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.

Every salesperson has to make presentations to their customers, and the most common tool they use is Microsoft PowerPoint. In an earlier post, I even talked about PowerPoint as a form of “persuasion technology” in sales. But PowerPoint is not without critics; some feel that it encourages a lazy way to deliver information: first, you get the bullets into PowerPoint, then, you read the bullets to the audience. Presentation done.

Lots of stuff has been written about how to do it better, but if you are already prone to using PowerPoint, are there any alternatives?

Flypaper is interesting, because it is free. No caveats or hitches here.

Download this software and you can immediately design impressive presentations for delivery locally on your computer, or over the web. You can include video, audio, animation, and choose from predesigned models and templates. Flypaper works using a “story” model of building your presentation, and it breaks away from the “bullet method” of doing things. With Flypaper, the emphasis is on Flash-based animation that is easy to put together. Highly recommended and well worth a try.

What I findparticularly interesting is that the man behind Flypaper is Pat Sullivan. As you may already know, Pat was the founder of ACT! and later, SalesLogix; two commercially successful customer relationship management solutions. Given Pat’s background in sales, it comes as no surprise to me that he would be involved with “persuasion technology.”

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.

Enio Klein
Principal at K&G

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.