The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino » Sales 3.0

Two Rules For Using Sales Metrics Effectively

S. Anthony Iannarino — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:12:41 +0000

Don’t Use Single Metrics

Single metrics tend to give you a very narrow view of what is being measured. In and of themselves, some metrics may tell you a story, but it may not reveal the moral of the story. It usually won’t tell you what the story means or how to make improvements.

Maybe your win ratio is lower than you need it to be. This means your not closing well enough, right?

Adding other metrics might add to the picture. Maybe your win ratio is low, and you also show a high percentage of deals falling out between the discovery stage and the evidence stage. That metric might mean that not enough value is being created at the discovery stage to command a presentation. It could mean that your needs analysis and discovery isn’t getting you the result you need to move the deal forward, and when you are able to advance to the presentation, you do so without having what you need to win.

Qualitative information can help you to understand what is needed to improve your win ratio. Is it poorly qualified opportunities? Is it a poor needs analysis or discovery? Are you losing because your solutions aren’t right?

One metric by itself isn’t enough to make a sound judgment. You need qualitative information, and a deep look at other metrics that might help inform your interpretation.

Swap Input Metrics for Output Metrics

Trade input metrics like number of sales calls made and estimated value of opportunities for output metrics like commitments for a future activity that advances the sale.

It is helpful to know how many dream clients you completed a discovery call with this week, but not if none of them committed to a future activity that advances you towards a deal. We track metrics like number of presentations made, but not a metric that relates to the outcome of our presentation: How many of the buying committee member’s votes did we gain?

There shouldn’t ever be a sales call made without an intended outcome that moves you towards a deal. That means that there isn’t a sales call made that doesn’t require a commitment to move forward at the end of the sales call. Period. Exclamation point!

Why measure the number of sales calls and not the number of commitments to advance the deal? Why measure the commitments that advance the deal and not measure the number of kept commitments?

In sales, we say things like “our clients don’t want drills, they want holes,” and then we proceed to measure drills. Think about it, and tell me that I am wrong.

Output metrics are made up of the commitments, large or small, that move us closer to a deal. We should be measuring those commitments, the output metrics, and not worry so much about the input metrics.

Conclusion

Sales metrics lie; they don’t tell the whole picture. To make sales metrics more useful—and honest—add qualitative information, ignore single metrics, and measure outputs instead of inputs.

Questions

What single metrics capture your attention and why? What other metrics might help you to better understand the metrics that you believe are important performance indicators? What additional metrics could you use to help you determine what actions would help you to best make the improvements you need to produce better sales results?

What are the input metrics that you capture? What are the real outputs that you might be misrepresenting at input metrics? What outcomes are really trying to measure? Even though the outcomes are tied to input metrics, does increasing the number on the input metric necessarily produce an increase on the output metric? Would you be better off improving the effectiveness, instead of the activity?

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4279.

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

Two Rules For Using Sales Metrics Effectively is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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Do Your Sales Metrics Lie?

S. Anthony Iannarino — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:07:54 +0000

The short answer: Yes, your metrics lie.

Metrics are numbers; they are quantitative. They can tell you much. And they can you tell you little. What they lack is a qualitative context.

Example 1: Activity Metrics

Let’s take two salespeople and their individual numbers. Salesperson 1 makes ten face-to-face sales calls in a week. Salesperson 2 makes only five sales calls per week. Looking at the metrics, Salesperson 1 has twice the activity. Double the activity has to be better, right? The answer is no, it means nothing without the quantitative context.

Were the fifteen prospects that were called on all equal? Did Salesperson 1 only make twice the calls because they he called on unqualified prospects while Salesperson 2 called on qualified dream clients? The qualitative value makes all of the difference in the world, doesn’t it?

Simple, isn’t it? Then why it so infrequent that the qualitative value is added?

Example 2: Time to Close Deals (Cycle Time)

How about more complex metric? Let’s look at the time it takes to close a deal. Maybe Salesperson 1 closes deals in just under ninety days. It takes Salesperson 2 just over two hundred and seventy days to close a deal. Salesperson 1 closes deals in a third of the time; that has to be good, right?

Without knowing the deal size, the lifetime value of the deal, whether or not the deal is a good strategic fit, and some additional facts about each deal, this metric is meaningless. Maybe Salesperson 2 has the larger, more complex deals. Maybe their deals will produce far more value over time. Maybe Salesperson 2’s deals will allow them to create the kind of value that unlocks future deals and bridges the company into new strategic growth markets.

Not so simple to determine whether or not the cycle time should be shorter without the information, is it? Why then do we not work to discover it?

