Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 28, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
I got a call this week from a blog subscriber that desperately needed some tips for selling in a "down" economy. Now that summer's here, his prospects are ramping down in terms of their purchases. He's really feeling it at the end of the quarter, and wants to ensure he doesn't have the same situation at the end of the upcoming quarter as well.
The philosophy I teach in my inside sales training courses has always been that you sell all year ‘round just the same as you would when things are tough. Great sales practices should be in place all the time. So here are four tips that are critically important right now. And once you do them consistently, you shouldn't have too many under-quota months:
1) Upsell and cross-sell to your current customers. Your customers already know you. You've done a great job for them, your solutions are working, and they're happy. But if you're ignoring them, you're not only leaving the door open for the competition, but you're missing out on additional sales, I'll bet. Why don't you call to introduce a solution that your customer might not have acquired yet? Even if he or she said "no" in the past, it doesn't mean things haven't changed.
2) In terms of cross-selling, make sure that you are in contact with all corporate entities under your customers' umbrella. You've got a same-enterprise reference, so call all of those other companies. Call high into those companies, tell the exec what you've been doing for his or her colleagues, then get engaged in an initiative at a new same-enterprise company for which your offering is a solution.
3) Know why every company in your territory is not doing business with you. My old boss Perry Lynne had us keep a record of what he called "lost sales," which told him not only who wasn't buying, but why. And what was surprising was that when we asked, we found a lot of great data, and it opened the door for us at numerous companies. Parenthetically, it was also a great CYA tool if we ever got asked why a company wasn't our customer. If asked, I could simply go to the database, and prove that there was a valid reason. And if there hadn't been a valid reason in the first place, I often had a conversation about it, and that prospect then became my customer.
4) Ask your customers what project they're using your solution on. Customers want to talk about their business more than yours, and if they love your product, they'll tell you how they use it to make their area work more efficiently and effectively. If you do ask this question, I guarantee this: at least once every few conversations, you'll be lead down a path that will open the door to another of your solutions that the customer doesn't yet own. All you have to do is listen.
It's the nature of salespeople to forget about a customer once he or she has placed the order, because money is already "in the bank." If your company is like most, you have a product or engineering team coming up with new exciting stuff that appears once every quarter or so, but you might be so focused on new business that you forget about the people that have already given you their business.
Upselling, cross-selling, knowing why people aren't buying, and asking about your customers' business never go out of style, and using these techniques constantly will keep you out of the sales doldrums, especially in tough times. Add them to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 21, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Salesforce.com is a CRM database tool that's become the standard for many companies' inside sales teams, and I've seen it used many times when I coach team members during my inside sales training courses. It's powerful, but like most robust tools, it needs to be tweaked for the characteristics of the team using it, based on use cases. Generally, I encourage my clients to either have a dedicated Saleforce.com expert on staff, or utilize a consultant to assist in making the best use of the CRM.
One of my blog correspondents is going nuts over how her company has implemented Salesforce, and she's made a very cogent, if impassioned, statement about how it's not working as well as it should at her company. What triggered her correspondence to me was the ongoing discussion on the blog based on my KPI (Key Performance Indicators) post. She's got a litany of concerns, including some that relate to intra-company politics, but basically what she's dealing with is a sales process that's not working as well as it could. She wants to remain anonymous, which is why I'm telling the story here, and it's not listed as a blog response.
I'm posting it here, because she addresses issues that I've been hearing a lot over the past few months. I'll let her tell it in her own words. If you can relate to her issues, you'll know you're not alone. And if you don't have similar problems, congratulate your CRM expert for doing a great job.
Here's what she has to say:
"Data Quality 101. I've been burned by the company buying a bunch (7000+) of "leads" from somewhere & loading them into Salesforce.
"The alleged quality was questionable. For a 10% sample of my patch I kept statistics on: address, phone, URL, description & contact. Boiled down to taking an AVERAGE of 7 minutes to bring a single Account record up to callable quality. So I'm doing DATA ENTRY, while I'm paid on sales. Would you have any idea if there's a mechanism or accessory for Salesforce that quarantines incoming 'leads' into a pending status before accepting them a valid?
