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.
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.”
CNN reported earlier that newspaper sales are generally down by 2% in the US, while online news viewing has increased by 8%. I definitely contribute to that increase. Living an ex-pat existence for most of the year, I appreciate, more than most, the ability to get news from my favorite dailies over the Internet. While the morning coffee is brewing, my T3 is syncing with AvantGo, and instead of six sections of the New York Times competing at the breakfast table for space with my cereal bowl, spoon in one hand and T3 in the other, I skim through their digital counterparts without the bother of advertising or clutter.
Following the Times, I skim through my collection of ten other news and technology sources, including the international edition of Time Magazine, where I can get a look at the week’s cover photo and a taste of the articles inside. I sate my information hunger with Quick News business and technical feeds, carry the dishes to the sink, and start my work day fully refreshed.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich confirmed, during his interview by Steven Colbert on May 9th, the seriousness of this trend when he said that PDAs spelled doom for the newsprint industry. I downloaded that episode of Comedy Central in Moscow, from iTunes to my PC (while I patiently wait for Apple to buy Palm and take the video iPod to its ultimate incarnation). I think PDAs (including “smart” phones) spell the same doom for book publishers, broadcast TV, music and video discs.
Before I became a voracious eBook reader, I ordered my bestsellers from Amazon, waited an average of three weeks for them to wind their way through the postal maze that stretches between California and Moscow, and paid a premium of 40% for the “pleasure.” Now, they are minutes away via eReader, Mobipocket and Fictionwise, at an average of 30% less than hardcover prices.
Most of you have broad consumer choices, as you are from cities full of shopping malls. For those of us living in the thousands of diasporas scattered around the planet, digital is our only choice. No matter what our native language or culture (or what language or culture we are studying), there are digital newspapers, libraries, music and video collections just a few keystrokes away. The Russians call it “mir tesen”—it’s a small world!
Personally, I don’t think that Sony will be any more successful with their new eBook reader than earlier failed platforms. I do think that the mobile device users of the world will increasingly read and watch on them simply because they can, but that those activities will always remain secondary. Primary will be real-time life management including phone calls, emails and instant messaging. Whatever will be, I’m smiling smugly now because I’m already there!
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.
I have been in the high tech industry for all of my life, and have always had the luxury to choose my own computer. As I always worked from both home and the office so I gravitated to portable computers.
I must have worked with all the so called portable computers since the early eighties, although I confess I never had an Osborne, which most computer historians claim to be the first truly portable device (1981), with a five inch monitor and a weight of 24 pounds. Although I did not have one, I bumped into them a lot in my career of a high tech lab instrument salesman. Seems to me that they were light years ahead of their time.
I went through a number of machines of all weights and sizes, but one of my favorites was “the Brick.” The idea of the brick was to put the computer into a very small package (3″ x 8″ x 11″), which could then be transported. When you got to the office you plugged in your keyboard, monitor, and printer and started work. This was in 1990. I loved it, although you had to hold your breath when you plugged it into the docking station, which had a gazillion connectors, anyone of which, if bent, could bring the system down. I must have been through a dozen different portable, laptop, or notebook variants over the years, but my favorite is the one I have now – the Sony Vaio TR3A. I like tiny computers—before the Sony I had a Fujitsu B-Series Lifebook, which is actually smaller than the Sony, but doesn’t have the same features.
My Sony weighs just three pounds, has a 10 inch high resolution display and a built-in optical drive. My requirements are simple—give me the smallest computer that will allow me to touch type and read the screen. Battery life is important too, but I settle for three hours and the ability to replace the battery. It seems to me that the overwhelming factor in of this size thing is the keyboard. I am a new touch typer as I picked the talent up late in life; touch typing is liberating. I’m glad I gave it the three months of effort needed to pick it up. But, if you can type at the rate that you can think quality thoughts, the world opens up. It definitely makes writing a book a bit quicker.
Lately there has been a lot of buzz surrounding Web 2.0. There are many great posts and articles on this – Wired, Om Malik, and O’Reilly.
The pendulum is swinging back to network computing – applications can be built on a browser that can actually have more power than a client-side app. Tools such as AJAX and Ruby on Rails are pushing this envelope. Even Microsoft is jumping on board with their introduction of Windows Live (great summary here).
With wide spread broadband access along with powerful new tools, true business applications are coming to the browser. Salesforce.com is a great example of Web 1.0 technology – look for them to continue to expand into Web 2.0 technologies with tools on their AppExchange platform.
This agreement gets full marks from me, and is a step forward in providing an optimized mobile platform for salespeople to conduct business. RIM gave us universal, easy access to information in the form of e-mail. Palm gave us the ability to run complex business applications from a very small footprint. The ideas in sales automation done right have already been running on the Palm platform for three years, and they work well. When they run on the Treo with RIM software, they show the promise of working even better.
Palm is also bringing out a Treo that will run on the Microsoft operating system. If you were to ask Steve Jobs today if his highly protective stance on licensing out the Apple operating system decades ago was the best thing to do - he would say NO.
I “locked” the material in sales automation done right sometime around January of this year. Anyone doing a book should know that at the rate that technology advances, it’s dangerous to make statements about its relentless growth. Here is one example of where I came unstuck – in Chapter 25, I make the statement that “as of today, it is not feasible to connect to the Internet in an airplane – something that will eventually be possible, but not for everyone”. I think I was right about the first part (it will be possible) – and wrong about the second (but not for everyone).
One of the latest posts by Tom Peters has Tom posting live over the internet at 37,000 feet while flying to Russia. It costs him $30 for the trip. It was first introduced in May 2005. I guess everyone can afford $30! It looks like it is here to stay – now that more and more airlines are coming on board.
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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