Part 1 - What are you doing wrong?

-> trigger warning - straight talk with a touch of sarcasm :-)

I imagine that you were looking for that one thing you can do to quickly change the slope of your sales trend.  Wrong question, I’m afraid.

Too many sales organizations and senior leadership teams are asking the wrong question.  I’m sure you have either heard or asked,  “How can we sell more sooner, starting right now?”  Maybe you have even mandated more pipeline by the end of the quarter.  If either is true, then please read on.

I would suggest a couple of more basic questions:

A.    How do sales happen?

B.    How long have we been doing the things that make sales happen?

Just for fun, let’s take question “A” in the negative –

“How do sales not happen?”  In other words,

What are the things you are doing to drive increased sales that don’t actually work.

• Feet on the Street – Most companies put more feet on the street to create pipeline.  Fair enough, but how do you expect that to happen?  More phone calls?  More blind emails?  More hounding people at conferences? 

Let me ask you – how do you react when a cold caller gets through to you?  Do you even read sales outreach emails?  What’s your reaction when someone you don’t know walks up to you at a conference and pitches you?

Of course, those are rhetorical questions because I already know the answer. 

The ominous implication is that adding more feet on the street to create pipeline may only build negative awareness.  At best, the new sellers will flounder. 

Oh wait!   

You’ve already seen that movie, haven’t you? 

Not your first rodeo? 

You’ve already churned through your sales team a couple of times and are thinking about doing it again – Why?  Because the “rock stars” you hired to ride your “rocket ship” were really not good at all?  Yet, you used the same selection procedure to get a new crop of “rock stars”.  Could it be that your selection process needs work?  It probably does, but, much more importantly, you are swinging a baseball bat wildly in hopes of killing mosquitos. 

Never. Going. To. Work.

• BDR (business development rep) team – Same story here as with your account executives . . . only worse. 

Let’s say, by some miracle, your BDR gets through to a prospect. 

Remember what your reaction would be? 

You have about 4.5 seconds to convince an annoyed person on the other end of the call to engage for a few minutes.  And to whom have you given that assignment?  What’s the average business experience level of your BDRs?  How many years in this sub-industry?  How long at your firm?  Exactly – you gave an impossible job to the least experienced, least skilled members of your sales team. 

Brilliant!  

Probably not going to actually generate many, if any, outbound leads.  Instead – and if you have any internal awareness of your sales organization you already know this – your account execs put the BDR down as the lead originator in exchange for some salesforce.com admin support.  If you think that doesn’t happen in your organization, you can probably just stop reading here . . .

and go get an ice cream cone . . .  

or play golf . . . 

or watch a movie . . .

or take a nap . . . or whatever.

You may be too out of touch to benefit from the rest of this post.

• Social Media – If you are a firm of some size with a reasonable marketing budget, you probably have an outside firm curate posts that your BDRs and sellers can share on LinkedIn with a single click.  Do you think that the rest of the world doesn’t know your secret?  They do.  That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it.  You just need to understand that everything your folks share is now slightly tainted. 

The real problem is that social media is really anti-social media, and all platforms rapidly converge into copies of each other.  As a result, many of your prospects just never go there.  When they do, they are deluged with “In-mail”. 

How’s that working for you?                

Right.

• ABM (account-based marketing) – this can be helpful, but only in context and with care.  I’ll tackle this in a separate post.

• Pipeline Calls – Given what’s happening with your sellers, BDRs, and social media, you should know what to expect here, right?  Weak pipeline growth – almost all of it inbound. 

And, if you have been pressing your sellers to grow the pipeline, and you are pleased with their response, it’s likely filled with fluff. 

Sellers are street-smart and coin-operated.  Anything that isn’t real selling activity will be met with the path of least resistance. 

Please tell me that’s not news to you!  The upshot is that your pipeline calls can be valuable, but not for growing pipeline.

That’s it for question “A” in the negative. You can answer question “B” on your own.  :-)

In my next post, I’ll answer question “A” in the affirmative – “How do sales happen?”