I am always impressed and – let’s be honest – very happy when I need to visit Canadian Tire.  In one visit the other day, I went in, spent 15 minutes, grabbed three items that were most unrelated, and left.  If this was a start up business, it would fail or be expected to fail right away.  This is not what one can consider….focused.  Now let’s be honest, from their corporate website but also from the name, it is easy to know that when it all started, Canadian Tire was selling – well – tires!

Imagine that…one of the most diversified stores in the country, was extremely focused when it started.   The diversification happens when you are successfull at doing what you do best.  You don’t start with “being everything to everybody”….the same goes with any companies.

It is a good lesson for entrepreneurs as well.   People in the biz call this “trying to boil the ocean”.  Be focused.  Take something you are good at, develop it and work hard at it.

This is what we are trying to do as well.  More to follow on that story….but now that the dog looks good and my wheels are shiny, time to head to the golf course!

Local wine blogger finalist for ‘A Really Goode Job’ (and some serious $$$)

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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!

In a post a few weeks ago, I talked about the problems caused often by sellers selling hard when the client is not ready to buy….I also mentioned that in my last assignment we had devised a 7 step sales process that would have to be matched against a 10 step buying process.  If you are trying to close the deal but the client still doesn’t know where they will spend their money, there is misalignment.  More often then not, you will end up with a severely discounted sale……if you sell at all.

The flip side of that is when you have a client, that has money to spend, you need to be able to direct him/her in a direction that will only lead to one decision – buying your product.

I was put in that situation a few weeks ago, and sitting deep in a chair, I saw a call unfold that was going nowhere but 90 miles an hour to a brick wall with no brakes on.

The client sat down with us and was asked by my partner if they had money….to which the client said no….than, you fast forward on….to us giving a lot, an awful lot of information….and asking…”Do you think you would need something like this”…and obviously, the client said no….

IF YOU ARE SELLING, THE CLIENT SHOULD NEVER HAVE ANY MONEY!!!

Let me clarify this….When a client has identified a need, and decided that the need is causing problems that need to be fixed, they allocate dollars to fix the problem.  You are also not selling, the client is buying! Selling is a long process in which you understand your client’s situation, you identify opportunities that can be improved, you maximize the pain felt by the client and have the client assign value to that problem.  Then, they allocated money to it, and if you did a great job, they might not have money but will have to get it from other services, and then they end up buying your solution.

When you answer an RFP, some sales skills are in play.  When you start the sales process(not buying process as you noticed) that leads to a sales, you have earned your full commission.

In the case of the prospect that came to visit us, I will not follow up with that client.  He is at the top of the foodchain, and we have helped him believe that he doesn’t need us.  Worst, after the call, I was told  -  ” See, they are too small and have no money…”

Although it was bad, it was not as bad as this…but if you want to see what happens(with humor) when a call is one-sided, have a look at this….

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????

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…..

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!

There is a big outcry right now and most people are getting caught in the heat of the moment  – I am obviously talking about AIG and what people think is a travesty because they are paying bonuses to employees and executives.

I understand that AIG has received significant money from the feds (read more than 160 billion dollars).  I also understand that over the last 6 months, what has become a black hole in the US economy is continuously surprising investors and government officials as everyone tries to understand how bad the situation is at this once great American Insurance bastion.  I am not biased – I am an investor that has seen the value of this stock shrink by more than 80% since I bought it and has cost me in the 5 figures with this stock alone.  Fortunately, I did better, much better with other ones.  But, business is business.

AIG has employment contracts with their key talent / employees.  This is how it is done.  You want top talent, you pay top dollar.  You put incentives in place, you put them on paper, and based on how you perform against these metrics, you get a percentage of your salary at the end of the year, at the end of the quarter etc.  Your payout, as a performing employee is based on YOUR objectives.  The company might be going in the tank – if you did your job(base salary) and overperformed against your objectives, you are entitled to a bonus!  End of story!!  If your actuaries can’t identify risks properly, if your management is buying toxic assets, and you are not measured on these actions, it should have no impact on wether or not your receive a bonus!

The same goes for an earlier story that broke around October after the feds had bailed out AIG to the tune of 85 bln dollars.  A week after this had taken place, there was an incentive reward for sales agents in California and once again, there was an public outcry.  The agents write that business for AIG, the incentive trip with massages and all, was the reward for meeting performance targets.  It is how you run a business.  They could go sell other products for other insurance carriers, but they sell AIG!

Before taking to the streets and the barricades today, try to dig deeper and understand who the recipients of the bonuses are at AIG.  IF you see Edward Liddy’s name, get mad, otherwise, just assume that it is people like you and I that put their head down and worked their a**es off while the captain of the ship was playing scrabble.  This is a contract, that money should be paid!

