Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

What other solutions are you considering? A can’t miss question that will save you time and trouble on RFPs and RFQs

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.

A brutal sales territory: as challenging as yours is, this one’s probably worse

Today I'm flying over the Kamchatka Peninsula. It's completely covered in snow, with huge Mt. Fuji-shaped volcanic peaks thrusting out of the landscape. Relatively few extol the beauty of Kamchatka because it's not exactly a tourist destination, remote and uncompromising. It looks cold down there, and it reminds me that no matter how bad a grim sales day can be, there are many jobs that are worse than sales. Just ask those miners working 30,000 feet below me.

But then again there are a few really bad sales jobs, too. The story I'm going to tell you is one I sometimes tell in my telesales training classes, to illustrate how good the people I'm training really have it. They say every bad sales territory is salvageable. I'm not sure about this one. You tell me:

My dad's great with people, a natural story teller, and a real nice guy. Despite the fact that he had no college, he was hired as a sales rep for a significant building supplies company. He soon blew out the numbers in his territory, and the president rewarded him by giving him the largest territory in the company, one that had been underperforming for years. With the same success he'd achieved in the smaller territory, he was bound to be successful, right?

That territory was indeed huge, running from Monterey to Santa Barbara, at a time when California's Central Coast was on an unbelievable building boom. Highway 101 was, at that time, 2 lanes wide, one running in each direction. Dad was in the right place at the right time. But guess what? Nobody bought anything. Nobody wanted to talk to him either. He sometimes visited 6 hardware stores per day. No sales. Then he discovered the reason. Before my dad's sales predecessor in the territory had been fired, he'd been stealing significant amounts of supplies from the company warehouse, loading them into his car, taking to the road, then undercutting all competitors by selling his goods for pennies on the dollar. Not only could my honest dad not match the prices, but the buyers knew they'd been receiving stolen goods, so they didn't even want to see him walk in the door. His territory was, in the old military parlance, FUBAR (look it up, families read this blog). He gave it 3 more months, but finally quit the sales business entirely and went into the food business, which he felt was a lot cleaner. Dad was never told, going into the territory, that his customers had been sold stolen goods at barebottom prices, and once the previous rep had been fired, they were probably afraid of crime investigations as well. He had to find out on his own after his "promotion."

So what can we learn and take away from this crazy story of a territory gone bad?

When we're having a bad day, it's sometimes really motivating to get a sense of good things really are. Sure your CRM is slow. Sure marketing could get you more leads. And yes, you may feel your KPIs are unfair. That's when you want to brace up and get back to work, knowing that as bad as things seem, they're probably not bad to the magnitude that my dad's situation was. You're also not a miner in Kamchatka. We all have different ways of motivating ourselves, but reflecting for a moment on people that have things worse than we do is a damn good motivator if you're searching for one. Whatever your situation, you'll have an occasional bad day. So use that bad day to find new ways of thinking out of the box to find new opportunities, make more effective presentations, and do a better job of doing your own marketing to get you some better leads. Creativity is born out of frustration, so use those occasional frustrating days as springboards to thinking of new ways to make your territory more successful. The best salespeople always do.

How to turn the executive interview from Hell into your advantage

Today's post is for sales executives and managers and those who wish to become them. A sales executive I know just went through one of the worst interviewing experiences of his life, and asked what he could have done to change the outcome. In today's hiring market, every one of you reading this post could run into the same thing. My solution touches on a closing technique I use in my telesales training courses, too. So let me tell you the story, and what you can do to turn a similar situation that you might face into your advantage.

Robert interviewed for a sales exec position at a medium-sized company that had a sales situation that needed to be turned around. As part of his interview, they asked him to present a sales plan for the upcoming year, based on what he knew about the company. He spent quite a few hours designing it and writing it out. He told me about it, and it was a brilliant plan. The interview took three hours, in front of the company's executive board, and he outlined it all out. They told him they liked the plan, would discuss it, and call back. They did, and invited him for another interview to discuss the plan, as they had questions. He did, addressed all the issues, and they told him they'd call him back. They did, and said they were moving in another direction. He didn't get the job.

