Understanding sales strategies and tactics can be difficult, especially when you aren’t all that experienced in the world’s second oldest profession. So many of the concepts are counter-intuitive, the opposite of what you might expect. And there’s so much other contradictory comment published on what’s good practice, and what’s not. It’s all very confusing.

That’s why real sales coaches – sales managers, sales trainers, sales mentors, and even the heavy hitting sales veterans – use stories to explain what they’ve learned from front line experience. Stories create their own context, and that context illustrates the point.

It’s what the PR and Communications experts call narrative.

In our articles here and at Successful Sales Management we’ve published our ideas on sales operations, sales management, strategies and tactics, and processes and tools. We’ve also written about our philosophies, developed over more than 30 years, and put forward some thoughts to challenge some commonly held beliefs.

In our latest efforts we’ve added some stories as narrative to make the suggestions more meaningful, and perhaps a little more fun.

And now we’ve published some of those stories in a eBook – Sales Story Playbook.

Anybody involved in sales will find something interesting amongst the 100+ pages. There are great stories here you can tell to your CEO, or your sales teams, or your sales manager, or customers and prospects. Be careful though. We’ve called these weapons of mass insurrection. Tell the wrong story, to the wrong person, in the wrong way and you’ll get more aggravation than you bargained for.

Best to keep them to yourself. Use them to add to your own thinking. Choose carefully when deciding who to share them with.

You can find our eBook here. Download it today, and you’ll be thinking differently about sales as from tomorrow

Sales people’s biggest challenge is the way everybody else tries to make them fail. Anybody with a couple of weeks in the job will recognise the paradox.  There are so many people who try to stop them selling.

It doesn’t make sense of course. Surely, everybody wants sales people to succeed?  Well at least everybody on their side of the fence – management, bean counters, suppliers, customer service, trainers, coaches, consultants.  They all more or less depend on the sales guys for their job – need them to be successful.

The same is sort of true for the other side of that fence – prospects, customers, users.  They also need sales people to succeed.  After all, without successful suppliers there would be nobody to buy from, and then what would they do. And successful suppliers need successful sales staff.  It’s one big circle which the sales professionals make go around.

So it’s a fact. Everybody needs sales people to succeed.  In which case, why interfere with how they do their job?  When the bean counters know nothing of the role, the skills, the processes, why do they want to decide how its done?

Like most things in life – they do, because they can.  It’s in their nature, especially the office types.  While rain makers get measured on revenue, those desk jockeys get assessed on ability to impede the rest of the organisation.  Managers, Marketers, Customer Service, Human Resources, IT support, Accountants – they all set rules others have to live by.

This is the stuff nobody tells you in sales school.  You get taught all about activity rates, forecasting, cold calling, presentation techniques, how to present proposals and stay safe with revenue recognition regulations.  Avoiding the interference is another matter.  You are left to figure that out for yourself.

So how do you get the job done, in spite of all that extra ‘help’ you get?

Sales veterans find ways of turning the tables on the bureaucracy.  They explain what the bean counters don’t understand, and they use stories to make their point.  Those stories are the weapons of mass insurrection – defences against misplaced authority, tools for turning the tables.

There isn’t one story they all use, or even ten.  Every veteran has hundreds in the Playbook, ready to deploy as needed.  They pick up those stories as they go along.  Some are their own.  Others they get from colleagues over a cocktail.  Still more are sales mythology – not necessarily true, but with an obvious link to reality.

Our new eBook Sales Story Playbook is a selection of the best we’ve heard from the usual sources – guys who survived against all the odds, making money and having fun by keeping the interference at bay, with stories.

There’s no rule saying you have to like the people you sell to, but it helps a lot if they think you do. This sales story from the front line illustrates the point.

A major oil company wanted to move from mainframe based accounting software to a package which could run on the cheaper, Unix hardware. The difference in cost of hardware and software combined between the alternatives could be measured in millions of $s each year. Across the 27 countries in the planned deployment that added up to a lot of money. Perhaps $50 million, per year. But the big question was whether the relational database software together with Unix hardware could cope with numbers of users and transactions required.

