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2010 Sales goals – Q1 Review

It should look like that!

You will recall that in late 2009 we looked at how to set sales goals for 2010. Well it may have escaped your notice but it’s getting to the end of Q1, so how are you doing? With a week and a half to go, now is about the right time to start worrying if you’re not there yet. So to help you along the way here are a few short term and then longer term ideas to help you achieve your sales goals.

Tactical

  • Don’t panic. It won’t help and customers, like dogs, can smell fear. If they know you’re desperate and it’s end-of-quarter, expect some “take it or leave it (until Q2)” low-ball offers.
  • If you need to chase someone up to try and get an order placed, now is the time to do it. If you leave it until the last week of the quarter sure as eggs is eggs the one person you need will be on vacation.
  • Take a systematic look at your Q1 numbers, particularly if you are coming up short. What can you sensibly try to pull in from Q2?
  • If it looks like you are going to miss your numbers through something beyond your control (e.g. customer went bust) now is the time to try and negotiate something on your Q1 quota. When the numbers are in it’s too late.

Strategic

  • Now is the time to start setting your goals for Q2, although you may need to fine-tune them based on Q1 achievements. All too many companies wait until the dust has settled on one quarter before setting goals for the next. If you’re not careful those goals aren’t finalised until you’re midway through the quarter.
  • Take the time to review goals for you and your team for the whole of 2010.
    • Are they unrealistic?
    • Has anything critical changed?
    • Are they too easy?
    • Do I need to re-deploy my resources based on Q1 performance and markets?
    • Do I need to re-prioritise my customer list?
    • Should I reset my goals for the rest of the year?
    • Is there anybody in my team struggling? Do they need extra coaching or help?

Good luck with the end-of-quarter, I hope you hit your goals and have healthy bonuses to spend in Q2!

A prospecting no no

It’s a amazing sometimes how you find new prospects. The other evening I was in the pub with some friends and introduced a new acquaintance, Bert, to an old friend of mine, Fred. After a minute chatting it turned out that the organisation Fred worked for was a prime prospect for the service that Bert was selling. Furthermore Fred was really interested. Contact details where exchanged and the follow up arranged. Bish, bash, bosh. It doesn’t get any sweeter than that.

But… then Bert (obviously feeling very pleased) continued to rattle on for 10 minutes about the virtues of his company and products. I could see Fred’s eyes glazing over as he tried to get back to his beer. I’m certain he was by now thinking “what on Earth have I let myself in for?”

The idea with any type of prospecting (even when one lands in your lap) is to qualify the prospect and get the appointment. You do not want to get into selling at this point. It’s the wrong time and place. Your efforts may very well work against you.

Ask yourself…

  • Is my product/service a good fit for the prospect?
  • Does it solve a problem for her?
  • Are they a good fit for my company? Do I want to do business with them?
  • If so… ask for a meeting with the prospect
  • Got it? Job done, now save your selling for the big day.

I hear you knocking…

I hear you knocking…
Most sales trainers advise you not to knock the competition and in general that’s very wise advice. Early in my career I’m embarrassed to admit that I ignored it (as most inexperienced sales people do) and came a cropper. I was competing for a good size deal and from previous experience thought that the person I was competing with had questionable ethics. When it came down the final two I couldn’t help but slip this into a conversation with the customer… I thought I was doing her a real favour. As it turned out the customer knew my competitor personally. I didn’t get the order and also had a very embarrassing conversation the next time I bumped into my competitor, who had been told about my opinion of him.
So that you don’t have to learn the hard way like me, here are three problems that arise from knocking the competition…
* It reflects badly on you and can be seen as “dirty tricks”.
* You may actually raise the profile of the competitor in the eyes of your customer. For instance if all of your product comparisons are against one particular competitor you are as good as saying “these are the guys we worry about at night”.
* You open a can of worms. The customer may be enthusiastic about your comparison with the competition and start asking you how you compare on other features that aren’t so favourable to you.
However we all know that sometimes the customer will ask you how you stack up against a competitor. Or your competitor may have “knocked” you… and the customer wants to know if their facts are correct. So if you must talk about the competition…
1. Make any comparisons generic rather than specific to the competitor. So you might say “our new flanged widget offers a 20% speed increase and 10% downtime reduction compared to older unflanged designs”. This way you are seen to be making a general point and as even-handed.
2. If you are forced to comment in a one-to-one way about a competitors product talk about your features, advantages and benefits not the competitor’s short-comings. This way you are more likely to come out of it smelling of roses. Also if you try and comment on your competitor’s features you may be wrong (you haven’t been trained on them after all) and you could look foolish.
So, as ever, put your brain into gear before you your mouth goes into action. It’s tempting to take a cheap shot, especially when you think you are helping the customer but better to take the high ground.
Knocking the competition

