I was with one of my major customers last week starting another programme with a new team to our company when as part of the introductions the sales manager of the team read out 7 emails the company had received, unsolicited, from different customers.

They Were Compelled to Write
It seems these customers felt compelled to write in to express their delight and thanks for the way the company had handled the sales process. Apparently each sales rep had managed to involve their prospect like no other competitor. The customer found the process so rewarding that they just had to write in and say what a pleasure it had been, what a difference it had made to understanding their needs and to say the process was a great differentiator… in what is a very competitive market.

The sales manager told his team that each and every sales rep mentioned had been through our training and had taken to heart the process of involving the customer… each had taken them through the Business Imperative… and each were rewarded with the order.

The Difference that makes the Difference
I don’t think it can get better than that… when your customer’s customers praise the result of your work… everyone feels good! I have said it before… the Business Imperative can be the difference that makes the difference… and you can download a free copy from here… but only for a limited time.

I have had up our site for the last year three eBooks for free download. Qualification Analysis, Business Imperative Analysis and the Buying Process. Interestingly the Qualification has had twice as many downloads as the Business Imperative, yet the Business Imperative has been the greatest differentiator in the way people sell. This example is the typical response… other customers of ours have had similar experiences. Some of our customers’ customers have been to our site and downloaded the Business Imperative because they want to use the process for their own internal projects.

Limited Availability
If you wanted to have a free copy of the tool then please feel free to download it. As mentioned we have had the three tools up for free for the last 12 months but we will be stopping this free access soon. We will be updating the tools and posting new ones, but we will be making a small charge for each download… it seems our kids want presents for birthdays and Christmas!

However, if you have already registered or register now… “Get an email when the next eBook is available”… then you will continue to receive our eBooks for free as they are released. This registration will be taken down when we revamp this part of the site… so register now… otherwise feel free to contribute to the kids’ present fund!

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Great sales people hit (and exceed) their target.

Great sales people maximise their commission.

Great sales people stay great by constantly looking to expand their knowledge.

Focus - our opportunity management software, has always helped sales people achieve the first two points. Now we have developed a series of videos and slide shows to help you better understand how to maximise the value of Focus, and achieve the third point!

Our Learn more about Focus area shows you how to get started with, and the most from, Focus, as well as teaching how to apply our sales-methodology. The training videos are free to view, and we have more advanced subjects planned for the near future.

Check out all the focus & sales methodology videos here

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I have written about it before, I write about it now and I will write about it in the future… it’s that important. I see the evidence from the people that I coach… using the Business Imperative analysis significantly increases their chances of closing the deal. So what is it?…

I always talk about the three main elements of being able to successfully forecast the closure of a deal; Need, Value and Influence. However, like most things if the preparation is correct, the foundations sound, then you have a much better chance later on in the sale when you are looking to close. The foundation of the complex sale is all about understanding the Need – why must the customer buy? Knowing ‘why?’ and being able to describe the reasons to your customer leads to two key benefits. First you increase the customer’s level of trust in you; and second. you put yourself in a good position to influence the final buying decision. As we all know, people will only buy from people they trust and selling is about having the right level of influence without which you are more than likely to be outsold, therefore these are good benefits.

However, answering ‘why?’ a customer must buy may not, in itself, be enough. Unless agreement is reached on a further question – ‘why now?’ - there is every chance that budget considerations, a change in business environment, or even a change of strategy may force the sale to be delayed or even cancelled. So, what’s the difference between why a customer must purchase and why a customer must purchase now?

Let’s imagine we’re selling into the IT side of an organization. You answer the ‘why?’ quickly and easily: they have outdated equipment that is having a detrimental impact on the services they’re providing internally. Unfortunately, the head of IT, who clearly supports the need for a purchase, is not in control of the company budget. Spending is controlled by ‘the business’. And ‘the business’ has a number of competing claims for finance. In a world of unlimited budgets, providing a simple reason for ‘why?’ would almost certainly be enough to bring your proposal to close. In the real world of closely-monitored spending however, ‘the business’ will release funding according to priority. That means that any proposal that you create must convert a need for your solution into a BUSINESS IMPERATIVE. Taking our IT division example, ‘the business’ must be presented with evidence that failing to purchase would cause severe problems or that a purchase would lead to significant gains. When documenting the business imperative, it’s important to speak in business terms: the best articulated business reasons have the greatest chance of winning budget.

