Memo from the Field

When I don't sell, I'm miserable. When I do sell... I'm miserable.

2011-07-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's been in sales for any length of time, knows what it's like to have a dry spell - a slump. You find yourself pressing, begging, cajoling. Selling a piece of business is a lot like getting a girlfriend* or finding another job - if you've already got one, it's easier to get another one. If you don't have one, you come off as desperate. You're miserable.

As disturbing as it seems, sometimes you're (almost) as miserable if you ARE selling. That's because after you sell something, you have to implement it. Sometimes, the implementation all goes smoothly and your world is wonderful.

Sometimes - not.

You've all been there - there are product delays, IT disconnects, billing problems, slipping timelines and your job is to get it all fixed before your customer rethinks her decision and pulls the plug on the whole deal. Probably the only thing worse than not having a sale is having one and then losing it.

Implementations in my business generally take two or three months and when they're going sideways, you spend your days crisis to crisis, having to manage both your team and the customer in order to keep it together. It's two or three months of sleepless misery.

Sometimes it's enough to have you rethink your choice of career.

But that's why they pay us the big bucks, right?

Right.

* as far as girlfriends are concerned, apparently this has proved to be an instinctual directive. If a woman sees a man with another woman, evidently she assumes that he's been vetted and found desirable and is therefore more attractive. Go figure.

Advertising Fail

2010-09-28T06:13:00.000-07:00

There are many types of advertising fail – confusion about what the product is or does, not knowing or addressing the target audience, offending potential customers, etc, but the topic today addresses a different type: assuming that your audience either doesn’t have a brain or at some point won’t engage it.

The first example is actually kind of funny; it’s for a Toyota dealership in Northern California. Here’s the tagline – “we’re moving around the corner and we’d rather sell them than move them.” Well, that makes sense – wait, these are cars, right? Mattresses, washing machines, dining room sets – sure, but cars? How hard can it be to move cars? Around the corner no less?

Although it isn’t done in jest, it’s just so stupid that it’s funny.

The next one bugs me a bit more, probably because it straight out insults your intelligence. I’m sure you’ve heard this one or one similar – “if we can’t beat their price, we’ll give you the ____”. The particular ad I’m talking about now is for mattresses but I’ve heard a similar ad for cars. “So let me see, I can either beat my competitor’s price by a dollar or I can give away a $500 mattress. Hmm, which one will I choose?”

Now, I get the point that this place will ensure that they have the best price and I guess the normal tack of “we’ll beat any competitor’s price by 5%” probably wasn’t good enough, so they came up with this.

Maybe, I’m too sensitive (maybe?) but hearing this ad makes me think so much less of this store that I’m not at all inclined to shop there and would instead opt for one of their competitors. As mentioned – advertising fail.

Prudential vs. Veterans

2010-09-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

The headline of the recent Bloomberg story could just as easily have been: “Credit Card companies profit from Veterans!” because they charge 21% interest to Veterans and their families. Wait, doesn’t everyone pay 21%?

Exactly.

As far as I know, every group insurance policy in the US pays claims via checkbook, rather than as a lump sum check. Not prominently mentioned in the Bloomberg article: it’s easy/allowed/perfectly OK for a beneficiary to take check #1 and withdraw the entire benefit amount and deposit it wherever you please. I did that last year when my mom died.

Incidentally, if one were to do that and deposit the full amount in a typical savings or checking account, you’d get somewhere between one-fifth and one-half of what Prudential is paying. “CitiChaseAmerica ripping off Veterans Families by giving less than half the interest of Prudential!”

Another big deal in the Bloomberg article is the fact that “a secret deal” was made to take advantage of veterans. How many contracts and amendments to contracts are signed by the Federal government every year? Thousands? I’m sure that some of those affect me in some way and even though I check the news and my mail frequently, I seem to be never informed of these signings. Does that mean they’re “secret”? Yeah, to me maybe. I wasn’t there at this particular amendment ceremony but I think the implication that it was signed in some sleazy motel parking lot under the cover of darkness is probably not accurate.

A little background on checkbooks vs. checks: Unsurprisingly, it turns out that beneficiaries, stricken with grief and confusion following the death of a loved one sometimes make bad financial decisions with the large checks they receive from insurers. Even more unsurprisingly, occasionally they are helped into these bad financial decisions by less than benevolent “financial consultants”. Checkbooks were created to take the pressure off from having to figure out what to do with a couple hundred thousand dollars right now. As previously mentioned, if there was no pressure, one check could be written for the full amount.

The general expectation was that six or so months down the road, a check would be written to pay off the mortgage or deposited into the kids college fund, and the account would be closed. The fact that that doesn’t happen all the time is a happy occurrence for insurers.

Now if there is a bone to be picked with Prudential, it’s that they didn’t choose to treat Veterans better than they treat any other policyholder, by crediting their benefits with the full amount of interest earned, and I think it’s safe to say that that’s what they should have done. Obviously, that opens the door to other groups (should they do the same for Police? Fire? Nurses? Teachers?) and would be an administrative headache (no one cares).

One last thing - you can bet that if Prudential and Veteran's Affairs decide to amend the contract to make that change, it will not be done in secret.

Corporate Cluelessness – part 3000

2010-08-12T03:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve written about Fidelity before, as they are the repository of my kids’ 529 plans (through no fault of my own).

Now the thing that used to set me off was the convoluted phone system that required me to eventually hit “0” and speak to a representative every time I wanted to withdraw money (about 8 times a year, with two kids in college). So I’d go through this procedure and they would transfer the money to my linked checking account about two days later, so I could pay the bills.

About a month ago I get an e-mail telling me they now have on-line withdrawal capabilities. Yippee – no more convoluted phone system!

Naturally the first two times I try to enroll – it won’t let me, but third time’s the charm. I enroll both accounts and make my first withdrawal. Wait, what’s this? You’re going to mail me a check and I’ll get it in about six days?

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the on-line experience supposed to be easier and faster? The frustrating part is that they already have my checking account info – they’ve been transferring money to it for two years. All they had to do was add a “transfer to checking account on file ending in xxxx?”

So my choices are these: use the frustrating phone system and get the money in two days or use the not-so-frustrating on-line system and get it in six? Or just move the 529 plans to a less clueless institution – yeah, that might be the way to go.

An (almost) Converted Liberal

2010-06-15T20:25:00.000-07:00

Being the open-minded guy I am, I've been reading some of the Tea Party information and, once you exclude the really bizarre and/or overtly racist rhetoric, there are some pretty appealing ideas. The idea of a smaller, less intrusive Government and lower taxes really interests me but I've got a problem that I can't figure out how to solve.

In recent memory we've seen several fiascos that were caused, primarily, by the greed and arrogance of individuals and companies, to wit:

- The Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme,
- The financial meltdown/derivatives-caused recession,
- The BP Gulf oil spill.

And I won't even mention all the e-coli and salmonella problems we've had.

The SEC should have been all over addressing and preventing the first two issues and the Minerals Management Service should have prevented the third (and the FDA the food issues). But the SEC didn't have enough folks to police all the Madoffs or folks savvy enough to understand the derivatives mess and the Minerals people were just corrupt and/or drug-addled. So this would seem to argue for more government regulations and regulators, right?

But we already had regulations and regulators and, frankly, there's no way we could ever have enough regulators to stop all the greed and arrogance in the US.