Project managers from the oil company recruited big name consultants to advise them. A benchmark exercise was the solution they decided. Bring in the software vendor and all the likely hardware vendors and get them to strut their stuff – show they could cope with the volume.

Naturally the consultants were retained to manage the exercise, and the software vendor would build the benchmark test. The hardware boys would turbo charge their machines, and keep their fingers crossed.

Of course the whole exercise turned out to be a nightmare. The consultants sent in a team of guys who knew nothing about accounting, or software, or hardware. The software people didn’t want anybody finding out just how fragile their product was, and the hardware boys were sat waiting for something to run. Nothing worked.

Typical in such circumstances, the consultants flew in a crew of senior managers to get the job going. They didn’t of course. Those people never do. They just made a lot of noise, threatened everybody with hell fire and brimstone, assured the client of spectacular results, and then left before the next thing could go wrong.

And then two weeks later they did it again. And again, after another two weeks.

Our hero of this story is John. He was the sales rep / account manager for one of the hardware vendors. His software guys knew how to build benchmark tests. John understood the consultants had to win the argument about capability, before the software guys could win the argument about functionality, before anybody could win a deal for hardware.

He had to make it work for everybody, before he could compete for the deal.

For 6 weeks, virtually locked up in an office in Hamburg, John and his team worked on the client, the consultants and the software people, eventually assuming leadership of the whole exercise, and ultimately winning the benchmark competition. They made it work for everybody, despite the consultants and software vendor insisting they were in control.

Along the way John won a lot of friends. He went to dinner with client, dancing with the software team, bought the consulting team drinks and had lots of important sounding discussions with the managing consultant about risk management and account control. He made his main task to help the client, the consultants and the software guys get on with each other.

After the competition was finished, John sat drinking a beer with Steve, the on site consulting manager. Steve had lots of issues with his managers. Everything which had gone wrong, was his fault apparently. He disliked them intensely, and was frightened by them. If the project hadn’t turned out a success he was going to get the blame.

“John” he said “it seems we’ve done a pretty good job here, with your help, and you and I have gotten along well. What I don’t understand is how somebody as straightforward and sensible as you can get on with those managers of mine. To me they’re all jerks but you seem to like them well enough, and they like you. What am I missing?”

“Well” replied John “you’re absolutely right. We have done a good job, and your management are jerks.”

“The point you’ve missed is I don’t have to like people.”

“They just have to think I like them.”

“OK, now I understand” said Steve, and ordered another beer.

Of course he never stopped for a minute to think the same might apply to him.

The Sontaran Stratagem (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Is there a role for stratagem in your sales strategy?  There is, but probably not the one you might automatically consider.  The objective of stratagem in this concept isn’t laying a trap for your prospect.  It’s laying a trap for your competition.

One of the Principles of Professional Selling is Never Mislead a Customer.  Fooling a prospect may, or may not, be easy but it’s always bad news.  Duped prospects turn into sour customers, and sour customers are very bad for business.  So there is no room in a professional sales strategy for stratagem, which Thesaurus tells us is a trick, an artifice, a trap.  As far as the prospect is concerned, that is.

But we owe no duty of fair play to the competition, do we?  A stratagem built into a sales strategy and intended to trap competitors is perfectly acceptable.  Especially when the prospect benefits as a result.

Inspiration for this thought came from a reader who commented on our article A Strategy for Sales People to Avoid Death Valley.  The point made in that post was we should always keep open a reason to go back to the buyer, until the deal is signed.  The comment asked the question – when competition is fierce and the buyer is in control how does the sales rep keep something back?  Our answer was lay a trap.  Set up a future conversation, not directly related to the requirement, but promising value add for the customer.

That’s the stratagem, and the point of this article. It works in any situation, in any sales campaign, but is especially effective when the buyer holds all the cards.