In the complex sales, the customer (the group of people inside the organisation who are looking for a solution) would normally also have to make an internal sales pitch in order to secure funding. However, they often make representation for the technical reason for the solution without being able to fully articulate the business reasons. Therefore, completing a Business Imperative Analysis and sharing it with the customer also helps the customer to present their case internally and in so doing helps secure funding.

Our business is helping sales professionals hit their target and make money. So we get to see a lot of sales campaigns and without a doubt most of the professionals improve their chances of winning when they focus the initial part of their campaign on the Business Imperative.

You can download a copy of our free Business Imperative ebook here. Read it, understand it and apply… it really is the difference that makes the difference!

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How many accounts do you look after? How many of these require a strategic account plan? Are you based in the office or at the client’s office? What are you looking to achieve from developing a strategic account plan? In my experience, many If not all of, the books on strategic account planning go in to far too much detail for most sales people. In a previous job I had to design and deliver strategic account planning to a number of sales people in a large telecommunication company. My client had read up on the matter and wanted to jointly develop a SAM plan for the company. They saw the implementation of SAM plans as key to getting more out their customer base.

Even with desperately trying to get them to reduce the content of the plan, the resultant program was overkill, the plan was too big and everyone had too many customers to deal with to find the time or inclination for strategic account planning. If you have one account and you are based at the client’s site along with a whole team of people from your company then you probably have the relationship and the account to make strategic account planning worthwhile. Otherwise you need a scaled down version of the strategic account plan. You need something light and manageable and something that is going to add value to both you and your client.

We see account planning as a process of proactively identifying areas of the client’s business that you can add value. The client reads the plan and should be impressed with what you are looking to do for them. Therefore, it needs to be written with that in mind. Our Account Plan template is as light as we could have got – 4 pages plus the relationship analysis map – more detail can always be added. In addition, depending on the number of accounts you look after and what you are looking to achieve you may also need to move above account planning and look at territory planning. Again we have simple tools for this, ones that sales people find easy to use and they provide great benefit to them.

In summary, my experience says be careful that strategic account management is not overkill. The lighter, simpler and easier you can make it the more benefit it will deliver.

If you want a copy of our Account Plan template or Territory Analysis then feel free to contact me and I’ll email you a copy.

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Focus - our opportunity management software which helps you hit your target - has hit version 1.1.3. This new release of Focus has several enhancements designed to make managing your pipeline of deals even easier.

We have listened to your feedback and comments, and have responded by implementing your most common requests. The enhancements to Focus include:

• Increased flexibility for period dates. setting flexible period start and end dates allows for increased control over your pipeline. Feedback from our users was that periods are not always set to match calendar months, Focus is now able to mirror the way you need to work.

• Enhanced pipeline reporting. We have improved the reports found within Focus (select ‘report’s from the Focus menu) to be more user-friendly and more relevant. We have also resolved a bug within the ‘To-do’ reports. Available reports now include:
  • Summary pipeline report
  • Summary pipeline report (including lines of business)
  • To-do report
  • Deal profile report

• Revised qualification statements. We are constantly looking at refining the methodology which powers our Focus pipeline, and as such, have improved the quality of the built-in qualification statements. The result is a more logical flow to the qualification process, which results in a better quality of deal qualification for you. (Remember, you can always create your own qualification statements tailored to your exact needs by selecting ‘Tools > Pipeline Manager’ and clicking the ‘qualification tab’)

Click here to download a free trial of Focus 1.1.3.

Upgrading from version 1.1? We have improved the activation process in version 1.1.3 to make it simpler and resolve issues that users where experiencing with corporate firewalls. If you have Focus 1.1 and would like to upgrade to 1.1.3 - please contact us and we’ll be happy to send you a new activation key for Focus.

