The Complex System: Story of an Entrepreneur

Solution Selling, Good; Selling Success, Better

We’ve made great progress on the transformation of our sales organization in the past few weeks. There have been some fundamental changes occurring in the way that we approach sales. I think it started when we clarified our corporate vision and presented the idea of making leads more valuable. With this in mind, we came up with the idea of selling to success. For us, ensuring client success is at the core of our mission. If we aren’t doing this from day one, we aren’t doing our job.

Selling to success is in direct contrast to the old ideal, ABC (always be closing). I don’t know if this concept works anymore; at least I know it doesn’t work for us. It’s not about getting a deal. It’s not even about getting a demo. It’s about helping our clients succeed and if that goal is achieved by selling our software solution, then great, let me show you the software. If that goal is achieved some other way, let me point you in the right direction.

We have to buy into that concept from the heart. We have to believe it “from balls to bone” (great quote from The Matrix, others quotes to follow in future posts). And if we do this, that means we can’t be focused on the money, we need to be focused on the fit.

We’re even going so far as to modify our numbers board to show pipeline, rather than sales. Sales pipeline is the total amount of potential deals that may one day close, but is made up of ONLY prospects that are a fit and that would succeed from the use of our software. Selling to success means filling the pipeline with winners. A pipeline filled with winners translates to a client base that is succeeding.

Aaron Ross Catch-up

Aaron Ross and his new BlackBox team are helping us build some process and jump start our sales machine. He started working with us full-time and in one week we’re seeing serious results; and in particular, my sales team has the eye of the tiger back.

I realized I got a bit behind on my mandatory reading (sorry Aaron); just banged through a backlog of AR posts. Good stuff of course, but I love this, I’m sure to try it with the next cold caller:

Especially having been in sales, whenever someone tries to "close" me or uses a sales process that is obviously forced or inauthentic, I always feel like telling them "Wait, John - I'm getting a phone call. Hey, it's 1995 calling, they want their sales technique back."

Thanks Aaron!

I’ve been spending a lot of time (sadly at home, apologies to my wife) thinking about key metrics. Aaron’s points on not going overboard on metrics are right on. It’s so easy to have metrics coming out of your ears; I’ve succumbed to desire to put too many metrics in our software. We recently had the first of many future client roundtables at Leads360 and I learned quite a bit, in particular about the metrics that are most important to many of our clients and how they want them presented to them (that’s another post of course).

The high school adage barked at me many times; keep it simple stupid, holds true again.

Aaron Ross Sessions Part II

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on implementing the strategies that Aaron had helped us develop. He is a huge advocate of progress in“bite sized chunks” and I’ve begun to realize how effective this can be.

Two weeks ago I moved into the sales room to begin mentoring my team in a much more intimate fashion. Of course, after spending 15 minutes in the room, listening to calls and demos, I wanted to tell them ever detail they were doing wrong. It was suggested to me to just listen for the first day. I did that, and took note of the topics to discuss.

The next morning we all met to discuss my observations. While there was some pushback with my suggestions, I found them to be very receptive to short bursts of coaching. Over the next two weeks I worked both as a group and individually with my team. Much progress has been made.

Per suggestions from Aaron, we’ve implemented an “outbound” sales process using two teams and we’ve begun to develop the sales pipeline. As simple as that may sound, I suggest you read my post on the bad habits we picked up during the mortgage wave, it is very telling on how we’re having to re-invent our sales strategy.

The idea of having a “conversation”, or multiple conversations rather than going straight to the demo is contrary action for my guys. But they are working hard to break these habits and we’re starting to see the results.

Strategy Sessions w/ Aaron Ross – Vol 1

A few months ago I was introduced to Aaron Ross, of SalesForce.com fame. Since then I became an avid reader of his blog, and I’ve had the opportunity get to know him. This week we were fortunate to have Aaron spent a few days with us doing some sales strategy sessions. This is the first of several posts around how Leads360 is transforming our sales organization under Aaron’s tutelage.

