There are a huge number of tools available to help sales professionals be more effective and efficient.  Properly used and implemented they can have a profound impact in improving sales performance.  At the same time, used improperly, the provide the potential of causing great problems or creating crap at the speed of light.  Every tool has the opportunity, properly used to have great impact or improperly used to have great negative impact.

Too often, however, it seems the implementation of the tool in itself, is the end rather than just a means.  People implement CRM thinking “because we have CRM, we have much greater insight into our customers, pipelines, opportunities, and so forth.”  Or implementing powerful research tools to provide great sales intelligence–without providing a foundation the sales people can intelligently use these tools.  Or providing great content and email marketing tools that are used to blindly inflict content on people who have no interest or desire to get that content.

 We too often forget about the fundamentals–the basic blocking and tackling, the foundations of sales effectiveness.  None of these tools replace the need for this, but the amplify the impact of the sales person using it.  A high performing sales person, executing a well defined sales process will get phenomenal benefit and create much more value using these tools.  They will be able to leverage their time and presence in ways they couldn’t without the tools.

We have to continue to focus on building a sound platform based on the fundamentals:  Do we have a well defined sales process aligned with the customer buying process?  Do we know how to develop and execute high impact sales strategies?  Do we have the knowledge and business acumen that enables sales professionals to connect with their customers discussing their issues, concerns or helping them discover new opportunities?  Do we understand what customers value, how we create, communicate, and deliver differentiated value?  Do we understand how to listen and really understand?  Do we have the ability to confront the customer–appropriately, to ask for money in exchange for value and to defend that value without resorting to discounting?  Do we understand how to manage our time, leveraging it for maximum impact?  Do we understand how to prospect and gain the attention and interest of people we may have never met?  Do we understand how to create, build and maintain relationships?  Do we understand how to trust and be trusted?  As managers, do we understand how to analyze performance, how to coach and develop people to achieve their full potential, how to measure performance and hold people accountable for that performance?

All of these are the foundations of high performance selling.  Implementing tools, whether they are CRM, sales intelligence, analytic, content management/delivery, presentation or other tools on this sound foundation can magnify the impact and effectiveness of the sales team.

Absent these foundations the tools can be harmful.  Not only do we waste time, resource,  money on tools that aren’t used, used well, or used properly.  But we run an even greater danger–used improperly they can have exactly the opposite affect.  They can alienate and create great distance with customers.  They can magnify poor strategies and stupid execution.  Recently, I encountered a sales person selling a marketing/lead development tool–his thoughtless use of the tool he was selling caused him to spam 1000′s of people.  My feedback to him was that his use of his tool made me certain that I would never use his tool and would actively recommend people avoid his company.  He didn’t seem to understand.  This week, I get prospecting calls from a person selling a tool that was to provide great insight into customers.  His first question was, “What does your company do?”  I get endless offers for content, newsletters for thing I never requested, things that I have no interest in. 

I talk to people who are considering the acquisition of very powerful tools.  I ask a few questions.  For example, powerful analytic tools–but are you asking the right questions?  The quality of the analytics is dependent on the quality of the question you are applying the analytics after–or the quality of the data being analyzed.  Bad questions, bad data give you terrible answers.  The greatest presentation, storytelling, whiteboarding tools are meaningless if your people do not understand the customer, what they value and how to create value.

I can’t imagine any high performing sales professional not leveraging these tools to their full potential!  They are very powerful.  But the tools are the means, not the end.  If you don’t have a strong foundation in place, they are worse than useless.  Before wasting time, resource, and money on these tools, make sure you are building on a strong foundation.

I’m constantly amazed at the calls I get.  People calling me, with little idea about who I am, what I do, what my company does.  I see this from sophisticated people in large organizations to those people dialing for dollars.

Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not my ego speaking, but I’m a really easy person to research.  Do a Google query, a lot of stuff about me pops up to the top or near the top.  In LinkedIn, there’s a complete profile with links to my blog, my company’s web site, and twitter.  So it’s really easy to find out about me and to be prepared to engage me in a conversation.

