I believe that you can’t manage sales.  

But, you can and indeed you must manage the activities that produce sales.  

In today’s extremely competitive selling environment the team that understands and controls their activities is the team that will win, more often than not.  

Activities must be controlled from both a qualitative as well as a quantitative point of view.  Failure to do this will produce a sales organization that creates revenue and profit “surprises” for its management team.  

You see, traditional sales management relies on measuring the dollars produced by the sales force.  This in itself is the flaw in the process.  

If you are measuring dollars, you are indeed measuring a lagging indicator.  

Any conversation that starts with a discussion of the dollars produced last week, last month, or last quarter is a discussion of lagging/historical measurements.  No one can do anything about the dollars produced last week.  

But all of us can do something about the dollars that will be produced next week, next month, next quarter and or next year.  I believe that there is a direct and mathematically measurable correlation between today’s activities and tomorrows dollars.  

Increase the quality and quantity of activities and you will, proportionately, increase the dollars produced by those activities.  

Please note I emphasize quantity and quality of activities.  An activity for activity sake is nothing but busy work, but activities that are executed with precision, predictability and consistency will produce a profitable outcome.  The most important of these metrics, which must be controlled by the number of first meetings completed by the sales team.

I define a first meeting as either a phone meeting and or a face to face meeting with a decision maker or influencer who could move into your sales cycle and be qualified.  

To start your process of activity management, track the relationship between first meetings and the accounts that progress into your sales cycle.  

It will ultimately measure the ratio between first meetings and new orders.  This is the key ratio that you should track and manage to be successful.

The problem that I frequently observe is that business owners, MSP’s, VAR’s and or sales managers make the mistake of hiring people for the wrong reasons. You see, I believe in hiring sales people for their behaviors not for the quality of their resume that they have produced.

First and foremost hire those people with attributes that can’t be trained.

For instance, I can’t train tenacity nor can I train curiosity. Both tenacity and curiosity are important ingredients in the sales success. I also can’t train competitiveness, a sense of urgency and an overriding desire to win.

These are behavioral traits that must be manifested by a candidate in order to be considered for a position that I’ve nicknamed “hunter”. As you know, hunters are those men and women who need to win.

They’re extremely competitive.

These are the men and women who will bring new accounts new business and open new territories for your company.

In order to start the screening and selection process of a hunter, I will ask all candidates my “hunter question”. The hunter question simply stated is to have the candidate tell you when was the first time in their life that they can recall competing for something.

I also want to know what was it they contested, how did they do and most importantly how did the outcome affect them?

You see, my experience is most hunters can recall competing for something they wanted in the 2nd or 3rd grade. Hunters have also  manifested a behavior of competing throughout their life.

I’m not talking exclusively about athletic competition. Rather, I want people who are competitive not necessarily athletically competitive.

If the hunter failed in his or her earlier competitions, I want to know how that impacted them. This trait is vital to the success as a hunter. A sales hunter has the possession of a short term memory. I am not talking about a health ailment, but I am talking about people who can fail and will recover from that failure.

Lastly, the most important trait is the ability to self correct based on a failure.

For instance, a sales representative who goes out to give a presentation to a prospect and fails to win the order should analyze what went wrong, what went right, and implement a correction. This trait of self correcting of mistakes is vital to success in today’s sales arena.

Make sure you ask these questions and interview to ascertain the behaviors and traits of your hunter/sales candidates. If you’d like some help recruiting hunters, click here.

A common theme was the fact that their sales force has aged and their CEO’s have found it challenging (and a few cases impossible) to manage their senior sales people.

The purpose of this article is to provide some insight as to why a senior/experienced sales person needs different management than other sales people.

I will also present some suggestions that may help if you find yourself in this bind of trying to manage people who have been in your business for a considerable amount of time, have developed a “book” of business, and do not respond well or willingly to suggestions for them to change any and all of their operation.

Over the years that a sales representative has worked for a specific company or industry, their income requirements have changed. As we Americans age our needs for increments of cash in our W2’s actually decreases.

