Let’s face it, customers really hate us.  They will tolerate our marketing content—as long as it isn’t too promotional—just the facts please.  Sales people, well that’s another story, we’re really a total waste of their time, unless the are looking for lunch or a golf game.  With the exception of the lunch and golf game, the web now can solve virtually all our customer problems.  Customers can find peers, other people who have the same interests, concerns, problems.  “Trusted sources,” that can provide much” higher quality information and insight” about vendor products than the we can.  Our role as suppliers is now to sit politely by the phone, wait for it to ring, then answer any remaining specific questions the customer may have, process their order (if we are fortunate enough to be the supplier selected), smile and thank them for their business.

Our buyers are so fortunate.  We know all that information is totally accurate.  We know those users or people who have experience know everything there is to know about our products and services, and how they apply specifically to the problems other companies have.  We know these are totally without agenda (or even being compensated).

We also know that our customers know exactly what they are looking for.  We know they have all the right questions and just need answers.  We know they know how to solve their problems, so they are just looking for data and information.  We know they have the time, ability, and judgement to invest in searching the web, engage in conversations with people they have never met, talk about their proprietary information and problems.  Imagine a web based conversation, “Our manufacturing process really sucks, we have too much scrap, bad quality, and poor customer satisfaction and are looking to reduce those problems…in your experience, what are the best solutions to that?”  Or “Our financial systems are a mess, we can’t close our books, we don’t know if we are properly reporting our results, if we are in compliance with government regulations…. what have you done to solve that problem?”

Yes the web is the answer to our customer prayers.  We need to transform our organizations to better serve our customers and to more effectively process those orders.  We need to spend more time encouraging our current customers to spend less time doing their jobs and more time participating in web based forums, maybe we can even provide them some copy they can use in their discussions.  (Perhaps this is the role for all the displaced marketing and sales people).

Frankly, I am getting PISSED OFF with all the apologists for sales and marketing.  I’m angry with all those naive enough to think that marketing and sales can bring no value or insight to our customers and they should be displaced by web based forums.  Finally, I am terrified for our customers who may not even recognize they have a problem or may be so busy just surviving they can’t spend the time solving their problems.

Sure, we deserve much of the criticism that is leveled at marketing and sales.  Every day, we are bombarded with an ever escalating volume of messages, promotional content, and stupid sales pitches.  Too many organizations seem to see the solution to this move to the web is to turn up the volume.  This only serves to piss customers off, rather than turning up the volume, we need to turn up the quality and customer experience.

If we can’t turn up the quality of the customer engagement, if we can turn up the quality of the customer experience, if we cannot offer real insight and value to our customers, then the web is probably the best solution.

But I think too much of our customers to succumb to that.  I think too much of our companies and shareholders to to succumb to this.  I think too much of the value we as sales and marketing professionals can offer to succumb to that.  We have to change and we are changing.  We have a huge amount to offer to our customer and can create real value.  We can provide our customers insight they can’t get anywhere else.  We walk the halls, visit the plants, talk to lots of people in our customers.  We see new possibilities, we see opportunities to help them grow and improve.  We can offer help and advice, we can create real meaning in helping them outPerform their competitors and better serving their customers.

If we aren’t prepared to change, we deserve what we get — but that’s always been true, the web hasn’t changed any of that.

Let’s stop apologizing for our professions, let’s not abandon our responsibilities to our customers, our companies, and ourselves to create great value.  It’s not time to give up, it’s time to get more aggressive in the changes we have to make in ourselves and how we engage our customers.

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 have to admit, I’m writing this out of a little bit of frustration.  I have a prospect, it’s virtually impossible to communicate with them — at least through the normal channels.  Now, you may say, “Dave, don’t you get it–they don’t want to talk to you!”  But they really do want to talk and communicate with me.  They say so, they get upset when it appears that I’m not communicating with them.

They originally contacted me a couple of months ago.  I got an email from a mid level executive in the company.  He wanted some information, I responded–rather than doing a simple reply, I wrote a new email, using his email address, and sent it.  30 seconds later, I get it bounced back, saying it is undeliverable.  I call the guy on his mobile, apologizing and explaining the problem to him.  He groans and say, it’s our security system.  You can’t send emails to us, we can only send you emails.  It’s best for you to email me at my personal email.  I’ve been using his personal email to send him emails, he always responds from his company email.

