How to Become An “Opportunity Creator”
A mentor recently reminded me that the word “sales” is not always perceived well when used in a conversation. It is unfortunate but true because some “sales people” have ruined the reputation of all of us through non-standard practices that are remembered and shared with others. Even those companies and employees that I coach have trouble being called “sales people” even though what they do does have an impact on company revenues. Maybe that is why most businesses do not even print the word “sales” on business cards.
The primary duties of anyone in the business development field is to create opportunties for their company by finding a need in the marketplace and filling that need the products or services that their company offers. How do you do that without being “sales’ like? I would offer that the activities that you do have an impact on how you are perceived and that some of the best sales people I have know have never been described to me as “sales people”.
What do these people do differently that leads to increased opportunities for their companies?
- Perform strategic business reviews with current clients that helps them understand how you have added value to their business and what other services you offer
- Conduct lunch-n-learn sessions for account managers in other companies that can refer you to opportunities in their client base.
- Schedule breakfast and lunch meetings with centers of influence that are secondary stakeholders in targeted companies you want to work with.
- Focus your free time and champion a non-profit by volunteering your services to help with their fund development.
- Ask current clients for referrals.
- Introduce your clients to prospects, strategic partners, and other service providers that help them grow and improve their business.
- Make sure all of your family and friends know what you do.
Working any of these tactics into your activity calendar will help you increase your opportunities without the traditional sales tactics that are taught in videos and highlighted in the movies.
How can they be called “Salespeople”?
Salespeople spend most of their time on non-revenue producing activities. Really?
A recent study found that salespeople spend more than 70% of their time doing things other than selling. Our research found that salespeople spend, at most, 30% of their time in face-to-face selling. The rest of the time is spent handling administrative tasks, making collections calls, resolving logistics issues, attending meetings, and filling out reports.
How can we call these folks “salespeople” anymore when less than half of their time is spent selling? Maybe we should call them “support account administrators who occasionally sell.” Who is at fault–salespeople or management? Finger pointing does not really accomplish much other than scapegoating the blame.
It confounds me when salespeople tell me that they cannot make more face-to-face calls. Why not? Do buyers perceive little value in the meeting? Do managers require salespeople to yield to administrative distractions? Is traffic that bad?
I grew up in a sales culture where we were required to make eight face-to-face sales calls per day. If we were in the office between 8 AM and 5 PM, our bosses assumed we were goofing off, and we probably were. Sales managers scrutinized our phone credit card statements to make sure we did not spend the day doing phone work versus face-to-face selling. We did paperwork at night or on Saturday morning. If it sounds a bit Draconian, it was not. We were salespeople after all, not office people. I learned a work ethic that helped me start and run a successful business, and I am eternally grateful for the lesson. Maybe it is time for some old-school selling rules again.
Make Cold Calling Part of the Plan
There will always be a place for cold calling in any sales strategy and knowing how to do it is a critical differentiator in all market segments. For many sales people, cold calling can be the best and most effective way to build a pipeline but only through determination and polite persistence.
To be a good cold caller it’s key to understand the environment. Cold calling is interruptive and not permissive. Therefore from the second the call is placed, the people on the other end of the line have their defenses up and are NOT receptive until you give them a reason to let you in.
Because cold calling is interruptive and not permissive it requires 4 things to be executed flawlessly:
1. You have to know who you are calling – have a list.
Before you pick up the phone and start making calls, you have to know who you are calling and why. Let’s call this pre-qualifying. Pre-qualifying means creating a key customer profile that outlines the traits of a company that is the best possible fit for what you are selling. Build a list of pre-qualified companies to work from and make it as long as possible before you start calling. Don’t do research while you call, it slows down the process and makes it difficult to get into a rhythm. A calling list is the most valuable asset a cold caller can have and spending the time upfront building it will make all the difference.
2. Know what you are going to say
You have less than 10 seconds to capture someone’s attention. If you don’t know what you’re going to say, you’ll look sound like a rookie. I’m not a big fan of “scripts” and actually I consider them constricting, impersonal, and don’t always align with the flow of the call and what the person on the other line wants to hear. I prefer improvisation and agility. This doesn’t mean wing it, it means you have a set of key messages you know you must get out, but how you communicate them and when is driven by the person on the other end of the line.