The stratagem has to create a competition you can win.  It might be price, or service, or relationship, or technology development.  The fundamental requirement is the new and additional promise must be something extra, something not in the defined requirement, but an extra benefit.  And something for which you know you’ll come out on top.

And its vital the competition doesn’t see it coming.

At this point an example is always helpful.

As usual we’ll go back to old friend Paul the insurance broker.  Persuading a business to change brokers is like asking them to change banks.  They don’t do it very often.  Worse the existing broker always has an inside track to the decision maker, and the opportunity to respond to any initiative taken by the competition.

Paul got tired of winning business on the quality of his consulting, the security of the policy, and the cost, and then losing it at the final hurdle because the incumbent was the CFO’s brother in law.

He needed a way of going back after the deal had been lost, and winning it again.  And the trap he laid was a detailed analysis of risks inherent in the existing policy, with a report from the existing broker on ways the policy could be improved, to be compared with a similar one from him.

The trap of of course was the incumbent broker would always have difficulty in critiquing his own work. After all that’s what brokers are there for – arranging adequate cover at the lowest cost. But Paul’s secret was there are hidden risks in every policy.  Client’s just don’t know about them.

Instead of opening up the project to win the new business with a detailed evaluation of the existing cover, he built that into a new post selection phase.

Once the broker selection had been made on the basis of the PowerPoint sales pitch, and all the relationship strings had been pulled, the detailed evaluation would start.  He’d highlight all the holes in the cover and the prospect would compare his report with the incumbent’s version.

It’s hard to buy from somebody you know is incompetent, or worse, even when they’re your brother in law.

Some time ago the Supply Chain software business was all the rage.  Every company was looking for ways to optimise it’s supply chain, using data intelligence to find ways of improving availability, whilst simultaneously reducing cost.  License fees were high, and competition was fierce.

The vendor executing our stratagem was awesomely successful.  In every deal the pitch was the future.  Something the buyer couldn’t predict.  Something the vendor had already worked out.  The promise was a meeting with the vendor CEO, a vision of where things would go, and a promise of partnership to help the buyer get there.

The competition didn’t understand what was going on.  Our example vendor added the future to the existing requirement, and a partnership with the company defining it.

If you’d like more insight and ideas about managing sales check out our eBook Succeeding in Sales Management

Business Model Triangle (Photo credit: Alex Osterwalder)

What do we mean by Sales Model and why is it important?  And isn’t this all a little too intellectual?  Why are we wasting time talking about theory while, out there, people are spending money with somebody else?

These are all good questions.  If you are the sort of sales professional who can sell anything to anybody, make top dollar on every deal, do it differently every-time and still over achieve against your goals?  Please tell us your secret before you leave to do it again.

if you’re not one of those guys, stay with us for a while.  This article makes no judgement about right and wrong.  But it does explain what the best sales model is, and the ways the decision directs other choices.

The Sales Model is just like a business model, only limited to sales operations. It’s organisation, strategy and processes. It might also include skills needed by the sales team and their compensation package.  It’s influenced, at least should be, by the product and associated services, by the target customers, by the competition, and by the prices and costs involved.

That’s quite a lot of influences for what most people would consider a simple departmental issue.  Why not send the sales people out to knock on doors and ask for some orders – that’s what everybody else does, isn’t it?

Well, actually they don’t, or at least the successful businesses don’t.  They work out at least a skeleton strategy with value proposition, customer demographic, price and cost of sale targets, and sales process.  A couple of examples will help show some of the differences.  We can see how different sales models will apply in the same recruitment agent.

The business value proposition is all about human resourcing for the hotel and catering industries.  Companies needing additional staff use our company to find and recruit the people they need.   The service covers both senior management salaried staff and by the hour casual labour for kitchen porters, cleaners, and waiting staff for the restaurants.  But the company uses different sales models depending on the staff to be provided.

