Corporate Sales Guy

It’s absolutely frustrating when I read press releases from various companies that I’ve worked for. Here’s a great example:

“…businesses and their employees are embracing the Internet as a medium for rich interaction,” said [insert executive's name here]. “

Are you kidding me - businesses are embracing the internet as a medium for rich interaction? How cliche and old is that? This may have been something relevant about 9 years ago. Heck, for the larger companies I’ve worked for IT black-holed the domain names of most sites that allow for “rich interaction”

The more I read Dilbert the more I realize that Scott Adams is 100% right on and it’s scary.

I have tried to avoid using this blog as a place to rant however; A trend that I am noticing as I move from company to company over time is that so many companies deliver a mediocre product or service. Rather than focusing on delivering an outstanding product companies will resort to:

1. Pushing sales people harder

2. Gerrymandering territory lines

3. Increasing sales quotas

4. Firing and hiring sales people endlessly

5. Re-hiring sales folks with different acumen (we need a sales rep with a consulting background!)

6. Making term commitments on contracts that are draconian with no out clauses.

7. Playing sales folks against one another

8. Setting up inane contests for performance

9. Repackaging and combining crappy existing products to make a “new” product

My suggestion to companies; ensure that sales people have the best product on the planet to sell. If it’s not the best product on the planet then it should be:

1. The only product of its type on the planet (which would be arguably the best since no others exist right?!)

2. The cheapest product on the market

Most companies I see with just fidget and tweak but never getting to the underlying issues at hand. They will sell around the weaknesses of the product even if the weaknesses are huge. Legally binding, long term contracts ensure that once a customer catches on to the crappyness they’ve purchased it will be too late to change their minds.

As far as salespeople go, if you work for a company like this now and your livelihood depends on believing and selling a product (to everyone in your rolodex) I would suggest getting out. You’ll never be truly successful if you yourself wouldn’t buy the product if you were in similar circumstances as the customer.

A final note, early stage start ups need to release v1 of their product or service. This is normal and the product will get better and evolve over time, so this is more focused on companies out there that have been around for a bit. I am not a fan of rolling out a product after 8 years to learn that the markets passed by.

It was the early 90’s and I had recently started selling industrial chemicals for a chemical company in Maryland. I had always been interested in sales but I didn’t know squat about selling and I was having a hard time getting appointments and sales. I felt that I was just making my base salary and putting 50k miles on my car each year. There were many factors keeping me from hitting my monthly number other than not knowing what I was doing but of course I didn’t let the fact that no one had heard of our company before stop me from trying to meet with everyone. It was that unreasonableness that I think taught me more than the cautious, realistic approach I take to things now.

I had long known about the vast wealth that could be had on audio books on tape. There were the greats producing excellent material such as Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracey and others. The only problem is that of the 3-4 library branches in my area none of them had a reasonable selection of sales training on audio tape. In using the card catalog system (it was computerized, even in the early 90’s) I found one branch of the library systems had almost all the popular sales trainers. I instantly drove out to the branch and checked out at least 4 sets of audio books. For the next 5-8 years I listened to almost 0 talk radio, 0 music and made all my drive time my opportunity to learn and make all the sales I could possibly make. There was no better way to be pumped than getting out of the car after having listened to one of the greats and maybe applying a new method or technique to uncover pain with a prospect.

Long story short I would have to say my favorite from a content and delivery standpoint had to be Hank Trisler. Although I learned from many over those years I think the items that I most apply came from his “No Bull Selling” series which I will try to locate and purchase sometime soon. Here are the 2 points that still resonate with me today:

1. Speak plainly. Speak directly and never try to use jargon or big buzz words to show a client you know something. If you are an engineer and you are speaking to an engineer - forget I mentioned this but for the rest of us…..

2. Folks can be categorized in 4 major groups as far as their attitudes on buying. Hank puts them into a quadrant and helps you understand how to effectively understand the underlying issues with each of the buying types.

Hank has a cool story about him buying a Mercedes that will not only put you on the floor laughing but will illustrate everything that a sales person needs to do to make sales repeatedly while building the utmost amount of trust and confidence. The story also clearly outlines the characteristics held by the minority of salespeople that make the rest of us look bad.

Happy selling

-CSG

There are many products and services that businesses have to purchase. For instance all companies these days have internet access. This shouldn’t be a difficult sale as long as you can beat out your competition. The challenge comes from selling items that companies most likely need but don’t know they need it.

