The squeeze

We had a prospect who had been dithering. Time was moving on and they seemed to be reluctant to get down off the fence and make a decision and live with the consequences. Eventually we used a squeeze to close the business.

I'm not sorry that we used a 'trick' to encourage the decision. It was important that they moved on and stopped wasting time. I think that they have made the right choice but only time will tell. We will do what we can to make their copy sing and if we get it right then we should see the results in their visitor statistics.

In pipeline terms we understood how much they needed our solution and valued our input - where we took a risk was on how much we could influence the outcome.

Make sure that you sell value, from the beginning

• We have the best product / service
  
• Our customer service team is the best
• Our pricing is the most competitive
• Our team is the most qualified
• We are number one in our market

Buyers hear this day after day and they simply stop believing it and start looking for more solid evidence. It's a common habit in sales to present these descriptions as fact when there is no opportunity for the Buyer to test whether the statements are true or not.

As a sales and marketing approach it isn't very effective and it doesn't distinguish the business from any other supplier - it's a 'me too' sales tactic. These approaches are often supported by marketing programs that use a relatively passive communication model which consists of "here it is, this is what we do". Why not try something a little different?

Is it possible for any of your prospects to experience your business value prior to the first meeting with your sales team? If they can, it can be a springboard to the process - it reduces the comparison with competitors, the sales cycle can be shortened and it will be easier to protect gross margins.

Your sales team can spend most its time personalising how they will help the prospect use your product or service as a business tool, instead of spending a disproportionate amount of time in the sales cycle cold calling, and educating prospects.

One way of letting prospects experience the value is give them free business content which encourages them to make a call for a salesperson to visit.

Marketing tools like webinars, teleseminars, newsletters and workshops can be the key to communicating your value first to generate qualified leads. These marketing devices allow your prospects to learn about your value through their own filtering and judgment process and if done correctly, they will call and say "I am interested".

Why have they got clay feet?

The latest sales person or sales manager is recruited with the best of intentions, but after 6 months or so it is clear that they haven't turned performance around - they are OK, but they simply aren't setting the world alight.

There could be plenty of reasons for this, and it needn't be because the latest recruit doesn't have the skills that they mentioned on their CV.

Sales is a team game. For the salesperson to be really successful, there are plenty of activities behind them which need to be working well, too. Paying upper quartile salaries to people with good CVs isn't enough. Managers of the business need to make sure that the organisation has positioned itself to help its salespeople be successful.

A little preparation might be a good idea

If you are pitching to a big company and you think that you have just one shot then you are probably doomed to fail.

In big companies, people rarely (if ever) decide to change how they're doing things in just one meeting. They need to:

• involve others in the decision process. Getting management & staff buy-in is often essential for the success of any new initiatives or products
• compare your potential ROI figures with their own internal analysis
  
• make sure it's worth their while. Bringing in new vendors, service providers or consultants is a lot of work and frequently disruptive to their existing schedules

As a seller, you need to realize this from the beginning. It's going to take multiple calls, multiple meetings, multiple contact points. It can go more quickly, but you have to prepare for the long haul. You can't disclose too much at the initial meeting. You have to think about how to spread out what you want to say over time so as to advance the sales process.

Key questions to ask yourself as you get ready for that first meeting are:

• what is the logical next step? Once you know this, you can evaluate all your other ideas in terms of how they contribute to that outcome
  
• what do I need to share with this decision maker to entice him/her to learn more? Which stories and examples will have the strongest resonance with this buyer?
• what do I need to learn about them to ensure my offering can make a valuable contribution? Selling consultatively means that you need to think through the questions you want to ask before you go on that meeting. Your ability to engage the people that you meet in an intelligent discussion of their business objectives, issues and needs will be crucial to your success

Modifying sales activity

Phil and I sat down yesterday to review what we had been doing for one of our clients. How we had shared the activities; what had worked; what we might do differently. It also gave us a short term plan to share with our client.

It's important to have this kind of review meeting periodically. It gives you an opportunity to stand back from the day-to-day activity and take a more critical look to see whether your investment in individual activities is paying off. In sales it is important to focus on activities that take you forward in your pipeline. The moment that you undertake activity for activities' sake, you are probably wasting your time.

It was a useful session and both of us got a lot out of it. The frequency of account reviews depends to an extent on the nature of the account and the amount of effort that you are putting into it - the higher the investment - the more frequent the reviews. As a minimum, all live accounts should be reviewed once per year. A large account with many contact points might require a review every 6 weeks.

Planning for January

At our Operations meeting last night we went through the current pipeline in some detail. It was a pretty cheering experience. We look to have a solid chance of starting the calendar year with a really good month, but to do that we have to close some of the business in the pipeline.

It's important to review the pipeline regularly in terms of its quality. Of course every situation is competitive, even if the competitor is the status quo. The reason that we like our current pipeline so much is that there are a number of prospects in it who all have burning reasons for not staying with the status quo.

The best news for us is when a business approaches us - better if they are selling into corporates. They know that we are a commercial business and they have already half made up their minds to work with us. Clients like this can take a while to close down, but often that is because of the internal difficulty of their team sitting down together to agree on what to do.

I'm looking forward to a good New Year.

Why don't they play nicely together?

Forrester Research published a survey in October called Improving B2B Lead Management. The core of the research is that Marketing and Sales aren't working closely together. I'm afraid that isn't newsworthy. Sales Director congratulates Marketing Director for quality of sales leads ... now that is a headline in the 'man bites dog' category.

The core of the problem is that often the two functions are simply targeted to do different things in different ways and very few organisations look on their Marketing investments as being the first stage of a Sales ROI. Until the whole process becomes significantly more joined up and both functions are measured by metrics which have real relevance for the organisation it is unlikely that the situation will change.