The Sales Café

Since the dawn of commerce, there's always been a thin line between marketing (telling the story of your product) and sales (getting someone to exchange something for your product). At one point in time, it was a chicken for some seeds while meeting on a dirt road. "This chicken will lay a golden egg for you." "These seeds willl grow the finest beans." (You get the picture.) Today, it's money/credit for products and services online. But we all started by telling our story. And, depending on which side of the line you lean (marketing or sales), your story might have a slightly different purpose, with a unified goal of making the sale.

I've always been sheltered from the sales side of my work. I worked on the "creative" side in publishing. The suits handled all the financial stuff, we creatives just made sure we offered the best content for them to sell. My only cold calling happened when I needed a quote for a story. It just didn't seem like sales to me. As my career evolved, I knew a lot of people who were already familiar with my work and my style. Through word of mouth, they hired me and, well, word gets around, so I get to write this column today.

You might say that I've been selling all along, that my quotas were calculated in word counts, white papers and blogrolls, that my leads have been honed meticulously throughout the years with every informant. My sales career is a work in progress.

Marketing and sales are intrinsically tied, but there is a definite space between the two. I experience it every day. Follow along as I tell the story of my journey to bridge the gap.

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.

 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!

With the recession in full tilt, businesses are imploding everyday. But implosion has some positives. Dilapidated systems, out of date process, unsafe business practices get updated and values recover. Improvements come out of the dust and rubble with planning and appropriate reactions to the current state. 

Have you watched any of your customers' business implode? If you've been paying attention, you know the reasons businesses are failing.

• Specifically, what business challenge is hurting your customer?  (“The recession” is not a specific-enough answer.)
• How would you counsel the leaders in the organization to take a different path?
• What is threatening the leaders of the organization?
• How would your service help minimize or eliminate these threats?
• What are the long term benefits?
• How can your customer implement your service and realize benefits quickly? 
  

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!