The VP of Sales is the most fired position in corporate America today. The reason is simple. Their forecast number is tattooed on their foreheads for everyone to see. Make it and the Sales VP is a hero for a day. Miss it and well….

But consider this. Before any sale goes up on the big board, there are at least 10 critical functions that your sales leader has to perform. As CEO’s, and business leaders, we would do well to inspect these critical functions and to help our sales management succeed. Otherwise, you’re going to start over, which can be even more costly.

You can help sales management by looking at what’s not working. Here are a few questions to ask when your sales management is not delivering the number you both agreed to.

1. Do we have the right sales and go-to-market strategy?
2. What kind of sales structure do we have in place to support them?
3. What kind of motivation and comp system will accelerate results?
4. Is the team sufficiently trained on our product or services?
5. Are they trained on industry and competition?
6. Do we follow an effective and predictable sales process?
7. Is marketing providing qualified leads?
8. Are we supporting sales with the right tools?
9. Are we mentoring and coaching our sales team?
10. Are we hiring the right high-performance sales people?

If your first reaction is to fire the VP when the number on his or her forehead doesn’t match yours, then ask these questions. If you’ve asked, and coached to these questions, and not gotten answers, only then must you answer question number 10 with respect to your VP of Sales. But the final question to ask is, “What makes a great sales leader?”

(Take our 90 Second Sales Performance Benchmark)

Do Great Things!

L. Hobart Stocking
Founder
PrairieSkyGroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

Share

I prefer to hire smart sales people.   The smarter the better.

Here’s why.  The sales environment has changed extensively over the last ten years.  It’s bifurcated.

Products and services that were once complex are less complex because of the availability of information.  That information is easily available to buyers on the Internet.  At the same time the Internet has changed the competitive landscape and how we buy products and services.   So the skill sets required to sell some things have been dumbed down.

However, other portions of our lives have become more complex.  Think about the rapid changes in the Internet, communications, information technology, software, security, energy, environment, healthcare and medicine.   Think about how the world has shrunk.  How our world has flattened, so that now I do business with someone living in Mexico, using programmers from Brazil and the Philippines.

These changes require smart people to help prospects solve problems.  Not just the problems the prospect knows about, but problems they haven’t thought about yet.  I want a sales rep who can understand the impact of a new technology, see how it might be applied to solve a problem the prospect doesn’t even know exists.  This requires smart.

While we have many societal stereotypes around smartness such as “The Nerd,” it’s been my experience that intelligence is an asset in sales.  And I’m not talking street smarts, or emotional intelligence here.

I often hear managers say that they want street-smart individuals to sell.  I think there’s a clichéd credo that street smarts and intelligence are two different things.  I don’t believe they are.  I’m not discounting street-smarts, but I’ve rarely found someone who is street smart who is not also intelligent.   A recent publication in the journal Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience by Aron Barbey finds evidence of s a strong link between the two.

“Intelligence, to a large extent, does depend on basic cognitive abilities, like attention and perception and memory and language,” said study coauthor Aron Barbey, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, in a statement. “But it also depends on interacting with other people. We’re fundamentally social beings and our understanding not only involves basic cognitive abilities but also involves productively applying those abilities to social situations so that we can navigate the social world and understand others.”

So leave the Bubbas behind.  Test for general intelligence.  Hire smart people.

Do Great Things!

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

Share

Part II – It’s the category of internal candidate criteria we tend to focus on the most when hiring sales people.  We tend to hire people we like, and we like people like ourselves.  So hiring for internal criteria his is where our gut takes over.

Humans are visual and we are evolved to make quick decisions on what we see.  One study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Doctor’s often evaluate their patients within the first ten seconds of entering the room, even without speaking to the patient, although they will deny it.  Jurors often select a jury foreman within the first twenty seconds, though the actual process may take much longer.  How long does it take them to judge the defendant?

I can’t say that I want to be diagnosed that quickly, or be judged by a jury of my peers based on how I look, so what can we do about this when we interview sales people, especially for the intangible internal criteria?  Do we hire for looks?

The first filter used in interviewing intangible criteria is match to your corporate values.  Why?  Because corporate values help you make triage decisions when there is a conflict.   Your values may say something like… always do right by the customer.  But you might also want to hire candidates that have a “desire to win.”  What happens when these are in conflict?  Values help you decide.  And if someone doesn’t exhibit your core values, how can you expect them to support your company?

