At the end of the day the professional sales guy has only one friend - the one in the mirror. Or more precisely, the person behind the guy in the mirror. The integrity which differentiates the professional from the snake oil.

Selling can be a hard life.

In fact it usually is. We work for people who can't do it, but think they have the right to tell us how to. Customers insist on trying to prove they're smarter, when they know less. Competitors seem to be only interested in destroying our price. Ultimately the bean counters resent paying us the commission.

Hero or Zero

We're always one or the other. Only as good as the next deal, if we won the last. Only as good as the last, if we didn't. Nobody believes in us, apart from us that is.

Snake Oil

Somewhere along the line sales guys picked up a the faint whiff of duplicity. Nobody really trusts us - we would say that, we're selling something. Whatever we say can't really be true.

Our Friend in the Mirror

When the cards have been dealt, the hand played and the winnings collected (whoever wins) we're left with nothing but our integrity. And that's really important. It keeps us going when things get tough. It gives us confidence when we need to push the customer. It confirms we're right when we walk away. In the good old days before the Internet, and CRM, and business process re-engineering people would say the sales guy was as good as his/her Rolodex - that index card system we all used. But they didn't mean the cards, or even the contacts. They meant how those contacts felt about the sales guy. By Rolodex they meant Integrity.

The sales guy was only as good as his/her integrity. Only as good as the trust customers were prepared to invest in the relationship.

Back then successful sales people understood selling is about people. They spent their time helping prospects buy and they never misled a customer.

Sometimes it feels as the world turned and integrity got lost somewhere. Professionals like us should fight like hell to bring it back.

original post at frontofficebox.com

Companies no longer train their sales people. Every business wants to hire hot shot, proven guys who can hit the road running. That's the only way to run a cost effective sales function, or at least thats the way it seems. They treat sales reps like disposables - throw them in the deep end and see who swims. Somehow find the numbers, or find another job.

If you're reading this article its likely you are in the sales business somehow, or would like to be. Maybe you're an entrepreneur starting your own business and taking on the challenges of sales for the first time. Did you get some training? Will you get some sales training? Or will you just get stuck in and hope it works out OK? Where will you find the lessons you need? How will you know its any good?

Are you prepared to invest time, money and ego - finding out how to do the job properly? Or will you buy a book hoping for an overnight transformation? Please don't do that. It never works.

Maybe we can help?

We don't do sales training, and we certainly don't sell books full of self improvement nonsense. What we do is offer straightforward advice in simple, logical terms, to help people understand the critical elements of successful selling. And of course we offer them some great tools to help do the job better. Simply doing our best to help make up for the loss of the art of sales training. Hope you find some interesting insight here, to help you develop your own style.

You might be interested in some of the posts in these categories:

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Sales Management Principles

The Art of Qualifying Sales Opportunities

Handling Price

Original post at frontofficebox.com

What's the difference between a contract of employment, a contract to supply services on demand and a contract for supply?

This is a particularly relevant question for us because we're embroiled in such an argument ourselves right now. In another business we have a contract for supply but the other party seems to think it's a contract for services on demand.

Contracts for Employment are governed by a different law, in the UK at least and almost certainly in Europe. In the USA they're different, but similar. The employer has rights and so does the employee, and those rights pretty much govern the terms of any termination. The employer is required to provide the employee with a statement of terms and those terms have to comply with regulations.

Contracts for services on demand are different. Neither party has particular rights when it comes to termination, apart from the usual confidentiality type issues. Each can pretty much go his own way at the drop of a hat. Contractors get paid more than employees, have less security and more control. An unreasonable boss soon gets told the facts of life. There's less co-operation and more confrontation in these contracts.

A contract for supply is entirely different. The only way out for either party is breach of the contract and the law governing cases goes back centuries. Remedies for breach of contract only come in two guises - damages for breach and specific performance, another way of saying we don't give a crap if you don't like it - do it.

If you're getting into a contract you really should know the difference between these types because that could stop you making a complete fool of yourself, like the jerk off trying to argue with us. It could also make you an awesomely powerful adversary to anybody who doesn't . Good luck to anybody starting their own business. Consider a primer class in laws of contract. It'll pay dividends for the rest of your business life.

