This ties-in to the last discussion about “design thinking”.  When you approach your selling effort as a product development process you can learn much more about what is happening.  If you elicit feedback from your market & employees and understand your competition there is a much higher succes rate in building something that is sustainable and repeatable other than a continuous cycle of hiring and firing salespeople.  If you were to step back from the day-to-day and really examine what you are doing, you might find things are very different than they seem. 

Here are a list of things to look for:

1.  Do you know who you are selling too?  Do you have clean data for them?  Do you have a process to manage data collection, cleaning and communication?  Do you have a collaborative technology platform for the data?  

2.  Do you know how to be “useful” in the selling process?  Do you know what “job” you do for your clients?

3.  Do you have a big idea?  (For instance if you sell services you probably say something like this… “We have a methodology, we hire the best people, we have lots of customer references, etc…)  WHO CARES?  Everybody says this.  Come up with a big idea!

4.  Does everyone on your sales team operate at 100% of quota or more?

5.  Have you tried to buy “appointments” or “leads” with little or no success?

6.  Do you print a lot of “brochures” and create lots of PPT’s?

7.  Do you ask your sales team members to do too many jobs?   Prospect, Help Marketing, Find Data, Cold Call, Trade-Shows, Write Proposals, Manage Partnerships, Close Deals, Support Delivery, Account Manage, Grow the Account, Pick-Up Donuts for the office, etc…

8.  Do you execute “something” every month or better yet every week as part of your demand generation process?

9.  Do you use the web as part of your demand generation process?  Not just a request form but strategically using your site, social media, SEO, useful content, video and other things to drive the demand generation engine.

10.  Is finding more customers and more revenue really important to you?  What if you stayed flat?  What would happen then?  What if you hire and fire in a six month cycle again?

IF you can ask and begin to answer these questions you can start designing an efficient, scalable and repeatable sales process.  You can also begin to understand the roles of the people in the process and start hiring the right people for the right job with the highest likelihood of success.

Don’t hire this guy if you can help it!  Even if he is family…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bECV_yF_I0w

Yes, I said opportunity to reinvent the way you engage with your suspects, prospects and current customers. Design Thinking is a great framework for this.

After an Innovation Strategy class at Northwestern University, I started thinking about improving the B2B sales process using innovation theory. My ideas are still in early beta but they feel solid enough to share.

In a June, 2008 HBR article (http://bit.ly/71NEtr) Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO defined design thinking as the following:

спални комплекти“a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

This idea translates nicely to the B2B selling process. Think of it this way…

“use rapid customer feedback to evolve the solution that adds the most value to the customer and can be feasibly delivered quickly to the market.”

As an example, I have recently been working with a Technology Services firm that fixes broken IT recruiting processes. The company sells to anyone that hires contingent, permanent or project based human capital. They had problems hiring themselves and also saw the problems that existed within their own clients’ process.  So they fixed the process for internal use. When they were done, what they had built was intriguing enough to take to a few open minded customers to see if it fixed their problem. It did.

These early customers are helping the Company iterate and get the service ready for prime time. The process has been very rewarding and successful.

This company didn’t build first then try to sell. They built something that did “just enough” then validated assumptions by engaging customers in a true process of value creation. They achieved buy-in and input into the solution and have confirmed that there is real value. This will create a new market position, a new service and maybe even a brand new business.

It sure beats a cold call, a brochure with features and benefits or a slick “sales system” that is focused on what you think the market wants to buy and “selling” it to them.  This buyer/seller engagement is transparent, problem solving and high value. It is NOT a buyer seller “transaction”!

During a recent unloading of the DW, as we call it at home, I realized that Sales & Marketing is the dishwasher of many organizations.  It is kind of there in the corner waiting to be unloaded.  Yes, sometimes you want to get right in there and unload that bad boy and it can be an easy job.  But usually, when that weird platter is in there and you have no idea where it goes and it sits on the counter for two days waiting to be put away, it becomes a crappy job that is left unfinished.  It gets done in the end but only because you know it should get done so you can cook another meal and serve dinner.  Very rarely do you want to dive right in and do it. 

