Every VP of Sales and Sales Manager will tell you that the most important thing they can do to achieve forecast is to “hire right.”   The question is why so many struggle with this process?

One way to address the problem is to ask the question, “What is your sales development strategy?”  A sales development strategy focuses on how you recruit, develop, and motivate sales people in your particular sales structure.

There are lots of sales development strategies, but let me contrast two options that I call Big Money and Moneyball, after the recent baseball film.

In the movie Moneyball, the 2002 Oakland Athletics sell three big salary/big hitter players; Giambi, Mulder, and Zito.  As a result they face a competitive issue for the next season.  They also don’t have the Yankee’s $125M budget, but only $41M to attract star players.  As a result, their Manager, Billie Beane changes strategy due to limited resources.  He develops a strategy that rejects wisdom and gut feel in selecting players, and replaces it with a statistical approach that looks at a player’s stats such as RBIs, hits against left handers, and batting averages.  He looks for bargain players with the right stats.  In 2003, the next year, they break the league record in consecutive game wins and just lose the World Series.

Hiring sales people looks like a similar challenge.  Do you go for the Big Money players with experience, or do you play Moneyball with less known talent and develop them?

It depends on what you are trying to accomplish, budget, how much time you have, and whether you can coach and develop your players.  If your time and development are limited, you can go out and try to hire the big guns, and this may work.  If you choose the Moneyball approach you need several things.

The first is a farm team.  By this I mean a sales structure that you can use to recruit promising young talent and train them on your sales process.  So for example, you might hire people into market development, watch how they do and bring the successful people up into account management or mid-market sales.  Then take those that are successful and bring them up into national or key account sales.

For my money, I would rather attract young sales players and develop them than go for the big money players.

Both approaches have pros and cons.  Regardless, there are a series of steps you have to go through to hire sales people, and these will become subjects for upcoming posts.

The job of VP, Director and Manager of Sales is one of the most difficult in business.  But if hiring right is the most important thing you can do, then you need to think about the following things.

Elements of Hiring:
•    Determining what type of sales person you want and your sales structure
•    Writing a job description for each position
•    Determining if you will go with a paid recruiter or a head hunter
•    Driving the recruiter to do their job
•    Developing your own scouting system
•    Having a framework for interviewing
•    Getting simultaneous candidates
•    Making a decision
•    Constructing and selling your offer
•    Establishing comp
•    Negotiating an offer
•    Creating an on-boarding process
•    Doing a 90 day review to determine if you’ve made the correct decision
•    Putting in place a longer term development system

All these things need to happen before you sell anything.  No one gives you credit for these things, because we are so focused on “the number.”  But great sales leaders excel at these less glamorous skills.

Do Great Things!
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Here’s a video book review of The Trust Edge

I recommend you put this book on your Christmas
list for any marketing or sales people you know.

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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In Norman Maclean’s, A River Runs Through It, he tells a story of two brothers growing up in rural Montana and fishing the Big Blackfoot River in Montana.  The book is a lyrical and beautiful story, and I highly recommend the book over the movie.  In one passage, the older brother, Norman, after watching his younger brother Paul catch an enormous fish while being swept into the rapids, remembers:

“However one closeup picture of him at the end of this day remains in my mind, as if fixed by some chemical bath.  Usually, just after he finished fishing he had little to say unless he saw he could have fished better.  Otherwise, he merely smiled.  Now flies danced around his hatband.  Large drops of water ran from under his has on to his face and then into his lips when he smiled.

At the end of this day, then, I remember him both as a distant abstraction in artistry and as a closeup in water and laughter.

My father always felt shy when compelled to praise one of his family, and his family always felt shy when he praised them.  My father said, “You are a fine fisherman.”

My brother said, “I’m a pretty good with a rod, but I need three more years before I can think like a fish.”