Most sales trainers advise you not to knock the competition and in general that’s very wise advice. Early in my career I’m embarrassed to admit that I ignored it (as most inexperienced sales people do) and came a cropper. I was competing for a good size deal and from previous experience thought that the person I was competing with had questionable ethics. When it came down the final two I couldn’t help but slip this into a conversation with the customer… I thought I was doing her a real favour. As it turned out the customer knew my competitor personally. I didn’t get the order and also had a very embarrassing conversation the next time I bumped into my competitor, who had been told about my opinion of him.

So that you don’t have to learn the hard way like me, here are three problems that arise from knocking the competition…

  • It reflects badly on you and can be seen as “dirty tricks”.
  • You may actually raise the profile of the competitor in the eyes of your customer. For instance if all of your product comparisons are against one particular competitor you are as good as saying “these are the guys we worry about at night”.
  • You open a can of worms. The customer may be enthusiastic about your comparison with the competition and start asking you how you compare on other features that aren’t so favourable to you.

However we all know that sometimes the customer will ask you how you stack up against a competitor. Or your competitor may have “knocked” you… and the customer wants to know if their facts are correct. So if you must talk about the competition…

  1. Make any comparisons generic rather than specific to the competitor. So you might say “our new flanged widget offers a 20% speed increase and 10% downtime reduction compared to older unflanged designs”. This way you are seen to be making a general point and as even-handed.
  2. If you are forced to comment in a one-to-one way on a competitors product, talk about your features, advantages and benefits not the competitor’s short-comings. This way you are more likely to come out of it smelling of roses. Also if you try and comment on your competitor’s features you may be wrong (you haven’t been trained on them after all) and end up looking foolish.

So, as ever, engage your brain before putting your mouth into gear. It’s tempting to take a cheap shot, especially when you think you are helping the customer but better to take the high ground.

It’ll be alright on the night… the art of the demo

It’ll be alright on the night…
Being in tech sales has certain pluses and minuses. One of the pluses is that you get to see lots of cool technology before the guy on the street. One of the minuses is that you sometimes get to demo to state-of-the-art stuff before all of the wrinkles have been ironed-out.
If has a pound (or even dollar) for every time I’d sat in a customer meeting trying to divert attention while an applications engineer colleague desperately tried to get a piece of kit to work I’d be a rich man.
Although to a certain extent this comes with the territory there are some things you can do to minimise your chances of embarrassment…
Don’t just do a demo because you can. This is a “throw it at the wall” and see what sticks strategy. Have a very clear understanding of what the customer needs, what you want to show them and how this will advance the sale.
As the old British Army adage says “Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance”. Do a dry run before the customer meeting. Do this far enough in advance of the customer meeting that you can fix any problems that you might find. In the dry run replicate exactly what you are going to show the customer.
If you have one, take a spare. If the demo is a really important one (for instance you are going to be on stage at a major trade show) send the spare via a different route. That way if your luggage gets lost or stolen you aren’t left empty-handed.
Take all the hardware you will need. If you rely on hooking-up to a piece of customer equipment it might not work the way you expect.
Don’t let anyone else tinker with your equipment! I can recall several demos where the apps engineer to have to stop and hacek for 10 minutes because someone else had used the machine and changed the Unix directory structure.
Be open with the customer about the state of the product. Better to explain in advance that they are really lucky to be seeing something hot out of the labs… but it’s not quite there yet, than to give them the impression it’s tried and tested… and then watch it fall over.
Get feedback from the customer as you go along…
“Is that useful to you?”,
“Does that explain how you would implement feature xyz in your abc?”
“Is that enough performance for you application?”.
Try and get feedback on other demos they may have seen from competitors. Be subtle… ask how yours shapes-up, not for exact data on your competition.
If the customer doesn’t seem to be liking something ask them why. It might be something that you can easily rectify or a simple misunderstanding.
So good luck with your product demos. I guess demos really act as accelerators of the sales process. Done correctly it can move you quickly to a close, done badly it you can move you quickly back to thebeginning.

