Summer is here (I know this because half of California is on fire) and thus begins the most challenging season for a sales guy. The kiddies are out of school, the weather gets better (supposedly) and every customer or target executive seems to mentally –if not physically- check out for weeks on end. Even if you can get someone on the phone, all you hear about is “our kid’s first trip to Disney” or “American Idol camp” (which is probably a cover for Brenda’s rehab) or however your standard US business person misspends the lousy 69.3 PTO hours they get per year. Don’t get me wrong- I love summer- but it is tough time for sales people to push deals along. And unless you work for some fairyland company where the quota gets lowered to account for July and August being shot then you need to develop a strategy for not getting canned. Here are a few ideas:
1- Plan ahead and be ahead of a yearly number by now. Hahahahaha. Thanks for the tip, grandpa. Maybe next year. And I’ll clean the garage and get all my Christmas shopping done early, too. This post is not for sales people that are crushing the number- they should be on vacation, too!
2- Pipeline development. By this I don’t mean stuff all stages of the sales process into a month, try desperately to create a fall sense of urgency, discount the crap out of your product and ultimately fail miserably trying to close a deal on July 31st. I mean really examine your territory, choose what companies should be doing business with you, research who the players are, get all the time suck networking or partner stuff out of the way and start trying to have INITIAL conversations. Pipeline isn’t closed revenue, but it is something that your sales VP can enter into a spreadsheet and model to his heart’s delight. And you’ll be in a lot better position next quarter than the guy who spent the summer pounding the same four prospects, surfing Monster.com and bitching to HR about benefits.
3- Farm your client base. The quickest deals to be made are with your current customers- upsells, cross sells, accelerated sales, whatever. Check your comp plan (or better yet, go sell your manager or the appropriate accounting guy) to make sure you will be compensated and get imaginative. Is there training that could be bought now and delivered later? Professional services? Pre-pay for next year’s subscription? Remember, your company obviously prefers good old fashioned revenue, but everybody likes something over nothing and they have moving target numbers to hit, too. Besides, it is never bad to solidify that relationship with a customer who might be moving to another company soon- or be there to buy your next company’s product.
4- Conduct your internal campaign. All sales guys (including yours truly) love saying that “numbers don’t lie” and “coffee is for closers” and all that ma-cheese-mo stuff. But at least 1/3rd of your job security and recognition is directly related to how great everyone else in the organization thinks you are. Spend extra time in the CEO’s office listening to him blather on about his latest shiny object idea. Pick a night to get hammered with the VP of Sales to solidify your position as a hard nosed closer that is poised to deliver the goods by year end. Discuss why Eureka has hotter chicks than Stargate SG-1 Check (Wikipedia to get your dork rap down) with the tech guys. Humor the Biz dev guys and talk about “partnerships that will really move the needle.” Being popular pays dividends, believe me.
Above all, do whatever you can to not give into the urge to get stressed and do unnatural things (like call them on vacation) to your current prospects. Nothing kills a deal more quickly than when you let your customers feel your desperation. Labor Day will be here soon enough.
If you’re like most salespeople, including me, your natural response to a gap in any conversation is to fill it. The more uncomfortable the silence, the more words you try to stuff in there. It’s almost as if you’re an Iowa shopkeeper and silence is that nasty oil topped flood water spewing toward your front door. Quick- get out another sandbag of inane excuses for everything that you think your customer might be thinking.
When I first started in sales my most obvious tell that I was in over my head was my penchant for babbling. At the first sign of technical trouble with a demo, price resistance, or an accusation that my CEO had told an outrageous lie (an hourly occurrence) there I was spouting acronyms at crystal meth speed in Porky Pig cadence. On the phone CIOs probably took a little mental vacation (pre internet, remember). In person I’m sure they just noted the time and looked forward to when the IBM sales guy was going to show up for drinks or golf.
