Power Up Your Sales With Technology

Rick McCutcheon's Chapter from Sales Gurus Speak Out

For decades sales professionals have been searching for ways to increase their productivity and make improvements in their interactions with their customers and prospects. Traditionally, the focus for improving sales productivity has been on enhancing their abilities in the areas of time management, presentation skills, negotiation and a myriad of other sales training methodologies. Along with having these skill sets, one must also become an excellent listener, communicator, presenter and closer, in order to become a top sales professional. Even if they can achieve these skill sets, salespeople can make significant productivity gains only by improving the quality and volume of customer and prospect "touches."
"Touches" can be defined as personalized communications with customers and prospects, for example, face-to-face meetings, phone conversations, networking and personalized e-mail communications. In other words, the sales professional needs to interact more efficiently and effectively in order to build high-value relationships. These "touches" can best be best achieved by leveraging state-of-the-art sales technologies. Sales technologies include CRM (customer relationship management) software for managing customer and prospect information, presentation software, Web-based search engines and portable computing hardware devices. To be more precise, technology will help the sales professional do their job more efficiently and profitably.
The best news is that over the last decade these powerful software and hardware tools have become more reliable and affordable. For just a few hundred dollars, a salesperson can now outfit themselves with the latest CRM software and load it on to a hand-held computing device, such as a PalmPilot%u2122 or BlackBerry%u2122. This eliminates the excuse that sales technology is just too expensive. Because the cost of these hardware devices continues to drop, and the power continues to increase, we are finding sales technology penetrating the market faster than at any time in history.

How Sales Technology Improves Sales Productivity

As companies continually push for increased sales revenues, customers are simultaneously demanding improved value for their purchasing dollar. To stay on top, sales professionals must be able to manage more opportunities and move them through the sales process more efficiently and effectively. Let's look at how technology will liberate the salesperson from many mundane tracking tasks and allow for more focused selling time.
A study done by Pace Productivity (www.getmoredone.com) illustrates that the average salesperson typically spends less than 25 percent of their time actually selling.

Source: www.getmoredone.com

The study shows that the bulk of the sales professional's time is spent on administrative tasks, order processing and service issues. If we put this into a real-time example, the salesperson would spend from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday and from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Tuesday selling. This would complete their direct sales efforts for the week. The balance of the week, approximately three and a half days, would be spent on "administrative stuff."
Our goal here is to leverage available sales technology to decrease the time spent on administrative stuff and increase the time spent selling. You want to make your selling time as efficient as possible. Imagine the results if you could decrease the time spent on "administrative stuff" by 25 percent and add that much time to direct selling. Your selling time would increase to almost 50 percent-theoretically doubling your output.
Let's look at how technology can improve sales productivity throughout the sales process in the following six areas:
- Developing new business;
- Researching prospects;
- Qualifying leads;
- Making sales presentations;
- Gaining commitment;
- Managing customers.

Developing New Business

Any good CRM software will let you easily look at your sales territory as a whole and create a snapshot of all your active prospects and customers. With this information you can then determine which companies you are not actively pursuing. Then you can go to a third-party list provider, such as D&B www.dnb.com, and purchase information on the missing companies. Pulling this database of information together in your CRM software will give you a great starting point for new business development activities.
The following are some additional examples of how sales technology can be leveraged in the area of new business development:
Cold calling: Even for the most experienced sales professional, making cold calls can be one of the toughest new business development activities. But CRM software can make the task much easier. With your new database you can begin to target potential sales prospects. Using your CRM software, you have the ability to easily warm up a prospect before attempting the dreaded cold call. This can be done by first sending the prospect an e-mail or a personalized letter outlining who you are, what you do and how you can help them to achieve their objectives. Typically, you have about 15 seconds to say something to impress a prospect during your initial contact. Many sales professionals prefer sending pre-call correspondence, as it gives both parties a working reference point. When using this method, some sales professionals will make a call, and if the prospect has not seen the correspondence, they will back out of the call by saying "Let me send that to you again." They then ask for permission to schedule a follow-up conversation.
Here a few more points on cold calling. Persistence is often the key determining factor in successful cold calling. It is common to hear salespeople say how difficult it is to make cold calls today due to the use of voice-mail by most prospects. Again, the CRM software can help you to mix up your follow-up activities. For example, if you make a call today and end up leaving a voice-mail, you can follow up with an e-mail message or a letter. Then continue to repeat the sequence of activities. Many people employed as sales professionals fail because they just stop following up too soon. You may find that some of your best new business will come after months, if not years, of persistent follow up.
E-mail: Sometimes CRM software makes it too easy to just e-mail prospects your current marketing promotion. These promotions are usually never personalized and contain too many graphics and advertising slogans. Always remember that sales is not about you, your products or services, or your company. Professional selling is about understanding and delivering what your prospect wants and needs. You will probably have much greater success writing professional e-mails that look like personalized letters. Always have the prospect's name at the top of your e-mail and a body paragraph briefly describing how you can help them achieve their goals. Another nice touch is to add hyperlinks right in the e-mail to allow the prospect a passageway to your Web site if they require any additional information. If you use e-mail professionally, you will find that the recipient will even forward the e-mail to their colleagues, which gives your new business development efforts a whole new dimension. Lastly, ensure that your e-mail has all your contact information at the bottom and stay away from the overuse of graphics. That last thing you want is your e-mail to look like somebody else's cheap advertising campaign or Spam.
Professional e-mail can also be leveraged for mining new business referrals from your existing customers and referral partners. Existing customers will refer you to others if you've done a good job and have built a high-value relationship with them. Your referral partners are your network of contacts who might sell their other products or services to the same prospects that you sell to. For example, if you sell computer software, you may be able to refer prospects to individuals who sell computer hardware or computer network services. Keeping this in mind, to get prospect leads from your referral partners, you in turn must be willing to supply them with potential prospects. What many sales professionals do is periodically send e-mails and/or schedule phone calls with their list of referral partners. This keeps them top of mind for any potential prospect leads uncovered by the partner.
Professionals can also leverage e-mails in the area of trade shows and event marketing. You can easily send an e-mail to all your customers and prospects and invite them to a trade show or event. Then again use e-mail to request post-show or event follow-up activities, such as a conference call or meeting.
To recap, in the area of new business development, your CRM software can produce letters and e-mails and record correspondence in just a few keystrokes. Therefore, you can better target new business and make follow-up a standardized procedure. Your technology will map out required activities and the times for follow-up. At this point your CRM software becomes your own personal sales coach-making sure no prospect falls through the cracks.

