Back in the 90's, after years of Chiropractic, I learned to crack my own back and neck.  You never know when you will need to relieve stiffness and/or pain.  Actually you do know.  If you drove more than two hours today or slept in a hotel bed last night I'm certain you'll need to crack your back and neck...

In the spring of 2020, I sprained my ankle and it never improved.  I'd step out of the car and the pain was so bad I would limp for the first twenty steps until it loosened up.  Imagine my surprise when two years later I heard a familiar crack - not in my ankle - but in my foot and then my knee.  When I stiffened my leg below the knee and purposely created the necessary torque, I heard four separate cracks and then bam! I was pain free!  Now, each time I stand up, I crack my knee and foot and I can walk without pain.  The most important thing was that my symptom screamed ankle but the root cause was my leg and foot.

it's the same with sales teams.  I receive calls and emails that begin with things like "My salespeople are complacent" or "My salespeople need some training on closing" or "My salespeople aren't bringing in enough new business" or "My salespeople need help with negotiating" or "Our team has a lot of stalled opportunities."  Just like my ankle, the real problem is RARELY any of these things.  It's usually something else or, in many cases, a number of something else's.

Today a client asked me to explain the difference between skills and effectiveness. You won't find the answer by doing a Google search as that search turns up exactly nothing on the subject.  This article will discuss the similarity between symptoms/causes and skills/effectiveness. Do you remember Bob, the subject of many articles and my favorite weak salesperson to write about?

Bob strikes again!

I've written 10 articles about Bob and everyone says that the Bob series is their favorite.

I was reviewing Bob's OMG (Objective Management Group) Sales Assessment and realized it is a great example of a salesperson who has skills, but is not effective.  For example, he scored 90 in the Hunting Competency but was not effective at scheduling new meetings because he was sabotaged by his huge need to be liked as evidenced by his score of only 50 on the Doesn't Need Approval Competency.

His need to be liked made him worry that prospects would be angry with him if he got through and interrupted their day. His need to be liked also prevented him from asking good, tough, timely, questions for fear that prospects would dislike him.  Bob has relatively good scores for both the Selling Value and Qualifying Competencies but he has another weakness that limits his effectiveness.

Supportive Buy-Cycle is a Competency in which Bob scored only 29 - an incredibly low score. 

His process for making major purchases does not support ideal sales outcomes and absolutely crushes his ability to sell value and thoroughly qualify.  One of the articles I wrote about Bob dealt with his Non-Supportive Buy-Cycle in great detail.

Let's look at Bob through the lens of his symptoms because up until now we have been discussing the root causes for his lack of effectiveness.  The best way to do this is to ask management.  When they discuss Bob, what do they talk about?

Bob hunts but doesn't land many appointments.  The opportunities that do enter the pipeline end up being about price. Opportunities stall and he can't get them moving again. He drives his sales manager crazy.  He has the skills (knows what to do) but lacks effectiveness (isn't able to execute).  Fortunately, OMG is able to differentiate between those who can sell (know what to do) and those who will sell (will execute) so clients using OMG to assess candidates don't have to deal with these problems. When clients use OMG to evaluate their current sales teams, these are but a few of the challenges they discover.

Last week I wrote an article about OMG not being about any one single score.  Like today's discussion of Bob, that article provided a great example where the sum of the parts, instead of a single score, will always predict exactly what will happen on the phone, over video, or in the field.

Take a crack at OMG and see what happens!  Whether evaluating your current sales team for development purposes or to assess sales candidates for open sales positions, OMG has the science-backed accuracy you can trust.  You can reach us here.

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When you think about cars, you know there are coupes, sedans, crossovers, SUVs, and sports cars.  You also know there are luxury cars, mid-range cars and economy cars.  You also know there are fast cars and slow cars, flashy cars and vanilla cars, big cars and little cars, white cars, black cars and every color in between.  But if you were to think about specific features that differentiate one car from another, you would have to really think about it, wouldn't you?  It used to be easy.  Air conditioning, power brakes, power steering, power windows, power seats, side mirrors and automatic transmissions were standard in the expensive cars but not available in the budget-priced cars.  Today, most cars, in most classes include all of those features as standard.

