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.

A few weeks, ago, my post on The Most Used – Useless Metric In Sales created an avalanche of comments and emails.  Many of you commented on a variety of “useless metrics” you have experienced.  One of the most popular categories of “useless metrics” was Activity metrics.  Activity metrics are very popular, they’re easy to establish and measure.  There are all sorts of activity metrics:  Number of outgoing/incoming phone calls handled per day/week, number of customer meetings per day/week, number of proposals, number of sales opportunities in the funnel — the list is endless.

The problem with activity metrics is that all they measure is activity (dughhhh), they don’t measure the appropriateness, impact, or outcomes of the activity.   Activity metrics tend to measure what you’ve done, not whether you have moved the opportunity forward in the sales process.  In establishing activity metrics, it’s important to understand the behaviors they drive and to assess whether they are motivating the right outcomes.   It’s important to define the metric in terms of the results you are trying to achieve.

As I mentioned, Activity Metrics show up in various forms.  They can be goals that management sets on number of calls, meetings, proposals.  Activity also shows up in sales processes, one of my favorites is “Meet with decision-makers.”  For what purpose?  OK, I met them, I said “Hi,” they know who I am and what I am selling.  Did I bother to ask them their needs and priorities?  Did I determine their role in the decision making process?  Did I ask them about their attitudes toward us and the competition?  Do I understand why they are involved and what a personal win might be?

Another example of activity oriented metrics run amuck, requires me to reveal a deep dark secret from my formative years as a sales person.  Early in my sales career, my manager in the hopes of motivating the team to spend more time with customers, set the following metric:  There was a $10/day fine, if you were in the office between 8:30-4:30, unless you were entering an order, attending a meeting, or researching a sales opportunity.  You can guess what happened, we were already spending as much time with customers as we could–the team was good, we were really driven to make our numbers, we knew that we had to meet with the customers, but they only had the time to see us a certain amount of time, try as we might, we couldn’t fill all that time with cusotmer meetings.  Well, we solved the problem, the reality was, at least one day a week, we would have to pay $10 to our manager.  My teammates and I thought about it, we figured, why not spend that money in a way that we wanted to—that summer, every Friday, we ended up going to the movies–I’ve never seen so many movies.

Our manager’s intent was right, but the way the measure was implemented motivated unanticipated behavior.  When she understoond what we were doing, she quickly  stopped the metric, we started coming back into the office and doing things that would get us more meetings.

Often in doing reviews with sales people who have strong activity measures, I see much of the same thing.  People say similar things, “It’s easy to make my ‘call number,’  I can dial the phone so many times, I can talk to someone, they are often people that I know will never have an intention of buying, but I talk to them because I make my number.”  It’s hard to criticize them, they are doing exactly what their managers want them to do.

The problem is the way the metric is defined.  I actually like activity metrics.  Activity metrics, properly structured are great forward looking indicators.  Good activity metrics can give you great insight into your likelihood of meeting your overall business goals.  As an example, I measure myself on a couple of key activity metrics, but they are defined in a way that focuses me on achieving my objectives, not just accomplishing the activity.  For instance, I have to have a certain number of calls or meetings each week.  Those calls have to be with a certain type of person and produce very specific outcomes.  It’s a key metric for me.  I know if I achieve my goal, that I am highly likely to achieve my overall quota.  What makes this different though, is the activity is very well defined in terms of its purpose and the outcome.  Without this, it could be useless.

There’s another problem with activity metrics, it’s the way managers use them.  Too often activity metrics are used as a weapon (Metrics — The Secret Weapons Of Sales Managers) rather than as a diagnostic.  Since Activity metrics give you a forward looking view of the business, when an individual or team is not achieving the metric, it’s important to look at the underlying reasons.  Have there been fundamental shifts in the business or markets that are causing people to not achieve the activity goals?  Are there specific skills problems that might indicate a need for coaching or training?  Does the person understand the selling process, are they executing it well?  Activity metrics are great indicators and warning signs, they are not ends in themselves.

Too often, we also see too many activity metrics.  A sales person has to make a certain number of phone calls, have a certain number of meetings, submit a certain number of proposals, have a certain number of opportunities.  Too many activity metrics confuse the sales person on what the real priorities are, the key goals.  I believe there should be, at most, 2 activity measures.  The trick is determining the 2 that have highest impact on what you want to achieve.  It requires real study to understand what really drives your business.

Activity metrics can be very powerful.  Great sales professionals establish personal activity metrics to guide themselves, improving their impact and productivity.  Great leaders put in place appropriate activty metrics and use them as diagnostics.  When you are putting in place these types of metrics make sure you:

1. Clearly define what you are trying to achieve with the activity–what outcomes, what results?  Make sure the activity focuses on achieving something, not just getting a “tick mark.”
2. Re-assess activities you have in your sales process.  Make sure they are clearly defined.  Again focus on achieving outcomes, not going through the motions.
3. “Game” the activities.  Look at how the sales people might behave in achieving the activity goals.  You don’t want them spending afternoon’s in the movies.  If in gaming them you are getting the behaviors and outcomes you want, then you probably have a good metric.
4. Realize the activity metrics are powerful indicators and warnings–they are great diagnostics.  Use them for this, look at the underlying reasons for not achieving a metric.
5. Keep them to a minimum, use no more than 2.  Make sure you have identified the 2 key activities that really drive your business.

