BP Oil Spill and CRM?

 What does the BP oil spill and sales performance have in common?  I began my career working for a large process automation company providing systems to the oil and gas, petrochemical, power, and paper industries.  We provided these industries with process control automation to insure that these plants ran smoother and safely produced the maximum amount of product at the lowest cost.

After installing a new system we would commonly get complaints from plant operators.  The most common complaint was that the system was different and more difficult.  Many times they would ignore what the advanced controls were telling them to do; even worse they would ignore the process alarms and even bypass them.  This not only undermined the production improvements that the automation system was supposed to give, but it also made the plant unsafe.

More often than not, these issues went away as the operators became use to the new system.  But this was not always the case. Sometimes you would come back to a plant, years later, and find that they still didn’t know how to correctly use the system.  These faulty plants always had one overarching theme, their management didn’t make their operators use the new system.   Some management didn’t step in because they didn’t want to get involved or they, like their operators, were also resistant to change.  Sometimes a plant would ignore the system, or even override the safety controls, just to push for more product/profit.  Many people believe this was the cause of the BP oil spill. It will be years before we truly know what happened.

Sales people using a new CRM system are much like the aforementioned operators.  They almost always have resistance to change in the way they’ve been running their sales.  The solution for your sales team is the same for the plant operators, management has to believe in the CRM system and enforce the use of the system. Management needs to use the tool as well.  Nothing kills a CRM project faster than having a manager ask the sales people to put together their forecast in an excel sheet.  The sales managers should do all their reviews with the sales team, leveraging the capabilities and data in the CRM system.

I also think that the key to having a successful CRM system is to have the sales process driven by the CRM system.  To not have the sales process in the CRM system is like not having safety or advanced controls in a chemical plant.  It still baffles me that most sales organizations don’t have a defined sales process and that they only use the CRM system as an electronic rolodex and maybe as a forecasting tool.

Other keys to making a CRM system successful are making it easy to use, making sure it helps sales people do their job, and training, training, training.  If BP had provided more training and insured that alarms weren’t ignored, maybe we wouldn’t have had the oil spill.  If your company used a CRM that drove your sales process, maybe you would get more orders and maybe the quality of the orders would be better. 

Good selling,

From The Ground Up

Nine years ago we made a decision to move to beautiful Lake Hartwell located on the Georgia and South Carolina line.  We had owned a small cabin on the lake for a few years prior and just loved it.  We sold the cabin and bought a lot at the end of a gravel road that had 5 other lots; different people had purchased each lot, but none had been built on.  We started building and 6 months later we moved in.  We love the lake and have really enjoyed the privacy.

Two years ago construction started on one of the lots.  So much for the privacy.  They have been slowly building this house for two years and are still several months away from completing it.  Two months ago the lot right next to us started building.  In only two months they have almost caught up with the first house.

Watching these two houses being built is the inspiration for this week’s blog.  Why does it take over two years to build house one and six months to build house two?  Which is the better-built house?  Are there advantages and disadvantages to both?

Of course this spurred me to start thinking about Salesnet.  Two years ago we decided to refresh the Salesnet product and infrastructure.   We had to make a decision, do we want to gradually upgrade the product or do we want to rebuild from the ground up?  While most of our competitors gradually upgrade their product and infrastructure we decided to rebuild from the ground up.

We started with the infrastructure.  We replaced every piece of hardware and operating system software.  To make this easier and more secure, we decide to install everything in a new and enhanced data center.  We took the same approach with our disaster recovery site.  This turned out to be a great decision.  When everything was ready and tested we just moved the Salesnet software over to the new infrastructure.

Then it was time to work on the Salesnet software.  We wanted to take advantage of any new leading-edge technology while maintaining what has made Salesnet successful in the past.  We were able to leapfrog all our competition with regards to the Salesnet user interface and the built in analytics, while keeping and improving the patented Salesnet sales process engine.  This sales process engine is what has always been the differentiator for Salesnet.  It is what makes sales people better, which makes for better sales.

To make a long story short, this whole effort has been a major success.  As of the beginning of 2010 our customers, partners, and potential customers have shown that they see the value in The New Salesnet by renewing contracts, adding users, and signing on as new Salesnet customers.  Our build from the ground up approach is validated everyday by our customers.

But we are not going to stop there.  We will continue to launch new exciting features and our decision to leverage the latest technology advances make this much easier to do than if we had decided on the upgrade as you go approach. 

Sorry for the long-winded blog, but when you are excited about what you have accomplished it is hard to keep it brief. 

Good Selling

Mobile

I was very happy that we were able to release the New Salesnet Mobile last week. I was even happier when we started getting feedback from our customers as to how much they liked it and how it saved them hours of work each day. It is tremendous to get this kind of feedback.

I was on the road this week and had my first chance to really use the new mobile application in a real live situation.  I had lots of meetings and didn’t really have the time to pull out my PC and update Salesnet.  During breaks I just logged in with my iPhone and did everything I needed to.  I never thought it would be so easy and fast.

That takes me back to a previous blog about our strategy for the new Salesnet mobile application.  We decided to go with a web based approach instead of having an application that resides on the smart phone.  This approach has many advantages and almost no disadvantages.  The biggest advantages are that you don’t have to sync up data with your phone.  You are logging into the system just as you would when using your PC, and this means everything is real time.  If someone else changes something you will see it.  If you make some changes or add some data it is instantly available to anyone who has access.

We have always had an offline product that allows you to sync your data to your PC, work offline and then sync it up when you get to a connection.  My issue with working with offline is that I usually forget to sync the data before I leave the office or just don’t have the time.  To use this product you also have to get the PC out and start it up.  This week for me was a perfect example of not having time to do this. I just pulled out my phone during a break and did what I needed to do.  It was wonderful.

