Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 09, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Lots of people read this blog, including a number of field salespeople who’ve told me that the advice in this blog helps them to better qualify prospects by phone before taking the time to physically visit them. I’ve even built an inside sales techniques training course for field reps that I’ve delivered to the outside reps of a number of companies.
Last week, I received an email from a field rep that presented a dilemma he was facing. The situation affects both inside and outside sales reps. So here’s “Dave’s” question, and my response:
I'm an outside territory manager and a portion of our weekly meetings are scheduled by our Inside reps. From time to time, we get a meeting scheduled that has not been qualified and we have to find a way to back out of the meeting or assign it to another outside rep that handles some of the smaller products. This is an uncomfortable situation and can be challenging while trying not to upset the prospect. What we really want to say is “you're not worthy of my time,” but we can't. Any ideas on how to make this a little easier, while saving face with the customer?
- Dave
Hi Dave, There isn't an easy way to tell an unqualified prospect that "you're not important enough." When this occurs, I'd suggest that you call the unqualified prospect and apologize that you have been accidentally double-booked, but say that the prospect is important enough that the meeting will instead take place by phone, rather than delaying the conversation to a future meeting. This saves face for the prospect, tells the prospect that he or she is important, but saves you from having to meet with an unqualified prospect.
- Geoff
Today’s topic isn’t merely a tip. It also underscores the value of completely qualifying every lead on every call. If you end the call prematurely, call right back and get the answer to the question you forgot to ask. There’s no crime in forgetting to ask something, but there is a crime in not calling right back to fix it. Add qualifying on very call 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, Jul 26, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
One of my inside sales training course clients had a real dilemma a couple of weeks ago. Since her Lead Qualification reps were being compensated on appointments being sent to the field, she was finding that there were a significant number of unqualified appointments being made, and the Field salespeople were beginning to complain.
One of the problems was that there wasn’t a lead grading system in place, so a lead was characterized as either being an appointment or a non-appointment. This is not an isolated incident, and I see this quite frequently. Naturally, if no lead grading system is in place, Business Development reps will create as many appointments as they can, because that’s how they’re measured and compensated.
To fix this, a lead grading system should be put in place, and compensation should be adjusted accordingly. My feeling is that unqualified leads should never be part of a compensation package, and the best place to start is by defining what constitutes an “A,” or fully qualified and compensated lead.
One of the concepts I teach is that there are six basic qualification question types, and each question should be asked on every qualification call. Here they are, along with my ideas on the responses that might constitute an “A” lead:
Requirements: The prospect has defined at least one technical or product/service requirement that links to an element of the proposed solution.
Timeframe: The prospect intends to buy within 90 days.
Decision Tree: The decision process is defined, leading up to the appropriate VP or CXO.
Scope: The potential size of the opportunity is defined, encompassing all individuals, departments, and divisions within the enterprise that will be eventually using the solution.
Business/Consequence: A business problem is identified that links to the proposed solution, as well as the consequences of not solving the problem.
Budget: Has a budget been allocated for the solution in question? This question must always be asked, but a “no” answer is not necessarily a deal-breaker, as budgets can be allocated if the Business/Consequence, Requirements, and Timeframe answers constitute a qualified lead.
This is a model, and it’s going to vary somewhat depending on your product. For transactional sales, maybe the “A” lead timeframe is 30 days. For large enterprise deals, maybe it’s 3-12 months. You can craft your own “B” and “C” categories after you’ve determined what an “A” lead is, and perhaps tweak your comp plan to reflect that as well.
Although the issue on the table is sales leads going to Field reps, the case for ranking lead qualification categories is critical for all Business Development teams. Asking the Field for input regarding what they think constitutes an “A” lead is important too. After all, the Field is the customer.
If you’re a Business Development manager who hasn’t yet implemented a lead ranking system, now’s a good time to start. And if you already have, it’s worth a check at least once a year to ensure that youre ranking system is giving the Field what it needs, and you’re compensating your team members on the activities that best reflect on the profitability of the company. And be sure to add Lead Ranking development and maintenance to your Best Management Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Mar 29, 2010 @ 10:01 AM
This past week I met with a prospect that had a fairly common sales dilemma. His telesales team sells both directly and through a reseller channel. They are compensated on both types of sales. Channel sales had been subpar, and in our discussions about our inside sales training courses, he wanted some ideas on improving the way his inside sales team works with the Channel. Being an "out of the box" thinker is always helpful in sales, and you have to be that way with the Channel, too. By doing so, you can get a jump on your competitors, and they may never figure out how you did it.