All in all, Robert spent many hours designing and interviewing for a job he was probably never going to get. They just needed some free consulting. So I suggested that since this was becoming an all-too-common experience these days, he turn it around to his advantage the next time this happens by following the following steps:

1) When a prospective interviewer asks for a business plan, walk in with an outline, not a whitepaper.
2) Answer any questions, but keep the interview to two hours or fewer.
3) If the interviewer wants a more detailed plan for the next interview, tell the company that the detailed plan is what you'd be implementing at the company. Suggest that the company hire you to build a sales plan for a consulting fee. When you present the plan, the company will have four options:

            a) hiring you (the candidate) to implement the plan
            b) hiring someone else to implement the plan
            c) doing the plan in-house with current personnel 
            d) not doing anything at all

This is an approach I've used successfully when a prospect company wants me to do a lot of front-end work with no guarantee of a contract. About 50% of the time, I get a consulting contract, and eventually get their follow-on business, too.
Prospect companies aren't always disingenuous when they ask for a lot up front. Many times they are disorganized, have political issues, or internal disagreements about candidates and processes. But taking my approach does force them to come to the table with something in return for the time you (the candidate) spend on diagnosing their sales process. My friend and colleague Barry Mainz would refer to this approach as quid pro quo, and it's a closing technique that works just as well with prospective employers as it does for closing sales prospects on business.

It's an employer's market these days, but you'll gain a lot of respect by taking this approach, and you may get paid for your time, too. And it's is a good start to getting hired by that company. If they don't agree that you have a point, you may have what we call a "walk-away." You won't have lost anything, and will have gained some professional respect. Add this technique to your Best Management Practices playbook.

Want to kill a great sales candidate? Give him or her a personality test!

Today's post may alarm you, but hang in there, as what I'm discussing today could one day --- if it goes far enough --- affect everyone reading this post, individual sale reps as well as sales managers. The story I'm going to tell is right out of Monty Python, but it happened just last week to a great candidate that wants to be in inside sales, and has all the tools to be making six figures within a very short time. Here's a little background. Read along and see if you're as concerned for hiring practices our industry as I am:

Two weeks ago, I recommended a great candidate for an inside sales lead development position to a company whose inside sales manager I know and like. This candidate had sterling references from execs in the hospitality industry, and a history for getting repeat business out of customers that could be difficult. He's great on the phone, and he'll be a successful inside sales rep making six figures pretty soon. As an inside sales trainer for 20 years, I've got a good track record for finding talented people out of our industry and bringing them in to be successful sales reps, so this was going to be another winner (and I've had a bunch).

So I called my friend, an inside sales manager who is trying to  hire a rep for a company he's just started working with, told him about the candidate, and he was enthused. He said the candidate had to talk to HR first, and the HR specialist loved my candidate after talking with him. Then the HR specialist told the candidate that he'd have to take an online personality test (they called it a "sales aptitude test." And he "failed." The test claimed he couldn't deal with challenging people (I've known the candidate for some time, and this is 180 degrees wrong.)

My pal the Telesales manager wasn't allowed to talk to the candidate, as he'd been vetted out. So the manager's opinion on the candidate was worthless, as was the HR specialist's. The opinions of all personnel in the company responsible for hiring were overridden by a testing company, obviously hired by upper-level management. Incidentally, the position was for high tech inside sales in the Silicon Valley. The testing company was located thousands of miles away, and their website indicates they specialize in testing people for a number of industries, none of them high tech.

I believe this process is potentially dangerous to our high tech telesales industry, for the following reasons:

1) If personality tests had any merit at all, we'd be giving them to elementary school kids as predictors of who's going to end up being a career criminal. Then we'd provide remedial education. Then we'd have no more violent criminals. But we know such tests aren't adequate predictors, probably to the chagrin of the multimillion dollar test industry, who wishes they could prove them effective.

2) The Inside Sales manager asked for the test to be re-evaluated, so The World's Greatest Psychologists reinterpreted his answers. Politically as well as professionally, they can't change a result, can they? If they did, it would indicate the test wasn't valid to begin with.

3) A question that most be the most disconcerting: what kind of database is storing the "failed" questionnaire of the candidate? Who has access to it? Will it be used whenever another client of the testing company has the same candidate targeting a sales position within the new company? If so, the candidate will be discarded because there will already be a personality test on record. This "test" will probably be alive in a database in perpetuity.  I'm sure the testing company would deny it keeps old tests. Is that really believable?

