Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 30, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
This past week, I was working with an inside sales rep on some coaching calls. He was having a real challenge, because receptionists were refusing to connect him with his target prospects. Upon listening to one of his calls, it was easy to see why. He was over-introducing himself, using way too many words when he didn’t have to.
I've never liked the word “gatekeeper,” because I’ve gotten so much help from the people at my prospect companies whose job it is to field incoming phone calls. They’ve got often demanding jobs, and I like to make it easy for me by making it easy for them. In my sales training courses, we discuss the differences between receptionists, who answer a company’s main telephone line, and Executive Administrators (EAs), who are essentially executive-level people that help the given executive run his or her sphere of influence. Generally speaking, you’ll be a lot more directive with a receptionists than you will with EAs, so today’s post is about some things to do (and not to do) when opening a call with a receptionist.
So let’s first look at how Bob (my rep) was opening his calls with receptionists, along with a response I actually heard:
- Bob: “Hi, this is Bob Brody from ABC Instruments, and I wonder if you’d be able to put me through to Sally Smith. This is in regard to introducing her to our company.”
- Receptionist: “Have you spoken with her before?”
- Bob: “No.”
- Receptionist: “If you haven’t spoken with her, I can’t put you through.”
In this situation, Bob’s opening immediately identified him as a salesperson that was cold-calling, and many receptionists have been trained to avoid putting these calls through. He also used weak terms, “I wonder if,” and “introducing her to our company,” which practically begs the receptionist to drop the cal, because it doesn’t sound authoritative enough. A better way to handle the situation is to sound more direct, and take control by not providing information you really don’t need to initially provide.
Instead, try this, simple and direct: “Sally Smith, please.”
A huge percentage of the time, Bob will get transferred immediately, because he now sounds authoritative. We made the correction during the coaching session, and he was amazed to find he got through the receptionist on every subsequent call on which we worked that day. Using this technique, he won’t get grilled by the receptionist most of the time, who, after all, has a lot of other inbound calls to process anyway. Sure, some of the time the receptionist will ask what the call’s about, but again, a short answer, like “development systems” is a whole lot better than being too wordy.
And yes, in some companies, especially smaller ones, the receptionist and EA are one and the same, so you’ll be asked one or two more questions. I’ve discussed this in previous blog posts, but if you’re making a cold call to a Director-level prospect or higher, you should at least be doing a web-search on the person’s name before the call, which can give you some terrific clues that will warm up your call, whether it’s to the prospect, or to the EA.
Will receptionists, though, keep it short and sweet, have a polite but authoritative tone to your voice, and you’ll have a lot less resistance. Add brevity with receptionists to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 23, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
April, one of my blog correspondents, wrote this week that she’s moving to another geographical location, and she’ll be looking for a new inside sales job in the tech industry. We always try to help match up people that have taken our inside sales training courses with new companies when appropriate, but April is located far from us, in a locality that we’re not serving right now. She’s starting from scratch, and wanted a few tips on finding a new company. Many of you reading this blog post have been, or are in the same position.
Finding a great new job takes planning and foresight, so here are 6 great things to build upon as you identify and go after an inside sales position at a new company:
1) Update your LinkedIn profile. Ensure that your LinkedIn profile has been completely updated. Include in your contacts as many professional people as possible that you actually know, including colleagues and customers. Don’t invite people you don’t know, or haven’t talked to in awhile. In the case of the latter, why not call again, have a conversation, then mention you’ll send a LinkedIn invitation to him or her. Many employers are reading LinkedIn profiles before they read résumés, so make sure your LI profile is spotless.
2) Identify companies for whom you’d like to work. Read business section in your target area’s local paper, focusing on stories about companies that are doing interesting things, hiring, or getting venture capital funding. In our local paper, I regularly read the quarterly Venture Capital report, as those are often the companies with immediate inside sales hiring budgets.
3) Visit those companies’ websites. Once you’ve identified companies of interest, visit those companies’ websites. Begin your process by first selecting a company whose product or solution offering resonates with you, and you have a passion for. You’ll want to be in love with the solution offering before you interview, and your interest and enthusiasm will be apparent during your eventual interview.
