The Problem with Sales Meetings......

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Some while ago I wrote a short piece on the problem with board meetings, following work with recent clients it seems that there is also problems with sales meetings. Let me recount recent experiences to illustrate what I mean. The meeting starts well and their is an Agenda of sorts. What happens next is that a member of the team is asked to describe what they have done for the preceding month. There follows a long rambling commentary about how busy they have been and what opportunities their are and a volley of reasons why they haven't sold us much as they thought. This monologue took about 20 minutes.

Image by Nils Geylen via Flickr

The next member of the sales team them repeated the process with one objective in mind; to spend more time talking that the person before him. Repeat that four times and your have a very long sales meeting. In the worst case it was 6 hours, yes, 6 hours I kid you not. Worst still, at least from my point of view, was that very little valuable information was provided either to management or from management. It was also clear that the sales team saw the meeting as largely a waste of time, and at 6 hours who can blame them. Having said that the sales team were also part of the problem.

Sales people by definition quite hard to manage. This is because they are trained to handle objections (management questioning) and get around obstacles (management questions and reporting). Put another way without a strong focus its difficult to put sales people on the spot. Except of course when they've just made a big sale and then of course they will remind you at every turn. We shouldn't criticise but simply understand that this is the nature of sales people and we just have to learn to manage it. 

So the problem with sales meeting is that they are run by managers who are not trained as sales managers and who have to deal with trained sales people. In many cases it's just an unfair fight. The result is often that sales people don't treat the meeting with the respect it deserves and take advantage of their managers' lack of experience. This is not universal but in my experience it is a common situation.

So if you fall in this category as a manager/owner what can you do about it?

It all starts with asking the right questions. Sales meeting reporting need to be precise and unequivocal. By that I mean getting information from your sales people that is binary either a yes or no. So to keep control of a sales meeting its best to get your sales people to report on items such as business won in the month business lost in the month and business expected to close in the next month (or weekly depending on your sales cycle). 

Getting sales people to report on numbers makes it easier for you to understand what is really going on. It also leaves much less wriggle room about what has or hasn't been achieved. As a manager/owner you will have a target for monthly sales you need to know  are they being achieved and if so is thee significant over or under achievement. Depending on the answer, which by the way can be identified from the reports, you will know what kinds of questions to ask. It also means you can get through the meeting more rapidly because it becomes a Q&A session rather than a series on monologues. Further it will be easier to identify actions to take place before the next meeting thereby providing focus for future meetings and making it easier for you to stay in control.

You can get a sample of reporting formats I've been discussing by clicking here and downloading them.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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How to Build a Sustainable Sales Process—without a Rock Star

Occasionally I have guest blogs on this site when I think the article is interesting and more importantly relevant to owner managed businesses. I have been recently running articles on structuring sales processes and building effective sales pipeline reporting tools. I read this article from Barbara Weaver Smith on her mission to help small businesses sell to big companies - "to" as they say "land whales"

Laurence Ainsworth

Exigent Consulting

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Image via WikipediaPundits  are calling it “sales 2.0” or “the new world of sales.”  Whatever you call it, the story line is the same—Elvis is dead.  If you are going to make bigger sales to bigger customers, a rock star salesperson is not the way to go.

Chances are you built your company selling to companies with which you had some things in common—same region, shared friendships and associations,  maybe even similar size and years in business.  Almost like friends and family.

But to take your company to the next level, you need to venture out into new, unfamiliar territory, where you will meet tougher customers and much tougher competition.  To do that, you need a sustainable sales process  that rests on the performance of a cross-functional team, not a rock star.

Here’s why.

• ·     Big companies (we call them “whales”) are afraid to do business with small companies.  They are afraid you can’t deliver, that you will run out of capital, that you don’t understand how big companies work, and that your operations and customer service teams are just not sophisticated enough.  No matter how much they want your innovative solution, they won’t buy it unless you alleviate all of those fears.  And your sales person can’t do that!  It will require participation of key subject matter experts, deeply involved in the sales process.

• ·     The buyers in big companies (end users or purchasing agents) will never lose their jobs over a conventional choice of vendor.  But they can definitely lose their jobs if they award a big contract to an unknown provider and the project tanks.  You will have to win them over with the strength—breadth and depth—of your team.

• ·     The corporate environment is getting much more stringent about the nature of relationships between their buyers and all sellers.  They want to increase the distance between buyers and sellers and  reduce familiarity.  They want to avoid even the appearance of collusion or any improper value exchange.  Your rock star salesperson, charismatic hail-fellow-well-met, is likely to have serious difficulty in making this transition.

So, what is the alternative?  Go from a solo act to an orchestra.  You need to develop a  disciplined, systematic sales process, overseen by senior management, in which each pursuit of a large sale is directed by a skilled sales person who is not a rock star but a conductor guiding the performance of a cross-functional team.  

The Whale Hunters Process™ advocates a plan of three stages—Scouting, Hunting, and Harvesting.  The plan is designed to get your company positioned to sell deals at 10 to 20 times your current average account

The “scout” stage involves creating a Target Filter—a profile of your ideal customer—r researching the most promising companies, watching their behavior over time, and calling on them when they may have a propensity to buy.

In the “hunt” stage, train key subject matter experts to participate in the sale and develop a systematic process of discovery and disclosure that becomes your core sales process.

The “harvest” stage becomes important after you land a big account, but you can’t wait until them to implement best practices for bringing a new account on board.  Be sure your team is as ready to deliver the services as it is to make the sale.

By following these steps, you will develop a disciplined process for marketing,  sales, and delivery that will give you a considerable competitive advantage.  It will not accommodate a rock star but will elevate the performance of ordinary people, well trained and seriously committed to the growth of your company.

