Introduction to Sales - Part 3: Research

A friend of mine is starting a commission only sales job and he asked me to help him with getting started. So I thought I would share my insights to him and ask for any feedback from the people out there. This series of posts will focus on an introduction to selling and how to get started from a zero base with no previous experience.

So you've started in sales and you know nothing. Nothing about your product, nothing about your customers, nothing about your prospects, nothing about your competitors and nothing about your market. If you're lucky your one-week induction course covered some of this.

Unfortunately while many companies teach people how to sell and a bit about what their products they don't give them a guide to or an option for 'research'. This is quite common - "the best way to learn about your market is to make some calls". And that's true - that is literally the best way to learn about your market. But there is a good way to get a head start and make your first few calls effective - research your product, competitors, market, industry and target clients. There is such a thing as being over-prepared, and you can spend so much time researching that you never get around to making a call. But whilst your employer might throw you in the deep end, you can do some research on your own time.

First of all find out how big your competitor base is and how your industry sector is split up. Find your top 4-5 competitors on a large scale and your top 4-5 competitors in your market niche. What are their "USPs" (Unique Selling Points)? How do they separate themselves? If your biggest competitor is market ignorance what solutions are people using now that yours could compliment or replace?

Now learn about your target market. Who is the best person to speak to in each of your target companies? Is it a C-Level Exec? Is it a manager? A director? Are there external 3rd party suppliers they might use that could use your services? When you know who the target person is find out where they go to get information about your product? Are there conferences they attend? What are their biggest pain points? Where could they generate more revenue or use cost savings? Is there a list somewhere or a director of companies in your target market? Can you visit business parks or office buildings and write down details of what companies are there?

Speak to your product and services teams and find out more about your product. While you're at it speak to marketing. And then search your product online and see what people have to say about it. Find out what the best and worst features of your product are. Can you frame negative features in a good way? E.g. because it's known to fail mention how you have an outstanding technical support team. Now how do these features benefit the customer?

List the key benefits of your product as an expression of what is important to your prospect. If you are speaking to managers they need to look good to directors. If you're speaking to directors they need to look good to the C-Suite. If you're speaking to the C-Suite they need to look good to shareholders. If you're speaking to shareholders they want the business to be profitable. How does your benefit help your target person achieve their goals?

Now that you've done this research you can be prepared to answer a lot of questions from potential clients and hopefully highlight the benefits of your product to the point where they will meet with you and eventually buy from you.

Read Part 2 (Go-to-Market Strategy)

Read Part 4 (Making the Sales Call)

Government IT Projects

In reading this article "Ombudsmen Lashes Out at Inept [IT] Projects" the first thought on my mind was the typical reminder of inefficient government bureaucracy and red tape.

Then I remembered the recent failure by Harvey Norman to implement SAP for a second time. It was a Multi-Million dollar project that had to be scrapped for a second time after it had already cost the company large amounts of money.

And it occurred to me - large scale IT implementations are difficult. It doesn't matter if it's a small company, a global business or a government department; it's hard no matter what. The difficulty of the execution is simple - IT systems are emergent. Large amounts of complex parts interact with people (further complex parts) and come together to form something that is often greater than the sum of its parts. The best IT solutions are ones that have been built and then re-build from scratch or started off simple and gradually had more components added. Unfortunately for businesses that rely on IT infrastructure to do business that's just not possible.

So why does the government get so much flack for failed projects?

The question more related to this blog - how do these expectations relate to selling solutions into the government space? Often this results in long tender and bid processes with multi-faceted multi-vendor solutions required to solve horrible regulatory restrictions. Yet government tenders are often a lucrative source of income for companies large and small alike.

I think that with a truly tailor made IT solution it could be possible to streamline operations in all government departments and deliver a solution that can actually remove red tape. The big question, how do you approach such an entity with the idea of real, practical change?

Introduction to Sales - Part 2: Go-To-Market Strategy

A friend of mine is starting a commission only sales job and he asked me to help him with getting started. So I thought I would share my insights to him and ask for any feedback from the people out there. This series of posts will focus on an introduction to selling and how to get started from a zero base with no previous experience.

