Many years ago the only channels that most organisations would use would be the direct and indirect sales channels. The promotion of the product would be carried out by marketing in the form of advertising campaigns, newsletters, direct mail, exhibitions, seminars, etc.

As technology became available and affordable companies employed web sites and e-marketing campaigns trying to drive interested parties to engage so that they could be pursued as leads.

The biggest revolution today is that technology is not only available and affordable to companies, but to anyone. That allows for innovation not only in companies but in other institutions and by budding entrepreneurs such us Mark Zuckerberg, and his classmates at Harvard University, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes. Another is Twitter founded by Jack Dorsey.

Both Twitter and Facebook have given enormous power to ordinary people to communicate with each other. The extension of this is that the same people are talking about products and services, things that are the ‘rage’ that you must have, e.g. iPhone, or venting their feelings about awful experiences to warn others and by doing so letting the offending company know in a very public way.

In business we are embracing the use of media such as Twitter and Facebook, but the biggest challenge is how to integrate them into one cohesive strategy that is supported by systems that not only are used to store the information received, but can manipulate it and use it as sales and marketing, and customer service intelligence to improve products and services that are being offered and ultimately to grow the business.

The challenge for system suppliers is to produce CRM, sales performance management, sales force automation, revenue performance management, marketing management systems that are adaptable to the changing ways that the client wishes to go to market, whether the client is reviewing or buying products and/or services. There are systems on the market that are catering for the new channels and the use in generating awareness, interest, and business. It is getting a system or systems to deal seamlessly with the whole client process from marketing, to sales, through to customer service that is presenting problems. There are companies that capture information from their web site, but have another system to capture information about their marketing campaigns. Then there are companies that have an additional sales management system.

Many systems that are implemented today seem to be rigid in structure that is if one was to compare them to a shape they would be represented by a cube. What is needed are systems that help businesses manage all of the client facing process seamlessly, both from the selling and buying point of view, and also adapt to the different channels that the clients are using during the process. In this case there can be a specific shape at any one moment, but it can change depending on the behaviour of the market and the clients. It can be a cube, but it might have to be any given shape at any given moment. The system needs to be based on a framework that can easily be manipulated to take any form at any time.

The reason for this is that the client is running the show, especially how he wishes to be engaged, and we have to be receptive to it both internally and externally of the business.

We are all selling most of the time. We are trying to convince people of our point of view, we are trying to gain respect, and we are trying to get people to like us. Apparently, this does not count as selling because a lot of people associate selling with sharp practices.

I read two articles in the Financial Times ‘Selling deserves a corner office’ and ‘Portrait of a perfect salesman’, by Philip Delves Broughton, that highlighted two key areas that contribute to the image that sales has.

NB. To read the two articles listed you will be required to register for an account with FT.com At the time of writing this blog post, you are able to sign up for a FREE account which will allow you to read "8 articles per 30 days".

In the article ‘Portrait of a perfect salesman’ it describes how much attention to detail is required when selling. Sales is about understanding people and adapting to the situation you find yourself in. The example given is that of the Majid rug peddler in the souk.

‘Majid is a master at categorising sales leads (the people who walk through his door) and tailoring his approach. Sometimes you need to be patient. At other times, you must treat the customer as a king, to make them feel powerful and inclined to exercise that power by buying. Sometimes you need to teach, to establish your authority with customers who take you for a mere peddler. He compares the different modes of selling to gears in a car. “You change because the gear needs changing,” he says.’

The article discusses Apple and Salesforce.com in great detail in relation to Majid.

Apple is a success story about traditional selling meeting modern selling. The approach taken was to cater for the different types of people entering their premises and also to have enthusiasts selling that would extol the virtues of the Apple products. The premises would be laid out in such a way that it would cater for people to have access to their Apple products as soon as they walked into the premises, then there is the red zone where sales are made, and lastly the family room where customer are helped with issues that they may have. All this is carried out by teachers, photographers, filmmakers, etc. who are selling the product because of their belief, credibility, and trustworthiness.

Salesforce.com is not much different than Majid in their approach: they employ different strokes for different leads, from a person purchasing the use of salesforce.com by paying via credit card, to sales being generated by an army of corporate sales people.

Unfortunately the image that the general public has is not about the noble art of sales, but about the sharp practices and the commission based sales person.

For more 'Shoot The Salesman' sales comics, click here.

This is not helped by the lack of focus by academic institutions in the main, and to some extent professional bodies, on sales as a key part within the professional courses they run for people that will become leaders of industry, e.g. MBAs, chartered exams, etc. The first article highlights the restructuring of business schools to be more academic rather than vocational.

One of the most poignant paragraphs within ‘Selling deserves a corner office’ is the following: In his book Birth of a Salesman, Harvard Business School professor Walter Friedman observes that “while business schools have continued to offer some type of sales management instruction – usually within a larger marketing course – they do not offer courses in salesmanship skills. The topic remains, just as it was in the 1910s, more suitable for popular how-to books and memoirs of successful salespeople than for academic classes. Economists, for their part, still tend to ignore the role of salesmanship in the economy”.

