Do you have “Prospects” or “Future Customers”? Hint: It’s not the first one...

 How much do I hate the term “prospect”? So, so much. 

Open up your browser and Google the word “prospect” and this is what you get: “a person regarded as likely to succeed or as a potential customer, client, etc.” The definition is so simple but the context in which it’s used almost feels… derogatory. 

Salespeople often use the term “prospect” when discussing opportunities and calculating potential sales in a funnel, eg. “How many prospects have you sold to this week?” Now of course I understand that reps need to have a way to identify and refer to opportunities so they can be tracked and organized, managed etc. but the way that we use “prospect” seems to dehumanize our potential new client. After all, they are human - not an ATM. 

Let me flip this around for a second. Imagine a mentor, spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend that you’ve had a relationship with (current or past). Picture them in your head. Imagine what makes (or made) them so special. We’re not talking about just any relationship here. This is a positive, meaningful, and deeply rewarding experience that will last for a long time in your memory - maybe even the rest of your life. One where you both gained something and learned something. Imagine how they made you feel at that time and much they truly meant to you. Now… if you could travel back in time to the first day you met them, knowing what was about to take place, would you still refer to them plainly and simply as a “prospect” for your attention and amusement? 

We never know when we’re going to encounter these people in our lives, so treat each of your potential customers as though they could be the start of a tremendous experience, one that is positive, meaningful, deeply rewarding and will last for a long time. 

As for the “p” word, let me share some ideas for an alternate:

• Future-customer/client

• Hopefuls

• Potential customer/client

• Patron

• Guest

• End user

• Owner of the product/solution

Are KPIs the best measure of success? Not really...

 Measuring the success of sales reps. Sales reps should be measured based on the quality of the opportunities they bring to the table, not the KPI’s they log into a computer. 

Measuring success is always challenging for sales leaders. You could fill a library with all the sales books written about how to manage and measure your sales team, and many of them contain really great ideas on what metrics to use, what tools to use for tracking said metrics, and how to interpret the numbers. 

Typical tracking revolves around these metrics:

1. Revenue - One of the most basic and telling numbers, and really, the only one that matters at the end of the day. 

2. Outreach Activities - This is usually made up of a subset of indicators including calls, emails, meetings, proposals or quotes sent, number of engaged prospects, companies contacted - any activity that generates new leads or moves people through the pipeline. 

3. Bookings - These are commitments given by the customer prior to a formal contract signing or purchase ordrer. These commitments can be in the form of a written document with conceptual agreements, terms, and conditions, an email, or in the good old days, a handshake. 

There is one metric that I personally think gets overlooked because it’s difficult to quantify. It doesn’t always provide the hard numbers that accountants like to fawn over, nor does it provide the C-level with a measurable KPI like a call or an email. So what am I talking about? I’m talking about Qualified Opportunities. 

Qualified Opportunities are a significantly more accurate representation of sales efforts, especially over the typical KPIs. Qualified Opportunities are defined as a sales prospect that has a defined need or problem that aligns with the product or solution your company provides, and has met an ideal criteria set (market type, employee count, revenue, geographic location, funding stage, or other stats that put them at the center of your target market). 

Measuring the quality of your opportunities can help to paint a more complete picture of the efforts of your sales team. It’s an indication that the right types of calls, meetings, and other outreach are being done, and that your pipeline is being filled with quality, not meaningless quantity. 

The 10 things you can do right now, today, to create a better outlook for next year

For so many sales reps this time of year is known as forecast season. Looking through the ugly numbers of the 2020 sales year (which I’m sure will be remembered for many years to come) and trying to make a prediction of what juicy nuggets might be in store for us in the new year. Not an enviable position, but let’s see if we can help push hard the last half of Q4 and build some momentum going into 2021. 

Here are 10 things you can do right now, today, to create a better outlook for next year:

1. Call up your top 5 customers and ask them what their goals are for next year. Find ways to add value - this doesn’t have to be a direct sale. If you know of someone in your network that could help, offer an introduction. 

