Is it Really the Sales Person's Fault?

I spent quite a lot of the last week working with a company that has gone through 6 sales managers in less than 3 years. That is a lot of sales managers for a young business with aggressive growth targets!

As we worked with the company it became increasingly clear that while the sales managers had not helped much, there were a couple of deeper issues that stopped the company being able to achieve its sales targets. Basically the lack of sales was a message from the market to say, “You are not offering anything we want, so we are not going to buy.” The sales managers were the unwitting messengers.

This was clearly uncomfortable news to the company we have been working with for two reasons:

• It is normal to assume that a lack of sales from a sales person means that the sales person has failed. The result is usually a high turnover of sales staff with all the associated cost and upheaval to the business that might well have been avoided by getting things right earlier.

• It means that the company needs to look deeper and start analyzing more than just a lack of sales. This is an alarming prospect for most companies, which raises all sorts of issues and risks they would rather avoid.

1   It can be very difficult for a management team, especially if it includes the founders of the business to accept this kind of market feedback, especially when it comes from the people that most managers trust least in their businesses – the dreaded sales punter.

There is no hiding from this issue. If your business is not making sales, it’s because the market you are targeting does not want to buy your products as they stand. You can change the sales folk as often as you want, but unless you change the product, or the way you are positioning the product in the market, sales are unlikely to increase.

However, there is a flipside to this.

In all the years we have been doing this kind of work, we have yet to come across a terminal case. In fact some have been resolved with simple measures that have been put in place in a matter of days.

One memorable case I can think of is a tech company that was struggling to make sales and suffering from high staff turnover. Simply by changing the way it communicated with the market and tweaking the message, which took about 2 weeks, the market perception was transformed. As a result that business increased its sales revenues by a factor of more than 10 in less than a year.

So what is the point of this little blog article?

Well it simply this, if your sales team isn’t delivering the goods, don’t just assume it’s their fault. It may well be and we certainly are not suggesting you ignore that.

But…it might also be something that the average sales person can’t change because they are either not skilled enough, or because it is beyond their pay grade.

As always, I hope this helps and I’d love to hear your views and experiences on this.

Do you really want a big corporate customer?

I was talking to a colleague the other day who owns a small business that has a number of small customers and one very large corporate customer. By far and away the worst payer, most demanding and least sensible customer is the huge corporate, which in reality is contributing nothing to the business except cost and hassle.

This is an area that I have been pulled into many times in the past and in every case bar one, when analyzed properly and in detail the only sensible conclusion is to ‘fire’ the big corporate customer.

In theory having a huge global customer sounds like a great idea. Big orders, little or no risk and so on – the fast track to that Ferrari you’ve always dreamed of.

Sadly it is very often the opposite.

Let me share an experience I had a number of years ago in 2010. A company I was working with ran a seminar with a well known global bank. The bank had agreed to allow its procurement team to tell us the truth about supplying the bank. I am not allowed to name the bank publicly and you’ll see why in a minute.

To a room full of excited and enthusiastic potential suppliers, the procurement team laid out how the bank buys and its tactics for getting the best deal:

• Payment terms were 180 days – non negotiable.
• Contracts could be stopped instantly by the bank, but only on the agreed notice by the supplier – usually 90 days or more.
• Procurement would never stop screwing the price paid down or improving on the terms of service required of the supplier until it was convinced it had just about got the supplier to back out.
• Buying cycles were measured in months if not years on average.
• If a supplier could not supply globally it would not be eligible to supply locally.
• As a business, the bank considered that if suppliers barely broke even on supplying the bank that was okay, because just having the bank as a customer would win them other customers.

It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the reaction in the room from all those enthusiastic and eager potential suppliers. Most of them were shocked and many of them angry that a big player would consider treating smaller companies so badly.

However, think on this. That particular bank had a procurement budget of more than $10 billion annually so its buyers were probably quite rightly focused on big solutions from big companies that would ensure that they had fewer contracts and were able to lever economy of scale in ways that buying from smaller companies just would not permit.

The harsh and unforgiving reality is that it is usually a costly hassle for big corporate business to deal with smaller suppliers and often that is why they shy away from it.

It doesn’t mean you should ignore them, but does mean you need to be very clear in your mind what it is that you want from dealing with them. You need to have a plan and the sense to walk away if the deal isn’t right, because make no mistake, if you don’t then you could finish up with a great business being held back by its biggest customer.

Author – Tim Sandford

You're Not a Marketing Guru?

This article has been bouncing around in my head for a little while. Mostly because I haven’t found time to tell you about the meeting I went to where my client was surprised when I said, "No, I am not a marketing guru."

I have been working in sales and marketing for more than 20 years and enjoyed considerable success in my work as a marketer, but I do not claim to be an expert or guru - I'm still learning new things every day. Then again, how could anyone credibly claim to be an expert when you take a look at the diagram below?

