Motivating Sales People Doesn’t Have to be Expensive

Sales people, for the most part, are competitive by nature.  Organizing a contest for a specific purpose, doesn’t always have to include a trip to Belize or a new BMW.  If there is one thing to be won, whatever that is, sometimes, with the right team at the right time, that is enough.

Make it special.  Make it unique.  Make a big fuss about it.  Reps will get fired up and want to be the one to win the prize.  I used to say that if there is only one blue pen in the office, run a contest with sales.  They will all fight for the blue pen because it is the only one.  Pride still exists in the sales community.  Dollars motivate in a different manner,  but along the way, during the year, a short term contest with a unique prize will provide the spark needed to close a month.

To make my point, a long long time ago(say 1991), the company I worked for ran a contest where the first 10 reps in the district to replace a competitive product will win a prize.  There were 108 reps in the district.  I wanted the blue pencil – I have always been one of those.  The prize, to replace a competitive colour copier, was a piece of “history”.  Inside a glass case was a piece of a motherboard from the first competitive unit we had knocked out as a company.  I remembered that because I found it on my 4 year old daughter’s shelf.  She thought it was “nice looking”.  Now, sales managers, find the blue pencil, run that contest and let your team’s competitive side emerge!

Glass Case Containing the Motherboard of a Competitive Replacement - The blue pencil of the story

Are CRMs that good – that one size really fits all???

I hate to recycle but at the same time, I am just too slow to understand I guess – so I will restate a question from the past.  Do CRM’s deploy the same way across the organization or should it be – say – situational?

More than you need to know, but I wear size 36 pants, 44 tall shirts.  My neck is 16 inches.  Why should one care?  For the same reasons that CRMs should care when they deploy their solutions – inside an organization, not everyone is the same.  In deploying the CRM across the organization, groups inside groups should be treated differently.    As an example, say that you are part of a same sales team.  You have major accounts only while your new friend in your geography has smaller commercial accounts.  As a sales individual, should you have the same screens?  Should you go to the same lengthy process to enter a new opportunity?  Do you have to document your sales activity with the same level of details as junior over here?

In reality, the senior sales person with larger accounts is most likely your best account executive that was hired from the street or graduated through the ranks.  Focused mostly on what I called “revenue generating activities”, these whales of account management cannot be treated the same way as the junior that was just promoted to field territory from inside sales.  You want to track the latter at the microlevel.  More over, the one with the most results, or largest transactions, is likely to have more value doing revenue generating activities than administrivia with the CRM.  Not a scientific view, but this is how I have observed CRM adoption among the types of users that I manage over the years.  When we mandated that everything went in the CRM, we applied the one size fits all approach.  I believe it is the wrong one.  At that point, going back to my original view, there would be no need for different styles and sizes at the store.  I would walk in, take the medium size pants and shirts, and walk – or try to walk away.  Any thoughts?

HOW CRM USAGE SHOULD VARY WITH LEVEL OF SUCCESS

Customer Relationship Management? Really?

In the last week, 4 times I was asked to suggest a CRM solution to organizations.  One is for 100 employees, the other for 20, one for 1000 and one for 600 distributed in 4 provinces.  Invariably, my answer was the same:   Why do you want a CRM?  

The answers I received were as varied as the organizations these individuals were leading.  Being the solutions driven individual I am however, I had to let them on the dirty little secret that CRM vendors have known for so long:  from the 4 answers I received, none of them need a CRM.

Not in the actual state of the CRM offering that is.  It seems that there is still a need for much clarity between a CRM, an SFA solution and a contact management solution.  Wanting to be all things to everybody, CRM vendors get caught at their own game and most often are busy adding feature that differentiate them while not necessarily making the organization more productive.

Interestingly enough, the audiences were different in each situation.  The 100 employee scenario was led by the owner of the business and sought an open-source solution, option strictly driven by costs.  The 20 employee sales department was led by the vp of sales and wanted a full-fledged CRM.  The 1000 employee play was led by the VP of IT and already had bought a solution a few years back that had aborted before even being deployed but was now mandated to go at it again.  The 4 provinces opportunity was led by the VP of Sales on behalf of the organization and wanted to know which the top 5 options to consider were.