I’m not alone.  It’s easy to get insight for virtually everyone — or at least their company.  A Google query, LinkedIn, Facebook–these are just starting points.

If we are trying to connect with our prospects, if we are trying to engage them or maximize the impact of each call we make, before you pick up the phone, do some basic research.  On every call I make, even to people I know very well, I have at least two screens open on my computer, the person’s LinkedIn profile and their company’s website.  With some, I may have other information available.  Having that insight at my fingertips enables me to accomplish more in each call.

The reverse works, as well.  When I get a call from someone I don’t know, I do two things–I bring up their LinkedIn profile and their company’s website.  I quickly skim them to get some measure of them and what they do.  It’s important to understand how credible they are.

Realize, the people you are calling are doing this with you.  If you don’t have a current LinkedIn profile, you are immediately disadvantaged.  If your company doesn’t have a web presence, you may be discounted as not credible.

Selling is tough!  It’s incumbent on every sales professional to be as prepared as possible.  When we get through to a prospect, we want to maximize our impact.  The more we know about the individuals and companies we call, the more effective we can be.  We want to be as credible as possible when we reach our prospects.  Our “social” presence and that of our prospects are critical tools to enhance our productivity and impact.

Before you pick up the phone, make sure you have your prospect’s LinkedIn profile and website in front of you.

When you get a call, immediately bring up the profile of the person who is calling and their company’s website.

We all take shortcuts.  We want to find the path of least resistance, we want to get to the goal in the shortest time possible.  It’s natural human behavior.

Too often, however, the shortcuts we take are the wrong ones.  It’s too hard to research a company and individual before a prospecting call, so we just call and talk about the only thing we know–ourselves and our products.  We’re pressed for time, so we don’t prepare for a sales call–we shoot from the lip, after all, we’ve made hundreds of calls before.  It takes a lot of time to develop a sales strategy, so we just go to meetings, respond to the customer in meeting after meeting, hoping they will buy at some time.

But it turns out, these aren’t shortcuts.  In fact, they take more time, they slow us down, they adversely impact our effectiveness.  We make unresearched phone calls, blabbing on about ourselves, not understanding the customer need, wondering why we can’t get a meeting with a prospect. We ramp up the number of calls and emails.  We find ourselves making dozens to hundreds of calls, only getting a couple of meetings.  

If we took a little time to research—Are we calling customers in our sweet spot?  Do we understand what they might be interested in, based on researching their companies and them?  Have we thought of new ideas, insights that we might provide which would have a great impact on them?  Have we thought of the questions we want to ask to better understand what drives them?  It takes time to do this, but it enables us to connect more effectively with the prospect.  As a result, the number of calls we have to make goes down tremendously.  And when we talk to the prospect, they’re engaged, they’re interested, they want to hear what we have to say.  They may invite us to a second meeting, then another….

Sales call planning—we know we’re supposed to do this, but we’re busy, and it’s just another call–we’ve made hundreds.  Research tells us that sales people make as many as 3 times the number of calls necessary to close a deal.  The reasons, poor preparation and execution.  Think about the last call you went on, after the call did you say to yourself, “I forgot to ask this,” or “I should have done this.”  This doesn’t happen if you prepare and plan the call.  Think about it from a customer point of view.  If we use their time poorly, if we aren’t prepared, they don’t want to meet with us.  If they don’t meet with us, they may not understand our solutions and might not buy from us.

We don’t take the time to think about our deal strategy–again, we’ve done lots of deals before, we can do it on autopilot.  But after a number of calls, we’re surprised–there are people involved that we didn’t know, we don’t really understand the customer buying or decision making processes.  The competition does something unanticipated, we didn’t really understand the customer requirements.  We didn’t take the time to develop a business justification then find the customer is struggling to get funding approved.  We find there’s a lot of stuff we need to know, we have to schedule more meetings, but the customer is impatient—”Why didn’t you do this the first time around?  We’re almost finished with our evaluation, you are slowing us down?”  or worse, “You really don’t understand what we are trying to achieve.  We feel more comfortable with your competitor?”

