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How Strong is Your Referral?

5 Dec

An interesting post on EyesOnSales by Paul McCord got me thinking early this morning.  He says to make sure you know how strong your referral is before contacting the prospect.  Just because someone gave you a referral doesn’t mean that the prospect values that referral.  Seems like common sense to find out what the relationship is and how strong it might be before acting on that referral.

But maybe it’s not common sense.  Inquisix (as you all know!) maps the process of getting (and giving) referrals online.  Just like a SFA system tracks a sale from lead to prospect to opportunity to close, Inquisix tracks referrals from search to ask to get to rate.  Our data shows that the referrals with the best rating almost always have the best exchange of information at the ask and get stage.  Why?  Because at this stage in the referral exchange is where you are networking with another person to gain a referral from them.  Thus, you are exchanging your bona-fides on why you deserve the referral and why they can deliver on the referral.

The best referrals provide you the opportunity to strengthen your reputation with not one but two parties – the person you’re asking the referral of and the person you’re getting the referral to.  Makes sense to take the time to do it right!

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More than just Rock Stars need publicists on the Web

29 Oct

Ever want to be so famous that you need a publicist to ensure your name is in the papers and TV? Ever wish you had a publicist to help keep your name out of the press?

Forget George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother watching you, it’s “little brother” on the web watching you. If your goal is to be found on the web then you need to manage your reputation carefully. It’s so hard to build a good reputation online but unfortunately its very easy to get a bad reputation.

As Maxine Winer, who leads the Reputation Management practice at PR agency Edelman, reminded me, “…one of the top 10 rules of blogging is to always get permission to use someone else’s material…. in the blogosphere, transparency reigns supreme and people are judged (often harshly) based on their authenticity or lack thereof.”

Many of the sales author bloggers I’ve been reading have turned in another sales author/speaker because they’ve found their content published on his website under his name. I first saw Dave Stein mention it in his blog. Then Geoffrey James of Selling Power posted on his blog. Next I saw Jill Konrath’s blog saying that this same author was plagiarizing her content.

When you read the trail of blog postings and comment, what do you think? Maxine and I think this is plagiarism, pure and simple. Maxine told me, “It’s bad behavior in any form–not to mention illegal if the material is copyrighted. In this case, it’s just plain foolish (or perhaps arrogant) to publish on his blog and represent as his own work that was written by others. And word spreads like wildfire online. Repairing a tarnished reputation isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either.”

After reading these sales author blog postings and talking to Maxine, I suggest:

  • Don’t plagiarize. Duh! It’s unethical and way way too easy to get caught
  • Keep tabs on your own content. Use a service like Google Alerts to search the web for your published content being used without your permission

So what should this sales author do about the plagiarism charges? I asked that question of Maxine and her response was that what he needs to do is admit what he did, acknowledge that it was wrong, apologize (both to those whose material he used and to his readers) and promise to never again use other people’s work without their permission. What do YOU think?

PS - Thank you to The Pandemic Blog for the picuture, where I found another post by an author complaining of plagiarizing.

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The Incompetence Tax

27 Oct

At a company I worked for, we (the sales reps) called bringing in the CxO level people to our accounts the “Incompetence Tax.”  It was a small technology company and we sold to the Fortune 1000.  Yet the CEO, CFO, CTO and Chief Legal Officer invariably thought that these big companies would bend over backwards to buy our stuff.  The rep would have the deal almost closed when Legal would insist on red-lining the customer’s contract with so many changes that the resulting contract looked like ours.  Or the CEO would talk down to a young Managing Director who controlled a bigger budget than our annual sales.  Or the CTO would tell the customer that their existing architecture was “…not well thought out.”  Or the CFO would insist on “value-based” pricing when our competitors’ products were marginally inferior to ours but priced 2-5 times less.  The sales reps learned to put deals thru our partners so that the deal was on someone else’s paper with someone else’s pricing.  Of course, we then got less money on the deal but it was better than losing the deal all together.  Thus, the Incompetence Tax!

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Get in the Door – Be Assumptive not Consultative

16 Oct

I attended the “Winning Big Company Clients” event in NYC earlier this week.  The event was hosted by Nigel Edelshain, CEO of Sales 2.0 with a panel discussion led by Jill Konrath, author of “Selling to Big Companies” and Razi Imam, CEO of Landslide Technologies.

Jill’s discussion was very interesting.  While she admitted that much of what she wanted to talk about was in her book, it was beneficial to get the synopsis.

Her main point is that the corporate decision makers use the delete key first.  When listening to your voice mail, their finger is on the *3 or whatever key combination they use to delete your voice mail and email.  Their preference is to delete, not listen.  So if you are not relevant, your message is deleted immediately.

That means that you don’t have 30 or even 10 seconds to get your point across.  You have 5 seconds to be relevant.  Her studies have shown that corporate decision makers also believe that it’s your responsibility as the sales rep to call them back.  Jill says that you’re their conscience.