Make your activity metrics useful and you will really drive business growth!

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 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?

Social media is changing the way our customers buy and the way in which we engage our customers.  Before customers even see us for the first time, they have a great deal of information—not necessarily knowledge—about our company, our products, and our competition.  I am often asked, “How should sales professionals be engaging in social media?”

The short answer is, I’m not sure—but every sales person must be gaining familiarity and leveraging social media.  Social media and social selling is changing everything we do, the pace varies by industry, but every sales person must get familiar with how the world of engaging customers is changing.

The most powerful way sales people can be using social media is to listen—listen to the market, listen to customers, listen to competition, even listen to their own company.  Tools like Twitter, Blogs, even company sites on Facebook and LinkedIn can give the sales people tremendous insight about what’s going on in their customers’ industries, in their customers’ companies, and in the industry.  They provide great insight into what people are saying about our own companies and competition.  Leveraging social media is critical for all sales people in being informed and competitive.

Sales people should leverage social media for their own personal development.  There are great resources  where sales people can learn more about business, professional selling, and things going on in their industries.  Sales people should find and subscribe to a few of their favorite blogs.  They should join some groups and participate in discussions on LinkedIn.    They should start commenting both in LinkedIn, on Twitter, and in some of their favorite blogs.

I’m always asked the question, should sales people be writing blogs?  My answer is, “It depends—but probably not.”  I know this sounds wrong, and I’ll probably change my position over time.  I believe companies need to have strong blog presence, positioning themselves and their solutions, engaging customers in new conversations.  The issue is, should sales people be doing that?  With a few exceptions, I don’t think it’s a great use of sales people’s time.  I also don’t believe most sales people are trained to be able to do this as effectively as others in the organization.  Finally, I think sales time is best spent in engaging customers in specific situations relevant to their business.

Finally, sales people need to be cautious.  Social media will absorb as much of your time as you let it.  You can become consumed with it, not spending time focusing on specific opportunities with customers.  Sales professionals don’t let the time the spend with social media become an excuse for failing to produce results.

What do you think?  How does social media impact sales professionals?  How should sales people be leveraging social media?

I’m getting all kinds of messages and emails.  I must be wearing people down with my incessant pleas for organizations to update their sales processes–to make them really work, to assure they reflect current realities, priorities, markets, and competition.

A number of sales managers have contacted me asking for further guidance.  Last week, I got an email, saying, “Dave, I buy what you are saying.  I want to make certain my team is executing the sales process as effectively as possible. What should I be doing to make certain they are doing this?  How do I fit this coaching into my already overloaded schedule?”

It’s a great question, here are some quick thoughts.  They are focused on coaching the sales process, not on the many other areas managers might also coach and develop their sales people on.  Here’s what I’ve found works:

1. Integrate coaching into your daily activities and business management processes.  Too many managers think of “The Coaching Session.”  Coaching should be a natural part of what you do every day.
2. One aspect of coaching the sales process is assessing the opportunity strategy.  As sales managers, we want to know what’s going on with key deals or opportunities.  Every manager does deal reviews.  Well the sales process is the foundation for your deal/opportunity strategy.  Use the sales process as your “checklist” to look at the deal.  By doing this, you kill several birds with one stone: 
   1. You work with the sales person in making sure she has the strongest strategy in place and is developing actions based on the most appropriate next steps.  You gain some understanding of where the deal is and it’s likelihood of closing.   
   2. You reinforce the selling process and how the sales person should use the sales process to build winning strategies.  By constantly doing this and probing, using the sales process, the sales person will start anticipating your questions and be prepared to respond–using the sales process.
   3. You probably don’t have the time to do detailed reviews of every opportunity.  In reality, managers must manage the process, not the transactions.  In your deal review, if the sales person is executing the selling process well, executing a winning strategy for those opportunities you review; you can be reasonably confident they are doing the same on all their other opportunities.  If they aren’t using the sales process, then you will be forced to review every deal to have the same confidence.
3. Another aspect of coaching the sales process is the pipeline or funnel.  This is simply the collection of all the deals a person is working on (or the team), wherever they are in the sales process.  I won’t go further with this–the topic is worth a bunch of posts in the coming weeks—stay tuned!
4. Consistency counts, use the sales process for every deal review and pipeline review.  Initially people may not be prepared, but if they see you using the process every time, they will be prepared for each review.  A funny thing happens, if they start using it to prepare for reviews, they suddenly start internalizing it and use it on a daily basis in developing and executing their sales strategies.

