (at a talk or in an email luring them to your site) to see that there might be a better way to do things, and that might send them on a shopping expedition in which you end up pulling the strings. Someone who is disposing of an old process is also generally self-determining how they want to replace it, so a demo would represent an early attempt at getting them to shop with you.

Any thoughts? When do you demo?