How do you build a truly successful sales foundation

How do you build a truly successful sales foundation

Nov 28, 2016 | Customers, Sales

Selling is a tough gig, but it is one that every business has to master or fail.

The days of waiting for the next customer to walk through the door and place an order are over. These days you have to be out there hunting for new customers at the same time you are building relationships with existing customers to optimise your repeat purchase and share of wallet metrics.

So how do you go about this?

There are a few common practises of truly successful sales people that I have seen over my long career. These practises form what I call a ‘foundation’ for successful sales activity.

Always be positive.

When was the last time you bought anything from someone who clearly did not care if you bought or not, who had a take it or leave it attitude?

People like to buy from enthusiastic and helpful people, so being ‘up’ all day, every day, is vital. The sales leadership plays a huge role in the development of this sort of positive and proactive culture.

See yourself through the customers eyes.

When the sales effort is just all about the numbers, sales people tend to focus on making the sale now in order to make those numbers. Customers do not really care if you make your numbers or not, they care only about the value they can derive from buying something from you. Seeing yourself in this way is an unfortunately rare skill, but those who have it sell multiples of those who do not. However, luckily it is a skill that can be learnt.

Manage time proactively.

It is so easy to waste time, not to maximise the productivity of that most precious of resources. In selling, this approach demands that you plan your day and sales approaches, anticipate the needs of customers, and plan the conversations to focus on the value your solution delivers to them.

Treat your prospects and customers time as  being more important than yours, as to them, that is the way it is.

Balance your activities such that there is a flow of leads that are in various stages of conversion so you have a steady flow, which is always more productive than a flood/drought situation.

You only get one chance to make a first impression. When you meet someone, they generally make their minds up in the first few seconds about whether you are someone they would like to engage with, or would rather move on. Making that good first impression is absolutely vital to having any chance of building a relationship.

Listen, then listen some more.

As the old saying goes, ‘god gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason’. The best sales people I have met are always great listeners, they keep conversation going, steering it by asking key questions at key times based on the feedback they are getting from the other person.

Follow up regularly but sympathetically.  Continuous follow up is a key skill, but there is a line between following up in a friendly and sympathetic and stalking.

Model your behaviour on the masters.

Joe Girard is seen as one of the best, if not the best salesman ever. Taking lessons from the masters is always a good idea, those who both practise what they preach and have profited from the practise. The best sales book I have ever seen is now decades old, “Spin Selling’ by Neil Rackham, but the same rules still apply.

As a final point, from my own experience running sales and marketing in FMCG, one of the most common mistakes I have seen is businesses treating sales as a training ground for other functions. Every trainee, particularly marketing and management trainees have to ‘do their time in sales‘. This is a huge mistake, when sales success is so important to survival, it makes sense to only have the best representing you and your products, and if they become the highest paid people in the organisation, great!

Cartoon credit www.tedgoff.com

 

Where are your OSZ boundaries?

Where are your OSZ boundaries?

Nov 25, 2016 | Change, Management, Strategy

We are all familiar with the term ‘Comfort zone’ as in ‘that is outside my comfort zone’.

When most people speak publicly to a large audience for the first time, it is way outside their comfort zone. That discomfort manifests as fear, they sweat, the knees are rubbery, voice goes up a few octaves, and sometimes nausea takes over, but for most, they become increasingly comfortable with being on stage with practice.

In effect the limits of their comfort zone have been expanded. What was previously in their discomfort zone has become comfortable.  The ‘fear’ of being on stage has lessened, you learn to work with it, manage it, and often turn it to your advantage.  For some it becomes an exciting and stimulating experience.

I would propose then that we go one  step further.

To our own comfort and discomfort zones, which are well populated in our minds, we add a third option.

Our ‘Oh Shit’ zone, or OSZ.

This is not just an increased level of discomfort, the jelly-knee, voice cracking experience of that first gig on a big stage, where you are able to add rational thought and know that whatever happens, you will go home that night at about the same time.

The Oh Shit Zone implies a level beyond  psychological discomfort to one of physical or psychological danger. Manageable but nevertheless, danger, with the attendant fear that has to be managed if you are to get through to the ‘other side’ of the event.