As I’ve met other executives in the company, the same thing happens.  They can send me emails, but the only way I can communicate back is to respond to their personal email.  Now whenever I meet someone new, it’s one of the first pieces of information I get.

I tried calling one of the executives once.  I didn’t have his mobile number, so I called the office switchboard.  I did the “spell the name” thing, the response was, “No one by that name works here.”  I was surprised, I called someone else to get the story.  “Oh, we have trouble keeping our name directory updated (The person I had tried to reach had been with the company over 3 years.).  He gave me the guy’s mobile number and his extension for future reference.

Recently, I met with the management team.  We talked about a project and got a lot done.  At the end of the meeting, I said, “I have another topic I’d like to talk about.”  I went on to describe the email and telephone problem.  They chuckled, looked at each other sheepishly, and said, “Yeah, it’s a real pain.  We just work around it, you’ve figured it out too.”

I looked at them and said, “What if I were a customer or a prospect?”  The room went silent for five minutes.

I’ll stop the story here.  It sounds outlandish, but it is–was–true.  Perhaps that was part of their sales growth problem.  While that was an extreme case, consciously or unconsciously, too often we make it impossible for our customers to reach us.  We may steer them through a specific channel.  This company had a form at their website, that someone was supposed to fill out and submit—but what if your customers don’t feel like filling out a form.

There’s another example, this time I was the customer.  I was trying to buy a pretty significant piece of software for our company.  I had made the purchase decision, but then I had to buy.  The sales rep presented me with a 27 page contract.  It covered all sorts of things.  Then there were the forms I had to fill out.  Not only the normal credit information, but information about each user of the system, all sorts or unnecessary information about our company—I think it was for the marketing people.

I had my lawyer look at the contract.  It was OK, though it was so long and poorly worded, it just took time for both my lawyer and I to go through.  On the other information, I called the rep.  I said, I’ll give you the credit information, but nothing else.  You want the order, make it happen!

Often the only differentiator we may have is how easy we are to do business with.  Selling is hard enough, but if we make it difficult for those who do want to buy, then we’ve made it much more difficult.

Are you easy to do business with?  Look at your phone systems, look at your email systems.  Do you have guidelines for responses to phone and email queries?  What about your contracts and all the other things needed from those who have made the decision to buy?  Are you making it easy for them?  Finally, when there is a problem, does the customer know how to get it resolved?  Are there people that own the responsibility for solving the problem?  Is it clear, simple, easy?

The phone rang, I picked it up.  The voice on the other end went into it’s pitch, “Hi, I’m so and so.  Would you be interested if you could invest in a stock that could give you a cud-jillion-billions return in 60 days?”

Yes, it was one of those pointless boiler-room calls.  But is was a slow day, I was a little bored, so I decided to have fun.

“Yes, I’d actually be very interested in getting that kind of return.  However, before you go further, would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?”

I could hear the excitement in his voice, you could almost hear his thought process, “Caught another sucker, now I just have to reel him in.”  But he said, “Sure, I’d be glad to answer your questions.”

So, I responded, “My business is to help sales people close more business faster.  I can imagine, that you have to make hundreds of calls to get someone like me who is interested in talking to you and investing in your stock recommendations.  We happen to have a guaranteed method where I can actually reduce the number of calls you have to make by 75% and triple your personal income at the same time.  Surely that has to be something you are interested in.”

Silence……

“What do you mean, are you trying to sell me something?”  came the confused response.

“Absolutely not, I’m just want to show you a way to triple your income doing 25% of the work.  Surely, it would be foolish to pass up that opportunity.  Think of it, if you put in the same amount of work, your income could go up 12 times!”

“Wait a minute,” he said, getting a little impatient and frustrated, “Let’s talk about how you can make money with this stock!”

I interrupted, “I’m glad to talk about that, but would you please answer my question, wouldn’t you want to learn how you can increase your income by 12 times doing the same amount of work?”

