Jeffrey Gitomer has it wrong

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

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.

Sales vs. Ethics

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?

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?

The 7 Types of Sales People

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

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.