Recently I was interviewed by Paul Diamond from the Vistage organization. We discussed the vast array of social media sites for salespeople and the fact that there are a lot of these sites out there, but not all of them are good. I think that Paul’s take on the topic and what he uncovered in his research is helpful. Check out his blog post on the topic on Bizmore.com.

I have been living in the world of sales training, writing, hiring and strategy for quite some time now. I have had a chance to look behind the curtain to see what is back there. Here’s what I have found: a lot of misspent money.

The consultants and trainers working in the field are well intentioned, and many are very talented and effective. There is among all of us, however, a myopic view of solutions and consulting. For example, if I sell selection testing, then I see testing as the solution to everything. If I am a trainer, guess what, training is the answer. Process guys love process, of course the CRM people believe activity tracking is the panacea and so on. The fact is that there is not a universal solution to a multi-faceted problem and as a result, your risk in buying into one solution to solve your problems is that you are bound to overspend on one part and get poor results on another.

The Big Picture

Companies hire my company when they are ready to double the speed with which they are going to double their company. We help them develop the strategy, process and techniques for big sales. But such exponential growth is not everyone’s goal. Some companies just want to grow at a more manageable rate. This means that some times—actually a lot of times—I’m the wrong consultant for the job.

Look at it this way:

• If you want to grow 5-10% per year, then skills training with your current sales staff can help you make that improvement. It is a smaller investment and requires the least amount of organizational change to accomplish it.
• If you want to grow 10-20% per year, then you will need to change personnel and the way that you attract and select them. It is a bigger investment in dollars and culture change. If you want to get bigger in this range, you have to bite the bullet and make the choice.
• If you want to grow 20%+ per year, then you can’t just use the same people with some better techniques to get there. You can’t just use new people to sell into your current market. You are going to need a few new players and a much better market/message/sales process strategy to land your transformational accounts.

In the ideal world, you do all three because no single approach will give you the sustainable growth and solid sales organization necessary. But because most organizations have a finite amount of resources, sales consultants wind up selling you their solutions as the complete answer. It’s not accurate and that is where consultants get a bad name.

The Quartiles

If no one solution is the best for everything, then how do you figure out what is best for you? I believe you should use the Quartiles method- Break down your sales staff in blocks of 25% performers, based upon raw gross sales. Be careful, you can over analyze this. Just force-rank them by sales and you can evaluate for exceptions later.

When you break down that group, the general guidelines look like this:

What you apply universally will kill the productivity of half of your team. Let me say it again. Whatever you apply to everyone reduces productivity in half of your sales staff. You are going to need to apply a blended approach if you want to dramatically change your sales results as it relates to your team.

EXAMPLES

• CRM. If you start using CRM as an activity measurement tool, then your top 2 quartiles are over-managed and annoyed. You are wasting their time by managing them like your lower 50%. The unintended outcome is that the best performers get marginalized
• Selection Testing. You are not going to hire your next rockstar through testing alone. Testing is great for identifying potential. It keeps you away from hiring those who do not fit the job and dramatically increases the possibility of high potential candidates who will develop into top quartile producers. This process doesn’t guarantee all top quartile hires, but it does avoid almost all bottom quartile performers.
• Strategy. Half of your team is not prepared to learn the strategic and nuanced call-coaching information that you are providing. They will take misunderstood ideas to their customers and confuse them. Strategy is lost on people who need tactics and those people who want strategy are bored by tactical training that they learned a long time ago.

THE TRUMPS

Here is my rule of thumb if you have to make tradeoff choices rather than implementing all of these investments at once:

• Strategy trumps talent
• Talent trumps skills
• Skills trump activity
• Activity trumps inactivity

In best-in-class companies, there is an attention and investment in all four. Picking consultants has to be an outcomes first consideration. Decide what you want, then look at the changes in which to invest. As always, buyer beware. If anyone promises a fast and effective answer, it is probably neither. And if anyone promises a universal answer, they probably don’t understand the problem in the first place.

“We’re getting commitments, but we’re not getting orders…”

“Some of the biggest companies out there are our customers, we just aren’t getting the volume…”

“The decision-maker is saying we’re going to get the business, but then her people order from their old suppliers…”

One of the most common problems I hear from clients is the problem of traction. They can get into the big companies, but they can’t get that “yes” to turn into dollars. I have touched upon this in the past in “Unsticking Stuck Deals (parts one & two) and “The Executive Sponsorship Agreement.”

