fix sales | No Smoke and Mirrors

Hand Tattoos and Fixing Broken Windows in Your Marketing

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What does your company really know about your customers and targeted new customers? Is your web site an inbound lead generation machine or a virtual brochure just taking up space? How strategic is your marketing and is it creating value or just costs? In this post we will discuss how to identify if you have any broken windows in your marketing.

This week all the news and radio stations are sharing the story about Ariana Grande’s new Kanji tattoo and how it says something totally different than it was supposed to say. Ariana went through the pain and cost of having a tattoo on her palm and wanted it to say “ 7 rings” to promote her new Album. What it did say was “small charcoal grill”. When she was informed of this error she immediately went back and had it corrected. Now her Tattoo reads “small charcoal grill finger heart” Huh? I have heard people laughing about this mistake and the star herself is making light of it. The trouble is she assumed people would read the tattoo as she does left to right then top to bottom. Here’s the trouble you read Japanese right to left. She shared a picture of her hand as seen below.

How could she let this happen?

How could such a fun message get so screwed up?

How could a promotion strategy become such a market joke now?

Ariana had a vision and she went to someone she trusted to execute that vision. She had a strategy, she invested money, time and pain to have her vision become a reality. Sound familiar?What if you discovered all the time, pain and cost you put into marketing today is a joke to your target customers?

What if I told you your marketing may be sending the wrong message or no message at all to your customers?

What if your customers read your promotional material and laugh and ridicule your company instead of want to learn more and want to buy from you?

Ouch…that’s not so funny anymore.

In my last post we discussed Broken Window theory. If you missed it, this is work completed by psychologist Philip Zinbardo from Stanford who ran an experiment and it showed if you allow small crimes it will create chaos and even law abiding citizens will commit crime. The longer you allow small crimes the more serious crimes increase. In my last post I shared signs, broken windows you should look for in your sales organization. If they exist they must be repaired or replaced to have a sales team that meets and or exceeds it sales and profit growth targets.

Does your marketing efforts have broken windows that need to be repaired?

Do you know where to look?

Below are some common marketing broken windows you need to look for and repair before your marketing efforts can create the value they were meant to drive.

No web site

A web site that is a virtual brochure not a strategic lead generation tool

Bounce rate greater than 70%

Not knowing what a bounce rate is

Not understanding who your ideal customers are and why they are ideal for your business

Not knowing and understanding the language of your customers

No buyer personas

Your vision is about marketing activities today not strategies for future

Not knowing what a buyer persona is

Salespeople are selling naked: do not know what sales tools you have or where to find them

Salespeople are not using new sales tools because they so not work

Salespeople creating their own sales tools

You do not understand the current voice of your customers’

Do not understand the problems you solve for your targeted customer

Do not have clear-targeted markets

If you search for problems you solve on Google and your company is not found on first page (ideally in the top three)

You are in B2B space and marketing believes “content marketing” is only for B2C

No content strategy

No thought leadership published in your markets and industries

No content map

Not speaking at industry trade events

Do not understand how buyers buy today

No WebEx strategy to demonstrate your team’s knowledge

Do not understand what buyers need to buy today

Do not understand the buyer journeys of your buyers today

No blog

All your marketing talks more about you than the problems you solve

No LinkedIn presence or strategy

Someone on marketing team says: “Our buyers do not shop for products like ours on the internet”

No Facebook presence or strategy

No Twitter presence or strategy

Not leveraging pintrest and instagram

Your team cannot all agree on your target audience

You do not have enough team members to execute effective marketing

No You-Tube content

If you publish content you share same content in every social platform

Your content is selling not educating

Your content is gobbledygook (check out his link gobbledygook manifesto)

Does your team have any of the above broken windows that need repaired?

Is your web traffic growing each month?

Are your inbound leads growing each month?

Have you strategically created a community…your tribe?

Are your inbound leads converting into sales and profits?

What is the sale close rate on inbound leads?

Or does your marketing say “small charcoal grill finger heart” and you don’t even know?

Running a market leading business is very difficult. It starts with being customer centric and intimately listening and understanding your customer’s voice.

Marketing teams that add tremendous value know how to leverage the voice of their ideal customers and they strategically speak the language of their customers correctly. You must clearly understand your customers’ problems, solve them and capture the success stories and share them in strong content.

If you have any of the broken windows above in your marketing please repair them. The longer they are allowed to exist the more time your competitors are winning business you could have won.

As for Ariana Grande? TMZ just reported she now has a $1.5 million opportunity to remove the tattoo LazerAway.

Talk about jumping on an urgent problem and being able to solve it brilliantly and have all her fans and media share the problems you solve to a key target demographic ! Excellent Strategy!

In our next post we will discuss broken windows in leadership you need to repair.