We listen to and enjoy receiving your feedback - please feel free to send your comments (good or bad) to focus.support@firstborder.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

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Sales are the life blood of all organisations. If you don’t sell, you don’t eat. Therefore, when it comes to investment sales get a fair chunk of the spending. If you like spending, then there is no better way to invest those hard earned dollars than to throw them into a corporate CRM system. To steal a few words from a great man… Never in the field of sales has so much been given, by so many, to so few. It’s mind boggling the amount of money that is spent year after year on CRM systems and for what return?

I’ve just received an email flyer from salesforce.com looking to drum up interest in their products – the very first bullet point they list is… ‘Implement a solution your people will actually use’… and there we have it, from the horse’s mouth… the problem with CRM… it’s not really used. Why is this?

The people who buy CRM are the top dogs; they control the budgets and have a thirst for information. They believe the all encasing CRM philosophy is a great way to go. It is claimed by those who peddle CRM that all departments within a business, including finance, human resources, manufacturing, R&D, logistics, support and sales benefit from CRM. Here is the problem; it is all things to all people. No ownership. It reminds me of the story about Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody….

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done!… ownership of data in a corporate silo of information is always and will always be a problem. MRP, ERP, CRM, Knowledge Management Systems all suffer from the same problem.

I had a conversation a couple of years back with the UK sales management team of a very well known global company. This team were several layers of management above the field sales guys. This company had implemented Siebel and were very proud of what they had achieved, but these guys admitted that they did not have all the sales information in the system, however, they had enough. I made the mistake of saying that their role was to improve sales, no was the reply, our role is send sales numbers to the states and with Siebel we can do that! Unfortunately they meant it.

So this leads me to my next question… Is the objective of CRM to help sales reps hit their number or to supply sales data to all other departments within a business? Notice I did not say to improve sales, rather to help sales reps hit their number. There is a very important distinction between the two.

At the end of the day CRM requires sales reps to maintain it, yet CRM delivers the least value to sales reps, everyone else may think it is great, yet the guys who are expected to keep it updated are the ones that get the least from it. CRM does very little to help the sales guy achieve what they are paid to do… hit their target. Is it no wonder they don’t like using it, all pain for no gain.

Now, while the market is buoyant sales targets are generally met. Sales look good. There’s no problem with sales, sure we could improve, but overall there’s no problem with sales and so that CRM system must be doing its job. Well, there’s a downturn coming and when that hits the flaws in CRM will show even more. So, what will be done to ride the storm? More training or maybe hire the best, get rid of the rest or then again maybe invest more in CRM or if none of that works change sales management. If nothing is done, sales management will be changed. The worst thing to do would be to invest more in CRM and here is why…

CRM does not hep sales reps to hit their number and it’s because CRM is all things to all people and consequently the focus is not on hitting the number.

CRM does not reflect the way in which most corporate sales are achieved. First of all, CRM systems are silos of data within the organisation. There are even silos within silos. Feed it at the bottom and report it at the top. Effective selling is not achieved in silos. It is often not even achieved using resources from just within the same organisation. There is a whole sub culture working together to get the job done and all this is outside of any system.

CRM’s claim to fame for sales is the corporate pipeline. Corporate pipelines are so yesterday…. first of all the steps in the corporate pipeline are wrong, the pipeline is probably factored which is also wrong, it doesn’t reflect reality and there is only one instance of the pipeline and that is also just so wrong. It’s time to move on to something that does the job.

CRM does not provide help in how to close deals. Following the steps in the pipeline is not going to do this. Recoding who you are seeing, what you have done and what others think you should be doing does not help that much either. CRM is a content free database that sucks in data and spews it out in various ways, none of which helps the individual sales rep hit their number.

Having spent most of this post bashing CRM, I should make it clear that I’m not saying CRM is wrong, it’s just not right for helping sales reps hit their number. Following this statement, the next question has to be… so what is right?… and the answer to that question is that you are going to have to wait and see. The answer is radical, different and turns the whole subject of systems on its head.

