Sales people are great at “reacting.”  The customer puts a hurdle in front of us, we know how to respond.  The competitor does something, we know what to do.  Our management asks us to do something, we immediately (well OK–almost immediately) jump on it.

Most sales people are proud of their nimbleness and speed in reacting, handling any challenge put to them.

I guess I have the problem with the “re” part of reacting.  If we are reacting, it means someone else is acting–demanding our response.  It means someone else is setting the rules, defining the playing field, possibly defining the outcome.  Reacting always diverts us, it sets us down a different path than the one we were originally on.  Reacting slows us down.

Somehow, that makes me uncomfortable, I want to be driving the strategy, I want to be setting the rules.  I’d much rather have competition be forced to react to what I’ve done than to be forced to respond to them.

How do we get out of reacting?  This is where that ugly four letter word–starting with P—comes in.  It’s the word no sales person likes, it just wastes time. 

To stop reacting, we have to develop a Plan, yes that’s it, a Plan.  In fact before we even act, we need to have a plan in place. 

When I start talking to sales people about planning–whether it is an opportunity plan, an account plan, a territory plan, or a sales call plan, there eyes roll back.  I know what they are thinking, “Here’s a guy that doesn’t understand the time pressure I’m under, he doesn’t understand how hard it is to get things done.  He doesn’t know how nimble I am, how I can handle anything that comes up.  He’s just going to slow me down!”

It gets worse, I ask them to write the plan down — they can barely suppress the groans.

Well, I’m sorry, I’m not very sympathetic.  I get it, I get the pressures everyone is under–I see it every day, I have similar pressures.  But if we want to control our destiny–if we want to manage sales opportunities to have the shortest sales cycles and highest probabilities of winning, if we want to make sure we are maximizing our impact in the territory or account, if we want to make best use of our time and the customer’s, we have to have a plan.

Planning is nothing more than a disciplined way of thinking about how you are going to achieve your goal.  It is simply the process of laying out exactly what you need to do to reach the endpoint as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Planning makes our actions purposeful, not random.  It gets us out of react mode — it causes others to have to react to us.  Good planning accommodates shifts in course.  The plan is living, not just something we do at the beginning of a sales opportunity, or once a year when we are asked for a territory or account plan.  We update our plans, based on changes that occur as we have executed them.  I guess if you are nit picking, you might call this a reaction, but in reality, it isn’t.  When we react, we simply respond to the action of a customer, competitor, or someone else.  In adjusting our plans, we take stock of where we are, what has changed, and what we must do to most effectively achieve our goals.  It is always forward looking and goal oriented.  It keeps us focused on being effective and efficient.

Are you acting purporsefully, with a plan; or are you reacting?  You will more likely get to your goals if you have a plan of how to do it and thoughtfully execute that plan.

I’ve always hated the term, Sales 2.0.  I don’t know what it means, to me it’s always a conversation about great new tools and software systems, but not really about selling.  But I’ve succumbed. 

On Tuesday, August 24, 1:00 PM EDT, Tom Scontras, VP of Marketing for Glance Networks and I are having a discussion:  Learn The 3 Keys To Making The Successful Shift to Sales 2.0!  It would be great to have you join us in the discussion–click the link to register:  Register.  We’ll be talking about Sales 2.0 — as much as the whole concept bothers me.

Why am I so bothered by Sales 2.0?  It may be a bunch of my own mental blocks.  To me if we are talking about Sales 2.0, it seems that we have mastered Sales 1.0—whatever that was.  Was it CRM, but then why do we talk about CRM 2.0?  I look at much of the current sales literature and writing, including my own, and we are talking about the same issues we were talking about when I first started selling:  How do we become customer focused?  How do we establish deep relationships with our customers?  How do we become trusted advisers?  How do we create differentiated value?  Why do people dislike sales people?  The list goes on…….  I’ve written before about the “Ground Hog Day” effect, sometimes I feel like I am reliving the same conversations about the same issues year after year.  We change the buzzwords to make it sound new, but we still are working on fundamentals about our profession.