Sell More: Become a Modern Seller

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Are your salespeople seen as “just another rep” or a strategic partner who brings insights and delivers value? Are your salespeople focused on finding unresolved problems with their accounts or commission junkies needing their next fix? Amy Franko’s new book: The Modern Seller will help your salespeople understand what buyers want and need in a salesperson today. The Modern Seller accurately depicts what the sales landscape is like today and provides 5 practical tips to help your salespeople drive top results.

How are your salespeople today differentiating your product and or services in a sea of seemingly similar services?

I think we all can agree buyers today are more knowledgeable. With a click of a mouse they can find product features and benefits, competitors, pricing, and your customer’s comments. It’s now all out there and buyers are skilled at finding it quickly.

So how does your company win?

What if how your salespeople sell became your point of differentiation and value for your customers?

If you want your salespeople to differentiate themselves in our often crowed and highly competitive markets they need to become: Modern Sellers.

What is A Modern Seller?

A modern seller is recognized as a differentiator in their customer’s business and the value of their product or service isn’t fully realized without them. A modern seller ‘s customer sees the work they do together as strategic to their competitive advantage”

Amy Franko

Who wouldn’t want their salespeople seen as: “strategic to their customers competitive advantage”…right?

How do we help “sales reps” evolve into modern sellers?

The author shares 5 dimensions of modern sellers today.

Agile

Entrepreneurial

Holistic

Social

Ambassador

For example the Entrepreneurial dimension is critical to sales success today. You want your salespeople running their area of responsibility as if were their own business. You want them making decisions on how to spend their time to drive the greatest return. Our sellers today must have a balance between strategic thinking and executing to be a top performer today.

The Author unpacks each of the dimensions and shares not only why it is important today but also how to do it. She provides spreadsheet tools your sales teams can use like how to calculate: Loyalty Value and Lifetime value.

In The Modern Seller Amy Franko shares practical insights regarding what behaviors our salespeople must have today to be seen as strategic parts and trusted advisors by their customers.

I highly recommend you add The Modern Seller to your sales library and apply its 5 principles with your sales team.

Are you a Prisoner to an Out dated Sales Process? Break Free with VOC and Sales Enablement

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In my last post I shared how to determine if your sales team is following an out dated sales process. If your team is experiencing declining sales, lower profit per sale, losing orders you should have won and a decline in your sales close % you have a out dated sales process. If your sales team can’t seem to open new markets or sell new products you have an outdated sales process. In this post I share how you can stop being a prisoner to an out dated sales process and break free of poor sales results.

The first step in solving any problem is clearly defining the issues and impacts or as I like to say: “ throwing the skunk on the table”.

Sales is a changing process in today’s markets and we must constantly be sensing those changes and adjusting to them.

Some sales problems sales teams are experiencing today include:

Buyers going dark, you thought you had good sales meetings and now no feedback
Longer sales process from first meeting to close
More influencers involved in purchase decisions
Gross margin per sale declining
More competitors
Strong price pressure
Buyers commoditizing products and services
Up to 70% of buying journey is over before buyers speak with a salesperson
Buyers choosing to do nothing
Buyers choosing to solve their needs internally
Difficulty in having discussions with buyers
Faster service requirements
Buyers wanting JIT and not large stocking orders
Buyers needing 100% on time delivery
Higher quality expectation
Real time conversations – wanting answers now when they have them, immediate response

The above are some challenges sales teams are facing with buyers today and there are many more.

When sales, marketing, customer service, Hr and operations align sales teams break free of the above sales problems and win more business.

The trouble is sales and marketing are often not working strategically together and this leaves them both in a prison of their own making.

Are you familiar with what is referred to as : The Prisoner’s Dilemma ?

I found the below explanation on Wikipedia in case this is new to you.

The prisoner’s dilemma is a standard example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two completely “rational” individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and named it, “prisoner’s dilemma”

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent.

The offer is:

If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison
If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa)
If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge)

It is implied that the prisoners will have no opportunity to reward or punish their partner other than the prison sentences they get, and that their decision will not affect their reputation in the future. Because betraying a partner offers a greater reward than cooperating with them, all purely rational self-interested prisoners would betray the other, and so the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them to betray each other.^[1] The interesting part of this result is that pursuing individual reward logically leads both of the prisoners to betray, when they would get a better reward if they both kept silent. In reality, humans display a systemic bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games, much more so than predicted by simple models of “rational” self-interested action.^[2][3][4][5] A model based on a different kind of rationality, where people forecast how the game would be played if they formed coalitions and then maximized their forecasts, has been shown to make better predictions of the rate of cooperation in this and similar games, given only the payoffs of the game.^[6]

So what does the “prisoners dilemma” have to do with fixing the above sales problems teams are facing today?

A great deal!

