Tuesday, September 27, 2011

PAY ATTENTION!!!! INITIATIVE, SHOW IT!!! and why am I yelling?

I am sure we have all had that experience where someone asked us to do them a favor and being one prone to be kind we comply and then we get some follow up message that makes you go "really? Did you open the damn attachment? Did you read the damn email?" Did you bother to look at the screen before asking me for further assistance?" For example, if I make an introduction for you to one of my contacts and they don't respond, it seems appropriate ( to me anyway) to send a follow up e-mail yourself. After all, we are in sales and good sales people often have to have some persistence and initiative. So then  a few days or a week or more go by and they don't respond to your e-mail. Let me ask you, what would you do next? If you answered "call them" you would be correct. But wait Mike, you never gave me their phone number? I'm sorry my mistake. However there is this wonderful device called "the Internet" that contains just about every piece of information you could possibly need to contact somebody.  So then people will say " well, I didn't want to seem pushy." I can't speak for the rest of the sales world but If I take the time to introduce you to someone, I entirely expect you to make at least one phone call and send at least one email regarding the introduction. Very rarely will a customer take the initiative to call you after such an introduction, so take this opportunity and make the best of it.
And this leads to my bigger problem with the sales community, initiative or a gross lack there of. I recently sent a VERY good lead to a couple of contacts in my industry regarding a potential client in need of their services. Not only did they not thank me, but neither of them have contacted the customer. I don't want lunch or an award or something but a "hey thanks Mike" would be greatly appreciated. Oh yeah, a quick email or phone call to the customer is probably a pretty good idea too.
I admit, as a salesperson I make mistakes all the time. I forget to do stuff that I said I would. But when it comes to a new sale or a new opportunity and you don't EVEN send a quick note acknowledging the interaction, WTH?! If you are soooo busy that you don't need more customers, just tell me, I wont bother you any more. I don't know about all of you loyal readers, but I seem to have the exact opposite problem. I don't have enough customers.
I am often told by people that I follow up very quickly. My opinion on this matter has always been that answering an email or phone call only takes a couple minutes and if it is for a customer, why not? I am sure someone will blast me for making that statement and tell me that it is an "inefficient use" of my "selling hours." These are often the same people that like to tell me how effective cold calling still is. We will agree to disagree (at least I will, they will probably keep yelling into their megaphone that they're right). This is an important point to make across the board. If your treat everybody as equally important then they will also begin to treat you the same way. If you answer some calls right away but ignore others for days and weeks at a time and then respond "I'm sorry I've just been so busy" what you are really saying is "my relationship with you is largely less important than just about everything else going on in my life. Think about it, either you didn't read my email which means " oh it's just Mike, no way this is important, I'll read it later" or even worse you did read it and your lack of response says " Mike went out of his way to try and do something nice for me and I just don't give a crap." I am sure several people will blast me with responses like "well what about a death in a family or some other emergency?"
Every concept has very real exceptions. I find it "highly unlikely" that the overwhelming majority of people that ignore me are in the middle of a personal crisis. they just think very little of me and what I may be able to do for them. It's okay, I'm in sales, I am VERY used to people ignoring me, at least until they really need something, then I am "Mister Popular." I have a LinkedIn contact that is a very successful business owner in Baltimore. When I first reached out to him he quickly accepted my connect request and has subsequently ignored almost every single message I sent him. Every year I make a point to wish him a "Happy New Year" to which he always replies "thanks Mike, I hope you have a great one too!" but he ignores every single other message I send him. So I know he reads them. He just doesn't care enough to be a considerate human being and respond to them
In summary, Please share today's entry with your office mates and when they laugh and tell you "that's a good one" don't be afraid to say, "uh yeah, it's also how you act, so straighten up and fly right!"

Thanks for reading today

Mike S.

If you are in the Baltimore area, I hope you will come out to my next great Networking event. We are raising money for a very good cause.

Networking and FUNdraising 11-11-11 in Baltimore!

