Sales Management - Better Closer

5 Leadership Tips for Sales Managers

October 25, 2011 By Bill Rice

Becoming a sales manager is a transition from a producer to a teacher. Have you made this transition recently? What are your tips for success?

Jim is the best. He can close 10-15 mortgages a month without even breaking a sweat. He knows every Realtor, CPA, and financial advisor in town. His phone is always ringing.

Sue is the top producer. She pulls in advertisers who don’t even need to advertise. Her charm and social grace seems to literally print money.

Both are new sales managers. And both are in trouble.

Sales coaching

For some reason their success is not transferring to their teams. These stories are typical to sales organizations. Good sales managers and top producers are often very different people.

So if you just got promoted to sale manager from top producer let me share some personal advice.

Stop Trying to Be the Top Dog

It all starts here. Negotiate with your supervisor, boss, or CEO to understand that the sales manager role has to be your primary mission. Your sales numbers will slip. Shift your goals and metrics to that of the team.

If you’re still trying to be the top producer the team and the sales organization will suffer. And chances are your numbers will slip anyway from the additional responsibility.

Here’s the idea: If you shift your attention from your single sales pipeline to optimizing the sales management skills of a team, you get a huge sales multiplier. But, it can’t happen if you don’t invest in each of those team members.

Start Handing Out Gifts

Investing in your sales team starts with handing out gifts. We’ve all got special talents and gifts. In the sales business that might be prospecting tricks, networking techniques, scripts that just work, or secret tactic that seems to be a bottomless well of opportunity in tough times.

To be a great sales manager you have to start handing out those gifts. Bring folks along on sales appointments. Let them set and listen to you sell. Ask them what they learned. Highlight points in the meeting or conversation that made you take a certain sales tact.

Help Your Folks Set Goals

I think this is the cornerstone of building a great sales team. Sit down with each member and have them tell you what their goals are. Chances are they haven’t thought about it all too much. In which case, you simply get the shoulder shrug. Opportunity!

Without goals your team, with or without you, will wander aimlessly and everyone will settle into their warm, comfortable, no-growth job and become employees. We don’t want employees on our sales teams–we want team members.

Immediately, sit down with each team member and help them identify their goals. Get commitment for their role and their contribution to the team.

I recommend keeping this simple and tied to dollars. Something like this:

What is your commission or earnings goal?
How many sales would that take per month?
Based on your current conversion, how many appointments or calls per day does that require?
Start tracking it!

You would be shocked how many sales folks have never been through this simple exercise.

Hold Them Accountable to Their Goals

Now that you have goals for each of your sales team members. Record them and regularly check on them. Have your team members report back how they’re doing on their own goals.

I know this is silly to mention, but I see it neglected routinely. Even though your team is reporting on their personally set goals make sure you’re tracking too and looking for teaching moments too.

Track daily or weekly calls, appointments, presentations for each team member. This gives you the opportunity to coach with numbers and goals, not simply rah-rah emotional pleas.

Let Them Make Mistakes

Have the confidence in your leadership to let them make mistakes. You made them and learned from them. Give them the same opportunity.

Becoming a sales manager is a transition from a producer to a teacher. Have you made this transition recently? What are your tips for success?

Filed Under: Sales Management Tagged With: leadership, sales tips, sales-manager

Guard Your Sales Time!

October 17, 2011 By Bill Rice

Why isn’t the new business coming in? I bet you’re not selling.

Whether you’re a full-time sales person or a freelancer trying to land a steady flow of projects–you’ve got to set aside time to sell. And you have to avoid confusing activity for action.

Sales time

I assure myself that I’m giving sales it’s due time by guarding it. Time blocking is not a new technique, but it’s effective. Unfortunately, for all of its proven effectiveness, it’s rarely practiced.

Here are a few of the notorious silent killers of a dedicated sales time block…

Prospecting and Researching

Although critically important to sales success, prospecting and researching new clients is not selling. Don’t do this during your sales time.

Give prospecting it’s own block of time in your schedule. Make it productive with a spreadsheet or CRM software open and ready to capture new leads and opportunities as you discover them. Have a notepad handy to capture ideas and themes you want to pursue in your next sales conversation.