The President's Health Care bill is what seems to have really sparked the Tea Party movement, but again (and I can say this as someone who worked in the Health Care industry for years) many of the reasons that caused the bill to be necessary were caused by the Health Care industry itself.

So, here's my problem: how do we control the greed and arrogance (and subsequent screwing of individuals, companies and the environment) while also shrinking the government, its intrusiveness and the taxes required to support it?

The only answer I can come up with is as unsavory as the current predicament - more lawyers. I know, I know, but hear me out.

In a perfect world deregulation would lead to lower prices and better products but we don't live in a perfect world so many times we get higher prices (via hidden fees), and faulty and sometimes harmful, or deadly, products.

So, in the real world, deregulation doesn't really work - all it does is allow greed and arrogance to run rampant. In other words, unfortunately, we can't just expect people to do the honorable and decent thing.

What if the punishment for being arrogant and greedy was so severe that people felt compelled to do the decent and honorable thing?

We can either spend billions of dollars on making regulations, hiring government operatives and attempting to ride herd on every transaction we make every day or we could simply beat the tar out of folks who we find take advantage and wrong others.

Would the Tea Party support an army of lawyers whose job would be solely to prosecute and brutally punish the greedy and arrogant, in lieu of thousands of pages of regulations and thousands of regulators, in order to protect the American Public?

Would you?

Are Sales Leads worth anything anymore?

2009-02-26T16:55:00.000-08:00

When corporate offices are trying to help salespeople sell, they give them lists of leads; companies have sprung up in all industries selling lists of leads. You can buy lead lists sliced and diced any number of ways – want to know the names of all the females living in Sandusky who have 2 kids and a household income between $36,700 and $63,700? We can get that.

But lead lists on their own aren’t worth anything. Sure they give you people to call and if you get paid by the call, I guess they’re worth something. But salespeople get paid to sell, not call and unless someone buys something the list is worthless.

So how can you tell if that housewife wants your widget?

Marketing departments often perceive their number one priority to be finding likely buyers. In other words, it’s all about the Who. It’s easy to get the Who (even if it’s not the right Who).

What about the Why? Why do people buy? In individual settings, lots of studies have been done trying to ascertain consumer buying patterns and motivations but how much do you (or your salespeople) know about why corporate customers buy the particular type of widget you’re peddling? After all, in business settings, there are a lot of forces at work in making purchasing decisions – the customer’s need and budget, sure, but also historical vendor relationships, internal political struggles, the firm’s willingness (or resistance) and ability to change, and the overall corporate environment. Some of these things are easier to ascertain than others, either by doing research or asking pertinent questions but some, like the political and relationship questions are harder to ascertain.

And failing to get those details can, unfortunately, derail a potential sale at the 11th hour.

All of this theoretically falls under the heading of “qualifying the lead” and even lists of “qualified” leads aren’t typically going to get into that level of detail.

So what are you gonna do? Well if plain old lists of leads are worthless, lists of “qualified” leads are at least a starting place and to the extent that the marketing department can further drill down, at least on the need, budget and timing issues, the likelihood of converting that lead to a successful sale goes up exponentially.

The real work of getting to the Why (or Why Not) comes from relationship-building, usually on the part of the sales rep, which is how it should be.

After all, although it’d be great, it’s not marketing’s job to give us customers ready to sign on the dotted line – it to give us potential customers who are ready and willing to begin building a relationship with us. And if they can do that, it’s not worthless at all.

Share the Vision

2008-10-03T13:35:00.000-07:00

As an executive you know how important it is to communicate the company’s mission to your employees, and we all know that that’s easier said than done. Talking about “the vision” at company meetings and having a Mission Statement on the website are not the same thing as having people understand it and believe it. The number one reason sales people don’t “Share the Vision” is that what they hear in speeches and read in letters from management often doesn’t align with what they see in action every day. Reps may not see, or may not think about, how their day-to-day activities fit with the company’s strategy, how their territories and their quotas align with the overall corporate goals. The major function of sharing the vision is to get the sales team to think about something other than their individual quotas. Reps can be very myopic when it comes to their little place in the corporate universe and occasionally need to be reminded of the “greater good” and how they can (and are expected to) serve it.
I cannot stress enough the value of senior management spending time with sales reps and giving them the insight to apply the company’s overall vision to their little slice of the world. Clarify and explain how sales objectives and territories are built and how what you have reps doing is an integral part of fulfilling specific milestones and meeting specific corporate targets, rather than just hitting sales goals.
Sales reps will be much more productive and happy if they understand your shared goals and can connect their activities with the activities of all the firm’s other employees. In the field they will be much more effective if they can trust that the corporate mission is more than words on paper; that it really is something you are all committed to.

Why do companies hate their customers?

2008-06-09T19:47:00.000-07:00

This is one of those “well, duh” issues, I guess, but the dichotomy between what companies say and what they do is simply astounding to me. Much like what the dichotomy between what politicians say and do. And we all hate politicians, but we can vote against companies (and their practices) with our dollars and yet, apparently, we don’t.

If you look at virtually any company’s website or annual report, you can find their mission statement and after you get done with the junk about “empowered employees saving the earth” you will find out that they really, really respect and cherish and love their customers. Turns out what they really, really respect and cherish and love is their customer’s money. And they will lie and cheat and deceive to get it.

Now you’d think that all this lying, cheating and deceiving would be kind of a turn off for customers, not to mention kind of illegal. But no.

For instance, how are rebates not a “bait and switch”? Did we say that was $49.95? Well yeah, you pay us $150 today and if you complete these seven steps in the exact order we tell you and slice and dice the box it came in just so and send the whole mess in before midnight tonite to Young America, MN, we might send you a check for $100.05 in 4 to 6 weeks. So obviously the $49.95 is a lie. If the real cost, across the board was $49.95, that’s what you’d pay at the store and be done with it.

People don’t complain about this because they’re all sure that they’re gonna do the seven steps, etc. But we all know that the only reason companies do this is that some good portion of the populace won’t do the seven steps before midnight tonite, so the company gets to keep the $100 and 50 cents. If you really loved and cherished those folks would you be trying to hose them out of $100.50? You would not. Clearly your money is more important than you are.

My last point on rebates is this: it’s not like just one or two companies are doing them, there’s hundreds . And they ALL think you’re a schmuck. How does that make you feel? Cherished?

OK, rebates are an easy target, but there’s tons more proof that there are companies that hate you and will do virtually anything to get a few more bucks from you, while at the same time proclaiming their love for you.

OK, time to name names (but just for illustrative purposes):
Macy’s – my wife is a fine and long-term Macy’s customer and constantly gets 15% or $10 off coupons. Can she use them? Of course not, because the things she’d actually like to buy are excluded from the coupon’s discount. Would it kill Macy’s to give out a 15% off coupon with no limitations to its good customers? It would not. But why do that when you can lure them into your store and wring out a few more dollars?

Wireless Companies – I was gonna say AT&T, but they’re all the same. Is there a real problem with offering a plan with 1500 minutes for, say, $99,95 month, all in? Of course not. They advertise $99.95, but is the actual bill ever $99.95? It is not. If you respected your customers, you’d actually give them what you advertise. And make sure that you let them know before they ran up a bazillion dollars of overage charges. I’ve gotten text messages from AT&T advertising stuff but never to alert me that I’ve gone over my monthly allowance. Technologically impossible? I think not.