It was only after a number of years that I learned that when I shut up, my customer started telling me things. Important things, like what his objections were, or who was really going to sign the purchase order. Positive things- like what our product strengths were vs. the competition. Negative things, like how the competing sales guy never zips his fly up or his SE keeps hitting on the marketing chicks. Sometimes he even started talking himself into buying my product-my personal favorite. At the very least, neither one of us spontaneously combusted if there were few moments of silence.
Now that I’m on the other side I notice the nervous gabbing all the more. It is amplified by the asynchronous nature of speaker phones- only one person can talk at a time. Recently a Jigsaw product manager and I had a salesperson on the line and we used his inability to pause as a replacement for the mute button. It sure would have been helpful if he had at least cleared the line for 10 seconds so I could sell his product for him- it looked interesting from the web research I did.
This isn’t anything new- everyone says “ask questions,”” listen to your customer,” do 80% of the listening and 20% of the talking.” You know when verbal diarrhea is coming. Take your pepto or go to your happy place or do whatever you can to wait it out. You’ll be amazed at what you learn.
Obviously, the title above does not mean that the folks that worked so feverously to complete the Open Data Initiative are a bunch of dummies. I can be critical to the point of snarky sometimes, but I do more than sit around and shoot holes in my foot all day.
What I am talking about is that for everyone involved in BtoB selling or marketing, downloading Jigsaw’s company data FOR FREE makes so much sense that you have to be a nitwit to not at least check out the offering. Here’s why:
For our CRM partners, it is just too easy. Their biggest challenge to overcome with new and existing customers is data quality and maintenance. Salesforce took time off from counting their money to OK our idea and all the other major players are on board, too.
Entrepreneurs looking to start a BtoB company need to research their market if they want anyone to invest in the company- or come work there. I know all the MBA types are great at licking their finger, holding it up to the wind, and then pumping out a 30-page market report based on the population of Detroit times the GNP of New Guinea. Now anyone that can operate a computer can go to Jigsaw, download a million companies into Excel (FOR FREE), and get a look at their market based on tangible things like the revenue, employees, geographic location and industry for future prospective companies.
For smaller companies already selling to businesses: Stop hiring sales people based on how many company addresses they know off the top of their head and cobbling them together into an under licensed Act database. Now you can focus on 10,000 companies from Jigsaw that fall into your 2 top verticals that have revenues of more than what your product costs. Did I mention that this will cost you nothing? (Make it 100,000 companies if you want to get freaky- that’s free, too)
For companies that have been at it long enough to have amassed that ugly mess of historical data from 6 generations of salespeople (about 3 years) into your 2nd CRM database, you need us, too. Jigsaw won’t match, de-dupe, append and maintain all the companies that you have for free (we charge what amounts to pennies per record for that), but I bet you are paying some sales-ops guy who would love to get his hands on a list of 1 million up-to-date and complete company profiles that he could download into a spreadsheet that has been specifically created for the CRM system of his choice. (Maybe not- those guys do like to complain a lot and would rather buy a 10 year old tivo -because those are the ones you can hack- than pay $5 a month for the new service DVRs.) Jigsaw company data is better than yours because we have 500,000 sales people that are incented to enter and maintain the accuracy of the data. That is 499,999 more motivated people than you have. (there is always some dork who likes to update CRM data for fun)
For even larger companies that can afford to pay one of the traditional data companies millions of dollars to update and maintain your company data… good on ya. If that is working so great, why have you switched vendors so many times and still your sales people ignore your big CRM system- in- the- sky? Because it sucks and you know it. Come to Jigsaw and at least check out the companies we have. It probably isn’t as good as what D&B has today, and it doesn’t have some esoteric 20 digit code that maps out the location of every Burger King in Sheboygan Wisconsin. But it just might be good enough to power your sales and marketing efforts. And with the power of our user generated community, Jigsaw will be picking the data dinosaur’s bones pretty soon.
And yes, I believe so strongly in the Open Data Initiative I was willing to walk around Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco wearing tights for over six hours. You can watch me along with my co-founder and Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler declare data independence in a short three minute video. Get a laugh out of it? Help me get my marketing department off my back and forward it to your friends.