How does this relate to sales and marketing?  Simply, that if we want to be better marketers and sales people, we need to “think like a client.”  Too often, for example, marketers think; how can I send more emails, rather than how can I provide content that is valuable to my clients?  Or sales people think; how can I close this deal, rather than, is this the right product of service for my client?

How is your company** geared to think like a client?  From your call answering message, to your website navigation, to your ease of doing business, if you want to catch (develop) clients, you need to think like a client.  The first step is to look at your business and interactions as they would.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

* Like fish portraints?  Shop this guy: http://www.fishartist.net/fish-artist-gallery.htm

** Footnote:  An old colleague, Dave Peterson, once told me he could tell the profitability of a set of manufacturing companies to +/- 1%  within ten seconds of walking onto the manufacturing floor.  He based his estimates on the neatness of the floor which gave him an estimate of the facilities process efficiency.  I can now apply Stocking’s corollary to the Peterson Rule:  The profitability of a company is directly proportional to the client experience.

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Many companies still rely on the “presentation” as a sales tool.  But a couple recent studies may indicate a major problem with this approach.  A University of Maryland study of undergraduates found that after a lecture by a well known professor, NONE of the students could answer the question, “What was the lecture you just heard about?  In another study, Nobel Laureate, Carl Wieman quizzed his students about a key fact in his lecture presented just 15 minutes earlier.  Only 10 percent remembered it.

So now you’re saying, but these are hung over, drugged-out students, and, of course, you’re not speaking from personal experience.  It’s well known that college students have these characteristics.

However, in another experiment, at the University of British Columbia in a physics course on electromagnetic waves, one group of students was taught by standard lecture, while a second group was broken into smaller groups and asked to work on the problems in an interactive problem solving session.  The first group scored 41% on the material, while the second group scored 74%.

College students are not business prospects.  But the takeaway is that no one wants to listen, or will remember your 25 slide presentation.  Occasionally we get roped into giving a presentation, and there are specific things you can do to give a great presentation.  But instead, what if we worked with smaller groups and individuals on problem solving?

Sales, the next time you ask marketing for a presentation, ask why you need it.  Marketing, the next time you provide a presentation, ask what other tool or skill set you should have provided to sales.

Do great things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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I asked my three year old grandson the other day (proud photo inserted), how many cookies did he eat?  I told him he could have two.  He answered very quickly that he had eaten three, and held up three fingers.

Now let me ask you:

       1.  How much do you weigh?
       2.  What’s your college grade point average?
       3.  How far did you run?

A lot of people answering these questions tend to minimize their weight, inflate their grade points, or say they ran 5 miles when they only actually ran 4.4 miles.  Why is this and what does this have to do with marketing or sales?

We tend to live in a world that values appearance or image more than truth.  None of the three questions I asked can really be verified easily.  They also don’t seem very important, and the consequences of exaggerating don’t seem to hurt anyone.  Some would call exaggerating answers to these little white lies. 

In marketing and in sales, we are often responsible for appearance, and we often have the opportunity to tell little white lies.  For example: “We’re the leading vendor of XYZ.”  (When we forgot to add… in the five state region).  “We’ll be able to deliver that service by the 15^th.”  (When we know it won’t be until the 1^st) 

Of course the issue is that there are difficulties in determining the boundaries between a small exaggeration and a bigger exaggeration, and we seem to easily slide into…

• “You don’t really need a down payment, you qualify for the loan.”
•  “These real-estate derivatives are rock solid.”
• “You can’t go wrong.” 

You don’t really need a lecture on telling the truth.  But sometimes we forget that telling the truth, even what I call “Micro Truths”, helps build trust.  And in marketing and sales, this is the single biggest factor in whether someone does business with us. 

Telling a Micro-Truth is sometimes harder than it seems.  Try answering the small questions with your own personal Micro-Truth next time.  For example, “Why were you late to the meeting?”  Answer simply, “I just forgot,” rather than, “I was on the phone.”  Take responsibility.  See what happens.  People will trust you more.

