Sales Blog for Sales and Sales Management

We have a training module called pre-call strategy sessions.  When we initially talk about this process, most participants think that the pre-call strategy session applies to only the final presentation when you are presenting your proposal in hopes of getting the business.  There are a couple of problems with this thinking and I'll get to that in a minute.  I want to talk first about my daughter Alex going off to college this weekend to the University of Dayton.

College planning, like sales planning, is more than just planning for the day of the event when you drop your daughter off to school or for the day when you make your presentation.  In reality, in your professional life as a sales person and as a parent, everything you do should be to prepare you for these moments.  It was at that moment when I hugged her, kissed her and told her I loved her in front of Marianist Hall that I realized I had missed several opportunities to be prepared for that moment and to make sure she was prepared. It was then that I realized that:

• My execution did not reflect what should have been my priority.  In other words, I spent too much time on the road, in the office, working at my computer at home and not enough time with her.
• You spend too much time doing admin 'stuff' instead of developing new relationships
• I took her presence for granted.  I rarely went to her room to talk and visit.  The first morning she was at school and we were home, I walked past her room; the door was open, the bed was made and she was gone.
•  You fail to stay close to your best clients on a proactive, regular and consistent basis. The key word being "proactive" - seeing them when they don't need you or they don't have a problem or providing solutions for their problems that you don't have a product or service for.
• There is more to planning for college than making sure there is money.  I then realized that everything that I said, did or thought - good or bad - was now her foundation as to how she would live her life on her own.  I realized and regretted all at once the times I was short with her, criticized her, didn't take time for her, and gave her an opportunity to witness me being selfish, arrogant, prideful, rude, unforgiving, ungrateful, angry and stupid.  (Certainly, there is another side to that coin, but in these moments we are all worried about what we didn't do or didn't do right)
•  Everything you do with your client, EVERYTHING, regardless if it is a direct contact with them or what they observe you do in other settings, gets recorded and they develop an impression of who you are and how you treat others and probably treat them when they aren't around.
• Eventually things come and they go.  It is the natural progression of raising children.  Either by design or by default, they do go away or we will suffer the stages of loss no matter how well we try and intellectualize the departure.
• You will lose clients.  But you need to let some of them go even when they or you are not ready.  You can't grow and they can't grow if the status quo remains the status quo.

Today is Monday the 24^th of August and she is on her own surrounded by 10,000 of her new best friends and the staff at the University of Dayton that is committed to putting her, my daughter, in a position to become the very best she can be.  With all of my short comings and all the things Linda and I may have failed to do, we did manage to do enough of the right things to put her in that position.  She loves UD. She has already made several friends and she is excited about being on her own and exploring her future.  She will do well.

As I talked to Linda about how I felt about Alex's departure, I told her that I needed to blog about this.  It wasn't the answer she was looking for. But after further discussion this morning, I had a chance to explain myself.  My goal is to help others.  Not just in the arena of sales training, sales management and sales culture development.  No, it's just helping people.  My goal with this post is to help those unsuspecting parents think differently about college planning so that when their day comes, they will have felt that they've planned well beyond the financial requirements, that they have paid the emotional bill for that moment well in advance, and they can look back on their time together and say to themselves "Job well-done."

Go Flyers!

It isn't necessarily breaking news for selling, but make sure you read between the lines.  Here is what Seth Godin had to say:

Prediction: There will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US by 2012. So, you've got two and a half years before the newspaper industry is going to be doing something else with the news and the ads, or not be there at all. Does that change what you do today if you work in this business?

Insight! The newspaper industry is in trouble, but news is not going to go away, just the paper part. Those who are working hard to preserve the paper part are asking the wrong questions and are doomed to fail.

I don't know when the world will stop needing sales people but current buyers in the b2b world really don't need sales people to get information about products or services they need to solve today's problems.  They still use sales people to get pricing if it isn't posted on the website.

Insight:  Stop kidding yourself if you are selling on price.  If you get or lose business based on price, then what are you planning to do when all the pricing and negotiations are available on line?

Prediction: 90% of your sales will come from word of mouth or digital promotion by 2011. How do you change what you're doing today to be ready for that?

Insight:  As companies attempt to get more product into the market place with fewer and fewer people, what skills beside technological skills will you need to survive well beyond 2011?  In the words of Dan Sullivan, author of The 21st Century Agent, there are three things that you must master to keep your job:  Develop long term relationships, provide creative solutions, and move people to make decisions.  Currently, the microchip can't do those things but the question is not if but when?

I take from his blog that we need to stop thinking about what we need to hold on to in order to be successful now and in the future.  We need to let go of those systems, processes and ways we do business today that will inhibit us tomorrow.  Instead of holding fast to what we've always done, we must embrace what we have to do. 

There is nothing easy about this but survival is hardly ever easy.

Everyone is talking about the economy, and most everyone is talking about cutting and managing expenses instead of selling.  Browsing my Google reader, I found the following from Verne Harnish's post on the 6th of March: 

Drive Revenue, Eliminate Waste, Save the Team -- I've been pushing hard on tools and techniques for driving revenue.

Driving revenue through new sales is hard.  Managing expenses is easy.  You identify those items that do not contribute revenue and then methodically reduce the amount being spent or eliminate the expenditure.  It's easy to the extent that it is measureable, and in many cases, immediate.

To pull yourself out of the economic slump and put yourself in an economic and sales opportunity, do the following:

1. Pull your head out of the dark place.  My guess is that you don't own 100% market share so any decrease in your sales production has everything to do with your attitude and your effort.  Get your head straight first.
2. Think sales, think offensive strategy, and think selling to those that have already bought from you in the past.  You cannot win on defense.  You will only drive revenue if you sell and you might as well talk to those that already know you and are confident in your competence.
3. The market is the market, go to work.  When you leave the house in the morning and tell your family that you are going to work, remember that work isn't a place it is something that you do.  Effort starts the entire selling process.  Yes, it is harder now but you have to believe that your competitors are sitting back and whining about the economy while you're out talking to their clients.

It's only a tough economy if you want it to be.  There is plenty of business and plenty of opportunity to show your stuff right now.