Sales and Sales Management Blog

February 8, 2010

Guest Article: “Developing Sales Professionals in Today’s Complex Selling Environment,” by Jeff Thull

Filed under: Sales Management, career development, management, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 9:19 am
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Developing Sales Professionals in Today’s Complex Selling Environment
By Jeff Thull

Today’s marketplace is characterized by the increasing complexity of the business problems we solve and the solutions we offer that address them. Combine that with a highly competitive market that offers abundant solution options, and you’ll find that many customers are overwhelmed with choices and are looking for guidance in making quality business decisions. Salespeople are the obvious source for this guidance, and there now may be more people influencing the decision to buy as it moves higher and broader in the organization. Unfortunately, this level of guidance is frequently not forthcoming from salespeople, yet providing it can become a critical source of advantage.

How do you begin to develop and motivate your sales force to operate in this challenging environment when you know you have unique and valuable solutions that are not reaching or connecting to the right people, in the right place and at the right time?

Sales professionals who are capable of guiding their customers through the process of thoroughly understanding the problems they face and developing an optimal solution amongst the available alternatives is clearly the path to sustained profitability.

Designing sales development programs for these times starts with helping the salesperson understand how their role has changed. Their role today is that of a business advisor and a source of competitive advantage. Their required skills are more similar to those of a process analyst or project manager than the historic persuader. The objective of today’s sales professional is to create a solution that the customer would have been unable to think of or put together on his or her own. The sales professional looks at the issues beyond the expertise of the customer and collaborates with the customer to create such a solution.

The content of today’s learning programs must reflect the sales professional’s desire to become a trusted business advisor. The program needs to be about business, not about selling. It needs to be about guiding customer decisions, not about presenting volumes of solution information. The content needs to be integrated into the customer’s environment. As a guideline, we have found the metaphor of “a bridge” provides a meaningful template. The bridge provides a roadmap or guide for a diagnostic conversation. It is literally designed to connect the customer’s business drivers to the value sources within your solution. It describes a series of relationships that extends significantly beyond the one-to-one nature of the feature/benefit relationship.

The intermediate relationships within the bridge would include:

1. The business drivers of a customer are shown to relate to various job responsibilities within the customer’s organization.

2. Job responsibilities are then connected to physical indicators or symptoms that would suggest the desired performance of the job responsibilities is at risk.

3. The symptoms must be associated with the possible causes of the symptoms, some your solution can address and some your solution may not be able to address.

4. The causes are connected to specific consequences that are or may be experienced by the individual and the business.

5. And finally, your solution capabilities need to be tied directly to the causes of the problem to be solved, noting how they eliminate those causes. If the cause of the problem is eliminated, so are the consequences of that problem.

The net effect of developing the bridge provides a direct corollary between the absence of your solution and the customer’s ability to attain their desired business driver performance. The flow of the bridge content teaches a diagnostic strategy, provides the flow of a diagnostic conversation and supports the development of the skill to thoroughly diagnose a customer’s issues, design an optimal solution and deliver maximum results.

By designing learning programs with the objective of developing today’s sales professionals, your programs will connect firmly with the individual’s motivation to be accepted as a professional, respected by their customers and colleagues, and successful in accomplishing their goals. Their value to your organization will be clearly defined, and the knowledge and skills they are developing will position them in high regard with their customer and within your organization.

The Commitment:

The question asked by many organizations and sales professionals is “What will it take to become successful in this new environment?” First, the learning path should be precise, including specific field applications, and the expected time commitment. As you create the development plan, include how they will be supported. How will they be coached, what reference materials are available, and if relevant, would you be able to supply a sample of their expected output when the skill is mastered? With this in place, the learner who knows what they want to accomplish will understand exactly what is required to get there. This allows the learner to make an informed decision to “pay the price and do what it takes.”

Very specific application steps should be described as part of the learning process, and coaching guidelines should be built into the design of the program. It should not be an option to participate in the program and not be required to demonstrate the knowledge or skills being taught. I realize this seems like a very basic tenet of program design, but sales training is notorious for being served as a smorgasbord of ideas, the “use what you like and set the rest aside” school of training. Imagine the effect of programs such as “Six Sigma” or “Principles of Finance” being offered up as optional components. Built in application and accountability ensures that the learner understands they are expected to take action and the manager understands they are expected to coach.

