OK so that’s the attention grabber – I can already hear the protests about how tough it is on the street, especially in an economy like the one we have now.

And the protesters are right, in some ways.  Corporates just don’t seem open to new ideas anymore.  The executives are so focused on what’s happening in their business, they don’t have time to notice what’s happening to their business.  They certainly don’t want us outsiders interrupting.

But actually there are a number of things going on which can make it easier for us to know who to talk to, and how to get to them.  Social Media sites such as Linked In, Xing, and Facebook, plus lots of others, give executives ways of engaging with the rest of the world, including us sales guys.

With “who knows who” information it’s a lot easier to get introductions to people who would normally be unreachable.  And when we do get to them, they’re a lot more open than they would be if the contact was in their office.

This is all very positive, but only answers the “how to reach them” questions.  Unfortunately we have to fall back on the old fashioned way of figuring which companies we want to talk to, and which executives in those companies.

In my day this used to involve driving around industrial parks, looking for businesses, and asking receptionists for contact names.  Nowadays it’s much easier, with directories and and associations on web sites.  But it still involves a lot of research, digging out the information we want.

The really good news is that’s about to change.  Just a couple of days ago I came across implu a start-up focused on providing us with the information we need, and giving us tools to manage it.

implu is consolidating information from public filings, press releases, news feeds etc. and using social media software to help us put together our own picture of what’s happening in the parts of the world we’re interested in.

The social media features will offer Bios, blogs, forums, and answers, which means ultimately implu will take over from the other sites, becoming the preferred networking platform for corporate sales people.

I just know with the help of Implu I’d be totally on top of my market intelligence, with everything I need in one place.

Sales 2.0 really is Real.

Pundits have commented for some time now that Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search is an advertising strategy which benefits only Google and marketing experts.  For novices it’s a black hole to pore their future down.

Now it’s becoming a strategy even experts can’t exploit.  The Internet is a modern day wild west with people who understand it’s complexities exploiting those of us who don’t.

How many people have noticed a change in the way Google ranks results when we use it to research products and services?  Google now selects premium rate advertisers first, then content from social media sites (the content network) and eventually marketing sites.

What this means, to me at least, is SEO is a complete waste of time. Regardless of how good it is, we only get to show on the back pages.  With Google’s preference for content, any marketer is forced into the auction for keyword clicks if he wants to get a look in. 

Google no longer puts willing buyers and sellers together for free.  What it does is share its’ ill-gotten gains with the people who feed it stuff to put in its’ results.

The ranking is:

1. Premium rate advertisers
2. Bloggers who provide the content network
3. Other “content”
4. Optimized sites
5. The rest

by which time the searcher is at page 176.

A couple of months ago somebody dragged me in to another one of these new Internet based services.  To be honest I couldn’t see any “real world” as opposed to “social time wasting” use for it.  The main page talks about microblogging and “what are you doing?” type applications and I was already swamped by email and fed up with being invited to a host of networking platforms.

The other day Marc, of http://www.redlinesoftware.com/ , who tends to be my coach in things like this, suggested Twitter might be an interesting tool for publishing information to Front Office Box users.

Taking another look really didn’t change my opinion, but having exchanged a couple of “tweets” with Marc and Ian at http://www.wecando.biz/ something started to dawn.

Watching a video presentation on social media marketing I listened to a business leader explaining the best way to contact him was via Twitter.  He never answered the phone to blank caller IDs and rarely read his email. All communication with his network was through Twitter.

Maybe there is something there, after all.

Digging deeper into the help files and settings several interesting functions reveal themselves.

• The standard format for Twitter is the user makes micro (max 140 character) posts – tweets – to his/her page.  Other Twitter users have the option to “follow” people of their choice, in this way they get to display other people’s posts on their own page.
• A typical tweet is published to the entire world, with followers picking them up in the usual publish/subscribe model, but there are variations with the possibility to reply to a tweet and also to send direct messages to individuals.
• All of this is web page based but the app really comes into its own when phones are enabled.  Now the tweets, replies and messages are all sent via SMS to and from authorized devices.  This gives us publish/subscribe using SMS, anywhere there’s a cell phone connection, plus reply and direct message.
• Apple iPhone users also have the option to instal Twitterific, a downloadable app that simplifies the view, post, answer and message functions.
• The option that transforms this “social time wasting” tool into a genuine business application is the ability for broadcasters to restrict followers to people they want to receive the messages.
• For added value Twitterific also uses GPS and Google maps to publish the location of the device.