Example 3: A Look Into the Pipeline

If we peer into our fictional salespeople’s respective pipelines, we might find that Salesperson 1 has $1,000,000 in the final stage of the sales process. Salesperson 2 has only $600,000 in the final stage of their sales process. All things being equal, Salesperson 1 has a better opportunity to close more business, right? But all things aren’t equal.

Doing a simple opportunity review using the company’s sales process checklist, we might find that while Salesperson 1 has more deals in the final stage, that he also skipped over the important value-creating steps that might have given him a reasonable chance to win his deals. We might find that these deals aren’t really in the closing stage at all; in fact, they may not even be the kind of deals that his company wants.

Completing the same opportunity review with Salesperson 2 might show that the deals are rock solid, that the sales process has been followed, that the deal strategy provides a greater return on the dream client’s investment of time and money than they need to justify their purchase, and that she has verbal and written commitments that allow her deals to be forecast with great confidence.

Understanding these metrics is much more complicated that it appears on the surface. That is because numbers lie. More isn’t always better, and neither is less. They are meaningless unless and until they have the qualitative factors added in and they are properly interpreted.

Metrics Are Great Tools, If Used Correctly

I am not suggesting that metrics aren’t useful. Far from it! In fact, understanding your metrics is critical to your success.

But in order to make metrics valuable and meaningful, you have to look at them in the context of the qualitative factors. This isn’t easy. Understanding the story that your metrics tell requires someone with the knowledge and experience to ask the questions that will provide the qualitative context that make them useful. In order to know what needs changed and what needs to be improved, you need to add these factors to your interpretation.

It’s often helpful to get a second, unbiased set of eyes on the metrics, someone who isn’t tied too closely to the outcomes. Someone with the knowledge and experience to help see through the numbers to the meaning that is hidden inside their relationship to the context.

Collect all of the metrics that are meaningful to you and to your sales results. Then add the qualitative factors that give them their context and their meaning. This will ensure that your metrics tell the truth.

Conclusion

Quantitative metrics are critical to your success and must be tracked. But they are meaningless without the qualitative factors that give them their context and their meaning.

Questions

What are the most important personal sales metrics that you track? Are they all quantitative?

What qualitative factors are missing from your sales metrics? What do you need to add to these metrics to make them meaningful and useful? What questions need to be asked in order to provide this context?

Who could you share your metrics with that has he knowledge, the experience and the background to ask the hard questions that will allow you to make judgments about your future behavior based on your metrics?

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

Do Your Sales Metrics Lie? is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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The Short Shelf Life of a Deal in Your Pipeline

S. Anthony Iannarino — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:24:55 +0000

You worked hard to create opportunities with your dream clients. Now that these opportunities are in your pipeline, your challenge is to keep them moving along from target to close, doing all that is expected of you and more.

One of the iron laws of sales is that the longer your deal sits between stages, the more likely you it is to stall (or to die altogether). Don’t believe me? Does your pipeline tell you something different?

Your deals have a shelf life. Once they reach that shelf life they die. You may not believe they are dead because the company is still in business. Heck, they may even be having a banner year. But your opportunity has no pulse. It stopped breathing a long time ago, and that little metric in your sales force automation that tells you how long it’s been between stages is now in triple digits.

Most sales force pipeline reports are often little more than a graveyard of expired opportunities. But this doesn’t have to be true. There is another way. A better way requires that you observe the shelf life of an opportunity and you make sure it doesn’t die of old age or of neglect. Here are three big ideas to keep in mind.

Focus on Dissatisfaction and It’s Cost

The more dissatisfaction, the greater urgency there is to change. Your opportunities are created and driven by dissatisfaction. The more you can focus on the dissatisfaction, the easier it is to move the opportunity forward. But it isn’t the dissatisfaction alone that moves deals; it’s the cost of that dissatisfaction.

Dissatisfaction comes with a price. By focusing on that price, you help to create the urgency that compresses your sales cycle—by compressing your dream clients buying process. Dissatisfaction is what moves your dream client to action.

Now you have to obtain the commitments that move your deal forward.

Collect the Commitments to Act

Your dream client is motivated by their dissatisfaction and the high cost of the status quo. It is your job to do something with that motivation. You have to ask for and obtain the commitments that move your opportunity forward and that help you to help your dream clients.

You have to obtain the first commitment, often the hardest, to gain access to the decision-makers and decision-influencers to collect the information you need to build your solution. You have to collect these, moving from commitment to commitment, always advancing your deal—and moving your dream client to a better future.

Days, weeks, or even months with no activity, with no made and kept commitments, is a surefire way to allow your opportunities to die of neglect. You may want to believe that you are being professional and giving your dream client the space that they need to decide. In reality, you are almost certainly putting your opportunity at risk to a competitor—or the most ferocious of all competitors: no decision.