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

the email you previously sent was creepy and due to that I do will not do business with you

The title to this weeks blog is an actual quote from a "no longer" potential customer(typos and all). I thought telling this story and analyzing it would be entertaining and useful. Several months ago my company joined an organization with one of the purposes being to network with and sell to membership. My first contact with one of the companies was polite and honest. "Mike, I have just hired a new office manager and I am in the middle of training her. If you give me a couple months we can re-visit the opportunity." That seemed perfectly reasonable so I put a note on my calendar to follow up in 60 days. When I called back, I spoke to the new office manager, explained my conversation with her boss and asked to schedule a meeting to meet. She was very polite, said yes and we picked a day and time to meet. Two days before the meeting I received an email from her that said "Now is not a good time, I will reach out to you when we are ready to look at other options." This is the same woman who told me 5 days earlier that she would be glad to meet with me. So I sent her a follow up email and I added a "read request" to make sure that she did not ignore me. My message was simply "thank you for following up, we can certainly look a couple weeks out, let me know what works best for you." A couple days after sending that I got an auto response that said she deleted my email without reading it. Still determined I sent her a follow up email and cc'd her manager who I originally spoke to. In my follow up email I wrote "we had a meeting scheduled for Wednesday that you said we needed to reschedule for a later time. I followed up with you via e-mail yesterday and got a message that my email was deleted without being read. I hope I have not done anything wrong, I still would like the opportunity to meet with you and assess your companies needs." She responded "I did read your email; I just did not open it. This is not a good time for us. I will reach out to you when things are slower." Ok, no big deal, this is not a prime opportunity so I put it into my 90 day follow up. Then things got very interesting. The next day she sent me the follow up email that you see as the title to this weeks blog. So here is what I think happened. She scheduled a meeting with me on the telephone because she has trouble telling people no. Once she got my email confirming our meeting she thought that would be a convenient time to back out and then ignore future messages from me. When I follow up with her and her boss who told me to contact her, she became embarrassed and told me never to contact her again. I left that part out of the title because I just thought it would be too long of a title.
When your a salesperson you learn when people aren't being upfront with you (read that as "lying"). You also recognize that no matter how much you didn't do something wrong you are always (at least in part) to blame. Last weeks blog I spoke about when to "push" a customer. In this case, I pushed at the wrong time and in the short term, I lost the ability to win this business. But I have always been a big believer that if customers were just a little more open and honest with sales people the world would be a much better place. Movies likes "Boiler room" and "Tin Men" give sales people a bad name. And there are many unethical people in the sales world today. But that doesn't give customers the right to just flat out lie and be deceptive. and more often than not it works against them. If this customer had just said to me" Mike now is not good, we have too many projects of higher priority to deal with right now. If you will touch base with me in 90 days we can discuss the opportunity then." Now that's not a whole lot different than what she originally told me, but the tone is significantly different. Her email to me said "go away." The response I just wrote says "give me this period of time and we can talk then."
Now, if her true feelings are "go away" then she needs to say that at the beginning, that's her problem not mine. I suspect that her boss did want her to meet with me but she was so overwhelmed that she did not feel like she could. I have a hunch that when I call back to speak with her boss in 90 days I will discover that the office manager resigned or was fired.


So, hopefully you got a good laugh out of this one. If you have a similar story, please share, I would love to read it.


Thanks for reading today


Mike S.




BTW I have put together a great networking and fundraising event for November 11th in Baltimore. Use the link below to register, thank you!


November 11th at MaGerks in Baltimore, great networking for a great cause

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

A New Customer Reminded Me About a Key to Sales & Why We Need to Fire Customers Sometimes

September started slowly for me. Normally I pick up one or two new customers the first week as a result of accounts that just did not wrap up the previous month. This time around it took me until the 12th for my first new customer. I had been working on him for several months, we made several changes to his proposal, a couple other more important projects came up for the customer and he put me on hold for 3 weeks. His signature yesterday came a full week ahead of when I was supposed to follow up with him. I didn't call him, this time he called me. He asked me to come to his office and go over the paperwork so he could understand it. As I walked out the door, we shook hands and I thanked him for his business. His final comment to me "Mike, you are very persistent." In sales, that statement can be a real compliment. It can also work against you. I felt it was a good idea to use this sale and talk about where things went right and where they can go wrong.
Being persistent ultimately means following through. until a customer tells you "no" you have every reason to believe the answer should be "yes." Like anything else in sales, there is a right way and a wrong way to be persistent. To further complicate things, your style of persistence with one customer will often be very different from the style you have with another. This particular customer is an American immigrant who came from nothing and started a very successful distributorship. He is used to doing most of the work himself and he cares about little else other than cost and reliability. Now you may be saying "Mike, all customers care about cost and reliability" and to a certain extent that is true, but in this case he cared about little else. Company history, references etc. did not come up and when I tried to discuss other matters the topic quickly came back to what he needed. He is a very shrewd business man and used very little in the way of pleasantries. If you mentioned something to him 3 weeks ago, he would bring that detail up again and ask you to explain it. If something seemed inconsistent he would repeat back to you what you said and ask you why it was different from what you told him 3 weeks ago. This man is direct. So being direct with him was a key to the sale. If he brought something up and it was not relevant to my product, I told him that. He would look for reasons not sign today and I would address them simply and move on. He told me his time line and agenda and I agreed to keep pace and follow up at those intervals.When he would not respond at the appropriate times I would remind him (via voicemail or email) that during our last conversation we had agreed to speak again on this specific day and it had passed. Once we reconnected and set a new time to discuss again, I would notate the account to not follow up with him before then unless he contacted me first.