2. Call up 5 customers that sit at or near the bottom of your top 20% and ask them the same question. 

3. Review your goals for 2020. There may be a large discrepancy between what you wrote down at the beginning of the year and where you’re at now. Or maybe you changed your goals when Covid began to take shape. Either way, it’s important to understand what you’ve accomplished, and I really emphasise “accomplished”. This has been a challenging year to say the least and now more than ever we need to zero in on the good things we have done. 

4. Re-imagine your goals for 2021 in light of the “new normal”. How we interact and connect has changed dramatically and there are many studies coming out now that show that the sales landscape has changed forever. We have discovered that not all meetings need to be held in person and that relationships can be created and nurtured over a Zoom call. 

5. Connect with your team members and re-evaluate strengths. You’re only as strong as the least-trained and experienced person on your team. Work together to learn from each other and get stronger. 

6. Think of the thing you like least about your job. Maybe it’s cold calls, follow-ups, or doing customer research. Whatever it is, make a point of doing it first thing in the morning once you’re settled. Go hard at it and feel good that you truly moved the sticks today. Now, do this for 21 days and create the habit to go along with it!

7. Consider the various industries your company serves, that is, look at your customer base and understand the space(s) they play in. Now go read whitepapers, industry articles, and anything else you can get your hands on to best understand the trends you will face in the new year. 

8. Review your personal goals and integrate them with your professional ones - your career should be the financial vehicle that gets you where you want to go. Are you still on track? 

9. Update your competitive analysis. Our competition is always changing to meet the needs of the market, as do we. Have a look at your top competitors and find out if their offerings have changed or if they’re still in business. Without sounding like an evil comic book villain, competitors that go under present a unique opportunity to gobble up some of their customer base and aggressively  expand your market share. 

10. Spend as much time with family as you can. Some may argue that this should be at the top of the list and they’re right. If you’ve read this far, then you’re more likely to have the right mindset for this last point. We’re in the midst of a global pandemic and regardless of your views, it’s an opportunity for you to reconnect. Re-investing in family pays massive dividends as these are the ones who support you when the going gets tough, personally and professionally. Who knows what the world has in store for us or what events will transpire. This time last year we all took many things in our lives for granted that have been taken away from us now. Remind those in your circle about how much you love them, how important they are to you, and how your professional success is helped by them. 

These are my #ThursdayThoughts.

4 Tips To Protect Your Business from Credit Card Fraud This Holiday Season

Retail businesses are getting hit hard with the Covid-19 pandemic, and this is especially true for independently-owned shops and stores who are working with limited cash flow. As we approach the holiday shopping season this year it may look and feel very different. More online shopping is a given, and small business owners take the risk with the reward. 

Credit card fraud is an ever-present threat for businesses, especially what’s called a Card-Not-Present, or CNP for short, transaction. Of the various types of CNP transactions you may be surprised to hear that it's not just the online variety that are being targeted. The reality is, transactions done over the phone or by mail are heavily exploited by fraudsters because there are gaps in security for those types of transactions that are well known by criminals. 

A recent article published in the Washington Post says that “While microchips in credit cards have sharply reduced fraud in transactions that take place in stores, mobile and online transactions have become the low-hanging fruit of criminal opportunity.”

It goes on to state that “‘Card-not-present’ credit, debit and prepaid card fraud has ballooned in the United States in the last few years, reaching $4.57 billion in 2016, up 34 percent from the year before, according to the most recent Federal Reserve Payments Study.”

To help all the small business owners out there, I’m going to provide you with 4 tips on how to keep you and your customers safe from fraud this holiday season. 

1. Perform a PCI DSS compliance audit on your business. The PCI Security Council provides a thorough set of guidelines and documents to help you find any gaps in security throughout your transaction process. Information on the process as well as downloadable documents can be found on the PCI DSS website here.

2. Verifying address and personal information at time of transaction. This one seems obvious but many employees may be unaware. Remind your staff to verify information when possible. 

