Applying the Scientific Method to the Sales Process

Well, this one is sure to result in a few emails flying my way. Let me start off by saying that I realize that this book was an extremely successful endeavor for Ms. Rhonda Byrne and a lot of people literally swear and live by it. My review here is based on it’s application to us salespeople and that’s all the farther I’ll go with it.

I’ve read reviews and blogs and listened to Podcasts heralding The Secret as the best book for a salesperson to read. Just read and believe and the sales will come marching in. I resisted reading it, but finally caved in to see what all the fuss was about.

I’m here to say that The Secret is a dangerous book for salespeople to believe in. Hold on; let me explain. The central core message of the book is that you posses seismic magnetism that has the ability to attract anything that you desire to you (The Law of Attraction). All you have to do is focus on what you want and you’ll get it. No need to even consider how you’ll get there - concentrate on the what not the how.

So as salespeople, we are to believe for example “this year I’ll earn $1,000,000″ and poof it will happen. You are instructed not to even think about how you’ll get to that $1M, just simply believe that you’ll get it and you will. You can even download a blank check from her Website to fill in for yourself.

What??? If any of my guys ever came to me with that plan, they’d be out on their ears. I can just imaging this conversation:

“So, Sam what are your sales revenue goals for next year?”
“Well boss, I’m going to make a cool $2.5M.”
“That’s very aggressive, what is your plan?”

“Oh, I don’t need a plan. I just really believe that I’ll hit that number.”

Yeah, right.

Now, I’m all for visualizing a successful sales call before you make it. I’ve read, and frankly believe, the studies where Olympic archers practice without a bow and arrow to help them visualize success - but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there shooting for real ten hours a day too.

So my bottom message is that it’s ok and healthy to visualize having successful calls, but please don’t rely on that visualization to make up for product and customer knowledge. In the real world, you need a plan and you need to practice.

Oh, and I’m happy to accept your comments and emails saying that I’m crazy - that’s what makes this country so great!

Continuing in the “Where do sales leads come from?“, posts, we’re talking today about using Internet networking sites, LinkedIn in particular, to help keep your sales funnel full. I use LinkedIn extensively and have made numerous initial contacts via this route - here’s a three step process to get the initial sales contact.

1. Identify a name, company, industry or product and search on it.
2. If you can contact the person directly (i.e. they’re in your network) do so, otherwise ask for the referral. If they are completely out of your network, you either have to buy their email address from LinkedIn (I pay $200/year for this service and it is well worth it), or search the Internet to try to uncover it somewhere else.
3. This is one of the rare times I feel it is better for the initial communication to be via email rather than a phone call, so shoot them an email saying something like the following:

Hi Steve, I came across your name on LinkedIn while searching for individuals in the automotive industry in the Tampa region. I’m doing some market research to determine if there are opportunities for our gizmo product in automotive and would be most appreciative if you would be willing to spare 5-minutes to talk with me. I promise no sales pitch, we’re just getting our feet wet and want to make sure that we’re not going into a market that we shouldn’t be in.

I was asked to do an interview a few weeks ago by a freelance writer, Jackie, on tactics and trends in business cards. There are tons of crazy examples out there, but as Guy Kawasaki points out on his blog - sometimes a simple solution is the best solution.

This post isn’t about business cards at all, but about how I should best deal with my new freelance writer friend. So I asked her three questions and here are her responses.

Q1: Is it appropriate to pitch story ideas to freelance writers like yourself or should that be saved for known editors of interest? (in other words do freelance writers have the freedom to write what they want to?)

A1: It is appropriate to pitch ideas to freelance writers. Most have the freedom, and incentive, to generate story ideas. If a writer isn’t coming up with ideas, they’re waiting for editors to assign them work. A more proactive approach nets more assignments and therefore more paychecks. That being said, pitching to the appropriate editor is a more direct tactic, and might work better in some situations.

Q2: How do you know if your writer is the one you should be talking to?

A2: I would ask the writer what publications they’ve written for and what kind of work they typically do; most have a specialty or two. It’s a waste of the writer’s time, as well, to receive pitches outside of their expertise, so I think most would be happy to refer you.

Q3: What is the best way to pitch a story idea to you?