So it transpires Twitter really can be used as an internal communication’s tool for businesses, projects, teams, or networks – from anywhere to anywhere.

It’s as easy to use as SMS, it broadcasts to authorized subscribers, there’s an audit trail of messages.

Of course best of all it’s free, although if you use the SMS device updates there’s the per message charge from the carrier.  My plan includes 500 messages per month that I never use, so I don’t care

If you want to give it a try register for an account and “follow” or message me at user name frontofficebox

“Well, actually, I have” came across the room in a sort of embarrassed way.

“Which deal?” asked the branch manager in a sort of threatening manner.

“Commercial Ignition” replied the sales guy, quietly.

Instead of offering congratulations the branch manager asked “Why wasn’t that in the forecast?”

This sales guy had been here before.  ” I didn’t think I was going to get it.”

The branch manager slunk away back to his office, and everybody in the office had a quiet grin.  There would be pints in the pub at lunch time.

Nice little story, and true as it happens, but that isn’t the point of this post.  The point we want to discuss is CRM systems fail more often than any other IT project, and they fail because they attempt to control the uncontrollable.

Sales guys understand they’re only as good as their next sale.  Managers, administrators and support people all resent sales guys -they get more elbow room and earn more money.  The only thing that keeps them in a job is numbers – feeding the rest of the organization.  Sales is the ultimate “hero to zero” role in most corporations. Sales guys don’t play the same game as all the others.

This breeds a certain independence, and arrogance.  We’re going to get fired if we don’t make the number so why should we play the game with all the paper pushers?  Filling in all the forms in the world won’t save us if the numbers are bad.

When the bean counters (accountants and IT people) try to put in systems that control the sales guys they are doomed to fail.  CRM systems are designed to measure activity and progress, and forecast revenue for the accountants.  Not to help sales guys do their job.  So these systems are a nuisance, and, at the best, only get lip service.

Every sale is a unique coming together of customer, requirements, vendor, capabilities, and the man in the middle’s ability to align them in a sort of optimum result for everybody involved.  Ultimately, the whole organization lives off the sales guy’s ability to make this make sense to the customer.

Instead of CRM, the process and systems people need to give the sales guys stuff that helps, not stuff that gets in the way.  That’s why we built our software, and why it works the way it does.

The post reminded me of an experience that shaped my attitude toward anybody wanting to “help” with my deals.

CEO’s, VP’s and Sales Managers need to stay out of my way until I decide how they can help, and then do it my way.

Here’s a true story, told in the 3rd. person to avoid the “I” word.

Steve had been working for six months with Gesterklar, a manufacturer of construction items, trying to sell the company a software package for manufacturing.  There was no shortage of competition in those days.

He and Richard, the Gesterklar IT Manager, had worked out a proposal that worked for both companies, including the price.  To make the “close” easier they agreed to set up meeting between David, CEO of Gesterklar, and Martin, Steve’s sales manager.  The excutives would only have to meet and shake hands on the deal with a price of $240,000.

Everybody understood the execs’ jobs were purely about making the CEO feel he’d been in control of the decision.  They would negotiate. both knowing when they got to $240k the deal would be done.

To start with the meeting went well enough.  The big guys did their “pretend I’m in charge” bit but soon got down to the price.  Martin confidently offered ” David, I think we can make it work for us at $240k if that will work for you” and extended his hand for the shake.

Relieved, David stood up, accepted the extended hand and accepted “Martin, it’s nice working with people who know how to do business.  We have a deal.”

The smiles around the room didn’t last long, at least on Steve’s side of the table.

Martin continued, ” BUT, David, I want you to feel really good about selecting Dornix to supply your new system, so I’m going to offer it to you for $200k”.

Bewildered, but highly amused, David just grinned and said “OK then”.

At this point both Richard and Steve were badly out of shape.  Richard had totally lost control of the project and cast his boss’s ego in stone.  There were more measurable impacts on Steve.

In the car driving away from the meeting Martin suggests “sorry Steve, I may not have done the job you asked me to, but we have got the deal closed”.

“Right on both counts” replied Steve.  “An hour ago I had this deal sewn up and Richard really appreciated my efforts in helping Gesterklar to choose the best solution.”

