Front Office Box

Good sales guys are very different to bad sales guys, in all sorts of ways. Customers will have one view. Colleagues another and management yet another. In this post we’re talking about the sales manager’s perspective.

How does a new sales manager tell the difference between his good sales people and the other kind? This is the most important detail s/he needs to understand, and as fast as possible. Sales managers are only as good as the next number they’re going to make, and making numbers depends on the sales team knowing what it’s doing.

Experience tells me there’s a simple way to distinguish between the two – look at their prospect lists.

The good sales guy will always have a small number of prospects, all closing in the 30 and 60 day columns. The bad sales guy will have a large number of prospects but none of them closing soon. They’ll all be closing in the 90+ days column.

This a well recognised phenomenon amongst professional sales managers. They call it the “hockey stick”, because that’s the way it looks on the chart. Nothing for the next three months followed by more deals than they can shake a stick at.

Here’s where the manager needs to enforce his process – qualification, bid review, agreeing the buy/sell activity, negotiation and close.

Poor sales people are eternal optimists. They refuse to face the reality of their inability to control the relationship between them and the prospect. They just hope they’ll get lucky on one of the deals.

That sort of attitude is as useful to their new manager as a hole in the head so either the sales rep has to change, or get changed. Learn and implement the process, or find somebody else’s money to waste.

There’s a message, albeit subliminal, here for the entrepreneurs taking on the job of selling (for themselves) for the first time. That message is get a process and qualify continuously, or get ready to be disappointed and disillusioned.

Get real about prospects – why they’ll buy and how they’ll pay for it – and get ready to walk away and look for a better opportunity.

Sales process, in principle at least, doesn’t need to be complicated.  So what’s all the fuss about if its simple?  The fuss is about improving results.  Our favourite golf caddie tells a story which illustrates the point in a sales context.

A sales process is just a sequence of actions, a plan of how we’ll do anything.  Seeing a list of actions as a process helps us understand the context of each.  We can also measure each action in terms of inputs, resources and outputs to understand which bits don’t work as well as they should.  Once we know which bits don’t work we can find ways of improving what we do. As the performance of each action improves so does the overall result.

In our golf story the caddie is hired by a big shot banker from Denver for 4 days.  It’s a good gig with tee times around mid morning every day, and a regular bag.  They’re playing at Royal Dornoch where the 2nd is a famous par 3, called simply Ord.  The green is a 12ft high mound with the top somewhat flattened, sloping from back to front.  Tight lies on all sides make missing the green an unattractive prospect.  The front is guarded by two of the scariest bunkers.  These genuine hazards require a vertical lift of 8ft if the next stroke is to be a putt.

Our sales process starts with the two standing on the tee and the golfer asking for a yardage.  The caddie explains distance to front, flag and back, adding it’ll need 155 yards in the air to clear the bunkers.  The golfer asks for his 6 iron, pulls the shot a touch and finishes in the bunker front left.  Writing a 7 on the card the golfer groans as he walks to the next.

To cut a long story short on each of the next three days the pair go through exactly the same sequence with exactly the same result.  The golfer just won’t accept he doesn’t hit the 6 iron 155 in the air, despite the proof.

If he’d understood process improvement on the 3rd day he’d have taken a 5 iron, hopefully with better result.  He’d have figured what wasn’t working quite right and fixed it.

Neither did the caddie understand the concept, otherwise he’d have found a way to improve his sales process.  Recognising the golfer wouldn’t admit to lack of distance, the caddie could have suggested the shot’s a touch uphill, or into a breeze, or the humidity stopped the ball flying so far.  He’d have added more information to inform the club selection.

He’d have improved his sales process and gotten the golfer a better result without hurting his ego.  Perhaps more importantly happier golfers generally tip more generously.

Interviewing for the sales manager role? It’s time to release your secret weapon – your own definition of process, roles and responsibilities. And you can get that here.

First lets understand the backdrop. The people hiring sales managers are rarely experienced in the job themselves. They might be C level executives, or general managers. Quite often they’ll be accountants of one type or another.

When interviewing for a sales manager they’re looking for specialist expertise – not sales skills but the ability to interface between the sales guys and the rest of the business. They won’t understand the job, and will know that. But they will understand a model comprising process, roles and responsibilities.

Give them your vision of that model and the rest of the interview will be checking for reasons not to offer you the sales manager job. You’ll have closed the deal already.

That’s dealt with one side of coin, but what about the other interviewees?

The fact is sales managers are very rarely trained. They might be familiar with the job in another business, maybe more. But it’s highly unlikely they’ll have a generic understanding which can be adapted to suit different products or business models.

With proper sales manager training under your belt you’ll be unique, or if unlucky, only close to unique. Either way you’re streets in front of the competition.

Ok so that’s all very well, but where do you get that training, if nobody does it?

This blog is an excellent place to start.

Our Sales Management Best Practice is one of the most popular articles.

We have a lot more sales manager specific articles in our Sales Manager category.

And our category Sales Qualification has more general comment on when to hold em and when to fold em.

There’s a lot of reading here – too much for one visit so you might prefer to download some of our free White Papers. That way you’ll have a library of comment to carry around.

Good luck with the interviewing. When you get the job come back and see us for a Front Office Box – it’s designed to help make our ideas work in ways you’ve interpreted them.

Sales qualification can be achieved quickly, and cheaply, using on-line forms.   In our case that means Webrequest, our “swiss army knife” approach to collecting information.

Here’s a real life example of how Paul uses it to qualify his sales opportunities, increase his win rate and reduce his costs of sale.

Paul’s a specialist.  There’s very little about liability insurance that he doesn’t know after 40 years in the business.  There’s also not much he doesn’t know about wasting money chasing deals he isn’t going to get.  Insurance, like investment planning, house remodeling or party arranging, is one of those purchases which get influenced by existing relationships.  Quite often Paul would come up with an eye watering proposal only to discover the prospect wouldn’t buy, because he couldn’t disappoint the brother in law.

In his case a new prospect can involve a plane ride and overnight stay.  Somebody from Oregon calls and asks for a quote. Paul lives on the East Coast.  That’s the best part of $1,000 in cost to make the sales call.

Paul figured he needed an inexpensive method of checking how likely it was he’d  get a fair chance at the business.  That would save him a lot in both time and money.

We persuaded him to use Webrequest.  It’s integrated with our Address Book and easy to use. He could choose his type of questions – open or multiple choice and write his own words.  Webrequest would send an email with a link to the on-line form to the prospect.  The response shows up in the Webrequest reports and also on that individual’s people page.

Here’s the type of questions he asks:

1. How big is your revenue
2. Which industries do you sell to
3. When does your policy renew
4. How much is your renewal quote
5. Who makes the decision to change provider
6. How does that decision get made
7. Who is your existing provider
8. How long have you sourced insurance from that provider

Perversely this is a comfortable method of sales qualification.  It’s always easiest to ask the hard questions right at the start of the sales process, and somehow filling in a form is so much more comfortable for the prospect than a face to face interrogation.

Fast, cheap and painless.  If only sales qualification could always be this easy.

How do you do your sales qualification?  Could Webrequest help you like it does Paul?

Here’s a short video showing how it works for both the customer and the sales rep.

Demonstration

Business lessons from golf caddies sounds hard to believe.  Popularly seen as roguish, itinerant, irresponsible journeymen the golf caddie doesn’t come naturally to mind as a font of business acumen.  Until you’ve seen both sides of the coin, that is.

Through my career I’ve sold everything from outsourcing to debt collection, and from mainframes to milking machines.  I’ve managed big teams and been a solopreneur.  I’ve pumped gas, driven cabs and caught cans in food factories.  After all those experiences I learned even more business lessons about selling, customer service and the facts of life on the golf course – as a caddie.

Any golf caddie knows more about being a  business owner than most entrepreneurs and managers I’ve known.

Here’s a few of those business lessons.

Constrained by resources.

Every caddie I ever met only had two shoulders, two legs and 24 hours in the day.  It doesn’t matter how much s/he wants to grow there are limits – the resources available – so we’d better make the most of them.

There is always more in the deal

When the Caddie Master says “you’re up” the bag fee is as good as in your pocket.  Now we’re working for the tip.  A $50 bag fee looks a lot better with a $20 tip on top.  That’s 40% more revenue and worth working for.  But it has to be earned.

The customer is always right.

Caddies are guides, companions, educators – sometimes just colleagues, and unfortunately at other times servants. Ultimately they don’t dictate what the customer perceives as value.  They just have to discover it, then deliver it.  Usually they have only the length of the 1st fairway to do that.

There’s always another customer.

If this bag doesn’t work out in our favour the next one will. Lets make sure we get round without the customer complaining to the Caddie Master.  Caddies are really good at swallowing their pride.

Ultimately it’s about delivery.

Caddies don’t get paid on the 1st tee.  They get paid in the car park, when they’ve counted and cleaned the clubs and stored the bag in the trunk. It’s about delivery.

And finally there’s the caddies prayer:

Please Lord let the bag be light
Let the tip be heavy and
The idiot put the ball where I tell him.

Watch this space for more caddie tales.