I probably got the "out of the box" concept from my grandfather. He came out of Russia after the revolution, through Siberia, to Harbin, China, onward to Mexico, and then up to the U.S. Some of the creative ways he survived aren't fit to convey in a business blog. But when he came to San Francisco, he bought a house, and one of my earliest memories if of his kitchen. He painted a beautiful Chinese landscape on the entire eastern wall of the kitchen, because he wanted it decorative, and he wanted it to be his (it may still be there, if you know the person who lives on the corner of Hugo and Arguello streets in the Golden Gate Park panhandle, and they've been wondering about their kitchen mural, let me know). He did things his way, rarely listened to anyone about anything, but continually found new ways to solve old problems. In business, I believe that creative thinkers are that way because they want to develop something new, and there's a certain pride of ownership in knowing they got there first. The annals of American entrepreneurship are loaded with tales of the successes of people that made a creative 180 and "accidentally on purpose" made a lot of money and changed an industry.
Many salespeople don't think creatively enough when they work with channel sales partners. They hand them leads, forget about them, and wonder why channel sales numbers are down. Here are some tips for turning this around and getting your channel to increase sales for your product or solution.
1) Call the CEO of your channel company and ask what you can do to help him or her drive more business. Notice I didn't say "ask what you can do to sell more of my product." Your channel company cares more about overall profitability than in just selling your product, because they often have a bunch of other products, too. You need mindshare more than anything else, and in discussing his or her business, you'll probably be the one principal sales rep this year that will show genuine concern for his or her profitability. When I was in sales, one of my channel principals, whose business was partly based on providing engineering consultants as an outsource solution, told me that his outsource business had been crummy. I told him that since I was making tons of calls into his territory, I could ask a question to each of my prospects as to whether they ever used contract programmers. I got my channel partner some business that way, and guess what? My product sales through that channel partner grew exponentially in the ensuing months. Calling high and taking my channel partner's interests to heart were the two keys to getting my channel partner to sell more of my products.
2) Call each of your channel partner sales reps on a regular basis to help him or her make a sale. If you've got a handful, there's no reason you can't call them all once a week. Maybe a call to one of his or her prospects from the manufacturer will make a sale, so why not ask if you can call that prospect and help out. Ensure the rep that you won't let the prospect "go direct" and buy from the manufacturer, and you'll help close the sale for him or her. Sometimes channel partners are unwilling to do this because they're afraid the principal will steal the sale from them. Convince them you won't take away their business, and build trust. I guarantee that you'll be brought into more of their deals, and each of you will have better sales numbers as a result.
3) Create a "virtual channel" by developing your own personal sales channel, right from your desk. Let me give you a "tecchie" example from my own world to explain this concept. I used to sell a software debugger for programmers writing in C language. Before my prospects bought a debugger, they had to have a C complier. There was one C compiler vendor that had bought some of our debuggers for their own use. So I called the sales director of that company, and suggested that I could help them sell compilers to companies that were in Analysis phase, and hadn't bought any software development tools yet. They'd need both compilers and debuggers. The director and I reached a gentleman's agreement that we'd help each other out, and he'd ask his own reps to chat up our debugger. This turned out to be a great relationship. It wasn't formal, wasn't written on paper, but forged a great relationship that was profitable for each of us, and helped my sales territory tremendously. So if you know of a non-competitive vendor that sells to the same people you do, and he or she makes a great product, why not turn that vendor into an ally? This will give you additional "feet on the street," and increase your sales.
So there are three great ways to work with the Channel. Far too many reps view the channel as competition, which is absurd when they're getting comped on both types of sales. It's all about team communication, and in such cases, the Channel is part of your team. I've given you some doable ways to solidify important business contacts within your channel structure. If you sell directly and through a Channel as well, add these ideas to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Mar 01, 2010 @ 10:01 AM
First in a 3 part series on sales training theory
In the 20 or so years we've been in the telesales training business, we've turned down a significant number of potential training situations. The main reason? We didn't think training was the solution for the client's problem, and we knew it just wouldn't work, because other things needed to be fixed first. Today's post is about saving you money if you're thinking of hiring any company to train your team, or doing it yourself with internal resources. Lack of superior performance can be a training issue, but not always. So before you consider sales training as a solution to poor performance, ask yourself the following questions to determine if you've correctly analyzed your sales situation:
1) Product. Do you have a significant underperforming product issue? If so, it's probably all over the web, and prospects love to talk. This "bad rap" will stop calls from being taken by prospects, and voicemails and emails being ineffective. Possible solutions: fix the product or consider dropping it from your product mix.