Let me paint a picture. (I am keeping this very simple)

You sell bookkeeping services to small business. The biggest obstacle here is that the owner of the company you have approached does this himself and views bookkeeping services as a $300 per month fee that he can keep in his own pocket.

A person trained using Sandler’s methods would ask simple questions like:

“have you ever paid a bill late?” “What types of fees did you have to pay for sending in a check late?” Is there anyway an employee can be taking cash for themselves without your knowledge? Do you feel that at this point your revenue should be higher? If you weren’t doing the bookkeeping after hours what would you be able to focus on that would increase your business?

Basically the method seeks to find pain, relates the pain in lost opportunities or money. After these steps a salesperson would be able to show that it’s more expensive NOT to purchase their product.

Here’s a cool story I always like to share. A long time ago, I went in to purchase a car. For those who don’t know me personally, I hate drawing attention to myself. Anyways, the sales person who showed me the car at dealership #1 told me, “your friends will be jealous of you if you purchase this car!” I literally walked out on the spot.

Dealership #2. I spoke with a sales rep about the vehicle (which was out of my budget) until he got tired of me and sent his sales manager over me. He started off by asking me what I did and we just talked. It was casual and friendly. He learned that I too was in sales. After establishing rapport (another Sandler item) He began to drill down as to why I wanted to trade in my car for a new one and I had explained to him that being in sales, I really needed a car with air conditioning. Long story short, about an hour later I was $30 higher per month than my budget would allow prompting the sales manager to ask me, “would it be worth $1 per day to show up to your clients office dry and without the back of your shirt being wet from the heat of a Virginia summer?” Needless to say, I drove home that night with the car - completely confident that I had made the right choice.

If you are serious about being an entrepreneur who is going to have to hit the road selling a product or a sales person who is looking to sell software I’d highly recommend you find a Sandler Sales training seminar.

-csg

I named my blog “corporate sales guy” and somehow I veered off track drastically and began to talk only about tools and gadgets. This is my 1st in a series of articles that will bring me back to good old fashioned sales. The tools and laptops are fun to me, but time to get back to selling.

I’ve learned a few things over the years as to what works when communicating with customers.

1. A phone call is (almost) always better than email

2. Face to face is (almost) always better than a phone call.

3. Never be long winded, communicate clearly and don’t preface things too often. (e.g. “this may sound crazy but….”) just spit it out.

4. Be brief in email and the spoken word.

5. Never interrupt a customer, never.

6. If a prospect has gone quiet on you, offer a meeting over lunch or coffee.

7. If a prospect has gone quiet on you, tell them plainly, “usually when someone gets a bit quiet, it’s usually bad news for me. Is that the case here?”

Note: this has been powerful for me. It’s a tough question but one that needs asking. It also gives the customer a chance to clear their chest. Lastly, you can move on to other qualified opportunities. Push hard on all deals but know when a deal is dead and move on.

8. Outlook calendar meeting invites are powerful ways to get a response. (thanks to Jason for this one)

9. Never lie, regardless of how furious a client will be with your response. If they ask something that you cannot answer due to confidentiality issues, tell them you cannot talk about it. They will understand, they are highly intelligent.

10. Never BS. If you don’t know let your prospect know that you’ll get back to them. If you find yourself saying “I don’t know” frequently, you may want to learn your product/service better.

-csg

I worry sometimes of having some form of OCD based on how much time I’ve spent trying to figure out the best way to balance work vs. home computing platforms.

Once upon a time I worked for a company with a flexible IT policy. Let me cut to the chase, it wasn’t long before my corporate laptop was sitting on my shelf collecting dust while I happily plugged away on my mac for both personal and business needs. (Our tools were mainly web based)

Anyhow, trying to keep a corporate blackberry and MS exchange in sync with my entourage on my mac + iPhone I think I spent more time worrying about the sync success than anything else. Moving to a new job just a couple of months ago for a company that would surround my cube with a swat team by even thinking of plugging in my personal mac into a holy network receptacle I had to rethink my corporate / personal IT setup.

We all have stuff outside work to do. You may be politcally active, you may have a family, you may do some consulting on the side or heck you maybe just an obsessive compulsive gadget guy/gal that needs a hefty personal IT setup.

Long story short - after realizing that I had to separate work and personal infrastructures here’s what I ended up with.