4) If a company adopts this "personality testing" concept, why not just do away with my HR department altogether?  Why would a company need HR, when their judgment is valued so little that they can't override a personnel decision made by an outsourced company using computerized test made my supposed psychological sales "experts"? Why not just vet the candidate using a personality test, then let the Legal department handle pre and post-hiring issues?

Bottom line, the candidate loses, the company loses a good candidate, and because their opinions are worthless, the Inside Sales Manager and the HR specialist lose, too.

So I'm recommending that none of you reading this post EVER take a personality test. You might "lose," so you won't get the job, and your failed test will sit in a testing company's database, ticking away like a time bomb where it can be accessed by another potential company that may be thinking of hiring you. And you may never even know this occurred, because it will be hidden from you.

You can't test adults for what it takes to be successful inside sales reps. There are simply too many important variables, and they all change radically depending on the sales situation (one example: price negotiation techniques). Desire and intrinsic motivation can't be tested for. But a good inside sales manager can figure them out pretty quickly and have a real discussion with a candidate, using his or her expertise and experience within the industry, and candidate references (read my post 20 Characteristics of a Superior Inside Salesperson if you'd like to know what I'd look for in the interview process).

So if you're a sales exec or inside sales manager, challenge anyone in your company that tries to convince you that personality tests are meaningful predictors of sales success, because you'll be acing yourself out of being able to bring in good candidates that you know will be successful, based on your expertise and telesales savvy. And if you're a rep, avoid companies that insist you take a test as part of the hiring process: you don't want your name sitting in a database somewhere, describing your "personality." And add skepticism of the "personality testing" industry to your Best Practices playbook.

Job interview ripoff: Here’s how you can get free consulting by making your candidates work for nothing!

Got your attention? If you're a telesales rep or manager, and you're looking for work, I want to expose a couple of scams that have the end result of putting you to work making a profit for the company that's interviewing you, while you get paid nothing. Today's blog post is the result of an email I got from Alan, a very good rep that took one of my telesales courses a while back.

Alan wrote:
I have a question for you. I received an e-mail from an old colleague who is looking for a job and got an odd request from a company he is applying to. In summary, here is the e-mail, "The interview process is such: meet with [Hiring] Manager and then VP of Sales. The final stage is for me to go into their corporate office and make an hour's worth of customer sales calls (via telephone). I am supposed to be supplied a call script and other information prior to making these initial calls. I find it weird making calls without being an employee and not yet having any internal sales training." (Geoff,) Do you think this is a legitimate request or a red flag?

It's a red flag to me. A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about an innovative interviewing done by Marc Cook, who mocks up a sales situation, then has a potential hiree call him. I liked the idea, so do read my post on it.

By contrast, what I don't like about the situation Alan's friend finds himself in is that in making calls to real prospects, he's essentially giving the company interviewing him an hour's worth of free consulting. He might do a great job, move the sales process to the next step, then not get the job. He also won't know enough about the product or service to answer meaningful prospect questions, so the calls could be real duds, too.

Don't think I'm being too far-fetched on thinking this is a ripoff, either. Several years ago, a friend of mine who was a terrific inside sales manager began interviewing for a management position with a new company. Twice she was called in for interviews. They asked her to white-board a telesales operation from head to foot in the first interview, then asked her about comp plans in the second. When they called her back for a third interview, she asked if they were going to hire her, or just wanted another hour's worth of free consulting (yay, Barinda!) It turns out that the CEO of this particular company had a reputation for getting free consulting by picking the brains of candidates he was never intending to hire in the first place.

So folks, free work during an interview is a scam. As far as the hiring process goes in general, I don't like personality tests (meaningless), W2 forms (no one has a right to see your private income data) or drug tests (your body and medical situation are not owned by your employer, only your time is). Slave labor went out of vogue in this country some time ago. If you're treated unfairly during the interview process, think of how you'll be treated on the job. In the case of Alan's friend, the interviewer doesn't know enough about what makes a superior inside sales rep to be able to hire one. How the heck is that person going to manage the "successful" candidate that gets hired?

