Having used two metaphors in my opening paragraph… the first to help explain an oxymoron and the second to help explain the explanation, I’ve come to the conclusion that customer service is not so much an oxymoron but an idiom. As we all know, an idiom is a term or phrase whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal definitions of the words used. For example, we Brits often refer to ‘kick the bucket’ as an endearing way to express the passing of one’s sole to another place… or more bluntly… it is a better way to express the word ‘die’. Now, if you took the literally meaning of ‘kick the bucket’ you would think that people go around doing nothing more harmful than putting one’s foot in contact with a water holding receptacle. Now for those not versed in local language a foreigner to our shores may well get into trouble in wondering why the middle of town is full of people six feet under ground having done nothing more than kick a bucket… and why they are buried with 6 feet when they should only have 2 just further complicates things… and having to explain that a grave yard is not a dead centre and therefore these people may not actually be in the middle of town is just a confusion too far… which is about how I felt today after speaking to customer services at British Midland Airways.

I’m a regular customer of BMI… I might not be their best customer but I try and use them whenever I can. I’ve used them so much in the past that I have lots of frequent flyer points… and now I like to use some of these loyalty points to upgrade from cattle class to mildly acceptable class… they call it club, but on short haul is only just acceptable. However having used my frequent flyer points, my loyalty to the airline puts me in a different class to everyone else. One would think better, but it appears cash still talks and those that fund the whole journey with cash… are king… and those that show loyalty and use their points are trailer trash… which of course, trailer trash… is an idiom, but I think more of American origin than British. An idiom can be thought of as a colloquial metaphor… so origins can be important as we will see later.

It all started with booking on line. Booking on line saves the airline money and generally, when it works, it is easy to do. However, it seems that booking on-line and using points to fund some of the journey does not allow you to reserve your seat. If you pay cash then the system will allow you to reserve your seat. My reservation confirmation sent to me by email says that I can manage my booking on-line… but I still can’t reserve my seat. I therefore call the customer service number shown on my confirmation. I called, had to listen to their on line advert about flying to wherever and then wait in a queue for an agent. The line dropped… I called again and listened to the same advert over again, then went into the queue and the line dropped again. I called a third time and listened dutifully to the advert… which is wasting my time and my call money… and went into the queue, and thankfully this time the line did not drop and after 5 minutes I heard the dulcet tones of someone sitting in a call centre in the middle of India. I explained what I wanted. I had to give the booking reference, my name, the first line of my address, my post code, the full details of my itinerary, my date of birth, by which time I was prepared to give my inside leg measurement, what I had to eat yesterday, the mileage on my car and anything else to confirm who I was. Having gone through all this and wasted 20 minutes of my life I was informed that because I use points I need to call another number. It’s not what it said on the confirmation. This man could book my seats… I know he can… he works for British Midland Airways… he has my reservation details on his screen… but could I persuade him to do it… no… unemotional, uninterested, jobs worth. I now had to ring another number and go through the whole thing again, except this time the dulcet tones had just too much of a local accent to be fully understood and so most things had to be repeated as I strained to work out what was being said. It’s not a pleasant experience speaking with someone you just don’t understand.

So, something that I could have done on-line when I booked the flight, which because I used some frequent flyer points – and cash I may add – I am in a different class of customer and the airline wants to penalise me for my audacity of using my loyalty points and therefore restrict me from booking my seat in the club class cabin. When I pay full cash the system will let me do this. I am therefore forced to pick up a phone and spend a whole day confirming who I am only to be told that the person on the end of the number I was given to call will not book my seats as I am a different class of passenger… one of the unclean who has had the audacity to use their loyalty to the airline points… and therefore I have to speak to someone else who has yet to be trained in building linguistic rapport with their customers and wants all the same information again from me  before they will deal with my request. I got there in the end… but customer service… no it is not, rather customer disservice… and that’s not an oxymoron.

Had a similar experience with customer service?… then add to this post and name and shame those corporations who have more customers than they sometimes deserve.