It turns out the “easy” shortcuts aren’t really shortcuts at all—we have to re-do things, we have to add more meetings and more time.  We test the prospect’s or customer’s patience, we never get their confidence or engagement.  The odd thing about these “shortcuts” is we never have enough time to achieve our goals if we keep using these shortcuts.

The real shortcuts involve work—research, planning, preparation.  Understanding our customer and competition, taking the time to understand what they need.  Figuring how we can strengthen our competitive position and create great value for the customer.  Thinking about how we can accomplish more in each call, how we can compress the buying/selling cycles.

Are you taking the right shortcuts?  Do they really enable you to maximize your impact in engaging and creating value for your customers?  Do they improve your ability to win and reduce your sales cycle?  If they don’t then they aren’t shortcuts.

Virtually everything we do can be recovered.  We make a bad call, we can fix it and recover from it, we lose a deal, we can learn from it and win the next ten deals.  The one thing we can’t recover is time–once we’ve spent it, it’s lost, we can’t re-do it, we can’t recover it.  So it’s critical we manage our time to maximize our impact and effectiveness.

If our job is to sell—to acquire new business, orders, and revenue; then clearly we want to maximize the time available to sell (as well as maximize our effectiveness for the time spent–but that’s a different post).  This seems obvious, you might be asking, “tell me something I don’t know.”

However, when we start looking at how sales people spend their time, increasingly we find more time is spent in non-selling related activities than in selling related activities.  Surveys show time spent in sales related activities at a little more than 40%.  In surveys we’ve done with a number of organizations recently, we are seeing sales related time significantly lower, sometimes south of 20%.

We’ll never be able to spend 100% of our time selling, there are things we have to do as sales people that aren’t sales related.  But we want to do everything we can to maximize the time we have available to sell.

Generally, we find two categories impacting time available for selling:

• How we, individually, manage our time.
• Organizational impacts on our time.

In maximizing time available for selling, we have to look at both.

Managing our time available for selling:  We are responsible for setting our daily schedules and priorities.  Too often we don’t manage our time–we let interruptions manage us, our time is consumed with reacting or responding.  Or we get into an avoidance mode.  We know we have to prospect, we find all sorts of excuses to avoid prospecting.  Or we just don’t have a plan at all.  Soon our time available for selling disappears.  Vicious prioritization of our time, focusing on where we invest our time, blocking time focusing on the activities that enable us to achieve our goals is critical.

Track how you spend your time.  Look at how much time you spend in selling, look at the other time drains.  Block your time, schedule yourself, make sure that you are conscious about how you invest your time–invest it in activities that enable you to achieve your goals.

Organizational impacts on time:  Sometimes our ability to manage our time is out of our control, people in our company start consuming time.  Most of the time it’s unconscious, it’s people, our colleagues doing their jobs.  They may have questions, they want to understand what’s happening with customers.  Sometimes, roles and responsibilities are unclear, as things start falling through the cracks, in order to serve our customers, sales people step in to take up the slack.  Sometimes, our organizations just impose a lot of bureaucracy.  We have to work with our colleagues.  We have responsibilities within our own organizations, but too often–and inadvertently, the internal meetings or requests can start to consume our time.

We see systemic issues impacting selling time within organizations.  Often it is the result of poorly defined roles and responsibilities, sometimes it is poor mechanisms for managing communications in the organization.  It’s important to understand where the time drains are.  It’s important eliminate those that you can.  For the others, it’s important to see how you can minimize the impact.  For example, often product managers want feedback from sales on new features they may be considering.  They may survey 100% of the sales force.  Get a few product managers surveying 100% of the sales force, all of a sudden you have a huge time impact.  If each surveyed only a portion of the sales force, the impact on each sales person could be significantly less.  Usually, there are pretty simple solutions, but first we have to know we have a problem.

