Simple Sales Tracking Blog

May 22, 2011 • 4:31 pm 0

What Is Your Prospecting Plan?

We talked about “Farmers” and “Hunters” last time and how many salespeople fall into the comfortable role of farming their existing clients rather than bringing on new business.

This occurs largely due to a lack of a clear step by step plan on how to go about prospecting. Many salespeople make the excuse they are so busy servicing existing clients they don’t have time to prospect for new ones.

A recent study of over 500 companies in the UK would tend to support this argument. They weighed the influence of 73 different factors in successful selling.

What would you expect the number one cause of low achievement in sales to be?

  • Low motivation?
  • Personality Problems?
  • Inferior products or service?
  • Poor training?
  • Overpricing?

Wrong.

This survey pinpointed the number one cause of low achievement in sales as poor time utilization due to lack of planning.

This considered it comes back to us as the salespeople to plan our time to maximize our face to face time with prospects and clients.

A client I worked with recently in professional services was able to delegate 11 hours of low value work he had got into the habit of doing. This effectively gave him another 7 appointment slots in his week which could be used for –

  1. First appointments with new prospects
  2. Follow up appointments
  3. Existing client appointments
  4. Centre of influence meetings

All key components of a prospecting plan.

Another constraint that can impact on prospecting is the sales manager or business owner overloading the salesperson with other duties.

What we need to think about is in the wide range of activities we do in our business – manufacturing, accounting, HR, risk management, sales, research and development, quality control etc. Out of all of these only one – sales activities – brings in the money.

There is an old saying – “Without the sale no-one gets paid”

Another one for us to think about is – “Unless you are talking to a prospect or a customer you are unemployed”

So back to our prospecting plan – our first step is to have a clear picture of the type of prospects you wish to target, for without this you will waste precious time hunting the wrong game.

In our training we develop a prospect profile which describes in generic terms what a good prospect for our business would look like. This helps us to clarify which type of clients we wish to target and helps our centres of influence to better understand who they should be referring to us.

We will look at the next step in my next article.

Quote of the Day: Clean out your prospect funnel. Put your current prospects through a sieve. The biggest mistake salespeople make is they call on the same useless prospects over and over. If you have not been able to get anywhere with a specific group of prospects, move on and find new prospects. Being persistent is good. However, if you are spending too much time on fruitless leads you will just burn out. After a shepherd’s herd has eaten all the grass in a specific pasture he knows its time to move on to a new pasture. If he does not move on his sheep will starve. Move on if you are not getting anywhere with old prospects and come back at a later date. Larry Duca

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy, ,

April 6, 2011 • 1:12 pm 0

How Many Sales Interviews Are Your Team Doing?

Recently I was questioning a sales manager about the number of new sales interviews each of her sales team did each week.

Her answer was that a week probably wasn’t the right duration – more like a month.

When I asked how many they were doing a month the answer was that they would be lucky to average one a month each.

The explanation for this she said was that they were busy sorting customer problems, building the relationship, doing pricing/proposals, delivery services or installations.

My thoughts were she didn’t have salespeople; she had very expensive mobile customer service reps disguised as salespeople.

This is a problem I see in many businesses I work with – the sales teams getting bogged down in the admin and low payoff areas of the business.

There are two reasons for this –

Firstly the company is under resourced which means the salespeople must be “jacks of all trades”. While I understand not all businesses can afford to add adequate support staff to take on the extra duties that could be delegated by the sales team, the questions I asked the sales manager were –

1. What was an average client spend over 12 months Answer: $6000

2. What was the average conversion ratio of your salespeople? (Most businesses guess around 80%, in fact conversions for most companies run at around 35-45%, say we work on 50%)

3. How many extra appointments with new prospects could your sales team do if we took away one activity, say quoting? Answer: 5 new appointments per week

If they converted half of these that would be 2.5 extra sales per week or $15k if we translate these into dollars or $780k over 12 months
Quite a compelling argument for freeing up your sales teams time!

The second reason is a lack of confidence in the actual salespeople themselves usually due to a lack of sales skills/systems. Interestingly enough I often see this lack of confidence in very experienced salespeople who have fallen into the role of “farmers” over the years.

“Farmers” is the term given to salespeople who spend the majority of their selling time managing existing clients and selling to these clients and slowly get out of the habit of prospecting and selling to new clients.

