Thanks for your continued, spot on, comments.! Regards, Dave

I particulary enjoyed the 3rd last paragraph when you talked about reducing the wall time for our prospects. The sad reality is that most sellers don’t recognize that their prospects face internal battles every day and many of them don’t know how to navigate the politics and challenges of moving something from an idea to an actual buying decision. This is especially true in today’s buying climate and smart sellers will learn how to help their customers navigate this tricky path.

Cheers!
Kelley
http://www.FearlessSellingBlog.com

I love this: “Wall time is bad—for the customer and for our companies.” I would add a huge exclamation point to that sentence (In fact, I will when I use it and quote you).

Too often, we in sales are responsible for the space between activities. We make all kinds of excuses for leaving the wall time. We say things like, “They aren’t ready to move to the next step yet,” and “They are going to look at this next quarter.”
This is simply a failure to advance the sale, and more often than not it is the result of a few factors. The first factor is one of the salesperson not knowing what advance he can reasonably expect to obtain. The second factor the failure to create enough value on the sales call to be able to justify obtaining the advance.

(I live and die by the idea that you never leave the scene of a sales call without another sales call scheduled. Period.)

You know where I stand on process. I am agnostic because I see things like “Obtain Commitment Letter” in the middle of the sales process. Who does that create value for? It sure as Hell doesn’t do anything for the prospect.

Instead, process needs to focus on advances that create value for the client and that, as you correctly point out, help them with the buying process, help them justify the decisions within their own organizations, and decrease their wall time. There are activities that can be used to advance the sale that do all of these things—and they do advance the sale and decrease the wall time considerably because they are as valuable (or more valuable) to the prospect as they are to the sales organization.

There is no quick fix to wall time. But we should focus on it and how we can reduce it. Your discussion on business value is music to my ears, but of course you aren’t surprised. Business and financial justification is critical, I am shocked by the number of sales people that don’t do this (even though it is a faster path to close). I am even more surprised by the number of sales people (MBA’s included) who really don’t understand how to do this. You can provide better data on this than I, but it seems we invest a lot in training about technique, but invest little in training about business analysis, financial analysis, etc. We need to rebalance priorities.

To expand on my point on wall time, it seems that we lose an opportunity in looking at effectiveness and productivity. Most of the time we focus on the activities we conduct through the sales process (there’s that term again). But we don’t spend much time on the “spaces in between.” If we spent a little time understanding those and how we can reduce them, productivity, effectiveness, win rates, and value to customer might be improved.

As usual, you are a generous contributor to my blog. I really appreciate your continued comments and support. Regards, Dave

This is a thought-provoking post. Great comments as well.

It has motivated me to add a few points:

First, don’t give up the process soapbox, please. When the pendulum swings the other way–salespeople become ineffective because there is *too* much process–you and I can take a rest. Until then, process, to varying degrees, is what most troubled sales organizations need more of. That’s not opinion. The facts are there for anyone who cares to examine them.

Regarding wall time… I’m not going to pretend there is a quick fix. One thing that everyone in sales must strongly consider is this: Have they tied the business value of their products and services directly to their customer’s P&L or Balance Sheet? At ESR we’ve seen a renewed sense of urgency to buy within companies (in most sectors) when they realize–and have validated by their own financial people–what the quantified financial impact of what they are considering buying really is.

The salesperson must: 1) have the facts, ROI models, assumptions, examples, and references at hand; 2) know to whom this business case must be made; 3) get access to those people; 4) be credible so that they are taken seriously; and 4) have sufficient competitive selling skills to prevent their competition from saying they can do precisely the same thing.

This kind of selling isn’t new and it’s not going to reduce wall time in every situation–maybe not even in most or, for that matter, for many situations. But if it does reduce wall time and increase the likelihood of winning for a deal or two a year, that will amount to a significant return on any investment in time or money.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by davidabrock: Lean-Mean Selling Machines. This is not what you think. http://ow.ly/10Z5w...