4) Identify your target individuals at those companies. On the company’s website, find out who the top sales and marketing execs are. Plug their names into LinkedIn to see if you have mutual contacts. If you do, you can cold call them, mentioning the names of common associates. In addition, under the “people” search box in the upper right of the LinkedIn screen, type the name of your target company and the term “inside sales” (but don’t uses quotation marks). You may find that the inside sales manager is listed that way, and you can cold call that person, too.
5) Cold call your prospect company’s contacts. Since your new job will involve cold calling, show them that you’re fearless, and love doing it!
6) Prepare for a world-class interview by honing your interview techniques. Unless you’re a world-class interviewee, read Allison’s post in my blog about preparing for an interview. It’s the best document I’ve seen on the art and science of interviewing, so don’t wing it, prepare for it.
OK, so there are 6 critical elements to finding a position at a company that’s right for you. Following these steps will give you a head start on others who may be competing with you for the job, and you'll be expected to compete, just as much as you would for an order or a next call to action on the telephone. Add them to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 02, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
I just delivered our Telesales Skills for Field Reps course to a few dozen field reps working for one of my clients. They’d taken all the well-known, standard sales courses, but realized they could be far more effective by doing better qualification work on the telephone before they made face-to-face sales calls. They were all very sharp reps, and one asked me how to apply these telephone techniques when he was on his mobile phone, and couldn’t take notes.
I replied that prospects and customers today are so savvy about mobile phones that they won’t mind if you tell them to hold on a second while you pull over and park so you can take notes. Actually, many Field sales reps are used to “living” in their cars, and their mobile phones are essentially their main offices. What they’re doing to make their sales days more effective is something every inside sales rep should consider as well.
Today’s post is for you inside sales people who aren’t yet using your mobile phones to increase your sales pipelines while you’re on your way to work. Even if you start your workday at 8 am, you’ll find a significant number of prospects --- particularly high-level ones --- that will be in their offices before 8, and will be available to take your call. If your commute is one hour (pretty common in any metropolitan area), you can actually increase your sales day by at least one hour by using your commute time as prospect calling time.
Most high-level (CXOs, VPs, Directors) prospects begin their business days as soon as they leave home. If you reach these people from your office during the standard work day, end the call by asking for their mobile numbers, and tell them you’ll always be happy to call them while you’re going into work or coming home. A significant number of high-level prospects are engaged in meetings for virtually their entire business day, and may welcome a commute call from you.
And you can make calls after you leave work, as well. Many times, your best prospects are staying late. Make it a habit to include your mobile number on your outgoing email signature, and leave it on your voicemails, too. That way, your prospects can reach you when they’re commuting to and from work, because they know you’re accessible by mobile phone on the road.
So there, you’ve just figured how to extend your sales day by two hours by using “dead” time that you may now use just fighting traffic. Since you’re sitting there, you may as well make some money from it. And if you need to take notes, just pull over for a minute or two, write everything down, and get back on the road when the call is finished. Add your new “mobile office” to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 14, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
One of my most popular blog posts is the one dealing with getting "shopped" by purchasing folks that ask you to bid on a project that you've already lost. Now that the economy is nicely rebounding, my inside sales training customers are telling me that unsolicited RFPs (requests for proposals) and RFQs (requests for quotes) are starting to come in over the transom, from telephone and email from prospects to whom they've never spoken.
Answering these blindly without talking to someone first is always a mistake, because in all probability, some competitor of yours has already gotten there, the decision has been made against you, and the person that contacted you did so to do some price comparison for the purpose of grinding your competitor's price down a bit.
So you've really got to have a telephone conversation with the individual requesting the RFP or RFQ. And when you do, you'll always want to ask this great question:
"What other solutions are you considering?"
The answer to this question should tell you where you are in the sales process. It will tell you who got there first, and your follow-on questions will tell you if you have a ghost of a chance to get the business. If a known competitor is involved, I always ask what the prospect likes about the competitor, and if he or she could "wave the magic wand," how could the competitor be better? I'm looking for holes in my competitor's offering that will open the business for me. If I hear a lot of good about the competitor and no negatives, I'll ask the following tricky question:
"It sounds like you like [competitor] really well. Is there anything preventing you from just going with them?"