I believe that sales people are pathologically optimistic, and it’s a good thing that they are. If they weren’t, how could they get out and face the rejection and frustration that accompanies the sales process? But that optimism carries with it some inherent dangers for their companies.

False positives, missed signals and ‘hope’ acting like ‘commitment’

Sales people are given a variety of “yes” answers over the course of a sales process that create the sense that a deal has occurred. In reality, though, there is at least one unseen step in the decision spectrum where the ‘maybe’ masquerades as ‘yes.’ You can probably spot it.
(more…)

“If we get Microsoft, (replace Microsoft with your favorite iconic brand name), then it is going to be a lot easier to get other big guys. So what if you take a little bit of a haircut on that deal? It’s what we are going to have to do to get our name out there.”

When I work with small and mid-size companies, I often hear the siren song of the logo deal.

This is not a discussion I hear on occasion. In one flavor or another I hear this conversation in almost every company I meet. The promise of affiliated greatness for your brand because of someone else’s strong brand is very hard to pass-up, I know.

I’ve written and spoken against this practice at length. For the sake of context, I’ll just give a quick summary of why this is a dangerous temptation. Then I will outline the Trigger-Map Strategy we teach for companies that want to boost their brand through key brand affiliation.
(more…)

Yes, it’s January, but the PowerPoints I’ve been going through in the last eight weeks have me flashing back to the Christmas letters I was reading just a few weeks ago. You know the ones. Each letter is filled with an update from the family that sent it. The letters typically fall into three categories: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s take a look:

• The Good. Lots of photos, little text, only high points. Leave you feeling like you miss the people and you want to re-connect. The feeling reminds you why you like them.
• The Bad. One photo. No text. Standard “Happy Holidays” with ink-jetted signature. Gives you the feeling of a bad stand-up brochure for plumbing or painting services.
• The Ugly. Two pages of 6 pt font text, outlining every event of the year including the dog’s de-worming. Possibly a photo thrown in for good measure, but it is posed in front of the obligatory fireplace with the Mr. Potatohead smiles in place.

The parallel to PowerPoint presentations is hard to miss. The best ones have the following characteristics:

• Short and sweet. I mean less than 15 slides total. Trust your audience and trust your presenter. Your audience will fill in with questions and its own understanding some of the gaps. Your presenter is there to tell a story that brings your slides to life.
• Low text. Why did you send a presenter if people are supposed to read the text? If you don’t trust your presenter to get it right, I suggest you train him or her better or send in a different presenter. A dense and long presentation will not make up for a bad presenter.
• Focus on the audience. When you read the Christmas letters, what is interesting to you? The key events, the photos that show those events, possibly an insider comment that connects us with those events. That’s it.

(more…)

I spoke to Newpreneurs™ at Inc. Magazine/Alibaba.com conferences in New York and Chicago this week about the 5 key things it takes to be successful in growing their businesses explosively through large account selling.

Here’s what I told them:

• Focus. Pick your 4% marketplace to attack and weed out “toxic clients and black hole prospects” as quickly as possible
• Solve your prospect’s real issue. Companies are not focusing on pain, features or benefits. They are buying on time, money and risk.
• Get a bigger buyer’s table. The people who will kill your deal are often times not in the room. Invite your detractors into the process. They will work against you anyway so you might as well face them head-on and work through their issues with them.
• Think like a big prospect. Interest is generated by your compelling advantage, but the decision to buy from you comes from how much fear your big prospect has of your ability to deliver.
• Hunt heavy. Take a big team and all of the resources. If you have to err on how many resources to expend, err on the heavy side.

Here’s what I didn’t tell them:

• It’s not about the product. Many of the contestants in this national Newpreneur™ of the Year contest sponsored by Alibaba.com are product companies. As I listen and judge their presentations, the recurring theme of their 90-second elevator pitch is “my product is best.” Their distribution channels are not necessarily looking for the “best” product. Whether they will take their products to market through dealers, distributors or retailers, these Newpreneurs have challenges that have nothing to do with the quality of the product. Quality and value of product to the end buyer is an issue of returns.
• Distribution channels want to know about:
  • Velocity. How quickly will the product move in and out of my DC?
  • Margin. How much will be made per unit and palette in total dollars and in percentages in comparison to same or similar product in the warehouse?
  • Risk. How long will it take for the sales to be the same or better than whatever it was    that filled that space in the DC and on the end sale point shelf?

