Think About It… the e-book version

by Todd Youngblood

“Professional” is an interesting word. The standard definition – one who pursues an occupation for financial gain – implies that everyone with the word “sales” on their business card qualifies. It doesn’t even matter if they’ve actually ever sold anything! The definition is simply inadequate.

Since the dictionary isn’t much help in differentiating between the truly professional sales reps and the masses, a different approach is necessary. I decided to pick someone in a different field of endeavor that is quite clearly a professional and examine a few characteristics of that person.

Tiger Woods was my choice. Since he made somewhere north of $10 million last year – NOT including endorsement deals or investment income – you’d have to agree that he’s pursuing golf as “…an occupation for financial gain.” Also, the whole idea of “professional golf” is very well established, Tiger has been a “professional golfer” for ten years now and is currently ranked as #1 in the world. The guy’s a pro. End of debate.

It was fascinating that after some study and thought, one of his characteristics really leaped out as far and away the most significant. That characteristic is a fanatical commitment to continuous improvement. You might prefer to call it chasing perfection or the pursuit of excellence, but however you name it, rest assured that Tiger has focused all his resources, natural and otherwise, because he has decided that he WILL get better.

All that’s well and good, but a look at how he’s chasing continuous improvement is more pragmatically useful to the sales “professional.” Here again, one thing stands out. In Tiger’s mind, it’s all about performance metrics. It’s about measuring all of the key aspects of his game and how he stacks up against the competition.

He understands that being ranked #1 follows from having the best scoring average (#1 last year at 68.6), but that the best scoring average is based on a whole host of other factors. Things like driving distance; #2 at 316.1 yards (not 316, but 316.1!), Putting average; #5 at 1.731, Sand Saves; #46 at 54.2%, Distance from pin on shots from greater than 200 yards; #75 at 41′ 6″ and Driving Accuracy; #188 at 54.6%.

There are 187 professional golfers with better driving accuracy???!!!. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Tiger spends more time practicing straighter tee-shots, more accurate long approach shots and getting out of sand traps than he does on putting. Not that he ignores putting…

The essence of his strategy is measuring and comparing performance for all of the critical components of his profession.

Is that what you do as a sales “professional?” Have you defined 50 metrics to track your performance for the critical components of your profession? That’s right, 50. F-I-F-T-Y?. Go to www.tigerwoods.com and count ‘em up for yourself. Most sales people don’t measure even 5 things. And sales is far, FAR more complex than golf. That added complexity means that there are many, MANY more things that can and should be measured.

So, can you really call yourself a professional sales person?

by Todd Youngblood

I sure hope so…

Take a close look at the type of customer issues you’re wrestling with. Does your customer trust you with the BIG problems? Or do they keep you busy working on other, less strategic projects?

Most sales reps, most of the time are assigned by their customers to fixing “shopping” problems. If you find yourself winning deals because of your ability get the right price and delivery, you’re reacting to solving problems that have already been defined. The customer tells you “I need an X,” and depend on you to get it. If this is you, it’s time to get a promotion from your customer.

The traditional sales job requires a great amount of product knowledge. Knowledge that your customers don’t have. At this level, you find yourself matching up the right combination of product and service features, functions and specifications with problems the customer has defined for you. They tell you “I need something that can do X,” and depend on you to figure out what can do that. You’re still reacting. If this is you, it’s time to get a promotion from your customer.

Maybe customers depend on you to help them “do things right.” They look for you to be pro-active in helping to figure out ways to solve operational problems and/or to make their operations more efficient. At this level you find yourself regularly dealing with people who carry titles like Manger of This or Director of That. You might even occasionally get a chance to present to a VP. You’re not just reacting anymore, but you’re stuck working in the present, on existing problems. If this is you, it’s time to get a promotion from your customer.

“Doing the right things” is the domain of the functional Vice President. Operational results are still quite important to these folks, but they are much more concerned with cash flow and with the future; with how all the different parts of their organization work with and affect all the other parts; with decreasing the true total cost of all those parts and their interactions; with increasing the future value of what those parts produce. Your input is sought to help ensure continued success, efficiency and effectiveness, and, most importantly with improved cash flow. If this is you, I’m impressed, but it’s still time to get a promotion from your customer.

The genuinely professional sales rep is working on the customer’s long-term future and on improving their Income Statement and Balance Sheet. He or she thinks like a stockholder, an owner. This rep’s input is sought in the context of increasing shareholder value and making the best, long-range investment decisions.