A3: It’s always good to ask how a writer prefers to receive pitches, whether via phone, email, etc. Many prefer email, but a follow-up phone call usually doesn’t hurt. Also, make it brief, to the point and include all the relevant information. Nothing is more frustrating than receiving a press release that lacks crucial information (like contact info) or one that requires lots of of time and effort to wade through. If a quick scan doesn’t provide the basics, it will probably get tossed.

Bottom line: Since we preach that you should run your sales efforts, and sales funnel, like your own personal business, cultivate editors and writers so that when you have a meaningful press release your story has a chance of being heard around the world.

One of my favorite sales podcasts is the SalesRoundup Podcast, the hosts, Mike and Joe, are funny and are actually selling - i.e. not trainers, and it shows in what they say.

That being said, I have had a slight bone to pick with them for quite some time. I LinkedUp with Joe over a year ago and we exchanged a few emails talking about sales cycles. I explained that a sales cycle in my industry (advanced materials) can be as long as five years. Well the next Podcast I hear them taking a few shots at an unnamed person (me!!) and making fun of me a bit. I was jogging when I was listening to it and it really fired me up for about a day - I even shot them an email about it. So this post is to clear the air and explain my very complex sales cycle.

Among other things, I help develop and sell advanced metals to the aerospace industry. From the time of a first call with, say an engine OEM, to a production sale it can indeed take over five years. Would you feel comfortable flying across the country on an unproven material? There is so much testing and evaluation that you can switch jobs before you make the big sale.

So what is my solution? I obviously can’t wait for five years to make a sale. The solution is twofold. First, you better have more than one material at various levels in your sales funnel, or you better make the majority of your pay via a salary for the first few years as opposed to commission.

The second solution, and what I choose to do is to find more forgiving and risk taking markets to sell to before your main aerospace customer blesses it. Let me show a quick example to keep this post from getting too long.

Let’s say that your company has a new material called Xmetal. It is strong, lightweight and will never corrode. GE and Rolls-Royce are both very interested and in the initial stages of testing. Revenue from them buying your test material is maybe $150,000 per year, and your company is probably losing money at it.

Who else can use this awesome material? How about the motor sports industry? They will die for a lighter metal that can shave a few pounds out of their chassis - there’s another $200,000 per year. The medical industry has a need for a super-corrosive resistant metal for certain surgical tools. That equates to $500,000 per year at a healthy margin.

You see where this is going? You might have to support your big breakthrough with supplemental sales in the early years so that you don’t starve while waiting for the big payday.

Oh, so it’s five years later and your material is finally approved and you got your first repeatable production order - for $7MM.

I trust that my honor has been restored, in my own mind at least.

To show that there are no hard feelings and that I still love these guys, I asked Joe to comment on this strategy and here’s what he had to say.

Heck you should be put on a pedestal for taking on a product line with an average sales cycle of five years. - And I thought nine to twelve months was long. First let me comment on your strategy. Whenever you have a cycle that transcends fiscal years (and could up to five) you really should develop a laddered approach to the business timing. In your example, you close the $7M deal in year five. Hopefully you started a second and perhaps third cycle four and three years ago respectably. This way you will have built a nice pipeline of “large” deals and a predictable success rate.

I particularly like the creativity of approaching adjacent markets to supplement your revenue in the short-term. As you so nicely pointed out you do need to generate a steady stream of revenue! Although not your prime source, adjacent markets could be what your company needs to sustain operations during the “startup” period.

One final point I would like to underscore. In your post you alluded to the fact that many sales professionals will not make it the five years needed to realize success. Having said that, I would pursuit large deals with a team of sales people to mitigate the risk of turnover systemically affecting the outcome.

As far as the honor goes, anyone who successfully takes on a product line with a multiple year sales cycle is tops in my book. Five years! Man I still think you are crazy! LOL

Make sure to check these guys out - it’s about 40 minutes a week of free sales training.

As we talked about in the previous time management post, managing your sales time is of paramount importance to keeping your sales funnel loaded. Let me explain this post with a personal example. I had a inside salesman working for me, let’s call him Steve. Steve was always at his desk working - filing, reading, stapling, Web surfing - you name it, he was doing it.

He made me look like I was lazy.

To make a too long story shorter, this went on and on and very little actual sales fell through his sales funnel, but he was always “close to closing”. It got to the point where I literally sat right beside him for an entire day to observe his sales tactics. And all he did was busy work.