Finally, it is imperative to the motivation of the salesperson that you help them recognize the progress they have made. This is dependent on defining measurable and relevant milestones for each learned behavior. The milestones should tie directly to the desired success and be defined in both quantitative and qualitative terms, but more importantly they must occur early and often during the learning process. If the milestone selected is “increased sales,” it is certainly measurable in both a quantitative and qualitative sense, but waiting too long to recognize that success will no doubt be very de-motivating.

As an example of short term measurement, let’s consider a module on questioning skills designed to lead to more sales. Assume that part of the skill taught is how to research your customer and craft high-gain questions. The first step or measurement of the application of the skill could be to research one company and build a questioning strategy or diagnostic map. Feedback and coaching would follow and progress is noted. For step 2, the questions are used in a role-play with a colleague. Feedback and coaching follows and more progress is noted. In step 3, the questions are used during a customer interview. Quantitative measurement: asked four new questions. Qualitative measurement: uncovered more in-depth information than I ever have before. Logical conclusion: I am uncovering more relevant information, building a closer relationship of customer understanding and I am measurably closer to a successful sale. In this sequence of learning, criteria number four, “recognizing progress,” is accomplished.

The challenges of today’s sales professional have vastly surpassed the level of learning required by historic feature benefit/product training. We are well advised to develop our learning programs to reflect the characteristics of the programs designed to meet the similar challenges of other professions, such as teaching scientific principles to research scientists, diagnostic principles to physicians, and the coaching of top athletes.

The goal is to develop learning programs that meet the requirements of performance: a system that will guide performance, skills that will enable the individual to execute the system, and the personal discipline to address the emotional inhibitors of performance. With that accomplished, you have successfully delivered a development program that will equip your sales organization with the skills and mindset to successfully bridge the value gap and become a trusted business advisor to your customers.

Jeff Thull is a leading-edge strategist and valued advisor for executive teams of major companies worldwide. As President and CEO of Prime Resource Group, he has designed and implemented business transformation and professional development programs for companies like Shell Global Solutions, 3M, Microsoft, Siemens, Citicorp, IBM, Raymond James, and Georgia-Pacific, as well as many fast track, start-up companies.  Visit his website

February 5, 2010

A Couple of Blog Milestones and Some Other Stuff

Filed under: Networking, Referral Selling, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 9:21 am
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A Positive Milestone: 1,000 comments
As every blogger knows, it’s tough to get people to interact with you on your blog.  I took me a couple of years to finally get to the point where comments became somewhat frequent.  I’m pleased to say that this morning the blog registered its 1,000th comment.  Not a giant milestone, but still, progress.

A Negative Milestone: 20,000 spam comments
Coincidentally, this morning the blog also blocked its 20,000th spam comment.  Spam, I’ve found, is the real cost of blogging.  Spam comes at you in all forms, whether bots with sex, casino, or watch spam or individuals trying to get mention of their blog posts about their get rich quick scheme or their lead generation ebook for only $79.99.

Anyway, as we continue in our fourth year of the Sales and Sales Management Blog, I’m honored that some have found it worthy of their time to read and even to comment on the content or link to the posts.

I’ll continue to try to bring quality posts that will help increase your sales, help you improve your sales team, and prompt you to think.  As always, I’ll be featuring many great authors besides myself. 

HELP!

My article “Sales Call Reports–Are They Worth the Hassle?” has made it to the finals for Sales Article of the Month for February at Top 10 Sales Articles.  I’ve got tough competition from Dr. Tony Alessandra, Keith Rosen, Lee Salz, Kevin Eikenberry, Danita Bye and others.  To win, I need your vote.  Half of the selection of the winner is based on reader votes; the other half based on votes by a panel of professional sales trainers and consultants.  I’d appreciate it if you’d hope over to Top 10 Sales Articles, read the 10 finalists and vote for the one you believe best (mine, of course).

Networking That Really Works: A FREE Prospecting Webinar on Feb 18

Are you spending time at the chamber networking event or the morning leads exchange group and finding you’re just wasting precious time and energy for no return at all?

Unless you’re an auto mechanic, a personal banker, sell cars, or are a dentist, the chamber event and the leads exchange group probably aren’t going to help you at all.  If you sell sophisticated products and services or high dollar items, more than likely you’re not going to be meeting great prospects or getting many quality leads at these venues.  The majority of people at the chamber event are other sellers looking for prospects and those at the networking breakfast typically can only refer to micro and small businesses or less than ideal consumer prospects.

