Sep 5, 2012 | Sales
In tennis, the simplest point, and if you do it well the most effective, is the serve and volley.
Put in a good serve, and follow up with a volley that puts the point away.
Same in selling.
The serve: Ask a simple question to which there is only one answer,
The volley: Follow up with a related question that closes the sale, or moves it to the decision point by a decision-maker.
“Do you believe that a machine that processes this task faster would help with the backlog?”
“Would the XYZ machine, with double the capacity of your current at a comparable cost be of any interest?”
Serve….. Volley….. Sale.
Sep 4, 2012 | Marketing, Sales, Small business
A modest sized marketing services agency I do occasional work for has an awards wall, where industry peer bestowed awards appear, a feature of most service agencies I have seen. However, theirs has two wrinkles
- Beneath each award is a further rating, done in collaboration with the relevant client that records the effectiveness of the ad/campaign, whatever it was, in the only awards arena that really matters, the marketplace.
- Campaigns that fail to win industry awards, which is most of them, are also subjected to their internal assessment of effectiveness, and they give it an internal award, and a spot on the wall.
As part of the effectiveness assessment underneath each award is a record of the assumptions, that drove the communication strategy, and their own internal award, the rating of which goes from “ratshit” to “not again” to “OK” to “dreamtime”. It also records what they collectively did right and wrong to deliver the result, and what they learnt that can be applied next time.
The wall provides a talking point, is a reminder each day of the reason they are in business, and how they are performing. Making performance transparent in this manner can be confronting, but time and time again, as I review best management practice, I see such transparency as a key success factor.
Oh, and another small wrinkle that sets them apart. They apply a pre-agreed sliding fee scale based on the agreed performance against objectives they set with their clients, so they always have skin in the game.
Clients love it!
Aug 28, 2012 | Customers, Management, Marketing, Sales
Most of the best ideas are simple, as is the Net promoter Score (NPS) the brainchild of Bain & Co executive Fred Reichheld.
As it gained currency, its simplicity became blurred by unnecessarily imposed complexity, often added it seems, just to make a consulting job seem more complicated.
NPS is really just one simple question:
“How likely are you, on a 1-10 scale to recommend this product/service to a friend or colleague”?
What Reichheld termed “detractors” answer 0-6, “Passives” answer 7 or 8, and “promoters” answer 9 & 10.
A company’s NPS is the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of detractors. Simple.
The complexity comes often from the sample to whom you direct the question, and it is pretty easy to see how it can be “gamed” by those selections, which happens most often when some senior person reads about NPS, decides it makes sense, and just decrees to the sales force to go ask your customers, and that is exactly what they do, selectively. After all, their bonuses may depend on it.
Aug 24, 2012 | Customers, Sales
I wandered into a car dealer a while ago, largely killing some time, but I do need a new car, sometime soon, so I was tyre kicking with a rough agenda.
One of the salesmen saw me get out of my old Pajero, and instead of sliding up with the typical opener, “got a few beauties here you might like to look at” he said instead, “great car those old Pajeros, don’t make them, like that any more”. A conversation was started, and I was engaged to the point where I will probably have another look when it actually comes to making the change.
Most sales programs I have ever seen are all about the “closing”, 101 techniques for a quick close, but the real opportunity is for an opening, the opening of a conversation.
Aug 21, 2012 | Customers, Management, retail, Sales
Without sales, all the rest of the stuff that goes on in an enterprise is irrelevant. All the lofty strategies, policies, and well intentioned platitudes are dependent on the delivery of sales for their oxygen.
As a senior manager in a large enterprise, I used to annoy, sometimes terminally, marketing personnel by insisting they all spend periods of time, particularly during the annual peak sales periods, out in the field, carrying a bag, talking to the retail personnel of our customers, and interacting with consumers in the retail space.
Most came back energised, engaged and motivated, some did not, and they usually found their career prospects better elsewhere pretty quickly.
Often other functional management also benefitted greatly from seeing how the product they made, counted, delivered, or engineered lived in the sales environment.
50 interactions with intelligent customers and consumers, and those who preferred our competitor products may not be a statistically significant sample, but you will learn more from those interactions than you will from reading expensive research reports behind a desk.
Jul 25, 2012 | Marketing, Sales, Social Media
Sales people are used to being measured by hard metrics, and management is very used to imposing and managing these metrics, and marketers are more inclined now than just a while ago, to have quantifiable measures.
Therein lies one of the challenges of social media.
To varying degrees, SM is not a great sales tool, but it is a great tool to build engagement, and engagement leads to sales, eventually, and amongst other outcomes. It can take the place of the face to face selling, and potentially much of the role of traditional advertising.
When on the web, searching for information, peoples bullshit meter is working, so their receptiveness to advertising may be no greater than in a normal mass media environment, the huge difference being the ability of web advertising to target information at those looking for it. However, on social media, I contend that the bullshit meter is at a lower level, perhaps turned off, as they are seeking to engage, not just seeking information, so information accepted takes on some of the characteristics of endorsement.