He was clearly getting upset.  I guess my response wasn’t on his script.  “You can’t be selling me something — I don’t know you, why should I believe you!  Let’s get back to this stock!”

“Wait a second,” I replied, “I’m confused, you won’t talk to me, because you don’t know me and you are skeptical about my claim, is that correct?”

“Absolutely, now let’s…….” he continued.

“No, hang on, you won’t listen to me or buy from me.  But I’m confused, why should I listen to you?” I replied–trying to sound very sincere and very concerned.

Click…..

The line went dead……

He was probably busy dialing someone else, making one fo the 500 or so calls he has to make every day.

I’ve been chuckling to myself since then.  It was a fun call.  Sometimes, I just can’t help myself

My colleague Anthony Iannarino wrote an outstanding post:   “Mismatched Skills And Value Creation.”  Usually, Anthony and I are so aligned in our thinking that we tend to complete each other’s sentences.  But I had to disagree with part of his post, it was the perspective he presented on Commodity Buyers.

Virtually every product and service, at some time in it’s life cycle moves to commoditization.  As differences between offerings become smaller; as buyer familiarity with the products, solutions becomes greater; as perceived risks to the purchase decision become much smaller; then there is the potential that our offerings become commoditized.  Given no other differentiation, the only way to win is based on price  — or is it?

Don’t get me wrong, there are people that will always buy on price–regardless of whether our product has significant differentiation or it is a commodity.  Price is important to every decision.

But as sales people, I think it is incumbent on us—both for our success and the customer’s to always focus on value creation and to aggressively seek to create value in every situation. 

Value can be created with commodity buyers–it’s just different than what we may have seen before.  While commodity buyers may be driven by price, they are also seeking other things–they may want to have an easy, painless, hassle free, procurement process.  They may want to look at reducing the overall cost of the transaction–not just the price. 

As an example, a number of years ago, I worked with the Chief Procurement Officer of a very large procurement organization.  They were responsible for procuring everything from basic chemicals, office supplies, “nuts and bolts” (literally), to complex computer systems, communications systems, development tools, machine tools and thousands of other items.  They managed billions of dollars in “spend” every year.  When we started to analyze their procurement processes, we started seeing very surprising data in the “costs of procurement,” or the costs of doing a transaction.  In some cases, the costs of procurement started to approach the purchase value of the items being procured.  Clearly, they had a problem that reducing the price of the commodities they were buying would not solve.

Some of their really smart suppliers recognized this as a problem.  They started working with the customer in seeing how they could reduce the cost of procurement.  Clever vendors realized there was value they could create in helping the customer reduce these costs–while still maintaining superior (but competitive) pricing.

Procurement organizations are very sophisticated–they are shifting to be strategic sourcing organizations.  They realize there is more to “save”  than just on price negotiations.  Supply chain management, vendor managed inventories, contract simplification and management all become critical elements of value that can be created for “commoditized products.”  In their book, Challenger Sale, Dixon and Adamson cite the example of W.W. Grainger challenging their customers on their process of procuring commoditized products. 

There are hundreds of other examples.  Indeed, some of the best thinking of creating value that I have encountered is from organizations who sell commoditized, undifferentiated products.  The sales person who sells carbon black and commands a superior price has to think about value creation differently.  The sales person that sells commoditized electronic components needs to be innovative in how they create value.  Sometimes those of us who sell more “complex or differentiated solutions,” are a little lazy about value creation–we still can rely on the differentiation of our solutions.

As sales people we have to be leaders, for our customers and with our organizations.  We have to constantly focus on value creation–in every sales situation.  Value can be found and created everywhere.  It’s our responsibility–not the customer’s, to create, communicate, and deliver that value.  We cannot succumb to the commiditization of our offerings — even if they are commodities. 

If we allow ourselves to be commoditized, if we allow ourselves to stop searching for and creating value, then we deserve the outcomes we create.

Are you constantly looking to Create Value?

(For extra credit, as you think about this, study and learn about Strategic Sourcing.  Go talk to the top sourcing and procurement executives in your customers and understand what they are trying to achieve.  They are hungry for value, you just have to learn how you can create value for them!)