Create a set of key messages you think are critical to your customer and to make sure they impact the key business elements of my target customers. I don’t talk about my services, but rather how my services can positively affect their business in the next 30-60-90 days.
3. Set Goals
Set daily cold call goals since the hardest part of cold calling can be just making the calls. Setting goals you know based on past success will ensure you can make your numbers. Know how many new calls you need to make in a day and know how many return calls you will make. New calls are calls made to someone on the list you’ve never called before. Return calls are someone on the list you didn’t get a hold of the last time you called them.
Overtime, as you call more often, your call back list is going to be as equally as big as your new call list and the most important thing to remember is to not quit until you reach someone. Make the call, leave a message, set a reminder to call them back, but never quit calling.
4. Don’t stop until they say “NO!”
This is where determination and stamina come into play. Do not stop calling until you get a no. Without a no, you don’t know why they aren’t calling you back. My rational is this; if they’re not interested, they’ll let you know because they may be too busy to do otherwise. For every prospect that will tell you to stop calling, I bet that you will have five that will thank your for your persistence and were glad you kept on them as they wanted to talk but were so busy they never got around to calling you back. – Don’t stop until they tell you to stop.
Cold calling is not dead. It maybe warping, but, regardless of what it’s doing or not doing, doing it right matters and will have an impact on your income.
Why You Need Sustained Activity Goals and Metrics
One of the most dangerous mistakes a salesperson can make is to go without activity because it will cause major problems in producing results later. As much as a salesperson may want to resist activity goals and metrics, they are necessary, and as much as the sales manager may not want to measure or enforce activity goals, it is necessary that you do so even when the numbers are being made.
Maintaining Momentum
The great game of sales is not very different than an athlete maintaining peak performance with the right activity (training). Without the right sales activity (prospecting) for even relatively short periods of time in sales, your pipeline starts to look a little light. Without face-to-face meetings, your deals start to stall and your pipeline looks even weaker. Eventually, your numbers will not be sufficient for the company to consider you a value to the organization, your commissions will sufferr, and a change will have to be made.
Maintaining momentum requires that you keep some standard of activity level, just like an athlete. Your activity goals and metrics are an indication of your future sales results. Your activity metrics are a snapshot of your fitness level as a salesperson and without them it easy to underperform and miss your numbers.
Build a “Model” Week for Momentum
The best way to maintain momentum is to create a “model” week with specific activity goals with prospecting calls and prospect meetings. Every week is not going to look exactly like the “model” week, and some are going to look very different based on the demands of the business you are in. One week of poor activity isn’t likely to make or break your quarterly or annual sales results, so it’s better to look at the averages since some weeks are naturally going to be more productive than others. Activities like prospecting calls and first sales meetings are good metrics and it is important to review your results and make changes to your activity levels as necessary.
Selling is one of those endeavors where it is very difficult to make up for lost time. You can train in the off season and perform during the season. You can also train like crazy in the season but you are guaranteed to produce nothing but a sense of frustration and panic. Activity goals and metrics are what keep you deliberately training for the season and in sales, the season never ends.
Sales Accountability VS Organizational Responsibility
Customers are disappearing, buying habits have changed, profit margins are shrinking, marketing budgets have been stripped, and the competition is entrenched. To compound the problem, your sales team is only selling 20% of the time, call reports are fictional, sales are unpredictable, and the training seminar that was purchased has had no impact on results whatsoever. In this day and age, more production is needed from the sales team and they need to be held accountable for results.
To truly hold sales people accountable, organizations have a responsibility to have certain things in place. These responsibilities include:
- Having a lofty goal in place
- Aligning the company on the lofty goal
- Knowing their “ideal” client
- Having current marketing materials
- Knowing opportunities exist in the market
- Being market-oriented and customer-centric
- Being able to measure success
Once these responsibilities are taken care of, the next step is to design a sales system and create a roadmap that is reverse engineered on the lofty goal. This road map should include clearly defined expectations such as:
- Specific activity metrics
- Weekly sales plans
- Public activity calendars
- Expected funnel size and velocities
- Structured reporting mechanisms
- Time bound results
Once an organization has taken care of their responsibilities, developed a sales system to follow and fully communicated what is expected, only then can the sales people be held accountable
Increase Your Sales Throughput with Process Alignments
| No matter what you offer for a product or service, customer buying habits have changed and organizations are becoming increasingly frustrated by a lack of market understanding, conflicting strategies between marketing and sales departments, and a lack of understanding about buying decisions. These frustrations are leading to unfocused selling efforts and wasting precious marketing dollars.To combat this, organizations must align their sales & marketing process to answer key questions in each stage of the prospect’s buying process in order to convert market opportunities into sales. Here are some pointers about what you need to accomplish when the prospects are asking the following quest Why do I need to solve this problem?
