Archives for category: Sales
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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

The Blurred Lines Between Sales and Marketing

March 5, 2014 //
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[Disclosure – this blog post contains adult sexual references, though not expressed in a vulgar way, because that would be a poor show.]

I thought I’d open, dear reader, with a warning, as I’d hate to see your double espresso do a U-turn as you read this. The adult reference is not to the title of the well-known song that you will find in the subject line of this blog post (and I can imagine there might be a slightly different audience finding this post as a result) but to an analogy for the difference between sales and marketing.

The rivalry, jibes and sometimes gulfs between sales and marketing is a path so worn away with words that I hesitated before I wrote the post, yet I think my point has merit.

In the old days, you could say that marketing was like sex for 1. A mainly solitary exercise, you would be crafting strategy, messaging and plans in your own company. Sales, on the other hand, was like sex for 2. You were building a rapport with that person, listening and catering to their requirements.

The connected economy has blurred those lines almost beyond recognition. If I’m a salesperson, my B2B customers can do their research online, see how people score what I offer, without ever having to dance with me until they’re ready, and on their terms. I don’t sell to them until they’re ready to start the relationship – unless I understand how to use the same processes to guide them to me.

If I’m a marketer, while I should always have been listening to the market, I can get instantaneous feedback on what I’m putting out there and can collaborate with my customers in real time to give them what they need.

The best salespeople, marketers and customers are those that understand the leveraging power of the Internet and use it to put themselves in the shoes of the other person. That way they can relate to them more, and partner with them better.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Ownership or the Lack of

February 28, 2014 //
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Yep, all this is mine...

Yep, all this is mine…

“Yeah, we own that customer…”

No you don’t.  You don’t own a customer, ever, and they don’t own you either. As a matter of fact, we share ownership of all that we consider ours: our house with various critters, our company with a bunch of stakeholders, and our real estate and world with an altogether different bunch of stakeholders. It’s like we share a view or a moment.

The sooner we get the notion of sharing into our heads, even in the commercial western world, we all work together better and we all profit. You don’t have customers, suppliers, or competitors, you have partners, and partners by their very nature share stuff.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

The Business Joy of the Hand-Written Note

February 26, 2014 //
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I got a hand-written card today! From an organisation! I was so excited. The oblong hole in the front door is not just for bills after all.

Somebody had written me a personal thank you note and a different hand had written my name and address on the envelope too. This wasn’t from a friend or family; this was from a large organisation.

Yes, the good people – I always suspected they were good but now I know it – at Movember wrote to me personally to thank me for the huge sacrifice of growing a moustache for 31 days. Now there are thousands of people a year that raise money for this prostate cancer charity, and I bet we all got a hand-written thank you letter. Mine was from Sara and she signed it ‘Sara x’. Who cares if it wasn’t actually Sara, it’s the thought, and the perception, that counts.

I shall definitely grow a moustache for November 2014; they have me for another year, and another few hundred quid, with one thoughtful gesture.

Attention people who have customers – or people who want to stay on the right side of someone else: show you care by taking three minutes out of your day to write a card and envelope and why you appreciate them. You’ll need a stamp too of course, but if there is a better return for such a small investment, I don’t know what it is.

Incidentally, even if you’re not in marketing – or even business – you should dip into the daily genius that is Seth Godin’s blog. Here’s one of his best ever pithy-but-explosively-useful posts containing the handwritten thank you note.

Anyway, back to emails, the web and calls…

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Recruiter Etiquette

February 19, 2014 //
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Continuing, dear reader, this week’s focus on respecting the customer, I want to tackle the recruitment industry. This is an industry that provides a valuable service both to customers and potential employees, and to an extent serves them both.

Some call themselves recruitment consultants, while the posher ones that deal with more senior appointments call themselves executive search firms, after the ‘headhunter term first coined a generation ago fell from favour.

These companies are either paid by or retained by their customers to filter candidates and appoint the best available person for the role. So the prospective employee is not the customer, but they are a vital part of the recruitment process and are in effect the secondary customer.