2) Compensation. Are your reps being compensated for the wrong behavior? For example, dual commission structures, in which reps are paid better on some products than others will virtually guarantee less activity on lesser compensated solutions. A common case is when inside salespeople are paid less for turning over a lead to the field than when selling it themselves, which will result in fewer leads going to the field. Another situation commonly found is when business development teams are being comped for the number of raw leads being sent to the field, qualified or not! For salespeople, compensation drives behavior, so consider changing your comp plan if they're being paid for behaviors not conducive to your company's profit picture.
3) Business processes. Is your inside team burdened with unnecessary paperwork or non telesales-related duties? If so, this could be affecting their efficiency. We see this mostly in non-centralized sales environments where individual sales reps report to Regional managers and work away from headquarters. Sometimes these reps are charged with generating proposals for the entire regional team, which is one issue we commonly find that takes telephone time away from inside sales reps. Solutions to this vary depending on the company and situation. If you think this may be the case, consider asking each of your reps to log their duties for one week, then compile your answers to see if there's a common thread.
4) Intra-company conflict. Is your team getting "mixed messages?" Calling high is a prime example. You want your inside team to feel comfortable talking to upper level executives at major accounts, but if they're being told by others in the sales organization to avoid calling into accounts beyond a certain size for no intelligent sales-related reason, you're losing business, and your inside team's sales numbers will suffer. This is just one example of an internal roadblock that can damage the efficiency of an inside sales group.
5) Motivation and Personnel Churn. Does your team really want to work in your company and be in sales? One classic example is when a company converted their customer service reps to salespeople. The problem? They didn't want to be in sales and found it distasteful to ask for the order. They really wanted to be customer service people again, and their ears were not open to sales training. We've seen many situations where people converted to sales jobs and loved it, but it's not always the case. In the case of poor performance, it's always a great idea to ask the rep if he or she really embraces Sales as a career. Some companies have a terrible problem with inside sales personnel continually leaving the company, and they're rightly concerned with having to deliver the same training over and over throughout the year for replacement reps. Personnel churn sometimes results from underpaying reps, but often results from individual motivational issues as well. These are best covered by superior interviewing processes, but beware of "personality tests," which have little value in determining the potential effectiveness of a sales rep.
I've touched on product issues, business processes, intra-company edicts, compensation, and motivational issues that you'll want to ensure are handled or discussed before you take the financial step to train your team. Superior sales training is an essential way to get your team performing at optimum level, but you'll want to make sure you have a firm foundation in place before you do it. Add pre-training analysis to your Best Management playbook.
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 Tue, Dec 01, 2009 @ 10:00 AM
Success can be measured in a number of different ways. This year we can another great year in the telesales training business, but I measured our success in another way this year, too. We helped a whole bunch of people get hired.
Inside Sales Execs and Reps that have taken my courses know I'll always help them when they're looking. We even helped place several people that weren't involved in my classes, because they had stellar referrals from people that did. The secret is we're not a recruitment firm, and don't charge anything for placement calls, so companies will always talk to me.
We went beyond just making calls, reviewing and occasionally fine-tuning résumés, getting them to have more robust profiles on LinkedIn, you name it, we did it. The high tech telesales world is skewed when great people aren't working. Reps who have never been under quota were laid off this year. Sales execs with proven track records went months without a position. The last couple of months have been pretty successful for us, in terms of getting great people placed.
I told you that story so I can tell this one. All of the above I did by telephone. But several weeks ago I attended a conference, and met a young man, an associate of a friend of mine. When I shook hands with him, it was like shaking an eel, it was that limp and fishy. It gave me a cold shudder, and for the life of me, I can't remember anything he said. But I do remember that handshake!
It wasn't my place to do any on-the-spot mentoring. But I figured that fellow will close a lot of doors before they have a chance to get opened, and until he fixes it, he'll be aced out in the job market. Handshakes aren't trivial in Western countries. People tend to form snap judgments on introductory handshakes. Firm handshakes are the gold standard of introductions. They don't need to be bone-crushers, but they have to have substance. With all the terrific books on interpersonal skills out there, it still surprises me that some people just don't have the handshake bit down yet. While we're for the most part telesales people, we still meet occasional customers and prospects. And we shake hands with our fellow employees all the time.
