Customer Communication is King -- Sales and Marketing Team Work

It is critical at whatever stage the economy is in, good times or bad times, for your customer messaging to ring true with your target market. If the potential customers you are talking to do not understand what you are trying to convey, then your company is in big trouble. And that is spelled with a capital T. If your salespeople send more than a few percent of their time trying to explain what it is you as a company are trying to convey, you are then not in an optimum sales situation.

I have just a brief example of shaping the message to the target audience. When my son was very young his favorite fast food was a cheeseburger from McDonalds with ketchup and pickles only. He would go with me and tell me he wanted a cheeseburger, but please only ketchup and pickles on it. When I ordered it the way he wanted it ordered the McDonalds clerk would repeat it back multiple times, and with a high degree of certitude my son’s cheeseburger would have either mustard or onions or both on it. This would cause me to trek to the counter to exchange the cheeseburger for one that would meet my son’s standards.

This disconnect in communications got old very fast. McDonalds would always be gracious enough to make another to my son’s specifications, but the hassle quotient was off of the scales.

I started thinking about the issue at night once and determined for a product that contained only a bun, hamburger, cheese, onion, mustard, ketchup and pickle there had to be a better way to communicate my son’s requirements and make the process easier to digest.

I determined that I would order my son’s cheeseburger by what he did not want on it. “One cheeseburger with no onion and no mustard, please.” The clerk would repeat back, “Cheeseburger, no onion and no mustard.” Bingo, the rate of successful ordering for my son’s cheeseburger shot through the roof.
But there was still one small problem. When my son heard me order in the new fashion he would say to me, “But I want pickles and ketchup only on my cheeseburger.” With my son it was very easy to communicate to him that because of the finite number of ingredients only ketchup and pickle on a cheeseburger was exactly the same as no onions and no mustard on a cheeseburger.

My Son was happy, I was happy, the clerk was happy and somewhere Ronald McDonald and the shareholders of McDonalds were happy because the cost of preparing my son’s food had been reduced.

I use the above only as an example of customer communications and how critical it is. Lack of clear communications could be why you lost an account, why your close rate is not as good as your competition, or why you often leave your customers with a dazed and confused look on their face. Talk to your key salespeople and find out if messaging might be getting in the way of representing and selling your company. If it is, then fix it.

Setting Sales Goals

Setting sales goals is a core activity of sales departments. The establishment of the goal for annual, quarter, and month is probably the single most critical decision that shapes and drives a sales department. Every company needs and deserves a purpose built sales team that has the capability to deliver on the sales goals of the organization. When the sales goal is overlaid with the company’s offerings, the resources available, level of marketing support, route to market, market potential and competitors; a sales strategy can be formulated that dictates the sales tactics (sales plan). A sales plan simply outlines how the sales and marketing resources that are available are going to be allocated to achieve the goal.

Just setting a goal, without examining impact to the sales and marketing department is not a reasonable approach. A good everyday example of a goal without a reasonable plan would be someone who wants to loose 15 pounds in 90 days. That is a stretch goal and depending on the weight and health of the individual that may or may not be a good goal. Let’s assume that it is a good goal. A very bad plan to achieve this would be for the individual not eat until they had lost the 15 pounds. Not a very practical plan. The plan that sits behind a goal has to be reasonable to implement. The plan must have the resources available to permit proper execution.

If a developed sales plan calls for a 40% increase in marketing spend and 6 new hires to sales, but there is only budget for 20% increase in marketing spend and 2 new sales hires, then the success of the goal comes into question. The goal and the plan are tightly integrated because of their nature. The plan must be reasonable in scope, and look at potential contingencies.

As an example, consider a mythical company that the previous year achieved 50 million in sales; this represented an increase of 12% over the year before. Then let’s assume that management’s goal is to grow an additional 12% in the new year, this would put the new revenue target at 56 million. The question then becomes, what is the sales and marketing plan that has a high probability of achieving that goal, all other things in the market being equal (competition, disruptive technologies, major market shifts, degree of market penetration, maturity of market, significant new products, major changes in your go-to-market partners, etc). All things being equal, your sales force should become more efficient year over year. So the assumption becomes that to achieve a 12% increase in annual sales the sales budget would need to increase less than 12% (this is dependent of the relative size of the organization and market conditions).

