Sales Blog with Sales Tips

Are you familiar with the term “marketing latency?” It’s the time between a prospect noticing your company and buying from you.

Latency is a funny thing because our sales managers push us to shrink it as much as possible. Ironically, they are most likely doing us a big disservice. Long marketing latency surprisingly has many things going for it.

The Reasons Sales Managers Love Short Latency

• Sell ‘em fast and move on to the next order!
• Our region isn’t going to make its numbers this month. Close, close, close.
• Sell this prospect something quickly so we can get our foot in the door.
• I just bought a new home and you need to do something pronto to bump up my sales manager’s commission. (I actually had a sales manager at a Fortune 500 company who would say that exact statement. Who could make this stuff up?)

The Advantages You And Your Company Will Realize In Longer Latencies
These are presented in no particular order.

• A prospect that throws you all of their business very quickly is normally looking for a supplier to finance their business. This is the kind of financing where they don’t feel obligated to ever pay their bills. All of your competitors have already shut off their credit.
• Prospects that are truly looking at you and your company for things like TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), ROI (Return on Investment) and value in general will take longer to sell. They aren’t buying on price; your margins will be higher as a result.
• Prospects that have a high latency are stickier (i.e. more faithful) to you once you start selling them. They are also more competitor resistant.
• Longer latency gives you more time to explore all the selling opportunities within a company. When we’re not looking for the quick sale, it’s amazing how often we can find additional products and services to talk about with the prospect beyond the obvious.
• Sometimes we’re in such a hurry to sell that we sell to the first person who can order from us, thinking we’ve found the mother of all decision makers. Not always true. Especially in large companies. Finding and building relationships with high-level decision makers can’t be done in a few days.
• Prospects know when we’re trying to close them as quickly as possible. They don’t like it. Who wants to buy from someone who has an attitude of, “Let’s get this over quickly so I can close this deal and move on to the next”?

Sales Tips Wrap Up
Whenever we take a myopic view of prospecting, we make compromises. Any time we only focus on how fast we can get an order, we usually leave a great number of possibilities on the table.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer

Just about every sales professional I’ve ever worked with has thought of – and dreamed of – becoming a sales manager.

There are numerous reasons for this: boredom in current position, more income, get away from the monthly quota grind, etc. The following are four attributes that upper management looks for before promoting a sales professional into sales management.

The Four Traits Of Aspiring Sales Managers
1. Recently I heard an executive of a very large company say that the reason he promoted a certain individual into sales management was her receptiveness to feedback. Being open to feedback is critical.

2. People like working with people they can count on. Are we on time? Do we take care of important details? Can people trust us? A sales manager’s sales team and the VP of Sales need to know they can rely on the sales manager.

3. Change is something sales managers have to deal with on an hourly basis. If we can’t elegantly handle change, we should take ourselves out of the sales management candidate pool. A good sales manager copes with dramatic change while softening the impact to his or her sales team.

4. Sales professionals who want to become sales managers know they need to grow in their careers and in their industry. They want to grow. Sales tips blogs, magazines, podcasts, seminars, professional organizations and books are part of their ongoing learning regimen.

We need to demonstrate these four qualities in order to be considered sales management material.

It’s Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be
While you might fantasize about being a sales manager, let me warn you that it’s not all roses. Think carefully before you pursue this career path.

You’ll likely have to travel 50%+ of the time. Sounds glamorous. It isn’t.

Top sales professionals frequently make more than their sales manager does. When you factor in a compromised quality of life (e.g. travel), it exacerbates the compensation issue.

The sales budget assigned to a sales manager  is much more burdensome than that of the individual sales professional. Why? You have to rely on others to meet your budget. You’re really going to hate this if you’re a control freak.

The higher up the food chain you go, the less understanding (i.e. forgiving) sales management is of missed budgets. Your VP of Sales couldn’t possibly care less that four members of your 12-person sales team were out with hepatitis all last month.

Sales Tips Wrap Up
One last thought. We’ve all heard the axiom, “Good sales professionals don’t necessarily translate into good sales managers.” It’s true.

However, the opposite is also true. Don’t take yourself out of the running if you’re not the top producer in your company and want to pursue a career in sales management.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer

One of the ways we act like children is to only hear what we want – or need – to hear. While it might be entertaining to watch kids practice “selective hearing,” this habit can dynamite our business development efforts.

What Are Needy Ears?
“Needy Ears” are ears that only hear information that supports our self-deception. The deception we’re forcing on ourselves is that the companies we have in our pipeline have real potential when they don’t.

We sometimes feel so desperate to fill our pipeline that we lie to ourselves. The pressure for this can come from within and from sales management.

I used to work for a Regional Vice President who would put the squeeze on her sales force to the point that she encouraged this kind of behavior. The sales funnel for her organization, as a result, was worthless.

Prospects Know When We Have Needy Ears
We all know that customers and prospects can tell when we’re coming from a position of urgent need, when we have to get more business.

When decision makers detect we are listening (i.e. filtering) with needy ears, they will frequently take advantage of us. We unconsciously become their sales slaves by: overly discounting, providing  information beyond what is reasonable, allowing them to play us against our competition and letting them waste our time.

Sales Tips Rx
What can we do to maintain our objectivity and not be a victim of needy ears?

1. Get real with yourself. You know in your gut when a prospect is wasting your time. Listen to that voice and move on. Activity alone does not equal sales. It’s a temporary balm.

2. Start asking hard qualifying questions at the beginning of the sales cycle and throughout. Budget. Time frame. Decision makers. Competition. Product and service fit. Legal roadblocks to contract execution. You get the idea.

3. Finally, and possibly most importantly, find a trusted peer who will be your accountability partner. He or she will ask you tough questions about each prospect in your funnel and help you discard the ones that don’t make sense.  You are free to reciprocate the favor. Think of this as an episode of Clean House. Your “house” is your funnel and your trusted peer is providing the intervention.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer