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

Social Media Policy – balancing freedom and corporate responsibility

I caught a very interesting article this morning from the WSJ about social media policy. It delved into the issues public companies face with respect to using social media tools and public disclosure/SEC compliance.

This is a topic I’m always asked about when I talk about social media with CEO’s and I think it’s a reasonable question to be asking. I commented earlier this month about Australian Telco Telstra’s recently announced social media policy which was good but I felt they were closing the gate after the horse had bolted.

Many social media experts put forward an overly simplistic ideal that the corporation should just get in and join the groundswell and let the information be free with this sentiment picked up in the article with reference to eBay seemingly putting some boundaries around an official Twitterer:

Some followers think the tougher oversight is squelching Mr. Brewer-Hay’s spontaneous, informal style

This type of mindset is dangerous as it fails to balance the desire to be open and collaborative with real world regulatory demands (such as continuous disclosure obligations).

This collision of ideals is where I feel many social media experts and participants really let themselves down in that they don’t or won’t accept realistic boundaries around the use of social media. If an employee puts information into the community that is wrong or is breaking the law why shouldn’t the company act? What justification is there for this ideal that “sanitising such posts risks hurting credibility with online audiences”?

If you step back from the regulatory aspect, it’s also good business to have a policy in place that reinforces mutual obligations as well as the overall strategy. The US Air Force has a very interesting flow chart that they use to help their employees understand how to engage. As David Meerman Scott discusses in his post, the USAF has a well developed policy that encourages every employee to be a communicator. The USAF’s blog assessment flowchart is something I was very impressed with as it’s a simple but effective tool to help visualise one aspect of a social media policy.

US Air Force Blog Assessment Flowchart

My advice to CEO’s is to focus on getting a clear and simple policy in place and then sticking to it. Get on the web and find examples of what others are doing well – i.e. Dell, IBM. If you find reason to intervene then make sure you do it in a way that is open and transparent. Most people in the community will respect this and appreciate the fact that a company is prepared to be open but is also prepared to be diligent and responsible.

Social Media Policy – Telstra Tries Hard

Telstra announced today the release of its social media policy. Given they’ve been in the Twitter space for a while I was surprised it took them this long to get a policy in place. Whilst it’s good to see a large Australian company formalising how they participate and the obligations upon its staff, aspects of the policy seem somewhat draconian.

Several aspects of the policy (as reported by Smart Company) puzzled me.

Firstly, Telstra employees need to undertake accreditation – or social media training. This seems like a fair request given Telstra probably uses this training to set expectations, reinforce the strategic objectives, ensure the right skills are in place (i.e. can the person spell…)

But after an employee has been accredited:

Employees will also need authorisation from their department head and the company’s public policy staff.

I’m not sure how effective this is going to be in the long run. Does this mean a Telstra employee running an official Twitter account needs to get approval from two layers of management before they can reply to a Tweet? I get the impression that whilst Telstra wants to convey the impression that they are progressive in reality it would seem they don’t trust their staff to be prudent and responsible.This flies in the face of how other large corporations (like IBM, Microsoft, US Air Force) set and manage their social media policies.

I guess this is more evidence of the fallout from the Fake Stephen Conroy saga that Telstra found itself in the middle of.

Salesforce.com – behind the times but applauded by the analysts

Tech Target reports today that Salesforce.com is moving customer service into the cloud and allowing integration with communities, discussion groups, forums etc. Whilst the analysts are (yet again) falling victim to the relentless PR machine that is Salesforce.com what this release actually says is two things.

Firstly, they are way behind the times when it comes to innovation in customer service. What SFDC has announced here was actually pioneered by RightNow Technologies and Lithium around 3 years ago. RightNow Service was integrated into the Lithium community platform providing a complete customer experience solution that focuses the overall customer care experience. So why is it news that it’s taken SFDC 3 years to catch up?

Secondly, they still don’t get this whole social media/web 2.0 space. Their approach so far has been to latch themselves onto other people’s ideas and let hubris take over. I particularly liked the comment from SSPA VP Ragsdale – “They’ve done a good job of latching the Salesforce brand with the FaceBook brand”. Many SFDC customers must be truly confused as to what all this means.

Innovation in customer service (or customer experience management as it is rightfully called) is being done elsewhere. Here’s a good example – Greg Gianforte – not spewing out noise or grandstanding, but actually getting out into the field and talking to real customers, listening to real business issues and bringing this back into his organisation.

Ragsdale rightly comments that as many organisations are new to social networking and many of the web 2.0 ideas and need help understanding how to leverage these ideas and technology components – something we’ve been championing at Smart Selling for a while now.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

I happened across a really interesting article about social media experts and how to differentiate the good from the bad.

In reading the comments I can across Martin Edic of Techrigy. Aside from the fact I thought he was quite within his rights to provide a link to his product (maybe more subtle next time Martin…) it made me click through to his website and have a look at the product SM2.

Social media monitoring is something we’ve had a few customers ask us about and we’ve looked into products like Radian6. We’re actively looking at adding a product like this to our product eco-system to help build out our social media expertise.

I‘m going to give the SM2 product a test drive so I’ve registered an account under our Smartpen business. This will give me a chance to see how it goes tracking some Livescribe keywords. Google Alerts seems able to find 6-10 articles a day on Livescribe so it’ll be interesting to see how SM2 goes.

They also had an interesting blog post on Twitter and the cult of MLM

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.