Being relevant means you can’t be consultative.  No more, “Hi, this is Jill and I’d like to understand more about your business issues so that we can find a solution for you.”  Corporate decision makers don’t have the time or desire to educate you.  Jill says that you must be assumptive in your belief that they have a pressing problem and that you can solve it.

Jill says that the corporate decision makers will review 3 things in their head as their finger is poised over the delete key.

  • Are you relevant?
  • Is this an urgent problem?
  • Are you credible, ie are you the one to solve this problem?

I found what she said very timely and very interesting.  Thanks, Jill for your insight.  And thanks to Nigel for hosting!

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NYC Event – "Winning Big Company Clients"

3 Oct

Jill Konrath, author of “Selling to Big Companies” and Razi Imam, CEO of Landslide Technologies are discussing new Sales 2.0 technologies for helping salespeople win big corporate accounts. The event is being moderated by Nigel Edelshain, CEO of Sales 2.0.

I will be there as a guest of Nigel.  Will you join us there?

DATE:
Tuesday, October 14, 2008

LOCATION:
The Penn Club
30 West 44th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues)
New York, NY 10036

AGENDA:
6.00PM – 6:45PM Networking and Hors d’oeuvres
6:45PM – 7:45PM Presentation and Interactive Discussion
7:45PM – 8:00PM Wrap-up & Networking

Register here for this event. I look forward to meeting you there.

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Seth calls it "intangibles" I call it "reputation"

14 Aug

I met Seth Godin years ago at one of those kids activity centers where parents host their pre-schooler’s birthday parties. If you have kids, then you know that pre-school birthday parties means “no drop-off” thus you can’t run a few errands or stop by Dunkin Donuts. I was reading his “Permission Based Marketing” book amongst the happy screams of little kids and I notice out of the corner of my eye that 2 people keep walking past me and smiling. One of them finally approaches me and says, “My husband wrote that book!” The other person walking past me turned out to be her husband, Seth. You’d think that I’d recognize him since his handsome dome was right on the front cover of my book!

I was reading this while my kid was here

Seth’s recent post is about how intangibles are what allows you to charge more for your service vs the commodity-oriented competition. Some of his ideas include participation, enthusiasm, speed, focus, generosity and hope.

Hope? No, not “I hope this deal will close” as that’s not an viable or effective tactic for beating the competition. Instead, “is your offering going to be something great.”

As I’m reading this blog, it struck me that I consider all these intangibles to be my reputation. Just like an intangible, it’s hard to quantify reputation. You either have it or you don’t. Your reputation with your customer is what keeps them coming back to you instead of saving money with your competitor. Your reputation is what gets you the warm welcome when you meet with prospects.

Here’s a few suggestions of mine on ensuring you have the intangibles, the reputation, it takes to compete and win.

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Practical Advice from a Wall Street Buyer

6 Aug

I had the pleasure of recently attending a presentation by a Managing Director of one of the top Wall Street firms. His topic was “How to Sell to Wall Street” for small companies, specifically IT ones. It was a great presentation and the entire audience had his full attention. What I found most interesting was that many of his points were not focused on how the sales rep sells to Wall Street. Rather, much of his focus was on setting the vendor’s senior management straight on their obligations to ensure success. I just wonder how many senior managers in the room understood the “what not to do’s” were targeted at them!

Wall Street firms spend money on solutions to:

  • Reduce their costs now. Not in 2-5 years but right now.
  • Support expansion of their high growth market areas. Don’t waste their time on incremental gains in saturated markets. And don’t expect them to tell you what their high growth markets are.
  • Stronger risk & control systems. The current economic crisis is affecting financial services firms worse than the bubble of 2001 did for technology firms. If you have system that helps them reduce risk and improve compliance, they want to know about it. But remember that everyone is pitching “compliance solutions” nowadays.

Selling at the CIO level isn’t the best bet:

  • There are multiple decision makers, all below the CIO level.
  • Tech decisions are made bottom-up by really smart people with a great mix of technology and business savvy.
  • CIO doesn’t have time or desire to pick your solution. They pay their people a lot of money and empower them to make the right decisions. Or get fired. Either way, your only hope with the CIO is that they refer you to one of the decision makers.
  • Work the administrative assistants. Don’t screw with them because they can be your worst enemy.
  • It’s a long sales cycle and they’ll demand aggressive pricing.

The Managing Director said that Wall Street and the metro NYC market is larger than continental Europe. Larger than the next 3 US markets combined. Therefore, “…get in anyway you can….make it easy to buy…legal, pricing, best tech people….but don’t give it away.”

