Posted by Todd Kasper on Thu, Oct 15, 2009 @ 03:00 PM
The Conversation Economy
An important emerging trend in the selling profession today is how to deal with the new "conversation economy." One of the key takeaways from the Chicago Sales 2.0 Conference in early September was that as information becomes easier for customers to get, the sales function's role becomes less about providing information and more about having conversations with customers.
Fortunately, the rise of both the social media and Sales 2.0 movements have made this transformation easier for sales professionals. Lead management, personal introductions, prospecting, forecasting, pipeline management, and even contract signing are now much easier than even just a couple of years ago.
Despite the rise of these wonderful tools, customers still know more than ever about our products and services. Furthermore, they are as busy as ever before, and when combined with email, IM, and other means of communication, all of this means that we have to make the most out of the limited time that we actually have in "live" conversations with customers.
Blocking & Tackling Still Works
Given this new environment, the basic sales fundamental of pre-call planning is as important than ever. While pre-call planning is certainly not "flashy" in a world with all kinds of new sales toys, it is still a fool-proof way of guaranteeing that sales professionals are maximizing their return on time spent in front of customers.
Pre-call planning includes research and due diligence, but centers on tactical preparation for what is going to happen during the actual meeting. It covers the objective of the call or meeting, questions to be asked, answers to possible customer questions, contingency plans, and other factors.
In an environment where only a small minority of sales people take the time to actively think through the mechanics of an upcoming conversation, effective pre-call planning presents a tremendous competitive advantage.
It's the Little Things
Many times in sales, as in sports, it's the little things that make the difference in the end - almost everyone does the easy stuff.
Consider the following statistics from the 2008 PGA Tour. The overall adjusted scoring average leader was Sergio Garcia at 69.12 strokes per round, and with $4.85 million in Tour earnings. By contrast, Pat Perez was 22nd in adjusted scoring at 70.08 strokes per round and $1.76 million in earnings.
Less than one stroke per round separated 21 spots on the scoring list, and represented a difference in $3.1 million in earnings!
Pre-call Planning
Virtually all sales people take at least some time to prepare for customer meetings - even if it's just to look at a past purchase history or the customer's website. However, very few professionals go the extra mile do the special "little things" in preparing to fully anticipate how that conversation may proceed.
In a world where live conversations with customers may be getting harder to come by, those little things will, metaphorically speaking, shave that one stroke off your game (at least), and represent a lot of ranking spots (and money!).
Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives
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Posted by Todd Kasper on Thu, Sep 17, 2009 @ 07:38 AM
"In essence, Sales 2.0 combines customer-focused processes with Web 2.0 productivity technologies to enhance the art and science of selling while creating customer value."
--Gerhard Gschwandtner
Last week, I had the pleasure of joining 245 global sales leaders in Chicago for the last Sales 2.0 Conference of 2009. According to Gerhard Gschwandtner, Publisher of Selling Power, "Sales 2.0 is the chicken soup for the recessionary economy."
What follows are the three key takeaways you should know if you did not attend:
#1: It's a conversation economy
As information becomes easier for customers to get, the sales function's role becomes less about providing information and more about having conversations with customers. We all know that customers are changing the way that they prefer to buy, but sales organizations have not been as quick to change the way that they sell.
Customers (especially for complex sales) want to co-create with the sales professional solutions that meet their needs. This means that sales professionals need to ask more open-ended questions, do a better job of listening, and get the absolute most possible return out of each client interaction.
This also means that sales professionals need to have better leads, qualify opportunities earlier, and do a better job preparing for the time they actually get to spend with a customer. (An IDC study discussed at the conference revealed only 1 out of 6 sales professionals were "extremely prepared" for an initial meeting with a customer, and 57% were either NOT or only somewhat prepared!)
#2: Lack of Sales and Marketing cooperation on demand generation is inexcusable
The days of Sales and Marketing pointing the lead quality finger at each other need to be over. Companies need to begin to realize the efficiencies that come from sales and marketing alignment (especially in today's economic environment). Actually disqualifying leads is as important (if not more important) than qualifying them, due to the vast amount of time and resources that can be saved at later (and more time-intensive) stages of the sales cycle.
Kevin Hooper, VP, Technology Solutions Group at Hewlitt-Packard, spoke about giving the Marketing folks in his group at HP a share of the sales quota. What ensued was an instant alignment of interests between Sales and Marketing. Isn't this how it should be? (For more on this, read Mike Damphousse's Smashmouth Marketing interview with Mr. Hooper on sales and marketing alignment.)