So is networking out of the question?

Not at all.

You just have to network where you’re going to find a large number of quality prospects and create long-term relationships with them.

Join me on February 18 at 1PM Central for a FREE 1 hour webinar to learn how to make networking work.

You’ll Learn:

  • Where to spend your time networking
  • How networking demonstrates your integrity and trustworthiness
  • How networking builds your image and reputation as being an expert
  • How to work a room and guarantee after event meetings with prospects

This isn’t a come-on to sell products or coaching.  You’ll learn real strategies that produce results.

Limited Seating

Register HERE

Dave Brock reviews Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals

Over on his blog Dave Brock reviews my book on referral generation, Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals.  Dave makes some excellent observations and I encourage you to stop over and read the post—and while you’re there, read lots more posts as Dave is a very insightful writer and thinker.

February 2, 2010

Guest Article: “Turn Selling Around,” by Ram Charan

Filed under: Client Relationships, Sales Process, sales, sales psychology, selling — Paul McCord @ 11:07 am
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Turn Selling Around
by Ram Charan    

The heart of the new approach to selling is an intense focus on the prosperity of your customers. This is a radical departure from what most salespeople and selling organizations do. The entire psychological orientation is shifted 180 degrees. No longer do you measure your own success first. Instead, you measure success by how well your customers are doing with your help. You’re not focused on selling a specific product or service; you’re focused on how your company can help the customer succeed in all the ways that are important to that customer. By tapping the many resources you have at your disposal to help customers meet their business goals and priorities, you are adding value.

This ability to create value for customers will differentiate you in a crowded marketplace, and you will be paid a fair price for it — one that is commensurate with the value customers perceive they are getting and the value you do in fact provide. I call this new approach value creation selling, or VCS.

Value creation selling is sweepingly different from how most companies sell today, in these ways:

First, you as a seller and your organization devote large amounts of quality time and energy — much more than you do today — to learning about your customers’ businesses in great detail. What are your customer’s goals? Which financial measures is he most keen about? How does he create market value and what are the key factors that differentiate his product or service from those of his competitors? Only then do you look for ways to help the customer in the short, medium, and long term. The greatest opportunities lie in the medium and long term, where you and your customer can work together to change the nature of the game in your customer’s industry based on value you can help provide.

Second, you use capabilities and tools that you’ve never used before to understand how your customers do business and how you can help them improve that business. Sales is no longer just for the sales force: you need to muster the help of people in many parts of your company to do that. People from many different departments, including the legal, finance, R&D, marketing and manufacturing, become intimately familiar with your customer. You compile large amounts of information about your customer, both facts and impressions, in useful databases that are shared and used to determine the best approach for helping your customer win.

This will demand that you build new social networks, both within your organization and between your organization and the customer’s shop. Information will have to flow in both directions, and there will be a need for frequent formal and informal interaction among people serving different functions within your company and between your company and the customer’s. For example, your engineering people will need to meet with the people in your customer’s shop who define the specifications of your customer’s products or services.

Third, you’re going to make it your business to know not only your customers but also your customers’ customers. It is no longer enough simply to satisfy your customer’s demands. You also have to know what motivates his customers, what their problems are and attitudes are and what decision-making processes they use. In order to tailor your solutions to your customer’s market, you have to know who his customers are and what they want. To devise unique offerings for your customer, your company must use its capabilities to work backward from the needs of the end consumer to the needs of your customer. This is the customer value chain.

Fourth, you have to recognize that the execution of this new approach will require much longer cycle times to produce an order and generate revenue. It requires patience, consistency, and a determination on your part to build a high degree of trust with your customers. This is imperative because in this new relationship the two-way information exchange is far deeper than what you have relied on in the past. But once it gets going, the cycle time can be very fast, because you will have established trust and credibility.

Finally, top management in your company will have to reengineer its recognition and reward system to make sure that the organization as a whole is fostering the behaviors that will make the new sales approach effective. Hitting quarterly sales targets is not the only basis for rewarding the sales force under this approach. Further, other members of the sales team from various functional areas must be recognized and rewarded proportionately for their contributions. If after receiving sufficient training and support the salespeople or other functional executives don’t adopt the new approach with wholehearted enthusiasm, you will have to replace some people.

