The Sales Insider

It’s a tough pill for new and inexperienced sales reps to swallow, but it’s absolutely true: it’s just as easy to lose a deal on the last five percent of the journey as it is on the first five.

High performance sales reps know you can get a deal 95% right—and still leave a customer highly dissatisfied.

A co-worker related an experience last week that proves this point in absolute clarity. Apparently he had gone in to get a new pair of eyeglasses from a local retailer, and 9/10 of the experience was unaccountably pleasant. Service was prompt and efficient, the optometrist demonstrated a high level of competence, and the business carried a quality selection of frames and lenses. He chose a style of frame that suited him, the order was placed, and it arrived a day ahead of schedule.

So far, so good.

Except when the lenses and frames arrived, the lens makers had sent the wrong size (for this business, the frames and lenses were generally ordered separately and assembled on location).

At this point, the company had two choices:

1. Fix the problem by re-ordering the right lenses, even though it meant the customer wouldn’t get their glasses for another week.
2. Try to grind/reshape the lenses on-premise, and/or jury-rig the frames to make them fit.

Not a great situation, but eminently fix-able. Depending on what the customer wanted, either could potentially be a long-term win for the customer and the business.

Unfortunately, the rep didn’t even bother to ask.

Maybe she was trying to avoid a “customer service disaster” by “making the customer happy.” Maybe it was because it was late, and the rep just wanted to go home and not have to deal with the problem. Or maybe it was just “too inconvenient” to re-order the lenses. But for whatever reason, and without any input from the customer, the rep chose Option #2.

Strike 1: Not asking the customer what they wanted.

Unfortunately, Strike 1 was immediately followed up with Strike 2: She didn’t even get it right.

The rep took the lenses into a back room and started grinding around the edges. Then without even giving my co-worker the “right of denial,” she took a pair of needle-nose pliers to his brand new, never-been-worn, $300 Titanium flex frames and started bending and twisting. When the lenses still wouldn’t fit, she went back and did some more grinding. Then a third time.

Finally, she ended up taking a set of screws that weren’t even the right size for the frames, shoved the lenses into the sockets, forced the screws through, and snipped off the screw ends.

By now small scuff marks had appeared along the joints of the frames, the screws were visibly misaligned, and the ear pieces of the frame were now running slightly but noticeably askew (he showed me the glasses himself).

The service rep handed the glasses back with a smile and a happy “Here you go,” absolutely certain that she had just made herself into a customer service superstar by “fixing the customer’s problem.”

Never mind that my co-worker friend would have been more than happy to wait the extra 5-7 days to get the right set of lenses. Never mind that the rep’s “exemplary service” had subtly changed the basic shape of the frames so that they no longer felt like the demo pair that had won him over in the first place.

Why he didn’t immediately protest, I don’t know. “I didn’t want to cause a scene,” he told me. “I thought, Well, everything up to this point has been great, so I guess I’m willing to cut them a little slack. And it’s not like the glasses are unwearable, or anything, it’s just that I should have been given the choice. If the entire process up to that point hadn’t been absolutely stellar, I probably would’ve demanded an exchange for a new set of frames and lenses, but as it stands, I’m definitely not going to go back, or recommending them.”

I should have been given the choice.

The morals of the story:

1. Never, ever assume you know what the customer needs. Ask them. Then when they tell you, ask again until you really know.
2. Remember: you can lose a customer’s trust—and consequently their future business— at the “11th hour” just as easily as on Day 1.

There’s an old saying, “Hoe to the end of the row,” which a lot of people assume means that you need to stay longer, keep working after everyone else has left.

But it also means never cutting corners, sacrificing quality for convenience, and it especially means never assuming “It’s what the customer wants.”

Rather than avoiding black cats and cowering in fear from triskaidekaphobia, the team at InsideSales.com decided to spend some time on Friday, May 13 at the Food & Care Coalition offices in Provo, Utah. Ten InsideSales.com volunteers worked and cleaned the kitchen, and served meals to Coalition patrons.

Robb Young, Director of Operations stated afterwards, “This was so much fun and they [the Coalition] were extremely grateful for our time and effort serving their facility. We will be participating in more of these service projects throughout the year and we encourage employees to come and participate. This is a great way for us to contribute to our community and help those that are less fortunate.”

The Food & Care Coalition was founded in 1986, and incorporated as a 501c(3) non-profit organization in 1988. Since that time, the Friends of the Coalition has expanded its operations from meals and clothing to providing community workshops, job training for patrons, an in-house dental clinic, and more.