Credit card companies. You probably think I’m going to rail against 20% interest rates or the fact that years of loyal card-ownership go out the window if you’re three days late one month. Well there are those things, but frankly we all know those things going in so they don’t really fall into the “screwing your customers with malice aforethought” category. But this does: You know those checks you get, monthly, offering low, low interest rates if you use them to pay off other high-rate cards? Turns out that this is not the great deal you’d think – it’s a ploy to insulate, and increase, the debt you owe (at 20%) from ever getting paid off. How’s that work? Here’s the fine print - the debt you roll over at 2.99% gets paid off first, so that $500 you send in every month doesn’t reduce your high-interest debt at all. The highest rate debt gets paid off dead last. Nice.

Now believe me, I get the profit motive (business major!) and I also know that these companies have probably done cost-benefit analyses that support, on paper, screwing over your customer base to make a few bucks.

What I just really just don’t see is why companies feel they’ve got to lie to be profitable. And here’s my real problem – there are people (not companies) making these decisions. Do the people making these decisions know the people who write the mission statement? My fear is that they’re the same people.

It just goes to prove that Mencken’s phrase “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” is, sadly, still true and that, sadly, there are still people willing to exploit that fact.

Jeffrey Gitomer has it wrong

2008-04-09T15:18:00.000-07:00

If you read any business blogs or papers, you’ve probably seen Jeffrey Gitomer, he’s all over the place giving his (pretty gruff) advice on sales and his big tag line is always: “People hate to be sold, but people love to buy”

People don’t love to buy. Well, OK, some people do – my wife loves to buy shoes, but even then she frequently has buyer’s remorse and even more frequently, returns them. From a salesperson’s point of view, not exactly a success story.

In the corporate world, people certainly don’t “love” to buy – they have to buy. They have to buy a new phone system, different software, a new health insurance plan. Are these things people love to buy? Not so much.

If they “loved to buy” why is so much time taken up presenting, convincing, cajoling and overcoming objections?

When you buy you have to deal with the cost of the new item/service, the pain of implementation and the possibility of failure. As a sales person, if you could offer something where you could say “Tomorrow we’re going to implement the new system which will add all the new features you want, take away all your pain points, do it for slightly cheaper than you’re paying now and we’re going to do it with the flip of a switch.”

Does this sound like something you sell? Anyone?

I will agree with the “hate to be sold” part so (obviously) you’ve got to address the prospect’s needs, wants and fears in the manner in which they want them addressed and make them feel as comfortable as possible with their decision. Make it as painless and as positive as possible.

So the line ought to be “People need to buy, but hate to be sold”.

You heard it here first.

The Metrics of Metrics

2008-03-27T21:33:00.000-07:00

We all know that using metrics in a sales organization can be a great thing. After all “what gets measured gets done”, and there’s lots of things we need to get done in sales.

So naturally the first issue is figuring out what you want/need done. Closing more sales is usually the main objective, but there may be others – customer satisfaction, brand awareness, functional cross-selling etc. that may need to be done either on an on-going basis or for limited periods of time. So what you want done can change over time. The next step is figuring out a) which activities directly contribute to your end goals, b) which of those activities are measurable, c) what the measurement is gonna be and d) lastly which activities will get done anyway even if you don’t measure them. This last one may seem weird but you can’t measure everything so why bother your reps having them track something they’re going to do anyway. You also don’t want to be redundant in asking your reps to measure something you can get from other sources – for example, if you get a report showing how many quotes each rep has, you don’t need a metric for that; you already have one.

Whatever metrics you choose to implement should be designed to encourage the actions and behaviors you want in your reps – actions and behaviors that directly lead to more sales (or whatever else your desired end result is). If your best practices show that presenting a proposal face-to-face, rather than via snail mail or e-mail, results in higher closing ratios, measure f2f meetings. If your studies show that prospects close more consistently if you respond to their RFP in under 36 hours, make speed your metric. Whatever you want reps doing better and more consistently is a good activity to measure.

But there can be pitfalls to metrics, too.

First and most egregious, is making the tracking of metrics time-consuming and difficult on your reps. Many of your reps, especially the most successful ones are a) already doing most of these things and so see the tracking process as redundant or b) are successful without doing these things and can’t understand why you’re cutting to their selling time with new reporting. So it’s gotta be painless or so important that it’s worth the pain – theirs and yours.

Second and only slightly less egregious is instituting metrics that you can’t clearly show are valuable in closing sales. For example, making all the reps in your organization make 25 calls a week on an unproven sales channel is a recipe for disaster. Unless you know for a fact that firms have successfully sold essentially similar products in this manner in this channel (or better yet, you have reps that have successfully sold your product in this manner in this channel), do not make this a metric. Attempt it on a smaller scale in order to prove its success. Once you do that, you can roll it out to the company as a whole.

And don’t be afraid to change. If something starts working for one area of the company or one geographic location, spread it around!

Instituting good metrics is one of the best methods you have of ensuring the spread of, and consistency in, the use of your firm’s best sales practices so that everyone can perform as an “A” level rep.

A(nother) Sad Story

2008-01-27T17:10:00.000-08:00

This is a true story – names have been changed to protect the innocent (and shield the guilty). There’s a very large, well respected company that has their reps use an internal Sales Force Automation System (SFA) we’ll call SalesSonar. This is a Siebel system, but I’m not gonna blame this on Siebel because I’m sure that, even though there may be some limitations in Siebel systems, most of the faults in this particular installation are self-imposed.

If you asked this company to define what the goals of this SFA system are, they’d say activity tracking, analyzing metrics and data integrity – the usual buzzwords. Let me tell you what they actually get.

Due to “data integrity” issues they’ve made it practically impossible for reps to change data already input, or to erase data. For example, there are three separate entries for one client, whom we’ll call ChoicePoint. There’s Choice Point, ChoicePoint LLC, and CHOICEPOINT. Now you’d think that, if you’ve ever Googled anything, in this situation you’d have been asked “Did you mean ChoicePoint LLC?”, so that you could choose something already entered. Can’t do that. Two of these entries have the same address, one has an old one. Each of the three has different listings of contacts, activities and opportunities. Can any of these things be changed by a user? They cannot. Suppose the firm moves – can one change the address? One cannot. How about if someone leaves one prospect and goes to another – can one move or copy all the previous activities so one can tell what the firm has already done? They cannot. Multiple entries, conflicting addresses and contacts and incomplete activity history. So much for data integrity.

And because the company has strange fears about security (this is a company that flaunts its client lists in its marketing material. Hello?) they refuse to web-enable the application, meaning that reps have to either be in the office or attached to the VPN to access it. And access it they must because the company bases part of a rep’s compensation on their use of the system, which is normally something I’d recommend.

However.

This compensation reduction is based on a rep having X number of “trackable activities” for the month, as reported as of the 10th of the following month. What this means in practice, because the system is practically unusable on an on-going basis, is that on the 9th of every month 90% of the sales force, hundreds of reps, sit in their offices all day inputting their monthly activities. That’s quite the loss of productivity, isn’t it? Considering that there’s ~ 20 work days a month, losing one day is the equivalent of reducing productivity by 5%. And these things are supposed to make us more productive, not less.

