The Sales Insider

I have been selling for many years. As the VP of Sales at InsideSales.com, I do not usually give demos of our PowerDialer for SalesForce software. Today, however, I took the opportunity to present to Brian Geery, Interim VP of Sales at Sustainable Minds and a managing partner at Sales Productivity Architects.  Brian was a referral from a friend and sales expert, Trish Bertuzzi of the BridgeGroup. I have been evaluating what InsideSales.com can do to improve our game and increase our sales growth in 2012.   I figured that doing the demo would not only clear my mind, but also get me close to our product and a prospect.

My demonstration was not as polished as one of my best salespeople, but it lasted the standard 45 minutes, and it covered in content and form, what a standard demo would include.  It was also received favorably with the prospect requesting a formal proposal.   It is good to know that an old dog still can do a few tricks!

At its conclusion, Brian offered a personal critique.  Simply stated, “The demo was good, however, I think you could sell more, faster, if your demonstration was less about what your software does and more about how it solves my problems.”   Brian was exactly right!

Innovative companies often begin creating products that solve a specific business need.  Early adopters experience those solutions through feature benefit demos that solve a particular business problem.  Early products tend to be less feature rich and therefore drive the discussion to business need and ROI benefit offered by implementing.  It works and they buy!

As products mature, so many features are added that the demo transforms itself into a sales training on product rather than what business needs it solves. Brian’s feedback was spot-on.  Effective salesmanship is when our solution solves our prospect’s problems.

We don’t sell software, we automate selling. I’ve upgraded my demo skills and those of my team to ensure that a good demo highlights the 2-3 core problems and demonstrates benefits of the PowerDiaer for Salesforce.

Blogging keeps you on your toes… always looking for a good story.

They have come to me in the form of ice castles, current events, or good restaurants.  I just came from eating lunch at El Azteca Taco Shop in Provo, Utah that has been around since 1962.  Many of us from InsideSales.com go there several times a month now.  In fact, we like them so much, we had them cater our (after) Christmas party.

I remember getting a few tips that I needed to try this little taco shop just north of Provo High School. I had enough people mention it in the fall of 2010 I finally caved in.

Everything looked the same as other times I had gone, but Wow, the food had changed! I had been there several times over the years, but today things were VERY different. The food was decent before, but now it was out of this world.

Uniquely wonderful salsa

You know me, I had to find out why. There is always a story, so I asked.

Meet Carlos Rubio.

El Azteca Restaurant

He recently moved back from Los Angeles to manage the family El Azteca Taco Shop and to expand the catering business. He had spent over 10 years creating fabulous catering spreads in Hollywood with the likes of Wolf Gang Puck, The Patina group, and Off The Wall. He worked The Oscars, Grammy’s and many private events for the likes of Denzel Washington, Drew Barrymore, and Elizabeth Taylor. He created special menu items for Pedigree, Starz, Uncle Ben’s and Nissan.

His food is sooooo uniquely outstanding you can’t help but tell someone. Every dish is interesting, different, exciting. Everyone has tacos, burritos, rice and beans, but what about:

• Tropical Fajita Platter
• Acapulco Shrimp Enchilada
• Chicken Mole Platter
• Oaxaca Burrito
• Tropical Cactus Salad
• Jicama Slaw

Everything tastes great and each dish is unique.

That’s it! That is the primary ingredient of word-of-mouth.

Stand out. Be unique, wonderful, interesting, different, exciting.

And I’ll talk about you, and thousands of others will also. There is nothing better than word-of-mouth advertising and it’s never too late to go viral. (And this article isn’t just about tacos.)

You and your company have done everything right up to this point.

The marketing team created a compelling, targeted set of material that caught the attention of a potential buyer. They found your Web site and grabbed some information—a couple of white papers and a pricing list.

You followed up on the new lead quickly and effectively, using good lead management and nurturing tactics to make contact.

You feel like you’ve done your homework. You feel you understand their position in their industry. You’ve done a deep needs analysis, and feel you have a common ground with the prospect on how to address their pain. You get your best collateral and presentation material, tailored to the information you already have.

You wind up and give them your best 95-mile-an-hour fastball, the pitch that’s worked for you so many times in the past.

Yet contrary to evidence, against every sign you’ve seen to this point, you’re met with looks of confusion, or even worse, apathy.

The prospect doesn’t get it, or worse, doesn’t seem to care.

Now what do you do?

In baseball, the difference between a run-of-the-mill pitcher and an All-Star is rarely their “first pitch.” In the Big Leagues (and we’re assuming that’s where you want to be), everybody has a 90+ mile-per-hour fastball—but the best pitchers have a 2nd, a 3rd, sometimes even a 4th pitch that they can command.

While there are occasional exceptions to the rule (see Mariano Rivera and his un-duplicate-able cut fastball), in most cases the best pitchers win because when their primary pitch isn’t working, Plan B isn’t crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

Sales is no different.