Ram Charan is the author or coauthor of many bestselling business books, including What the CEO Wants You to Know and Execution. For more than thirty-five years, he has worked behind the scenes at Fortune 100 companies like GE, Bank of America, DuPont, Thomson financial, Honeywell and Home Depot to help senior executives develop and implement strategic plans. www.ram-charan.com

February 1, 2010

Networking That Really Works: A FREE Prospecting Webinar on Feb 18

Filed under: Networking, Personal Marketing, lead generation, marketing, sales, selling, small business — Paul McCord @ 9:34 am
Tags: , , , , , ,

Are you spending time at the chamber networking event or the morning leads exchange group and finding you’re just wasting precious time and energy for no return at all?

Unless you’re an auto mechanic, a personal banker, sell cars, or are a dentist, the chamber event and the leads exchange group probably aren’t going to help you at all.  If you sell sophisticated products and services or high dollar items, more than likely you’re not going to be meeting great prospects or getting many quality leads at these venues.  The majority of people at the chamber event are other sellers looking for prospects and those at the networking breakfast typically can only refer to micro and small businesses or less than ideal consumer prospects.

So is networking out of the question?

Not at all.

You just have to network where you’re going to find a large number of quality prospects and create long-term relationships with them.

Join me on February 18 at 1PM Central for a FREE 1 hour webinar to learn how to make networking work.

You’ll Learn:

  • Where to spend your time networking
  • How networking demonstrates your integrity and trustworthiness
  • How networking builds your image and reputation as being an expert
  • How to work a room and guarantee after event meetings with prospects

This isn’t a come-on to sell products or coaching.  You’ll learn real strategies that produce results.

Limited Seating

Register HERE

January 31, 2010

Book Review: Selling Change: 101+ Secrets for Growing Sales by Leading Change by Brett Clay

Filed under: Book Reviews, Sales Process, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 11:16 am
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Change is a natural part of all life and, consequently, a natural part of our sales lives.  Nothing is static; not our products, not our prospects, not our clients, and certainly not our competitors.  Change is the only constant.  But surprisingly enough, change as a central theme of selling has seldom been addressed head-on.  Brett Clay in Selling Change: 101+ Secrets for Growing Sales by Leading Change (ARIVA Publishing; 2010) changes that.  As you can tell by the title of the book, change is the central theme of his sales philosophy.

Clay argues that our job as a seller isn’t to sell a product or service as a solution to a problem or issue but rather to understand the change forces taking place within the organization or individual and then show how our solution changes the organization or individual for the better, that is, how we not only solve a problem but at the same time advance the goals of the organization or individual.

Although not a new idea, Clay’s format for relaying the idea makes it easy to understand the steps in turning selling from a simple solution orientation to a change management orientation.  Rather than lengthy chapters of detail and endless discussion, Clay has divided the book into 107 “secrets” which are themselves divided into 5 sections which together make up what he calls the Change Leadership Framework®:

  • Force Field Analysis:  Which asks what change force is the customer feeling?
  • Change Response Analysis: Understanding how the customer is responding to this change force.
  • Power Analysis:  What effort will the customer have to undertake to make the necessary change?
  • Value Creation:  What value will the customer experience from the change?
  • Change Actuation:  How will the change be made?

Each “secret” then has its own short, two-page chapter broken into three parts:

  • What I Need To Know: a brief description of the secret
  • What I Need To Do: an action that must be taken based on what you now know
  • Action Summary:  a couple of bullet points about what you just learned

The 107 secrets range from the obvious such as “No One Needs Your Product,” to the obscure such as “Stay Away from Turtles,” to the critical such as “Where There Is Change, There Is Conflict.”  Each new secret builds upon the previously explored secrets. 

If you’re looking for a change primer, Selling Change is an excellent starting point.  If you’re more advanced, I’d recommend Sharon Drew Morgen’s Dirty Little Secrets instead as it is currently the definitive book on change management within the purchasing process. 

Selling Change’s great asset is its simple to read basic content laid out in such a manner as to make both reading and implementation easy.  In fact, the only drawbacks to the book are that it is too basic in some areas where I’d like to see the secret explored in more detail (difficult to do when each is relegated to only two pages) and–as a purely personal issue with the book–Clay quotes himself several times, a practice I find very irritating and in poor taste. 

The book is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other fine booksellers.

HELP!