We all know the shifts in buying.  The web offers a tremendous resource to all of us.  There is an overhwelming amount of information available on virtually every topic.  There’s a lot of data that says customers don’t want to see sales people until later in their buying cycle–presumably the final phases, as they have developed a short list of alternatives.

Many think this is wonderful–certainly on the customer side they get to avoid all those terrible sales people.  From the sales side, we now get involved with really serious customers and our sales cycles can be much shorter.  So somehow people seem to think we create this terribly efficient buying and selling environment.  From the sales side, we shift our focus to high quality content, SEO, and all sorts of things that increase our visibility to customers who let their fingers wander their keyboards.

But you have to pause and wonder, is this really a good thing for customers and for sales?  Perhaps for simpler transactions, or where professional well informed buyers are invovled, this may be OK.  But in the world of complex B2B solutions, one really wonders.

What are the problems with self education?  Is it really the “right” thing for customers?  Perhaps this is an arrogant view, but as sales people are we fulfilling our responsibilities in creating great value for customers by succumbing to this self education/information?

Here are some of the challenges:

First, we all know that if something is on the web it must be 100% true, right?  This is the easiest concern, probably the majority of stuff on the web is wrong or out of date.  So how do our customers determine what’s good, what’s accurate, and what information they can rely on?  I suppose if you wander around enough, perhaps participate in discussion forums (but who knows who those people really are), we can sort through the piles of information– perhaps finding things that are more accurate than not.  Perhaps is we narrow our search to “trusted” suppliers, then we can feel more comfortable that we are getting accurate information — but how do we know who is to be trusted?  Just as with working with sales people, smart buyers need to be skeptical.

Second, “my problem is different.”  In complex business decisions, everyone has a different problem or need.  Yes, 80% of the requirements may be the same, but it’s the last 20% that really make the difference.  Companies are different, strategies, culture, priorities are different.  Their goals, objectives vary.  Their processes, history, legacy systems (in the broadest sense) are different.  That last 20% is probably the most critical to the success of any project the customer is undertaking.  Where are they going to get the answers specific to them, where are they going to get the answers specific to that critical 20%? 

Third, do they know what to look for?  Do they know what questions they should be  asking, what they should be researching?  This, to my mind is probably one of the most important concerns customers should have about self educating.  In the complex world of B2B solutions, knowing what questions to ask, what things they should be looking for, what things might be possible is critical.  How do customers know what they don’t know?  A CFO and her staff may be very knowledgeable about how they run the financial operations in their organization—but what do they know about buying a new financial system?  How many times have they bought financial systems in their careers?  What are the capabilities of these systems?  What should they be looking for and why?  How can they change their operations and processes to get much better results? 

We’r all prisoners of our experience.  We know what we know, we don’t know what we don’t know.  If we are self educating, we are constrained in our search to what we know and think we need to know.   Our ability to solve our problems is constrained by the quality of our questions.  Sure, we might stumble upon some interesting content on a web site, we might talk to people and learn new things we should be considering–but that takes a huge amount of time and can really be hit or miss.  Is this the most effective way to buy?  Is this the most effective way to drive tremendous improvements in our operations? 

Fourth, to the customers know how to buy?  Do they have the right people involved, do they know how to organize themselves, do they know how to align their objectives and put together a project plan to identify, select, and implement a solution?    After all, unless they are professional buyers or sourcing people, their jobs aren’t to buy (which, as a side note, is why we are seeing strategic sourcing being involved in more decisions where they haven’t had a presence in the past).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, do customers even recognize they have an opportunity to change, and opportunity to improve and grow?  Do they realize they are missing opportunities, or understand how they could seize them?  Simply put, from a sales point of view, we are being irresponsible in serving our customers.  Our job is to help customers identify new opportunities to improve, to grow.  We can’t let our customers cheat themselves of the opportunity to achieve their dreams.  We have to bring them new ideas and insight.

Self education and self directed learning works — after all, there has been great progress in distance based learning.  But the reason those programs work, is they have very clear objectives, very clear methods, and are well structured–not random.  Self education and self directed learning can be very effective in buying, but only in well structured and well defined environments, and in using trusted sources.  For certain types of purchases this is very effective.  But in complex B2B solutions and complex business problems, things are seldom so clearly defined.

