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Michael Webb
May 20, 2009
I hope the spring weather has reached your area. We've finally had rain here in Atlanta, and the buds and blooms are vigorous.
Recently, a reader asked: "What is the 20% of sales process improvement that generates 80% of the results?"
It's a great question, because it is the right way to think about business in general, and the sales process in particular. Here is our list of the six most important components of a healthy functioning sales process.
Get these down, and you'll get an 80% improvement ... or better!
Visit Six Easy Ways to Boost Your Company’s Sales Results to read more!
Michael Webb
April 14, 2009
If you are a salesperson, and you need a productivity boost, there are lots of possibilities, such as better meeting preparation, more practice presenting, maintaining your relationships, and working to become more organized.
However, what if your entire organization needs a sales productivity boost? What can an organization do?
Contests and sales training are obvious things that come to mind. However, if these have any effect at all, they are typically short lived.
If your salespeople are already doing the basic blocking and tackling of selling, and you still need to improve sales productivity in an organization, you cannot do it by trying to affect what salespeople do.
That’s aiming at what salespeople do overlooks the sales process itself.
That is, it does not change the flow of activities around leads, opportunities, and deals.
For organizations, productivity boosts require changing the flow of the work. Here are two examples: Lead Generation, and Lead Nurturing.
Lead Generation
In most companies, leads (if there are any) are probably of low quality, meaning most are never going to buy.
Sales contests and sales training do no good if the real bottleneck is lead generation. Neither does asking salespeople to do more cold calling or networking. If salespeople could generate enough leads that way, would you have a lead shortage in the first place?
This is one of the most common problems we see in sales organizations. Senior leaders usually grew up in the era when it was at least somewhat feasible to “hold salespeople accountable for finding their own leads.”
In the Internet age, when everyone uses their favorite search engine to find information to solve their problems, this is no longer viable. Sure, salespeople need to be able to make cold calls when absolutely necessary, but your business better not depend on it.
Much better to devise some kind of magnetic attraction system via the internet and in trade publications, where you can generate a predictable stream of traffic.
Salespeople are generally not involved in their company’s presence on Internet or in trade publications, much to their frustration.
In fact, entire companies are emerging to tap the market for helping independent sales representatives use Internet marketing to find their own leads and create their own customers. Perry Marshall (www.perrymarshall.com) is only one example of this. Glazer-Kennedy is another (www.glazer-kennedy.com).
The result? The independent sales reps who succeed at marketing in the Internet age gain control: They can find a different manufacturer far more easily than the manufacturers can find new customers or independent representatives!
This sea change in the market hits B2B companies in an awkward spot, because it contradicts traditional departmental functions.
On the positive side, when a company gets its act together and gets good at lead generation, the result is miraculous!
As proof, I would offer the case examples described by Brian Carroll, author of “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.”
We conducted a fascinating webinar with Brian in the professional members area of SPIF! in early February. (Members can log in here to watch that webinar: http://www.salesperformance.com/how-to-generate-and-sustain-a-25-increase-in-sales-opportunities-in-90-days-or-less-2)
Lead Nurturing
One of the principal challenges of lead generation is that once you succeed in finding individuals who could buy, they are usually not ready to buy now.
Most companies simply send all “leads” on to their salespeople, which creates lots of waste and negative effects:
First, customers get frustrated when salespeople try to get them to do things they are not ready to do.
Second, salespeople get frustrated. After all, their job is to close business and the majority of these “leads” do not want to buy now.
Third, salespeople end up spending time unproductively.
Of course there are the rare occasions when prospects need to overcome inertia to do something they need, but don’t want, to do. A good salesperson can make a difference then.
Yet, how often does this happen in B2B, where so many people play a role in buying decisions? Is it even realistic that sales training can get these prospects to do things they are not ready to do?
A company that has its act together not only has a process in place to generate leads, it identifies the ones who are actually ready to talk to a salesperson and sends only those to the sales force.
The rest are hooked up to a nurturing campaign that is designed to benefit the majority of prospects who are not ready to buy now. These prospects get educational information and entertaining communications distributed over time. They are more highly qualified at the end of the campaign than they were at the beginning.
Nurturing campaigns are not difficult or expensive to do. They are not time consuming. In fact, once they are set up, they save loads of time: Salespeople become immediately more productive because they can focus on the right prospects.