The next advantage to our users has to do with the cost.  We are able to provide this at a much lower cost than an application that resides on the phone.  The security is also much better with our approach because none of the data is on the phone.

The only disadvantage that I can think of is that if you don’t have a wireless connection you can’t use it.  I will gladly take that disadvantage to get the above-mentioned advantages.  Maybe some day we will find a way to let you have your cake and eat it too.

Good Selling

Customer No-Support

For those of you who have been following my blog you know that my youngest daughter recently moved to New Orleans to take her first job.  The whole process of getting the job and getting her moved proved to be a great source of inspiration for several of my posts.  Well believe it or not this gift just keeps on giving. 

When we were moving her in she asked me to try and order her internet service.  As it turns out she only had two choices.  Both of the choices were about equal cost wise and both were big reliable companies.  One was a cable company and the other was a phone company.  I ordered the service from the phone company and placed the order via their web service. 

The first issue I ran into was that her address was not listed as a valid address.  The only way I could get it to go through was to pick the apartment next to her and put in the special notes that it was for apartment 101 and not 102.  The web site automatically sent her an email back saying that she would have internet on July 8th and someone would call her to schedule a time for installation.  It was a Friday night when we placed this order and she received a call back on Tuesday. 

This is where it starts getting interesting.  The phone company told her that it would be two weeks before they could schedule someone to come out.  Much to her disappointment, she scheduled the time to take off work to meet them.  Two weeks later, the installation man met her but told her because the order was for apartment 102 instead of 101 it would take another two weeks.  The only reason he knocked on her door was that he noticed the special instructions note that said it was apartment 101. 

The good news (if you are really search hard for a silver lining) is that she would not have to meet anyone at her apartment to get it turned on because he was able to do all the onsite work that day.  The two weeks came and went and she still didn’t have internet access.  She called several times and spent what she says is hours on hold just to find out that it would be two more weeks.  She told them to forget it and called the cable company. 

The cable company said that they could come out the next week to get it installed and that she would not have to be at her apartment.  While they didn’t get it turned on when they said they would it was only a few days late. When she called them they always answered the phone and never put her on hold for more than a few minutes.   

Last night she sent us an email saying that she finally had internet.  Can you believe this all started on July 2^nd and ended on Aug 9^th?  How do companies stay in business with this kind of customer service?  Is there not enough competition?  Do they just not care or do they just not care about small accounts? 

In the CRM market that Salesnet competes in, there are almost too many competitors to count.  Even with all this competition, I still hear stories of bad support as a reason for companies switching from other CRM products to Salesnet.  Sometimes this bad support is due to the company’s lack of resources in customer support, they may just be overloaded with quality issues, or it might be that they really don’t care about the smaller companies because they have so many large customers. 

While Salesnet support isn’t perfect, we do everything we can to make the customer experience positive.  Almost all our support questions are really training questions and yet we answer each one.  Salesnet has a large installed base of customers from all sizes of companies and (as long as I have anything to do with it) we will support our customers no matter the size of the company.  While our product superiority is important to getting new customers, our customer support is the key to keeping them as Salesnet customers.

Good Selling

Hot Reunion

I recently went to my wife’s family reunion.  I’m sure that like me, most of you really look forward to going to your spouse’s family reunion.  However, this reunion had some very special features that made it more dreadful than normal.  It was in Cordele, Georgia in July. For those of you who aren’t from the South, Cordele is located in South Georgia.  When asked how hot it gets in that part of the country a coach at Valdosta State College told a new football recruit “While you can’t see hell from here, you can feel the flames”.  Cordele is also known for the quantity and size of its gnats in the summer.  While I love this part of the country 9 months of the year, I make it a point to not visit during June, July, or August. 

So why did someone schedule this reunion in July?  Maybe the local relatives just wanted to get back at the lucky relatives who live north of the gnat line.  The reunion was held in a beautiful state park located on Lake Blackshear.  I should have taken my boat, because I’m sure the fishing would have been great.  The actual reunion was held at noon under a large pavilion in the middle of a field.  This was another stroke of genius in planning.  The good news is that no one had a heat stroke, even though the heat index was over 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

The actual meeting was excellent.  Good people, good food, and lots of laughs and reminiscing.  The best part was that they had presentations on the history of the family lines that went back to the 1600’s.  The presentations were very interesting and we all learned a lot.  It was great seeing and learning about all the family, but my favorite event was a side trip to one of the best farmers markets in the country.  It doesn’t take a lot to please me, and I naturally spent way too much money on fresh fruits and vegetables.

So what is the moral of this story?  Many times as sales people we are required to attend sales meetings or sales training that we dread going to.  We dislike the travel, the staying in a hotel, the time lost to selling, and especially the boring slide shows we will be forced to watch.  While we loathe all these things, more times than not a lot of good comes out of these meetings.  It may be that we learn something new about how to sell or maybe we are just reminded of things we already know but have gotten too lazy to do.  We may learn new features of our product or that new products are coming.  We may find out more about the competition.  So don’t dread going to sales meetings.  Embrace the opportunity to learn more about selling.  Use the opportunity to rekindle relationships with people in your company and remember at least these meeting won’t be outside in 100+ degree weather.

Good Selling,

Understand and Support Your Customer

Lately I have been interviewing many of our customers in order to produce press releases, testimonials, and podcasts.  So far it has been a great experience and a couple of themes have come out of these interviews.

