The SalesWays blog and other content throughout the site is written by Keith T. Thompson, the SalesWays team, and a select group of business professionals. (see more)
We are deeply passionate about the present state of sales automation as well as its development in the future. Among our chief aims is to disentangle the confusion between CRM and SFA, terms that have now become incorrectly synonymous with each other.
The SalesWays brand transcends its name; it is a philosophy just as much as it is a method of selling. The most efficient and effective way to sell is to bring technology in line with everyday sales activities, and to make the process of sales cycle management implicit, intuitive, and repeatable.
Sales Automation Done Right (SADR) is Now Available as an eBook
The world of eCommerce is truly amazing. It took SalesWays Press several months to publish the paper version of Sales Automation Done Right and arrange distribution through Amazon.Com. Publishing the eBook version was much easier.
The first task was finding a reliable partner to convert the manuscript into the forms required by the eBook stores we had targeted to distribute. These are MobiPocket, a French company acquired by Amazon a couple of years ago; eReader, a subsidiary of Motricity and the Palm Software Store (operated by eReader). MobiPocket has its own proprietary format for text and illustrations, as does eReader.
We chose Scribe, based in Philadelphia and Miami to do the conversions. David Rech, Andy Brown and their teams worked with us to ensure that the books vital illustrations would be faithfully reproduced and usable on small PDA and smart phone screens. Scribe accomplished this by the use of magnified images that can be scrolled left and right, up and down to view all the information. They worked with us to create a system of hot links between chapters, sections and to illustrations to allow readers to move quickly to the information they need. They did a great job!
We worked with Jeremie Le Proust in Paris to upload the book into the MobiPocket eBook Store, and to solve a humorous problem that evolved over their use of the “customers who bought this book also bought” category. It seemed that the first few purchasers of SADR were also interested in purchasing other material that didn’t quite fit the same genre. We were hesitant to move forward with an inappropriate association linked to our book. We explained our position to Jeremie and he readily fixed it.
We worked with Jim Harvey, the head of content and developer services at Motricity to keep our project on track with eReader, and with Sarah Janoch at Publishing Dimensions, who manages the product library for eReader. Sarah helped us clear the last hurdles and publish versions on eReader and the Palm Store just as 1996 came to an end.
Some books are too valuable to leave at home on the shelf. The obvious problem is that most are too heavy and too bulky to carry around all of the time. The best example for medical professionals is the PDR, the phone book sized Physician’s Desk Reference that lists critical information about pharmaceuticals and drug interactions. Until eBooks arrived, these were impossible to carry around. Now they live comfortably in smart phones, PDA’s and notebook computers, always available for reference at a moment’s notice. As eBooks, they can be digitally searched, bookmarked and notated without damaging the pages. Information links can make them even more useful.
SADR is the PDR for sales professionals. The paper version is not as big, but still too bulky to easily carry around all of the time. SADR is my CRM and sales automation bible. I refer to its glossary of CRM terminology frequently, and have book marks in about fifty places to help me when I’m planning marketing campaigns, plotting selling strategies, managing opportunities and looking for ideas.
To celebrate the publication of our first eBook, SalesWays is offering free registration codes for our SalesCycle Manager Software for Palm and Windows to purchasers of the eBook from any of the three publishers. Download a trial version of the software from the SalesWays Store, and send us the information requested in the registration instructions along with a copy of your sales receipt. As always, the Excel version is already available free of charge.
The combination of the SADR eBook and Sales Cycle Manager software is the perfect combination to empower you to unleash the potential of the SalesWays methodology and apply it to your personal needs. This compatibility chart will give you an idea of the platforms supported by the three eBook distributors: Compatibility Chart
In sales automation done right I make extensive use of one of my favorite business analytical tools, the 2×2 matrix. It’s a given that if a complex idea can be framed into two counter or opposing issues, the four quadrant result of a well-planned 2×2 matrix can throw a huge amount of understanding on a problem.
