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“But if we tell all of our customers about (INSERT SOMETHING THAT WENT WRONG), we will be needlessly upsetting the apple cart. Why not just let the people it effects contact us.”

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard a top ranking executive say something suprisingly similar to this. Worse, I watch sales reps shake in fear at the thought of sharing problems with customers. HEAR ME SCREAMING FROM THE ROOFTOPS! TREAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WITH RESPECT. Here is a thought, tell everyone when an issue arises and explain what you are doing to fix it.

BE PROACTIVE!!!

Send an e-mail, make phone calls, post it on your website, list it on the login screen of your service. and make sure everybody knows from you and not the irritation of discovering the issue for themselves. Some thoughts:

1. The people it effects will appreciate your candor and not have to go through the pain of disocvering the issue for themselves. They avoid wasted time trying to troubleshoot other things besides your problem. Best of all, they know you are working on it and did not have to go out of their way to notify you of the issue. Nothing is more irritating than calling someone about a problem and having them respond with, “We are aware of that.” Well, why did you not bother to tell me? While they might not be happy with the issu, at least they respect you as a business partner.
2. The people it does not effect will be grateful that you are so forthcoming and prepared. Why? Because if anything ever did come up that would cause them concern, they know you are the type to be up front and let them know. This is a tremedous advantage when looking at time. Now you have shown respect to someone who is not hampered by a problem.

When people are wooed by your competitors, the issues they had with your offering are not what gets them thinking about leaving. The way you handled an issue is what sticks in their mind. If you are a professional that shows the customer that you are looking out for them first and all else second, it will not be forgotten. A better price, a neat feature, they cannot succumb to these enticements, for the greatest benefit has already been delivered…trust.

Again, I need to preface with one of my philosophies. If you have not read the last post, or had the “privilege” of sitting with me and talking sales after a couple of glasses of wine, you probably have never heard my opinion of closing. The greatest sales people are not deal closers, they are door openers. They see the first sale as a starting point, not the end, and no matter how you color it, closing has a sense of finality.

I ask all of the sales leaders reading this to think about what it takes to hunt. Prospecting is a thankless task, and finally one gets to qualify a contact extensively and uncover an opportunity. Then, to flush out the conditions of the sale, the requirements to make a difference, and the management of any possible objections. This process involves really getting to understand someone and what they are trying to accomplish. It involves become trusted and liked by that person. WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU DO ALL OF THAT AND THEN BE DONE?

When you are finally done proposing and you have the opportuntiy to foster a long relationship between your company and another, it is time to start planning for the marriage. Plant seeds early to get what you want, a reference and referrals. It is critical to gain access into your contacts inner circle. People tend to run with others like them. If you develop a relationships with one person in IT, they will usually gain you access to other IT professionals. If they are trusted in their circle, you are welcomed by implied reputation. This can be even stronger within a company. Here the results can help you gain access. Doing a good job in one department can often gain you access to another. It can also make it easier to up sell or cross sell as the opportunity permits.

So, what do you do if you are not closing? The answer is easy, but takes some dedication. This is well worth the effort, since every customer you do this with can equal hundreds and hundreds of cold calls. Call them and thank them a day or two after the sale. Follow up via e-mail weekly, and remember those little news articles and tips you found and shared as you were cultivating the lead? Do not stop sending them. Call monthly and ask what benefits they are seeing. If they do not know, find out and take that data and develop a study. People appreciate these things, and once the data is confirmed, they will not only let you share it, but help you find people in their network to share it with. If this sounds hard, guess what while the answer is easy, at first doing this well is challenging. Like everything else however, it becomes second nature after time. Nothing, and I mean nothing, helps endorse a sale more than a colleague telling you why you have to do something NOW!

This next set of posts is going to focus on leveraging your sales tools and programs to train and ramp up new initiatives and new hires. We will also dive into the relevance of using these tools to continually educate sales people on the process developed to best manage leads, activity, and your pipeline. With so much to cover where I think it is most important to begin is with helping your team define the difference between selling and non selling activities.

So often people assume that selling activities involve communicating with prospects and customers, and non selling activities is everything else. While I agree that selling activities include communication, what most sales people forget is it also includes the strategic and tactical steps needed to ensure that those communications produce the desired results. Without goals and assessment, a high volume of sales rarely come to fruition.

So let us splice activity into the two categories:

Selling:

1. Calls
2. Meetings
3. Some E-mails
4. Web presentations
5. Reading of account history for pre-call planning
6. Studying notes and determining the next objective
7. Creating goal questions for meetings
8. Reading account history for gaps in knowledge
9. Determining value proposition for a customer
10. Crafting value propositions based on customer requirements
11. Meetings with your team of superiors on a specific account

And now your non selling activities:

1. Updating notes in CRM
2. Updating accounts and pipeline in CRM
3. Weekly team meetings
4. Weekly forecast meetings with superior
5. Trainings
6. Reading e-mail
7. Working with support on issues
8. Customer service calls
9. Delivering reports to management
10. Setting up your activity for any given day
11. Designing and writing non selling e-mails

With Web 2.0 tools jumping into the market, many of your non selling activities can be reduced if not eliminated. Landslide, a product I recommend, offers a VIP assistant who enters data for you. This means your reps can make a phone call or send an e-mail to your VIP and have activity, accounts, pipeline, contacts, or anything else in the system updated. Landslide calls their system a “Workstyle Manager” because their focus is on the rep not the customer. This time saving tool not only frees the rep from tedious non-selling activity, but also increases the likelihood that reps will properly update information making it more valuable later in the process.

They also have built the entire sales process, including media and training into the system, so you can send items like, data sheets, email templates, and testimonials directly to the contact. Rep’s can review trainings or best practice documents relative to what they are trying to accomplish, reducing their dependency on others and speeding up their ability to deliver. Also, they have WebEx built into the system so you can immediately get people into meetings for web demos and collaboration. This can cut away much of the time wasted on non selling activity, but also improve and intensify the selling activities.

Web 2.0 also gives the new wave management power tools for educating and delivering information. Many of my team members, old and new, read my blog for educational purposes. I also am networked on LinkedIn, and on Skype or free to chat on IM 24/7. This allows me to share my knowledge with my teams in friendly and more passive modes. Sometimes the boss can be daunting, even when the intent is to be helpful. Social networks and blog posts are softer ways of getting information to your more timid reps.

Back to the control of a new way of managing data. With cleaner and more common data management, and a defined sales process with training, meetings inevitably become more focused, which tends to make them shorter and of greater value. A final parting shot is that when people feel they have resources in the proper place, they ramp up much quicker. Empower your reps and teach them to stand on their own two feet, or at least the new Web 2.0 abilities.