Creating Sales Collateral

Again, important, but it’s not selling.

I love writing sales copy and producing short tight presentations to give my prospects and leads. It is useful in propelling a warm prospect across the finish line and it helps me refine my pitch. However, it’s not a pitch!

Writing copy, building PowerPoint presentations, creating one-pagers are all excellent ways to tune and tighten you message. Give it due time in your schedule, but don’t confuse it with selling.

Organizing Lists and CRM Systems

I think this is the number 1 killer of sales time. Sifting, sorting, and organizing your prospects and leads. It gives you a false sense of productivity and confidence that you have opportunities, but it’s not going to move your numbers up to your quota.

Getting your sales funnel in order can make your goals and objectives more visible. It can also help you be more productive and informed when you are selling. However, it is not deal making.

When your selling time block comes up have your list ready. Don’t fuss with CRMs or spreadsheets–talk!

This is Selling: Calling, Emailing, and Appointments

When the selling bell rings–yes, I think it should be an alarm–you should be at the starting line ready to sprint off the line.

No finding a list of prospects. No gathering sales notes or scripts. No fiddling with your contact database.

Have prospects ready and in front of you. Be prepared to trigger and start a conversation. This can take a variety of forms.

1. Calling – This should mean a list of names and numbers ready to dial. I also recommend a script prepared to guide you in selling to the types of prospects you have queued up.

2. Emailing – Again, your list should be curated and ready to go. Like calling, a script or template can really help improve your success rate in emailing and following up with prospects in your sales funnel.

(Note: I do NOT recommend a system of “cold calling” via email. In my experience, this is always a counterproductive strategy.)

3. Appointments - This is the best way to fill your sales time. If you can schedule face-to-face or telephone appointments you are most likely moving the ball forward on a deal. This frames yours and your prospects mind’s to close a deal.

Set more appointments.

One final note: I think sales people often overwhelm themselves by thinking they always need to be selling. I disagree. Selling is exhausting mentally, which transforms into physical and emotional exhaustion. I encourage focus and balance to hit your quota with consistency.

I set three one hour blocks per day. Scheduling short, defined bursts allows you to be ready and focused to hit every sales time block with maximum intensity. Schedule it, guard it, practice it and you will hit any quota thrown in front of you.

Join the discussion: How do you guard your sales time?

Filed Under: Sales Management Tagged With: Productivity, sales time, selling, time blocking

Social CRM, Prospecting the Web for Sales Opportunities

January 31, 2011 By Bill Rice

Embracing Social CRM

The collision of sales and social media was inevitable. Rich, open, hyperlinked conversations are becoming, as the profound Cluetrain Manifesto predicted, “Markets.”

That means that they are also rich with opportunities and insights into buying behavior. Decisions that are increasingly made closer to the Web. Much of this paradigm is the result of organizations flattening. However, it can also be attributed to the rapid mainstreaming of social networks and media as core business communication.

It certainly seems obvious that the social Web must mesh with CRM (or similar lead management software), but what might that look like?

Here are what I consider the pillars (i.e., opportunities for innovation):

1. Discovery: One of the most difficult challenges in sales is looking for new opportunities. Social media should help. After all, people are constantly blogging, Twittering, and Facebooking their needs, challenges, preferences. Unfortunately, regardless of how many thousands of followers you accumulate you will still only see a tiny fraction of your market. What’s even worse, even if that fraction were to increase your opportunities would only become harder to see.

RSS, the “plumbing,” if you will of most social media platforms suffers one major flaw–it assumes you know who to listen to. Social CRM needs a better discovery mechanism. Maybe the real-time search of Twitter and FriendFeed are the early infrastructure for that discovery mechanism…

2. Opportunity Monitoring: Finding is one thing, monitoring for ongoing opportunity is another. Attention in this accelerating market is only getting more precious. The ideal Social CRM will be able to monitor and flag new, emerging, or evolving opportunities.

The hazard here is avoiding our tendency to sink into a voyeuristic trance–watching and not acting on opportunities. Filtering is going to be critical.