And the company as a whole becomes more productive, because it achieves dramatically increased returns on its investment in lead generation.
How does this work? How can you implement a lead generation campaign for your business, so you can double your salespeople’s productivity?
That’s what you’ll learn in the SPIF! webinar on Thursday of this week:
How to Double Salespeople’s Productivity
by Building Nurturing
into Your Sales Process
An Interview with Jim Cecil
Thursday April 2, 2009, 3:00pm Eastern Time
http://www.salesperformance.com/member-services/april-2-webinar
This webinar is free to Professional Members of SPIF! Guests may register and receive access to the recording of the webinar for 30 days for a fee of $47.
I look forward to talking with you on Thursday.
Michael Webb
March 31, 2007
Last week’s blog post “Why People Are NOT Your Most Important Asset” created some strong reaction.
Here is an example:
Michael,
I was recently fired from my sales job, because I wasn’t on the road “cold calling” enough …
Instead, I had been working to set up Google alerts for research as well as trigger events that Jill Konrath (www.sellingtobigcompanies.com) refers to. I was trying to set up an automated way of attracting and nurturing contacts through email, phone follow up, etc. They told me I was being fired for not doing the sales.
It is frustrating enough to be told to do things you know don’t work any more. But, to get fired for trying something you know could work! It is just incredible.
Your article touched all those things that companies still either don’t understand or don’t want to do…Do the research, create the value … all they want is more cold calls or send that proposal out …
You pointed out the reasons why the sales process is messed up and how it needs to improve … that the whole company must organize around researching the market, creating value, etc. It must deal with the “whole process,” not just what salespeople do.
It really gave me hope that maybe some of the old ways will be flushed out with this recession.
By the way, I got lucky: I start a new job in two weeks.
But I’ll be careful not to bring these new ideas to my new employer too soon…I need a job…
Bob Smith (not his real name)
The exact same thing has happened to me, Bob. More than once, actually.
Many employers today are stamping their feet, unwittingly trying to get their salespeople to do more of what does not work.
My employers assumed the problem was me. They felt that way for a bunch of reasons:
For one thing, they succeeded when they were in the field! (They didn’t realize how much things had changed.)
For another, everywhere they turn they are told “People are the most important thing. Get the right people and everything will be alright. If the numbers aren’t coming in, there must be a problem with the people.”
Bullshit.
The greatest people in the world cannot overcome a broken system. And most managements today are not even aware that they are part of a system. Instead they assume the solution to their problems is for the marketing department to market better, the sales department to sell better, and the service department to service better.
It has been said that “The last thing a fish discovers is water.”
Bob’s message is evidence that these managements are unwittingly damaging their companies. They are running off talented salespeople like him: people with the initiative to create new approaches that respond to today’s environment and technologies.
These management teams need to come up for air. They need to take a look at the world from a broader, more accurate perspective.
There is a widely held belief that an organization would have few problems if only their employees would do their jobs correctly. As Dr. Joseph Juran pointed out years ago, this belief is incorrect.
As Bob and I can attest, most of the problems companies have in sales and marketing can be resolved only by improving the sales and marketing “system” (which is largely determined by management). Few of the problems are under the employee’s control.
Only when a management team understands this can they can begin to leverage the people they do have to their best advantage.
Michael Webb
mwebb@salesperformance.com
Why Prospects Don't Understand Your Value - And What You Can Do About It
All too often businesses launch products, promotions, and proposals that do not achieve their goals.
When that happens, cost of sales goes up and confidence goes down. Everybody has to work harder.
Years ago I saw that happen multiple times at a company I worked for, and figured out how to solve the problem. Initially, it helped me tailor sales training materials to the specific environment clients needed. Then, it expanded to an organizing principle for value propositions that was needed by product managers and marketing managers. I wrote a popular article about it:
"Customer Value Mapping: A Key to Making Sales Easier"
(You can read about that article if you have opted in to the new website at http://www.salesperformance.com/sales-process-basics/free-spif-sign-up)
I even wrote a guidebook about it. Now, on Thursday this week, I'll be conducting a Webinar that will provide you with a step-by-step approach for uncovering what your customers value, and show you how to turn it into a powerful selling value proposition. Customer value mapping is acrucial component for designing any sales process, especially in a B2B environment.