One emerging trend to look for is the increasing use of predictive analytics to optimize sales and marketing resource allocation. This technology allows the right lead to be placed in front of the right sales rep at the right time. IncentAlign is doing some very interesting work in this space, especially around lead scoring and optimized lead routing.
#3: Social media enables better conversations
The good news is that if we are evolving into a conversation economy, social media is a major engine that allows sellers to engage customers in conversations at a much earlier point in the sales cycle (or to conduct better due diligence at later stages!).
According to Kevin Popovic of Ideahaus, the beauty of social media is these conversations can now be started with the customer where he/she is right now, and on his/her terms.
Pull strategies are proving to be significantly more effective than push strategies, and for more, please see Kevin Popovic's Social Networking in a Sales 2.0 World presentation.
Social media isn't just for teenagers and college students - it is a power toolbox that allows sales organizations to have better interactions with customers throughout the sales cycle. For more on the conference's social media panel, read Gerhard Gschwandtner's The Sales 2.0 Movement Accelerated in Chicago - Part II.
Photo credit: Sales 2.0 Conference
Posted by Todd Kasper on Fri, Aug 28, 2009 @ 07:20 AM
What to Do When You Don't Have All Year
We've all been there before - we know there's something we need to do for an extra "boost," but we just don't have the time (or budget, bandwidth, etc.) to make it happen. With that situation in mind, here are five actionable, easy, and cost-effective steps you can take to increase your sales force's effectiveness right now:
#1: Leverage Sales 2.0 resources
Some Sales 2.0 tools can be put to use immediately.
Are your reps having trouble reaching prospects? Try Jigsaw. It's free to sign up and takes just a few minutes to learn. The paid versions are even better.
Looking for a way to quickly find news and insights on your prospects and customers? Try Google Alerts - simply enter the company's name and create an alert - it's free and it can't get any easier. Alternatively, take a look at InsideView - it interfaces with many CRMs and integrates research and data from many different sources.
Your sales team should also use their social media accounts (i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). These are extremely valuable tools for discovering customer insights and competitor intelligence, along with connecting and building relationships. Find the ones that are most useful for your organization (and the ones that your customers use) and get started!
#2: Prepare better
I'm biased of course, but it's a fact that pre-call planning helps sales rep performance. In our survey of top-performing sales professionals, these reps told us that the three key benefits of pre-call planning are: (1) greater control of the sales process, (2) more effective use of time, and (3) better customer-specific need discovery. Do you think increasing performance in these areas would help improve your sales force effectiveness?
Do you need to have a formal pre-call planning process? In the long-run, the answer is probably "yes", but we're not talking about the long run here - we need actionable steps you can take now.
To that end, make sure your team is clearly identifying the objective of the call they are going to make. What key data points do they need to uncover? What questions might the customer ask? How will these questions be answered? Make sure your reps are going beyond the standard web research and purchase history pre-call due diligence.
Once you get started on these ideas, you can begin to implement something more formal for the long-run.
#3: Take a look at your sales efficiency
As a sales executive, your job is to maximize the return on the investments (ROI) and assets (ROA) that your company has entrusted you to manage. Are you as a sales executive squeezing as much revenue as possible out of each dollar you are given to manage?
For example, take a look at (what's left of) your budget - are you getting the maximum return on every dollar that is being spent? Can you redeploy budget dollars in order to increase overall return on this money that will be spent between now and the end of the year?
Need help? Let us know. We can help you find out your team's sales efficiency index and share ideas for improvement.
#4: Get back to basics
What are the "fundamentals" for success in your business? Calls per day? Face-to-face meetings with prospects and customers? Pre-call planning?
Sometimes just focusing on the basics leads to an increase in performance. Tony Gwynn, 8-time batting champion and statistically one of the most consistent hitters in the history of baseball, hit balls off of a batting tee daily during his career.
What do you and your team need to do on a regular basis in order to be successful? What is your team's batting tee?
#5: Set expectations
While the previous four actions can be done now, they will still involve commitment on the part of your sales team.
Set expectations now for performance and usage of these steps, as these expectations will both give you points of accountability and a foundation from which you can grow your team's performance.
Now get started!
Break out of the summer mindset and get results between now and the end of the year. Not only will these action items improve your team's performance, but they will also help you identify even more opportunities for improvement.
Photo credit: Jon_Marshall
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Posted by Todd Kasper on Tue, Aug 04, 2009 @ 07:27 AM
A lesson from Michael Phelps...