This customer valued direct, honest information within a specific time frame. I not only obliged but I held him to the same standard, he respected that and we consummated the contract.

I am sure many of you are saying "Mike, don't all customers value doing business this way?" The answer is "Nope." in fact many customer will be turned off and run the other direction if you try to deal with them this way. If your don't have a strong relationship with the customer and the customer is also not used to the negotiation process they can easily be turned off by you following up, even if the time interval is appropriate. When you first meet with a customer it is crucial to understand what their timeline is. Are they moving? Did they open a new office? Have they had tremendous growth in a short period of time? Did they hire new staff? What is causing them to meet with you today? If the answer is because you made a cold call and they agreed to meet with you then get ready for a long sales cycle. If there is no specific need and you don't find something within the first meeting to create need or urgency then you are on the lowest rung of the priority ladder. If that is the case it is essential to ask the customer what their decision time line will look like? Will this coincide with an annual budget review? Will it be addressed in a weekly or monthly management meeting? Who else is involved in the decision process? Are those other people equal decision makers in the process or are they senior partners and have veto power over the person you are dealing with. All of this information helps you set the decision timeline and also helps you know when to follow up or "push."

Another element to touch on briefly is "the push." There comes a time when you have done all that you can, you have answered the customers questions your product solves a problem, saves the customer money or fills another need they have but they just are not responding to you. That is when you must decide to "fire" the customer. Very simply you send them an email ( and cc it to all other contacts you are aware of that are involved with the process) and you simply tell them " I have addressed your needs and presented a solution that helps your company but you have not responded to accept or decline my offer. I must assume at this time you chose to work with one of my competitors. Please let me know who you chose and where you felt their product held a competitive advantage for your company." You then leave the customer alone, because 1 of 3 things will happen. They will ignore you. Fine, you already resigned yourself to that when you sent the email, at least now it is done on your end and you can move on. They will respond and tell you who they chose and why. Great! Now you have additional information to better prepare for you next customer. And the third option is my favorite & it probably happens about 30% of the time. The customer gets back to you and says "no no wait! were not done! We still need you we just had FILL IN THE EXCUSE come up and had to table this, so sorry."

In summary, persistence is a key to sales success but knowing how and when to apply it is equally important.

Thanks for reading today

Mike S.

BTW, if you are in the Baltimore area and would like to meet up with me and talk more sales, I am hosting a fundraising event and would love to meet you. Click here for more details

A Great Place to Meet for a Great Cause


Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Sales People are Just a bunch of Job Hoppers