Preparing for the big demo

Preparing for the big demo

Preparing for the big demo

Preparing for the big demo

Being in tech sales has certain pluses and minuses. One of the pluses is that you get to see lots of cool technology before the guy on the street. One of the minuses is that you sometimes get to demo state-of-the-art stuff before all of the wrinkles have been ironed-out.

If I had a pound (or dollar) for every time I’d sat in a customer meeting trying to divert attention while an applications engineer colleague desperately tried to get a piece of kit to work I’d be a rich man.

Although to a certain extent this comes with the territory there are some things you can do to minimise your chances of embarrassment…

  • Don’t just do a demo because you can. That would be a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” strategy. Have a very clear understanding of what the customer needs, what you want to show them and how this will advance the sale.
  • As the old British Army adage says “Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance”. Do a dry run before the customer meeting. Do this far enough in advance of the customer meeting that you can fix any problems that you might find. In the dry run replicate exactly what you are going to show the customer.
  • If you have one, take a spare. If the demo is a really important one (for instance you are going to be on stage at a major trade show) send the spare via a different route. That way if your luggage gets lost or stolen you aren’t left empty-handed.
  • Take all the hardware you will need. If you rely on hooking-up to a piece of customer equipment it might not work the way you expect.
  • Don’t let anyone else tinker with your equipment! I can recall several demos where an apps engineer had to stop and hack for 10 minutes because someone else had used the machine and changed the Unix directory structure.
  • Be open with the customer about the state of the product. Better to explain in advance that they are really lucky to be seeing something hot out of the labs… but it’s not quite there yet, than to give them the impression it’s tried and tested… and then watch it fall over.
  • Get feedback from the customer as you go along…
  • “Is that useful to you?”,
    “Does that explain how you would implement feature xyz in your abc?”
    “Is that enough performance for you application?”.

  • Try and get feedback on other demos they may have seen from competitors. Be subtle… ask how yours shapes-up, not for exact data on your competition.
  • If the customer doesn’t seem to be liking something ask them why. It might be something that you can easily rectify or a simple misunderstanding.

So good luck with your product demos. I guess demos really act as accelerators of the sales process. Done correctly it can move you quickly to a close, done badly it you can move you quickly back to the beginning.

Minuting customer meetings

The great Sir Winston Churchill once said “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”. He was true to his word, writing “The Second World War”, “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and winning the Nobel prize for literature in the process (as you do).
[photo]
Likewise for us the importance of getting your version of a meeting circulated first is not to be underestimated. In fact I heard a story a while back about an ex-colleague who visited a very major account, had an OK meeting and went off on his way. A month or so later his boss wanted to visit this very major account with him and asked our friend to arrange it. So he picks up the phone calls them and asks for the meeting… to which they respond “no… we haven’t seen the action list from the last meeting yet”. Ouch.
As we’ve documented on Real Life Selling previously, sales people are notoriously shy of paperwork. However this is one case where you really have to grit your teeth and bash those minutes out.
If you don’t get your minutes out pretty quickly there are two risks…
* The momentum of the sale is lost. You’ve had a great meeting, got some commitment, but in two weeks time both you and they have moved on to the next urgent item.
* The customer minutes the meeting. “Great” you may think, “that’s saved me the effort”. But, of course, in their version of the minutes the commitments they made may be just a little softer than they seemed at the time and the items you committed to have been “bigged up”.
Here are some suggestions on minuting that I hope you’ll find useful…
Minute meetings as soon after they finish as possible. If it’s at your office, stay on in the meeting room for 15 minutes to write-up the meeting. If it’s at a customer’s site, sit in your car outside and write it up on your laptop before you leave, or at the airport, or on the plane home.
Concentrate on the next actions and use W3… who, what, when.
Start your follow-up actions immediately. You may not be able to finish them, but at least initiate them. So if you need a quotation… fill in the form and submit it. If you need someone to do something, email or call them and tell them what needs doing and by when.
Use your diary or electronic calendar to set some follow-up reminders.
Thank the customer for their time and hospitality.
And finally keep the minutes to-the-point and business-like. As Sir Winston once said “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read”.