I just read a survey that said that only 30% of Americans trust corporations.  Marketing and sales own this problem.  So tell me… how many moons of Jupiter were discovered on your shift?

Do Great Things.

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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I once had a boss that sent me an email asking me to set up a meeting with him.  His office was twenty feet away.  Lots of passive aggressive thoughts went through my brain before I realized that in a single stroke, he had embodied the two biggest black holes of personal productivity in contemporary business; emails and meetings.

No one is rewarded for the number of emails they read.  Yet we feel obligated to read them at all hours of the day or night.  Somehow we must feel our national productivity goes up when we read and answer emails.  This is especially true when Marketing sends emails to Sales requesting 29 things from them.  Don’t do this.  Remember the average sales person only spends 8 to 10 hours a week in real contact with prospects and clients.  Do you really want them reading your emails?

The problem with email is that it can be disruptive.  For those with the compulsive addiction to send emails or answer them immediately, it’s not helping.  It’s OK to send fewer emails or to answer them two or three times a day.  While we pride ourselves on multi-tasking, studies show that multi-tasking doesn’t produce more results, and that in fact, as humans, we are really poor at it.  If you disagree, please just try driving and texting.

The same goes for meetings.  Ask anyone where they go to get something done.  Rarely will you hear that they go to work.  You might hear answers like a coffee shop, or my office or on a plane.  Sometimes you hear a time such as early in the morning, or late at night, or weekends.   Meetings have the same disruptive quality that emails have.  They keep you from getting things done.  And the worst tool for creating this havoc is the open calendar in Outlook.  It screams… go ahead, make my day.

The worst offenders are poor managers.  They need to have meetings to see what you are doing.  Managers, please stop this behavior.

There is plenty written on the concepts of email and meetings.  But here’s my modest proposal.  If you want to improve the productivity of your organization try a couple of simple steps.

1. Create a no email time on Tuesday mornings from 9 AM to noon for internal emails.
2. Have no meetings the first two hour of each day, or alternatively no meetings on Wednesday afternoons.
3. Check your meeting ratio… the number of meetings you schedule for others or attend versus the time you allocate to get things done.  If the open time is less than 50% see #2.
4. Try having only one 15 minute meeting a week with your team.
5. Pray for a blizzard.

If you follow these guidelines, I absolutely guarantee that your productivity will skyrocket so much that you will have extra time to read email and hold meetings.

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I once had a project to help a sales team align their territories to focus on their most likely prospects.  The project began by asking each rep to send me their current top fifty prospects.  One key criteria for targeting was simply the size of the prospect (revenue or number of employees).  The ideal target market was $250M to $2B.  When I looked at the list for the Boston rep, 45 out of 50 of his target accounts were greater than $2B.   When I asked him why, he indicated that even closing a few would allow him to achieve his budget.  I asked him to think about what would happen if he didn’t close a few.  He was elephant hunting.

Targeting the right prospects is Sales and Marketing 101.  In my experience it’s done poorly by both marketing and sales more than 75% of the time.  There are two reasons for this.  First, if you are in marketing, there are lots of different ways to segment a market.  Size is an easy one. So is vertical industry segment.  In the case above we started with the easy segmentation then expanded to more sophisticated segmentation.  There are dozens of other ways to segment ranging from buyer persona to behavioral segmentation that are much more difficult to identify and pursue.  Communicating these to your sales team is hard, so a lot of marketers just take the easy way out… size or vertical segment.  The second reason is that the sales team has a tendency to sell to anyone who will buy from them, especially when they have no guidance from marketing.  They are rewarded on sales revenue.  Given the choice between accepting a sale from a prospect outside the targeted segment or not, they will take the sale 98% of the time.