I think one of my problems with the discussion about Sales 2.0 is the discussion is always about a tool—a great piece of software that improves our effectiveness and efficiency as sales professionals.  Often, it seems that by simply using one or several of these software packages, our results would immediately change for the better.  But then I think back to CRM–then presented by many as the panacea to developing and managing customer relationships and improving sales productivity.  I looked up “tool” in the dictionary.  One of the definitions that really struck me was, “a device that aids in accomplishing a task.”  Don’t get me wrong, we actually use a huge number of software tools.  I couldn’t imagine running my business without a CRM system.  We couldn’t manage our communications with customers, prospects, and the larger business community without powerful marketing tools.  I would never pick up the phone and call a customer without using some of the great research tools.  Collaboration, conferencing and related tools improve our productivity tremendously. 

However, these tools are aids to our business.  We’ve focused on the fundamentals of our business:  What are our cores strategies?  What do we want to stand for, how do we want to be perceived by our customers and prospects?  Who are our target customers?  How do we help them?  What sets us apart from other alternatives the customers may be considering?  What are our core processes?  Do they represent best practice, have we refined and updated them?  How do we measure ourselves to make sure we are performing at the highest levels possible.  The list goes on, but our focus is on the core strategies and processes in our business.  We choose tools that aid us in the execution of those strategies and processes.

What about Sales 2.0?  Some of the tools are old school tools–we use handwritten notes a lot.  Is something wrong, should we be abandoning that and tweeting the customers (Hmm, what if they aren’t on Twitter?).  The telephone (albeit a mobile) is critical to communicating–within our team and to customers and clients.  I suppose we should be abandoning voice communication and moving to texting.

Where does Sales 2.0 begin and end?  Did we do a good job on Sales 1.0  (what was it?)?  Should I just skip Sales 2.0 and move to Sales 3.0?

Join us in the webinar, I’m looking forward to discussing these issues with you!  Register.

I’ve fallen into a trap, it seems my preferred mode of communication is becoming digital–that is, I email, tweet, text.  It’s so fast, convenient.  To tell you the truth, often it’s the most effective.  A lot of our communication is “asynchronous,” or one way.  Often, we just want to let someone know something or give a reminder.  We really don’t need to engage a person in a discussion.  It’s fast, it’s easy, I don’t have to worry about phone tag or voice mail.  In my busy world, I’ve come to rely on these tools as my preferred mode of communication.

But then, there are the times we use these forms of communication as a form of avoidance.  The other day, was one of those times.  I needed to have a difficult conversation with a colleague.  He had emailed a call report (Yes, I do look at call reports), it was for a complex deal we were working on with a large client in the Far East.  I was particularly worried about this situation, since both language and cultural difference made miscommunication with the customer something we were really worried about.

The email concerned my, my colleague had abandoned our strategy, for no obvious reasons, and was headed down a path that was completely different than the path that we had agreed on — and been working so hard to pursue.  As I read the email, my temper started to boil over, I was really angry at the shift and what he had done.  I immediately hit reply, and dashed off an angry response, escalating things to Defcon 5.

My finger hovered over “Send,”  I was about to send this missile, escalating things.  For some reason I stopped.  Instead, I picked up the phone, steeling myself for a difficult conversation.  I dialled his number, he answered, I replied, “Hi Marc, I just got your email about ……, I’m really concerned about the situation…..”

We had a long conversation, at times it was a little difficult, in the end it was a great conversation.  We had some disagreements, but at the same time we each had a deeper understanding of each other’s views and our course forward.  It was a tough conversation, it was confrontive and uncomfortable.  It was inconvenient–we were separated by 9 time zone’s, so the hour was not convenient for either of us.  However difficult and inconvenient, we both ended up in a better place.   After the call, I looked at the email, still on my desktop–had I sent it, I probably would have taken a difficult situation and made it even worse.  However difficult, picking up the phone and having a conversation enabled us to address issues and have a clearer understanding that we could not have achieved through an email battle.

