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.
A while ago, I tuned into a conversation between two of our salespeople. One (a relative newcomer to sales) was commenting that given the experience of his first year in sales, “selling was easy.”
I sold for a long time, and I never thought it was easy.
I’ve talked about sales as a profession in earlier entries. As in any profession, it’s difficult to make a call on how easy it is until you have a lot of experience under your belt. Early success in sales can be the result of factors outside of your native selling skills.
I remember my first order for about $10,000. I was elated. The problem was that most people in the sales department are nice, and they pat you on the back for your first sale. But it wasn’t a sale; it was an order. I just took the customer’s call and wrote down the information. The guy whose territory I had just taken over did the spadework.
The better you get in sales, the higher you rise, and the more challenging it becomes. You are now up against competitors whose maturity evolved from the same torturous path that you followed to become successful.If selling is easy, you have no competition—and sometimes that is the case. Or, someone else is doing the work for you. But if your product is much the same as your competitors, and the salesperson you are working against has the same experience as you—selling will not be easy.
Strategic customer relationship management has been my focus for the last twelve years. During this time I have worked with sales executives, managers and directors at major software vendors and consulting firms. I have always faced one major challenge: how to sell software or services to people who just don’t believe it can help them. “This is going to waste my time” they say.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons why CRM still does not have the same impact on sales as it does for marketing and service organizations.
Recently, I have completed some research which asked sales executives the major benefits that CRM brought to sales organizations. Most of them said that even considering indirect benefits related to their activities such as communications or reduction in administrative overhead, CRM did not help on its main promise: “increase sales productivity and revenues”.
In fact, sales automation, when associated to mobile order entry is quite well recognized as an important tool. However, when associated with increased sales effectiveness with any kind of structured methodology, sales reps just turn their faces: “I´m afraid that it will take me too much time”, they say, “I do not see it as something that could make me work better”.
Working in the consulting business for the last 5 years, I could not find anything really new in this business. That is until a sales rep at one of my clients said to me: “Hey Enio, I´m in control of all my opportunities” and showed me a PDA running a piece of software with an interesting dashboard. According to him, it was the first software that was worth using, because “time invested on data entry, results in fantastic results”. He told me “you should try it yourself!”
It was the first time in many years that a sales rep told me that sales software was helping him to sell. I decided to check the methodology behind that software. And guess what? I found the book ‘Sales Automation Done Right’. Based on the ideas in the book, SalesWays was able to build ‘Sales Cycle Manager’, the software that makes the methodology come alive.
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
I’m writing this on the way to Hawaii, on a cruise ship—a planned attempt at avoiding part of the long Canadian winter (which has actually been very forgiving this year) Cruises are always a good opportunity to read books, something that I find tough to do in life back home.
I quickly read two excellent books, the kind that you can’t put down once you start. One of them was Bob Woodward’s account of “deep throat,” the contact who gave him and Carl Bernstein guidance while investigating the Watergate break-in. In a short postscript Bernstein said something that caught my attention: “Reporters may believe they control the story, but the story always controls the reporters.” This triggered something—I have often talked about the story that resides within our OPM sales method, which originated out of my first book and which has been expanded and augmented within the framework of OPM sales training. A sales method must have a story, because it has to follow real life experiences involved in the process of selling. A good many sales methods have been developed over the past decades and only a few of them have survived and are accepted. The test of a sales method is that it has to work, and it takes a lot of time to establish that. It’s extremely difficult to get salespeople to switch methods, even to a good one. They don’t have much patience, and if they try something new that detracts them from their normal routine, they had better see results quickly. If not, they revert to their previous way of doing things. The point is, that it is difficult to introduce new methods to salespeople if they have spent any significant time in the field and have confidence in what they believe is the right way to do it. Because of this, bad sales methods will never go mainstream—they are like bad news stories, unless they stand up to scrutiny, people won’t believe them.
Bernstein says the “story” controls the reporters. He’s right. Nothing can change the story, because it should be, by definition the truth. Reporters grapple with the task of finding the truth. It’s the same with sale methods. We try to discover a sales “method” Sometime, under scrutiny the method breaks down, because we haven’t got it right. The method only works if it truly reflects what goes on in the sales process—figuring that out is as difficult as a reporter trying to unearth the details that will piece together the “story”.
If I seem like I’m belaboring this point, it’s because I sometimes wonder how we got to where OPM is today. We started in the early nineties in assembling the components and here we are fifteen years later with a method, a book, a training course, and a patent. But the process was evolutionary, just like Woodward and Bernstein figuring out Watergate. There’s no doubt that the OPM method controlled us. Sometimes when we tried to add stuff the method fought back—with the new material the method broke down. We had to change it and test again, until it was right. As we added pieces to the puzzle, the basis for truth was tested. If we passed, we locked up that stage, and moved on.
The method controlled us, as the story controlled the reporters.
In my last post I referred to Michael Schrage’s comment that the 2×2 matrix rated along with PowerPoint as the two most popular business tools. I don’t rate them equal—PowerPoint does not have the same depth as the 2×2 in the power to unravel problems—it is more a set of tools to get a more effective portrayal of an idea or message. In an effort to learn more, I went over to Wikipedia to check on PowerPoint. This led to a digression that is worth blogging about.
