First lets understand the backdrop. The people hiring sales managers are rarely experienced in the job themselves. They might be C level executives, or general managers. Quite often they’ll be accountants of one type or another.

When interviewing for a sales manager they’re looking for specialist expertise – not sales skills but the ability to interface between the sales guys and the rest of the business. They won’t understand the job, and will know that. But they will understand a model comprising process, roles and responsibilities.

Give them your vision of that model and the rest of the interview will be checking for reasons not to offer you the sales manager job. You’ll have closed the deal already.

That’s dealt with one side of coin, but what about the other interviewees?

The fact is sales managers are very rarely trained. They might be familiar with the job in another business, maybe more. But it’s highly unlikely they’ll have a generic understanding which can be adapted to suit different products or business models.

With proper sales manager training under your belt you’ll be unique, or if unlucky, only close to unique. Either way you’re streets in front of the competition.

Ok so that’s all very well, but where do you get that training, if nobody does it?

This blog is an excellent place to start.

Our Sales Management Best Practice is one of the most popular articles.

We have a lot more sales manager specific articles in our Sales Manager category.

And our category Sales Qualification has more general comment on when to hold em and when to fold em.

There’s a lot of reading here – too much for one visit so you might prefer to download some of our free White Papers. That way you’ll have a library of comment to carry around.

Good luck with the interviewing. When you get the job come back and see us for a Front Office Box – it’s designed to help make our ideas work in ways you’ve interpreted them.

Here’s a real life example of how Paul uses it to qualify his sales opportunities, increase his win rate and reduce his costs of sale.

Paul’s a specialist.  There’s very little about liability insurance that he doesn’t know after 40 years in the business.  There’s also not much he doesn’t know about wasting money chasing deals he isn’t going to get.  Insurance, like investment planning, house remodeling or party arranging, is one of those purchases which get influenced by existing relationships.  Quite often Paul would come up with an eye watering proposal only to discover the prospect wouldn’t buy, because he couldn’t disappoint the brother in law.

In his case a new prospect can involve a plane ride and overnight stay.  Somebody from Oregon calls and asks for a quote. Paul lives on the East Coast.  That’s the best part of $1,000 in cost to make the sales call.

Paul figured he needed an inexpensive method of checking how likely it was he’d  get a fair chance at the business.  That would save him a lot in both time and money.

We persuaded him to use Webrequest.  It’s integrated with our Address Book and easy to use. He could choose his type of questions – open or multiple choice and write his own words.  Webrequest would send an email with a link to the on-line form to the prospect.  The response shows up in the Webrequest reports and also on that individual’s people page.

Here’s the type of questions he asks:

1. How big is your revenue
2. Which industries do you sell to
3. When does your policy renew
4. How much is your renewal quote
5. Who makes the decision to change provider
6. How does that decision get made
7. Who is your existing provider
8. How long have you sourced insurance from that provider

Perversely this is a comfortable method of sales qualification.  It’s always easiest to ask the hard questions right at the start of the sales process, and somehow filling in a form is so much more comfortable for the prospect than a face to face interrogation.

Fast, cheap and painless.  If only sales qualification could always be this easy.

How do you do your sales qualification?  Could Webrequest help you like it does Paul?

Here’s a short video showing how it works for both the customer and the sales rep.

Demonstration

Through my career I’ve sold everything from outsourcing to debt collection, and from mainframes to milking machines.  I’ve managed big teams and been a solopreneur.  I’ve pumped gas, driven cabs and caught cans in food factories.  After all those experiences I learned even more business lessons about selling, customer service and the facts of life on the golf course – as a caddie.

Any golf caddie knows more about being a  business owner than most entrepreneurs and managers I’ve known.

Here’s a few of those business lessons.

Constrained by resources.

Every caddie I ever met only had two shoulders, two legs and 24 hours in the day.  It doesn’t matter how much s/he wants to grow there are limits – the resources available – so we’d better make the most of them.

There is always more in the deal

When the Caddie Master says “you’re up” the bag fee is as good as in your pocket.  Now we’re working for the tip.  A $50 bag fee looks a lot better with a $20 tip on top.  That’s 40% more revenue and worth working for.  But it has to be earned.

The customer is always right.

Caddies are guides, companions, educators – sometimes just colleagues, and unfortunately at other times servants. Ultimately they don’t dictate what the customer perceives as value.  They just have to discover it, then deliver it.  Usually they have only the length of the 1st fairway to do that.

There’s always another customer.

If this bag doesn’t work out in our favour the next one will. Lets make sure we get round without the customer complaining to the Caddie Master.  Caddies are really good at swallowing their pride.

Ultimately it’s about delivery.

Caddies don’t get paid on the 1st tee.  They get paid in the car park, when they’ve counted and cleaned the clubs and stored the bag in the trunk. It’s about delivery.