Organizations and systemic impacts on selling time are difficult for sales people to deal with.  Typically, a sales person cannot refuse to comply.  Managers need to be attentive to these organizational and systemic time drains, seeking to eliminate or reduce their impact.

One of the easiest ways to improve sales productivity is to simply make more time available for selling.  Moving from 20% time available to 30% time available can improve results by 50%.

• Are you using your time as effectively as possible–maximizing the time you have for selling?
• Are you looking for the time drains on your schedule, seeking to eliminate or minimize them?

The other day I watched an outstanding video by Tibor Shanto, Preparation Trumps Rejection.  Tibor focuses on how to increase your prospecting effectiveness and deal with the potential of rejection.  Be sure to look at it.

Tibor’s comments prompted me to think about the importance of “Anticipation” as part of your preparation for every engagement you have with your customers–not just in prospecting.

I watch sales people preparing for a call or customer meeting.  They know what they are trying to achieve, they think about the questions they want to ask, what they want to present.  They may bring others along to help them achieve their goal–maybe it’s presenting some of the capabilities of their solution.  They may have a presentation, some collateral.  They’re prepared and ready to execute.

Then they go into the meeting, they get started, focused on executing their call plan.  All of a sudden, the customer asks something unexpected.  Or perhaps some different people show up.  Or perhaps the customer has a different agenda.  All of a sudden the meeting is derailed.  All the preparation goes out the window.  Perhaps the sales person tries to recover and get back onto “their plan.”  Perhaps the sales person deals with the new direction the customer establishes–maybe achieving their outcome, maybe achieving another outcome, maybe not accomplishing a whole lot–not moving the customer forward in their buying process.

Too often, the customer comes up with “the Question From Hell.”  You know what that is–it’s the worst possible question they can ask.  It’s the thing that we fear and hope they never ask.  Guess what, they almost always ask it and the sales person, looking like all the blood has suddenly left his head, stumbles with responding.

These things happen too often–a study we did years ago showed sales people make up to 3 times more calls than necessary to close, largely because of poor preparation and execution. 

The problem with much of our planning is we focus on what we want to accomplish, we don’t spend a lot of time anticipating the customer.  What do they want to accomplish in the meeting?  What questions, concerns, issues might they have?  Are we in sync with where they are in their buying process?

Anticipation is critical to our preparation and execution of winning sales calls.

• What questions is the customer likely to ask?
• What concerns might they have?
• What’s the customer’s expectations and objectives for the meeting?
• What do we do if people we didn’t expect show up?
• What objections might the customer have?
• What attitudes toward us and the competition might the customer have?
• What’s the customer going to get out of the meeting?  Does it align with their expectations?  Does it create value meaningful to the customer?
• What’s the worst possible question the customer might ask and how do we deal with it?
• What else could possibly derail this meeting?
• What happens if, by some miracle and the stars are aligned, everything goes right?!  How do we leverage that opportunity?

Preparing for high impact sales calls is more than preparing for what you want to accomplish.  It means anticipating everything that might happen in the meeting and developing strategies for managing it.  They may not happen, but if they do, we have it nailed.  We won’t be able to anticipate everything, but we can tilt things in our favor with a little paranoia.

There’s another critical aspect about anticipation and preparation.  By doing this–we have the opportunity, with the customer, to shape an agenda in advance.  We can make sure both we and the customer are aligned.  We can make sure we are both prepared to accomplish something of value to each of us.  It can help us minimize surprises.

When you prepare for your next call, don’t just focus on what you want to accomplish.  Spend some time anticipating waht the customer might want to achieve or do.

The only thing worse than losing is losing after a loooonnnnnnng sales cycle.  I’m constantly amazed at sales people investing time and resource chasing bad deals, but too many fall into the trap and stay there.