His practical advice for selling to Wall Street:

  • Understand your customer. Yes, this is obvious but remember that the customer knows how important they are in the biggest market in the world and therefore how important it would be for them to be your customer.
  • Remember who has the money. The one with the money (the customer) is the boss. It’s their rules or no money.
  • Don’t out-arrogant arrogant people. They’re successful Wall Street people and you are who?
  • Send them your best. They’re the best so send them your best.
  • Don’t send them resellers. Wall Street wants to work directly with the manufacturer.
  • Give them consistency in sales. Don’t send a new rep every 6 months or worse, a new Sales Engineer every 3 months.
  • Don’t break the process. Use their NDA. Use their license agreement. Don’t redline the agreements so that they look like your agreements. Let your business people review the contracts, not your legal team. Don’t make it hard for Wall Street to do business with you. They won’t.
  • Have a local NYC presence. A rep traveling in from Los Angeles or even Boston doesn’t cut it. Wall Street is the biggest market so invest here.
  • They all talk to each other. If you have cool stuff, they’ll tell the rest of Wall Street. If you fail to heed the advice from above, especially the parts about being too arrogant or not sending your best, they’ll tell the rest of Wall Street that, too.

He summed up his practical advice by repeating “…get in anyway you can….make it easy to buy…legal, pricing, best tech people….but don’t give it away.”

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Golden Rule of Networking

29 Jul

I recently listened to a podcast from John Jantsch at Duck Tape Marketing with Bob Burg. Burg is the author of Endless Referrals and together they discussed why a systematic approach to building referrals was so important.

You can hear the full podcast here.

The first step in deciding to systematically build a referral business is to ask yourself, “Am I getting referrals now? Am I giving referrals now?” If just by accident you are giving and getting then it’s worth building a system. But no system will help you build when there’s nothing to start with.

[shameless pitch] If you are ready to systematically build a referral-based business, then come join us at Inquisix!

To paraphrase, the Golden Rule of Networking is, “…all things being equal, people will do business with people they know, people they like and people they trust.”

Are you this kind of person?

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We are not moving forward with your company

19 Jun

The blog postings about “Morale Killer or Career Limiting Move” have been some of the favorite postings in our blog based on the number of comments. The email below was sent in by one of the Inquisix readers who wanted to share a “thanks-for-nothing” moment by their boss. The subject line of the email (and the title of this post) must have been a kick in the gut to the sales rep receiving this email. Names have been deleted to protect both the innocent and the guilty. And like the first posting of the “Morale Killer or Career Limiting Move” some key information that I wondered about is missing. I’ll share that information as I get it.

But until then, what are your thoughts?

* Surprised the prospect was nice enough to actually follow-up and say, “No thanks”?
* As the sales rep, how would you use this email internally?
* Any ideas on how to get back to this prospect and get another chance?

From: Divisional Manager at Potential Prospect [and decision maker]
To: Sales Rep
Cc: Prospect’s peer
Subject: We are not moving forward with your company

Hi [Sales Rep]. I hope that this email finds you well. I wanted to get back to you and let you know that we will not be going forward with your company. While I truly enjoyed talking with you, I wasn’t overly impressed with the sales approach of [your sales manager]. When a company is selling a service I would expect that the sales approach would be directed to the individual in charge of managing that service. The majority of the conversation was directed to [prospect’s peer] who is not the decision maker. I have to say that a couple of times I thought I would get up and leave, however, I chose to stay because I did not want to appear unprofessional. I feel compelled to make a personal recommendation to your sales manager] to make sure that sales conversations be directed to the individual responsible for making the decision as to whether or not to purchase the product.

Have a nice summer – take care,
[Divisional Manager]

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Morale Killer or Career Limiting Move? Part Three

10 Jun

My source for these interesting emails sent me the VP’s next email about the sales meeting, an email that was sent to all sales and senior management.

The VP lists the reasons why the sales meeting is being held on the weekend. I’ve added commentary on what the sales team could be thinking as they read this email. Which response, A or B, would be yours?

Dear Team,

I have discussed the meeting dates with executive management and we have decided to firm up July 11th and 12th for our quarterly sales meeting…”

Response choices:
A – Good, the VP checked with senior management and they all agree
B – The VP must have forgot to check with the far-flung sales team

* Senior management team routinely travel 50% of their time, including weekends and holidays to support sales efforts.

Response choices:
A – They’re doing all that travel and only asking us for one weekend? That’s reasonable, then.
B – That’s why senior management makes more money then us and has 10 times the number of options

* Large public technology firms routinely plan off-site sales meetings on the weekends

Response choices:
A – We want to go public and cash in our options so we’re all for emulating those firms
B – Yeah, and they plan the off-sites in locations like Las Vegas, Atlantic City or New Orleans instead of corporate’s class B office space

* Large public technology firms require their employees to share hotel rooms

Response choices:
A – Cost savings are important so we show a bigger profit (or smaller loss)
B – Those employees share a room at the Vegas Hilton with their buddy or friend-with-benefit, which is not the same as sharing a Motel 6 room in Albany.

The VP summarizes the reasons for keeping the meeting on a weekend, “[Our company] has done more for its sales people while requiring a lot less than what other firms expect from their field sales force.”

Response choices:
A – You sold me, I’m glad I work with such a great management team
B – Ah, the beating continues. Can I find a new job in a month?

So what do you think now? Did you choose more A responses than B responses?

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