The Sales Café

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.

Did you know that people who hold a cup of coffee or a hot drink are more prone to agree to things than people with a cold drink?

This tip, called the Coffee Cup Effect, came from the Twitter feed of @atra_intelexis (Alfredo Trabulsi) and it's had an extraordinary effect on my day, making me wonder:  What other things can we do to help people say Yes to us?

If we are in sales or marketing, it’s our job to make people agree to what we are offering them, whether it's a specific product, service or idea. I suppose the best place to start is to be agreeable ourselves. The next step, it seems, is to extend that feeling and proffer something warm and sweet. One successful sales person I know carries a large bag of Tootsie Pops around with her and hands out two with her business card. “Who doesn’t like a Tootsie Pop?” she asked me. And, by her sales results, she’s on to something.

I know that bringing chocolate and sweets to a meeting makes people more agreeable—especially during the mid-afternoon slump time. The word "Free" gives people an all-over warm feeling, too, as does the sound of their own name. (This depends on the tone of voice, however. Hearing my name spoken in a condescending way makes me quite disagreeable.)

In the end, it’s whatever you are selling that must light the ultimate sales fire for the customer. Without a strong product, service or idea, you just might leave them cold.

What do you do to get a prospect or customer to warm up to you?

 Managing Outside-In selling means staying plugged into the real world

by Jeff Williams

In parts 1 and 2 of the blog series on Outside-In selling, we discussed the importance of putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and viewing everything your sales force does from an “outside-in” perspective. This includes the realization that the sales cycle must be aligned to the customer’s buying process, and that having a superior product does not always make you the winner. In this installment, we examine the ramifications that the Outside-In selling approach has on sales management behavior.

Although it may sound like a simple-minded cliché, in an Outside-In sales organization the customer is truly King. This can be unnerving for sales managers, who may have built their success on always having the answers to guide their sometimes fledgling sales representatives. However, in an Outside-In sales organization, everybody needs to listen to the customer. Yes, everybody . . . even the highly experienced sales managers. Since the world is ever changing, listening has emerged as one of the most significant skills that separates reasonably successful sales managers from stellar performers. 

Listening to customers directly is crucial to maintaining an understanding of what is relevant to the target customer base -- what business challenges they are wrestling with, and how your product/services portfolio can help address those needs. In addition, sustaining a close connection with customers is essential to understanding how your portfolio may need to change to continue to be relevant and competitive.  For many sales managers, face time with customers tends to diminish over time as internal administrative duties tend to consume more and more of their day, leaving less time for direct customer interaction. This raises two challenges for the sales manager. 

First, a conscious effort must be made by the sales manager to get out of the office and spend time with customers in the field. Scheduling a minimum number of sales calls per week is a good way to make sure these opportunities don’t begin to trend towards zero.

Second, and at times more difficult for the sales manager’s ego, the manager must begin to rely on what she is hearing from her sales reps as a window into what is happening in the real world. Listening to sales reps can bring much needed information “from the front lines” regarding competitive shifts and new unmet market needs. The trick is to develop a viable mechanism to encourage sales reps to share this information, without fear of reprisals.

One technique I witnessed that was very successful was the following: 

During the annual sales award dinner at a Fortune 500 company, impressive looking glass trophies were handed out to the top 50 sales reps, based upon criteria such as highest year-over-year growth, most dramatic competitive turnaround, and best team player. OK, so far, nothing out of the ordinary, every company bestows these awards to motivate its sales reps. What came next was different, however.  Following the individual recognition awards, all 320 sales managers in the region, from district managers to the region EVP were called up to the stage to receive a smaller, but nevertheless substantial looking trophy. On each trophy was a short, but revealing sentence:  “Sales Rep Opinions Valued Here.” The sales managers were instructed to go back to their offices and place the trophy in front of their telephones as a constant reminder to the importance of listening to their sales reps.  Needless to say, the distribution of the trophies brought a cheer from the entire audience of sales reps, and ushered in a new era of communication between sales managers and their representatives.

Let us know how you view the topic of sales managers staying in touch with their sales reps and customers by taking just a few minutes to answer this quick 5- questions survey.  In return, we will send you the results.   

Pleae click here to take the Outside-In Survey!

Outside-In selling -- may the best product win . . . not always!
by Jeff Williams

Second in a Series
As part of the on-going discussion about how an Outside-In sales organization operates, let’s talk for a moment about the importance of the product. 