My article “Sales Call Reports–Are They Worth the Hassle?” has made it to the finals for Sales Article of the Month for February at Top 10 Sales Articles.  I’ve got tough competition from Dr. Tony Alessandra, Keith Rosen, Lee Salz, Kevin Eikenberry, Danita Bye and others.  To win, I need your vote.  Half of the selection of the winner is based on reader votes; the other half based on votes by a panel of professional sales trainers and consultants.  I’d appreciate it if you’d hope over to Top 10 Sales Articles, read the 10 finalists and vote for the one you believe best (mine, of course).

January 29, 2010

Want Referrals? Find Them, Then Have Your Client Give Them to You

Filed under: Referral Selling, lead generation, sales, selling, small business — Paul McCord @ 1:27 pm
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Most of us who sell would love to get a number of quality referrals from each of our clients.  The reality for most of us is we seldom get referrals, and when we do, they’re usually no better than if we’d picked a name or company at random from the phonebook.

Asking For Referrals Will Get You Nowhere
Most of us have been taught to get referrals by simply doing a “good job” and then asking for referrals after the sale has been completed—often literally as we’re walking out the door or during a post-sale follow-up phone call.  We pop the referral question on our client and are then surprised and frustrated when they don’t have a quality referral to give.

We shouldn’t be. 

Instead we should be amazed when one does give us a quality referral because what we’re doing is inherently unfair to our client.  We’ve given the client no time to become comfortable giving referrals; we haven’t defined for the client who a good referral for us is; we’ve not given them a reason to give us referrals; and we’re asking them to do our job for us. 

I’ve questioned thousands of sellers over the years about their closing ratio of referred prospects vs. the closing ratio of their non-referred prospects.  Sad to say, in general the closing ratio of referred prospects is about the same—only slightly higher—as the closing ratio of the prospects they’ve contacted through other means such as cold calling.  What does that mean?  It means the quality of the prospects they receive from referrals is no better than the quality of prospects they generate through other means.  It means that when they get a name and phone number from their clients all they are getting is a name and phone number, not a quality referral.

Yet, we want quality referrals from them.

Your Clients Have Quality Referrals to Give
Almost all of us has gotten at least one great referral from a client.   We know our clients have referrals to give if we could just figure out how to get them.

The problem is that our clients really don’t know whom to refer, and even if we define for them who a great referral for us is, most of our clients simply don’t think of those prospects that we’d love to be referred to.

It isn’t their fault.  It isn’t their job to do our job for us.

But we really want those referrals they have.

Make It Easy to Give Referrals
How do we get those great referrals our clients have that they don’t think to give us?

We do it by making it so easy to give us quality referrals that we walk away from our client with three, four, five or more great referrals and all our clients had to do was say, “Yes, I know them.”

We get lots of great referrals by doing our homework, by discovering who our client knows—or probably knows—that we know we’d like to be referred to. 

We do the work for our client.

Become a Referral Detective
Doing the work for your client means you have to become a detective; you have to use your eyes and ears to ferret out who your client knows, or you have reason to believe may know, that you know you want to be referred to. 

For most sellers this is a tough assignment. How can you possibly discover who your client could refer you to?  Can you get into their head or sneak in and take a look at their Rolodex?

In a sense, that is exactly what you do.  You use your senses to figure out who you know you want to be referred to that you client may well know that at the proper time, instead of asking for referrals, getting none and walking out empty-handed, you ask your client if they know the people on your list.  If they do and you’ve earned the referrals, you’ll get them.  So instead of walking out with no referrals, you walk out with three or four or more referrals to people or companies you know you want to be referred to.

Sources of Referrals
Where do you find these potential referrals?  Everywhere.  You must be ever on the lookout for potential connections your client has.  Literally from the moment you meet a new prospect you’re looking for clues to who they may know. 

Here are some ways to discover who your client may know:

  1. Talk.  Asking casual questions about their background, their hobbies, their neighborhood, their workplace during small talk can turn up some great connections.  Former employers, the organizations they belong to, where they spend their time can reveal many potential connections you can explore.
  2. Observe. If you’re meeting them in their office or place of business make sure you look around.  What organization’s membership book is on their bookshelf?  What plaques and photos do they have on the wall?  Are there signs of who their vendors or customers are such as boxes, envelopes, or business cards?
  3. Internet.  Look them up on LinkedIn.  Who are their connections?  Who else from their company is on LinkedIn?  Do they have a blog?  Are they on Facebook or Twitter?  Who are their followers?  What do they blog about?  Examine their company’s website—are there potential prospects you can find there?  Are they likely known by your client?
  4. Think of their professional connections.  If your client is an architect, what other architects do you want to be referred to that they may know?  If your client owns a franchise, are there other franchises of the same company around that your client probably knows? 
  5. Think of their family and social connections.  Do they have family members you know you want to be referred to?  Are there people in their neighborhood or within the same business park you know you want to be referred to?  Are there people involved in the same charity they’re involved with?