Recruiting and staffing of by the hour temporary requirement is a minimal value add business.  There’s a lot of competition so fees are low.  Success is about having the right staff looking for work and luck catching the right manager on the phone at the right time. Sales is Inbound and Outbound telephone call based. Either the customer wants extra help or doesn’t.  Either the agency has the right skill available or doesn’t.  This type of business is really numbers game.

The other side of the business is entirely different – Executive Search as opposed to temporary staffing.  Fees are much higher, and so is the involvement of sales.  The sales function is led by an Account Director with an intimate understanding of the client, the industry and what’s required for the senior management roles.  When the hotel is recruiting a new Hotel Manager, or Front of House Manager, or  Head Waiter or Head Chef it needs a business partnership with the sales representative which starts with the initial introduction and continues through the complex process of specification, advertising and search, negotiation and start up.

This is one simple example of how sales models will differ between businesses and value propositions.  There are many more, of course.

Just how the sales operation works in order to achieve the right mix of revenues and costs of sale is what we describe as the sales model with organisation, processes, and metrics.

If you’d like to get more insight and ideas about managing sales check out our eBook Succeeding in Sales Management

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Anybody looking to run a muti user CRM and Account Management app on their Android tablet should take a good look at Front Office Box.  It looks great, and works well, on a desk top or notebook computer, of course.  On the Android tablet it’s simply gorgeous, thanks to Rich Powell’s colours and layouts.

When it comes to tablets, appearance is really important.  Very high standards in design are set by the new social applications.  Users have come to expect more elegant software than they typically get on their desk top machines.  But most of the business applications haven’t kept up with the progression to elegant, less is more, design.  Front Office Box is the exception which proves the rule.

Please note this is not a local App.  It’s a cloud based, multi user business planning and archiving solution.  But with the Android widgets and 3G or 4G network connection it works just like one.

We think (we would wouldn’t we) this is the perfect solution for small business, anytime, anywhere, always on, customer focused planning and collaboration.

We put a lot of thought into designing a less is more platform with the flexibility small businesses need and none of the overhead they don’t.  The upside is it’ll do a great job for anybody understanding their business process.  The downside is its hard for people who don’t have that capability to understand its power.

The app is built around core data sets including

• multi people, multi address, company
• plans, milestones and actions defined as sales, projects, and customer service
• internal staff

Any planned task or action is associated with the customer, the plan, the milestone and the person assigned it.  Supporting documentation including documents, emails and images can be stored in the same relationships and retrieved as needed.

With the Tablet, Front Office Box goes everywhere with you and with 3G or 4G connectivity  you and your colleagues get real time updates about what’s happening back at the office or out in the field.

Check our video demonstrations to see how we help you do more with less software and if you’d like to know how to Succeed in Sales Management.  Front Office Box is designed to implement the ideas explained in the book.

Is there a diference between selling a product and selling a solution?  Over recent years all sorts of marketing and sales people have transformed their pitches.  Products were out, and solutions were in.  Great news. Something different to talk about, and an escape from the pressure on features and price.

Customers liked it. There’s an implication in the word solution suggesting results guaranteed. Not just tools (products) but expertise, services and risk management.

In all too many cases the words changed, but everything else stayed the same. Without corresponding transformations in the sales and delivery models any evolution from product to solution will be an illusion.  The customer experience won’t change, except for increased disappointment.

The lines between products and solutions are easily blurred, and misunderstood, so maybe a short review of the history of selling will be useful? Understanding how we got from there to here makes it easier to understand the ramifications for both sales and delivery processes. And points to the very real changes which need to be made for a business to really evolve from product to solution.

There was a time when there weren’t enough products to go around.  In fact, right from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution up until the new millennium, factories were flat out trying to keep up with the explosion in demand for just about anything.  Sales people were employed to present products to potential buyers.  That’s all they had to do.  Catch the buyers attention, present the product, and ask for the order.  If any punter didn’t buy, so what.  There was always another just around the corner.