  When they focus on the quality of the product, companies are focusing on one-off sales, not on the big deals that go through 2-step distribution.

• It’s about the supply chain. As my brother Tim likes to say, “In this marketplace, companies don’t buy from other companies, they buy from supply chains. You are not just you any more, you are you plus all the partners you bring with you including your bank, your landlord, your business partners, and everything that makes up the composite picture which is what you offer.” To be successful in going to market, companies have to bring the full solution and the complete team to the table to land their biggest deals.
• Passion will only get you so far. Every contestant has a dream. Their passion inspires to the point of making you want to weep. I’m serious. It is energizing just to be in their presence and if you can get to one of these events coming up, you should. You will leave fired up and confident in the future of our economy. That having been said, very few of the contestants would have survived the TV show “Shark Tank.” Push in on their business plans, poke at their go-to-market-strategies and everything is a little squishier than you would like to see. A couple of glaring gaps:
  • Money? For the most part, these new business people are looking at their businesses in a hand-to-mouth fashion. A big order, an investor, even an inheritance would probably not be used well based upon the answers to the questions we heard. There has to be a plan for what the next level of money would do for the business.
  • Team? You can’t do it alone. Each of these businesses needed a MasterMind group of advisers to guide them.
  • Scalability? One of the first things a big company is going to ask a product company is “Can you keep up with demand?” This is a question that was not well answered by most of the contestants. A strategy that says “We’ll figure that out when we get there” will run out of runway the moment the business is “there.”

The Newpreneuer™ series of events has been great and I am looking forward to the remainder of the tour. Even with these small critiques, I understand why almost two-thirds of Americans surveyed believe that the economic turnaround will be fueled by new entrepreneurs, not the large, old-line companies of the past.

I’m working with a team of sales people right now—good sales people—who have one teensy-weensy problem: follow up.

The sales process for all of us includes a large number of transactional communications. They may include coordinating a meeting, securing a key piece of information, getting approval from Procurement or Purchasing, sign-off from a superior, the review of the proposal, signing the contract and so on. Every one of these communications must be completed in order to land the deal. If you participate in the sales process, you understand that rarely have you suffered more indignity or unprofessionalism than in this cycle of unanswered, unreturned or ignored emails, voicemail messages and sent and unsigned documents.  And it’s done WILLINGLY.

I’ve watched frothy-mouthed-screaming-at-officials-soccer-moms, who when faced with following up with a prospect who agreed to an action and hasn’t done it, say “Well, I’ll just give it another week.  I don’t want to be too pushy.”

I’ve seen bar-pounding-get-me-my-beer-now-guys wait for weeks for a response on a proposal. Weeks!

What is the right amount of time to wait before following up with a prospect? Not just any prospect, but a big prospect.  I know that you don’t want to be pushy or desperate.  I get that.  But you also need to keep moving the process along. We are looking for the Goldilocks “just right” level. Here are some pointers before I give you the timing guidelines:

• Ask. My favorite approach came from a guy in Ireland pitching me some commercial real-estate. He said, “Thomas, the line between persistence and annoyance is a fine one, and I wouldn’t want to be crossing it. When should I be getting back to you so I’ll know you’ll be picking up the phone.” In every direct communication, ask when they want to have you get back to them and be specific. “Early next week” is not specific. “Tuesday at 10am” is specific.
• Set expectations. It starts with setting expectations. In voicemails, emails, face to face or by phone, never end the conversation without setting the next time. Tell them when you will be calling or sending an email, specifically.
• Be impeccable. Never miss a time or date. Not by a minute. If you are going to set the time for follow up with precision in your email or voicemail, then you have to hit it. You are creating a perception of attention detail and reliability. Just because they are not impeccable does not give you a pass not to be.
• Allow some leeway. Sometimes, my calls for appointments and follow ups are missed by the person whom I am calling. I leave this message, “I have us scheduled for a meeting today at 9am. I probably just missed you or one of your other meetings is running over. I will call back in 15 minutes to connect. I look forward to our conversation. Thanks.” Then I call back. If I don’t reach the person, my message sounds like this, “I’m sorry we didn’t get connected today, I was looking forward to our conversation. Your day may have just gotten away from you, I know that happens to me sometimes. I’ll call you back at end of day today, say 5:00pm, to reschedule this call. Thanks.”  Don’t wait for a call back or an email.  Keep pressing forward.
• Drive, don’t ride. I don’t expect that people will be calling me back. I’m driving the process, so it’s my job to drive the communication. I am always willing to be surprised in a good way with a responsive person, but my control needs dictate that I can’t be waiting.  I have to drive. How about you?
• Walk away. Like the movie title says, maybe “He’s Just Not That Into You.” At some point, continued follow up is groveling. Don’t grovel. (see Brando Don’t Audition)