When I helped sales and marketing teams in the past, I always heard the same things…

Marketing would share…

Sales is a bunch of “prima donna’s” and they want everything served to them spoon fed on a silver platter
Sales has no appreciation for marketing
We spend so much time and money creating sales tools and we latter find no one is using them
I can’t produce great content if I don’t know what’s going on in the market and sales will not take me on calls
We give sales leads and they can’t close them
We are crushing our leads generated goals but sales can’t seem to close them
Why can’t sales sell new products?
Why can’t sales sell more of what we have?
Why can’t sales win new business in new markets we identified?

Sales would also say….

Marketing has no idea what its really like out here..Selling today
Marketing spends all this time and money on new brochures and new sell sheets but they are all ”company speak” I can’t use them.
Marketing feels so distant from what is really going on out here today its like they think our customers are like they were 10 years ago
Marketing gives me “lists” not “leads” ( there’s a big difference) to chase and they are worthless. It takes time to follow up on each and none of them are actually leads.
My buyers say they can’t find what they need on our web site
I can’t find the sales tools I need quickly in our system
We have the worst web site in our industry
I spend more time building sales tool than selling anymore
if our product had just one more feature I could sell it
Marketing launches this new product, or asks us to open new markets but we don’t have the tools to do so

The Prisoners Dilemma…instead of working together many teams choose to stay in a poor performance prison for years to come.They betray each other and in the process lengthens their time in poor results prison.

What if Marketing and Sales would stop complaining about each other and defending their silos and work together? If they did they can both break free from the prison of poor performance metrics and in about 8-12 months be free to be the market leaders they were meant to be.

How do sales and marketing teams break free?

Voice of the customer

Sales Enablement

Since I have shared close to 20 articles on the voice of the customer and shared the financial the impact this work has on sales and bottom line, in this post I will discuss the power of sales enablement.

What is Sales Enablement?

Lets quickly review 5 definitions…

A strategic, cross-functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by providing integrated content, training and coaching services for salespeople and front-line sales managers along the entire customer’s buying journey, powered by technology.

Brain shark

Sales enablement is the technology, processes, and content that empowers sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity..

Hubspot

“Aligning marketing processes and goals, and then arming sales with tools to improve sales execution and drive revenue.”

The Pedowitz Group

Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help sales people sell more effectively.

TOPO Blog

“Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips sales teams to have consistently effective engagements with prospects and customers throughout the buyer’s journey.” – Highspot

From my experience, Sales Enablement is about intimately knowing how your buyers buy today and what they need to buy today. Secondly it’s about having the right content at the right time in the buying journey, in the right format that helps your buyers buy. Sales enablement is about teaching your salespeople a sales process that mirrors how buyers are buying. It is about serving your customers .It is about training and coaching salespeople on what you have, where they can find it and when they should use it.

How about your sales and marketing teams?

Are your teams hitting “their goals” but your overall company is losing?

Do you have a sales enablement? How is it working?

Is there any reason why sales enablement would not work in your sales and marketing efforts’?

When sales and marketing teams start working together strategically with voice of the customer and sales enablement, sales and profits increase, new products achieve ROI targets and customer satisfaction scores climb. Sales becomes less of an art and more of a science.

In future posts we will unpack sales enablement and how you can use sales enablement to break free from a prison of outdated sales processes and grow sales profitably.

How do I correct sales problems after a market shift?

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Your sales team was aligned and equipped to have a strong sales growth year. Your team created sales playbooks, buyer personas and new sales tools to insure you hit your sales goal (this time). Your team was building a strong momentum and then it feels like someone turned off the sales faucet. What just happened? What probably occurred is your team has experienced a market shift. How do you fix sales after a market shift? In this post I will share the strategy I have used when we experienced a market shift. ( and it’s not likely you are starting in the right place)

Before we discuss the strategy to refocus your sales efforts I want to remind you of a quote from my last post that shared various caused of market shifts. I used the below quote for years as a filter when asked to help companies in the middle of a market shift or more often after a market shift.

“Are you prepared to stake everything, change anything, and do whatever it takes— even if it means altering long familiar habits, redeveloping precious programs, and redeploying sacred assets?”

– Tom Bandy

A market shift will cause your company to change and adapt to the new reality. The degree of the shift and the severity of the shift’s impact on sales performance will determine just how much your team will need to adapt.

I can hear some skeptics saying …”We have been doing business this way for 15 years and we do not need to change, we need to wait until the market goes back to normal” The trouble is when your market shifts, you will never go back to normal.

Don’t believe me when I say how much markets change and shift? OK, how many people reading this have a Myspace account? From 2005 to 2008 Myspace was the most visited website in the United States, even more than Google! Today? Myspace is ranked 1272 on most visited website. What happened? A shift! New companies felt the shift and created products buyers wanted to buy.

Or listen to a leader who transformed shopping with Zappos.com.

“There’s a trans-formative shift in business, and what worked before is no longer an option. It’s time for evolved entrepreneurs, visionary creators, and change makers to rewrite the rules of business for the 21st century.”

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com

Or read one of my past posts about when sales plans fail and how to adapt.

