Pick Up The Phone!

“So then I sent the rep an email…”
“I’m waiting for support to respond to my status update request”

Whenever I hear a phrase similar to these in one of my consulting engagements, I know I’m close to finding a problem, or at least uncovering a major symptomatic issue. Let me explain ..

After four months of travel running enablement and training workshops, May has been kinder and gentler and I have been working on a couple of “take-home” consulting opportunities. Both involve some badly broken internal sales processes at a couple of mid-sized companies. These processes were impacting both the effectiveness of presales engineers and ultimately the win-rate of sales. You know when a process is so badly broken that the injured parties readily admit that they spent more time trying to fix the blame as opposed to fix the process, which is why a third-party comes in to obtain resolution.

In both cases, email was to blame, and the people who relied upon it as their primary communications mechanism. Instance #1 involves a company with incredibly poor Sales Discovery habits and instance #2 a company where Sales Engineering spends 35% of their time bailing out Customer Support. Repeatedly, an email was

1. Left unanswered
2. Sent solely as a CYA (Cover Your A$$)
3. Incomplete and poorly written
4. Partially answered

My response in both the situations was to say “pick up the phone!”. An email is linear (in the good old days we’d call it half-duplex) as only one party can communicate at a time. An email can’t contain (much) emotion – I don’t feel there is much room for smiley-faces in business communications unless you really know the other person. A phone call allows you to get all your questions answered (you’re in sales – you know how to ask questions and get them answered!). Plus a phone call leaves no audit record other than that the call was actually made. You can say things in a call you cannot in an email.

So if you are frustrated in some internal process (or even in a customer communication) see if email is in the communication chain. If it is – ask yourself what would happen if you picked up the phone rather than send another email?

Maybe things would magically get better.

In my two engagements, the discovery rate doubled and presentation standards have improved dramatically in just three weeks for one customer, and the other customer reports that post-sales time has decreased from 35% to a still-high 22% and is trending downwards.

Pick Up The $^#@ Phone!

Check The Calendar!

For those of you whose fiscal year ends Dec 31^st, or even if it is just the end of the quarter it is time to check the calendar. Last week I sat in on a North America business review for a technology company that was focused on closing as much as they possibly could in their Q4. “Drain The Pipe” was the phrase of the day.

Except ..

50% of their deals were going to close between December 20^th and December 31^st. (15% were closing on December 25^th!)

90% of those late December deals were scheduled for a Proof Of Concept or heavily customized demo between now and December 20^th – (which is 35 actual days and in reality 32 or 33 business days because of the US Thanksgiving Holiday).

The math didn’t work.

First – given the timing of the holidays, a massive proportion of the buyers, recommenders, approvers and signers will be celebrating the holidays and taking off the entire week of the 23^rd and most likely the 30^th and 31^st as well. No-one is going to be there to complete the sale.

Second – looking at the number of days required to either run a POC to completion or create a custom demo (it’s a highly configurable system) , there were too many days and not enough SE’s – by an overage factor of 100%.

Something had to give. In the end we scrubbed the pipeline, developed some prioritization guidelines and “borrowed” a couple of engineers/consultants who could quickly configure a number of similar demos. They’re still 20% over.

The message – you may the greatest goals in the world for this quarter – but are they logistically and socially achievable? It’s not just the responsibility of sales to look at these things. How does your calendar look for the next 7 business weeks?

(And then next quarter we have the Chinese New Year ….)

Getting An "F"

The next edition of the Mastering Technical Sales Edge will be out on Tuesday August 9th. It's a week late so I give myself an "F" for Time Management. Which is ironic as that is one of the topics which gets raised in almost every seminar and workshop I run.

Now I know why I am running late - and that is a mixture of extending a business trip to take in some additional vacation, a last minute customer project and too many sunny days. BUT .. Do you know why you never seem to have enough time in the week and hours in the day? The first question I always ask is "How do you spend your 40-50 hours per week? What do you actually do?". Rarely can anyone account for all their time in the week, even if their company has a time tracking system. The reason I ask the question is that it is tough to impact time management and efficiency if you don't know where that time is going.

You don't even have to divide it into too many buckets. Just split it a few ways. Measure it as customer/non-customer-facing time. Measure it as reactive/proactive time. Measure it as "A" vs "B" and "C" customers - and finally measure the time with a grade. For every chunk of time you spend on something give yourself a grade in terms of timeliness, quality and even quantity. You will surprised at the results - we often gravitate to those areas we find the easiest. So if a large part of your day is spent on activities where you give yourself an "A" - you are probably (a) not stretching yourself out of your core competencies and (b) you are ignoring other activities you may not be so great at.

Measure, Monitor and then Change - but only if you want to.

Time Tracking For Sales Engineers

I overheard a lively conversation between a group of Sales Engineers and their manager last week. The topic wasn’t compensation, bad salesreps, lousy technical support, endless RFPs or any of the usual suspects. The conversation was about the requirement that they track their time and enter it into a CRM system by activity.

“Why do I have to record my time? It’s like Big Brother watching over me. Don’t you trust me to do my job?”

The manager immediately became very defensive, and replied “it’s now a job requirement. You better get used to it.”

The conversation kept going for a few minutes more without a satisfactory conclusion. It occurred to me that it would be a great Talking Point article for November. Why is it so important that the SE organization tracks its time when Sales doesn’t? So stay tuned.