It’s tough finding opportunities these days.  Many sales people are desperate to find something, anything, get a prospect to find a deal.  We struggle to find someone that’s willing to meet us.  We get that meeting, the customer expresses some interest—or at least that’s what we think we hear.

Immediately, we latch on, we put it in our pipeline, we assign a 25% probability to win, and we start chasing.  We start going to meeting after meeting with the customer.  We have lots of activities, we put in lots of effort.  We’re relieved that we have something “real” to work on.

The customer is receptive, they are interested in learning more.  We are encouraged.

We get people in our company investing time and resources to help us with the deal.  Maybe it’s making calls on the customer, maybe it’s supporting our efforts.  Pre-sales people are making calls, doing presentations, preparing demonstrations.  We spend time doing opportunity reviews with our managers.

We start to hit bumps in the road, the customer isn’t paying as much attention, they seem diverted.  We struggle to recapture that interest.  We increase our activity, trying everything we can think of to get that interest and to create a sense of urgency.  We may throw more resources at it, we may start making executive calls.

We keep getting shuffled to the side, but we intensify our efforts.  We’re like bulldogs, once we’ve locked in we don’t let go.  But it seems to be losing steam.  The customer doesn’t have any sense of urgency.

We’ve become “attached” to the deal.  We won’t let it go—partly because at one point the customer expressed interest—they seem qualified—but now they’re not.  We don’t let go—we believe by sheer force of personality and persistence, we can recover the sense of urgency and move forward.  We don’t let go–if we do, we don’t have enough in our pipeline to work on.

We look at the reports in the CRM system.  The deal shows up in the “stuck deals report.”  It doesn’t move forward.  The days start racking up.  I look at pipelines where the sales cycle may be 180-270 days and see deals that have been in process 450, 600, 800 days (more than 2 years!).

None of these deals are real, but we still carry hope, we still make that weekly, then monthly, then quarterly call to the customer–”Should we be meeting on this?  Is it a priority again?”

The longer it goes on, the more “attached” we become, the more we invest.  Losing a deal after a long sales cycle is draining.  We look back at all the time we spent, all the resources we invested, the expectations we set with management.  It’s devastating!

We reflect back on the time we lost.  We can’t recover that.  We might have invested the time in better opportunities, we might have chased good deals that we could have won—but that time is past, we’ve lost it and can never recover.

Winning deals is fantastic, we love focusing on winning deals.  But deals with long sales cycles are also draining.  They occupy our time, we can’t look at other opportunities.  The longer they drag out, the more we have to invest in winning.

Letting go—it’s difficult, particularly after having invested so much in a deal.

But letting go is critical, killing deals that are lingering in your pipeline, not moving is important.  They distort our pipelines, they occupy our minds, they are a drain on our productivity.

Once deals stall, do everything you can to break them loose.  But if you can’t, let them go.  Take them out of the funnel.

They may come up again, but guess what–they’re different, the needs have changed, the priorities are changed, we have to go through the entire sales process again, we can’t pick up from where we left off.

Be vicious in managing your pipelines.  Don’t let deals linger, the longer they linger, the less real they are.

Follow-Up, a simple concept, but one which too many managers fail to execute.   Yet is is probably one of the most important elements of successful coaching.

When we coach our people, one of the critical elements is establishing the next steps and actions to be taken.  They may be tactical–about a deal, they may be improving the person’s capabilities or performance.  We want to see progress and change. 

But it’s insufficient to drop it there, we need to follow up, both to see  the outcome and to leverage the outcome to reinforce the coaching discussions.  Coaching is an ongoing dialog, we want to continue to reinforce and build on our discussions.  We miss a tremendous opportunity by neglecting to follow up.  Rather than having an ongoing dialog, our coaching becomes a series of isolated discussions, often missing the progress that may or may not have been made.

