Growing up there were always things I didn’t like that were deemed to be good for me. How many of you hated vegetables as a child? I was a vegetable hater but now I absolutely love them. I guess living with a vegetarian helps but the real credit goes to my mother. As I moved from teens to adulthood similar scenarios (or vegetables) surfaced with tasks/actions deemed beneficial but no real desire to do them. (more…)

The environment in which salespeople now sell has changed considerably. The process of buying has changed – therefore the process of selling has changed accordingly…. Markets are smaller and more complex – there are less genuine opportunities for salespeople to sell…. Decision makers and the people involved in decision making have changed meaning purchasing decisions are now longer and much more complex. Reality check! The bottom line is that the market will not adapt or return for the salesperson, it is now up to the salesperson to change – so as to meet the needs of this new sales environment. If you are still a salesperson in 2010, firstly congratulations – here are 5 recommended strategies you can employ towards getting on top of your target this year.

1. Start by Moving the Target Up

What? I hear you ask, my target is challenging enough without putting additional target and pressure on top. Wrong! Sales are ultimately about smart averages, so putting your target up a notch means you give yourself more breathing space from the get go. In planning for a higher target, you automatically increase your chances of hitting and exceeding your original target. It’s a simple fact!

2. Analyse Performance and then Plan for Success

It amazes me to this day how many companies continue to use KPIs badly and how many salespeople insist on trying to fudge the figures. Your KPIs are one of the mostly deadly sales tools you have. A proper and realistic analysis of your KPIs will provide you with everything you need to know and do to improve your performance. In short, they provide you with the building blocks for both your long-term and short-term sales planning.

So KPIs provide you with the relevant information and your sales plan decides how and where you intend to spend your time. You will need to plan for long-term (yearly) and short-term (monthly, weekly). It’s critical that you get this right, because your time is your ultimate resource in sales – so ensure that you are spending it wisely. In the words of a famous ex-Manchester united captain “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail”

3. The Trick is to Prospect rather than Close

A key skill for all sales people in this environment is their ability to find genuine prospects. Its takes time and research but it pays to do so. A problem for a great many salespeople right now is that rather invest in prospecting, they are choosing instead to invest in closing. In other words, they are continuing to spend the majority of their time chasing prospects that don’t want to buy rather than finding prospects that do. You could almost call it, a type of sales madness. Remember, research is the key piece when prospecting. The more thorough your research, the better prepared you will be to meet the decision maker and ultimately the greater your chances of success.

4. Selling is Easier when you Embrace Technology

While technology may on one hand threaten the very role of the salesperson, it also assists us to be increasingly more effective and professional. Information is freely and widely available on the organisations and the people that we want to sell to. It is now easier than ever to connect with these people and networking can happen at speeds unimaginable only a few years ago. A salesperson that is not willing or afraid of these new tools will quickly be left behind. Embrace rather fight technology, it just made selling a whole lot easier.

5. Become a Business Person, not a Sales Person

In 2010, being a salesperson alone no longer cuts the mustard. Prospect’s time is increasingly valuable; they are only interested in speaking to people who will bring lots of value to any conversations. The flipside is that you now are expected to know a lot more than merely what you sell. The salespeople that will succeed will be those who bring with them developed and strong business acumen. They will be those who can step behind the desk of the senior managers within organisations and see the world through their eyes.

This means that the role of salesperson is also that of someone who has an aptitude and appetite to constantly better oneself. If your company are lacking in their support in this regard, you must pick up the slack, and consciously devote both your person and time to learning. The wealth of available information means that this is now very easy to do. So whether it is reading a business book a month or subscribing to some top class business blogs, it will not happen unless you make it so.

My Sales Prediction for 2010…..

While 2009 could be considered perhaps survival of the fittest in terms of its effect on professional sales and sales people, it is my prediction, that in 2010 – we may start to see the survival of the most knowledgeable. I am not one who subscribes to the theory that technology is making sales a redundant profession. It is my belief that what we are actually seeing is the start of the true professionalism of sales. It would make me exceedingly happy if this turns out to be the case…. Please be sure to share your strategies towards making target in the comments section below and the very best of luck in 2010.

