What are we doing here again?(sales call)
Posted by: Michel Chiasson on: June 10, 2009
The best questions are often the most simple ones. Whether you run a large sales organization or a small one, every once in a while, you will be called in to help on a call. The question to ask is obviously about where we are in the process at this point, where do we plan to be at the end of the call and put a call plan together to make it happen. Did I say obviously?????? Oops. Sorry.
More often then not, the sales exec will get in a stage that I call a funk….where it is all mechanics, and by experience, none of that planning occurs….this is why it is good to throw a wrench in the process and not wait to be invited to a call, but to invite yourself.
Review your team pipeline, pick 2 or 3 of your top reps, and call them. Tell them that you want to be on the next call with the client you are looking at, and ask them about the call objectives. Ask for the call plan or the account plan. You know that if you are invited to a call by the rep, he/she will be prepared, because they specifically asked you to be there. Don’t wait, you will find the exercise quite telling.
This clip, not necessarily related and not endorsed as an organization….highlights at least the results of what can happen when you are not prepared…..if nothing, it will give you a good laugh at the sales exec expense!
How can you track relationships in an account?
Posted by: Michel Chiasson on: May 28, 2009
Obviously, I have the solution to this problem. I wan to know if you do. I might have talked about this before. I had a series of articles on managing contacts in an account as it was getting more and more complex. The reality is that the business we were targeting was a 2 billion dollars business. On our side, a presales, myself as vp sales, the director of client support, 5 people in marketing including the vp, the vp finance, the vp of client services, a client relationship manager, a partner manager and a consultant. And all this, was only on our side. So there were 13 resources on our side interfacing with a potential client at any given time.
On the client side, there were people in global sourcing, the vp of dev, the vp of IT, the vp of admin, internal resources evaluating the solutions from all vendors, and 15 different departments playing some roles in the evaluation process.
So here is the question – Who do we know? Who knows who best? How could I see this matrix in one view? Any thoughts? We were running a CRM solution from Epicor called Clientele and i can assure you, other than putting notes in the comments section, there was no way we could track this. And people buy from people, people they know and trust. http://www.alphainventions.com
If you have a solution for this, I would be very excited to hear about it. I will be waiting for your commments…..
Would this be the answer????
As J Peterman would say, …………….and done!
Posted by: Michel Chiasson on: May 24, 2009
Wow,
It has been a long while ….very long but I missed this and thought the world really couldn’t go on without my sales observations about overmanagement, my stories reflecting on great experiences – and not so great ones – along with rants about daily frustrations that I could link to business.
And I thought, I would go with one of the latter for the 2nd season of my blog. I will pull one on stats in 2 posts from this one, as I will have hit the magic 50 posts mark. I suppose I get a gold watch with this. But we will see then.
Today, I attended a meeting. It is Sunday, and one of the associations in which one of my girls is an active member was having a “year end celebration”. I thought it was more of a “Everything you should do if you want people to know you have zero experience in planning, management or family life”.
So the meeting was to start at 4pm on a Sunday, they had invited members and their families, were to provide a light snack and rides at an amusement park for a fee. If this had been a movie, people would have walked out in the first 10 minutes, but since there was over 100 people in the room, they thought they would start the meeting 30 minutes late. Since it was a Sunday, they also thought it would be a great time to be with your family to stare at a blank wall while we waited for someone so important that everyone had to wait for the presentation to begin.
Nobody took the time to apologize to guests for starting late, so they just went on. After an amateur slide show that lasted forever, they treated everyone to chips and doughnuts BEFORE going for the rides.
I have to skim on all the details of this comedy of horrors(not errors)….but there is really a point. Please understand that this is obviously run by volunteers with zero experience in the business world. However, the point I will make is that often, way too often, to a lesser extent, this happens to business people too when they set up meetings.
If you want to lose an audience, that’s the way to do it. Set expectations, very lightly, and then completely ignore them. Don’t talk to people as they wait and realize that it won’t be on time. And please, if you have a 90 minutes agenda, and start 30 minutes late, DO NOT ADJUST THE AGENDA!!!! Assume that everyone will settle in and the 30 minutes of silence rested everyone. We will talk about expectations in the next few posts, some good examples and how it has worked magic for me and my clients. In the meantime, in honor of my Sunday spent learning about a new low for meeting management, I thought I would pass this one along…..
Why great sales people shouldn’t be bothered with a CRM
Posted by: Michel Chiasson on: March 26, 2009
I have been there. I have managed it, oh so many times. The expectation. The cost that the company paid to have a CRM only to find that not all on the sales team want to spend time populating the information. Who is the key contact, what sales cycle is in process ok. What are the notes from the call you just made? What did the client say? What are the decision making criterias? Who else do we compete against? I have pushed and pushed again, to no avail. I have even worked for a company that had made the statement – “if it is not in the CRM, it does not exist”! BULL. It does, but you as a manager have a job to do.
That job is to recognize that your top producers have recognized a fact – Money producing activities generate results. Admin time entering data, not so much. It works for the manager to cover his/her ***….but the value to the GREAT rep, ZILCH – NADA – A BIG DOUGHNUT. I have figured this much which I will try to illustrate.
BASED ON REVENUE GENERATED BY REP
So here it is. Who do you want? What do you want your top producer to focus on – generating results or typing so that you look smart in front of your manager? I will take the former. I have seen it.
The rep that can’t generate revenue will hide by making sure that everyone can see how busy they are….how busy typing that is. The reality is – it goes back to one of my older posts…..do you want a rep that is fixing a hole in the roof when it rains…or one that is really busy painting the basement….
Have another approach. There is another approach. I will talk about it in future posts. Limit the involvment your sales team has with your CRM, forget what Siebel, Oracle(two of the same I know) or Saleforce.com says. Let your top reps focus on revenue generating activities, and you, as a manager, focus on either training the rest or weeding them out. Feedback respected, will be posted and welcomed!
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