In the category of "why are so many things in the sales profession messed up", a new survey by Blueroads and Sirius Decisions has found that most executives running channel programs in large companies need to focus more on helping their partners sell?!

It seems most channel executives have been spending their time and money on things like partner portals and have just realized that maybe it is time to focus on actually generating leads that their partners can close. I doubt this is much of a surprise for their partners! Of the channel executives who did focus on sales effectiveness 62% reported...an increase in revenue...

Reading between the lines, it's my opinion that channel executives are not fighting the tough fights in their own companies to get the resources they need to actually help generate business for their partners. Hopefully this report will help to change that. The channel team has often been treated as the "poor cousins" in many sales organizations I have seen. I hope they will stand up for themselves more in 2009 and help their partners drive some big revenue gains. With the way the economy looks partners surely need it!

Here's a few extracts from the report:

Top channel executives do not focus enough resources on driving sales effectiveness, suggest the results of a new survey released today by Blueroads and Sirius Decisions. In fact, 80 percent of the channel investments by the vendors that were surveyed are focused around tactical issues such as training, partner portals, and partner communication tools – all activities that automate partners, but fail to help them drive top-line revenue growth.

The Channel Survey: 2009 Priorities, which polled an audience of over 1000 high ranking vendor channel leaders, also indicates that vendors are seeking to drive revenues, but didn’t always know how, and resorted to brute force tactics including channel partner recruitment in their existing markets rather than focusing on programs that increase the productivity and yield of their current resellers and partners. The survey covered a variety of channel-dependent industries--including software, telecommunications, computer hardware, and information services--on their channel plans, investments, and expectations.

“Too many channel chiefs are engaged in low-risk, low-return activities,” said Charles Watson, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Blueroads. “Too few are ready to drive fundamental changes that help them achieve greater equality with direct sales and enable increased visibility, empowerment and accountability in the channel.”

Nearly sixty percent of respondents recognize they need to spend more on sales effectiveness programs in 2009. However, their intended actions don’t necessarily support that goal. For example, training and partner content portals were among the top technology investments, yet these are often simply easy-to-implement infrastructure investments with limited return.

Gee, how much more bad news do we need?

I think it's great for news stations and newspapers. I know I can't help looking at the Wall Street Journal site five times day to see how much the Dow Jones is down but I also know that is NOT helping me sell more.

I'm also pretty sure a lot of us sales people are feeling pretty worried/scared right now.

"Is my company going to cut some jobs soon?" "Don't companies often lay off their sales people first?" Most of us know cutting sales people during a downturn is a big mistake (and we don't even know if this is a real downturn yet). Companies that don't market during a recession are in a really weak position when things start to improve. But even though CEOs know this they often still cut sales people because they feel compelled to cut costs in the short term and don't care about two years hence - basically because they need to save their jobs.

But the longer I spend in the “sales industry” the clearer it is to me that highly-skilled sales people are in short supply. I believe this will continue to be the case even if we go into fairly deep recession. Every company I talk to seems to want more sales people and even if some companies start cutting back and not hiring sales people, sales talent will always be in demand.

Hence, if you are committed to being a professional sales person and want to stay with it as your career, I predict you will have no problem finding a job even if things get “dark” with the economy. But how about making your journey through the tough economy easy - or at least easier?

Too much of the time sales people “fly totally solo”. This fits the cliché of the sales person as the “lone wolf” hunting for meat. But does this cliché really make sense when you need all the help you can get to sell in a market where buyers have less budget to spend? I don’t think so.

Consider the other sales people in the world. They likely feel just as concerned as you about the future. Why not reach out to them and start building support structures for yourself? How about starting to connect with other sales people to partner up on business development and knowledge sharing? Form your own "sales team".

If you are a sales person, you have a complicated and challenging job. Trying to do it all alone, especially in a downturn, is a huge burden. Why not share the load with others? Why not build yourself a team to help you sell (a lot) even during tough times. Even wolves work together when necessary.

My first job out of business school was working for a junk mail company (one of the biggest in the world in fact by number of letters sent). An unexpected part of the culture of this "junk mail" company was that everyone was extremely analytical and scientific. Perhaps not the first thing you think of when you see a piece of junk mail.

One of the areas we focused on most was lists. We were forever testing different lists. And in a lot of detail. “People who subscribe to Magazine X versus people who bought product Y”. We were always looking for small statistically significant differences in response that would indicate consumer interest in our offer from a particular list. If we found interest from that group, we would invest more next time in mailing to more people on that list.