This is very common in companies that do not have Sales & Marketing as a core competency or consider themselves Sales & Marketing focused.  They end up struggling, hiring the wrong people for the wrong job and not understanding the process.  Revenue goes up and down and there is no sustained growth.  Sales & Marketing feels like unloading the dishwasher.  If you are not a Sales & Marketing focused organization do you think you can hire good Sales & Marketing people?  Who wants to go to work and unload the dishwasher?

How can you begin to transform your organization into a Sales & Marketing focused organization? 

At my house we approach it with these 5 steps as a framework…

1.  Cross -Functional Team (Me – VP of Sales & Marketing, My Wife - President, COO, CFO, VP of Supply Chain,etc…)

2.  Good Strategy and Communication (“I will do silverware, you take the platter that I have never seen before.”  We work on opposite ends of the kitchen, we won’t be in each others way.  It’s efficient, goals and tasks are defined and we measure it by how long it takes to unload and whether or not everything is put away.)

3.  Feedback Loop and Adjustment (“Next time can you take silverware and the dishes for the china cabinet in the dinning room?  It is closer to the silverware drawer.”)

4.  Right People, Right Role (My wife puts away the platter because I have never seen it and I do silverware because my mild OCD wants me to make sure it is all stacked and lined up nice in the silverware drawer insert thingy.  This works great.  We may even be excited about our roles but not quite the idea of unloading the DW.)

5.  An Eye Toward Innovation (“Maybe I can strap the dishes to the dogs back and she can carry them to the dining room while I am putting away the silverware?” – The President did not fund this initiative.  Too much risk for our portfolio.  I am safe enough within my working environment to share this kind of idea without fear of being fired!  This is a pretty important point…)

Good luck and if you need help getting your dishwasher unloaded let me know.  I can bring my OCD and my Rottweiler to help you out.  The President is my competitive advantage and is not available for engagements!

Unloading the dishwasher

1.  Techies like to sell features and benefits.  If one person bought it everyone will.

2.  Non-sales minded people or people coming from the buyer’s chair think sales is EASY.  They do not respect the sales profession or the process.  They then try to hire someone to do sales for them and pay them commission only or a $20K salary. 

3.  They think brochures, websites and white papers telling people how smart they are sells stuff. 

4.  The partners will bring me leads!  They embark on spending a lot of time building a relationship with vendors, partners, channel, etc…  If you do not understand the intricacies of the sales & marketing within a channel this equals a lot of effort, frustration and little if any business.  (This is usually because they are afraid of sales and do not want to “cold call” or contact people they are not comfortable with.)

5.  Now that I have someone hired back in #2 make them do everything, make more calls, write more proposals, meet more people…  It is a numbers game and it will all shake out in the end.   THEN FIRE THEM AND START THIS PROCESS ALL OVER…

So what can we do about these problems? How do we help these companies survive or grow?  A few simple steps to get started.

1.  Tell them to talk to someone that is from the sales & marketing world within their industry.  Not their friend or neighbor.  Someone who has been there… done that with multiple companies.  Big and small.  Ask them how it all happens.  Ask them to tell you more about how they achieved success.

2.  Look at the process like a technology project.  If it is in terms you can understand it may help.  Break down the entire sales process into rational chunks or iterations and begin to understand what happens in each piece and begin to think of sales from a 360 degree viewpoint.  Without sales there is no business.  (IF YOU CAN NOT DO THIS YOU REALLY NEED TO TALK TO AN EXPERT!)

3.  If you get past # 2 you need to think about how you will communicate with your universe.  This is where the convergence of sales, markketing and technology happens.  You can create a conveyor belt of opportunity if you leverage the smart people and technology that are out there.  Think of it as outsourcing an non-core competency.  Are you a SOX IT Audit firm or a Sales Consultancy?  Get it?  This is the foundation for success in a Sales 2.0 world.

4.  If you are small and you do not have any money, find some.  If you can not dedicate full-time to selling or if you can not do it because you don’t have the skills you are in a difficult spot.  This is all of your eggs in one basket syndrome or stuck in the seller – doer cycle.  This can be broken if you take some risk and make some investment.  Sales and Marketing is a 365x24x7 function.  No time better than now to start.