And one of two things will happen. The prospect will come clean and tell you he or she is doing "due diligence," another term for "you lose." Or, as has happened a few times in my own sales world, the contact will tell me that there are some perceived issues with the competitor that weren't flushed out earlier. Now we've got something going!
Of course there are other factors of importance, too. What is the title of the individual that is asking for the RFQ? If he or she is in Purchasing or HR, it's far enough away from your technology focus area that you're probably being shopped. In this case, I'd recommend calling high into your product solution area, and talk to an exec that can tell you if an initiative is on the table. If so, you may be able to break into the sales process and get some real traction.
Unless you're dealing in commodities, unsolicited RFPs and RFQs are always a red flag. And even in commodities sales, you do want to have a conversation before you take the time to craft a proposal and put it in your sales pipeline. It's always worth doing a check up to ensure that your company is the front-runner. Add those all-important front-end conversations to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 24, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Every time I teach one of my insides sales courses, one of the first things I do is ask what the folks in the room did prior to becoming inside sales people. Not only does this help me to know them better, but when we get to the part of the course where we talk about the importance of knowing the prospect's business, I can link it back to some expertise in business areas that the reps, in many cases, had forgotten they had. We're all experts in something related to business, and the kinds of questions I ask the reps, they can in turn ask to their prospects. Asking great business questions is often as simple as simply being interested.
A few of my past jobs generally surface as part of the class, too. I thought about one of them this week, because I read Brother Korte's obituary in the newspaper. I worked for Brother Korte at the Novitiate Winery in Los Gatos, CA one summer. He was a marketing genius that took the Jesuit's altar wine business, evolved it to the next step, and began winning awards at wine festivals. Brother Korte made ads for the winery's Ruby Cabernet, showing him in his priest's garb with the tag line "a devilishly good wine."
This was the early 1980s. I had just cooked up a deal with the military where I would be inducted as an officer to run a radio station in Europe (I'd done a lot of radio, and it was a good fit). But this was June, and induction would take place in August, so I'd need a summer job. I wanted a manual labor job to beef up before boot camp, so signed on at the Novitiate to work on the bottling line, which consisted of dumping empty bottles on the conveyor belt on one end, then sealing full boxes of wine and stacking a pallet with them on the other. At the end of each shift, every worker got a bottle of what was bottled that day. It was idyllic. The winery was in an old building in the mountains, and my co-workers and the priests for whom we worked were terrific. We had lunch at a picnic table overlooking all of Santa Clara Valley. A few years later, the Novitiate went out of the wine business, so it's all history now.
So I took an afternoon off last week to pay my respects to Brother Korte. None of the people I remembered from my days on the bottling line were at the memorial, so I drove up the mountain for the first time since the 80s, to visit what was left of the winery. A new concern has taken over, but the tasting room host walked me back to where I'd worked. Fresh bottles were coming off the new bottling line, but the old tanks were still there, still being used, and the place smelled wonderful, just like it had when I'd worked there.
As a young man working on a bottling line, I couldn't have guessed that a couple of decades later, I'd have achieved a lot of success in the business of inside sales. Inside sales is a career to which no one aspires in high school. We end up there by accident. For many, it's a way stop, then all of a sudden, it becomes fun, we make a good amount of money, and we realize we didn't find a career, it found us.
Although it was only a summer job, it stuck with me, and most months, I still think of it once or twice, because I do think that it contributed in its own way to what I was able to accomplish in inside sales, in terms of the value of doing one's job as perfectly as possible. And whenever I made an inside sales call to a company in the wine business, I mentioned my time on the bottling line, and it really broke the ice. Most wine execs have worked on the bottling line at one time too, as it turned out.