And finally there’s the caddies prayer:

Please Lord let the bag be light
Let the tip be heavy and
The idiot put the ball where I tell him.

Watch this space for more caddie tales.

Google Wave was probably the most eagerly awaited software technology in history. Those guys did an awesome job of pre-announcing the release and the world waited with baited breath.

It seems Google must have learned a lesson with Wave, because only a few months later the company let Buzz seep out. No fuss, no announcements. It just appeared for Gmail users and still doesn’t work in Google Apps

Google Wave just bombed, virtually sinking without trace and the company’s reputation has obviously taken a battering in the process. Hence the sheepish release of Buzz.

We got egg on our face as well. The idea behind Wave excited us with its potential as a collaboration and discussion platform. We even started a daily Front Office Box discussion, which sank without trace. In our Avantrasara business we tried to use it to bring a project group together. It bombed there too.

Users found it confusing, not helped by the strange idea of those extension. In some cases they had trouble figuring how to add new comments or edit texts. But the biggest problem was not knowing when there were updates. Nobody wanted to sit with a Wave window open and nothing happening and they didn’t have time to keep logging in to check. The application badly needed notifications – an email letting wave participants know there was something new.

At last we now have email notifications and hopefully Wave will achieve some serious adoption.  We hope so, because the opportunities for real time customer service are exciting. And opportunities for collaboration.

A bit like Buzz, notifications just seeped out a couple of  days ago. No announcements that we saw. We came across it in the Google Wave blog. Perversely there’s no mention of it in Wave even but you can find it. Hover over the Inbox label and a drop down arrow appears. Click the arrow and voila – notifications.

Turn on notifications and select frequency and you’re up and away.  Now all we need is for people to use it so there are updates to be notified about

If you’re interested we’d love to hear from you at frontofficebox@googlewave.com

Making complicated concepts simple so others can understand is probably the sales guys biggest challenge. Prospects don’t have the time to do the research, do the thinking, or sit for hours through never ending presentations. They pretty much want to know three things:

• Where’s the deal?
• What’s in it for them?
• What it costs?

Our job is netting down all that competitive positioning and marketing speak into straight talking. But that can be really hard to do.

We’re involved in a project bringing a new type of medical software to market. Not selling software to customers right now, but selling the concept to the business support and investment communities.

Mostly we’re talking to people who smile, and nod encouragingly, at our presentation. Nice people who just don’t have the brain power to understand the way we’ve netted down three years of thinking into a 20 minute software pitch.

This isn’t their problem. It’s ours. We’re the ones trying to get something, whatever it is.

So maybe we need to start again, improving our process. Stop talking about how clever we are. Stop demonstrating how much we know. Get on with explaining why they should be working with us and our software

Where’s the deal, what’s in it for them and what does it cost.

Keeping stuff simple can be awfully boring. Demonstrating our expertise can be reinforcing and uplifting. No wonder we like to make stuff complicated.

Meanwhile we make it harder for the customer to buy, just through polishing our own ego.

I’ll do better tomorrow, promise. How about you? What can you do to make your customer’s understand more easily?

Amusing and informing at the same time. That’s the winning strategy for today’s content led selling.

There was a time when the sales rep’s first responsibility was knowing new jokes, and who to share them with. This customer would laugh like a drain at an off colour story where others would take offence.

Jokes were an essential part of the sales call, amusing the buyer for a few minutes and buying the right to inform him of the new ? – whatever the pitch was that week.
Somehow we lost the plot.

Jokes, along with cigarettes and alcohol lunches are no longer part of the customer engagement process. We’re all too busy, being dreadfully busy.

But when it comes to content based selling we maybe need to think about the way things used to be and get back to Infotainment.

We don’t knock doors anymore, or organise regular calls, or even build relationships with prospects. They choose when they want to buy what and who from. And they mostly do that on the Internet.

Good news for those of us who understand and work to accommodate the new way of doing things. We can build blogs explaining in lots of ways how our solution solves problems for people just like our buyers.

But in today’s world it’s all happening too fast. Nobody has time to read academic treatise on the details. They just want the meat, in 30 seconds or less.

If we’re going to buy the right to make our pitch we have to do more – introduce a little entertainment so we can deliver the information. That’s infotainment based selling.

It’s why we’re seeing so much multimedia in blogs. It’s why we’re using cartoons in our web sites. It’s why Facebook is growing like crazy while traditional media is dying on the vine.

So here’s my recipe for infotainment sales strategy in 2010.

Just to avoid any confusion, this post isn’t about Internet Marketing. It’s about how we sell regular products and services. The old ways don’t work anymore.

When relationship management is a critical function of sales performance which metrics can we use to figure out what works and learn lessons from the people who do it well?