One of the major roles of sales people has been to teach.  Too often, our teaching has been misdirected, we focus on teaching/pitching our products.  The greatest value we can create is to teach our customers about different ways of doing things, about new opportunities, about things they may not even realize.  We have to help our customers learn.  We have to help our customers understand the questions they should be asking.  We have to help our customers learn what they should research, what they should be looking for. 

It’s important that we have high quality content, that we continue to create great web/social presence.  But this is most impactful when we have an educated buyer, a buyer who knows the questions they should be asking, a buyer who knows what they should be looking for, a buyer that can critically evaluate the alternatives.

Are you prepared to teach your customers?  Not about your products, but about how they can improve their operations and businesses, how they can better serve their customers, how they can outperform their competition.

What are you doing to help your customers learn?  What are you doing to prepare yourself to teach?  What are you doing to prepare your customers to buy?

Truth be told, most sales people would prefer to have a root canal than prospect.  Sales people do deals—we love the engagement with a customer that wants to buy and is willing to give us an audience.  We love the adrenaline rush of competing in the final stages of the customer buying process, convincing the customer that we have the superior solution and can create the greatest value for the customer.  Then, it’s capped off by the customer calling us to let us know we got the deal!

In an ideal world, we would be blessed with never-ending qualified opportunities in our pipelines.  Marketing working it’s magic somehow produces great leads, we qualify virtually all of them, then get into doing deals.  Life would be wonderful!

Unfortunately, the real world is seldom like that.  Too often, we don’t have healthy funnels.  As much as we try to increase our win rates, as much as we try to cross sell to increase our average transaction size, most of the time there’s a great gap–we don’t have enough opportunities to pursue to make our number.  We may be successful, we may be closing deals–but that empties our funnels.  Unless we have new opportunities coming into the funnel, we won’t continue to make our numbers.

Ideally, marketing is creating enough demand to provide the continued flow of new opportunities.  But if, for whatever reason marketing can’t provide that flow of great leads, we still have to figure out how to make out number—that’s our obligation to our companies and to ourselves.  It is unacceptable to go to our managers saying, “I’ve closed every deal in my pipeline, now I just have to wait and twiddle my thumbs until marketing gives me good leads.”

If marketing can’t create a sufficient number of leads, then we have to go out to find them.  We have to go out and prospect.  Hopefully, there’s a willing audience–a list of people that are willing to sign up for our seminars.  Ideally, we can go back to past customers, seeing if they have new opportunities.  If they don’t have opportunities, ideally they will introduce us to people who do–they’ll actively refer and sponsor us to new people in their organizations or other companies.  Getting a referral or introduction is very powerful in helping us identify new opportunities and we should leverage them as much as possible.

But what if that doesn’t produce a sufficient volume of great leads that we can qualify and fill our funnels?  We are still obligated to achieve our goals—anything less is just excuses.

So we leverage indirect relationships.  We ask people in our companies if they know people we should be talking to, we ask friends, neighbors, maybe the person sitting on the bar stool next to us (though I’d be a little careful with those).  We leverage our connections in LinkedIn or Facebook.  We do everything we can to leverage even the most distant connections or relationships—”Did you know you are the third cousin of my next door neighbor’s high school buddy’s roommate in college?”

Any time we have anything we can leverage–a close relationship, a past relationship, a powerful referral, a distant relationship, whatever—we leverage those because it’s out job to find a sufficient number of opportunities to achieve our goals.

But what if we’ve exhausted all of those and we still have a gap in our pipelines–maybe not for today, but what about tomorrow?  We still have an obligation, a commitment to reach our goals.  We have to continue to look for new opportunities. We have to……. I’m hesitant to say…….  I guess I’m scraping the bottom…..  God forbid…..  but we have to cold call!

There, I said it, the dreaded words—”the cold call.”  Well actually, it’s the well researched call to someone we may not know and to whom we have no possible introduction.  We have to do the research and find a meaningful way to pick up the phone or email or show up in their office or whatever.  We have to find a way to engage theses “total strangers” and reach out to them with a well researched and prepared “cold call.”  And we have to do one, and another, and another…..

