Sales Leadership – Simple Tips from a Master

I’ve been a fan of Jack Daly for a few years now. I really like his simple approach to sales and his infectious energy. He’s also what I consider to be one of the real gentlemen in sales.

He published two good lists a few days ago that I want to share with you as he’s encouraging us to have a thrive mindset (as opposed to a survive mindset). I’ve taken the top 10 points from each list

SALES MANAGEMENT CHECKLIST

1. Rank sales staff performance and deal with poor performers
2. One on Ones with each Sales Professional minimum monthly
3. Sales Meetings twice monthly min
4. Recruiting basket of at least 20 we are courting
5. Recruiting courting process built around a touch system
6. Inspect the baskets (pipeline mgt) min monthly
7. Inspect key activities of Sales Professionals
8. Training, training, training: to include role practice, joint calls, training calls, coaching calls and building a success guide
9. Key account focus
10. New hire orientation

SALES PROFESSIONALS CHECK LIST

1. Goal setting
2. Key activities tracking
3. Touch system design and maintenance
4. Data base management
5. Sales meeting participation
6. One on ones with Sales Manager
7. Inspect the baskets prep (pipeline mgmt)
8. Training, training, training: Role practice, joint calls, training calls, coaching calls
9. Web 2.0/social sites proactivity
10. Model the masters

Bottom line is in any market, the key is proactivity and having your head in a positive place. If we wake up each morning deflated and defeated, don’t expect the day to get any better. Fret less about the results and stay focused on consistently doing the right activities, and the business will come. The question to be asked is who is ensuring that these checklists get done? Don’t expect people to be cheering about doing all of this, and having people “in their stuff”. Very few players on sports teams “enjoy” the coaches “in their stuff” during practices, yet all celebrate the victories. It’s time we went about posting some victories!

Jack makes some good points with these lists. Simple stuff, but it’s how well we do the simple stuff that counts

The Wiki is Not Always the Best Solution

One of my many Google Alerts arrived this evening and a particular entry caught my eye. Despite the fact the first part of the blog post was really good, it went on to propose a resolution to a sales reporting problem that has sent me into a quiet rage.

As much as I support and promote the use of Wiki’s in organisations, suggestions like those contained in this post make me angry as it’s an example of technology being used outside its traditional scope to fix a problem that has been caused by technology being misapplied, and then reinforced by a major dose of general corporate incompetence.

Whilst Stewart’s idea has merit, in essence, he’s suggesting the customer accept a band-aid solution rather than confronting the real issues and working towards a long term, sustainable, best practice outcome. And this is before I even start on the sad fact that this type of ‘work around’ has to be proposed for a terribly archaic reporting structure.

The information presented in the post outlines (at least) two fundamental business issues – and I’m not convinced that a Wiki is an acceptable solution on its own (though I will propose that a well resourced Wiki will help engage and deliver corporate change).

Problem #1

I get the feeling they are using a CRM solution and that it clearly hasn’t be configured to suit the needs of the organisation. Call me a sceptic but I’d say they are probably using Salesforce.com and engaged Salesforce.com PS team to configure the solution – so they have a beautifully configured CRM that does nothing to help them sell more effectively. Based on our experience of sales automation projects I’d suggest the VP of Sales was rail roaded by the Salesforce.com sales reps via their typical colour, light, and movement sales presentation and probably never thought to consult the people for whom the system relies on – the field sales person.

Resolution? Stop listening to your CRM vendor and actually listen to your sales team. Look at your sales processes and start understanding your sales data. A Wiki is not going to do this for you but can become a central knowledge repository for specific sales, process, and how-to guides

Problem #2

Stewart’s proposal that a sales reporting Wiki might eventually allow the VP of Sales to analyse data ‘perhaps twice a week’ is fundamentally flawed. In fact it’s wrong.

Resolution? Get serious about your CRM use and how you report sales information. Implement a solution like Cloud9 Analytics. Cloud9 would provide this VP of Sales with the opportunity to take immediate action to improve sales performance and drive revenues.And by immediate I mean she could focus on the forecast breakers, the major customer deals and have any significant events delivered to her via a dashboard or directly to her BlackBerry.

Problem #3

Either the VP of Sales is in way over her head or she’s been given a charter to be mediocre. The role of a VP of Sales is to be a Sales Leader, not the resident reports monkey. The role of the VP of Sales is to reduce revenue risk, increase team productivity and facilitate collaboration. At a minimum the company needs to invest in a sales coaching tool like Private Sales Coach. This would allow the sales reps to take greater ownership of the progress of their opportunities and allow the VP of Sales more time to spend being a sales coach and sales leader.

A wiki will help this company but not as a sales reporting tool. If the company wants to mature into a true Sales 2.0 organisation then they need to do more than just put a wiki in place.

Blue Ocean Strategy – Helping Sales Leaders move out of the red ocean

Through my business relationship with Smartpen and BigAnt I’ve been introduced to Blue Ocean Strategy.

I read about Blue Ocean Strategy sometime ago (I think via Harvard Business Review). It’s a very exciting approach to strategy and business thinking and one that has much to offer organisations throughout Australia and New Zealand who are looking to excel and differentiate themselves.

My interest in Blue Ocean Strategy is around how the strategy can be applied to help sales organisations overcome many of the self-limiting beliefs that pervade the profession.

The local team – Blue Ocean Strategy Regional Centre has kindly invited me to a 2- day workshop on the 15th and 16th of December in Melbourne.

