Engineering Sales Effectiveness

By Darren Cox

Sales Manager

 

The Sales Guy (Three years ago):

 

Targets hit (just!); Head held high; claimed back the “business lunch” at  the Park Hyatt (Woo Hoo!); Sitting behind the desk; feet up; breathe a sigh of relief; wait for the phone to ring.

 

The Sales Guy (Now):

 

Target’s missed (by a mile); lost three clients to competitors who dropped their pants for the business; sitting behind the desk – at home; Seek and MyCareer open on laptop; breathe a sigh of hope; wait for the phone to ring.

 

* * *

 

It’s remarkable to note that in Australia, many companies, before the economic crisis, rested on their laurels; the sales people sat in their leather chairs, tilted back, feet on their desks, awaiting the phone to ring,

 

And ring it did! Existing customers called to request a paid upgrade, a newer version, an alternative product, a professional service or two, and sales guys didn’t feel they needed to prospect for new business. Life was easy!

 

And then, BAM! The Credit Crunch. And, over the weeks and months we have witnessed mass job cuts, in order that businesses can reduce costs.

 

And who is cut? The sales people waiting for the phone to ring!

 

Now, times have changed. We’re in a different world – A world where businesses, to remain competitive, have to be on the lookout for new business – proactively. They have to create an effective sales strategy dedicated to new business generation and telephone prospecting.

 

Unfortunately, business owners, being less inclined to make cold calls, are equally less inclined to force their sales people to do the same thing. Furthermore, they look among their sales team, finding the familiar faces of veteran sales guys – the ones who made the cut – who outright refuse to get on the phone to generate new opportunities, or have no idea how to do it!

 

And so, their competitive edge becomes blunt, and the sharpened saw snaps.

 

So, what is the solution to the economic woes we now face? How can business owners and sales people overcome their blunted sales strategy and replace it with a new enthusiasm and purpose?

 

First and foremost, your sales people must be targeted not only on business retained – existing business – but new business generation.

 

Existing business should not be your only protection from keeping your business out of the red. Organisations must be looking at finding new opportunities, and forging new relationships.

 

Please don’t misunderstand, existing business is an important part of your sales pipeline and continued growth, but please consider, your existing business is your competitor’s new business and when the going gets tough the tough get going.

 

Your competitors are hungry. And so must you be.

 

Is it your intention to just make it through this crisis; to keep your head above water as you frantically swim to the edge?

 

Or is your strategy to grow and continue to expand?

 

Now is the best time to refine, or redefine, your sales strategy, to be proactive in your approach to new business generation, to get tough, but also disciplined in your approach to making outbound cold calls.

 

Our Joint MD, Ciaran McGuigan, drives a car with a number plate highlighting one of his own key strategies – 10B410. That’s ten outbound new business calls every days before 10am.

 

This methodology, though sounding simplistic, could be the difference between growth and stagnation.

 

So be tough. And get going!

Revenue, Revenue, Revenue!

By Chris Moriarty

 

Revenue is everything in business. Nothing else matters. It is the life blood of any organisation – even if you are not profitable.

 

As long as you have revenue circulating through your business you are a chance of staying alive.  Unless you have revenue pumping through your veins you can never prosper.

 

Sales generates around 100% of all revenue for just about every business.

 

Therefore, whoever has the best sales teams and the best sales process is in the best position to prosper through the current economic climate.

 

Think about athletics.

 

It is hot, humid and oxygen is thin. You have to run a marathon. Who is going to survive – the elite athletes or the slobs?

 

This is a great time to be in sales. Great sales people should be celebrating their good fortune at being in the market at this time.

 

First, all the lazy and weak order-takers will be the first to fall. This will open up the field.

 

Second, your prospects are all in pain. Everyone is in pain, the whole economy is feeling pain. This is great. It means there is an abundance of pain points. Pain points are great because they give you something to sell against.

 

An amazing thing is happening. At Strike Force Sales our hit rates are going up. I would like to think it is 100% due to our skill and application. But another factor is at play. There is less noise in the market. People are giving up.