You will have a process that you can measure, replicate, improve, scale, and teach to a stream of new hires.

Barbara Weaver Smith

October 2010

The Whale Hunters is a strategic sales coaching company that helps small businesses achieve explosive growth by landing bigger deals with bigger customers.   The question is how can small businesses grow at a rate that will show results sooner rather than later?  That’s where The Whale Hunters comes in – and we invite you to register for a free account which gives you access to the wealth of information on the new expanded Whale Hunters website– http://www.thewhalehunters.com - Barbara Weaver Smith founder The Whale Hunters

How to Build a Structured Sales Pipeline

Following on from my earlier article “Developing a structured pipeline – The Issues” this article describes how to build the all too elusive, structured pipeline.

So to recap: what should a structured pipeline report aim to achieve?

Firstly, it should enable you to view each sale in a consistent manner.

Second, it should clearly identify if a sales opportunity has progressed or stagnated.

Thirdly, it should contained a factoring index which will more accurately reflect the true value of the pipeline

Fourthly, it should provide sales and/or company management with a consistent and reliable prediction of business that should be closed in the forthcoming period.

Fifth, it should be simple and relatively easy to complete (salespeople as a breed are poor at filling in reports).

Sixth, it should be focused on numbers rather than opinion.

To build a consistent view of each sales opportunity take the sales cycle in your business and break it down into discrete milestones.

So for example,

Milestone 1 is a lead or an enquiry who has identified desire to purchase your product or service.

Milestone 2 to progress the sale you need to demonstrate the product

Milestone 3 they have the budget to pay for your product

Milestone 4 you have submitted a proposal

Milestone 5 you’re on the shortlist

Milestone 6 you have a verbal order

Milestone 7 you have a written order.

The next step is to put percentages against these milestones for example, 1) 5%, 2)10%, 3) 20%, 4)25%, 5) 50%, 6) 90%, 7)100%. This approach allows you to build a factored pipeline i.e. the value of the opportunity time the percentage milestone. Don’t get hung up about whether the percentages should be this or that number what we are building is something that will give you a consistent view across all your sales opportunities and not something which reflects the precise chance of winning per opportunity. The progress of the sale can be shown in any way you like; this could be as a table, a graph, or a set of traffic light colours going from red to green as you move along the sales process. Other information you need is simple the prospect name, if it is a new or existing customer, the value of the opportunity and a projected win date.

By constructing what I have described you’ve gone a long way to getting a grip on your sales performance, you’ve now turned sales reporting into a set of numbers which over time you can analyse. For example you’ll see which sales have stagnated because they wont have moved along the pipeline for a period of time, you’ll be able to identify how overoptimistic you sales force are by comparing the projected win date with the actual win date. Most commonly this is between 3-6 months.

Now that you have a factored pipeline you can start to build up metrics on the relationship between the size of your pipeline and your monthly sales. It also now enables you to look forward because as your factored pipeline rises and falls to will your sales, thus you can act early as soon as you see your pipeline numbers dip.

You’re now at last starting to get some sensible numbers to enable you to plan your business and you have moved from a jolly nice chat to a shorter focused and more effective sales meeting. As the Meerkat would say “simples”.

Exigent Consulting specialises in providing Business Turnaround, Sales, Marketing and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.

3 Steps to Successful Sales Forecasting

In most businesses this (the 4^th) quarter is the busiest and much sales effort is focused on getting the best results from these critical weeks. However good sales managers are also preparing get to grips with next year's sales targets. This is an important activity because the earlier issues are identified the more time there is to adjust strategies to meet them. Whilst it is important to continue to focus on getting the numbers for this year, for sales management it is vital to understand the nature of the challenge for next year. This analysis is as relevant for the owner managed business where the MD is often the sales manager, as the larger organisation where is has a well developed sales function.

Often it takes a month or two to re orientate your sales activity and doing it now (in Q4) gives 12 months to shoot for next year's target rather than maybe 9 or 10 months if left till the first month of the New Year.

Putting together a simple forecast requires one to break projected sales down into 3 areas, Known, Seen and Unseen. So what do these 3 categories mean? What is their significance? Let us look at each one in turn. This forecasting method is really only applicable to B2B sales, retailers have to use a different method which will be the subject of a future article.

Known sales are those which come from your existing accounts, so you can, based on previous years, fairly accurately estimate your income for the coming period, whilst we all know that individual account incomes vary from year to year it should be possible to approximate the likely revenue. This number for most businesses this will represent a large % of the overall target

Seen sales relate to a category of sales which estimates income based on the long term pipeline and an estimate of what percentage of sales tend to come from new business. Typically this would be the total value of the pipeline factored by the likelihood of success.

Unseen sales comprise that proportion of the sales target where you have no indication of where these sales are coming from. These are, t0 paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, "unknown unknowns" This element represents the risk in your forecast. The larger the percentage of unseen sales, the more risk there is in the forecast.

Once you have these figures it should also direct you where you need to concentrate your sales effort be that new business development or maximising revenue from your base accounts. If you're trying this for the first time don't be too cautious in forecasting revenue, there should always be an element of unseen in the forecast depending on the type of business it can vary between 10-35% as a norm, anything more than that would indicate that the forecast is too optimistic and is unlikely to be achieved.

Forecasts have to support management objectives but if they are too unrealistic the sales force will very quickly find this out and the target will be disregarded and there will be no real attempt to achieve it. Accurate forecasting is nonetheless an important component in managing your business and an important tool in how it will be developed.

ExigentConsulting specialises in providing Business Turnaround, Sales, Marketing andMentoring to the Small and Medium Business.We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business