One of the questions I ask is “Why did you choose Salesnet?”.  I expected to get answers like because of the sales process engine, the reporting capability, the forecasting, the ability to slice and dice the data, or even price.  What I heard was more around how we sell.  More often than not, it was how the sales person or the sales team was able to understand their needs and show how Salesnet would meet those needs.  This was music to my ears and assured me that we have the right people on our sales team.

  I have always said that being successful is more about the sales person than the product.  I have also always tried to train sales people to be more consultative, do more listening than talking, and make sure you understand what the customer needs are and how your solution best meets those needs.  If it doesn’t meet their needs, walk away.  It is better for the customer and for you.  Walking away from a sale is one of the hardest things for a sales person to do but not walking away can be very costly. Every salesperson has spent time working on opportunities that they can’t win at the expense of the ones that they can win.  Don’t let this happen to you.

Another common theme from these interviews is that all these customers can’t say enough good things about the project team and the ongoing support.  With Salesnet they feel like we do everything in our power to make sure they are successful.  While it is important that we do the right things in the sales process, it is just as important that we do the right things after the sale.  This superior support is the reason that most Salesnet customers are Salesnet customers forever.

Until next time, 

The Hand Written Letter

This week I received a five-page hand written letter from my youngest brother.  I left home to join the Navy right after my 17^th birthday.  He was just a baby then.  We have never lived in the same part of the country and have not spent a lot of time together over the years.  I haven’t talked to him in about a year or so and it was really a pleasant surprise to get this letter.  The entire letter was written in cursive, in ink, and with no cross outs.  I’m not sure I can even write in cursive anymore and I’m sure I couldn’t write five pages without a mistake (Oh and by the way these pages were the old full size notebook pages).  My youngest daughter also sent me a very nice thank you note for helping her move to New Orleans.  It was also hand written and really meant a lot to me.  I guess this was my lucky week for getting meaningful letters.

The written letter has become a thing of the past.  The last time I can remember writing a full letter by hand was when I was in the Navy.  Not much to do on those long nights at sea.  I’m currently reading “Nelson’s Trafalgar” by Roy Adkins, which is a book about the battle of Trafalgar.  This battle was fought at sea between the British and the combined fleet of France and Spain.  The British overwhelmingly won the battle and prevented Napoleon from invading Great Britain.  This account of the battle and everything that happened before and after this important event comes mostly from letters written by people there.  Some of these are official letters, but many are personal letters written to family members and friends.  These letters not only give a detailed account as to what happened before, during, and after the battle but also give an insight into the mindset of the people involved.  Will future generations be able to get this type of insight from our current day methods of communications?  I have my doubts.

When I first started out in sales I used to hand write and send out thank you notes to customers and potential customers.  Over the years I changed from this approach to sending email thank you notes.  I really don’t think it has the same effect that a hand written note does.  If you really want to thank someone, the hand written letter is much better than an email or even a phone call.  I think I’m going to make it a point to try to start writing letters and thank you notes and sending them via snail mail.

Until next time,

“I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.” –Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

All Stars – Simple versus Complex Sales

Like most baseball fans, I stayed up way too late watching the MLB All Star game.  I was happy to finally see the National League win this annual event. It is hard to believe it was 1996 when they last won.  I was especially glad to see the Duluth hometown boy win the MVP award.  Brian McCann was in the same class as my oldest daughter in high school. Not only do I have that connection to him, but I have been an Atlanta Braves fan all my life.   

When I spoke with our office’s Boston native (and fan), we had the normal discussion about National League versus American League.  For those of you who are not baseball fans, the main argument is that because of the use of a designated hitter in the American League the game has much less strategy than the National League.  The comeback for the American League fans is that their league’s games are more exciting because they score more runs.  They also claim that their players have more talent.  After seeing the results of this year’s All Star Game I guess the American League’s talent doesn’t pack as much punch as they used to.  Okay, it was only one game, but when it has been 14 years since their last defeat you tend to relish these rare occasions.

All this talk about baseball spurred me to think about how Simple Sales and Complex Sales are much like the two leagues in baseball.  When you think about simple short-term type sales, there is significantly less strategy involved than in a longer-term, complex sale situation.   Even though this is usually the case, maybe it is just that the strategy happens at a different time in the sales process.   You see if you are selling a product that has a very short sales process, it is more likely to be about the product and the positioning of that product before the sales person even gets involved.  For the sales person in the short sales process it is all about closing; for development and marketing it is about the strategy to create the right product and position that product so that the sales person will have the chance to close the sale.  In a more complex sale the sales person is more focused on planning and strategy than closing.  If they do these things correctly it will close itself.   

Taking all this back to baseball, in the American League the strategy is more about getting the right players for the team and positioning them correctly than it is about making strategic decisions during the game.   I prefer the National League and I prefer the complex sale, but there is room and a need for both. 

Until next time:

I wish I had an answer to that because I'm tired of answering that question.  
Yogi Berra

Hard Work

Over the July 4^th holiday we moved our daughter from Georgia to New Orleans.   We began by moving all her stuff into our basement for storage until her apartment was ready.  We then repacked everything, rented a trailer, loaded it, and drove the fully loaded trailer and truck to the Big Easy. 

Once we arrived at the apartment we learned that the task of moving in was going to be big and in no way easy.  You would think that when you rent an apartment it would be ready to move into.  This is apparently not so in New Orleans.  After moving everything into the apartment we discovered that a lot of work was needed just to get the apartment livable.   We had to fix plumbing, lights, dishwasher, cabinets and much more.  Even though the place was suppose to have had already been cleaned by a cleaning company, it was filthy.  Things like the AC filter hadn’t been changed for at least a year.  My wife, my daughter, and I worked feverously to get everything ready by Monday.  We were successful due mostly to my wife’s hard work.  She is probably the hardest working person I have ever known. 