I’ll be posting my thoughts after the workshop. You’ll also be able to follow my Twitter updates @markpk

Livescribe Smartpen comes to the fore

I’ve just left Chicago having had the opportunity to attend the Selling Power Sales Leadership conference on Monday. Selling Power assembled a brilliant list of speakers including Neil Rackham – author of SPIN Selling; and one of the founding fathers of modern sales thinking.

With such a stellar cast of thought leaders, I was really looking forward to the event and also using my Livescribe Pulse Smartpen to capture the audio. Starting with Gerhard Gschwandtner’s opening address, I was able to capture each session and across the day captured over 6 hours of notes and audio. Each session has its own page and includes key comments, illustrations and audience questions. In a large room, distant from the speakers, Livescribe really shows its worth.

Given the uncertain times we’re faced with and the climate of fear being propagated by the press mongrels from around the world, Gerhard gave an inspiring address to the audience. It’s a fantastic example of the power of positive leadership – something lacking in political leaders everywhere at the moment. I’m going to upload the opening remarks of Gerhard to the Livescribe website and make the file available by invitation. If you’d like to listen, post a comment and I’ll add you to the access list on Livescribe

Three of the presentations really stand out as being incredibly valuable and I’m extremely happy to have captured them:

1.       Malcolm Rees – Global Head of Sales for DHL Express. Managing a sales group of 6,000 is not without it’s challenges and Malcolm gave a really interesting, detailed insight into how he extracts maximum performance from his global team

2.       Mary Delany – CSO at CareerBuilder.com. Mary chaired a panel discussion on Coaching Salespeople. Her opening remarks were a real highlight of the conference and she went on to chair a very interesting panel discussion on coaching.

3.       Neil Rackham – Author of SPIN Selling. Neil is one of the founding fathers of modern sales leadership thinking. Neil’s comments were very interesting an quite an inspired take on the current situation we’re all facing.

The audio is a bit scratchy at times, primarily as I was on a noisy table, but overall, the quality is sufficient for someone to create transcripts if required.

Sales Leadership Conference

I’ve just arrived in Chicago for the Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference. I came up from Australia back in March for their Las Vegas event and found it so relevant and informative that I’ve made the effort to come back for this event.

The agenda looks really interesting and I’m pleased it’s got a strong focus on leadership and culture. I spend a lot of time on these two topics as I find they are always at the heart of the issues and challenges that we are engaged to deal with for our customers. I’ve noticed that Sales 2.0 seems to have really taken hold in the US, but is still virtually unknown in Australia or APAC for that matter.

This event kicks off two weeks in North America for me. I’m hitting Atlanta, Boston, and San Mateo also – speaking to a range of vendors and potential partners. A number of these are really exciting and represent the opportunity to work with some really smart, innovative people.

Hopefully I’ll have some downtime to catch up with my buddies in Boston, maybe catch a Patriots game and get re-acquainted with my good fried Sam Adams.

The Role of Social Media in a B2B Sales World

I noticed a really interesting post over on SalesBlogcast – Doyle Slayton’s sales blog. The post introduced a question from a member about the emergence of blogs and social media for sales professionals.

I posted a response as this is a really interesting issue and one that I’ve been spending quite a bit of time researching and trying to get my head around. So much so that as I’m now in the US for 2 weeks, I’ve made contact with a number of thought leaders in this space to try and get a better feel for this and what we should all be doing.

Personally I’m very excited about this direction and I’ve been talking to our customers and prospects about this trying to get it onto their radar (with some success). I love researching my prospects and customers and using this information to give myself an edge – I guess that’s come from years and years of competing against much larger foes (like Oracle and SAP) – timely relevant knowledge was our competitive advantage and we’d spend hours looking for facts and building this information into knowledge. What we’re seeing now is the power of this technology to do that for us. It’s like an application of neural network technology in a way that sifts and organises information en masse.

Interestingly, I feel we’re in phase 2 of this revolution. The first phase started when Google really got going. Google started the information overload Tsunami and has now swamped us all. What we’re seeing now with solutions like Avitage, MindTouch (their Dekki for CRM is quite amazing), Mzinga, Brainshark. These guys and a few others are really pioneering the business oriented application of Web 2.0

Where it then gets exciting is how we can use these new information organisation type services with the next generation of CRM/Sales Automation that we’re now seeing – the guys at InvisibleCRM, and SugarCRM (the open source leader) are starting to apply this technology in new ways so that it’s easier to evolve the role of the sales person. I’ll come back and create another post about the discussions I’ve had with SugarCRM around mobile CRM as this is a really interesting space now that we’ve FINALLY got some useful devices like the iPhone, BlackBerry Bold, HTC, as well as some of the emerging/proposed devices from Google and Sony Erikson.

The question is how quickly will we evolve as sales professionals so that we take advantage of these new generation tools?

How do we time manage ourselves when in most cases the culture is still one of ‘hit the number’ above all else?

Are these tools going to deliver the process improvements required so that we can do more with less and more?

Will these tools actually detract from core skills development in new sales people? Are we automating too much? Relying too much on non-personal information?

I’ve been reading a really interesting book that’s related to this topic – Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by social technologies and the authors seem to address some of these points with their notion that social media is another form of listening (the core skill of any good salesperson).

The question I can’t answer is how the revolution will deal with this…

The Smart Selling Blog

Hi everyone, welcome to the Smart Selling blog. We’ve taken too long to arrive in the blogosphere; but now that we’re here, we’ll do our best to make a positive impact.

We’re going to cover a lot of ground in this blog, from Sales 2.0 to Livescribe smartpens, to Social Media in the B2B world.

I welcome connections, particuarly those of you in the sales leadership/Sales 2.0 space, and social media experts.