Around about 1998 or so I started meeting people who wanted to promote their business via email. I went to several meetings back then of a marketing group discussing how to best use email. At the time the discussions were very primitive to my ear as a "junk mailer". People seemed to be sending email to anyone without much of a plan. The concept of testing each list did not seem to exist. Fast-forward to 2008 and email marketers are completely different. Email marketing has become extremely analytical. Testing everything is accepted as the smart thing to do if you are an educated e-marketer.

Now think about sales people prospecting. What are we doing when we prospect? We are using the telephone (primarily) to contact people who are not expecting our call. Sound a bit like "junk mail"? In my opinion absolutely! The only difference is we are using the telephone not an envelope.

So if prospecting is like "junk mail" then shouldn't sales people, sales managers & CEO's be obsessed with the lists they call like direct mailers and e-mailers are? Shouldn't they be testing their lists looking for even the smallest indication of above average interest?

Many sales organizations today are prospecting by starting at "A" in Hoovers and working their way down. They are "boiling the ocean". They are not testing their lists. They are not being analytical. They are not looking for small clues of statistically-significant difference in interest amongst targets.

They are not being smart!

The "junk mail" business is a well-established business with over 100 years of experience. Maybe it's time sales people "junked" some of their prospecting habits and learned something from these marketers.

Sales people should minimize the number of people they call. Yes, I said minimize. One of the biggest challenges for sales people is time management. As a sales person you should be calling people who you can convert into customers. You need to focus your efforts on a well-qualified list of people.

In our "real world lab", which is our own telesales team, we constantly track data to try to answer questions like "how many times should I call a prospect?" (questions with answers I always think should be common knowledge but just don't seem to be). Here's some of our latest observations from this "lab":

Six Calls
I've recently written about how sales people need to find a balance in their prospecting between calling too little and calling too much.

Research has shown that many sales people call once or twice but that contacts need to see your name at least 7-8 times before they start to "warm up" to your brand. On the other hand, we have noticed from our own prospecting data that calling over 10 times tends to leave sales people with a list of contacts who have been filtered out to be the ones who are hard to reach (the kind who put their phone constantly on "do not disturb").

So we've come up with our latest "rule of thumb" that six (6) calls is about the right number to make to a cold prospect (someone you have never spoken to). Once we've tried six phone calls we will put them back into the "nurturing process".

Ninety Days
What about people who have shown some interest?

I have also noted in the past that sales people tend to cling onto opportunities/people way too long. They also tend to assign way too high a probability to deals coming out of these prospects in their sales reports.

In our team our latest observation is that a lot of the higher-end products and services we sell have a 90-day sales cycle. What we mean by this is that by going through historical data we noticed that prospects that did turn into clients almost always did so within 90-days of our first conversation with them. Only prospects who never closed kept us coming back for longer than 90-days. So we learned from this that we could pretty much kill off anyone that had been lingering in our pipeline for much more than 90 days.

Put 'em Back in the Greenhouse
So what happens to all these prospects we give up on? We put them back into the "nurturing process".

And yes, there are a ton of people in the "nurturing process"...and not that many in our true sales process. But that allows our sales people to focus. That means we have a decent chance of calling people when we are supposed to and spending time handling issues that come up.

Meanwhile we use cheaper means like email and mail to stay-in-touch with everyone in the "nurturing process" (sales people are expensive!) We don't discard people who fit our prospect profile. But we don't burn sales people's time on them either. If you have a marketing department, these people become the responsibility of the marketing department. Research shows there's plenty of future business in this list of people so don't lose them. These people are your future hot prospects they are just not-ready-to-buy-yet.

Six calls. Ninety days. Or put 'em back in the greenhouse to grow into prospects who are ready-to-buy. What do you think?

This post continues my efforts to bring you the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events. This is Part 9 of the series (the preceding parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8)

In the first eight parts of this "mini sales training" I have covered preparation (hugely overlooked) and in prospecting so far I have covered: using a multimedia prospecting approach, how to keep yourself motivated, being organized and how to sound right on the phone. Now I'd like to talk about taking "an account approach" to your prospecting.

I have frequently seen sales people focusing all their prospecting energy on one person in a target company. This typically manifests itself in the CRM system as lots of calls to the same person without getting through. The sales person (usually correctly) starts to feel like they are wasting their time calling this person.