As we were making the 12-hour drive back to our home I reflected on the importance of hard work when it comes to success in sales.  I have never met a successful sales person who didn’t work hard.  I have been with companies where most of the people in the company and even management thought that sales people didn’t work hard and that they were over paid.  It only takes one down turn in sales to wake people up to how important sales is to the company, but even after a downturn people may still think that sales people are lazy.  After all, all they do is talk, eat expensive meals, travel, and play golf.  Anyone who is in sales understands that the glamour of entertaining and travel are not so glamorous when you are doing these things in order to win business.   The meals aren’t relaxing, the travel is hectic and even the golf is more stressful than normal.  You can’t even throw the club or shout profanities when you hit a bad shot.  Not that I have ever done those things. 

The other part of sales that requires lots of hard work is the research and planning.  I can’t tell you how many late nights after a long flight I’ve spent trying to get the proposal just right, or working on the perfect presentation.  There is massive amounts of strategy planning needed to be successful in sales; and then there is all the training required, both product training and sales skills training.  There are times when this training is not required by many companies, but in order to be successful, sales people will do this on their own. 

With all that said, working hard by itself doesn’t make you successful.   During the move to New Orleans if we didn’t plan how we were going to get everything loaded and unloaded, and what route we were going to take, the move would have been much harder.  In sales, if we don’t work smart and do the proper planning, we will not only make it harder to get the business, we will likely not win the business.  So make sure you as sales people are working hard but also make sure you are working smart.

Primed for the Long Haul

We live on a beautiful lake that borders Georgia and South Carolina.  One of the many advantages to living on a lake is that we can irrigate our yard and my vegetable garden with the lake water.  This is not only a cheap source of water, but the lake water also provides valuable nutrients, which helps everything grow without having to use much in the way of fertilizers.  The only down side to using the lake water is keeping the pump and irrigation system running.  

Each winter I have to drain the system to make sure it was not damaged by freezing.  Last year, when I was starting the system back up, I forgot to prime the pump and as a result is was damaged. The motor that runs the pump was fine, but I either had to replace both pump and motor or try to rebuild the pump.  I decided the rebuild the pump and I used it all last summer and this year until a few weeks ago when I started having problems.  After much trouble shooting, I decided to replace the whole unit.  It is now working better than it ever has.

A few things come to mind in relating this experience to Sales and Salesnet.  In 2008 the Salesnet infrastructure was in need of being upgraded both from a hardware and operating software perspective.  The cheapest and easiest way to solve this issue would have been to upgrade the hardware and software on an as needed basis.  This would have been sort of like what I did by rebuilding the pump.  It would have worked for a while but we would have had to continue to upgrade the systems.  Instead we decide to totally replace every piece of hardware and software in both the primary and disaster recovery data centers.   This was a major capital investment but has been well worth the effort.  We are in a position now to grow by 10 fold without adding any hardware or software.  We have also dramatically increased the speed and security of Salesnet. 

In addition to upgrading the infrastructure, we also needed to start work on the user interface.   We took the same approach for this effort.  The New Salesnet is a complete rewrite of the user interface with copious amount of new features.  These two efforts have put Salesnet in a great position to leverage current technology and quickly roll out new features and functionality.

The last lesson in the pump story is about priming the pump.  The sales funnel needs to be full to insure the future success of any sales organization.  In the past, I have often consulted with companies that have a good year or quarter to be followed by a slowdown in sales.  Usually this happens because when things are going well, we forget to keep the sales funnel full.  It is not an easy task for the sales person to keep the sales funnel primed after having a good quarter or year.  This is because as they are busy trying to make sure everything is taken care of and that the customer is happy.  This is all very important, but continuing to prospect is a must in continued long-term success. 

Until next time,

Keep Your Sales Funnel Primed for Continued Success

Long Term Success

 A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I, went to see Carole King and James Taylor for their Troubadour Reunion 2010 concert.  I have always been a big fan of them both, but was worried after seeing some of the older performers, who have been guest on American Ideal.  I was suspicious about how well the 60+-year-old performers would do.

First, we started out by going to dinner at a nice place close to the concert.  We arrived early and soon the placed filled up with a lot of old people.  We wondered if these people were also going to the concert.  I suggested that these people were too old to be going to a concert.  Well I was wrong.  I think everyone in the restaurant was headed to see Carole and James as well.  I guess they couldn’t have been that old since they were probably all my age.

The main difference I noticed at this concert from what I remember from concerts in my youth was that they had concessions stands (even several cocktail stands) and that during the concert everyone stayed seated most of the time.  While the audience may have been a little old and mellow, Carole and James were absolutely wonderful.  James’s voice hasn’t changed a bit, and even though Carole’s voice wasn’t quite what it used to be, she made up for it with her vivid performance.  She is 67 years old and still moves like a 20 year old.  It was one of the best performances I have ever seen. 

Having both of them on the stage for the entire show and switching between his and her songs allowed for a good mix of different types of songs.  The story telling by both of them was also very entertaining and gave added depth.  I never knew that James Taylor was such a comedian.  They both made a couple of references to being older.  Carole King was talking about a song that she had written in the 60’s.  She said something like this “for those of you who remember the 60’s, but I guess if you are like us you don’t remember much about the 60’s, and well now it is welcome to the real 60’s”. 