3. Don’t write down customer’s credit card information. We’ve all done it - we take an order over the phone and the customer asks “can I just give you my number over the phone?”. It’s tempting but it’s also a breach of PCI security standards. Instead, use a virtual terminal to allow for entering credit card information directly into your merchant provider’s system. Most banks and providers have an online, secure portal that can be used for transactions. Talk to your bank for more information. 

4. Use a PCI compliant tool to help you process transactions over the phone. There are several on the market, but look for ones that are cost effective and can easily integrate into your systems. They should not be expensive, and they may also offer additional security through voice bio-metrics, encrypted tokens, or pass codes. 

Do whatever you can this season to make sure the money you do earn stays in your account and doesn’t get lost to charge-backs from your bank. #TechnologyTuesday

Have you ever mapped out your prospecting on a graph?

 #MaximizeYourMonday

Prospecting is a staple of selling. Finding new opportunities to fill the top of your funnel is a high priority, daily occurrence requiring discipline and focus. It’s also subject to a particular ebb and flow that if not properly managed can place massive strain on your monthly and quarterly earnings. 

Interestingly, prospecting activity can be mapped out on a line graph to show the difference between an effective vs ineffective flow.

An ineffective prospecting process would show two lines hitting peaks and valleys exactly opposite to one another. This would indicate a flurry of prospecting resulting in sales as one line rises and the other falls. Those sales now take up the bulk of the rep’s time which means that prospecting loses its priority and falls to the wayside. As the rep rides the wave of activity the line begins its downward slope - the sales begin to drop off from a lack of prospecting activity and the cycle begins again. 

Artificially extending the time between those sales peaks by not managing the prospecting flow will dramatically impact sales revenue for the year. 

In the second scenario, the same two lines on the graph would look a little different. The prospecting line would now show as level, with a minor gradient increase over time as the prospecting cycle is held at a steady pace with a minor increase - usually from growing numbers of accounts and referrals. The sales line will show as travelling upwards at a steady pace as consistent prospecting will yield a near-compounding effect on sales revenue. 

The real power behind consistent prospecting is getting your entire sales team to buy in. The effect of each rep making consistent and regular efforts prospecting can produce some mind-bending results. 

Keep up the good work!

 

The Path to Enlightenment

 #PhilosophicalFriday

Wise Buddha told his disciples one day that whoever makes a true and honest effort can attain enlightenment in seven days. Those who are less gifted would attain it in seven months. Students who are of average ability could only hope for it in seven years. 

A young man listening to the great Buddha decided that was gifted and could attain enlightenment in one week. He asked Buddha what he must do to achieve great enlightenment in 7 days, and Buddha replied, “concentrate”.

This seemed too simple a task the young student thought, so he began his journey. He knelt down on the floor of the temple and began to focus. Minutes passed, and he kept his focus until he heard a fly buzzing about the temple. He followed the fly as it travelled around the room and he began to imagine what the fly must see. How high could it fly? What must it see in the world that he, a student, could learn? 

Realizing he was distracted, he decided to refocus his thoughts, remembering his commitment to enlightenment in seven days. Soon, a gentle breeze danced its way through the windows of the temple and brought with it the scent of fresh lilacs and cherry blossoms. Once the fragrance reached the nose of the student, he began to remember the lilacs and cherry blossoms his grandfather would grow. He recalled the many lessons and teachings his grandfather would share with him while sitting under a cherry tree. 

Frustrated, the student fought to bring himself back to the task at hand - how can he keep getting distracted when this journey was so important? He closed his eyes once more and began the process again. 

Little by little however, he began paying attention to everything that distracted him - the trees, the birds, the sounds of the temple - and slowly he began to realise that what he thought were distractions were anything but. What he assumed were moments of time wasted was actually him experiencing his presence in the world.

Shortly thereafter he decided it was not necessary to arrive at his goal so fast, because his path was teaching him many things.

It was at that moment that he became an Enlightened one.

Professional vs Personal Values: Making Sure They Align on Both Sides of the Sale

What are your professional values? How do they impact your relationships on a daily basis? Do they align with the values of the organization? Does that factor into your decision to work with a company? How about a customer?  