Do you agree markets shift ?

Assuming you are willing to adapt and change: “how we have always done things around here” in this post I will share the process I have used over the years to help sales teams fix sales problems due to a market shift.

Meet with your key customers who represented 80% of your sales opportunity before the shift. What you are looking for in these meetings is to clearly understand what shift occurred, when, and more importantly how your buyers plan to react to this shift. Having faced market shifts many times the first reaction for most sales teams is to target new customers. You may need to do this if your current market is not likely to produce sales to meet your sales goals. You must clearly understand what changed, how your buyers are and have reacted to that change.

Improve overall buying experience. Take the information you have gathered and update the way you deliver solutions to your market based on the way they want to buy and receive them.

Explore for technology shifts. Was the shift due to a technology shift? (72%) of business leaders think technology will transform their company’s competitive landscape in the coming years according to an IBM report .

While meeting with your key accounts ask if there are other departments within their organization that would value your team’s distinctive competence. Why? One of the reasons why buyers do not buy is risk. Can this new vendor execute what they are promising? Is their quality as good as they say? Will it be easy to work with them of difficult? The more a buyer feels there is risk the less likely they are to engage with a new vendor. The exception occurs when you are a:”vendor of record”. Your company is in their system. You are set up to receive purchase orders, get paid and so on. Assuming you have done a great job you can share your on time service statistics, your billing accuracy and have your other buyers refer you.

Based on meeting with your accounts you need to gather what you learned and create the following I shared In a post some time ago :

Write a market truths document based on gathered current data

Highlight strategies and tactics in your current sales plans that are no longer in alignment with the market of today

Asses your internal truths, capabilities, discard action items that do not support your objectives

If your team lacks a motivation to serve your market, create one

Determine your ideal customer profile

Write a plan you will execute based on the information you have gathered from the market and your capabilities. (allow some flexibility, design your sales plan to be Agile)

Once you complete the above you need to determine if making adjustments in your current markets with current customers will provide sufficient sales opportunity to achieve your sales goal. If yes proceed with executing your plan and you will not need the following steps.

After you have gathered your current market truths and internal truths and you determine your market does not have the opportunity necessary to achieve your sales goals please continue with this process and complete the following steps:

Find other accounts in the same market you have not sold yet. In most of the companies I have helped their “customers” have represented 20% to 30% of the entire market. In this step you will identify other accounts in the same market that are likely to have similar problems as the account(s) you have been selling. Keep in mind when business slows down buyers have time. They have time to meet with new vendors and they often have new goals like specific cost savings targets. When you discover this to be the case make sure the solutions you propose are shared in a way that speaks to the buyer’s company and personal goals.

Explore surrounding markets that include accounts buying products like those you supply. I look for adjacent markets that are interconnected to the markets I have been serving.

Expand your search for new markets that have similar problems your current market has. The key is to clearly understand your companies’ distinctive competence. What is your product or services’ value proposition? Is that value transferable into new markets? Ideally you want to find one to three accounts and test your assumption. In this process you will learn new information and a new language for the new market. Assuming your test clearly demonstrates value, you will want to scale that solution in the language of this new market.

Design new Innovate solutions if your current products no longer solve your current customer’s problems.

Share innovative new products in your current markets.

Share product innovations in adjunct markets

Share product innovations in new markets

As you lead your team through the above process you need to stop when a step will achieve your desired sales goals. For example, let’s say as you explored adjacent markets and you found a number of new accounts who agree with your value proposition, have agreed to buy your products and their sales will help you meet goal. Stop and execute. Stop following the steps and focus on executing in the adjacent market. Why? Why wouldn’t you have us do all of the above just to play it safe? Three reasons;

Focus – you want to lead your sales team with as clear a focus as possible. When you lack focus your team will be “very busy” but fail to achieve desired results.

ROI- The farther your team expands from your known core business the less RIO you will realize in the short term.

Timing – Often when sales teams experience a problem they have a short window to fix the sales problem. The farther you move from your core the longer it will take to win sales.

Have your sales taken a downward turn?

Did your sales team experience a recent market shift?

How does your sales team fix sales problems due to a market shift?

We serve dynamic markets and we need to expect them to change. When you experience a market shift the key to reacting and fixing your sales is clearly understanding the shift and having a systematic approach to finding new sales to insure your sales goals are still achieved. Most inexperienced sales managers will quickly launch into a new market. Why take this strategy that has a history of the slowest contribution, lower ROI per sales transaction and highest risk when a current market or a market close to your core will fix your sales problem? The above is the process I have used for years and I welcome comments on other processes and advice for when market shifts occur.

What if Fixing your Sales problem was Simple?