Guest Author

Jackie Prendergast

This morning at a Networking Event which I had organised in aid of Childline one of the presenters, Shane Twomey, a fellow HR consultant, threw out a question that really made me think! ” How do you reward poor performers“.  Initially he was met with stunned silence.  You could almost hear people thinking…”what on earth is he talking about…who would reward poor performance?”.  But then the penny dropped.

I must admit that despite being a seasoned HR professional I had never really thought about the issue of under performance in quite this way.  Of course I have expereinced it.  And had to deal with it.  And even had to deal with managers who didn’t deal with it.  But I had never thought about it in terms of “reward“.  But of couse we do.  How?  Well let’s look at what typically happens to poor performers in an organisation:

• You / their manager ignores them
• They are given less work
• Less is expected of them so they have lower targets / performance standards
• They are paid the same or similar pay to average and even high performers
• They are promoted (so they can become someone else’s problem)
• They get a salary increase (well they haven’t been told there is a problem with performance so they have to get it)
• More time is spent on them, dealing with issues and correcting problems
  
• Others are asked to help them complete their work
• They are given overtime to allow them to complete tasks
• They are not asked to do any additional work
• They are regularly sent on training courses (well they aren’t doing much else)

Of couse at the same time you are punishing your high performers.  Typically they will:

• Be expected to work harder and faster
• Get the same or similar salary to poor performers
• Get less training because they are too valuable to release
• Get less of the managers time and therefore less coaching and mentoring
• Be given all additional work
• Have higher targets and standards

The list goes on!  And what does that poor performer think about his higher performing colleagues?  Well he probably thinks they are fools and secretly laughs about them.  And what do they think about themselves.  Eventually they will begin to see themselves as fools too.  They will get tired of always having more work, always having to pick up the slack because their co-workers aren’t up to standard and never seeing any reward.  And honestly, even if they are being rewarded they will eventually become demotivated when they look at their poor perfoming colleagues who can just do as they please, never have a heavy workload and can just amble along, stress-free.

So are you guilty of rewarding your poor performers? If so, it is time you took action – NOW!

Jackie Prendergast is a dynamic and focused HR and business professional with over 15 years experience in both public and private sector environments. She is a firm believer in the concept of delivering excellence through, and with people and strongly supports an ethos of continuous learning and development in the achievement of goals. Jackie established her own HR & Management Consulting practice - Consulting Excellence - in 2007

Guest Author

Lewis Evans

When times are hard and money is tight, I hear this often. The belt-tightening process seems to automatically result in ditching the creative. It’s ironic, because when anyone starts a new business, it surely springs from a creative inspiration. So, why is it that the very thing that inspired the whole thing is seen as expendable?

I think it all stems from one simple fact that we really need to change if we are to move forward, pull ourselves out of recession and achieve a stable and abundant state: it’s simply that we are taught what to think, not how to think.

Consider any belief that you have, and you can usually trace it back to someone you trust telling you that this is a fact. It starts with our parents, and we continue this way of learning, often throughout our lives. Very little of the information we have is information we have originated ourselves. Politics, religion and education reinforce this way of learning to the point where we exclude creative notions as a matter of course – unless, by a process of repeated exposure and our own evidence-building processes (we want to believe certain things, so we find evidence that they are true for us), we start to believe them ourselves. Once we start buying into a belief, we tend to guard it, argue on its behalf and blank out counter beliefs. After all, we may have taken some convincing, and our self-esteem would be damaged if we think afterwards that we have taken on a wrong belief. You can see this happening in all areas of life, from the personal to the international.

We are not taught to be creative. A cynic might say that this is intentional, as it helps maintain control and order if common beliefs are developed that serve the purposes of those dishing them out…
Common beliefs are convenient, and they help things run smoothly. This is true in business, as well, of course. This is what corporate culture, corporate image and identity, advertising and PR are all about, and it can help a company become successful.

So it is to be expected, then, that we often have an uneasy relationship with creativity. Faced with a creative person, business executives sometimes don’t know how to deal with this uneasiness and may criticize or put down creative ideas without appreciating their potential or seriously considering them at all. I call this Fear Undermining Creative Knowledge syndrome, the acronym of which accurately expresses the frustration that is so often felt when a businessman and a creative person try to work together. Two ships passing in a pea-souper at night, foghorns blasting to ensure a safe distance, but each desperately wanting to appreciate the existence of the other. Left brain meets right brain in a tortured dance to find an acceptable middle ground.