“Now his boss thinks he’s incompetent and wonders how much more discount we would have offered.  Richard blames me and thinks I’m a snake oil salesman, because I didn’t offer him our best price.”

“Worst of all, my commission check is $5,000 lighter and I’m $40,000 further away from my target”.  “Next time …………….”

Well there wasn’t a next time, because Steve never took Martin on a sales call again.

One of the ways the smaller businesses can increase their cost advantage over the bigger guys is the way they use information technology.

The corporates are hide bound by all those IT department guys who insist on locally hosted, client server, applications and synchronizing systems on PCs and servers.  They come out with all sorts of justification for their “strategy” but usually avoid mentioning their main motivation – self preservation.  After all, if the users to could everything they needed for free, with somebody else looking after all that sysadmin complexity nobody would need an IT department. These guys would have to go get a proper job.

But the advantage isn’t limited to the fact the software is free and there are no support guys.  Internet software is increasingly being written to add more value than just the data processing.  It makes us more effective, by taking away the complexity of doing things well.

Here’s our “free”  IT architecture with a few comments about some value add.

Planning, Scheduling and Client Relationships
Front Office Box is our choice for managing our operations.  We’re Ambassadors so get a five user account free of charge.  It’s much more than CRM and Project Management. It enables us to see our business in once picture, from all the different angles.  More than that, it makes us better managers without us doing anything.  The guys have built Plan>Act>Review into the workflow so we just use it.  We don’t need to know this has been the core of the management consulting industry for 60 years, or that it’s based on a philosophy described by Henri Fayoul a hundred years ago.  We just use it, and are better at what we do as a result.

Mail, Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations
Google is our choice here.  We have our own domain and Google hosts it for us, for free, so we can have “proper” email addresses (not xxx@gmail.com).

Like everything Google does, Gmail is good and bad in parts but the good outweigh the bad by some distance.  The first is virtually unlimited remote storage.  Anybody who has ever lost their Outlook file will understand how important this is.  The second is the SPAM filtering which is absolutely first class.  I haven’t actually done the calculation but my guess is the filter gets it wrong for maybe one message in a thousand.

Documents has had a pretty rocky road for something that started out as the web’s best word processor (Writely) but the only trouble we get now is sometimes the servers can’t keep up with the page refresh and scrolling screws up the page.  The value add is “sharing” documents, spreadsheets and presentations with other people, as web pages, and of course the remote data storage so we can forget those security back ups (which we never did anyway).

Google sites gives us content management, although it has a long way to go, and we have hosting accounts for other reasons so use those in preference.

Accounting
A long time ago I worked as an accountant and CFO so don’t get intimidated by accounts and tax returns.  We keep everything simple in records of income and expenditure in a Google spreadsheet.  Lots of people do something similar but we’ve been a little more sophisticated.  On page 1 we have this months transactions with balances across all accounts automatically calculated.  On page 2 we have the entire year with totals in columns, with actuals for months past and planned for months outstanding.  On page 3 we analyze our credit card spending.

At the end of each month we reconcile the accounts and update the “year” and “credit card” pages, then “save as” the sheet to set up the next month.  We’re always bang up to date, we always have a forecast out-turn for the year and year end accounting takes less than ten minutes.  Of course we could do this with Excel, but then we’d have to buy Office (which anyway is crap on Mac) and worry about those security back-ups.

Blogs
Our choice for blogs is WordPress.  Its free software and they’ll host for free as well.  There’s a huge range of design options and lot’s of goodies provided by other people.  Especially interesting is a new service from VodPod that allows us to display videos inside the blogs.

Phones
Skype just keeps getting better.  Skype to Skype now works really well and of course of free from anywhere to anywhere.  Skype Out lets you call ordinary phones, landlines and cell phones for what amounts to pennies for calls.  There are all you can eat plans that effectively mean for less than $20 per month we can call anywhere in the world for as long as we want.

Others
We’ll get to talk about other solutions over time but need to mention Vimeo for video hosting and DropSend for file transfer, both of which are elegant, simple to use and FREE.

Closely related is the best business content forum I’ve come across. The people posting at Salesgravy are real players with interesting things to say about just anything – well worth a visit (and the joining fee).

