Recently I’ve taken the time to look around the web take in how much material is being developed to push information products or marketing systems that are unproven.  I’m amazed at how much ‘get rich quick’ stuff I’m seeing lately.

Human nature being what it is, I suppose that I shouldn’t be all that surprised. 

New Economy Selling.com is NOT a get rich quick scheme.  Nor is it a book that will then urge you to buy my DVD or another up sell.  It’s the real deal - it’s stuff that IS proven and works. 

Can you expect overnight results?  Instant benefits?  Probably not.  Short term improvements in how you sell and produce results for yourself and your company?  Absolutely.  Some great ideas on marketing, selling and insight into where the professional of tech sales is going - I believe the answer is yes. 

Anyway, I have been solicited like mad the last few weeks by what I would call the internet hucksters and I have politely turned down all of their invitations to “join” their movements. 

There’s no such thing in my mind as “overnight income” and I don’t want to be associated with the type of people who would have you believe there is. 

New Economy Selling is a solid investment of your time and money if you are in sales, marketing, management or sales operations for a tech company.   

If you don’t think so, then check out my better than money back guarantee.

I don’t profess to know everything about the profession or the industry.  However, I am convinced (mostly from the feedback of those who’ve read my book and worked with me personally) that you are going to find value worth many times the price of the book and the time you’ll take to read it.

If you are looking for a make-money-fast system or scheme, this is NOT what I or my book is about.  

~ Brooks.

Let’s face it, there comes a time when some applications just aren’t competitive anymore.  In this business, it’s very true that you ‘can’t put lipstick on a pig’.

Recently I worked with an organization that was trying to increase market share with an application that was Windows based in a marketplace where their main competitors were offering the same functionality either with off-site hosted/ software as a service or as a web enabled deployment model.

The CEO of this company solicited feedback as to how they could increase market share and we were able to help them - but not much - due to the changed landscape of their market place.  What was worse, the CEO got rather upset when he was told that the product was no longer competitive due to the reasons above and a few others (like missing functionality that product management was incapable of building because the application because they were too busy fixing issues in the existing feature set). 

We were able to increase revenues with upselling existing customers modules of the Windows application to their existing deployments and increase interest in the brand with some good old fashioned SEO and a new website. This was a short term, sugar coated fix to a bigger problem. 

However, when it came right down to it, that software was not longer saleable in the marketplace in my (and other’s opinion) and the time had come to put the company in maintenance mode or invest in a whole new, web enabled product line.  This was a decision that was clear to most, but not easy for this CEO to make.

Ego, jobs and personal interest in a publicly traded company were larger issues.

To make matters worse, this organization remained convinced that if they could just hire some really good sales people, that they could blow the doors off and grow revenues dramatically. 

We tried that and failed, despite best in class efforts. 

I told them that the business has to be a team effort…that product management and sales need to collaborate in order to bring products to market that people needed and wanted.  This wasn’t happening and it caused a chasm of communication internally.

Don’t get me wrong - I don’t like it when Sales is constantly complaining that “if I only had certain features I could sell more”.

This wasn’t the case here - sales couldn’t sell anything new because it was missing some major elements available from other vendors, for less money.

I think the lesson here is if you are considering a position with any company, you really owe it to yourself to see if you’re being hired to put lipstick on a pig.

Look closely at the competitive landscape, do your research and compare other vendors to your prospective employer and see what’s going on out there.  Make sure their value message matches the viability of the product or service.  You don’t need the stress of being hired only to find out that your product isn’t saleable and have the entire management team tell you that you’re failing, it’s your fault sales aren’t happening and you’re not as good as you think. 

~Brooks.

It’s not unusual for me to hear sales people say that prospects “didn’t get it”, or “they are just plain dumb”. 

I always wonder what this says about the sales person making this statement.   It’s important for us to remember that we are conveyors of information…like a pipeline.  We are supposed to connect the flow of value through that pipeline between the prospect and our company.

Therefore, it’s unacceptable that we should expect prospects to know much, if anything about us and our organizations.   There is one area, however, the prospect DOES know a lot about and that’s their own situation and problems. 

Remember that true selling is helping people solve their own problems.  You must approach this task as the prospect’s partner - or equal.  Don’t be arrogant or cop a superior attitude - it will show through.

If your prospects aren’t catching on as quickly as you’d like, it’s your problem. It’s your marketing departments problem.  The actual problem is that your messaging isn’t as clear and compelling as it should be.  Until you come away from every interaction where the message was clearly received, you and your business have work to do.

