Getting things done requires process. Smaller businesses typically do whatever it takes to win and satisfy customers. Larger businesses understand the importance of process, but business process isn’t a fashionable subject. Unfortunately we’re all searching for the silver bullet that will turn our ideas into an instant success.

The bad news is that silver bullet doesn’t exist, at least outside of the murky world of Internet Marketing.

Getting things done consistently, without getting in the way of business as usual, takes management and management isn’t about lucky silver bullets. It’s about setting objectives, planning how to achieve them, executing the plan and regularly reviewing progress then changing the plan. It’s a process.

For more than fifty years management consultants have tried to explain to us the secret of success – getting things done – lies in process – a measurable, repeatable, standard way of doing things. You’ll have heard the expression “if it can be measured it can be improved”. That comes from the concept of process which in turn comes from Henri Fayol.

From the early days of the 20th century to the time management books of the last, theorists have described the virtuous cycle of planning, execution, review of the results and revision of the plan.

“Failing to Plan, is planning to fail” explained Alan Lakein in his bestseller -  How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life.  He explained “You cannot do a goal. Long-term planning and goal-setting must therefore be complemented by short-term planning. This kind of planning requires specifying activities. You can do an activity. Activities are steps along the way to a goal.”

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” defined Albert Einstein.

“To manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to coordinate, and to control.” wrote Henri Fayol, the father of management philosophy.

To most of us this sounds obvious, but we don’t follow the thinking as well as we could.  Our systems just aren’t built that way.

Front Office Box is different.  It has Plan>Act>Review “built in”.

The workflow is a constant process of deciding what we want to do, scheduling the activities, and reviewing the results.

We don’t need to worry about management best practice, because the software looks after it for us.  We can get on with the day job, delivering for customers.

Front Office Box tells us when things aren’t going the way we want.

Small business owners like us have more than enough challenges to get over every day. The last thing we need is problems with our information systems and software, but it’s what we get. Nobody builds the type of software we need – software that stays out of our way while we get on with the day job.

That’s why we built Front Office Box. It’s not ERP. or CRM, or Project Management or any of the other big company concepts the software industry designs for. It’s best practice, in a box We’ve figured the simplest way to combine sales pipeline management, CRM and project management in an information management solution designed specifically to manage small business information and operations.

Instead of sticky notes, email and spreadsheets, small business owners and managers can now use a single, sharable business database to record customer history, sales and operations information. The solopreneur can save time and avoid stress by knowing exactly where to find the details she needs whenever she needs it. Team leaders can plan, assign and schedule tasks amongst their crew, whilst the whole group stays on the same page when it comes to customers, plans and schedules. Meanwhile we take care of all the technology stuff like data backups, security, operating system and all the other stuff that gets in the entrepreneurs way.

Best of all our software is capable without being complex. Unusually for small business software it lets users do most things in the ways they want. It’s flexible without gaps between the stools. At the same time it’s capable – multi user, 24X7 access anywhere in the world, plans, schedules, actions, milestones, correspondence, documents. Small businesses can start their Front Office Box with simple straightforward organisation of customer records and plans. As their business develops the software just naturally grows with it.

Front Office Box is different because the way it works was designed by people who use it everyday to manage their own businesses, not by programmers to make their lives easier, or by marketing people so they could check feature boxes.

Take our Tour to see what we mean by simple, flexible, capable.

“Consultants need something different for managing their sales pipeline- not typical CRM, not typical Project Management, not isolated lists, not Email and Document folders – but a single sharable database of companies, people, plans, tasks, correspondence and documents.“

Consultants and smaller services businesses are different  – they need to be flexible in the way they work, and focused on their competitive advantage.

They create value add for clients and, since every client is different, every project is different.  Flexibility to fit processes to client projects is fundamental to winning new business and delivering customer service.

The delivery of services is often an extension of the sales process. There are no functional silos for sales and delivery in consulting.  Everybody does some of everything.

Managing client expectations and perceptions is the major challenge.  Making sure the entire business stays “on message” is vital for successful projects.  That takes Relationship Management, with everybody knowing what the plan is, how it’s being met, and the conversations about it.

Achieving the shared, seamless and flexible, management of plans, integrated with client history records, needed by consultants can be hard.  Typical information systems are built for larger businesses, working in departments and mostly doing the same thing every time.

Standard software offered for Customer Relationship Management – CRM – and Project Management just doesn’t work the way smaller services businesses do.  It’s too rigid and complex, with features that never get used, and limited adaptability,  to meet different needs.

Software designed to do somebody else’s job just gets in the way.  Working around the rigidity while deciding between the features takes time and energy away from the main purpose – providing service to clients.

As a result these, businesses resort to a combination of spreadsheets and Stickie notes for planning and communication, with correspondence and documents stored somewhere else.

This approach has all the flexibility needed, but it’s hardly seamless, and can’t easily be shared.  There’s a significant overhead in keeping everything in synch, and playing catch up when it isn’t.  Ultimately the law of diminishing returns comes into play, and gets in the way.

At this point they need something different – not typical CRM, not typical Project Management, not isolated lists, not Email and Document folders – but a single sharable database of companies, people, plans, tasks, correspondence and documents.

That’s why we built Front Office Box.

But we didn’t stop at the database.  We chose to extend the principles of business software with design- isolating the technology, removing the complexity and adding best practice.

Because of this Front Office Box looks, feels and works differently to other business software.  It’s meant to.  It adds value to users partly because it does all the normal things, but especially because of what it doesn’t do.

It doesn’t get in their way, stopping them doing what they want; and it doesn’t soak up their time with un-neccessary complexity.

Sales qualification does a lot more than check whether the prospect has a budget. Qualifying sales correctly can have a major impact on the price the customer pays and therefore overall profitability. Business owners wanting to get more profit from their business should focus on sales qualification.

The fastest, and simplest route to improving bottom line performance is increasing top line margins. Customers will always pay more! It’s our job to make sure they pay as much as they’re willing, not take the order for as little as we are willing.

The very best sales people are the ones who get top dollar for whatever they sell, but even these guys leave money on the table.  It’s just too risky pushing beyond the price we’re prepared to accept.

However there are techniques we can use to get closer to the price the prospect is prepared to pay.
These are the ones used by true professionals and, funnily enough, they help to make sure we win the deal.  Pushing for the best price needn’t put the deal at risk.

Using sales qualification properly does a number of things for the sales guy.  It:

• Helps him understand why the buyer is interested in a proposal.
• Tells him how much the solution is worth to the buyer.
• Reveals whether there’s competition, and its’ price.
• Confirms if there’s a budget, or capability to pay.
• Explains why the buyer hasn’t already cut a deal with somebody else.

Given all of this information, even the least experienced seller can figure where the sweet spot is – in terms of benefit, quality, risk management and price.

If you can know more about my aspirations, and how to achieve them, than I do, you’ll win the business and get a better price.

You might like to find out more about sales qualification, and how to do it? Check out these short articles:

Sales Qualification Checklist

The Pro’s Secret

Understand the Process

Understand the Competition

Understand the Threats

Five Questions About Money

Recruit a Coach

You Might Also Enjoy

• Qualifying Sales Deals With On-Line Forms
• Questions to Qualify the Sale
• The Worst Problem When Selling
• Sales Qualification in Pipeline Management
• Qualifying Sales By Coaching

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May 18th, 2009 - Posted in sales qualification  |  Edit | Add a Comment sales qualification. 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. Edit this entry. -->

Qualify sales opportunities with a checklist to make sure you have all the bases covered. Accurate sales qualification helps us make sure we only invest our time in deals we want to win. Thorough sales qualification will show us which elements of the deal we need to work on. Continuous qualification helps us stay on top of the deal when the competition tries to change the rules of the game.