The customer is looking to learn so you should teach them in the way that they want to learn. Connect your teaching to something they’re passionate about but remember to be polite and keep it relevan Why do I need you to solve this problem? The customer needs to make a decision so you need to become a trusted advisor by creating relevance, building credibility, demonstrating value, and being honest about limitations Why should I buy from you now? The customer is looking to commit so you need to motivate them by providing a reason and making their decision easy by eliminating risk. How do I get the most out of my purchase? The customer is looking for confirmation so you need to continually add value, fix all problems as they arise, and inspire them to demonstrate why they made a good decision. By aligning your sales process to your prospects buying process, you will shorten the sales cycle and utilize your marketing dollars more effectively because your efforts will be focused. |
How to Stop Guessing about Increasing Your Sales
Whenever it comes time to focus on increasing sales, most companies focus in the wrong place. How do we know that? Simple, there are more wrong places than right, and without an understanding of how to focus, the odds are you’re going to get it wrong. So how do you get it right? The answer is to understand the theory of constraints and the lessons it holds for increasing “throughput” in sales
What is throughput? In sales, throughput is simply selling and delivering more products and services to your customers…..a simple idea, not always remembered by those who attempt to manage sales efforts. How often have you seen a sales manager attempt to manage the sales process by measuring a single intermediate point when they should be measuring enough intermediate points to determine the “constraint” to increasing sales.
A constraint is defined as anything that limits a system from achieving higher performance. To increase throughput (sales) you need to follow a five-step process:
1. Identify all of the constraints in the sales system. Every business unit has at least one constraint and most have several and sales is no exception. What are your constraints? Too few leads, too few qualified leads, too few qualified sales people to follow-up on the leads, too few people to create useful proposals, too few qualified buyers……
2. Exploit the system’s constraints. Make sure you don’t bother to increase output of things that are not constrained. If a constraint is too few people to qualify leads, then increasing raw leads beyond the level you can qualify is a waste of system resources. Maximize the input to the constraints just to the limit of the constraint’s ability to handle the input. Any more is a waste of resources.
3. Subordinate everything else to the decisions made in step 2. This will maximize system efficiency. That is, the cost of selling will be minimized for the level of sales being achieved, but it doesn’t yet increase sales. The reason is that we have not yet relieved any constraints, we have simply acknowledged that they exist and that trying to “force feed” more through the constrained system is a waste.
4. So now we must elevate the constraints. What is the one step in the process that if you expanded its capacity would increase sales? Make sure you understand what the constraint is and then expand its capacity until it is no longer the constraint.
5. Sales will increase and… there is now another constraint so go back to step 1 and repeat the process.
This process sounds simple. It seems obvious, and it’s tough to force yourself to do it. We are too quick to want to jump on a “solution” without understanding if we are increasing throughput or activity. The purpose of your organization is not to increase activity but rather to increase throughput and it will not happen by guessing.
Maximize Sales Opportunities through a Division of Labor
With the sales function in most companies looking remarkably like production did prior to the industrial revolution we can apply the same division of labor principles to the selling function in order to increase productivity or in this case “sales”.
The primary duty of a sales person is to convert new opportunities into a sale but most companies do not allow them to perform that duty because salespeople are increasingly expected to perform non-selling activities such as customer service and even fulfillment duties. By assigning the non-selling activities to other positions in the organization, a sales person will be able to increase performance of their primary duty of converting opportunities into sales. But who in the organization should the non-selling activities be assigned to and how do all of those people and activities work together to increase the number of opportunities for the sales person? The positions and their respective duties should include:
The Promotions Coordinator is responsible for communicating the product or service offering to targeted prospects in order to generate leads. What is your company doing to keep the top of the funnel full?
