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.