The job herein is the align with the prospect’s intelligence, not to expect them to align with your existing message. 

If the prospect didn’t “get it”, that’s your fault.  Figure out how to make is clearer for the audience you’re speaking with.

 ~Brooks

If you are going to work for a tech company today, it is very important that you CLEARLY understand their value proposition BEFORE signing up.  In fact, I think this should be in the top TWO reasons why you would join forces and help them sell. 

Not long ago, I worked with a company that had a poor value proposition in the marketplace and it was very difficult to build sales and marketing messaging that was compelling.  Here were their problems:

• They could only sell 90% of thier product line in Canada due to regulations and tax laws
• The product had to be 100% installed on customer hardware and offered no viable options for offsite or “hosted” services
• The product took 6-12 months to install and the services to do this in many cases were 2:1 as expensive as the licensing.
• It was very difficult to cost justify replacing many separate systems with this company’s single database system, due to the high capital outlay required to buy this software package. Most customers were willing to live with their disconnected systems rather than spend on a new, unified one.
• Their platform was focussed primarily on the healthcare vertical, which is notorious (at least in Canada) for being very slow to make decisions (read: loooooong sales cycles, before you get paid!), slow to adopt new technologies and fraught with a very high level of subject matter expertise required to sell it (read: your personal training commitment is going to be bigger than other companies you might work for).

Are you excited to work with a company like this? 

I didn’t think so.   If you’re looking for a new company to sell for, I suggest you REALLY do you homework and focus on understanding their value proposition.  Companies that would be ones I suggest you consider are those whose value proposition is going to be easier to manage in your sales conversations that the one I outlined above.  For example, a good value proposition would include:

• Anything with Software as  a Service, where the product or software is hosted by the vendor.  Companies like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM are two such examples in the Customer Relationship Management sector. 
• Anything where displacing people and their jobs is the main driver towards cost savings.  Even though it fundamentally makes sense at the economic level, nobody likes to lose their jobs or bring in solutions where that will happen.
• Anything where it helps people do their jobs and eliminates frustrating, long standing IN-efficiencies in the day to day operations.
• Any company that has broad adoption accross the range of industry.  Unlike my healthcare example above, companies that offer solutions anyone can use for a specific problem to all or most businesses is a good place to be.  The Business Intelligence vendors like Business Objects and Cognos did a great job of this in the last 15 years.
• Anything that can either A)directly help drive more revenue (such as the improved conversion in e-commerce traffic like those offered by companies like HackerSafe or The Online Sales Accelerator) B) make the process of driving revenue easier to manage (Digital River is a classic example of this type of business).

These are some examples of things you ought to be considering.  Ask yourself if you understand what the company does and if you can get behind it.  Does it make sense to you?  Would you buy it if you were in the market for such services?  If not, don’t sign up.  

A solid value proposition is one of the most important things you must have in your current or next employer if you’re going to be successful in technology sales.

~Brooks.

Sales rarely happen without many things taking place on both the buyer’s and seller’s side.

Most of the research in the domain of sales indicates that there is usually a series of repeatable behaviours that occur each time a sale is won (or lost). This suggests that if one could become more aware of those steps, then it would be easier to sell.

I am suggesting here that if you are selling any kind of IT solution without some kind of process or awareness into how your buyers are buying for you, then you’re not truly a sales professional. Instead, you are merely an order taker. There’s a big difference between those two kinds of salespeople.

The point of having a sales process is so that organizations can mitigate revenue risks and have a more systematic approach to revenue creation. The effect is a better understanding of when and why sales could close. This is often referred to a ‘revenue reliability’.

Simply put, a sales process is a series of repeatable steps and behaviours that marketing and sales people do to move a sales opportunity forward or disqualify it completely.

Typically those steps would include, but not be limited to something like the following:

Lead -> Prospect -> Opportunity -> Evaluating -> Negotiation -> Win or Loss

Some of the better known software as a service offerings include A key element of a sales process in my opinion is the focussed use of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. There are MANY reasons why organizations should use a CRM tool like Salesforce.com and Entellium, not the least of which is to track and manage a sales process..

Having sold, implemented or participated in designing sales processes for Salesforce.com and others, I can say without hesitation that the benefits were nearly immediate.

If your organization doesn’t have a sales process or you are considering joining one that doesn’t, I can almost guarantee a frustrating relationship between you and management. Even a simple sales process with key criteria for each step is better than nothing.

There are many good off-the shelf sales processes in the marketplace. Some of the better, more well known ones include: CustomerCentric Systems, Solution Selling and Miller Heiman to name just a few.