The second filter should be your own list of inner characteristics that you believe make good sales people.   As an exercise, take a minute and write down the first five inner characteristics that you believe a sales person should exhibit.  Then prioritize them.  Regardless of how hard it is to determine these in the candidate, you won’t have any consistency among multiple interviewers if they each have their own list.   It’s a hard exercise and requires both discussion among your interviewers, and hopefully a way to generate evidence.

Lastly, you can look for external testing to verify these traits or generate a set of question focused on these characteristics.  So for example, if you value Intelligence, you can use a simple intelligence test.  If you value honesty, maybe you ask them if they’ve ever lied to a prospect.  I’ll cover testing in another post.

Some of my own criteria and the reason for them are listed here.  I’m not prescribing them; it’s just that I’ve found them useful.  Your situation will be different.

Intelligence:
Emotional Intelligence:
Authenticity
Empathy
Curiosity
Drive
They are all connected but represent different vectors.  I’ll discuss each in upcoming posts.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell24x7)

Share

Part I – I once ran into a Sales Manager printing his own interview questions for hiring a sales candidate.  I asked if I could look at them.  One of his first questions was what kind of car do you drive?  I asked why this was important, and he indicated that if the person was a good sales rep that they would drive an expensive car.  I pointed out to him that the best sales person I had met in twenty years drove an old pickup truck.

What are your criteria for hiring a great sales person, and what qualifications are you looking for?  There seem to be as many processes and sets of qualifications as there are sales managers.

I believe there are three types of criteria.
1) Circumstantial Assignment Criteria.  Those job criteria, such as experience in the industry you serve, location, or salary range you can afford.
2) External Candidate Criteria.  Those criteria you believe qualify the candidate and are verifiable, such as whether they have a college degree, references, and so on.
3) Internal Candidate Criteria.  Those criteria that tell you what kind of person you are hiring, such as whether they are honest, hard working, or have high EQ.  These traits are a little harder to determine, and they are the ones we tend to focus on with our “gut.”  There are also whole industries set up to help you “test” your candidate and “predict” their potential for success on internal criteria.  But one question is do they work?

Just as there is no single sales process, or single type of buyer, there is no single hiring process.  It depends.

So you begin by filtering your candidates for circumstantial and external criteria then bring them in for an interview.  Like the sales manager above, we all have our pet interview questions, but which ones should you use, and how should you interview and hire?

One of the best techniques for interviewing is called “behavioral interviewing,” and if you are not using the technique, it’s worth evaluating.  Its premise is that the best indicator of future success is past results.

So the questions asked focus on what the candidate has accomplished or the behaviors they’ve exhibited in past situations.  As an example, you could ask a candidate to “explain” what they do when they run into a roadblock in a sale.  Or you can ask them to give you an “example” of how they’ve overcome a roadblock in a recent sale.

The questions sound similar, but the first one is simply an intellectual or theoretical exercise.  Someone could know theoretically what to do, but have never done it.  The second question actually demands they tell how they have demonstrated the behavior in the past.   This type of questioning helps sort the BS’ers from the Doers.

In the next posts, I’ll explore Internal Candidate Criteria.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail
651-357-0110 (Cell24x7)

Share

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)

Share

Challenging your team requires that you do things smarter and not just harder.  There are some goals where working smarter is difficult.  So for example, if you are working on an assembly line, it might be difficult to increase your output, especially if you are not given any latitude to change things.

One common case of the “false challenge” can occur in sales forecasting.  It stems from the belief that sales people are lazy and will sandbag their numbers.  So management might add 20% to their numbers regardless of history or latitude.  The root problem is not sales achievement, but trust.   As a result, the organization winds up with multiple forecasts.  The one management thinks they might achieve, the one that sales thinks they might achieve, and the one operations scales to.  With three forecasts, no one knows where they are.  Since they are all based on mistrust, they are unlikely to be dealt with rationally.

The worst case of this phenomenon I’ve seen was in a company where the CEO either didn’t trust the sales team or was simply stingy.  He continually set sales goals so high that he didn’t have to pay bonuses.  He felt he was challenging his team.  But he wound up with a yearly turnover in his organization of 50%.