Wikipedia says that PowerPoint is a ubiquitous presentation program. I guess we all knew that, and the reason it is ubiquitous is because of Microsoft’s marketing clout. It goes on to say that PowerPoint “is among the most prevalent forms of persuasion technology.” That last term caught my interest—I’ve heard of information technology, change technology, but this is the first I’ve heard of persuasion technology. I ploughed on:
“Persuasion technology is technology that can be used for presenting or promoting a point-of-view. Any technology designed and deployed for those purposes can be considered a persuasion technology. Such aids are regularly used in sales, diplomacy, politics, religion, military training, cult recruiting and management, and may potentially be used in any area of human interaction.”
Wow, look at what heads up the list—sales! Click on sales and you get this:
“Sales, or the activity of selling, forms an integral part of commercial activity. It could be argued that it is the cornerstone of business as it is the meeting of buyers and sellers and all other areas of business has the goal of making that meeting successful. Mastering sales is considered by many as some sort of persuading ‘art.’ On the contrary, the methodological approach of selling refers to it as a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesperson relates his offering, enabling the buyer to visualize how to achieve his goal in an economic way.”
I need to say “wow” a second time. That definition of sales is right on. I try to emphasize the true meaning of sales in our OPM course. I use a slide that says “sales is the business of doing business.” One of our trainers asked to take it out. I let him do it—but on sober second thought, I won’t do that again.
There is so much to talk about just in this simple wander through Wikipedia (sales is a persuading “art”, wow number 3!!)
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.
Most salespeople arrive in their profession in a roundabout way. Most have already spent some time in their industry doing something totally unrelated to selling. But if they get involved, as many do, with supporting the direct efforts of the company’s dealings with the customer, they are often enticed to cross the line—to get permanently involved in the most important customer facing process, that of sales.
A direct result of this circuitous route to the job of selling is that many salespeople never get a logical step-by-step grounding in the language and science of their profession. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that most Universities shy away from implimenting comprehensive programs that teach sales, even though corporate America wants them to do it.
I’m not saying that salespeople don’t get trained, they do. But the training is almost always centered on the immediate needs of the sales team, driven by strategic and tactical considerations. Consequently salespeople are drilled on what to do and say in front of a customer without having a firm understanding of the sales cycle and the fundamental characteristics of the sales opportunity itself. This is why so many salespeople have trouble with forecasting—they don’t understand how to recognize the value of the sale, and what factors determine it. This ignorance is compounded by misunderstanding the underlying dynamics of the customer’s buying process, which means that it becomes impossible to make worthwhile predictions on when the sale will conclude. Faced with this, Managers have a tough time in predicting future revenues, which in lean economic times can have an adverse effect on the health of the business.
The last post introduced the idea that two basic selling styles dominate the salesperson’s efforts to capture customers. We can see what the two styles are if we look closely at the idea of the conversation between customer and salesperson that happens through the sales cycle. The end game of the conversation for the customer is to obtain a product or service that will solve some form of immediate need. The end game for the salesperson is that they supply the solution to the customer, rather than a competitor.
Multiple interactions occur between the two parties throughout the sales cycle. The customer is engaged in a buying process and the salesperson is reciprocally pursuing a sales process. This is a business transaction and both customer and salesperson will be using certain sets of skills. The customer needs value, and the salesperson must show that they can provide it. Value will be determined by capability and price.
The skills that the salesperson uses can be learned or acquired through experience. The degree that he or she can use them effectively will partially determine whether they will win the sale. There will be others who present different solutions – each will have their own spin, highlighting strengths and minimizing weaknesses. The skill of the salesperson to boldly present what he or she believes to be the truth will lead to gaining the customer’s confidence.
But there is another important factor that determines selling style. The better the relationship between two negotiating parties, the more chance the deal will go through. Salespeople who have the ability to gain the respect and the loyalty of their customer will have a much more solid platform off which to build on their true selling skills. This kind of skill is usually inherited and driven by the intrinsic personality of the salesperson. In Opportunity Portfolio Management we refer to the style of relying on selling skills as being opportunity focused. The style relying on relationships to win sales is being relationship focused.
Salespeople naturally are inclined to one of the two styles, but the most successful ones are comfortable with either, and moreover, have the ability to blend the two styles to match a particular stage or point in a sales cycle. This idea is at the heart of Opportunity Portfolio Management and represents a key opportunity for salespeople, whether seasoned or newcomers, to test themselves in their strategic interactions with the customer. We’ll talk about how to do that in future postings.
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 have bought four books on sales…in the past week. They are all quite new and very different. If I have a glance around my bookshelves, I have anywhere between fifty and a hundred books devoted to sales, salespeople and sales management.
The reason I am reviewing them now is that I am writing my second book, which is devoted to sales methodology (my first book mixed in a bit of technology). It’s good to see what has already been done before you embark on a project you feel has something new to say about a subject. When I review books on the sales process, it strikes me that the human interplay between customer and salesperson must be complex; if that wasn’t the case, how could so much be written about it?
The first thing that comes to mind is that almost all of these books targeting salespeople are tactical. I use the word tactical to describe the actions of the salesperson as they are in front of the customer, whether it is what questions to ask, what to listen for, what information to retrieve, and the like. The emphasis is on the interaction with the customer as it happens in these few minutes or hours, on this day in time. The results of the tactic will hopefully contribute to the overall strategy in place to win that particular sale.
I don’t have any problem with learning the tactics of winning, but I do feel that most salespeople are faced with consuming these ideas before they know the intrinsic dynamic of the sale cycle itself. A thorough understanding of the progression of the sales cycle as it reacts to ebb and flow of the customer’s natural buying process makes tactical selling much easier.
I took a random sample of six sales books from the shelf and looked to see how many of them had “Sales Cycle” in the index. Guess what? One out of six.
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