These “farmers” have become busy looking after the relationships they originally gained through prospecting.

The lack of confidence to go out and prospect for new clients generally stems from a lack of a step by step plan on how to prospect.

The answer most sales managers and business owners offer on how to prospect is “go knock on enough doors and you will get the business”. This is known as “cold calling” which is defined as: “calling on a prospect who may not know you and isn’t expecting a call”.

Some companies believe sending a letter then ringing helps to warm the call up. In my opinion the only advantage of this type of approach is that it may save the salesperson a little time.

Cold calling is a punishment for not having a prospecting plan.

We will look at this in more depth in my next article.

Quote:

There’s no magic to it, and you don’t need a lot of natural talent.
What you need is a disciplined organized approach to selling.
If you have that, you’ll outperform the great salesman
who doesn’t understand the process every time.
Selling can definitely be learned.

Steve Bostic

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy, , , ,

March 15, 2011 • 1:26 am 0

Are you a Rocket Scientist or a Salesperson?

Recently I attended a business function where one of my clients introduced me to a business consultant.  Upon hearing I was a sales trainer the consultant related how he had watched a couple of dvds on sales training over the Christmas break and decided that perhaps he could add sales training to his portfolio after all as he said “its not rocket science”!

I was most disappointed to hear this as I have been waiting for the call from NASA for some time!!! 

But in fairness I have to agree that selling isn’t rocket science, it is very basic.

I always say -    “selling is simple – but not easy”

Sales in a nutshell comes down to –

Identifying your Prospect

Gaining an Introduction

Uncovering a Need
(If they have one)

Showing the Return on Investment

Asking for the Business

Delivering the Service

Follow Up and Support

Regular Contact

So if you want to launch your sales to new heights in 2011 you will need to jettison some of your unproductive practices that do not directly contribute to one of these areas.

We know that most salespeople on average only spend 90 minutes per day in face to face meetings – the rest of the time is spent gliding through the myriad of other jobs that they are tasked with.

A breakdown of where a typical sales rep spends their time would be -

Sales administration:  16%.  This includes any administrative work directly related to a sale such as entering information, writing reports, filling out order forms, pricing up jobs, quoting and writing proposals.

One way to lessen sales administrative time is to put an expert network in place.  Sales reps spend a lot of time tracking down answers to customer questions – finding the right person to answer the question,
sending emails, exchanging voice mails and so on.  Consider delegating the most time consuming tasks such as pricing and proposal writing.

Sales preparation:  16%.  This includes all the time spent preparing for a call, including research, preparing a meeting agenda, putting together a presentation and so on.

Waiting: 11%.  This includes time spent waiting for a customer, whether in the customer’s reception, on the phone, or in the customer’s office while he or she attends to another matter.

Travel and travel-related waiting:  21%    This category is just what it sounds like – the time reps spend in a car, on a plane, sitting in traffic or sitting at the airport.  To decrease the amount of time reps spend travelling or waiting to travel, look at how you might use telemarketers to interact with customers.  Face–to-face contact is great, but save it for when it adds the most value.   Territory planning can have a huge effect on reducing travel time.

Other administrative tasks:  10% – This is a catchall bucket for time-spent doing everything not included in the other categories. It includes everything from filing expense reports and time sheets to getting a cup of coffee.

Selling:  25%.  If you can decrease the time your reps spend doing other things, they theoretically should have more time to spend selling.  So put systems to work for you and watch this percentage grow.

How do these figures compare to our sales week?

If we are to propel our sales into lunar orbit then we need to delegate any task that is not related to business growth.

The beauty about selling is the sky is the limit when it comes to business growth.

So to help your sales to soar this year, spend more time face to face with great referred prospects – after all, it’s not “Rocket Science”!!!

Action Steps:

1. Identify all tasks that take up more than 30 minutes per week
2. Plan to either eliminate, delegate or outsource within a month
3. Block times for face to face meetings in your weekly planner
Quote:
                                                             Sales isn’t rocket science
                                                                                        Unknown Consultant

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy, , , , ,

February 23, 2011 • 1:27 pm 0

How Much Actual Selling Time Do You Have?

A challenge I hear from many salespeople and business owners alike is that there is never enough time to keep in touch with all their clients and prospects.   This in turn leads to many lost opportunities and indeed lost clients.

There are just two areas salespeople and business owners need to focus their time on as far as sales are concerned.