One of the most well known examples is Stephen Covey’s wonderful grid for managing personal resources. Covey says that tasks should be viewed from the two aspects of importance versus urgency. Some stuff that requires urgent attention may not in fact be important, and vice versa.
For instance, Covey categorizes personal recreation as something that is important to get done, but usually not urgent (you can wait four hours until you are out of the office before having a game of tennis). Conversely, he puts many intrusive telephone calls into the urgent, but not important category. According to the quadrant that people tend to focus on most, Covey can predict whether a person is heading for burnout, or is leading a well-paced, creative and crisis-free life. The simple four quadrant perspective allows Covey to disassemble troublesome conflicts that are potentially stressful in a busy business environment such as sales. Most will have read at least one of Stephen Covey’s books, but if you haven’t, a good place to start is with “First Things First”, which is excellent for salespeople who want to hone up their organizational skills.
There is a review of the above book here by business thought leader Michael Schrage. Michael’s article is interesting because he considers the 2×2 and Microsoft PowerPoint as the two most popular business analytical tools. But he also points out that they are not always used effectively. A good 2×2 is difficult to construct (we’ll take a look at my attempts in future posts). But PowerPoint especially is often thrust at audiences by presenters who haven’t put too much thought into the slides. We’ll take a look at that in the next post.
Opportunity Portfolio Management (OPM) is the sales training course using the methods and ideas that are mostly (but not entirely) described in my first book, Sales Automation Done Right. Most of the analytical stuff from OPM is encapsulated in a range of mature SalesWays software products bearing the Sales Cycle Manager name.
Sales Automation Done Right has a chapter on new technologies that are having a huge impact on selling. The point that I tried to make here was that good sales methodology developed with technology in mind would fit all the diverse new technology tools that are springing up so quickly. Two important ones are mobile computing and subscription CRM. We’ll talk about mobile in a future entry, but right now, I’m pleased to say that Sales Cycle Manager is now available for Salesforce.com on their AppExchange platform.
On page 248 of SADR, I show the Sales Advisor Dashboard embedded in Salesforce.com. I must admit that we did this in 2003, before Salesforce.com had fully developed their AppExchange technology. We saw the potential here and literally hacked our stuff in. That experiment proved that the methodology fitted well within the Salesforce.com CRM framework.
But now AppExchange is here, and is a wonderful way for third party developers to make their material available to Salesforce.com users. The technology is solid, has the backing of Salesforce, and the marketing message to show what’s available—this should be a win-win situation for both Salesforce and their partner community.
Jeffrey Barrie was instrumental in getting me to finish writing “Sales Automation Done Right.” He has also spearheaded the effort of getting the book, our software, and the SalesWays web site translated into Russian, where he is leading a major initiative to promote SalesWays methodology in that country. His story is fascinating, and I’m posting a blog entry that he recently penned for the Palm Addicts web site that tells of how he and I originally connected over five years ago.
I am a consultant with dozens of potential clients at any given time, only a few of which get converted into paying customers. I am not a salesman, and need all the help I can get to “close” my opportunities. Several years ago, I surfed the Internet looking for Palm software that could help me manage my consulting opportunities. I searched PalmGear and Handango for hits on “CRM” and “sales automation,” came up with nine listings, and began downloading and testing them all out. The prices were all affordable, between $20 and $40, and they all seemed to have similar features.
One, in particular, caught my attention because it not only offered to actually become my personal sales assistant, guide me through the important stages of each deal, and give me advice on what to do and when to do it along the way – but to thoroughly educate me on the whys and wherefores. There was an entire system in place: a sales methodology specially adapted to personal computers (and PDAs!), a 300 page book explaining it in language I could relate my needs to, and Palm software (with a Windows client) to use at first as a learning aid, and then to manage my own sales opportunities.