3. Identity: Finding opportunities is relatively easy. Finding out who they really are and how to contact them can be one of the most challenging parts of sales prospecting with social media.

The Web began and continues to harbor a shroud of anonymity. People, even in social networks, seem to have a tendency towards using pseudonyms of aliases. Ultimately, this makes finding useful connections more challenging.

Any Social CRM needs to efficiently solve this challenge.

4. Synchronization: We all have our precious database of contacts. A database we are probably regularly adding to, but the average contact is still defined by name, telephone number, and email. A social CRM must enhance that contact information (automatically) with social profiles and identities.

Consistent with the identity pillar, synchronization will be challenging without standardization and growing user trust. I think initiatives like OAuth and microformats are likely to take this challenge to a solution.

5. Lead Nurturing: Finally, social CRM has great opportunity to inherently nurture leads. Integrating social media and tools into CRM will bring sales people closer and closer to the prospective client.

This engagement will naturally keep sales people top of mind of their entire database.

Social CRM has great potential to put CRM directly and effectively in the hands of sales people. However, there are certainly some essential challenges to be worked through to really hit a home run with this evolution of CRM.

Filed Under: Sales Management Tagged With: prospecting, Social CRM, social selling, social selling online

Post Call Evaluation for Better Future Sales Performance

January 26, 2011 By Bill Rice

Understanding Why Calls Worked and Why They Didn't is Key to Increasing Sales.

Part of increasing sales performance is ensuring that calls are being made properly. The post call evaluation is a method that is used in order to ensure that the calls are going the way that they should be. This is an integral part of the process. Here are some sales tips that you can use in order to improve sales performance by properly utilizing post call evaluations.

Keeping Dibs with Evaluations

Obviously, the information that you gather should be put to proper use. By evaluating which calls were successful and which were not, it is possible to determine the behaviors and strategies that separate a successful sale to a lost one. Once this is determined, it makes it possible to evaluate a call and determine how it could be done better. This way, you can give advice to a salesman on how to improve their performance.

Call evaluation does not need to be high tech. This can help in some cases, but some sales performance evaluation and call monitoring is better than none. A simple spreadsheet is all you need in order to take note of things that are missing from a call.

Remember that call evaluation should not be designed to catch sales staff doing something wrong. The process should be dynamic, and include feedback. It should be just as beneficial for the sales staff as for the customers. The process should include feedback from the staff, and they should play a genuine part in the decision making process.

Experienced Evaluators are Vital

It is worth the effort to make sure that the call evaluation is being performed by somebody who is highly skilled. There is a difference between somebody who can tell exactly what a caller needs to change in order to improve sales, and somebody who mindlessly checks a list of requirements. It might be a good idea to hire somebody who is extremely good at sales to be in charge of the monitoring process.

In order to measure the effectiveness of the sales techniques you are using, it is important to compare the effectiveness with your competitors. If you only gauge success internally, you will get a distorted picture of how successful given techniques really are.

When a call goes extraordinarily well, it should be saved. This can be used as a training tool. Nothing gets across what a good call sounds like as much as hearing one take place. This is the only way to truly understand how the process works.

Filed Under: Sales Management, Social Selling Tagged With: post call evaluations, sales call management, sales performance evaluations

What’s in My Sales Stack?

June 1, 2010 By Bill Rice

: Image via Wikipedia

Glance, one of the software tools in my Sales Stack, introduced a very interesting Sales 2.0 concept in their post on Building a Custom Sales 2.0 Toolkit. They framed it in the analogy of the more traditional software stack. My simple definition: the combination of multiple software to create a full-featured, consistent, and stable platform on which you can build solutions.

I think they created a very useful analogy. It structures our thinking on how to enable our sales objectives, not just chase hope-filled sales tools. Using this framework you can quickly identify and setup your sales 2.0 platform and get to selling, confident you have the tools and the platform you need to win.

Here’s a peek into my Sales Stack:

1. Lead Generation: It’s always nice to have a steady flow of new conversations coming into your sales pipeline. Online lead generation is a great way to automate that consistent flow. For me I use a tight combination of blogs (Sales, Lead Buying, Lead Generation), eBooks, and email marketing for demand generation.