The same kind of thinking is required when thinking about the various roles of salespeople.  We can name them: Account Executive, Territory Manager, Business Development Rep, Sales Development Rep, Account Manager, Key Account Manager, National Account Manager, Channel Manager, Application Engineer, Sales Consultant, Inside Sales, Outside Sales, and more.

To further complicate things, in some companies and industries, Sales Managers function as salespeople and Sales VPs function as Sales Managers.

While the above roles have selling as a primary responsibility, there are as many differences to selling roles as there are differences to the class or style of cars.  Today, we'll explore the difference between an Account Executive and a Business Development Rep.

I collaborated with Joe DiDonato, Chief of Staff at Baker Communications, and together we produced the following comparison.

While both roles overlapped in 10 key competencies, the capabilities in the remaining 11 competencies were very different. 

A successful AE needs to excel at 18 of 21 competencies that OMG assesses, while a successful BDR needs to excel at 13 of the 21 competencies. BDRs perform lead follow-up, send emails and connection requests, and conduct cold-calling. The reality is that most individuals in that role aren’t very good at it, based on the data we've collected. There is a prevailing misconception that those 3 tasks don’t require much selling ability because it’s “all top of the funnel,” but success in the role requires proficiency in 11 different sales competencies.

It’s the nature of each role’s responsibilities - and the prospect’s point of entry into the sales process and funnel - that requires different strengths. A BDR is focused on closing the prospect on initial sales and proof of concept steps at the top of the sales funnel. They’re going to be faced with 9 out of 10 callers rejecting them – if not more - and must be able to shrug that off without taking the rejection personally. As a result, the BDR must be “rejection proof” in addition to having strong hunting and closing capabilities. 

In contrast, the AE role relies on relationship building to move the opportunity down the sales funnel and through the formal sales process. Included in that effort is a strong consultative selling ability, as well as the knowledge of how to convincingly sell value to the prospect – both essential skills in moving the opportunity forward. 

Next comes strong presentation skills as the proposed solution has to be presented to multiple stakeholders, as well as a keen understanding and respect of the formal sales process that successfully moves the opportunity forward. Rounding out the AE's portfolio of skills is that the AE must have a considerably stronger comfort level around discussing money. 

So many opportunities are squandered as a result of an AE's failure to verify that the money is there, it can be spent, they are willing to pay more, and the value of more has been established. AEs who are comfortable having that conversation will outsell those who don’t. When they skip, avoid, or vaguely cover finances, proposals are generated for prospects who either won’t buy or won’t pay the price resulting in price objections, delays, business lost to competitors, or prospects choosing to do nothing. 

One of the most significant differentiators between the most successful AEs and their less successful counterparts can be found in the sales competency called Supportive Buy Cycle (shown in the table above). The attributes in the Buy Cycle competency correlate to how salespeople go about the process of making a major purchase for themselves and salespeople tend to sell in a way that is consistent with how they buy. The best salespeople determine what they want to purchase and simply buy it - without much consideration of price, alternate sources, having to think it over, and more. 

Conversely, the weakest salespeople tend to conduct research, comparison shop, look for the lowest price, think things over, and some of them even hate salespeople and "being sold" something. As you might imagine, the weakest salespeople understand it when their prospects want to buy the same way that they do, while the strongest salespeople don’t understand that buying behavior, push back, and ask questions. 

Strong salespeople have the ability to eliminate competition, shorten the sales cycle, and help prospects buy on value instead of price. It’s difficult for some salespeople to grasp the concept and consequences of this competency. But when salespeople change the way they buy so that it supports ideal sales outcomes, their revenue increases by 50%.

As you can see from the analysis, the skill sets are very different. Many companies treat the BDR role as an entry-level position in preparation for the more demanding AE role at some future date. But as closely aligned as these two roles are in objectives, they require different skills to be successful. As a result, the movement between roles is not as easily accomplished as most sales managers hope.

