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April 19, 2010
By Mark Faust – Echelon Management
 One challenge in today’s competitive landscape is how does one create an image of difference in the mind of the customer to compete and win? One angle is to sell profit, not simply product. One should sell to customer’s objectives and the value that the customers stand to gain with your solutions. But how do you help your team become better questioners and thus consultants? How do you help them find new profits for customers by using better questions?
Getting to the point of empowering a sales team to be true consultants, takes the effort of customizing a vocabulary of questions that is not just a list of relevant info you need to know in order to qualify a customer, but that is also a list of questions that clarify the profits being lost for inaction and profits to be gained with the implementation of your solution.
There are 5 types of questions that can be asked in the selling process. We call this the FOCUS Questioning Method™
- Fact questions elicit data that is of a neutral importance to the customer. While certain fact questions may be critical to qualifying or appropriately presenting the right solutions to your customer, poor sales performers get caught up in asking too many fact questions many of which may be of little importance and/or could be found through basic preparation before or after the initial call. Examples: How many acres to you have? What have been your top hybrids?
- Opportunity questions elicit the objectives, problems, pains, or direction toward which a customer needs to move. Most often the answers find a pain; it could be the pain of an unsolved problem and/or the pain of not moving as fast as possible toward a valid objective or result. Examples: What are your top problems? Which hybrids are performing poorly?
- Consequence questions (can also be called Cost questions) elicit the cost of not solving that problem or reaching that objective faster. Cost questions can quantify the negative dollarization of the problem. Sometimes the Consequences are merely emotional, but in most business situations an excellent questioner/consultant/sales professional can help a customer discover the dollarized costs of the “Opportunities” discovered. Examples: What did that problem cost you? Is that really that important of a problem to solve?
- Upside questions help to understand the value that stands to be gained if a change is made, the problem is solved or the objective is reached sooner with an intervention that has yet to be decided upon. Examples: If you can solve this, what would happen? What is the value of reaching that objective?
- Solution Step questions clarify the next steps that help to advance the sale/relationship and often give the customer a choice of options rather than a yes/no “doyawanna…” forceful buying close. Most complex sales aren’t closed as much as they are advanced to the next step if all proper qualification has taken place at each step. Examples: What are the next steps we need to take to get a solution approved and implemented? We have the solutions to your problems, what do you need from us to make a decision?
Bottom line creating a list of these five types of questions listed above creates an empowering tool that is a key to more thorough preparation and selling effectiveness. Create a sheet of questions for you and your team and add to it the best questions as they come to mind. Review regularly; evaluate each others sales calls and questioning effectiveness and you will have created a process for creating consultants that sell profit vs. peddlers that just present product.
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March 26, 2010
 Reason #1
Buyers have a system, sales people usually don’t. It is a battle of the plans, and the person with the stronger plan wins. Buyers have a effective system to deal with salespeople. Many technology buyers are formally trained in dealing with salespeople.
The buyer’s system is designed to get as much information as possible and to keep them in control of the situation. Buyers often mislead sales reps about their intentions, how much they’ll spend, who makes decisions, etc. The prospect’s system is designed to turn high-tech sales people into unpaid consultants, lead them on until they have all of the information they need, and often use their proposals to negotiate better deals with their current supplier or a competitor.
Does this make buyers bad people? Of course not. We all use this system for dealing with salespeople. It’s almost second nature. But still it’s true, in every culture we’ve visited around the world, there is a universal belief that:
You can lie to sales people and still go to heaven.
Why do buyers do this? First, it works. Also, in order to protect themselves, buyers feel they need a system to deal with sales people. It is an instinctive reaction to the negative stereotype of a salesman that causes buyers to put up a defensive wall when dealing with anyone who is selling something.
So how do most sales people deal with the buyer’s system? Most play right in to it. Many don’t use a systematic approach to selling and find themselves winging it. They allow the prospect to take total control of the sales process. They eagerly:
• Give their information
• Make commitments without getting any in return
• Waste resources on pursuing deals that will never close
• Make unneeded concessions
• Misinterpret the ubiquitous I’ll think it over and get back to you as a future sale
• Lose deals to competitors with stronger salespeople
What do companies do to contribute to the problem? Most high-tech firms train their reps on the features and benefits of their great technology, even though traditional feature and benefit selling has proven ineffective. This underlying paradigm that drives the buyer/seller dance works to the detriment of the sales person. But is it in the best interest of the buyer to make significant technology decisions this way? No, this default mode of operation is in neither the buyer’s nor the seller’s best interest.
FACT: Over 80% of high tech salespeople we observe are still using traditional Feature/Benefit selling techniques.
Solution: A non-traditional approach to selling that provides a system that sales managers and reps 100% buy in to. The system should balance both the buyer and seller’s best interest the Art of Mutual Agreement.
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March 24, 2010
 Why are we passionate about Sales Recruiting?
By Rye D’Orazio Rdorazio@rayandbarney.com
Netscape CEO, Jim Barksdale, once said, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.” Sales is the universal, fundamental activity that drives companies and organizations. Regardless of the economy or what is going on in the world, nothing happens without a sale.