Researching Prospects

By using the approaches already described, you will create plenty of sales prospects to qualify. Experienced sales professionals understand how precious their time is, so they spend a significant amount of time researching the companies they are trying to do business with. Technology now plays a key role in the area of research.
With the power of Web-based search engines, such as Google%u2122 or Yahoo%u2122, any novice computer user can quickly find detailed information about virtually any company and its key personnel. By going to the prospect's Web site, you can generally find out such things as the size of the company, whether they are a regional, national or multinational organization, and what other companies they are associated with. You can also find out whether they are privately or publicly held or are a government or not-for-profit agency. For publicly held companies, you can go to the listed stock exchange and find detailed information on their financials or whether there have been any fundamental changes in their business structures. This could be a big determining factor in how much energy is spent on follow-up.
Many companies also have sections on their Web sites dedicated to the senior management team and board of directors. You can do research on these executives through the Web and find out what other groups they may be affiliated with, any associations they may be active in, or which publications they have authored. This can be great background information to have when you are making your initial approach or for future sales meetings.
Company-wide use of CRM software gives a substantial return on investment as prospects' and customers' information is tracked across the organization. In these situations, sales professionals can begin their research by checking the internal CRM software to find out if anyone in their organization has contacted this prospect in the past. A well-designed CRM software system will also track the results of those past encounters. You may even find out that someone you assumed was a prospect was really a customer in a different region. The bottom line is that technology can empower you to quickly, easily and accurately research potential prospects.

Qualifying Leads

Once you have made contact and qualified a prospect as a lead, they will generally fall into one of three categories:

1. Disposable leads
These prospects are disposed of and taken out of the sales process. This is only done with prospects who definitely do not fit your business criteria or who have no need for your products or services. It is good practice to leave this information in your CRM software, just in case this prospect comes up again. Then, you or other people in your organization will know of the past activity.

2. Opportunities
These are the prospects that we turn into sales opportunities. You have contacted the prospect and qualified that there is a need for your product or service, and the prospect has agreed to continue the sales process.

3. Keep-warm leads
These prospects may have a requirement for your product or service, but the timing is not right. This can be for a number of reasons, including budgets, other priorities or lack of time during their busiest season. These leads need to be put into a keep-warm system. The idea behind the keep-warm system is to periodically stay in touch with the prospect in order to stay top of mind for them, so that when in the future the prospect requires your product or service they will remember you and know how to easily make contact with you. Having a keep-warm system is what makes the best sales professionals excel and the average salesperson fail.
Let's say, for example, that as a sales professional you speak with 100 qualified prospects per quarter (a three-month period) and typically close 10 new customers from this group. This means that 90 prospects are left behind, as either lost or no-decision opportunities. These numbers are typical for sales people who consistently perform at the same mediocre level throughout their careers. But what the best sales professionals do to excel in their productivity is to keep all lost and no-decision prospects warm. They keep detailed information, such as the history of activities, notes and communications with these prospects over a long period of time. They systematically send these keep-warm prospects letters, e-mails, articles of interest, newsletters and invitations to special events, all through their CRM software. They never let these opportunities fall off the horizon. Over time they start to see that the initial 90 keep-warm prospects they create every quarter begin to produce results. Over time, the best sales professionals not only close the average 10 new opportunities per quarter, they begin to close some of the keep-warm prospects. Then what begins to happen over the long term is that these sales professionals actually start to double or even triple the 10 per quarter productivity of the mediocre sales people.
Throughout the sales process, your CRM software plays a critical role in capturing and managing key information. In sales, information is power, and tracking the right information becomes an essential element in uncovering the prospect's needs and creating customer-focused solutions. This is especially true in a team selling environment where you may rely on technical experts, management or other sales professionals to help you develop and close opportunities.