A challenge must have an element of achievability and support in order to work.  This doesn’t mean that sales teams can’t be challenged.  But that Management needs to stand behind one forecast, not three, and support the sales team.  If everyone is on the same page, then it’s much easier to deal with mid-coarse corrections, and it’s much more likely you will actually achieve a stretch goal. Make this year’s new years resolution to have one forecast.

Do Great Things!

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

Share

In Cost, Quality, and Value – The Buyer’s Side, I defined value as quality divided by cost.  And quality was loosely defined as the degree to which customer or prospects needs are met.  But that’s not the end of the story.

The problem with this definition is… what happens when the prospect doesn’t know what they need?

In sales we are taught to ask questions in order to understand what the prospect needs are.  This is often an excruciating process.   The buyer has to trust that you will add some value after he answers all your questions.  But it’s boring and sometimes a waste of time for the buyer to do this.

So what happens instead, if you tell them what they need?

It depends on how you do this.  If you’re too direct, you come across as bossy or aggressive.  No buyer likes to hear, “Let me tell you what you need to do.”  They hear it as, “All you need to do is buy my product or service.”  It’s a sales kiss of death.

But often what prospects want is for sales (or marketing) to make them think in a new way about their business.  In order to do this, you often have to challenge their current thinking.  They are busy, and they want to know things that will help them in their business.

How do you do this?  By educating them.  Providing them with useful information.  By pushing them out of their comfort zone.  That’s the basis of Quid Pro Nada.  And Quid Pro Nada is owned by both sales and marketing.

So to really add value, can you challenge your buyers to think about their businesses and issues in new ways?  Quality is not just understanding their needs but understanding their businesses better than the prospect.  Can you help them by providing them with useful information?  Or are you simply going to agree with them.  If you simply agree with them and copy down their needs, then everything reduces to the lowest common denominator… cost.

Some of the best sales people I know, make me uncomfortable.  So grow some cajones.  Talk back to your prospects.  Respectfully.

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

Share

I was on a website and had just downloaded a whitepaper when I got a call from the company sponsoring the paper. I hadn’t even exited the site.

The eager inside sales person wanted to know if I had any questions. I replied that he was creeping me out, that I hadn’t even had a chance to read the whitepaper, but as long as he was on the phone, I had one question; “What made him think it was a good idea to call me within 60 seconds of the download?”

He apologized and said he just wanted to make sure I got what I needed. We then had a discussion about the appropriate length of time and approach for responding.

There is a 2007 study by James Oldroyd, PhD Professor Sloan School of Management at MIT and David Elkington of InsideSales.com that I think is worth looking at.

In this study, they found a ten-fold drop off rate in odds of calling and connecting with a prospect after the first hour of delayed response to an inquiry. The odds of calling to qualify a lead drop six-fold after an hour, and after twenty hours, calling may actually hurt your chances.

What really isn’t clear is what is the event that triggers the call. If a prospect actively sends a question, or requests contact, then I believe response time is critical. Prospects tend to want what they want when they want it. And their attention drifts if you can’t give it to them. That’s why bounce rates are important to websites.

But what is your response to a sales clerk in a store who immediately asks if they can help you? Most people say, “Just looking,” which is code for don’t bother me. So the key is not response time, but understanding what the prospect is looking for.

For anything but a direct request, it’s best to log a download or event into your lead scoring system and treat is as a developing lead. It’s a best practice to automate your response so they get a thank you. Then you may even suggest another subject in which they might be interested. The logic and architecture of your campaigns becomes very important at this point and should be A/B tested.

But please don’t creep out your prospects and kill your speed to lead. Delight them by providing them with what they need or may need when they need it.

Do Great Things!

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

Share

I once had a telemarketer keep me on the phone for over a minute.  My usual average is less than 15 seconds, depending on how long it before they take a breath.  I’m polite because I like to hear their approaches.  He asked me a key question; “Was I earning 20+% on my investments?”  I said, no.

He then asked me if I’d like to earn that much.  I said, “sure,” and then I asked him what the investment was.  He demurred and said he couldn’t say what it was yet.  He then started in on his “sales pitch,” about the returns and his happy clients.  I interrupted and told him I would hang up in ten seconds unless he told me what the investment was.