When your initial, carefully-prepped pitch is a “miss,” the answer is almost never to keep “winding up” and tossing something out there.

Stop, and figure out what happened.

Typically it’s one of three things:

• You’re not actually a contender and you didn’t know it.
• You’re in the dark about something going on inside the prospect’s company.
• You’re talking to the wrong people for the value prop you’ve presented.

If you’re just a “sounding board” for a competitor’s RFP and they’ve already locked in to another vendor, stop wasting your time and move on. Maybe the prospect just realized that your solution will require an entire technology platform overhaul—one they had no intention of making. Maybe your solution forces them to change a licensing situation with another vendor, and they don’t want to upset their current arrangement.

If you really are in contention, then clearly something has changed. There’s a management “realignment” on the horizon and your product/service is in the line of fire. A relocation is about to happen. A key budget or cashflow problem has reared its head.

Regardless, the solution is the same: dig back in. Who’s really in charge now, and who’s really going to make the decision?

Gather data, re-set your presentation, toe the rubber, and fire again.

As a football coach for a city league team of 13-year-olds, I came across a very interesting statistic over the weekend.

Want to know what the difference between success and failure in the NFL?

It’s one yard.

It’s the difference between having a 2nd down and 5, versus 2nd down and 6.

An NFL offense that can average 5 yards on 1st down instead of 4 converts nearly 30 percent more 1st downs.

The same principle applies in baseball.

To bat .300 (the statistical “All-Star” gold standard), a player has to get 180 hits in 600 at-bats.

The difference between hitting .300 and .250 in 600 plate appearances? 30 hits, or 1 additional hit every 20 at bats.

That’s it.

A five percent increase in base hits a year is the difference between being an All-Star (and getting paid like one) and run-of-the-mill.

So what’s the big “So what?” here?

Mostly that I don’t think the majority of us plan our sales pipelines around prospects walking up and saying, “I need what you have, where is it and how soon can I get it?”

If you’re one of the lucky sales reps who gets leads that are always qualified and ready to buy, more power to you, but I know for most of us, sales aren’t 80-yard touchdowns or “home runs.” They’re a consistent process of “moving the chains,” controlling down and distance, and setting ourselves up for success.

Hitting singles, moving baserunners, and setting up RBI opportunities.

Too many reps go into their next phone call, their next email, their next conversation not really knowing what they want the outcome to actually be—so it’s not for lack of reason that noted sales evangelist Paul Castain preaches using a “sales playbook.” A playbook teaches a rep how to make the “right call” for the right “down and distance,” and to make progress with every “touch.”

If it feels like you’re constantly facing “3rd and long” situations in sales, go back and look at your strategy and playbook–for every down and distance. Occasionally you’ll convert a “3rd-and-13″ type of prospect out of sheer luck, persistence, or both. But good “down and distance” means running the right “plays” to have productive first and second downs–and not having to sweat the pressure of converting a “3rd and long.”

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Heaven knows Seth Godin doesn’t need an ounce’s worth more publicity from anyone, least of all me.

But one of his posts last week, “No knight, no shining armor,” struck a chord with me.

He states, “Does your project depend on a miracle, a bolt of lightning, on being chosen by some arbiter of ‘Who will succeed?’”

We know who these people are, don’t we, these “Arbiters of Success?”

Consider this: Oprah has turned books that were literally out of print back into best sellers simply by speaking the book title and author’s name on the air.

Obviously that’s what we all want in sales. To have some individual, some company reach down from their lofty place on high and say, “You’re the anointed one.”

And it’s incredibly easy to get caught up in this “Arbiter of Success” myth. That if only we could get that one, single enterprise account that suddenly our lives would change radically, because we’d instantly have the “street cred” to call into any CxO we want.

But if/when we “bridge the chasm” and move to the mainstream, it’s almost always because we’ve successfully built a foundation of client accounts that are happy and engaged with what we’re offering, not because someone anoints us. “The Big One” almost always comes from one of “The Many” who already chose you, are happy with you, and just so happen to be in the right place at the right time for you when “The One” asks them.

At InsideSales.com’s company-wide meeting this morning, it was brought up once again that though we have made significant inroads in solving customer service issues, we still struggle on occasion with truly satisfying our customers’ needs, as evidenced by the loss of a few accounts this last month.

It’s the never-ending story of finding the right balance.

How much support do our clients need?

How many service agents do we need in place to effectively provide quality service?

How can we better set up and train clients to use the system?

How can we provide more effective “self help” options?

How can we make the use of our software easier and more intuitive?

If you’re looking at those questions and saying, “All of them need work,” you’re right.

There’s no one right answer, and even if there was, it’s probably interrelated to three or four others. There’s no magic formula, no secret sauce we can pour over the heads of our employees and make client attrition simply disappear.

But if you’re like me, you’d probably like to know what was working and what wasn’t. What has the biggest impact, what’s going to make the biggest difference right now (hence the need for active, engaging customer service, and CRM principles).

