This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

As founder of the Internet’s hottest startup, FoursquareFoursquare

, Dennis Crowley knows a thing or two about growing a small business.

Foursquare is a location-sharing mobile app that lets users check-in to venues, share that check-in with their friends and social media sites, and discover friends, tips, and popular places nearby. The startup launched one year ago, has attracted massive press coverage, and has grown to around 600,000 members.

This isn’t Crowley’s first success story as a technology entrepreneur, and given that he’s also worked for GoogleGoogle

, his perspective is colored with the sagacity of knowing that being nimble, lean, and fast can be just as effective — if not more so — as having bigger budgets and more manpower.

Over the years, Crowley’s learned several key lessons applicable to small businesses. Here are five that small business owners should take to heart.

1. “Twitter is your best friend”

Crowley speaks of TwitterTwitter

as a distribution channel for all types of communication, and describes it as the most immediate way to connect with customers.

“At Foursquare we use Twitter for a little bit of everything: Good news and bad news, press clippings, RTs [retweets] from other users and customer service inquires. We’ll tweet when new versions of our apps are ready for download and tweet when our database is experiencing hiccups. Keeping users in the know doesn’t take any more than a few seconds and your most loyal users will spread the word via RTs.”

The nature of Foursquare may position it to be more heavily followed than the typical small business, but the point here is that small business owners should use Twitter to compliment their day-to-day work experiences.

2. “Keep it light”

The Foursquare team lives by this mantra, so while they share everything from where they are to what they’re doing, they’re doing so in edible, consumer-sized bites, perfect for the sporadic attention spans of their audience.

On this front, they’ve opted to use TumblrTumblr

as a lightweight blogging platform. Crowley explains, “On our company Tumblr we’ll post the success stories our users send in, write recaps of what goes down at Foursquare HQ meetings, and post pics of what we’re having for lunch. Our staff is full of personality and we try to show that as much as we can. The story of 16 guys and girls crammed around four tables is much more interesting than the story of a faceless Internet startup.”

Crowley also advises to apply the “keep it light” philosophy to all customer-facing initiatives. He also suggests that small business owners don’t have to be “all business, all the time.”

3. “Guerilla customer service”

Foursquare is by no means perfect. As a young startup, the company faces the challenge of keeping their servers running as they attract record levels of activity, and doing so always in the public eye. It’s a daunting position to be in unless it’s approached head-on, and that’s what Crowley and his team do on a daily basis.

“We’ll use Twitter Search to search for things like “foursquare sucks,” “foursquare broken,” etc. to find people who are experiencing problems but who would probably never submit a support ticket. With a quick @reply we can often shed some light on the issue and do it in public.”

The same guerilla-style customer service is perfect for small businesses, especially with regard to negative press or unflattering blog posts and comments. Crowley says, “don’t feel shy, jump in and comment. Making yourself part of the conversation shows users you’re listening and care about the issues they have.”

4. “Small and scrappy marketing 4eva”

Not everything should be expensive, especially when it comes to marketing. Small businesses could easily be intimidated by the money that bigger companies can throw at large campaigns, but bigger isn’t always better.

Steal a page from Foursquare’s play book and get scrappy. Take the SXSW Interactive festival. Inside the convention center there were dozens of sponsors with huge tents and elaborate setups. Here’s what Foursquare did:

“Instead [of formulating a marketing plan] we did two things: #1. Took all the swag we had (pins, stickers, temporary tattoos) and put them in ziplock bags. Everytime we found a user that told us how much they loved Foursquare (and there was an army of them!) we gave them a bag of swag to hand out to their friends. #2. We picked up a rubber Foursquare ball and a box of chalk, drew a Foursquare court on the ground outside the convention center and played for four days straight (and yes, we are still sore).”

The game was a huge hit and attracted the attention of conference goers and big media alike. Crowley continues saying, “Thousands of people stopped by to see what was going on, say hi, play a game or two, and pick up some swag. It gave people the chance to meet our team in a super informal setting (playground game!) and hang out with us in an environment where phones and laptops were completely out of the way.”

5. “Show off your team”

The scrappiness didn’t stop with fun and games. Crowley also used the offline event as an opportunity to introduce users to team members, and vice versa, in a playful way.