When the goal is established, an assessment is made of the previous year’s success balanced against budget expenditures, a draft plan is built that accommodates the expected growth for the coming year, and the plan’s implementation cost is then forecasted. If goal, plan and budget are signed off on then the next step is implementation and measurement.

The goal and the plan must align. This seems so obvious, but I have often seen examples with little or no alignment between the two. Most often this happens when the sales plan is not adapted to fit the company’s product offering, the potential market and the internal resources available. Critical for success is a company’s alignment with the market, and the internal alignment of the sales and marketing team.

Points for consideration:

• Goals need to be clearly defined
• Company’s sales and marketing plans need to align to goal
• Plan has to be resourced to the right level
• At the very least middle management needs to buy into both the goal and the plan to achieve the goal. This is critical for success.
• The entire sales and marketing team should believe that the goal is obtainable, and see a way forward to achieve the goal.
• Everyone in sales and marketing must understand their role and their contribution to the company goal; if this is not clear then they become disassociated from the process of meeting the goal.
• Senior management must be completely supportive of the goal, the plan and the allocation of resources to support that plan.
  

One last comment on this subject is that many times in an organization there is imperfect plan alignment and even internal plan conflict can exist. It is hard enough to develop customers and grow sales, but when there are core conflicts inside an organization it becomes doubly hard. There is never an environment of 100% peace, love and harmony; the complexity of an organization is too great to achieve that, and a small level of dissonance is not a bad thing. However, there should never exist a condition that takes the focus off of the plan and execution of the plan.

Customers Visiting Headquarters, Part 2

Corporate visits were a critical component of sales at a larger enterprise company I worked at. There were 200 to 300 customer visits per year at this company; sometimes there were three a day. We had a very nice corporate visitor facility; with dedicated staff, and with dedicated resources. Sales people, who wanted to have a customer visit staged, would call the visitor center and all of the particulars of the visit would be coordinated for that sales person and customer by the assigned visitor center staff.

I had an opportunity to see how the enterprise visit worked from the point of view of a “subject matter expert”. In a year-and-a-half I gave approximately 30 presentations on the company’s integration story. Each time after the visit the presenters were evaluated by the customer on their presentation quality, we received a grade, and the presenter with the highest grade at the end of the month received recognition for being recognized by the customers. In the 29 out of the 30 times I presented I was not briefed on the history the customer had with our company, what was the visitor’s objective, what was the sales objective, who the individuals were, their role in their organization and what was the customer’s objective.

The one time that was different was when a sales representative from Scotland came to my office the day before his customer was scheduled to visit. He had contacted me the week before and said he wanted to bring me up to speed on what he was trying to accomplish. He told me what the customer was evaluating for purchase, he told me why integration was important to his customer (my pitch was on integration), what he hoped they would learn from my presentation, how much they had bought from our company the last 5 years (year by year), who would be attending (and their roles), and he wanted to make sure I brought handouts of my presentation.

On most visits I knew only the name of the company that was in our visitor center, what room to show up at, and the time. At the end of my presentation the sales representative left the room with me and thanked me for presenting to his client, and gave me a rough appraisal of how it went from his point of view. Most of the selling that are supposed to happen on a customer visit he had prepared for.

15 THINGS YOU MAY WANT TO CONSIDER

From this and other positive and negative experiences I had at the visitor center I have developed a list of things that you might want to consider on staging a customer visit;

1. Before the customers are on site have a crystal clear idea of what their objectives are,
2. At the start of the visit list the visitor’s objectives and how you are going to accomplish those,
3. Make sure the visit is designed to address the customer sales and product issues,
4. Get executive sponsorship for each visit, at least have a letter from the CEO welcoming the visitors,
5. Make sure the people involved are briefed, at least with a background document,
6. Make sure the presentations are meaningful to the customers situation,
7. If you are the sales representative, request a copy for yourself of every presentation (I have seen presenters with 80 slides that were slotted for 45 minutes, and would not leave the lectern till finished),
8. At the end get feedback, not just on the presenters, but on how well the visit met the objectives your visitors had prior to the meeting,
9. Have handouts that are related to the visitor issues that are uniform in appearance for visitors,
10. Do not hold the visitors captive all day, provide breaks after most presentations, have the subject matter experts available for side discussion,
11. Stay on time,
12. Set-up a question “parking lot” for follow-up at the end of each session,
13. Ask customers to sign a visitor wall or hang their picture (something personal) that leaves their mark on the company that day,
14. Have sales person rate support staff, facilities, and subject matter experts (this goes to top sales management),
15. Stay flexible, and enjoy the time with your customer.
    