James Taylor talked about the set they played for the original Troubadour Concert.  He said they tried and tried to remember the set but couldn’t.  As we get older, like King and Taylor, our memory seems to go.  It is also a fact that as stress increases or we get busier our memory is not as good.  We live in a stressful world and if you are in sales your stress levels are constantly at a high level.  Being able to remember your client’s name, what you last discussed with them, details about their business and even their personal life are very important for sales people.  Even if you aren’t older like me, you still need to have something to help you remember all the details and keep you on track.  Salesnet is designed to not only track all the details and conversations; it also reminds you when the next steps are due.  Without Salesnet, I would have things dropping through the cracks all the time.  Salesnet is my sales memory and sales driver.

 Another thing that comes to mind when thinking about Carole King and James Taylor is why they have been successful since the 60’s, and why the current tour is so successful.  The key is, in my opinion, that they provide a valuable product and that they have stayed true to who they are.  The two of them are a great team and really like working together.  They and the rest of the band also worked together flawlessly.  Aren’t all these keys to success in sales?  You have to have a good product or service to sell or you won’t be successful for long.  You must be honest, real and true to yourself and your customer.  For most sales people being successful requires that they have a good team to support their efforts.  This includes your sales manager and all the people who support you, including your family.

Until next week,

Good Selling




Superb Poster courtesy of DKNG Studios Los Angeles, California

The Glass is Full

My last two blogs have been about my trip to New Orleans.  This will be the third and final blog about this experience.  As I said in the last two blogs, my wife and I had a trip planned to New Orleans for our anniversary.  As it turned out our youngest daughter went with us so she could interview with a company in New Orleans.

I’m sure everyone wants to know how the interview turned out.  First, let’s go back to a blog from a few weeks ago where I talked about a speech at her graduation. The keynote speaker was very negative about the job market and advised the graduates to go and do social work, travel across Europe, take up yoga or origami, and to not worry about getting a job.  I suggested that this was a “the glass is half empty” view of the job market.

Luckily my daughter didn’t take this view.  She picked out several companies she would like to work for and sent resumes to these companies.  She had two callbacks from this effort, and one was the job in New Orleans.  As it turns out she has now accepted the job and is moving to New Orleans next week.  I am proud of her for taking the half full approach.

OK, so what is the sales message of the week?  Well it isn’t about her getting the job (even though I could use that).  I want to focus on the fact that I planned a romantic trip to New Orleans that didn’t go the way I planned it.  Sometimes we make the best of plans, but they are spoiled.  We have a choice to go with the punches and make the best of it or we can just give up and let it get the best of us.  In sales things rarely go as you plan and many times it is your reaction to these setbacks that creates the differentiation between you and your competition.  You should look at these setbacks as opportunities to excel.

My trip didn’t go as planned, but as it turned out it was much better than I could have ever imagined.  I spent time with a great sales person and got a multitude of ideas about how to improve the Salesnet business. I spent quality time with my wife and youngest daughter. My daughter got her dream job.  How can it get any better that that?  Oh yeah, I also got my last child off the payroll.

Until next week,

Good selling and make sure you go with the punches; you never know what good things are just around the corner.

Hidden charges

As I said in my blog last week, my wife and I had a trip planned to New Orleans for our anniversary. Our youngest daughter went with us so that she could interview with a company in New Orleans. As it turned out this trip gave me several ideas for blogs, so this is part II of the New Orleans trip.


I had a nice room reserved in an old house turned hotel. It was a nice place with one catch. The room I reserved only had one bed and they didn’t have any other rooms. As you can imagine, this presented a problem as no one was willing to sleep on the floor. So I made arrangements for a room for 3 people in another hotel that was an old warehouse turned into a hotel. This hotel was supposed to be a step up from the other hotel and of course the cost was doubled.

We arrived at the hotel to find that our room was on the second floor. We had to take an elevator to this floor and then walk down a flight of stairs. The room was nice but it had old wooden floors that made a lot of noise when you walked on them and they were extremely slick. The floors made so much noise that you could hear every step made by the people in the next room. It was so noisy that if anyone moved on one of the beds the floor noise would wake everyone in the room.

We overlooked these issues and had a great time but there was something else about the hotel that really annoyed me. The room had a costly amenities package that included breakfast and internet. This package wasn’t optional. In the other hotel these were included. As it turned out the breakfast was coffee and a cinnamon roll. One of the big features of the other hotel was the full breakfast and great service for this breakfast. The other charge, above and beyond, was parking for $30 per night which was included in the other hotel. Not to mention that this was valet parking so you have to tip the guy every time he goes to get the car for you.

All of this got me to thinking about how people price their CRM packages today. Most CRM companies have several levels of their product that start with a very low price without a lot of functionality. If you want more functionality you pay more. Many also charge for things like disk space and such. At Salesnet we made a conscious decision to provide the Salesnet product with all the functionality so that our customer would have no hidden charges. I wish our hotel had taken this approach. On my next trip to New Orleans we will stay at the hotel without the hidden charges. I hope that when you make your CRM choice you will choose the CRM product with no hidden charges “Salesnet”.

Until next week,

Good Selling

Having a Sales Mentor

This weekend was my 28th wedding anniversary. Several months ago I planned a romantic trip to New Orleans to celebrate. A few days before our departure my youngest daughter who just graduated from college came to us and said that she had a possible job offer in New Orleans and had set up her final interview during the time my wife and I were going to be in New Orleans. So guess what, she joined us for our romantic weekend. I have to admit, I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I was happy to be able to spend the extra time with my daughter but so much for romance.