By the end of 2011, the Coalition hopes to complete its new live-in residence facility for Utah County at-risk populations, and establish new training opportunities using computer systems generously donated by NuSkin and others.

For more information about the Food & Care Coalition, to make a donation, or to ask about opportunities to volunteer, please contact:

Treva Christensen
Volunteer Director
The Food & Care Coalition
trevavc@foodandcare.org
801-373-1825
http://www.foodandcare.org

As sales reps, we occasionally forget that sometimes a prospect isn’t looking to solve a problem, they’re trying to alleviate the symptoms of something else.

This isn’t to say that you can’t make money selling solutions for both. Just be clear with the prospect about what it is you’re actually attempting to solve.

Inexperienced sales reps can be particularly susceptible to the fallacy of assigning need based on the requested solution—”Well, they’re asking about X, so clearly their problem is Y” (even though your solution is massaging a symptom, not solving the root cause).

Carried to its logical conclusion, the idea can apply nearly universally. For instance, if you’re selling outsourced HR services, you’re not actually solving your buyer’s need to eventually improve its own internal resources—you’re just applying a particular band-aid to it (i.e., your services). As soon as the value of managing HR in house is higher than the cost of outsourcing, the buyer will inevitably make the switch.

Does this mean you shouldn’t pursue deals if you’re not meeting the direct need? Of course not; that’s why service-based solutions and outsourcing exist to begin with. But it does mean you should be careful.

If you’re selling to a company looking for a SaaS inventory management system that better integrates with their customer service software, why are they actually buying? Is it because their distribution network can’t function without the added data visibility the integration provides (the cause: customer service reps cannot function in their duties without the data)? Or because they’re looking for more bargaining leverage when their current distribution contracts come off the books at the end of the year (the symptom: the buyer’s not particularly happy with their distributors, and wants the software to help keep tabs on service levels)? The buyer’s commitment level will vary greatly depending on the situation. In once scenario, the company is dead in the water without the new system; in another, the purchase provides a value-add, but failure to buy isn’t going to derail the enterprise.

Sometimes buyers intrinsically know they’re addressing symptoms, not the causes—and they’re generally okay with it when they recognize it. “Yeah, I know this isn’t going to solve Problem X, but I know that Results Y and Z are going to be beneficial, and it’ll at least get the ball rolling on solving X down the road.”

But one final word of caution: never forget that it’s almost always easier (and cheaper) to fix symptoms instead of causes. Quick fixes are generally just that—quick. They’re rarely as effective or meaningful as solving root causes, and if a prospect is looking for something more, a sale designed to treat symptoms is a classic recipe for failure and long-term dissatisfaction.

Here is a fun new video that Trish Bertuzzi from The Bridge Group just put together where she interviews a half dozen people and asks to associate the first word that comes to mind when she mentions a word:

Check it out, quite eye opening!

or click through to her website

http://blog.bridgegroupinc.com/blog/tabid/47760/bid/51335/Sales-Marketing-Word-Association-VIDEO.aspx?source=Blog_Email_[Sales+%26+Marketing+Wo]

Those of you who attended the AA-ISP Leadership Summit 2011 in Minneapolis, MN got to hear the first rendition of “It’s a Great Day to be in Inside Sales” performed by yours truly, Ken Krogue. I was going to say “sung by” Ken Krogue, but it wasn’t really singing, more a form of belting, or actually yelling might be a closer description.

Click below to view the live performance!

Open in a separate window – The Official Inside Sales Song by Ken Krogue at AA-ISP

But it’s official, Bob and Larry from AA-ISP agreed that we now have an official inside sales song:

It’s a great day in inside sales, best day I know
It’s a great day in inside sales, every where I go, go, go
Goodbye “no” and “never”, goodbye doubt and fear
It’s a great day in inside sales so be of good cheer
I feel health, I feel happy, I feel terrific!
I love living, loving, and being a high performance individual!

There’s lots of reasons movie sequels often suck—but regardless of the actual symptoms, the root cause is generally the same: the creators forget that the audience must have a reason to care AGAIN.

Characters have to evolve in new directions to remain interesting. Plots can’t just retread old developments. If we wanted to watch the same movie twice, we’d just watch the original.