Many companies -- more than would like to admit it -- believe that customers buy from them because they have the best product in the market.  Well, in some cases (like advanced technology) this philosophy can appear to work for a while, luring the unwitting company down the road of complacency (best case), or the road of arrogance (worst case).  In either situation, the sales successes that are enjoyed early in the game tend to disappear, leaving sales management scratching their heads and asking, “What happened to our lead?”  

The piece that can be easily overlooked during the “we have the best product in the market” exuberance phase is that customers rarely buy based upon who has the best product.  Instead, we find that they are more often looking for a supplier who demonstrates a true understanding of their business and can help them solve underlying business problems.  And, solving complex business problems requires more staying power than simply having the current hot product.  

An Outside-In sales organization builds an understanding of the customer through active listening, and finds ways to strengthen the relationship with the customer over time.  By building trust with the customer, the Outside-In sales team can effectively remove perceived risk in the customer’s purchase decision-making process.  Whether the sale is for something as simple as a single copy machine for the shipping dock, or as complex as a new company-wide accounts payable system, the customer is interested in a lot more than just the initial purchase.  Aspects like long-term reliability, serviceability, and alignment to company values can all play a big role.  Many times the deciding factor comes down to something as simple as how easy it is to “do business” with you.  Rather than the performance attributes or feature set of your product, a mundane thing such as flexible credit terms that fit the customer’s buying process could spell the difference between Deal or No Deal.  

As a case in point: a Fortune 50 computer company I worked for was being consistently beaten by its arch rival in the scientific server market place. Despite having a superior product, customers were beginning to turn to the competitor as a better alternative, and this was causing some consternation for our sales and marketing organization, since we could not fathom why customers were gravitating towards a clearly inferior product. Well, as it turned out, our quoting process had become so bureaucratic that turn around time on new quotes had grown to longer than 14 days. By asking customers what was important in making their purchase decision, our competitor discovered our Achilles heel, and quickly developed a streamlined quoting process that could produce a quote to customers in less than 48 hours. Needless to say, the competition continued to take away market share until we woke up and addressed the real underlying issue. Thus, by steadfastly staying in tune with the unique needs of customers, the Outside-In sales organization – in this case, our competitor – stayed one step ahead of us, even though we had the best product.

I would love to learn about your own experiences with an Outside-In sales organization, so please let me know your thoughts, and what examples you have seen.

At some point in their evolution, all sales organizations go through a thorough analysis of their sales process, with the goal of maximizing the efficiency of pulling customers through their new and finely tuned sales cycle. The prevailing notion is that if we just understood our selling process better – what the steps are, who performs them, the timing of each step, etc. – then we could optimize our selling process, thereby improving our closure rates and overall quota achievement.  Viewing the world in this way – what is best for us – is what I call an Inside-Out approach.

Instead, we should recognize that the only reason that our selling process even exists is because our customers have a buying process that they are trying to get through as efficiently as possible.  Once we make this realization, things can really start to fall into place.  Rather than trying to find all the ways to more efficiently pull our customers through our selling process (Inside-Out), we should focus on how well our selling process aligns to our target customer’s buying process, which is what I call Outside-In.

Let’s take an example of a potential sale near the close of our fiscal quarter (end of January) for $150k worth of forming equipment for a small lamp shade assembly plant.  In the normal Inside-Out (sales cycle) approach, our sales team would naturally be fixated on convincing the prospect how our forming machine is superior to anything on the market, and at a price that beats the competition.  We would focus on moving the customer through the stages of our sales process, including: 1) confirming that they need a new forming machine, 2) verifying that our machine meets all their requirements,  3) checking that the price of our solution fits within their budget, and 4) that we can deliver our solution in a timely manner.  Sounds like we have this deal in the bag, right? 

Wrong. 

If we had been focused Outside-In rather than Inside-Out, we would have put ourselves in the shoes of our customer.  Doing so would have indeed verified all the steps above, but would have also uncovered the fact that any purchase for over $100k requires Board approval, and that the Board only meets four times per year, just after the close of each calendar quarter.  Since that meant the Board held their recent meeting about a week ago, we now have no chance of closing this deal until next quarter!  Bummer . . .

This is Part 1 of a continuing series on Outside-In thinking.  Please let me know what you think – post your own “ah-ha” moments in the comment field – and stay tuned for more to come.  

You’re on your way to an important meeting. Let’s say it’s with a prospect your company has been pursuing for two years and the COO has agreed to meet with you. You know she’s got a trough of problems – that’s what your sales team has found out so far, at least.

