Selling Power offers up an article that explores reasons for bloated pipelines.  That never happens in sales, does it?  The article - Warning: There€™s a Gash In Your Pipeline - presents some excellent suggestions for why this happens and how to correct it.

Robert Kear, SPI€™s chief marketing officer, observes that the lead generation challenge stems partly from the erroneous view that lead generation is a quantity problem; that the more leads you can get, the better. Instead, he says, the lead generation challenge is about maximizing value awareness with the right potential buyers.

Right.  It is a qualitative issue.  I enjoyed Kear’s solutions offered in the article.  But the last two points truly stand out:

5. Sales process and methodology. Roughly 75 percent of leads generated by marketing never get acted on by sales. And the ones that do get acted on are often selected intuitively, by €œgut feel.€ Reps need concrete processes and methodologies so they can use science, not intuition, to separate the wheat from the chaff and prioritize their efforts. 

6. Individual skills and knowledge. Many salespeople lack the situational fluency to cultivate qualified leads. In other words, when they do get an appointment, they don€™t have the skills to carry out good, consultative conversations. This correlates with the recent finding of CSO Insights that 51.3 percent of companies are converting less than half of their initial conversations into subsequent presentations. And when a rep lacks the ability to move a sale forward from the initial conversation, he not only loses out on that particular piece of business, but on all the potential referrals that might have resulted from it. The bottom line: salespeople must have the situational fluency and problem diagnosis skills to cultivate leads into opportunities.

Perfect.  First, a sales department without a general process is trouble  That is part of the driver behind our recent article - The Structure of a Selling System.  The lack of a sales process feeds into point #6.  Salespeople without a process tend to over rely upon a single aspect of selling (building rapport, influencing, presenting, trial closing, etc.).

“Situational influence” is a clever turn of phrase for salespeople who lack the skills to advance a lead to a decision, whether that decision is a yes or a no.  The worst response from a lead is “I’ll think it over.”  That is a stall that leads many salespeople to chase rabbits down holes without a real chance of closing the deal.

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We’ve referenced this quote before, but JustSell.com has it in their daily email and it catches my eye everytime I read it.

Harvard Business School Professor emeritus Theodore Levitt once said, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.“

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Ok, I haven’t heard of this book until now, but it sounds most interesting - Teaching an Anthill to Fetch: Developing Collaborative Intelligence @ Work. The book is profiled in the BusinessWeek.com article Building a Better Team. From the author:

Teaching an Anthill to Fetch is a metaphor for the challenge of creating a significant level of collaborative intelligence in a system. It applies equally whether it is a team, a business, or an entire organization. The title also poses a question: Is it possible to create change at a micro level that will have s(sic) predictable large-scale effects? In my opinion it is.

I think he is on to something here with the developing Gen Y workforce. They are networked like an anthill - it is an apt metaphor. Here is the description from the article:

Here are some of the most important characteristics of a team with high CQ:

€¢ Is able to share the stress and strain evenly throughout the team.

€¢ Achieves its objectives more through people and less through politics.

€¢ Has a strong network of connection and support between its members. This accelerates learning, enabling the team’s reactions to be rapid and responsive to challenges.

€¢ Looks after its own: Individuals are not left to fend for themselves, and staff retention is high because people feel a strong sense of belonging.

€¢ Is well connected with other teams and with corporate objectives. Like a healthy organ in the body, it knows what its function is and serves the greater good through rough times and smooth.

€¢ Replenishes itself, growing its members, and is constantly learning to better adapt to its environment.

€¢ Displays a strong sense of meaningful participation, which the members are all nourished by.

I’m intrigued by CQ in that it is not common for salespeople to be highly collaborative. The lone wolf mentality still dominates the sales world, but I think that may be changing to some degree. The Rock Star posted on this topic back in July and I think this article goes to the next level of change occurring in the workplace. I believe Gen Y is the driver behind that change.

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Ok, I have been delinquent in responding to Clayton from Salesopedia and his tag of me. Apparently I have to share 8 little known things about me. I’ll give it a try:

1. I am a twin. I have a “younger” sister - I was born 3 min. before her. Still counts.
2. Although I live in Minnesota, I was born in Ann Arbor, MI and bleed Maize and Blue. I only lived there the first 5 years of my life, but it had a huge impact on me no matter what the Rock Star says.
3. I met my wife at work. I was in sales and she was in marketing. We worked together for 6 months before we found out that we were both ferret owners. I had a male ferret named Otto and she had a female ferret named Emily.
4. There is no sport I enjoy more than hockey. It is simply the coolest game on Earth.
5. I have a weakness for reality shows. Even So You Think You Can Dance. Definitely TMI.
6. I have a desire to be a coffee barrista at Dunn Bros. Irrational, maybe, but truly a passion of mine.
7. I’m a dog guy - can’t stand cats. I may get flamed over this, but I had to share it.
8. I once took a yoga class in college to basically meet some cute gals. At the end of the class, we would stand in a circle as the teacher dismissed us. One time I sat too long with my legs crossed and both legs fell asleep. I was right next to a female student I was hoping to impress. I tried to stand up but kept falling down like a French prizefighter. The entire class stared at me as they tried to suppress their laughter. After multiple attempts, I finally stood there like a newborn deer - teetering on my asleep legs as the teacher quickly dismissed us. The gal next to me did not appear to be impressed. In any way. Ever.

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Here is the ultimate hiring conundrum - you complete all of your sourcing and qualifying to end up with one candidate.  That candidate was strong on the phone screen, has strong online assessments and a notable track record of sales success.