Cold calls are tough, they’re tough, they take a lot of work.  Clearly, if we can leverage anything else that is more effective, we’d be foolish not to.

As sales professionals we have an obligation–it’s our commitment to make our goals.  Again, in an ideal world, we have perpetually healthy pipelines and never have to prospect.  In a real world we have to prospect, we have to go out and find new opportunities.  We have all sorts of ways to do it, and we should choose the simplest and most efficient possible.  but if that doesn’t produce the right volume of opportunities we can’t stop there–we have to keep exploring, we have to keep searching, we have to find new opportunities.

When we have a gap in our ability to achieve our goals–today’s and tomorrow’s, it is irresponsible not to exhaust every single alternative in our prospecting efforts–there is simply no excuse.

Recently, I met with the executive team of a large consulting/systems integration company to discuss Sales Processes and why was critical for their organizations to have a sales process.  Before we started to discuss the sales process, we talked for some time about their business.  I asked, “What’s most critical to your success in delivering these complex IT projects to your customers?”

They all quickly responded, “It’s really two things, it’s the quality and experience of our people and it’s our project management approach.”  I asked them to talk about their project management approach.  They started to describe it with some precision.  They described critical success factors like:

Starting with the end in mind:  They worked with their customers to explicitly define the end goals and objectives, the target dates, what success looked like, how they would measure it, and so forth.

From this, they worked backwards from the end goals and target dates to determine what critical activities were required to achieve the goals, when they had to happen, who would be responsible for each, what the sequencing was, what the critical dependencies were and how they would measure their progress.

They went on to describe their project management process.  They had established a template they applied to every project.  It forced them to identify key milestones for each project, they were spaced through various phases of the project.  They said getting the customer on board with this project plan, and tracking to the milestones and objectives was what separated success and failure.

I asked them more about the process–naively, I thought it was just a generic process. but they said I was wrong.  They had built a process that was based on what made them successful.  They showed me critical milestones they had in their process.  They told me that based on their past experience — projects that have gone really well, those that had failed, they knew certain things were key to success.  They said if they didn’t do those, projects tended to get delays or problems would pop up.  They knew those things were critical to their success.

We talked a little bit more, I was struck that their process seemed to be ingrained in the way they approached the business.  They just seemed to naturally talk about what needed to be done, why.  They could look at projects that were at risk and quickly develop corrective action plans to resolve the problems.  One thing that struck me was they believed their process was a critical differentiator–their approach set them apart from their competition.  It was something they featured when they spoke to prospects.  It was a key tool to convincing their prospects they could do the project in a superior fashion, they would meet the goals and delivery dates the customer established.

In talking about how they sold, they said the project management process and the skills and experience of their people were critical differentiators in selling.

At that point, one of the executives started getting a little impatient, he said, “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about our project management process, but we’re here to talk about our selling process.  I’m not clear what it is, or why we need to have one.  Can you share your ideas about this?”

Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty savvy about reading signals and cues from prospects and customers, so I decided to switch gears and talk about the selling process, otherwise I might lose them.

So in responding to his query, I looked around the table, and said, “Well in a way we’ve been talking about the sales process already.  You should think about the sales process as a special application of a project management process.”

I paused and looked around the table—all of a sudden there was a different look in their eyes.  They suddenly got it–we didn’t have to go much further, other than discussing, how would develop the sales process.

Every company has project management processes–whether it’s how you deliver projects to customers, or how you complete projects within your organization—development projects, marketing projects, internal sales projects.  We know how to do project management.

If you are struggling with your sales process-think of it as a specialized case of project management.  It has a clear end goal and a target completion.  There are clear milestones–these might be the transition from prospect to qualified, from qualified to discovery, and so forth.  We know there are critical activities we must do based on our past experience.

If we understand project management, establishing the sales process is easy.

A well known saying, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”  I’d like to add a corollary, “It helps to pay attention to the signposts.”  

Yes, this is a post about establishing and executing plans.  Whether it’s a plan to win a deal, to make a high impact sales call, to maximize your share within the account or territory, to make your quota, to hire the right people……  For all of these, we maximize our effectiveness and the quality of the result by having well defined goals and strategies in place, and refining our plan based on signs/signals we see as we execute the plan.