I'll bet you have one or two of those jobs in your past, too. When you're making a high level call to an exec in a field in which you've worked, mentioning it will turn a cold call into a warm one, I assure you. As I said before, engaging in business discussions with your prospects is critically important, particularly in enterprise sales where ROI is invariably a big part of the decision and sign-off process. It's as simple as simply being interested.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 @ 10:01 AM
It's fairly common for superior sales performers to be rewarded by being transferred to an underperforming territory. Rarely is the sales rep happy about it, and it's probably happened to a large percentage of you reading this. If it hasn't happened to you yet, get ready, for it may. In my telesales training courses, I always tell people that our world is a lot about constant change, and how well we handle it. Today's post is about how a really great rep got a lemon and made lemonade out of it. I worked with Gordon at a software development tools company, and saw him take control of what had been a terrible territory, work it, and make it one if he best territories in the company within a very few months. Even though the product line we're talking about was technical, his story can apply to anyone selling anything in a territory that has traditionally been a poor earner. Here's what he did:
First of all, he wanted to know which companies weren't buying our tools, and why, so he made a list of the biggest companies in all of the states in his new territory. In his first week in the territory, he made a telephone call blitz, and found that there were two types of non-buying prospects: those in which upper management (e.g. VPs of Engineering) made the decisions against us, and those where upper management didn't care, but instead had empowered Project Managers and Developers to make their own decisions and select their own tools.
Not surprisingly, he found that many of his prospects had never been called, or hadn't been called in months. Gordon started making extensive charts of the types of software development projects that these companies were working on, and became an expert in project knowledge. Gordon was a great salesperson, but he was non-technical. All he wanted to know was what they were building, who would buy the finished product, and what types of tools the engineers used. So he ended up with two charts (today, you'd call them spreadsheets): "Nonbuyer Reasons and Personnel," and "Project Classifications." Then he really went to work.
He had inherited several decent customers, called high, and found that there were many projects starting at those companies for which development tools had not been selected. He leveraged his VP contact, and sold a lot of new product to those companies (within 6 months, he'd doubled the previous year's sales on current customers alone). He also uncovered many opportunities at companies that hadn't been called in awhile. They were now in his sales pipeline, after less than one month in the new territory.
But there were still some companies that wouldn't buy, because they didn't like our company. He was able to determine that the VP of Engineering at a huge prospect company had a sister, and she was married to the Director of Sales at one of our competitors. That company had standardized on our competition, and Gordon knew he'd never get a sale there as long as upper management stayed the same. At other companies, Gordon found that individual engineers and project managers had prejudices against our development tools (too bad, because our tools were superior), and would work to ensure our tools were never placed.
In his new territory, many development teams were in a state of flux. Some companies were downsizing their departments, and engineers were getting laid off, and having a challenging time finding work. By this time, he knew about different engineers levels of expertise, and he also knew how they felt about our products. So here's what he did: since he was calling all over the territory anyway, he started asking if they were hiring engineers. If they were, Gordon would check his list. If an engineer looking for work loved our products, Gordon found him or her work at companies were he wanted to get more business. He got advocates at new companies that way. And if engineers didn't like our products, he found them positions at that big company with the VP whose sister was married to his competition. Gordon figured if he had engineers in his territory that didn't like our solutions, it was best having them all work in one place, in a company that for political reasons would never buy our development tools anyway. In essence, Gordon played his territory like a chessboard, shifting the pieces from one square to another. He was able to do this because he probably called more people in the territory than anyone had before, asked great questions, took good notes, and plotted things on charts. He turned two of the states in this underperforming territory into two of the most profitable in our company in under a year.
So what can be learned from Gordon?
1) An underperforming territory can be an opportunity waiting to flourish.
2) Call high, and ask great questions to determine why people aren't buying.
3) Ensure that you're providing as many solutions as possible to companies that are already your customers.
4) Know your prospect's business, so you can figure out how your product can help your prospect to make money faster, or stop losing money.
5) Make enough calls that you can be considered a territory expert.
6) Develop your own analyses tools and charts to understand what's happening (or happened) over time, not just what happened today.
7) Think out of the box. In Gordon's case, he improved the lives of his advocates, and they remembered the favor he did for them.
As Gordon would tell you, you have to work hard, but you also have to work smart. Add Gordon's techniques to your Best Practices Playbook for selling successfully to an underperforming territory.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Dec 07, 2009 @ 12:09 PM
I'd imagine most readers of my blog have at least developed a profile on the business networking website LinkedIn. But if you're not using it as an important part of your daily sales process, you could be losing sales. If you work a territory, you'd be surprised at how many of your prospects will know customers of yours. In the past we all found this out by accident, guesswork, and careful questioning. Today, the LinkedIn tool does a lot of it for us.
