February 6, 2009 by dave.

Has anyone asked you the hard question yet?  In tough times, we are often asked, “What are we doing about it?”  Sales Managers especially will be asked this as soon as revenues start to slip below forecast.  My advice is this: have an answer.

The expectation behind the question is that you already have been thinking and planning and that you have some ideas even in the face of unforeseen, unprecedented difficulties.  If the person asking is your boss, it means that your boss’s boss and all those up the chain to the board of directors are also asking (or soon will be asking).

So don’t let the uncertainty overwhelm you.  Instead sit down with pencil and paper, perhaps with a close circle of advisors, and generate an idea list.  Brainstorm freely, without critique, rejecting no idea at this stage.    The world has changed, so take the opportunity to think outside the box.

Once you have a list, then spend some time thinking and evaluating (but don’t get stuck there).  First make sure your ideas are not harmful.  Resist the urge to slash prices.  Instead, make small investments with the resources you have.  For example, run a contest with prizes, enlist others in the organization in part-time sales work or networking, give something away, launch a new educational seminar program, implement a new customer satisfaction survey, implement training or a coaching program.  Look for things that bring more people into contact with more customers, more frequently.  Look for things that improve skills or productivity.   Everyone in the organization wants to help, so enlist them.  Everyone is willing to work harder and longer in tough times if they understand the purpose and how it will help.

Don’t forget to look for things to stop doing; this is great time to get rid of administrative work that is benefiting too few stakeholders. Move meetings into early morning or weekends or cancel them altogether.

As you begin to make choices, expect that you will try and discard many ideas to stimulate sales in the coming months, so don’t get hung up looking for a perfect solution.  Instead, look for things you can try quickly, measure easily and abandon quickly if they aren’t producing results.  This is a great time to have a bias for action.  If you don’t have that bias naturally, then call on your people who do.  You know … the ones who never seem to analyze anything.  Try to have a new pilot project ready to implement with a different group of people every month.

And when you go to your management meetings, be prepared to present the ideas you’ve tried, how they worked or didn’t, what you learned and what new things are coming next.  Avoid at all costs saying, “Well, we’ve tried everything and we’re running out of ideas.”   That’s the signal that the company needs someone who has more ideas that you do.

You will likely find that some of your programs didn’t do what you expected, but they had other good results that you didn’t foresee.  Publicize those!  Improving morale is critically important in tough times.  On the other hand, you may just find something that works, something that everyone should be doing.  If so, quickly turn that pilot program into a training and implementation program.  Make celebrities out of the pilot team and get them to help everyone else get rolling.  You’ll also find that some people get results with a new program and some don’t.  Some are reluctant to try and some are unable to adapt to a new environment.  Identifying performance problems quickly is another valuable outcome in a challenging time.

This can be an exciting time if you manage it well.  Tough times have the power to transform people and revive sluggish organizations.  So don’t just stand there … do something!

Good selling,
Dave

Technical Sales Consultants, LLC
www.techsalesconsultants.com

Posted in life science, tough times, advice, sales training, management, sales | Print | 1 Comment »

February 4, 2008 by dave.

What does selling pencils have to do with selling technology? Quite a lot, if you’d like to double or triple the effectiveness of your sales force!

Recently I was leading a sales training session for a life science company and used the time-worn example of selling pencils to explain the advantages of asking questions and focusing on benefits rather than features. You know the drill: having an eraser is a feature; being able to revise on-the-fly saves me time and paper. And if flexibility is a feature, then a benefit is being able to sketch in a diagram or illustration as I write, “unleashing my natural creativity”. We have to ask questions and listen to the answers to know which of these things are important to specific person.

As I made these points, I noticed that the people in the group began to grin and nudge each other, snaking sidelong glances toward one particular person in the room. “Alright,” I said, giving up on holding their attention, “let me in on the joke.” The woman who was the center of attention spoke up and admitted sheepishly, “It’s just that I’m a little obsessive about using a particular pencil and everyone kids me about it. I like the ones that have a natural finish because they don’t slip through my fingers when my hands get sweaty.”She made my point for me that day! Who would have guessed that particular reason for preferring a particular writing tool? The only way to uncover that kind of “customer need” would be to ask some good customer-focused questions and listen carefully to the answers. If you were interviewing each of your current sales people for a new position, and asked them to sell you a pencil, how many would ask questions to uncover your needs and then present on the benefits relevant to your needs?Salespeople with technical products often have difficulty with this. We don’t want to seem naïve, so we don’t want to ask questions that might be too simple. And our customers also don’t want to admit it when they don’t know much about a particular topic. So while we talk technical terms with great assurance, assuming they know everything we do, they smile and nod and begin to think about something else. There is so much to know about these products and so much to know about how people use them that it is hard to resist the urge to unload a lot of that hard-earned knowledge on our audiences. But we’ll never really know what drives buying decisions until we learn to ask … and to listen carefully to the answers. The Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak,” [iThinkexist.com] and it still is true.

Here’s an exercise for your next sales conference call:

• Make a list of several top customers and some that have recently started buying from you.

• In advance, ask the salesperson responsible for each one to find answers to these questions:

• Why do they use the product? How exactly do they use it? Where does it fit in their process? What do they like most about it? What do they like least? How does it compare to competitors or alternatives?