Original post at frontofficebox.com

If you find people forgetting to do things, or struggle to keep everybody in the loop with email and shared calendars, our Planning and Task Management could be just what you need.

If those project management systems are more complicated and expensive than you need, but you still want to be able to break down plans into milestones and actions, and assign them to team members, our simple but powerful Plan, Act, Review workflow might be just what you need.

If you want to be able to see the entire business timeline on one page, have it linked to individual customer and plan records, and drive the entire process with incoming email, our integrated database offers you management software with best practice built in.

If you want to do all this across locations, and timezones, 24X7 with software you can just use and get on with the day job register for a Front Office Box account today - because it really is for you.

Spend a couple of minutes seeing how simple and yet powerful business software can be when it's built by experts who want to use it

Original post at frontofficebox.com

Are you looking for FP7 Partners? We are, and have a lot to offer the right research groups.

SME

We’re a boutique IPR Exploitation consultancy, with less than 10 people (for the moment). Businesses like ours stay focused on the end game, adapt to changing circumstances when necessary and respond to others requirements. That’s why the EU is keen to involve SMEs in projects. Guys like us are more likely to develop commercial propositions than bigger businesses, and make a success of them. We’re assured the pace of FP7 Calls and Awards is accelerating, and more emphasis will be placed on the involvement of SMEs. – That’s us!

EU Location

We’re based near Inverness- capital of the Scottish Highlands and emerging hotspot for LifeSciences research.

The weather is a lot better than you might think, the beaches are golden and empty, the hills offer perfect peace and solitude, and the links host some of the best golf in the world.

Experience

Our involvement with FP7 dates back to October 2006 when we were invited to lead an application for the Avert-IT consortium. Ours was one of the first projects funded under the programme and we’ve worked with the EU as the processes and procedures matured. We’re just about to present our second annual review. We’re quoted as an example of best practiceand our consortium partners want to continue working with us in new projects. – We have the Tee Shirt!

Skills

We went into the project with software and business development skills mostly acquired in the engineering industries. During the project we’ve developed other capabilities:

• Collaboration with Scientific and EU institutions.
• Change leadership in clinical research.
• Bayesian Artificial Neural Network design, development and discovery.
• Web 2.0 techniques and technologies.
• Innovative approaches to exploitation.

Interests

In every respect FP7 is a huge opportunity for SMEs, but especially in terms of healthcare and medical devices. Both segments are protected by formidable barriers to entry but, with a focus on clinical leadership and pre-funded research, entry costs are dramatically reduced by FP7. The programme enables wider ranges of innovation and an acceleration in the pace at which it can be implemented. So we’re particularly interested in eHealth.

But we’re also open to other fields and topics – anywhere our data warehousing and analysis skills can add value.

Let’s talk about ways we might work together. Contact Steve Reeves at steve.reeves@avantrasara.com.

avantrasara.com

We’re bewildered by Twitter and the stories of marketing success claimed by some of those gurus. Dell might be able to shift millions of spare inventory over a weekend but how do small guys like us do to get heard above the noise. We just don’t have the brand. Happily we’ve found a service – Indux – which helps us do precisely that (we’re now an affiliate). We introduced it in Indux Twitter Optimisation.

From Synergy to Spam

Twitter used to be a fun place for us to hang out – meeting people, having a bit of a laugh and finding people to do business with. That was over a year ago. Since then the whole thing has gotten too big, too busy and too dangerous. Now its more like email with a vast %age of spam – this morning’s version offering the “grow” parts of my anatomy and “make me last longer”. Unfortunately there’s no “report as spam” button like the oneGmail employs to such good effect.

From Opportunity to Issue

Twitter has become one of those “can’t live with it and can’t live without it” conundrums. The problem is a combination of a) the number of 3rd party tools available and b) the number of crooks wanting to take over account and spam everybody – ruining our reputation in the process. With it all made so much more complicated by a gazzillion internet marketers filling the space normal businesses would like to occupy, for a while at least.

From Reservation to Revelation

Indux has found the answer. It uses keywords to identify Twitter profiles with interests like ours and puts us together. It automates our friend/follower processes whilst making sure we stay within Twitter’s rules. And it saves us huge slabs of time we can spend on content.

