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I’m Alright Jack

May 16, 2014 //
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Ach, how to rid ourselves of the scourge of the self-servers, people who always put themselves ahead of others! In English, we say ‘I’m alright Jack’ to refer to these kinds of undesirable people.

In Irish, we call them ‘me feiners’. Here’s a good example of someone – a pretty laconic and articulate Kiwi as it happens, using the word to describe someone else.

It doesn’t matter in what walk of life or work you’re in, the me feiner is to be avoided, shunned even. They don’t pay back, they take but don’t give, they feather their own bed. If you’re in sales or marketing, you won’t last the course if you put yourself first the whole time. Success in those spheres is based on partnership, equity, balance, equilibrium. A fair exchange of effort, investment and reward.

You may be alright Jack, but not for long.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Reading the Signs of a Bad Deal About to Happen

April 21, 2014 //
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The best sales people are those can combine the science of following repeatable best practice and the art – or perhaps even artistry – of skills like empathy, listening, charisma and intuition to the best effect.

From the scientific perspective, the old 6P adage holds true: Perfect Planning Prevents P*ss Poor Performance.  I don’t know if it’s really called the 6P approach, but if it isn’t then I’m happy to coin it so. The idea behind planning and analysing properly is that you factor out the things that can derail your deal, such as luck, as I’ve talked about before.

Where the art comes in is the judicious use of your experience, emotional intelligence and gut feel. Your intuition is often a powerful indicator of the likely result of a deal. Phrases like ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this deal,’ or ‘something’s not quite right about this prospect and I can’t put my finger on it’ are sometimes a case of you not properly applying the scientific rigour to your sales approach. On other occasions, it’s your intuition working correctly and you should listen to it carefully.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when I played soccer.  Being on the old-ish side for such a youthful pursuit, I’m alway careful that I warm up first. On this occasion, a perfect storm of circumstances had conspired to cause me to be late for the first time in years. Against all my intuitive feelings, I threw on a bib and got stuck in.  I started in goal, reasoning that after 10 minutes or so in this physically less demanding role I could venture out into the backs and work my way forward from there. After a few minutes of outfield play I could feel a dull ache in my right calf. It was not painful, but still I didn’t listen.

Five minutes later, with the ball in open space I sprinted off to claim it and – twang! – tore my calf, properly this time. I hadn’t done the prep, I didn’t listen to my body and I didn’t go with my gut.

Don’t let this happen to your ‘must win’ sales deal. If you’ve exhausted all scientific methods, listen to your art and follow your gut, like I didn’t.

PS This is my 100th post. I hope you’re liking it so far :-).

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Categories Customers, Planning, Sales

Packaging Fails Can Be Terminal for Your Business

April 18, 2014 //
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Doesn’t it drive you mad when you can’t easily open a pack of food or drink? Why don’t manufacturers of anything – especially food and drink – realise that getting at the contents before consuming is part of the customer experience, part of the product itself? They have to work harder at getting the balance right between securing the contents and providing access to them.

The packaging, as far as I’m concerned, is part of what Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm called the ‘whole product solution’. Admittedly, that book is about so-called ‘disruptive’ products, but you still have to get everything to do with your product or service right. This is something I’ve talked about before here.

If you don’t get it right, you run the risk of someone substituting your product for someone else’s. Someone else who has thought harder, and worked harder, about exactly how you are going to consume what they sell, from the moment you see it. For an old but hilarious packaging fail, have a look at this beauty and imagine yourself being the owner or captain of this business, demonstrating how easy it is to consume the product – not.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Is Your Pipeline Nothing But A Pipedream?

April 2, 2014 //
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In the high octane world of large deal size, long and complex sales cycles involving many buyers and influencers, there’s an awful lot to think about and an awful lot of work to do. It seems unfortunate, then, that forecasting such deals remains a black art, despite the technology in place focused on helping this tricky area. This is because the technology is simply the delivery mechanism, and if your data and discipline is weak, what it delivers is weak.

Many hours get taken up in forecast calls and meetings, with jargon like ‘drop dead’, ‘best guess’ and ‘upside’ permeating them and generally obfuscating the truth, or as close to the truth as we can manage. There’s a much bandied about statistic that forecasts are about 50% accurate. That means you might as well forget your forecast calls and flip a coin.

That doesn’t stop sales organisations around the world doing forecasts. Since your pipeline is really just an extension of your forecast, looking further into your future, it follows that for many organisations the pipeline really is a pipedream, a funnel full of fantasy.

Outside the world of complex sales – and who knows what proportion of all sales that is, maybe 80% – there are hundreds of thousands of sales organisations that don’t do forecasts or count pipeline. They don’t set quotas or targets, they might not pay commission, they don’t do deal reviews. They have folk out there selling and what comes in, comes in.

I don’t know how they can run their business with any confidence at all, especially in tough times. I think in general it’s a function of sales being so late to the top table in business. It’s something people have always done based on their intuition. Up until recently you couldn’t study sales at University or College. There was a marked absence of methodology, theory, training and formal structure. Compare this with the much newer profession of marketing which has the best part of a century’s curricular preparation under its belt.