Each commitment you gain moves you closer and closer to a deal. Commitments are what keeps your deal alive and within the boundaries of it’s shelf life.

Focus on a Better Future Result

It is surprising how much your dream client can put up with. They can learn to live with a shockingly high level of dissatisfaction at a staggeringly high cost. I have seen clients muddle through this way for years.

To observe the short shelf life of your opportunity, you must create an ever-present vision of a better future. You have to help them to envision the story of how they get from where they are to where they want to be, writing and selling that story together. Focusing on the future helps provide the motivation to change—especially when you can point to their return on their investment of time and energy. This helps to keep the motivation high if and when the dissatisfaction wanes.

Leverage dissatisfaction and its cost, collect the commitments, and drive your opportunity and your dream client towards a better future result. Measure the days between activities and commitments, and know that the longer the space between, the more likely your opportunity is to expire.

Conclusion

Your opportunities have a relatively short shelf life. You have to focus your efforts on moving your deal from target to close before that shelf life expires. Pay attention to these three big ideas to keep on track.

Questions

How many opportunities in your pipeline have expired? Is your pipeline really a memorial to opportunities that either died of old age or neglect?

What factors do you leverage to create both the rationale and the urgency to keep your opportunity progressing and on course? What causes these motivations to fizzle out over time? How can you prevent that from happening?

Make a list of the commitments that you have to obtain in order to move from one stage of your sales cycle to the next. How can you ensure that you collect these commitments and keep your deal advancing?

What factors can you leverage that motivate your dream client towards a better future result? How can you encourage their engagement in the process of helping you to write the story of that future and featuring you in the co-starring role?

Clean up your pipeline. If you want to create little grave markers to recall the opportunities past, go ahead. Use them to remind you of the opportunities you lost that you might have won. Then take action to ensure you limit these losses in the future.

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

The Short Shelf Life of a Deal in Your Pipeline is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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What Your Company Expects of You

S. Anthony Iannarino — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:08:16 +0000

Your sales process, in part, encapsulates how your company believes it needs to act in order to win deals. It is also more than likely that it contains some of the iron laws and principles of successful selling. Following the ideal operational plan and your company’s doctrine is a great starting point to winning deals and producing sales results. By doing so, you increase your odds of succeeding. But your role in sales doesn’t end there; if it did, anybody could sell.

The real challenges to winning deals begin when your plan and your company’s ideas about sales come into contact with the realities of winning the deal. You have been hired to navigate the messy realties that often bear no resemblance to your plan or your process. Welcome to the big time!

Here is what your company expects of you when you run up against roadblocks (and what you need to expect of yourself).

Follow the Roadmap Until It Doesn’t Work

If your sales process is reasonably well thought out, it contains the big objectives that you need to obtain in order to move a deal from target to close. It can be a source of competitive advantage. It is your job to make your best effort to work the deals through the process, achieving these objectives. This doesn’t mean that your deal will follow a linear progression from A to B to C, but that the objectives need to be pursued and achieved.

You are responsible for recognizing when you have veered off the map into uncharted territory. You are responsible for recognizing when what you are doing is not getting the outcome it was designed to achieve.

It is your job to recognize when the realities of the deal prevent you from advancing it according to your process or your strategy. You are not paid to blindly attempt the same activity with the same failing result. Your company, and especially your sales manager, knows that there is no template that works 100% of the time. They know that there is no single right answer. This is sales in all it’s messy glory!

Your job doesn’t end with recognizing what isn’t working.

You Are Paid to Think

I know that to outsiders it looks like we win deals because of the smile on our faces and the shine on our shoes. I would that were still true. Truth be told, making and managing the complex sale is a thinking person’s game. That’s why you were hired. You weren’t hired to act without thinking.

When your opportunities run into obstacles that prevent them from progressing the way that you would like them to, your job is to notice what isn’t working, and then use all of your initiative and resourcefulness to figure out what will work to get your deal back on track. The answer isn’t always going to be found in your sales process. Sometimes there are sales principles that need to be applied, and sometimes you need to come up with something new, to innovate.

Either way, what you learn needs to be shared with the rest of your team. You need to pass along the lessons that you learn so that you can help to inform your company’s future behavior.

Get the Help You Need

Sometimes your initiative and your resourcefulness isn’t enough. You need the multiplier effect of adding other people’s initiative and resourcefulness to your own. The longer a deal sits stalled, the more likely that it dies. When the deal dies (of neglect or of old age), when you do bring them back to life they come back as newborn opportunities, not the mature opportunity that you thought you had in your pipeline.This means that you have to take whatever action is necessary to keep the deal alive and progressing, never risking it’s death and starting over.

