Yes, I’m on that soapbox again.  There have been a number of research reports released, all highlighting the decline in sales performance.  CSO Insights, 2009 Sales Optimization report is one that you should look at.

It’s disappointing, but not surprising.  My friend, Dave Stein wrote an interesting perspective, Declining Sales Performance:  Have You Had Enough Yet?

In many ways, the decline is understandable, though not excusable.  We are in the midst of overwhelming and rapid change, it’s difficult just keeping our noses above the water.  Customers are changing the way they buy, social media is making information (accurate or not, positive and negative) about our products and services more available, the role of the sales professional in advising customers is changing.  Finally, overlay all of this with the new economy.  It’s no wonder that sales performance is suffering.

In the face of everything that is happening, what do we do?  It’s often difficult to tell where to start?  Should we change our routes to market, making the shift from direct to indirect to eCommerce and back again?  Should we change our organizational structure? Should we change our recruiting profile?  Should we change our incentive systems?  What Sales 2.0 tools should we be deploying?  Should we embrace the latest greatest sales methodology and re-dip all our sales people?  The list can go on, the choices can be overwhelming.

The starting point for each organization will be different.  But in some sense, driving the highest levels of sales performance is like building a house, without a strong foundation, everything else is likely to be weak, and sustaining high performance will be difficult.  The foundation of selling is based on two key elements:

• Strategically:  Who are we, who are our customers, how do we want to be perceived by our customers, what do we want to stand for, what kinds or relationships do our customers want with us (how do they want to buy), how to we achieve our corporate ambitions, how will we provide leadership to our customers?  I’ve certainly not addressed all the questions, but this is sufficient for now.  These are tough questions, they can’t just be answered by sales–often they are answered for us by our companies. 
• Tactically:  How do we most effectively and efficiently execute our strategy?  What resources, skills, capabilities, programs do we need?  How do we measure and track individual/organizational performance?  We can come up with long lists of the tactical actions we must consider, but the core question is the first:  How doe we most effectively and efficiently execute our strategy—This is the selling process.

Let’s face it, the strategic questions are important, but we need to produce results today!  I don’t disagree, let’s focus on what we have to do today–but let’s not forget that we have to also invest time in the strategic issues.  Pragmatically speaking, the best starting point to improve sales performance is your sales process.  Many of you must be thinking, “Dave, I get this, why do you keep harping on this, why are you always on this soapbox?”  I get to interact with 1000’s of sales professionals every year.  Additionally, I spend time in conferences, looking at the research, speaking with other consultants, I keep seeing the same things:

• A shocking number of companies actually do not have a sales process. 
• Many companies have a sales process, but they don’t use it—or at least aren’t using it as effectively as they can.
• Many companies have a sales process, but it does not reflect current realities.  They put it in place several years ago and have not updated it.

Can your sales process stand up?  Are your people using it as effectively as possible?  Is management leveraging the process as a cornerstone to understanding and improving sales performance?  Make sure you can answer these questions in the affirmative, if any answer is No, then you are missing a tremendous opportunity.

Partners In EXCELLENCE has developed a free Sales Process Self Assessment.  It is a tool to help you assess your process, understand critical aspects of whether you are getting the most out of your process, and to help you to think about how you might improve performance.  For a free copy, click on the link:  Sales Process Self Assessment

I got this piece of LinkedIn Spam: 

Hello ,

 I’d like to connect to you to on my professional network on LinkedIn. I am a LinkedIn LION with over 4,500+ connections currently. I would be happy to connect so that we can mutually expand our network of potential contacts. Unfortunately LinkedIn has restricted the number of invitations I am able to send, so I am pushed to expand this way.   My profile is at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/Mr. X   If you are unable to open the above link just go to people search and put Mr. X.  Please feel free to send an invitation, I will always accept.   Send an invitation to: Mr. X@gmail.com     If you are not an open networker, I do apologize for this inconvenience.               If we are already connected, then ignore this mail.        All the best,  Mr. X

Don’t these deeply personal invitations to connect just warm your heart?  Doesn’t it make you feel good about the power of social networking?  Don’t you feel that your connection with this individual really means something  (Particularly, if you are already connected and are receiving this email).

When will people realize, social networking is about relationships, not quantity?  Yes, many of the relationships will be distant relationships, but are we just accumulating mailing lists (I think a lot of these people are and just feeding their spam machines)?

I like LinkedIn, it’s a valuable tool.  The value of the tool declines, when idiots like this start intruding on my time.

Referrals are critical for every sales professional.  No amount of cold calling will surpass the power of a great referral.  Yet most of us are pretty bad about nurturing and developing our customers as great referral resources.

Recently, I took the time to read Paul McCord’s “Creating A Million Dollar A Year Sales Income, Sales Success Through Client Referrals.”  I thought I had been doing a pretty good job in doing this myself, but I learned a lot from Paul’s book.