The great Sir Winston Churchill once said “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”. He was true to his word, writing “The Second World War”, “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and winning the Nobel prize for literature in the process (as you do).

About to get his version in first!

About to get his version in first!

Likewise for us mere mortals the importance of getting your version of a meeting circulated first is not to be underestimated. In fact I heard a story a while back about an ex-colleague who visited a very major account, had an OK meeting and went off on his way. A month or so later his boss wanted to visit this very major account with him and asked our friend to arrange it. So he picks up the phone calls them and asks for the meeting… to which they respond “no… we haven’t seen the action list from the last meeting yet”. Ouch.

As we’ve documented on Real Life Selling previously, sales people are notoriously shy of paperwork. However this is one case where you really have to grit your teeth and bash those minutes out.

If you don’t get your minutes out pretty quickly there are two risks…

* The momentum of the sale is lost. You’ve had a great meeting, got some commitment, but in two weeks time both you and they have moved on to the next urgent item.

* The customer minutes the meeting. “Great” you may think, “that’s saved me the effort”. But, of course, in their version of the minutes the commitments they made may be just a little softer than they seemed at the time and the items you committed to have been “bigged up”.

Here are some suggestions on minuting that I hope you’ll find useful…

  1. Minute meetings as soon after they finish as possible. If it’s at your office, stay on in the meeting room for 15 minutes to write-up it up. If it’s at a customer’s site, sit in your car outside and use your laptop before you leave, or at the airport, or on the plane home.
  2. Concentrate on the next actions and use W3… who, what, when.
  3. Start your follow-up actions immediately. You may not be able to finish them, but at least initiate them. So if you need a quotation… fill in the form and submit it. If you need someone to do something, email or call them and tell them what needs doing and by when.
  4. Use your diary or electronic calendar to set some follow-up reminders.
  5. Thank the customer for their time and hospitality.
  6. And finally keep the minutes to-the-point and business-like. As Sir Winston said “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read”.

When the deal gets to legal…

Will it get signed, or go into the long grass?

Where deals to to die.

A legal black-hole. Where deals go to die.

You’ve worked with the customer for months, closed the big deal, even enjoyed the adulation and now the agreement is with legal. A month later the agreement is still with legal and you’re getting nervous. A conference call is arranged with the customer’s lawyers to go over it. Someone is off sick, so it gets postponed. You finally hold the conference call, a few amendments have to be made, nothing major. Three months later the agreement still isn’t signed, you’re worried about the deal unravelling and are losing the will to live. Oh dear!

In many companies the sales team regard the legal department as a black hole where deals go to die. This may or may not be true but there are a few reasons why it might be…

  • Sometimes legal can deliberately delay signing agreements. If you have an ongoing customer they will be buying products using your standard terms and conditions (or an old agreement) until the new one is signed. Thus the new agreement is kicked into the long grass.
  • No sense of urgency. Legal are rewarded on a completely different basis to you and have their own goals. What is a critical deal for you is just another project to process for them. Sales and legal work on completely different timescales. Sales people by their nature want results now. As anyone who has had dealings with lawyers personally or professionally know, they work on more glacial kinds of timescales.
  • Sometimes there’s something fundamental in the agreement that the legal person objects to but they have been over-ruled. They will not outright refuse to do it, but will just drag their heels every single inch of the way.