But does it work?

Early results are very encouraging. We’ve been using Indux for our @frontofficebox business for the last few weeks and here’s the results so far.

• Total followers UP almost 100%
• Total traffic to our site UP 17%
• Total traffic via Twitter UP 455%
• Total FOB registrations UP 50%

Don’t know about you, but this impresses the hell out of me.

Where else can you get affordable, professional help to build your brand on Twitter?

For a simple explanation of the power of check lists with review process take a few minutes to read Mathew E May’s How To Get Things Right

We’ve included some interesting excerpts (italics) in the article below to set the scene, because we agree with every word. Not surprising since we built the concept into Front Office Box, with Plans and Actions displayed as checklists – for each individual, for each opportunity, for each customer and in a timeline for our entire business.

Just about the only thing we would add to Mathew’s suggestions is get some good software to help you create, share and review these checklists. While you’re here check out the video at the bottom of the page, and follow the link in the sidebar to create your own Front Office Box.

Check List Best Practice

“As a master kaizen instructor, I’ve come to know and understand just how impactful a simple checklist can be, irrespective of your work or business. The kaizen process is based on three steps: create a standard, follow it, and look for a better way. Repeat endlessly. Trying to improve and innovate without a standard as reference is like a journey with no starting point. And more often than not, the standard created is indeed a simple checklist.”
“Now, there are three basic steps required to deploy a checklist:

1. Establish a Best Practice. Make sure it’s the best-known method. Get input and feedback from those doing the work. Get agreement on it.

What happens if the standard isn’t followed? Investigate! Find out why. Is there a better method? Was training adequate? Are there special circumstances? Redesign it if you need to. And keep searching for a better way.”

How We Do It With Software

 

Have You Got Your Front Office Box? Register for a Personal Pipeline Management account at the top of the page. It’s Free!

First published at Front Office Box

I’m really great at selling, just not very good when it comes to talking about price or asking for the order.

This little gem came from somebody whose name’s long forgotten. It resonated with me, not because she didn’t like closing – lots of people feel like that – but because that particular forum was full of her comments telling other people how to sell.

Obviously she’d been reading the wrong books, believing the wrong ideas and slamming open doors firmly shut.

It appears she’s not unique. A recent visit to LinkedIn drew me to a forum discussion with a title something like “What is the Secret to Successful Selling?”. If you spend much time over there you’ll know most discussions receive between 5 and 15 comments. This one had 88.

Checking the responses was an illuminating experience. Every comment was different. And every comment related to some daft motivational concept the contributor had read in a book somewhere. The whole conversation suggested there were 88 different special secrets, and 88 experts who obviously made so much money selling they could waste time in that particular snake pit.

“Why” you could rightly ask “are these guys not out there making even more money, instead of hiding on LinkedIn?” Excellent question – let me know when you’ve figured the answer.

Meantime we publish stuff in this blog which doesn’t come from books. The insight comes from experience of trying to do the job properly. We don’t talk about that motivational garbage – just straight forward common sense. We don’t charge for the advice and we don’t expect slavish commitment to our ideas. We simply want to help people get a clearer picture of what’s going on in the sales process – knowing when to “hold em” and when to “fold em”.

The best advice we can ever give anybody is “sell like you’d like to be sold to”. After all, we’re all somebody else’s prospect most of the time. We know what being a buyer is like. It’s not a big leap to deciding how a seller should act.

There’s a bunch of stuff in this blog that relates to integrity – the sales guy’s biggest asset – and doing the job properly. You might find some interesting ideas about

• the worst mistakes sellers can make
• why my customers are smarter than me
• selling is about people
• why we should never mislead customers

plus a whole lot more common sense explanation of sales strategies and tactics.

And on top of this great insight about the real world we offer you some fantastic software as well – all of it for free.

Selling does seem a crappy job a lot of the time, but it’s a lot better than most of the jobs people have to do. Our best stand by thought when things go wrong (as they always do) is we’re the professionals around here.

Best of luck with that next deal.

Have You Got Your Front Office Box? Register for a Personal Pipeline Management account at the top of the page. It’s Free!