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Start with what you are trying to achieve. It has to be more sales. CRM was developed and sold on the basis that it will help generate more sales. Looking after the customer will generate more sales. CRM was going to do everything for everyone – and I think it has ended up doing very little. However, it has done very well for those that sell, implement and support it.

If we are going to have something new, and please don’t call it CRM 2, then we need something that is going to deliver value to the sales professional. Give them something that will help them do their job, rather than something that hinders them in their job. I think that you will find the companies who develop and teach sales methodology and process will develop the tools that will be engrained in methodology and process. This has already started and it will pick up pace. The advent of Web2 technology will allow rapid development and deployment. Real tools that will help real salespeople do their job.

Rather than look at the organisation as a sales entity, the individual sales professional will be the entity – everything will be focused around helping the individual achieve their goals. The way that management review sales will also change. The way that the sales professional reports will also change. For example, sales professionals will have to take greater responsibility for forecasting and they will have to forecast earlier. Sales managers don’t need a consolidated pipeline; they need a dashboard of individual forecasts so that they can initially focus on the individuals who are forecasting a miss. Consolidated pipelines rolled up to top management will be a thing of the past. The whole area of sales, sales management and systems that support these activities will change.

And yes, the customer does feature. The methodology will help the sale professional move away from product led selling to solution led… away from features and benefits to value… and away from selling at the bottom to selling at the top. Research and understanding the customer will be paramount. The full availability of information from the web will be integrated into these tools. Selling will move from being predominately reactive to proactive – sales professionals will be involved in the buying cycle of their customer a lot earlier than they are currently.

CRM manipulates data; the new approach will be based on information management which will see the advent of collaboration between sales professionals. For example, Business Issue Identification, Solution Discussion Points, Business Imperative, Value Analysis and Competitor Analysis are all good examples of areas where collaboration supported by information management will aid the role of the sales professional.

The last thing to mention… and the most important. The tools that will support this new approach have to be very easy to use, very quick to use and be very visual.

What I have described is already beginning to happen. It’s early days, but momentum is growing.

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There are a number of different reasons, but this is the one that matters…

CRM does not provide any value to the people who have to maintain them.

That’s it, all that work for no return. Billions spent each year on implementing and running CRM systems. Billions of selling hours spent inputting in to systems that do not help sales professionals do their job. Why should they spend all this time for no return? So what do they do, do enough to keep their job and then go off and do what they need to do to earn a living.

It’s about time companies woke up and started providing tools and systems that actually help sales people, not hinder them.

My message is not new, it’s been said thousands of times before, yet companies still keep investing in the hope that they will get the output they want. If you keep doing the same input, you will get the same output. Time to change the input.

The companies that make the change will reap the rewards for being first.

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In our last post Colin stated that Focus may well be the difference that makes the difference.

‘How does it do that?’ I hear you cry, well, we have anticipated just such a cry and have listed some of the features (complete with screenshots) that makes Focus, errr, Focus:

It’s a Visual Tool.
To Manage your opportunities…

Focus Dashboard.
A Visual performance indicator…

Minimal Data Required.
For Quick and easy updates…

Drag & Drop.
For Quick and easy updates…

Optional Deal Information.
For increased control…

Deal Plans.
For total control…

Reports.
For easy sharing…

Filters.
For easy review & sharing…

Panels.
For easy viewing and updating…

See how these features work on our new Focus features page.

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It’s a little later than we had originally hoped - which seems always to be the way with software development - but I’m happy to say that Focus is now ready. Early adopters are giving us some extremely positive feedback and, although this is a tool aimed very deliberately at the individual sales person, we’ve been getting some serious interest from large companies looking to use Focus within their sales teams. The beauty for some of these companies, of course, is that because Focus is very much an individual’s tool it is priced for individuals. That means sales teams can introduce the tool with no impact on the departmental budget.

So, whether you’re a member of a large corporate sales team or a sole operator, download Focus now and see what a difference it can make to the accuracy of your sales forecasts, how it can show you the deals to work on to make your target for the period, and, for those of you working with commission plans, how it can maximize your commission at the end of the period. It’s free to try for 30 days - so give it a go!

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