Please enjoy this page and then goto the updated version Sales Qualification Checklist and Probability Calculator

Are you going to get that sale?

Maybe, and maybe not. The best way to evaluate your chances, and improve them, is checking for some critical elements. The more of these you can honestly say “yes” to, the more likely you are to win the deal.

If you can’t say “yes” to some, then get to work and turn the “don’t know”s into “yes”. If you can’t turn the “no”s and “don’t know”s into “yes”s maybe you’d be better off spending your sales hours on something else. Sales professionals call this technique “qualification”.

These elements are fundamental to every sale – doesn’t matter whether the deal is for job cutting grass or a multi million $ supply contract, they still apply. Of course in some cases the answers might be obvious, and the exercise irrelevant, in others they might really make a difference. Want to check the logic? Just go over a deal you lost recently and measure your sales campaign against the list.

1. What’s the business imperative – the reason the buyer will spend the money? What benefit is she going to get out of it? and does it justify the price?  Know the answer – give yourself 10%.
2. Who will make the final decision to buy, and who from?  Beware, almost every buyer claims to be the decision maker, but is this really true.  In our house typically I’ll decide whether we buy something, but my wife decides what we buy.  Know the answer – give yourself 10%.
3. How will the decision to buy be made – the decision process.  Buyers rarely have only one option.  How will they choose between the alternatives available?  If you know give yourself 10%.
4. Have you agreed with the customer the buy/sell process – the way you’ll work together to make sure you both get the best deal?   Yes – 10%.
5. Who’re you competing with, and how to win against them?  Can you do it again?  Yes – another 10%.
6. Do you have a “coach” – somebody on the inside who wants your offer, and will help persuade the other decision makers and tell you how to get the deal?  Yes – 10%.
7. Has the prospect confirmed you’re the preferred vendor, provided you can get the commercials right.  Yes – 10%.
8. Has the prospect agreed a delivery or start date and committed internal resources?   Yes – 10%.
9. Has the prospect agreed the contract terms and conditions?   Yes – 10%.
10. Has the prospect signed the contract?  Congratulations you’ve won the deal.

Check out these short articles to find out more about sales qualification, and how to do it.

Improving the Bottom Line

The Pro’s Secret

Understand the Process

Understand the Competition

Understand the Threats

Five Questions About Money

Recruit a Coach

Like these ideas and want to try them out?

Get your own free personal account with Front Office Box – it’s been designed help you customize your sales and relationship management processes to work the way you want.

Follow this link to our Registration Page and sign up for more control with less stress.

You Might Also Enjoy

• Qualifying Sales Deals With On-Line Forms
• Questions to Qualify the Sale
• The Worst Problem When Selling
• Sales Qualification in Pipeline Management
• Qualifying Sales By Coaching

Did You Get Your Free Front Office Box?
Register today, Get Started with the management tool that works your way

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November 20th, 2007 - Posted in sales qualification  |  Edit | Add a Comment sales qualification. 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. Edit this entry. -->

Sales Qualification – why do we need it and how do we qualify sales properly?

Proper qualification not only tells us our chances of winning. It also tells us how to win. It helps us plan the ground we’ll compete on, and move the prospect in our direction. It helps us choose contingency plans for when things don’t go the way we want. Best of all it puts us on at least an equal footing with the prospect.

The absolute fundamental requirement of sales process is Qualification. Anybody who learns to employ Qualification is on the road to becoming a professional sales guy. Anybody who doesn’t is consigned to amateur status, and always will be.

Successful sales people display the same characteristics in my experience, but those characteristics aren’t the ones most people would expect. They don’t include ambitious, aggressive, gregarious, social, pushy, or any of another 20 we might think of.

But they do include the qualities we would look for when wanting to buy from somebody! That shouldn’t be a surprise, but it will be to some!

In 30 years of sales and sales management, every successful sales person I’ve worked with has combined four characteristics, usually in these proportions:

• 30% Honesty
• 30% Efficiency
• 30% Empathy
• 10% Luck

Successful sales people tell customers the truth, do what they say they’ll do when they say they’ll do it, and understand what it’s like being a customer. And of course all successful sales people get more than their fair share of luck – probably because they make it.