For most of us, if we really put our mind to it we could come up with many potential referral prospects for each of our clients.  It isn’t easy, at least not at first.  You have to get your mind into the habit of thinking about whom your client may know that you know you want to be referred to.  You have to train yourself to think like a detective—always questioning what you see and what it means for who your client knows.

But the payoff can be tremendous.

Quit just asking for referrals.  Learn to be a detective and both the quality and quantity of the referrals you get from your clients will go outta sight.

January 23, 2010

Keep Your Client in the Loop After You Get the Referral

Filed under: Client Relationships, Communication, Referral Selling, prospecting, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 10:55 am
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Congratulations, you’ve just received several referrals from one of your clients.  Great job!  But hold on, you’re work has just started.  No, I’m not talking about contacting and selling the referred prospect, I’m talking about keeping your client in the loop.

One of the primary reasons clients are hesitant to give referrals is that they are afraid of being embarrassed in front of a friend, relative, acquaintance or co-worker by you not performing as you should.  So, when they do give a referral, they have a vested interest in what’s going on between you and the prospect.  Not in the sense of whether or not the prospect purchases, but in how the prospect perceives you and the value being referred by the client.

When a client gives you a referral, you learn a number of things:

  1. The client will give referrals.  Obviously, you just received one or more.
  2. How well the client understands what you do.  The quality of the referral will let you know how well your client understands what you do and who is a good referral for you.  The better the referral, the more the client understands.  The poorer the referral, the more work you must do to educate them for future referrals (and future sales to them for that matter).
  3. How much they trust you.  Generally, the stronger the trust relationship between the client and the referred prospect, the more the client trusts you. 
  4. They have more referrals to give.  Seldom will a client give you all of the referrals they can make at one time.  If a client gives referrals, you can almost bet they have more to give—if you keep earning them.

How do you get those additional referrals?  Additional referrals are earned, just as the original referrals were earned.  You earn those additional referrals by:

  1. Giving your client the assurance that you’re trustworthy with referrals.  You must show through your actions that their trust in giving you a referral was well placed by making sure that the referred prospect has an exceptional experience with you.
  2. By keeping your client fully informed of everything that is occurring with the referred prospect.
  3. By continuing to deliver superior service to your client.

Does the above mean that you must perform perfectly with the referred prospect?  What if there was an honest mistake or miscommunication?  What if something out of your control happened during the course of the sale?  Will these incidents destroy any possibility of acquiring additional referrals?

No, not at all.

The keys to gaining additional referrals from a client are to treat the referred prospect exactly in the same manner you treated the client and to keep your client informed of what is transpiring between yourself and the referred prospect.

Your client gave you referrals because they understood that giving referrals was in their own best interests and because you earned them through the service, you gave them.  You must now demonstrate that same level of service for the referral they have given you.  They expect—actually demand—you perform at the same level—or higher—for those they refer to as you did for them.  That level of service you gave them was what demonstrated to them that they could trust with a referral.  Anything short of that and they will reevaluate whether you should be trusted with additional referrals.

That having been said, clients understand that mistakes, miscommunications, and problems arise in business.  A single issue during the course of the sale to a referred prospect, even a major issue, will not sever your ability to gain additional referrals from you client if you address and resolve the issue in an exceptional manner.

Clients don’t expect perfection, they expect exceptional service—both for themselves and for those they refer you to.  How well or poorly you handle the issues will be a major factor in determining your future refer-ability.

Keeping your client informed of the progress of the sale with the referred prospect reassures them that you’re doing your job—and that all is well.  It is also your source of informing them if there have been problems and how they were resolved. 

It is critical that you let your client know of issues involved with sales to prospects they have referred you to before the prospect has a chance to relate the incident.  You can relate the circumstances and the resolution in the most favorable light—the prospect may not.  This doesn’t mean that you can lie or gloss over it, just that you can give the background and the full resolution without the emotional involvement the prospect will have.  Of course, if you’ve done an exceptional job of resolving the issue, the tale told by the prospect should also be impressive.  However, you always want problems to be related to your client by you—you don’t want to get a phone call from the client asking what happened.

