Living Sales Excellence - Dennis Connelly's Blog

All month, Dave Kurlan, Frank Belzer, Chris Mott, and I have been writing on Sales Architecture as part of an ongoing series on what it takes to build a world-class sales organization.

We’ve touched on issues of enablement, management, infrastructure, and other critical areas this month as well.  These articles have been written in support of our upcoming webinar that you won’t want to miss if you are a business leader or sales leader who believes that sales could be a lot better at your company than they currently are.

In this fast-paced, one-hour webinar, we're going to cover sales architecture and other related issues in more depth.  If you're the person who needs to get the sales organization right, this webinar is for you.

Here is the webinar agenda:

• Sales Process - Optimizing Conversions
• Sales Methodology – Why It Matters
• Sales Messaging - How to Get It Right
• 3 Critical Conversations
• Executing in a Changing Economy
• Sales Model – Making It Scalable
• Channels - Optimizing Your Traction
• Sales Training - Critical Components for Maximum Impact
   

If you missed some of the articles specifically related to these issues and this webinar, here they are:

• Organic Sales Growth and Its Impact on Sales Architecture
• Overlooked Conversation Between Sales Managers and Salespeople
• Do Technical Salespeople Need Sales Training?
• Why Doesn't Sales Methodology Get More Attention?
• Getting a Sales Organization to Buy-In to Sales Training
• Marketing and Sales Feedback Loop Can Help You Grow
• Five Things VP’s Must Do To Insure Sales Enablement Has Impact
• Sales Execution - What Should You Pay Attention To?
• You May Be Expecting Too Much From Sales Training When...
• What is the Best Sales Model for Your Sales Force?

Today, I want to talk more about how sales and marketing must work together.  It's sort of nuts, in today's market, to let these two organizations work in a vacuum.  They must continually feed each other valuable market information in a healthy, robust, iterative process of information gathering and feedback.

Far from silos, the line between these two organizations has been mixed together like chemicals in a flask, producing a new kind of hybrid organization within the existing company structure.  Sales leadership and marketing leadership must have the right chemistry to drive results for the organization.  Let’s take a look at some of the questions we need to be asking:

Who are our customers?

So what are some of the ways that sales and marketing can help each other?  Of primary importance is answering the question of who we are targeting.  Who is our customer and what are their issues?  And another important and often overlooked question is who do we want as customers in the first place?

What is our strategy?

How are we getting in front of our customers?  How are we getting their attention?  What role is marketing playing and what does the handoff to sales look like?  Ideally, not only is marketing feeding the front end of the pipeline, but they are also planting seeds in the minds of your prospects, or more accurately "suspects."  These seeds or issues then serve as a conversational starting point from which the sales staff can probe further.  When marketing points out a source of frustration or a missed opportunity, it preframes the discussion for your sales people.

How do we gain traction?

No, not the kind where they drill holes in your head.  But more like a good snow tire.  Can sales move the prospect through the sales process effectively?  How can marketing help?  How far along the sales cycle is marketing bringing the prospect?  And how far should the salesperson back up the prospect in the process to ensure that the bases are properly covered? 

Marketing might be setting the stage, but sometimes they've shared so much information that it creates a false impression in the mind of the salesperson that they are further along the sales cycle than they really are.

How many of your sales people will recognize as a mirage, when a prospect only appears to be in a later stage of the sales cycle, but really isn't?  How many of them can properly bring this prospect back to an earlier point in the cycle, perhaps somewhere near that point discussed above where marketing might have identified a key source of frustration?  If you're not sure, you can click here to find out.

How do we get the business?

Finally, how are we getting the business?  Where do we fit in the market?  What kind of feedback can sales bring back to marketing to adjust the message and continue an iterative process that improves your results and desired outcomes with time?

 

Not long ago, marketing created the brand, researched the market, and positioned the products.  The job of sales was to close the business that marketing teed up for them.  The problem is that communication wasn't strong enough nor frequent enough, leading to complaints from both sides.  "The leads were no good."  Or, "Why can't those guys close the business?"

Today, a more iterative approach is needed.  The market is changing rapidly.  Marketing must solicit from sales real-time information gleaned from all interaction in the field to constantly adjust their message and ensure that their positioning statements are resonating with their intended audience.

Join me and a panel of sales experts for a powerful, one-hour webinar that will address the topics that the Kurlan team has been writing about this month.  The webinar is on February 5^th and we will discuss, "Leading Your Ideal Sales Force - Part 1"at 11 AM Eastern Time.