I am in favor of persistent prospecting. Too many sales people give up after one (or two) calls to a contact. But continually calling the same person over-and-over-and-over-again is a problem too. What you tend to find in this situation is (a) you manage to annoy your prospect, (b) they start to recognize your caller ID and don't pick up (even if you block your caller ID, they recognize "it's that blocked caller ID again") or (c) you are focusing your effort on a person who almost never picks up their telephone (their phone is always on "Do Not Disturb").

Some great research conducted by MarketingSherpa showed how many people are involved in buying a sophisticated product over $25,000 in price (in the case of this research the product was technology but I believe the research findings apply to all sophisticated business-to-business products):

- Firm Size, 100-500 employees: 7 decision-makers
- Firm Size, 501-1,000 employees: 14 decision-makers
- Firm Size, over 1,000 employees: 21 decision-makers

The fact that lots of people are involved in buying your product or service means that any one of these people may be a good point-of-entry into a company for you. After all, last time they bought this kind of product that person was involved in the decision-making process.

This means even if your target firms are small, 100-500 employees in size, there are roughly 7 people you can target to get that first elusive meeting or conversation. If the firms you call are 500-1,000 employees in size, there are roughly 14 people you can call. And if you are calling on Fortune 1000 firms, a whopping 21 targets.

So if you are not getting anywhere with the person you are calling, brainstorm a bit. Who else could be involved in buying your product or service? Ask anyone you can at the target company what kind of people get involved in looking at this kind of product (executive assistants are usually the ones to ask). Or try to partner up with a sales rep from another non-competitive firm and ask them what kind of people buy this product at your target firm or any firms that are similar to your target.

Think about how to grow your prospect list at your target accounts. Don't trap yourself by your prospecting approach.

How long is your sales cycle? How do we shorten our sales cycle? Interesting questions but how do you answer these if you don't know what your sales cycle is?

I'd like to be a bit odd as usual and define a sales cycle my own way. My definition is a little different to the one I have heard in many companies throughout the last decade or so I have been selling and helping to improve people's sales processes.

Many people seem to think of a "sales cycle" as the time it takes you from "starting from nowhere" to getting a contract. But how do you define this (I am having trouble defining "starting from nowhere" myself)?

The reality of prospecting is that it's a statistical process of looking for someone with a need. You have a list of usually hundreds of names and you "inquire" to see if they have a need that your product or service might solve. The time it takes to find a prospect in this process is quite difficult to define as it is based on probability. You could find your first prospect in a day or in a month or in 3 months. For example, if your ideal prospect - unbeknownst to you - works for "Zeta Corporation" and you started calling companies in alphabetical order with “A” it might take you 3 months to find your prospect at “Zeta” but if you had been lucky and started calling your list in reverse alphabetical order this time would have been 1 day. So this time varies widely. The average for this time might be knowable for any given product is any given market but I don't know anyone who has really figured it out! Maybe we can call this time the "marketing cycle".

So what is the "sales cycle"? I like to define the "sales cycle" as something much more tangible. I define it as the time it takes to take a qualified prospect to close. This means you have already found someone who has a genuine need. Now it's the time it takes to “progress the deal” with all the relevant decision-makers in that company.

This time is much more predictable and trackable. It's also a very useful tool for managing sales pipelines. Over the years I have almost never seen a deal close that has taken much more than 50% more time than this definition of "sales cycle" (except for exceptional circumstances on the buyer’s end that a sales person should be aware of, such as the buyer is away from work for a couple of weeks etc.). Therefore if you do an analysis of all the opportunities in your sales pipeline using this definition you can see which deals are too old and are NOT real deals.

One thing that has become quite clear to me over the years is that deals have momentum. Once a deal "slows down" in your sales pipeline (i.e. it's in your "sales cycle" as defined by me). It will NOT close. "Slowing down" means that the communication between you and the prospect becomes less frequent and the execution of agreed-upon actions becomes slower. When these things happen your deal has real problems.

Using the definition of a "sales cycle" I present above can help you clearly identify which deals in your pipeline will close and which won’t. If you are a sales manager or business owner, you can speak to your sales person and try to understand if there are special circumstances for why this could be happening that may mean the deal is one of the rare ones that will close. Now you have a tool that you can use to put meaningful probabilities on your sales pipeline opportunities.

Knowing your sales cycle (as defined above) can help you focus your energies on real deals and hence boost your sales results. Cycle on!

