The landscaper called me over to look at a tree on our property.  He showed me the enormous hole and I asked, "What did that?"

"Woodpecker," he said.

On one side of the tree we had this perfectly cut, huge hole, and the other side of the tree had many small holes.  I learned that the Woodpecker that made the small holes were looking for food while the Woodpecker that made the huge hole was making a home.  Hunters and Farmers. 

Just like the two types of Woodpeckers, salespeople tend to fall into the same two categories of being either Hunters or Farmers.  In a perfect world, Hunters make lots of outgoing calls in order to find an opportunity which could pay them to eat.  Farmers work a single account and try to make them bigger.

Other than predators, there isn't much to stop a woodpecker from doing their thing, but there are plenty of things that could interfere with a salesperson's Hunting or Farming efforts.  Let's discuss them.

Let's begin with the Hunters. While many tech companies have adopted the use of BDRs to conduct inbound and outbound prospecting, most companies in most industries did not go there.  So let's assume that we are talking about a traditional sales organization with traditional salespeople who have responsibility for both finding and selling opportunities. If the salesperson already works at your company, you know if they are hunting because those who hunt consistently regularly add new opportunities to the pipeline. But what about the salespeople who don't hunt consistently.  Do you know why? The seven reasons most often to blame are:

• Sales Managers.  What?  Yes, sales managers who fail to hold their salespeople accountable for the agreed upon prospecting activities are enabling those non-hunting salespeople.
• Fear of Rejection - they fear that a prospect will say, "No," or "Not Interested," and that will destroy them
• Need to be Liked - they believe that if they interrupt a prospect and the prospect becomes upset, the prospect won't like them.
• Call Reluctance - they refuse to make cold calls.
• Perfectionist - they won't make the calls until they are sure the calls will be perfect but, of course, there is no such thing as a perfect call.
• Time Management - they have time for everything except making prospecting calls
• Nobody Answers the Phone - a nice excuse since it can take anywhere from 8-15 attempts to reach a decision maker and most salespeople give up after 4 attempts.

If the salesperson does not work for you - yet - but they are candidates for a sales role that requires Hunting, you need a crystal ball.  In this case, you aren't as concerned with why they might not hunt, you must know, in advance, if they WILL hunt.

In both scenarios, one of the assessments from Objective Management Group (OMG) can help.  For your existing salespeople, a sales team evaluation will help you understand if you can get your non-hunting salespeople to become hunters.  For potential salespeople, OMG's Sales Candidate Assessment will tell you whether or not they WILL prospect consistently and you can take that prediction to the bank as no assessment is as accurate and predictive as OMG's Sales Candidate Assessments.

According to OMG's data from the evaluations and assessments of more than 2.3 million salespeople, 68% of salespeople are strong in the Hunter Competency.  But don't rejoice just yet.  If we look more closely, we see that 95% of the top 10% of all salespeople are strong Hunters so what does that mean for the rest?  If we look at the bottom 50% - half of your current and potential future salespeople - only 34% are strong Hunters and that drops to just 6% of the bottom 10%.  Ugh.

Thankfully, OMG measures more than the Hunting competency as that is only one of the twenty-one Sales Core Competencies featured in OMG's various evaluation tools.

The other type of salesperson we were discussing earlier in the article is the Farmer.  While more salespeople tend to be attracted to the Farmer role than the Hunter role, attraction does not equal well-suited.  There are several reasons why salespeople in Farmer roles fail to significantly grow their large accounts:

• Unable to reach decision makers so those in power are unfamiliar with the salesperson.
• Unable to penetrate the account both vertically and horizontally resulting in lost opportunities
• Unable to provide value because of a focus on pricing
• Order-taking vs account growth mentality
• Risk averse so they focus on not losing the account rather than growing the account
• Lack of strong relationships across the account so when a key individual leaves the account is vulnerable
• Faulty sense of loyalty where they advocate for their customer instead of for their company

The next time you are in your yard you might hear a woodpecker but you probably won't see it.  Is the Woodpecker hunting or farming, and does that even matter?  There's not much you can do about it anyway.  However, at your company, there is a lot you can do.  Get your sales team evaluated so you can identify why your sales team isn't more effective and what you can do to train and coach them up.  Utilize OMG's Sales Candidate Assessments to improve your sales selection.  Your salespeople don't have to be Woodpeckers!