For instance, when children graduate from college, mom and dad receive a “pay increase” because their cash requirements have gone down.

Secondly, as house mortgages are paid off, there’s another relaxation in the requirement for cash.

Consequently, attempting to motivate a senior sales person by suggesting if they worked harder, sold more, and generated more revenue for the company they in turn will make more money.

In many cases they just don’t care.

A second contributor to this phenomenon is the fact that many compensation plans reward on a recurring revenue basis. In other words, every time a client purchases, the sales representative receives a commission. This phenomenon is followed up by a good sales person who says “I have a good book of business”.

In other words, their book of business sustains the level of income that they want.

Last and certainly not least, you cannot make an adult want to make more money than he or she wants to earn.

In many situations, these senior guys and gals are holding down relationships with accounts that are valuable to their employer and as such the employer does not want to jeopardize the relationship with those accounts by releasing the senior sales person and or “aggravating him or her”.

If you find yourself in this situation the best thing you can do is to develop a “legacy versus a new account” deployment.

The legacy accounts are the ones that the senior sales people are currently managing. Don’t disrupt these relationships. Unless it is strategically and tactically vital that the day to day operations with your accounts change then – leave it alone.

But, identify the accounts in the geography your senior people are not calling on and set those up for new account selling.

Once these accounts are identified, make a once and forever offer to your existing team to take responsibility to attempt to penetrate those accounts. If they don’t sign up for this effort, then the prospective new accounts should be reassigned to a new accounts selling team.

You’ll find this “work around” strategy to be very effective and non destructive.  It allows the company to grow while recognizing the quantity and quality of effort that your senior sales people have put in over the years.

Take a hard look at this strategy. If you have any questions feel free to contact me.

What strategies have you utilized in this situation?  You may also want to review this video and learn more about “Why Can’t Sales Sell?

In a phrase, I believe that there is a love hate relationship that exists.

Specifically, when an MSP or VAR has a sales team that is producing profitable transactions, the MSP literally loves the sales force. There are probably many reasons for this.

First, the technical skills of a VAR or MSP are always at their highest. In order for a person to be very good technically they have grown up and flourished in a world where there are absolutes.

Simply put, to a technology driven mind, 2+2 should always be 4.

But, to a sales driven mind 2+2 will frequently not produce the outcome of 4. Consequently what sales people do is sometimes confusing and frustrating to the technical mind of the MSP or VAR.

Let’s try to bridge that gap through the balance of this article.

First, understand that there are several different styles of selling.

A sales person, who sells in a consultative fashion more often than not, will be very successful in our technology world. However, should that sales professional sell in a stimulus response/demand fulfillment mode they will be successful as long as the customers keep calling in or visiting your website.

In order for sales person’s activities to be clearly understood by a MSP, the MSP must stop believing that the sales person is operating in a mode guaranteed to produce results.

The key to avoiding this conflict and this frustration is for you to have a sales process in place which is easily inspected.

A word of caution, when you ask many sales people to account for the quality and quantity of activity, you will find some sales people (the hard to manage ones) pushing back and stating that they don’t work well in an environment where they are accountable. This misconception is, in my opinion, one of the biggest sticking points and creates the love/hate relationship.

You see, the sales person’s employer knows that they’re spending money (even if you pay on a commission only basis) but they can’t tell what they’re getting for their money.

The unwritten and unspoken component of this kind of compensation speaks to the fact that the employer must trust the employee/sales professional is doing what they are supposed to do.

This trust is frequently misplaced or at least confused with good management. If you want to eliminate the conflict between you and sales people you must build a sales process which holds the team accountable.

This process will speak to the accountability to the number of first meetings completed by the sales professional. This metric of first meetings is the vital metric to be measured and managed in order for you to achieve your goals.

You should collect a weekly plan and review form from your sales team. If you’ve attended one of my presentations at the ASCII forums, the goal setting and review form is part of the sales manager tool kit which I distributed.

If you weren’t able to attend and would like my sales manager’s tool kit, feel free to contact me at gil@gilcargill.com and I will send it to you asap.