As it turned out some really good things came out of this trip. First, we decided to stop in Mobile, Alabama and spend a night with a very good friend who just happens to have been my sales mentor. I met Jerry over 27 years ago and at that time he was one of the top sales people in the company I was working for. He is the best relationship sales person I have ever met and a true southern gentleman. In fact many times I have heard people say that when you look up southern gentleman in the dictionary, you will see a picture of Jerry. We had a great reunion and talked for several hours about business and sales in general. Jerry had a lot of good ideas about how to improve the market presence of Salesnet. This alone was worth the trip.

Second, visiting with Jerry got me to thinking about the importance of the sales relationship and how that has changed in the last 10 years. While people might say that today the relationship is not as important as it use to be, I would say that people still buy from people. I would agree that it is harder to develop the relationship. For one thing, more and more sales are done over the phone. In the Salesnet business almost all of our sales are done via the phone. In fact even the demos, projects, and training are normally done via web meetings. With this in mind, the challenge is to develop the relationship without ever meeting the customer face to face.

While all the things you do to develop a relationship still apply, except of course for the hand shaking and body language stuff, they are just harder to accomplish. This means that everything you do over the phone and off the phone in preparing for your meeting becomes much more important. Strategy, tactics, persistence, punctuality, honesty, attention to detail and all the other stuff are exponentially more important.

It's definitely something to consider when you are developing your sales strategy. Send your sales mentor stories to blog@salesnet.com and you could be featured in the next Salesnet CRM blog post!

While there is much more about this trip that I want to talk about it will have to wait until next week.

Good Selling.

Sales - Good and Evil

I just finished a very good book titled “The Pillars of the Earth’ by Ken Follett.  This is a great story that takes place in England during the Middle Ages.  The story is about Kings, Knights, Lords, Monks, Priest, Bishops, and Peasants and their struggles between good and evil.  While the author wrote this because of his love for Cathedrals built during this era, he included all the things that make for interesting reading: love, mystery, sex, war, murder, and the constant struggle between good and evil.  While this book is a page turner and shouldn’t take too long to read, it is not a quick read (973 pages).   

  

So what does this have to do with the Salesnet Blog? Let's focus on two themes in the book: the struggle between right and wrong and the cunning of one of the main characters in the book, Monk Phillip.  Phillip is a very honest monk surrounded by people inside and outside the church that are truly evil and will do anything to advance their agenda including lying, cheating, stealing, and even mass murder.  While Phillip struggles throughout the book, he stays honest to doing want is right and in the end good wins out over evil.         

Ok, so what does this have to do with Sales?  As most of you would agree, sales people have a bad reputation when it comes to being honest.  I have always believed that if you want to succeed in sales over the long term, you have to be honest.  You even have to be more honest than the average person because you have to overcome the stigma that comes with being in sales.  Always tell the truth and do what is best for the customers even if it means you don’t get the order today.  In the long run it will pay off.  One of my first sales managers many years ago said that I was a Boy Scout and that this was going to get in the way of my success in sales.  I wear the title proudly and have been able to be very successful in sales without losing my Boy Scout approach.  I’m not saying I never was less that fully honest with every client I have ever worked with but to the best of my ability I have always tried to be honest with the customer and do what is best for my customers.   I truly believe that in the long term this approach wins over the short term scorched earth approach.  

   

The second theme is the cunning of Phillip.  Phillip was constantly out thinking his adversaries.  He started as just a monk then became a Prior and then a Bishop.  He was able to build the tallest and most magnificent Cathedral in all of England and outlast and overcome multiple evil Kings and Earls.  He was almost always one step ahead of the enemy and while he didn’t win all the battles, he won in the end.  As sales people, we have to decide what type of sales person we want to be and if we want to be in it for the long haul.  If you are in it for the long haul, being honest is just as important as your cunning.     

Good Selling.

Is Your Sales Glass Half Full

This weekend I went to my youngest daughter’s graduation from college.  As you can imagine, I am thrilled to have my two daughters through college.   The keynote speaker at the ceremony spoke about what these graduates will face in the current job market.  She said that because the economy is so bad that they more than likely will not be able to get a job and that they shouldn’t just sit around and wait for their first job.  They should go to Europe, travel across the country, do social work, take up origami or a number of other things which have nothing to do with what they just spent four years of their life preparing for.  I was disappointed with this half empty view of their future and as a result, I decided I would do a blog about this Half Empty / Half Full subject.  

            

First let’s take the college graduates:  While the economy is bad, it is getting better and people are starting to hire again.  After many layoffs of senior employees with high salaries, many companies are looking to bring in young, new, inexpensive talent.  There has also been a rash of small companies started as a result of the layoffs.  These companies also need talent.  There is also great opportunity for the young entrepreneur college graduates to start new businesses.  While this may not be the best job market, I believe there are jobs for the people who want to work.  As an example Salesnet has added employees this year and we hope to add more in the coming months.  If you have just graduated from college and think the glass is half empty, you likely won’t find a job.  

I remember when I was about to get out of school, the economy was bad and the job market was weak.  In my last year of school I started sending out resumes to large companies that I thought I would like to work for even though I may not have had the type of degree that most of these companies required..  After sending out more than 50 resumes, I received one phone call.  The call was from Westinghouse Electric and the job was for an entry level field engineering position.  Even though I wasn’t qualified, I got the job.  Was I just lucky, maybe so, but a big part of being lucky is putting forth the effort.  I saw the glass as half full and for me it was.         