Crowley states, “We designed our business cards as collectibles — collect all 6 and unlock a Foursquare badge. Once word of this got out, people were looking all over downtown Austin for employees just so they could introduce themselves and collect a badge. Every time we handed out a card, we got to meet one of our users. Actually encouraging people to reach out and introduce themselves to your team puts a name and a face on the products you’re building. It also helped us start a dialog with people who’d probably never introduce themselves.”

It’s a smart strategy that small businesses can emulate to create more personal connections with their customers.

For more business coverage, follow Mashable Business on Twitter or become a fan on FacebookFacebook

More business resources from Mashable:

- Why Your Brand Needs to Be on Facebook Now
- HOW TO: Make Your Small Business Geolocation-Ready
- Web Entrepreneurship: Does the City You Live in Matter?
- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy

Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto

, shulz

More on build your business for free using social media and doing everything light and cheap.

Today's paradigm is all about keeping costs as close to zero as possible, even if that means being a bit amateur.

The old paradigm where spending VC money to build a base fast and then monetize doesn't work anymore - venture capital went away of course.

And the other problem is achieving revenue isn't that easy, especially in the social space where users expect everything to be free.

Spending money you don't have is the fastest route to misery, as Mr. Micawber told us.

So today its all about doing it without spending money while all those competitors go bust in the race to the bottom.

The Real Results series is supported by Gist, an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and companies. See how it works here.

For startups, the amount of money you have to burn before you either need to break even or raise more capital is your runway. Extending the length of that runway is an art form that requires startup founders to learn how to squeeze maximum value out of every dollar they spend. Social media is one important way that startups are saving money while still delivering value.

Whether being used for customer service, community building, product marketing, or internally for staying organized and communicating as a team, one common thread can be found through the social media use of every startup we talked to: Cost savings.

“We have no outside investment. That means we’re bootstrapping right now,” said Jack Benoff, Director of Marketing at Zugara, which last year went back into “startup mode” to create their own augmented reality software. “Social media has given startups the ability to market themselves in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before. Sure, it takes a commitment (in time), but the hard costs are minimal. It allows us to focus our financial resources on production, research and development, and sales, which is huge for us.”

Here are four ways that startups are using social media for real results.

1. Customer Service

One of the most useful ways that startups are employing social media is for customer service. “On the customer service side, beamME gets tremendous value out of social media. These days, people expect to be able to post issues with companies directly to Twitter and obtain a real-time response. This instantaneous access to our customers is invaluable,” said Gabe Zichermann, CEO of beamME, a maker of mobile networking tools.

According to Zichermann, one of the most useful tools they’ve used to manage their customer-focused social media efforts is HootsuiteHootSuite

, which has cut the amount of time necessary to look after their TwitterTwitter

and FacebookFacebook

accounts tremendously by allowing them to be used at the same time. “HootSuite is particularly effective and cuts down our time/cost requirements,” said Zichermann, who still advises getting someone, at least part-time, to help manage the flow of social media use and plan things out as far into the future as possible. “[That] will reduce the repetitive workload and make campaigns run faster.”

Phonebooth.com, which sells PBX services to small businesses, has had a similar experience using Twitter for customer relations. Said Todd Barr, Vice President of Marketing at Phonebooth:

“Twitter has become the launching point for many of our internal processes. We have multiple examples of responding to an issue on Twitter within a couple of minutes and being on the phone with them within ten minutes. A tweet actually starts an internal process where we pull in the appropriate parties, get our information together, and reach out to the customer.

All of our other social media usages are extremely important, but Twitter is actually helping to create a culture change. We’re able to quickly assemble the correct folks to improve life for the customer. Internally, this begins to shed light on the power of social media and the team of folks who want to be involved is gradually expanding.”

Barr told us that Phonebooth has solved over 20 customer support issues using Twitter and has also created a “vibrant product feedback loop, with good user participation.”

2. Building Community

Barr and Phonebooth also utilize social media for building a community of customer evangelists. “With the launch of Phonebooth Free, we heavily relied on our social media efforts to rapidly build a community and are providing support, invites, encouragement and general engagement through Twitter. Social media also impacted our decision to launch Phonebooth Free at SXSW,” said Barr. “We believe that it is important to focus on where our customers are and not where our industry is. This is a very important distinction in our minds.”