Too often, managers simply neglect to follow up, more often, they just forget.  Follow up can be easy.  After each meeting, schedule a “To-Do” in your calendar — write a note to your self, schedule the follow – up.  If it’s something tactical, for example, checking the outcome of a meeting or some other activity, write an email to the person, copying yourself, and schedule it for advance delivery.  For example, if there is an important meeting in 10 days, schedule a follow up email for the 11th day–”How did it go?  Let’s talk about what happened.”

Follow up can be simple and easy if we schedule them immediately when we agree upon them with our people.  Follow ups improve the results we get from coaching, they improve our own personal effectiveness.

No, today’s post isn’t about some esoteric view of people’s agendas–how we discern them, how we leverage them.  This is a rare post for me–it’s about the simple issue of having an Agenda–for meetings that is.

I’m amazed at the number of meetings I’m asked to participate in that have no published agenda.  Sure everyone knows the topic and general issues, though, 85% of the meeting sales people ask to have with me, they appear to have no structured agenda–at least nothing they have communicated with me.

The written agenda is one of the simplest, yet most powerful tools available to the sales person.  Yet it is the most underutilized.  The written agenda accelerates the sales/buying processes, allowing you and the customer to accomplish more in less time.

Why written agendas:

1. They add structure and focus to the meeting, helping both you and the customer keep on track.
2. They help you make sure you accomplish what you intended to accomplish.  Our research indicates that sales people make 50% more calls than required to close.  Largely, this is driven by poorly planned and executed meetings.  Imagine how much your customer will appreciate you not wasting their time with extra meetings.  Imagine the productivity impact of reducing the number of calls to close.
3. They free you up to actually listen to, and engage the customer.  You don’t have to keep thinking about what you want to accomplish, you can just refer to the agenda as a prompt, so you actually can take the time to listen to the customer.
4. It frees the customer up to actually listen to you.  They don’t have to worry, “What’s she here for, what is she trying to achieve?”  The agenda is your plan for the meeting, they don’t have to guess, they don’t have to be apprehensive, you’ve outlined what you plan to discuss.  They can relax and concentrate on the meeting.
5. It’s a demonstration of your respect for the customer and their time.
6. It’s a demonstration to your customer that you value your time and want to use it well.
7. It’s a demonstration of your professionalism.

What’s a good agenda look like?  On those rare times when someone presents a written agenda before or at the outset of the meeting, too often it contains far more than we can possibly accomplish either for the time we have scheduled or for the participants that are involved in the meeting.

A good agenda will have the following elements:

1. It will not be a long laundry list of discussion topics.  It will have the appropriate number of topics for the time allotted for the meeting and the objectives of the meeting.  Generally, for a one hour meeting, I like to have no more than 3-4 agenda items.
2. The agenda items are expressed in short, but complete sentences.  Too often, the agenda item may be only a few words or a phrase.  When you get to that item, you are clueless about what you intended to discuss.
3. The agenda will have a few blank lines at the bottom, allowing you or the customer to add additional agenda items, Always!  Even if you have circulated the agenda and agreed upon it in advance.  There are always things that may arise at the last minute.  You want the flexibility to add these if they come up.
4. The agenda should express an “Action” or “Next Step” item.  this may be a peculiarity that I have, but colleague suggested it to me a number of years ago.  It’s one of the most powerful and focusing items I’ve ever had.  I always include an “Action” item as the last item on each agenda.  I present it as “If we accomplish everything we have agreed upon in this meeting, I would like to suggest this [action] as the next step.”  It’s our close–and we’re presenting it at the beginning of the meeting.  This simple statement as the last item on the agenda, is very focusing–for you and the customer.  They know you have a purpose, they know you are serious about accomplishing something in the meeting.  Successfully achieving this in every meeting accelerates the process tremendously.

If you were counting, my typical agenda will contain 6-8 line items (usually 6).  the 3-4 key discussion topics, 2-3 blank lines for additional items, and the Action statement.

Should you have a hidden agenda?  You can look at this a few different ways. 