Image credit: kateleigh / 123RF Stock Photo
Diagram credit: Dennis Connelly, Kurlan & Associates

© Copyright  Dennis Connelly All Rights Reserved

Just yesterday, I was walking through the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle in New York with my son. After getting our free chocolate truffle from the Godiva store, we stumbled into a famous luxury goods store while we enjoyed our little confections. I should note that if you like chocolate, the Godiva membership is one of the few that gives away something for nothing. One need only wait until the calendar changes to the next month to get your yummy treat. You don’t need points; you don’t need to buy ten to get one; you don’t need to spend a nickel – ever. You just show up and get your free truffle. 

This isn’t a marketing blog but there’s something there worth noting. I know Godiva fully expects that I’ll buy stuff along the way. But that’s beside the point. While other companies work to build “relationships” with their customers with all kinds of strings, caveats, and quid pro quos, Godiva is acting more like a friend. “Here, have one. I ask for nothing from you.” Seth Godin writes copiously about this kind of behavior toward customers becoming increasingly important in a noisy, information-rich world of companies desperate for your narrowing spans of attention. And Frank Belzer, whose new book Sales Shift is in the running for Top Sales World "Top Sales & Marketing Book" of the year. Vote here.

But I want to talk about the luxury good store experience because we can learn something about selling. We walked in, turned right (just like the research showed we would), and started looking at stuff in the glass cases. Art deco lighters, fancy cigar holders, and thousand-dollar pens were among the items so you get the idea of the type of store we were visiting. The young salesperson walked toward us and asked, “Can I help you find something?” I replied, “No.” He said, “Okay,” and backed away. That was it. Poor “ol’ sport,” I thought, having just seen Gatsby and having not yet completely purged that phrase from my head.

How do you spend a fortune renting retail space at Time Warner on the ground floor, with carefully-designed layout (the result, no doubt, of all the latest in psychological testing), and the best in customer acquisition strategy, and still manage to neglect the part about actually getting the sale? If inbound marketing gets you 70% of the way to making the sale (their figure), in this modern era, the upscale retail shop is designed to go even further. It has to, after all, given the expense of all the bricks and mortar they took the time to assemble. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t keep building them. Humans, occasionally, like to get up from their computers and move around. We get cabin fever, eventually, and continue our voracious shopping habits in person.

The mentality that led to such poor salespersonship at “Luxury Store” reminds me of the approach that car dealers take, where the role of sales is misunderstood and misdirected. (More on that in another article.) The corporate executives undervalue the role of sales, rely on imagecraft, market positioning, aesthetics, and prestige, etc. and for the most part, it works. People walk into the Honda dealership because they already like Hondas, not because they have no idea what they want and lucky for them, the nice salesperson is there to help them figure it out. Gazillions are spent on advertising to help minimize the role of the salesperson, whose job is to get the person to stay long enough to experience the paper-shuffling, manager-approving Jedi tricks and sign on the bottom line.

The good ones don’t lose the sale. The lousy ones make people furious. Really, haven’t you had that experience, or know someone who has? Don’t you know people who will never buy a car from so and so till the fiery underworld remodels itself as an arctic getaway? But what about real salespeople? Can’t they make a sale where there wasn’t one? Of course they can.

Let’s replay that conversation with Ol’ Sport using a simple conversational technique I learned from TopSalesWorld Hall-of-Famer, Dave Kurlan. “Hi! Should I say welcome, or welcome back?” Me: “I haven’t walked in here before.” OS: “Then welcome. What made you walk in here today?” Me: “You were across from Godiva and I was too busy enjoying my chocolate to notice which store I was wandering into.” OS: “Perfect! If there were a reason to wander in here, what would it be?” Me: “I like cool pens.” OS: “Do you have a pen collection?” And so on, which might include questions like, What’s your favorite pen? Why? Is it sentimental or design or quality? Etc. “You know,” I might think to myself, “I wasn’t expecting to have a real conversation.”

Instead, OS stood back, afraid to say anything more, and eliminated the risk that he would lose a sale that he thinks might otherwise automatically happen. Why is this allowed? It happens because the leadership of Luxury Store, the manager, the marketing department, the board of directors, the finance team, and the sales staff are all on the same page. They undervalue the role of sales. Sales is increased, in their thinking, by the clever product creation, history, story, reputation, design, store layout, inbound strategy and marketing. The sales associate is there to open the glass cabinet, make light conversation, and ring up the purchase, right?