Zugara also uses social media to create community and build awareness. Both the company’s Twitter account and Facebook page are used to actively engage people, Benoff told us. “We also use Twitter to attempt to organicly build relationships with our industry’s key influencers,” said Benoff, who reached out to MashableMashable

over Twitter for this post.

Building relationship and fostering community are commonly talked about uses for social media, but one of the most often overlooked aspects of social media is building relationship offline. It is important for startups to take online networking to the next level and go out and talk to customers in person at tweetups and conferences.

“There were at least ten social media people that were critical to our success at SXSW that we had met in person before or planned to meet in Austin. Many of those connections even helped funnel people to our booth and evangelize Phonebooth,” said Barr.

3. Product Marketing

Using social media for marketing is another cost-saving no-brainer for startups. Social media tools like YouTubeYouTube

, SlideShare, and Ustreamustream

have helped Zugara save money and increase new business opportunities, said Benoff. Much of Zugara’s social media use is centered around thought leadership and allowing journalists and potential customers to have immediate and easy access to information about their products and industry.

Social media marketing tactics also figured into the launch plans for Phonebooth Free. “Social media levels the playing field. It has never been easier to be more in touch with your customers or market than it is now,” said Phonebooth’s Barr, who used social media to lay the groundwork for the Phonebooth Free product. “Traditional marketing promotes messages to unwitting audiences –- our marketing seeks to draw in interested people who want to hear from us with compelling content, products and conversations.”

As a result, Phonebooth Free “blew away” launch goals, according to Barr, in large part because “our [social media] messages were amplified by a strong group of followers.”

However, startups using social media for marketing need to be in it for the long haul, cautioned Benoff. “If you are going to use social media to market yourself think of it as a commitment, or strategy, not a campaign. You can’t start a conversation with someone (in the real world) and then walk away. The same applies here.”

Every startup we talked to counseled on the value of being authentic. “Be honest. Be respectful. Be responsive. Be transparent. Sell infrequently,” said Benoff.

“Keep it real: Don’t try to be someone you’re not; don’t cover up issues/problems –- instead, address them head-on and transparently; follow-up with people (do what you say you are going to do),” was Barr’s advice.

“Concentrate on the value you’re providing for others through these tools,” said Dmitry Dragilev, Marketing Lead at ZURB. “The tools are just another communication medium. What value are you providing for them through SM? Try to imagine yourself in their shoes –- would you be interested? Imagine you’re standing with strangers in an airport -– what would you say to them to get their attention and get them excited about what you’re doing?”

4. Staying Organized

Finally, startups are also using social media with great success internally as a way for employees to stay organized and more connected with each other. At design consultancy ZURB, they’ve actually built two social media tools, Notable and Verify (not yet available), to help streamline their internal workflow. Though they now sell it as a “software as a service app,” their flagship product Notable, an application that organizes and manages design feedback, is actually used internally at Zurb.

“The homepage of Notable was actually designed with the help of Notable,” said Dragilev. “We took the capture of it, iterated through feedback with the team, then closed it down and implemented it.”

The team also uses Harvest (time tracking) and Highrise (CRM) to keep track of complex consulting hours and people at the more than 75 companies they have worked with. “Social media has provided another channel for teams to streamline their internal workflows,” according to Dragilev.

Online gadget community gdgtgdgt

uses a number of social media and web-based applications to create a virtual office environment for its employees and increase communication and collaboration. Company founder Peter Rojas explained how gdgt uses social media tools internally:

“We don’t have an office (at least not yet!), so being able to collaborate together online is essential. We use Campfire as our primary chat room, SkypeSkype

when we’re rolling out new features and need really close collaboration or have a conference call, Google DocsGoogle Docs

for documenting anything and everything, DropboxDropbox

for sharing files, and YammerYammer

as sort of a looser way to chat and share links.”

By relying on web-based tools and not needing to have an office, said Rojas, the company is able to save a significant amount of money and been able to better communicate with each other. “I think it’s made it easier to be decentralized and run very horizontal organizations with a minimum of micromanagement,” said Rojas.

One thing to remember when putting social media in place internally, according to Rojas, is to test applications and find the ones that work for your startup. “I’d recommend trying out different [apps] until you find one that’s the right fit for your organization. The tools need to fit with the team rather than the other way around,” he said.

How is your startup using social media, either internally or externally, for real results? Let us know in the comments.