Most people have a personal set of values they carry with them that were developed over their entire life. Perhaps instilled from family members, a religious doctrine, culture, or environment. Professional values, although rooted in personal values, comes from somewhere else entirely.

Brendan McDaid, the 2016 winner of the Critical Prize for Writing awarded by The Scottish Organisation for Practice Teaching, wrote a paper on the contrast between personal and professional values. In it, Mr. McDaid writes “What is unique about personal values in comparison to professional values is that they can often change and alter as the individual develops, through life experience, societal influences, political awareness and as their understanding of people develops. Professional values, on the other hand, are not personal to the individual; they are a formal guide [professionals] must adhere to which aim to create a professional culture that improves practice and attempts to draw boundaries around what is deemed acceptable conduct.”

In the world of selling, your professional values are your bond to company and customer. They are what separates you from every other rep that is knocking on your customer’s door. They also make up the critical foundation of what it takes for both the company and the salesperson to work together and to truly succeed. Your ability to interact professionally with trust and integrity means having values that are shared across all teams, leaders, and owners. 

Professional values are a reflection of yourself and your character. There was a time when a handshake was all you needed to seal a deal and the paperwork was a formality. These days, we bring out the paperwork first and shake afterwards (maybe a little less now with the pandemic). 

I’m a member of Sales and Marketing Executives International, a non-profit organization established in 1935 dedicated to ethical standards, continuing professional development, knowledge sharing, and mentoring students. Members abide by a written code of ethics and a creed that sets the professional boundaries for how sales and marketing professionals deal with their customers. It’s a doctrine that I firmly believe in. 

To wrap up my #ThursdayThoughts for this week, I would caution anyone who doesn’t investigate and understand the values of the company they want to work for, or the employee/contractor they are considering for hire. There are still a great of both out there who have yet to find their values. 

You Can't Beat the Numbers, but the Numbers Can't Beat You

Today is #WinningWednesday which means it’s the middle of the week and a great milestone for which to measure your progress. By this point you should be at 50% or more of your weekly targets; whether it’s calls, meetings, sales, prospecting… whatever you planned last week, you should be half-way through it. 

Most reps have targets that are typically set for us each quarter or each month, but what about the targets we set (or should be setting) each day? Each week? Revenue targets are not accomplished by sheer will alone. It’s the result of meticulously planned activity, strategy, multi-channel touchpoints, and aligning with the right market. 

I would encourage you to take a minute to study your stage conversion ratios this week and find out how many calls it takes to get a meeting, how many meetings it takes to draft a proposal, and how many proposals you need to make a sale. Then, once you’ve figured it out, play with the numbers and work them forwards and backwards. Can you determine how many calls you need to make each day, week, month, or quarter to hit your revenue targets? How accurate are your predictions? I would love to hear your feedback in the comments section.

It’s one of the worst questions to ask, or get asked...

For today’s #TechnologyTuesday post, I’m going to tackle one of the most hotly contested questions that is discussed amongst clients and salespeople alike. In fact, I regularly get asked this question with the implied expectation that there is a single, indisputable answer. The reality is much different, however. 

“What is the best Customer Relationship Management software to use?”

It’s one of the worst questions to ask, or get asked, because there is no straightforward answer without exploring a list of questions, so what if you could use some simple criteria to help narrow down your choice? Wish granted. Here is a list of essentials to look for in your quest for your own CRM.

1. Ease of Use. If a CRM is not simple and intuitive, it won’t get used and you’ll spend more time harping on reps to update their files than you will making sales. CRM systems are only as good as the data being fed in, so make sure the process is simple.

2. Mobility. It’s going to be 2021 in a couple of months, so if your CRM choice doesn’t have a solid mobile platform as part of the package then you need to find a new CRM. Mobility can be accomplished through a mobile app (the preferred choice) or through a mobile-optimized website - either way, you need to make it a priority for your team. 