For me, it would be jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane with a little sack on my back that promised to float me to earth safely.

However, once done, having conquered the fear the first time, the second time would be easier, and the third, easier again.

The uncomfortable things we all need to do, but often do not are the things that hold us back. I am as guilty as anybody, that fear of failure, of public censure or even pity is strong. Those that push through, conquer their fear and get the job done despite the obstacles, are the ones who will be successful.

Considering you OSZ puts a different perspective on  bit of discomfort.

 

How to set a marketing budget that works

How to set a marketing budget that works

Nov 21, 2016 | Governance, Management, Marketing

Pretty obvious question, particularly at this time of the year when organisations are starting to think about the preparation of the 2017 budget.

In many  enterprises, the marketing budget is set by the boss and the finance people.

They see marketing as a cost, so typically it becomes a percentage of revenue. They agree a targeted revenue, then apply a percentage.

What absolute bollocks

If marketing is a driver of revenue, then the more you spend, the more productive you should be, and when well done with metrics and sensible discipline, the more money you get at the top line as a result.

Therefore the challenge is for marketers to come up with sensible marketing plans, that promise to deliver on the strategic objectives agreed by the enterprise.

Marketing then becomes  an investment, not a cost.

Zero based marketing will have its day, when the marketing planning  is done reflecting the strategic drivers and priorities of the enterprise, and answers the question ‘what are the best ways to deliver on the objectives?’.

Do that and you generate the revenue, and marketing becomes an investment, the effectiveness of which can be measured.

Thinking about marketing as an expense is about the most common stupid assumption in the corner office, but is well ingrained because marketing people have lacked the balls and organisational grunt to back their convictions that it is otherwise. When confronted by reasonable, but difficult questions marketers without the necessary experience, knowledge, or intellect,  break into generalisations, weasel words and fluff.

Use cascading S.M.A.R.T. goals to forecast and measure the impact of the tactics employed to achieve an outcome, any outcome, not just marketing.

Pretty sensible acronym.

Specific. Measureable. Agreed. Realistic. Time bound.

I know the BEHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) crowd will trot out JFK’s BEHAG to reach the moon by 1969, that galvanised the space effort, but most of us do not have the resources of the US at our disposal, so lets just take a powder and be realistic.

Set realistic enterprise goals, then have them drive the allocation of resources to marketing, and indeed elsewhere, hold people accountable, and have continuous learning loops in place. Only a fool makes the same mistake twice.

I once had a very confronting shouting match with the MD of a business I worked for who drove the whole budgeting process from the bottom right hand corner of the P&L. Somehow, magically, a number appeared, and he drove budgets backwards through the business. It was a reverse auction between functions, who could promise to deliver the most for the least?

Problem was that the promises were extracted in a strategic vacuum, and meant little.

The shouting happened as the finance guy offered up a chunk of his budget that had been earmarked to integrate the reporting systems of several businesses we had taken over the previous year to deliver reliable and timely sales and margin numbers. At the time (it was over 20 years ago) I stated it was not worth spending marketing budgets if I could not track the outcomes, and the priority was therefore the sales information, not the promised revenue resulting from the marketing expenditure because it could not be reliably measured.

I smile now, but at the time, it was not fun, and was just another nail in my corporate coffin.

Should we be rethinking our Unique Selling Proposition?

Should we be rethinking our Unique Selling Proposition?

Nov 15, 2016 | Marketing, Sales

From the dawn of marketing time, the Unique Selling Proposition has been a foundation idea. I wonder if it holds the same attraction now, post the digital reconstruction of marketing, or should we be rethinking our approach.

The USP was intended to communicate what you did that nobody else could, or would. That was fine in the days before the marketing world was global, as in your local area you could pretty easily be unique, but that is no longer the case.

Any idea that emerges that generates traction with customers will be copied very quickly by competitors, making it no longer unique. Anyway, just because an idea or claim may be true, there is no compulsion that customers should believe it.

Perhaps this boils down to making an appeal to people’s hearts rather than their minds. This has always been the case, but in a homogenised world, takes on even more importance.