It seems to be they often get de-prioritised in the heat of battle, so to the recruitment industry I offer the following five best practice rules for dealing with the pawns in the game, namely your secondary customers:

– Understand that most of the risk is with the new employee, who might be leaving a secure environment with tenure for a job that promises better but who has pretty much no rights in the first 12 months of their new job

– Understand that the impact on an employee of a bad hire (by which I mean the cultural fit is bad) is usually worse than it is on the employer. It may not feel like that to your customer who has hired badly at senior sales level, or C-Suite level, but it is

– Understand that your customer is usually in a buyers’ market, and that while it’s perfectly understandable that in fast-moving businesses requirements change and roles get pulled, your job is to educate your customer that it is poor practice not only to do the real resource planning after you’ve engaged prospective employees but also trawl for candidates for internal benchmarking or other purposes when you’ve no intention of hiring anyone

– When you get applicants for a job, it is a cop-out to say that because of the volume of applicants you can’t communicate to those who have been unsuccessful. There’s no excuse for not even sending out an automated email to say sorry you weren’t successful this time. You allow the applicant to cross the role off the list and look elsewhere. You don’t leave them flapping in the breeze

– If a candidate asks you for feedback as to why they were unsuccessful – and not many do – give it. It strengthens the overall candidate gene pool

I know your prime responsibility is to your customer, so please treat this as a gentle reminder to keep the secondary customer on your radar too. The best recruiters do.

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Categories Customers, Sales

Plumbers, Builders and Electricians – A Law Unto Themselves

February 17, 2014 //
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What is about the industries that supply our construction and home improvement needs?

How can they persistently flout the golden rule of business and not only survive in business but even thrive?

Perhaps it’s the laws of supply and demand, but how can they deliver such poor service? It boggles the mind.

I realise I’m tarring vast swathes of society with the same brush, but, taken together, these folks commit so many don’t dos it’s unbelievable. They don’t return calls. They don’t come by when they say they will. They don’t send in a quote when they say they will. They deliver stuff that’s at variance with what they quoted. And they never, ever finish the job when the say they will, preferring to keep a number of jobs on the go at the same time and underdelivering to all their exasperated customers in one go.

The golden rule of business is always respect your customer. Always. If the relationship turns out to be grossly unequal and they are totally unreasonable, then by all means sack them as a customer, but otherwise they deserve your respect and your fullest attention.

They’re four times more likely to buy from you again – even if they provide something you only need a few times a lifetime, so you do the math. And if you give crap service, they’re three times more likely to tell people about it. And, with online customer reviews so easy to give on suppliers’ sites or via customer review platforms like Trustpilot it’s going to get ugly for you really early.

Companies that don’t respect the customer usually get found out. Maybe it’s the fact that for us home dwellers we’re served by fragmented industries full of sole operators, but these guys collectively show no signs of being found out. We don’t have the time to go and get certified to do our own complex DIY projects. Instead, we concentrate all our efforts along with all the other customers on the tiny majority that are trustworthy.

If I came back as one of these people in another life, my competitive strategy would be simple:

We always call back.

We turn up when we say we will.

We are on time, on brief, and on quote.

Customers will always pay a modest premium for that kind of service. Easy. And just think of the schadenfreude you would get wiping out the competition, or forcing them to participate in a race to the bottom or else making them improve how they treat their customers.

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Categories Customers, Sales

It Really Is OK To Assume

February 7, 2014 //
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Do you remember in the old days of business training? There used to be a phrase, still prevalent today, that ‘to assume makes an ass out of u and me’. We were told never to assume.

This for me is not only out of date, but it’s plain wrong. It should be consigned to the era of conforming, regimentation, uniformity. The era that’s not the era we’re in.

Life’s too short, and the business world moves too fast, for us not to assume. There is too much complexity, too many variables, too little time for us to not to do otherwise, unless we want to left behind with the also rans. And who wants to be an also ran? They have neither choice nor control.

My advice on assuming is this:

– assume, whenever you can

– the first law of management is to check your facts, so do that if it’s possible, and do it quickly and effectively

– then make assumptions around what you don’t know, based on your experience, your gut feel, and preferably both

– then make that decision quickly and confidently

Assuming helps us make quick decisions, wrong decisions, fail more quickly, and learn and improve more quickly.