Lastly, make sure that you get a forecast from the team that complies with the rules established in my Initial Plan document which is also in your tool kit. If you implement these simple steps, you will find that you are perhaps for the first time in total control of your organizations sales efforts.

This is not an article about an old rock and roll song. 

It is however recounting a situation I encountered earlier. 

During the past few days, I have terminated my relationship with several service providers. 

My need for their service has been satisfied and I decided to save some money and terminate these relationships.  In both cases, my attempts to end the relationship were met with cordial professional responses. 

One of the service providers processed my request thanked me and we both went on our way. 

The second one (this is really the point of this post); the second service provider granted my request but asked me a few questions:

• regarding the quality of service, 
• whether I’d refer them to someone else, 
• why I was terminating the service, etc. 

The lesson to be learned is that even when a customer says no or no thanks there is information that can and should be gleamed by the organization. 

Make sure that every negative is turned into a positive by collecting information. 

• You may find, over time that your customers view your organization through different filters than you and the balance of your team utilize.  
• You may learn why a competitor is winning.  
• And or you certainly will understand what’s going on in the marketplace.  

Don’t let an opportunity to collect, analyze and utilize business intelligence slip by. 

Although the breaking up may be hard to do there are positives to be gained by asking questions and collecting this data.

Specifically, trying hard just isn’t enough.

We sales professionals are always measured on the only thing that counts…new order. If you’re not growing the topand bottom lines for your employer, it’s improbable that you’ll be rewarded for merely trying hard.

Professional golfers that “try hard” but don’t lower their score, just don’t win.

Let’s take a look at why I believe that the difference between trying hard and getting the results that are desired frequently is an issue of alignment. Specifically, the alignment between the selling styles of the sales representative and the buying styles of the majority of the prospects in a given market.

Research has been conducted and published which shows an extreme correlation between the success of a sales representative and his or her alignment with their buyers. This research identified several different selling/buying styles.

They are as follows:

• Consultative; a consultative sales representative solves problems for their prospect and or customer. A consultative sales person produces a permanent improvement in one or more of the businesses operating conditions. A consultative buyer buys a true solution…problem resolution.

• Stimulus Response Seller Selling/Buying; a stimulus response sales professional pitches the features of his or her product and hopes to “hit the hot spot” as a result of these pitches. Stimulus response selling is appropriate if and only if the customer understands the value of each feature that is pitched.

• Relationship Selling; all sales require a relationship… that’s a given. In this instance, I’m talking about a sales situation that requires multiple relationships to be managed in order to get an account to give the affirmative response to a sales professional. Relationship selling is appropriate in large accounts and or large multi decision maker decisions are being made. Failure to get all of the relationships to say yes (albeit for different reasons) will result in the sale failing.

• Commodity; the commodities sales person believes that price equals values. Based on this belief, he or she leads with price and frequently leaves profit on the table.

• Retail; the retail sales professional is passive. Very much like a waiter in a restaurant, the retail sales professional will explain his or her product or service. Then they will passively wait for the customer to give the go ahead. Retail selling is completely inappropriate in today’s modern business to business selling environment.

If you are trying hard but not getting the result you desire, you may be suffering from utilizing the wrong selling style in the right situation. 

How hard are YOU trying?

An easy way to determine whether or not you’re talking to the right person is to constantly reflect on this question.  “Has this man or woman ever implemented any product or service that requires the magnitude of change that my offer brings to their company.

If your talking to someone who has never implemented a change of the magnitude that you’re proposing, you are probably talking to the wrong man or woman.

As a rule, I don’t want to be the first person to ask a customer to change.

One of my first sales managers told me that GOD gave us 2 ears and 1 mouth and that we should use those features in at least those proportions (2 to 1) when selling.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed an alarming decrease in the willingness of sales people to listen.  When I make field calls with my clients’ sales people I can see the prospects literally seething due to the fact that the sales person clearly isn’t listening to them.

Not only is this disrespectful, but by not listening and talking (way to much) the sales person is literally talking him or herself out of a sale.  Proactive listening is a skill that can be developed.

But, like all skills it must be practiced.