Let me start by telling you a little bit about Aaron. Hopefully he enjoyed working with me as much as I did with him, and that as we become better friends he won’t hold this against me. First and foremost Aaron knows what he is talking about, and he’s got the experience to back it up. However, as someone who likes things wrapped up with little bows (that is, I’m super anal and like things super clear and organized), I often found Aaron’s message to be hard to understand.

As we powered through strategies and tactics, I was sometimes left more confused than before we started. Aaron would frequently say things like; you’ll have to let this sink in, and it will take some time for all this to resonate. Of course I didn’t want that; I want instant results and I kept hammering him on coming up with specific and clearly defined action items. At some points I was so agitated and uncomfortable I almost came out of my skin. I’m sure Aaron noticed it.

From time to time I would see little nuggets of clarity through the clouds. I would connect with one thing he said and try to expand that out into a tangible idea, but then Aaron would be on to the next thought. When our 2 days was over I was sure Aaron knew what he was talking about and that he could teach me a lot, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to actually learn from him.

Jump to 10 hours later. I’ve had some time to think. Things have started to set in and I realize that I did actually “get” a lot more than I thought. I’m starting to visualize a clear path that we can take to get the sales results and long term sustainability we want in this business.

The next post I’ll begin to describe that vision and articulate how useful it was to spend two days with Aaron, and how instrumental my working with him will be.

Aaron, thank man; I’m fired up!

The Two Types of Prospects

I believe that sales prospects fall into 2 primary categories I call “disposed” and “disinclined”. Disposed prospects are those that are ready, willing and able to become clients. These prospects have already made the mental shift that is needed to be amiable to your products and services. This does not mean disposed clients are lay-downs; it just means they are open to a conversation about your products or services. They know they may need something and they may be something that can help their business. They are not sure if you have that, but they are willing to see if you can help.

The other type of prospect is disinclined. These prospects are not ready for a conversation about your product or services. They may in fact be a great fit or they could be completely wrong for what you are offering. These prospects need to be converted to Disposed before you can close them. When prospects are in this stage, you must have a dialog with them. This can take hours, weeks, months or longer. You must qualify them. You must get them to make that mental shift into the space where they are open to the idea that what you sell might be something that can help them.

If you try to jump the gun (more on this soon) by “selling” these prospects before they are disposed to your sales pitch, you’ll lose the sale before it even began. It’s obviously much harder and time consuming to convert prospects that are disinclined vs. those that are disposed. The key is to develop a sales infrastructure that bolsters the production of disposed prospects.

Is Sales Force Really that Good?

For a while now, Sales Force has had a lock on the web based CRM and lead management space. I guess I just figured they had the most sophisticated and best solution out there. Recently I signed up for a demo of Sales Force and was pleasantly disappointed. I say pleasantly because once again I wasn’t wowed by the 600 pound gorilla, which leaves room for Leads360 to make its mark on the sales force automation and lead management space.

In my experience bigger is rarely better in the software market. In fact, the bigger the company, the slower they move and the less likely they are to be on the cutting edge. Furthermore, I’ve found that small to medium size companies are often made up of small amount of mostly smart people rather than a large amount of mostly average people. Read more about this paradigm in my post about Big Companies, Small Minds.

In exploring the Sales Force demo I realized that it is not that sophisticated in comparison to the Lead Manager. There are a number of features and functions that are much more advanced and have been built out much further than we have done so to date. However, I think there is a major aspect to the software that is lacking. The user interface and workflow is highly un-intuitive; which is rather ironic seeing as Sales Force is software about developing a more intuitive and enhanced workflow in your sales organization.

My best guess in what has happened with Sales Force is that it has been compounding development and features over the past 5 or so years. This fact, combined with the incredible, nearly vertical, rise in technology capabilities has caused the solution to be, for lack of a better word, a Frankenstein.

My business partner, Charles often refers to a software solution as Frankenstein when it has been piecemealed together over time. I think that Sales Force has become something of a Frankenstein. I really did like some of the deeper configuration capabilities, but found that setup was truly a nightmare. I’m sure had I done training and taken advantage of all of the support and frequent calls from my sales representative, I would find it that much easier. But after all, I’m biased. I love our solution and I think we’ve come along at jus the right time. Read more about why I think it is the right time for lead management.