Recently, I’ve been an observer to another similar, but very public battle  (Why “Reply All” was ever invented astounds me).  These two individuals clearly had a disagreement, but rather than solving it, they decided to lob missiles at each other and an audience of about 15 other people.  It started over a relatively simple misunderstanding, but rather than pick up the phone and talking through things, they chose to fire at each other through the “safety” of “Reply All.”  In three or four exchanges, the situation escalated, each person became stuck in their positions.  It finally stopped, the problem wasn’t solved, it was only made worse.  Both parties are not speaking—it’s impacting the whole group, we are having difficulty moving forward.  I’m not certain the damage can ever be repaired.  I called each person to understand what had happened.  “Why didn’t you pick up the phone and call the other person,”  I asked.  “It didn’t even occur to me,”  was the response—from both parties.

We talk so much about having conversations.  We talk about engaging our customers, our employees, our stakeholders.  Conversations imply a dialogue.  Conversations include emotions and context.   Conversations involve listening and, potentially, changing our points of view.  However convenient and instantaneous email, twitter, instant messaging and texting may be, they are monologues.  No amount of happy faces can add the necessary depth and context to a phone or face to face discussion.

As I reflect on so much of what I see going on today, we are losing the conversation–to some extent, it seems we are avoiding the conversation.  We have great tools that enable us to quickly and conveniently express our thoughts.  We can email, tweet, text.  In many cases this is appropriate.  But if we really want a conversation, pick up the phone.

I’ve been intrigued about much of the publicity around Hoover’s Near Here offering.  Apparently it’s an Iphone based application for a sales person to find new prospects close to them–wherever they might be.  I’m certain this is the first of many new services that will be offered by organizations like Hoovers  (In fact, LinkedIn and Tripit have been offering similar, but much lower capability for some time).

I’m intrigued about the offerings, but really wonder if this is the type of prospecting behavior we want to encourage?  The approach reminds me of those sales people who start out on the first floor of a building, knocking on every door in the building, trying to find prospects.  In fact the practice goes back to the door to door sales person.  Don’t get me wrong, in some cases these approaches may be effective.  Additionally, I think Hoovers is a great service, though I question the real value of this service.

All you have to do is read Chapter 1 of Jill Konrath’s SNAP Selling to understand the reality of customer’s lives today.  Customers are too busy, too time-poor to be bothered by sales people “dropping by.”   Sales effectiveness is driven by purposeful, value creating meetings, focused on the customer’s priorities and fitting their time.  It’s critical that sales people are prepared and focused in meeting with customers.  Shooting from the lip just doesn’t cut it any more.

So how useful are the location based prospecting tools?  Do we really want our sales people to “squeeze” in meetings with customers, just because they “happened to be in the area?”  Shouldn’t sales people, in fact, be doing a better job of planning their time further in advance, setting up purposeful meetings with customers “in the area.”  I can see these tools as offering great value if used as part of the weekly planning process.  For example, I’m going to be in Manhattan in 2 weeks, I could get great value out of a tool that might help me identify prospects I might see while I am in Manhattan—and I won’t drop in on them.  But I’ll call them up in advance, set a meeting, and make sure I have prepared for the meeting, making sure both they and I are using the time together as effectively as possible.

I don’t believe in the ad hoc, just in time sales call.  I don’t appreciate sales people dropping in on me, my experience is that customers feel the same as well.  I think these location based tools offer great potential, but more as a planning tool than as a tool to squeeze in the ad hoc meeting.  If a sales person finds they have spare time, rather than ad hoc meetings, they are probably better served by planning and preparing high impact meetings.

Am I missing something or off base?

Improving sales productivity is the Holy Grail of all sales professionals, executives, Sale 2.0 solution providers and every sales consultant.  We look for all sorts of tools and mechanisms to improve productivity.    Sometimes, it becomes very gimmicky.  Maybe we are making it too complicated.

I was apalled in reading IDC’s Sales Enablement Service’s recent survey of IT Buyers.  In this survey, 54% of IT Buyers said sales people were unprepared for their initial customer meetings.  For those seeking a silver lining, the 2010 survey indicated 54% were unprepared versus 57% for the 2009 survey.  Nothing to be proud of. 

While I don’t have the data, my experience indicates this probably extends far beyond IT Buyers to buyers in all disciplines.  Our own research, not just limited to the initial meeting, indicates that sales people tend to make 2-5 times more calls than necessary to close a deal.  A key finding in this research is they did not prepare or plan adequately for the call.