 As Sales Advisors & Recruiters, it excites us that we get to work with Sales People! Sales people are high energy, assertive and aggressive personality types. We find they are fun to work with and we must be on our best game to do it right. Sales people are the people who are willing to take a risk for a reward; those who are instrumental in the success of their companies!
We are also passionate about the companies we help to meet their objectives. Many times it is the Sales Team that is the cure for the issues companies are facing, and to have a small hand in that gets us excited. From diagnosing hiring issues to helping build a Sales Bench, we offer an expert perspective in hiring and developing a winning Sales Team. It’s rewarding to watch our clients realize their goals because of the sales team we helped them hire. We enjoy the opportunity to participate in companies expansions or the opening of a new division or the launching of a product offering.
Companies are looking for help to improve sales performance, our thoughtful, long-term approach towards Sales Recruiting is helping them achieve their goals!
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March 9, 2010
What is the Goal of Your Business?
By Mark Faust@EchelonManagement.com
“The goal of this business is to make money, of course!” responded the owner.
Then we asked a few more questions.
How do you involve your team in efforts to improve profitability or has this mostly been the job of management?
- Besides yourself, who else is given incentives to improve profitability?
- How aware are your people as to what areas most affect profitability, such as pricing concessions, controllable expenses etc.? Are you able to prioritize, quantify and communicate to the team to what extent the top areas of profit drain are within your business?
- What types of business, customers, products, services etc. yield you the greatest profitability? Is your sales team aware of these and are there incentives for them to sell profitably? Are you coaching them to effectively – helping to move more business toward the more profitable areas?
- What we find with our clients is that tremendous increases in profit can occur by implementing a process around improving profits. Here are a few strategies that can help to create results around increasing profits.
  It helps if you can determine incremental awards or incentives around ideas that improve profits. We’ve seen rewards given as a percentage of money saved and thus tens of thousands of dollars with a potential cap as well as simple small cash or gift card awards for any and every idea that has an impact on profitability. Determine an incentive program that you can live with and deliver upon regardless of how voluminous the profit improving ideas may become. Back up monetary rewards with genuine praise and gratitude; this can be in written or formal spoken expression.
Not that selling your most profitable products and services is always the highest priority, but it helps to show your team the rankings of how your products and services stack up in regards to profits. It also helps to show as many areas of costs that may have any potential for improvement. Don’t limit these areas to just the immediate areas of responsibility of the employee, but rather allow their creativity and awareness of what is happening on the front lines of your business help to innovate completely new solutions or incremental savings no matter how small.
Encourage even the smallest of savings. Even if just 15 employees came up with 15 ideas that each increased profitability by an average of just .05%, that could in some cases work to double the profitability of a company.
Often the greatest drains in profitability occur in the selling process. Sales people often are unaware that even just a one percent price concession is frequently well over a 10% reduction in profitability. Training your team to sell on value and to negotiate options and the estimates of what your solutions stand to deliver are just a couple of ways of inoculating your team from profit draining price concessions.
 There are the Eight Essential Areas of Objectives in the strategic planning process (for a free Strategy Handbook email us) and while Profitability Objectives are of the lowest priority according to Peter Drucker it is still always essential to have specific profitability objectives. Like all objectives they must be measurable on a regular basis, preferably at least monthly. There needs to be clear accountabilities and at least quarterly points at which progress will be measured and discussed.
Involve your whole team in setting and executing upon the objective of improving profitability and you will get far more accomplished than doing it alone.
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February 11, 2010
By Mark Faust @ Echelon Management
 We have seen sales and profits literally double in less than three months at companies where 10% annual growth was the standard for generations. How can sales increase so much so fast? Sales innovation is the process of identifying and implementing new ideas into your sales process every month.
We will share insights we’ve learned from the best and fastest growing sales organizations. The objective is to help you reach what is one of the top two goals for the vast majority of readers; optimizing growth of sales and profits.
Not long after starting our sales improvement firm 17 years ago, we realized that teaching techniques is not the root key to continuous growth. Rather working to instill a culture and habit of continuous sales innovation is the key to fostering a team toward a more aggressive growth of their business to its fuller potential. One process you can implement with your team right now is to start an I-Power program with all those whom have any influence on sales. Require every person to come up with one sales improving idea every week or month or for perhaps every sales meeting or some other regular function. Commit to implementing one new idea every month or more if possible.
We have seen a focus on fostering new ideas around sales growth to be one of the most profitable habits for a company to implement. As many research efforts have proven, a genuine effort to foster innovation is one of the most profitable management interventions period.
The dean of management theory, Peter Drucker was the direct inspiration for the transformation of Martin Edelston’s company Bottom Line Publishi ng and the resulting book I-Power, which is a business classic about how to implement an innovation program at any company and how there will be a resulting increase in profits, sales, team work and even esprit de corps. We have implemented such programs at many companies only to see the results be nothing less than phenomenal.
We highly recommend the I-Power book and the process of formally gathering ideas on a regular basis and committing to implementation and feedback on every idea gathered.