There’s a danger though. In building the personal relationship based on trust we open ourselves to counter-attack. The buyer feels he can use the relationship to push for a better deal. Here we need a “bad guy in back”.

If we refuse the buyers requests (probably during negotiation and certainly thru implementation) we put all our credibility at risk. Now we’re worse off than ever. We’ve “conned” the customer into thinking we care, when actually we don’t. He’s been taken for a ride, because, when it comes down to it, we prefer our interests to his.

The guy who wrote “hell hath no fury like a women scorned” obviously wasn’t a salesman. Disillusioned customers are far worse

When the customer starts to ask for concessions, our “bad guy in back” is the one who has the ultimate say, and customers aren’t at the top of his list. We’re not allowed to make concessions and he doesn’t understand the synergies for both parties.

Now we get to be the “arbiter” – the deal maker who can make things happen despite the commercial tensions.

The “trial balloon” now becomes our secret weapon. “if I can persuade my “bad guy in back” to go along with this, will you do the same?

Now, provided our “bad guy” goes along, we’ve achieved two VERY important objectives:

1. We close the deal and
2. Our customer “knows” we’re on his team.

Provided we can keep delivering, we’ll have a lasting, and mutually supportive relationship and best of all we’ll have Account Control.

Sales people need “Bad Guys in Back” who’ll go along, because they understand.

CEO’s, VP’s and Sales Managers need to understand the biggest contribution they can make is being the “Bad Guy in Back” and staying out of the way until called upon.

Sounds easy enough! All realtors work the same way don’t they, for example. No they don’t, actually. They all have their own competitive advantage built in to the way they operate. They all have their own relationships with clients and partners.

What happens when they use the same software as everybody else? They just operate like everybody else. Goodbye competitive advantage.

So how can anybody build software for realtors. They can’t. They can just build software for 80% of realtors’ needs and let the users figure out the rest for themselves.

They could build their own “business solution”.

How much more efficient would it be if realtors could get software which let them figure it all out for themselves. If the software provided only “business” best practice in generic processes and data management. Then they could use it in ways that make sense to them. And they could benefit from economies of scale, by sharing the development cost with all the other businesses who have clients, partners, processes and plans. They could minimize the cost and complexity of implementation, they could get much faster payback on their investment and they could evolve their business model in response to opportunities or competitive pressures.

We might call this “something for everybody” software.

Software like this would be difficult to build. The business process guys would have to really understand the generic, best way to stuff. The user experience guys would have to work even harder, making sure everything would be exactly where the user expected to find it.

It might be even harder to sell. Users have been taught, by the industry, to expect to choose between alternative packages, selecting the one most closely fitting the way they manage their business. This software would expect them to understand they can be free to make their own decisions, and change their minds as often as they need.

I recently came across such a software product. It’s being quietly “leaked” out as the company feels it’s way through a marketing model based most on social networking.

For the moment “free” accounts are still available for early adopters who want to contribute to the social networking model.

Anybody wanting to get a preview of the future of business software can get one at Front Office Box

Suffice it to say people generally are uncomfortable around sales people. So how is it some people will always take a call, will always accept a visit and will always have a project just around the corner which could be just right for the hapless rep. These people are Serial Prospects. They just love the attention that being a serious prospect gets them. When times are good they get entertained, hosted at golf outings, breakfast meetings, dinners with partners. Actually it sounds OK doesn’t it? Getting all that attention and all you have to do is pretend there’s a buy going on. Of course they have to devote the time to it as well. They are always busy people, but somehow find a way to squeeze us into their schedule. Look closely though and there is the secret.

The Serial Prospect is only busy because he’s a Serial Prospect. Filling the calendar with meetings is a great way of appearing to doing something important. Boy he works hard. For busy people trying to sell their wares the Serial Prospect is a nightmare. They will always have great product, fantastic prices, impressive service. They will always be number one on the list, and they will never get any business, because there isn’t any. But we can’t walk away, because one day he might buy something. Serial prospects can be very hard to spot, and harder to get rid of. Even after they’ve let us down a few times, they still call and ask us in to discuss?? How do we spot them? Avoiding any commitment to a process is a good sign. Not delivering on agreed events and dates is another. Maybe the best though is overt enthusiasm for the project without any in depth examination of the offer. How do we get rid of them? Send them a contract and a note explaining you’ll be pleased to meet with them, after they’ve signed it.