For example, if he was supposed to call on someone, he would spend all his time printing out Web stories about them and highlighting meaningless passages - in face he showed me a collection of binders filled with this “intelligence”. I forced him to stop and we made a quick cold call to the company, got an appointment and he was on his way.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out with Steve and I had to let him go, but there is a year’s worth of posts that will come out of my working with him - as well as some good lessons for me on when to let people go.

Bottom line: Don’t get sucked into thinking that just because you are doing something, that it’s counts as selling - a single call is worth more than a dozen reams of printed paper of contact information.

We all know that there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything, so take a lesson from all the time management gurus that are springing up and allocate your time wisely.

I suggest laying out your plan of attack for the week on Sunday evening - this is in the form of major goals, such as “Finish XYZ’a sales proposal” and “Make 15 cold calls”.

Then at the beginning of each day (before anyone else is at work), lay out your daily plan. I do this at 6:00 in the morning. These tasks should be as detailed as you need them to be. Some folks respond best to tasks laid out on a time line, so that you know from 9-10, you’ll be cold-calling; while others respond better to a short listing of tasks.

My personal style is to make a list of general tasks for the day and knock them out - except cold calling. It’s not my favorite activity so I have a specific day and time that I shut down and do nothing but prospect. And make sure to leave lots of slop in your schedule for all the things that crop up and demand your attention.

One more tip - write your sales proposals and quotations at night when your customers aren’t at work; use the daylight hours to sell. Writing a proposal is not selling.

Experiment and find out what works best for you.

We all know Newton’s First Law of Motion stating that a body at rest wants to remain at rest and one in motion tends to stay that way - I like to apply that to my selling.

I call it client friction. When your prospect is sitting there and not moving he has a lot of friction that helps him stay right there at rest. It’s your job to somehow reduce that friction. This is why many people find cold calling so difficult - their subjects are glued with a high degree of friction. You have to get over that hump to get them into your sales funnel.

We’ve touched on many ways to reduce this friction in previous posts, but what I want to talk about today is the importance of keeping them moving once you make contact.

You should have a structured plan (some call this a sales process) on how you walk prospects through the first layers of the sales funnel. Once you get over that high hurdle of initial contact, you have to keep slight pressure on them to take advantage of their lower kinetic friction - as opposed to the initial static friction that you have already overcome.

There are many ways to do this and it can be company specific, but here are some ideas:

1. Make sure it is clear at the end of every communication who’s court the ball is in. If it’s in your court, great - you can control how fast you complete your task and when you get back in touch. If the ball is in their court, ask for permission to contact them at a certain time.
2. Ask meaningful follow-up questions. Perhaps you’re preparing a quote and one of your machining vendors says that he can remove a processing step if a certain tolerance is just increased by 0.001″ - that is great time to call the prospect and propose a money saving alternative.
3. Send literature of interest. If you come across a press release or article that you think would be of interest to your prospect, send it their way.
4. Attend conferences that they will be at.

The list goes on and on, but my point is that once you get over that static friction and to a point of kinetic friction - you need to keep them moving toward the bottom of your sales funnel.

Mike Smith had a great post last week called “5 Reasons Why Arguing with Unruly Clients Will Get You Nowhere“. While most of the work is directed at Internet workers, I’d say that he’s just about right on the spot even in complex engineering sales.

The main point is that it wastes time and typically doesn’t gain you any money. You have to be selective in who your customers are. Any time you spend with a certain customer is time away from another potential customer.

So ask yourself if you’re better off bickering with a jerk in a losing situation or spending that hour calling up a customer that you’ve lost touch with over the years - should be a pretty easy call.

Try this, “Well Mr. Prospect, it seems pretty clear to me that your business would be better off not dealing with us, perhaps we’ll have a chance to work together in the future.”

I have a strange habit of saving one of my own business cards every time I have a new one (I’m up over a dozen). Thinking about this got me reflecting on the importance of your own title.

My feeling and experience suggests that you don’t want to be called a salesman - that’s a title reserved for sly characters that sell used cars. If you’re an engineer, flaunt it.

One of my favorite titles that I ever had was “Director of Engineering Services”. I was in charge of the sales and marketing department and was initially given the title of “VP, Sales” - yuck!

When I would call on fellow engineers (that’s who I was selling to), I got much more traction with the seemingly technical title than with the flashier sales title.