What’s more is that in terms of activity tracking, the company can only be sure of what it’s reps are doing, have done, that one day, the 10th. Since reps don’t use the system on an on-going basis, if the organization wants to know what everyone is doing this week (say) they can’t. The 10th of next month they can find out, but not today.

Now of course you’re thinking that this is an isolated example. Well this might be a slightly more egregious example than most, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of firms whose implementations of SFA have been so botched that any benefits that would normally be expected are non-existent.

And that is both a shame and a tremendous waste of time, money and talent.

Sales vs. Ethics

2007-10-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

I know this topic doesn’t really come as a surprise to most people (especially any non-sales people who may be reading) but seeing it firsthand kind of did shock me. In the field I work in, financial services, the by-word has always been Ethics and even more so since Mr. Spitzer came on the scene a few years ago. Every year each of us has to take a continuing ed course, three hours or so, on Ethics where we are presented with various scenarios regarding “questionable” ethics and the right actions to take in them. Like most continuing ed courses the general feeling most of us get is “this couldn’t be more lame” and/or “what kind of idiot doesn’t know this?”

Well I’ve seen the idiot and he is us.

Over the years I’ve seen many situations where, although there may not be any real malice involved, the thinking is “we can make the sale, so we should make the sale” with very little thought as to how the client is impacted. Does the sale always come first? Shouldn’t there be some tangible benefit to the customer? We all think our product and our service and our company are better than the competition, but unfortunately that isn’t always the case. Some customers have perfectly good deals with other perfectly good vendors and what do we make of those situations? Isn’t that what the Continuing Ed classes are really supposed to be teaching us?

I’ve got an ethical issue with selling a product just to generate new commissions but due to the pressures of the job (or whatever) I don’t think a lot of sales reps see it that way. In certain industries (like Life Insurance) there are specific regulations prohibiting replacing products in this manner. Many of us have to put up with onerous laws and regulations that, for the most part, we think are unnecessary, overdone and a hindrance to our selling ability. If we don’t start policing ourselves and actually think about what we’re doing, there will be more and more and more such regulations.

Are Sales Reps an IT security threat?

2007-10-19T15:12:00.000-07:00

Many, if not most, employers arm their field sales folks with laptops so that they can be productive on the road, and more often than not these laptops are loaded with security software (virus protection, VPNs, encryption software, etc) meant to protect the corporate network from security threats. While this security software seems like a good idea there are instances where it may not be enough, due to the nature of the beast that is the field sales rep.
There’s a couple of fundamental issues with field laptops in general that are issues that don’t come up with corporate desktops. One is that while you can block websites and application loading when someone’s using a desktop on the corporate network, it’s trivial to just not launch the VPN and go and do, basically, anything you want to, unfettered by corporate Mom.
A more likely scenario in the case of sales reps is the checking of personal e-mail. While it’s not usually a big deal for Home Office employees to wait until they get home at night to check e-mail, if you’ve got a rep constantly on the road, they’re not likely to wait 3 or 4 days to do so. That’s especially true for reps with families, who likely use e-mail or chat to communicate with family members while they’re away.
Of course there are corporate rules against some or all of this type of behavior, but human nature being what it is, it will continue to happen, and locking laptops down even more is definitely not the answer. Right now I turn on CNBC and get a cup of coffee before I start booting up so I have something to keep me occupied while I’m entering passwords and waiting.
Sure you can scan for virus’ and rogue applications once reps get back on the network, but sometimes (as in the case of the Storm worm) that step might be too late.
What to do? I have a solution that I’d personally like to try, but so far, I’ve been unsuccessful in convincing corporate IT to let me do it. The answer of course is to let me use my Mac laptop. Since Windows based virus’ and worms don’t run on Macs, what I do on my laptop with the Mac layer on the road doesn’t threaten the network and I’d be happy to have IT control (and lock down) the Windows layer for corporate only use. I don’t need, or expect, IT support for the Mac.
This seems to me to be a good solution, but, obviously I’m missing something. What is it?

We apologize for any inconvenience …

2007-04-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

Really.

Feel badly, do you?

This "We apologize for any inconvenience" phrase is rapidly becoming meaningless, seeing as how it’s both overused and usually immediately follows someone telling you the corporate equivalent of “go pound sand”. The truly irksome thing is not the insincerity of the sentiment, it’s that most of the time the inconvenience is, if not intentional, certainly not causing any sleepless nights over at the XYZ Company.

If you want to be truthful, the response should be “Yeah, we know it’s a pain for our customers. What of it?”

I imagine there really are some firms that are sincerely apologetic, it’s just the two I’ve recently been dealing with (Chase & Vonage) clearly aren’t. But it’s not just them, I see this phraseology all the time and virtually always with the same preceding “shove it”.

Listen, don’t fake sincerity. If the customer is wrong, you can point out their error, apologize for the misunderstanding and offer solutions to fix it. If the customer isn’t wrong, you need to make it right for them.

Case in point is the Chase situation. Their interpretation of their fine print (define “may”) and mine vary. Their corporate policy is to define “may” as “will”. Legal issues aside, they should either change their disclosure wording or acknowledge my understanding. Instead their response is “This the way we do it” (go pound sand) and “We apologize for any inconvenience”. It’s not inconvenient – it’s wrong and you should offer to fix it.

How about “We’re sorry you misunderstood what we meant, but you’re gonna have to live with it.” At least it’d be honest.

It's 2007, dammit!!

2007-04-04T15:19:00.000-07:00

One of the most egregious things that companies do to hamstring their sales efforts is having numerous computer software systems that do not inter-operate; they don't speak to each other.

Let's assume for a moment that it's true* that there isn't one system that you can use in your company that can:
• automate the sales process (CRM)
• send and receive e-mail,
• calendar, and
• track customer and product information for your particular widget.

Even if that's true, there's no reason on God's green earth why you would consider saddling your sales reps (or internal staff for that matter) with software that can't share data. It's 2007 for god's sake!!

I'm sure there are some companies that have it together, but judging from what I see every day, there's not many. A company I'm working with right now uses a CRM system and Lotus Notes. While these two programs can share contacts and appointments (not automatically mind you; you have to specifically force the link and the procedure is different in each program), neither of them can share data with the separate customer/product database**. In other words, once someone actually buys a product, their data and product specs go into this separate silo never to be linked with the sales CRM system or Notes again, unless someone does it manually.

Cross sell much? What happens if you want to sell them something else, or the contact person changes, or they move? Again, it's 2007 - how can you not deploy a unified customer/client database that is one central depository for prospects, clients and their current or future product information?

And I'm not saying this because it sounds like a nice thing to do. Not doing so wastes time and resources, is costing you sales and is frustrating your sales force.

If you want to maximize sales, you should get with the program. It's 2007.

* and I don't believe this is true in 95% of companies. Software can be customized to handle just about any configuration of any product. This process is further aggravated because firms often don't deploy the latest versions or all the capabilities of software they have.
** not to mention the issues with mobile electronics which sync only with Notes, so you've got to remember to sync everything twice (CRM to Notes, Notes to Blackberry) before and after every outing.

