“We don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan”, is an old saw that is still true today. Despite an avalanche of tools to help us plan well, we still manage to do a lousy job of it. Another oldie goldie is “a good workman doesn’t blame his tools” and so this applies perfectly to the tech panoply we have at our fingertips. Having tools available and using them at all, much less effectively, is the bugbear of most sales organisations. The firm buys the tool or the monthly subscription, spends a lot of money on it, only to see the salespeople barely engaging with it. The information stays in their head or on loose bits of paper, perhaps in a notebook or in an organiser. Anywhere but where it needs to be, to be of any assistance to the marketing effort, to properly segment and go after specific, defined markets.
Salespeople like people and they like talking to clients. This is relatively easy. Keeping records of those conversations is another matter. Getting those records into the Client Relationship Management (CRM) system is a different ask.
Setting up the meetings is a process which can be very poorly done in the hands of poor salespeople systems. The timing of meetings should be done with a mind to geography, so that you are not traipsing across town over long distances. You need to be grouping the visits together, so the time lost travelling is kept to a minimum.
There was a funny commercial you could see on the monitors in the back of taxis in Tokyo. about selling in Japan. A new guy was being welcomed to the sales team and one of the tanned, tough looking, veteran sales guys enthusiastically shakes his hand, but then notices the newbies calf muscles are puny. Mr. Suntan and the other veterans proudly show off their super muscular calves, built from going door to door to see clients and deride the new guy. The point of the commercial was that this was very much an old style sales methodology where you hit the pavements. Today, they were saying, you can use computer programmes much more effectively to reach clients. I quite liked Mr. Suntan myself, he was pretty cool, rather than Mr. Puny Calf Muscles wielding his computer. Anyway, I digress.
To make appointments needs a prospect list. A prospect list comes from leads coming in through SEO, your website, pay per click ads on Google etc., also existing clients, prior clients who have gone cold, networking, referrals, inbound phone contacts or highly selective cold calls. There are new clients to be targeted and this requires real research and effort. Today in Japan, you can’t easily buy client lists anymore. There are so many restrictions now around privacy of information and getting permission to connect. Getting simple information is much harder today than it was even five years ago, so we need to allocate sufficient time to do the research.
If you don’t know the name of the person you are calling, then the staff taking the call are all gold plated, absolute pros at getting rid of you. They make sure you never get through to the person you seek, who is always in a meeting by the way and who never returns your call. No one is thinking “let’s all make sure the wheels of industry are turning faster and faster and let’s grease the wheels to make sure that happens”. They are in full shield wall defensive posture of protection and denial to invaders from outside. So you at least need the name of who you want to contact to get on the first rung of arranging a meeting.
Keeping track of how many people you are contacting, how many you are actually reaching, how many appointments you are winning, how many deals you are concluding and the average size of those deals, is critical for the well organised salesperson. This provides us with success ratios and norms around how much activity is required to generate new business. Yet how many salespeople know their one ratios, know how many calls they have to make to reverse engineer everything to achieve their monthly budget?
When we do meet the client, how good are the notes we are taking? Are we talking notes or leaving it all to our ironclad memories? Remember that the faintest ink is vastly superior to the best memory. Write it all down. If for some reason you can’t take notes during the meeting, get it all down immediately thereafter. The next step is to get the key bits into the system. This way your notes are kept safe, can be accessed from anywhere and can easily be shared. When you are looking for case studies of success these notes are goldmines. They usually describe the client’s problem in detail, the proposal you put together talks about the solution you provided and the P&L provides the results.
When we know how many contacts have to be made to meet budget, have the prospects identified and selected to pour into our sales funnel, we can use our excellent time management skills to make sure we are doing our tasks in priority order and that we are doing the most productive thing at every given moment. None of this happens by itself. We have to plan our activities carefully and plan our days fully. Record keeping is pretty boring, but for those salespeople who get it, they know that is where the gold is buried. What are you doing about all of this down at your shop?