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Categories Communication, Sales, Strategy

The Silver Bullet for Focusing on Sales Success

January 31, 2014 //
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In sales, there is a lot of complexity. A lot of moving parts, a lot of scenarios, a lot of things to measure. If you can’t measure, you can’t manage, so how to make sense of the data onslaught and focus on the really important stuff?

I used to work with a company called The TAS Group, who invented something called The Sales Velocity Equation to help with the problem. In this equation, anyone in charge of sales needs to focus on – and measure – just four things to get a sense of how successful their sales efforts are, and whether they are improving or not.

The four levers are the number of qualified opportunities your team works in a given period, the average deal size of the deals you win during that period, your win percentage, and the length of the sales cycle of all qualified deals before you win or lose them.

Your sales velocity – which is a measure of how effectively you sell – is a function of the top three levers multiplied by each other, divided by the all-important factor below the line, the sales cycle length. This gives you a dollars per week, month – however you measure your sales cycle – for a given period.

Consistency is the name of the game with this. You may know that I’m a big fan of consistency. You must be consistent in how you define the period (I recommend looking over at least a quarter) and in how you measure a qualified opportunity, otherwise you’re comparing apples and oranges. If your sales velocity increases from period to period, you’re selling more effectively. If it decreases, less effectively.

The key is to have an iron grip on your sales process and your sales cycles, because time is a killer and that factor below the line can kill all your good work elsewhere.

You can read more about this important topic here and here.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Nirvana of Perfectly Efficient Connections

January 17, 2014 //
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When I sit on a London-bound train and don’t want to shut the world away and write, like I’m doing right now, I like to soak up the ambience of my train carriage and home in on some of the mobile conversations that the less discrete business people tend to have after their meetings in the UK’s capital.

As well as the standard business shorthand phrases like ‘food for thought’, ‘keep moving forward’, ‘in this together’ etc. I usually have this unexplainable – as opposed to inexplicable – feeling of sadness wash over me. Not because I want to work where they work, but because of the inherent unproductiveness of big society where a mass of people mills around like atoms in a pan of boiling water.

All these people travel together with strangers into the big city, head to their specific meeting with their customer, partner or supplier, conduct their business, scurry back to their travel hub and head back home. They use the journey back for follow-up calls, post mortems, problems, solutions and actions, all within earshot and sight of another band of strangers.

And that, for me, is the modern big city: a vast collection of people on the move, in between things, trying desperately to minimise their A to B time and expenses. Whole industries built around a state of perpetual transience.

The promise of the Internet is that it can bring us together in ways that the phone never could do. Despite the advantages that the face to face element of Skype and video conferencing delivers, nothing has yet replaced the physical meeting as the pinnacle of human interaction and collaboration.

And hence the sadness. We crave interaction from our fellow humans, yet meeting them is all so inefficient. Teleportation would be extremely handy, but in the absence of that, I always wonder if there is a better way to co-ordinate these millions of criss-crossing journeys.

I think when I get back to my home office I’m going to stew on that and not come out until I have fixed it. Or in case someone wants to see me for a meeting…

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Technology

The Importance of the Niche

January 3, 2014 //
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In this era of the long tail, it’s never been more easy to find, create, develop and service a niche market.

A niche is a small place that you can defend and protect from bigger competition who either can’t fit in the niche themselves or lever you out of it. Aside from the risk of the long tail niche – there is a gap in the market but is there a market in the gap? – I was reminded of how protectable a niche can be when walking on the beach with family yesterday.

We were collecting empty shells, and on several occasions we saw some limpets sitting in the cracks between rocks. These weren’t limpets stuck to the rocks in the normal way. They were empty shells with their edges were simply resting – or so we thought – between the folds of rocks. The spaces under them were not deep and impenetrable, they were shallow, maybe a centimetre or so of a recess. When we tried to pick them up, however, we couldn’t move them, even by levering a finger and a thumb under the entire limpet.

Even though they appeared to be resting on the rocks, the force of the storms from the last few nights had wedged them in, hard and fast. Added to that, the conical structure of the limpet was such that even though only a few millimetres of the limpet edge were touching the rocks on two sides, it could withstand any human attempt to remove it in one piece.

When we find the perfect niche, and we’re set up the right way, we can be impossible to dislodge.

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Categories Marketing, Sales, Strategy
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