Paul creates a comprehensive process that ranges from setting expectations with customers on referrals, through earning referrals, getting the referral, and contacting the prospect.  He provides a comprehensive guide to the complete process.

The best thing about the book is Paul’s suggestions about using his process is that you adopt those parts that are most relevant to you.  There were some parts of Paul’s process, particularly setting the expectation of getting referrals up front, that don’t fit the way many of my clients sales people do business.  But I can clearly see how the entire process fits many industry segments and people who  sell  personal services.  Whether the entire process applies to you or not, there are some very important things every sales professional can learn from this book.

One of the things, that isn’t really obvious until you think about it, is that just asking for referrals doesn’t work.  Sure, the customer may say yes, but what you need is a referral that has real impact and creates the outcome you want–powerful introductions to the right people in the right way.  There is much more to getting those kinds of effective referrals than just asking.  Paul does a great job in decoding that and outlining a clear process–one that helps the referrer and gets you the result you want.

I really liked Paul’s’ discussion about earning the referral.  Clearly, unless we perform and create great value for the customer, we can’t expect getting a referral.  Another part, contacting the prospect was also outstanding.  Too often, in contacting referred prospects, we do that poorly, wasting the power of the referral and, perhaps, adversely impacting our relationship with the customer providing the referral.

Creating A Million Dollar A Year Sales Income, Sales Success Through Client Referrals provides sound advice for any sales professional that wants to build their business through referrals.  This book is different from similar books that I have read.  It provides lots of great tips and advice.  It’s pragmatic and something you feel you can immediately execute.  Buy the book and read it, you’ll learn something. 

Oh, by the way, when you do pass this along, please introduce me to the person you send this to.  I’d appreciate the referral!

I’m a great fan of Customer Experience Design.  Unfortunately, most of the work in customer experience design tends to be focused on web design, user interfaces and product design. There is some interesting Design Thinking work being done in business process/strategy.  I think as sales professionals we need to rethink the Customer Buying Experience.

Actually, it’s already being done, but, it’s being designed without us!  Social media and networking create means by which customers are already redesigning their buying experiences.  Axel Schultze wrote an outstanding article, Sales Process 2010, that outlined much of this.  Social media isn’t the only place we are seeing customers redesign their buying experiences.  There is some very interesting work being done by procurement thought leaders and in supply chain management.  They are reassessing how they buy, how they work with suppliers, and how they (perish the thought) collaborate with vendors.

Change is happening all around us.  It’s going to happen regardless of what position we take, the train has left the station, we need to find a way to jump on board.

The challenge, however, is we are all prisoners of our own experience.  It is difficult for us to think about how to change radically, but we tend to evolve incrementally.  If we changed our approach and our thinking, we might be able to drive some profound changes and contribute to what is already being done. 

Customer Experience Design offers an interesting way for sales professionals to redesign how we work with customers.  Imagine the insight that we might get if we applied these principles to the Customer Buying Experience?  It does produce some interesting opportunities. 

In some ways, things like this have been done before.  We have seen profound changes in relationships in working with customers on their key/strategic account programs.  In those instances, the conversation started with, “How would you like us to sell to you?”  Recently, we brought some functional executives in front of sales people (in this case CIO’s), we posed the same question, how would you like to be sold to?  The conversations all brought profound insights to the sales teams and changed the way these customers were approached.  They built closer relationships, built greater value to the customers, produced greater revenue to my clients, and reduced their cost of selling.

Start your Customer Buying Experience Design in a small way.  As outlined above, consider focusing on your key/strategic accounts.  Engage the key people in those customers in a different conversation—not about buying your products, but ask “How would you like us to sell to you?”  Focus on the process, the quality of interaction, the coverage model.  Examine how they want to buy and what their ideal buying experience might be.  Test some new ideas with them–let them help you design the process.  Once you get their insights, look at what you can change and how closely you can achieve the design parameters.

Alternatively, leverage your Customer Advisory Board  (surely you have a Customer Advisory Board).  We usually talk to them about our products, sometimes about our policies, sometimes about our strategies.  Reserve one meeting with them to talk about their Buying Experience.  Talk to them about their buying experience, leverage them to help redesign it.  Or get customers representing a key function together (for example CIO’s).

It’s in your customers’ interests to engage in these discussions.  Afterall, aren’t all of them looking for a better buying experience?

These are just starting points. Customer Experience Design and Design Thinking is much more comprehensive.  I think there are great applications to this for Sales.  We have to look at things differently, these approaches provide tools that enable us to do this. 

We’ve been spending a lot of time talking to people in this space.  We’re still new, but we’ve gone a few steps down the road.  If you need help or have questions, you know where to call.