Series supported by Gist

Gist helps you build stronger professional relationships by bringing together information from across the web for all your contacts and their companies giving you the right information at the right moment to get a first meeting, deliver an amazing pitch, or just find a better way to make a connection. Gist does all the work for you, assembling a dynamic collection of all your contacts and their companies from your email inbox, your social networks, or even your CRM system automatically building and updating their profiles as new content is published – by them or about them.

[img credit: jakrapong, Big City Swing]

Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto

, sironosov

Sponsored by Gist so hence the advertising :-) this is a useful guide to exploiting social media for free promotion/communication.

Of course this isn't just for startups - every business can, and should, use these tools to create an internet footprint and build a global brand, no matter how micro.

This is the way we've built our Front Office Box brand and how, in our Widespread Solutions business, we're helping others do the same.

Brown overstates aid for business

in Other Stuff

More Brown lies.

There isn’t a business in the country which doesn’t know about this, first hand

GORDON BROWN exaggerated figures on how many businesses the government has helped during the recession.

The prime minister has repeatedly claimed that 300,000 firms have taken advantage of an initiative allowing them to stagger tax payments.

He cited the figure during prime minister’s questions in the Commons and also during a Labour party conference.

However, the business minister Pat McFadden has revealed that the true number of companies receiving help with cash flow under all government schemes is actually 168,000.

Related Links

• Businesses denied loans to get right of appeal

• Buy local – and buy your local pub, says Labour

Yesterday, the Conservatives accused Brown of misleading parliament, saying he had a long record of making “bogus” claims.

The criticism comes less than a week after the prime minister was forced to make a humiliating climbdown over claims defence spending has risen in real terms every year. He repeatedly made the inaccurate claim in statements to the Chilcot inquiry into the war in Iraq, the armed forces and the Commons, before being forced to admit that it was untrue.

The latest claim relates to the Treasury’s “time to pay” scheme, which allows businesses to reschedule tax payments.

During PMQs this month Brown said: “Three hundred thousand small businesses have been given direct cash flow help.” He also cited the figure in a speech to the Welsh Labour conference last month, where he said the government had faced a choice over whether to “let the recession run its course … or help 300,000 businesses … get the cash flow they needed”.

It has now emerged that this figure is the number of agreements that have been struck between firms and HM Revenue & Customs — not the number of businesses that have benefited. Many firms have made repeat agreements.

The correct figure of around 160,000 who have benefited from “time to pay” has been used by the chancellor, Alistair Darling, and Stephen Timms, the Treasury minister.

Philip Hammond, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: “In the week when Gordon Brown was caught peddling false information about his funding of our troops on the front line, this is another example of his cynical manipulation of figures to cover up his mismanagement of the economy.”

The Tories claim Brown has a history of misleading the public over the government’s record on the recession.

Among the other examples they cite is his claim last summer that he had saved 500,000 jobs. Treasury documents later revealed that government measures were considered to have “supported” between 25,000 and 450,000 jobs.

“Therefore you could say ‘supported 450,000 jobs’ in the Budget speech,” they advised.

However, the Conservatives have also been accused of using misleading statistics.

Sir Michael Scholar, head of the UK Statistics Authority, last month reprimanded the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, for misrepresenting crime statistics by claiming violent crime was rising.

via timesonline.co.uk

Whitehall Wastes Our Money Again

in Other Stuff

Proof of our Government’s profligacy with our money just keeps coming, from the government, itself.

Brown and Blair between them pulled the biggest confidence trick ever on the British Public, and it seems a big chunk of the electorate still believes the con. Brown and the Labour party rank highest in the polls on the question “which party do you trust to look after you?”

Ken Clarke explained in terms a 5 year old could understand how when Labour took over in 1997 government spending equated to 38% of GDP. This year it will be the equivalent of 50%.

Back in the 80’s everybody with even a passing interest in economics knew the magic number for government spending was 40%. We’d seen the phenomenal growth of the economies in the USA and South Asia and been able to compare it with the decline and fall of socialism across Eastern Europe.

Everybody understood Governments feed themselves first, and when they’re allowed to keep growing the private sector gets progressively more hungry. It only stops when the international money men relegate the currency to junk status, and ultimately everybody starves.