"One of my big, first clues to Salesforce was their introductory training video... where at one point they go out of their way to emphasize the importance of using "good naming standards/conventions" when choosing a opportunity name. So if one time it's called BCBS MA & another time Blue Cross/Blue Shield Massachusetts & another time BlueCross/BlueShield Mass... duh you'll get results all over the place. Guess what? Busy salespeople are NOT typists. They'll make up whatever name makes sense to them at the moment.
"Surfing the Salesforce site last night was not enlightening. ‘Data Quality' seems to be no more complex than de-duplicating. Basic challenge... when the CEO puffs up his chest ‘We're using Salesforce...' which means we're way cool, this essentially slams the door on the question, ‘...yes, but HOW well are we using it?' Another non-unique challenge... the freshly appointed Salesforce administrator took it as personal insult to imply that just perhaps everything in Salesforce wasn't 100% up to snuff. How dare you challenge my manhood! I just do not understand why people get so tied up in their shorts over common stuff like this... admit it, knuckle down & fix it & get on to selling."
Geoff here again. So there you have it, some pretty frustrating words from an inside sales rep trying to motor through a challenging situation. Lots of my readers are management people at startups, just beginning to put together an inside sales team. If you're in this category, put some serious thought into pre-tweaking your CRM to get in inline with your KPIs, and try making a few calls yourself as a use case to ensure that your system is set up to optimize the successful work of your reps. Add this 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, Jun 07, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
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.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Jun 01, 2010 @ 10:44 AM
This past week I delivered an inside sales training course to a client that makes devices used to diagnose electrical problems. This company makes terrific equipment, has begun to take market share away from its biggest competitor (who owns 90% of the market), and has hired me to train their inside sales team to take over and own the market in one year. In a coaching session that occurred last week, we cooked up some bright ideas that the competition probably won't be using. I'm going to tell you what they are, but I'm not going to divulge the client or the industry to protect our program. I've been teaching the techniques we're using for years now, but there are a few new twists because of some tools we're using today that fall into the Sales 2.0 realm. So read on, and use them to take over your focus industry as well.
My client has sold many devices into the mining industry, but there are a whole lot of mining concerns that haven't yet bought its equipment. One non-client is pretty well known, but has gone through bankruptcy proceedings in recent years, and we suspected there might be new owners. We googled the company, and found a story about them on Wikipedia, giving the new name of the company. We then did a search in the "people" field of LinkedIn, searching for the name of the new company. And we found a TQM (Total Quality Management) director.
We cold-called the TQM director and told her that we specialized in troubleshooting devices for the mining industry, and she referred us to the right executive in charge of that function. We're now on a roll with that company. There are three very good lessons to learn from this story, and you can apply them all today. One is about turning a "horizontal" solution into a "vertical" one. Another is intelligently using internet tools that are still considered a bit non-traditional. And the third is that there's nothing as good as a great cold call.
1) The Vertical piece. My client specializes in a solution, not an industry. But because the company has sold successfully into the mining industry, it is a de facto expert in mining solutions that relate to its devices. My client's reps are going to call every mining concern in the country. And I predict they'll soon own that segment in the market, because they're experts, and they're telling new prospects about it.
2) The Research piece. To uncover data we had to know, we used Google, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn. Sure our target prospect had prior trouble. But like many companies, they've been bailed out. They changed the name of the company, and are geared up again and making money. LinkedIn enabled us to find an individual we couldn't have found otherwise.
3) The Cold Call piece. The rep I coached loves cold calling. He's completely fearless, doesn't give a fig about rejection, and has an attitude that in reflective of the fact that he won't let anybody kick him around.
We're using a number of superior techniques to take over an industry, step by step, vertical by vertical. I've just described three of them. Thinking out-of-the-box and being fearless are two of the supporting elements that need to be in place for it all to work, and my client's reps are already making huge strides in that direction. Add those three techniques to your Best Practices playbook, and go out and tackle an industry yourself, starting this week.