Before we conclude the article, it's important to note that for each of these 21 Sales Core Competencies, OMG includes 8-10 attributes (64 on one of them) for a total of around 275 specific sales findings and scores.  We have a site that shows the following data for each competency:

• Average score for all salespeople
• Average score for the top 10%
• Average score for the bottom 10%
• Average score in your industry
• Average score for your company (you'll need some of your salespeople to take the evaluation to populate this bar on the graph - it's free for them to take it and populate the bar graph with your aggregate scores but you'll have to pay for the 30-page reports if you want them)

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I bought my first cell phone in 1985.  The enormous device was hard wired to the car, connected to a heavy metal box, and cost $2,000 to install.  All calls in and out were billed by the minute and my bill averaged around $1,500 per month. The coverage was so spotty that most calls were dropped several times per conversation.  The only practical way to use the "car phone" was to find a coverage area, find a place to park in that area, and then have a conversation.  It took a good 15 years for the technology to catch up with the concept!

The same thing has happened with email prospecting.  I had my first email account in the early 90's.  My email address at the time was sales guru at prodigy dot net. Since then, marketers and BDRs have been sending dreadful emails to drum up interest and I believe it has been an utter failure. Over the past few years, they added artificial intelligence (AI) to their efforts and despite the time it saved, it was far worse.  Emails generated using AI were absolutely dreadful.  Until now. Sunday I received a cold email, generated using AI that was actually personalized.  Not with just my name, but it included information about my company, where I attended college and more.  While I still have no interest or need for the service being pitched, I actually read it instead of deleting it.  Here's what it said:

Hi Dave — We hope you're well, and having a great start to the new year and the Q1. I'm inviting CEOs with similar backgrounds to an exclusive session below.

I love that Objective Management Group continues to pioneer the sales assessment industry by providing crucial insights to maximize sales performance in companies of all sizes and industries. It's clear why you do it. I have been researching the importance of creating "perfect pitches" for consistent conversions when selling candidates quarters!

I'm [his name], [his title] at [his company] We recently invited a number of companies similar to yours, please accept our intro session for Objective Management Group (attached deck here) to learn more about how we've helped them.

I've noticed that you graduated from Assumption College, hope it was a great experience! Have a wonderful rest of your week!

I'm not saying this is good because it's not even close to good.  It's just better than what I usually get.  The second paragraph is copied from OMG's website and the college information was probably taken from LinkedIn. Every sentence has grammatical and style errors and it has a terrible call to action but it is SO much better than the dozens of emails that you and I receive each day. Those are so, so awful and without any good reason ask for us to hop on a call this afternoon for a discussion.   

Worse, their workflow was overly aggressive.  Without indicating that I was open to a meeting, I received a calendar invite for a random time.  I declined the invite and then received a meeting confirmation.  The potential is there but the execution, from writing to workflows was still horrible.  It makes me wonder.  Companies and marketers invest the money for these AI applications but don't invest in copyrighting, messaging and getting the workflows right.  Why bother?

And in case you got the wrong idea, I'm not suggesting that you run out, get an AI application and begin sending better automated messages.  I'm suggesting that if you are going to bypass the phone and resort to prospecting by email (I'm not a fan), then invest the time to manually target, do your own research, invest in better messaging, take the time to plan your follow up and don't follow the email I shared.  That's your only chance if you actually want and expect anyone to read a cold email.

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I found it challenging to write this article.

The company that provides us with cyber-insurance required that our entire team watch a series of 21 training videos to make us more aware of how hackers operate, how easy it is to be hacked, and what we must do differently in order to protect our data, privacy and accounts.  Imagine my surprise when the first video described hacking operations as businesses with outbound prospecting operations whose goal is to convert their emails, texts and calls into paying customers.  They described very aggressive and efficient sales and marketing operations staffed by people who operated without feelings or empathy, felt no rejection or remorse, and didn't care about the prospects that didn't respond, but were all in on those who took the bait.

Wow.

Salespeople have never had GREAT reputations, and from among the tens of thousands of B2B salespeople I have met, worked with or evaluated during the past 35 years, if they were guilty of anything, it would be for trying to overcompensate for that undeserved reputation.

While I can't stop thinking about that video and the analogy they used, there are two strong thoughts pulling at me.

On the one hand, I am shocked and chagrinned that the insurance company would use salespeople as a reference point for hackers.  You could not possibly understand the degree to which It bothers me.  

On the other hand, you and I both know that if salespeople worked as methodically, consistently, aggressively, effectively, and efficiently as the hackers do, we would double our revenue.

Most B2B salespeople are ethical and trying their best to help their prospects, customers and clients.  They have feelings and consciences, try to be honest and that makes them good human beings.  Hackers lack those traits and while I'm not a psychologist, I'm pretty sure their lack of a conscience makes them psychopaths!  