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I love the above quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. What if fixing your sales problem was simple? What if your sales team could be great? Far too often I see clients try too many tactics and fail to connect to a core strategy to understand then completely solve the problem. I hear owners and CEO’s describe sales problems that need fixed in many ways; We need “more sales”. We need “increased sales”. How do we “sell new products”? How do we “increase our sales close rate”? How people describe sales problems they want to fix varies but what they all want and need is to create sales velocity that I shared in a post some time ago…

Sales Velocity is Sales Acceleration, with Direction and creates Momentum.

Easy to say, but the perception is it is hard to do…Not so fast!

What if I told you growing your sales profitably is actually “Simple” if you focus on one strategy?

I was asked to be the keynote speaker for a large local company having their national meeting recently. I asked the person in charge of the meeting what they wanted me to speak about? How can I best serve those in attendance? What is the outcome you want from me kicking off your national meeting? He responded: we want what everyone wants; more sales, higher profits, and product launches that hit and surpass our product launch sales goals. Can you share how to fix these sales problems? No Problem I shared it’s what I have done for over 30 years, I will give your team a great experience.

To get my creative juices flowing I did some Google searches to read advice this group may have already found…

Increase sales : 623 million results

Increase Sales and Profits : 270 million results

Fix Sales Problems: 85 million results

The trouble is so many of these results is they jump right into tactics and lack a focused strategy. No wonder so many companies struggle with increasing sales profitably. What advice should you listen to? What programs, training, coaching should you follow?

What I am about to say may cause some people to say;” It can’t be that easy”, but I have case study after case study that proves it is.

If you want to fix all your sales problems and increase sales and profits you must …..Are you ready?

Know your customers and markets. (That’s it …simple right?)

“The reason sales goals are missed and sales increases fail to happen is companies jump into sales tactics without clearly knowing their customers.”

Mark Allen Roberts

Teams try tactics until they find one that seems to work. The trouble with this approach is we serve dynamic markets. Markets shift quickly and we must constantly be in tune with our customers and markets. We must understand the process they use to buy, the criteria they must have to make buying decisions and clearly understand the problems they are solving today.

Who is the worst person to inform you of market shifts and understand unresolved problems?…Salespeople! (Kills me to say this) Why is this the case? For the same reason they are the worst people to conduct win loss interviews. They are focused on selling. It’s what you pay them to do. The trouble in most sales organizations is they have been so focused on selling they fail to practice active listening. Therefore they miss the problems buyers share. What is the #1 reason buyers don’t buy? Hint it’s not price… as I shared in this post it’s the buyer felt the salesperson failed to understand the problem and therefore they did not trust the solution they presented would fix the problem completely.

So who in your organization is focused on knowing your customers and market?

After sharing this I paused and watched the reaction in the room. I could tell some had this look like: it can’t be that easy…that simple. I am sure the salespeople in the room were thinking: we already know that, what a waste of time…who is this guy, I know my customers, and why did they bring him in? I had one marketing person approach me after the event and say; we have wanted answers to these questions but sales won’t let us meet with customers. In case you are thinking the same thing, let me ask the same questions I asked this room to turn this speech (this post) into a discussion….

Who are your customers? (Notice I did not say who pays you, who are your customers?)

Who are your buyer personas? … Are they predominantly male/ female? Age? Education and background? How do they shop? Where do they shop? How are they paid? How are they measured inside their organizations? What discipline do they come from…Engineering? Accounting ? Human resources? What are some current market problems others like them have?

What problems are they facing today they may or may have had a year ago?

How do they describe them in their words?

What do your buyers need to make purchases today?

How big are their problems?

What is the cost if they do not solve these problems?

How do problems like this show themselves?

Who influences the sale at your customers?

What do the influencers need to make purchase recommendations?

When your buyers search do they use a desktop or a mobile device?

I asked a number of industry specific questions …. (Because everyone is convinced their market is unique and special and to help those who may have tuned out want to engage and it worked)

People in attendance were sharing some feedback but for the most part the questions I need answered to fix their sales problems were not answered. Some of the answers were true 10 years ago, but based on my limited research prior to the event I knew were no longer the case. Some of the answers were fresh off their web site and were described as features not solutions to problems. I wish this was unique but it’s not. As I shared in one of my most popular posts: the reason most product launches fail is mullet marketing.

Mullet Marketing is a terms I have used for years and it implies very short efforts in the front, the researching the problem and customers. However when sales fail to meet plan its long on the back side, all hands on deck. In this phase sales, marketing and others are scrambling to gain answers they should have had prior to launch. I argue the same is true for all products we sell every day. So much energy and budget is spent on training, marketing, CRM systems and very little time is spent understanding and knowing your customers today.

Would you like a “simple “test to see how tuned in to your customers and market your team is?