This is a missed opportunity because it’s possible to dramatically increase sales.

• How many of your sales people are falling into this trap?
• Is your company fostering the problem?
• How much pressure do salespeople have to not blow the sale?
• Do your sales people have the necessary selling skills?
• Do they have the DNA to overcome their own weaknesses?
• Can they listen?
• Can they react in the moment?
• Do they have the presence to be the added value themselves?

Maybe it’s time to evaluate your sales organization? Maybe it’s time to look at what you might be missing from your sales team. What are their current capabilities? How much better could they be? What would it take to make them better? And how long would it take?

Someday, I’ll buy a super nice pen because I like pens. When that happens, there was nothing about my experience at Luxury Store that puts them on the short list. But there could have been. It was a missed opportunity to make a sale much more than it was a careful execution to not lose one.

 

 

 

In Frank Belzer’s recent book, SalesShift: How inbound marketing has turned sales upside down making it more difficult and more lucrative at the same time, he convincingly demonstrates that the nature of the lead has changed and many salespeople are having trouble adapting.  It’s true that in an Inbound world, marketing must work in tandem with sales creating an information feedback loop which propels new sales.  That is also one of Frank’s points.  Where salespeople get into trouble is thinking that a lead is a lead is a lead.

The reality is that all leads are not created “equal.”  As different as a referral is from a cold call, an inbound lead is different than those generated through traditional marketing channels.  When marketing works well, it performs the first part of the sales function.  It generates interest, exposes a potential issue, and may even lead to someone picking up the phone and calling your company for a rep appointment.  When it’s done well, the sales department can get hooked on this approach, even to the point of developing an “order taker” reputation.  The prospect, in this case, is already interested.

But inbound leads are different.  They are born on a different continent.  They are ethnically and culturally different from a traditional lead.  A potential prospect might have been doing research on the internet, watching a cool video, or simply wandering around on the web when an opportunity presented itself.  Taking advantage of the opportunity might have involved a simple mouse click.  Then after typing in an email address and answering a couple of multiple choice questions where your computer usually fills in all the details for you - free stuff arrives on your screen.  Behind the scenes, a company is collecting that information and calling it a lead.  The “prospect” barely lifted a finger in this case, and might not have thought about it very much.

Now back to that lead that is sitting in the rep’s inbox. It has the look and feel of someone who wants your product - just like a traditional lead.  It looks "bigger and badder" than it is.  But it is fundamentally different.  The person on the other end actually might be stunned to get a call from you - “What?! You mean I triggered a sales call? I just wanted to see the video. I’m not in the market for anything.”  But this is exactly the point where the path forks.

What is this fork, you ask?  Yogi Berra said to “Take it.”  Okay, let’s take it.  And here are your choices.  You can continue reaching out to leads who appear to be deer caught in headlights, make assumptions, and watch them run away, or you can develop your selling skills, approach them differently, and convert them.  That’s why Frank said that it’s more difficult, yet more lucrative.  With a few critical tweaks, your sales team can convert more of these kinds of leads and outproduce the competition.  And isn’t that the point?  As the economy comes back and as it lifts all of the boats in your market, are you concerned that your vulnerability to the competition will be masked in the short run as sales increase?  The market winners will be those who outpace the competition or those who beat the competition relative to each other rather than where they were last year.

Throw away "solution selling".  Toss aside spin, dodges, and dropping five dollar bills.  (Reminds me of the Barry Levinson movie, Tin Men, about two rival aluminum siding salesmen!)  Read Dave Kurlan’s Whitepaper on Trust for additional insight in that area. Get rid of "technique" altogether and embrace a conversational and consultative style, like you might with a friend or an uncle.  Back off.  Don’t push.  Ask questions.  Assume nothing.  And most of all, slow down.

In Part 2 of this Inbound Marketing blog series, I will let you in on few secrets.  There are two key selling weaknesses, which most sales people have, that prevent them from having this consultative-style discussion.  Having or not having these two key weaknesses makes all the difference.  And there are three others which could also cause your people to get in their own way and lose more of these opportunities than they need to.  But your staff can overcome them with help, and open the doors to a wealth of opportunity generated by Inbound Marketing.  You may want to consider having your sales force evaluated to see whether the current team can executive your objectives and whether they can both embrace and be effective selling in an Inbound world.

 

Here is the link to "Inbound Marketing Part Two - Leads Are Up But Why are Sales Down?"