Hackers perform the way we wish our salespeople would however they are psychopathic criminals.

Salespeople underperform because the human elements that make them normal and ethical - their fears, feelings, emotions, consciences and empathy, slow them down, get in the way, make them think too much and sabotage performance.

It's a double edged sword.

According to Objective Management Group (OMG) and their data from the evaluations of 2,180,816 salespeople, the top 5% as well as many in the top 20%, are in fact human, ethical, and have consciences. This proves that high performing salespeople and ethics are not mutually exclusive.  We can have the best of both worlds.  To prove that, I looked through OMG's data and found that the top 5% of all salespeople actually score 45% higher than the weakest 50% in the attribute of high integrity selling.  Despite that, only 26% of all salespeople and only 39% of the top 5% are effective at building trust.  What does that mean?

Salespeople who are not high integrity sellers and who struggle to build trust have major credibility problems while salespeople who are high integrity sellers that also succeed at building trust establish tremendous credibility and consistently win business.

Warning:  The salespeople to beware of are those who are not high integrity sellers but despite that, manage to build trust.  Watch out for them!  That is the group that gives salespeople a bad name.

There's more!  One of the OMG Sales Core Competencies, "Stays in the Moment," encompasses  fears, feelings and emotions.  Great salespeople are able to stay in the moment and don't allow their fears, feelings and emotions get in the way.  OMG's data shows that while only 37% of all salespeople are able to stay in the moment, 65% of the top 5% of salespeople are able to stay in the moment and 19% of the weakest 50% are able to stay in the moment.  The top 5% are 42% more effective at staying in the moment and preventing their fears, feelings and emotions from getting in the way.

You can see more of OMG's data here.

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Yesterday I watched a toad walk across the outdoor side of our kitchen window.  Picture it!  I wish I had video but it ran so counter to what I have observed toads doing over the past 65 years that I froze.  I performed a google search and found exactly one image of a toad on a window. Please understand that the dirty window and sill are not mine - I found the image via a Google search.

Regular readers know that I'm all about the data and I have written nearly two thousand articles based on data from Objective Management Group's (OMG) assessments of more than two million salespeople.  Occasionally however, I see data where incorrect conclusions have been reached and like the toad on the window, my conclusions run counter to theirs.  One such example is a beautiful infographic from sales playbook company Xant. I am going to share some of their data, graphics and conclusions and I'll provide my counter argument to their conclusions.

I'm not challenging the data, only their conclusions.

They cited data from tens of millions of outbound follow up calls to leads showing call conversion rates being significantly better on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Their conclusion was that salespeople should make their outbound calls on those three days.

I see it a bit differently.  Wednesday is hump day and Friday is the beginning of the long weekend.  Both days are notorious for being slacker days so it's not that prospects are less likely to schedule meetings when you call them on Wednesdays and Fridays as much as salespeople tend to be far less effective on Wednesdays and Fridays.  So if Xant is suggesting that salespeople focus their calls on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays you should absolutely make your outbound calls on Wednesdays and Fridays when there is less noise and competition but while being as effective as you would on the other three days.

The data also showed that contact rates were best in the morning and they suggested that you make your calls then. Of course, I see it differently!  I have always suggested that outbound calling be performed for no more than 4 hours per day because salespeople become exhausted and less effective as the day goes on.  I believe the poorer afternoon contact rates are due to salesperson fatigue; not prospect behavior!  Therefore, if Xant is suggesting that you call in the morning, begin making your calls in the afternoon when fewer salespeople are calling!

There was one conclusion that I wholeheartedly agreed with and that is the time elapsed from lead to follow up call.  Five minutes does seem to be magical with a conversion rate that is 8X better than waiting even ten minutes before your call!  FOLLOW UP IMMEDIATELY!!

Their data shows that most salespeople - 81% - make fewer than 5 follow up attempts but the data isn't filtered by title. Calling the C Suite requires more attempts than calling a manager but salespeople suck at reaching decision makers.  Read these articles.  Despite that, it is very clear that you must be persistent! The reality is that the contact rate for between two and six attempts is much better than for one attempt and more than eight attempts.  My advice, call every day until you reach the person that generated the lead.