SUMMARY

The customer visit is an important sales event that requires careful coordination between the field and headquarters. When headquarters is in the planning mode they should not forget that the focus should be on helping the field close and support important and critical customers.

Customers Visiting Headquarters, Part 1

The corporate visit is a part of sales that is typically only seen in larger enterprise sales. Customers or potential customers drop in on your company to receive an update on company’s direction and for assurance that you are the right technology partner for their needs, now and in the future. Customers that take the time to visit you are very serious about the relationship they have with you as a vendor.

At an enterprise software company I worked at, an outside consultant was brought in to look at our sales process and why customers bought from us. The consultant found out that over 70% of the corporate visitors who visited us bought a substantial amount of product and service over the 18 months following their visit. Typically a large enough purchase was made that the customer visit program was deemed a very successful part of the sales process. Customer visits are not always appropriate, and have to be a well thought out part of the sales and marketing process. However, the expense and effort that it takes to put together a successful program can be well worth it in building close relationships with key customers.

Grading Leads

When Marketing is chartered to bring in leads at a very low dollar amount per lead; more is not always a good thing. There is pressure to bring in only low cost leads, which tend to have a lower value to sales. By assigning multiple attributes to sales leads, such as developing a point system and targeting an average lead quality along with a target acquisition cost, sales groups will see better sales results.

Not all businesses and sales teams are driven by leads and converting those leads to sales. If your business is based on lead generation and the conversation of leads to sales you might find the following of interest. I have worked in both types of sales environments, those focused on leads and those focused on the enterprise. One sales organization I worked for, sold to the 35 largest telecoms in the world. It is a relatively easy task to find out who the largest telecoms are, and once the list is developed it is straight forward to determine the individual or individuals who are the decision makers in those organizations. There is not a large need to use marketing resources for lead generation in this type of sales organization.

Yet in other organizations I have worked in, leads were the life blood of the organization. Fresh leads flowed into the top of the sales funnel and executed sales deals flowed out of the bottom of the funnel. What happens to the leads while they are inside of the funnel is in many organizations a bit of a mystery. The mystery surrounding the processes that are associated with leads needs to be pealed back to really maximize sales impact. If leads are your life blood, then you had better have a good fix on how to maximize their value to your sales organization.

To see how one comes to terms with this process I am going to jump ahead a bit and then come back to the beginning. Depending on a number of factors (sales infrastructure, experience of reps, complexity of sale) businesses who require sales leads to keep their business going find out quickly that there is an optimum number of leads that one sales person can deal with in a day. It is important to know what that number is. Too few and your sales people are sitting on their hands; too many and the process becomes very inefficient. Sales reps need to wade through a heap of leads to find the hot sales opportunities.

Let’s say for example that one sales representative can make 50 quality contacts in one week, but you have 200 leads for each sales representative every week. That means that 150 of the leads are not being properly followed up on. Now if we had the ability to gaze into a crystal ball and judge the quality of each of those leads, we might see that 40 of the leads are hot, 80 are cold, and 80 are marginal. Which leads do you want your sales team to follow-up on? The 40 hot leads should be the number one priority of the organization. Once the leads are not graded, there is only a 20% chance on any random call that your sales team is following up on an optimal lead. Why not move the hot leads to the head of the call queue and then message the 80 marginal leads with a campaign that addresses customer value and has a clear call to action. When the prospect responds, they come back into the system as a hot lead.

Usually most organizations will send some type of communication to all 200, just to keep them warm. After this general communication let’s look at the numbers. As an example let’s say that after the campaign 7 of the leads that were previously marginal come back as hot; and out of 80 cold leads, 3 come back as hot. With the original 40 leads classified as hot, this gives us 50 hot leads for one sales representative to follow-up on that week. The amount of time a sales rep would have spent chasing bad leads has been cut dramatically.

Second level qualification or a “Closed Loop Marketing” system is imperative to making a lead driven sales team more efficient. Sales should pursue prospects that represent the best opportunity and there should be a process in place to bubble up these high-value prospects. All leads must be graded by some agreed criteria to maximize the efficiency of a sales department, if there is not an effective grading system in place then sales resources are being wasted, the team is not motivated to work at their peak, and the entire sales process slows down to a crawl. When I am focused on lead grading criteria, I like to grade very aggressively. I would prefer exceptional leads and have some sales capacity left over, instead of overrunning my sales team with poor leads.