There is a good chance that if you’re new to sales you have little-to-no control over the overall sales strategy for your territory. In my opinion this is a massive shame. People who are simply given a list of clients to call or worse a copy of the yellow pages or an internet connection and told to “go get-‘em”, are in a terrible disadvantage to people given guidance and strategic direction. Sure you might be taught tactics like ‘how to close’ or ‘how to get past the gatekeeper’ or ‘offer a value proposition’, but these things mean nothing long term and don’t help with the big picture.

But even as a novice you do have control over how you’re going to go after new business. The problem is strategy takes time to implement and if you need to get quick wins on the board to avoid getting fired you might not have the time.

As a recruiter I’ve been tasked to find people who can develop a “go-to-market” strategy and then execute it. The one thing I’ve learned from this is the difference between a Salesperson and a Business Development person. It is the fine balance between long-term goals and quick wins. The things below are what I’ve learned from the people who have been successful in their industries.

The first element to strategy is “brand”. Does the company have a brand? Do you have a brand? You need to become an expert in your field, working for a company with expertise in the field, providing a value add product or service to your clients. The best way to convey that is with a consistent corporate identity. Marketing Collateral that looks the same as your website, that looks the same as your business card that looks the same as any formal documents (briefs, proposals, etc).

With your personal brand you need to have a solid LinkedIn profile, a solid bio on your company website and an ‘elevator pitch’. This great article at the Harvard Business Review covers how to have a good elevator pitch http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/pitch/. This is the pitch you use when someone asks ‘what you do’ and even when you are making a sales call. My ‘Pitch’ as designed in their suggested style is: 80 words – 20 second estimated speaking time – 15 repeated words. So mine clearly needs a bit of work to be punchier and make better use of the short time I have, by not repeating myself.

Another aspect of your brand is your ‘title’. If your boss allows you to be flexible with titles consider adopting a vanity title, e.g. ‘consultant’, ‘specialist’, ‘client relationship director’, ‘associate director, client engagement’. It’s easier to call the CxO of a company if you are the “General Manager for XYZ Services at ABC Company” rather than a ‘salesperson’.

Once you have a brand, marketing material, website, etc, you need to consider how you are going to go after your market. Think about this:

• Can you afford, or is it possible to do, a ‘lead generation campaign’? This is a way of getting your name into the market place through marketing tactics that mean clients call you or willingly input their names and contact details into your company’s database (e.g. in exchange for a free sample or report)
• Are you going to target an ‘industry vertical’ and become a specialist in that industry? If you sell widgets to the automotive industry, you need to understand where automotive companies have troubles, where they bleed money, where they can use more efficiency and why your widget can help them achieve that goal.
• Are you going to identify market triggers and wait for those before making contact with a company? E.g. A power failure in a particular suburb means you could call to discuss potential power continuation devices or data back-up, or redundant phone systems, whatever the case may be.
• Are you going to do market research first to find out about the industry and use that for lead generation?
• Are you going to sell a small service or product to ‘get your foot in the door’ and then grow the account with the client later?
• How are you going to map your target market? Will you have online tools with contact information or will you make cold calls to gather your initial information? How will you group and organise prospects? Where will the data be stored?
• How are you going to get referrals? Are you going to set-up a referral scheme or is your product so good that people will want to help each other by referring you?
• What is the maximum size solution you’re capable of delivering? Will you target those clients first because it takes longer to build relationships at that level? Or will you target the smaller solutions to develop a better understanding of the market first?
• How are you going to organize long-term efforts to win prospects? Some deals can take months or years to close. How are you going to keep track of which clients you’ve called and when you should try them again?

The answers to these questions help you to develop your go-to-market strategy. This will help you work out which clients to go after and how you plan to go after them. Picking up the yellow pages or even an online database of contacts and making calls is a tactic – cold calling. What is your strategy around that tactic? Do you plan to get to know an industry sector so well that you become an expert and consultant in that industry? Do you plan to spread your personal brand as far into the market as you can so that you get referrals? Do you plan to sell big deals or small deals? If big, can you sell it? Do you have stock? Do you have the understanding?

Knowing these things before you pick-up the phone to make a call can make a world of difference over the long-term. If your employer discourages you from doing these things then do them in your own time.