So here's the bottom line. I'll bet all the readers of my blog have handshaking down to an art. But you probably have friends and colleagues that don't. In this volatile business climate, people need all the help they can get. It's tough enough to get hired if one has all the tools and great recommendations, and a poor handshake could scotch everything. So do a favor for your weak-handshaked friends. You're a friend, so you can tell them. Or you're a manager, and you can do some mentoring. Or even easier yet, point them to this blog post.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 15, 2009 @ 01:22 AM
I've written before on the critical importance of using strong professional verbiage to position oneself as a peer when calling high and talking to a prospect at the CXO, VP, or Director level. Asking permission ("Is this a good --- or bad --- time to talk?") and beginning the conversation with "How are you today?" are two things I strongly suggest you do not do on a cold call, because by doing so, you're giving the subtle message that you don't really have anything important to say.
Today, I want to discuss some additional weak verbiage that will erode your position as a peer to higher level prospects, namely the use of diminutive phrases that convey the feeling that you are not as important as the people to whom you're speaking. Four of the most common are:
1) "I'm just..." (as in "I'm just calling to see if you've looked at my proposal yet.")
2) "I'm new here." (or "new to the territory")
3) "Are you the decision-maker?"
4) "Would it be all right if I called so-and-so?"
Each one of the above phrases erodes the confidence that the prospect needs to have in you, and you stand to be in danger of losing the business to a competitive rep with more professional communication skills. Not only should you not use these phrases with high level prospects, you shouldn't use them with lower level prospects either. Let's discuss them individually:
1) "Just" gives you no justice. In my example above, it's more like a whine, and is reminiscent of how a child talks to a parent. Remove that word "just"from your telesales vocabulary to fix the problem.
2) Prospects like talking to "the buck stops here" reps that have all the answers, or at least project an image that they do. They don't care whether you're new to the territory, the company, or the planet, but they need to have confidence that you're the right guy or gal. Save "I'm new here" for bar talk, not business talk.
3) Who's going to answer that question with "no, I'm not the decision-maker"? Most of you reading this blog sell or qualify leads for companies selling enterprise solutions, where one individual rarely makes a unilateral buying decision. To get the information you're trying to get, ask "How does the decision process work?", and you'll obtain better information about all the people involved in the decision, and sound more professionally savvy as well.
4) Asking permission to do anything rarely invites a positive response, and when you're told "no", then you feel uncomfortable in going ahead and doing what you're paid to do, which is calling everyone in the decision process to ensure that you've comprehensively qualified the opportunity. You should have the philosophy that you'll call anyone at the prospect company at any time, and feel confident enough that you don't have to ask anyone's permission to do so.
Using professional verbiage is not only important in communications with prospects and customers, it's terrifically important within the sales department too, particularly when you're in close communication with field sales reps. As inside sales professionals, we fight an ongoing battle to prove to our field sales colleagues that we know just as much as they do, are as smart as they are, and can close as much business as they can. Many field sales people feel that if telesales people were really clever, they'd be working in the field instead, a prejudice many of us in the telebusiness industry have spent years in the process of changing. In my telesales training courses, I always find time to discuss the fact that inside sales has to be more efficient, more effective, and more professional than our field counterparts, because we've always got something to prove. And one of the best ways to do it is to use powerful, professional verbiage, and kick those weak phrases out of our vocabularies for good. Add powerful, no-nonsense terminology to your Best Practices playbook, and you'll increase sales and improve team communication at the same time.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Wed, Sep 03, 2008 @ 03:57 PM
While today's post is specifically about selling software development tools to the DoD, anyone selling anything to the DoD can increase sales by utilizing these skills, whether you're an inside sales or a field sales rep. I was very successful selling tools to the DoD when many of my sales colleagues could not, because they couldn't navigate the system well enough, and didn't ask as many good questions as they could have. Much of what I'll discuss today is from the curriculum I teach in my devtools classes. Here are a few tips that can help you to increase sales when you are selling to the Department of Defense and their contractors.
1) Titles are king. Get the title of everyone in the decision structure, so you know how high up the ladder you are, and who will be responsible for making the final decision. There will probably be consultants on board. If so, ask what their roles will be in the decision process.
2) Always ask the name of the project. Much of the time it will be a "black project" and they're not allowed to tell you the name. That's OK, because they'll have an alternate ersatz name that they just use for vendors, and they'll give that to you. The DoD can get pretty confusing at times, and the ersatz project name is one way for you to keep everyone knowing what you're talking about.
3) Ask what other elements in the DoD and defense contractors are involved with the project. Others will be contributing code, developing subsystems, you name it. You'll then want to contact these others to ensure they're all going with your solution, and not talking to your competition. Get contact names and titles from your prime contact. You want everyone on the same page.