The marketing communications channels shown in the diagram do not represent a complete picture by any manner of means – if I had put everything down, the diagram would have become so complex that it would have been almost impossible to understand.

In the old days, Marketing was much more straightforward with only a few ways to communicate with the market. Now we count more than 60 ways to engage with your market and thousands of individual branded variations in the mix. 

So the question is, how do you get your message in front of your target decision makers and noticed? 

This is where a lot of CEOs, accountants and technicians from medical types to IT entrepreneurs that I’ve met over the years haven’t quite realized yet that it is no longer just about a bit of PR and advertising with a bit of social media chucked in on the side. Its much more complex these days.

In today’s fast moving, connected marketplace, the sheer number of channels available makes it almost impossible to be an expert in all of them, especially some of the more arcane ones.

Setting aside things like the message, its quality, its focus  and so forth, these days our experience shows that a key part of success lies in identifying which of the many communications channels is relevant to your market.

For example, there is absolutely no point in investing a fortune in marketing on Facebook if your target market doesn’t use Facebook as a way of finding out about the kind of products and services you sell. That would be a bit like trying to sell premium beef burgers to vegetarians.

This is something we recommend strongly that you do as part of the development of your relationship with you market - not the selling beef burgers bit. We mean finding out how your target decision makers look for information on the kind of products you sell and concentrate on those channels because they are where you are most likely to get the best return for your marketing buck.

If you do, take the time to do this, experience shows that you increase the chance of your campaigns being successful and generating the demand your business needs - at least a 50 better chance in our experience. 

As for the client I mentioned at the beginning? Well their team is doing well communicating across just 4 channels and generating a much greater volume of enquiries than they had been before using more than 10 channels.

As always we're happy to answer any questions you might have and it would be great to hear your views.

Author - Tim Sandford

(Bye the bye. I'm working with the design guys to publish the full channels diagram, if you'd like a copy get in touch and we'll send you one when its published in a couple of weeks)

The Dangers of Spin in the Internet Age

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I was recently involved in a situation with a colleague where we were considering buying one of a number of products for one of our businesses. As part of this, my colleague asked a question of one supplier (Supplier A) in relation to one of its competitors (Supplier B) and providing supplier B’s web address so that supplier A could answer the question properly.

At this point supplier A was the preferred and my colleague was asking a legitimate question that would probably have resulted in a decision in favour of supplier A.

The response we got from supplier A is when it all went wrong and led me to writing this blog in the first place.

The response from a sales person in supplier A suggested that they were the only credible company and any other company like supplier B was simply a new kid on the block and probably wouldn’t last 6 months. The sales person also went on to make suggestions that supplier B was offering loss leading services and other statements designed to discredit supplier B.

Remember that supplier A had been provided the web address for supplier B – it will be clear why in a few minutes.

On reviewing the response from supplier A, my colleague and I decided to check up on some of the statements made, just to be sure and found the following:

• Supplier B has been trading for 10 full years longer than supplier A – this took two web searches and 3 minutes to confirm.
• Supplier B’s business has been profitable every year bar its first year since it was founded and profits continue to grow steadily  - one web search, two documents downloaded and 5 minutes to confirm.
• Supplier B’s mature business gives it economies of scale that mean it can offer its products and services are lower cost while still being profitable – same search as point two. 

So in less than ten minutes supplier A, went from being our preferred choice to rejected for two reasons: 

• First they tried to spin us with a ‘stock’ answer that had not been researched, had no justification and was materially untrue. 
• Second, despite the fact that we gave them everything they needed to give us an honest answer, they chose to spin and as a result we lost faith in their sales person as a credible, honest person, which in turn meant we lost faith in supplier A as a whole.

Would you make a different choice in our shoes?

When selling it is natural to want to put your best foot forward and ensure your company is seen as the best. However in an age when information is so easy to get online about virtually anything, trying to spin a potential customer is both dangerous and I would suggest unprofessional. You will get caught and these days it doesn’t even take ten minutes.

This is just a recent example of something that so many companies and organisations fail to grasp. In the Internet age, the availability of accurate, information about virtually everything including from finance to customer satisfaction means that spin is becoming less and less easy or credible, especially if it is rushed as a way of addressing a potential negative. Anyone with any experience of social media can reel off half a dozen corporate brands that have made appalling mistakes with reactive spin that have cost them dear.

So what is the point of the first negative blog I have written in years? Well simply this, you can do brilliant work creating a positive business, a positive image and a great product, but it can be trashed in a matter of moments unless you are prepared to ensure that everyone working for your organisation takes the same care with your reputation it can very easily be damaged. 

The good news is that this is relatively easy because it is about process and education to make sure your people know how to manage this properly and keep your business' reputation 'in the black' as it were.

As always I hope this helps and it would be great to get the views and experiences of others.

By Tim Sandford