Read Part 1 (Inner Game of Selling)

Read Part 3 (Research)

50 Fastest Growing Tech Companies - Deloitte Report

Deloitte released their Fast 50 report for the booming IT industry. Key note from the report:

"Our analysis of the 2011 Technology Fast 50 shows the following highlights:

• The total revenue of the index is approximately $2.2 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 2010
• Half of the top 50 companies are based in NSW, with a further 19 based in Victoria
• Privately held companies dominate the index, with 44 being privately owned and six companies being listed companies, two of which appear in our top 10
• Internet companies lead the charge, with 23 companies being involved in the Internet industry –
• the highest ever total
• Twelve companies are involved in the communications/networking industry
• Software companies follow suit, comprising 11 of the winners, down from 15 companies in the prior year
• 25 of the companies have appeared in the winners’ list in previous years
• Average three-year revenue growth rate for this year’s winners is 209%, down from 425% in 2010."

Here's a link to the full Fast 50 Report from Deloitte.

For me there are two notable companies who have appeared on the report for a few years that don't get as much press attention as they should - M2 Communications and Atlassian Corporation. Two companies with exceptional growth that are real physical companies not based entirely online. Also noteworthy is Anittel who is on the list for its second year with amazing growth of over 1000%! They are the clear winner this year on the Deloitte report and just showcase how much there is to go after in the market.

It's interesting to me that there are a lot of online businesses like iSelect and RedBalloon that are mentioned and seem to be part of a massively growing industry. Meanwhile Software company TigerSpike are the highest ranked software company at #11. Considering the likes of HP and IBM have moved to expand on their software businesses I'm surprised there aren't more Australian Software vendors on there.

In fact the Software lead seems to be coming from foreign companies specialising in BPO and BPaaS. It suggests to me that there is definitely a skills shortage in Australia in terms of strong software development talent and that this is something IT sales people can definitely take advantage of.

Introduction to Sales - Part 1: The Inner Game of Selling

A friend of mine is starting a commission only sales job and he asked me to help him with getting started. So I thought I would share my insights to him and ask for any feedback from the people out there. This series of posts will focus on an introduction to selling and how to get started from a zero base with no previous experience.

Anything that is a "game" has two components. 1) the "outer game" or skills and techniques and 2) the "inner game" or the psychology associated with being successful. Many a tennis match has started 2 sets down and finished 3-2 because the leading player got over confident and relaxed his game. The losing player reached deep down and found the will to come back. Similarly football games are notorious for flipping 0-1 to 2-1 because the winning team gets too defensive and is quickly countered.

Even games like Chess have an inner game. Untimed they can last hours and out of frustration a player may stop thinking strategy and make a quick rash decision. Tournament Poker can last hours and cause players at the end to make large uncalculated gambles just to have the game finish. Many a person during a job search applies for job after job and finally ends up at a final interview with their dream employer and get pipped at the post by a better candidate. It's the will to keep going and start applying to new jobs despite the letdown that's needed to be successful.

The number one thing to look at is your motivation for being in sales. If you're in sales you likely want to make money. Buy the "why" is so important. To the left you'll see Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. As you obtain each level of need and are satisfied you begin searching for the next level of need.

Once you have food, water, a roof over your head you start looking for safety. Once you have long term employment, a stable place to live and a stable life you look to expand your social life. This often manifests in buying the latest gadgets, toys or clothes. Once you have all the gadgets you feel the need to be considered important. Once your self-esteem is at it's highest you feel the need to do something worthwhile.

Do you need money so desperately that you don't know what you'll eat next week? Have you had such a successful career that you're now looking to do something important? Perhaps you've been around the block long enough now you just want to make a difference? At each instance you need to think about what's motivating you to get into sales.

The next thing you need to do is set a goal. If you're goal is "I just want to make a lot of money" you have nothing to aim for. The best sales people are the ones motivated by an immediate goal. "Pay off my credit card", "take that trip to Vietnam", "save up enough money to start my own business", "buy that house outright", etc. Once your goal is a tangible number every sales call you make contributes to your desire to get that number. If you can live and own that number all the hard work you put into making sales will make sense. It's also important to think 1 or 2 goals ahead. Often your immediate need ("pay off credit card") isn't as important to you as what you really want ("take that trip overseas").

The next thing you need to consider with sales is that it is not the most respected profession out there. You tell people you're in sales and they look at you like you need to get a real job. But remember - Sales & Marketing are the only reason the other people in your company have a job. They exist to produce, count, manage or talk about widgets because you're selling them. Never forget that as a sales person you are important and that people rely on you, much as they may not want to take a call from you.

