The tools of the [sales] trade have changed remarkably since I began my career 20 years ago.  That fact struck me on 

Yes, sales tools have changed…Actually, sales tools have been radically transformed over the past 20 years.  Only after the day had ended, when I was eating dinner and reflecting, did I piece together just how amazing the transformation has been.

Here is a summary of the tools that I leveraged.

First, the travel itself.  I booked my trip through Travelocity, managed my trip through Tripit on my iPhone, and boarded the plane (using my mobile boarding pass of course).  In the “old days” this would have called for me collaborating with a travel agent via phone while the agent looked up options on their private terminal.  Then, I would have received physical tickets in the mail, and checked in at the airport to receive physical boarding passes.

On to the research.  I began by  the exploring the backgrounds of the clients with whom I was to meet, literally gathering more information than a team of people could have done over several days in the 1990s.  I accessed bios on each attendee of my meetings via LinkedIn, then accessed breakdowns on their company via Data.com and Google Finance.  Finally, I Checked Radian6 and HootSuite for any social media postings by or about them or their company.

Then there was the preparation of meeting materials.  While in the air for the 4 hour flight (which used to be 4 dead hours) I worked on my PowerPoint presentation, connected to the in-flight wi-fi on American Airlines, collaborated with my co-workers via Skype to complete the presentation, then emailed it to my team at the destination.

Suddenly, Radian6, my social media listening tool flagged a newly published article about another key client of mine.  Before I landed in California, I had clipped that article, emailed it with a congratulatory note the my key contacts at this important client, and landed a meeting with their CEO, all of which was neatly and automatically tracked and summarized in my cloud-based CRM system, salesforce.com.

On the way to my meeting, I called up the mobile version of salesforce.com on my iphone, downloaded a map to the meeting place, called my contact, and logged a note to remind myself of our conversation.

Amazing.  Nothing short of stunning, really.

In one day, I had leveraged “sales 2.0″ tools including:

1. Wireless internet during a flight: Go-Go in-flight internet on American Airlines (converting 4 dormant hours to productive time)
2. Cloud-based CRM: salesforce.com and integrated Outlook email
3. Online intelligence:  Data.com, Google Finance
4. Social media: Radian6, HootSuite, and LinkedIn
5. Mobile solutions: salesforce.com mobile, Google Maps,

This is such a fundamental paradigm shift for someone who began in sales at a time when the fax machine was breaking its own paradigm of physical document delivery (Remember?…”It sends the contracts over the phone lines as data and then re-assembles them on the receiving machine!”).

So, before jumping into your next big day, take a moment to reflect and appreciate the progress we’ve made.

Of course, as a famous time traveler once said,”It’s always a big day tomorrow – I’ve got a time machine; I skip the little ones!” ~The Doctor

One day earlier this month, I got up for my morning routine and went to pack my breakfast – which, since my wife became a nutrition coach and got me on a solid path, usually consists of some whole grains and fresh fruit. I’d been craving a banana and had not had one in a while. I rounded the corner to my kitchen, filled up my coffee, reached into the fruit basket and without even looking broke off a banana from the bunch. The ensuing “snap” let me know what my eyes now confirmed – it was a [very] green banana and was not going to do me any good that day. “Maybe by the end of the week,” I said. The more familiar scenario in my house is that we find there are several brown spotted bananas which we quickly convert to banana bread and all is well. But as I completed my commute to work that day it got me thinking. Do we have any “green bananas” in our pipeline?

Looking at my firm’s business after the big push to the finish in 2011 had my team wondering about the top of our sales funnel, which we had not done in a while.

After spending so much time nurturing the mature opportunities through the more time-consuming stages of qualification, proposals, contracts, and closure, we turned our eyes to the top of the funnel, and were not happy with what we saw. We had just baked a big loaf of banana bread but the basket was lower than we liked, except for a some [very] green bananas.

