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Sales Fundamental: Reliability

Brendan · August 20, 2020 · Leave a Comment

One of the most basic sales fundamentals is reliability, the simple act of doing what you say you’re going to do. You could also argue it’s the most obvious. (It’s also a rule that translates equally well to most other areas of life.) In two words: Be reliable.

Deliver on your commitments. Be on time. Make sure your customer gets the document or other obligation you promised when (or before) you promised it.

Failing to deliver on time causes a cascade of potential responses, from irritation to frustration to resignation to disqualification. None of them are good and all of them avoidable.

When unplanned delays occur that may delay the delivery, give your customer advanced warning. It’s rare that you don’t know well beforehand that a deadline is in jeopardy. Which means there’s seldom a reason not to give your client the heads-up.

Embrace Your Mistakes

Own your mistakes. Be quick to admit an error. A mistake early in the sales cycle is a harder spot to dig out from than one late in the process when you’d had the chance to establish a reputation for professional follow-thorough.

This might cause some hesitation, thinking you can let it slide. It’s better to own the error. Your customer may be disappointed, and even angry, but is ultimately likely to appreciate the update. More importantly, it’s psychically liberating for you almost from the moment you deliver the news. Try it and you’ll see.

The key to making reliability easier to follow is to be mindful, and even cautious, about what you promise and when you promise it. For example, don’t offer to send a proposal tomorrow if it means writing it up from scratch, requires complex configuration help from others, and/or depends on management approval before you can share it. (This is where your Sales Toolkit can help.) Similarly, don’t tell them you’ll be there in thirty minutes when it’s a twenty-minute drive and you’re standing in your bedroom, taking the call in your underwear.

Keep it in Perspective

Most of the time, your client’s expectations are less demanding than your own. Understanding this affords you room to maneuver. Give yourself some cushion. It’s infinitely easier to be reliable, punctual and responsive when you’ve got time to work with. But once you’re committed, do what you can to stick to your promises.

Over time, this sort of reliability becomes habit-forming. And as one of the most basic habits you need to be successful in sales, it makes everything else that much easier.

Sales Fundamental: Got Sales Game

Brendan · August 18, 2020 · Leave a Comment

I like to think I’ve got sales game, but would have never thought of this. Because I’m not a gamer, so I just don’t have that perspective.

Maybe I should.

A friend of mine who is also a B2B SaaS startup founder has now played Age of Empires II with three clients of his. If this is replacing golf for networking, this is one pandemic-induced change in business culture I can fully get behind.
— Farooq Tirmizi (@FarooqTirmizi) August 18, 2020

It’s good to be able to think outside the box. Plus, sales golf has never been a big part of my strategy. Too much time and I’m not willing to spend the effort to become good enough. And it tends to eat into your weekends.

But gaming and sales. During the pandemic. That’s brilliant.

Sales Fundamental: Have a Sales Out

Brendan · August 16, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Early-stage founders need to be actively selling. It’s a key sales fundamental to understand that having a dual founder/sales role means that the buck stops with you. This means your prospective client knows that you call the shots. They know that you have the authority and can commit. You can say YES.

But… there may be situations where you don’t want to. Or shouldn’t. Or don’t know.

Maybe the deal is squirrely. Or you haven’t fully figured out the terms, the numbers, the obligations. Or you’re not sure this is a good initial customer. Whatever the reason, you don’t want to make the call at that precise moment or under those conditions.

As the founder, give yourself an out in sales moments like this. Have an escape hatch that can prevent you from making a bad deal in the pressure of the moment.

It’s smart strategy. Sales reps have to get approval from their VP. The guy on the showroom floor has to talk with his manager. The real estate agent has to check with the seller. You’re the boss, but there will be times when you need a bad cop to go with your good cop.