Making Sales Presentations

The next area where technology can really improve productivity is the sales presentation. Along with strong communication and presentation skills, a sales professional requires a user-friendly software program, such as Microsoft PowerPoint%u2122. This application has become the standard in most sales organizations. It provides a solid foundation for building and delivering their value-added message to their customers and prospects.
Leveraging PowerPoint%u2122 as a presentation tool helps presenters stay on track during their delivery. During a presentation, the sales professional will typically move from one point to another. They will sometimes find that questions and conversation pull them away from their intended direction. In fact, many conversations will take them right out of the sales presentation and into areas the sales professional may not have the answers for. But no matter how tough the questioning or how difficult the answers, the sales professional can get right back on track with just one click of their mouse. This allows them to regain control and get back to where they left off in the presentation. Here are some tips for making PowerPoint%u2122 work for you:

1. Make sure you have designed your presentation to cover all your key selling points. Remember that less is always more when dealing with slide presentations. If your current sales presentation is now 35 slides, try to edit it down to between 15 and 20 slides. Here are some essential areas for you to cover in your presentation:
Who you are: In the first section define who your company is and what your company does. Typically, when you are presenting, there will be new people in the room who haven't interacted with you before, so they may not be aware of this information.
Evidence of success: The second section should cover evidence of past success. This can be shown through the use of customer lists, testimonials or simply points outlining past accomplishments. Remember to make your company look successful. Everyone wants to deal with a winner!
Overview of offering: The third section should be a high-level overview of a description of the features and benefits of your products and/or services.

How you can help: The fourth section should show how you feel your products or services can benefit the prospect.
Call to action: Lastly, the presentation should always have a call to action or a next step for the prospect to take.

2. PowerPoint%u2122 is a great foundation for customizing and improving your presentation. You can customize your presentation by adding the prospect's logo and deleting any portions of the presentation not relevant to the prospect. When you are presenting, begin to look for the audience's feedback and try to determine which areas are of highest interest. This will allow you to build on these areas of interest and reduce the less interesting content for your next presentation.

3. Lastly, PowerPoint%u2122 provides you with an easy way to provide your audiences with a set of handouts. You can print your PowerPoint%u2122 slides in a three-slide-per-page handout format. You'll find prospects usually have better retention when they can make notes next to the slides as you present.

Gaining Commitment

The next area of the sales cycle where technology plays an important role is in gaining the commitment of the prospect-in other words, closing the sale. During this phase you basically have to beat the competition, negotiate terms, overcome objections and ask for the order.
This is usually not an area in which CRM software or presentation tools will give you too much of an advantage. But let's first look at the five fundamental characteristics you'll find in top sales professionals who know how to gain commitment with their prospects.

Top sales professionals:
1. continually grow their knowledge and understanding of their products or services offerings, their industry and the competitive landscape;
2. know how to listen and then ask the right questions-in order to understand the prospects' needs, problems and requirements;
3. know how to build solutions that are based on their customers' and prospects' needs. These solutions are easily understood and clearly highlight both the benefit and the return on investment;
4. know how to gain a customer's long-term commitment by developing high-value relationships and possessing superior selling skill sets;
5. are extremely good time managers who are focused and self-motivated, and who possess a sense of urgency.

