A great explanation of how the web is morphing right now!

A great explanation of how the web is morphing. 263 slides, less than five minutes. Go fast!

http://www.slideshare.net/DavidGillespie/digital-strangelove-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-internet

A New Sales Model

Traditional sales models have been one way, straight lines, “Qualify, Present, and Close,” funnels, playing fields, etc.

Life has been giving me anecdotal evidence these are not accurate models. If you give enough presentations, you eventually have several where the buyer’s first question is, “How much is this going to cost?”

Here are two answers from the straight line school:

“I would be happy to answer that question, after I learn a little about your situation…” Not good.

“I have to ask my spouse, er manager.” Worse.

How about, “A quarter of a million dollars.” Buyer’s response, “OK. Can I get it in red?”

A few months ago I read that seller-enforced regulations are designed to control the buyer…and that in an internet world, buyers are not interested in being controlled.

Have you ever seen a door in a retail store that said, “Employees Only”? Perhaps you were looking for something that was out of stock on the shelves and that door was to the storage area.

Can you imagine seeing something like that on Amazon.com?

A model is a simplified way to define a complex process. What would a new sales model look like?

I started thinking it is a circle as some sales presentations circle as a buyer develops their knowledge.

Then I realized the salesperson has a flat out question-answering model. That’s scary, because that means it is the quality of your answers that keeps the sale developing. But when was that any different?

We just used old models to deemphasize that.

How would you prepare for that model?

I see four areas of preparation, and any order will be selected by the buyer’s interest.

The first area is beginning a conversation. Call it an introduction.

The second is getting the buyer to talk…and listening to what is said. Sometimes that is easy and sometimes it is like breaking rocks. I find making the sale gets easier when the buyer tells me something they didn’t know before our discussion…when as a result of our conversation they have a new understanding of their situation, of what they want.

The third area is knowing when and how to answer the buyer’s questions. We find there are some questions the buyer asks with good intention, which will terminate a transaction if answered incorrectly.

So it is up to the salesperson to recognize the pitfalls and craft the answers to these questions.

The fourth area is the close. However, with all the emotion and misunderstanding traditionally associated with this activity, (Did she buy? No. Ah, you didn’t close) let’s redefine a kinder, gentler close.

How about: “A close occurs when you and the customer agree to do something.”

The purpose of using this sales model is not to manipulate the buyer, but to have a working model of where you are when you are working. It’s a paradigm shift, which I find much closer to reality.

Comments?

Qualified Leads

I was in a sales meeting last week, and one of the managers started exhorting the marketing liaison about not having enough “qualified leads.” I’ve heard that many times before, but this time I started thinking about “qualified leads” and the role of the salesperson.

People buy on emotion and justify with reasons. The primary benefit of a live sales person is to create the emotion that begins the sale. That doesn’t necessarily create an immediate sale, and I had an “aha” moment last year when I had lunches with two of my previous technical partners.

They both said that most of their current business was coming from people we met when we first started our territories many years ago…and that the current sales people weren’t seeing many new people. They were stretching their account administration duties to fill the month, averaging five to eight external meetings.

I make major sales and aim to have 20 meetings a month. First meetings, second meetings, group meetings, abject apologies, project resets, completion celebrations, I don’t care. They are all an opportunity to open more business.
I once had a marketing person ask, “But are they good meetings?”

I asked her, “Have you ever had to create twenty external meetings a month? I’ll take anything!”

“Good meetings” come from our ability to interest others in what we are doing and the total number of attempts. I don’t expect every prospect meeting to generate immediate business, but I have seen them create multimillion dollar projects, referrals to interested prospects, ideas for how to better explain what I am doing, and acquaintances who forward the sale for me when I’m not there.

Then I had one manager who said, “So you’re not interested in closing.” I was stunned. That’s another meeting, and knowing what people want makes it an easy as well as profitable meeting!

It seems to me that salespeople (and managers) who focus on “closing” have a harder life, since the customer defines the close. By focusing on opening, I spend more time doing things that turn into sales.
BTW, I define “closing” thusly: A close occurs each time the customer asks you to do something.

What do you think?

Value of a Tag Line

I got a LinkedIn invitation and a breakfast with Joe Shumard, a Sales Lab Irregular from 15 years ago. We had lost touch.

At breakfast he said, "I suppose you want to know how I found you again?"

He is now Director of Development at the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce and was in a meeting discussing the value of tag lines. He said, "I remembered yours, 'Explosive Growth, Abundant Cash Flow' as the best one I had heard, so I went to the internet to see if it was copyrighted or anything. Low and behold you were all over the Google page. So I sent you that LinkedIn invitation."

I got that tag ten years previously, when I asked Jim Dixon, President of Bay Area Cellular Telephone what was the best thing I was doing for him. I was stunned by his response and never forgot it.

After seeing Joe, I came home and tried Googling "Explosive Growth, Abundant Cash Flow." Works best with the quotation marks, but it really works.

What are you using for a tag line these days?

Please Welcome www.DickDavies.com

Over the weekend I put up www.DickDavies.com. I had planned to build my web presence on this blog, LinkedIn, and a few other specialized public sites.

I had someone get exercised that I was using my gmail email rather than a custom domain. Frankly, I am a rabid GOOG fanbois. It's their engineering and I suspect the future is in open source development and the power of the open source community.

 But I knew about the hotmail prejudice from years past and figured if one person still had it, probably more (and maybe most) did, too.

When I see a domain on an email, I usually check it...and want to see something other than a squatter's placeholder. What should I put?

Over ten years ago I built an AOL-hosted website using notepad, laboriously checking content, spelling, code, and links for what became an extensive series of essays and observations. I remember some unreasonable pride when I learned how to code “curly quotes.” I downloaded all kinds of steadily improving html editors, clip art, and at one point had burning flame letters. I had more enthusiasm than taste. 

This time I started with Google Apps standard edition, so I have capacity for a website, 50 email addresses and 500 aliases at no cost, all sitting on Google servers. The biggest hurdle is understanding the Apps paradigm, and that was minor, just like switching from Wordstar to Wordperfect, to Word, to Writer.

The manual is fantastic. It's the Google box. I would type in Google Apps and whatever I wanted to do, and get back Google help, Squidoo lenses, blog posts, and generally I had my answer within the first three results.

As always, architecture was 75% of the battle. I decided that this site should bind together all my web real estate, and for the first time provide the handouts from presentations over the years. (I have been admiring how Tom Peters posts his slides, and learning how Web 2.0 is about contributing so we can get more done over the web.)
Slideshare was where I placed documents, handouts and slide shows.

Yeah, I do slides when hobbled by webinar technology.

For background information about me, I could never write (heck, I've never seen) anything as good as the recommendations my friends have written on my LinkedIn site. When I started doing LinkedIn, I had no idea how it was going to turn out, but the recommendations on LinkedIn are where the awesome power of crowdsourcing really hit me.

One nagging detail was that I hate the repetitious emails at custom domains, like dickdavies@dickdavies.com. I think that's silly. Actually, I wonder who has gmail@gmail.com? That would be the height of cool! I figured for brochures and collateral I would put “Dick Davies, present@dickdavies.com.” And we were off!

What do you think? Sure would appreciate your comments. Thank you!