When you are talking to a customer constantly ask yourself what does this individual mean by the statement they just made?  Also, practice using open or reflective questions which prompts more conversation to come from your prospect.

You’ll find that the combination of proactive listening and reflective questioning will give you greater insight to the needs of your prospect.

As your insight increases, your sales cycle decreases.  You’ll have more confidence and you will sell more of your products and services with less effort.

Remember, use your ears not your mouth and you’ll close more sales more rapidly.

In fact, if you violate some of the principles discussed below, there is no amount of sales training that will overcome those inherent problems.  Let’s take a look at some of the problems that you can address, next week, that will improve the productivity of your existing sales team without putting anyone through the cost, expense and inconvenience of a one- or two-day sales training “blitzkrieg”.

• Increase selling time: Over the years, many organizations have required salespeople to do many non-sales tasks.  Without exception, the number one sales productivity inhibitor is this incessant move, on the part of many managers, to have their salespeople conduct non-sales tasks.  In this regard, my rule is Salespeople should sell, and everyone else should do everything else. Give your salespeople more selling time, and they’ll sell more… it’s just that simple.
• Hiring mistakes: You can’t win a Super Bowl championship, if your team is made up of 150-lb. football players.  Many managers and CEOs hire good men and women in hopes that they will develop into good salespeople.  Small-to-medium businesses, which are the backbone of our economy, can’t afford to continue this practice.

  If you’re hiring a salesperson in the near future, before you write the offer letter, make sure that he/she can do the job the way you want them to do it and will do the job the way you want them to do it.  If you skip this, you will be one of the large number of companies that has made the half-million-dollar hiring mistake, when it comes to bringing salespeople on board.

• Alignment: It’s amazing how many companies sell with a complete misalignment between their marketing messages displayed on their website/brochures and/or during their salespeople’s presentations.  Make sure that your company “sings from the same hymnal”.

  In other words, align your marketing messages and value propositions throughout the sales cycle, from your website to your brochures to your business cards to the presentations that your salespeople make, as well as the elevator speeches that your non-sales but customer-facing employees are charged with presenting to customers, when they encounter a customer.

• Lead generation: Now, this is an area where the CEO of a company can dramatically impact his team’s ability to produce revenue.  In today’s world, it’s virtually impossible for salespeople to keep their funnels and pipelines full without assistance from a dedicated sales-ready lead-generator.

  In many organizations, this dedicated resource is a full-time Business Development Coordinator.  In others, it is a closed-loop marketing system.  And, in yet others, it’s a combination of those two functions.  Regardless of how you solve this problem, make sure that your company produces an adequate flow of sales-ready leads to fill the funnels of each of your salespeople and to keep them full at all times.

  In the 21st century, it is a waste of time (more often than not) to charge salespeople with prospecting, using 19th-century prospecting techniques.

• Lack of accountability: Many CEOs wring their hands over the poor performance their sales team produces, yet there is a reluctance on the part of that very same CEO to hold the sales team (collectively and/or individually) accountable for the quality and quantity of activities undertaken by the sales team.

  Frequently, CEOs react painfully when they’re accused of being a micromanager.  Holding your team accountable for the quantity and quality of work is no different when you do this for your sales team as when you do it for any other function within your business.

• Compensation: Many small-to-medium businesses overpay for underperformance.  Now, I don’t mean to infer any negative feelings with this statement.  I believe that this phenomenon of overpayment for underperformance is a result of operating without a documented sales process.

  Therefore, management is forced to pay salespeople to do things that salespeople either don’t do very well and/or aren’t very profitable for either the salesperson and/or the company.  Make sure that your sales process is 1) very well-documented and 2) followed religiously by your sales team.

  You’ll find that this activity, in and of itself, improves the effectiveness of a sales force by as much as 17%, according to some industry experts.

• Forecast management: Failure to understand why you and your team win opportunities, lose opportunities, and/or have opportunities postponed is a key contributor to repeating flawed strategies in hopes that, through this repetition, your results will change.  Obviously, this is applying the definition of insanity to your sales organization.