This post continues my efforts to bring you the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events. This is Part 8 of the series (the preceding parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7)

In the first seven parts of this "mini sales training" I have covered preparation (hugely overlooked) and in prospecting so far I have covered: using a multimedia prospecting approach, how to keep yourself motivated and being organized. Now I'd like to talk about sounding right.

I've listened to a bunch of calls recently made by our own telesales team and our clients. It's a more revealing process than I initially expected. When you are doing your own prospecting you don't hear how you really sound. Just like seeing yourself in photos or on video, listening to yourself can be quite shocking and revealing.

What struck me from listening to calls is that some people sound like they are executives and some people don't. Some people sound like they are in the right place and some people sound like they are not. Some people sound like they are calling to transact business and others sound like they are pleading for a favor.

When someone is calling you for the first time, you (the prospect) are looking for "clues" as to what to do. Is it important? Is this somebody important? Is this call worth my time and attention? (Or if you are an executive assistant, should I put this call through)?

Human beings are incredibly good at processing non-verbal information. The sound (tone, speed etc) of your voice is processed extremely quickly by the prospect to try to make a determination as to who you are (note: calling from a noisy call center is a major clue you are not important). Obviously, you want to sound like you are important.

Your voice gives away a lot more about your inner thoughts than most of us would like to admit. So first of all, it's very important that you actually believe in what you are selling! If you don't, you are likely to start sounding like you are pleading for help.

Assuming you do believe in your product or service, you may still need to practice conveying this strongly in the "heat of battle" when prospecting. A little self-programming may be needed. Speaking from personal experience, what I find useful is to review all the positive results our service/product has brought to clients, including reading our testimonials and case studies and focusing on the benefits contained in those documents. This helps me get in a positive frame of mind. Then just keep repeating this exercise over-and-over again every time you prospect (daily if that's your prospecting routine) -- repetition is key to self-programming.

For anybody who knows me or who has read much of my writing you will know I am a huge believer in testing. So in this case I believe it's critical to record a whole bunch of your calls and listen to how you sound. As I said earlier this is like looking at photographs of yourself. Usually what you hear is not what you expect. Listen and judge if you sound "executive". Do you sound like you belong? Do you sound like you should get an appointment with "Mr. CxO"? You need to. The person on the other end of the phone will be trying to figure that out.

Sounding right takes a lot of practice and working on yourself. But if your primary tool for starting the sales process is the telephone, it's a must. Prospects are listening to your voice as much as to what you say. Don't sound like you are pleading. "Dress" your voice for success!

We are keen on data here at Sales 2.0. In our telesales operation we recently reviewed conversion data for some of our projects. From that analysis I can reveal to you today that:

The product you sell influences your prospecting outcomes -- a lot!

OK so that's intuitively extra-obvious. But the way management acts in most companies you would think everything, including a “me-too” product in a very competitive market, could be overcome by the sales force. I've heard countless conversations in senior management meetings and with sales people themselves that imply the sales people are at fault in selling such-and-such a product. I don't think so.

Here's some real world data (and yes, some of it makes us look good and some of it less so, but this is perception as I hope you will see below) Ratio 1: we looked at the number of dials our inside sales people are making to the number of conversations they are having and, Ratio 2: the number of conversations they are having to the number of appointments we could set for outside reps.

Here's what we found "Ratio 1", number of dials to conversations, is remarkably consistent, it ranges from 5-15 but the broad average is 10. So when prospecting to people you don't know ("cold calling" but I have an issue with that phrase) it takes us an average of 10 dials of the phone to speak to a decision-maker/executive (does not include speaking to assistants or others).

This data in itself can spawn a whole discussion, "cold calling does not work" or "cold calling does work" - sort of depends which "party" you belong to. But my belief is this number is going to come out approximately the same for everyone who uses basically this same approach since it’s a function of the buyer not the seller (it’s about how busy and screened we all are today).

Let’s look at "Ratio 2", number of conversations to appointments (aka moving the sales process forward). Unlike "Ratio 1" this number varies widely. For some projects we’ve seen this number as low as three (3) at the other extreme we’ve seen this number as high as forty (40) – big difference. And big (big) difference in the happiness of us and our clients (or if you work in an internal inside sales team, or a team doing your own prospecting, your CEO).

OK, so what was the difference in the projects. Did we do a good job on the projects where "Ratio 2" was good and a lousy job where "Ratio 2" was not so attractive? Did we just have "rock stars" on some projects and "losers" on others? No. We had similar people on each team and we constantly try to improve our processes and results.