3. Automation. Any CRM you choose should have automation built into it - everything from creating marketing emails to getting reminders and auto tracking of activity like calls and emails. It’s also extremely important when it comes to your inbound marketing strategy to automate some elements of the process. Examples include welcome emails to new customers, capturing contact information from gated downloads like whitepapers or eBooks, and sending out newsletters, coupons, special event notifications… etc. 

4. Integration. A CRM on its own is nearly useless. Finding a platform that isn’t afraid to connect with other tools to expand its reach is a smart move. It gives you the option to not only expand the functionality of your investment but also leverage the data from other commonly used tools (like Outlook, Zoom, Task Managers) to help centralize your activities in one place within the CRM. 

5. Cost. We all have budgets to contend with and we need to squeeze as much as we can from them. There are almost as many CRM pricing models as there are CRMs - the good news is that the SaaS-based CRMs typically work on similar pricing models that include a per-seat amount tied to the number of users. The pricing is also adjusted according to the needs of the buyer and in some cases, the modules they choose. Think of it as creating a unique solution “a la carte” where you can pick and choose the elements you need to make the best tool you can. Bottom line here is to get as much of the previous 4 essentials included in your choice as possible. And yes, there are some great FREE options available out there.  

Focusing on these 5 areas will help you narrow down your choice significantly. You’ll end up with a great tool for helping to measure the impact of your sales activity, maybe even some of your marketing activity. If you have questions or would like some extra help in finding the right CRM for your business, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email or a private message on one of our social media channels. Good luck!

Proving You're Right vs Finding Resolution: Fatal Mistakes of the Customer Service Manager

 I was travelling this weekend as part of a celebration for my daughter’s birthday. Part of our trip involved going to a popular amusement park in the city we were visiting. Now, I’m not one to ride on machines that turn me upside down and toss my robust frame around like a rag-doll, but my 8 year old and my wife are all over it, so my plan was to walk around the park and watch my two special ladies have an amazing time. 

Once we arrived, we discovered that the admission policies to the facility had changed. Previously, folks who wanted to ride the rides would purchase tickets redeemable at each ride. Other family members were free to walk the park at no charge and watch their children play. The change in policy meant that all persons who wanted to enter the park, regardless of whether or not they ride the attractions, had to pay the full admission price. This seemed like a punitive and poorly devised policy, and those that know me understand that I have to speak out. 

“Upon arriving at the gate to speak with us, the manager committed the cardinal sin of customer service…”

Now, one could spend time arguing the ethics of their revised pricing model or coming up with several options that improve upon it and provide a more equitable way of managing attendance but neither of those were paths to solving the problem in the moment that I was standing there at the gate to the park.

The front-line staff were simply not equipped to have this discussion, nor did they have the authority to make a decision, so I needed to respectfully elevate the conversation to someone with more authority. A short while later, a supervisor arrived but was unable to make any firm commitments so the supervisor then put in a call to the manager of the park who arrived a few minutes later.

This is where we get to the crux of the matter. Upon arriving at the gate to speak with us, the manager committed the cardinal sin of customer service; he immediately began defending his position, the policies of the park, and attempting to convince my wife and I that we were in the wrong. 

To pause for a moment, I want to list out the 6 basic steps in dealing with an upset customer. They should sound familiar as these steps are the exact same as when dealing with customer objections.

Step 1:  Hear it out	Let the customer vent in a private and controlled setting. If they are angry, it gives them a chance to get the emotion out of their system.
Step 2:  Feed it back to them	People want to be heard and acknowledged, and usually once that happens they begin to calm down. Take this time to reiterate their complaint so both you and the customer are on the same page.
Step 3:  Question it	Asking someone to change their mind in a conflict situation obviously won’t work, so you need to dig deeper and discuss the underpinning concepts that their mindset is anchored to.
Step 4:  Answer it	Provide a suggestion for resolution that is aimed at providing new underpinnings while maintaining the dignity of the customer and validating their feelings.
Step 5:  Confirm the answer	Once the customer agrees to a resolution, tie that agreement to a sense of closure and repeat it back to them once more.
Step 6:  Move on	Don’t dwell on the situation. Once it’s resolved let them get on with their day so you can get on with yours.