Check out all 21 Sales Core Competencies, comparison data by industry, and even how your salespeople compare here.

Take OMG's Sales Candidate Assessments for a free trial here.

Check out OMG's Sales Team Evaluation Samples here.

I do my own weeding and that "hobby" takes up a lot of my free time.  Weeding is like playing the arcade game wack-a-mole where you pull the weed, use a weed wacker, or poison the weed on Monday and two more weeds appear in its place on Tuesday.

If you think about territory sales or sales into a specific vertical, reps should be calling on the same customers and prospects all the time.  The key similarity is that both groups of salespeople have a limited number of prospects, as defined by geography or need, and therefore must continue calling on those prospects until they are sold.  But then what?  If a rep is selling consumables and/or supplies of some kind, they'll continue calling on those customers who buy. But what if they aren't selling consumables?  What if the purchases are much more infrequent, as in many months or even years apart?

That's the problem I'm writing about today.

The salesperson finally closed that customer for an infrequent purchase and now they don't have to try so hard.  But the salesperson's competitors didn't close the sale so they are still calling on that prospect, your customer, trying to take away the business, or get the next sale, or be there when something goes wrong.  In this case, your competitors are just like my weeds in that they simply keep showing up no matter what we do!

So if this is your customer, and you stop trying so hard because you finally sold them, but your competitor continues calling, appearing, adding value, being there, developing a relationship, trying really hard and then something does go wrong, who will get the next order?  You?  I'm afraid not.  And exposes the challenge that role specialization is supposed to solve - but doesn't - and that's account churn.

Moving a new account to an account manager allows the salesperson to look for additional new customers and get them sold too.  That's Great! But as a group, account managers generally add little value, aren't strategic enough to fend off the competition, and aren't the ones getting the call when something goes wrong.  Those calls go to customer service and we all know what happens when you have to reach out to customer service these days.  Most customer service teams (unlike our team of CSR's at OMG who are awesome!) are unresponsive, don't listen, can't fix anything, and seem to hate their customers.  If your customer, who is already upset, reaches out to your customer service team, what will happen?  At the end of the call, will your customer fall in love with your company all over again, or despise your company?

The secret to churn prevention is fantastic customer service, not dedicated account managers!

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Walter and I attended a recent Boston Red Sox / Houston Astros game at Fenway Park.  It was my first visit to Fenway Park since 2019 and it was exciting to see most of the seats filled. It was exciting to hear all of the fan noise that has been missing for so long but there was one fan in particular that I heard louder than all of the others.  Starting in the fourth inning, Timmy, the eight-year-old Astros fan sitting next to me, didn't stop chatting with me for the remainder of the game. When Timmy said he hated the Red Sox I had to ask him why. His answer is the focus of this article on selling!  "Why do you hate the Red Sox so much Timmy?"  

He said, "Because their faces are ugly."  Wow.  I asked how they were ugly and he said "They have zits - and they pick them in the dugout."

That might not sound like the basis of an article on selling to you, but it certainly does to me! 

Timmy's grandfather flew him to Boston to watch his favorite team play the Red Sox in the absolute best ballpark to watch a game. He loves his Astros the way I loved my Red Sox when I was that age (OK, I love them at this age too) and as much as Ethan Bryan loves his Royals.  Ethan still wants to throw out the first pitch at a Royals game this year....

Timmy was not able to provide talking points, data, facts, bullet points, or even anecdotal evidence of why his team, which cheated to win the 2017 and 2019 World Series, was the best and the Red Sox, who won the World Series in 2018, was not.  He has an unexplainable emotional connection to the Astros.  

Salespeople don't understand this phenomenon.