Are you “valued” by your customers? You probably are, but is that good enough? Wouldn’t if be better if your customers were giving you regular “promotions?”

by Todd Youngblood

Do you ever get this uneasy feeling about the “solutions” you bring to the marketplace? That maybe they really aren’t all that special or different any more? I mean, everybody claims to offer, “not just products and services, but solutions!” Isn’t it possible (or even likely) that your customers can’t distinguish between your solution and your competitor’s solution?

Face facts. You don’t have a single competitor clueless enough to not at least claim to offer “solutions” to customer problems. A few might not have the wherewithal to actually deliver, …but they probably can.

The notion of creating solutions has been around for decades. The survivors have figured out how to do it. Adding application know-how and other value-add to core products and services is simply no longer a differentiator. Since everybody else offers the same sort of product/service packaging, buyers still have you cornered into the lower price game.

So now what?

As always, the answer lies in being both innovative and competent enough to deliver on those new, creative ideas. Easier said than done. Especially when you have already spent the last several years racking your brains to come up with something new and different. Maybe its’ time to get a little more creative about extending an approach that we know works.

Think through your traditional sources of innovation and competence. Obviously, others within your own company are first on the list; closely followed by your suppliers, whose own self-interest is served by helping you perform better. Next come customers. Including them is what enabled us to graduate from providing commodities, to differentiated products and services to total solutions to begin with! Think about all this in the context of the diagram below.

The more people you get involved in generating ideas, the more ideas you get. A larger pool of talent provides more sources of the right and best talent to implement those ideas. Every time you stretch out a bit further on either axis, you become a bit more valuable in the eyes of your customers.

Now stretch a bit further. Think about including “adjunct partners” in the quest for more differentiation and value. Adjunct partners are other individuals or organizations that have interests in common with your customers. Like, for example, their other suppliers, suppliers of those suppliers, your other customers, your customers’ customers, maybe even your competitors. Of course it’s conceivable that integrating their ideas and capabilities with your ideas and capabilities can result in a whole host of new and more compelling value propositions.

Then take it a step further and create a “community” of all these entities. Become the center, the focal point, the nexus of all this thinking and discussion about innovation and sources of knowledge and competence. Become the first place to check for where else to go and what else to do. Anybody can come up with a solution. Become the one who can create an “Environment” that will ensure success.

How? Use the classic tools. Really work those industry associations, user groups and contact lists with innovation specifically in mind. If you haven’t already done so, create user groups and advisory councils of your current customers. Use the new tools. Google everything – every problem, every issue, every idea. Sign up for and read blogs regularly. Write your own blog. Go take a look at what Innocentive is doing at www.innocentive.com and copy them. (WOW!) …or at least set up a forum for idea exchange on your web site.

Selling solutions just ain’t gonna’ cut it any more. Become “The Source” – that special individual who will always point to …or create… that new environment needed to solve any problem.

by Todd Youngblood

Talk is cheap. Especially talk about “how my sales force is one of the best” – which tends to be totally subjective. Maybe now is a good time to take a more rigorous approach, starting with…

I have never read about, heard about or worked in any significant and successful endeavor that was not firmly grounded in a few core principles. Since this newsletter is dedicated to helping you grow sales, and aspires to be both significant and successful, we practiced what we preach. I think the following can apply to any sales organization. Let me know what your think:

Principle 1: The relentless pursuit of sales excellence is a fundamental necessity.

I doubt there is any argument here. The sales pro who believes that his or her skills are honed as well as they’ll ever need to be is living in fantasyland. As the old (and accurate!) cliché goes, “If you’re not getting better and your competitor is, relatively speaking, you’re falling behind.”

Principle 2: What gets measured gets done.

Many of you will recognize these words of W. Edward Deming. If the key aspects of my sales performance are not measured month after month after month, I have no way of knowing if I’m getting better or worse. Without metrics, I cannot know if I’m adhering to principle #1 or not.

And don’t lose sight of an important corollary… The more that gets measured, the more that gets done. Two metrics are better than one. Three are better than two. Ten are better than five. (I’ve gone on record that the number of metrics you really need is “a few more than you’re using now.” See this.)

Principle 3: The sales process must be well defined before meaningful metrics can be identified.

Humor me for a minute… Take out a blank sheet of paper and write down the three key measurements you would use to judge the quality of the performance of your wicket-keeper. I’ll wait… Got them?

Odds are not too bad that you recognized “wicket-keeper” as one of the players on a cricket team. Odds are extremely high (unless you are one of our UK-based readers) that, at best, you took a few wild guesses as to what a meaningful metric might be. Here’s the point… If you really don’t know anything about the wicket-keeping process, there’s no way on earth you can define meaningful measurements. In other words, until you implement principle #3, you cannot get started on implementing principle #2.