Get help. Your company has resources it can bring to bear on your opportunity. There are other people you can engage and get involved. These people have their own brand of resourcefulness and they have the ideas that you can act on to prevent your deal from stalling. They want to help you. They need to help you. Engage them, whether they are two blocks up on the organizational chart or three blocks down.

Build your network of resourceful, off-the-wall thinkers and come up with the ideas that you need to create value for your dream client and to move the deal forward.

Lead the brainstorming sessions that provide new and alternative actions that may help you to advance your deal.

This is what is expected of you; nothing less will do.

Conclusion

There is no universal deal template and no single solution to winning deals. Your company expects you to know when you are off the roadmap, to be resourceful enough to achieve your outcome anyway, and to get help when you need it.

Questions

Why is it important to follow your company’s sales process? What is the value of following a roadmap that includes the outcomes that you need to advance a deal?

What is expected of you when what you are doing isn’t achieving the outcome it was intended to? What is expected of you beyond simply noticing what isn’t working?

How do you exercise your initiative and your resourcefulness to move deals that stall during some stage of the sales process?

How do you share the lessons that you learn across your peer group? How do you work together to build a knowledge base that gives your group access to new ideas and new tools that may move other deals in the future?

What additional resources can you bring to bear on stalled deals? Who at your company can you ask for help? Who has the ability to help you move your deal forward? What stops you from asking them early enough to make a difference?

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

What Your Company Expects of You is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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Activity Doesn’t Cure All Sales Problems, But . . .

S. Anthony Iannarino — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:03:02 +0000

There can be no doubt that one of the primary contributing factors to poor sales results is low activity. You will never hear me argue otherwise. But increased activity is often touted as the panacea for all sales problems. This is, unfortunately, not true; making more calls doesn’t necessarily result in more sales. The other side of activity was, is, and always will be effectiveness.

But there is one problem that increased activity invariably improves: low activity.

Too often, sales management applies the “more activity” to salespeople with poor results, believing that more calls equals more sales. This is exactly the wrong prescription. The right prescription for poor performance is usually increased effectiveness, but that is a lot harder to achieve than simply commanding: ”Go! And do more!”

The “more activity” solution usually needs to be prescribed to salespeople who are already effective, but who don’t leverage their effectiveness to produce better results.

The High Cost of Low Activity

Regardless of how effective you are as a salesperson, your success depends on your ability to take action. You have to put that effectiveness to good use. The cost of not taking the disciplined actions with enough frequency results in fewer opportunities being pursued and fewer opportunities being won. You can recognize the lack of the behavior in salespeople who do well, but who don’t spend enough time prospecting or qualifying new opportunities.

Effective salespeople are so adept at winning big deals that they sometimes fail to manage themselves well and end up compressing the time they need to achieve their quota. When they fail to win the big deal in the quarter in which they were counting on winning it, they push it in to the next quarter. Their sales managers are often complicit in allowing the low activity—after all, these are good and effective salespeople.

Regardless of how effective you are, all your dream clients take time to nurture. Salespeople with high effectiveness in their sales skills are as guilty for failing to nurture their dream clients as are less effective salespeople. Most of the time salespeople with good sales abilities fail to nurture their dream clients because they already have a dream client or two in process. They focus on the hot deals to the detriment of future relationships. When pressed, they admit they have time to nurture these relationships and that the big deals take time to win—time in which they already have commitments and not much to do in between.

The high cost of low activity is the cost of missed opportunities, missed goals and quotas (and the stress that results in a furry of useless activity trying to close deals that aren’t ready), and a lack of progress with the dream clients that need nurtured.

Low activity is what prevents many great reps from making the top 20%.

How to Improve Your Activity

Find the Steady State: The first key to maintaining your activity is to do enough of the activities each week and at a level that you can maintain over the long haul. There will be times that you have no control over your time. But most weeks you can create a steady state of activity that includes the prospecting activity, the qualifying the activity, the new sales calls, the activities that you need to take on live deals, and some account maintenance.

Balance the activities at a level that you can control and maintain over time. Don’t behave as if you can cram prospecting, qualifying or nurturing later on. There is no cramming for success in sales—or anything else.

Calendar Activities (Not Just Appointments): Professional salespeople live on their calendar. They schedule the appointments with their big deal dream clients and they calendar these events with pride. But your calendar isn’t only to secure your appointments with others. Your calendar needs to be used to schedule appointments with yourself. Calendaring time to ensure that you keep your commitments to the activities that will ensure your success in this quarter—and the next quarter—results in higher sales and more predictable results. As long as you treat your appointments for commitments to yourself as being every bit as important to keep as the commitments you make to your dream clients.

