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.

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.

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 

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.

 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!

The blockbuster sales advice article for the first half of 2009 can be found in the March edition of Harvard Business Review: In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffry Moore. The title grabbed my attention; the content was nothing short of inspiring.

Sales executives spend their working days in discovery with prospective customers, looking for pain, finding ways to align with customer perceptions of business challenges, and hoping to configure and sell solutions in a manner that addresses as much of the pain as possible faster, better, or cheaper than the competition. Yes, this is important, and yes, if you're really good at the process, you are most likely conducting it in a highly collaborative fashion. There may be a better approach - at least some of the time.

This HBR article pokes holes in the consultative approach in an honest and very helpful way. Though it does not negate consultative selling, the premise is sort of "post-consultative" and the approach is easy to cipher if you have good experience and business acumen. "Provocative selling" is possibly more collaborative, more consultative, and provides much more value to the customer than other approaches.

The fact is, if we have any motivation towards excellence in how we behave in the marketplace, then we are investing quite heavily in knowing a lot about our prospective customers and their business challenges before we ever contact them. If we don't, chances are we won't go anywhere with that prospect unless we're very, very lucky that day. This article addresses this particular set of behaviors on both a personal and organizational level.

Buy the magazine (or go to the library!) or just purchase the article at this link on the HBR.org site.

It is perhaps one of the most important you will read this year.

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.