The hope here is that he will interview well and there is not reason to think he won’t.  The issue is that many clients are not comfortable just interviewing one candidate . . . no matter how strong the candidate is.

This predicament is one we are in currently.  The candidate is quite strong and has been excellent throughout our process.  He has stood head and shoulders above the other candidates we have run through our process.

Yet, the thought of someone better out there is a seductive one.  A thought that almost guarantees we will need one more strong candidate before our customer makes their hiring decision.

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Since we work in the sale hiring and management arena, we get the chance to see a sales position from both sides - the sales management side and the sales person side.  It is a unique perspective that we discuss often internally.

Like most people, we tend to look at what goes wrong in these situations and we really see 2 items that lead to performance issues within the department:

Mismanaged - Sales Manager side
This problem is quite severe and certainly is the greater of the two problems.  A sales manager who mismanages salespeople has a tremendously negative effect on an entire company.  The most common problem is disengagement.  A sales manager who does not invest time in his or her people is worth little.  I think this is the driving force behind sales managers who want to hire salespeople from their industry.  The hope is that they won’t have to train the new salesperson.  They can plug them into a territory, walk away and watch the revenue roll in.

The polar opposite of this problem is micromanagement.  In most sales manager cases that we see, the manager morphs into the surrogate closer.  They swoop in to close as many accounts as possible at the end of the sales cycle.  Over time, the salesperson develops a crutch where they must rely on the manager to close.  I believe salespeople gravitate to this position for a simple reason - if the prospect doesn’t close, the blame is shared by the manager and the salesperson.  You could call it performance insulation.

Misemployed - Sales Person side
This term gets bandied about but I think it is accurate.  Most salespeople have a decent set of sales skills (though we have found our share of ciphers).  The misemployed issue develops when their skill set is not a match to the position’s needs.  I know this sounds a bit overly simplistic, but you would be surprised by how many hiring managers are grossly unaware of what skills are needed to succeed in the role.

In these instances, experience becomes the hiring hallucinogen.  The fact that a salesperson has experience in your industry does not mean they have the skill set to succeed at your company.  I suspect a part of this hiring approach feeds back into the previous section in reference to the desire of the sales manager to hire someone and have them start producing with minimal, if any, training.

The outcome of a misemployed salesperson is someone who seems to be close to “clicking” but they never reach it.  The salesperson’s performance resides in what Teddy Roosevelt described as “that grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”  They perform well enough to stay on the team for a time, but they are not strong in their role.  The ultimate issue in this case is creeping mediocrity.  Once mediocrity overtakes your sales team, the fix becomes far more difficult.

Both of these performance problems can be avoided by evaluating your current team (including the sales manager) and ensuring that your hiring process is repeatably accurate.  Most stereotypical sales hiring processes are good strategically but poor tactically.  When this happens, sales manager utter phrases like “I know what I want, I just cant’ find the right person.”  Don’t let this happen to your sales department.  Stay in front of the performance problems and keep your sales department growing.

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Some more general points from this morning’s cold calling discussion:

Some other items to consider:

-Be positive - it is only a phone call

-Stand up-your tonality is better, you’ll be less anxious and less distracted

-Don’t get verbal diarrhea

-Have a hook, don’t try to do a data dump

-Qualify the next step - no fuzzy phrases (”I’ll think it over”)

In the end, you need to be able to answer (well) this question from the prospect:

What do you know about our company?

We use a modified approach when phone screening candidates.  We ask them how their skills and experience fit the criteria listed in our ad.  The Rock Star pulls his hair out on some calls since it is obvious the respondent does not recall the ad nor do they have it in front of them.  Since our phone screens are prescheduled, we’re always a bit concerned about salespeople who do not have the ad available during the call.

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I’ve been reading much about cold call techniques this week which is good because I am a lousy cold caller.  An interesting discussion occurred at a networking meeting I attended this morning regarding cold calls.  There are 5 cold call basics to maintain before each call:

1. What does the prospect company do and what industry are they in?

2. Based on quick research, in what areas does the company need help?

3. Based on what you know, what is the value you bring to them?

4. Who at the prospect’s company will recognize your value?

5. What are the other unique aspects your company brings to this discussion?

The point is that any salesperson making a cold call should be able to answer these 5 questions before making the call.  We have encountered salespeople who attempt to build an encyclopedia about a prospect before picking up the phone.  Bad move.  But if you can answer these 5 questions, you will greatly improve your cold calling success.

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I have a weakness for bizarre interview questions so Yahoo’s Oddball Interview Questions was a must read. Apparently these questions are couched as a method for determining if a candidate will fit into the corporate culture.

Right.

Anyway, the article provides more insight into how to handle these questions as opposed to the actual questions themselves. Still, a couple of dandies are in there:

“What would I find in your refrigerator?”

“What did you want to be when you were 10 years old?”

You know, some times just having an open, clear discussion with a candidate will accomplish more than some loaded, oddball question.

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This excerpt is taken from a sales ad by a well-known, national recruiting company:

But you must be sales orientated - it (sic) you have a specific industry or occupational background such as IT, engineering, or whatever that is good but again not a requirement. You must be smart - normally a college grad.

Boy, where to start on that short piece of bad writing. I would not recommend using “whatever” in an ad - sounds like a high school student. I doubt the author’s intention was to state that college grads are the only smart candidates, but you can see how the mangled syntax of that sentence could be misconstrued.

I continue to state that online ads are very effective for sourcing strong candidates, but the ad must be well constructed . . . and well written.

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