The first we will look at is retention of existing clients.   Our existing clients offer the best opportunity for future growth for a couple of very good reasons.

Firstly we have already earned their trust as an advisor/supplier and are therefore most likely to be offered the first opportunity of further work and secondly in many cases we are only getting a percentage of their work.

Some studies have shown that most of what we might consider to be “A” type clients are only in fact giving us slightly more than 50% of their potential business. 

Secondly, and this may come as a surprise to many salespeople, the key reason for this is a lack of account strategies and planning, particularly in smaller businesses who seem to believe if we look after the client we will automatically get all their business.

So to maximize sales to our existing clients we need to develop an account strategy.

The first step in this process is to identify the services and products they are already buying from us then work out what other needs we can fulfill for them and build these into our call objectives.

Another step is to work out a call cycle. This will depend largely on what type of client you are dealing with.  A trap for many of us is to categorize by turnover.  It is therefore very important to look at a number areas when categorizing accounts, such as gross profit margin, lifetime value, wallet share, potential growth and so on.

All accounts, including those of prospects and customers, should be categorized to keep their call frequency as productive as possible. You must decide which accounts are most important to your company.  Categorizing helps determine this.  For every prospect or customer, there is a call frequency that will give you maximum return per call.

It is based on the belief that a greater portion of time should be spent on prospects or customers who offer larger volume potential.   Less time should be spent on lower volume prospects or customers.

You will categorize your prospects or customers as A, B, and C accounts.  A are major accounts; statistically they number about 15 percent of your accounts and give you 65 percent of your volume.  The following 20 percent of your accounts are B, or minor accounts.   They give you 20 percent of your total sales.  Of the remaining prospects or customers, 65 percent are C, or marginal accounts.   They give you 15 percent of your total sales.  These percentages apply in most industries and are an excellent rule of thumb for determining account classification and setting sales-call frequency.

In most businesses, this simple analysis is rather startling.  You will probably find that a small number of accounts produce the majority of your sales dollars, whereas a majority of your prospects or customers provide you with a small percentage of your sales.  The classic statement that “80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers” is refined somewhat in the three account classification – A.B.C.

A good exercise would be to go through your database of clients and categorise them as

A, B or C.  By understanding this you can then manage your time more effectively and look after the 20% of your clients who are indeed giving you 80% of your income and more importantly retain these very valuable clients through regular call cycles.

I will look at the second key area which is growth in my next article.

Quote of the Week:
“Sales is a contact sport”
Brett Burgess

Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy, , , , , ,

January 26, 2011 • 1:41 pm 0

Import directly into Accounts and Opportunities

Until now, importing your data into Simple Sales Tracking has been limited to Contacts and Leads. 

If you had wanted those Leads to be Opportunities or Accounts, you would have had to Covert the manually.

You’ll notice now, on Step 2 of the Lead import, at the bottom of the page, a new drop down list which asks you to choose at which stage you want to import the data. By default, this is still Leads. Optionally, change this to either Opportunities or Accounts to import directly to this stage.

Keep in mind that First Name, Last Name, Job Title and Company are fields that only exist in Leads.  After the Lead stage, that information gets seperated out as a Contact.

Filed under: How To's, New Features, , , , ,

January 11, 2011 • 12:37 pm 2

New Reports and a Few Changes

We’ve added 2 new report to capture more details on the dollar amounts of your opportunities.  Grouped by Account, both a summary and detail Opportunities report have been created which include  a Sum total of the Low, High and Actual (dollar) amounts.  The summary report also includes the Expected Closed Date as well as your User Defined fields. 

The details report includes additional fields.

Additionally, we’ve added your custom user defined labels to each of the Sales reports.  Until now, a generic column header was given, which did not reflect your custom naming. You’ll find this has been put in place.

You’ll also notice something new on the detail pages of your Accounts.  In the “Opportunities” box, where you’ve associated an Opporunity with an Account, you’ll find that the amount columns now give you a Sum total, simliar to what’s being generated in the new reports.

Finally, as you know, the majority of list pages within Simple Sales Tracking default to showing records which have a status of “In Progress”. We’ve now changed this on the Accounts list page.  Since an active account could be considered either In Progress or, more likely “Won”, we’ve decided to show the list without filtering by status.