Why prepare?  Most sales people I meet are very bright, they are nimble and fast, why not continue to shoot from their lips?

I think the answer is simple, perhaps too simple.  When we aren’t prepared, we waste our time, more importantly we waste our customers’ time.  At a high level, we get it, but there are some important derivative impacts which we tend to overlook.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from sales people is they can’t get meetings with customers.  Sales people call to set meetings, leave voicemails, send emails—none are returned.  Sales people are looking for the secret of “How do we get customers to return our calls?”  I think the answer is simple, stop wasting their time!  Make sure the meeting is valuable to the customer.  How do we do this?  Again the answer is simple, preparation and planning—-doing your homework.

When we do get the chance to meet with customers, how well do sales people use this opportunity?  Too often, it’s not well.  Sales people are intent on pitching their products, customers are intent on describing their problems.  It’s difficult to connect.  What would be the impact if sales people could lead high impact meetings, where customers and sales people could really connect.  Customer’s would stop avoiding the sales person’s call—they would know their time won’t be wasted.  Sales people would probably have to make fewer calls, they are getting the information they need and connecting with the customer more effectively.

Sales productivity is simple, it’s all about being prepared  (The Boy Scouts have something here).  I don’t know if you will double your productivity, but I know you will improve it.  I know you will improve your ability to connect with your customers and create real value.  I know you will be more successful in selling.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been mulling over ideas on Lean Selling—-no not what you think.  Every sales organization I work with is lean—cutbacks have gotten rid of any “fat.”  People are busier than ever, managing larger territories, with ever growing quotas, and fewer support resources. 

I want to focus on lean from different point of view—Lean Selling Processes (yes, it’s tough for me to get off the sales process soapbox).  Many of your customers, in fact your own company, may talk a lot about lean in manufacturing, or other functions in the organization, but I think there is a lot about lean in selling that can help improve win rates, improve sales productivity and dramatically reduce sales cycles. 

I have a very simplistic notion of lean (after all I’m a sales guy, I have to keep it simple).  Much of lean focuses not on how efficiently you are doing the activity or process step itself, but on what happens in between those activities or process steps. 

Think about this from the point of view of a deal that you are working on.  Typically, there are a series of activities and meetings you go through in executing the sales process.  We all go through meetings or calls to qualify the customer, then needs discovery, preparing and presenting our solution, negotiating a close, and getting contracts.  We spend a lot of time focusing on how we improve our effectiveness in executing those meetings or process steps. 

In the typical complex sale, it may take months or even years to execute all those steps and to win — or lose — the deal.  But when you think about it, over those months, you’ve probably only actually spent hours or days working on the deal or with the customer.  There is a tremendous difference between execution time and wall time in any complex sale.  Execution time is the time we actually spend working on the deal, either with the customer or internally.  Wall time is the hours, days, months that pass from when we first started pursuing the deal to completing it. (Better explanation at end of post)

I worry a lot about wall time.  Somehow, I want to compress wall time as much as possible—perhaps getting it very close to execution time.  Why am I so worried about it, deals have a natural cycle, why not just live with it? 

Wall time is bad—for the customer and for our companies.  Long wall times represent tremendous opportunity cost to our customers.  They are buying something to solve a problem or address an opportunity.  The longer it takes to solve the problem or address the opportunity, the more it costs.  In extreme cases, those costs can mean the success or failure of the business.  In others, it means lost value they can bring to their customers, loss of their own competitiveness, and deferred or lost revenue.  It’s important to reduce Buying Cycle Wall Time for our customers.  They need to realize the benefits and value of the solution as quickly as possible. 

Wall time is bad for our sales efforts.  We want to accelerate our wins as much as possible, our managers want us to bring in revenue much faster.  We are always trying to reduce our sales cycle.  Additionally, the longer a deal goes on, the greater our exposure—competitors can strengthen their positions, customers can lose enthusiasm and cancel a project. 

Wall time is about “the spaces in between.”  For the moment, I’ll assume we are executing our sales process as effectively or as efficiently as possible.  Wall time is the time that passes in between those execution steps.  It’s important for us to think about that and how we can reduce that time. 