As Jack Trout’s “Law of Singularity” states, “In each situation, only one move will produce substantial results.”

Implementing the move itself is the easy part.

Knowing how to find it isn’t.

A few thoughts about Apple’s recent PR problems:

1. When your client has a real problem, simply telling them “You’re holding it wrong” isn’t a real solution.

Even if it’s the truth, clients and prospects rarely want to hear that their process is to blame. Even if it is actually part of the problem, be extremely careful and proceed with caution. A lot of people at the client’s organization have spent a lot of time and energy putting the current process in place.

2. As dense as the general public (read: your clients) often seem to be, they can tell when you’re pushing spin, and when you’re really trying to solve their problem.

You think that the G4′s buyers, many of whom had owned earlier iPhone iterations, were excited to hear that their brand new hardware had an engineering defect, only to have Apple saying to the press, “It’s no big deal, just buy our slip case for it!”? Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away, it just comes across as arrogance.

3. Be extremely cautious about what you treat as a “random outlier,” and what you treat as a real problem.

Bad news never travels well. You think the V.P. of production wanted to have a meeting and tell Steve Jobs, “Hey, um, I think there’s a problem with our antenna design?” How soon did Apple know they had a problem on their hands? Within the first 5,000 units sold? The first 25,000? First 50,000? (Some seem to think Steve Jobs showcasing the Apple slip covers during the product launch meant they knew about it all along.) One of the biggest problems that leads to disaster is the fact that employees don’t want to communicate bad news for fear of the consequences. If your employees don’t feel empowered enough, or trust management enough to let you know when you have a real problem, your corporate culture is in dire need of change.

4. If it’s real, own the problem.

The words “Yes, but . . . ” should never leave your lips until the problem is solved. Clients and prospects don’t want to hear about how amazing you were six or 12 months ago. Don’t point the finger at other vendors, or other people in the company. “Well, if So-and-so Technologies had made Widget X properly, we wouldn’t be having this problem.” It’s not their problem, it’s yours. Fix it.

5. When you definitively know there’s a problem, act decisively, act now, and tell your clients what you’re doing about it.
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The worst thing you can do in a situation like Apple’s is to “circle the wagons” and go silent. Open channels of communication tells your clients that you’re more interested in actually fixing the problem than in trying to save face. Be proactive.

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I was reminded yesterday of a major turning point in my life.  It was sixteen years ago and I was the Marketing Director at Infobases, Inc.   Paul Allan and Dan Taggart were the two founders and they had recruited me away from my Sales Manager position at Computers Made Easy, the Novell Platinum reseller in the Provo Area.  They went on to start Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com and now Paul Allen has launched FamilyLink.com.

I think they recruited me because I had lots of cool ideas for marketing, even though all of my career and background was in sales.  My hobby, love, and background from the military was strategy and marketing was the purest form of strategic thinking I could find in the business world.

A close friend of mine, Jon Heaps, was the VP Sales and was selling up a storm.  I was over Marketing and Dan Taggart, in his customary direct approach asked me a very pointed question in front of the whole team, “When are you going to start bringing in sales?”

That question brought me up short.  I thought I had been doing lots of things, and I had.  But doing lots of things and bringing results are often two very different things.  I learned something that day:

Results are all that really matter.  It’s about execution.

My course correction to that pointed question has changed my career and many others.  Dan probably doesn’t even remember that little event, but I do.

Chet Holmes in one of my favorite books, “The Ultimate Sales Machine,” says that there are three kinds of executives in the marketplace.  90% of them tactical and get things done.  9% are strategic, and know the right things to do.  1% are both strategic and tactical, and get the right things done.  The 1% accomplish more than all the others combined.

Now I have seen people who are very effective at getting things done, but never take the time to make sure what they are doing will make any appreciable difference at all.  I’ve seen some who are addicted to staying busy, or keeping their people busy.

Troy Fullmer, one of my dear friends and a master at getting things done, taught me the value of ‘hoeing till the end of the row,’ with this great poem about a boy named Bill Brown.

Hoe to the End of the Row!

Bill Brown made a million,
Bill Brown, think of that.
That boy you remember,
As poor as a rat.

He hoed for the neighbors,
Did jobs by the day.
And Bill made a million,
Or near it they say.

He worked for my father,
You’ll maybe recall.
He wasn’t a wonder,
Not that, not at all.

He couldn’t out-hoe me,
Or cover more ground,
Or hoe any faster,
Or beat me around.

In fact, I was better
In one way that I know.
One toot from the kitchen
And home I would go.

But Bill Brown always hoed
To the end of the row.

We used to get hungry
Out there in the corn.
You talk about music,
What equals a horn?

A horn yellin’ dinner,
And tomatoes and beans,
And pork and potatoes,
And gravy and greens.

I ain’t blamin’ no one
For quittin’ on time.
To quit with the whistle,
That ain’t any crime.

But as for the million,
Well, this much I know.
Bill Brown always hoed
To the end of the row.

- Anonymous