If they are not responding, it means that they have moved on. I send an email or leave a voice message that sounds like this:  “I’ve been in this business a long time, and when I stop being able to connect with someone it usually means that the timing for us to work together is not good. This is my last call to you for 6 months. I’ll circle back around then to see if timing is better for us to work together. If something changes for you between now and then, please feel free to call me. “

Having said all of this, here are some guidelines for proper Hunt Big Sales Prospect Follow Up Etiquette:

Prospecting Calls

• 1st Prospecting Call- You can call or email an unresponsive person within 48 hours.
• 2nd Prospecting Call– Within 48 hours of last call
• 3rd Prospecting Call– Within 48 hours of last call
• 4th Prospecting Call– Within 72 hours of last call
• Final Prospecting Call– Within 72 hours of last call

Trade Show Follow-Up – This gets trickier depending upon the volume of contacts.

• Pre-Set Personal meeting – Within 48 hours of trade show closing.
• Good conversation on floor – Within 48 hours of trade show closing
• Passing conversation on floor – Within 72 hours of trade show closing
• Fish bowl business card – Within 7 calendar days of trade show closing
• Prospect listed in program – Do you really have time to chase someone who you never met at the show? Don’t be a psycho stalker. Let it go.

Proposals. Assuming that you are sending a requested proposal, rather than an unsolicited one, your follow-up cycle should be declared in the cover letter. It should be within 24 hours to confirm receipt and distribution if appropriate. The time should be set at that time for a full review of the proposal within 72 hours. The house goes on fire outside of 8 calendar days—you must get connection and confirmation of interest and progress within 8 calendar days or you are dead.

Contracts. Who is driving? You are. Contract cycles within clients are a misty and dark area of the sales process. Lawyers think of themselves in this process as the stewards of their company’s risk, which they probably are. Because of this, they are slow, methodical and indifferent to you. First, get an understanding from your champion how long the cycle usually takes. Cut this time by two-thirds and follow up at the one-third mark in the cycle. Work both the attorney and the champion. Your approach should always be helpful: “What areas are of the most concern in the agreement? Which parts of the agreement are we going to be able to leave the same? How can we help to work through this agreement?”

Getting the prospect’s team to move. Stuck. I hate being stuck. Usually it’s IT, but not always. The process gets tends to get bogged down while your champion of your new client is waiting for someone in his or her organization to do something. Now everybody is waiting. Your follow up here has to be vigorous and consistent but friendly. You are working within 4 hour cycles of commitments. Any time that a time or date has been missed on a commitment, you follow up within 4 hours. If they are not missing commitments, then your follow up is within 1 hour of commitment completion to thank them for completing the commitment. 20 commitments? 20 thank you’s.

Information requests. Use the same guidelines as “Getting the prospect’s team to move.”

Guidelines are not laws.  When in doubt, use your own judgment. Always remember though, YOU ARE DRIVING.

Comments have been pouring in about your preferred “brain food.”  Gini Deitrich, one of our favorite guest bloggers, has chimed in with her two cents, as has my friend, Scott Collins, Present of SRA.  Take a look and share your own.