Calendar your prospecting, qualifying, and nurturing activities now. Write them in the open space on next week’s calendar now. Then treat those appointments with the respect they deserve.

Don’t Allow the Pursuit of Your Dream Client to Override All Other Activities: One of the many reasons that salespeople with high effectiveness have low activity is because they have a dream client in process. The pursuit of the dream client doesn’t normally require abandoning and forsaking all other activities, but that is often the result.

To make an improvement here, simply take the action you need to move your dream client forward, and then commit yourself to taking all of the actions that ensure that you will have another dream client hot on the heels of the one you presently have in process. No excuses . . . you know I am right here.

Conclusion

Activity isn’t a cure for all sales problems. But it is a solution for the problems that result from low activity. These problems plague salespeople with great sales skills but low activity. Take action on these ideas to improve your activity.

Questions

When is more activity the wrong solution? Why is it the wrong solution? What does applying the more activity solution to poor performing salespeople say about our commitment to them as salespeople? What does it say about our responsibility to develop them?

When is more activity the right solution to sales problems?

Why do salespeople with good sales skills and high effectiveness suffer from low activity? What are the beliefs that they hold that cause them to behave in ways that prevent them from improving their sales results? What prevents them from taking action on the activities that have the ability to better than their lesser skilled peers?

How can you consistently take a high enough level of activity consistently? How would a more consistent application of disciplined effort on certain activities improve your results?

Which activities do you avoid and why? Which activities do you need to apply your efforts and energies towards?

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

Activity Doesn’t Cure All Sales Problems, But . . . is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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Do Something Brag-Worthy

S. Anthony Iannarino — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 01:09:17 +0000

Well, the week is over. How’d you do?

Did you win that big dream client you have been pursuing and nurturing for the last ninety days?

Did you make the cold call to that C-level executive to schedule the appointment you need so that you can share your big (value-creating) idea with them?

Did you raise the dead by moving a long-stalled and overdue opportunity further down the pipeline? Did you obtain that commitment that finally advances the deal?

Did you make a major investment of time in your personal development and gain some new insights and new competencies that will radically improve some important aspect of your game?

Or, did you move the proverbial papers from one side of your desk to the other side of your desk?

What did you do that was brag-worthy?

Make It Brag-Worthy

At the end of each week, what can you point to as the outcome of your efforts? What have you done that you can point to as a major milestone or major progress towards your goal? What have you done that is worth bragging about?

Your time is short, and even though we are only three weeks into the quarter, the quarter will end before you know it—and in some cases, before you are ready. You have to take the actions each day that move you closer to your goals and closer to the results that you need to succeed.

Next Week’s Brag-Worthy Work Plan

Next week, start your Monday morning by taking action on the one task that, were you to achieve the outcome that you need, you would have a week worth bragging about. If you can’t achieve the outcome that you need on that task, work on the tasks that will have the most noticeable impact on your sales results.

Do the same thing Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Start each day by tackling the tasks that will produce the greatest result. This will help you to produce a brag-worthy week—even if you don’t win that big dream client this week. Your effectiveness and your efforts don’t always line up neatly. But your efforts will produce results over time.

Maybe you didn’t move the stalled deal. Instead maybe you called every target on your nurture list and scheduled one key appointment. Maybe you spent all five days prospecting and working above the funnel, qualifying five key opportunities. Maybe you spent one hour each night reading a killer sales book and gaining the insights that you need to make the actions you take next week more effective then they have ever been.

More than anyone else, you are responsible for knowing what you need to produce in the way of outcomes in order to have a brag-worthy week. And you know what actions you have to take to achieve those outcomes. The question is whether or not you are disciplined enough to take them.

Don’t let a week go by without doing something brag-worthy. Actually, make that a day; don’t let a day go by!

Conclusion

You can never allow a week to go by without producing some meaningful, brag-worthy results. Your time is too short, and your results are critical to your short and long-term success—and your company’s. Do something worth bragging about!

Questions

What do you allow to prevent you from taking the actions that produce the greatest results and have the greatest impact on your sales?

What are the outcomes that you could achieve that would be worth bragging about? How can you free up your time and your energy to tackle the tasks with the greatest return on time invested?

What actions are you going to take next week that you can come back here and brag about?

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

Do Something Brag-Worthy is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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You Are Being Judged By A Higher Standard

S. Anthony Iannarino — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:22:44 +0000

Your dream client is making judgments about you. They are holding you to a higher standard.