There’s nothing worse than sitting through a sequel “retread” feeling like you’re being had—”This isn’t taking me anywhere, it’s a waste of time”—and if the creators screw up badly enough, it can damage the the entire collective experience.

Take, for instance, the generally reviled Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III. By all accounts they achieved financial success, but in some ways their blatant artistic failures demeaned the entire George Lucas enterprise. Episodes IV, V, and VI suddenly don’t look so “magical,” or meaningful, or worthy of praise.

So what’s the point of all of this?

Namely that in business contexts, customer support is the “sequel” to sales. If support teams aren’t “keeping the magic alive,” re-inventing value and connecting with the vision of the client, it casts a pall across everything that came before it (not unlike Hayden Christensen’s acting).

In some ways, the transition from closing a sale to implementation & support must resemble Part 2 of a trilogy—it has to keep up the momentum of Part 1 (The Initial Sale), set up and solve new and evolving challenges, while remaining true to the original intent. It has to ensure that there is room for growth, and that the client/audience is ready and able to reach a satisfying conclusion in Part 3 (Long-term Potential & Customer Growth).

So how do you build a support team that can do this?

1. Empower your support team. Nothing kills the momentum from the sales process faster than a support rep who has to
   • Constantly haggle with the legal team over a minor contract point.
   • Fight with management over lost “training hours.”
   • Fight through IT roadblocks to get that one key system integration done.
   • Find creative work-arounds for fixes that should already be in place.
   • Beg for better internal tools to speed up their own work.

   Every problem your support rep faces is ultimately passed on to the client—and the client has zero control over fixing them.

2. Measure the right metrics. If customer satisfaction is the real goal, find the measurements that actually correlate to it. Too often, organizations talk about creating “great customer experiences,” but don’t use metrics that give employees the incentive to do it (see The Madness of Metrics on CustomerThink.com).
3. Institute performance rewards. In addition to correct metrics, give your support agents reasons to meet them. Sales tracks the ROI of what they do to the nth degree. Well guess what: employees instinctively keep a tally of their own “internal ROI” within the company. When mediocrity is rewarded equally well as excellence, guess which one takes root?
4. Provide as many customer contact channels as you can. The days of sitting behind a “Request Support” Web form are long gone. Phone and email support are de rigeur standards now, but are your support agents listening where your customers are? Web forms, Twitter and social media, user forums, community sites, and custom support portals might also need to be in the mix.

In the end, a well-managed sales-to-support transition gives customers real peace of mind, and adds value; they see your support organization not as an expense, but a key component in achieving strategic goals. When bungled, it’s never pleasant, always painful, and often fatal to the customer’s long-term viability.

In its purest form it’s difficult to find, and even harder to keep.

When used properly, it creates more conversations than a thousand mediocre TV ads, a million tweets, and a 100 million social media experts blathering across the blogosphere.

It doesn’t build companies, it creates movements. It doesn’t design a brand, it defines it.

It gets more sales reps to hit quota; transforms challenging problems into the “do-able.”

It keeps people up at night—and helps them sleep better at the same time.

So where do you go for inspiration?

In no particular order, here’s my Top 7 Places I go on the Web to Get the Creative Juices Flowing:

• The Brandbuilder Blog: http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com

  If you’ve never read Olivier Blanchard’s The Brandbuilder Blog, you’re missing out on some of the best cultural analysis, and insights into human leadership principles on the Web. Oh, and he’s not bad at marketing, social media, and general business practices too. Brevity’s not generally his style, so be prepared for a good sit-down reading session when you visit. But what he does write is never dull, and his takes are almost always dead-eye spot-on.

• Brains on Fire: http://www.brainsonfire.com

  I actually found Brains on Fire from a link on The Brandbuilder, which isn’t all that surprising considering they’re both based in South Carolina.

  Brains on Fire is an eclectic mix of design ideas, social media thought, and an exploration of what drives people to discover—and then share—remarkable experiences.

• Harvard Business Review: http://www.hbr.org

  Cliché, but still true—the Harvard Business Review aggregates and comments on the most thought-provoking business developments around.

• Rands in Repose: http://www.randsinrepose.com

  Contrary to popular belief, the writer of this blog isn’t named “Rands.” It’s actually Michael Lopp, and he’s the funny, fascinating author of the book Being Geek. He’s a Silicon Valley “insider,” who’s made the rounds across a variety of industry heavies as a software engineering manager.

• Seth Godin’s Blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com

  Does this really require an explanation?