When I think about my own behaviour critically, there are a few things I notice that presumably are pretty common. If so, why are we not using them more in place of claims of bigger, faster, better?

Choice. In most cases, there is more than one product that solves whatever challenge I am facing. In making a choice, being sure of the ability of the product to deliver the solution is worth money to me.

Top of mind. TOM is even more relevant than at any time in the past. We are blasted with thousands of messages every day, so being Tom when the appropriate occasion arises is gold!. A good enough solution that is there, easy to access, and offers reasonable value will get a vote.

Experience is never forgotten. Good or bad, the past influences the way we behave today. There are now a number of café’s in easy walking distance of my office. Some time ago I got a lousy coffee in one of them, probably a ‘trainee barista’ but when I pointed out politely the coffee was crap, all I got was a shrug, and explanation that the boss was  not there. No second chance will be given, perhaps irrational, as it was a while ago, and almost certainly a one-off, but  that is their problem, not mine, I have plenty of choice.

Heart. What it says about us. Sometimes we make purchase choices simply on the basis of what the choice we make says about us, and this is usually almost unconscious. I drive an old Mercedes, it is a great car, but much to my surprise, it is what that car says about me that makes it so comfortable for me. Similarly, in the days we all smoked, Marlborough was a big brand, not because there was any USP, it was just a fag, but because of what it said about the smoker. (Lucky that has changed a bit over time).

Value is always a combination of all sorts of little things, some not obvious. Convenience, availability, branding, packaging, exclusivity, design, and yes, price, as well as many other often highly personal factors.  In an increasingly busy life, changing just a little of any one of the factors can considerably enhance value.  When we compute value, again often unconsciously, it is rarely the USP that pops into our minds, there is a mental wrangle of all the foregoing, that sometimes ends up being expressed as a number relative to some other number for an alternative, called price, and sometimes as just a feeling.

Back to the question, should we rethink our USP?

To my mind the changes that have occurred in the last 20 years demand that we do so.

We used to be able to sell products, so the USP was a useful tool, but that time has passed. The power in the buying relationship has moved from the seller to the buyer, completely altering the nature of a sales process. We can no longer deliver a product and charge a price, now what we deliver is an increasingly personalised value package, for which we are paid. We need therefore to be considering a Unique Value Proposition, UVP.

It might seem just a semantic difference, but it is a huge behavioural one

 

11 rules to ensure customers love you

11 rules to ensure customers love you

Nov 8, 2016 | Customers

Customers and potential customers always remember how their needs and expectations were managed through the sales process. It is all part of the experience of doing business.

However, In my experience, B2B businesses are often poor at effectively managing these pre-sale customer touch points. Many seem to think that their widgets are the best in the world, and customers should be grateful they supply them, at the very least, they should be prepared to respect that our life is not easy.

Repeat to yourself: “Customers do not care about my problems, only theirs” in the mirror every morning.

Following are 11 simple rules, evolved out of the cock-ups I have seen over many years.

# Customer communications should always be acknowledged, and a customer should certainly never have to send anything twice, and worse still, to different people.

# Following the above, when a customer says something to one person, it should be heard by the whole company.

# A customers time is their most valuable resource, never, ever, ever, waste it

# Sweat the minutia. Even a tiny mistake in the paperwork, or packaging, can bring undone lots of good work elsewhere, so be a zealot for the detail.

# Do not expect the customer to play any role in your QA. A product failure is your complete failure, not just a mild annoyance easily remedied.

# Customers should never have to ask for a progress report, they should be available on an ongoing basis.

# Let potential customers set their own pace through the sales process. While it is often a delicate balance between closing a sale and letting it slip away through lack of expected attention, few like to be pushed.

# Share best practice that emerges amongst all your customers. Helping to make them better in their markets is in everyone’s interests.

# Customers love to be loved, show gratitude and respect at all times,

# Never moan about how hard you had to work to deliver their product, they do not care, you just sound like a spoilt child.

# Over deliver what you promised, no fanfare, no hype, just unexpected value.

 

Finally, the old adage that the customer is always right is rubbish.

However,  strategically important customers, the ones you really want for the long haul, the ones that make you a better supplier, they are always right.