Right now, I think there are two major reasons for long wall time, at least that we can do something about.  The easiest part is how effectively we are managing our internal processes to move rapidly between execution steps.  How long does it take us to arrange and conduct the demo?  How long does it take for us to get the answers and respond to the customer’s questions?  How long does it take for us to develop, configure, and develop a proposal for the customer?  How long does it take to turn around a contract revision?  

There are lots of things we do internally, getting answers, preparing responses, getting approvals that take wall time.  These are all within the control or our companies and us.  What are we doing to increase our responsiveness, agility, and ability to reduce wall time for our internal work?  If we have channel partners, this is critical, reducing this makes it easier for them to do business with us, makes our solutions easier to sell, increases mindshare, and helps them win. 

Reducing wall time on the customer side is more difficult.  There is a lot that is out of our control.  But there is a lot that we can do to help them decrease wall time.  Many of our customers don’t know how to buy.  Many of our customers don’t know how to organize themselves to make a decision.  They don’t know how to overcome their own internal hurdles to justifying a solution, selling it within their own organizations.  Here is where sales professionals create real value.  We go through this with every deal we do, we have lots of experience in this.  If we leverage this experience and start becoming partners with our customers in facilitating their buying process, we not only differentiate ourselves from the competition, but we decrease their wall time.  They get to realize the benefits of our solution much sooner. 

I spend a lot of time writing about developing and executing highly efficient sales processes.  There is lots of discussion on this.  Somehow, I think we need to spend some time thinking about the spaces in between. 

Lean concepts can help us do this.  I think there is a lot we can learn from lean.  My friend John Cousineau knows much more about this.  He pointed me to this interesting tutorial.  It’s short, simple (after all I understood it).  Look at it and think about your selling process.  Spend some time thinking about the spaces in between, look at wall time an how you can reduce that—getting wall and execution time into closer alignment.

______________________________

Clarification:  I have gotten questions on what is wall time.  I realize I may have been a little obscure.  Here is some clarification:

1.  Execution time is that spent on doing activities related to the sales opportunity.  For example meetings with customers.  Over the sales cycle, I will spend an hour here, another hour there, over the entire cycle, maybe a few person-days.
2. Wall time is elapsed time.  For example, I started this deal on January 1, I close it on March 1, close to 60 days wall time.
3. My execution time may have been a few person days during those 60 days, leaving 57 days as the “spaces in between.”
   1. In lean term, it is the spaces in between are the process hold times.

Last week, I took the time to attend SalesForce.com’s meeting:  DreamForce ’09.   As a geek, I felt like a kid in a candy store–so many Shiny New Toys!  But as I wandered the sessions, I felt a strange sense of disconnect.  I kept struggling with, “what’s it mean to me, the sales person?”

There were lots of very interesting sessions about new features and functions, shiny new capabilities, lot’s more to tie me to my computer–entering or consuming data.  Because it’s SalesForce.com, there was a constant battle cry about “the cloud.”  I have to admit, from the point of view of a sales person, I didn’t get it, why should I care.  I suppose it’s important to IT folks, but I thought these tools were for me, so why did they spend soooooooo much time with their heads in the clouds?

The assertions about how the CRM tool increased win rates, shortened sales cycles, improved competitiveness, increasing revenue, and other benefits were flying.  I started wondering, maybe if we could just get the sales person out of the way, the CRM system could really improve business!

There was a lot of chatter about Chatter–an upcoming SalesForce capability, but which will surely be picked up by other vendors.  While I am a very strong advocate of Social Media and Networking, and use all the tools, I’m not sure this capability contributes to a meaningful workflow for sales people.  In an already data rich world, it just provides more and different data–primarily focused on internal communications.  But, I’m not arguing for or against–I actually think the capability is kind of cool.

I struggled with my sense of disconnect in the conference—and my issue is not with SalesForce.com or it’s tools, the same issues arise with all the CRM, SFA, and related tools.  (Actually, I really like SalesForce.com).

Somehow, it seemed to me the technology is crowding the sales person out.  The technology seems to be taking center stage, rather than the sales person.  It seems to me these tools should stimulate an increase in “thoughtfulness,” in the way sales people approach their jobs.  Instead, I got the feeling, in many cases the tools “dumbed down” the sales person.  In other cases, they just piled more onto already overburdened sales professionals.  While the dashboards provide a lot of interesting and valuable insight, in my experience, I see very few sales people using them or understanding them.

