Consumers

People and people in companies want many different things.
People and companies only buy a limited number of things.

We all want many things that could make life better or to have a better feeling about life.

Companies

Managers want or aim for getting many things or solutions for different reasons:
- Productivity increase
- Convenience for their employees or workers
- Social status – enterprise status
- Ego
- Expressing of their power
- Spending lots of money or running an expensive department can help a career.
- Clearing out the budget at the end of year

Decision takers who are employees of a company mainly think or consider themselves first and the company comes in second position.
- They want a lot of things.
- They get little.

Decision takers who are founders of the company are entrepreneurs who will take risks in order to grow the company faster.
- They want a few things.
- They get almost all.

Both want different things for different reasons giving salesmen different chances to actually sell to them.

The ROI in sales: the expertise of the salesman

However when it comes to the actual purchase the gap between wanting and buying becomes clear and evident: a budget or an economic reason needs to be present. The power of a decision maker is a big parameter.

All capacities in a company are limited. Also the capacity required for selling is limited. Hence a Return On Investment (ROI) needs to be made based upon estimated chances.

The salesman, using his expertise acquired over many years, needs to differentiate between the wanting or the needing demand of the lead.

This is where the salesman plays an important role by evaluating, qualifying and deciding whether a suspect or lead is a prospect or not.
His experience and expertise are is required to estimate the chances for success (= sales) with a suspect or lead as he (or the VP Sales) decides to invest more or less time in a potential customer.

However he needs to take the power of the decision maker into the calculation as his ego, his social status, his enterprise status or his need for expressing his power can overrule any rational or economic reason.

How many times have you mistakenly took wanting instead of needing?

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This is a list of mistakes made before, during and after sales meetings and conference call which are to avoid.
Although most seem obvious, many of them occur frequently:
- Giving a bad impression
- Feeling of being less important customer
- Losing trust

Before the meeting

1. Ignoring small customers
You don’t want to waste time by meeting small customers that don’t increase your sales significantly. Ignoring those companies saves a lot of time.
- Smaller companies can grow bigger. Management of small companies can refer you to friends and relations in bigger companies. References help selling.

2. Travel more than meet
You spend more time traveling than meeting face to face with the customer.
- Plan your travel better in order to have more time available to meet and to prepare your meetings.

3. Always rescheduling meetings
Rescheduling meeting or conference calls for whatever reason gives a bad and unorganized impression.
- When the appointment has been made to meet or to call just make the call on time. Stick to it as your customer needs to be available too.

4. Arriving too late
You know you will be late for a meeting is a sign of lack of respect for the time of your customer.
- If you know in advance you will be late, so warn him by giving him a call.

5. Getting lost
Getting lost is no excuse anymore as GPS systems are available at fair prices. Driving without a GPS is like taking an additional gamble to miss a sales deal.
- Get a GPS system.

6. Key content missing
When having planned a meeting or call but missing an important piece or key person the event will have less value. Why meet when the information is not available or the specialist is not able to participate?
- Once the meeting is scheduled make sure the valuable time with the customer is spend wisely and your opportunity keeps in existence. If key content is missing then cancel the meeting.
- If the specialist cannot be present physically, getting him to call in by phone or video conferencing can be a feasible alternative.

7. Basic customer investigation
Not knowing anything of the customer business or news seems a lack of interest in this era of the Internet.
- Before you have a meeting make sure you visit their website during 5 minutes allowing you to prepare some questions showing your interest in their business and awareness.

8. Meeting with somebody
When addressing the reception desk without knowing who you will be meeting gives a very bad impression and indicates being a less valuable customer or person. As receptionists speak with most employees and managers of the company the word will travel fast in the company.
- Make sure you know exactly who will be in the meeting.

During the meeting

9. Not knowing your customer personally
Your meetings and telephone conversations are limited to the business.
Still you miss out the human part and possible relationships.
As relationships matter in sales you miss a very important part.
- In order to be able to understand the problems to be solved and their decision process you need to know the customer better by using the small talk before each business conversation.

10. Smart phone playing
Playing with your smart phone during the conversation gives the impression of being uninterested as your toy is more important or interesting.
- Just keep your phone in your jacket and put it in meeting mode or even turn it off.

11. Cell phone answering
You just answer any phone call on your mobile that you receive during the meeting or even a conference call.
Your customer will feel unimportant and not respected.
- Set your telephone to quiet mode or even turn it off as during a meeting or conference call your customer is the most important (at that moment).