You’ve got an hour-long drive. You call your mate to check in. Your eastern regional sales manager calls because two of his salespeople just won big deals. You get stuck in lunchtime traffic at the bridge. You check your Blackberry (c’mon, admit you do). You turn on the news and none of it is good. You switch to a music station. As usual, none of that stuff is good either. You arrive at your destination, wait for fifteen minutes in the lobby, check your Blackberry three more times, and then finally go to your meeting. Sound familiar? Is it any wonder that listening skills are at a premium in the 21^st century?

This post isn’t about “listening skills” – nodding at the prospective customer while she answers your questions, repeating what she says and using her name, so that you’ve indicated that you’ve heard her (and hoping you did). It isn’t about quieting the noise in your head either. You didn’t really need to check your Blackberry six times in the last hour, did you? And, it isn’t about a technique to try and reconstruct that most important morsel of information your prospect has just told you, that you’ve just missed while your brain has been multi-tasking. You know, the one tidbit that means the difference between a $200K sale and a $2M sale. You’re a senior sales executive – a trained professional! You know this stuff by now.

Let me turn you onto a little tip, something that you may not know unless you happen to play jazz, blues or some other type of improvisational music. This tip will perhaps help you quiet your brain and get the bigger deal that solves all of your prospect’s problems.

Think of a great jazz show you’ve attended. If you haven’t been to one, then go, they’re good for you. Then, come back and read this again.

What distinguishes a great jazz performance from a good one is the listening skill, not the playing skill of each musician. In this day and age, any musician you hear on stage is highly skilled at playing their instrument, but many of the musicians you hear are lousy listeners. The great stuff that’s making you bob your head and dance in your seat is the interplay between the musicians – the subtle adjusting, reacting, leading, and inventing that goes on chorus after chorus. (For all you non-musicians, a chorus is each time the song goes around.) Each solo you hear is a product of both individual invention and supportive collaboration.

All of this fantastic interplay is grounded in intuition. This intuition isn’t something these musicians were born with. Their intuition was developed by paying attention, in other words listening, to what’s going on around them; absorbing the mood of the piece, moving to the rhythm, and inventing counter-melodies to something the bass player or singer might be doing at that moment. We jazz musicians call this improvisation, but really it is an intuitive management of the situation combined with an invention – original or not – that suits it.

One additional point: When you find yourself bored or yawning during one of these shows, it most likely isn’t that you don’t like jazz, or that you haven’t gotten enough sleep the night before. It’s because the musicians on stage aren’t there. They’re playing licks that they’ve played a thousand times in the same way and even though you may not have heard those notes in that particular way, the notes lack energy and creativity. These licks are not born of the moment, they are standard issue notes grounded in past years of meticulous practice and current situational distraction. It’s the soloist’s stock marketing material. No wonder you’re bored, who isn’t?

So what does this have to do with a sales call? The short answer is everything. As you know by now, anything can and does happen during these calls. Whatever you’ve heard before, or heard from your team is only information. What goes on during a sales call is all possibility. There is a rhythm and a mood to each one of these situations that calls for intuitive management and invention, energy and creativity.

To play like a jazz soloist, you need to listen like a jazz musician. Don’t rely on your licks, your marketing material, and your pre-planned competitive differentiation strategy. If you’re good at that stuff, you’ll get the $200K deal. When you’re on, you need to forget that stuff, and forget the jibber-jabber on your Blackberry as well. Key into the people in the room. Listen, absorb, react, and observe, and then step out and “take a solo” that’s driven by your intuition. That’s the difference between a good and great performance.

Peter Krammer is Managing Partner of ELA Consulting Group, co-author of Let Your Music Soar with Corky Siegel, and a jazz guitarist.  

Very often, sales executives or the teams that support them, react to market opportunities and challenges in an ad hoc fashion. Symptomatic problems or “bright shiny balls” tend to focus attention away from the sales organization’s overall operation and long term growth, something the Sales VP always needs to keep in mind. Budget or resource constraints are an unavoidable part of the current environment and there is a great temptation to cherry pick tactics to fit these constraints. Unfortunately, the payoff is rarely very good - whether it’s an automation, staffing, or training play - when taking a piecemeal approaching your sales force’s future.

A successful approach that is guaranteed to improve results is to address the sales organization holistically and regard it as a sales operating system. It’s the sales executive’s job—be that the sales EVP, VP or director—to assess this sales operating system by looking at the alignment, process, metrics, skills and systems that support the selling activities.

The first step is to address how your sales approach aligns with your customers’ buying behaviors. Interview both internal staff and external customers to understand what they value in the purchasing process and how well your sales organization adds value in that process. Very often what you think is valuable is often not what your customers value.

It’s critically important to take a good, hard look at the alignment of your company’s overall business goals with your specific sales goals. Frequently there is an internal disconnect between what the organization is trying to achieve and the sales organization’s goals and metrics.