4) Graphically chart the decision process by using an org chart. The best I ever saw do this was Pete Tarbox at the Mathworks. To chart one defense contractor's 82 lines of business, he had 4 walls of charts. In fact, his whole job was pretty much to chart this particular contractor, and because of his great work, his company was aware of pretty much every contract for which they had a solution. You don't have to use all four walls like Pete, just keep a paper or electronic graph (like Visio) handy so that you always know where you are with your primary contact as well as every other entity that touches your project and will need your solutions. Reps have lost big sales because they failed to keep track. In technical sales to the DoD, you don't want your competitor doing a better job or charting than you do.
5) Subscribe to a defense journal appropriate to your solution, and make contact with people mentioned in the articles and the authors themselves. They're the experts, and know others making decisions on solutions like yours. They may or may not give you other names, but folks in the DoD come to them for advice, and word on good solutions travels fast in the Defense Department. The best journal I've seen is CrossTalk, a terrific publication if you're selling tools to DoD clients. The website is www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2008/09/index.html You can subscribe there free of charge, and one of the Best Practices articles on this month's page will have some interest for you if you're selling tools. It's at www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2008/09/0809Goertzel.html I've sold millions of dollars of DoD solutions via contacts I made through CrossTalk. If you sell something other than tools, ask your DoD contacts for the name of the publically accessible journal they read. If it's sponsored by the government, it's free, and as a citizen, you can subscribe.
Perhaps the most critical key to remember is that to whomever you're speaking, you're the boss. Your tax dollars pay for the defense industry and its defense journals. It's in your best interest as a citizen to ensure that our country adopt the most effective solution possible. If you don't believe you've got the best solution on the planet, you shouldn't be selling it. But you do, and you can articulate that to anyone from a General to a consultant. Using the five points above, you should now be able to navigate through the Defense world to sell your solution more effectively. Add these to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Aug 26, 2008 @ 01:45 PM
Within the last several years, several of the finest Inside Sales managers I know of lost their departments, either because field people needed to gain revenue by having additional product transferred to them, or the field was successful in convincing upper management that prospects and customers were getting "confused" by all the attention they were getting in receiving calls from different salespeople in the company. Bruised field sales egos seem funny until someone gets handed the pink slip. I think it's important to recognize this as an important issue. If you're an Inside Sales Manager, you may want to take steps to pre-empt these types of difficulties in the following ways:
1) Strive to let the field know the value your team adds to their sales process. Do you sell products that your outside people don't? Why not ask your inside team to ask at least one additional field-product related question to each of your prospects in order to feed a few good leads to the field?
2) Always make the field look good. That doesn't mean taking the blame for their foul-ups, but it does mean offering to make a few calls for them when their travels present difficulties that your team could help solve. One or two of these calls can dramatically improve the in-house PR your inside team needs to continually have a high profile within the corporate sales matrix.
3) Poll the field. At least every quarter, poll either the entire field or, if you're part of a large company, the most influential regional sales managers. Ask them honestly what they think of the value your inside team brings to both them and the company as a whole. If you detect any negativity at all, understand that you are operating at risk until you've taken steps to solve the problem.
As the manager of an Inside group, you've got to make allies out of the field so when issues arise that could result in cuts in head-count, training budget, or marketing resources, they'll be on your side. This is more than just a CYA exercise; it calls for some strategizing within your department so that all your inside people realize that revenue generation is only part of the picture. Your department must be positioned within the company --- just as your product must be positioned in the mind of the prospect --- as a maximum-value entity that presents the best possible solution to a critical business problem. In short, superior team communication covers the entire sales force.
There's also a message here for you VPs of Sales whose primary focus is the field, but have an inside group working for you as well. When I sold in the field, I found my most pressing problem was getting maximum coverage to all my prospects while at the same time making enough face-to-face calls to generate sales for our IBM Series/1 communications solution (yep, this was a while back.) When I began using the phone effectively to better cover my territory, I dramatically increased my sales (today, I can train your field team to do it.)
I soon became a real believer of superior territory coverage by telephone. If I had had the luxury of an inside team to work along with me, I could (and would) have leveraged them to further increase my sales, even if they had their own revenue responsibility. Some of you field sales managers are fortunate enough to have an inside group in place right now, but may be wrestling with communication issues between your field team and the inside team. Good solutions don't include firing their well-liked manager or lowering their revenue, but they do include team training courses as well as your continued personal emphasis on the value of the inside group as a necessary and vital strategic and tactical component to closing sales and the revenue generation process.