Sometimes, a partner doesn't need to bring business to be efficient. Opening the door wider could be enough!

www.alphainventions.com

Buying versus Selling

Client A scenario

Every month or so, there would be  a trade show to attend.   The best ones were always the smallest ones because you actually had time to meet the clients.  With the big shows, their might be 500 exhibitors attending and 2000 attendees.  The clients would walk the halls looking down at the floors hoping that the vendors would not stop to talk to them.  Or worse, tackle them so they would “join” you for a few minutes.  This one, this show we were attending, was a small one.   After registration, we received a “pre show list” that would list all registered attendees.  I saw a familiar name from a previous life and thought that this would be funny if this turned out to be the same person I had known 15 years prior.  It turned out it was.

John was now CEO of this consulting group and while having a glass of wine, volunteered that he had just been signed up by client A to do a review of the document publishing needs.  HELLO JOHN!  HOW HAVE YOU BEEN???  At this point, you have to recalibrate the whole story.  I can abandon my effort and push for John to take our technology into Client A’s infrastructure.  Or I can add John as a resource, keep my track to client A and manage John to end up where we hope he would.  We chose that path.   John was CEO of Partner 1.

We agreed that we would meet again with some members of his team so that they would be aware of our technology.  We met with 2 of his senior consultants, and by luck, with the consultant responsible for Client A’s relationship.  Because he was very important to our success, we made sure to give all the ammunition to this consultant so that he could position us favorably.

At this point, this is what the situation looked like at Client A.  I was going to be in the US the following week, so I scheduled a meeting to see how their process was moving along.

With a tally of influences and influencers, here is what I know of the account:

The client in the purchasing process, is still only in stage 2.  There are 11 players from 3 organizations involved, and this is just on our side.  And we have yet to start the process.    There will need to be a more efficient way to do this.

www.alphainventions.com

At one time or another, a person's true character will emerge....

A lesson in lack of judgment and character!

I write this post not as a sales enabling article, but as a story about what you should look for in an employee, a sales person or a business partner.    Before the work ethics and the great skills, you want someone with CHARACTER.   I always illustrate my comments best with a story.

I gave 10 years of my life to Xerox Canada.  I say give because although I was paid really well, I worked extremely long hours under huge pressure to deliver results from month to month.  When we ended our relationship ( you can read here that I was fired for refusing to move out of my job to a 6th location in 1o years) – as I said – when we ended our relationship,  I was extremely mad at my employer.  2 weeks later, I thought I was the luckiest cat in town.  I had worked for 10 years for one of the greatest companies in the world, made some money, learned a ton and met my wife during that time.  I had a lot to be thankful for .  I was leaving with my knowledge, a fresh start and a few hundred friends in my old workplace.  Since that day, in 1999, I have not stopped singing the praise of that company and hoping for it to be succesful.

After Xerox, I joined a startup in Moncton NB.  From Xerox and ties, to Whitehill and golf shirts.  From 45,000 employees plus at the time, to 35 .  I was one of 6 in the management team and we struggled to survive at the beginning.  Eventually, we built a good business with great people.  NOT the other way around.  Business was good – people were great.  And because of that fact, other companies started to court us.  We were sold in August 2007.  In 18 years, I have worked for one incompetent manager, and he was my last.  I also had the decency to tell him that I thought he was incompetent to be my manager when we first met.  I just thought he should know.  He came from the acquirer so that there would be personality clashes would be expected.  In 18 years, I have only worked with great people.   The people at Whitehill gave us products, support, great customer satisfaction.  They fed me for 8 years.  And the fed me well.  After I left, only great comments.  Only good people there.  When asked about the reorganization by business partners, I only have great things to say – “they are smart, they are in good shape, we are survivors here”.  Nothing to worry about.  After all, I worked with them, elbow to elbow to make it a success.  I know what they can do and the pride they have in the business.

In an unfortunate turn of events today, I read that not all are held by the same standard for character.   Or maybe they just don’t know what that notion stands for in the business world.  Trying to build up his own name or get visibilitiy for his new gig, one of my former employees talked about the demise of the remaining Whitehill employees.  I did the acid test and asked a few peers what would they say about Whitehill today?  All had the same thing in mind, great people, a good business out of Moncton and poised to grow.  What transpired in the papers was: ” It used to be great, and now it is not so great.  But look at what I am doing here”.  And with that, a view of how a little press can rapidly get to someone’s head.  I have nothing but respect and praise for the people at Whitehill.  Keeping with my own discipline, I will not post the name of that person….he doesn’t deserve my press.  I will, for the US readers following my blog, let you email me and request a copy of the article.  For the Whitehill employees, remember that the equation is always the same:  Success is the product of  Work Ethics X Great Skills.  You have both, so success is on its way!

IF all goes well tomorrow, he will realize his mistake, and understand that while trying to elevate his status, he hurt some great people.  IF all goes well tomorrow, he will write an apology.  Textbook behavior.  Damage done, judgement passed.   If you can’t contain your emotions on the phone with the press, simple answers are listed as follows:  1 – I don’t know 2- No comment 3- See no.1