Plan Ahead

The out can be as simple as:

– “This all sounds good, but I first need to check with the implementation team.”
– “Personally, the deal terms look good but I am going to need to run this by my board / VC / accountant.”
– “I think we’re in agreement and I’m excited about this partnership, but one of my idiosyncrasies is that I like to give myself a day. I’m assuming you’re okay with that, and we can finalize the details tomorrow.”

This isn’t to say you should make a habit of dragging out deals. But as a founder, be aware of this sales fundamental. There will be times when need to buy time before wrapping up a complicated sale. Plan for for it.

Sales Fundamentals: Your Sales Toolkit

Brendan · August 12, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Do you have a sales toolkit?

Because a salesperson’s income is directly linked to their sales performance, being more productive pays real dividends. Which means every increase in preparedness and productivity typically translates into increased sales success, which should then result in greater earnings. (Or it should.)

A ten percent increase in your productivity should result in a ten percent increase in your income. Right?

In order to see that kind of consistent return, it helps to have certain processes and practices in place. And one of the most basic is creating, managing and updating your sales toolkit.

So, what exactly is a sales toolkit?

Basically, your sales toolkit is whatever you customarily need to address any significant aspect of the sales process. You will want this core set of sales resources immediately available at the various stages of the sales cycle. And in a very real sense, your sales ability is made apparent by what’s in your toolkit and how well you leverage each of these tools.

Having the right tools at the ready and employing them effectively is critical to managing the sales process rather than being managed by it.

Your toolkit is the collection of resources required throughout the sales process, from initial engagement through the post-contract phase. This list includes, but is not limited to:

Resources, Materials and Assets to Consider

What goes into a sales toolkit? Think about:

Marketing Materials: sales collateral, press releases, case studies, references, event schedules
Sales Documents: discovery documents, call planning sheets, NDA, draft proposals, boilerplate contracts, technical specs
Implementation Materials: requirements documents, draft Statements of Work, project plans, timelines
Communications: thank you letters/emails, follow up emails, meeting agendas
Presentations: branded PowerPoint deck, standard slides on your company, testimonials
Giveaways: promotional materials like t-shirts, thank you gifts
Anything else that you routinely need in your sales process

These are the resources that should be immediately accessible and ready to edit and share, either when the client wants them or when it best complements your selling situation.

Consider this. You’re no different from the surgeon performing an important procedure. The physician’s toolkit naturally includes an extensive set of scalpels, rakes, sponges, sutures and various other specialized and esoteric tools. These assets are precisely arranged and available in anticipation of any possible medical situation. In exactly the same way, you should have your set of prepared resources ready and up-to-date for the exact moment needed to be called into duty. (Remember, if you’re not able to respond properly when you need to, your deal could die…)

Getting Prepared

Ask yourself these questions. What…

Sales materials do I need at each point along the sales process?
Communications do I use?
Templates can I use to communicate quickly with prospects and clients?
Presentations do I use over and over?

Identify your key resources. Examine your sales process and figure out what tools you already have and what you may be lacking. Gather the good stuff, create draft versions of the documents you regularly need but don’t have, and then move everything else off to the side where it won’t be a distraction or get in the way.

Once you’ve got your set of tools created and collected, it is time to figure out a usable, reliable organizational structure that works for your sales style.

Ask Yourself…

Do you make everything templates and stored documents inside your CRM (customer relationship management) software? This has the advantage of reliability and a record of what has been sent to whom.

Or do you create a logical set of folders in Dropbox or Google Drive? This has the advantage of being accessible, sendable, even editable from your cell phone.

Or are you truly old-school, and paper-based? There’s something to be said for having physical copies of important documents. In an age of infinite electronic clutter, having a paper handout may not slip off the screen and thus out of your client’s attention.

Whatever works for you and whatever your system happens to be, it pays to review it from time to time. During this review, you should add new documents and templates and cull outdated or less effective material to prevent them being a distraction or sent inadvertently.

Remember that the primary objective in developing and maintaining your toolkit is 1) to make you more responsive to your clients, and 2) to make you more efficient. Whenever you can deliver more quickly on your commitments and create a sense of responsiveness and reliability over the course of the sales cycle, you’re enhancing both your competitive advantage and your productivity.