12. Too long presentations
Your presentations just take too long wasting the precious time of your customer.
- Be to the point with your presentations. Moreover the attention span of all people is limited.

13. Time flies
Your meetings and telephone calls always demand more time than average.
- Stay on topic and be brief with your information concentrating on the possible business opportunities. Effectiveness counts while not wasting the time of the customer.

14. You always talk
You just keep on talking and pitching and forget about their problems.
- Make sure the customer talks the most and explains you about their problems, situations and limitations.
Ask open ended questions.

15. Wild guesses
Pretending to know what you’re talking about while you really haven’t got a clue. As the customer probably knows more than you, he will spot this immediately and your trust is destroyed.
- Be honest and admit you don’t know, write down the question while promising to get the information as soon as possible which gives you a cliffhanger for having a subject during a follow-up conversation.

16. The big pretender
You pretend to know all in order to make a big impression.
- A meeting is not to impress, but to co-operate and find solutions together.

17. No added value
Your information is what can be found on the company website or internet: there is no added value from your visit.
- Bring your expertise or experience in order to make a meeting or telephone call interesting and beneficial for the customer as you help to solve their problem.

18. The co-operation lie
Your co-operation proposition comes down to selling stuff to them or through their channels. You have raised expectations that wasn’t your plan thus distrusting your customer.There has to be a benefit for both in a co-operation.
- If you want to sell to them, then make it clear upfront.

19. Trashing the competitor
In the heat of the discussion you could trash your competitor.
- Never ever trash your competitor as it will likely trash you too. Your customer considers the company as your competitor due to a certain merit or impression created.

20. The questioner gets all the attention
During the meeting you mainly pay attention to the person asking the most questions. However it is likely this person is not the decision taker but merely an influencer He is probably a geek who can ask more questions than you ever can answer.
- Make sure you pay enough attention to the decision taker and involve him into the conversation in order to find out what he really wants. Geeks don’t buy.

21. Yes man
Promising to do everything or being capable of delivering everything the customer asks won’t fly long.
- You need to say no to your customer.
Limit your offering in order to stay credible and being capable to supply what has been promised within the agreed delay time.

22. Granting additional discounts
In order to win a customer, you give additional discounts.
- Once you have started this discount game, customers will continue to ask for more discounts for the next purchases.

23. The soon promises
Your production or shipments are delayed still you keep the customer believing the goods or services will be delivered soon.
- Be honest and set the exact new delivery dates you can keep instead of lying. Breaking the trust will be reflected in your future sales.

After the meeting

24. Dropping slow customers
If a customer or lead requires too long to decide, you forget about them.
- Slow moving customers can become big customers as these bigger companies have a longer decision process.

25. The invoice
After all the negotiations on delivery terms and pricing, a minor item gets added to the invoice. Why did you have all those meetings for?
- Make sure there are no surprises (even minor ones) on the invoice as the price has been agreed upon as you need to have new meetings with them.

26. Neglecting to contact afterward
Once the deal has been closed and the invoice paid, you forget about your customer as you don’t find it anymore challenging or you see no obvious additional sales.
- Acquiring customer cost many times more than keeping a customer.
A customer who has decided in your favor, you need to keep as they have taken the risk with you.

Any of these mistakes apply to you?

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Online social smalltalk

Inspired by Facebook and Twitter a number of on-demand solution vendors propose to introduce the concept of social websites into the daily operations of sales and marketing by merging a CRM with a social messaging in order to have more direct interaction or more social contact with customers and leads.
Somewhat similar to the social smalltalk at the beginning of a telephone call or a meeting in order to know more about the person sales people are dealing with.

The difference is the smalltalk is controlled related to the beginning of an event and controlled in time whereas the social messaging or chat is rather uncontrolled.

The white noise of social websites

The main problem with social website is the amount of white noise as social messaging is:
- Unstructured
- Without a subject line like email
- Capable of deriving quickly from the subject

All this white noise could derive people from their actual work as it could be more interesting.
Still the work needs to get done while the employees could be wasting their time filtering out the white noise not related to their actual work.
This filtering is already a problem with emails that are contained and classifiable items, whereas social messaging, chats or status reports are unstructured demanding even more time to file.

Customers and leads willing to participate in online social?

