“Does Sales 2.0 represent a real opportunity for sales management and reps to become more productive, close more deals faster,  better align with customer buying behavior and [insert your benefit statement here], or does it potentially represent a case of Shiny Object Syndrome for your sales organization?”

He then gives some good advice on choosing the right sales tool for your organization:

• Will it make my sales team more effective, not just efficient?
• Will it help me focus my resources on the right opportunities?
• Will it help me improve the accuracy and predictability of my forecast?
• Will it help us achieve our overall business objectives and improve results?

You can read the full article here.

Sales Cycle Manager On Demand is now faster and more user-friendly than ever.

In version 2.0, you can configure the Products setup in a number of ways depending on your needs. There are several options that allow you to make entering product information for sales opportunities as simple or as detailed as needed.

There’s also a new custom IBO field that can be used to add any kind of information to each sales opportunity, for example an internal reference number or commission-tracking code.

New data export formats give you greater flexibility in how you pull and use data, and a new analytics section for administrators adds a new dimension of reporting for your organization.

Below is a list of all major feature updates in Sales Cycle Manager version 2.0.

New features and enhancements

User Features

• Improved speed and performance
• Improved flow – column sorting and page settings are preserved as you navigate through the application. When you come back to the planner view from another screen it remembers which priority tab you were looking at previously.
• Search by country is now available in the IBO list in version 2.0.

Administrator Features

Export Options

• New Export Formats – You can now export to CSV, XLS or HTML formats. These options are helpful to accommodate a wider range of spreadsheet programs.

Users

• Ignore IP Whitelist – Enable a user to have access to Sales Cycle Manager from anywhere, regardless of your IP Whitelist settings.

• Export User List – This is handy is you want to export your list of users for use in an external emailing tool, for example.

Roles

• Assign Roles – If a user is removed from an assigned role where they own any open IBOs, a toolbox will open that prompts you to re-assign the open IBOs to another user and role. This ensures that all open IBOs are being looked after even when there changes in your organization.

IBO Form

• Default Expert Mode – Enable this option to automatically open the Expert Mode in the Sales Cycle Dashboard for new IBOs.

• Advanced IBO Role Filter – If enabled, a user who has multiple roles can choose which role(s) an IBO should belong under. This can be set to ‘required’ to force each IBO to belong under at least one of the user’s roles.

• Attachments – Option to disable attachments for IBOs and Interactions

• Custom Field - Add an extra field to the opportunity form. This is a text field and can be used to store information about an IBO such as a reference number.

Product Setup

• Hide Product Groups, Hide Product Number, Hide Qty & Unit Price – Options to simplify adding products to IBOs if desired.

• Custom Product Information Fields – Administrators can add custom fields for Products. The custom fields can be text input fields or selection boxes. Administrators can define the name of the custom field and its options that are available to users in the IBO form Product Information section.

Analytics

• Login Activity – Administrators can view a log of users and their login activity. Can be exported.

• IBO Activity – Administrators can view a log of IBO activity including user, IBO number, time-stamp and actions (save or delete). Can be exported.

They present some staggering figures:

• Only 9.1% of sales meetings result in a sale
• Only 1 out of 250 salespeople exceed their targets
• $1760 of profit per sale is needed just to cover the cost of failed sales meetings (assuming that the average meeting cost $160).

It’s interesting to see the notes on the five types of salespeople that hurt performance, and the authors’ suggestions on how these people could improve their sales performance.

It’s clear that the Storyteller, Focuser and Narrator types need help in understanding the fundamental skills of Probing.

Storytellers: Need to focus meetings…, to ‘read’ meetings, and to become more aware of their behavior.

Focusers: Need training in listening skills and must learn to use their technical savvy to meet customers’ needs.

Narrators: Need basic instruction in questioning techniques… Should shift their focus… to customers themselves.

The last two unsuccessful salespeople types, Aggressors and Socializers suffer from an imbalance of Relationship versus Opportunity focus. Aggressors would seem to have a higher Opportunity focus but poor Relationship focus as they “approach sales meetings purely as price negotiations.. however some customers dislike their combative approach.” The Socializers are highly Relationship-focused but have too little Opportunity focus, “[they] may initially impress customers with their friendly chat… [b]ut they usually don’t get past this, and close few deals.”

When you make your first visit to a potential customer, do you make sure you’ve learned everything you can about their business before you arrive?