Honesty

This should be easy to understand. Customers are smart, suspicious of sales people, and have lots of reference resource. If, despite all that, they are misled into buying the wrong deal they won’t forgive or forget. Sales people who abuse customers don’t get away with it for long.

Efficiency

Ultimately it’s all about assured delivery – of what the customer thought she was buying and at the price, quality, on time with the service. We can only persuade the customer we’re capable of that assured delivery if we do everything we say we’ll do, on time.

Empathy

Not sympathy. Customers rarely want that. But they do want to buy from sales guys who understand the problems of deciding to buy, choosing who to buy from and from that point being totally dependent. Buying is challenging and risky. It helps the world go around when customers feel some empathy from the seller.

Luck

Throughout life we all need a bit of luck here and there, just to get to the other end. Selling is the same. Every so often we need that extra something that, despite odds stacked against us, makes our honesty, efficiency and empathy shine through.

All the successful sales people I ever met displayed these same qualities.

You Might Also Enjoy

• Always Keep Some Sales Tactics in Reserve
• Where Did the Great Sales Guys Go
• Selling Software Keep It Simple
• The Lost Art of Sales Training

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April 23rd, 2010 - Posted in Sales Coach  |  Add a Comment Sales Coach. 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 tactics are precious. We’d should always keep one or two in our back pocket, ready for action when we really need them. A bit like playing cards, we’d should never declare our entire hand, always keeping one “up our sleeve” to keep the other players wondering and guessing.

(For the record this isn’t me suggesting we cheat at cards – just a helpful illustration.)

Inspiration for this post came from sales veteran and friend, Ivan. We were struggling around Royal Dornoch golf course in the wind and rain (well it is April) and discussing an on-going dispute one our businesses is enjoying(?) A client closed down an arrangement with us and broke the contract in the process. We have a number of tactics in play between us and our lawyers in an effort to persuade the other side’s lawyers that we have bigger guns and more ammo. We also have a couple of real Gotchyas in the back pocket – real kick in the nuts attacks just in case they don’t see sense.

“That’s what you learn in sales” said Ivan, “always keep some ideas in your back pocket for when the going gets tough”.

By ideas Ivan meant sales tactics – not tricks, and more like chess moves, sales tactics are the things we’ll do or say to get the sales process working for us rather than against us. Sales tactics are our ideas for executing our sales strategy, for this particular opportunity and this particular customer.

Ivan says always keep one or two back. Never use all your ammunition early in the sale. Do that and you’ll spend the rest of the campaign fighting off the competition. Keep some sales tactics back and bring them into play when the competition starts to control the customer’s conversation, or when it’s time to close the deal.

One word of caution for new sales guys. Be very careful how you use your sales tactics. It’s easy to fall into the trap of gaming the customer. Prospects can usually spot tricks of the trade and resent manipulation.

Sales tactics need to be serious moves, not tricks, and transparently in the customer’s interests.

What tactics do you employ in your sales campaigns?

We’ve written some our own thoughts here. You might enjoy one or two of these:

• Call As High As You Can
• Sell Your Delivery Process
• Don’t Concede, Negotiate
• Find Out What the Customer Really Wants with Conditional Close
• Never Discuss Price Until the Customer is Ready to Sign

You Might Also Enjoy

• Where Did the Great Sales Guys Go
• Selling Software Keep It Simple
• The Lost Art of Sales Training
• Sales Coaching You Don’t Need

Did You Get Your Free Front Office Box?
Register today, Get Started with the management tool that works your way

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April 22nd, 2010 - Posted in Sales Coach  |  Add a Comment Sales Coach. 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. -->

Free software on the Internet has reached its sell by date, or at least that’s the implication behind Ning’s announcement highlighted in Mashable’s post Ning:Failures, Lessons and Six Alternatives It seems the run away train of Ning’s success is screeching to a halt with a decision to focus the business on making money, as opposed to building a community, from which it can make money. Having passed the 1 million social sites mark the new management has decided to put an end to its freemium model and concentrate on providing tools to community builders who make money themselves, and will pay for use of the facilities.