Specifically, I use the following software tools:

WordPress – Some still think WordPress is simply blogging software. I submit that it is a feature-rich, but easy to use and maintain content management system. Don’t just run your blog on it run your entire website on it. Make it your lead generation foundation and home base.
Thesis (WordPress Template) - Thesis is the WordPress theme that I use [affiliate link] on all my lead generation websites. Again, it is more than a theme. It’s a foundation for good design and SEO. A simple, unmodified base install will get you ahead of 90% of the websites out there in terms of clean design and traffic generating search engine optimization. It gets your lead generation game started with good fundamentals.
AWeber – I’m continually amazed at how many people neglect this critical component of traffic generation and lead generation. Email marketing is still, hands-down, the most responsive Internet marketing technique. If you don’t have a mailing list start one today. If you start one use AWeber [affiliate link].

2. Prospecting & Sales Intelligence: Attracting sales prospects and generating demand is one channel of opportunities. However, I think you also need to actively engage your market. This means seeking out those prospects that need your products and services, but simply don’t know it yet. That’s right, cold calling. This part of the sales stack also prepares you with better pre-call/pre-appointment preparation.

These are the tools I use:

Google - Surprised? You shouldn’t be Google is probably the most incredible advance in sales prospect since the telephone. I think of Google as my interface to an enormous database of sales prospects [grab my PDF on Google prospecting] just waiting to be discovered. My clients are continually providing data and information about themselves, their preferences, their needs, and their wants. Selling to them is as simple as segmenting their data and engaging in their own dialogue.
Linkedin – A big part of any sales person’s success is networking. Linkedin is the de facto giant in networking business people and is my default database for B2B sales prospecting. It allows me to find and analyze companies and individuals I want to engage. It also does a fair job of generating new leads, with a few special Linkedin tricks I use.
Gist - This is one of the latest tools I’ve added to my sales stack. Gist is a simple way to keep me aware of what my relationships are doing in pursuing their own interests and goals. Using their direct interface and the plug-in for my email I never go into a conversation with a lead or contact without a quick snapshot of their latest activities in social media. As an extra bonus it gives me the opportunity to help them more efficiently, if I see them promoting or requesting something I can assist with on the spot.
Twitter - People needing immediate help are turning to their social networks. This provides great “targets of opportunity” for sales. And there is nowhere better to find these than on Twitter. I continually jump into discussions and conversations that net new relationships and sales via Twitter. Twitter is always a great place to gather a little intel on the personality of people you are planning to call or meet with–making breaking the ice much easier on cold calls and meetings.

3. Sale Enablement & Execution: At this point in your sales process you have a few prospects on the hook. Now you have to convince them to move forward. This is where the good conversation happens–telephone calls, face-to-face meetings, web demonstrations or webinars. In my business, I do a lot of showing, helping, and teaching. That means making contact and sharing.

Here is how I share:

Glance - I mentioned Glance at the top of this article, but they need a prominent mention in my Sales Stack as well. I’ve used all the regulars WebEx and GoToMeeting, but most have failed me regularly. Demonstrations are so critical to the Web 2.0 sales process and I often find myself giving impromptu demos. Doing a quick on-the-spot demos really shows off how well you know your stuff or have a software product that immediately adds value. Glance makes this simple. It works in all browsers, on all operating systems, and its simple URLs make it easy to give over the phone–getting my prospect and me quickly into a sale demo.
Skype - This is an old stand-by that I find creeping back into a more significant role again. Much of my company is virtual (we hire where the talent is–sort of silly to do it any other way, right?) so this is our primary means of communication. However, as our business grows I find myself engaging more internationally and Skype is really the simplest and most universal way to do this.
Google Voice – Much of my time is spent with clients and traveling. I certainly don’t want to have prospects waiting on me to get back to a desk phone in my office. So, I long-ago abandoned that relic and replaced it with Google Voice. Now my leads and prospects come to me wherever I am and get my live voice, not a voicemail. This is a powerful sales converter in this world of voicemail roulette.
Twitter – Again, Twitter pops into the stack. Twitter has become an increasingly primary means of communication, fitting in with email and phone. I am just as responsive to a prospect or client here as I would be in these more tradition modes of communication. However, I like the advantage of being able to share valuable (and lead generating) discussions beyond just one person. If I’m giving free advice or counsel away, which often the initial contact involves, I want as big an audience as possible–that’s lead generation! This is why I try to have much of my initial conversations with suspects on Twitter.
iPhone - This has become my communication command center. Since I spend as much time as possible away from the office. This is the nerve center for email, telephone, Twitter, Linkedin, and Gist. I can manage it all from this little workhorse.

