Leave the Hang-Ups To Us

How do you network?

by Colleen McCarty, VP Talent and Organization Development

Recently my husband was cleaning out his memorabilia and was reminded of an old friend from high school. Nostalgic, he googled his friend, found an email address, and sent his friend an email. Within minutes his email was returned with the message:

“I just facebooked you last week!”*

So have you facebooked anyone lately? And is it business or pleasure?

Personally, I like LinkedIn as I network for business. Apparently that shows my age as the May 2008 issue of Selling Power Magazine suggests that professionals 30 and over prefer LinkedIn while those under 30 prefer FaceBook.  Linked In lets me stay in contact with my professional network. There I can find past and current business associates and stay up-to-date with their professional successes and ever-changing contact information. I can ask questions and leverage their relationships. I can stay in-touch on a professional level. And when I want to stay closer on a personal level I pick up the phone to talk.

How do you use social networking sites to stay in touch?

 

Traditional communication still matters

by Mark Horne, Guest Writer

Robert Bly is one of the most well known copywriters in the business.  Like many veterans of “traditional media,” he now has a blog.  Somewhat ironically, he occasionally uses it to strike a blow for the reputation of traditional media over against those who deride it in favor of social media on the Internet.  He writes against the opinion of new media advocates who claim intrusion advertising is dead.

If social media and other forms of electronic two-way communication are making traditional “dead tree” media obsolete, why hasn’t direct mail — perhaps the most intrusive of the paper-based marketing media — disappeared?

According to the Winterberry Group, total U.S. direct mail spending in 2007 was $58.4 billion, an increase of 18.2% over the $49.4 billion spent in 2004.

What gives? If “no one reads direct mail anymore” as one blogging consultant told me recently, why are advertisers spending more than $58 billion a year on it?

 

Obviously, we like new media or we wouldn’t be writing this post in it.  But Bly’s point is irrefutable.  Even with the popularity of “social media” people still read paper.  And they also still use their phones.  There is no evidence that will change anytime soon.

What We Think is Worth Reading (part 3)

by Mark Horne, Guest Writer

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

We are concluding a series about the books the Initial Call staff has found to be helpful in building their sales and business knowledge and skills. I hope you've found these posts informative. Be sure to leave your comments and let us know what you think about the books we've already reviewed, as well as what books you've found foundational.

Our first book in this post, The One Minute Sales Person by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth H. Blanchard, is from the same pair who wrote the best selling The One Minute Manager, as well as Who Moved My Cheese.  Sadly, unlike The One Minute Manager, as far as I can tell, The One Minute Sales Person is not available free online.

Like The One Minute Manager, The One Minute Sales Person is presented as a story.  An aspiring salesman wants to learn how to do better at his job.  To accomplish this he seeks out others to obtain their advice.  The advice ranges, but centers on caring about the potential customer, focusing on the customer’s needs, and helping the customer feel good about his purchases.  The book is written in a rather simple style, but it succeeds in communicating the basics of not only sales, but also all effective communication.

Another book, Stephan Schiffman’s primer, Cold Calling Techniques (What Really Works), is a great guide to understanding the importance of cold calling and the obstacles a salesman faces in making such calls.  It is noteworthy that this book was recently released as in a twentieth-anniversary edition.  It’s continuing popularity is no accident; Cold Calling Techniques remains a valuable resource.

Schiffman gives excellent guidance for making calls that get returned and that lead to meetings.  In addition to techniques and strategies, Schiffman provides a context for his advice with an explanation of why cold calling is an essential part of sales and business.  Your primary competitor, he writes, is not another business or product.  Rather, your primary competitor is the status quo.  People are happy (they think) with the way they are living and working now.  Otherwise, they would be the ones calling you.

Finally, Jim Collins is the author of Built to Last, a study of corporations that are (or were) indisputably great.  He says that he came up with the idea for From Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t when a businessman complained to him that focusing on companies that had been great from their inception wasn’t useful to the majority of corporations.  There were many good companies that could use guidance on how to become much better.

