I’ve been spending a lot of time recently teaching engineers how to sell. As it turns out, they’ve been helping me learn something very valuable about selling, too.
For whatever reason, I have spent a lot of my time, particularly within the last three years, working with a lot of companies who have sales engineers – meaning that they hire people with engineering backgrounds to be salespeople. When I tell people about this fact, they give expressions of horror or sympathy, because of what they perceive as the difficulty of training engineers to be salespeople. What’s funny is, I love working with engineers. Want to know why?
It’s simple. Engineers know their numbers, and they understand repeatable processes. Engineering is all about creating repeatable processes, and so is selling. The only difference is that in selling, our processes aren’t 100% repeatable because we sell to human beings who have their own motivations. That said, every new skill learned, every new technique applied, is designed to raise our percentages. If a new skill does not raise our percentages, we ought not use it. There’s a basic formula to calculating your chances of selling success, and it is:
(Quantity of activity) x (Quality of activity) = Results.
Notice that I didn’t use variables like “luck” or “economy” in there. Those are factors that might skew your results somewhat in the short term, but over the long haul, your success in selling depends entirely onhow much selling work you do, and how good you are at it. Although that sounds simple, there are a lot of salespeople – and a lot of companies – that do not get it. Salespeople will look forever for a “magic button” to improving their results without measurably improving their quantity or quality of sales activity. Hence, with this in mind, let’s take an engineering-focused approach to a sales improvement plan for 2011.
Step One: Optimize Quantity of activity.
You will notice that I didn’t say “Maximize” quantity of activity. Sometimes, the “maximum” level of activity isn’t desirable; you then find yourself rushing through calls just to put up numbers. You increase your Quantity, but you can actually decrease your Quality of activity enough that your results are worse. Consider this: Most B2B salespeople have about 40 hours of meaningful selling time to work with in any given week. Let’s look at two simple ways to maximize your “Between the lines” time:
Cut the BS. Look, I’m no saint when it comes to sales activity. I have been known to make personal calls, pick up dry cleaning, etc. during that 40 hour window. But whenever I do those things, I first consider the penalty for lost selling time. Too many salespeople don’t. Make a log, in fifteen minute increments, of how you spend your selling time during the week. What can you cut out, and more importantly, what meaningful selling activity can you plug in? Push as much personal junk off to the after-hours, and optimize your selling time.
Delegate. Every task has a value, and every person in a company also has a value. If the value of the task doesn’t match the value of the person, you have an inefficient allocation of resources (gee, that phrase sounds like the engineers are rubbing off on me, too). Essentially, we want tasks delegated to the lowest salaried level that can carry them out well. Hence, if your time is better spent outside making calls than sitting at your desk writing sales letters, perhaps you might work with your manager to find someone to write those letters for you. Can a customer service department or inside salesperson process that order? Give it to them, and get back to what you do best. In doing these things, you will optimize your activity.
Step Two: Improve Quality of Activity.
This step differs from Step One, because in Step One, there’s a limit to how much you can streamline your workday. There’s no limit to how much you can improve your skills – yet I see salespeople who have been selling for 25 years and obviously haven’t learned anything new in the last 20. This is a process ofcontinuous improvement, gang. The selling environment never stops changing. When you stop changing, you are giving up.
Get up to speed with technology. I thought about putting this under step one, but the truth is that technology can improve your quality of activity much more than your quantity. I’ve already made myself clear on social networking (and if you haven’t read those articles, they’re archived on my site in the blog section), but you should be using technological tools like Jigsaw and ReferenceUSA to find new prospects, Google News Alerts to keep up on current customers, and tools like Constant Contact to stay in touch. If you’re not on game with these, all the Tweeting in the world won’t help you. Selling in today’s world is a battle of information, and the salesperson with the most customer information usually wins.
Commit to a program of self improvement. You should be a continuous digester and user of selling information; fortunately today’s technology puts more of this at your fingertips than ever before. Commit to learning one new skill every two weeks. Week one is to research and read about the skill; week two is to practice and adopt it. Repeat the process every two weeks for the rest of your professional life. Sometimes these skills don’t work in your environment; have the professional discipline to toss them out.
No Donut Calls. The “Donut call” is the lowest common denominator of selling activity; it’s “Hi, here are some doughnuts. Can I have an order?” There’s no effort at relationship building here. Don’t be that guy or gal. Instead focus on building the relationship with every customer you have, and developing them to their maximum.
Well, this plan is simple to write, but it’s not simple to execute. However, if you COMMIT yourself to executing these steps on a continuous basis, 2011 will be a lot better than 2010 – even if your 2010 was pretty good. Hopefully that’s a repeatable process we can all get behind.