Second let's talk about sales people: Sales people have the choice of thinking that the current market is half full or half empty.  Let me borrow a story from a well know sales trainer.  He was invited to speak at a real estate company's sales meeting.   He was scheduled to speak to the group after lunch.  He decided to eat lunch with the group to get a feel for how the sales people were doing.  He sat between two of the company’s sales people.  He first turned to the sales person on his right and asked her how things were going.  She told him that the major employer in the area was laying off people and that her business was awful.  Even the people who hadn’t been laid off were concerned about their jobs and weren’t interested in real estate.  He then turned to the sales person on his left and asked her how her business was.  She said that the major company in the area had experienced some layoffs and many of these people were moving so she had been able to pick up a lot of listings and several of these people were looking for jobs in other areas and she was trying to help them find a new house or referring them to other agents in other areas.  She also said that a new small plant was coming to the area soon and that she had been able to sell a lot of houses to these people being transferred in to work at this plant.  She also said that foreclosures were up in the area and that for the first time she was now working foreclosures and had even started buying some of them for rental property.  Her business had never been better. 

      

Is your glass half full or half empty?  It's your choice.

Why CRM?

Companies purchase CRM products for many different reasons. Many are just looking to have a central place to keep all their contacts, some are looking to improve their ability to forecast business accurately, some are looking to improve customer support, some are looking at doing some email marketing with the CRM, and my favorite are the ones who are looking to improve their sales teams ability to sale more effectively. These companies are prime candidates for Salesnet. There are also many companies who don’t have a CRM.

I will use the car analogy to discuss the different situations. First let’s take the companies who have no CRM. This is like still using a horse and buggy to get from place to place. You can still get there but it will take you much longer and if you are in a race with your competition, you will lose. The cost is low but the value is also low.

Next we have the companies who use CRM as an electronic rolodex or filing cabinet. They just want to keep track of their customer’s contacts and maybe some notes about the customer and conversations they may have had with the customer. Believe it or not this is probably the largest group of CRM users. While there is some value gained by using CRM for this limited purpose, it is much like driving a Model T Ford. It is better than the horse and buggy but it is hard to get to where you want to go with this approach.

Third there is a group of CRM users who use their CRM to manage forecast, track activities, send email blast and maybe even some basic process capabilities. This is like driving a modern car. Likely you will have many new features in the car like antilock brakes, air bags, variable
speed wind shield wipers, CD players, and so on. The basic process capability in your CRM is like having a map in your car to guide you to your locations.

The last group takes advantage of everything that the third group has but also uses the CRM to drive sales effectiveness of the sales team. This is like having a GPS in the car. It makes it much easier to get to your location and even if you get off track it brings you back to the best route. Salesnet with its patented process engine is like having a GPS for your sales team that not only keeps them on track, it drives the correct activity and insures that the right data is captured at the right time with its also patented smart forms. While I can get to my destination without the GPS it sure makes it a lot easier if I have it. Until next week good sellng.

To Love Baseball is to Love Strategy and Statistics

Statistics may be defined as "a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty." ~W.A. Wallis



I’m often asked about sales statistics and/or analytics. Normal sales statistics are win loss ratios, win loss reasons and who your competition is when you lose or win. While these are very important there is much more to consider as you analyze your sales teams success and potential of future success.

Some people would say that it isn’t very important to analyze all the sales data while others people might say that they just don’t have the time or the capability to analyze the data. Before we get into the details of sales statics, let’s take a look at two of my favorite subjects outside of sales, baseball and fishing.

Why is baseball considered America’s past time? Why are we so attracted to a game that is so slow as compared to most other sports? I would say one reason is that it is a very strategic game with hundreds of decisions being made during the game to try to outwit the other team. I would also say that we love to look at all the statistics which help the managers decide who is going to bat, when to replace a pitcher, when to put the hit and run on, when to try to steal, when to bunt and so much more. Almost all of the decisions are based on statistics from past situations that are similar and who the players are and their past statistics. To love baseball is to love strategy and statistics. You also have to love the analysis of the statistics because that is what drives the strategy.

Not many sport fishermen keep statistics but I am one of the few. Every time I go fishing I log the water temp, weather, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, moon phase, where I fished, how I fished and detail about what I caught. These details help me to set my strategy for the days fishing and take a lot of the guess work out of my fishing strategy. This keeping of statistics has improved my fishing success 10 fold and I’m not the only one. Most people who are really successful at fishing keep a log and refer to it often. I recently read an article about the person who holds the previous and current state record for striped bass caught in South Carolina and Georgia (previous record 59lb., 8oz., current record 63lb., and 4oz.). In this article he talks about his fishing log and how no one ever gets to look at this log. I currently will let anyone look at my log but when I break the state record that may change.

If you are not keeping statistics about your sales success and failures you are bound to repeat your mistakes. Most companies keep the basic sales statistics but don’t take advantage of the many other statistics that can be captured, measured and analyzed. Beyond the won loss details you should measure things like, time in each step of your sales process, success rates at each step of the process, win loss ratios by product, industry, strategy, location, sales person, and competition. Over time you can develop alarms for any data that shows that a deal is at risk (i.e. too long in a step, technical or product issues, pricing issues, etc).

I know that many people don’t have the proper type CRM system to collect and analyze the sales data. To do this properly you not only need a CRM product to capture and analyze the data, you must have a well defined sales process and a CRM system that drives and enforces this process. Of course, I believe that Salesnet is the only system that truly drives your sales process with a patented workflow engine and smart forms to insure that the right data is captured at the right time. Until next time:

“Statistics can be made to prove anything - even the truth.”

Sales Strategy

When I did my first draft of this blog and sent it to the person who checks it for mistakes, she didn’t seem to be able to read it all the way through. I ascertained from this that the blog was just a little boring and so I revamped it with my favorite subject “Fishing”.