Overall, when you start investigating the quantity of sales time available to your team, why the time is what it is, as well as how to improve the amount of time available to your team, you’ll find that your top and bottom lines will go up.  Combine this with a dedication to the one missing ingredient that I have failed to mention so far in this article, which is sales practice.

Regardless of your team’s experience, you should hold practice sessions (a.k.a. role-playing) with your team regularly.  The CEO who ensures that his/her sales and marketing operations are managed in conjunction with the recommendations in this article is the CEO that’s well on his/her way to enjoying a company that produces predictable and profitable results.

Good Luck & Good Selling!!

My offer to help began what I eventually perceived to be a bit of a technological nightmare. Now I hasten to point out that the technology of bulk email marketing is quite simple and proven. Where things really got complicated was in the area of comparing pricing and services based on published plans from the various email service providers.

Candidly, it was maddening. For instance, the term “softbounce” is a very common term in email marketing. The complexity comes in under the definitions of various email marketing services.

You see, one of the differentiators of email marketing services is their claims of deliverability. How deliverability, and in the case soft bounces, are calculated vary infinitely. If there is no standardization of the methods under which these measurements are calculated, it is, therefore, impossible to ascertain which service is superior.

Another area of deliverability I found very perplexing was the ways in which various emails providers benchmark their deliverability. For instance, provider A claims they have X percent deliverable, however, once you peel back the details you will find that their percent is based on a percent of the total emails sent. Consequently when you are comparing a percent of a percent versus an actual percentage it gets to be complicated and mathematically impossible unless you are will to do a lot of “algebra” to understand which service is superior to which.

Then, this exercise really became fun when I contacted the various email service providers and asked them why they charge me for all of the emails sent. You see I’ve been in the marketing game long enough to know that even back in the days of “snail mail marketing” some percentage of every mailing never got delivered. In other words the perspective receiver had moved, address was incorrect, title was incorrect, names where misspelled, whatever. In those days we paid, and many companies continue to pay for mailings that don’t get delivered to the recipient. This is an absolute waste of money.

I reasoned that here in the 21st century and utilizing the power of computers one could differentiate between emails that are sent and emails that are actually received. However, none of the companies that I interviewed were able or willing to offer any rationale or reason as to why we would have to pay for emails that weren’t delivered.

It gets even worse when you realize that the purpose of an email marketing campaign is to bring prospects to your website. Now I really had some fun when I said” would you charge me for only those emails that produced the result my client desired”? I got a few chuckles over the phone some long awkward moments of silence and no positive responses. Most email marketing services believe this is either impossible and/or would be disastrous to their business.

I was however able to find one service that operates strictly on this principle and I’m here to tell you folks that I was surprised, shocked, amazed, and most importantly delighted at the simplicity of their program. Instead of presenting tons and tons of metrics volumes of reports analyzing anything and everything… except the most important thing; a new company called Pay Per Visit Email only charges for those emails that actually deliver the reader to my clients website!

This is a blessing! Stop and think about it if you’re using email to drive traffic to your website why would you pay for email that doesn’t get delivered? Or why would you pay for email that gets delivered but doesn’t drive traffic to the website?

Pay Per Visit has solved both of these problems. If you are interested in email marketing that is cost effective and conserves your budget you should certainly navigate over to the Pay Per Visit website. Let them show you how you can save money while increasing the effectiveness of your email marketing. One of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed when I contacted them is the fact that they didn’t offer any training.

That’s right this is a technology tool that is so simple that there is no training associated with it. Compare that level of simplicity and that level of focus (delivering readers to the website) to the tons and tons of metrics complexities and measurements and percentages that other services offer. The level of information that the services provide could lead one to believe that they recognize that they aren’t doing the job that their clients actually want (delivering readers to the website) therefore their providing volumes upon volumes upon volumes of useless information designed to mask the fact that the real job, delivering readers to the website, is not being completed.

Should you have interest in this program contact Pay Per Visit Email at their website and I’m sure you will be delighted with the results they deliver. As always I wish you…

Good luck and good selling,

Gil Cargill