With greater use of technology sales faces another massive attack as to whether sales people are needed. Just look at LinkedIn to see how many discussions are about social media and whether a sales person is needed anymore. Do we really believe that sales people can be eliminated from the process? The question should be how sales channels are changing as technology changes the habits of the client.

The most poignant statement I found in the article is:

'Technology creates transparency and gives us more information. It should lead to better prospecting and franker negotiating. But so far it hasn’t eliminated the ghost in the machine, which remains the human interaction.'

Sales is a noble profession when it serves the customer.

Over the last five weeks we have published a series of e-books on the theme of ‘Tips on how to develop predictability within your sales forecasting’.

The only way to establish predictability within your sales forecast is in the main to convert what you are predicting. It’s all about sales success.

Step 1 is about defining the sales process so that you can understand your customers buying habits and so plan your activities to enable them to make the decision to purchase from you as quickly and as painless as possible. A classic example where the selling and buying cycles are not in sync would be with regard to the sending out of pricing. There are many that would feel that as soon as client has asked for pricing it should be given, but without knowing the client’s needs how can you give a price? You might want to give indicative pricing to establish whether it is acceptable to the client, but do you want to go any further? Knowing when to give a quote in the sales process is dependant as to where the client is within their buying cycle.

Step 2 is all about qualifying the opportunity as you go through the sales process. There is a need to justify where you are in the process based on key criteria that you use in everyday discussions to understand what is happening within an opportunity. Key criteria would include: Budget Availability, Contact with the Decision Making Team, Understanding the Decision Making Process, Fit to Client’s Requirements, etc. All too often a statement is used to identify where you are in the process such as; ‘we are at the proposal stage’, ‘we are at the presentation stage’, ‘we are the negotiation stage’, etc. The risk with this approach is that you are not monitoring each criterion on its own merits. An example of this would be to do with ‘Availability of Budget’. In one opportunity you could establish that the budget is available, but in another the budget will be approved by the Board on presentation of a RoI (Return on Investment) justification. How do you allow for such differences when you are using an option in a list of positions within the sales process?

Step 3 brings a common language when describing your position within the sales process for each of the opportunities that you are dealing with. It can be a series of percentage points that are clearly defined by the status of each of the criteria that are part of the sales process. If you take the example of ‘Suppliers’, it could that at 50% the status for ‘Supplier’ would be ‘we are on supplier list’, 70% ‘we are on the short list of two’ and at 80% we are the preferred supplier. There will be more than just this criterion that will contribute to each of the percentage points.

Step 4 brings credibility to all that has gone before. It is where you substantiate what you are saying is your position within the sales process. Just a simple sales plan to record information to verify what you are reporting as being based on fact. An example of this would be in identifying the decision making team. The sales plan would require the name of the person, his or her position within the company, the issues they are trying to solve, whether you have addressed them and how, and whether they have bought into your solution. You now have some facts about the decision making team instead of assuming that all decision makers have been met and discussions taken place to understand their needs.

In summary the 4 steps are about bringing discipline, order, and best practice into sales and so improving your sales performance.

Download any one of the 4 steps and the other 3 will be automatically forwarded to you:

Following on from the last blog, this is the final step in building a sales process for your company. 

This is the final step in the process to greater predictability within your sales forecasts. The aim has been not to discuss how to put a sales forecast together, but to make the sales forecast a by-product of the sales qualification process. In this step we need to clearly demonstrate that we are in possession of information that substantiates our position at any one time. To do this we need to put in place a very simple mechanism that we can use to record the information we gather. As with steps 1 to 3 it has been about you thinking clearly what you do and what you prospect is doing whilst you progress through the sales process. Be ready to refine your sales process because you will learn by experience whether what you have documented and what is happening are in alignment.

I hope that the documents you have received have been of benefit in your sales environment. Please feel free to contact me if you any questions.

Best of luck with step 4.

Register now and you will be sent 'Step 4: Substantiate Your Position'.  Furthermore if you didn't download the previous steps they will be automatically sent to you.

Following on from the last blog, this is the next step in building a sales process for your company. 

Continuing on from step 2 when we developed the qualification profile we now have to developed a common language, the prospect rating scale, that is used by all in the sales environment to understand what is meant when a sales person refers to a sales opportunity being at a given milestone, say 70% chance.  It will minimise if not remove the subjectivity that is introduced in most sales management discussions because there is no clear qualification definition.

Next week in the final step we will concentrate on the collection of information that will substantiate where we are within the sales process.  After all we would not want anybody to say that we are guessing.

Best of luck with step 3.

Register now and you will be sent 'Step 3: For Consistency, Decide On Your Milestones'.  Furthermore you will automatically receive the next document and if you didn't download the previous steps they will be automatically sent to you too.