A few principles for making an innovation process effective are the following:
- Require participation. Everyone must submit a minimum of so many ideas per a period of time
- Create an Innovation Team that will review each idea and respond to every one with either a request for more information, how and when you will implement it, and/or a personal acknowledgment and thank you for the idea. This thank you is most effective coming from the top leader of the team. A handwritten note of just four words works like high octane fuel being poured into the untapped creative dragster mind engines on your team
- Reward ALL ideas. Edelston suggested a $1 bill for every idea and a $10 for every idea implemented. We’ve seen these same amounts (and cash is a must! No $1 checks please) work wonders to underline the appreciation and encouragement of more participation. Sometimes there may be bigger awards or even percentages of money saved or made from an idea, but a minimum gift with the thank you is key to showing the value leadership puts around this process
Peter Drucker wrote of how the two major functions of a business were marketing and innovation. They go hand in hand, and we promise you that you will reap a tremendous ROI if you implement an I-Power process on your team.
January 29, 2010
Hey Sales Managers! Do you have the Right sales plan? Are you rewarding the right behavior?
 We get asked a lot about sales compensation and commissions. Everyone wants to know “what is the best structure for a successful Sales Force?”. Companies fall across the board on what and how they commission their sales people. Of course, there is the obvious strategy of incenting the results and behaviors you need to be successful. This seems simple enough, but how does it actually work? Often, in consulting with companies we have found sales comp plans that are not actually aligned to the results that the company needs. Companies often incent good things but not always the right things. Perhaps the plan did initially, but then things get complicated. We sales people are canny and will find the loop holes for how to best work the system to get paid the most from any comp plan. This may not always work to the company’s best interest. Another base rule of sales comp is simplicity; Sales people need to clearly see how each activity affects their bottom line. Keep it simple so everyone can immediately see how they benefit from their results. The third area is to make results very visible. A great way to do this is with a sales dashboard that the Sales reps can access daily. Transparency is key to helping incent the results you are looking for!
The topic of spiffs always comes up and a good guideline here we found was to use spiffs to reinforce the behaviors that lead to sale success; to focus on an area for a time period. Examples we have seen are call volume, appointments booked, proposals written, close percent etc. Watch that spiffs do not comp on what your comp plan already incents sales reps for.
Perhaps it’s time you took an assessment to see if your plan is incenting your Sales Force to succeed. Are you aligning compensation with results you need? Is the system easy to figure out? Does the sales team have good visibility into their results?
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October 25, 2009
By Mark Faust
How accurately can you project the sales that will be closed in the next week, month or quarter? Are your team’s projections accurate and reliable? If you experience unpredictable undulations in sales forecasts and revenue, consider implementing a more effective sales pipeline management solution, because the lifeline of many businesses is in the Sales Pipeline.
Ask yourself what it would be worth to: 1. know what deals are going to close by when, 2. be getting the optimal production out of your sales force, 3. know on what you need to focus and 4. how much is needed in order to deliver on the orders?
We interviewed Rye D’Orazio, a partner with Ray & Barney Group, a national consulting firm that has worked with large seed companies as well as a host of small and midsized companies. Here are some points Rye made about the benefits of implementing a pipeline solution in a SharePoint software solution or centrally shared spreadsheet in a simple Excel format.
· You can quickly access a view of the pipeline around 1, 3 or 100 reps
· You’ll foster consistency across the organization, in communication, management and productivity
· Gives you the ability to more accurately predict revenue and production needs
· Streamlines & Shortens sales cycles
· Focuses management on the right areas needing their coaching or assistance
Many managers say their critical success factor is spending more time in the field with the right reps on the right calls to better coach the reps and help advance more of the best business. The pipeline dashboard is perhaps the most needed tool for focusing management.
To begin the process management should involve team in assembling a list as to what they think needs to be managed. The effort should be positioned not as a “reporting tool” but a tool to direct management where to better support, coach, and help them sell more, and better manage resources.
Management should also explain how this helps sales people to see what and where they need to focus more time; i.e., prospecting, advancing, or closing accounts and the art of balancing the large accounts with enough smaller accounts in order to give them both stability in commissions and higher potential earnings.
The next step is to identify your target markets and criteria of what is a real prospect. Then you can label the Sales Phases, for example, they could be:
1. Identifying your prospects
2. Profiling your prospects
3. Setting of appointments or phone call
4. Identification and qualification of Opportunity
5. Proposal
6. Identifying your advocate
7. Footprinting – getting your customer to participate in your building of your proposal
What is in it, only 10 or so items of info,
1. Client
2. Contact
3. Opportunity descript
4. Projected close
5. Line of business
6. Location
7. Dollar opportunity
8. Likelihood to close
9. Using the process
10. Online Current Views of the Sales Pipeline and Reporting
The process needs to be online. If you haven’t migrated sales information online yet, now is the time, the speed and ease of keeping this up to date online is incontrovertible.
This dashboard becomes the tool for owners and managers to have a more accurate view of the sales pipeline and provides better information for coaching reps and running sales meetings. The team will begin to focus on reviewing each opportunity by phase, line of business, location and other elements that are most important for them to get and keep a customer. Suddenly, the focus is on prioritizing activities and helping both your sales reps and customers, make more money.
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