Even if your company enables and offers social features the question is if customers and leads will use it as they have to open a social conversation with you.
Are they ready for this?

Social website Return On Investment

Enterprises and corporations need productive operations from their employees that contribute directly or as directly as possible to their bottom line.
This will be hard to proof when employing social websites during work especially as it tends to be apparently unproductive work at first sight.

It could get even worse in case the marketing and sales teams are getting used to the social tool. They could get addicted and use it for all kinds of purposes not always related to marketing, selling or operations.
Work should be fun, but it should not be a waste of time.

It is questionable if the online social talk will be any profitable or improve profitability.
How about all the time wasted on messages that have little or no relation to the business whatsoever?
Calculating a Return On Investment on all the time that has been spend on a social corporate chat or status message board will be hard to do – if not impossible.

Online social websites allowing to interact sales and marketing with customers and leads are likely only to succeed if these social functions could be integrated with features that enhance productivity: for example workflow.

Will you take advantage of integrated social functions and features of your CRM?
Will your customers or leads use the online social conversation possibilities offered by your company?

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During any conversation with potential customers or customers you need to avoid to trash your competitor as this is likely to have a negative effect on your image and business too.

Often during meetings and telephone calls your competitors become one of the items discussed. Then you have to avoid to say anything really negative about them.

The worst thing you can do is presenting bogus reasons why their solutions are less good or your solutions are better than the ones of the competitor. People know more than they say they know and by using the Internet they have access to a vast amount of information and knowledge.

When you start trashing the competitor it is often perceived as being on a losing strike.
Any negative statement will reflect negatively on you too.

However you can state the main differences in function, features, market segment or even years of experience.
Try to steer the conversation away from your competitor to another subject like:
- Your references or successes
- Back to the problem that your customer needs to get solved

Your competitor has its’ merits and benefits too, else he wouldn’t be perceived as your competitor by the customer.

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Since years you have been fighting your main competitor on:
- Products
- Services
- Pricing
- After sales service
- Marketing events

It was a neck to neck race or even a cut-throat competition turning in advance for them in most cases.

However since a few months it seems you are winning easily deals that previously would have been won by the competitor.

The reason of change
You need to know why this sudden change:
- New management
- End-of-life products
- Pricing issues due to technology lagging behind
- Change of focus to other products or services
- Underpaid sales men
- Changed commission schemes
- Reorganization
- Acquisition ahead
- Change of technology

The main thing you need to find out is if the cause related to:
- Their internal affairs
- Management vision or focus changes
- Management anticipation for yet-to-come changes
- External causes: Market changes or Technology advancements

Maybe the company management of your competitor has already anticipated on an external fact or developments that will hit your market soon.
These type of changes could make your products or solutions almost obsolete overnight.
You have to find out if the change or the reason of change of your competitor could be a threat to your company or market soon.

Don’t cheer – Watch out instead
Don’t cheer and consider yourself as the Master of the Universe when overnight you start to win market share without making any significant changes.
Instead be careful and investigate if your main competitor all of a sudden decreases fighting for deals as their might be a bigger problem lurking around that just might change your market.

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In the software industry before releasing a product commercially to the market the solution is to be given to so-called beta customers.
The idea is that these companies or users will test the software thoroughly in real life situations experiencing real life events in the hope to debug the application as much as possible and to test have real life strain tests.

Reasons for becoming a Beta user
Why should people or companies sign-up for the Beta?
- They have the opportunity to influence the development of the solution
- They can have a solution at no cost

Beta vs future customers
- Are the suggestions made by the Beta users the same level of importance for your future real customers ?
- Could using Beta users drive and change your solution surpassing the original goals set as these Beta customers are far more technically advanced than the potential customers of the marker you are targeting ?
- Is the Beta customer representative for your future paying customers ?
- Will Beta customers eventually become paying customers ?

It is the myth of Beta customer.

Finding beta customers
In reality finding and having signing-up user as Beta is not that simple. It requires a complete marketing campaign to generate interest and having people to take the risk.
Getting the Beta customers to sign-up is not that easy.
Especially with business applications, as these companies need to take the risk:
- For the benefit of having a free solution
- Having to stumble on all the possible problems and errors
- Interrupting the normal activity due to these bugs
- Reporting the required feedback to the vendor
Whereas the main rule for companies is risk-avoidance.