In my telesales training classes, I cover several of the free online Sales 2.0 tools that are becoming increasingly more important, and I'm coming to think LinkedIn (LI) is the best. Let me give you one real world example of how it can be used "out of the box," then discuss what you can do to ensure that you're working at optimum with LI.
Case Study: A network solutions provider
One of my sales training customers had been trying for months to get into a large prospect, to no avail. In a coaching session, we determined that he'd call a CIO at the company, someone that wasn't in the lead database. We found that person's name on Hoover's. Before he called that exec, he checked out his LinkedIn profile. Guess what! He knew one of our company's regional managers while that manager was employed in a previous company, working another territory. My rep made a quick call to the out-of-territory Regional Manager, and found out that he'd had a great relationship with that CIO. My rep was then able to make the call, and had a conversation. Without LinkedIn, the CIO might never have taken the call.
So let's investigate how to get LinkedIn working at optimum for you. Here are 6 great ways to get going for you right now:
1) Make sure your profile is as good as you can get it, detailing your professional background and successful accomplishments. These is essentially your résumé, and believe me, your prospects will occasionally look at it to get an idea of who you are before they trust you enough to buy from you. Additionally, if you're ever looking for another inside sales position, your potential new company will look at your LI profile before they bother with your actual résumé. Don't gloss over this important step.
2) Send a LinkedIn invitation to professional people colleagues you know well, or with whom you've had a business relationship, so you can link together. These would include your fellow Inside and Field salespeople, and all sales management within your company.
3) Call your customers that you have a working relationship with, have a conversation, then tell them you'd like to LinkIn to them. The best time to do this is right after the conversation. Caution! If you don't call first, they may perceive you as being too pushy, and won't accept the invitation. Besides, by calling them, you may also find other opportunities within his or her company that you didn't know about. If so, you've increased your sales.
4) When your invitation has been accepted, take a look at your invitee's connections. They may include people working at a company that you're trying to work with. If so, consider whether it might be worth calling your contact and asking how well he or she knows that person. If that's the case, you may get a reference!
5) When making a first time call to a prospect, especially to an exec or manager, take 30 seconds up from to check out his or her LI profile. You may discover you have mutual business associates or interests. Those can prove to be the best ice-breakers you'll ever have (see Case Study above).
6) This one's just a quick cautionary tip. Invitations from unknowns don't often result in links, and can be perceived as LinkedIn spam. Only invite people you really know. I get invitations from people I've never talked to, and I won't LinkIn to them. Most others won't either. There are other social networking sites that are great for popularity contests, but LinkedIn isn't: it's a business tool. If there's someone you'd like to know and LinkIn to, please call and say hello first.
I always check out someone's LI profile now before I call him or her. It takes hardly any time at all, and it's a great ice-breaker to spend thirty seconds or so at the beginning the call to talk about mutual acquaintances or interests. So if you're not doing all of this right now, start today. It's a great way to communicate better with your prospects, and you'll increase sales, too. And add using LinkedIn effectively and efficiently to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Sep 28, 2009 @ 01:03 AM
One of the complaints I most often hear from inside sales reps that take my telesales courses is that they don't get enough leads. Whether you get your leads from lists, whitepaper downloads, your own lead qualification reps, or any other source, you're probably missing a significant amount of business in your territory if you're not subscribing (and reading!) at least one trade publication that addresses experts in your solution area. This is really an old-fashioned idea, and one that still works. Best of all, I'll bet your competitors aren't doing it. So today's post is about beating your competition. And I'll give you a real-world example of what I'm talking about, because it worked for me, and the publication still exists. If you sell into the market I sold into, you can use it too. And if you don't, you can take my story and plug it into your solution set and prospect base, too, and go out and subscribe to a magazine that fits your needs similarly.