Everyone needs to establish their own grading system that works for them and gets the sales machine rolling. Criteria for leads grading can be accomplished in a number of different ways. You can ask the customer if they would like to be called (yes) (no). If someone is asking to be called they must be considered as having good potential. Other ways to categorize a lead are asking for a purchase time frame, number of units, company name, all of these and additional criteria can be used to determine grading leads. I recommend you develop your grading system and then divide the leads into their buckets. Do you now have enough or not enough to work with? You then adjust the criteria based on the amount of leads you need to put into the top of the sales funnel on a daily, weekly or monthly time period.

By grading leads you will see an increase in employee morale, achieve higher close rates and see increases in revenue per employee. All of these are good things.

Whatever decisions you make, make sure you identify what your objectives are prior to designing the sales process, establish your goals, and measure the effect of the sales process. If you do not see a measurable improvement in sales closures that means your sales people need further training, or the criteria you use to grade the leads is wrong. Adjust based on measured feedback, try again and compare results. It has been my experience that 5 salespeople with good sales leads will outperform 5 salespeople with bad leads any day of the week.

In baseball the batting the coach instructs players to not swing at bad pitches. Sales is much the same, don’t chase bad leads, not all leads have the same value to your sales organization, figure out how to establish a grading system, measure the effect of lead grading and see improvements in your sales.

Necessary Evil or Tradeshows & Conferences: Part One

Trade shows and conferences are still an important part of the marketing mix, but very seldom is their potential fully realized. The booth is packed and shipped with the latest literature packs. People who may or may not be appropriate to staff the booth are volunteered for booth duty. Flight reservations and hotels are booked. The day arrives and the show commences. The booth is always staffed, the literature is always present, anyone and everyone who enters your floor space is talked to and their badge is scanned. Someone is placed in charge of the leads, everyone goes home, and management feels that shows not that important in the marketing mix.

Most companies have very professional people who worry about the show logistics, but few companies focus on what happens in the booth, and the follow-up process. Why? Because event marketing is not that high of a priority to most companies. People are sent, not selected for their potential impact. The follow-up is spotty. The potential impact for the show is not really realized.

To really understand what the potential is, someone has to be given the ability to change what is done at a show. At a company I was in charge of sales at, we would take four workstations to a trade show and demo all day. At the end of the day we would be dead tired, and have accumulated 100 to 300 questionable leads. We talked to so many people that they started to blend to together. Well meaning booth staff would look for people that were standing two or three deep at the demo stations and ask to if they could scan their badge for follow-up. When we left the show we would send out a mail pieced that thanked everyone we scanned for their attendance and then we would just wait to see what would happen next.

I lobbied to not do any demonstrations and request that booth visitors fill out a form during a brief product overview. The first question was, I am here only for the “give away”, and I am not interested in your product. True or false. After much debate the company decided to cut back to one demo station for occasional demos and to include the form. Just the action of qualifying the lead had such a positive impact on the sales people that they spent more time in the booth. They were excited about talking to real potential customers and about real potential deals at the show. No phone exchanges, no who are you again scenarios, or no I can not talk to you right now I am in a meeting. Real sales conversations with the sales team fully engaged were happening on right in our booth. The next show we left the single demo station behind and we improved the process five fold. We actually were plugged into some sales deals only because we had attended the show. Our competitors adopted our strategy a couple of shows later.

Think about it. As an example say someone throws 10,000 Monopoly dollars on the floor of a room, and in that paper mess they mix in 1,000 US dollar bills. You are given 10 minutes in the room and whatever you can carry out is yours. Now let’s say you have an hour, then a day and now 3 days to sort through the money on the floor. At what point have you picked up all of the US dollars and you start collecting Monopoly money? My guess is that point is never reached. Now let’s say for ever piece of money, real or counterfeit that you walk out of that room with, you are going to be charged 10 cents. Remember leads do not come for free. The answer again is that you come out of the room with no Monopoly money.