If your company has a product or service that solves a problem or helps generate profit or achieves a goal then you are selling a solution. People love to buy but they hate being sold to and it's important to remember that when you cold-call or visit a prospect. If the person on the other end isn't receptive it's them that's missed out on an opportunity to save money for their business or to have a problem solved. If the product your selling is good then it is useful to someone - and your job is finding that someone and convincing them that it is worth it.

There are far more sales people out there than you would imagine, and they're making sales from $20 to $200,000,000. So there are prospects out there willing to buy. You just have to work out how to get a hold of them and convince them it's worth spending their money.

Read Part 2 (Go-To-Market Strategy)

Is Ninefold the only REAL Cloud provider in Australia?

Cloud has become a bit of a ubiquitous marketing term, rather than a practical term describing a real IT service. If anything accessible over the internet is 'in the cloud' then I've been accessing my personal e-mails 'on the cloud' since Hotmail and I watch videos 'on the cloud', I even read my news 'on the cloud'.

A company offering their own software suite aaS (as a Service) and calling themselves a 'cloud provider' (e.g. salesforce.com) is definitely jumping onto the bandwagon. When recruiting high-level candidates we often do personality testing which is accessed through a web-based applications and we get charged per-use, yet you don't see them calling it 'Testing as a Service'.

Then we get to the big vendors like CSC, Fujitsu, IBM, etc who offer on demand hardware and software, even the entirely ambiguous 'Platform as a Service' layer. They charge on a service model and allow burstable usage. Yet there's one problem, you can't approach one of those companies and get them to (almost) instantly provision a server for you, use it for a few days or weeks (or hours) for a project and then switch them off. With those vendors you are locked into multi-year contracts (often up to 5 years).

They also offer virtualised hardware and infrastructure hosted in their data centres which you access over the internet and instead of dedicated managed services or IaaS they call it 'Private Cloud'.

Ninefold on the other hand have this on the other hand have this on their website (http://ninefold.com/pricing):

Compute Micro 1CPU, 384MB RAM $0.002  hour

Similarly, Amazon have this on their website (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/):

Small (Default)  $0.12 per hour

 This is the ability to access servers in a truely elastic and expandable way. Imagine having a large scale project and being able to 'rent out' a virtual server for a short period of time to achieve your goals and only pay for the amount of time you need it? It's accessible over the internet, it's burstable to as much as you need and you don't need to purchase any equipment. This is what "Cloud Computing" is meant to be.

But is this what businesses really need? Many want to completely eliminate the "tech guys" from their business and have that handled all off-site so they can focus on their core business. For the average business Ninefold's solution may be too complex and they would prefer to have less flexibility but have it handled by an external company. So should we abandon the 'cloud' tag, or should truely elastic services be given a different title?

EDIT: On the Australian IT Industry Group someone pointed out ITonCloud (http://www.itoncloud.com/) to me. They offer month-to-month Managed Desktops and Hosted Applications on top of servers and DRaaS. There are SLAs in place with no long-term contracts. Is this an ideal hybrid between flexibility and managed IT?

3 Tips to Designing a Great Sales Compensation Plan

I read this great article at http://www.entrepreneur.com/ with Tips for designing a Sales Compensation Plan.

It's an excellent starting point as I think many commission and bonus structures are not designed to get the best sales people to join, but to pay as little commission as possible. Eventually someone paying sales people what their worth while engage a headhunter like myself to come along and poach that great talent.

Retaining talent is hard enough and sales has some of the highest turnover around. If you rely on a New Business Development team to generate revenue for your company you have to remember how the best performers are motivated and engaged.

How do you open a sales call?

When making a cold call to a prospect how do you start your call? Let me know by answering this LinkedIn Poll: http://linkd.in/sQlvvO

Top 4 Ways of Getting Past the GateKeeper

As BDMs the last thing we want is to be considered a telesales person. We want to win accounts and have clients that will keep buying from us. So a big question is, how do you set-up a good relationship from the beggining? When I speak to IT BDMs and Account Managers I'm always curious how they go about 'getting past the gatekeeper', especially for C-Level contacts. This 'gatekeeper' interaction can frame the relationship with the C-Level boss and a lot of different approaches are taken.