The myth of the Beta company customer is even bigger.

Currently we have the Beta for popupbooster:
- Providing relevant content to your visitors in real-time.
- Dynamic web pages: less bounces
- Matching landing pages: keep their attention
- Decrease cart abandonment: more sales
- Exit stopper: win their interest or gain awareness
- Conditional conversation starter using popular web services
You can sign-up a Beta user here – If you want.

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Sales bonus plans for continuous growth
If sales bonus systems would be the perfect motivator, then market leading companies would only grow bigger as the sales bonus system would continue to fuel the sales(men).

However this seems not to be the case.
Could it be that sales bonus systems are not really stimulating and motivating?
Or stimulating the wrong or less effective sales actions and efforts? Not optimal ?
Even the most complex commission plans (that are hard to understand) can miss their initial beneficial goal for the company.

Salesmen will optimize their benefit
As with any mathematical system based on rules and conditions, salesmen will optimize for their own benefit.
Thus the smallest mistake in any of the assumptions made during the design and development of the bonus plan will generate less optimal sales efforts as the salesmen will optimize their bonus – not the benefit or bottom line of the company.
Their bonus is the most important.

Salesmen have no full control
On the other hand the salesman is not completely in control of the products or solutions he can propose to his potential buyers: R&D, development, quality control or production can be late in delivering the new product, version or the specific adapted solution for a market segment. Delayed delivery means fewer bonuses for the salesman.

The assumptions are wrong due to constant change
All bonus system are based upon assumptions and starting from a given fact or measurement.
However during the course of just one year the market changes, new products are introduced by the company and the competition. Hence the assumptions or starting point are no longer reflecting the reality of the market and the level of competition.

Sales bonus systems are locked-up systems that reward sales efforts in a changing market.
Commission systems will always fail as the market is constantly changing.
As sales people are driven by their commissions much effort is wasted to achieve the wrong goals.

As the salesmen of the bigger or leading companies have the wrong focus or goal, it creates opportunities for the competitors or smaller companies to step in or start-ups to have a window of opportunity. the larger the company the slower it will react to the ever changing market.

What if there would be a bonus system for R&D or development dept.?
– A bonus system for delivering products on time
– A bonus plan for delivering products with a minimal number of bugs
Or should salesmen have no commissions a constantly changing commission plan is not manageable?

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The main competitor:

The main competitor for:
- Coca Cola isn’t Pepsi but water, tea, nimbupani and Pepsi
- Vittel isn’t Evian, but tap water
- ABInbev (Anheuser-Busch InBev) isn’t Heineken, but wine
- Visa isn’t Mastercard or American Express but cash
- Newspapers isn’t Google but Twitter, Facebook or the web as a whole
- Microsoft isn’t Google or Open Source but pirated software and older Microsoft software
- Banks in BRIC and emerging countries it isn’t the other bank, but the un-banked people
- Many software solutions are pen and paper.

The unmarketed market

You nearest competitors aren’t always the other leading brands but often the replacement products that are in place since ever.

The biggest challenge is to get people move from a certain solution or service to an innovative or new solution. Once people are convinced of products or services then they have taken the big step.

Now as these newly acquired customers have gotten used to these services, the competition between brand competitors will start. They might shop around in case better deals or more features are offered.

Two competitors is a market – just like two is a crowd

In any market it is always better to compete with several competitors instead being sole in this market. In that case you need to ask yourself if there is a real market and a market demand.

Together with your competitors you will send more marketing messages to the potential buyers and you will create more interest than alone. The competition creates interest.
People like to compare between products or solutions.
Alone is alone – Two is a crowd.

You have to investigate into your direct competitors.
However you should look beyond them and try to obtain a picture of the entire market or the problem that you are solving

Who are you really competing with ?
What is the problem that you are solving ?
What competition are you really in ?

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At first it seems interesting and challenging:
To be a international traveling salesman voyaging from customer to customer visiting many cities in a continent or even the world.

It seems the journey opportunity of your life.
The chance of your life-time to see and meet many different people and cultures.
Seems like holiday forever all paid by the company.