“Great advice Dave, but you still have provided me a whole lot of help on how to actually do this, I need specifics!”  At least I hope a lot of you are asking this question.

It’s useful to really get into the weeds, a blog post is not sufficient to show managers how to leverage the sales process in their daily coaching.  We’ve developed a Free Tool for managers to use:  Sales Manager’s Guide To Coaching Opportunities.  I do 100′s of these reviews every year.  I’ve captured what I do to prepare for, conduct, and follow up these reviews.  It’s a starting point that you can adapt to fit your style and business.  Click on the link:  Sales Manager’s Guide To Coaching Opportunities, and I’ll send you a copy.

Remember, this is most effective if you have a strong selling process in place.  If you missed it, get our free Sales Process Self Assessment, so you can check your sales process to see how strong and current it is.

Try using the guide for the next 30 days, you’ll be amazed at how much it improves your understanding of the deals your team is working on, and how much it improves their ability to execute the sales process, winning more deals!

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.

When I speak to sales people, this is the second biggest complaint I hear.  Sales people have trouble getting meetings.  This isn’t just with prospects, but also with customers we know well.  Let’s face it, everyone is time-poor.  Everyone has more on their plates than they can possibly deal with, and the pile just gets bigger. 

In  the face of customers being time-poor, in order to get a meeting, we have to have a compelling reason for them to invest their precious time in us.  This probably bears repeating with emphasis:

In order to get a meeting, we have to have a compelling reason for them to invest their precious time in us!

“Thanks Dave for pointing out the obvious, but you don’t understand,” is a typical response I get.  They go in, “Our products are really important for them to understand.  I really need to get in and pitch them our products, but I can’t get that opportunity!  How will I ever sell anything if the customer won’t see me?”

Well, you probably know where I’m headed with this, so I might just as well go there directly.  Well almost, I got on this soapbox when I had the opportunity to preview a great little eBook by Tibor Shanto, Six Ways To Get More Sales Appointments.  He has some great ideas and provided a good excuse for me to get onto another soapbox, so here goes.

As a profession, we’ve conditioned our customers remarkably well.  They know, based on what sales people do all the time, that we’re just in there to pitch them on our products.  The better among us, will ask the few obligatory questions  (because we’re told we have to), but really it’s telling them about our wonderful products!

Customers get that, that’s why they won’t meet!  They don’t care or don’t know they should care about what we want to pitch.  They care about achieving their own goals and objectives.  They want sanity in their own lives and jobs.  Until we focus the conversation on What’s In It For The Customer, we’ll never get them to invest their time on us.

So how do we come up with the compelling reason?  Sales people have to do their homework, before we even try to approach them, we have to understand who they are, what are they likely to be concerned about and why, how are they likely to be measured, what’s going on in their company that’s likely to impact them, what’s going on with their customers that’s likely to impact them, what’s going on in their industry, and the list goes on.  This research gives us insight into the compelling reason.  With the availability of information on virtually everything and everyone on the Internet, it is not difficult to get enough insight into what makes them tick. 

One of my greatest introductory calls was on my now good friend Jerry Johnson.  When Jerry was a senior executive at Kodak, I called him.  I had barely gotten my name out of my mouth, when Jerry calmly stated, “I don’t talk to consultants, you have 30 seconds to tell me why I should invest my time in you.”  Fortunately, I had anticipated that, my preparation helped me understand that would be Jerry’s likely response, and my response earned me another 5 minutes, then another 25 minutes.  It was the start of a long and mutually profitable business relationship and a valued friendship.  None of this would have happened if I hadn’t prepared and done my homework.

Sales people don’t like it when I say this.  It’s so much easier for us to shoot from the lip, after all, we’re smart, glib and fast on our feet.  We can talk our way into and out of anything.  Plus, we don’t have the time to do it—don’t forget we are time poor too!

I’ve become very impatient with the “I don’t have time to plan” excuse.  Sales people can find the time to try all sorts of different approaches, to nag people terribly on the phone, to make sales call after sales call to dig themselves out of problems created because they weren’t prepared.  Sales people have time to do all those things, but they don’t have the time to plan and do things right in the first place.  Well, it’s just flat wrong and an excuse.  Time spent in planning and preparing will always shorten sales cycles and maximize impact on the customer.

So, we’re back to planning and preparation.  There is just no getting around it.  But do it well, and you will have the compelling reason for customers to invest the time.  One thing, before you pick up the phone and make that call to get a meeting, test yourself—can you state the compelling reason in terms that are meaningful from the customer’s perspective.  If you can’t, you’re not ready.

Well, I’ve said my piece.  Tibor Shanto has some other great tips in getting customers to see us.  Even better, he’s making them available for free in an eBook at SalesMarks.  The book, Six Ways To Get More Sales Appointments, provides sound advice.  Take the time to read it!.