Taking a more scientific approach (without the usual emotion attached to sales results) I believe the data shows the main variable in all this was the product. In the cases where we were achieving some great results the products are truly interesting to it's market and at the other extreme the products are in a crowded market and their value propositions are not clearly over-and-above their competition.

Of course, there are ways to improve sales results of even me-too products in crowded markets (we talk about them all the time on this website) through smart sales and marketing strategies but ultimately all firms should realize buyers are smart and sales people are not slackers.

Not every product is created equal. Some products are more equal than others.

This post continues my efforts to bring you the content that we present in our live "mini sales training" events. This is Part 7 of the series (the preceding parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6.)

In this post I'm still talking about prospecting as that is where most of us sales people feel the most pain. In the first six parts of this "mini sales training" I have covered preparation (hugely overlooked) and in prospecting so far I have covered: using a multimedia prospecting approach and how to keep yourself motivated. Now I'd like to talk about something boring: being organized!

Time Management: I believe a foundational skill for sales people is time management. If you can't manage your time, you won't find time to prospect. Sales people who cannot manage their time will always find something else to do. My friend John Orvos of SellMasters says you need to "build a fortress around your prospecting time." In other words schedule your prospecting time into your calendar first before anything else in your week. Try not to let anything else interfere with it. In most companies "you eat what you kill", if you don't make time for prospecting, you will starve!

Scheduling Follow-Up Calls: follow up is key in prospecting. The research out there clearly shows it takes a lot of "touches" to get through to a cold contact (a minimum of 7 but could be up to 20 or 30!) You need to use some kind of system (usually a CRM system) to keep track of the next follow-up call when (like most of us) you have hundreds if not thousands of contacts. Keeping your follow-up call times documented and organized so you call when you need to (or said you would) is critical to good prospecting.

Understand Your Priorities: some calls are more important than others, some contacts are warmer than others. Make sure you develop a system for tracking key priorities in your prospecting efforts. We use fields in our CRM system to identify the importance of contacts and accounts so we can quickly identify the high priority contacts and accounts in our large database. Keeping these priority fields current is critical so important contacts do not get lost in a "haystack" of low priority records.

Note Taking: CRM systems are pretty boring. But taking good notes on your interactions with prospects is very important if you "team sell". Team selling can be extremely powerful. It lets others come up with ideas you may have missed. But team members can only help you if you take enough notes for them to know what's going on with that contact/account. Make sure you keep good notes on all prospects. The benchmark we use for CRM notes is: can some other member of the team read your notes and get an accurate picture of the status of your work so far on that contact? If not, improve your notes.

As I've said before "sales is just like accounting". In prospecting this is so true. The details count a lot. The cliché of sales people is as loud backslappers buying drinks at the golf club. Great characters but lousy at administration...and details.

The reality in a "Sales 2.0 world" is that sales people need to be "boring" and not miss a detail -- or they will miss a deal.

In a "Sales 2.0 world" sales and marketing are the same thing.

I'm a bit weird in that during my career I've spent several years in both marketing and sales (and studied marketing at Wharton but now "eat and drink" sales). My take away from being on both sides of the departmental divide is that this is a problem we have created for ourselves - it's not a fundamental one.

The problem usually starts when a growing company appoints its first head of marketing (if it has a head of sales) or its first head of sales (if it has a head of marketing). As soon as that happens it opens up the possibility of departments not being aligned.

To me sales and marketing are just different parts of the same function. The point for a business is to generate leads and close deals. Who cares who does that? As a CEO, I certainly don't, as long as we close deals then the accountant could do it as far as I'm concerned.

The biggest real divide I have seen between sales and marketing people is that sales people think everything can be done on the telephone and marketing people will use any mechanism possible before calling a prospect themselves. This is a bit of a strange differentiation in jobs isn't it?

As we move into a "Sales 2.0 world", we sales people are starting to be armed with the more advanced tools we need to deal with ever more difficult-to-reach buyers. But as we start to use these tools look what's happening: sales people are sending their own mass email (e.g. Sales Genius) and grabbing their own contact lists (e.g. Jigsaw), so sales people are doing the same thing as marketing people.

As Sales 2.0 picks up, sales and marketing departments are going to look more-and-more alike. Maybe the big change will come when the first marketing person makes a cold call - a bit like the opening scene from the movie "2001 - A Space Odyssey". (By the way, please, email me if you know what the end of that movie means I'm still trying to figure it out).