• The Sales 2.0 Network Blog: http://sales20network.com/blog

  Donal (that’s pronounced “Dough-nall”) Daly is the CEO of the TAS Group, a provider of cloud-based business analytics tools—but don’t let the description scare you.

  His writing combines business analysis and wry British humor into a highly engaging read for sales managers and reps.

• The Ad Contrarian: http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com

  I stumbled on to Bob Hoffman, the self-proclaimed Ad Contrarian, when he wrote a a guest post for on one of my previous sources of inspiration, CopyBlogger. Unfortunately, in my opinion CopyBlogger has almost completely sold out; I haven’t been to their site in months, and the half-dozen times I went prior to that, the content was lackluster.

  Luckily, Bob’s personal brand of hilarity and scathing analysis of the marketing and advertising industries is alive and well on his own blog.

Honorable mentions:
The Funnelholic
The Bridge Group’s Inside Sales Experts
BNet’s Sales Machine blog

So what about you? Where do you go to get your brains back on fire?

A couple of weeks ago, we showed a client an early beta mockup of a custom development project we were doing for them. It was a big project, and it was taking quite a bit development resources (read: time) to complete.

The client’s feedback was, shall we say, “pointed” (though not unfair, and certainly relevant).

After the client meeting, the support liaison emailed them the following (I’m paraphrasing here):

“I apologize that we’re not finished yet. The main features you’ve requested are already built, and meet the requirements you scoped. When the other components get added to it, we’re confident it will be what you want.”

On the surface there’s nothing wrong with that, right? Just a reminder to the customer about the scope of the project, what was agreed on, and that there’s more to come.

Here’s the problem: In spite of its good intentions, the response includes the implied assumption that if the end product isn’t what the client wants, it’s their fault for not scoping it properly.

That’s something you never tell a client. As vendors, we don’t get to decide what’s “good enough.” Ever.

Sometimes, of course, we make the choice to prematurely stop working on a project. The return on investment isn’t there, or the opportunity costs too high. In that case, we work on the project until we decide it’s not worth it anymore, and the customer can take it or leave it. Depending on the circumstances, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that choice—but that’s entirely different than the customer deciding that it’s “good enough.”

Telling a client “Well, that’s how you scoped it!” doesn’t solve the problem, it creates resentment. A client didn’t pay for a product scope, they paid for a solution, and if what they see isn’t meeting they’re needs, they have every right to voice their concern.

Telling a client that a product that doesn’t meet their needs is exactly what they asked for is a recipe for massive discontent, and if they think there’s a serious enough breach of contract, say hello to the lawyers.

When a client attacks our work, sometimes we get defensive—”Well, we’ve worked hard on this, we put our best people on it, we built this two weeks ahead of schedule.”

Unfortunately, defensiveness only exacerbates the problem. The client doesn’t care; it’s not what they want. Telling them how hard you worked, and the resources you invested doesn’t increase their confidence, it degrades it. Now not only is the client panicked that they’re not getting what they need, they also feel they can no longer trust you to understand what they need. In the prospect’s mind, if you don’t understand what they need, you have zero shot of producing it for them.

Look, I understand that sometimes a client’s expectations are unrealistic, and ironically, they’re usually the ones least equipped to make your solution work. If they knew what they wanted/needed, they wouldn’t be flailing around in the dark asking you to fix it, and it’s hardly your job to work miracles (of course it begs the question why you took a contract with an overly-demanding, pain-in-the-butt client to begin with—but that’s a whole other story).

But if a client’s not happy with what you’re producing, be darn sure before you throw out a nonchalant “It is what it is,” that you’ve done your part. If the cost-to-benefit of making them happy is too high, hand over what you’ve done and call it good. Just don’t presume to tell the client that it’s “good enough” when you’re finished.

Is this your sales pipeline?

Bumped into an incredibly thought-provoking blog by former programmer and VC investor Jason Cohen over on his blog, A Smart Bear.

His point is simple:

If you’re an “early phase” startup, when it comes to choosing clients, never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.”

“Wait a minute,” you might say. “This is an inside sales blog, right? What’s all this about ‘choosing’ clients?”

It goes back to something I read last year on the Sales 2.0 Network and InflexionPoint blogs: there’s only two reasons a rep ever loses a sale, either he or she wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place (i.e., pursuing an unqualified opportunity), or they get outsold by a competitor.

