Buyer Beware — Seller Be Aware!
I guess as a blogger, twitter user, and sometime pundit, it’s natural to get into a lot of conversations about the impact of Social Media, and the Internet for that matter, on buying and selling. In the past several days, I’ve had a number of conversations with people all over the world. “How do we leverage social media to sell?” “What should we be doing with social media?” “What is social selling?”I have to admit that I feel a little awkward in these discussions, I don’t by any means consider myself a social media expert—it seems, I’ve just learned how to spell www….
Social media, social selling, and the Internet are very powerful tools for buyers and sellers. As with any tool, there are good and bad aspects. As sellers, we can reach out to a far wider customer base, we can get our “message” to people that were difficult to find and reach in ways that are much faster and cheaper than before. As buyers, we can be much better informed. We can do a tremendous amount of research on the Internet, in discussion forums, through blogs, through a tweet here or there. I recently bought my wife a new car. I researched models on the Internet, researched pricing, researched dealers and was able to walk into a dealer armed with data to get the right car at the right deal. We do this in the products we buy every day, our companies do that for the solutions they are purchasing, and suppliers they are considering.
I can’t imagine what we would do without all the information, data, and insight we can quickly get from the internet, social media, and through many of the tools that enable us go find information quickly and easily. However, it creates a great challenge for buyers and sellers.
The explosion of garbage and bad information available seems to grow at a rate faster than anything else. Sometimes we (as sellers and marketers) do it ourselves–the victims of our enthusiasm in communicating through this medium call that SPAM. Sometimes the volume of messages, communications, and information is so much, it’s difficult to sort through the clutter and noise. The reaction is to turn it off.
Buyers use social media to become informed—not necessarily well informed—just informed, or often misinformed. Social media can create an illusion of validity. After all, if it’s in a blog, it must be accurate! If there’s a discussion about a certain product, company, or topic, it must be true–the words are right there on my screen, it’s the next best thing to being in the newspaper. Someone has anointed themselves with the title “Expert,” or “Guru,” and they immediately become experts. We must hang on every word they write. The problem is so much of it is just wrong! It’s bad data, harmful advice, or something taken way out of context or misapplied.
All of this makes us informed–not necesssarily well informed.
It brings new meaning to the concept, “Buyer Beware.” Buyers have to sort through mountains of garbage, research and understand, validate to get “good insight.” Just because it’s on the Internet, doesn’t mean it’s gospel. Just because it’s written in a blog doesn’t mean it’s true (present company excepted 
But sometimes buyers are naive and accept things at face value. Sometimes they don’t have the time to dig and research–afterall, isn’t social media and social selling supposed to make things easier and faster. Sometimes buyers to their homework and reach incorrect conclusions.
All this creates a challenge for sellers, “Sellers Be Aware.” I get sales professionals and executives telling me they don’t have time for social media. You need to make time. You need to be Aware! It’s critical to understand what customers are saying—about their issues, trends and business. It’s critical to understand what customers and others are saying about you and your competition. Some of it is accurate, lots of it is dead wrong. If you aren’t aware of what is happening on the Internet, of how your products, services and companies are being reviewed, you will walk into your customers disadvantaged. They think they are informed, but they may be misinformed. As sellers we need to know that and address that–with customers and through social media.
Social media, social selling, and the internet are powerful, we can’t function without them. But it creates challenges for buyers and sellers. Buyer Beware, Seller Be Aware!
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:
- 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.”
- 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.
- “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.
- 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.
- 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.
Prisoners Of Our Own Experiences
I meet with executives everyday. They have great knowledge about their businesses–they can cite everything about their strategies, priorities, goals, key metrics. They study their competitors incessantly, understanding their strategies and positioning. They study their markets, and the best study their customers. They have deep insight about everything in their industry.
But when I talk to them, a critical issue they always bring up is, “How do we innovate?” “How do we start thinking out of the box?”
One of the problems with innovating and thinking out of the box is that we are prisoners of our own experience. Most of us have long experiences in our industry. We’ve been working with our company a long time, we may have worked with one of our competitors, we may have worked with one of our customers. We go to “our trade shows,” we read “our trade magazines,” we have deep knowledge about our companies, industries and markets.
That’s part of what makes us effective as leaders and business professionals, but at the same time, it’s exactly what limits us. Our ideas and innovations are limited by this collection of past experiences. We “know” what works and what doesn’t work, never reconsidering ideas that were “bad” in the past. We look at what our competitors are doing, copying them, perhaps tweaking the idea to one up them. We turn the crank on the tried and true programs of the past, sharpening them, reshaping them—sometimes it’s just like putting lipstick on a pig.
So how do we escape this? It’s actually pretty easy (maybe I’m giving away the secret decoder ring of consultants), we need to look outside our own industries. We need to look in very different industries to see how they approach some of the issues that we face. For example, a few years ago, we put the executives of one of the leading high technology (B2B) companies together with the execs of an extreme sports company. It was an interesting picture, on one side of the conference room, a row of execs in neatly pressed khaki’s and blue shirts, on the other side, guys in board shorts, torn tee shirts, lots of body ink and interesting piercings. Each eyed the other warily, some started looking at me thinking, “Dave, what have you gotten us into? Who are these freaks?”
We tee’d off the session with a few key questions about their business models, key challenges, problems, and so forth. Gradually, they found they had a lot in common. All were struggling to grow their businesses. All were struggling to get new and innovative ideas. As they started to talk over different approaches, one of the exec’s said to his peers in his company, “They are doing something really interesting and different from what everyone does in our industry, if we co-opted their ideas, if we twisted them a little here and there, they would be really new and novel for our company!”
Soon everyone was discovering something “new.” It wasn’t “new” to the presenter, but to the others it was new and innovative–when adapted to their industry. Each side started seeing ideas presented from a source they never would have thought about before.
Innovation doesn’t have to be brand new and revolutionary. innovation can be artful adaptations of old ideas from very different industries and sources. Try looking outside your industry–not just to adjacent industries, but to widely separated groups. Try looking across generations–forget Gen Y–they are so old–look at kids. Try looking across national borders and cultures. Look at what other people do, how they handle similar issues, look at what you can learn and adapt from them. Share what you are doing, let them learn and adapt from you.
Innovation is simple, you just have to know where to look, how to listen, how to artfully co-opt and adapt. Tom Peters coined the phrase, Management By Wandering Around, MBWA. Try IBWA–Innovation By Wandering Afar.