The Sales Contest

2007-02-03T09:34:00.001-08:00

I don't really "get" sales contests, at least in the professional world of corporate sales. Oh, I’ve won my share of them, and have the plaques and crystal decanters to prove it, but (and here’s my dirty little secret) every time I’ve won it’s been pure, dumb luck. Naturally, since that's how I've always won them, I assume that's how everyone wins them. As with many corporate sales, I've always been involved in big-ticket purchases with long sales cycles. Do you think I started working on proposals in May so that I could be sure to close deals in September to win the contest? No, that just happened to be when the client decided to buy and I was the happy beneficiary.

There are many people who think Sales Contests are great for motivation or recognition and although I, of course, think motivation and recognition are great things, I don't believe sales contests are any good at doing either of those things. Oh, sure in certain situations they work - retail, telemarketing, new product introductions ("First person to sell one of our new gas/vodka hybrid generators gets a trip to Fiji") but once you get out of that realm - not so much.

Technically, if you distribute Sales tally sheets, you have a Sales Contest all year, every year. Every rep knows where they are, where the competition is and who they want to beat.

Professional sales people are self-motivated - give them a good product, a good story, good service and point them in the right direction and they're off. A sales contest won't make your products any better, your story any more compelling or your service any better. If you've got those things, you won't need sales contests. If you don't have those things, you should be spending your sales-contest dollars on getting those things.

Fire the Coach?

2007-01-08T13:53:00.000-08:00

It happens all the time in sports - at the end of a losing season, the manager or head coach gets fired. Obviously, that's easier than getting rid of all the players and, more importantly. it deflects responsibility for the team's failure away from management.

This same type of thing happens in the corporate world and for the same reasons. If sales are down, more likely than not sales management will take the heat and/or get fired rather than the sales reps and rather than senior management looking looking introspectively.

A case in point, from an anonymous correspondent;
"I work for a well-known East Coast based financial services firm and 2006 was a horrible sales year for our division. In December it was announced that our Sales Manager would be leaving and that our department would be rolled into a division that sells products complementary to ours. While none of this seems bad or unreasonable to the outside world, one key element was missing - any kind of real investigation as to why sales were down. The real problems were out-of-date products and horrendous service, problems upper management refused to fix, and therefore a terribly unmotivated sales force. The new management went into the change oblivious to what the issues were and treated us as if all we needed was a lesson in sales, some new laptops and a bigger quota. We don't want to be seen as crybabies or not as "team players", but until some of the underlying problems are addressed we still won't be selling and whose fault is that? I believe it's upper management's fault."

Now, I'm not sure the "management refused to fix" part is 100% accurate as it's likely as not that they were either unaware as to the extent of the problems or were unable (for one reason or another) to remedy them, but still. Even when the ball team's manager gets fired, usually management makes other changes to ensure that the new manager and the team is successful, or at least, more successful. Marching on as if the only change required is a change in middle-management is hardly ever the right approach.

If things are bad enough that team, or executive, management feels the need to fire the manager, you can be certain that other, more serious, problems are afoot and need to be attended to.

The Promise (or Threat) of Universal Health Care

2007-01-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

2007 is likely to be a watershed year in the battle for Universal Health care, in California and across the country and sides are already being drawn in what is shaping up to be a Red State/Blue State sort of conflict.

People use the phrases “Health Care” and “Health Insurance” interchangeably when, in fact, they are two different things. Health Care may or may not be a right for all Americans but health insurance is a funding mechanism that pays for health care and is not a right but a product that is bought and sold. When we talk about Universal Health Care we really mean Universal Health Insurance where one entity (usually the government) is the insurer for the entire population and so therefore everyone should have access to the same health care since it will all be paid for in the same way and in the same amount.

This battle over what form health care should take and who pays for it is likely to be hard-fought with accusations and claims on both sides.

On one side are the proponents of universal health care who will speak to the plight of the six million uninsured Californians, while on the other side the insurance & health care industries will remind us that we enjoy the highest standard of medical care in the world. In order to address, and fix, our healthcare system both sides are going to have to be honest about what various solutions entail and be willing to compromise.

One group of proponents claim that current administrative costs are between 25 and 30% while going to a universal system would bring it down to under 5%. I’m sorry, but this claim simply doesn’t pass the “reasonableness test”. There’s never been an instance where government performs a function more efficiently than private enterprise, much less 5 or 6 times more efficiently, so it seems likely that this is either very biased research or just wishful thinking. On the other hand, since the private enterprise we’re discussing is the insurance industry, never a paragon of efficiency anyway, if there was ever a chance for government to show its stuff, this would be the place. So, let us suppose that it’s a new day; we’re about to make history and claim that through the use of streamlining technology, bulk purchasing and reduced expenses and commissions, a universal care system can reduce administrative overhead from 20% to 10%. Considering the overall size of the healthcare budget, that’s a huge win. It sounds reasonable and do-able.

There’s also probably something to be said for having just one Big Bureaucracy rather than 5 (or 7 or 10) little Bureaucracies, since health care providers won’t have to keep re-learning the rules and procedures to be followed.

Insurance carriers are likely to proclaim that they can bring these types of efficiencies to the system, but there’s really no evidence to support that. There’s never been a standardized claim form or standardized procedures that have made it easier for providers to navigate the system. Technology-wise, carriers have never been at the forefront of change and have only adopted technology as profit warranted. They have had years and years to become the solution and have not done so. It’s also clear that the current system is rapidly leading to a crisis. Health care costs are a huge drag on the economy, affecting employers large and small, making coverage all but unaffordable for families and affecting the retirement plans for millions. We simply cannot continue to allow health care to eat up larger and larger percentages of GDP, and leaving so many people uninsured.

Several other issues will need to be addressed in any major change to our health care system – quality of care and rationing.

Our current system does indeed afford us the most technologically advanced care in the world, at least for those who have health insurance. In order to not be at a competitive disadvantage, carriers have to accommodate new procedures, drugs and technology because that’s what their customers demand. Will a universal system accommodate these advances? Moreover, with a governmental entity squeezing costs, what will happen to innovation in the field? Will the pace of advances in health care technology slow or stop?

This leads to the subject of rationing health care. In order to control (much less reduce) costs the system can’t provide all care to all people. That’s one of the main knocks against nationalized health care in other countries – everyone gets care but it’s not great care. That’s fine until you need great care. Stories abound about people waiting months for surgeries, and then dying during those surgeries, in countries with nationalized health care.

In the US we ration care right now based on whether or not you have health insurance. Those without coverage get acute care when they’re desperate and that’s about it. If we have universal care, rationing will have to be based on something else. Will it be based on circumstance (we refuse to pay for a heart transplant on an 86 year-old or refuse to pay the $2 million it would cost to save a baby born 13 weeks prematurely), based on lifestyle (refuse payment for smokers, obese people or helmet-less motorcycle riders) or based on something else? And who decides these issues and to whom can adverse decisions be appealed? Can adverse decisions even be appealed?

Will the system allow private insurance to supplement the universal plan, ala Medicare or will private insurance be prohibited as in Canada?

A note on insurance agents and brokers – many will applaud the elimination of what they see is the cost of an unnecessary middleman in the health care scheme, however, we should be careful what we wish for. Yes, agents and brokers get paid to recommend and place medical insurance plans, but their real worth is not in that effort but in resolving client service and claims issues that stymie mere mortals.