I’m always asked, “should you publish the agenda in advance?”  Too many sales people want to hide their agenda, presenting it at the beginning of a meeting. I always always publish it in advance.  I want to make sure the customer and I are aligned on what we intend to accomplish before the meeting.  I want to make sure the customer has the right people invited to the meeting.  I want to make sure the customer is prepared for the meeting.

Sure you may have additional objectives you have not put on the agenda–I always like to have some stretch goals for each meeting.

Finally, make sure it’s published.  If you have a telephone meeting, email it to the participants as a reminder before the meeting–don’t make them search their email archives to find the original agenda.  If it’s a face to face meeting, print out copies of the agenda to distribute to all the participants.

Agendas are simple and powerful.  Make sure you are using them!

Finally, I have a confession, I did have a “hidden agenda” for this post.  I just left a meeting someone had invited me to.  It was a face to face meeting, a 30 minute drive from my office (60 minutes round trip).  I had suggested an agenda, but the people who invited me to the meeting never got one to me.  We had scheduled 60 minutes for the meeting.  No agenda was presented, 20 minutes into the meeting, I was confused, wondering what the point was.  22 minutes into the meeting, I decided there was no point, I stood up and left.  Do you think those sales people accomplished their goals?  Do you think I will permit another meeting with them on my schedule?

One of the biggest problems sales people face is their deals slipping.  We forecast a certain close date, then it slips, and slips, and slips, and ……..  Things keep coming up, we push the close date out, then more things come up and we get into this seemingly endless cycle until the deal closes.

Sometimes these slips in close date can’t be avoided.  The customer keeps deferring the decision, we have little control over it.  But too often, I think these slips are the result of bad deal strategies — and the sales person is responsible for managing the deal strategy.

Here’s what happens.  We tend to look at our deal strategies in terms of “what’s next.”  Based on where we are in the sales process and the customer is in their buying process, we identify the next steps or critical activities.  As we progress through these processes, things come up, requiring more work, more activities–and the deal slips.  We execute those, more stuff comes up, we generate new next steps, slipping the date yet again.

Or we may have thought the deal all the way through.  We have a clear plan mapped out, we are executing–then something slips, we readjust our plan, shifting everything back, something else slips, we shift everything again, and the cycle continues.  We finally close months after our original projection.

These slips happen because we approach the opportunity planning process all wrong.  The slips need to be unacceptable–slipping causes the customer to miss some of their internal deadlines.  Slipping creates create opportunity losses for the customer–the benefits they had hoped to achieve reduce with each slip of the close date.  It creates havoc within our own companies, we, our managers, and others want some predictability in the revenue streams. 

We need to begin thinking of the “targeted close date” as sacred.  We need to think of it as immovable.  Establishing the targeted close date must be driven by the customer buying process—when do they intend to make a decision, is there a critical deadline or a compelling event that requires a decision by a certain date?

Once we have established the targeted close date, we need to develop our opportunity plans and strategies to fit with that date.  The sales and buying processes are the foundation to maintaining the integrity of the close date.  We have to look at all the things both we and the customer must accomplish to achieve the deadline we have established.

As things progress through the selling and buying process, new things come up, things change, we have to revise our plans.  Rather than just slipping activities, we have to revise the whole plan and schedule to fit within the time left with the original close date.  By keeping the targeted close date fixed, we reschedule all the things we must accomplish to meet that date.  Likewise, we work with the customer to help them reschedule their activities to continue to meet the close date.

This requires great discipline on the part of the sales person.  It’s so easy just to let things slip, to go with the flow.  But if we want to maintain the integrity of the targeted close date, we have to continually be looking at and revising the plan so that we re-align everything that needs to be done around that date.

Do you keep the “targeted close date” as sacred?

Do you continue to revise your plan and help the customer revise their plans to maintain the integrity of that date?

There’s always a lot of discussion in the Sales 2.0, CRM worlds about compliance.  Millions are invested in new systems–supposedly.  There’s a great urge to make sure people are using them, so compliance has become a key topic of discussion in lots of places.  Basically compliance is measuring, “are people using the system?”