Knowing he had ten seconds, he told me.  It was ostrich farming.  All I had to do was buy some ostriches to earn 20+% on my money.

I said, “Hmmm, what is the price of ostriches these days?”  They didn’t cost very much he assured me.  Only ten grand.

I then asked if he knew where he was calling?  He said, no.  I was living in Minnesota.  The temperature that winter was particularly cold.  That day it was minus 10 degrees.  I told him I thought the ostriches would die in these temperatures, and as a result, they would be a bad investment.  However, if he had any penguins, I might stay on the line.  He hung up.

If you are in sales or marketing and selling your products, your first task is to really know your prospects.  This is Sales 101.  My telemarketer failed miserably in this step, and it cost him valuable time.  Although perhaps his time wasn’t worth much.

The second step is to understand what the prospect is trying to accomplish and their goals.   However, most sales advice is to ask a few broad questions, and then quickly steer the conversation to discover issues with which your product or service can help.  I disagree with this approach.  It doesn’t build trust.  It says, “I’m in a hurry to sell you my “solution.”  If instead, Mr. Ostrich had provided me with some useful investment information first, or asked about my goals, maybe I would have been more receptive to a new investment idea.

When I asked him the price for ostriches, I was being cynical.  Without establishing my goals, and the cost of overcoming the barriers to achieving them, any price would have been too much.  If he had established that my goal was to put my kids through college, and that I was worried about doing this, he might have been able to justify the price of his investment or create some value.  Though at today’s college costs, I would have had to buy a lot of ostriches.

If the client believes your solution may help them overcome a problem, the difference between the cost of their issues and the price of your solution becomes the value.

Cost of Problem – Price of Solution = Value of Solution

It can only be called a solution if the prospect comes to that conclusion, and the prospect develops the value in their mind.  This is true no matter how hard you try to tell them what they need. (Don’t do that.)

So slow down, in both your marketing and in sales efforts.  Understand your prospects.  Help them in ways they don’t expect.  Give them information that is useful to them.  And don’t rush them.

Nobody shows up on a first date with flowers, their parents, and a proposal.  By slowing down at the beginning of your sales cycle you can speed up the sale later.

Only after you’ve built trust, have you have earned the right to ask prospects about their goals.  Then if you establish the true cost of failing to achieve these goals, and next help them see a vision of what their lives would be like if barriers to their goals were overcome, then you might ask them if your capabilities could help.

Why this sequence?  Because then your conversation won’t be about price.  Your conversation will be about value… and not about penguins.

Do Great Things!
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
651-357-0110 (Cell24x7)

Share

Would you show up on a first date by bringing an engagement ring and your parents along?  While this may be a custom in some countries, it could be interpreted as intrusive or presumptuous in our culture.  Courtship takes some finesse, and often requires a number of steps. Often the best approach is the product of each of these steps.  So why should it be any different with inbound and outbound marketing, or sales?

Recently, my son-in-law proudly informed me of his number one page ranking for his new furniture outlet business.  I was impressed and ran a quick Google search to confirm it.  Sure enough, he was number one.  However, I was more impressed with the number two search rank which had a value statement in the search response promising me I’d get the best design at an affordable price.  My son-in-law’s statement said he had 10,000 square feet of warehouse space.  I didn’t much care, because I wasn’t looking for a warehouse.   When I dutifully went back to my son-in-law’s number one ranking and clicked it, I was taken to his home page.  I’d been searching “sofas.”  This confused me a little.  When I did find what I was looking for, it took me four or five extra clicks.  Then there was no action I could take except to look at a picture of a sofa.  His competitor took me immediately to what I’d searched for and then offered me design help.

In the Prairie Sky Group business development model, there are three vertices to a strong prospect triangle.  One is inbound marketing, one is outbound marketing, and the other is sales.  All three are required for success.  But each individually is a product of a number of steps.  As you recall your grade school math, when you multiple a number or fraction between zero and one by another between zero and  one, the product is smaller.  It’s our job to get each of these steps as close to one as possible so the product is as high as possible.  This is very difficult.  It’s also why we need to test and retest in any campaign or sales approach.  Decrease the resistance.  Make each step an advance.  Incremental improvement in each of these steps leads to more qualified leads and greater close rates.

Did I mention that my son-in-law and daughter eloped?  That’s another story.

Do Great Things!

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

Share