There’s an adage which states, “If you don’t know how you got where you’re at, you’re still lost.”

The same is true about being in this fantastic profession of sales without a sales process. So the next time someone asks you about your sales process, make sure you have an answer.

If you have been in involved in any facet of technology the last 30 years - you will know there’s always someone in the mix who’ll buy anything new. But those people only account for about 20% of the total buying marketplace.

They are the early adopters and they should not be the focus of your entire sales efforts. The ones to really focus on are the late adopters - the people who will consider buying something once it’s been around a while.

However, there is an even more important component to late adopters and that is HOW they buy. Even though you may be selling a “new” technology, late adopter buyers out there don’t buy the same way early adopters do. This is where most sales managers fail to help their teams properly segment selling behaviour.

All of this thinking comes from one of my favorite books, Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore. It is one of the recommended 10 resources you’ll learn about in New Economy Selling. You must read this book.

Anyway, my point is this - if you can’t learn how to sell to late market buyers, you will meet with limited success. Here’s a basic premise in Moore’s book, which is even more true today with the Web 2.0 movement than when Moore wrote the book: Late market buyers need help seeing how they will use your products and services. Early market buyers have already figured it out. Early market buyers are not as loyal and don’t often make the best customers to build a business around.

Selling to them is more like order taking…like a transaction. Late market buyers…late adopters are loyal and less likely to switch vendors. If you can learn how to sell to them, you will be more successful and so will your company.

Why? Because they make up 80% of the buying market place. Now, what if you had 9 other critical resources like this to help you improve your sales?

You can - I’ve got them listed in New Economy Selling.

If you are going to be successful in this new era of enterprise sales, you are going to have to challenge traditional thinking. Old school thinking just doesn’t cut it in IT. Specifically, you are going to have to think in a new way about the employee-employer relationship. Traditional HR departments aren’t going to like this. Don’t worry about them - they won’t get it.

Sadly most HR departments in technology still haven’t earned their place at the table and should stick to filling out benefit forms and writing job descriptions. The mechanics of the relationship between employer and employee will still exist - don’t get me wrong. However, YOU are going to have to think about the way you operate from a different perspective if you are truly going to be successful over the long term. In this industry, you really don’t work for anyone but yourself.

The basic idea that a product or service needs a skilled sales force to sell it, is still the same. Nothing has changed there. Unless you’re an independent contractor, you will still technically be an ‘employee’ of a company. However, the shift in thinking that I am suggesting you adopt comes from the perspective that you must treat your territory and accounts as is they are truly your own - like you had to pay for them when you began with the company you sell for. You have to believe that you literally own them as if you have a right to sell them.

What I mean here is that we need to start thinking about territories or account lists almost like a franchise before we can make one phone call or send even one letter to them. To ensure that you take this perspective seriously, I would like to suggest the following exercise for you. At the beginning of each quarter, figure out what you want to earn. Calculate your commissions as exactly as possible. Then, write yourself a check for that amount and put it in your wallet, day timer or tack it up somewhere that you’ll see it everyday.

Think of this as having to make payroll every month for your own ‘personal selling services corporation’. I promise you will take your daily activities much more seriously. Knowing that you have an outstanding check out there (even if it is only to yourself) will help ensure increased focus and reinforce that you work for yourself. I do this at the beginning of each quarter and find it a terrific exercise for affirming my commitment to this profession as that of a ‘business owner’.

Now I realize that you might be uncomfortable thinking like this. Maybe this ‘business ownership’ model is too extreme for you. I understand that. Don’t worry; at first I felt that way too, until I realized that I needed a better way to increase the intensity of my efforts.

What I am trying to promote here is a kind of ownership and commitment to your sales territory as if it was a business that could one day sell - just like a real business with its own payroll! I want you to imagine that 2 -3 years from now you have squeezed every bit of new revenue from all the accounts in your territory and now the referrals and upgrade business is starting to happen consistently. This would be the result of your professional sales and account management activities.

Don’t you think somebody would want a well-developed territory (read: ‘business’) like that? God forbid you should one day leave the company you work for. Surely, other sales people in your company would be fighting for your territory (which has happened many times in my career). If your region really was an independent business, it would be worth significantly more than when you started working it. Now, every year those happy customers upgrade their installations to your company’s current offerings, add a few more users and purchase more services and add-on products from you and the company you sell for. Talk about a great investment! This is how some of the best sales managers I work with manage their teams.

I’m going to finish this train of thought in a second post… stay tuned!