The people who come to this website for some guidance in using technology in sales may feel this question is almost too cryptic or fundamental. But those who have read sales automation done right will know that my pet peeve is that, most often, salespeople are not (but should be) fully aware of the language of sales, in the same way that lawyers should understand the language of law. If laws are written in an ambiguous way, how can the courts decide if someone is right or wrong? In some cases where the lawmakers have not been careful, decisions can take an awful long time to make.

In my last entry, I talked about the oldest sales book on my shelves dating from the fifties. It has a small section that is titled “What is Selling?” The answer goes on for three pages, but here is essentially what it says:

“The successful sale consists of the following elements:
1. It induces others to buy a commodity or service
2. Which confers some needed benefit on them, and
3. At a price which yields a profit to the company”

Here is my paraphrase:
Selling is the ability of the salesperson to persuade a customer to purchase their company’s commodity or service, yielding a benefit to the customer and a profit for the company.

I’ve used the word persuade in place of the original word induce. Both words imply that the customer has an alternate choice to yours. I’ve always thought that the act of selling must imply competition. Selling has the end point of achieving the customer’s choice of your product over the competition. If the customer proactively goes to your company’s web store, sees something they want and places an order—this is order taking and not selling. It can be argued that the marketing department, or the product design department, through their efforts to promote the product, did the selling. But no salesperson was involved.

So an important aspect of selling is a conversation between the salesperson and the customer in which the salesperson attempts to convince the customer that they have a better solution to suit the customer’s needs than other possible alternatives. That conversation happens over time, and the time period is called the sales cycle. There are two overriding styles of selling that can occur during the sales transaction (the conversation in the sales cycle). The ability to handle both styles is critical to good selling, and there will be more on that in future entries.

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.