Flyn has been very active within the LinkedIn community on the questions and answers… his appetite for both asking and answering questions is enormous and if this appetite was transferred to food intake he would be one very large individual… although in terms of his knowledge in the sales arena he is already a pretty large chap!

Flyn and I have been exchanging views on one of the questions that he asked and from that little exchange Flyn asked if I would like a couple of posts for my blog… absolutely… Flyn writes quality stuff… so here is the first…

Sales Leadership: How Do You Enable Salespeople?

By Flyn L. Penoyer

Enabling is the second biggest part of sales leadership following and closely tied to creating a vision.

Unfortunately, there is a far more common practice in use by many companies, I call it “sales prevention.” It is not, I think, practiced on purpose but more through a default lack of understanding by line sales managers on how to enable their salespeople.

Most companies think that “enabling” salespeople means as giving them a desk, a phone, some product training, a list of prospects / customers, and a kick in the seat of the pants to get them going.

Many sales managers seem to believe that if you hire a good salesperson, they will know how to sell, and more specifically how to sell your product effectively. Experience tells me that this is unfortunately not the case. It is this fact that makes the subject of enablement so important.

At its highest level enabling represents a “philosophy” more than anything. It is the philosophy of doing for your salespeople the things that allow them to sell more. It is a philosophy of focusing your time as a manager on making the little wheels (your salespeople) spin faster and thus leveraging your own personal efforts.

Years ago I managed an inside sales team at Logitech that sold to resellers. My practices of sales leadership or enabling were responsible for much of our success. Here are some of the things I did that help produce far more and effective calls by the reps.

1. Give them a story to tell –- Don’t assume they know how to sell the product, and more importantly that they know how to sell it well. Develop and document a sales process and develop a story for them to use. Then, train and coach them on it. This enables them to do it better.

2. Take away there “internal problem solving tasks.” — When my team members had a problem with shipping, finance, or any other internal department I had them give that problem to me and I handled it. First, as a manager I could get it done much easier than they could as I had far better leverage than they with other departments. Second, I could do it much faster and save them 30-60 minutes of selling time often more.

3. Run regular sales and communications skills training — I taught my team using the very story I’d developed. I showed them how to apply the principles of the major sales methods to the story.

4. Develop a system for organizing their calling time and efforts — In order to increase the time they could spend in front of customers give them a system. If you watch your folks work, or even better, if you do the work for a couple of days, you will discover that there are many inefficiencies that can be cleaned up. I was making some calls for a client last year and discovered quite by accident a couple of little tricks in my work flow that nearly doubled my calling numbers.

These are only a few of the things you can do. If you look for and focus on how to make your people more effective and efficient, you will find ways to enable them.

One of the great side benefits of such efforts is a sincere appreciation you will receive from your team for your efforts. Salespeople truly wish to do well, and when their manager actually helps them do so, they repay with hard work.

Make a difference; start enabling your team today. For some additional information on sales leadership try the educational quiz on our web site: http://www.penoyer.com/Quizzes/SalesLeadershipQuiz.asp

Copyright 2008, Flyn L. Penoyer, Unaltered reprints are encouraged.

…so I’ll do religion first… it needs to be taken out of sales. There seems to be just too much of it going around at the moment and its damaging people’s wealth creation ability. The religion I’m talking about is that there are too many sales people who must be praying that their deal comes in… they are not doing much else to make sure the deal comes in, so they must be praying. Sure they are busy. Sure they are talking to the customer… but are they talking to the right people, saying the right things… no and no… so they must be praying… what else is there to do?… oh, I know… take control.