Ultimately, your goal is to compress time and advance the sales cycle (and your position in it) by having the right tools in your sales toolkit when you need them.

The Request for Proposal

Brendan · August 10, 2020 · Leave a Comment

I think there have been four unsolicited Request for Proposal (RFP) wins in the course of my sales career. Four. That’s an average of one every… never mind. Of course, that may suggest that I suck at RFPs. Or maybe the deal was skewed to the favor of some other vendor. (I’m going with the second one.)

Here’s my advice. Apply serious scrutiny to an unsolicited RFP. The unsolicited RFP is almost always a genuine time sink at a minimum or, worse, a chance to spill all sorts of confidential information that could easily end up with the winning vendor. Conversely, I think I’ve won essentially every RFP that I knew of and/or helped craft from the start.

It’s Hard to Walk Away

It’s easy to tell you to pass on a deal, and probably just as difficult to heed that advice. But experience tells me that you’re better off picking up the phone and making a cold call (or taking the day off and playing golf) than investing huge hours, energy, enthusiasm and your karma in longshots.

It’s also difficult to explain to sales management that you should skip this one. It’s not natural for salespeople to walk away from a deal (although there are plenty of instances where they should.) This is especially true when the request comes to you thirty pages thick, asking for prices and promising the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship. Alas, that beautiful relationship is probably with the vendor that helped them write the Request for Proposal.

This is a lesson I was fortunate to learn early in my sales career. Here’s the scenario. AT&T was looking to launch a new initiative in a matter of a few months, and the opportunity promised to be enormous. We’d been invited because we had a reputation for being good at large-scale, systems integration efforts. Beyond those capabilities, we didn’t have any particular competitive advantages that we could emphasize. But we responded because at this particular company “That’s what we do.”

The Final Deliverable

We proceeded to amass a team to develop the response, answer all the questions, prepare an extensive budget and get it all packaged up for delivery. The final deliverable was beautiful, formatted and bound, and as professional as a proposal could be.

But I didn’t have a good feeling about it. Our costs seemed ridiculously high and our execution times long relative to what I would have expected, or what the prospect had outlined. Regardless, as the salesperson of record I dutifully submitted it a couple hours prior to the deadline.

It was the next day when I got the call from the customer, who it turned out was an outside consultant tasked with the vendor evaluation process. There was a noticeable distress in her voice as she asked me about our response. I answered her questions over the next couple of minutes, during which she seemed to relax. I then asked what was concern exactly, to which she replied with surprising candor. “Your response was four times higher than the next highest vendor response, and we were worried that we had missed an important step in our rollout strategy.”

Nope. They hadn’t. We just weren’t a good fit.

A Better Strategy

When you get that unsolicited Request for Proposal, figure out if you’re a real fit. Maybe you need to respond, even when you know it’s wired for the other competitor. Sometimes it makes sense to do so if only to help the customer bulk up the responses or as an opportunity to make this prospect aware of all your capabilities.

In the latter case, it’s often an infinitely better strategy to redefine the response and solution in such a way that it forces the customer to think differently about the problem. They ask for A, B and C, but you come back with a custom proposal and solution that puts your offering in the best possible light.

This approach should require less time and resources for you and your team. That’s because you’re drawing from existing internal resources and don’t have to adhere to their proposal format. You still look thoughtful and responsive, and perhaps provided some valuable consulting. But your renegade approach might cause them to rethink the project scope. Maybe they even scuttle the RFP process, prompting the client to ask you to come in under new circumstances to talk.

The unsolicited, surprise RFP (or its close cousin, the Request for Information) is usually a low probability shot. It’s a Hail Mary. And as much as we love watching that big hopeful but desperate pass into the end zone, it seldom ends in a touchdown.

And when is comes to the Request for Proposal problem, it’s not a strategy.