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, 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, Apr 05, 2010 @ 10:01 AM
Many of the companies with whom we work in our inside sales training classes are making increasing use of online chat with sales prospects. Much of the time, they're not maximizing the full benefits of chat, either because they're not collecting all the data they might have, or not attempting to engage the prospect in a telephone conversation as soon as the chat session has finished. That second situation is what I'll discuss today.
Although chat has the real benefit of engaging a prospect through your website, nothing works as well to increase sales as having a real conversation. During the chat session, the prospect controls the communication, and the rep is essentially in response mode. In most cases, reps give far too much information, enough that the prospect doesn't feel a need to talk with anyone. This is akin to sending a prospect to your website, or sending sales literature through the mail.
The remedy for this is to break the chat by finding a clue in the discussion that will lead to an opening for you, and responding by writing "that's a question that I can probably faster answer on the phone, because there are several variables that are easier to explain if we talk for a moment. I'm free for a couple of minutes right now. If you'll give me your number, I'll call you within 30 seconds." By telling the prospect that it will only take "a moment," you'll appeal to the immediacy that is a characteristic of the chat experience, and it makes it easier for the prospect to agree and actually have a conversation with you. Then you can make the call right away, do some qualifying, and learn a lot more about the prospect's business. You also have more control over the conversation, and might be able to make a sale or move the prospect more fully into your sales pipeline.
This is a great way to accelerate the sales cycle when using Sales 2.0 technology. Add it to your Best Practices Playbook.
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, Nov 02, 2009 @ 01:15 AM
In addition to writing my weekly blog posts on telesales training topics, I monitor a few other blogs in which sales questions arise. A few weeks ago, the following question popped up about getting POs in faster. We're closing in on year-end now, so I think it's topical to repeat the question in today's post, as well as my answer. Have a look:
Question: What methods do you use to put a time limit on a quote without exposing yourself to pressure? Let's say it is two weeks before the end of the quarter. You want to get a sale before the end of the quarter. What methods do you find effective to get the PO in the time you need it? I find that discounting does not contribute to that and that I am not able to back up from the discount even after the time limit. In other words, the discount is gone forever, even if the Purchase Order was not submitted on time. Please assume the customer is ready to decide, that is all other conditions for the purchase are already met.
(Geoff's answer) "You did the right thing by not further lowering the price. But you have to determine how the prospect perceives that your solution will either help him or her make money, or stop losing money. 99% of the time, companies buy for these reasons. This is always best done early in the sales process, but you can still do it now. Call the prospect and ask, and then try to quantify it. For example, let's say the prospect tells you that she will be using your solution to get her product to market faster. You can then ask how much faster she perceives your product will get it to market. Once you find that out, ask how much revenue is projected for that product in the next 12 months. Once you get that figure, divide by 52 (weeks), and you will know how much his or her company is losing based on lost opportunity costs, per week. Then you can tell her that for each week the decision is delayed, his or her company will be losing that much money. Those are real numbers, based on what she just told you, and you've given her a compelling reason to get the PO to you now. In addition, you'll have given her a good, financially sound argument she may have to take to her CFO. I've probably got a dozen examples of how to build an ROI model like this, but this one's one of the most common (for more on "Selling by ROI," read my whitepaper).
"This technique works equally well if your target company is building an external project (for use by their customers) or an internal project (for use by themselves). Ultimately, people buy solutions because they make financial sense, and sometimes the finances are based on projections. But you do have to ask what their thoughts are as to how the implementation of your solution will pass muster on both the technology and the financial sides of the fence. It sounds like you've won the technology battle. Now you've got to tackle the financial element."