In the real world all leads cost money. Why does your company want to spend money on something that is a very long shot? In accounting there is the concept of “Sunk Cost”. Once you spend money for something, you have lost the ability to spend that money again. Any decisions you make should not be based on spend. Once you have spent x number of dollars on the booth why chase bad prospects? Prospects that burden your sales and marketing effort. I call it the “high-body count effect”. High body count gives management a warm glow that the company is on the right path. All a high body count means is that you were effective in drawing in anyone with a heart beat that walked by.

In the room example, let’s say you take a vacuum in to the room and you vacuum everything up in 10 minutes. You walk to the door then to settle your account. You have just vacuumed 11,000 pieces of paper that at 10 cents each will cost you $1,100 dollars. You have $1,000 dollars of real money in the canister. You have just lost $100 dollars. If you had picked up just the real money, you would have been charged $100, 10 cents per piece of paper, and you would have made $900. The delta is $1,000 and the difference between profit and loss. Trade shows should be thought of as an opportunity to highly qualify prospects and establish the initial contact. It is not about collecting every name in the place. You can buy a cold lead list from many sources and have spent a lot less money. Part of the sales process has to be qualification. The earlier you qualify a lead and turn them into a real prospect the better off you are as a sales and marketing team. Your resources are focused on making deals not shifting through trash. Just as in any process, not everything is perfect. You will find out later that there are some people who have a casual interest that will heat up over time, but if they fail to give you the information to have a dialog with them, it would have been impossible to engage them anyway.

The take away here is just because you are spending a big chuck of money on a trade show, don’t ever think you are doing the right thing by just collecting names. In fact this could have a harmful effect on your sales results and the company’s bottom line.

Tell Me What I Want to Hear

Lots of us listen to the radio during drive time. The commercials spew out with great regularity (unless you are a satellite radio customer). The message most of the time falls on deaf ears, or worse yet a change in channels. The commercial messaging has little effect on the listener until they need what is being advertised. This struck home for me when I had a clutch fail on me a couple of years ago on a car that was out of warranty. I was trying to determine what my options were and then I recalled a radio spot for clutch repair shop that I had heard at least 50 times, but had paid little attention to. I called the shop, received a price estimate, and then had my car towed to the shop for the arraigned repairs. I never mentioned to the manager that a big reason I had contacted and then selected his shop was because of the radio spots they ran. Maybe I am the reason the shop does not buy radio spots anymore.

What is the point? The point is that in Business-to-Consumer or Business-to-Business sales you can deliver your message as often as you want, but until conditions are such that the prospect you are talking to is really interested in buying, you are not going to be able to establish a dialog with the prospect. The entire sales process is predicated on the sales dialog. The dialog can involve mail, email, commercials, and phone calls that allow you to send messages to your potential market, and allows interested prospects to raise their hand that they are interested. That is the start; the rest of the dialog is about the prospect’s budget, needs, timing, evaluation and decision. The figurative raising of one’s hand is when the sales dialog really starts.

There is a very good article on “Dialogue Marketing”, published in November of 2005. The article touches on retail mostly and is now a couple of years old but the messaging is spot on for today dynamic sales environment. My only criticism of the article is that it addresses mostly the marketing and messaging part of the sales process, and does not address the transaction side of the acquisition process. However the article is excellent food for thought. One of the critical elements of the article I felt was the following quote I pulled from the article, “Companies that blast frequent, irrelevant messages dilute their brand equity. What customers want is great service and a consistently excellent experience across all channels.” How many of us know the above is true, even without any empirical evidence to support it. We all want to be treated with respect.

In the past when working with integrating sales and marketing groups I have always focused on building a team environment, this can be hard to accomplish in many organizations, but is important for success. Many sales organizations like to give marketing a list of what they need and then sit back for the delivery. Many marketing organizations tell sales what they are going to deliver and then take little other feedback. I call this “Tick the Boxes Go-To-Market”. What is required is a sales process that makes sense from a business process standpoint and the marketing materials and infrastructure to support that. A sales process that makes sense starts with the customer, what is needed to support their buying decision.

To acquire new customers determine what your current customer expectations were pre- and post- sale, design a process that addresses those requirements in an intelligent manner and then implement the changes to your organization with the buy-in of all concerned parties.



The Perfect Message at the Perfect Moment. Kalyanam, Kirthi; Zweben, Monte. In Harvard Business Review, Case No. R0511G. Published 11/01/2005, Harvard Business School Publishing, (6 pages).