5.  Sales is not easy.  If you are the owner or founder consider getting some training while you are gaining experience.  I like the Sandler Selling System.  You have to begin to understand how a sales transaction works.  You will find that it is much more complicated and a lot more fun once you understand it. 

These are some simple steps to start you off in the right direction.   If you want to talk about it more contact me at coley-perry@northwestern.edu , this is a passion of mine so I love to listen!  Also you can look at my friends over at мебелиwww.maconraine.com.  They always have a lot of cool ideas running around.

If you don’t pay attention to what I am saying you are still using “Hope” as your Strategy.

Your marketing efforts should be focused on extracting the personal, emotional, economic and business value hot points from your audience.  Once you have done that, you can create a message that addresses these hot points.  Marketing should be integrated into your sales process so that they are one in the same. In my mind within a complex, relationship based, B2B sale, sales & marketing must work as one.

1. Have a framework for your sales/marketing process.
2. Make sure your sales and marketing teams are working from the same playbook. i.e follow a sales process for managing interaction with your prospects, suspects, clients. Use Sandler! Here is a link to my vendor of choice for Sandler – http://www.corporatestrategies-il.com/
3. Identify a tool for managing communications with key accounts. i.e Landslide – www.landslide.com
4. Identify the methods by which you will communicate with your universe of suspects, prospects, clients, etc. – i.e. Webinars, Involvement in the business community, letters, e-mail, voicemail, newsletter, events, trade shows, survey, value added content, etc.
5. Use survey techniques to ask “What is the pain?” Sounds simple eh? Most people do not do it!
6. Communicate in a cross functional way so everyone that touches your sales organization internally and within your universe externally knows what is going on and what you are doing. Again most people do not do it!
7. TRACK IT!
8. After you track it… Keep your data CLEAN!  How can you engage and move something forward in the sales process if you do not know who you are talking too? –  From my friend Ben Bradley – “Gartner, Inc. estimates that over the next two years more than 25 percent of critical data in Fortune 1000 companies will continue to be flawed. More specifically, the information will be inaccurate, incomplete or duplicated. Another Gartner report cited major reasons why CRM projects fail. At the top of the list is “data is ignored”.
9. Sell More!
10. Start all over again with the next one and make improvements to the process. 

Innovation comes from failing early and often.  When you capture the value go after it full tilt.  Being first makes a difference.  When you find the right combination put the pedal to the metal and go!

Good Luck!

Coley

Let me tell you why,  because companies are not able to look inward and understand why this is happening.  The only common element for them to start their examination with is themselves.  The organization is the only constant element with each passing salesperson.

Let’s take a technology services provider as an example.  This is an area that I have many years of expertise with both as a sales contributor and as a sales leader, manager, mentor or whatever you want to call it…

As an example here is a common statement – “Our Salespeople need better time management!”

The reality – Salespeople have as many tasks if not more on their plate as any single function within the company along with the pressure of providing the revenue to keep the firm alive.  Think about this:

If you are running a software development project would you hire the same person to play the role of Project Manager, Solutions Architect, Application Architect, Developer, Tester, Implementer, Maintenance & Support and “Client Manager”? – Probably not unless it was a very small project.

So why is it that firms want to nickel and dime sales salaries, not trust anyone, not empower or provide the tools necessary to do the job and then hire a sales person to do the following tasks: Lead Generation, Prospecting, Suspecting, Engagement with the customer, Qualification,  Facilitation (Project Management), Positioning, Proposals, Competitive Analysis, More Qualification, Presentation of value, “Closing”, Customer Relationship Management, Implementation facilitation, After sale support and then start all over again with the same client on a new opportunity and with a new customer at the same time etc, etc…

Gee, no wonder it is very rarely succesful, not to mention a lot of small and mid-size firms are very rarely run by anybody with a sales background let alone any understanding of how to break down the sales process.  It is typically delivery people trying to run sales like delivery.  It is a diffirent animal and requires different skills as a leader, mentor, coach and player.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart and I would be happy to discuss this with anyone that is suffering from this pain…

There has to be a better way!   And there is you first have to acknowledge the problem and help is right around the corner…

Please share your thoughts…