Somehow the British public fell for the same con as their forebears did in the 60’s and now we have to go through another Thatcher Revolution.

When will we learn – ultimately every socialist (Labour) government runs out of money. They shouldn’t be allowed to run a sweet shop, let alone the British economy.

More than £1 billion of taxpayers’ money has been spent restructuring government departments and quangos in the past five years with no tangible benefit, the public spending watchdog says today.

The National Audit Office (NAO) reported that the Government had reorganised 91 departments since May 2005, at an annual cost of £200 million. The document also showed that 25 central government departments had been created since 1980 but 13 of these no longer existed.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, led by Lord Mandelson, has been reinvented five times since 1983, when it was named the Department for Industry.

In what will be seen as a clear warning to David Cameron, the NAO said that each restructuring cost an average of £15 million once staffing, pay, rebranding and new premises were taken into account.

Related Links

• Tory cuts will halt recovery, says Labour

• Mandelson ridicules Tory shift on spending

• Reorganising Whitehall is seldom worthwhile

Multimedia

• The NAO report in full

• GRAPHIC: what’s in a name?

Millions of pounds have been spent redesigning logos for buildings, stationery and websites, while thousands of human resource managers, IT consultants and finance officers have been drafted in to help to manage the changes. Each time a department merges or bits are hived off, redundancy costs soar.

After studying the 51 biggest reorganisations since the election in May 2005, officials estimated that the average annual cost would have been £200 million. Once the remaining restructures, largely involving quangos, were factored in, total costs would have been at least £1 billion

via timesonline.co.uk

New consumer research shows  over 50% of Facebook fans and Twitter followers say they are more likely to buy, recommend than before they were engaged

Boston, MA – In a recent study of social media usage it is clear that consumers who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers. The study of over 1500 consumers by market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower. And an impressive 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.  Considering Facebook’s over 400 million users, the opportunity is great for social media marketers.

“While social media is not the silver bullet that some pundits claim it to be, it is an extremely important and relatively low cost touch point that has a direct impact on sales and positive word of mouth,”  comments Josh Mendelsohn a vice president at Chadwick Martin Bailey. “Companies not actively engaging are missing a huge opportunity and are saying something to consumers – intentionally or unintentionally- about how willing they are to engage on consumers’ terms.”

 

The study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch. When asked the question “What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?” they said the following:

• “It’s EXPECTED that a company have some digital face – whether it’s on FB or Twitter I don’t know – but they need a strong electronic presence or you doubt their relevance in today’s marketplace.” Female 50-54
• “Either they are not interested in the demographic that frequents Facebook and Twitter or they are unaware of the opportunity to get more exposure in a more interactive method.” Male 35-39
• “It shows they are not really with it or in tune with the new ways to communicate with customers.” Female 18-24.
•  “If they’re not on Facebook or Twitter, then they aren’t in touch with the “electronic” people.”  Female 55-59

Recent statistics from Facebook show they have 400 million active users and more than 20 million people become fans each day.  Twitter users post over 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.

 

About the Study
Data was collected from 1,504 adults (aged 18 and over) via a nationally representative online survey questionnaire within the United States by Chadwick Martin Bailey between February 8, 2010 and February 9, 2010.  In addition iModerate Research Technologies conducted one-on-one discussions to more fully contextualize their social media behaviors. 

 

About Chadwick Martin Bailey
Chadwick Martin Bailey is a Honomichl Top 50 ranked custom market research and consulting firm working with many of the most successful companies and best known brands in the world to help them acquire, maintain, and grow their customer base.  Founded in 1984 by John Martin and Anne Bailey Berman, the company has corporate headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, serving clients in more than 30 countries around the globe. Chadwick Martin Bailey focuses on using leading-edge research techniques to collect and translate the data into simple, business decision-focused deliverables.  www.cmbinfo.com

 

About iModerate Research Technologies
iModerate Research Technologies listens, connects and digs deeper with consumers online to provide the research story organizations need to win in the marketplace. Years of research and development by veteran field experts, as well as analytical specialists, produced the concept, methodology and software that have allowed iModerate to help Fortune 500 companies, large and boutique research firms and prominent organizations strengthen their research results. Focused on providing customized qualitative solutions, iModerate is broadening online research capabilities by delivering essential qualitative insight. iModerate is based in Denver, Colorado. For more information please visit www.imoderate.com 

 

Media Contacts:
Kristen Garvey
kgarvey@cmbinfo.com
Phone: 617.986.7478

Adam Rossow
arossow@imoderate.com
Phone: 303.928.8406

Good sales guys are very different to bad sales guys, in all sorts of ways. Customers will have one view. Colleagues another and management yet another. In this post we’re talking about the sales manager’s perspective.