It’s clear that there needs to be changes to our current system of providing and paying for health care, but whether those changes require the wholesale replacement of the current system or whether some sort of hybrid will suffice requires us to honestly answer many questions about what we expect our health care system to provide and will likely require some sort of sacrifice of us all.

Stupid customer service tricks

2006-12-14T16:02:00.000-08:00

Lest you think all I do is snark about my employer (and I don't; I'm more than willing to snark about anyone's employer albeit sometimes with the snarkee being anonymous), allow me to opine on two separate customer service experiences I've had recently, both automated and both telephonic.

Now I'm not usually a huge fan of automated customer service, not because I'm a technophobe, but because they're so rarely done well. I particularly hate voice mail trees. Oh sure they're sold internally as a customer service, "so that consumers are directed to the correct department", but we all know that they are usually extremely frustrating. The thing that galls me the most is the widely held opinion inside firms that everybody else's voice mail tree is voice mail hell, but ours is OK. If you don't like them when you call your phone company, why do you inflict the same thing on your customers?

OK, scenario one - the good one (change of pace!!) is CIGNA's Tel-drug prescription ordering system. Obviously someone took the time to actually use this before installing because it has just the right little touches and ease-of-use to be really good. Everything is logically explained, prompts make sense and actions are acknowledged. Additionally they add touches like "if you want to order another refill, press 1, if not, press 9"; normally it'd be press 1 for yes or 2 for no, but asking you to press 9 prevents you from accidentally pressing the wrong key. I know you're thinking "big deal", but when it come to things like automated customer service if you want people to use it and not feel abused by it, you really have to pay attention to the details.

Which brings us to scenario two - the bad one. Here I'll name names, Fidelity Investments, because I didn't ask to open an account there, my kid's 529 plans were moved there by the State of California. Never having done business with Fidelity before, I had a pretty good impression of them. Now, not so much.

First, I have two separate accounts for two separate children. Fidelity makes me activate each account before I can do anything. OK. I go through the 5 pages of information for the first one and the system blows up. Fine, glitches happen. Do it again - same result. I wait until the next day to try again and this time it works. Probably overloaded from everyone whose plan moved. I'm ready to start using my accounts - wait what's this? Only one is activated? Hmm. OK, I'll go through the steps again because surely all the information I filled out before (address, employer, etc) will be pre-filled, right? Wrong. Look, if I wasn't the same person that filled out the info before, why is this my account?

And I haven't got the telephony part yet. The on-line system doesn't let me do something fairly minor but asks me to call their 800 customer service line. You know the drill - "Please say or enter your social security number", cool- voice recognition! so after the pause I start to speak. She's not done speaking yet: "If you are using a customer identification number instead, you can enter that". Naturally since she and I are speaking at the same time my SS# isn't recognized. Now who inserts a pause long enough between those two phrases that the listener is faked out? So I do it again, correctly, after the second pause and after going through the tree and deciding that none of those options will fix my issue, they finally connect me to a rep. Who asks my account number.

Oh, and just one more - this one is short (I know I said two, sue me). I have about three or four different Earthlink accounts for different websites and such. Every once in a while they send an e-mail telling me account # such and such has a credit card expiring, please log on and fix it. Here's the thing - when you log on to Earthlink's My Account page there's nowhere to enter the account number - it asks for your e-mail address. Well my e-mail address points to only one of the accounts and there's no way to change that. Why bother to tell you to fix this account number on-line if you can't access it by account number?

Yes, automated systems can save money, but if you want customers to actually use them, rather than automatically hitting "0", you have spend some time to make them user-friendly, a greatly overused phrase but greatly underutilized action.

What we have here is a failure to Communicate

2006-12-13T19:30:00.000-08:00

Folks, it's all about communication. So, we're still working on the billing issue I talked about a couple of posts ago. In the conference call with the client we promised that we'd have the billing corrected and a complete audit of bills sent and money received by last Friday. Friday at 3 PM, I get a call telling me that it's not going to happen until Tuesday. Remember, the original conference call was a week and a half ago. Did they just discover Friday that it wasn't gonna happen? I'm guessing that's not the case. They should have let me know it wasn't going to happen when they first realized it. Client is beside herself.

Okay, so now it's Tuesday, the drop dead date for this fricking billing, and a cast of thousands have been huddled in a conference room all day, after having worked on it over the weekend, and I get a call at 12:30 my time (I'm on the West Coast, the cast of thousands on the East Coast) telling me they'll be back to me within the hour with the final result. BTW, why this is taking so many people so long on what should be a fairly simple issue (after all, billing for product should be something we do routinely, no?) escapes me.

The afternoon passes - I got nothing. At 2:30 (5:30 EST) and every 15 minutes thereafter I call the 3 principal players and get no answer. Leave messages. Nothing. At 4:35 (7;35 EST) I fire off a scathing memo to my boss because I, naturally, assume that everyone has bolted and they were too scared to call and tell me they were packing it in for the evening. I'm pissed and call the client to tell her that we have, once again, missed the deadline.

While I'm on the phone with the client at 5:10 (8:10 EST) I get a call from my HO and it's half the cast of thousands to tell me they've got something. Now of course your initial inclination is to say, "Wow, Rich they stayed till eight o'clock to make the deadline", and normally I'd agree with you.

But.

Number one - I'm out here, by myself, freaking out all afternoon not knowing what's going on. Communication. I should have gotten a call (or 2) telling me they were still working, so I knew and could tell the client. Instead, my blood pressure is through the roof.

Number two - did I get what we needed? Well, of course you know the answer to that - No. The audit we promised them a week and a half ago? Not until Friday at noon. Why? "Because this is a lot more involved than we realized." And you just realized that it was "involved" now, at 5:30 on Tuesday? Communication.

And the icing on the cake was when, after I complained about missing the deadlines, I start to get a lecture about "managing expectations". Please. Tell me something's gonna take two weeks, I'm fine. I'll make sure the client understands and usually I'll get us a few more days. But I'm not the one that told the client when this would be done - HO did in the conference call and follow-ups.

Point of this is that when you're not going to get something done when promised, let everyone know as soon as you know that. People understand. Everyone gets in these situations - things interfere, problems arise, systems go down. It happens. But you've got to let everyone know. You've got to communicate. The problems end up to be far worse if you don't.

De-Motivating Sales Reps

2006-12-04T11:48:00.000-08:00

I know you're thinking "Jeez, what a stupid title, who'd want to de-motivate a Sales Rep?" The original title was Why Salespeople Don't Sell but then I realized that there was a whole myriad of reasons that could be true (personal problems, looking for another position, just isn't good at her job, etc) so I decided to focus on the one area you, as a corporate executive, have some control over - keeping reps motivated, or rather not actively de-motivating them.

Now I know it'd be stupid to actively try to encourage a Sales Rep to not sell and of course most de-motivation is inadvertent. It's well known that professional Sales Reps can only be effective when they believe in what they're selling. The opposite of that is true, too: if I don't believe in what I'm selling, I'm either A.) not going to be very good at it or B) I won't sell it at all. So, as noted in the previous post, things happen that cause reps to believe that the things they're supposed to be selling are lies. I clearly won't be trying to get business from that client for a while, because they won't believe what I'm supposed to tell them and neither will I.