Your Dream Client is Holding You to a Higher Standard

You are being judged by higher standard than your competitors, especially your dream client’s incumbent. You are there to make an improvement, and if your dream client were interested in maintaining the status quo, you wouldn’t be being judged at all.

You are being judged by a higher standard than all of your competitors who have presented their solutions before you. As your dream client’s understanding grows, their education creates a more informed and higher standard. You are being judged by that higher standard.

You are being judged by a higher standard than your dream client holds for their employees and their staff. Because they are known, and because they have proven themselves, their behavior and their motives are no longer suspect. Because you are not yet part of the company’s team and part their culture, a higher standard is applied.

You have informed your dream client that you are different than all of your competitors, that you are a value-creator the likes of which she hasn’t seen, and that you have the ability to help in ways that your competitors do not. Your dream client is going to hold you to your word, the higher standard that you have set for yourself.

You Created the Higher Standard

The reason you are being held to a higher standard is because you promised to hold yourself to a higher standard.

You have promised your dream client that your business acumen and your ability to diagnose and understand their business challenges will help them to bridge their performance gaps. This is higher standard than your vendor-competitors have ever held themselves to, and it is the new standard for your dream client.

You have represented yourself as a change agent with the ability to make a difference for your dream client. You have sold and promised to help them achieve a better outcome by leading that change yourself. By doing so, you have created a higher standard for yourself, and the standard by which your dream client judge you.

You have represented to your dream client that you will own and manage the outcome that they need. They have bought you and they have hired you based on this representation and this promise. You are going to be judged by this higher standard.

Conclusion

Greatness in sales isn’t gained by delivering the status quo. You have set yourself apart by promising to hold yourself to a higher standard. Your dream client is going to hold you to that higher standard.

Questions

In what ways do you hold yourself to a higher standard than your competitors? How does your dream client recognize that higher standard?

In what areas of your foundational success attributes and your sales attributes could you increase or improve your own standards? How about the standard you have for prospecting? How about the standard for nurturing dream clients? How about the standard for value creation on every interaction?

Is your standard for delivering the outcomes that you have promised greater that your competitors? How could you raise your own standard to both increase your ability to create a better outcome and to take more ownership of the end result? What would this do for your sales?

How much do you need to raise your own standard? How much would your results improve if you held yourself for a higher standard?

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

You Are Being Judged By A Higher Standard is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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Two Quick Thoughts About Your Behavior off the Field

S. Anthony Iannarino — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:30:10 +0000

Thought One: Your Behavior Off the Field

The following is a true story. The names have been redacted to protect the guilty.

A salesperson that was working for me had a sales call across town. She was driving to the call, and the women driving next to her was on the telephone and her driving was unpredictable. Eventually, this erratic driver pulled her car in front of my salesperson, cutting her off.

My salesperson was a young girl, and she had some strong convictions and a fiery little temper when she was wronged. So, she did what to her came natural: she laid on the horn and gave the erratic driver a rather impolite, but heartfelt, gesture.

A few minutes later, she arrived at her sales call, still holding on to a little bit of her temper from having only a few minutes before being cut off. As she stepped out of her car, the woman in the next car stepped out of hers. And, as chance would have it, it was the erratic driver. They traded a quick and unfriendly glance.

The erratic driver entered the building first, followed by sales rep. My sales rep approached the receptionist and asked for the contact she had scheduled the appointment with earlier in the week.

Guess who came out to greet her.

Here is the thing: you are who you are even when you are not actually on a sales call. All the best attributes of a salesperson have to be the foundation of who you are, not behaviors or actions you sometimes take.

Thought Two: What Are You Saying About You?

There is still more to talk about with your car. I told a friend yesterday that I don’t write about politics on this blog. There is no way I could do so without offending all of you (not half of you, or even a third of you . . . I mean all of you). If I wrote about politics, some of you would discount the rest of what I write here. Some part of my message would be suspect.

Some of you hate President Obama. Some of you hated President Bush. That’s just fine. But there is no reason that your dream client should ever know this about you, least of all by looking at your car. If you have a bumper sticker that makes a political statement of any kind, immediately go and remove the bumper sticker from your car.

It doesn’t matter how strongly you feel about your political beliefs and opinions. I understand that your 1^st Amendment rights protect your freedom to speak your mind, especially when it comes to political speech. But unless what you are selling is a candidacy—yours or someone else’s—your politics should not be visible as your dream client watches you leave their parking lot.

In fact, let me take this a little further. If you have any bumper sticker on your automobile at all, go now and remove it. Period.

Some of you will believe that I am right about this. Some of you will believe me to be wrong. And many more of you will believe that this is rarely an issue. But, as we move into and election cycle, passions will be enflamed and conversation that need not be had at all will be had.