Most of the people who read my content have midlevel or senior level roles, please ask the above questions to your teams today both marketing and sales, (don’t be alarmed even your own team does not have the same answers or no answers) . Then call three customers that you probably have a relationship with and explain how your company is always looking for better ways to serve your customers and ask them the above questions? How many did your team get right? How many did you get right? From my experience less than 20% of the companies I work with have most of the answers to the above questions. Even more disturbing is what I find most often…they share answers that were true 10 years ago but are no longer relevant. If that is the case their sales training is dated, their sales tools fail to help sales flow through the funnel, and worst of all the value proposition your salespeople are using no longer resonates and this all creates sales problems. If your value proposition is too dated it also damages your brand because you are not tuned in to what buyers require today.

If you want to fix your sales problems and increase your sales and profits: Know your customers!

The strategy of knowing your customers is a very simple one. What you must do is focus on knowing your customers and market to remove the stress of missing your sales goals. As a recent post shared one was to remove stress is to force you to focus. Once your team achieves a clear understanding of your customers and markets it causes rapid profitable sales increases.

If you agree with the “what” that needs to be done but you are struggling with the “how” my next post will share an innovative way to capture what you need to know to not only survive but thrive with your customers and markets.

How to Create “Sales Velocity”; Turn “Street Legal Salespeople” into Servant Salespeople

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It’s not enough to just be “street legal”

I am often asked by business owners and leaders; “What is the best way to create sales growth that becomes repeatable and predictable?” I prefer to phrase this somewhat differently to achieve what the business leaders really want;

“How can I create real Sales Velocity?”

When I hear someone say;

I want more sales

I need more sales

How do I increase sales quickly?

What I immediately think is ; how do we create sales velocity for this team? In this post I will share one way to insure you build a foundation for achieving and often surpassing your sales goals by creating Servant Salespeople .

So what is “sales velocity”? In a previous post I said;

Sales Velocity is Sales Acceleration, with Direction and creates Momentum.

Sales velocity is not just “more sales”. When you ask your team to “go get more sales”, or my favorite with regards to hitting their sales growth goals; “just make it happen” you are in essence saying any sale is a good sale. We all know this is not true, but what will happen is sales will take a shotgun approach to the market and often bring in business you may not want and worse yet may not be able to execute effectively and create brand damaged buyers. In addition to often permanently damaging your brand in the marketplace you also run the risk of turning your salespeople into “snake oil salesmen” and they will make all kinds of promises your product or service was never meant to do. If left unchecked you will receive crazy orders you never should have received from customers you will never extend credit to and your team will jump through costly hoops to try to fulfill them.

When I used to conduct sales and marketing seminars, I would share the worst kind of business to win is one order. Once you win that “one order” you now have the liability of servicing it, hearing customer complaints (often now through social media), and sales assumes the position you want more orders like this.

I was in church last Sunday at Grace United Methodist Church and Pastor Don was talking about how it’s not enough to be a “street legal Christian”. Don does a great job of telling stories that have analogies to help people understand the message. In this message he shared how he and a buddy when they were 16 years old had this old beater of a car. He shared how the steering wheel had about 90 degrees of play in it and how the floorboards were all rusted out and you could see the pavement while driving. They had a rear brake light broken out so they covered it with cellophane and used red paint to make it look and somewhat work like a brake light. The car had all kinds of issues but technically it was “street legal”. The car met the basic requirements to be on the road, but really should not have been driven as it was an accident waiting to happen.

Don later pulled this analogy full circle and shared how Jesus taught us we are not to just be street legal Christians that go to church, maybe read a bible once in a while and go through the motions. As I drove home it dawned on me I have seen this many times over the past 30 years in leading sales turnarounds with “street legal salespeople” too. They have the title of sales and they go through the motions of sales but really do not have the heart to serve their clients and solve their customer’s problems.

What is a Street Legal Salesperson you might ask?

Received some basic product training.

They have some understanding of how to reach buyers.

They want to hit their sales goals and corresponding commission checks.

They often have some bad sales habits.

They come close to hitting their sales goal each year, not terrible but not sales super stars.

They try hard.

They are often commission junkies. (not their fault by the way)

At or below the acceptable targeted profit margin for your product or service.

Have problem customers, who complain, pay late or not at all.

When you hear them on the phone with a customer you cringe, but if it works… ah what the heck…

They go through the motion of sales…

The role of sales has evolved over the last 30 years from my perspective. At one time the salesperson was the keeper of the information keys. They did not need to be as good at listening and understanding customer needs as they needed to be aggressive and persistent and know their product inside and out. The salesperson had all the product information and used their sales product binders to answer questions as they arose. They worked hard on relationship selling. Back in the day we taught salespeople the objections buyers would probably make and how to overcome objections.

Next we saw sales consultants/ consultative selling emerge as product experts who would help buyers understand how their product or service might solve the buyers’ problems. In essence they were sales translators who translated what their products did in a language buyers understood once they found a problem they can solve.

Then the internet shifted the power from the salesperson to the buyer. The buyer now can Google almost anything and now has access to the product information keys. We have seen social selling emerge as buyers investigate products and their salespeople with tools like LinkedIn, blogs, online case studies and industry group forums where they openly share poor buying experiences. Buyers are connecting with companies who are seen as thought leaders and they make it their quest to understand buyer problems, criteria and buying processes.