Or not. I was listening to Michael O’Leary (Ryanair) on the radio, saying with some pride that he doesn’t use creative consultants, and anyone with a pony tail won’t even get through his door. He has young staff, and they produce all the advertising ideas themselves in-house, so he has created a mix of control and creativity that works for him. Not many companies have that much confidence and such a charismatic leader to make that work well. Often, a weakness of an owner manager is that he or she cannot determine when it is best to seek creative expertise. Many have an ego that serves them well in the good times but can be disastrous in bad times or when the company needs to take a significant step up in order to continue to grow.

All this means that whether the creative process is carried out internally or externally, it often gets a bad rap, and it’s easy to convince board members that it isn’t important for survival. But they are missing one important point in thinking like this. They need creativity in order to move forward, and it’s rarely the creative input that creates the kind of disasters we have seen in recent times, that all combined to create the financial crisis. As we know, it was primarily dodgy financial practices that caused the problems, fuelled by collective unthinking and a lack of creativity to create the tools and mechanisms to avoid it. Once we pull ourselves through the mess, will anything in the financial world change? There are already signs of a repeat performance.

What, then, is the message we are not hearing? Maybe we all have some fresh learning to do about creativity and what it contributes to our lives. Maybe, as Sir Ken Robinson so eloquently urged in his TED talk that has been admired by over 4 million viewers, we need to radically re-think our educational system.

I was told once that in the west, when we see an abstract work of art we assess it, judge it and criticize it. In other cultures in the East, they observe it, and see what they gain from it. To me, that rather sounds as if our culture blocks it out and maintains a distance from something we inherently don’t understand, and the other lets it in, and learns to appreciate what ever it is offering. Which way is the way of progress?

Lewis Evans is an artist, entrepreneur, inventor and marketing communications consultant. Fuelled by creativity and driven by a passion to provide innovation, impact and influence, his career has taken in a large variety of disciplines, skills and experience across many areas of industry and the public sector.

For the last few months, Bloggertone has been a labour of love and indeed a steep learning curve for me and the guys at Channelship. For those of you that don’t know (the new official explanation), Bloggertone is a business blogging community, a place where business professionals can stand out. You can read the specialists; share opinions and sign up to blog about business!

The site went live on the 23^rd of October 2009 and as it now goes through its first redesign, it feels like a good time to look back and access what I have learned in between.

Identity takes time

I had an idea in my head of what Bloggertone would be before the project got off the ground. In some respects, it now resembles those initial thoughts and in other ways it is completely different. “What Bloggertone is” has changed and is changing. I now realise that this is one definition online community, it is an entity that grows and changes and you as the parent need to support rather than resist. I now realise that it may be some time before Bloggertone acquires it’s grown up persona.

Community means you setting the example

I think most Bloggertoners (what they now like to be called) would agree that the single biggest success of the project so far is the community. It was probably 6-7 wks after the launch that this realisation fully dawned on me. Its easy to talk up community, but to really support a growing community like Bloggertone, you must be prepared to put some work in. You yourself need to become the example of the community member that you are trying to create.

It takes all types

The strengths and levels of involvement differ from member to member. Some people are great bloggers and produce excellent content. Others are wonderful networkers who promote, support and interact effectively - while some members come purely for the advice. The point is that people interact in the way that best suits them, while you might like everyone to do everything; this is not a realistic expectation. A better way is to accept this and find ways to make it easier for members to continue their level of involvement.

Summary:

The strength of any community is down to the people, we are very lucky in that we have great people who have invested themselves in the success of the project. This is really what has set the tone for Bloggertone.

Guest Author

Barney Austen

A meeting that is not constructively planned, lacks a purpose, is not properly conducted and ends with no action points is exactly that. Yet, in business, a substantial amount of our time is spent in meetings that seem to be constructed from the off-set to fail.

The responsibility for a meetings success is largely down to the organiser, but the preparedness of the attendees can also ensure it achieves is aims.