In Asia, a popular saying is "cash is king." The Asians have it right. There are lots of hiring scams, unfair interviewing processes, and crappy interviewing techniques out there. If you've ever been scammed or insulted during an interview process, tell us about it. Once I get a decent response, I'll publish a warning list on this site. Should make for some interesting reading.

5 Great Sales Demotivators: Decrease sales by following these practices

Regular readers of this blog know that I like to publish upbeat, real-world sales tips that telesales reps can use today to increase sales. I also discuss business ethics from time to time. Today I'm going to step back and discuss some terrible decisions made by Sales Management that ended up severely demotivating their inside sales forces, with a concomitant loss in sales revenue. I cover this topic in my Telesales Management and Coaching course, but consider these issues important enough to bring them up on the blog for those who haven't taken the class. If you're a telesales rep, I hope you'll never encounter them. If you're a manager, I'm sure you'll get a chuckle out of these, because managers that read this blog would never do this stuff! These situations all really happened. Read on:

Demotivator 1: Hire your significant other (SO) to run the sales team. Here, the individual that led the overall sales team hired the SO to manage the inside sales team. The SO had never managed and had never sold, and immediately clashed with the top-producing sales rep. The clash became worse, and issues brought up by the sales rep were not addressed at the top level. The top-producing rep left the company, and hired a lawyer. The legal issue was resolved financially in the rep's favor.

Demotivator 2: Let's borrow the reps' commission checks for a couple of months. Several companies decided that instead of continuing to pay commissions on a monthly basis, they'd pay them every quarter instead. As we all know, sales reps go crazy during the last week of every month, trying to get in business so they'll see it reflected on their next month's check. That's a motivator, and it happens 3 times per quarter. In extending the time it takes a rep to get a commission check, the reps only go crazy trying to drive the business for one week every three months. They also realize that the company is drawing 60 days interest on their commissions. This was a recipe for disaster, as it totally eroded any trust the sales reps had in upper-level management.

Demotivator 3: Hire the company gossip to run the sales team. This individual was promoted from the position of sales rep to run the entire team. The sales executive that made the decision was relatively new to the company, and didn't realize that the individual he promoted made a second career of talking behind peoples' backs, but the executive assistants knew it. The new manager was promoted based on longevity in the company, not on sales figures, as the person was not a top-producing rep. With the promoted individual now in charge of the sales team, the culture of gossip was now in full force. Top sales producers were now reporting to an individual they did not respect, as they knew every element of their personal lives would continue to be broadcast around the company, except now there would be no remediation at the corporate level. Memo to slaes execs: always interview the rank and file before promoting from within.

Demotivator 4: You get paid when we get paid. Here's another excellent way to make salespeople wait for their commission checks: don't pay them until the customer pays. Sales and Accounts Receivable are two separate functions in most companies, but this particular company forced their sales reps to become collections agents in order to get paid. Delay of payment wasn't the only demotivator for the telesales reps either. They realized that they were essentially being held hostage by the company, because if they quit, they'd lose all unpaid (although accrued) commissions. The reps brought up the unfairness of the practice, but management ignored them. This created an unfavorable situation in which rep attrition was extraordinarily high, as newly hired reps left to work for other companies as soon as they realized they took on the job of being collections agent when they thought they were signing on to be salespeople.

Demotivator 5: Fund my pet charity. Or else. Upper management loved to collect wall plaques from a well-known national charity. To earn the plaque, 100% of employees would have to donate to the charity. The company had accomplished this several years in a row. If a sales rep refused to give money to this charity for any reason, he or she was called into a one-on-one session, and accused of being miserly, greedy, hard-hearted, not a team player, you name it. Reps were brow-beaten into giving, but deeply resented it. When the national director of the charity was charged with misuse of funds, it made headlines in every major newspaper in the country, and the sales reps for this particular considered upper management to be buffoons.  Tip for Management: if you have a pet charity, let the company make a donation rather than "encouraging" your employees to donate.  They are salespeople, not fundraisers.

OK, so there you have 5 beauties. They all really did occur, because I knew people involved in all of them. It's really all about business ethics, a subject which doesn't get discussed as much as it should. Two of the companies mentioned above are out of business. Taking the high road and treating your sales employees fairly is a key to retention, and makes a statement about the value of your brand that is far more important than any framed sales mottos can. Set and maintain a policy of strong business ethics, and add them to your Best Practices in Management playbook.