That’s religion dealt with and so to the next taboo topic… I believe those in government, and I’m being very parochial here to the UK at both central and local levels, have forgotten that they have customers. Some crazy stuff is going around at the moment for collecting even more tax. Fines for leaving bin lids ajar while waiting to be collected by the bin people, or too much in the bin, or bin bags on the side, or putting bins out the night before… yep central government is pressurising local government to go round giving out on the spot fines for waste infringement… it increases the revenue receipts, but how we are expected to get rid of our household waste… the guy in the sky only knows… but that’s mixing religion and politics. On top of the bins, metaphorically speaking otherwise we will be taxed for leaving stuff on top of the bins, we also have a ‘green’ tax for owning large cars… even though we bought them long before anyone considered them environmentally unfriendly… we seem to be paying for a lack of hindsight on the green issue. However, we now find we need the large cars to put all the rubbish in that the bin people won’t take and so we increase our costs in fuel and while making those extra trips pumpimg even more of the noxious stuff into the sky hoping we don’t choke the big man even more.  How green is that!

When you start fleecing your customers they will get their own back. No matter how bad the fall in revenue, never start fleecing your customer… during the current economic climate the temptation will be there… look at the energy companies. Irrespective of your religion it may be an idea to think about one of the lines from Matthew and Luke’s well known verse… “lead us not into temptation”… make sure the temptation does not become too much. It is something our government should remember as they should also remember they have customers. However, when your customer is also your shareholder, then you really are dumb for fleecing… wait for the shareholder meeting and see who is on the top table after the vote. There is a big shareholder meeting coming up across the pond later this year, ours will be soon, perhaps sooner if the fleecing continues.

“How can small, fast-growing companies avoid hiring mistakes?”

Although it took Bob sometime to read his many replies he eventually got through them and nominated my answer as the best… thanks Bob!

I have copied my answer below as I believe that in today’s economic climate my answer is more poignant then ever…

In my experience the founders are the biggest part of the problem.

The founders can sell because they know exactly what they can do, they have a huge amount of passion for what they do, they are personally involved and they are agile to customer requests… they can change and adapt their offering on the fly… all this can make their proposition very compelling and it’s why they get their early sales. The customers are buying the founders as much as they are buying the products / services.

Now, bring in dedicated sales people and you have instantly lost a major part of your value proposition… they won’t have the same passion, they won’t have the in-depth knowledge of the founders, they won’t be able to adapt on the fly, they are going to have to work a lot harder to make those sales.

So, the first thing the founders need to do if they are going to bring in their first sales people is to make sure they are not part of the value proposition, to make sure their products / services are in a ‘productised’ state that can be sold by people other than a founder.

We now have the first part sorted and the founders are no longer a part of the value proposition… so let’s go hire some dedicated sales people.

Hiring sales people is an expensive business. It is also a very risky for small businesses because they can burn lots of cash for no return. Equally, if you don’t increase sales then the business does not develop –it’s a predicament. The solution is to reduce the risk as much as possible… and here is the next problem. Founders see risk as burning too much cash, so they often buy cheap… which is completely the wrong thing to do as the risk is… not making sales… and therefore to reduce risk they need to buy expensive.

There are a lot of people in sales – not surprisingly there are good ones, average ones and bad ones. I reckon the split is 20% good, 60% average and 20% bad. If this is their first foray into hiring dedicated sales people then they need to hire from the top of the pile. Obviously never hire a bad sales person. Average sales people are Ok if they have good sales management around them, but small businesses don’t and therefore they need to hire the best… these people manage themselves. Buying cheap ends up costing more because you end up doing exactly as you describe… “I’ve observed some companies go through a cycle of recruit > disappoint > fire and recruit again.”

The last thing to look at is what type of sales person is required. New companies need new customers and so account managers should be out. They need hungry door bashers who thrive on outselling the competition. If you are selling products then there are a number of people out there to choose from, however if you are selling services then good sales people are more difficult to find. Getting a product sales person selling services can be disastrous particularly without strong sales management support. For selling professional services you must take from the top of the pile and take people with industry expertise and people with industry credibility.

Lastly, they need to hire people with relevant contacts. This allows them to hit the ground running. People buy from people and there is nothing better than bringing someone onboard who have their own list of ‘suspects’ who know them and trust them… sales come much quicker this way. If you hire expensive, then they must have their own list of suitable contacts… and the best sales people will always have a list.