I could go on  (in fact the earlier version of this post did–but I realized I was dumping).  Perhaps people like me just shouldn’t go to these kinds of conferences.  From the point of view of sales professionals, technology doesn’t impress me.  I could not imagine being a sales person without having tools like a CRM or SFA system.  We use these tools and find they help us tremendously–but they help us because they free time for us to be more thoughtful about the strategies we develop and execute, the relationships we have with our customers.

Our tools do not increase our revenue or improve our competitiveness or shorten our sales cycles.  We do that.  The tools help us, but they don’t relieve us from the responsibility from thinking and executing with precision.

I like tools that help me do my job better.  Many of the tools under what ever version of Sales X.0 you subscribe to have tremendous capability.  But it’s not about the tool, it’s about the sales professional.  Let’s put the sales people back at the center of the discussion.

Everyday, I speak with sales executives about the issues of sales productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency.  For any sales executive it’s a critical issue, something they are constantly seeking to improve.

All the executives I speak with are bright, successful people.  They constantly are looking at their sales processes, the skills of their people, the tools their people use, and other things to get the highest levels of performance out of their sales people.  They are fine tuning, trying to find an edge, a few percent productivity improvement here or there.  They are looking to reduce sales cycle times, improve win rates.  They are looking at more effective and efficient ways of filling the top of their funnels.

As a self proclaimed sales guru, I spend a lot of time talking about it–even pontificating at times.  I’m not the only one, there are hundreds of blog posts every week, with everyone offering good ideas on improving the sales process.  Many of the Sales 2.o tools and vendors offer tremendous productivity and effectiveness advantages in executing the sales process.  There’s lots of training that teaches us how to prospect, qualify, discover, propose and close more effectively.

Yet at the end of all this thinking and good work, on a daily basis, I speak with executives that, while they can’t put their fingers on it, they just don’t feel they are getting as much out of the sales people.  The question I pose, in fact this is probably the starting place for any sales effectiveness assessment, is:  “How much of their time are they spending on ‘doing deals’ and deal related activities?  How much time are the spending on activities not directly related to selling?”  After all, that’s what we do—deals.  We find them, we qualify them, we understand what the customers want, we propose a solution, and we negotiate the close.  We do that as effectively and efficiently as possible.  We have all the latest tools, the best training, great management coaching, and we execute well.  When we don’t, we have all the consultants, trainers, and tools in the world to help improve our execution and productivity. 

But some how that misses something.  What we are focusing on is only a part of what sales people spend their time on.  To get a sense of where they are spending time and other areas to improve sales productivity, we need to almost do an old fashioned time and motion study  (sorry, that industrial engineering class in college made a lasting impression).

We’ve done that with a number of large organizations and every time, the results are startling.  Simplifying it, we basically look at how sales people spend their time.  Typically, we find sales people spend between 11% and 23% of their time “doing deals” or deal related activities.  Included in this is the time spent researching, prospecting, executing all the steps of the sales process in meetings with customers, the time spent preparing for those meetings, etc.   Usually, when we are looking at sales efficiency and effectiveness we are looking at these types of issue.  Stated differently, we are only looking at how sales people are spending 11-23% of their time.   Big initiative productivity improvements of 10/20/30% in how they execute the sales process are only impacting this 11-23% of their time.

What if we started looking at the other 77-89% of their time.  Those are the “hidden” time wasters, but eliminating or reducing those can have a tremendous impact on sales productivity, without changing anything about the way the execute their process.

Some of this time, we have no control over–things like holidays and vacations.  There’s a lot, though that we do have control of:

1.  Internal corporate requests of sales.  Lots of people in the organization contact sales people for help and customer input.  Product managers and marketing people are always looking for sales and through sales customer insight.  This is fantastic, the product managers and marketers are doing their jobs.  However, even though each request is small, taken together, these requests have a tremendous impact on people’s time.  In one Fortune 100 organization, we found requests for information from these people was taking up to 20% of the sales people’s time.  It was so easy to send an email blast to the sales force to get their views.  Product managers didn’t know their peers in the next cubicles were also sending request—and they were all sending followups.