Typically sales professionals were paid only a commission on what they sold.  Sales Managers allocated territories and measured activity rates.  They developed the concept of a sales funnel in which prospects were captured and forced through a series of arguments to a purchase decision.  The model was really simple.  Making 100 calls to get 20 prospects to listen to a pitch, would result in 10 proposals and 5 sales.

Sales teams would operate in isolation from the main business.  Their job was to get orders.  The factory would deliver.  Whether the product would, or would not, meet the expectations of the buyer was irrelevant.  Let the Buyer Beware – or Caveat Emptor – says the law.

That was how most of what we know as the principles of selling emerged.  The sales super hero who didn’t take no for an answer, battered down doors, cold called like a machine, talked fast, told jokes, hit and run, became the role model.

Much of that thinking survives even now, despite a fundamental shift in the power of the customer, which drove the evolution from product to solution.

Through the latter half of the 20th Century things started to change.  Mass production techniques increased the supply of product.  Globalisation allowed new suppliers from emerging economies.  Customers grew to have choices, and learn a great deal more of what they were about to buy.  The world went from a shortage of products to a glut in the space of 20 years.  Competition exploded, and the pressure on features and price grew with it.

In response, the marketing people came up with the idea of solutions.  With these, the customer wouldn’t have to worry whether the product was right – the solution would ensure satisfaction.

Customers liked the idea, a lot, and so did the sales people.  But not many understood.  The sales and delivery model needed to change if the promise of a solution was to be delivered.  All too often the businesses didn’t stop to understand they needed to change philosophy as well as the marketing words.

The solution assumes responsibility for the result.  That’s what customers expect.  And its what some companies delivered.  They developed a new model in which the sales guy took time to understand what the customer wanted and organise his resources to provide it.  Instead of sales operating in isolation from the rest of the business it became the first step in a seamless process, from marketing through manufacturing, distribution, delivery, implementation, to customer service.  The sales role transitioned from unwelcome interference to trusted advisor.  The sales funnel transitioned to prospect pipeline.  Sales processes ensured cost of sale wouldn’t be wasted on prospects who weren’t going to buy.

Companies which understood the change in the balance of power from vendor to customer, and reacted with a new focus on customer satisfaction have survived and flourished,  while product companies, which didn’t, haven’t, even if they did change the words they used.

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When is a sales prospect not a prospect? We just posted Making Lead Generation Make Sense at our other blog and it was syndicated at Customer Collective. That was nice, but even better, two sales and marketing professionals took the time to comment.They both made the same point. They didn’t agree with me :+(

The central topic was a common misunderstanding about what constitutes a prospect. Typically Marketing and other lead generation services like to attach the Prospect label to any name and number they come up with.

Sales professionals on the other hand use a different language. For them a Prospect is somebody who’s been qualified as a potential buyer. That is, somebody with an active project, and budget, and some sense of how they’ll select a vendor.

Where’s the problem with that, you might well ask. After all sales guys are supposed to push their way into peoples agenda and pitch their wares. Surely a name and number is just the start of the process?

That’s pretty much what the comments said. And it demonstrates how little those guys know about sales operations. And that’s where the problem lies.

Businesses need sales forecasts in order to plan revenues, expenses, cash flow, and delivery resource. Sales forecasts are based on lists of prospects. The sales manager’s job is making sure those prospects are really opportunities to make a sale, at a given price and within a given time frame. For a potential sale to get on that list the sales guy has to do a lot of work.

Of course some of those prospects will have come out of the lead generation program, which in part justifies Marketing claiming the names it comes up with are all Prospects. The trouble is most of the names collected never make it on to the sales forecast – because they aren’t prospects. They’re just names and numbers.

There’s obviously a conflict between sales operations and marketing which surfaces in the CEOs review meeting.

Picture this scene.

The CEO asks VP of Sales for his forecast sales for the quarter. The number he’s given disappoints. He’s already promised the analysts growth on last quarter’s numbers but that’s not going to happen. In fact the business might actually go backwards.