Visit the page below and sign up now:
How to Map Customer Value
So Customers Will Buy Now and Pay More
Guidebook Launch Webinar
Thursday March 19, 2009, 3:00pm Eastern Time
How the voice of the customer can reveal
the right value propositions throughout
the customer’s life cycle
http://www.salesperformance.com/member-services/mar-19-webinar
I look forward to talking with you on Thursday!
Michael Webb
mwebb@salesperformance.com
B2B Sales executives often believe that hiring the right people and training them well is the most important success factor in their business.
Unfortunately, believing this is a serious mistake.
Want proof? Consider:
You would probably agree there are a LOT of great people in companies like GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
Yet, Toyota, Honda, and Mazda have been kicking their asses in the market for decades.
Would you say these landed Japanese automotive companies are winning because they’ve hired the right salespeople, or because they’ve trained them better? Is it because they use Sales 2.0?
Of course not. The greatest salespeople and the best sales training in the world will not save the American car companies.
The caliber and training of a company’s people are no match for the larger forces in play here. Yet, these same forces are pressuring every businesses all the time, especially in today’s market.
So, why are the landed Japanese companies winning?
They are winning because they create more value. The proof is in the market’s reaction: they sell more.
Clearly, the sales process is only one component of their success.
Unfortunately, many, many talented sales leaders are trapped in corporations that view the world in ways similar to American automotive companies.
It is high time for B2B sales executives to stop being so myopic about their trade.
I’m not saying people and training aren’t important, they are important. But they are not the most important thing.
The most important things are as follows:
Businesses need to grow out of the false assumption that the sales process is “what salespeople do.”
This error causes B2B organizations get their sales process completely wrong. It is the reason salespeople only give lip service to the sales process. Salespeople know better, though they are usually unable to articulate why.
The fact is, processes that work create real value. Not only that, people follow them. In sales and marketing, the sales process is what causes customers to:
Companies must recognize it takes more than just salespeople to do all those things, especially in today’s market.
It is irrelevant whether the customer’s actions are caused (or enabled) by copy-written ads, social networking, web pages, or the words of talented, trusted salespeople.
If something your company did got the customer to take one of those steps, it created value.
If your competitor did a better job of it, they deserve the customer instead.
If your prospects are now looking for information they need on their favorite search engine, and you insist on hiring and training more salespeople to make cold calls, that is your problem, not theirs!
Further, consider all the things your company does that cause no customer actions, such as generating tons of brochures no one reads, spending millions on branding exercises customers care less about, consuming thousands of hours on proposals that are never purchased, or asking salespeople to pull out picks and shovels to turn over more rocks in their territories looking for leads by hand.
All these are mostly waste.
It is high time that B2B sales executives stop being so myopic about their trade.
They need to learn to think of their business as a system for creating value. Value is created when customers take the steps listed above: it is called the “customer’s journey.” Every one of those steps is measurable with hard data. That data is the only proof you will be able to deliver revenue to your company in the future.
If is to work properly, your company’s system for getting customers to act needs to be designed. It requires the best selling savvy you can muster. It must be as automated as possible. Your salespeople need be able to implement the portions of the process that cannot be automated.
Executives who cling to old-fashioned notions about selling (hire the best people! make more sales calls! twist more arms! work harder!) are riding the Titanic to the bottom and will be looking for bail outs, just as the American automotive companies are doing today.
The quality of your people is important, but it is not the most important thing.
The most important thing is the quality of your business process.
Michael Webb
http://www.salesperformance.com
You probably have salespeople working overtime right now on deals that will be:
If you’ve been around professional sales organizations for a long time, you already know that poor salespeople ignore qualification criteria; good salespeople, and their managers, obsess about it.
You’ve heard the acronyms. BANT, for example: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe. There are others. You may have worked with your team to define yours precisely.
Still, close ratios are erratic and deals are unpredictable. Sales people, trying to make quota, have little choice but to spend enormous amounts of time and money pursuing them. They can’t help it if many of the wrong prospects are in their sales funnel.
Right?
Not right.
Most companies use an approach to qualification criteria that fails in at least three crucial areas. It is:
There is a far more productive approach to qualification than any you have probably heard of. Companies who fail to update this critical part of their sales process will continue wasting enormous amounts of time and money – which they probably cannot afford in this economy.