When it comes to lead follow up, I have a few suggestions.

Do it quickly and you won't have to do it a lot.

Do it effectively and you'll have a better conversion ratio.

Do it a lot to become more effective.

Let's pivot to a baseball analogy.  If the batter fails to get a hit, one of three things have occurred:

1. They made solid contact but hit it right at a fielder - bad luck.
2. The pitcher got them out with good pitching.
3. They got themselves out with lack of plate discipline.

Don't get yourself out with lack of outbound calling expertise.  Practice every day and become awesome.  When I first began selling I hated cold-calling with a passion.  Since I was spending 6 hours per day doing what I hated I vowed to become good enough at it so that I could do it in one hour.  Remember, the better you are, the less calling you'll have to do!

The "ABC's" is an alternate term for fundamentals.

Unless ABC stands for Afghanistan, the Border, and Crime. The US Government has seriously botched the ABC's in 2021 and there's no way to easily undo what's been done.

However, there are some misguided selling strategies that can be undone and in today's article we'll discuss the benefits of the single tool that is the real deal and a huge difference maker.

Email sucks for everything except sending links and attachments, confirming meetings, saying hello, catching up, and sending along meeting agendas.  You should never sell over email and you know this.  How many unsolicited emails do you delete each day with offers to generate leads, appointments, SEO, website design, IT help and more?  Would you like to know what is always more effective than email?

The Phone is a much better way to have a conversation because you simply can not have a conversation over email.  You lose context, tonality, meaning, timing, spontaneity, and all of the dynamics of a conversation!  Please choose the phone for prospecting, following up on inbound leads, making outbound calls, and for follow up conversations.  Would you like to know what is always more effective than the phone?

Video is best.  While you can have an actual conversation over the phone, you can't see how your prospects and customers are reacting and for building trust, they can't look you in the eyes.  Video solves that.  I'm going to use my dog, Dinger, as an example.  You may recall that last year I proved that Dinger has better listening skills than most salespeople.

This 14 second audio provides an example of what you might hear when asking a question over the phone.

Link to Audio 

Now listen to the audio - but WITH video and watch how vastly different it is from what you expected.

Seeing how they react, how they respond and what they do is even more important than hearing their words.  I know, my example is with a dog.  Would it be any different if you asked a person?  Suppose you asked, "Is this something you would find useful?" and the human said, "yah, sure."

Let's assume you have the ability to observe them and you see them responding to email while they absentmindedly say, "yah, sure."

It's more important than ever that you choose video over phone if you can't meet face to face.  You want to have every possible advantage, tool, weapon, strategy and tactic at your disposal and video is the closest you can get to the good old days of face to face.

One of the new competencies that Objective Management Group (OMG) now measures is Video Proficiency.

When evaluating a sales team we also capture two videos of your salespeople delivering their elevator pitches and value propositions.  When assessing sales candidates, the Video Proficient competency, while not one of the 21 Sales Core Competencies, is still very nice to know.  Check out our best-in-class, sales-specific, accurate and predictive sales candidates assessments here.

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I experienced a number of firsts this week!

I saw school buses for the first time since early March and with the buses, came traffic congestion!

Some of the television networks began announcing that new episodes will return in January.  I don't know how much longer I can wait to learn what happened after all of those season finales.  Come to think of it, I don't even remember the season finales.  Whatever, finally something new to watch!

My office phone rang for the first time all year. Okay, that's a slight exaggeration but it is the first time it rang since I returned to the office in mid-August.  Not only did it ring, it was a cold call!  I ran a complicated set of analyses on all the pertinent data, and with some comprehensive deductive reasoning, I concluded that it was the first cold call received since mid-August.

According to Objective Management Group (OMG), only 3% of all salespeople prefer to prospect by phone, so it's no surprise that this call was an aberration.  More about that in a moment.

Unfortunately, there were several things I experienced this week that were not firsts.

On LinkedIn, 13 more of the people who asked me to join their networks immediately attempted to schedule calls to sell me something.  In Microsoft Outlook, my email inbox received 17 fairly awful unsolicited emails, 16 from companies who do various forms of lead generation promising more customers and sales.  Why would anyone hire a lead-generation company that demonstrates how poorly they will actually perform this service for you, while lying about which mediums *plural* they will use?  None of them ever reach out by phone!