How many times have you found yourself dealing with the mature deals in your pipeline like those ripe bananas and wondering, “Now what?” Or, looking at a bunch of green bananas and wondering how long it would be until you could eat?

Well, it’s all about managing your produce.

1. Block out time and buy some green bananas. Treat your demand generation and lead follow-up time as sacred. Book time during your week for this “appointment” of new sales activities and keep that meeting no matter what. Bring in the fresh stock!
2. Spend time balancing ripeness. Get face-to-face with your clients.  Never Eat Alone. Use coffee in the morning and lunch in the afternoon as ways to strike up conversations in your network to keep the produce moving through the process. It may not pay off today, but your deals will mature when you need them down the line. Personally, I’m finding more people willing to grab a quick coffee or be treated to an eat-in lunch at their office these days than taking time for dinners or playing rounds of golf like the heyday.  The point is, you need to spend one-on-one time to ripen your deals.
3. Rotate your stock. My firm uses salesforce.com for CRM (full disclosure, we also do consulting on the product and it is my personal favorite after using many over the years – contact me if you’s like to learn more) but whatever CRM system you use, be sure that it serves its core purpose – to allocate your precious resources across the portfolio of opportunities to maximize your business by helping your customers. To do this, you need to be sure about where you are in the buying/selling process. You need to know that you are taking the right action and applying the right resources. Use your CRM system to ensure you are not ignoring new opportunities while you’re focused exclusively on the “closing” end of the funnel. You need to spend time in each stage to get the most out of your produce.

Stick with this more balanced approach to your selling activities and you’ll create a more balanced sales funnel. You’ll have some nice green bananas, some delicious yellow ripe ones – and yes, hopefully, you’ll also be making lots of bread!

1. “Salespeople make too much of their sales process, and sales managers too little. Having a sales process and not using it is the same as not having a sales process. It means you aren’t following your best practices for stacking the deck in your favor, and there is no reason not to do so.”
2. “Salespeople aren’t avoiding the sales process; they’re avoiding asking for and obtaining the commitments that they need and that are embedded in the sales process.”

Are you leveraging and repeating your best sales cycles into all sales cycles?  Are you gaining the commitments from your clients early in the sale to ensure a higher close ratio? 

These are questions that we can all benefit from reviewing.

Give this post, “A Sales Process in Peril,” a read and become a subscriber.  Anthony always has great information!

Miller-Heiman’s Strategic Selling was a ground-breaking sales methodology that like Neil Rackham’s S.P.I.N. Selling has influenced almost all thinking on the subject since it was introduced.  In the Strategic Selling methodology, a key tenant was thinking about selling through the eyes of the buyer broken down by role or “buying influence.”

The epiphany of this model included:

1. “Selling” should really be looked at through the buyer’s eyes.  This was revolutionary and still remains a challenge in some organizations.
2. The single-sale-to-single-buyer paradigm is no longer relevant.  Buying is done by a group, either in organized or loosely federated teams.  This is a truth to this day, arguably accelerated by the internet and social media providing the opportunity for buyers to be more educated than ever, and instilling a drive to have a voice in collaborative decision-making.
3. These teams had various roles, and the roles could be grouped into common types with common business priorities:
1. Economic: The one buyer with $ authority
2. User: The person or people who will interact with the solution on a daily basis.
3. Technical: the person or people who will need to deeply understand the solution or do the care and feeding.
4. Coach: An active fan of your solution, who will help you sell it into their organization.
4. The salesperson should incorporate this into the sales strategy.

If you’re still looking at selling from the inside out, and think you have one buyer per sale, it is a very valuable exercise to dust off your copy of this book (or get digital and download it to your Kindle) and do a gut check. 

You’ll be glad you took the time to sell under the influence!

But if you are like most organizations, I would wager that you and your sales team have a natural tendency to “shoot at anything that moves.”

Acting with the discipline to treat opportunities differently depending on their qualification can pay huge dividends as a return on organizational effort.