Am I going to cut out selling every time the billing goes sideways or some customer service reps have a bad day? Of course not. If that was the case no one would ever sell anything. Accidents happen. If, OTOH, the billing issues, service problems, product failures or brain-deadness of the organization is an on-going and constant thing, you can be damn sure that your reps will shut down (and look for a way out). Again, I'd hope that if these problems were that bad, they'd be apparent to you and you'd have them fixed, however knowing the speed with which a giant organizational ship can be turned, sometimes even knowing the problems isn't enough. And then there are those firms that refuse to address the problems. The situation noted in the prior post (and I would venture to say, most good large corporations) fall into the former category. We know we've got issues; it's just that addressing them takes time and resources. In the meantime, no sales, because the reps aren't willing to throw their reputations under the bus. And note: asking a salesperson to burn their reputation so that you can get some sales is a surefire way to lose reps rather than gain sales.

Back to the issue of those that refuse to address the problem, let me pass along an anecdote from an an anonymous correspondent. This woman works for a firm that produces tradeshow graphics and booths. Now in her business everything is time-sensitive (getting the booth the week after the show is kind of a non-starter), so her clients are very specific as to when and how the products are delivered. The problem is that the boss is very scattered, disorganized and consistently over-promises and under-delivers. So the rep will have an order due, say, December 6th at 5PM. On the morning of December 6th, the boss will clear all the scheduled jobs in order to rush through the one that either he A) promised and forgot about or B) thinks is more important. The rep's job is now late. As before, if this was a once-in-a-while problem, no big deal, but at her firm it happens so often (and no one dares confront the boss) that she can never be sure that the promises she makes can be kept. She can never be sure that the job will be done on time. How can someone sell in that situation?

The bottom line is that, as a rep with any sort of pride, we need to be able to deliver what we promise on a fairly regular basis. That's what our clients count on and that's what our reputations are built on. If we don't believe that our promises will be kept, we won't be able to make them, and that's really all sales is - making a promise we know will be kept. If you can't make that happen for us, we can't sell for you.

Lose the Attitude or Lose the Client

2006-12-01T07:10:00.000-08:00

I want to share something that happens to Sales Reps waaaaay too often.

I have a client with a billing problem and she's been trying to work it out with the Home Office for 2 1/2 weeks. This is not a little billing problem, this is a really big billing problem and it's an important client. Here's my first concern - guess how I found out about this? That's right - the client emailed me. I should not be finding out about these things from my clients. Too much trouble for the HO to shoot me a note or call me to say "We've got a problem on XYZ Co., this what it is and we're working on it and will let you know if you need to do anything"? Now, I don't want to hear about every little problem but please use a little common sense to say "Rich needs a heads-up on this" for the big things. This lack of communication makes us both look like idiots.

But wait - there's more. We had a conference call, me, the client and four (count 'em) Home Office staff. Good thing I was there to referee, because the HO people were very defensive about how they'd done things. Apparently, it was the client's fault for not understanding how we were charging them. Notwithstanding the fact that a lot of the charges made no logical sense or that nowhere did we attempt to explain how we arrived at these odd numbers. Clearly, the client was wrong and they should just take our word for it that the charges were correct. Guess what didn't happen.

OK, let me make this perfectly clear: the client is not lucky that we let them do business with us, we are lucky that they have chosen to do business with us. I have seen this attitude for years, at many different companies, that somehow our clients should be thrilled that we allow them to buy our products. Where does that come from and how does it possibly make sense?

We shouldn't put people in a position that they need to change their procedures to match our internal processes. We should know what the clients need and expect. We should be accommodating to them, not the other way around.

There are very few companies in the world who make or do something so unique that a client can't go elsewhere, and get something just (or almost) as good without the condescending attitude. Everyone does it all the time - Bank of America treats you badly? Well, Washington Mutual is right down the street. Is Cingular constantly overcharging you? Switch to T-Mobile. The point is that if your employees are doing that to your clients, your clients will leave. And my reputation gets tarnished in the meantime and, really, that's all I have.

</rant>

I know I'm not saying anything new here. Everyone knows you're supposed to treat your clients well, right? Well, apparently everyone doesn't know this because this little scenario happened just this week and I'll bet it happened a thousand other times this week to other reps.

Think this doesn't happen in your company? It does. Call any one of your sales reps right now and ask. That's OK, I'll wait. Do do do doooo do. See, what did I tell you? Maybe it doesn't happen a lot, but it shouldn't happen at all. Make it stop!

What are we waiting for?

2006-11-27T19:56:00.000-08:00

One of the most frustrating things, both for you in the Home Office and for us in the field, is waiting for stuff to happen. But it's frustrating in different ways: for the field rep, once a problem has been identified or a procedure needs to be changed, well, just fix it and lets move on. Naturally, you know, I know, anyone who's ever had to actually fix a corporate problem or change a procedure and probably the rep herself, knows that it's usually just not that easy. Most of the time the issue is around either money or how to fix this one issue without breaking everything else.

To the rep, where everything has to be done right now (calls, sales, closes) waiting sucks and since reps for the most part run their own little shows, when something needs to be tweaked we can just do it on the fly. We just don't understand what takes so long, especially when the solution is obvious.

Two ways to combat this are to : 1) as often as possible, fix the little problems as soon as possible, immediately if you can, so that it doesn't appear as if the organization is paralyzed and 2) take a little time to explain what's involved in solving the problem. If the rep's proposed fix would break something else that's near and dear to her (the comp system?), that should definitely be pointed out.

The really frustrating part from the Home Offices perspective is the fact that, God Forbid, you rush the fix and get it wrong. The complaining will be unbearable.

So the trick is to make everyone understand that you, as a company, would rather do it right than fast but also disabuse us of the notion that Home Office folks spend all their time in meetings, accomplishing little.

We sell - What?

2006-11-16T20:12:00.000-08:00

Do you remember Donald Rumsfeld's "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want"? Please remember that saying when you're hiring sales reps. My point - don't hire sales reps for things you want to sell, hire reps for things you actually do sell. More than once, I've been interviewed for sales positions and been told that the company wants to go after "Fortune 500" size clients and we have this and that product and/or capability. However, after doing a little DD, it became apparent that there was no way either of these companies had the capabilities required for those size clients.

The two firms had different reasons for their actions and so in the interest of clarity, I'll explain them.

The first was a recently-acquired subsidiary of a huge corporation and, naturally, the bug was placed in someone's ear that cross-selling was a good thing and ought to be pursued. As it turns out, the subsidiary that was going to hire me was once a company that specialized in small business, but had been bought by a larger firm and in turn the two of them were both swallowed by a huge multi-national. Since the mother ship had always dealt with firms it's own size, they just naturally assumed that it's new acquisitions would be able to do the same. Unfortunately all the employees of this subsidiary, their training, mindset, and more importantly their systems were all geared for small clients. It's not that they were never going to get there but they needed to do a lot of infrastructure work and employee training in order to do it. They did, in fact, do some elephant-hunting in conjunction with their larger brethren for a while and failed miserably. Cross-selling has been tabled for now.

The second firm was moving into a different facet of it's business with a different client base and didn't do enough research to find out product differences that were industry standard among it's new prospects. When you are a new player in an industry and show that you don't really know what every one else is doing, or why, or how the client is affected, it makes the whole sales process a horrible sight. Worse, they didn't know what they didn't know and so the new reps were led to believe that the company had it's act together. When the skin was peeled back on procedures and processes, it was "WTF?",

Now maybe you're just saying that these are isolated instances. I don't think so; there is much anecdotal information about firms entering markets and failing miserably because they were unprepared to handle the needs of that market.