From everything I've heard here are the top 4 I've heard:

4. Ask for the person by their first name and say nothing else - e.g. "John Please".

• Why it's Effective: This is effective because it communicates to the gatekeeper that your time is not to be wasted. You state what you want and leave a pause for the PA to fill, ideally with "I'll put you straight through".
• Drawbacks: In order for it to work you have to sound quite curt. Usually the PA has good rapport with the boss, and he might ask their opinion about various people he deals with. The trouble is they might tell the boss about how rude you were and it could ruin your chances
• Common Objections: A clever PA will answer this with "He's in a meeting right now, who may I ask is calling?" and then "and what was the call regarding?"

3. Tell them you've lost the bosses mobile number and you need it urgently - e.g. "I'm in the airport and I've lost my blackberry. I need to call John when I land in Sydney, can you give me his mobile number?"

• Why it's Effective: You claim that you already have the bosses mobile number and most people don't like calling someone a liar. You're also in a troubled spot because you need to call the boss but don't have his number and you really need the PAs help.
• Drawbacks: This is a typical one used by people in Delegate Telesales and unfortunately has gotten a bit over-used. Also it relies on the PA not asking you for your information and then telling the boss to expect a call from you - the Delegate people will often give a fake name and do anything to get the mobile. If you want to be that unscrupulous go ahead, but many people prefer not to leave a bad impression on the gatekeeper.
• Common Objections: "Why don't you leave your details with me and John can call you when you land?"

2. Play dumb and ask the PA for their help - There are a lot of ways to do this. You can use a stutter e.g. "J-j-john, p-p-p, John, P-p-please" or "I've just started a business and I'm really hoping to get a hold of John. I'm not sure what the best way to do this is, can you help me out?"

• Why it's Effective: You play to the pity card and you ask for help. It's useful because most people like to feel helpful.
• Drawbacks: You can get given the runaround because the PA thinks you're easy to get rid of.
• Common Objections: "Sorry, John is very busy." and "Why don't you speak to HR/procurement/etc".

1. Ask the PA to help you out and put your proposal in front of the boss - e.g. "Hi Jill, I'm hoping you can help me out with something. I have this solution that could save $1M/20%/Half of your costs and I was hoping to put it in front of John. If I e-mail it to you, would you be able to put it in front of him and arrange a call if he is interested?"

• Why it's Effective: If you can build up enough rapport to get the PA to help you they will usually try their best. Because they control their bosses diary they will make sure to allocate time for your proposal. If there is a real value proposition in there she will make sure the boss hears about it.
• Drawbacks: They say yes to putting the proposal in front of the boss but never do it.
• Common Objections: "I'm sorry, I don't think John would be interested" or "John is really busy at the moment so maybe try another time".

There are two main strategies here a) talk down to the PA so that you sound like such an important person that they can't give you the runaround or through up too many objections, or b) get the PA on side and see if they will help you out.

Ultimately different strategies work for different people. But having known a lot of PAs they all agree - they will put a good word in with the boss if you can get them on the side.

DRaaS - The Easy Cloud Sale?

When speaking to people who sell Cloud Solutions I often ask where they get the most traction. Their answer is invariably the same - Disaster Recovery. Everyone needs disaster recovery, but it's always seen as a blackhole expense.

It's kind of like insurane, when you're paying the premium you wonder why you even bother and when you're relying on the payout your thankful that you have it.

It should be simple - it's data you don't need access to most of the time and it takes up a lot of sapce. Plus no one likes doing boring tape backups and automated backups can fail. And if someone forgets to do the backup you're in a lot of trouble. Why not offload that risk onto a 3rd party?

However, in speaking to a security expert I found out that DR is often a weak IT security point for a lot of enterprises. While companies make heaps of strides to secure 'current' data, virtually no effort is made to provide the same security to their 'recovery' data. So if there are so many concerns out there about how 'secure' cloud technology is, why is DR such an easy sale?

Further this article in the SMH discusses the legal implications of storing your data overseas - http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/cloud/is-it-legal-to-send-your-data-overseas-20111011-1lic0.html

Australian data laws seem inadaquetly prepared to deal with the sudden onset of Infrastructure and Storage solutions in the cloud. Especially when many large companies have their datacentres in the likes of Singapore, do many companies even know where their data is stored?

All this begs the question again, why do CIOs seem so accepting of putting their DR 'in the cloud'?