Customers often have unexplainable emotional connections to the salespeople, account managers and companies they do business with and it doesn't matter how much better your company is, how much more responsive you are, how much more capable your product is, how much lower your price is, or how much more motivated you are to win their business.  Their emotional connection to their account manager and company will determine the winner every single time.

Don't let that deter you!

If you know that this happens, it should be your number one goal, with each and every customer, to build that kind of an emotional connection so that your customer will refuse to even consider moving their business to anyone else.  This isn't easy, won't happen overnight, requires making every customer a much bigger priority than ever before, and is not for the salesperson who loves to hunt.  But you can do this!

It is also important to know that most of the salespeople working for your competitors aren't good enough for their customers to have these emotional connections.  Most salespeople can't and won't accomplish this.  The salespeople who do accomplish this aren't particularly good salespeople but they are fantastic at nurturing and developing relationships and have probably been working closely with those customers for over a decade.

Remember, whether it's zits or chits, unbreakable relationships can't be undone by better pricing or specifications.

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I've written a lot about scorecards in the past 12 months while Kurlan & Associates created scorecards for more than a dozen companies in December alone.  Companies that are using our scorecards are reporting significantly higher win rates, better use of resources, and much less time spent chasing deals and accounts that they simply can't win. Until now, I have talked only about sales process scorecards used to further qualify opportunities and predict the chances of winning the business.

• Marketing - to score a lead.
• Recruiting - to score a candidate.
• Account/Territory management - to score accounts so that you can objectively determine the accounts on which your salespeope and/or account managers should be spending most of their time.

In the table below, you can see a generic Kurlan scorecard for time/territory management as well as account management.  You can modify the weighting for the 9 criteria based on how important each one is to you and your business. Just make sure that the totals equal 100.  

After you have prioritized each category and assigned points, score each account in the territory.  Salespeople and/or account managers should invest their time in direct proportion to the scores for each account.  You can hire an additional salesperson to work on the accounts that aren't as important, but still need to be touched on a regular basis in order for growth to occur while at the same time assuring retention.

What other criteria can you include in your account/territory management scorecard?

• % of products or SKUs 
• Years a customer
• Loyalty
• Referral source
• Quality of the Relationship with the Account Manager
• Distance to Travel
• % of Their Total Business

Here are some of the other articles I've written on scorecards as a part of the sales process.

This weekend we had seats to the new Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway show, School of Rock.  Our son has watched the original movie around a dozen times and didn't think there was the slightest possibility that the show would be as good as the movie.  Did the show meet expectations?  I'll share that in a moment, but first, let's discuss the dynamic of the show versus the movie and compare that to an ongoing sales challenge.  While salespeople have expectations for meeting outcomes and sales results, prospects have expectations too - for the meetings, salespeople, products, services, prices and terms that a company will provide at various times during your sales cycle.  In the case of movie versus show, there is a better analogy to strategic account management and even customer service.

With an existing customer, you represent the movie, School of Rock.  You are known, there is history, and the customer knows what to expect, both good and bad.

When you schedule a call or meeting to upgrade, upsell, or simply renew your contract, you represent the Broadway show, School of Rock.  Will you be the same or worse, will your prices go up and will your service go down?  It could be extremely difficult for you to improve upon the performance you already provided or impress them further.

On the other hand, your competition, finally getting their chance to compete for the business, comes in with guns blazing. They represent a different show altogether so your customer or client has more of an open mind, lower expectations and becomes easier to impress.

How did School of Rock, the Broadway show compare to the movie?  They rocked, of course.  They brought a raw energy to the stage that could never be achieved in the original movie.  It would be quite the accomplishment for the Broadway version to impress our nearly 14-year old son, but they pulled it off.  He even walked away with a School of Rock guitar pick, tossed into the audience by the Dewey Finn character.

How can you  exceed expectations with your existing customers?  Step it up, bring more energy, bring greater creativity, bring your best ideas, and commit to completely wowing your existing customer.  If you don't, your competition will!