Using the above data, if you have 17 competitors sending completely delete-worthy emails from the workflows in their email marketing applications, 13 more reaching out with equally woeful LinkedIn messages, with almost nobody reaching out by phone, why in the world would you prospect using anything other than the phone, unless wasting your time sending delete-worthy emails is less painful than using the phone?

In 2015 I wrote this article about the power of the phone.    

This article has a boatload of prospecting tips.

This article has suggestions on how to improve your emails.

This 2014 article has great tips for both phone and email.

Luckily for you, this is the end of today's article, but if you want to watch a 2-minute video rant from yesterday, you can find my rant about the problem with Value Propositions and Elevator pitches here.

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There we were, in the dark, in the middle of a hotel parking lot, at 3:45 AM.  Why?  The hotel fire alarm went off and we didn't want to ignore the warning that was so loud my wife and I couldn't hear each other speak.  Why was every other guest in the hotel parking lot with us?  Well, what if the hotel was on fire?  What if our lives were truly in danger?  

Unlike the made up fears that prevent salespeople from asking tough questions, qualifying more thoroughly, or picking up the phone and making a cold call, the fear of burning alive in a hotel fire seemed like a pretty justifiable one.

What are salespeople so fearful of?  Rejection?  Not being liked?  Not getting a meeting?  Not closing a sale?  Oh yes, incredibly scary.  If I had those fears I might not want to leave the house.  Oh wait, most salespeople aren't leaving their houses.  Is it because they're afraid of the virus?  No.  It's more likely that they're home because their companies have asked them to work remotely.  But make no mistake.  Even if they won't admit to it they are afraid of the things I wrote a few sentences back. And today, more than ever, they are loving their convenient excuses for hiding behind their laptop screens, churning out emails instead of making phone calls, and hoping that as Ray Kinsella's daughter, from Field of Dreams said, "People will come."

Why are these imagined fears so debilitating? 

Because we allow them to be.

I'm guilty of having debilitating, imagined fears.  When my son got his driver's license, my wife and I worried endlessly. Where is he? Do you think he's OK? Could he have gotten in an accident? Do you think he is paying attention? I hope he's not playing his music too loud. Could his friends be distracting him? Why isn't he home yet?  Did I ask, "Where is he?"

Turning back to salespeople, suppose the things they worry about were to actually happen?  Who would care?  How would life change?  The only ramification would be their inadequate pipelines.  The only ripple effect would be in the size of their commission checks. Their inaction is the only thing that can hurt them.  Remaining in their comfort zone hurts them.  Failing to change hurts them. 

In his 1933 inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "The only thing to fear is fear itself." 

Sir Isaac Newton's third law of Physics states that for every action there is an opposite reaction.  What would the opposite reaction be to the action of not taking action? 

NOT taking action, and that includes not asking the tough question, IS an action against your pipeline, your income and your success. 

NOT taking action due to fear IS an action against your self-worth. 

NOT taking action, whether due to laziness or complacency, IS an action against what your company and your customer expect and deserve from you.

I'm sounding the alarm.  This is why salespeople fail.

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Do you have Rainbow flatware?  Biomagnetic ear stickers? A diamond-shaped ice cube tray? Baby feather wings?  Yah, these things exist here.  You don't?  Me neither.

Have you signed up to use a company that uses AI to generate leads for you?  You haven't?  Me neither.

It seems to me that the only companies using AI to generate leads are the companies trying to sell you their services using AI to generate leads.  How ironic!

AI-generated emails make up the majority of the digital solicitations I receive and they are all from companies offering their lead generation services.  These emails are very easy to recognize.  The personalization is nearly non-existent, the formatting is awful, the message sucks, and they lack traditional signature panels.  But the easiest way to recognize that these are AI-generated emails is the workflow.  They never send one email.  There are usually five or six more that follow and they all seem to include some of the same requests to "bump" their email to the top of the inbox, to "take another look" at their offer, "acknowledge" how busy I am, and the one that drives me crazy, that they "hope" I'm doing well.