You do not want the first message you send to your dream client to be the fact that you are the kind of person with whom they disagree about the biggest and most important issues facing our country. And I promise they are not interested in hearing your thoughts or enaging a friendly debate.

Your political opinions can cause your dream client to discount your real message.

Your politics, like mine, are sure to lose you friends and alienate people. Leave them off your bumper and out of your sales calls.

Bet you’re dying to know what happened with the sales rep in the first section of this post, aren’t you? She is an amazingly gregarious, charming person with a wonderful, self-deprecating sense of humor. She made the whole thing about her, and not her prospective client. They both laughed about it, and she got an order. She got lucky . . . no reason to see if you can pull off the same stunt.

Conclusion

Your behavior when you are not selling says a lot about who you are, even when you don’t want it to and even when you think it’s not fair. You are entitled to behave and believe as you wish, but how you behave and what you believe may be counted against you.

Questions

What does your behavior when you are not selling say about you? Are you ever impatient and intolerant with other people? Not they would have to be important to a deal for you to exercise your patience and your tolerance, but shouldn’t you be somebody more tolerant?

Even though you are entitled to your political opinions, what makes it necessary that you share them with strangers? What makes it necessary that you display your political opinions with your dream clients by advertising it on the bumper of your car or by interjecting it into sales calls on people you don’t know?

What do your political statements say about your company? Are they endorsing your message?

How do you respond to political comments and taunts that your dream client makes on a sales call? What is appropriate? What about when they make strong political statements with which you disagree?

Two Quick Thoughts About Your Behavior off the Field is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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The First Commitment

S. Anthony Iannarino — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:56:56 +0000

The first and primary skill that salespeople must possess is the ability to close. But closing isn’t something that happens once at the end of the sales cycle when you ask for and obtain the final commitment to move forward together with your dream client. Closing, the ability to ask for and to obtain commitments, is required throughout the entire sales process.

The first commitment is often the hardest commitment to obtain. That is the commitment to explore the opportunity of working together. Knowing that your dream clients all belong to your competitors, and knowing that it is important to just get it, once in, you have to ask for the commitments that are contained within your sales process.

These commitments include access to people and access to information. These are first commitments, and they will later determine your ability to win the deal with your dream client.

Access to Buying Team Members

Whatever is contained in your sales process, it is more than likely that it includes understanding the opportunity, understanding your dream client’s needs, and understanding your dream client’s motivations and rationale for buying. In order to put together the solution that will win the votes of the buying team, you need to understand how to meet their needs.

This requires that you obtain the commitments to gain access to the buying team members. Ultimately, you need their votes and you don’t want to wait to try to win them in the boardroom (the boardroom is where you confirm commitments, not win them, if you would tilt the field in your direction).

Access to Decision-Makers and Decision-Influencers

You also need to obtain the commitments that give you access to the decision-makers and decision-influencers, some who may not have the authority to be a part of the buying team, but who may have influence beyond their authority. This is the group of people who’s support you will later need to ensure that your solution succeeds when you are eventually chosen.

The commitments you gain that provide you with early access to these individuals helps to inform your understanding of how to build your solution, and it gains you a powerful group of allies (who, incidentally, are a great surrogate sales force when you have left but the sale continues).

The commitments that provide you access to these groups are critical. They have more influence through their long relationships with the buying team members than you can hope to build in so short a time as your sales cycle or their buying cycle.

Access to Stakeholders

All of these groups are stakeholders. But the stakeholders that I am writing about here include the individuals and groups that will be impacted by your solution, even though they have no authority and limited influence.

These stakeholders can often give you the greatest understanding of what will really be necessary to make your solution work. They can often help you to understand the constraints that might later derail your solution and help you to build the plans to ensure that these constraints are overcome.

If you would have this group give your solution the full embrace a change effort requires, give this group the respect that they deserve by obtaining the commitments to spend time listening to them—listening being the greatest way to show that you care.

Access to Information

Access to all of these groups can provide you access to the information that you need to build your solution—and not just the technical information that you need to build your solution.

These groups can provide you with information about the company’s culture, their preferences, and their work styles. They can provide you with an understanding of the company’s internal hierarchy and power structure, the organizational structure that that is driven by politics and isn’t found on any organizational chart.

By gaining access to all of these groups and the information that they possess, you increase your ability to diagnose your dream client’s entire organization including, perhaps most importantly, the human terrain.

These are the first commitments that set up and enable you to win later.

Conclusion

Advancing sales requires a that you obtain a complex set of commitments that provide access to individuals within your dream client’s company, as well as access to the information that will allow you to win and to succeed for your client once you have done so. The first commitments are all about access.