I believe the next sales person emerging is the Servant Salesperson.

What are the characteristics of Servant Salespeople?

They understand the various buyer personas in their market.

They understand why buyers buy and how buyers buy.

They understand the buying process and criteria buyers use to buy.

They are constantly sensing their market for any changes in how buyers buy.

They listen for problems buyers’ share that can be solved by their product or service.

They have a continuous improvement approach to both product and sales training.

They do online research prior to reaching out to a potential customer.

They have large social networks with many customer referrals praising their service.

They ask open ended questions to understand buyer problems.

They seek first to serve and believe if they solve customer problems income will follow.

The days of snake oil salesmen promising their products and services do whatever the buyer needs is over. Buyers are seeking authentic sales servants who seek to win their business by completely solving their problems,providing the best total buying experience, and salespeople who help them buy. Buyers today see a commission junkie coming from a mile away. Aggressive salespeople are blocked and filtered with email, voice mail and gate keepers. Buyers are looking for salespeople who are focused on serving them.

What stage of selling is your sales team in today?

Would a “servant salesperson” be welcome in your organization? Why or why not?

Why wouldn’t a buyer in your industry welcome a “servant salesperson”?

Just as we are not designed to be “street legal Christians” buyers today do not want “street legal salespeople” who go through the motions of trying to solve the buyers problems.

Servant Salespeople create sales velocity because they authentically seek to solve buyer problems.

Improve Sales: Stop Creating “Snake Oil Salesmen”

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making promises you can not deliver on

The role of sales is a difficult one. You face more rejection than acceptance and have to break through the many roadblocks in connecting with potential customers you can solve problems for. We are paid to “make it happen” often in environments that are not conducive to sales growth both externally in our markets but also internally, in our own organizations. A common problem organizations face today is they are turning their sales consultants into “snake oil salesmen” because their operations is failing to do what they said they would do.

When you study why buyers buy as I have, you hear things like;

I buy from people, companies who take the time to understand my needs, the problems I am trying to solve, and who “do what they say they will do”.

… let’s boil this down a little more;

I buy from people who listen, hear, and I can trust.

We have seen many changes in our markets over the past 7-8 years in how buyers buy as I have discussed in past posts. The reality I hope everyone will agree with is that how buyers buy has changed. As I have shared ; If you have not changed your sales process in the last six months….it is broken and you are losing sales you should have won.

We have seen many changes within our organizations in the last 7-8 years;

Less People

Less budget

Less time to do our jobs

Less inventory of finished goods

Less product in work in process

Less inventory at our customers

Less time to deliver, just in time

…and more competition, often from competitors who are so aggressive it feels like they must not truly know their costs ( or they are that mush better than we are)

My challenge in this post is with all these changes do you really know , based on your capabilities and market realities of today, what your organization is able to do? able to execute regularly, consistently, predictably? If not your salespeople in the market working with you most valuable assets; customers and potential customers and making promises you can not deliver on. To put it another way;

When your company fails to do what it says it does and or will do, you turn your sales consultants into “snake oil salesmen” and it negatively impacts your trust factor.

Back in the days of the wild west there were traveling salesmen who would stop in a town and sell snake oil. When we Google the term “snake oil salesmen” we find;

” a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is himself or herself a fraud, quack, charlatan, and the like.”

Snake oil’s origins are believed to come from an oil the Chinese laborers brought to America made from a Chinese water snake believed to cure joint pain. However the snake oil salesmen of the wild west were known to plant people in the crowd who would lie and say how the oil cured their various ailments. Snake oil salesmen had a sales process of basically traveling town to town and never selling the same people twice because once you bought the snake oil and found it failed to do what you were promised, you did not trust that salesmen.

When your salespeople serve customers , win an order from buyers it is based on a foundation of trust. Buyers naturally , because they have been burned so many times over the years ( by other traveling snake oil salesmen) do not trust salespeople. So trust must be earned and the simplest way of earning trust is execution. ( doing what you say you will do in the small things and the big things, over and over again) When your operations team fails to execute what the sales people have been told to promise, it immediately breaks trust and creates brand damage. This is particularly a urgent problem when you fail to deliver on promises to new customers as we only have one chance to have a “good first date”. ( first order experience)

The unfortunate reality in the world your salespeople live in day in and day out is their buyer’s perception is the reality they must deal with. The buyer rarely talks to your shipping department, plant operations group, your purchasing department, quality, and they are not aware of the internal challenges your team may be facing nor do they care. What they do care about is buying from companies who consistently do what they say they are going to do.

So let me ask you again;

Is your current operational performance turning your sales consultants into snake oil salesman in the eyes of your customers?

Are your salespeople making promises based on a dated information set that was probably true five years ago but not true today?