Most of the times, even when I own the company I’m selling - I don’t use CEO or President, I’ve had much more luck with mid-level technical titles. Your level should be high enough to convey that you can close a deal without running to your boss, yet low enough to suggest that you are on the same plane as your customer - this is why I like Director.

So, talk to your boss and ask to have business cards made up with a title of your choice - offer to pay for it if you have to. And don’t let ego be your enemy, flashy titles are just that, flashy title.

I remember one time, I had a title President and CEO and I was calling on people literally working in the field, they’d shake with a dirty hand, look at my card and say “wow, aren’t you important” with a disgusted smirk on their face - learned a quick lesson there.

Bottom line, put the effort into getting yourself a title that helps you sell to your target customers.

Several years ago I invented a gardening system that let homeowners create their own little garden space right over their existing lawn. Literally all they had to do was water the thing. People loved it, and it was starting to morph into more of a teaching tool for young children than anything else.

We had decent sales through the Internet and boutique shops and catalogs and had preliminary interest from some of the big box stores - although we were shying away from them. To make a long, long story a little shorter, I sold the business to pursue other opportunities that my heart was more into, and thus the point of this post.

The new owners (I still had 25% ownership, but no say whatsoever), never followed up with any of the current customers. I hope that seems as ridiculous to you as it does to me. I would have people calling me saying that they wanted to re-order. When I would pass this information along, my response was always the same: “you’re focusing too much on the small customers, we need to think bigger.” It got so bad that I stepped out of the picture all together.

It ended sadly with them closing the business down because sales dried up. I called some of the customers after the fact and they all said the same thing. They had way too many products to worry about and if someone doesn’t come to them to get their order, they’re not going to chase you down to order it.

So my point should be pretty clear. Keep in touch. If you don’t get another order, why not? What did you do wrong - what did your competition do right? Can you call back after you’ve addressed their concerns? You get the point.

Take care of the bottom end of your sales funnel - it is one of the easiest places to increase sales.

It is absolutely critical that you know all the touch points that your company and product has on your prospects and customers. The vast majority of salespeople out there worry only about their direct touch points, such as calls, visits, emails and the such - but you don’t want to act like that masses, you want to stand out.

We need to think about our sales position as if it were our own business and act accordingly. I’m talking about treating anyone and everyone in your organization as if they are part of your sales team. Don’t like the way the receptionist answers the phone; then write them a new script.

Sit down and go through your company’s entire system to see where your customer gets touched from initial inquiry through sales fulfillment. The list is long and is different for most companies, but here are some examples:

• receptionist
• accounts payable
• accounts receivable
• customer service
• MSDS documentation
• Web site
• building (if it’s a local business)
• shipping documents

Let me just take the last bullet as a quick example. Let’s say that you sell widgets and each one that gets shipped contains a packing list. What does it look like? Most of them look like something thrown together by an intern the day before they left to go back to school. Why not put in the two hours some evening and design a nice clean one to give to your shipping department? Many of your customers will be given a copy of all shipping documents when they receive their package from their shipping department - and for many of us, our customer is also the shipping department.

A messy packing list reflects that you might not really care about anything after closing the sale.

My point is twofold:

1. understand that the sales process involves your entire organization and lasts the entire life of your customer, and
2. take the time to choreograph your sales process and your sales funnel will thank you for it.

When I was pondering starting this blog I talked to as many people as I could. One gentleman that kept coming up as a recommendation was James Durbin of Durbin Media. I emailed him for a quote on designing and setting up the blog site for me.

We talked on the phone for about an hour and by the end of the conversation James recommended that I take a stab at designing the blog by myself to not only learn the process, but to reduce costs until I was sure that I had a sustainable Web presence - which can take a year to determine. He further offered to have me email him when I had it set up so that he could take a quick peek and offer any suggestions.

Why am I telling you this? Because it is a prime example of having your customer’s best interest at heart regardless of any sale that might be on the line. Here were James’s options as I see them (and my personal analysis of each).

Option 1: Close on a sale with me by frightening me into needing his service. This might have worked, I was pretty green at this in the beginning. I’ve only done Blogger blogging previously and the thought of actually coding up my own site was daunting. The end result of this option would be a one-time sale of $x. Kind of sounds like a used car salesman.