Hiring a rep to sell to clients you have no business going after does a disservice to the rep, damage to their reputation and to the credibility to your firm. Yes, there are always new markets we would like to get into but before you hire someone to crack them, make sure you do your homework to make sure you have the systems and deliverables to make your foray a success. If you do hire a rep that's knowledgeable in a market you want to get into and want them to help you do it, make sure to adjust their sales quota until you are ready to deliver the goods.

Everybody knows Sales, right?

2006-11-12T16:32:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows Salespeople – they’re everywhere, and everybody thinks they know what Salespeople do. Now your experience with Salespeople probably depends on what sort of experiences you’ve had with them. Everybody’s got a Bad Car Salesperson experience, and a boring Insurance Salesperson experience and I’m pretty sure nobody likes telemarketers. Having been in Sales for a really long time, I dislike sleazy Sales folks as much as, maybe more than, the next guy. But if you deal with professional Salespeople in your working life you know that Sales is what makes the business world go ‘round.

In business, the problem is that everybody knows Salespeople, but very few people who aren’t in Sales don’t know what Salespeople really do. Since, as someone much smarter than me once said, “Nothing happens in business until someone sells something”, not knowing how that happens is a problem.

If you went to Business School, you learned about lots of interesting things and one of those things was Revenue (often referred to as the “Top Line”) and obviously, Profit (the “Bottom Line”) and one of the big items between those two Lines is something called the “Cost of Sales”. Now your Salesforce isn’t all of that line item but it can be, and usually is, a big chunk. My question (and Tom Peter’s question and a bunch of other folks question) is – since the Sales job is both the major driver of Revenue and a large chunk of Cost, how come they don’t take more time explaining what, exactly, the job of Sales is? And I don’t mean “the job of Sales is to produce Revenue”, I mean “what do Salespeople do and how does one help them better produce Revenue”. I mean if, as a businessperson, your job is to maximize Revenue & Profits, how can you not know, intimately, how those things are produced?

This blog is an outline of a textbook that will attempt to rectify some of the shortcomings of the b-school curriculum by providing a firm appreciation of what Salespeople bring to an organization.

Because, like it or not, businesses live or die by the sales force.

The 7 Types of Sales People

2006-11-11T10:08:00.000-08:00

It’s a mistake to assume that a sales force is homogeneous, since sales people come in unlimited flavors but they can be generally classified into a few discernible categories:

• the Sales Pro – this is what people think of as the prototypical “can sell ice to Eskimos” sales person. They are sociable, aggressive, energetic and can remember names, faces & birthdays. They will ask the CEO’s secretary about her daughter’s soccer game and be interested in the answer. This type of rep is also why many people think they can’t be in sales. They generally know enough about the products to make the high points sing in a particular sales situation, but aren’t usually all that technically proficient, and will call in an expert to explain the details. To these reps the Sale is the thing, the bigger the better, and they can be extremely tenacious on both sides of the desk. They tend to have very good relationships with rank & file workers inside the company and usually only unload on the higher ups (you).

• the Marriage Broker – this type of rep is an expert at discerning the needs of the buyer and finding just the right person or people to pair them with to address their particular requirements. Rather than being any type of product specialist, they tend to have a good grasp of the company as a whole, your products, strengths and weaknesses and, most importantly, potential market opportunities. These are usually the reps who bring in the largest but most complicated deals. “I’ve got a guy over at GM who can hook us up if we can figure out how to give him 2 million 2 3/16” glommets in 3 days.”

• the Technician – Technicians know the product inside and out, what it can and cannot do and what all their competitor’s products can & cannot do. Many technicians are the experts in the product line for their location, help the others in their office and often get calls from people even if they don’t own (or want) your particular brand. These folks often come from the ranks of engineers, underwriters or other internal product specialists. Technical sales reps are successful because their clients know and trust them to have the best and most current information to address their needs.

• the Schmoozer – generally, the exact opposite of the Technician. This is a pure people person tending to be light on in-depth product knowledge but pretty good at golf and knowing where to eat. These folks are very good at putting clients at ease, getting to know the movers and shakers and zeroing in on decision-makers. Unfortunately, Schmoozers can sometimes over-promise in an effort to make the client like them.

• the Service Pro - often comes from the ranks of those they’re selling to. They know the pain of implementation, of using products that don’t perform as advertised and most importantly the job pressures faced by the person using the product. They empathize, they research, they explain, they hand-hold. Service pros are successful because buyers believe that the rep will make sure that the product does what it’s promised to do or die trying.

• Sad Sack – “Woe is me!”. Nothing is ever this person’s fault – the product is lousy, the Customer is an idiot, the guys on the factory floor screwed up the order, it’s raining. Not to be confused with:

• the Annoying Ass – unfortunately, at any given time every organization has one (hopefully not more than one) of these. The main characteristic of this type of rep is his inability to take “No” for an answer, constantly calling folks who have no interest in buying your product (or at least in buying from this rep) and offering little to the purchasing community save tenacity. This person generally doesn’t know a lot except product specifications and doesn’t know how the product can help the particular customer, but does know that he needs the sale. The general sales approach of the Annoying Ass is “show up and throw up” where the rep unloads a litany of product features and specifications, rather than spend any time actually, you know, finding out what the client needs or wants.

Any others you can think of?

The Rep is Your Company

2006-10-30T17:28:00.000-08:00

To the outside world we not only work for you, we are you.

It’s extremely important that you and everyone else in your organization remember that, to customers, your salesperson is your company. Yes, this is a cliché and everyone knows it, but on a day-to-day basis this fact is overlooked all the time. In the real world of professional sales where your representatives (note the word) are calling on and selling to other professionals, we are Sony, we are Blue Cross, we are Conde Nast, we are Stanley Tools and how the client’s experience goes with us, the sale and it’s implementation, goes their experience with Sony, Blue Cross, Conde Nast, etc.

Now that you’ve got that message, what does this mean on a practical level? What it means is that you may have thousands of employees, a well-known brand and spend millions on advertising but, on an individual customer basis, none of that matters if we can’t deliver what we promise.

So there are two lessons here: 1. your company should be organized around delivering what your sales reps promise and 2. you’d better have sales reps you trust enough that delivering on our promises doesn’t become a problem. If you can’t trust us to make realistic, reasonable and, ultimately, profitable promises, you shouldn’t have us.

The inability to follow through on a promise, ugly or confusing marketing pieces, bad customer service, mistakes and delays in the delivered order – all these things reflect badly on your person in the field and, therefore, the company. It’s the sales rep’s inability to control, manage and foresee these glitches that is the most frustrating aspect of a rep’s life. Yes, we’ll bitch and moan when something goes sideways, but you’ve got to let us know as soon as humanly possible that something we’ve promised is delayed or sidetracked.

It’s fairly common practice for Home Office folks to assume that the sales rep can, and should, just go back and change something previously promised. This is not easy and can damage the long-term credibility of the rep and, really, that’s all we’ve got.

Your brand, your products and your service can go a long way to having your client be committed to your organization, but in the end it’s the rep whose relationships can make or break the client’s bond with you.