How does a new sales manager tell the difference between his good sales people and the other kind? This is the most important detail s/he needs to understand, and as fast as possible. Sales managers are only as good as the next number they’re going to make, and making numbers depends on the sales team knowing what it’s doing.

Experience tells me there’s a simple way to distinguish between the two – look at their prospect lists.

The good sales guy will always have a small number of prospects, all closing in the 30 and 60 day columns. The bad sales guy will have a large number of prospects but none of them closing soon. They’ll all be closing in the 90+ days column.

This a well recognised phenomenon amongst professional sales managers. They call it the “hockey stick”, because that’s the way it looks on the chart. Nothing for the next three months followed by more deals than they can shake a stick at.

Here’s where the manager needs to enforce his process – qualification, bid review, agreeing the buy/sell activity, negotiation and close.

Poor sales people are eternal optimists. They refuse to face the reality of their inability to control the relationship between them and the prospect. They just hope they’ll get lucky on one of the deals.

That sort of attitude is as useful to their new manager as a hole in the head so either the sales rep has to change, or get changed. Learn and implement the process, or find somebody else’s money to waste.

There’s a message, albeit subliminal, here for the entrepreneurs taking on the job of selling (for themselves) for the first time. That message is get a process and qualify continuously, or get ready to be disappointed and disillusioned.

Get real about prospects – why they’ll buy and how they’ll pay for it – and get ready to walk away and look for a better opportunity.

 

You Might Also Enjoy

• Sales Process Lesson from the Caddie
• How to Get the Sales Management Job
• Measuring Sales Performance in Relationship Management
• The Brutal Truth About Sales Management

March 16th, 2010 - Posted in Sales Manager  |  Add a Comment Sales Manager. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Sales process, in principle at least, doesn’t need to be complicated.  So what’s all the fuss about if its simple?  The fuss is about improving results.  Our favourite golf caddie tells a story which illustrates the point in a sales context.

A sales process is just a sequence of actions, a plan of how we’ll do anything.  Seeing a list of actions as a process helps us understand the context of each.  We can also measure each action in terms of inputs, resources and outputs to understand which bits don’t work as well as they should.  Once we know which bits don’t work we can find ways of improving what we do. As the performance of each action improves so does the overall result.

In our golf story the caddie is hired by a big shot banker from Denver for 4 days.  It’s a good gig with tee times around mid morning every day, and a regular bag.  They’re playing at Royal Dornoch where the 2nd is a famous par 3, called simply Ord.  The green is a 12ft high mound with the top somewhat flattened, sloping from back to front.  Tight lies on all sides make missing the green an unattractive prospect.  The front is guarded by two of the scariest bunkers.  These genuine hazards require a vertical lift of 8ft if the next stroke is to be a putt.

Our sales process starts with the two standing on the tee and the golfer asking for a yardage.  The caddie explains distance to front, flag and back, adding it’ll need 155 yards in the air to clear the bunkers.  The golfer asks for his 6 iron, pulls the shot a touch and finishes in the bunker front left.  Writing a 7 on the card the golfer groans as he walks to the next.

To cut a long story short on each of the next three days the pair go through exactly the same sequence with exactly the same result.  The golfer just won’t accept he doesn’t hit the 6 iron 155 in the air, despite the proof.

If he’d understood process improvement on the 3rd day he’d have taken a 5 iron, hopefully with better result.  He’d have figured what wasn’t working quite right and fixed it.

Neither did the caddie understand the concept, otherwise he’d have found a way to improve his sales process.  Recognising the golfer wouldn’t admit to lack of distance, the caddie could have suggested the shot’s a touch uphill, or into a breeze, or the humidity stopped the ball flying so far.  He’d have added more information to inform the club selection.

He’d have improved his sales process and gotten the golfer a better result without hurting his ego.  Perhaps more importantly happier golfers generally tip more generously.