So how do these top sales professionals gain the skill sets? Yes, experience certainly does play a big factor in skills development, but nothing will take the place of a high-quality educational program. Top sales professionals stay in a continuous learning process throughout their careers. This is where a different type of technology plays a leading role. Again, the Internet has given you a platform for continuous learning. At no cost, you can subscribe to some very useful sales education newsletters. These newsletters will keep you up-to-date on trends, skill sets and even the use of technology. Very good examples of these newsletters can be subscribed to from the Web sites of Selling Power Magazine-www.sellingpower.com, Sales and Marketing Magazine-www.salesandmarketing.com, and the Canadian Professional Sales Association-wwww.cpsa.com.
Another great way technology can be leveraged in education is by turning your vehicle into a rolling school of business. Many sales professionals (I for one) swear their success has been due largely to the business education they receive through the educational cassette tapes and CD-ROMs, also known as talking books, that they listen to while moving from sales call to sales call. The number of titles for these talking books is rapidly growing. In fact, Amazon.com currently lists 53 audio CD titles on the subject of sales and more than 100 others for general business. You can also join a talking book club, such as www.simplyaudiobooks.com that has over 4000 titles that as a member you can access for less than a dollar a day.
When you attempt to gain commitment from a prospect, usually one of three things will happen. You may win the opportunity and the prospect will become a customer. Or you may lose the opportunity to either an outside competitor or a group internal to the prospect. In many cases, the decision becomes no decision, and everything remains status quo. Again in all outcomes, your CRM software plays a major role. The prospects we don't close with go into our previously discussed keep-warm system. Keep in mind that just because you lost this opportunity to a competitor doesn't mean you are out of the game forever. In many cases new suppliers do not perform as well as they promised and sometimes internal groups also fail to deliver. In the case of no decision, who knows what may happen over the next few weeks or months that can cause the opportunity to resurface. Just as in any keep-warm system, you must continue to touch the prospect and stay top of mind until you get another shot at the opportunity.

Managing Customers

So let's look at how technology can help you do a better job in the most important phase of selling-managing new and existing customers. In order to grow your business, it's important to find new customers, but it's even more important to keep the existing ones. Always remember, it is much easier to sell something to an existing customer than it is to find a new one. Yet, studies have shown that the number one reason for a customer to leave an existing supplier is neglect. Neglect happens when companies forget about proactively servicing their existing customers. They forget to call, visit periodically or to meaningfully correspond in any way. Many companies still measure customer satisfaction by merely the number of complaints they get. If they don't hear anything, they assume everything is all right. Meanwhile, in the real world, many customers just get frustrated and look for new suppliers rather than complain.
One of the best strategic moves you can make with CRM software is to build profiles for each of your customers. This way you can share customer information with other CRM software users in your organization. These profiles will give you and your team a working 360-degree view of the customer. This information can then be used by other members of the sales team as well as by customer service and professional services departments and management to build high-value relationships with your customers. The following are some specifics about developing them:
%u2022 Profiles should be built for the company, and should include detailed information about the organization, such as size, structure and affiliates.
%u2022 Profiles can also be built for the people that we need to touch and build relationships with who work for these companies.
%u2022 Other profiles can be built to cover areas of information on affiliated organizations, other suppliers and/or competitors.

Along with these profiles, a good CRM software system will include a calendar for scheduling activities, a notepad for recording conversations and meetings along with e-mail and a word-processing capacity for correspondence. It will also include other features for marketing campaigns, sales pipelines and forecasts, as well as customer service tracking and resolutions.
Within your customer profiles, classify each account by priority. Your best accounts may be classified as A accounts. Your second-best group of customers would become your B accounts. Finally, your smaller customers could be your C or even D accounts. By classifying accounts this way, you will find it easier to prioritize and schedule in your CRM software your follow-up activities. For example, A accounts may get quarterly visits and monthly phone calls. Your B accounts may get an annual visit and quarterly phone calls, and smaller accounts just get the quarterly phone calls. This will make it easy for you to plan your yearly activities, such as quarterly follow-up calls, correspondence and meetings. One of the best things about your CRM software is that it will track, record and manage all these activities and improve the way you touch your customers.

Planning for the Future

In the late 1990s, many Internet experts-before their timely and inevitable demise-called for the Internet and sales technology to replace the professional salesperson. Yet, what we're seeing today is the complete opposite. Companies are focused on getting closer to their customers and building high-value relationships. Many are scrambling to find top sales professionals who can help their prospects and customers work their way through the maze of information being pushed at them on a daily basis.
Over the last decade, we have seen sales technology mature and develop into a set of productivity tools that no sales professional can do without. These tools now help sales professionals improve their productivity through their ability to:
%u2022 prioritize and manage time, and improve the frequency and quality of customer and prospect relationships;
%u2022 improve access to information;
%u2022 target new business development activities;
%u2022 standardize customer management activities;
%u2022 improve the accuracy of sales pipeline forecasts and reports; and
%u2022 consolidate customer and prospect information into a priceless asset.

It is becoming increasingly evident that those sales professionals who continue to leverage the power of technology today will be tomorrow's winners!

Rick McCutcheon, CSP

Rick McCutcheon is the leading strategist, facilitator and writer for strategic sales development and customer relationship management. In 1990, he founded Sales Productivity Group (SPG). Since that time, Rick has worked directly on sales productivity improvement and CRM (customer relationship technology) projects for some of North America's leading sales organizations.

Business Name: Full Contact Selling
Address: 39 Butterfield Crescent, Whitby, ON L1R 1K5
Telephone: (800) 480-5762 x 200
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Web Address: www.fullcontactselling.com