 

When the going gets tough the tough get going. It is true. The soft are giving up. There are less people out there spruiking for business. Instead they are sitting at their desk in sackcloth and ashes moaning about how bad business is. Meanwhile their absence from the market is leaving it wide open for the tough and the fit.

 

Right now is a fantastic time to be on the phone, drumming up leads and developing a battle hardened sales team and sales process.

Sales Lead Generation

By Sali Lu

Before plunging into any prospecting, it is necessary to develop a clear marketing communication which differentiates your company’s position from that of your competitor’s.

What makes your company special? These elements might include your company’s expertise, process, insights, and everything else which integrates into the entire brand message. A plan for generating leads needs to be consistent. This is crucial in the process of the entire marketing communication strategy. If you’re making a call, and your prospect asks, “Why should I consider using you?” a well established, concise answer comes straight from your brand story.

At SFS we understand both your communication strategy and the entire sales process from beginning to end; our professional tele prospectors are able to deliver the pitch in conjunction with your brand message.

At the same time we continue to create a positive outcome for your sales team to make the closing. This is our brand message to you, “Power Prospecting.” Our mission statement is ultimately Call Convert Create.

Finally, it is also important to become a value-added partner in the long-term. Understanding your prospect’s position, conducting searches on the prospect and keeping up to date with their business is the key. Once that takes effect, it is much easier to reach out to your prospects with relevancy, sharing diverse ideas to help their business become more valuable.

Prospect Satisfaction Audit

By Rachel Poon

 

Strike Force Sales has found that often there is a disconnect between the emotional perspective of a sales rep and the reality which results in leads getting prematurely rejected by the sales team.  This is the prime reason that we developed the Prospect Satisfaction Audit which has been designed to add value to your lead generation campaigns and give you as a manager visibility into your sales pipeline.

 

This is also a useful tool to finding out how your brand is being received as well allowing you to delve deeper into why an opportunity was missed/generated.

 

Recently, we had provided a client with four appointments only to have him come back and let us know that he was very disappointed as our appointments were poorly qualified.  As a matter of service, we put the Prospect Satisfaction Audit to work. We discovered that out of the four appointments, two of the prospects were actually waiting for further contact from the sales rep in terms of proposals! Without the Prospect Satisfaction Audit, this client could have missed two opportunities for business.

 

The process is simple.  We have a standard questionnaire in which we use (can be customised if so desired), and have one of our most seasoned operators call to gain feedback from the prospect as well as provide your company with a professional follow up service on the appointments.

 

What you will receive is a true visibility from the perspective of the prospect of how your company was perceived during the meeting and to whether or not an opportunity really exists.

 

To find out more visit our website or call us on 1300 309 162

Use CRM as a profiling tool… not a contacts database

By Darren Cox

 

One of the principal challenges our clients face is the lack of visibility into their sales process and pipeline.

 

Many companies have implemented a Customer Relationship Management system, however they seem to be using it only as a contact database, rather than for what it’s meant for – a strategic sales and marketing tool for developing profiles of their prospect universe.

 

As a result, my team have been focusing heavily on asking qualifying questions that will add value to our clients and their sales/marketing strategy.

 

Our job as tele-prospectors is to ‘collect nos’ – it’s a huge part of what we do!

 

But, it’s those very ‘nos’ that are the ‘yes’’ of the future – as long as your database is populated with data intrinsic to developing and grooming a client relationship thru to completion.

 

As a result, managing data accuracy and input is vital to both our business, and our clients.

 

One of the questions we ask is: Can you please tell me three things that your current supplier can do better?

 

Such a question will elicit a number of answers – dependant upon the client, and campaign – however, the information received allows our clients to see where their competitors are letting their clients down. 

 

And of course, having this information to hand allows your sales and marketing departments to define a strategy to convert those nos to yes’ through a structured marketing and sales strategy dedicated to punching holes through your competitors weaknesses.

 

At Strike Force Sales, we look to fulfil the sales strategy of our clients by providing them with the tools they need to achieve, both now, and in the future, and combined with our ability to understand the “big picture” of our clients marketing and sales strategies, and our ability to accurately update and manage their CRM solution, we are able to create observable success.