So how do you make sure a meeting is successful?

Well, what is the purpose of a meeting? Simply put, from a business context, it is designed to achieve a decision(s) on an action or actions that will affect your business/project in some shape or form. If it is not going to do this, why are you holding the meeting?

Understand what you want addressed in the meeting and ensure that this is clearly understood from the agenda.

The Agenda!

You must have one otherwise your meeting will simply not be effective and get hijacked by some pirate who wants to use it for airing concerns on another issue. Strong words perhaps, but we have all experienced this at some time or another.

The agenda should state…

• Time, place, duration, attendees and meeting purpose.
• List of agenda items to be covered off

1. Urgent issues towards the top!
2. Quick items should be placed first so they can get covered off otherwise you may not get to them.
3. Avoid putting controversial topics together if possible i.e. vary the pitch and content of the meeting flow.
4. Pop in some breaks if it’s a lengthy session.
5. Time each section (if possible!).
6. Limit the scope for any other business (AOB) by having the agenda fixed with no mention of AOB.

Then send the agenda out in advance.

Remember, if you have a meeting after lunch, most participants will be feeling the effects. Don’t put a heavy duty item first if this is the case. You want participation and interest so start with a topic that will allow this to occur.

The Attendees!

Attendees should be invited based on the contribution they can make. If a person is not a decision maker or is not an expert required to explain a situation, then why are they coming? If an invitee is going to send a representative because they cannot attend, that representative must be able to commit to a decision on behalf of the original invitee – otherwise ask for someone else of defer the meeting until the main invitee can attend. Why? Because if you need that invitee to make a call, you will end up having another meeting anyway!

Attendees should be aware of their responsibilities in terms of preparation i.e. if they have to bring something to the meeting then they need to have this with them and be comfortable presenting it.

Other Things!

The above are the biggies, but don’t forget;

• Meeting venue – is the room suitable? Big enough? Too hot? Too cold?
• Are you going to supply refreshments?
• Do you need a whiteboard? Projector? Screen? Writing materials?
• Organise roles – chair (usually organiser), minute taker, time manager(if appropriate).

It’s really all about preparation – if you have it right, your meeting will work. If you don’t, expect to be back same time, same place discussing the same thing which is a waste of time, effort and cash!

I hope this was helpful! Any additions anyone?

Photo with thanks to:

Barney Austen is a budding entrepreneur working on software product solutions for business. His background is mainly operational and senior management roles in mobile telecoms and software houses. Areas of expertise include professional services, out-sourcing, team management and general operations management.

Guest Author

Ronan Gavin

Following on from my last blog post on the role of procurement I wanted to share some insight and strategies to help identify a win-win outcome with procurement.

Procurement Managers are under increasing pressure at present to deliver real cost savings. When positioning a solution make sure you can show a savings benefit that he can position with the business i.e. make him look good amongst his peers. Also try and get a clear view on procurement’s relationship with the business as you could win a useful ally if you can bolster his position internally by arming him with new innovative ways to tackle a problem that he can sell to the business.

Understand the process that procurement go through internally with the business from detailing specifications, assessing the market, going through formal evaluation process and selection and negotiation with preferred supplier. Understanding this is as important for you in setting expectations internally in your own organisation as to the effort involved and timelines of a sales opportunity.

Getting procurement to map out their sourcing process from start to finish will also enable you to identify and plan how and where you can differentiate yourselves from the competition. It is important to remember that evaluations carry a price and non-price element and a good relationship with procurement will enable you to get an indication in some instances how the evaluation is weighted.

My final conclusion is that traditional selling approaches of selling to the business and then defending your position at the very end of the cycle is not effective, particularly in today’s economic climate where the spotlight is on procurement. Be brave – invest the time with procurement as early as possible in the cycle and you can reap the benefits of selling through and not at procurement.

What are your views and experiences on the above? Let’s hear from Procurement people as well!

Ronan Gavin is Business Development Manager with Supplierforce. With over 16 years experience in the technology and financial services industries, Ronan has a unique combination of solution selling and procurement knowledge. With a career which has spanned sales, marketing, consultancy and corporate banking, Ronan has extensive experience in new business development and global account management roles across multiple industries internationally.