Back when I was an inside rep, I sold software and application development tools like debuggers, in-circuit emulators, and regression testers. Our standard trade publications were the EE Times, Dr. Dobb's Journal, and a few others. But the one I loved was Crosstalk, the Journal of Defense Engineering. That publication, published at Hill Air Force Base, addressed issues and situations involving how the Department of Defense built and maintained software (still does). Every issue was packed with information on who was building what. I subscribed free (you still can), and every month I'd take a couple of hours out of my Saturday, skim it (still do, I'm hooked), and highlight names and projects. Monday I'd call those highlighted folks and made sure they knew about my solutions and what we did. And man, did I sell a lot of stuff to the DoD. Most of those folks were experts, and rarely showed up on lists. The only way I could find them was by reading about them. And they always enjoyed talking to me because I'd read about them.
So here's where I'm going with this. Whatever you sell, there are trade publications where experts in your industry talk about solutions. I want you to subscribe to a paper copy, so you can get away from your computer on the weekend, sit in an easy chair with a highlighter, and skim material that will be important to you. Seriously carve out a couple of weekend hours to do it. I don't recommend doing this online, because everything else in the world gets in the way, email, YouTube, and random thoughts turned to web searches. And when you do allocate time to digest the material, what will happen is this: you'll get names of high level people, and you'll finding out what's bugging them that your solution can help fix. Unbelievably, your voicemails will get returned, admins will put you through, and you'll have real productive conversations because you'll know an awful lot about the business your prospects are in, from the inside out. I train and coach hundreds of telesales reps each year, and I know most of them aren't doing this (they should be, after my classes, though). So if you're having a slow time getting to prospects in these tough economic times, ensure that you're reading and working those trade mags. As Gomez Addams used to say, "Ahh, the old ways are best." So add mining those trade publications to your Best Practices Playbook to find those important and lucrative prospects you'd otherwise never find.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 31, 2009 @ 01:13 AM
In a recent post, I wrote about why perceived social class may be an element in the fear some inside sales reps have in calling high. One of my blog readers, Richard Fouts, responded with a poignant post on how his own manager at HP once got angry at him for talking to HP founder Dave Packard, and told him he'd fire him if he did it again! What may have been happening here was a pretty good example of poor industrial relations between management and employees, in this case involving three levels: the sales rep, his boss, and the president of the company. By all accounts I've read, Dave Packard was not only approachable, he loved talking to his employees. But there was a communication breakdown along the line, and it came to a head when Richard was called on the carpet for "calling high" within his own company. An educated guess is that Richard's manager considered himself a minion, and tried to inculcate that feeling in his employees. This is middle management failure defined.
Organizational development guru Alexander R. Heron discussed this problem in depth way back in the 20th century, and nailed it so well that he changed the way many large companies treated employees. Although best known for his years as a VP at Crown Zellerbach, he was a well-known author (Sharing Information with Employees, 1944) and speaker who realized that unempowered employees are often inherently unhappy, and tend to create inferior processes and products along the way. Here's his quote from 1953, describing what he views as the genesis of the problem:
"The relationship between employer and employee, if we trace it back far enough, was the relationship between the master and the slave. The master supported the slave; the slave was there for the master. The fact of the matter is that gradually the slave passed out of the picture and employment took his place... There is inherent in the relationship between employers and employees something that must have derived from that tradition of centuries past when the relationship was one of conflict, one of exploitation, one of conquest, one in which the worker was subordinate not only to the will but to the needs of the master. I am sure that those of you who do any psychological or opinion research will find the reflection of that in most employer - employee relationships today."
So how does Heron's view relate to today's' telesales reps that are reticent to call high? It's all psychological, and here, the errant psychology is "I'm not good enough to call high." It's yet another take on the problem of class perception, and it's part of the reason the Framers of our Constitution determined that having a King was not a viable option for our new country. Heron wasn't about smashing the kings of industry, but rather he believed in a "flattened" informational path that would allow for better team communication within a company, no matter how big or small. Sixty some-odd years after he made the statement above, some reps still struggle with the inability to call a "king" on the phone and make something happen.