2.  Meeting discipline.  We waste a lot of time in meaningless meetings.  We waste even more time waiting for those meaningless meetings to start.  It all adds up.  Think of it, 2 meetings a day, starting 10 minutes late, for about 236 workdays a year is just under 79 hours a week—almost 2 weeks a year per person of wasted time—waiting for meetings.  Think of it, if you could reclaim that time and apply it to sales related activities, without doing anything else, you’ve added 4% more selling time.  Based on the numbers I outlined above, that can be roughly a 20-30% increase in selling time, which is directly translated into productivity.  And this can be implemented at no cost!

Looking at the number of internal meetings on many sales people’s calendars, and knowing that 10 minutes is probably an understatement, think of the time that could be recovered only by starting meetings on time!  Add to that the number of meaningless meetings that are total wastes of time (read some of my other posts on that topic).  One European client has adopted a very novel approach to managing this problem.  All meetings start precisely on time and end on time, more importantly, meetings are optional.  So if people feel a meeting is a waste of time, they don’t come.  Imagine the number of meetings that are eliminated.

3.  Reporting discipline.  You read me rant about reporting.  Sure there are a lot of good tools that reduce the amount of time needed for reports, but I continue to be amazed by the amount of time sales people spend on reporting that is never looked at—but I’ve written about it before, needless to say, there are lots of opportunities to divert this time into selling related activities.

There are amazing and very simple solutions to freeing up sales people’s time to sell—dramatically increasing productivity.  Look at the amount of time spent in non-selling activities.  Much of it is necessary and a part of any sales professional’s job.  But there is tremendous waste.  I’m not suggesting you start managing by a stop watch, but the first pass at any sales productivity initiative needs to be decreasing time spent on non selling activities.  Make sure you are giving them as much time as possible to sell.  The next step is making them as effective and efficient as possible in selling.  There are hundreds of articles, lots of advice and many tools that focus on this.

By now, you probably know that I have a fairly short fuse and tend to get impatient fairly quickly–and sometimes unfairly.  However, I couldn’t restrain myself.  I’ve been tracking some conversations about sales reporting, CRM systems, and “useless paperwork.”

None of us like paperwork and bureaucracy.  Yet management has a justified need to be informed about critical things that impact the business.  A part of a salesperson’s job is to provide that information–on a timely basis and efficiently.  Many sales people rant “Do you want me calling on a customer or doing paperwork?”  Frankly, I believe that’s BS–an excuse.  I’ve never seen a salesperson or a manager prioritize paperwork over customer related activity.  When a sales person makes that complaint, I am often tempted to stop all their paperwork and see what changes–do the number of customer calls increase?  Do sales volumes increase?  In some cases that may be true, but I view that as more the exception than the rule.  Let’s be honest about it, paperwork (whether physical or electronic) is something we hate doing.  It has nothing to do with keeping us from calling on customers.

At the same time, I think many management teams require too much reporting  — on things they really don’t monitor or read.  If management is asking for reporting, then they should be using it to take action–and they should explain how they are using it to their people so they understand the importance.

Let me tell two stories:

Do you really need the report?  In a previous life with a very large technology company, I was part of a “sales simplification task force.”  I had the task of looking at some key management reports, trying to reduce the number of reports.  These reports took quite a bit of time to generate, they took sales people time, administrative time in consolidating and reporting, and distribution time – yes, this was in the days of paper — some of you may be too young to remember that.  Some of the reports had quite wide distribution–over 1000 people in many cases.  I did a rigorous job of analysis and went to people to ask them to prioritize reports and identify reports that could be eliminated.

Rather than eliminating reports, we got requests for even more reports.  All the current reports were “critical to running the business,” and “we need more information in these areas…”  Somehow things were going the wrong direction and I wasn’t simplifying things. 