Therefore, in summary…

1. Make sure the founders are not part of the value proposition.

2. Make sure the offering is in a ‘productised’ state.

3. Hire from the top of the pile – the best and therefore the expensive.

4. Hire the right type – new business, not account management.

5. Hire appropriate expertise… product v services.

6. Hire the ones with their own list of relevant contacts.

That’s it… simple… I wish!

Generally I can’t condone it, but it happens and it will continually happen while the sun still rises in the morning and will only be eradicated when pigs learn to fly. In my experience, the predominate reason for sandbagging is due to poor sales management… not necessarily the sales manager of the sandbagger per se, but sales management culture in the organisation.

I would suggest that those with the wrong sales culture are those with the rising fixation with spreadsheets… it’s often more difficult to manage and motivate sales professionals than it is to manage numerous versions of the numbers. You can therefore plot the decline of good sales management skills to the rise of the use of Excel…. The more spreadsheets in existence the more sales management skills erode. It’s a dying skill and soon no one will be left to pass on the skills to the younger generation. A harsh assessment?… perhaps… but also probably not too far from the truth. It is therefore the dying art of sales management that is leading to the rising tide of sandbags.

However, before I divulge anything I should point out to the uninitiated that sandbagging relates to not putting sales opportunities into the corporate pipeline… like keeping some back for a rainy day… and having cleared that up, here’s my list of reasons why sales professionals sandbag.

1. There’s Only a Pipeline, no Funnel
CRM systems do not appear to be able to handle the concept of a funnel and pipeline. Proof, if any were needed, that Customer Relationship Management were not designed for sales management… however, I digress on to another hobby horse and I know what happened last time I jumped on my hobby horse… where was I?… pipelines.

The pipeline is for real opportunities that have been qualified; the customer will be buying from someone… hopefully you. The funnel is for the unqualified… the sales leads that need to be investigated and developed with the customer to get them to the point where the customer agrees that they need to do something… and at this point they go into the pipeline.

The funnel is an important part of sales management. It’s an important part of obtaining incredibly high forecast accuracy… and most sales organisations don’t have one… because their CRM system doesn’t have one. Now, sales management may recognise this and encourage their team to put early opportunities into the pipeline as 0% or 1%…

“…listen team, we need to see everything that you have, so even if it’s early in the process (sales lead) put it in the system at 1%”

So, the unsuspecting sales rep puts their juicy deal, that they are trying to develop, into the system… it’s not a real deal yet, but the customer is talking and it may develop into a real opportunity soon. However, once in the system the red mist descends on sales management and they see a real opportunity and want to know when it is going to close… sales rep protests that it’s not real and that they can’t yet predict when it will close… the response by management?… offer to discount and see you can close it this quarter… the red mist is very intoxicating.

The sales rep won’t make that mistake again… safer to sandbag.

2. Target Setting
Most sales people are on commission… nothing like stating the obvious… and most have their commission earnings are accelerated if they overachieve… and so as sales people like to earn as much money as they can… they strive toward overachieving. If they overachieve they are happy, and the company is happy because someone else has missed their target, but thanks to the overachievers the company has not missed theirs.

So, with target set the sales rep sets forth and goes out to hunt for business and bring back the kills to feed the corporate beast. There is often a lot of work involved in finding and stalking the prey and the rep wants to be rewarded after the kill… sales reps are not like lions… they don’t want to be the lioness of the pride, to be sent out to hunt and kill, only for the head male lion to take the kill away and gorge themselves at the expense of the female hunters.

Same for sales reps. Why should they do all the stalking and working the deal and getting it ready for the kill only for the organisation to see the kill and then take it into account in the reps target.

If the large deal can’t be closed before the new targets are set, then best to sandbag until targets are known… better safe then to be out of pocket.

3. Commission Caps
As mentioned, sales reps are in it for the accelerators. A deal in accelerators is worth more in commission. However, once a commission cap has been met, then the deal will not be worth anything in commission… the rep will lose money. Therefore, better to sandbag until next quarter than lose money.