A little secret: my mom was Alexander Heron's secretary, back in the days where people still called themselves secretaries. She left his employ when she was a few months pregnant with me, and I grew up hearing a lot about him. He and his wife both liked mom, and gave her a nice little silver brush set when I was born and that I still have. Today, I spend a significant amount of time in my telesales training courses discussing how to carry on conversations with executive administrators so that telesales reps get to the executives they need to talk to. I was raised by a good one, so picked up some tips along the way. And it appears that a lot of what her boss believed and taught got passed on to me, too. If you're a sales rep that doesn't call high as often as you'd like, consider what Alexander Heron has to say, and see if it might somehow apply to you. And if you're a telesales manager who has reps that have trouble consistently calling high, consider those unspoken societal "rules" that may be holding your reps back. Consider holding a "lunch & learn" meeting on this topic, and add this concept to your Best Management Playbook.
I'd value your comments on this, too. What do you think of Alexander R. Heron's "slavery" model of business evolution? Does this concept have any value in today's sales world?
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jul 27, 2009 @ 01:27 AM
I write frequently on the importance of Calling High, and yes, I've put it in caps for a very good reason. Without constantly making an attempt to reach the highest level executive responsible for your product area, you'll be losing out to your competitors that do call high. It's absolutely critical to becoming a superior sales performer. I just finished doing another of my telesales training courses, this time in Europe with a team selling into the EMEA space. Calling High works just as well there as it does in the United States (it works in Asia, too --- I've tested it). But several of the salespeople in my classes wanted me to drill down a bit on the psychological factors behind the fear of calling high. So I did, and I'm convinced it's got to do with a perception of class structure and "place" in society.
In every class, I ask my students about their backgrounds. Over the years, I can tell you that comparatively few came from an upper class (or upper income) family background. While most were middle class, many came from families that struggled financially. As I've written before, people who had poor financial childhoods often make very good reps, because they've got something to prove. But there's also a psychological issue common to many of the reps that don't come from wealthy families. As children and adolescents, they never associated with CXOs socially as part of their family dynamic. In many cases, their blue collar parents didn't associate with them at work, either, as there was generally a middle management intermediary as a social and business buffer. Talk around the dinner table referred to CXOs as "high mucky-mucks" or other like verbiage, further separating, from a perception basis, the relative social status of the worker vs. the executive. This perception of social separation got passed down to the children (here I'm reminded of Dr. Don Rose's old radio program where he told loads of jokes about "The Boss"). And if any of these children we're discussing became inside sales people, this innate feeling about social separation might have served as a foundation for their resistance to talk to high level executives, and flavored their language in deferential terms ("Is this a good time to talk?") when they did speak to them. The overall result is that many telesales reps have an aversion to calling executives because they perceive that they haven't earned the "right" to call high.
The reality of what goes into making an executive is quite often different than the perception. Most executives I know weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Most of them went to college, but many didn't earn scholarships. They worked their way through school by washing dishes, delivering pizzas, painting apartments, and working at fast-food counters. In other words, they had the same crappy jobs that everyone else had (the jobs that our parents told us "build character"). Because they worked their way up, they have an affinity for others doing the same. And in their own companies, these CXOs have inside sales people doing the exact same job as the reps that are calling them. With a very few exceptions, I've found the higher in the organization the individual is, the nicer he or she is.
So all in all, the inability to successfully call high rests on two issues, lack of technique, and perceived difference in social standing. Training can correct the former, but the latter can only be changed from within. And unless the perception is changed, the opportunity to use those "calling high" techniques will never be put to use. It's all about "breaking the chains." If you recognize yourself in this story, here's a simple exercise I'd like you to try. Next time you're at a company offsite event or meeting, you'll probably have a company-wide social hour or two at a bar. Instead of just hanging out with your friends, walk up to your CEO, introduce yourself and what you do, and offer to buy the exec beer so you can tell him or her why you enjoy working for the company. You might be surprised that he or she will be happy to break away with the exec group for 5 or 10 minutes to talk to you. Team Communication is important to every exec, and they all like knowing what's going on at the prospect-interface level. Talk a little bit about why you like the company, and give one or two concrete examples of what the company is doing right. Keep it positive, keep it light, and take no more than 10 minutes. By talking socially to execs in your own company, you'll often see they're just like you. And you'll be remembered, too. It's a good habit to get into, and you can carry the memory of that conversation right into the next call you make to a CXO. Make it a point to get to know your own company's execs, and add this intra-company social skill to your Best Practices Playbook.