I wrote in an earlier post about my love/hate thing with Microsoft Excel. I hate it when it is used as a company wide solution for CRM, and I love it as a tool to analyze the data from a true CRM technology tool.

Well, I hope this one does not look like I’m backing off from my earlier statements. In sales automation done right, page 249, I deliberately introduced the idea that Excel could be used as a solid platform to use a lot of the sales methodology described in the book, in a sales automation application (SFA not CRM!) for the solo salesperson. The screen shot was from an early prototype Excel template in which we were testing out the ways that SADR handles the sales cycle.

I’m pleased to announce that SalesWays now offers a free beta release of the Excel Edition of Sales Cycle Manager, which should be downloadable as this post goes up. Many of the ways to characterize the sales cycle are just pure math. When did it start? When does it end? How much time in between? Calculate the three skill phases. Show where we are now in the cycle. Show the interactions that have happened. Excel is pretty good at doing that. When I thought about it, I figured that Excel could be a useful tool to get this done, so I mapped out a crude prototype and sent it to the SalesWays developers. They jazzed it up and it’s available for anyone to use—free of charge.

Although SalesWays can provide this free, I don’t want to downplay its power in managing a portfolio of opportunities. But this is a pure SFA product more oriented to the solo salesperson or small sales teams. It could be significantly better than the tools that they are currently using, and cheaper. It will certainly inject a dose of uniformity, consistency, and discipline into the way opportunities are managed.

Why give this away? Because we are so convinced that these new sales ideas can benefit everyone in selling that we are prepared to give it away to get it into as many hands as possible. It’s conceivable that we could create a ground swell of opinion to drive our more expansive enterprise software products and sales training programs into the organization.

If we find a firm following for this product, we will definitely consider ongoing development (adding SCMgr Expert functionality). Please try it and let us know what you think.

This posting is from John Darrin, an old friend who has been involved with sales and marketing for most of his career, with a few interludes - starting and running his own businesses. John worked with me during much of the time that the ideas in Sales Automation Done Right came to being, and was a valuable observer and commentator in those discussions. I hope John will be a frequent contributor to the SalesWays site.

- Keith Thompson

First, the disclaimer. I have been selling for over thirty years. Selling a broad variety of products and services from multi-million dollar projects to $200 electronics to the luncheon special. I have read the Sales Automation Done Right book, and I use similar processes and methodologies and techniques.

In the book, sales automation is defined (Page 7), and I paraphrase that definition to read “efficient and effective, technology-assisted selling.” The precision of that definition, the importance of both effectiveness and efficiency, and the ability of modern technology to support them, is critical to success in selling today.

Now I want to get something relevant to this definition off my chest. Something that continues to nag at me whenever my sales staff, or peers, or even bosses or clients, postulate one particularly absurd assumption. Here is my rant:

IT ISN’T ALL UP THERE.

One of the silliest things I ever heard came from a young, very aggressive, very ambitious, and otherwise very intelligent salesman, while he tapped his head with his index finger. “It’s all up here,” he said.

He meant that he didn’t need technology to record and save and use his sales opportunity information to help him sell, because he kept it all in his head. Technology was good for keeping his contact information and his calendar, but that’s all. Presumably, recording these bits of information on his computer left room for everything else to fit in his head.

Sales people are often smug, pretty confident, sure of themselves. We have to be able to get up every day and go out there and try to convince people to do something. Usually something they should do anyway but are dragging their feet for some reason, and usually with someone else trying to convince them otherwise. Often, we succeed, and this success can blind us to some realities. And when we fail, many times we don’t know why.

I don’t care who you are, or what you sell, it is critical to understand that it isn’t all up there. Some of it is. Maybe even enough to enjoy some success. But never all. If it was all up there, then you would be solving the big bang theory, or playing with super strings, or something equally esoteric. Or, you would be closing 100% of your opportunities.

But you’re not.

Look at it this way – if you had just one opportunity to work, and you could devote 100% of your time, your resources, and your talent to it, and as long as it wasn’t selling a fleet of 747’s or something equally complex, you would have virtually a 100% closing rate. It’s as simple as that.

As more opportunities are added, or as opportunities become more complex and require more activity, focus gets blurred, information remains undiscovered, chances are missed. And sales are lost.

So, whatever you can do as a salesman to focus all of your might on one opportunity before you move on to the next, do it. Even if you have a hundred open opportunities and you have to switch gears fifty times a day, technology can make the transition smooth.

When you do switch those gears, focus on the one opportunity. Treat it like it was your only one. And let technology keep track of the other ninety-nine until it’s their turn.

Do that, and it never will be the only one.