Option 2: See me as a waste of time because I’m just starting out and won’t likely be spending a large amount of money. This can be a tempting option for busy people whose time is literally money. I find myself struggling with this option from time to time when dealing with graduate students that want to buy small amounts of material from me.

Option 3: Lend a helping hand and put me on a successful path without closing a sale. This is the option that James chose and it is in keeping with everything we talk about here. If this site grows and becomes more than I can handle, you can bet that I’ll look James up. Or if anyone comes looking for a reference I’d be happy to pass his name along - just look at this post.

So the bottom line is to think long-term and always, always have your customer’s best interest at heart. This is the only way to ensure a full sales funnel.

I recently asked James to comment on his sales philosophy and here’s what he had to say:

Social Media consulting isn’t about just billing hours, it’s about discovering what clients need and determining if your services make sense for them. Most of what I teach can be done without a trainer, but it’s a question of time versus money. Companies can’t get the results without putting one of the two in, and my job is to figure out which makes the best sense. Eric has a great idea for sales engineers, but he needed to build an audience before he put money into the site. Sometimes the best policy is just paying it forward.

P.S. I talked to a lot of other folks that would probably be considered James’s competition - and you won’t see me writing any glowing reviews of their service here!

Who out there likes to cold call? I didn’t think so. But for most of us, it’s a necessary evil. A great way to get prospective leads, as pointed out in our “Where do sales leads come from?” post, is to look up SIC codes that your customers fall into.

You can run to the local library and look up SIC and NAICS codes for businesses that you typically sell to and then generate a list of similar companies. After you generate that list, you cold call your heart out and get to the right decision maker in each new company.

This can often be a dreary way to spend your time, as you might only get to actually talk to one in ten people so I’m not going to go through the steps to make this happen here. It will be covered in another article or two. I do, however, think cold calling should be at least a small portion of your overall lead strategy. I try to spend about two hours a week cold calling once I have a stable customer base. That’s not enough time to wear me out, but it helps bring new blood into the sales funnel.

In our never-ending quest to help you uncover more sales leads for your sales funnel, here is another addendum to “Where do sales leads come from?“.

What we’re talking about here is authoring press releases and newsletters for all your adoring fans - and those that don’t adore you yet.

I’m a firm believer in the power of press releases and newsletters. I gathered hard data that showed a sharp increase in inquiries, and resulting orders, immediately after releasing a press release or newsletter.

A word of caution here - make sure that you have your client’s permission before mentioning their name or even giving any clues as to who they are.

A quick story is in order here, as this is an important point. I was selling into the medical device industry, which is very secretive by nature. My competition was pumping out press releases left and right (literally a few per month) bragging about all the clients that they picked up. I knew the fingered customers would be fuming mad, so I followed up with them innocently congratulating them on the positive press release. Most of them flew off the handle and invited me in to become the major supplier for the program. Interestingly enough, that company still regularly puts out inappropriate press releases.

The beauty of a press release is that you control exactly what is said and they are typically short and sweet - although that doesn’t mean they don’t take some time to craft. The downside is that you can’t guarantee its publication or that your prospects will ever see it.

A newsletter, on the other hand, is much more involved in technical detail. I’ve found newsletters to be wonderful tools of conveying your capabilities to your customers. Many times I’ve gotten busy and let a newsletter slip by a few weeks and would get emails from clients asking me where their next free installment is. The key here is to not make it salesy. It should be informative, lighthearted, and possibly highlight case studies if you customer will allow it.

If you’d like to see an example press release and newsletter, please email me at Eric.Bono@EngineersCanSell.com and ask for a free sample - I’d be more than happy to send you one over.

Yet another sales lead generation strategy that I employ is to contact press release authors. In addition to technical articles, you should also feverishly track press releases of your competitors, customers, and prospects. Whenever something new hits the wire where your product/service could be used, shamelessly contact the source of the release. An opening phone statement could be something simple like this:

Hi Jane, I saw your press release announcing your expansion plans in Houston and was hoping to talk with you for three minutes about your networking needs. [don’t leave time for a response here] I promise that this won’t be a hard sales pitch and at any time during the discussion you are free to tell me that it doesn’t sound like a good fit and I won’t bother you again. Our widgets have been used in similar plants to increase network speed by 60% and I just want to see if we can offer you that same type of value.

This should buy you at least the initial three minutes – keep to that three minutes and ask for permission to talk longer if you need to.