Jan 3, 2013 | Customers, Management, Sales
Some informal research I completed recently amongst businesses in my “patch” turned up a surprising result.
One the questions I asked was “what is the most important job in your business?
The surprise was that so few respondents nominated “sales” at all, let alone in the top three.
When you think about it, without sales to pay for the apparently more important functions like, HR, Marketing, OH&S management, engineering, NPD&C, and all the rest that got a mention, all those more fashionable functions will not be around.
Has “Sales” become its own metaphor?
Sales is often an entry level role personified by the keen young bloke (or gal) with the brief-case, glib tongue, and “crash or crash through” attitude to human relations, and as a result is being left behind in the corporate furr-ball. Do well in sales, and you might be promoted to marketing.
Perhaps we should rename sales “Revenue Generation”. Call it what it is, focus more on those carring the direct responsability to conduct conversations with those who write the orders, and perhaps that might focus the mind a bit better?
Dec 17, 2012 | Communication, Marketing, Sales
Everybody, well almost everybody, uses Powerpoint. Some use it well, many use it poorly, and some are just appalling.
We have all sat through that presentation by somebody we thought had something to say, and they said it all on packed, almost illegible slides, which they then read to us!
Sigh!
So here are three simple, practical steps to take to make a boring presentation engaging, assuming of course that what is to be said has merit in the first place. No way to make a silk purse…………
- Use big fonts, the bigger the better. You therefore cannot get much on a slide, so need to distill the information down to the idea you are trying to convey. If you cannot distill the verbiage down to a few words that is the core of the message, work on your message, not the presentation.
- Use photos, drawings and graphics that convey a message, one per slide. As above, plus it gives you a visual hook onto which to hang a story. There are millions of images on the net, there will be many that convey the core message in a memorable way, you just have to find it.
- Do things in threes. For some reason my psychological friends can probably recite, our brains work in threes, we can remember three, and sequences of three, using this innate ability helps to organise your thoughts and presentation, and creates a flow for the audience.
If Powerpoint no longer does it for you at all, eventually the world does move on, then something like Prezi evolves, and simply makes the old stuff look, well, old.
Dec 7, 2012 | Governance, Sales
We are all pretty familiar with the typical sales funnel, wide at the beginning, narrowing progressively as you get closer to the “business end”. It is a simple, descriptive metaphor for other than an impulse or regular consumer purchase, but like most models, rarely reflects reality.
Prospects come into, and leave the sales process at all points, and then often come back, for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the efforts of a sales/marketing program.
Given that is the reality, it follows then that the relationships that evolve are far more valuable than the position of any prospect in the sales funnel, as it is the relationships that evolve that enable lead nurturing and recycling through the irregular, stuttering, and often unpredictable sales cycle.
A much better metaphor in many cases may be a game of snakes and ladders, but that is nowhere near as neat and tidy in a board paper.
Nov 19, 2012 | Sales, Strategy
Sales revenue is probably the most common senior management KPI, and is virtually always present for sales people.
It is a very misleading measure.
A friend, one of the best sales people I know, is in an industry struggling to reform itself in the face of direct sales over the net. Her sales are down 10% year on year, so the blasts from irrational budget enrobed donkeys keeps coming, but her industry is down 30% YOY. In that context, her performance is fantastic.
The basic question therefore when planning sales should be: “What are the demand drivers” Understanding the answer to that should offer a realistic view of the customers motivation to buy, not just from you, but to buy.
Too many ask “What sales can we do” which implies looking internally, ignoring the drivers of demand. They take the easy way, click a few keys to give an extrapolation of the past, which rarely has anything to do with the future.
Nov 8, 2012 | Sales
Few would dispute that Da Vinci was a great artist, he created great art and amazing innovations across several mediums, a creative genius. What is often missed is his technical skill, engineering, anatomy, and at a very basic level, his skill with a hammer, chisel and paintbrush.
Which came first, the art or the science? Probably neither, each nurtured the other. Da Vinci’s determination to reflect the body accurately in his paintings led him to risk his life and liberty by dissecting bodies to get the anatomy exactly right.
How you may ask, does that relate to sales?
The most effective sales people I have seen do two things:
- The build relationships that last
- They close.
One without the other is of little use, the first produces no revenue, the second without the first produces only a one-off transaction, and wastes an opportunity for an ongoing commercial relationship.
This all takes expensive sales time, so increasingly automated marketing tools are being substituted for sales people, adding to the science, but making the art all the more important, as nobody wants to be sold to by a digital robot, so the people need to understand when to intervene, and take control.
Oct 23, 2012 | Sales, Small business
“Not now” is a response sales people receive all the time, question is, does it mean not now, or not ever?
When sales people hear the words, they have two choices:
- Ignore the brush off, and keep at it
- Asses the lead for any long term value, and if it is there, put the lead back into the lead “carpark” for review at a later date, or for when something happens to give the opportunity to reconnect with the prospect.
Taking the first option is rarely the best, it just gets annoying, but persistence in continually recycling leads, adding to the store of knowledge each time, is a bit like continuous improvement in a factory, part of an ongoing cycle that delivers performance.
Any lead is hard to find, turning that lead into a prospect is not a one-off exercise, it is a process that can have many twists and turns, that can now be significantly automated.