So… How well defined is your sales process? Is it written down so that all reps in your company can follow it? Are they all measured on the same criteria? Which reps are getting better and at what rate? (Which are getting worse and at what rate?)

Are you really dedicated to the relentless pursuit of excellence in sales? Or do you just like to say that you are? Do these three principles make sense for your sales organization?

by Todd Youngblood

Odds are, someone in your sales organization can respond to any question, solve any problem, devise the right strategy. Trouble is, depending on the issue, it’s always a different person. If only the answers were always in the same place…

No single individual can ever have all the answers, all the knowledge, all the insights. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, collectively, your sales teams and support personnel know enough to address just about anything. The real challenge is to quickly identify the best source of information. Implementing three simple programs can get you there:

• A Sales Excellence Council
• A Sales Knowledge Mine
• An Electronic Sales Forum

The job of your Sales Excellence Council (SEC) is to tackle and solve at least 3 major sales problems each year. It should be comprised of your highest ranking sales executive plus 4 to 6 other respected sales reps and/or managers. A dedicated group that conscientiously meets for 2 hours per month will produce some powerfully useful ideas.

Capture the SEC’s flashes of brilliance! Document and store them in a Sales Knowledge Mine located on a secure internal web site. Start with a logical framework like The YPS Group’s Methodical Sales Process to organize the ideas. Use Microsoft Word or a simple web authoring tool like FrontPage? to make updating easy. Rotate responsibility for updating and maintaining the mine among the SEC members. (You’ll be amazed at how much better you grasp a concept when it’s your job to write it down…)

Actively solicit questions, answers and ideas from the entire sales force using an electronic bulletin board. (They’re extremely easy to implement.) Make it clear that this Sales Forum is the 1st place to go for support, and that you expect everybody to contribute. The SEC is responsible for combing through the forum and adding the best of the best ideas to the “K-Mine.”

As Rick Page would say, “Hope is not a strategy.” The sum total of your sales team’s knowledge won’t just appear because you want it to. You have to work at it a bit. When do you plan to get started?

by Todd Youngblood

Take the emotion out of it. Plot the skill-level of all of your reps on a graph. You get a bell curve. Your company has a few eagles, a few laggards and a mass of average folks.

Before you get depressed, focus on the additional fact that even the lowest performer has flashes of brilliance. Therein lies the key to consistently generating superior results.

Consider Henry Ford. Undoubtedly, he was not average, but a genuine genius. He built his first vehicles by himself, assembling them one piece at a time. Having invented and produced a viable car, he had two choices. He could either focus on people (by hiring and training high-priced folks with the wherewithal to imitate his own craft), or he could focus on process (by thoroughly understanding and documenting his know-how in bite-sized “average“ chunks).

His pool of talent for option one numbered in the hundreds. For option two it numbered in the tens of thousands. He chose option two. The result was an assembly line-based car production process and the ability to produce a massive quantity of high-quality cars at a reasonable cost. Further, it created a legacy of capturing the flashes of brilliance from his (average) troops, incorporating the flashes into the existing process and creating a cycle of continuous improvement.

The same holds true for sales reps and sales process. Good process creates tremendous leverage! Focus on improving your sales process! Results from the people will follow.

by Todd Youngblood

There are no valid excuses for missing your numbers – the current economic slowdown notwithstanding. Having said that, it’s also important to remember that “turning up the heat” almost never works.

Each of us who has been successful in business thrives on self-imposed pressure. Conversely, we resent overt pressure applied by outside factors (like the boss). The greater and/or more sudden the pressure, the greater the resistance.

Also consider the snowball effect. Lean on the reps and they will lean on the customers. Why create resentful, resistant customers? Five “force one” contacts have the same impact as one “force five” contact. ‘Tis more effective to be relentless.

by Todd Youngblood

You have to respect a statement with meanings on so many levels. Personally, I can pick up on three of Sir Winston’s nuances. Most likely, you can think of a few more.

First, ideas are worthless unless you DO something with them. If I had a dollar for every “great” idea that an employee gave me, I’d own my own island. Ideas, (despite the name of our newsletter!) are a dime a dozen. Without the revenue-generating, HARD work to implement them, they’re useless.

Second, it’s depressing to wonder about how many million-dollar ideas I didn’t listen to. Inspiration can come from some pretty humble sources. How often do you tune out the rookie – stranger – cold call – new hire – guru – etc. – etc. – etc. without a solid 60-second, unprejudiced value judgment?

Third, how often are you too busy to properly implement the really good concept? Aaaagh! It absolutely kills me to see somebody else making a fortune from the initiative I’ve been thinking about for four years.

If an idea feels right, DO something! Give all new ideas you stumble over a full 60 seconds of serious consideration! Act decisively now!