This news follows hot on the heels of Twitter’s announcement of a new monetization model, in that case through advertising. I guess everybody was expecting that move. Nobody can afford the costs of supporting more than 100 million users for ever. In the end everybody has to make money, and free software soon reaches its sell by date given today’s economic environment.

What’s particularly interesting is the way services to help other people make money using the Internet are developing into sophisticated business models. We’ve mentioned before that the only way to make money on the Internet is to charge others for helping them to do just that. It’s a development on the affiliate marketing, or MLM, model which has fallen into disrepute.

Over the past months we’ve seen other leaders of the social revolution turn their following, built on a seemingly altruistic philosophy, into a pool of gullible buyers. Instead of selling secrets of how to make money on the Internet they’re now selling secrets of how to make money on the Internet. Only now it’s turned into coaching and software.

Will it work? Will these new Internet entrepreneurs make money?

My guess is they will. There’s a bottomless pool of would be millionaires believing the stories of endless income from a couple of hours each day, wherever in the world they happen to be. Only $50/month for this book, $49.99 for this on-line course, $27.99 for this infrastructure complete with money making tools.

Will their hapless customers make enough to cover the cost? That’s another matter. But Ning won’t care if its customers don’t make money, just like the MLMers, and nor will the guys selling the coaching, the tools, the infrastructure. There will always be another punter willing to pay out small amounts for access to the secrets of Nirvana.

The only way to make money on the Internet is to charge people for helping them make money on the Internet. Free software isn’t the way to do that so we’ll need to find another way.

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• Making Twitter Marketing Make Sense
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April 20th, 2010 - Posted in Business Internet, Social Media Marketing  |  Add a Comment Business Internet, Social Media Marketing. 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. -->

Great sales people used to be everywhere. Others would describe them as natural born salesmen. They meant those professionals could talk to anybody, about anything, make friends with everybody and persuade Eskimos to buy freezers. You must remember some great sales guys and the ways everybody else wanted to be like them. I do.

But they don’t seem to exist anymore. Where did the great sales guys all go?

My theory is, like the DoDo and dinosaurs they died out, suffocated by changes in the environment.

First that book, Re-engineering the Corporation, persuaded bean counters they could design their business process in ways to make the really good guys redundant.

Second, the same book persuaded customers they could design their buying process to make the great sales guys redundant.

Third, the same book persuaded the great sales guys they were redundant. Like the dinosaurs nobody needed them anymore.

Now nobody will stand out, explaining the King isn’t wearing any clothes. Everybody is frightened to take on the bean counters – sales guys and customers alike.

And no customer will stand out, interested in new ideas which don’t fit with the bean counters plan to enforce mediocrity.

There aren’t any really good sales people these days because there aren’t any great customers.

All we’re left with is wankers following the rules and scam merchants taking advantage of the stupid.

But it can’t last. One day we’ll figure out accountants might be good at adding numbers but they’re crap at creating value.

We’ll persuade the bosses the secret to success lies in doing things differently, not following the strategy. That’s what everybody else is doing.

We’ll persuade them tomorrow’s answer comes in new ideas, not yesterday’s strategy, and that’s when we’ll see the great sales people appear, emerging from the ashes like the Phoenix.

Great sales guys didn’t die off. They’re just waiting for the beancounters to realize they don’t have all the answers after all.

You Might Also Enjoy

• Selling Software Keep It Simple
• The Lost Art of Sales Training
• Sales Coaching You Don’t Need
• Three Essential Dimensions When Selling B2B

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Tagged as: Business, Business process, Consulting, Design, Education and Training, Marketing and Advertising, Sales, Salesmanship