Questions

Once you have obtained the first commitment, the commitment to explore working together, what are the next series of commitments that you need to obtain?

What are the commitments that you need to obtain that provide you with access to the individuals who will ultimately determine whether or not you are chosen?

How does obtaining access to the decision-makers and decision-influencers that may not be part of the buying committee provide you with a strategic advantage in designing and selling your solution? How might they provide the influence and support you need to collect the votes you need from the buying team?

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

The First Commitment is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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You and Your Sales Process as an Unfair Advantage

S. Anthony Iannarino — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:32:44 +0000

Strategy is about creating an unfair advantage. The last thing you ever want going into any competition for any deal is a level playing field; you want to stack the deck as heavily in your favor as possible. You want your sales processes, your individual actions and behaviors, and your solution to build that unfair advantage.

Your Sales Process as a Competitive Advantage

Your sales process is your roadmap to winning deals. It contains your philosophy about sales and selling, and it contains all of the outcomes you have to be able to achieve to make winning more likely. If your sales process is well designed and custom-tailored to your company, it should also include the differentiation at every stage that leads to, and builds, your competitive advantage in the deal.

Here is one quick example. Imagine that your competitors obtain one contact, the decision-maker, throughout their sales process. Maybe they focus on working with and working through that power-sponsor to move the deal. Maybe that works for them. Your process, on the other hand, requires that in the discovery stage, you have to identify and interview the primary stakeholders to understand their view of their problem and to work with them to build your solution (in addition to your power sponsor).

Would your having collected the situational knowledge and the ideas of the stakeholder groups provide you with an edge later, say, when you are presenting your solution and describing the impact on your dream client’s business? It would, and it does.

This is one simple idea, and it may already be contained in your sales process (perhaps overlooked?). Much of what it is contained in your sales process is designed to help build a competitive advantage but, in my opinion, more could be done.

Review your sales process stage by stage (you should do this on a regular schedule anyway). Look for ways that you could create even more of a strategic mismatch between you and your competitors at each and every stage. And, while you are at it, start with the activities that you take that are above the funnel.

Your sales process can be an important source of a competitive advantage. I describe myself as sales process agnostic because I believe that the sales process only gets you so far. A bad salesperson with a great sales process will fare better than they would without a sales process. But a great salesperson with a great sales process creates the very best opportunity to win.

Your Individual Actions and Sales Behaviors as a Competitive Advantage

There is no one with a greater ability to impact your dream client’s decision than you, the salesperson. You opened the opportunity, and if you play your cards right, you will win the deal through your behaviors and your actions. You need to ensure that all of your sales behaviors and your individual actions create a strategic advantage.

Over the last 6 months, I have written about the attributes and behaviors that lead to success in sales, including foundational success attributes like initiative, resourcefulness, determination, and caring, as well as sales-related attributes like closing, differentiating, business acumen, diagnosing, and storytelling. Each of these skills or attributes is something that you alone are responsible for possessing, developing, and using to create a strategic advantage. They have to help answer the question: Why should I buy from you?

These ideas have to lead to the concrete actions and behaviors that cause your dream client to choose you over all others.

It is your job as a salesperson to give yourself an advantage by creating a strategic mismatch. Are you more resourceful and more determined? Do you care more than your competitors? Do you have a greater ability to differentiate—and to be a differentiator yourself? Do you have greater business acumen? Do you create value during every interaction?

You won’t find these skills, abilities, and attributes in your sales process. It is doubtful that they are even part of your company’s hiring criteria. But all of the individual actions and behaviors that are the result of these skills, abilities, and attributes enable the competitive advantage contained in your sales process to create a great strategic advantage.

And all of this is before we even get to the advantage in your actual solution.

Conclusion

Sales is a zero sum competition. The goal of your sales process and your individual sales behaviors and activities is to build an unfair advantage before you ever propose your solution. How do you create a playing field that is titled in your favor?

Questions

Why is important to build your competitive advantage into your sales process?

What outcomes contained within your sales process are different enough to allow you to create a competitive advantage? What outcomes are approached in a way so different from your competitors that they create a competitive advantage? How do these outcomes tilt the playing field in your favor?

What could you do during each stage of your sales process to create a strategic advantage.

What are the skills, the abilities, and the attributes that you must possess to give yourself a strategic advantage over your competitors? What do you do personally to create a strategic mismatch? How do these actions and behaviors increase the odds that your dream client will choose you and your solution?

Are your dream clients in fact choosing you? What strategic advantage do they hope to be provided with by having done so?

Even though your dream client suggests that they want a fair competition, does it serve you or your client to operate as if all things need to be equal?

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

You and Your Sales Process as an Unfair Advantage is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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