Thus, Collins describes Good to Great as a “prequel” to his earlier work.  He and his team of researchers studied eleven companies that made the transition from being good to becoming great.  As a result, Collins and his team developed a road map for companies that is laid out in his book.  While some of this material may seem like commonsense, the fact remains that only a few companies have made the transition.

While these are the nine titles that some of us have found helpful, we'd love to hear of additions (or even subtractions) from you.

Aberdeen's Timely B2B Sales Research

by Catherine Brown, President

Inside Initial Call, we sometimes joke that the most difficult part of our job is telling the future.  Many variables affect success in a sales campaign, so there are no simple answers when estimating project outcomes.  Only after we learn more about the variables can we apply our knowledge and experience to a situation and predict results. 

So, while I don’t have a crystal ball, I wonder if Peter Ostrow of The Aberdeen Group does?  The Group’s recent research on B2B Lead Generation is particularly timely.  Did Peter know when he began his research work last year that the economy would slow and that companies would be watching their dollars more closely than in prior years? 

Being able to look ahead and plan for a range of market scenarios is the key to growth in any economy.  More than in past years (and we’ve been in business since 2002), we see executives wrestling with the question about which is better: to build a department (hire employees and train them) or buy talent (outsource to a lead generation firm).

I had a recent conversation with a Silicon Valley small business executive who professed to have found an excellent full time inside sales person to work for just $50,000 per year. Knowing the going rate for experienced sales professionals in the Bay Area, I question whether this new hire will deliver what he hopes.  This executive will spend both money and time to find out whether or not he made a good deal.

While controlling costs will always be a top business priority, we contend that a bargain resource may cost more in the end.   Retaining part time but superior talent is ultimately a better value than hiring a full time junior employee.  When you need inside sales support, look for resources who define a lead like we do at Initial Call (Download Aberdeens_March_2008_Report.pdf ).  Seek out someone who is able to qualify opportunities and who really understands what it means to build a sales pipeline.  Then you won’t need a seer to know you are getting your money’s worth AND the results you need.

What we think is worth reading (part 2)

by Mark Horne, Guest Writer

What books do the Initial Call staff think are most foundational and helpful?  I started to answer that question in an earlier post.  Now here are three more.  Just remember, like I wrote earlier, I’m not listing them in any particular order of value.

In Why Johnny Can’t Sell...And What to Do About It Michael Nick and Bob Kantin address the problem of sales people (and their supervisors) thinking or at least acting like it is sufficient to “show up and throw up” to generate sales, especially technology sales.  Merely making appointments to list the features one is selling is not enough.  They argue that bad habits were formed during the economy of the nineties, habits that are not going to produce increased sales now that the nineties are over.

Nick and Kantin want to teach not only sales people, but also their managers and supervisors, what is necessary to sell to a business where the decision-makers typically won’t buy unless the question of return on investment has been answered.  The book enables readers to

• Recognize gaps in sales training that need to be filled
• Increase selling power by creating the right tools
• Convey to customers assurance of success
• Measure for a prospect the value of a product or service
• Use persuasive proposals and presentations to prove that value

CustomerCentric Selling by Michael Bosworth and John Holland stresses the importance of knowing a product or service from the perspective of the person who is in a position to make the decision and who will benefit from it.  This means that mere user knowledge isn’t really helpful for making a great sale.  Knowing a product’s features as a user is not identical to being able to articulate how it can achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need of the decision-maker.

Bosworth and Holland are concerned that both traditional salesmanship, and the more-or-less instinctive understanding of naturally-gifted salespeople is product centered and feature focused rather than customer centered.  Such sales people tend to gravitate toward users of the product rather than aiming at businessmen who make the decisions about the product for their company. Bosworth and Holland have a website that provides an excellent summary of their ideas about customer centric selling as opposed to traditional selling.

Brian Carroll is the president of his own lead generation company and a blogger.  Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Boost the Quality and Quantity of Leads to Increase Your ROI sets out the issues facing sales people when they are forced to waste time on “leads” that aren’t really leads, or else simply do their own lead generation.  No one should be surprised to know that sales people would rather have more time to devote to more promising leads, but many times a company will devote their resources in a way that heads in exactly the opposite direction (hiring more sales people rather than spending more on marketing, for example).