We all have a limited set of differentiated offerings.  It is also true that available time for selling is tighter than ever before.  So it makes the manner in which you identify, qualify, and pursue opportunities a higher stakes game than ever before.

In his re-creation of Michal T. Bosworth’s concepts in The New Solution Selling, author Keith M. Eades draws one key distinction that can be helpful in sorting the wheat from the chaff.  The image above is a modified version of the “Solution Selling Process Flow Chart Model.”  In it you will notice that opportunities fall into two types: “Latent,” where the client is not actively looking, but your solution is a strong fit; and “Active,” where the client is looking for a solution to a specific problem, and your solution may be a strong fit. 

You can quickly sort opportunities at your firm into these two types as one way to triage potential pursuits and if/how you are going to manage them.

Sales to Latent opportunities are typically longer (more nurturing, education and collaboration with clients) but also generate less competition and more profit per deal.

Sales to Active opportunities need to be scrutinized (what is our unique win strategy?  What is our profit position? Should we pursue?) but are often a faster path to closure.

The challenge is not to develop the perfect process, but to begin to differentiate the way in which you engage on pursuits. 

Interesting things will happen when you do.   Your hit rate should increase,  you should see a higher return on your effort, and people on your team will begin to feel that you are playing to win.

If you look at it from the perspective of the sales representative, one of the principal benefits of CRM (and I’ve selected, implemented, and used them all – Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM, Sugar, you name it)  is creating a “book of record” for opportunities and client touch points. 

I know where my opportunity stands.  I know the sales stage we’re in.  I know the people making the decision.  I know our allies and our detractors.  I have all my correspondence to and from our buyers.  I have the latest feedback from the  influencers.  I’ve documented our partners on the deal. Ditto the competition. I know our relative strengths and weaknesses.  And, here is the coolest part - SO DO YOU!  In fact, everyone in the organization has this information in one, centralized spot.

This is why my pet peeve is doing perpetual deal reviews for various members of a pursuit team – catching them up.  As the Sales Rep, this consumes  untold cycles of my time.

If you want to know about a deal, please go review the notes on it in CRM! 

Otherwise, why am I doing this typing?  (I’m the one who already knows this information, remember?)

…Rant ended

Years go by.  Then, something magical happens.  All the coaching sinks in and like a light-switch, the players lock into the concept of playing their position.  Suddenly all the lost energy becomes focused and efficient.  Players are making passes, assists, and goals more often with less exertion and more accuracy.

Sales people have a position to play in a selling process too – and it’s changed.  Radically.

In recent years, as the internet has exploded and buyers are more educated than ever, sales people can no longer afford to just “chase the ball.”  Buyers don’t like it.  They won’t tell you – they just won’t buy from you.

It boils down to this, you are no longer the source of information on your product or service.  Whether they have it or not, clients will come to you feeling as though they have all the knowledge about their purchase (want proof of this trend? Ask your Doctor if Web MD has caused her any frustration in this area with the medically “brilliant” patients she now must deal with).  Clients do their homework first.  We all do this when we buy. 

My respected friend, Ardath Albee (follow her on Twitter immediately if you don’t yet – http://twitter.com/#!/ardath421 )  is a thought-leader in content marketing.  This is the art and science of generating interest, attention, value, and engagement (that leads to YOU and the active selling position you play).   Here is Ardath’s new concept of a sales funnel:

The bottom line is that you as a sales person no longer work the entire funnel.  You and your organization need to need to put good, valuable content out there to capture the interest, gain the attention of, communicate value to, and Engage potential buyers.  This is where your position kicks in.  At this point is where you can make a huge difference as a sales person.  You can have more qualified sales conversations, and close more sales, if you play your position. 

Don’t to shoe-horn your clients into being “sold” on your product.  Instead, play your position by leveraging content marketing techniques to engage clients in the front end of the funnel while you bring value to buyers in key conversations and their decisions to buy. Be the best possible player you can be from “engagement” onward in this funnel and you will score more goals!