I’m pretty aggressive, and tend to come on too strong to perspective clients. The book calmed me down by instructing me to set the average time it took, from the time I met a client to the time he or she made a decision, into the system as the “length of the sales cycle.” It then broke that down into three parts: 50% of the time to “probe” the perspective client for information on his or her needs, 40% to “prove” that my solution was the most appropriate, and 10% to “close” the deal. Then it told me to assign high, medium or low marks to three questions: “will it happen” (is the customer really serious), “will I get it” (will he or she do it with me) and “when will it happen” (what’s the client’s decision deadline). With just these four factors, the software was able to prioritize my opportunities, advise me how to handle them, and in what order. There were other bells and whistles, but these were the basics.
I was so intrigued by all of this that I began writing to Keith Thompson, the inventor of the methodology and author of the book, and eventually met with him in Toronto. At that time the book was only about three quarters finished and a “beta” down load from his website. I kept bugging him to get the book finished, and to publish it in Palm readable format so that I could carry it with me as an easy reference. He said he’d get the book finished, but if I wanted a Palm version I’d have to do it myself. I took him up on that, found Scribe in Philadelphia to do the digital conversion I was amazed at how much more useful the result was than a paper book, with extensive hotlinks to chapters, subjects and illustrations, and the ability to bookmark and make page notes while working in parallel with the Palm software. I chose MobiPocket to publish the eBook in universaly PDA/Blackberry/smart phone format, and the whole package was really complete.
Reference books in digital format, when extensive linkages are included, become amazingly more productive than books on paper. This is especially true for dictionaries and thesauruses. Now, when I read eBooks on my Palm and find an unfamiliar word, it’s a matter of a stylus tap to find its definition or more about it. I rarely went to the trouble of doing that in my paper book days.
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.
Newton’s third law says that “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Even though I did physics for over nine years of my life, I’m very rusty on that stuff. But when I started putting together the material for sales automation done right I realized that even though he didn’t know it at the time, Newton was onto something important concerning the sales cycle.
Over ten years ago I was trying to answer the question “what are the dynamics of the sales cycle—what variables change as the sales opportunity progresses through the period of time we call the sales cycle.” This was important to get to grips with because we were trying to find a way for a computer to understand those dynamics with some helpful information from the salesperson. To cut a long story short, and not to take away the punch from future postings, we developed a model that said that the sales cycle can be divided into three phases, and each phase was distinctly different, requiring special skills from the salesperson.
After we came up with this idea, I revisited Neil Rackham’s books on selling and his research on how people buy stuff, from jet planes, to computers, to houses – in fact, to anything. He found that the buying process almost always followed a three stage (phase) model. We had concluded that selling followed a three phase approach too. That’s where Newton comes in – selling is a reaction to the action of buying.
Now, I figure that if I had started off with Rackham’s ideas, coupled with a knowledge of the Third Law, I could have written SADR in half the time.
Why do I ask that question? Well, SalesWays is about sales and technology. In my book Sales Automation Done Right I am downright discriminatory against paper. There are many instances where I infer that a paper-based office will ensure the demise of the business. I’m not backing away from that, because I’m referring to paper-based processes.
Paper is not conducive to dynamic workflow within the company; it can’t move itself so it needs people to pick it up and move it from one desk to another. It accumulates in heaps, and people, inevitably intimidated, procrastinate when they have to stare down a leaning tower of paper. It is much better to make the process electronic and move it using electrons down a wire or through the air. With paper-based information, you have to store it in big metal boxes, and then spend a lifetime trying to make some practical use of it. It’s a much better idea to store it on a 200GB hard drive and take advantage of some friendly software to extract the stuff you need.
But here’s the paradox; paper is great when it comes to capturing information when you are sitting in front of the customer. You can usually write as fast as you think, but you certainly couldn’t touch type into your notebook computer at 40 wpm in front of the customer (if you can, you should be commended; you have a marvelous ability to multitask). Somehow, customers seem to appreciate you carefully writing notes about your conversation, whereas they may have a problem with you when you’re dealing with the odd Windows quirk at the same time as they are telling you about their budget, product needs, or difficulties dealing with their purchasing department.