Strategy means a lot of different things for different people in different situations. Today I’m going to discuss strategy as it refers to big ticket, long sales cycles, complex sales, but first I would like to talk about fishing strategies. You might not think that fishing requires a strategy but I would beg to differ.

You need to:
1. Decide what type of fish you are going to fish for. (In Sales this relates to defining your target market.)
2. Decide where you are going to fish. (Define your territory)
3. Decide what you are going to fish with. Are you going to use live bait or artificial? If you decided to use artificial bait, what type are you going to use and how are you going to display it to the fish?
4. Determine how deep you are going to fish?
5. Determine if you are going to troll?  If you decided to troll, how fast and deep are you going to troll?
6. Determine what kind of fishing poles you are going to use?

All of these decisions are very important and interrelated if you expect to catch fish. If your focus is just to relax then you could just put a hook in the water and hope that a fish runs into the hook. Trying to sell without a strategy is like fishing with a hook in the middle of the lake with nothing on the hook or like an 80 year-old-friend of mind says “fishin’ on credit”.

When it comes to complex sales, I like to break down strategy into 4 different types: Direct, Indirect, Delay and Divisional. Many sales methodologies use different terms for these four strategies but they are very similar when you drill down into each strategy type. While I think it is important to understand what these four strategies mean, I think it is just as important to execute your strategy to the best of your ability. I have seen a few unsuccessful sales people who were good at developing the strategy and poor at execution but I have seen many more unsuccessful sales people who just didn’t have a strategy. Keep in mind that there is no silver bullet in sales and a sales strategy isn’t the silver bullet. In fishing you are always being offered the magic bait but as someone who has purchased many magic baits, there is no magic bait. Being successful at complex sales is a combination of Strategy, Tactics, Product Knowledge, Client Knowledge, Politics, Identifying Pain, Establishing Value and Execution.
Four strategy types:

1. Direct Strategy: This is the strategy that most sales people use even when they don’t think about strategy. You should only use a direct strategy if you have an overwhelming competitive advantage. This includes both a product advantage and a relationship advantage. If you have this overwhelming advantage, you want push straight ahead and close it as soon as possible before the competition has a chance to catch up or change the rules.
If the fish are biting where you are and you have the right bait, you want to catch as many fish as fast as you can before the fish stop biting.

2. Indirect Strategy: If you don’t have an overwhelming competitive advantage then you need to change the buying criteria to your advantage. Many sales methodologies suggest that you do this at the 11th hour so that the competition doesn’t have time to react. While I somewhat agree with this, I must caution you that if you do this too late, the deal may already be done. Timing is important and I would suggest that you have to decide when is the best time to change the buying criteria based on your customers’ situation.

An example of an indirect strategy in my world: many potential clients come to us wanting to purchase a CRM product to improve the efficiency of their sales team by managing their contacts, activities and forecast. We would normally use an indirect strategy and try to change the buying criteria to focusing on making the sales team more effective. If we can get the customer to make this the buying criteria, then we will win the business because that is what Salesnet is all about.

The fishing analogy here is if you don’t have the right bait or if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you may have to change the bait you are using and how you are presenting it to force the fish to bite. You may even have to move to a different location.

3. Delay Strategy: This is where you can’t win the business now but you could win this business if the project were delayed. For example: if you have a new product coming out in six months that would give you a competitive advantage but today you would likely lose, you may want to try a delay strategy.

If the fish are biting but just not on something you have to fish with, you may want to delay your fishing until you can get the right bait.

4. Divisional Strategy: This is where you know you can’t win the whole project but you could win part of the business. Sometimes this means taking on a partner to take part of the project. This is also the strategy to use if you decide to go after a small division inside a larger company. You know it is unlikely that you can get the larger companies business, so you get your foot in the door with a small division and work up from there.

If you don’t have the right bait or tackle to fish for striped bass today but you do have the right bait and tackle to fish for largemouth bass, then maybe you should just try to catch the largemouth bass and leave the striped bass for another day.

We could spend much more time on each of these strategies but as this is a blog and not a training session, I would just like to say that if you’re in complex sales and you haven’t thought about strategy, you are at risk of losing to someone who has.

Know Your Product

My inspiration for this week’s blog comes from a trip to a plant nursery. Last week during a driving rain storm, I decided I needed to drive an hour each way to go to my favorite nursery to buy some fruit trees. I could have purchased these at a number of local places or I could have purchased them over the web. So why did I drive 2 hours to buy these trees? Well it was because I needed to find someone who could help me make the right decisions as to what type and variety of trees would work best for where I am going to plant them. So I went to this nursery and received a lot of consulting around what I should purchase and how I should plant them, fertilize, and trim them. While the sales person was ok at doing the selling, he was excellent at the consulting. This trip reminded me as to how important it is for a sales person to know their products and services, and to act as a consultant for the customer. It is not enough to just be friendly and ask all the right questions. The customer should look to you the sales person as the expert.

Even though most of the sales training I have delivered over the last 20+ years has been about strategy, politics, pain, value, and so on; product knowledge is also a must to excel in sales. I have always had a strong technical background and a very good knowledge of any product that I have sold. I have always used this as one of my competitive advantages along with the more strategic items like strategy and value propositions. It is true that in many cases the sales person’s product knowledge is not a must but, it sure is an advantage. If you are truly going to be a consultative sales person you have to know everything there is to know about your product. Of course you also have to know about the customers business, industry, and competition. Tactical sales skills are also important but to really be outstanding in sales you have to have three things (Business Knowledge, Sales Knowledge, and Product Knowledge). It really is like a three legged stool. You can sit on the stool if it only has two legs but you have to be extra careful and someone can easily knock you off. Make sure you have all three legs for your selling. Good Selling