In the original post, author Donal Daley states that one of his consulting firm’s challenges is to change the mindset of sales reps to take on fewer deals, not more.

“We discuss ways to help sales teams win 4 of 7 deals, instead of 3 of 10. This means that you pursue fewer opportunities. It’s not about ‘getting up to bat’ more often (emphasis added). In fact it’s the opposite.”

Bottom line: high-performance sales reps don’t take on unqualified prospects, or fight for deals they can’t win.

One more thing: in the same blog, Donal states that it takes the average sales rep 50% longer to lose a deal than to win one.

Think about that for a second.

If your average close rate is 25%, it means you’re spending four and a half hours on losing deals for every hour you spend on winning.

If you were to sit down and analyze your “10 best” prospects in your pipeline, is it possible you’d discover three that could be tossed out right now—and it would have a negligible impact on your performance? In fact, might it actually improve your performance?

Believe me, I understand more than anyone that sales is a numbers game—but it’s too easy for the all-powerful, sacred quota to become something other than a goal, a number on a wall. It starts to live, breathe, stalk us in our cubicles.

Its all-consuming power persuades us to fill our pipelines with something, anything, even if some (most?) of it is crap and sludge. I’m sure some companies are immune, but I suspect for a lot us (myself and InsideSales.com included), two or three out of ten opportunities actually aren’t. We’re chasing “rainbow sunshine,” half-committed buyers, and people that might say “yes” but only if the conditions of their acceptance are prohibitively in their favor.

It’s the same principle Jason Cohen is espousing for pursuing potentially disruptive clients:

Set the conditions of ‘yes’ such that:

1. If they say ‘yes,’ you’re happy because the terms or money are so good, it more than compensates for the distraction.
2. If they say ‘no,’ you’re happy because it wasn’t a great fit anyway, so it’s not worthwhile for a small return on your time and effort.”

If you’re selling into a commoditized market, you may not have much choice in who your customers are; you take whatever you can get.

But in high-touch B2B sales, don’t be too quick to dismiss the idea that less is potentially more. One very good client is often worth four mediocre-to-bad ones, in my experience—and somewhere along the line, a sales rep was involved either way.

Unless your entire business is based on a “1-click” transactional sales model, the old rule of “You don’t have a sale until you have a conversation” remains pretty well entrenched. Sure, there’s lots of companies doing great things with inbound marketing, demand generation, lead nurturing, and “pre-qualifying” of prospects–but even then, unless you’ve got a relatively simple product with few set-up requirements, at some point a prospect is going to need a sales rep to step in and “bridge the gap.”

And as we’ve been preaching for years, the trick is giving yourself every possible opportunity to actually have that conversation.

With that end in mind, B2B lead generation outsourcers Green Leads has a “standing policy” for reps to work harder on “off peak” holidays (e.g., President’s Day, Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day).

Why?

Because a lot of companies, even if they don’t take the day off, they “take the day off.” There’s less noise, less static floating around the prospecto-sphere. It’s about better opportunities for getting a decision-maker’s undivided attention. And Green Leads has had a lot of success doing it.

Spend any time on this blog and you’ll know that one of InsideSales.com’s mantras is that “Speed kills”–our research in conjunction with MIT, and our later collaboration with the Harvard Business Review has pretty well proven that if you’re not getting to your leads fast, you’re losing sales (to say nothing of the fact that 26% of companies don’t even bother to follow-up on their leads at all). It’s why we built our ResponsePop inbound dialer suite that responds in seconds to new leads that arrive from your CRM or Web site, to give reps the competitive edge of getting to new contacts.

But one of the other pieces of data our research uncovered was that the day of the week and time of day can also have an effect (check out the actual data charts here).

And like Green Leads has discovered working off-holidays, there are definite times of day when you have a better chance–in some cases a MUCH better chance–of cutting through noise and actually getting a decision-maker on the line.

For both contacting and qualifying leads, you have a 114% to 164% greater chance of success by calling during the optimal hours of 8-9 AM and 4-5 PM, than during the worst times (11 AM – 2 PM).

Some have mistakenly taken this data to mean that they shouldn’t be calling at all in the middle of the day, which is definitely not the case. What it does mean, however, is that sales management teams should seriously consider how they’ve designed their current prospecting strategies. If you’re not currently having your reps pound the phones for the first and last hours of their days (at the very least), you may be unnecessarily stunting sales opportunities and growth.

Give your reps a better chance to cut through the noise.