Is your team aware of operational issue but treating them as politically incorrect secrets you hope your buyers and salespeople do not discover?

Are the competencies you share in your brochures and web site still true today?

What expectations do your buyers have, and how is your team performing to those expectations?

If your team is not focused on understanding what your buyers need, what your salespeople are promising, and what your organization is capable of executing today you need to be and you need to reboot your business.

In my next post I will share how to quickly access if buyers believe your salespeople are snake oil salesmen and how to quickly repair this perception.

Attention CEO’s and CFO’s; Do you have a “Sales and Marketing Funnel” or Bucket? …the answer may surprise you, take a short quiz and know for sure

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do you have a marketing and sales funnel or a leaking sales bucket?

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could have our sales and marketing run like our plant? We could have key indicators, a proven methodology, and process with predictable results…”I hear business owners and leaders say this to me often once they relax and truly share their thoughts and concerns. Far too often CEO’s and CFO’s think/hope their marketing and sales teams have a defined process that is efficient and effective to drive predictable results. Unfortunately, if you really understand and look at leading indicators what they think is a marketing and sales funnel is actually a sales bucket. In this post I will share how to determine if your team has a marketing and sales funnel or a sales bucket that leaks an occasional sale or two.

I was asked by the chairman of the board of a company to have lunch. He heard through his venture capital and private equity network what I do, and he was warned early on my approach is a bit different. I enjoy meeting new people and business problems are drawn to me. I enjoy learning new things, facing new challenges and each meeting like this one always teaches me something. Once we made it through the pleasantries it was not too long for me to hear his concerns;

Why can’t sales and marketing be like my manufacturing plant? Predictable, scalable, and provide me sales forecasts I can count on?

It drives me nuts to know we are spending so much money on marketing and I do not see an immediate and often long term return on that investment, but I am afraid to stop making it in case it would hurt the performance we are seeing.

What we need is a repeatable sales process. We need the sales guys to be more efficient at closing business and bringing in the revenue.

Based on our moderate to poor sales results over the last few years, do I have the right salespeople or should I be looking for new ones?

I feel like the CEO / President is asking for more money each year for marketing, but I am not seeing a corresponding increase in sales…why?

We seem to have high turnover in sales, we lost some good sales people and this has to be expensive and hurting our results.

About the time we finished eating he said; “what do you think? Is this something you can help with, can you fix sales problems like this?”

I have and often do “fix sales problems.” However more often than not what CEO’s and business owners want to hear on how to fix sales problems is not the way they anticipate. In most cases they think they have a repeatable sales process, but they don’t.

They think they have a marketing funnel that is dumping primed and ready leads to their salespeople and their sales people have a proven way to close them quickly. They think they need more sales training. They think they need to better motivate their sales people to perform. No, no, no and in most cases no again.

What I have observed in most cases is leaders, particularly those not from marketing and sales believe they have a marketing and sales funnel, but in reality they have a bucket, with an every so small hole in the bottom that occasionally leaks a sale or two. Left unchecked this marketing and sales bucket becomes a Chinese water torture to your senior leadership team as they try to explain and predict future revenues and ROI with owners and investors. As one thought leader just shared, what they think is a funnel of live and vibrant leads and opportunities is actually pipeline stench. The pipelines may look full and make you feel good in senior management meetings Monday mornings…but are actually full of dead and rotting opportunities polluting your entire marketing and sales process.

Do you have a Marketing and Sales Funnel or Bucket?

What is your lead to close %? Do you know it?
Do you have defined stages in the marketing and sales pipeline? What are they?
Can you share the # in each phase?
If I met with your latest new salesperson, could they share your repeatable sales process with me?
Does sales and marketing have an understood definition of the terms; opportunity, prospect, lead?
Can you tell me the average time a new person you engage with spends in your process until they buy or die?
Can you share the qualifying questions you use?
Do you have the top three buyer personas identified and have you mapped out their buying journey?
Have you added new sales tools in the last 6-12 months?
Does your web site speak in the tone of the problems you solve?

If the answers I receive to the above have three or more “no’s” you have Marketing and Sales Bucket not a funnel.

How about your company?

Do you have a “Marketing Funnel”, “Sales Funnel” a “Repeatable Sales process”?….are you sure? (you need to be)

What other questions could we ask to determine if you have a funnel of vibrant buyers anxious to buy and solve their problems, or a bunch of rotting dead leads just polluting your management process?

In the market of today there is no excuse to not have marketing and sales funnel that is a systematic process driven tool to maximize your team’s effectiveness and do so in the most efficient way.

So did this post make you nervous, anxious, and maybe a bit angry? As your team for the answers to the above that I use to diagnose teams I serve, and you will quickly understand your internal truths. Once you do, you are well on your way to driving a process that gets results. In my next post I will share some techniques I have used to turn marketing and sales buckets into funnels.