“What’s gone wrong” he asks “and what are you doing about it?”

“We don’t have enough prospects” responds the head of Sales.

“That’s ridiculous” interrupts the VP Marketing “We’ve passed on to you more than 500 Prospects, this month alone”.

“They turned out not to be prospects” replies the Sales guy. “Either they didn’t return our calls, or they had already bought from our competitor, or they didn’t need what we sell, or they didn’t have any money”.

“OK cut the hard luck story” the CEO intercedes. “Marketing is only there for brand building.   They ran the lead generation program to help you guys out.  If those sales leads were no good, why haven’t you been out on the street finding your own prospects, like a proper sales force?”

“We’ve been too busy chasing those 500 leads we got from Marketing” replies the VP of Sales.

Image via Wikipedia

What’s the difference between a sales rep and a sales manager? And how can the successful sales person climb the corporate ladder, winning promotion to the next level?

The answer is transitioning from Me to Us.

For sales reps life is relatively simple – all about Me. It’s my target, my territory, my prospects, my sales, my commission.

For sales managers its all about Us.

How can we live off the star performers, meanwhile helping the newcomers to progress?

How can we persuade the Product People, Marketing and Customer Service to do a better job for customers?

How can we keep the beancounters off our backs while we earn a living for them?

The answers to those questions are what you’ll find in Succeeding in Sales Management.

Nobody should generalise about sales managers. There are so many different types of business, and so many different ways of making them work. There are so many different approaches a sales manager can take. But there’s one dilemma most sales managers confront constantly.

Stuck between the CEO’s need for revenue, sales guys complaints about product features, price and marketing, and challenging customers, the sales manager has to find a way of making the impossible possible.

Part of the job is coaching, of course. Few sales people have all the skills needed. Not many work just quite as hard as they could. They aren’t that good at accepting other people’s strategy. Worse they really don’t like sticking to the rules. Managers need to get over that problem, constantly grooming new kids on the block to replace the superstars competitors will recruit away.

The other, and more visible, part is making the numbers. That’s where the dilemma comes in. Whilst the sales manager can be the team’s goto man when deals get tough, doing the selling for them gets in the way of the real job.

Allowing sales people to learn from their mistakes requires them to make those mistakes, and that means losing deals. But the demand for performance dictates the sales manager can’t let this happen. Business has to be won, whatever.

Ultimately the sales manager has to step in and win the business for the rep. The sales guy gets recognition for the sale. The sales manager gets yet another problem. Now the reps know there’s no need to learn, because the boss will always step in and make it work for them.

Back in the day working for Nixdorf Computer, Richard was a perfectly pleasant but ineffectual rep. The company expected every sales person to be competent demonstrating our Comet software, but Richard wouldn’t learn how to do it.

When I demanded he should learn, Richard refused, point blank.

“There’s no point in me learning that stuff” he said, “because I’ll never be as good as you, and you’ll never let me do it on my own”.

And of course he was right. I needed to focus on the numbers, and that meant going along on sales calls to check the qualification, make sure the prospect understood our unique selling points, and agree the basis on which our two businesses could work together.

This is all standard stuff for the sales professional, but all too often reps stick to the smiley friendly stuff and bring in the manager to add the business dimension.

The bottom line was, I was too busy doing the selling for the sales team to have any time for improving what the sales team did.

Eventually Richard got fired, but not before I’d made him more money than his efforts deserved.

And eventually I figured out the role of super hero sales guru was flattering, which was enjoyable, and counter productive, which wasn’t.

Regardless of the pressure for numbers, sales managers need to buy time during which they can improve the process, and the sales team’s ability to implement it.

Answers to Questions You Didn’t Know to Ask
You already know about selling, but maybe managing sales is a different matter. How about an introduction to the philosophies, strategies, and processes used by professional sales managers? That’s what you’ll get from our eBook Succeeding In Sales Management – Preview and Buy Here

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