4. Bad Quarter
Similar to reason 3. If it’s going to be a bad quarter and accelerators are out of the question, then it can often be more profitable to bring the deals in next quarter if there is a chance of moving into accelerators. So, instead of a bad quarter, have a terrible quarter by pushing the close date back until the next quarter. All good sales reps are allowed a terrible quarter now and again!

5. Protection
This is similar to reason 1. If you declare all your potential deals early and by early I mean they are in the funnel, rather than pipeline, then by definition the fall out will be greater than those deals that have passed qualification. If sales management do not understand the difference between a funnel and pipeline then you could gain the reputation of losing large deals… not a good reputation to have… and therefore safer to sandbag all these early deals until you are sure that they have a good chance of progressing and closing.

6. Unwanted Attention.
Big deals attract upper management like raw meat attract flies in the summer… they swarm all over it trying to feast in the glory of closing the large deal that will be the difference that make the difference. Sales reps will be asked questions by their manager and their manager’s manager and their manager’s manager’s manger and so on until the CEO is calling for his daily update. It’s not the attention that most sales reps crave and so sandbagging until it’s nearly a done deal saves weeks of unwanted attention.

7. Unnatural Acts
In their eagerness to close anything in the pipeline, no matter how far out, sales management will be encouraging, nay forcing, sales reps to offer discounts and other incentives for early closure. This is a bit like signing to buy a house before you have fully decided whether you want a house in the first place. If the rep is then forced to make the offer they know it will tarnish their hard fought credibility… so best not to tempt hard pressed managers… sandbag!

There we go a quick roundup of the 7 best reasons to sandbag and hopefully no one will recognise any of them.

Mad Hatters and Rain Makers
Low and behold, during my search, I find that my position of eminence in the sales world has moved on to new level of accolade… Ian Brodie of Sales Excellence… that guru of the professional services business development world… has kindly described me as mad as a hatter! What brought my eyes to Ian’s post is that he has set up a Rainmaker Resources portal and I’ve been struggling with Rain Making for a number of months now… Rain Making in the sense of Ford Harding’s latest book… and struggling in the sense of finding it hard work to get through… and my latest attempt to finish the book was while sitting in the hotel bar in Toronto during an extremely heavy downpour… was it the book or a natural phenomenon?… any how review on Ford’s book coming soon.

Pure Genius
The segue to my next oracle comes from Ian… and although he reckons I’m as mad as a hatter, he does say that there may well be some genius floating around my ramblings as well… nice to be loved… anyhow… talking about being a genius… Jim Klein of… From the Heart Sales Training… fame has a great new post all about being a pure sales genius. He is giving you the opportunity to part with some cash to improve your sales IQ… and if that was not enough, if you do part with cash… then you will also receive $3,000 worth of extra goodies. You don’t need to be a genius to work out what a bargain that would be!

Raise your Glasses
Continuing the segue theme it seems that having splashed the cash through Jim’s recommendation and received the book and goodies you may still ask WIIFM… what’s in it for me… that’s you asking WIIFM, not me… and that’s exactly what Karl Goldfield, that sales training genius of the startup sales world has asked in his latest post… well the world was asked bust the coached answered… and I would advise you don a pair of sunglasses before attempting to read the post… Karl has a picture up on this post that shows his west coast credentials… far out man!

Reading Nesh’s stuff can become addictive
And the West Coast theme brings me on to Nesh Thompson’s latest post about overcoming addiction… in bad sales practices. Nesh is on a mission to improve sales performance and he gives some food for thought in not only how to give up smoking, but also how we can get past our own addiction of the status quo.

Are You too Busy?
I find the biggest indictment of the status quo is that everyone is always too busy to do something different. You can come on a great training course, but as soon as you walk about of the door and back to your job… busy takes over. Tim Rohrer the sales loudmouth – his words, not mine, has a great post up about this very topic… Busy, Busy, Busy.

When being Honest… is Stupid
Being busy, busy, busy may sound a bit stupid and that’s exactly what Skip Anderson the sales trainer thinks of people who want to be honest. He makes a great point in his latest post…. To Be Perfectly Stupid!… when he talks about the appropriateness of being honest… it’s a must read!