Hi Tom,

There’s so much to read out there that it’s important to home in on what really serves your needs.  Here are the blogs and reporters that I read daily:

• Del Jones at USAToday
• Randy Hall at 4th Gear Consulting
• Jay Goltz at The New York Times Small Business Blog
• Harvard Business Review blog
• American Express OPEN Forum
• BusinessWeek blog
• WomenEntrepreneur
• Jay Baer at Convince & Convert

I also subscribe to SmartBrief leadership, and daily entrepreneur and social media newsletters for new ideas and articles.

And, of course, I read YOU!

Gini

And from Scott:

Hi Tom,

Here are some of my favorite information sources to share with your readers.

Vistage: I utilize a pretty wide variety of their speaking resources to enhance what we are doing.  Sometimes I read additional information from them, sign up for their newsletters, etc.

New strategic facilitator: We are going to engage the services of Harry Kangis (developer of the “One Page Strategic Plan”) to facilitate a completely redesigned strategic planning process.  I felt like we needed to do something very different to “shake things up” given our desire to accelerate our transformation…now was the right time.

LinkedIn: I have gotten some very good ideas through various LinkedIn groups as well as introductions to additional thought leaders.

Get Abstract: I can’t tell you how great a resource this has been.  New content every week in small, digestible chunks on a very wide variety of topics. You can always buy the book if the preview sparks deeper interest

Blue Ocean: I use this as a broad term to define bringing together a wide array of thought leaders from very unrelated industries to help us think about the future of SRA.  This has done so much to help us redefine the model and our target markets resulting in a much shorter timeline for us to complete our transformation (frequency - once or twice a year)

Building our business from the outside in: Coordinating our customers, vendors, and unrelated business visionaries in an “Advisory Board” capacity to help us think about and refine various parts of our business and product offerings.  We are now doing this with our redeveloped SRA University initiative and it is already paying dividends.  (Frequency is almost monthly as an ongoing part of the tactics that help us achieve our strategic objectives)

Six Thinking Hats by Edward deBono: Great resource to help improve the thinking and decision making process in your business.

Enjoy!

Scott

David Friedfeld of ClearVision Optical shared his “vision” on looking past day 90.  His thoughts on exploring new ideas, brainstorming and “brain food” are below.  Please feel free to comment with your suggestions on how we can all look past day 90.

Let me start by saying that I agree one hundred percent with your two points in “The 91st Day”:

1. Strategic thinking is more than 90 days out.
2. Strategic thinking requires working with people outside your immediate group or industry media.

At CVO, we require most everyone in a decision making capacity to participate in some version of strategic thinking for the company or their department.  Here are ten good ideas to accomplish that we use at CVO regularly:

1. Reading is fundamental.  Read often, read outside your field, read with a purpose and read for inspiration.
2. Conduct surveys/research or participate in surveys/research.
3. Put yourself in a position to be interviewed.
4. Participate in or conduct focus groups.
5. Attend trade shows, educational breakfasts and meetings.
6. Belong to a mastermind group like Vistage or YPO.
7. Be open to new ideas whenever and wherever they come to you.  Keep a “dream/vision pad” notepad (or task/note in your BB) and write down these thoughts when you hear them or think of them.
8. Conduct brainstorming sessions with a group of bright “associated” people.  These people ARE NOT colleagues from your industry.  They are your friends or acquaintances outside of your industry.
9. Listen to your kids.  They may see many things differently than you do.  They tweeted and joined Facebook long before you did, and they see the world from a different POV.
10. Listen to news shows from at least four different networks that represent different POV’s—CNN, Fox, NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, Sky News and so on.

There is a key to developing the long-term strategic thinking that is discussed in Tom’s “The 91st Day.”  Each of us has to understand that Darwinian Capitalism is alive and well—eat or be eaten, evolve or perish.  With that approach, I suggest that companies consider making a profit that allows them to fuel a base of business and to develop talent.  Then use that talent to morph the business over and over as your industry changes and as opportunities present themselves.

Apple, GE, Westinghouse, Wal-Mart, IBM, HP, Sony, Google and Luxottica (in my industry) are all different companies than what they started out to be.  All of them have successfully navigated the challenges of change to position their companies strategically.

I also suggest that leaders consider that what worked yesterday will likely not work tomorrow, and for that reason they have to be looking for the “next river of cash.”  An open and inquisitive mind is part of the game, as it “requires people to seek new strategies and to feed their brains from many of the different sources.”