Filed under: New Features

December 6, 2010 • 2:03 pm 0

Real-Time Collaboration with News Feeds

Earlier, we sent you part one of the latest features added to Simple Sales Tracking. In part 2 of 2, we’ll highlight the new real-time collaboration capability called the “News Feed”.

If it looks familiar to you, it’s because it probably is. Each time you use Facebook or Twitter you find something similar. Facebook with its latest news feed and Twitter with it status lists. In the same way, you now have the ability to communicate and stay up-to-date privately and securely with others in your team.

2 Types of News

There are two types of news that make it to the news feed.

  • Status Updates – On the Start Page you’ll find a new text box near the top of the page which reads “What are you working on?”. Simply answer this question and keep in touch with others on your team throughout the day.
  • Auto Updates – Each time you, for example, create a new Lead or upgrade an Opportunity to an Account, the news feed will automatically announce the upgrade to others in your team.

News Feed on the Start Page

You’ll find that the Notice Box on the Start Page has been replaced with the “Latest News”. Whatever news item is most recent is now automatically displayed in the box.

To view a full list of recent news, click the blue “Show News Feed” button directly underneath the Latest News box. Click it again to switch back and forth between the news list and the chart and follow up information.

If, as a Full Account user, you’re operating in the “Closed” access model, you’ll find that auto-updates on anything marked as closed, will not be displayed in the News Feed.

Comments

Included with the new News Feed is the ability to comment on any piece of news. In that way, you can discuss an idea back and forth, get clarification or provide suggestions.

Smells like Chatter?

Not only is the news feed similar to both Facebook and Twitter, but it has also become a simpler (and more cost effective) alternative to Saleforce’s new Chatter platform, which they released earlier this year.

With each new piece of functionality added to Simple Sales Tracking, we aim to keep ease of use and simplicity at the forefront. Include the most important features and reduce hardly-used ‘extras’, which serve mostly to complicate.

In the same way, what’s included in the news feed is what we’ve uncovered as most important, without a lot of extra bell’s and whistles.

As for cost? The news feed is available at no extra cost to Everyone who uses Simple Sales Tracking. And for that, there is no alternative.

Filed under: New Features, , , , , , , , , , ,

December 6, 2010 • 12:15 pm 0

A Feature Bonanza, Part 1 of 2

Over the weekend we released a handful of new features and we think you’re going to like them.

We’ll give you the highlights in this newsletter and with one in particular, we’ll follow up in a (rare) second newsletter to follow shortly.

User Defined fields as Drop Down Lists

Until now, User Defined fields were available only as text boxes. That meant that you needed to type in each value manually for every record.

Sometimes values recur, so to speed things up, we’ve given you the option to change a text box to a drop down list.
To define the values for the drop down list, have a look on the Admin page.

Avatars

A while back we gave you the ability to upload your company logo. Now, you can upload an Avatar, or profile picture of yourself.

Latest News & Real-Time Chatter

Sound familiar? We’ll tell you all about it in a newsletter to follow a little later.

Sales in Tasks List now Linkable

For better reference, and by popular request, we’ve made the column of Sales in the Tasks list linkable back to the related Sale.

Changes to the Social Tab

A while ago we introduced the Social Tab, with its Twitter integration. It’s been a popular feature and we’d like to continue to add to it; however, by growing it, it will outgrow it’s fit within Simple Sales Tracking. As a marketing tool, we felt branching it off onto it’s own mini-product (still integrated with Simple Sales Tracking), would be the best approach.

We’re calling the new product Twitter Web Alerts. Have a look and let us know what you think.

And not to worry, if you’re currently using the capability, you’ll have the option to migrate accross at no charge with a long while of free usage as well.

Filed under: New Features, , , , , , , , , , ,

November 14, 2010 • 6:13 pm 0

Scared to Close the Sale?

In my last ramblings we looked at overcoming the “no hurry/no desire to change from the current supplier or serviced provider” obstacle.

Today we will look at the key reasons salespeople don’t ask for the business.

In fact surveys conducted with the fortune 500 in the States showed that 62% of presentations finish without the salesperson actually asking for the business!

The number one reason people I train state for this is fear of rejection and embarrassment.  This fear comes as a result of lack of sales processes which would naturally lead to asking for the business.

The first part of the sales process then is getting a referral to the prospect by a trusted advisor and just as important is the way the advisor positions you with their client.
One of the tools we develop for our clients is a positioning statement.  This is a tool you give to your referrer so that they position you in the best possible way.