So here, dear reader, are my top 6 pointers for a sales pipeline that means something to your business and that you can plan around:

1) Define what a sales opportunity is for your business. An opportunity is more than a lead. An opportunity is a lead + BANT, where your prospect has identified there is Budget, you’re speaking to the person with Authority, they have shared a Need for what you can deliver, and there is a Time by when they need to act. If it’s not an opportunity, it shouldn’t be in your pipeline. It’s not real enough and it clogs your pipeline with uncertainty and inaccuracy

2) Get a sales process. A sales process is a series of buying stages your customers go through to buy your stuff.  You might need a separate process for each group of customers buying a product or service from you. Lumping all your prospects into one sales process – unless you’re very lucky – will cloud and average out your data, which is not good

3) Define each stage. What needs to be in place on the customer’s side for the deal to be at that stage? Examples might be: the customer has agreed to an exploratory meeting; the customer has shared the BANT criteria; the customer has confirmed your price is acceptable

4) Get your reps’ to buy in to what you’re doing, so they contribute to refining the process and see the benefits of following and recording it

5) Make sure you have consistency across the business.  If your sales stages mean exactly the same to each rep – and they record their progress that way – you have consistent, reliable objective data in the forecast and pipeline

6) Make the technology easy to use, so it gives more back than your reps have to put in. You want to achieve the following virtuous circle: the more I use it – the better my information – the more deals I close – the more progress or money I make – the more I use it.  Hint: spreadsheets are not the answer, you need to use something browser-based so that there’s always a single up-to-date version.  It’s way too tedious for everyone otherwise

An accurate pipeline helps you plan for success and get early warnings of potential problems ahead. But you gotta get the basics right first.

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Categories Customers, Planning, Sales

Luck or Karma? Planning’s Big Lie

March 14, 2014 //
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A few years go, as a recent recruit to a sales effectiveness company, I briefed the powers that be on how I wanted to run my session. I wanted to start with a story on how it was lucky I made it to the US that day at all. I had a new smartphone and set my alarm for 6am on the Saturday, unaware that my alarm was set for weekdays and not weekends. I awoke at 6am anyway, and realised my error. In any event, the thrust of my story, I said, was that you can do all the planning you want, but sometimes you need a bit of luck.

The powers that be looked at me askance. This was not what they wanted to hear. You see, they said, the whole point of sales methodology and planning is that you remove luck from the equation. You leave nothing to chance and you control the eventualities of the sale with your ideally perfect knowledge and assessment of the situation.

That said, loads of us believe in luck, hope for luck, are counting on luck. Luck and hope may not be great strategies, but even with the best planning in the world you get the feeling that luck still has a role. That bluebird deal comes in when you thought the customer gone dark. A change of key personnel plays right into your hands, or takes the deal away from you. Sometimes you feel that stuff happens that you just can’t legislate for.

The concept of luck is an interesting one. Some folks believe in it, some don’t. There was a great Greek tragedy writer called Euripides writing about 2,500 years ago. I reckon he was better than his much vaunted peers Aeschylus – who wrote The Persians – and Sophocles – he of Oedipus the King – and only a handful of his plays like The Medea survive from the 90 or so he wrote. He believed that there was no such thing as good luck. There was either no luck, or bad luck.

I take a different view of luck from my erstwhile planning perfectionist employers. Great planning means you can allow for luck or karma, or you know what to do when the luck rolls in. As Gary Player once said: ‘The more I play, the luckier I get.’

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Categories Customers, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Time is a Killer

October 11, 2013 //
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Time – we measure so many things by it.  Miles or kilometres per hour, revolutions per minute, dollars per day.  Time governs so much of what we do and it’s the one resource we can’t ever stop expending.  The march of time continues regardless.

In business, it’s rarely money that presents us with the biggest barrier to success, it’s time.  Time is the killer resource.  We need that software release, that big deal, that important new senior hire to start as quickly as humanly possible.  It’s never soon enough.  And what happens, to make things even worse?  Things always take longer to come to fruition than we hoped: pipeline is sluggish, deals slip, development is delayed.  These are complex things we do in business, with many variables.  Throw in the human element and you have a recipe for stuff not turning out as you planned.

To combat the ravages of time on your precious schedule, I offer these two seemingly contradictory pieces of advice.  Firstly, wherever you can, build slack into your planning, so you have room to manoeuvre and still be on time.  Secondly, don’t let work or what your doing simply fill the time available (much easier said than done).

It’s a fine balance, but isn’t everything that’s worth doing well?

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Categories General, Planning

Slow and Chunky Wins the Race

September 11, 2013 //
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OK, so not literally does slow and chunky win the race, or not probably, unless he’s got a good engine.  What I mean is that to get where you want to in life, to achieve what you want, you’ve got to divide time up into manageable chunks.  It’s all very well having a goal of being a millionaire in 5 years, or CEO in 10, but your plan has to contain the milestones necessary for celebrating progress.

Me, I like to divide my time up into non-regular chunks, and set targets around the next milestone that’s important to me, like a family holiday, a weekend away, a big social event, or a birthday maybe.  I find a month or 6 weeks a manageable length of time in which to sustain what it is I’m trying to do, which is generally around improved behaviour, be it parenting, work/life balance, the next job or major consulting gig, health & fitness and so on.

I find lofty long term goals a bit daunting.  It’s like driving at night.  I know the destination, but I can only affect as far as my headlights let me see.

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Categories Planning
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