I wonder if there is any cash for consultants in facilitating strategic planning these days…

Most of the CXO’s and the executive teams I am speaking with these days are looking at strategy as a 30 to 90 day perspective. The world changes fast, “environmental scans” and “competitive analysis” seem to be luxuries that are for a woebegone time. Nostalgia is great…it brings a tear to the eye and makes you long for a simpler era- even if that era was just two to three years ago in hotel conference rooms and business retreat centers with flip charts and “trust-building” group activities. Gone like three-martini lunches and corporate jets. Sigh.

Strategy is tactical…Like white is the new black for fashion and small is the new big for business partners…
But, what about the day after the day after? The 91st day? Who is thinking past the current 90-day cycle in your company and what are they asking themselves? What brain-food are they eating? What plans are they hatching?

Is it time yet to be looking out 91 days +? Let’s see…have you

• Cut every dollar you can cut?
• Pressed the flesh with every customer you can meet?
• Reassured all of your ‘A’ players?
• Read the Wall Street Journal and every other business source until your eyes bleed?

If the answer is yes, then it’s time.

Let’s start with brain-food- My advice is get out of the echo-chamber. Stop listening to your industry leaders, reading the trade journals and going to the shows. It’s like going to a coroner for a wellness visit. All of the thinking is about what was and it is coming from the people who are huddling in the warm comfortable space called “the industry average.” You have to break free of that group if you want the kind of brain-food that will lead you to the answers you need for the 91st day. Here is some brain-food worth consuming-

• Financial Times – Read it for the cleaner info sourcing. These guys don’t have a seat at the White House Press room- they write what they want and they are forward-viewing with a deeper dive on information. Of course it is more expensive- quality often is. If you read what everyone else reads, you will think what everyone else thinks.
• Google Alerts – Flag the key terms that are driving your business. Think about it- your industry information is trying to get oxygen in-between the important announcements of who Britney Spears is dating or the estate of Michael Jackson. You need the information coming to you as it is happening, not sifting through the packaged and processed filter of popular media.
• TED.org – 18-minute lectures on all sorts of stuff around technology, entertainment, design, futurists, communication and so on. Be selective, there is a library of hundreds of these lectures with the brightest of the bright, but many things aren’t relevant to you- So?  Skip those and find what is valuable to you.  You can subscribe through I-Tunes for easier access.

What about the peeps?… Coach Joe, (writer, speaker, philosopher from central casting), says that our thinking is the average of the 5 people with whom we spend the most time. This may be very scary if you are suffering from some relational arrested development and still hang out with the friends you did beer-bongs with in high school. I would tend to agree with the idea. We get a lot of our calibration, interpretation and mis-digested information from the people around us. This is more true with the frequency and intensity that comes from our most regular contacts. Should we throw out our regular contacts? Well, that question should be considered in therapy. Let’s expand the question to “Who else should I be spending time with that can feed my brain the ideas and information that will take me out past the 91st day?”

• Analysts – Go talk to industry financial analysts and follow them. These are the folks out in front of not only the movers and shakers in the industry who are moving adult-money to make big-things happen, but also the trends and technology that will leap frog your better guesses at the future.
• Politicians and lobbyists – I know…you want this like shards of glass in your eyes. It has been a long time since these people were on the list of future shapers that you would listen too…. But they own big parts of two industries already and they are hunting at least two more by Christmas. These folks are shaping yours and my future at a pace we are unaccustomed to.  If your business is a rock in the river of the stimulus package, then you have been at this cocktail party for a while now. However, for the rest of us, the dragon seems to have an unlimited appetite and is recognizing no borders. Better connect and spend time with them.
• Go up a zero, maybe two – Birds of a feather…I find that most of us hang out with people around our business size or personal income. Your range may go up as high as double to triple your size or down to half your size in either category, and you are still comfortable enough. But there it stops. Go up a zero on the back end- that takes the number up by a minimum of a factor of 10 on you. Two zeroes and you are in a whole new atmosphere. Their perspective and access is different than yours. Tap it.

These are only some sources for brain-food- there are others that I’d like to hear about from you. The point is that you have exhausted the traditional sources for feeding your mind about the future by now. It is time to get new food if you want to change your direction and shape a different future.

Tell me what your sources are to feed your future.