On Business.com Answers there’s a really smart question asked by an even smarter business owner. He’s figured customers are the best source of additional business and wants to target his sales team on building customer relationships. But how can he measure performance by his sales guys in this new dimension. He wants to find out what works and train the entire team to use his best practice.

It’s hard to apply the usual metrics to relationships. They’re necessarily a factor of two or more personalities inter-acting. The sales manager can influence the sales rep but influencing customers is a different matter. Two plus two sometimes equals five. At other times it can equal one and that’s not always because our guy’s getting it wrong.

We suggested maybe trying to measure the B2B relationship, since that’s what really counts, bringing us low cost of sale business, referrals and testimonials.

Maybe if we can identify which B2B combinations work we could then dig a little deeper to find out why they work. That way we can see which combinations work in our favour and distil that information down to who is doing what, right.

The B2B relationship measures we suggested were:

• Share of customer spend
• Joint process improvements
• Joint strategy for new opportunities
• Reliability of customer comittments
• Referrals
• Testimonials
• Engagement in social events

But that was just us Blue Skyeing a strategy.

What do you think?

Is there a way of learning from one client/account team combination lessons we can apply to others?

In today’s social media world we have connections and communication possibilities we never had before but do the measures of social influence bear any relation to how and why people do business with us.

At the end of the day the professional sales guy has only one friend – the one in the mirror. Or more precisely, the person behind the guy in the mirror. The integrity which differentiates the professional from the snake oil.

Selling can be a hard life.

In fact it usually is. We work for people who can’t do it, but think they have the right to tell us how to. Customers insist on trying to prove they’re smarter, when they know less. Competitors seem to be only interested in destroying our price. Ultimately the bean counters resent paying us the commission.

Hero or Zero

We’re always one or the other. Only as good as the next deal, if we won the last. Only as good as the last, if we didn’t. Nobody believes in us, apart from us that is.

Snake Oil

Somewhere along the line sales guys picked up a the faint whiff of duplicity. Nobody really trusts us – we would say that, we’re selling something. Whatever we say can’t really be true.

Our Friend in the Mirror

When the cards have been dealt, the hand played and the winnings collected (whoever wins) we’re left with nothing but our integrity. And that’s really important. It keeps us going when things get tough. It gives us confidence when we need to push the customer. It confirms we’re right when we walk away.

In the good old days before the Internet, and CRM, and business process re-engineering people would say the sales guy was as good as his/her Rolodex – that index card system we all used. But they didn’t mean the cards, or even the contacts. They meant how those contacts felt about the sales guy.

By Rolodex they meant Integrity. The sales guy was only as good as his/her integrity. Only as good as the trust customers were prepared to invest in the relationship.

Back then successful sales people understood selling is about people. They spent their time helping prospects buy and they never misled a customer.

Sometimes it feels as the world turned and integrity got lost somewhere. Professionals like us should fight like hell to bring it back.

If those project management systems are more complicated and expensive than you need, but you still want to be able to break down plans into milestones and actions, and assign them to team members, our simple but powerful Plan, Act, Review workflow might be just what you need.

If you want to be able to see the entire business timeline on one page, have it linked to individual customer and plan records, and drive the entire process with incoming email, our integrated database offers you management software with best practice built in.

If you want to do all this across locations, and timezones, 24X7 with software you can just use and get on with the day job register for a Front Office Box account today – because it really is for you.

Spend a couple of minutes seeing how simple and yet powerful business software can be when it’s built by experts who want to use it themselves.

This is a particularly relevant question for us because we’re embroiled in such an argument ourselves right now. In another business we have a contract for supply but the other party seems to think it’s an agreement for services on demand.

Contracts for employment are governed by a different law, in the UK at least and almost certainly in Europe. In the USA they’re different, but similar. The employer has rights and so does the employee, and those rights pretty much govern the terms of any termination. The employer is required to provide the employee with a statement of terms and those terms have to comply with regulations.

Contracts for services on demand are different. Neither party has particular rights when it comes to termination, apart from the usual confidentiality type issues. Each can pretty much go his own way at the drop of a hat. Contractors get paid more than employees, have less security and more control. An unreasonable boss soon gets told the facts of life. There’s less co-operation and more confrontation in these contracts.

A contract for supply is entirely different. The only way out for either party is breach of the contract and the law governing cases goes back centuries. Remedies for breach only come in two guises – damages for breach and specific performance, another way of saying we don’t give a crap if you don’t like it – do it.

If you’re getting into one of these you really should know the difference between these types because that could stop you making a complete fool of yourself, like the jerk off trying to argue with us. It could also make you an awesomely powerful adversary to anybody who doesn’t .

Good luck to anybody starting their own business. Consider a primer class in laws of contract. It’ll pay dividends for the rest of your business life.