I have been in Telecom since 1999. The first Telecom company, I was with them for 3 1/2 years and the next one I was with 2 1/2 years, and then I had a string of companies where I was there for 1-2 years.  Many would (and probably will) tell me that I must have an attitude problem or I am a quitter or "you fill in the blank" problem. I am the first one to say that anytime a person resigns or is fired there is blame on both sides. Today I thought it might be valuable to evaluate some of my personal experiences and also talk about some unfortunate truths out there today.
Unfortunate truth #1, there is no loyalty in the business world. I am referring to employers and employees. The days of someone taking  a job and keeping it 30+ years and then retiring are LONG gone ( for one thing, most of us need to work 40-50 years now, depressing but true). I received an email from a friend of mine asking me about my competition and if it was true that they would not hire sales people who "appeared" over the age of 40. WHAT?! A company would discriminate against someone simply because of their age, or gender or "you fill in the blank?" In a word.... Yup. I also think it is the only way some HR managers keep their jobs. They put you the candidate through an extensive screening process and then once you are hired, they look for any and all reasons to replace you. After all, if they don't need to hire someone, then what good are they? I actually had a job offer held up a few years ago because I reported that I worked at a company for 12 months but the company reported that I worked there for 24 months. To which I responded " so they have their dates wrong" and the HR person responded " If I cant get someone from that company to corroborate your dates of employment then we can't hire you?" Really, so the job before and the job after all checked out? And it is perfectly reasonable that the dates I gave you match the dates between job 1 and job 3 but this unknown person from a previous employer that has little or no vested  interest in getting my information correct is going to be the reason I don't get hired? I called up one of the owners, explained what happened and they agreed to contact the prospective employers and give them accurate information. It seems that the business world at a large is SO PARANOID about hiring the wrong person that they go out of their way to exclude the right people at the same time.
Unfortunate truth #2 the salesperson honeymoon. With every sales job, the first 6 months go very well. I am producing,the boss seems happy, lets me do what I need to do and all is right with the world. Then somewhere between month 6-9 something changes. All of the sudden the boss wants to know why I go to all these networking events. "Are you really getting ROI from all this time you invest?" and " where have you been for the last 4 hours?" and "why did you com into the office today at 10 am? where were you?" Now I want to be fair, these are all perfectly legitimate questions to ask. But if you think they are reasonable and valid then they should have been asked from day one, not after I have been on board (producing at a high level I might add) for 6 months. My job is to sell, let me sell. Unless you got a complaint from a customer or a senior manager about me, then leave me alone. On that note, if you did get a complaint, sit me down and discuss it with me? Maybe it is legitimate, I screw things up all the time, I'm not perfect and I would like to learn from my mistakes. Maybe the complaint is unfounded and based on erroneous information. Maybe, the complaint is just crap and someone trying to stir the pot because they have nothing better to do with their time. It seems to me that every company has one of these people on staff. Their sole reason for existence is to find out what you are doing and why you are doing it. Even though it has little to no bearing on their "legitimate" daily activities. Now let me be clear. As a sales person if I am not performing up to standards then that is a legitimate conversation and we should sit down and figure out why it is happening. Am I lazy? does the competition have a perceived advantage that we can or should work on with our products? Do I need sales training to better the number of customers I bring on board? Does the company need to evaluate how they go about  finding new potential clients for me to pursue? Has the company brand taken a PR hit that has negatively impacted sales? Is the company missing a brand identity in a target market that negatively impacts sales? Has something happened in my personal life that (on the short term) has effected my ability to sell?

It is my experience that very few people in sales are missing quota because of an inability to sell. It is often a combination of factors that end up frustrating the salesperson and their sales begin  to fall off. A friend of mine changed her position in the company we worked at and went from an indirect manager to a direct sales rep. I asked her why she did it and she listed a number of factors that were relevant to her at the time.  She told me about all the things she was going to do to support the other sales people on her new sales team and I responded "that sounds like a sales manager to me, what is he doing with all his time?" Her response was very revealing, she said "Mike the sales managers are so busy with meetings and running things that they don't have the time to work with the sales people." Yup! You read that correctly the "Sales Manager" is so busy that they cannot work with their sales team..... I must be from different planet, where I come from, the sales manager's job was to work with their team and do everything they could to support them and help close and manage sales and the sales process.

And maybe that is the problem. Maybe that is why I become so disenchanted with companies so quickly. I have never taken a job thinking "Well, in 12 months I'll be outta here." But that happens, and not just to me. I have looked over the profile of many of my friends in sales and I have seen a definite trend. Many of them (like me) had early track records of 3 or more years with the same company and then a string of 1-2 years with several other companies. Maybe it is an age thing, I have been at this so long, I know what works and what doesn't and when I see something being done in an inefficient manner I try to change it. And when they can't or wont change I realize that long term employment probably isn't a real option.

I really am open to feedback on this topic and I am sure many people will just tell me I'm an idiot. It's okay, I'm used to it. After all, I am a salesperson, you wont be the first person to tell me I am Lazy, or I am doing it wrong or I am a troublemaker.


Thanks for reading today

Mike S.

BTW, please read and share my fundraising blog www.40milesforautism.blogspot.com