Compelling events

Posted on 27/07/2012 by Paul Blunden

I was taught about ‘compelling events’ by a master sales practitioner called Tony Coppinger who had been IBM trained, although he was so good I suspect he taught their trainers a thing or two. I was reminded of the importance of compelling events again this week and of why they are so important.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a ‘compelling event’ is what makes a potential client buy. It is the driving force behind their decision-making process and can be a hard need such as “my tyres are illegal, I must get new ones” or soft such as “I need to be seen to be taking action”. Without one there won’t be a sale and if we have not identified one during the sales process we are not in control of the sales cycle and worse don’t know what to pitch.

In order to identify the compelling event we have to do some research which can be undertaken online via [for example] news stories to identify M&A, growth plans, redundancies etc., and also face to face using open questions (what, where, why, how, when etc.).

In the past week I have seen two sales approaches. One, utilised high volume calling to ‘pitch’ services at companies until they found someone looking to buy. The other used research to identify a compelling event and then pitch the relevant service against that need. There were a number of interesting learnings. Firstly, the call volume with the first approach was very high and the results very poor. I think the sales person achieved a 1 in 50 hit rate and that was just identifying potential. The second utilised far fewer calls, not least because of the time invested in research and the hit rate was [I think] 1 in 3.

Another learning was the general feeling of nervousness from the sales person and others around them in more senior positions. As the sales person switched to the research led approach the lack of calling activity was almost viewed as laziness. There was a big feeling that if ‘you’re not on the phone you are not selling’. There was similar nervousness from the sales person but when they got results they became convinced it was the better approach.

The process transformed them from a sales person without much knowledge about the company they were calling to someone who could have a proper conversation and identify genuine need.

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CEO’s who put sales first outperform peers by 80%

Posted on 18/07/2012 by Paul Blunden

Harvard Business Review (HBR) appears to be running a series of items on their blog about sales and selling. This week they write about the importance of putting sales at the heart of the business and that CEO’s who do out perform their peers in company growth terms by between 50 and 80 percent.

What I like most about this item is that it argues the need for analytics about sales, clear KPI’s and accountability. This sounds obvious but I meet plenty of organisations that don’t know where to start when measuring the performance of sales people. That is a recipe disaster given that the people they are trying to evaluate are capable, in some way, of selling them a story about performance that may be only partially accurate.

I came across a great company a few years back run by Juliette Denny called Growth Engineering that specialised in measurement of sales teams. She argued for activity measures when looking at sales teams because they were the upstream, key performance indicators of financial success downstream. Given the B2B sales cycle can be 3 to 9 months this makes perfect sense, especially when hiring a new sales person.

The article goes on to talk about ‘lean sales teams’ in essence stripping back the non-sales activities from front line sales staff. Obvious of course but so few companies actually do it. And finally making sales a ‘team sport’ which in almost every situation it is – and that doesn’t mean the sales person isn’t performing because they need help!

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The future of solution selling

Posted on 01/07/2012 by Paul Blunden

I came across this piece from Harvard Business Review (HBR) about the future of solution selling. http://hbr.org/2012/07/the-end-of-solution-sales/ar/1

They suggest that buyers are becoming better educated and able to find the solutions to challenges themselves and therefore do not need a solution sales person to help them. However, they also set out how sales people are adapting to this with more sophisticated targeting of clients. Definitely worth a read.

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Just say no!

Posted on 23/05/2012 by Paul Blunden

In my previous post “To stalk or not to stalk” I was sharing my experience of a dilemma that faces most decent people who make calls or send emails in order to generate new contacts and clients. I say decent because there are some in the industry who presumably have absolutely no compunction about reaching the point of stalking fairly quickly and ignore any requests to cease activity. I am not one of those.

My story continues because eventually I decided to call the reception of company concerned to check whether my contact was OK, in case he was off long-term following an illness or accident. This might sound odd behaviour but we had such positive regular contact (face to face, phone and email) I simply found it hard to believe contact would cease altogether. Presumably if he had lost interest he would tell me, right?

So, I made the call and the phone was answered by a very helpful person and I explained to them that I wanted to check if my contact was OK. “Yes he is”, she said and without taking a breath continued, “I’ll put you through”. With milliseconds to think I decided to stay on the line and was soon on the phone with my contact.

“Hello”, I said, “I just wanted to check everything was OK?” He could not have been more short with me and after a very short exchange the call ended.

So great, now I know he has obviously lost interest, doesn’t want to deal with me, or has some other reason for ending or putting off the relationship. I feel awful having disturbed him again unnecessarily and wish the ground would open and swallow me. He probably feels like I am a stalker and is upset that I used a back-handed method to get through to him.

What seems to have happened is that we have lost the ability to say “no”. Because I am a decent sort of a bloke, after the first couple of contacts went without reply I dropped him a note to say “if you have lost interest or don’t think it is for you just let me know and I won’t hassle you anymore”. I often use this approach because it helps to qualify the relationship and allows a graceful exit for us both.

People are busy, I get that, but wouldn’t it save time to be more candid. Even if the opportunity for a graceful exit has not been provided, a ‘buyer’ could still say, thanks but no thanks. Perhaps bad practice from those that are not ‘decent’ is to blame and we reap what we sow. If that is the case let it be a lesson to us all.

 

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LinkedIn Pro account – is it worth it

Posted on 03/05/2012 by Paul Blunden

I recently upgraded my LinkedIn account so that I can now send inmail and also see who is looking at my profile in a little more detail. It also let’s me store people’s profiles which is handy when I am using it to identify potential contacts within organisations. The main reason for upgrading was to use inmail and to see whether it would allow me to get to people I previously couldn’t, perhaps because they are not within my network.
It is fair to say that aft one month of using it I am not blown away. I had ten inmails available to me and have sent close to that number but had only one reply. Admittedly, in one situation I am contacting people in China And so the may be a language barrier but ironically, the only reply I have had came from China – a very polite “not me” in case you are interested.
The good news is that inmails expire and are credited back if they go unanswered so my limit of 10 is in practice much higher. The bad news could be that you can be rated by recipients and presumably put in a spam box but then again this does encourage quality communications. Thankfully I have not been rated at all, but also I have only been replied to once. My feeling at the moment is that it isn’t worth the money but I am continuing with it and will report back when I know more.

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Low cost graphic design for SME’s

Posted on 12/04/2012 by Paul Blunden

I came across this service recently that uses crowdsourcing to provide SME’s access to a large group of graphic designers at reasonable cost and you only pay for what you buy. The site supports graphic design of logo’s, websites event T-shirt designs and is touted as 100% risk free. They have been in business since 2003 so should be reliable.

Here is the link: http://www.designcontest.com/

 

 

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Top 7 web design mistakes made by SME’s

Posted on 28/03/2012 by Paul Blunden

Here is an interesting item on the top mistakes SME’s make when creating websites:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ilyapozin/2012/03/27/top-7-web-design-mistakes-small-businesses-make/

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