Is your presentation tailored to them, or is it the same one you give to every customer on a first visit? If you are doing a demonstration, is it a general exposition of your solution, or is it a focused presentation on how your solution can help your customer reach their goals?

Remember, in most solution-style sales situations, you are there to help the customer identify their specific pain, and show them exactly how your company and product can help them.

If you arrive, hand out literature (by “diving into the bag”), and show a standard presentation, you are following a basic process and relying on your company brand to make the sale. If this is the case, you were likely hired to be an opportunity hunter and strong closer. This can work for some companies, but eventually a competitor will offer a solution that helps the customer more, unseating you and your market share in the process.

Consider this: when a brand new potential customer calls (an untapped goldmine for any salesperson), what do you do?

In many industries, if a brand new name calls, it’s usually because the caller wants product information and a price. With the Internet, potential buyers can even arm themselves with this type of information, and are capable of being further along in their buying process than ever before. When taking such a call, the “Bag Diver” would be keen to give the caller a price, and set up a convenient time for a demo. The reality is, the Bag Diver may not be giving any more information to the caller than can already be gleaned from the company website, and with that kind of canned response, the Bag Diver is almost certainly losing the opportunity to make a positive impression on the caller.

So what should you do?

Learn about your potential customer’s specific pains, and suggest how your company and product can help. It’s this type of approach that will keep you, and your solution, ahead of the pack in the eyes of your customers.

But stage-based sales forecasting can be misleading and even reduce your sales effectiveness. Stage-based forecasting is inherently salesperson-focused, rather than customer-focused. Getting to step #7 in your sales process does not necessarily mean that you have a 70% chance of winning. Thinking from the perspective of stage-based sales forecasting may be distracting you from important elements of the sales environment, such as the position of each key decision-maker and what your competition is up to.

When one is working daily with a stage-based forecasting methodology, it’s natural for a salesperson to end up thinking along the lines of “How can I get the customer to see our product?”, rather than “How can I understand what the customer is trying to achieve, and then position our company to reach that goal for them?”

From the customer’s perspective, especially in the complex B2B sales world, they are not just shopping for something new. The customer is trying to solve a problem. Rushing into a product demo for the sake of achieving step 7 in your sales process does little to ensure that your solution is in line with the customer’s needs. In fact, it can be detrimental to the deal; the opposite of improving your odds by 10%.

You don’t necessarily increase your chances of winning a sale simply by getting to the next step in your sales process. It’s the other way around—the ideal next step in your sales process should be to do what it takes to increase your chances of winning. The distinction is both ideological and practical.

Sure, you have a process that has been fine-tuned for your industry; it has been tested and proven. But the sales process and the probability of winning a sale do not always march in lock-step. In reality, the sales cycle follows the buying cycle, and must adapt to the unique sales environment of each opportunity.

The best measure of the probability of winning a sale comes from establishing the customer’s needs and truly understanding their goals, timeline, budget, limitations, buying process and the obstacles that stand in the way of being able to make a purchasing decision. There is also the matter of where your competition stands in any deal. If your sales forecasts are going to be accurate and reliable, these factors must be taken into account by your sales forecasting method.

What gets measured gets done, as they say. Is your company measuring sales process or the real probability of winning sales?

There are four types of salespeople, and in our many collective years as sales professionals, we have, more than likely, met all of them.

Type 1: There won’t be many salespeople who have been working for any lengthy period of time, that still happen to be here. Type 1 salespeople don’t like dealing with people, and they will also be very weak at basic selling skills.

Type 2: This salesperson relies on friendship with the customer to win sales, but shies away from competitive selling. They will have a loyal circle of customers who will repeatedly buy, but they can get trounced by salespeople who have better selling skills.

Type 3: Type 3 salespeople are aggressive, hard-working, and excellent sales tacticians, which puts them in a good position to win most sales they come across. But once a sale is made, they often fail to follow up with the customer to ensure that the customer is happy with what they have paid for. As the customer relationship declines, repeat sales become unlikely. This salesperson is the very definition of a “one hit wonder” in the sales business.

Type 4: This is the place to be. Type 4 salespeople are comfortable with building the customer relationship where necessary, but also have the ability to win the sale by sound and proven sales practice. What’s more, they can switch between either of the styles as the dynamic of the sale changes.

It goes without saying that every salesperson should strive to be Type 4. Which type are you? And if you aren’t yet a Type 4, what can you do to get there?