So what can you do about this? Bite your nails, lose sleep, have a screaming hissy-fit in their office. All possible, but I’d suggest the following…

  1. Firstly you need to do some inside selling here. Make sure you’ve sold to the legal person how important the deal is for her, for you, for the whole future of the company.
  2. Escalate, escalate, escalate. Not by moaning to the legal person’s boss directly, but make sure your boss is fully primed and everyone up to the very top of the organisation. Ensure that everybody at a senior level in the company knows the importance of this deal.
  3. Keep agreements that you negotiate on the company’s behalf as simple as possible. For instance a bi-lateral agreement is easier to conclude than one involving you, the customer and two other supply partners. Base any agreement on an existing one if possible. It makes things simpler and leaves less loose ends to negotiate over.
  4. If you have a legal negotiation with the customer make sure that you have some senior people in the meeting along with legal. It makes it more difficult to kick something into the long grass if a CxO has already agreed to it.
  5. If there isn’t a natural deadline on the agreement make a deadline. A good one is to tee-up a CEO-to-CEO meeting with the customer in x weeks, and make sure all parties know this is for the official signing. Even legal can be prodded into action when the CEO doesn’t want to look a fool.

It’s rude to point!

Tonight I was happening to be vegging out in front of the TV (sorry… call planning for tomorrow) with a glass of Valpolicello Repasso. The programme happened to be a thing called “Antiques Roadshow”, which I’m sure most Brits will be familiar with. The debaniar presenter was holding forth about the exquisite nature of the georgian snuffbox that he was waving before the camera. Unfortunately my attention wasn’t on the antique, but was drawn to the poor guy’s thumb nail which looked like it had been beaten repeatedly with a sledgehammer for about five hours. I think the cameraman may also have noticed because he kept trying to pan across so that the thumb was out of shot, but the presenter kept waving the snuffbox to and fro and bringing the offending digit back into focus.
One of the more prosaic sales tips that I’ve come across during the many trainings I’ve attended is that of not using your finger to point when presenting to the customer. In a similar fashion to my Antiques Roadshow friend you do not want to distract the customer’s attention from the document under discussion… so use a nice clean pen to indicate. This advice may, of course, be a bit dated nowadays when you could well be using a projector to present, however if you are one-to-one and showing something on your laptop it still applies.
It's rude to point! sales tip

It's rude to point!

Tonight I happened to be vegging out in front of the TV (sorry… call planning for tomorrow) with a glass of Valpolicella Repasso. The programme was a thing called “Antiques Roadshow”, which I’m sure most Brits will be familiar with. The debonair presenter was holding forth about the exquisite nature of the Georgian snuffbox that he was waving before the camera. Unfortunately my attention wasn’t on the antique, but was drawn to the poor guy’s thumb nail which looked like it had been beaten repeatedly with a sledgehammer for about five hours. I think the cameraman may also have noticed because he kept trying to pan across so that the thumb was out of shot, but the presenter kept waving the snuffbox to and fro and bringing the offending digit back into focus.

One of the more prosaic sales tips that I’ve come across during the many trainings I’ve attended is that of not using your finger to point when presenting to the customer. In a similar fashion to my Antiques Roadshow friend you do not want to distract the customer’s attention from the document under discussion… so use a nice clean pen to indicate. This advice may, of course, be a bit dated nowadays when you could well be using a projector to present, however if you are one-to-one and showing something on your laptop it still applies.

Five ways to build trust with your customers

You will always have a problem selling if your customers don’t trust you. In fact if you are selling products that have a long sales cycle or managing major accounts you will be dead in the water without trust. Here are five ways to help build trust…
Have the customers best interests at heart. If your customer can see that you truly want to achieve a win-win situation they will be far more likely to open up and work with you.
Liar liar. Don’t lie to the customer. If you don’t understand something or if there is some confidential information you can’t share say so. If you make a habit of lying to customers you will eventually get caught out, at which point you may as well give up and go home.
Warts and all. When you present your product it’s often a great credibility builder if you admit (openly and frankly) a minor weakness, or missing feature that you know isn’t too important to the customer. Customers are so used to powerpoint-jockeys coming in and claiming every single feature of their product is world beating. They know it’s unlikely your product is perfect, better that you proactively admit a minor wart and gain lots of cred in the process.
Respect her time. If you have a 30 minute slot with a prospect or customer, make sure that you stick to it. If you are still there an hour later working your way through every feature on a datasheet what do you think happens next time you try to make an appointment for “just” half an hour?