(Back in the present again) The technique of drilling down on the financial reasons people perceive a need for your solution is critical to accelerating the sales process, and it's most effective when you're early in the sales cycle (I encourage you to do it on the very first call) because the prospect is not yet in price negotiation mode, and much of the time will be fairly comfortable giving you some hard numbers. Add this technique to your Best Practices Playbook, and you'll be getting those POs in a lot faster, and with less resistance.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 10, 2009 @ 01:05 AM
Later this week, I'm giving a presentation in front of some very savvy high tech inside sales executives and managers. They've heard just about everything about telesales courses you can imagine, and I've been asked to tell them --- among other things --- why my sales training is different. Those of you who subscribe to my blog know I stay away from actively promoting my training classes on it. Instead, I provide inside sales tips that you can use right now, today, to make more money. But in that presentation this week, I'm going to give them the differentiator that I'm blogging about today, because it's important, and most inside sales reps aren't doing it. And the bigger the deal, the larger the enterprise prospect is, its importance becomes greater. It's the one-call, 8 minute close. And it's got to be done on the first call.
It's my firm belief that on the first call to a prospect, you've got to get everything done in 8 minutes or fewer. That means opening the call well, asking your qualification questions, finding out about the prospect's business, determining how ROI fits into the equation, then closing on the next step. Most of the time, about 8 minutes is all the prospect will give you. Your delivery is a lot like show biz. It has to be interesting, concise, entertaining, and leave the prospect wanting more. And if you've done your job well, but forgotten to get the ROI data you need, the prospect is likely never to return your subsequent calls, even though he or she is interested. Why? Because the prospect has gotten a lot of data from you, and feel he or she now "owns" the sales process.
If you are fortunate enough to have a second conversation, the prospect will almost never tell you how much it's costing his or her company not to have a solution, although he or she would have on that first call. That's because he or she may be seriously thinking about buying your solution, and is already thinking about price negotiation. Giving you ROI data in this phase of the sales process puts your prospect at a competitive disadvantage, doesn't it? He or she knows it, too.
There's lots out there in the sales training world focusing on "charting," personality types, New-Age mysticism, psedo-psychology, pseudo-science, and communication styles. I think it's all junk, and lots of it's there to sell books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, and audio courses. It's not that complicated. You don't have to be a mind-reader to be a great sales person, but you do have to have a sense of urgency. You need to ask great questions, get elaboration on the answers, and find the ROI hole on that first call. And you'll need a call for action within a specific timeframe, too. It's a one-call close, and I recommend doing it in 8 minutes. Plenty of times, the prospect will give you more time or a few more phone calls. But don't bet on it. If you add this one-call technique to your Best Practices playbook, you'll improve call metrics, increase sales, and be better at price negotiation.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 29, 2009 @ 12:48 AM
One of the challenges in breaking a verbal habit is that it's nearly impossible to fix it by making your adjustment only while at work. In my telesales training classes, two of the most prevalent habits we work on correcting are the "you guys" and the "how are you today?" habits. And to fully correct them, you need help from the folks with whom you live (and play). Before we discuss "How are you today?" and its inherent problems, I want to review "you guys" for a bit. In the telesales courses I teach, I try to get people in our classes to stop referring to the prospect's company as "you guys", as used in "how are you guys addressing [the technology in question] today?" Especially when you're calling high, using "you guys" doesn't work very well in peer communication with a high level executive, and many women are resistant to that term at any level. "You guys" makes it sound like you're an adolescent, as well, and the prospect almost anticipates the word "awesome" to follow somewhere in the conversation. A better approach is to use the name of the company you're calling in place of "you guys", so let's say the company we're calling is called QED Technology. All you'd have to do, to sound a lot more professional, is to restructure your question by asking "how is QED addressing [the technology in question] today?", inserting the appropriate technology issue in the brackets.
So back to "How are you today?", the topic of today's post. It really doesn't matter too much whether or not you use this on a warm call, where you already know the prospect. Where it really hurts you is on a cold call. At an executive level, you will get hung up on frequently if you open a call with this question. In one of my coaching sessions recently, even though we rehearsed a better way to open the call, the rep did it anyway through habit, and got slammed immediately. There are a number of reasons not to begin your call with this shopworn phrase, but the main reason is that business-to-consumer telemarketers have been flogging it for decades, and it's associated now with getting interrupted by a telemarketer during the dinner hour. It's disliked so much that there's even an acronym for it (HAYT) because people "hate" the question so much from someone to whom they've never spoken. It's much better to open your call by saying who you are, why you're calling, and telling the individual what you need. In most cases, you need to know if there's a current initiative looking for a solution that your product or service can fix. Pretty good way to start a call.