Work - Nice HP laptop with Win XP + Blackberry and Exchange with full wireless sync between the 2. Using Windows in general is like sawing the small flap of skin between my toes and dousing it with rubbing alcohol but by installing some 3rd party apps I’ve made the best situation I can. For you GTD’ers out there - the Netcentrics plug in for Outlook is functional with no frills which has kept me from the constant tweaking that we gtd’ers are notorious for. Overall it just works but it’s ugly like exposed plumbing in a non-urban chic apartment.

Personal - Macbook Pro, Mac OS X 10.5, iPhone + Fully hosted Zimbra email hosting with full email, iCal and contact wireless sync. (Think MobileMe but with my own domain) For the 1st in my life I can send meeting invites from iCal to Exchange/Outlook users and it works! (I am using www.01.com for my email hosting with custom domain). Zimbra setup is identical to setting up exchange on the iPhone you even select “exchange” on the iPhone to do the setup. Zimbra is great, it’s 100% compatible with all things Mac but it’s just like exchange.

This setup absolutely rocks, no more Entourage (not a bad app but doesn’t hold a candle to mail app + iCal). By keeping work and personal separate I am able to do what I want without compromise. In a past life I used Entourage to get full exchange functionality. With Zimbra I can actually check ICal availability of anyone i add to my Zimbra account. I am digging this setup as I’ve waited for a long time to have exchange-like functionality for personal use without huge expense and without having to use entourage on my Mac.

I attempted to get the whole mobileme experience using Gmail but the CalDav functionality is limited to meeting time syncs back an forth to the mac only. The iPhone never liked anything from Gmail and besides it was never “in the cloud” or “over the air”. Additionally meeting invites only worked from the google calendar interface.

The long and short of this: do I feel like a moron wearing a blackberry and an iPhone? Yes a little. But I am able to take care of personal things such as civic work and family events with ease and a level of organization I haven’t experienced ever.

I’ll save my personal GTD setup for another post but as a preview it’s simple and effective and I find myself quickly forgetting the mechanism and actually doing the things I need to do.

My title was inspired by my reading of 100’s of posts that outline setups like this:

Exchange syncs to entourage, entourage iSync enabled syncing to iCal, iCal syncs to Gcal, Gmail syncs to another computer via BusySync.(remember there’s a Blackberry and an iPhone mixed in there somewhere!) It’s just too much. (BTW Busy sync is really good, and probably the only way to so a clean calendar sync between iCal and Gcal).

More to follow on this setup. BTW this entire entry was composed on my iPhone at about 34,000 ft in the air on my last trip for work using Wordpress for iPhone.

-csg

A good friend of mine asked me to write about a dumb thing that happens in his office frequently. Let me paint a picture:

Imagine: Conference call involving 2 colleagues on the same floor.

Each speaking to the same client (same conference call) but each has a difference role.

Both are sitting within 30 feet of each other yelling into their speakerphones at their individual desks.

Folks around them get quite annoyed. Why do this when the company provides numerous conference rooms with Polycom speaker phones?

I really feel that between email and phones that we’ve lost the point of collaboration. If I saw this happening in my (imaginary) company I’d either get folks to collaborate face to face when possible. Otherwise I’d sell the building or kill the lease on the place and let everyone work virtual office since that’s what’s happening anyhow but with all the overhead of a facility.

What are your thoughts on this? Does this happen to you? Does your Netcom GN headset with 2 earphones shield you from the noise?

-CSG

This is hot news and will really be interesting to see how the divide between Microsoft CRM and Salesforce will play out.

If you are trying to book appointments with partners and prospects and you end up in voicemail hell I have a few things that have worked well for me:

1. Never call on mondays unless its a specific call to followup on something already in progress.

2. Make your call list the night before with name, phone number and the gist of your call - must be done the night before.

3. Call on Friday especially. Folks have put in a productive week and friday is the day people catch up on reports and planning at their desks. My ratio of answered calls has gotten me to the point where all my appointment setting calls are done only on friday.

4. Have a specific goal for each call. (Eg. Schedule a meeting, demo via webex etc. )

5. Don’t call during lunch, take a lunch and use the opportunity to recharge before hitting the phones again.

Best of luck to you and happy hunting!

I love Dilbert.

In the next few weeks I’d like to write up the ultimate sales force automation / CRM integration wish list and see what others think of it.