Having been positioned well the next step towards closing is doing your homework on the prospect.  Your referrer will often help here as they are working in the best interests of their clients in helping you.

We have been positioned well with the prospect, we are well prepared with background information including possible issues we may have solutions for, we have our appointment, -  the next step is to establish trust.

We hardly ever buy from people we don’t trust and of course if our prospect doesn’t trust us then they may not give us all the information we need to taylor the very best solution for their need or may in fact deny they have a need.

Some key ways to build trust are –
• Being early or on time
• Coming prepared
• Dressing appropriately
• Having the very best sales aids – pens, folders, business cards (not a good look when salespeople hand you their “dog-eared” business card!)
• Asking good questions  (nothing upsets buyers more than poorly prepared salespeople with self-serving questions)

Now we have established trust with our prospect the next step is to uncover the need and help the buyer to recognize whether the need justifies our solution.

It has been found that 64.3% of salespeople start presenting their solution before the buyer recognizes the desire for a solution.  This results in buyer objections which opens
a whole new minefield to manoeuvre through.

We will look into this further in my next article.

This Weeks Action Step –
Make a list of all the closing phrases you currently use in asking for the business.

Quote of the Week –
If you don’t close the sale you are working for the opposition
 
Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group.

Filed under: Sales Techniques and Strategy, , , , ,

October 28, 2010 • 3:42 pm 0

New Features and Reports Released

Overnight we released a handful of new features that have been in high demand. We’ve also beefed-up reporting. We’ve included the highlights in this email, along with an experiment we’d like to tell you about.

Word-Of-Mouth Experiment

We’d like to try something a little different.

We’d like to see if we can outpace Google searches, Ads and Partner referrals for getting the word out about Simple Sales Tracking and we’re asking for your help.

If you find Simple Sales Tracking a useful tool for you, and you know of someone else who might also, tell them.

Then, let us know! We don’t want to know who, what or where. Just send us an email to let us know you did.

To sweeten the deal, in about a week we’ll pick at random 10 people and send each a free copy of Seth Godin‘s latest book, Linchpin.

New Features

Buttons added to Lead, Opportunity and Accounts Pages

We’ve added a new “Save & Add New” button, which will speed things up when entering multiple sales at the same time. Clicking the button saves the current sale and opens a new blank entry form.

We’ve also added a new “Clone” button, which will copy all of the data from the sale you’re viewing at the time, into a new sale entry form. If you’re creating new sales that are each similar to each other, this should help to speed things up.

Increased Size Limits for Notes and Documents

In the past you were limited to the length of Note you could enter for a Sale. Although that limit was large, for some, it wasn’t large enough. So, we’ve blown the cap off entirely. Notes can now be as long as you like.

We’ve also increased the document storage space limits from 50mb to 100mb on Full Accounts and 5mb to 10mb on Limited Accounts. In the near future we’ll also be making an announcement regarding unlimited document storage and overall enhanced capability in this area. Stay tunned!

Lead Import

In the past, you were not able to set the Status, Scale or High/Low/Actual Amounts during the Lead Import process. We’ve changed this so you can set each of those per record at the time of importing.

New Reporting

This release introduces a number of new capabilities surrounding reporting.

With all Lead, Opportunity and Account reports you can now filter your results based on a date range of when they’re created. Also, you can filter based on the data from your User Defined fields.

Additionally, we’ve added a report that will return ALL data fields for Leads, Opportunities, and Accounts.

We’ve added a brand new report called the “Pipeline” report, which returns a combined list of Leads, Opportunities and Accounts based on the pipeline they’ve followed. Filtered by date range, you can view, for example all Leads which where converted to Opportunities and all Opportunities converted to Accounts over the past month.

Finally, in addition to pdf and excel exports of reports, you’ll now have the added capability of saving the result of a report in MS Word document format.

Thanks

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions. You’ve helped to make Simple Sales Tracking a top CRM choice for Small and Medium sized businesses from around the world.

Filed under: New Features, , , , , ,

About

Simple Sales Tracking is web-based sales CRM software for the tracking, analysis and forecasting of individual and team sales pipeline and contacts.

Built with simplicity at its core, focus is kept on key sales tasks, while eliminating unnecessary ones, helping to ensure buy-in of the entire sales team.

Go to SimpleSalesTracking.com

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