But fixing ineffective communication habits often isn't easily done at work, so I recommend asking personal friends to help out. If you're in the HAYT habit on cold calls, ask your significant other, family, and friends to stop you whenever they hear you using the term when on the phone making personal calls. Chances are, you'll soon get tired of them nailing you, but you will break the habit. And once you've broken it at home, you'll pretty much have it licked at work.
It's hard enough to reach people these days, and you only have one opportunity to make a great first impression. Avoid using words and phrases that annoy people, and enlist the help of friends at home when you really need to fix the problem. A friend of mine once ran for Superintendant of Public Instruction on the platform of "inculcation of sophisticated spoken English." You don't need to go that far to be a great business communicator, but professional speech is terrifically important, especially when speaking to high level executives. Add that level of professionalism to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 22, 2009 @ 01:49 AM
I was coaching a rep during a telesales call last month, when she said to her prospect "So, I assume that you'll need the development process to run more efficiently" (she sold application development solutions that streamlined the development process). The prospect at that point became annoyed, and testily responded with "actually, we're pretty efficient as it is now, what have I said that indicated it wasn't?" (he was a Director of Software Development). While the prospect had other reasons for looking at the rep's solution, efficiency wasn't one of them, so by "assuming," she hurt the rapport she'd spent all call building up, and had to back up a notch and say she was mistaken for putting words in his mouth.
Fact is, we never know exactly what our prospect wants, or thinks, unless we ask through an "open" question, or the prospect volunteers the information first. We're never as smart as the prospect, as much as we try to be. In my telesales training courses, I discuss the concept of being "intelligently ignorant", which means that you want to ask a lot of questions, even if you think you know all the answers. In the United States today, there's lots of "assuming" on the part of companies looking for ways to attract customers, and all it does is result in products and services that reflect the least common denominator. Many Thai restaurants, for example, are making their tam yum goong (spicy prawn soup) with hardly any spices because "Western people don't like spices." As a result, the soup is nothing like you'd find in Thailand, and in many cases virtually inedible, but the Thais think they're doing the Yanks a big favor by lowering the quality of their product. For years, Ford has been marketing the cute, sexy, high mileage "Ka" car in Europe, but doesn't do it in the U.S. Did they ever ask the U.S. consumer if he or she wanted a car like that? Probably not, because Japanese automakers seem to be selling all the sexy small cars in the U.S. right now. And how's the U.S. auto industry doing these days, by the way? I could give you many other examples, but I think you know what I'm saying. By failing to ask the prospect what he or she wants or thinks, we're losing information that is essential to getting more customers and making the sale. In each case above, the "manufacturers" force-fed product to the customer, and in doing so failed to provide leadership or attempt to educate the prospect. And they're losing business because they assume the customer isn't bright enough to make an informed decision. Regardless of what you're selling, I hope you'll understand the metaphor.
Getting back to telesales, now, why not consider dropping the "assumptive" habit yourself? Instead, change the way you ask questions. Try to avoid asking questions that begin with the words "Is... ?" or "Are...?" , which most often lead to assumptions. Instead (and here I'll use applications development examples, for continuity's sake), try the following ways of asking a question:
"Describe", "Would you explain", "Would you elaborate on" and "Tell me about" are great words and phrases that you can use to start learning more by having the prospect tell you in his or her words where the problem areas are.
As much as some people seem to be telling us, there aren't all that many "one size fits all" sales situations, whether it's soup, cars, or development tools. You owe your prospect your best quality solution, and the way you diagnose it is by asking good open questions prior to making recommendations. Focusing on asking your prospect about his or her priorities should be your priority. So be "intelligently ignorant", assume nothing, and add open questions to your Best Practices playbook.