4. Lead Management & Nurturing: Not every lead or even contact turns into a sale (at least not immediately) that where lead management is a secret weapon. Getting every one of your leads into a lead management system and learning to automate the nurturing process is a huge competitive edge.

This is even more significant when you generate many of your leads online. These leads are generally new suspects–they rarely close quickly. In addition, these leads will be at all stages of the buying cycle. Without lead management it will be impossible to manage any reasonable amount of these diverse prospects.

I use (of course) Kaleidico’s Sales Manager. It was one of those “scratch your own itch” projects and has become even more powerful with a strong, serious sales customer base.

Building a solid Sales Stack is critical in a Web 2.o sales world. There is so much data and the prospects coming from online sources are so diverse–you need help. Take some time today and carefully evaluate your Sales Stack–cut what you don’t need and integrate what you have into a seamless sales process.

What’s in your Sales Stack? Can you help me improve mine? I would appreciate the feedback.

Filed Under: Sales Management, Social Selling Tagged With: Advertising and Marketing, business, Customer relationship management, Google, Lead Generation, linkedin, marketing, Social network

Why Sales Organizations Rarely Grow.

December 18, 2009 By Bill Rice

I received a lot of feedback on my post encouraging you not to buy lead management software. That may sound a bit peculiar from a guy that earns his living selling lead management software. However, as I said, numbers don’t lie.

Chris Johnson, one of my favorite freelancers and sales cold callers, and I got into a chat about this. He’s doing his own Flat Rate Web Jobs start-up (clever concept) and trying to make it grow. He made this comment, “the hardest time for a bootstrapper I think is when they are making a living and going from 1-5 employees.”

This comment got me thinking deeper about our own client’s growth numbers.

Kaleidico, after several years of serving hundreds of sales organizations and managing millions of leads, has experienced many interesting trends. However, the one I’m going to talk about today pertains to my post on who shouldn’t buy lead management software.

That statement was based on the general premise that…

Sales Organizations Rarely Grow.

Do you buy it? It’s true. I know I am blowing the lid off a dirty little CRM secret, but its true. Despite how awesome ours or any other CRM system is–it probably will not make you grow.

Why?

I would say the big picture answer is that we often confine ourselves within a limiting belief system. Now, I’m the last to get New Age or Think and Grow Rich on you, but there is a psychological barrier that works on all of us. Faith is really hard.

Problem #1 – Faith we can go beyond our current condition.

We also build frameworks that trap us. These are the processes and procedures that create consistency in an organization. Chances are you are rarely willing to try a new process. This is where I think Anthony Iannarino hit square on with his post: Sales Process Problems. These frameworks create predictability, but they kill break-out growth.

Problem #2 – Rigid Process that limits our freedom to try something new.

We also often lack the knowledge or the experience to see bigger opportunities. Sure we can read lots of business how-to books, but until you have tried to trek up the mountain you have no idea the steps between a little start-up and GE.

Problem #3 – Knowledge, simply not knowing what we don’t know.

Finally, and probably the root of one, two, and three is fear. So many of our businesses, especially in weak economic conditions, feel like they are teetering on disaster. We are afraid of stretching out, for fear of what we might lose.

Problem #4 – Fear of trying something new, even if it might Zoom us.

The real point is don’t buy software (especially CRM software) and expect it to grow you. Buy software to support your growth, to give you flexibility to be creative, and help you learn what you might not know.

What do you think? Do sales organizations grow or just churn? Do you have an example of one that saw break-out growth? What happened?

Filed Under: Sales Management Tagged With: faith, fear, growth, organization, process, social selling