A message to marketing from sales - We won't sell it if you make it too hard

As I mentioned last week we have been working with the marketing team of an IT vendor to provide the sales teams with the key messages they will be using to introduce some specific offers.

On the face of it this is a straightforward activity; take the offer marketing want to promote, identify why someone would buy it, create the message the sales team need to deliver, show them how to deliver the message and finally work with them to deliver the message.

But the offer is wrong!
Unfortunately we hit a problem as soon as we started, the message would not work. It was not that the message in itself was wrong, but it was not consistent with what marketing had been telling the wider world and what they had been asking the sales people to tell existing customers.

Read your website and supporting material to check your current message
At its simplest the campaign was to target specific products at Large Enterprises, but the website proudly announced that "we have designed these products to meet the needs of the mid-market".

Sales made it clear that they would not even consider this campaign as they had been told the product was solely targeted at SMEs! There was no argument, the message was clear, "we will not do this!"

Beyond this we did a quick audit of the website and although the new products were mentioned, when you clicked for more information you were sent to a page all about the previous model. Fortunately sales did not spot this or we would have had even more issues.

Sales will not do anything that is too complex!
As a sales person I am happy to do anything that will help me over-achieve against my OTE, but I will always look for the path of least resistance. If I am not sure about the message, or think that the customer will only get confused, I will not use that message with the customer, whatever marketing may ask!

Are you sure you have not done the same?
I am happy to put my hand up and say that our messages are not always consistent, and I use the excuse of "our messages are evolving........". I know that this is due to the need to be agile, but we have delegated the responsibility of managing our website and we don't always update our web partner on the latest message.

How confident are you that your messages are consistent!

Customers do not like inconsistent messages, they will just ignore you!
The reality is that customers do not care why your messages are inconsistent, they will identify the reasons not to buy and reject you.

The sales team were 100% correct, we could not ask them to position the product to Large Enterprises, not only would it have been an ineffective campaign, it would have been damaging to the brand of the organisation.

The three steps to consistent messages

• Before you build your campaign , check what messages you are currently delivering to your target market segments
• Before you tell sales the new message, tell them how the message is changing and why
• Before you launch the campaign ensure that all customer touchpoints are delivering the same message:
• On-line media (website, PR, etc)
• All above and below the line collateral
• All customer facing people
• All your channels

Keep following this blog, it will help you

It is our aim to continue to provide pragmatic and practical advice and solutions to the issues facing sales teams. We will always ensure that whatever we say you can use with your teams confident in the knowledge that we have already used the solutions in real life. We will continue to provide free tools and if you want access to more tools then you can always visit our website www.sales-accredit.com.

We need your input

We base all of our examples on the issues we are identifying in our clients, but we would like you to help us. Send us the issues you are facing and we will endeavour to address them in our future blogs.

And Finally

In the last blog of 2009 we discussed the personal business plan. We now have a worked examples, so if anyone would like a copy please drop me a line mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com

The next blog will explain what we did next after we got sales back on side.

That was a good meeting - I think I'll do it again

Well finally the snow has gone, and meetings are starting again. This means we are once again joining in regular reviews of meetings as our clients look to build their pipelines as the UK comes out of recession. As a result of this we had an experience that caused us to discuss our favourite subject of "planning your activities" as opposed to starting to discuss how you can take new offers to market.

The year ends in March, how are we going to hit target?
We have been working with an organisation whose financial year ends in March, so all the focus is on how can we close off deals. You would think this was a pretty straight forward activity:

• qualify the prospects who are able to makes a decision before the end of March (assuming you know their buying process and key decision making criteria)
• validate that your solution is a "good fit"
• ensure the key DM criteria and your solution match as closely as possible so that a decision is made in your favour
• check your solution beats the competition and work with your sponsor to win the business

So you would expect the sales team to have used the snow outbreak to re-qualify their pipeline and then start to have focussed meetings to win business. It would appear that for some sales teams this is not an effective exercise as it could ruin a "strong pipeline". Let me give you an example:

One salesman has just come back from a meeting, which he told us was "very good". We asked the obvious questions

• Can we win the business before March?
• What do we have to do to win the business?
• What is the next step?

The response we got was, "They are very interested in our approach, especially if we could include some of the new features we have promised in version 8 (due in June 2010). I told them that these features give us a clear competitive edge and they agreed with me. I have promised them a demo of the new features (using our beta tool) and we are looking to arrange a meeting in February. I hope that when we next meet we will be able to finalise the proposal, which I am confident we will win"

That was a good meeting, wasn't it?

I think we have a case of "Don't ruin the fun of the discussion by asking for the business". The salesman involved comes from a technical background and their comfort zone is in designing potential solutions. They enjoy the intellectual challenge of the discussion, but struggle with the close. In many cases they think that their customer will think less of them if they ask for the order!

So what did we do?

1. We did not pick on this one sales person! We asked the whole sales team to give us an update on every opportunity in the pipeline, specifically ranking them by
1. Target close date
2. Value
3. When the next meeting is
4. Objective of meeting and how this will help us close the business
2. We then carried out a one-to-one on each sales rep's top 3 opportunities and we specifically looked at
1. Did they know the decision making process and did this match their target close date?
2. Could we bring the close date forward?
3. Are they meeting the contact soon enough and have they agreed a clear objective for the meeting and the desired next steps?
3. We re-cut the pipeline (in terms of the final quarter) and identified where there are gaps and then revisited the process for any deals that are likely to close next year to see if we could bring any of them forward.