When feeling Stupid… is Honest
And being honest is what Tibor Shanto was doing when he posted his insightful article about Selling to Procurement. And if I’m being honest I would advise you to keep an eye on Tibor’s blog as he gives some great insights, but more importantly I reckon he is an expert on appointments and prospecting… and I know this after having the pleasure of meeting him while I was in Toronto… we had a great evening discussing various aspects of our different businesses and I was left in no doubt that Tibor has what it takes for prospecting and getting appointments… a skill that will become even more prevalent as the bear bites deeper… and what I know about this subject is comparison to Tibor… makes me feel stupid… and so I’ll be reading and learning.

Finger on the Trigger
And talking about prospecting and getting appointments… Craig Elias the master of trigger events… has another great post up reminding us how to get more appointments and shortening the sales cycle by capitalizing on… would you believe… trigger events.

Enjoy!
And my final roundup of the blog world ended up on Brad Trnavsky’s Sales Management 2.0 site dedicated to the art of sales management and a forum for like minded people. He has some good guest bloggers sharing their ideas.

I thought it was time to share my old versus new comparison. Unlike the Padstow Obby Oss festival that is steeped in tradition and has its roots back to the 14th century and has not changed much for hundreds of years the same nostalgic view of things past should not be held out for Pipeline Management.

To improve… to get better… things need to change and if there is anything in the B2B sales arena that needs a damn good change… it has to be pipeline management.

However, before I share my old versus new musings with you I would like to point out that Pipeline Management is also linked to another ancient custom… the quest for the Holy Grail. This legend or piece of mythology (not to be confused with methodology) has its origins dating back to the late 12th century when Robert de Boron, the French poet wrote Joseph d’Arimathe… all in octosyllabic verse… about how he, Joseph that is, used the Grail to catch the last drops of blood from Jesus’ body as he hung from the cross… apparently, as legend has it, the grail has magical powers. Through various routes it, the Grail that is… as legend has it… made its way to Great Britain where some careless soul lost it, or put it somewhere safe and wont tell anyone… people have been searching for the Holy Grail ever since… without luck.

The Holy Grail of the B2B sales world is accurate forecasting… sales directors and managers alike have been searching for years the secret of accurate forecasting… in the belief that once obtained they will be the custodian of ultimate power… they will be in control of their business!

Now, if sales management are looking for the holy grail of sales using the traditional pipeline management methods… then to coin another phrase… they are flogging a dead horse… no matter how hard you flog it, it isn’t going to do any more work… no matter how hard you insist people use the corporate system… they won’t… there are other stronger forces at work that prevent them from doings so… self preservation. Pipeline Management has to be for the benefit of the sales professional first and corporate second… not just for the benefit of the corporate. I’m advocating personal pipeline management rather than corporate pipeline reporting… notice the difference!

So… here are my 22 points of old versus new…yep… 22 points!

Click on the picture to make it larger… it will be easier to read, trust me.

However, even back then I was being advised by some of the team to consider having the application web based… how crazy were those guys… running an application like Focus on the web!!! It would never work… it would probably have been difficult in 2002 to have the app that I wanted… to look good, to drag and drop, dynamic refresh, to have pop-up windows, to be fast… etc, etc… but now it would be easy.

Now everyone is developing for the web… there’s an avalanche of new sites coming out all the time… and I know of one sterling sales enthusiast who is right on top form when finding these sites… my friend Karl Goldfield… the startup sales mentor has just written about one such site – Web2.0 and Sales 2.0 – Salesconx wants to help small businesses and startups.

With this avalanche of Web2.0 applications that are available I’m not saying that I made the wrong decision back in 2002 because we have a great application and Focus – to coin a phrase – does exactly what it says on the tin… which has to be good… but hindsight is a wonderful thing and as none of us are blessed with it the best piece of advice I have found in lieu of hindsight can be found in another friend’s blog… Skip Anderson’s latest post… it’s not too long, so you should be able to weed our the message from the padding!