Staying Alive

The struggles of a business trying to survive.

Editor’s note: Paul Downs is writing this week about his decision to hire a sales consultant. The series started with this post.

The sales training began with evaluations. My three sales staffers (Don, Nathan, and Mary) and I were given a psychological profile test (DiSC profile) and a test to gauge our attitudes toward selling. I was given an additional set of questions designed to reveal my capabilities as the sales manager. Mr. Waks also spent a morning with us listening in as we talked to clients on the phone.

A couple of weeks after the evaluations, I received a thick report with the results of all of the tests, both for me and for my staff. The good news is that we all had potential to be sales professionals, although some work would be involved. The bad news was that I scored a zero, literally, as a sales manager.

I wasn’t performing any of the practices that defined the role. No regular meetings. No ongoing training for the salesmen. No consequences for failure to meet goals. No data gathering, other than the gross sales amounts. I had been convinced that I had done a decent job in training Don and Nate to sell, but confronted with my many weaknesses, I realized that I had dropped the ball.

Soon after the evaluations came in, we started classes. These were group sessions, and most of the attendees came from small companies like mine. I was one of the few boss-level attendees. Most of the people were front-line staff, employees who needed to interact with customers and keep the money flowing in but who had never had any education in how to sell. We were being taught the Sandler Method.

Sandler is not the only sales strategy out there, and I have no opinion whether it is the best one or not. It was what Mr. Waks taught, and I figured that any structured training would be useful. As it turned out, Sandler focuses on understanding whether the person we are talking to has power and how to get to the decision maker. It also teaches techniques of influencing interactions with potential customers, to maximize our chance of closing a deal. This set of ideas gave me a new way to think about what we were doing. And I realized that we had been making some classic mistakes.

In particular, we were giving away our design and engineering expertise and revealing our pricing way too early in the process. It was an easy task for a potential buyer to hand our proposals to our competitors and ask them to beat our price. Also, we were making no attempt to figure out where our customer contacts sat in their company’s hierarchy. We had no idea whether the person we were speaking with could make a decision, and we made no attempt to work our way up the power structure so that we could make our case to the people who would actually choose a vendor. We didn’t have good systems for keeping track of inquiries, and we weren’t keeping good records of what the sales staff was doing all day.

We also started coaching sessions with Mr. Waks, both one-on-one with me and with my staff. When I had told Don and Nate, my salesmen, that we would be undergoing sales training, they were a little worried about the amount of time it would require, but they could see as well as I that we needed to do something. When we started the actual training, they were even more uneasy. Both had started their careers at a workbench, and they thought of themselves as craftsmen who happened to be doing a sales job. Now they were being asked to consider themselves salesmen first, with some specialized product knowledge.

They were both worried about the snake-oil aspect of selling, whether they would be required to do unseemly things to close deals. It took a great deal of discussion for us to agree on a better way to think about selling — that customers called us because they wanted what we make, that nobody is ever tricked into or forced into buying anything from us, and that selling to support the company and their families is a perfectly honorable way to make a living. I had long since come to believe this, even before receiving the training, because I could always see the connection between a sale, a healthy company, and a satisfied customer. Without sales, the company can’t exist. There would be no work to do, and no money to pay anyone.

By the middle of last July, we started to deploy the new techniques, and we started to close deals again. We also introduced a technical modification to our sales process. Instead of sending out pdf documents to clients, we started presenting our ideas in Web chat sessions, using screen-sharing software to show potential buyers a 3-D interactive model of our proposed design. This is very cool to see, but it leaves the client without a set of images to hand to our competitors. The technical documentation is a goody we now reserve for clients who have placed an order and given us a deposit.

I also spent much of the summer writing code to add a customer-relations management component to our database program, which we use to run the rest of the business. I considered buying an outside package, like SalesForce or Act! but decided against it — too expensive, and all of my staff are already in the database all day. I am not a FileMaker star, but I was able to add the features we needed without much trouble. I also wrote a number of Google Docs spreadsheets to tabulate data on incoming calls and the daily activities of the salesmen.

Our sales started to recover in July, and in August we finally hit our target, closing deals worth $200,607. Even better, we kept up the pace for the rest of the year and, somewhat to my surprise, we have continued to do so through the present day. We have exceeded my $600,000 sales goal in every quarter since beginning our sales training.

Friday: Should I Renew the Consultant’s Contract?

Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside Philadelphia.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/the-brutal-truth-my-score-as-a-sales-manager/?partner=rss&emc=rss