How did this help our troubled salesman?

We asked the salesman to visualise one of his colleagues who in the words of the salesman, "has no shame he will make any offer to win the business". We collectively worked out a strategy to allow the customer to place an order this month by:

• Identifying the key features they need us to deliver, and when they need them by
• Agreeing a delivery schedule that would allow them to buy now, and receive "credits" if we fail to deliver the features to the agreed timetable.
• Gaining commitment for a 24 month deal (not the 12 months that the salesman was originally offering)
• Ensuring there was no price discount but rather a win/win price!

The salesman has had his meeting and positioned the offer, and the client is working through the paperwork as we speak!

So what can we all learn from this?

There are 2 key lessons here:

1. Not all sales people think their job is asking for the order - with the focus on "solution selling" and the desire for our people to be able to build a solution, we have recruited a number of people who see themselves as "solution architects" and not sales people. As Managers we have to spot them and ensure that they are focussed on closing business.
2. Have a plan and implement it - Don't expect your sales people to have a plan, check they have a plan and check they follow it.

What can you expect from this Blog over the coming year?

It is our aim to continue to provide pragmatic and practical advice and solutions to the issues facing sales teams. We will always ensure that whatever we say you can use with your teams confident in the knowledge that we have already used the solutions in real life. We will continue to provide free tools and if you want access to more tools then you can always visit our website www.sales-accredit.com.

We need your input

We base all of our examples on the issues we are identifying in our clients, but we would like you to help us. Send us the issues you are facing and we will endeavour to address them in our future blogs.

And Finally

In the last blog of 2009 we discussed the personal business plan. We now have a worked examples, so if anyone would like a copy please drop me a line mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com

This week we are working with a key client on a reason to call campaign in support of some new products, I will share with you the lessons learnt on this project on next week's blog.

I couldn't sell anything - there was too much snow

The last 2 weeks have been a "challenging" time for sales people here in the UK. Not only have we been dealing from the post Christmas and New Year hangover, but we have introduced a new syndrome - "snowitis" where the onset of snow has resulted in a complete halt in sales activities.

Now of course some of this snowitis is correctly diagnosed where the subject is living in a remote corner of the country and he/she can only normally interact with clients face to face. For those who fully suffer from snowitis (often diagnosed by their managers) it has been fully acceptable to engage in a little extra-curricular snow man building, sledging, or in certain extreme cases having to mind the children because local schools were suffering from the public sector variant of snowitis.

But for the rest of us, snowitis has just been an extreme form of "duvet-day". We have immediately accepted that just because we cannot get out of our local road, all forms of transport have ground to a halt "DO NOT TRAVEL UNLESS IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY" shouts the BBC news. Even in those extreme cases where we cannot travel (or our customers cannot travel to their offices) then we have also decided that all forms of communications have been affected by the snow. Just like the "wrong types of leaves" impact our railway system, so then the wrong types of dampness and cold seems to impact our voice and data communication systems. Clearly there is no point in trying to call people as they will not be there, even though there are believed to be over 1.8 mobile phones per person in the UK!

My personal experience has been that a surprisingly large number of people have answered their phones during the last 2 weeks, and although I have had meetings cancelled, we did manage to carry on discussions over the phone ensuring that the next meeting will be further down the sales cycle. On a more depressing note I have had clients whose Inside Sales Reps, appear to have made limited contact with customers during this period, resulting in a 2 week delays of major outbound sales campaigns. The reason for this appears to be a combination of snowitis and a failure of systems so that those Inside Sales Reps who were willing to work from home had limited access to the systems they needed.

So how do we deal with Snowitis?

1. Attitude - Yes you can still work during snow!
2. Application - You have to believe that you are going to get through to someone
3. Perseverance - It will take longer than usual so persevere, use all the contact methods available and don't be put off.
4. Systems - The technology world has been promoting the value of flexible working, have you been willing to be flexible in your approach? Those who invested in solutions that allow home working were able to continue working - their ROI on the IT and Comms investment just went up!
5. Planning - Sales people who have a plan can execute it even during the snow!
6. Management - Managers have to manage even more so, do your people have a plan of activity, are they delivering against it?

What can we learn from the last 2 weeks

This outbreak of snowitis should help us identify those sales people who do not plan their time and activities, and those managers who fail to manage. We all have a duty of care to our employer (they are after all paying us) and so we should have made best use of the time available.

Look for those people who, even if they could not see clients, have made best use of the time. Those who have built a plan of activity for the coming quarter, or who have updated their account plans, and their contact strategies.

Look for those managers who have driven their teams as opposed to "going native".

Identify those people who have continued to sell, they are your potential stars for the coming year as they have the right attitude.

And finally, remember snowitis is an illness that only affects some. People with the right attitude and strong values don't seem to catch it - funny, they seem to be more successful too.

What can you expect from this Blog over the coming year

It is our aim to continue to provide pragmatic and practical advice and solutions to the issues facing sales teams. We will always ensure that whatever we say you can use with your teams confident in the knowledge that we have already used the solutions in real life. We will continue to provide free tools and if you want access to more tools then you can always visit our website www.sales-accredit.com.

We need your input

We base all of our examples on the issues we are identifying in our clients, but we would like you to help us. Send us the issues you are facing and we will endeavour to address them in our future blogs.

And Finally

In the last blog of 2009 we discussed the personal business plan. We now have a worked examples, so if anyone would like a copy please drop me a line mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com

Next week will start to address the issue of launching a new offering to market and how to ensure the sales team are able to drive it into your customer base.