In the last two posts, the effect of the technology lifecycle change is outlined.  Where buyers are in this lifecycle is a key segmentation issue. If you have sales people bringing you complicated or sophisticated product needs and prospects, they could be talking to the left side of Moore’s or Maister’s chart.  If they are continually asking you for lower prices they could be focused on the right side of the charts.  Or if they are asking you to demonstrate how your product is different and asking for proof points and case studies, they might be focused on the middle or early majority.  However, none of this may be true, because they may be talking with an individual prospect or customer that has evolved with time or become overly familiar with your current solution.

Marketing needs to recognize which of these situations is being encountered and Sales does as well.  Why?  Because how you market and sell is dependent on this.  A great deal of misalignment of marketing and sales is a result of the simple failure to see where you are on this curve.  While there are sales processes that teach sales people to recognize buyer personality types (i.e. Analytical, Driver, Creative or Amiable, or in other cases, The Decision Maker, The Financial Authority, The User, The Champion, and The Roadblock etc), there are very few that focus on alignment with where the buyer is in either the buying cycle or the technology cycle.  One excellent process that focuses on keeping in alignment with buying cycle needs is discussed by the Vision Group.

How can you make sure you don’t fall into the trap of selling to the wrong segment?  It may seem obvious, but the answer for both sales and marketing is simply to ask questions. It’s also prudent to be asking yourself three questions all the time: 1) Where are my prospects in their buying cycle? 2) What is their buying type?  and 3) Where are they in their technology lifecycle?

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On the eve of the mid-term elections, I am struck by the tactics for messaging used by the major parties and the parallels for Sales and Marketing.  The first is that those that keep their message simple and consistent are much more likely to get their point of view accepted.  CSO Insights indicates that companies that have consistent messaging have 35% more of their salespeople achieving forecast and win deals 20% more often more than competitors.  The second thing is that we are all risk averse.  Our little medulla oblongata (lizard brains) in the back of our skulls that generate our flight or fight response take precedence over our frontal lobes where reason happens.  So messages based on loss or fear tend to trump those based on reason.

In the B2B environment, Sales does most of the messaging.  The words that come out of their mouths create it.  When Marketing does not provide consistent or coherent messaging, Sales makes stuff up.  They see what works by trying a lot of different things.  As a result they are most often wrong, but their feedback from prospects is immediate.  Marketing on the other hand needs to figure out what the correct message is.  This is very difficult, especially if you don’t talk to customers.  It takes longer to think up, test, train and refine the correct message.   The best message is often a simple story.  The shorter the better.  Not twenty nine different things.

One place for Marketing to get good input on messaging is from the Sales team.  But often the Marketing  attitude is that the Sales team doesn’t know anything about messaging.   Marketing, talk to Sales.  Sales, listen to marketing.  It’s that simple.

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One of the most successful marketing campaigns I’ve been involved with was sending personal thank-you notes to over 1400 customers.  The notes simply said, “Thank you for your business.”  They were hand written by an executive management team, fifty at a time.  The benefits were twofold.  First, the customers were blown away.  Many said that they had never received anything like it from a vendor.  The rewards for renewal of business were in the millions of dollars.  But there was a more subtle reward.  The management team got more vested with the customers.  Their personal signatures made them feel more responsibility for customer satisfaction and loyalty.  They began to think about their customers differently, appreciate and pay attention to their needs.

Thanking customers and clients for their business is “Marketing and Sales 101.” But it’s rare when we do it with sincerity.  Many companies send year-end holiday cards, but I sometimes get the same reaction from this that I get when my bank sends me and email on my birthday.  Sometimes it’s better to send nothing.

One business I know sends Thanksgiving Day cards.  No one expects them, and they don’t get lost in the shuffle of the end of the year holidays.  So they stand out a little more and are appreciated.  There are a hundred ways to say thank you.  So what’s stopping us?

So thanks.  Thanks for reading this. Thanks for the encouragement, and thank you if you’ve passed this blog on to others.

PS: And right up there with thanking your customers is… thanking your employees.

PPS: Marketing, please thank your sales team.

PPPS: Image Attribution

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