In addition to AI, some marketers and sellers utilize workflows from their Marketo, Hubspot and similar marketing/prospecting applications.  Emails and workflows from these applications are usually better composed and formatted.  I'm looking at one of those now, from a UK-based technology firm, attempting to sell outsourced IT consulting.  This particular workflow has sent me 9 emails in the last 5 weeks.  They all begin with "Hope you're doing well."  Then they follow with:

• 1st email: I am getting in touch to make sure your fieldwork and data collection needs are met.
• 2nd email: This is a quick note to make sure you received my previous email
• 3rd email: In case my previous email was an educated stab in the dark,
• 4th email: I am connecting with you to ask if you need additional support
• 5th email: I hope you had a chance to review my previous email and hope it didn’t get buried in your inbox.
• 6th email: I am sorry if I caught you at the wrong time with my previous email.
• 7th email: see 1st email (back to the beginning)
• 8th email: I am getting in touch today to see if there is a chance for us to collaborate on your current/upcoming projects.
• 9th email: I was just curious to know if you received my previous email, and if you had all the information you need in order to get going!

She incorrectly assumes that after 9 emails, she has developed a relationship, participated in positive, constructive conversations with me, and that I have moved from cold prospect to closable prospect.  All this despite hearing nothing but crickets from me.  This is insane!  Why are people wasting their time on these "please delete me" emails?

Back to the AI-generated emails.  They are exponentially worse than what I just shared above!

My recommendation?  Use this powerful game-changer instead or use video conferencing.

Are you in?  Share your comments on the LinkedIn discussion for this article.

It was rainy and cool so the leaves are dropping from the trees, the peak color has passed and it's time to focus on something else.

Speaking of focus, this morning I was watching 3 squirrels each doing their thing.

Squirrel #1, who I named Ernest, was finding lots of nuts and burying them.  His nest was full and he will reap the benefits of his hard work over the winter.

Squirrels #2 and #3, who I named MT and LayZ, were playing.  They were running up and down tree trunks, jumping from limb to limb, running in circles and generally chasing their tails.  They don't yet have nests and unless they make a commitment, become disciplined, and get to work, they will starve to death this winter.

Ernest, MT and LayZ are no different than their human counterparts who find themselves in sales roles.  The top salespeople are like Ernest and the bottom salespeople are like MT and LayZ.  For evidence of that claim, take a look at the table below with a sprinkling of data from Objective Management Group (OMG) which has evaluated 1,910,915 salespeople from  companies.

Ernest would be an Elite salesperson.  Elites make up the top 5% of all salespeople.  MT and LayZ would be weak salespeople who make up the bottom 50% of all salespeople. As you can see from the 6 findings I included in the table, elite salespeople like Ernest are 208% stronger than weak salespeople like MT and LayZ.

The 2 findings most consistent with Ernest's focus and discipline are Commitment and Prospects Consistently, where Ernest is 92% and 82% stronger than MT and LayZ.

Even more importantly, Ernest is 326% stronger in the Hunter Competency.  The Hunter, and Commitment to Sales Success, are two of the 21 Sales Core Competencies that OMG measures. The other four findings listed above are all attributes of the Hunter Competency.

No matter how much selling evolves and how many complimentary selling tools become available, one thing will always remain constant.  B2B sales requires a full pipeline and a pipeline that yields results is built from a consistent prospecting effort, born from commitment and discipline.

With or without leads, a BDR team, or outsourced appointment setting, it is a salesperson's responsibility to be sure that the pipeline always has the 3 F's:

1. Full (consistent daily effort to keep the pipeline full)
2. Filled (qualified opportunities in the pipeline, lesser ones out)
3. Fluid (opportunities in, opportunities moving and opportunities closed or archived)

Most salespeople don't even know the threshold for a full pipeline.  It's the number of opportunities required to sell one multiplied by the number that must be closed.  It doesn't matter if it's one account, one order, or one contract as long as the same definition is applied universally throughout the pipeline.  Additionally, the number required to sell one is not the number of proposals required to sell one.  It's more like this (if you close 33% of your proposals):

• Closed: 1
• Proposals Required (Closable): 3
• Qualified Opportunities: 4
• Opportunities with Compelling Reasons to Buy (Prospects): 6
• New Opportunities (Suspects): 8

You can see that the typical pipeline requires 21, not 3 opportunities to sell 1, .

Don't be MT or LayZ.  Be Ernest with your pipeline building efforts.

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Images Copyright iStock Photos MT and LayZ, and Ernest