Sales Strategy

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just write an email knowing that the reader would simply interpret the direct message and respond accordingly?

All this reading between the lines and subtext is a pain.

Too bad.

Communications is about far more than just sending a message. Matter of fact, the overt message is almost the least important element of communication. While you’re struggling to be as clear as possible with your message, your prospect is evaluating your body language and picking out sub-text from your word choices.

Lose focus on your whole message and it can kill a deal.

My son is finally at the age where we’re ready to graduate from Cub Scouts (crafts, hand puppets and games) and move up to Boy Scouts (camping, fire and knives!). As we happen to live in a bizarre area with multiple overlapping Boy Scout Troops we actually have to put some time into touring and selecting the best-fit Troop.

I'm not sure your knot tying is up to our standards.

In most cases, it means scheduling a time to visit the Troop during one of their meetings to give your son a chance to interact with current members and get a sense for how the Troop operates.

In almost all cases, this has been a positive, if slightly bumpy process. Boy Scout Troops are run by volunteer parents. They have the best of intentions but may not respond to an email on a business timeframe. No big deal.

One Troop, however,  knocked itself out of contention because of the attitude conveyed in the response.

This is one of the bigger Troops in the area. I sent an email asking about setting up a Troop visit in the next few weeks and awaited a reply.

From a technical perspective, the reply was everything it should be. It shared the dates for upcoming meetings, talked a little about the Troop and let me know what I needed to do to schedule a visit. So far, so good.

However, through word choice and presentation, the primary message that came through on the email was pure arrogance.

It was a form letter email with no greeting. It didn’t even open with a “Thank you for considering our Troop, we’re excited to meet you!”

If I could paraphrase, this is what the message really said:

Dear Prospective Scout,

We’re a very large Boy Scout Troop and lots of people want to join. You can join if you want. The following procedures will let you do that with the least inconvenience to me.

Thanks,
Membership Chair

Now because I’m a classy communications professional I didn’t actually respond to the email, but here’s what was in my head:

Screw you.

It’s a large Troop. Recruiting and on-boarding prospective members is a daunting task. I get it. I’ve been there. But their “invitation” email told me all I needed to know. Being big is important to that Troop’s identity, and having my son join was only interesting if it was in pursuit of that goal and it wasn’t inconvenient.

I wish them the best. We’ll be looking elsewhere.

I’ve been doing a lot of business development work for the American Marketing Association lately to support the launch of AMA TV. Ok, “business development” is a fancy word for sales.

The point is that I’ve been on the phone. A lot. Calling. A lot of companies. In a weird way, it’s kind of fun.

In that time I’ve noticed a lot of bad habits. One in particular seems like a clearly missed opportunity.

At the moment, I’m calling through the AMA’s list of past advertisers and sponsors. Some of these companies no longer exist, many haven’t been contacted in a couple of years. No big deal, it just means that I often encounter a situation where I ask for a person who no longer works there.

Me – “Hi, can I speak with John Smith?”

Receptionist – “John hasn’t worked here for years” …  and silence.

Nothing illustrates "Who's there?" like a creepy eyeball picture.

There’s no follow up. No attempt to discover why somebody is calling and looking for a former employee.

I could be a past customer looking to start a new project. I could be a sales prospect who is finally looking to get started on a project.

Okay, I’m an sponsorship sales guy looking to sell stuff, but in the conversation above no one knows that yet. If I responded with, “Oh, thanks, goodbye” the receptionist would happily hang up the phone and go on with the day and have no idea whether a new customer just walked out the door.

Take the time to ask the next question.

“John actually isn’t with the firm anymore, but is there anything I can do to help you?”

It’s a simple question that will probably not yield anything useful 99 times out of 10. But it only takes an additional 2 seconds to ask it. You never know.

I’ve been using Clear.com for my home Internet, VOIP and a mobile account for my PC for about 9 months now. I’m almost universally happy with the service and the price I pay for it.

Will accept free T-shirts for this logo

I was on the Clear site earlier today (ok, for a tech support issue, but they’re still great) and saw a link comparing Clear.com to Verizon, who apparently is rolling out a 4G network.

The resulting page offered a side-by-side comparison between the two services. Not surprisingly, Clear was pretty clear that they think their service is better.

It was the conclusion of the comparison that caught my attention. Clear offered a link to the Verizon website with a call to action – “Check for Yourself”.

That takes guts, and some confidence in the quality of your offering. It’s one thing to claim you’re better. It’s another to claim you’re better, then offer to hold the door for your prospect so they can check out your competitor.

Did you know Verizon can hunt you by the smell of fear alone?

As a happy Clear.com customer I can’t tell you if this is an effective sales strategy, but it definitely shows some guts.

If you’re going to make a brand claim, make a big one. Make one that people will remember. It’s tempting to hedge your bets, but often the payoff is much better by choosing to be bold.

I had what was ultimately a positive tech support experience with Dell over the weekend, but there was one jarring moment of poor (and poorly timed) salesmanship that’s been sticking in my head.

Since I know you’re burning with curiosity, the issue had to do with Google Chrome crashing a lot. Turned out to be a virus that corrupted the files and it required more than uninstall/reinstall of Chrome to fix it.

Anyway, when you’re on tech support there are long periods when you’re just sitting on the phone while the rep has remote access to your computer. Usually, that’s just dead silence (or heavy breathing if he forgot to hit mute).