After speaking with each one at length about their long term objectives, the users of the system etc, I figured that one of these prospects is best suited for a good hosted sales force automation solution.  The other 3 will simply need a contact management solution and a relationship management module to realize what they plan to achieve.

I was quite shocked at the notoriety that the space – CRM – has achieved to date.  These four organizations knew they needed to do something to improve their business…and generically, money was allocated to go and “buy a CRM”… as if that would solve all their problems.  Recipes for CRM failures again.

What your sales closing technique says about you….

Are you one that needs to put the client in a vice at quarter end?

I have probably tried all the techniques.  When I was  evaluating sales talent at the Xerox Document University,

we taught all those techniques.  The Ben Franklin close, the Assumptive close, the Conditional Close, the Puppy Dog and others – we were training our sales reps on how to get over the last hurdle and get the deal done.  And if you couldn’t close during your 3 weeks of University training that were preceeded for most by 12 weeks of in-district training – you’d be leaving with a grade of “not territory ready”.

Forget that you would be the best at discovering needs that the clients were unaware of,  or that you’d be the best at presenting the alternatives to the painful painful situation that these clients were in – if you couldn’t close, you couldn’t be ready for a territory.

20 years later, many 1000’s calls later and million dollars of order, one thing is still true.  Your closing technique will tell a lot about who you are.  Actually, today, if you still use a closing technique, whichever it is, tells even more than your style itself.

Over time, obviously, the client has evolved, become more educated and is more aware of the dynamics in thesales process.  While the sellingorganization is trying to aim everything to line up with their timeline, their quarter end, the client has a buying process that is quite sophisticated.  They have their own check boxes.  They have their own people that they will inject in the process.  And they have their timelines.  If you want to move those timelines, it will cost you- greatly.

Front loading the sales process is paramount in today’s world.  You need to understand what problems you are solving.  You need to understand who will benefit from your solution and how will those benefits translate for the organization and its key players.  You need to understand where the money is and how and when those funds will be allocated.  Most of all, you need to build relationships and mature those relationships as the sales process evolves.

If you have a solid business case all along, if you have real business relationships with people making the decision, if you are solving a problem that they want to solve, here is the real truth behind closing techniques.  YOU WON’T NEED ANY!!!

Closing techniques are sales tactics that are there to push the client to forgive or forget, a shortcoming in the sales process.  Period.  Otherwise, the client will tell you that they are ready to buy.

Cold Calling Part 2 of 2) – in 2010, is it a misnomer?

Think of this.  In my last post, I talked about how we were getting ready before a call in 1988.  

How much has this part of the sales process evolved over time?  10 years later, in 1998, with the web, we were starting to read annual reports, understanding what was driving the executives and if we were very lucky, we could find quotes from those same execs.

Today, in 2010, a cold call doesn’t carry the same mystique anymore.  It is important to do, but the magic of the“unknown” is gone.  Cold calls are important, however the knowledge accumulated before you call is so different.  Doesn’t carry the same pain.   Doesn’t carry the same effort to understand the account you are about to call on and the executives at that account and what keeps them awake at night.

Today, if I want a call on a company on which I have no data, I get online.  I read their website, the executive suite biographies.  I use CVUSoftware to see if my organization has any prior relationships with that target organization.   I use Linkedin to understand the resume of my target contact.  I use Flowtown to see their online social presence and from there I can read through posts on blogs, tweets on Twitter and understand again, what keeps them awake at night.

The difference with 1988, is that today, to know an organization and paint the decision maker’s profile, it takes a few minutes.  Not over the course of a year like in 1988.  Not in the course of a few weeks like in 1998.  Today, it takes a few minutes to have access to more information that I need to make sure that there is no cold call anymore.  Those are very warm calls.  The next time that I have a rep that tells me he can’t do cold calls effectively, I will agree with that rep.  And I will ask that rep to step in 2010, and there won’t be cold call conversations anymore.