Many will say, “Dave, I have a plan and goals–my goal is to win a deal, my goal is to make quota….”  This is insufficient, the highest performers we have to know what path we are going to take to achieve our goal.  With aimless wandering, we may achieve our goal, but it could take us a very long time. 

High performers develop a specific plan, they map out specifically how they will achieve their goals.  Their plan focuses on effectiveness, efficiency, and impact.  They are purposeful in what they want to achieve, so they have strong plans in place.  If it’s a sales call, they are focused on accomplishing as much as possible–compressing their sales cycle.  If it’s a deal strategy, they focus on aligning with the customer buying process, creating the greatest value in the process, outperforming the competition.  If it’s a manager hiring a new sales person, they have a profile of the ideal candidate, they look for those that best match that profile.

With a plan that is purposeful, high performers can adapt to “road conditions.”  They recognize when things may be going off target — without a plan it’s impossible.  They are sensitive to the “signs” along the way–they can see obstacles, adjust their strategies to avoid or overcome them, they can see opportunities, taking advantage of them.

Everyone is time constrained–our customers, our team members, our managers.  We don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we want or need to accomplish.  The highest performers manage this by having clear plans in place, executing those plans relentlessly, by paying attention to the signals they encounter–adjusting their plans appropriately?

Do you know where you are going?

Do you have a plan to get there?

Does your plan maximize your effectiveness in achieving your goal?

Does you adjust your plan based on signals you see on the way?

I was struck by this comment from John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, “ We got knocked on our tail last year. Market transitions wait for no one. The ability to recognize and move on these is critical. If we don’t change, we won’t make it through these transitions and if you don’t change you won’t either. It’s happening at a faster pace in every industry.”

We all talk about how our customers are changing–what they do, how they buy, their expectations of suppliers is changing.  No business or individual can afford to stand still and survive.  Every organization is constantly string to innovate and improve.

This presents a special challenge for sales and marketing professionals.  Too often, we’re playing catch up–our customers are changing faster than we are.  We are still using our old techniques, approaches, and methods.  We’re marketing to them in the traditional ways.  Too often, we find our efforts are producing the results we need, our demand generation programs aren’t generating enough leads, we can’t get into customers to talk about their needs and requirements, our customers are leveraging the web and other sources to identify and narrow solution alternatives for their business.  We struggle to be relevant and create value for our customers.

But for many top sales and marketing professionals, this is a tremendous opportunity to provide leadership to our customers.   Imagine if we could help the customer recognize the transitions earlier–and help them take advantage of them.  What about helping customers create the transition?

“But Dave,” some of you might say, “the transitions Chambers speaks of are major structural changes in the world markets and economy, you can’t expect us to be driving those!”  In reality, they missed some major transitions as well as lots of smaller, more subtle transitions.  Cumulatively, they had a tremendous impact on Cisco, as they have had on many other organizations.

But I still maintain, “we” have the opportunity to help our customers anticipate and even drive transitions.  At an individual level, there are all sorts of things our customers may be blind to.  After all, too often, they are just caught up in the day to day.  They may not take the time to look around to see what’s happening to their customers, market, or with their competitors.  Or some of the things may just be beyond their experience base. 

We set ourselves apart by helping our customers recognize these transitions—by helping them understand what’s changing, how it might impact them, what they could achieve if they took advantage of the opportunity.

At a broader level, our companies should be providing leadership.  If the company is truly customer focused, we spend lots of time not just responding to our customers’ needs, but anticipating changes they may be facing and developing compelling solutions for them.  Product development people who look beyond our customers and their needs, to their customers and what they are doing. 

We and our customers can’t wait for the transitions and respond—we must anticipate, create and lead the transitions.  We must constantly be innovating.

When we see transitions happening around use–whether it’s to our customers or within our organizations, we can’t ignore them, we can’t resist them, we have to recognize them, embrace them and change.    There is no option, as Chambers says, “If we don’t change, we won’t make it through these transitions and if you don’t change you won’t either. It’s happening at a faster pace in every industry.”