Keeping your client informed doesn’t mean bombarding them with emails, phone calls, and notes.  A simple “thank you for the referral” card immediately after receiving the referral and the occasional call or email will suffice.  The object is to keep them in the loop and to reassure them that their referral was well made for both you and the prospect.  Even better than the occasional call or email is to explicitly ask the client how and how often they would like to be informed of the progress.

Clients are interested in what’s going on with the referrals they make.  They want to know the prospect is being taken care of in the manner the client expected, and they enjoy knowing that they have provided you with a quality referral.  More importantly, they want to know that they haven’t embarrassed themselves in front of an acquaintance.

Simple actions will earn those additional referrals your clients have—you just have to earn them.

January 19, 2010

Guest Article: “Why Customer Service Destroys Salespeople,” by Mark Hunter

Filed under: Customer Service, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 10:30 am
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Why Customer Service Destroys Salespeople
by Mark Hunter

One position that has not been impacted by the economy is sales.  Ask any CEO and you will hear that one of their biggest issues is finding and retaining good salespeople. Something happened on the way to a sour economy: Too many companies learned the hard way that their salespeople didn’t know how to sell. Instead, their salespeople were good at taking orders and providing customer service.  There is nothing wrong with this approach, as long as the marketplace is always going to serve up new customers and keep current customers in business. Does that kind of marketplace always exist? Unfortunately, no.

As a sales consultant who works with a wide number of companies, I am not surprised with the current state of sales.  In the past 20 years, books and soothsayers have inundated us with advice saying that the best way to grow your company is through great customer service. (Think of companies like Disney, Marriott and Honda, just to name a few).  These are certainly great companies, and I’m personally an avid customer of each one.  However, if great customer service is all that is needed to win, then why is each of these companies struggling in today’s economy?

I don’t offer up this example to generate an in-depth discussion on economics and market share.  Rather, I put it out there to say that customer service alone is not going to help a company achieve its growth targets.  It is essential for salespeople to be focused on selling as their first priority and providing customer service as their second priority.

Selling is about digging in and working with customers to help them see needs they didn’t realize they had.  It’s about helping customers see how the solution for which they are looking can be found in what you are offering.  Selling is not about sitting back and taking orders based on what the customer wants.  If that’s selling, then there really is no need for a salesperson.  The entire process could be done on the internet or over the phone.  I know that observation just hit a sore spot to many of you reading this. Possibly, you’ve watched your industry be decimated by the power of the web. Nowadays, many customers can get what they want, when they want it and how they want it, all through their computer.

If your job was lost because of the internet, then let me share something that you may not like to hear, but is simply true: you weren’t selling; you were merely taking orders.  I am not putting myself on a pedestal, because one of my first sales jobs I thought I was a salesperson (at least, that’s what my business card said). In reality, I was doing nothing more than going around to grocery stores and taking orders from store managers.  I wasn’t selling. I was conveying information and providing customer service.

Today’s economy is crying out for salespeople. Are you someone who is willing to be assertive in making phone calls, meeting with customers, and spending time doing what I refer as the “deep-dive” with high-potential prospects to secure the really big business.  If a salesperson is not willing to go face-to -face with a customer, then they have absolutely no right to be in sales.  The only thing they are doing is hurting themselves and their employer.  The fastest test I know to measure a person’s aptitude towards selling is to ask them to explain in detail how they develop leads and handle cold calls.

When a company looks to outsource the lead generation process, or spend so heavily in advertising to try to create enough leads for everyone, then they are setting themselves up to fail.  Over time they will wind up with a sales team focused on capturing the easy sales. They do this by making everything a customer service moment.  This is akin to a pro-athlete thinking because they are a professional, they no longer need to stick to a physical workout program.   When a pro-athlete stops their conditioning program, they may not experience a falloff in performance immediately. Over time, however, the decline will be evident. The same is true for salespeople who are not routinely in the game of prospecting and developing new customers. They will lose their edge. The decline will be so slow that they won’t realize it is happening, let alone why it is happening.

Each client with whom I have the privilege to work hears this message:  The responsibility of finding and retaining new customers is the responsibility of every employee.  Salespeople by the very nature of their position must take the lead and be assigned weekly, monthly and quarterly goals of prospecting calls they must make.  Management owes them the tools that encompass an effective sales process. This process must include employees outside of sales whose primary responsibility it is to provide customer service. After all, salespeople should focus first on selling.  They need the time to achieve this realistic expectation.