On Thursday, February 26, we will present a new and more effective approach to solving this problem:
In this webinar, you’ll learn an approach that has achieved some astonishing results:
• 90%+ forecast accuracy where ever it has been used
• Works at the beginning of the sales cycle, not just at the end
• Actually helps salespeople sell by influencing their decision making strategy
Rather than being myopic, remedial, and static, this simple new approach increases your company’s vision into customers, enables all of your salespeople to be more strategic, and changes with market forces.
It will lean out your sales funnel and improve the quality of your team's sales opportunities. And that will certainly increase your revenue, profitability, and success.
This will be the seventh sales kaizen webinar we have conducted since its inception last November.
I hope you can attend, because this one is really going to be good.
And rightly so, given the economy. Recently I received inquiries from several people working with a large organization that is very concerned about its sales process. Seems the CEO is having difficulty telling Wall Street where next quarter’s revenues will be.
No surprise there! The economic crisis affects large and small companies: everyone needs to know where next month’s revenue will come from.
Forecasting sales has always been difficult, but, in a threatening market like this, the problem is compounded by the need to get enough people to buy in the first place! This is a scary challenge, especially with the state of the sales process in most organizations. Ask yourself:
If you are like most companies, the answers to those questions are:
So, with the sales process so much in the spotlight, what are you supposed to do? How can you figure out what changes will have the right effects? How can you get everyone to realize that improving the sales process is the solution?
On Thursday of this week, Robert Ferguson and I will present the first of two initial webinars around design principles and tips you need to make your sales flow like water - and get results fast. Part one is this Thursday, February 19:
Guidebook Launch Webinar
Thursday February 19, 2009, 3:00pm Eastern Time
http://www.salesperformance.com/member-services/feb-19-webinar
Visit that page now, and register for this unusual and timely event.
Part two will be next Thursday, February 26. More on that event soon.
Michael J Webb
February 17, 2009
Recently I spoke with Burke, the VP of Business Development for an engineering firm in the material handling industry.
Unlike many people in this industry, Burke has a marketing background rather than a technical one. Since he joined the firm, their business is booming, seemingly unaffected by the recession. I asked him about that.
What he told me was really useful from a sales and marketing point of view:
I thought that was a great example of how sales is supposed to work. It is supposed to be simple.
Of course getting to that simplicity within your organization is not always so easy!
That’s where we can help you, hopefully a lot:
There are lots of new free materials, including articles, videos, recordings, and some new membership levels:
You can visit the site and surf anonymously, as you always have been able to. Then, there is the opt-in Free SPIF! Sign up, where we’ve added some videos, an “Ask You’re Question!” section and access to some of the best articles from the original website (including “Customer Value Mapping,” which Burke applied heavily).
Then, we’ve added a Professional Members area, where (for a fee about equivalent to that of a professional association) you get access to the in-depth Sales Kaizen webinars every month, archives of past webinars and conference presentations, the Print SPIF! Newsletter, private bulletin boards, and other helpful goodies for executives and consultants.
One of the coolest things is the ability for you to comment, compliment, criticize, or what ever you want on virtually every page. Check it out!
And don’t forget to check out Thursday’s Sales Kaizen Webinar:
I look forward to hearing from you!
Michael Webb
February 2, 2009
Hello everyone,
The inauguration today makes this a great day to get work done!
We've been working night and day to get the new website prepared for your use:
It is going to be the most in-depth high-impact resource available for getting serious education on how to help your organization improve its sales process.
Last month we released the "How to Conduct a Sales Kaizen Event" guidebook, and this month we're still planning to release another new guidebook - but we've been swamped by the details of putting this new site together.
As a result, the "How to Conduct a Sales Kaizen Event Guidebook" is still available - at the old price of $297!
That will go away as soon as we switch the new website on. List price for nonmembers will be $470. When will we flip the switch?
As fast as I possibly can!
These things are hard to predict, so you probably have a couple of days before we cut over. But after that, it's over.
Look for some announcements soon on the new website and on a new teleconference coming Thursday next week!
All the best,
Michael Webb
January 20, 2009
P.S.,
All products and services from Sales Performance Consultants are 100% satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back. So be frugal and visit the ordering page "How to Conduct a Sales Kaizen Event" now. You'll save about a hundred bucks and help accelerate your organization's sales effectiveness at the same time. Plus, you get your first month's membership in SPIF! for free!
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