This past weekend, I watched with amazement as Michael Phelps for the most part dominated the FINA Swimming World Championships in Rome. Phelps won five gold medals, and perhaps his most impressive performance was being the first swimmer to break 50 seconds in the 100m Butterfly, supposedly racing in suit technologically inferior to that of his competitors.
As if that wasn't enough, during the championships, he passed Mark Spitz's mark for the most world records - Phelps now has 37, and if last week is any indication, he's nowhere near done.
Watching this performance reminded me of an interview that Phelps gave to Matt Lauer for the Today Show shortly before the Summer Olympics in Beijing last year, when he famously won eight gold medals.
In some of the footage that was apparently edited out (see below), is a quote by Phelps about having just set five world records at last year's world championships, shortly before the Olympics.
When asked by Lauer if setting world record after world record ever gets "ho-hum," Phelps responded: "It means you're improving," then paraphrased USA teammate Ian Crocker, saying, "You never want to train a whole year and not get better."
Phelps added, "It helps me to judge where I am, and if I'm able to get faster at the end of the year, then obviously I'm doing something right."
...what do we learn?
Few aspects of life reflect the world of sales as well as sports. The lessons learned by athletes on the playing field (or in this case in the pool) translate to lessons learned by sales professionals and sales managers in the conference room, on the phone, or in front of the customer. Michael Phelps teaches us that even if we are on the top of our game, we still need to keep improving, because you never want to waste a year.
In his book "Winning Every Day," famed college football coach Lou Holtz says he keeps a saying on his desk that reads, "I'm not what I want to be, I'm not what I ought to be, I'm not what I'm going to be, but thank God, I'm not what I used to be."
Think about this quote. What are you doing for your sales team as a whole to make sure that they are getting better every day? How about for the team as a unit? How are you making yourself better?
In a world of software, metrics, and process improvement, sometimes increasing sales force effectiveness is as much about attitude as anything else.
Video credits: ana4182
Learn More About the Best Reps
Read what top-performing sales professionals had to say about their sales call preparation habits.
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Posted by Todd Kasper on Thu, Jul 16, 2009 @ 10:32 AM
Earlier this spring, we conducted a global survey of top-performing sales professionals (defined as being in the top 20% relative to their peers) in order to examine the pre-call planning habits of these high performers. By conducting the study, we reached the following five conclusions about top-performing sales professionals, some of which are not likely to be a surprise (and some may be):
- Pre-call planning is critical to achieving success
- The key benefits of pre-call planning to top-producers are: greater control of the sales process, more effective use of time, and better customer-specific need discovery
- Top-performers prepare better than their peers
- Top-performers say that if they could improve how they prepare, they could sell even more
- They'd do pre-call planning more often if it took less time
Show Me the Money!
What was very striking, however, was the difference in responses between top reps who listed "increased income" as a benefit of pre-call planning (we'll call these people collectively the "Income Crowd") versus those who did not list income as a benefit (the "Non-Income Crowd"):
- The Income Crowd placed a higher level of importance on pre-call planning (9.00 versus 7.68 - on a scale of 1 to 10)
- The Income Crowd tends to spend more time preparing for customer interactions than the Non-Income Crowd
- 78% of the Income Crowd peforms internet research (website, financials, etc.) on customers before meetings, versus only 41% for the Non-Income Crowd
- 91% of the Income Crowd respondents identify the desired outcome of the call/meeting beforehand (versus 73% for the Non-Incomers). The same numbers applied to creating a written list of questions to ask during the meeting.
- Additionally, 88% of the Income Crowd respondents say that they use pre-call planning better than their lower-performing peers. Only 58% of the Non-Income Crowd shares this sentiment.
Clearly, there is a link between (1) recognizing increased personal income as a benefit of being better-prepared for customer meetings and (2) the quality of the preparation by sales professionals for those meetings. Even among top-quintile performers, we see striking differences in the way these professionals approach pre-call planning.
What's in it for Me?
So what does this mean for you? You should examine the views that your sales professionals have regarding pre-call planning and the benefits they perceive that they get out of being prepared for a key customer call or meeting. Ask your reps what they see as "in it for them" and see how many say that pre-call planning will help their personal income. If a large portion of your sales team sees extra cash for them as a benefit, congratulations! If not, you may want to consider addressing pre-call planning at your next sales meeting.
We're all busy, especially sales professionals trying to make a living in a tough economy. But why not spend a few extra minutes preparing to help making that living a little easier?
Photo credit: AMagill
Top Sales Professional Survey
Learn more about what top-performing sales professionals had to say about their preparation habits.
Download a summary of the top sales professionals survey.