Carroll argues that quality lead generation is good for any sales, but, for complex sales typical of a business-to-business transaction, it is imperative.  His book lays out the basics on how to get sales and marketing departments in sync, how to improve leads, and walks readers through the fundamental steps such as using various methods for generating demand, creating value for prospective customers during the process, and prioritizing leads.

The Cost of Hiring

by Colleen McCarty, VP Talent & Organization Development

Over the last year we’ve been tracking the cost of sourcing and interviewing contractors for Initial Call. And as we complete the stats each quarter, I’m reminded that it is all too easy to get caught up in the day-to-day activities of our work and forget about the big picture that statistics and analysis provide.

Now I’ll admit, our recruiting process is thorough. Perhaps we spend more than others here, but when you deliver professional services you must have great people. And recruiting great people is expensive, really expensive. The average Initial Call Contractor works months before we see a return on our recruitment investment. To find the best contractors we have to talk to a lot of candidates. And each candidate brings his or her own unique skills. So we take the time to find those which will exceed our clients’ expectations and best complement our project teams.

We look for:

• A strong, relevant background in sales and cold calling.
• People who can hit the ground running.
• People who ask “how can I best do that?” rather than “why should I do that?”
• People who sell us on the product, when in the interview, the product is themselves.
• People who can work independently, intelligently, and with humor.
• People who want to work with Initial Call because we fit their life, not because it will do until they find something better.

Knowing how carefully we screen our candidates, I am confident our teams provide tremendous service to our clients. We eliminate the often hidden costs of recruiting and save our clients time they might otherwise lose on untested resources. In essence, through our hiring process, we invest in people, so that we can provide exceptional lead generation and appointment setting services.

No Bluffing

by Amy Keuper, VP Sales

Experienced “players” in the business world may think that the key to making a good deal is to hold your cards close—to avoid slipping up with a “tell” about your true position. Many prospects and sales people assume that maintaining a poker face will give them an edge. This is true in Texas Hold ‘Em and in any negotiation in which one party seeks to take advantage of another. However, since truly successful arrangements must be win-win, I propose that this secretive approach to services contract talks is counter-productive.  Transparency in the sales cycle benefits both parties.

First, openness preserves everyone’s most precious resource--time. If a client’s budget and a provider’s offering are not in alignment, a frank pricing discussion spares both people an uncomfortable dance. With a cordial parting of ways and a fair sense of reality, the parties can freely move forward to engage others, to refer one another if appropriate or perhaps to circle back at a future date. 

Secondly, a spirit of transparency enables the prospect and provider to explore together the true needs. When a potential client requests for a quote for X service, the salesperson should evaluate whether X service is right or whether Y offering would be better—or if both are necessary for success. This is consultative selling, which ultimately makes the client more successful since he will contract for a viable solution, not just what he asked for or thought he needed. 

Lastly, trusting each other enough to lay all cards on the table sets the right foundation for a long term relationship. If we at Initial Call have to create a proposal blindly, our first estimate of the work may be too broad or too narrow—which can work against us since we always want prospects to weigh us apples to apples if considering hiring other firms. Ironically, when prospects go “face up” about the competitive landscape as well as their budget, they actually help themselves since we are then able to bid the best value possible.

Shuffle up and deal!

What we think is worth reading (part 1)

by Mark Horne, Guest Writer

Naturally, these aren't the only books we think are worth reading!  We do have lives outside of work, after all.  Nor are these the hottest new books out there.  But these are the titles that stand out to us as presenting some of the basics.  They are not listed in any order of importance since we probably wouldn't all put them in the same hierarchy. In part one, we'll starting out with some management books, and part two will discuss sales and marketing.