Mark Hunter, “The Sales Hunter,” is a sales expert who speaks to thousands each year on how to increase their sales profitability.  For more information, to receive a free weekly email sales tip, or to read his Sales Motivation Blog, visit www.TheSalesHunter.com.

January 17, 2010

Leading the Rapid Growth Organization

Filed under: Leadership — Paul McCord @ 4:09 pm
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“I started this company four years ago.  We’ve grown but not nearly as quickly as I envisioned, and honestly, we really can’t grow right now because we just don’t seem to have the processes and procedures in place and I feel I’m stretched to the breaking point.  I see exactly where we need to be going and how we can blow away the competition; I just can’t figure out how to get there.”

Although that’s a direct quote from a recent conversation with the owner of service business in Omaha, I’ve had that same conversation with more small and mid-size business owners and CEO’s than I can remember.  They believe they have the right product or service, the right market, and the vision of where they want to go and wonder why things don’t seem to be falling in line.

Obviously there could be a number of common, identifiable issues that are hindering their growth and success—and their usually are a number of them.  But in many cases I find most issues emanate from a much more fundamental issue within the organization—leadership.

We often think of leadership as a single thing—the ability to get people to follow, to work towards a common goal.  Although that definition works on many levels, within an organization there are three types of leadership that are indispensible to create a rapidly growing, dynamic organization.  Although each leadership type is needed in mature organizations, they are mandatory in any organization that seeks rapid growth and expansion.  Without these three leaders, organizations tend to struggle, and if they grow at all, growth tends to be slow and painful.

The Visionary Leader
At the heart of any rapid growth organization is a visionary; one who envisions what could and should be.  The visionary leader works more from inspiration and imagination than from the practical.  Boldness and the impossible are at the forefront not limited by conventional thinking or industry norms.  The visionary leader wants to create more than simply build; she wants to make something that hasn’t been before rather than simply make the existing better.  The visionary leader sees the future and wants to create it NOW. 

The Managerial Leader
Vision is wonderful but useless without someone who can take the vision and implement the structure that will allow the organization to turn the vision of what should be into what is.  Sometimes the visionary leader is quite capable as the managerial leader also; very often though that isn’t the case.  Often the very traits that make the visionary leader the visionary leader hinder him or her from also being the managerial leader.  Their ability to envision what isn’t, that is the imagination and ability to think unconventionally, stands in opposition to the down to earth practicality needed in the managerial leader.  The managerial leader is more than simply a good manager; the managerial leader has the ability to take a vision and turn it into processes and structures that move it from the realm of possible into the practical.   

The Implementation Leader
Just as vision leadership is useless without managerial leadership, it is completely impotent without a leader who can implement the vision—the one who can inspire and drive the organization to realize its potential, the one we so often think of when we think of a leader.  Many times the visionary leader’s passion transforms them into the implementation leader—but not always (think of those visionary leaders who started the company but who are not the CEO but are instead the head of research and development).  In many organizations the implementation leader is neither a creator nor manager but may instead come out of the ranks of marketing or sales.  The implementation leader is the company evangelist, the one who takes the vision and turns it into excitement, sales and growth.

An organization with all three leaders in place is capable of not only rapid growth but of having an immense impact on its market and community, at time changing the very nature of an industry—think Steve Jobs. 

The difficulty for any organization is finding and engaging a full complement of leadership.  Seldom are all three leadership types found in a single individual, although those individuals do exist.  More common are individuals who are both the visionary and implementation leader although even that combination is by no means a given as there are many companies founded by a visionary leader whose success or failure depended ultimately on bringing in a managerial and implementation leader. 

Are you a visionary leader whose company is struggling?  Has your earth shattering vision failed to come to fruition?  Maybe like so many others, you’ve failed to recognize that your company’s success needs far more than your visionary leadership.  If you’re not a leader capable of leading in all three areas, recognize your limitations and find the additional leaders your organization needs.  Vision without the processes and procedures is no vision at all.  Likewise without the implementation leader to lead the charge and create the gung-ho team, an organization stands little chance of reaching its full rapid growth potential. 

Rapid growth organizations call for a unique combination of leadership skills that few single individuals possess.  Consequently, the sign of the true visionary leader is their ability to envision a full leadership team within their organization and then finding a way to turn that vision into reality.

January 12, 2010

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