The Sales Coordinator is responsible for ensuring that leads are followed up with by the sales people and that the sales people’s calendars are full at all times with business development meetings. They are also responsible for communicating the result of those meetings to the departments responsible for fulfillment and ongoing customer service. At the end of the day, sales people should only be reading what is in the CRM and not entering data.
The Technical Team is responsible for maintaining selling capacity by developing unique offerings to the market, providing marketing materials, automating standardized communications, and monitoring key activities such as business development meetings and conversion of opportunities into sales.
The Salesperson should only be responsible for conducting the business development meetings and converting the opportunities into sales. Additionally, a company may be able to decrease the amount of sales people since non-selling activities can be performed by more administrative and technical skilled staff.
The number of people dedicated to the above listed positions will vary depending on the size of the company, the amount of products, and the number of opportunities that are being generated by effective marketing but by having the right people in the right positions with the right procedures and the right promotions for the right product, a company will maximize the amount of selling opportunities and can guarantee an increase in their sales.
Stop Wasting Money on Sales Training!
Ask any sales manager about the need for continuous sales training and you instantly get agreement that it is important. So why isn’t there more of it going on? The fact is, most money spent on sales training is wasted. Typically, it annoys the sales team, disrupts your sales opportunities, bores the talented team members, and is totally forgotten within 30 days.
This is true for three reasons:
1) Credibility – “Who is this sales seminar leader and why on earth should I follow his/her advice?”
2) Relevance – “Maybe this stuff works in the X industry, but I don’t see how it applies here.”
3) Reinforcement – “I’ll implement these new ideas just as soon as I have the time.”
You can get around these issues and realize a greater ROI from your training budget with an internal “Sales Excellence Committee”. Put the best of your best sales talent on it. (i.e., those who are most respected by the rest of the team) and that alone will take care of missing links one and two.
Next, provide proof that you’re serious about using the knowledge of these folks for the benefit of all your reps. In other words, provide funding for and relentlessly conduct monthly 1/2 day “SEC” meetings. Their objective is to identify, clarify and communicate sales best practices and integrate them into tactical actions that produce the fastest, most tangible results for your business.
At the risk of being repetitive …the mission of your Sales Excellence Committee is to:
1st – Identify the best sales practices of your best reps
2nd – Clarify – write them down in specific detail
3rd – Communicate – make sure ALL your reps know how to replicate the power of each best practice.
Many firms find it helpful to use an outside facilitator to start and keep the ball rolling. This person would need all the classic qualifications of a sales trainer PLUS expertise in knowledge management and process engineering. Your best reps will always be the best source of sales tactics and strategies that work. Don’t waste time and money on standardized sales training. Tap into the gold mine you already have on the payroll. Fund it. Plan it. Do it.
Do your sales and customer service functions meet 911 expectations?
When you dial 911, you may not necessarily think of what is happening behind the scenes, you only know that you need the services that 911 provides and you need it fast. Your focus remains on the reason you dialed number in the first place and then a series of events happen that are out of your control….hopefully with a great outcome.
Why does dialing 911 work? First of all, people know to dial 911 because the message has obviously been promoted well. Secondly, before the number existed, countless hours were spent on planning and training to make sure execution would be performed flawlessly to deliver their “product” once they were called. Not to diminish the responsive and important role 911 plays in our lives, but what happens when one of your customers dials your company phone number and has a need for something you offer?
With proper planning and training, your company can implement the same standards to be just as responsive:
- People: Do you have the right amount of people to service your customers? Do you have the right people to service your customers? As the relationship between the organization and the customer becomes more involved, most companies have more than one person involved in the delivery of their product.
- Positions: Do you have the right people in the right positions? People have different skill sets and matching those skills to job function is essential for an organization to ensure the delivery of their product to their customer.
- Procedures: Anything that is able to be duplicated has a well defined procedure in place that is able to be replicated with the same result. This holds true for organizations that want to increase their customer retention and revenue per client. Any deviation from a well defined procedure could end with very bad consequences.
No one ever wants to plan on calling 911 but hopefully your marketing has been effective enough that customers plan on calling you when they have a need. By having the right people in the right positions with the right procedures, you can deliver your product as flawlessly to your customers as 911 professionals do when their product is needed.
Learn more about how your company can maximize their sales function at www.salestechnik.com
I hope these thoughts and philosophies help you increase your opportunities.
Peter C. Rathmann 