I then took another approach.  I identified several of the most complex reports with the widest distribution.  In the next publication cycle, I omitted major sections of the reports.  Then I waited.  Across 5 reports, with total distribution of several 1000, I received 3 complaints and requests for the omitted sections.  Except for those 3 people, no one was reading the reports, but somehow having it was a “security blanket.”  We quickly eliminated those reports and started a process of eliminating many other reports.  The moral of this story:  Try arbitrarily stopping some reports and wait for the complaints.  If you get none, people aren’t using them–eliminate the report.

Never ask for anything unless you are going to use it:  In another previous life, I took over as EVP of Sales for another large company.  I wanted to understand the what the sales people were facing and get their views on how we could improve their effectiveness.  I asked all the sales people to send me a report answering about 5 questions.  I further told them to spend no more than 30 minutes on it and to keep it to about a single page.  I gave them 2 weeks to do it.  My assistant collected the reports, put them in a binder, and on the weekend I sat down to read them.  There were over 1000 responses, so it was a time consuming, but very important for me to get a feel of what was going on.  I came upon one report from a sales person.  For all intents and purposes, he wrote, “Mary had a little lamb….”  The report was meaningless, did not answer my questions, but he had provided a “piece of paper.”

On Monday morning, I called the sales person, introducing myself, “Hi, I’m Dave Brock, the new EVP of Sales.  I was reading your report this weekend…..”  You could hear the blood draining from the sales person’s face.  I went on, “I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things.  First, I want to thank you for your report.  You taught me something important.  It appears that previous management has asked you for a lot of reports, but hasn’t used them—that they wasted your time.  That’s important for me to know.  Second, I wanted to let you know that I will never ask for reports unless it is important for me in managing the organization and helping improve what we do.  I don’t want to waste your time.  By the way, would you mind rewriting your report and getting it to me tomorrow, I’m interested in your answers to my questions…..” 

I got the report the next day and somehow the word filtered through the sales force about my views of reporting and paperwork  (thank goodness for the grapevine).  The moral of this story is if you are going to ask your people to invest the time in reporting, make sure you are using the information, let them know how you are using it  (sounds a little like the previous moral).

What about CRM?

I’m tackling a small part of this—with trepidation, whatever your position on CRM it seems to generate controversy.

CRM is appropriately maligned by too many people.  It is a sales person’s favorite topic to complain about bureaucracy, it’s one of management’s favorite performance issues.

My thoughts:

I cannot imagine running my own territory and sales responsibilities (yes, a major part of my job is selling) without a CRM system.  It is a tremendous productivity tool, enabling me to accomplish more than I could without it.  I cannot imagine any sales professional who values their time, effectiveness, and relationships with customers not using some sort of CRM tool.  In my company, all our people use a CRM system.  I don’t require them to use it, each uses it because of the productivity it provides them as individuals.  If I took it away from them, they would not be able to accomplish their personal goals.

I think we miss this when we implement CRM systems.  The primary objective of a CRM system should be about improving personal productivity!  Oh and by the way, if people are using it for personal productivity, management can get some tremendously powerful reporting information—all passively.

Too often, CRM is implemented as a management reporting system, not a personal productivity system.  I think we miss the real value of CRM systems in doing this.  Also the justification for the system changes, it becomes an expense item rather than an item that can drive revenue growth.

I’m not naive, however.  Management has a need for information to manage the business.  The degree to which they can extract that passively from a good CRM implementation, the better.  However, there are times that management, rightfully, will require sales people to use the CRM system for reporting so management has the information they need to lead the business.  My advice to sales people, get over it, it’s part of the job.  Do it quickly and efficiently.  Leverage the tools to minimize the impact (Oh and don’t complain, at least to me, about how it is keeping you from calling on customers.)

Sales professionals and sales managers are on the same side.  We want to spend our time in front of customers, growing the business.  At the same time, we need reporting and information.  It’s part of the job, let’s just make sure what we ask for and what we provide is used.

I’m finished, I’m off my soap box, I prepared for the deluge of comments, including those that say “Dave, you just don’t understand!”  I may not and look forward to learning.

1. Set your own time limits to email.
2. Let calls to your mobile phone roll into voicemail—don’t interrupt what you are doing to answer it.
3. Let text messages queue up, look at them periodically, but not instantaneously.
4. Take some joy in looking around, watching what is going on around you, engage in the real world.