Compliance — at least the way it’s commonly used is absolutely worthless!  Reporting on who has signed into the system, how many times they’ve logged in and all the related measures are  meaningless.  While some of the vendors would claim it’s important, the goal of CRM is not system utilization.

CRM is supposed to help sales people be more effective and more efficient.  It’s supposed to help them better manage their opportunities, territories, and time.  It’s a tool, properly utilized, that can help sales people perform at the highest levels possible.  So if sales people aren’t using the system, if compliance is low, the reasons are probably pretty simple.  The system is not helping them to be more effective or efficient, or they don’t know how to use the system to be more effective and efficient.

Continued beatings and warnings from management about compliance, continuing to measure it doesn’t solve the root problem.  It doesn’t address the issue of improving effectiveness.  Sales people can make the compliance needle go up–simply by logging on and doing nothing.  Or they can enter garbage into the system.

Having said that, I can’t imagine being a highly productive sales person without leveraging CRM to it’s utmost.  Most sales people simply have too much going on and too little time to be efficient without a tool.  At even the simplest levels of contact, activity, and calendar management, it helps the sales person keep track of things.  The first thing I do every morning is look at my calendar and to-do list to know what I have to get done–what prospecting calls, to who, about what.  The next step on a deal, something I have to complete, a follow up.  It’s all there, I don’t have to remember it.

But managing our deals, pipelines and territories are much more complex.  Are some deals slipping away from me?  Are they lingering–or have I ignored them?  Am I missing an opportunity to move something forward?  Am I chasing enough deals–sure, I know all the deals I’m closing, but what’s the state of my funnel?  Am I reaching out and touching past customers, am I staying in contact with everyone?  Do I have upsell, cross sell opportunities?

Increasingly, sales is a collaborative team sport.  We rely on others to help us do deals.  How do we keep track of what’s going on?  How to we manage the execution of our deal strategy across the team, how do we share changes and what we need to do across the team, how do we stay in sync, maximizing every moment we spend with the customers?

Or systems are getting increasingly social–they enable me to do more, to ask more questions.  Has something changed with my customer that might present and opportunity?  Has someone moved, are there new people to meet, who’s there that I should be meeting, who are they?

Many of the systems have rich analytic embedded.  A week ago, I sat with a sales person, he was leveraging the data in his CRM system to give me a deep analysis of his territory.  He could look at trends, he could look at specific customers or prospects, he could look at histories–or the absence of history.  We used this analysis to develop a prospecting plan–one that would have extraordinary payoff, because we could identify those customers and prospects that might have a higher propensity to buy this new product line.  He could identify, target, and begin to reach out to them.

No sales professional can survive without leveraging these tools everyday.  They enable us to manage our time, maximize our impact, free us up to think, plan, strategize, and execute.

So compliance isn’t the issue. Compliance should be 100% period!  If it isn’t it’s because the sales people don’t see the value.  They don’t understand how they can leverage the tools to maximize the results they produce in their territories.  They don’t understand how to use these tools to make them win more deals, more quickly.

Mandating utilization, mandating compliance, setting compliance goals is about system utilization.  It makes IT happy, it makes vendors happy, it make management happy because they can claim the investment in the system was good.  Utilization is not the point of any of these tools.

The fact there are endless discussions about compliance means we have missed the opportunity and are focusing on the wrong thing.  Helping sales people be better, helping them to be more effective, more efficient is what it’s all about.  If they don’t see this, then you’ve missed a huge amount of opportunity.  If you and your vendor aren’t helping your teams understand this, then you have wasted a lot of money on whatever system you’ve implemented.

Don’t waste your time at looking at who’s logged on, don’t track utilization data, it’s meaningless.  If your people aren’t using the system, if compliance isn’t 100%, then something is wrong–and it’s probably not the sales person.