On my better days, this makes the difference between a highly successful meeting or one that lacks specific direction and outcomes.

You can do a pre-meeting plan in a phone call, or more formal written document.  But whatever form it takes, I guarantee that you will have better meetings, and accomplish more in them if you take a few minutes and plan ahead.  It works for non-sales meetings too.

So what comprises a good pre-meeting plan? 

To fit your unique situation, you’ll ultimately need to answer that for yourself.  But here are some suggestions from my “g0-to” pre-meeting plan document to get you started:

1.  Meeting Logistics: 
Communicate the time, date, exact location, attendees from both organizations, dress code, and a reminder to bring business cards.  It seems simple, but at least one or two of these are almost always missed.  By the way, your client will give you points for asking for this information ahead of time. 
Not all their vendors come off this organized!

2.  Client Snapshot:
Include a brief, relevant overview of the client organization to baseline the participants.  Especially in the age of the internet, you never look so unprepared as when a team-mate asks a basic question that they should have known going in. 
You’re on for preparing them!

3.  Client Goals, Problems, Needs:
What does your client need from this meeting?  How often do you go in to a meeting without the answer? Too often if you ask most clients.  Preparing for this item is the only way you can know that you will deliver “in-meeting” value. 
Provide ”in-meeting” value or your follow-up won’t matter!

4. Sales Objective for the Meeting:
What do you hope to accomplish from this meeting?  Some people are not comfortable with this prep question.  I don’t know why.  Clients know that we are all in business to give and get.  Don’t just go in for a visit.
What’s annoying to them is you being unclear on what you want!

5.  Main Agenda Topics and Topic Owners:
Being organized ahead of time to avoid confusion or conflict makes a huge difference on the impact of the meeting . The collaborative nature of selling has introduced a variable that did not exist in the “1 vs. world” model of sales meetings.  We all think we’re smart and we all hate silence.  Have this mapped.
Someone will say something dull unless you script it out!

6.  Potential Objections, Planned Responses, and Owner:
If you can do just one item on this list before your next meeting make it this one.  This is the most critical item and most often missed opportunity.  Prepare for objections before you get in there.  Here is a fun exercise to run before the meeting: Ask 4 participants what our ideal answer to a client’s question/objection will be and watch how far-flung the responses are.    Practice this, or at least plan for it, and your meeting will be many times more effective.
A crisp response to a tough question can mean a win or a loss!

So there it is, your starter “Pre-Meeting Plan.”  Now go make it yours and watch your meetings soar.

Good Selling!

I recently spent the week at Shawnee National Forest with my family over Spring Break.  Getting lost in the wilderness  was wonderful (our National Park system is truly a treasure), and I was reminded of a valuable life lesson that often comes from spending extended time with children.  It’s an attitude I call - “I’m All In!”

I am happy to say that my wife and I have raised 3 kids (1 boy and 2 girls) who are only too glad to grab the varmint and ask questions later.  In fact several creatures, including the one pictured above, came back to us for inspection during our trip.  Kids have this impulsive and inquisitive quality that I think we tend to lose as we “grow up.” 

And so it can be with selling.  You start out with a fire in your belly, eager to take chances, lean into the wind and be aggressive.  You go out and grab that new client,  working a bare new territory into results,  whatever the situation calls for – You’re All In.

Over time, there is a tendency to grow cautious.  Sometimes for good reasons, after all you don’t want to chase any unqualified opportunity that comes along.  But sometimes, it’s just plain old complacency setting in.  Before you get involved, you want the “Glengarry Leads,” safe and predictable.

Get out of your comfort zone!  Remember that child-like instinct and just go ahead and grab that creepy crawly.  You can always put it down later if it’s too gross.  But it might just turn out to be that big deal you’ve been searching for.  I’m All In!