A strong logical next step is to detail your sales process, developing a model of the cycle times and yields (conversion) at each step. The sales process is not always clearly understood and many companies have little or no visibility into their funnel health. At this point, you can examine the various sales streams (new, expansion and extension business) and make sure that you have the right skills and compensation programs in place to be successful with these three streams. Each of these three selling streams requires very different aptitudes, skills and metrics.

As part of this overall inventory of your sales practice, you must also review the underlying supporting sales systems (CRM / SFA). This will reveal how well those systems support the desired sales processes and the overall sales operating system. Combine the results with the information gathered so far to develop a desired sales model showing the activity level and success rate.

Finally, examine your organization’s sales skills ability and how well the management team provides the necessary mentoring and coaching. The executive team usually has a strong desire for the sales teams to be consultative but there’s very little understanding of what that truly means and how to develop those skills within the organization.

And once you have done all that, start over because the only constant in this world is change!

When it comes to building sales, a structured 12-18-month plan pays dividends.

These days, it’s tough out there. In a lukewarm or sluggish market, it is tempting, perhaps even desirable if you have an antsy Board, to hire your way to growth. Recruiting and retaining top sales talent is a tricky and expensive proposition that only the largest organizations can afford to do well. The reality is that many successful salespeople in these environments are little more than conduits in a chain of well-orchestrated events generated by successful marketing and product development departments.

I’ve heard many sales vice presidents say, “Success has a thousand fathers.” Their success often depends on keeping feet on the street, hiring people who have strong personalities and are good at pushing product in front of customers. In hot markets, it’s hard to fail. However, despite close to 100 years of sales skill development seminars and publications, many people still push what to them looks like, and indeed may be, a hit product. But what if you don’t have the latest greatest “sells itself” product? Or if your “product” is really a service offering, what do you do with sales people who only know how to push product?

We’ve recently gotten reports from two clients that do business with currently distressed sectors of the marketplace—temporary staffing. The sales results for both companies over the past twelve months were rather startling given the doom and gloom we all read in the papers: national accounts are up 15%; there are week-over-week increases in new account acquisitions; and major accounts are up over 25. These are results that would be astounding even during a hot market, not like now, when the bread-and-butter market of their customer base (the construction industry) is lagging.
Two things stand out about these companies: their service offerings are very straightforward—providing workers—and easily copied so there is plenty of competition; and, they have both taken methodical, almost textbook approaches to developing their salespeople and sales managers. The approach has been the recipe for their success.

For those companies that don’t currently have products and services that sell themselves, acquiring new customers and growing existing customer relationships requires a consistent methodical approach—and a heavy dollop of strategy (which we won’t tackle today). This path requires planning, patience—and, most importantly, getting your CEO on board.

Here are a few of the steps toward laying out an approach that provides results:

1. No matter what sales process you choose, successful implementation requires first that you plan the journey well. Define your vision and mission with the mindset of an entrepreneur and customer’s point of view. Set solid, and real, twelve-month objectives that are measurable, and that you’re willing to stand behind. Develop real strategies that will inform your organization how to meet the objectives. And plan your projects and initiatives well, so that you stay focused on those strategies—not the shiny balls that appear along the way.
2. Train your executive and management team in your sales process first, and then train them on how to coach and manage the process. Inevitably, our initial conversation with the Vice President of Sales starts with a request to train the salespeople. Since a large part of what we do is training, this is of course a natural request. However, we find that in close to 100% of situations that we could train the salespeople till the cows come home and nothing much will change. It’s the sales managers and sales executives who must get out front of the curve, learn the process, learn how to coach the process and lead the way. Once your management team is up to speed, then, and only then, roll out your sales process and train the salespeople.
3. Even though your sales managers have become process experts, measure and pay them for their coaching capability, not their ability to rescue the deal. Your sales managers are first and foremost your coaches. Nothing kills momentum and dumbs down your sales force quicker than a team of heroic sales managers.
4. Don’t create process silos where none currently exist. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and HRM (Human Resources Management) need to be tightly linked to your company’s sales process. In other words, measure and compensate only for the behavior you desire. Salespeople are coin-operated. They will do what you pay them to do.

You should count on a period of 12-18 months from conception to full implementation. This may seem unreasonably long in a dynamic market, especially when it’s so easy to just go out and purchase a training class, but following a well-planned process and not skipping the steps will pay dividends you can only dream of today. In company after company, in industries ranging from software to staffing to agriculture, over the past 28 years, we have found that taking this type of methodical process produces both change and big results.