• Make a list of the answers share it with the group.

• Don’t accept top-of-the-head answers (like “they use ours because they get good service from me” or “we have the best price”); press for the more detailed reasons.

• Finally, assign the group to work up a list of good questions that will help to bring out this kind of information from the customers you haven’t yet landed. Heiman and Sanchez’ Consultative Selling has a great section on “Learning to Listen” with guides for developing questions.

From this exercise, you can train your sales people to present benefits to doing business with your company that really matter to the people you are pursuing. And the sales results will improve.

A professional never stops practicing the basics. If you’d like some help making this a productive and fun exercise at your next sales meeting, please contact us.

Good Selling,

Dave

www.techsalesconsultants.com

Posted in sales training, sales process, life science, technical sales, management, listening, benefits, sales | Print | No Comments »

March 6, 2007 by dave.

A recent study of sales force perceptions by GS Discovery has some findings that certainly caught my interest. And I think they will interest more than a few of you in the Life Science Industry. This study may be the first of its kind for this industry

The study highlights some findings which deserve immediate attention from sales and marketing executives. More than that, the findings represent a “call to action” for executives in the life science industry. Because I believe these factors will be important to your business, I want to take a moment to share my perspective on the findings.

There are some “red flags” in the study that show up both in customer relationships and in internal management practices:

Red Flags

1. Sales people don’t feel they get enough time with their customers.
2. Competition is increasing and sales people want more competitive product information.
3. Credibility with customers is declining.
4. Mergers and major reorganizations are disrupting customer relationships.
5. Most sales people aren’t convinced that they are working for the best company, and even though satisfaction is quite high, they don’t expect to stay very long.
6. Almost half the respondents feel their compensation is either not fair or not competitive

The first four points are primarily customer relationship problems. All raise red flags for the future of life science companies’ relationships with their customers. In fact, the first one, “decreasing time with customers” kills companies. And this threat follows directly from sales people earning less credibility with customers, increasing focus on competition, and increasing turnover of sales people from reorganization. As the industry becomes more competitive and companies are more focused on their own overstuffed product lines, sales people begin to look less like trusted consultants and more like the path to a discount. This decline in credibility has occurred in many industries, and it is a one-way street. This is the first call to action: let’s hit the brakes and steer in the other direction.

Which other direction? Remember Macy’s surprising and most effective sales tool in “Miracle on 34th Street”? It was as simple as knowing the market and being willing to recommend whatever the customer needed … even a competitor’s product if yours couldn’t meet the need. To get more time with customers, we must equip sales people to bring more value to their relationships. First, we hire people who have solid experience working in labs, just like their customers do, and then train them to understand the choices and trade-offs their customers have to make, as well as how their own products fit. Just reciting features and benefits isn’t enough. We make sure sales people are consultants and not just order-takers. We try not damage their credibility by asking them to repeatedly pull business forward with favors and discounts to make the quarterly goals.

The Call to Action

• Hire people with solid experience at the lab bench to sell technical products.
• Train them to understand the customer’s perspective and how their own products fit.
• Make sure they are consultants and not just “order takers”.
• Teach them to sell, but to do so ethically and credibly.
• Make it worth their while to stay for the long term; keep your product innovation, training and compensation at the leading edge of your industry.

That said, they still have to sell, and consulting isn’t the same as selling. We need to train people to give good advice, but then press for specific action, to leverage relationships and cover all the buying influences. It’s not easy to do both, but it’s not impossible. That’s what the best sales people have always done.

The second eye-opener in this study is the reminder that good sales people have lots of options and many sources of information in the life science industry. They are constantly looking at the industry and making career choices based on who has the best products, the best compensation, or the best training for the future, to name just a few factors. They listen not just to their management but to recruiters, other sales people and their customers. It is easier to lose good people than we might think, especially to a sharp sales manager who is intent on building a strong team. Reorganization makes our people more vulnerable to competitive recruiting; so do flawed compensation plans and overly ambitious revenue goals. The resulting job-hopping by cynical sales people compounds the credibility problem with customers and erodes confidence in the entire industry.

The best sales managers learn to recruit the best people, to train them well and continually work to make them want to stay for the long haul. They create loyalty by developing people, coaching and teaching business skills that are valuable. They use their influence with management to keep innovation flowing to the product line and to keep training and sales compensation at the leading edge.

While we see red flags in these study results, we also have answers and antidotes to address them. We have resources in training groups, research departments, human resource groups and a vast array of agency and consulting options. This study will make a great topic at an upcoming strategic planning meeting. Get your team started assessing the situation and generating ideas right away. Let me know how we can help you.

Good Selling,
Dave

Technical Sales Consultants, LLC
www.techsalesconsultants.com

Reference: (see RepReview Life ScienceSM: The Life Science Supply Marketplace from a Sales Representative Perspective, December 2006, www.gs-discovery.com/home.html)

Note: While I’m not affiliated with GS Discovery, I do have a friend there and I made some pre-publication comments on the study, so you’ll see me quoted in the press release. The study highlights are available for download at the agency’s website, http://www.gs-discovery.com/home.html; for a free copy of the full study, contact Mark Walker at GS.

Posted in advice, life science, sales training, technical sales, research, management, sales | Print | 1 Comment »