Think About It… the e-book version

by Todd Youngblood

When you blow all the smoke away, knowledge is the only thing any of us has to sell any more. That’s always been the case for a consulting-type business, but today, profitably selling even the most commoditized of commodities requires lots and lots of knowledge. It’s all about finding and/or purchasing and/or packaging and/or shipping and/or installing and/or applying and/or maintaining and/or disposing of and/or… It’s all about the intellectual content. It’s the knowledge, stupid!

Frankly, if I need to spend lot of time and effort to convince you that knowledge – genuine knowledge – is at the heart of sales success, regardless of the business you’re in, you shouldn’t bother reading what follows. On the other hand, if you’re trying desperately to figure out how on earth Web 2.0 and Social Media can be used to help sell your stuff, join the club!

Personally, with regard to things like blogs, podcasts, internet radio and YouTube?, I’ve said MANY times, “I just don’t see how it applies to B2B sales.” I’ve particularly struggled with finding value in LinkedIn?, no less the “kid stuff” like Facebook and Twitter. Wikis were the only thing that had any intuitive appeal, and that was mostly due to stunning success of Wikipedia. That said, I’ve established wikis for 9 different groups focused on collecting sales best practices. Everyone loves the idea, but getting anyone to actually contribute content is like pulling teeth. Lots of work, not so much reward.

So what changed my mind? Hey, I’m a capitalist. It was the money. A few people and organizations have already made a ton of money, and they’re making still more using the social networking tools. And as you may have guessed by now, they’re doing it by giving away their knowledge for free.

Go to TED and get blown away with the incredible – free – intellectual content. TED makes money by selling tickets to its conference. (Those associated with an industry conference, are you paying attention?) Up till 2005, they sold around 1,000 tickets for around $4,000 a pop. “Not bad,” you say? Well in 2006 they made it invitation-only and started posting ALL of the talks online for free. In 2009 they sold 1,500 tickets for $6,000 each. For the math challenged, that’s 50% more tickets at a 50% higher price. That’s 125% higher revenue in 3 years. (What bad economy???!!!)

And then there’s MIT’s Open Courseware site. You can pay north of $36,000 for one semester’s tuition. OR… you can get ALL of the course content online for NOTHING. Anybody out there think MIT is going under any time soon?

And then there’s Richard Muller. His claim to fame is a course about hard-core Physics. Yeah… quarks, general relativity, what the universe was like 8 nanoseconds after the big-bang… All that stuff you just can’t wait to learn about. (Talk about a tough sell!!!) Well the core lecture has been viewed on YouTube? by over 300,000 people. Oh, and the book, now four years old and in its fourth printing still shows up on the high end of Amazon’s top seller list. How much commission could you rake in if you were the Richard Muller of your industry?

OK, these examples are from industries different than yours, so this concept doesn’t apply to you, right? WRONG!!! It’s all about the knowledge and intellectual content associated with your products and services – remember? It’s a taste of that intellectual content that draws those customers in. It is now pretty much an incontrovertible fact that giving away some of your intellectual content – aggressively giving it away for free – is really, really good for business. And how hard is it to get started? Turns out, not very. We’ve had this monthly e-newsletter for going on 9 years and we’ll continue it, but now it’s also a podcast and a blog with an RSS feed. We’ve taken the first step to producing an internet radio show and for $180 and a 15 minute time investment, acquired the technology and know-how required to produce as many YouTube? videos as we want. Personally, I just got a twitter “handle” and a LinkedIn profile, but frankly haven’t figured out exactly how to exploit them for sales purposes …yet.

You can go ahead and ignore all this stuff, but me? I’m going to chase it down. This stuff is too powerful to ignore.

by Todd Youngblood

Most sales execs can easily get their hands on a dozen or so indicators of how well their sales teams are performing. Any 10-year-old with internet access can instantly get 109 up-to-the-minute indicators of how well a major league baseball team is performing. Obviously, the game is far more complex than your sales process…

Actually, it’s not really 109 metrics. That’s just what’s published at www.mlb.com. Since both individual and team metrics are important, it’s twice that, or 218. Also, in the real world, they consider right-handed and left-handed pitching, so it’s 436. Then there’s day games and night games – 872. Then there are those other measures that aren’t published… Then there’s… You get the picture.

Do baseball managers actually use all those statistics? You bet they do. Not only that, they analyze as many of the combinations and permutations as they possibly can.

Now, many would contend that success in a sport is due more to art than science; that it’s more dependent on instinct and natural skill than cold hard facts. If that’s the case, why do they do all that number crunching?
The answer is control. Control can be imposed only by predicting what is most likely to happen on the next pitch, and then maximizing the odds that the right player is in the right place at the right time, anticipating the right thing.
In other words, it’s a numbers game. A numbers game based on:

• the individual skills of each player…
• collectively executing an extremely well-defined process…
• that is measured in minute and extensive detail…
• and is scientifically managed to maximize the odds of taking actions that will ensure success.

Maybe there’s a lesson in here for sales managers. Maybe we need more than natural-born sales eagles. Maybe we need to understand the nature and nuances of our sales process in a LOT more detail. Maybe we need a working handle on several hundred metrics instead of a handful.

…or maybe the kid’s game really is far more complex than your sales process.

by Todd Youngblood

To answer that question start by thinking about the “maturity” of your own personal sales process. Recall your first few months as a sales rep. More than likely, your early successes were due mainly to determination, hard work and your gut instincts. You, like every other rookie rep, started out at the instinctive level of sales process maturity.

As time passed, you were astute enough to recognize that some sales techniques and tactics worked better than others. Like any “maturing” rep, you consciously focused on executing the tasks that consistently produced results. You moved up to the repetitive level of sales process maturity. Perhaps without knowing it, you became a student of “Sales Best Practices”. You not only repeated the things that worked for you, you studied others and emulated the things that worked for them.

Research shows that only about 15% of sales reps ever move up to the methodical level. This minority takes the time and makes the effort to write down the entire sequence of events that consistently leads to superior sales performance. If you haven’t tried this, it’s a whole lot tougher than it sounds. (As an example, the YPS Methodical Sales Process has 14 groups of activities, each with 15 to 35 discrete tasks.) If you have tried, you’ve experienced the profound superiority that a “Best Process” has over a collection of “Best Practices.

Not many reps ever get to the measured level. These few not only maintain a written, evolving, improving “Sales Best Process”, they have defined (and they use!) performance measurements for each major step along the way. They are far, far beyond just tracking number of calls made, proposals in process, revenue year-to-date, etc. They have a system in place to record, track and report on the quality and quantity of as many as fifty unique sales tasks. (…and – believe it or not – without creating a time-burning, administrative burden.)

Despite my continuing search, I have yet to find a systemic (or ultimate) level sales process. I’m certain, though, there’s one out there. Somebody has figured out how to implement an automated, simple-to-use, painless, self-tuning, self-correcting process that never fails.

So what’s the point? Quite simply, getting both your reps and your company to the next level of sales process maturity is an imperative. It’s a fast path to real payoffs in faster revenue growth, higher margins and better training. Take it up a notch! Do it purposefully! Start now! Get it done this year!