When the rep is waiting for something to happen, they appear to be trained to look for an opportunity to sell something. Great idea, and I’m sure it brings in some nice cash to Dell.

Most of the time, they try to sell some variety of an extended warranty or service package.

In this case, he was trying to sell me on an upgrade from Microsoft Office 2007 to Microsoft Office 2010.

His premise was sound. The newer version of Office would, theoretically, have tighter protections against viruses. I was on the phone with tech support due to a virus problem.

Oh, and you were doing so well!

He lost the sale because his understanding of what he was selling could not advance beyond the script in front of him.

“It will give you the latest protection against viruses up to the level of your anti-virus software.”

I asked for a translation of that gobbledy-gook three times, and all he could do was re-read the script.

Lost sale.

The idea was to couch a sales pitch into a legitimate piece of technology and computer security advice. All he had to do was rephrase the script into human speech and he would have had a nice little commission.

Tip for the masses – Selling from an expert positioning can be powerful, but you need to know your product to pull it off.

I bank at PNC. This is a recent switch based on their Virtual Wallet product – a creative combination of a checking account, interest-bearing checking and a savings account.

Stop selling and just take my money!

Anyway, the other day I stopped by the ATM to deposit some checks and had an odd experience with PNC’s sales process.

Depositing to an ATM is an act of faith. I’m feeding checks into a machine hoping it all turns out okay. Now, I’ve been doing this for 15 years so in most cases I don’t even think about it. It’s normal.

That’s not true for everyone. I occasionally come across people who are just not comfortable with technology. They don’t use ATMs. They don’t do anything online. It’s not common, but the is a wide range between that person and someone like me (who uses ATMs exclusively and does most of my banking and bill paying online). Most people are probably comfortable using an ATM for deposits, but …

In this case, I went through the process. I fed the machine my card, typed in my PIN and had set everything up for the deposit. The next step was feeding the envelope to the hungry machine and moving on with my day.

That’s when PNC decided to pop an ad into the process and ask if I was interested in learning more about some new service they’re offering. I don’t even remember, so you can see how effective the ad was.

The main problem is that the timing of that ad caused me to have a moment of doubt about the deposit I was about to make. It broke my routine and suddenly I was wondering if I had entered the deposit information correctly. I almost cancelled the transaction and started over.

The point here is that upselling and cross-selling is important, but there is a time and place for it. Watch out that your efforts to increase the deal size don’t interfere with your efforts to close the deal in the first place.

I had a consulting meeting with a startup firm last week where we started shaping out the marketing plan for the company. This is a firm entering a crowded marketplace with several established competitors, although none of the 800-pound gorilla type.

The company is led by a long-time salesman. He’s a good one. Long track record of success. Conscious of the habits he’s built that made him successful and will continue to do so in the future.

The difference is that he’s responsible for more now than just sales.

I am carrying you people

Like many salesmen, he has the attitude that marketing is what those semi-useless people over there do to generate sales leads. He’s polite about it, and to be honest only about half wrong judging from how I’ve seen marketing operate in many other organizations.

The attitude is going to lead to trouble, however. A company built on sales and … other stuff … is an inherently unstable beast. The only thing that will drive success in such an organization is raw muscle work. It’s simply a question of out selling the competition (note that I said outselling, not chopping prices).

Based on what I’ve seen of his sales skills, I believe he’ll be able to take the new firm to a respectable level of success. However, he’s not going to get further than that because sales can only go so far. You can’t always assume that you’ll have a superstar on staff to pull everything else through. If you’re the CEO, you can’t always be the superstar because you have too many other decidedly non-superstar duties to attend to during the day.

That’s why marketing matters. Yes, we generate leads and that is critical to the company’s growth. However, what’s really important is for us to fill in the institutional gaps that sales alone can’t fill.

If you have a marketing program, you can flub a sales call and still get that customer later because next month’s white paper will click in a way that you didn’t. If you have a brand, you can survive a goof-up in the service area. Assuming that those two scenarios are relatively rare events,

On a semi-regular basis I work with clients to develop content-based, thought leadership marketing programs. That’s a really fancy way of saying that I help them regularly write articles, deliver presentations and share their ideas.

You know what I tell them?

Consistency beats perfection every time.

I declare a Do Over!

You are much better off producing something of acceptable quality once per week than you are producing something of unparalleled perfection once in a blue moon. Write out an editorial calendar. Keep your publishing commitments.

As you may notice, I’ve written nothing in this blog for over a month.

So here’s the other half of that lesson that I teach my clients:

You can always declare a Do Over.

Coincidentally, that’s what I tell salespeople as well. They’re supposed to set goals – calls, meetings, close deals, etc. Sometimes, they miss those goals and sometimes, they miss those goals for unacceptable reasons like just being lazy.

The choice at that point is to deliver a regular round of self beatings … or simply declare a Do Over and begin fresh.

One of those options is productive. The other is not.

I declare a Do Over!

Why can’t companies get something as simple as service right?

Questions don’t get answers. Problems don’t get acknowledged. The bar is so low to set yourself apart by delivering superior service its almost a joke.

That being the case, why is it so rare? It’s such an easy route to success, loyalty, whatever you want to achieve. So why is it so rare?