 

 

 

59% of Businesses Fail the Test!

You might have seen all the media coverage of our recent survey all about the failure of sales process inside Australian businesses.
 
We are talking very basic stuff.
 
It is a fact that 59% of Australian businesses do not follow up web-generated sales enquiries within 7 days. Only 6% will pick up the phone to do so. And almost half of the auto-response emails promising follow up are never acted upon.
 
It speaks to a very basic issue within many businesses… do they have a sales team managed by a sales process… or do they have a whole bunch of order takers sitting back and waiting for the phone to ring?
 
Have a look at our white paper

Sales Process v Buying Process

Many people will agree with the proposition that sales is a process, but then proceed to manage a sale as if it is just a singular tactical opportunity.

They often lose sight of the reality that a sale process is always matched on the other side by a buying process.

This is particularly so with a smaller business such as a consulting service to the extent that a small or micro business is often hungry and wants to eat right now. It might decide to push for the chance to get an immediate feed regardless of the agenda on the side of the buyer.

Let me ask you a question – how many of the people who up until today have said ‘no’ to you have you maintained contact with?

Or, to put that question another way, is ‘No’ the end for you?

But think about the buying process. When working in a role within a larger business, how often have you engaged advisors only after getting to know them over a period of time? How often have you engaged someone who has persisted and persisted, who has refused to be shaken off your shoe?

At Strike Force Sales we have a rule in our own internal CRM that deletes all notes that include the word ‘no’ after six months. This is because we view a no as meaning: ‘Not now; you have not convinced me that you can offer me value right now.’

But business is highly dynamic – things change all the time, just ask Eddie Groves.

A lot of value can be gained by calling back old leads just to say hi and ask them how their project or business is going right now.

The axiom driving this is that people do business with people they trust. And trust builds over time.

If you ring people back every four to six months to ask them how it is going, then over time they build a sense of trust along with a general awareness of your skill, determination and application. There is a very good chance that you will move to the top of their list of talent when a need arises in their business.

The objective here is to encourage you to look on your appointments as more than just a chance to close business quickly. More than anything, they are a chance for you to extend your network, meet business leaders, and establish a beach head in their buying processes.

Then, over time, build a relationship and, sure enough, opportunities will arise.

Managing A Sales Force

A truly great sales force is an enormous asset for any business. After all, to mis-quote Mao Tse Tung somewhat, ‘All power comes from the barrel of revenue.’

Great sales people are high energy, high-impact, self-sufficient, super-beings. They get out there and leap from deal to deal. 

However, most sales people are not great – they are simply competent.

Here is the challenge in sales force management – you need great sales people, but can only find and hire competent ones.

So, the trick is, how do you make competent sales people great sales people?

The key is teamwork. You have to get them working as a team. And the thing that ties a team together is accountability – a great team is one where all the team members are accountable to each other and to the business as a whole. Accountability is not just about rooting out bludgers… it is more about pushing all the individuals in your team to achieve superior outcomes at a personal level.

One of the key aspects of any team is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each member of the team. Some are great closers, others great openers, some great at relationships and so on.

Take tele prospecting for example.

Tele prospecting – getting on the phone and making cold calls – is a hugely difficult job. It is not just taking all the ‘nos’ that is tough… it is actually understanding how to get past gatekeepers, how to deliver a pitch in just a few seconds and then how to manage all the objections and secure a positive outcome that is important.

Then, on top of that, you have to leave a positive brand impression behind… regardless of the answer you get… (remember, a no today has to become a yes tomorrow if you are to make your budget next year or the year after).

This is a very different skill set from, say, closing a sale.

Typically the people we view as great sales people are the ones who are great at closing… but these people are not necessarily great at opening.

Likewise, the people who make great tele prospectors are not necessarily great at closing.

In order to run a really great sales force you need to build a process that enables you to run, manage, motivate and reward a whole team of players, each of whom can hold down their highly specialised position.

Get professional tele prospectors to do the prospecting… and get professional closers to do nothing but close.