No… you’re a liar, liar. An obvious one, but don’t call the customer a liar or imply it. I once had an appalling visit with a technical marketeer who ran out of control during his presentation, making boastful comparisons between our product and the competition. The customer (who likely had the competitor’s product in his lab) helpfully tried to correct him on some of his facts and was told that “no” he was wrong. Fortunately for him, the presenter was across the table

out of my reach!

Trust

Trust

You will always have a problem selling if your customers don’t trust you. In fact if you are selling products that have a long sales cycle or are managing major accounts you will be dead in the water without trust. Here are five ways to help build trust…

  • Have the customers best interests at heart. If your customer can see that you truly want to achieve a win-win situation they will be far more likely to open up and work with you.
  • Warts and all. When you present your product it’s often a great credibility builder if you admit (openly and frankly) a minor weakness, or missing feature that you know isn’t too important to the customer. Customers are so used to powerpoint-jockeys coming in and claiming every single feature of their product is world beating. They know it’s unlikely your product is perfect; better that you proactively admit a minor wart and gain lots of cred in the process.
  • Respect her time. If you have a 30 minute slot with a prospect or customer, make sure that you stick to it. If you are still there an hour later working your way through every feature on a datasheet what do you think happens next time you try to make an appointment for “just” half an hour?
  • Liar liar. Don’t lie to the customer. If you don’t understand something or if there is some confidential information you can’t share say so. If you make a habit of lying to customers you will eventually get caught out, at which point you may as well give up and go home.
  • No… you are a liar, liar. An obvious one, but don’t call the customer a liar or imply it. I once had an appalling customer meeting with a technical marketeer colleague who ran out of control during his presentation, making boastful comparisons between our product and the competition. The customer (who most likely had our competitor’s product in his lab) helpfully tried to correct him on some of his facts and was told that “no” he was wrong. Fortunately for him, my colleague was across the table out of my reach!

Hunter vs. Farmer

Many years ago a colleague of mine told me that he thought I was more of a farmer than a hunter, which he said was fine. At the time I didn’t agree because being a hunter sounded a lot more macho, active and plain fun.
With the benefit of hindsight I think he was probably right. The company I was repping for had the first product of its type running on low-cost PCs instead of expensive engineering workstations, so the sales team has spent most of their time in what I spent most of their time in what I would call “rape and pillage mode”. Sales people took orders and then moved on to the next prospect, like a fox in henhouse they had so many targets they didn’t know which way to turn.
When I joined I visited some major accounts who had bought the product a year or two previously and never seen anyone again. Nobody had made sure that the tools were being used properly, nobody had asked if they needed more seats, worst of all no one had even collected any maintenance (then 15% of list price). So I did some pretty good business just fixing up the existing customers, selling them more seats, new tools and making sure the 15% was collected. Of course, I did my fair share of “hunting” as well… but not maximising your business out of existing customers is just plain dumb.
Many sales trainers stress the need to always ask satisfied customers for leads and referrals, but before you do that make sure you are maximising your sales into those existing customers. As a species we moved on from being hunter-gatherers to farmers about 10,000 years ago… there were good reasons for that!
Better to be a farmer or a hunter?

A happy farmer?

Many years ago a colleague of mine told me that he thought I was more of a farmer than a hunter, which he said was fine. At the time I didn’t agree because being a hunter sounded a lot more macho, active and plain fun.

With the benefit of hindsight I think he was probably right. The company I was repping for had the first product of its type running on low-cost PCs instead of expensive engineering workstations, so the sales team had spent most of their time in what I would call “rape and pillage mode”. Sales people took orders and then moved on to the next prospect, like foxes in a henhouse they had so many targets they didn’t know which way to turn.

When I joined I visited some major accounts who had bought the product a year or two previously and had never seen anyone again. Nobody had made sure that the tools were being used properly, nobody had asked if they needed more seats, worst of all no one had even collected any maintenance (then 15% of list price). So I did some pretty good business just fixing up the existing customers, selling them more seats, new tools and making sure the 15% was collected. Of course, I did my fair share of “hunting” as well… but not maximising your business out of existing customers is just plain dumb.

Many sales trainers stress the need to always ask satisfied customers for leads and referrals, but before you do that make sure you are maximising your sales into those existing customers. As a species we moved on from being hunter-gatherers to farmers about 10,000 years ago… there were good reasons for that!