However the reality is:
- You leave home in the early morning or even in the weekends
- You spend many hours waiting for the next connecting flight
- You need to commute from the airport to the customer with a taxi driver that you have to trust
- You need to verify every spending to make sure they don’t cheat upon you
- You need to collect and keep all the bills for your expenses report
- You take your lunch alone on the way to the customer
- You have meetings with people that seemingly have no time pressure, unlike yourself
- At the end of the day you have dinner again alone
- You prepare the meetings for the next day or reply your emails alone in your room
- In the hotel room you zap the TV-channels – mainly viewing the news as you can’t follow tv-shows.
- Maybe have brought some movies DVD’s to watch on your portable
- You might read a book, but these consume space and weigh a lot to carry
- When trying to go asleep you stare at the ceiling which is remarkably similar to all other white hotel ceilings
- In the middle of the night you wake up due to the jet-lag and stare at the white ceiling again.
- You have your breakfast again alone
- You pack your luggage, hoping to leave nothing behind (stress)
- You pay the hotel bill – hopefully at the agreed rate – else you need to discuss and argue
- Leave for meeting the next customer
- The stress you get from waiting lines in the airport, queuing in the taxi line, missing or canceled flights
- You go through many climate changes in a short amount of time (one week)
- In the air plane you are with many other people who can have diseases and viruses: more chance to become ill
- You get ill over the weekend at home
- The air miles earned are harder to spend than you ever could imagine. You hardly can use them: mainly for an upgrade to business class.

The life of the traveling salesman becomes boring rather soon as you start missing your family, your social contacts at home, your spare time activities and your free time.

In the end you come to the conclusion that:
- All hotel rooms have white ceilings
- The excitement of travel becomes the stress of travel
- You hardly meet up with local people
- You hardly see any foreign cultures as all major cities have become rather similar
- You may know many people that you don’t know really

You are locked up between travel, waiting in the airport lobby’s, commuting, meetings, lonely meals, your emails and the hotel rooms with the white ceilings.

The apparently challenging and exciting life of the traveling salesman is asocial and becomes boring too soon as all the hotel ceilings are white.

What was your expectation as a traveling salesman ?
How fast did you get cut off from your family, friends and social life – and got bored ?

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When your main competitor gets acquired you probably should be happy about it.
Instead of becoming a bigger threat your competitor is likely to become less threatening – at least for the first couple of years.

Executives – Management

If a company gets acquired the main objective of all CxO’s, VP’s, directors and managers of the company is not to increase or improve business, but to keep their job and position. Some might even hope getting a better position or more power.
For every CxO, VP, director and manager in the company there is at least one person having a similar function in the acquiring company. The battle of survival will start as soon as the acquisition negotiations start.
Internal politics and shifts of power will make executives and managers spending their time on internal matters.
Politics, perception, image and status become more important than achievements or business.

Wasting time and money

After an acquisition the two companies need to unify in products and solutions.
Time and money will be wasted in meetings, forecasts, budgets and reports on products or services, business plans and human resources.

Once the new visions and plans for the future have been agreed upon (if ever) and laid out, then this vision or message needs to be shared and explained to the employees of both companies.
Next the market with potential customers needs to be informed, educated or ‘brainwashed’ with marketing.

During all this wasting of time and money, the existing marketing spending of both companies will keep on being executed not having a unified or complete fitting message. The main change executed is the new logo or a mention of the acquiring company next to the brand name of the company.

Less business – more internal affairs

Thus instead of doing business, the newly emerged company will need to spend a lot of time and money on:
- Their internal affairs
- Their execs, managers and employees will waste efforts on politics
- Defining a plan for the future
- Laying off excess personnel
- Informing and motivating the employees
- Laying off (excess) employees
- Unifying the company cultures (or not)
- Building branding awareness the new company to the market and potential customers

In most cases these matters and issues will take a few years.

Window of opportunity

In case your main competitor gets acquired, you have a window of opportunity of a few years for expanding your market presence and market share, while your competitor is fighting internal struggles instead of doing business.

Your actions during this window of opportunity can be:
- Increase your marketing spending
- Hire salesmen from the company: promising them stability and income
- Sign-up their resellers or partners: stability, continuity of products and support
- Go after their customers: better service – better customer relation

After this window of opportunity time has elapsed, you need to be prepared for fierce competition.
However in some cases the new competitor starts to focus on another market segment: typically high-end as more operational or overhead costs need to be carried.
The best thing to happen is when the acquisition was a bridge to far: too complex, too different culture, too different products, too big, too different business, … your window of opportunity continues.

Is your competitor becoming an acquisition target?

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