Paper is great for capturing information quickly. Paper works with the human mind in splendid unison. If you don’t like what you just jotted down, you can scratch it out. If you love what you wrote, highlight it with a star. If there is no room left to write, put it in the margin or curve it around the perimeter—paper will let you do anything. And I don’t care how much of a computer junky they are, the typical salesperson will have their favorite notebook with no LCD or keyboard—just paper.
Sales Force Automation, or sales automation, was “in” in 1993, and everyone talked about it. It made sense because most people were automating their sales teams, but they were going about it the wrong way, by bringing together their processes into inadequate Contact Management software. They thought it would fix all of their problems, but the sales opportunities were still getting neglected, along with the strategies, skills and techniques that occurred in the sales cycle.
Just as software developers were coming to grips with these problems, up springs this concept of Customer Relationship Management.
Almost overnight, SFA and CRM got hastily paired together in the growing e-business lexicon, and they came out synonymous. The industry, the experts, even the customers, used them interchangeably, believing them to be one and the same. But they’re wrong.
SFA and CRM are related, dependent and intertwined, but they are not the same thing, and it’s a disservice to the market to suggest they are. It’s time to clear the air.
CRM focuses on building and maintaining good customer relations. On the other hand, SFA centers on providing salespeople with the proper tools to win the all-important sales opportunity. The former takes on a relationship focus, while the latter promotes opportunity focus. While these ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, they simply should not be lumped together.
The industry is simply out of touch with this concept. Let’s put the spotlight back on SFA, and concentrate on making it work first. Along the way, we can figure out how it meshes with CRM. And then, we’ll be ready to move on to e-business.
Welcome to SalesWays, an informative blog-centric portal dedicated to innovations in sales and technology. Sales and technology are the core themes that run through my book sales automation done right, which encapsulates ideas and methods that have taken me half a lifetime to see come to fruition.
Challenges facing salespeople today are greater than they have ever been. Competition is as strong as ever, and even though salespeople have numerous technologies at their disposal, there has been no evident push to ensure that the synergy between sales and technology truly works to their full advantage. That’s where we come in. SalesWays is devoted to the ways that technology can make the whole process of selling come alive.
We will keep these pages filled with content that is relevant to the theme of bringing technology to sales. Topics will span from probing to PDAs, CRM to connectivity, sales cycles to speech recognition and everything you can imagine in between. We’ll show you how easy it is for the paths of sales and technology to intersect, bringing harmony to the way you sell.
Our panel of contributors will provide you with insightful tidbits that you can apply, from your daily sales activities all the way down to the core of your sales processes. And if you’re a bit intimidated and don’t know how to go about doing this, you’ve come to the right place; we’re here to get you started. Technology is the single largest innovator, the force behind the biggest changes that the sales community has ever seen, and we’re here to create a sense of renewed excitement in the ways people sell. This is our philosophy behind SalesWays; we hope you’re just as excited about the possibilities of employing technology in sales as we are.
A sales opportunity management system for salesforce.com’s popular AppExchange on-demand platform
For salespeople, sales and marketing managers, sales administrators, and anyone seeking better results from their sales team.
OPM sales training teaches the methodology from sales automation done right but frames it outside the arena of technology - it also builds, extends and augments those thoughts into a compelling story.
I am a consultant with dozens of potential clients at any given time, only a few of which get converted into paying customers. I am not a salesman, and need all the help I can get to “close” my opportunities. Several years ago, I surfed the Internet looking for Palm software that could help me manage my consulting opportunities. I searched PalmGear and Handango for hits on “CRM” and “sales automation,” came up with nine listings, and began downloading and testing them all out. The prices were all affordable, between $20 and $40, and they all seemed to have similar features.
One, in particular, caught my attention because it not only offered to actually become my personal sales assistant, guide me through the important stages of each deal, and give me advice on what to do and when to do it along the way – but to thoroughly educate me on the whys and wherefores. There was an entire system in place: a sales methodology specially adapted to personal computers (and PDAs!), a 300 page book explaining it in language I could relate my needs to, and Palm software (with a Windows client) to use at first as a learning aid, and then to manage my own sales opportunities.
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