 

You Might Also Enjoy

• Knowing the Good Sales Guys from the Bad
• How to Get the Sales Management Job
• Measuring Sales Performance in Relationship Management
• The Brutal Truth About Sales Management

March 14th, 2010 - Posted in Sales Manager  |  Add a Comment Sales Manager. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Interviewing for the sales manager role? It’s time to release your secret weapon – your own definition of process, roles and responsibilities. And you can get that here.

First lets understand the backdrop. The people hiring sales managers are rarely experienced in the job themselves. They might be C level executives, or general managers. Quite often they’ll be accountants of one type or another.

When interviewing for a sales manager they’re looking for specialist expertise – not sales skills but the ability to interface between the sales guys and the rest of the business. They won’t understand the job, and will know that. But they will understand a model comprising process, roles and responsibilities.

Give them your vision of that model and the rest of the interview will be checking for reasons not to offer you the sales manager job. You’ll have closed the deal already.

That’s dealt with one side of coin, but what about the other interviewees?

The fact is sales managers are very rarely trained. They might be familiar with the job in another business, maybe more. But it’s highly unlikely they’ll have a generic understanding which can be adapted to suit different products or business models.

With proper sales manager training under your belt you’ll be unique, or if unlucky, only close to unique. Either way you’re streets in front of the competition.

Ok so that’s all very well, but where do you get that training, if nobody does it?

This blog is an excellent place to start.

Our Sales Management Best Practice is one of the most popular articles.

We have a lot more sales manager specific articles in our Sales Manager category.

And our category Sales Qualification has more general comment on when to hold em and when to fold em.

There’s a lot of reading here – too much for one visit so you might prefer to download some of our free White Papers. That way you’ll have a library of comment to carry around.

Good luck with the interviewing. When you get the job come back and see us for a Front Office Box – it’s designed to help make our ideas work in ways you’ve interpreted them.

You Might Also Enjoy

• Measuring Sales Performance in Relationship Management
• The Brutal Truth About Sales Management
• The Worst Kind of Manager
• Why Sales Managers Fail

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March 10th, 2010 - Posted in Sales Manager  |  Add a Comment Sales Manager. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Sales qualification can be achieved quickly, and cheaply, using on-line forms.   In our case that means Webrequest, our “swiss army knife” approach to collecting information.

Here’s a real life example of how Paul uses it to qualify his sales opportunities, increase his win rate and reduce his costs of sale.

Paul’s a specialist.  There’s very little about liability insurance that he doesn’t know after 40 years in the business.  There’s also not much he doesn’t know about wasting money chasing deals he isn’t going to get.  Insurance, like investment planning, house remodeling or party arranging, is one of those purchases which get influenced by existing relationships.  Quite often Paul would come up with an eye watering proposal only to discover the prospect wouldn’t buy, because he couldn’t disappoint the brother in law.

In his case a new prospect can involve a plane ride and overnight stay.  Somebody from Oregon calls and asks for a quote. Paul lives on the East Coast.  That’s the best part of $1,000 in cost to make the sales call.

Paul figured he needed an inexpensive method of checking how likely it was he’d  get a fair chance at the business.  That would save him a lot in both time and money.

We persuaded him to use Webrequest.  It’s integrated with our Address Book and easy to use. He could choose his type of questions – open or multiple choice and write his own words.  Webrequest would send an email with a link to the on-line form to the prospect.  The response shows up in the Webrequest reports and also on that individual’s people page.

Here’s the type of questions he asks:

1. How big is your revenue
2. Which industries do you sell to
3. When does your policy renew
4. How much is your renewal quote
5. Who makes the decision to change provider
6. How does that decision get made
7. Who is your existing provider
8. How long have you sourced insurance from that provider

Perversely this is a comfortable method of sales qualification.  It’s always easiest to ask the hard questions right at the start of the sales process, and somehow filling in a form is so much more comfortable for the prospect than a face to face interrogation.

Fast, cheap and painless.  If only sales qualification could always be this easy.

How do you do your sales qualification?  Could Webrequest help you like it does Paul?

Here’s a short video showing how it works for both the customer and the sales rep.

Demonstration

You Might Also Enjoy

• Questions to Qualify the Sale
• The Worst Problem When Selling
• Sales Qualification in Pipeline Management
• Qualifying Sales By Coaching

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