Peter Block's Flawless Consulting is widely described as the "bible" for consulting.  It clearly sets out how to be a consultant from start to finish, taking you through the steps, warning you about the pitfalls, and giving you guidance for how to avoid them.  It gives guidance in a way that is understandable, using illustrative examples, case studies, and exercises to communicate to the reader how to be an effective consultant.

You can find out more about Block at his website.  There you will find his own rather interesting recommended reading list as well as links to interviews he has given about his insight.  It also provides links to some interviews with him (scroll down).

Additionally, his business site Designed Learning has many resources for getting to know him and his approach to business.

Business Week dubbed Peter Drucker, "the man who invented management."  He wrote for decades,The Essential Drucker spans all his best writings in 26 selections from ten of his many books, dealing with different topics related to management. The selections are chosen and arranged with the aim of giving the general reader a unified and substantial introduction to management.  Those who have read some of Drucker's books will find here a good reminder of the scope of his thought.  Those who haven't read him before will find this a valuable introduction.

For online information about Drucker, visit The Drucker Institute or the Drucker Archives at the Claremont College Digital Library.

In The Fifth Discipline Peter M. Senge makes the case that institutions, to survive, must be "learning organizations."  The deciding factor that will decide which companies successfully compete and which do not, is which ones are able to learn faster than their competitors.

Block describes to readers the five disciplines that must be mastered in an organization if it is to be a learning organization: spanning from 1939 to 1999.

•     Building shared vision
•     Mental models
•     Team learning
•     Personal mastery
•     Systems thinking

This last discipline, systems thinking, is the center of the book (as the fifth discipline) because it is the one that integrates the other four. Without thinking in terms of systems, solutions will be found to problems that, in the end, only make the problem worse.

Senge details the nature of the five disciplines as well as common traps that can beset us in management decisions.

We have more books here that we've found helpful and that we will list later.  In the meantime, what books to you find especially helpful to business and management?  Let us know.

A Different Kind of Leader

by Catherine Brown, President

I love it when I read about a real, live business leader who is to be admired. I am sure there are many out there, but it seems that the media portrays two extremes: Leader A is the CEO who writes his own biography (or has his own television show) and seems to pride himself on his own accomplishments; Leader B is in the news because he’s embezzled money from the company and as a result his employees have lost a good bit of their retirement investments. I love to read about the third kind of leader: the Humble Leader, as characterized in Forbes magazine’s article on Micky Jagtiani, a CEO of a retail empire throughout the Middle East, the Landmark Group.

Forbes’ article is full of quirky quotes by the CEO that were reminiscent of the CEOs listed in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great: the “every man” leader- humble, hard-working, and modest. My two favorite quotes about Jagtiani are when he speaks about his wife’s help in the business. He says, “She was very clever, finished at the top of her school… I flunked all my exams.” My second favorite quote, when asked about his early struggles in the business is when he states, “The first thing I said to myself when I started this business was that I must be strongest in the area where I am weakest.” Many leaders are afraid to admit where they are weak. I am thinking about why it’s hard to admit where we are weak and the irony of the strength that it takes to admit weakness. 

 

Following Directions...

by Colleen McCarty, VP Talent & Organization Development

In a recent meeting, the Management Team discussed traits they want to see in future hires. Half jokingly, a response of “someone who follows directions” was tossed out. Group agreement was unanimous, followed by silence. Then another voice added, “Not just literally following directions…but strategically following directions.”

What a difference the word ‘strategic’ makes. We went from unquestioned and complete obedience to someone who:

•  Listens and really hears the meaning behind the clients’ request
•  Considers the obvious and hidden options to determine the best way to accomplish the goal
•  Gently, yet without fear, brings suggestions to the client to improve sales processes
•  Lather, rinse, repeat.

But how do you identify the thinkers in a crowd of candidates? One way is intellectual curiosity. I tend to favor candidates that ask lots of interesting questions – not the standard interview questions from every interviewing article – but rather the questions that demonstrate the candidate has spent time thinking about the job, the company, the competitive landscape. I’m looking for evidence of wheels turning behind their answers. Bonus points awarded if they follow a path alien, new, or even uncomfortable to my way of thought.