How To Effectively Manage Sales People Who Are In Remote Locations (Part 2)

Fourth, make sure you get yourself a good CRM system that gives you the opportunity to measure and monitor the activity and the performance of your sales people from remote locations. I suggest salesforce.com but there are lots of online web-based CRM tools today that can easily allow you to see what your sales people are doing and how they're spending their days in real time.

Fifth, make sure that you just take an active interest in building a relationship with each of your field sales personnel. If you're going to hire these expensive people you simply cannot afford to neglect them. Yet I see many companies who deploy sales personnel and simply leave them alone. This isn't a good idea.

So if you're thinking about how to improve your field sales performance, start with these ideas that I've given you. They make a lot of sense and experience has shown that they can greatly boost the productivity, motivation, and the sales results of your team.

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How To Effectively Manage Sales People Who Are In Remote Locations (Part 1)

If your organization has field sales personnel spread across the country or across the globe, it's very important that you provide them with the time, attention, and management that is required in order to make them effective. We see lots of organizations that hire expensive field sales personnel only to leave them to their own devices and provide them with little supervision, guidance, mentoring, or coaching. This is a serious mistake.

Here are some suggested things that you can think about in order to effectively manage your remotely-based sales people.

First of all, plan to spend regular time in their territory visiting customers with them. If you are not the person to do this directly, make sure that you have a sales manager or other members of your management team who can do this. A good sales person, no matter how senior, should have someone from the head office or from management visiting customers at least once every quarter.

Second of all, schedule regular sales meetings in order to bring your field sales people together. I suggest at least once a quarter if not once a month. This will give you the opportunity to train them, stay in touch with them, work through problems or issues with them, and provide an active level of supervision and engagement to them that helps them to be more successful. We see many companies cutting their sales meeting budgets trying to improve their overall expenses in sales and marketing, but sometimes when it comes to cutting sales meetings this can really mean that they're being penny wise and pound foolish.

Third, make sure that you schedule regular conference calls and telephone calls with your sales people to get updates. I suggest as a sales manager that if you're not talking to your field sales people at least every few days if not every week, then you're really not doing your job. Sales people need to have active communication with their supervisors. Some companies leave these people to their own devices and it just doesn't make sense.

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Do You Need A Sales Consultant? (Part 2)

It also makes perfect sense to bring in an outside sales consultant if you're trying to change the culture of your company in general. In fact many companies that bring in outside expertise in this area are trying to effect cultural change or somehow transform their organization.

A couple of common themes that we've seen when sales consultants are brought in relate to the following:

Sales consultants are great when you have a well-established sales force with a high level of seniority and many a sales people who've become complacent in their jobs. Bringing in a sales consultant to stir up the pot and shake the organization up a little bit to refresh it is a perfect way in order to breathe some fresh life into your sales force's efforts.

If your company is trying to overcome other cultural issues which are holding you back from having the kind of aggressive growth mindset that your team needs in order to take your organization forward, bringing in a sales consultant can make a lot of sense.

If you're considering outsourcing or bringing in interim-management to improve your sales process, breathe some life into a new sales strategy or work through issues related to your sales team and sales people, consider bringing in an outside consultant. They usually can bring a new set of fresh perspective and a depth of experience that can benefit your company directly.

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Do You Need A Sales Consultant? (Part 1)

I'd like to talk a little bit about when companies should consider bringing in an outside sales consultant in order to solve problems within their organization. Many companies reject the idea of bringing in outsiders and they have an adversity to employing consultants for any reason. I can understand this. We've all been burned by consultants who have "borrowed our watch in order to tell them what time it was."

Yet the fact is that many times bringing in a sales consultant is the most effective way to solve problems that your organization doesn't have the skills or experience to tackle on it's own. This is particularly true in sales. As a CEO, if you have a background in operations, engineering, finance or another non-sales or marketing disciplines, it can be particularly difficult for you to diagnose and treat sales and marketing issues on your own. You'd be a prime candidate for bringing in an experienced sales consultant who can help you to overcome the challenges that your organization is facing. Particularly if it's not selling enough.

Bringing in a sales consultant should be done as early as possible once you've identified the need for outside expertise. Why is this? Well, we run into lost of companies that wait far too long to bring us in when it comes to solving sales problems, and by the time that we're actually engaged to work with them, sometimes it's even too late. We see companies that have failed despite management's desire to achieve their turnaround in sales because they simply didn't recognize the depth of their problem early enough and take swift enough action in order to correct it.

If your company is facing a downturn in sales, particularly in this robust economy, you should consider immediately bringing in an outside sales consultant even if it's only to assess your current situation and give you a list of action plans and suggested improvements for your company. Other companies should consider a sales consultant if they're trying to go through a significant amount of change in the way they sell. This could be a result of taking your organization's revenues to the next level, or it could be related to shifting or changing the types of sales channels that your company is currently employing. For example, going from indirect to direct or vice versa. Bringing in outside expertise to help take your company through these types of changes makes perfect sense in most cases. Why? Because you can rent that expertise and make sure that you can benefit from that consultants experience without having to learn the hard way on your own.
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Using An International Sales Consultant

If your company wants to start selling overseas but doesn't have the in house expertise or knowledge, you should consider hiring yourself an international sales consultant. How do you go about finding that person? Well, there are many companies that specialize in helping companies position, sell, and distribute their products internationally. You can easily find these companies using search engines or other specialized sales and marketing directories.

One of the things that you should think about as you look for an international sales and marketing consultant is how to align the knowledge and experience of this consultant with the area of the world that you're looking to sell into. The second consideration is making sure that they have an understanding of the types of markets that your company is involved in. In other words are the B2C markets, B2B markets, industrial, medical, pharmaceutical, etc. The more you can tailor the skills and experience of your international sales consultant to your own company's particular domain, the better chance you'll have of achieving success once you employ their services to help you set up your international sales program.

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Follow These Steps To Take Your Company International

Before you decide to start exporting your products and pursuing overseas markets, start by doing some market research and understanding where the best opportunities are for your company overseas. Do some basic homework to understand the size of markets for your products in each of the major regions of the world. Then second of all, start to do some competitive analysis to understand who are the players and local vendors in each of these regions. Third, look at your product or service and understand where your best strengths are relative to the competitive landscape that you find in each region of the world, so that you can understand where you have the best opportunity to develop a niche or open a market for your product. If you start by doing some basic homework on these subjects, it will make you much more successful because you can determine where you want to go first, where you want to go second, etc.

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When Is It Right To Start An International Sales Program?

Many companies would like to start selling overseas but their not sure when they're ready. One of the key components of being ready for that is preparing your organization for changes that are required in order to deal effectively and compete in the international marketplace. Many companies wait too long before they go international because they feel that they don't have the resources required. Other companies go too fast and don't recognize the costs involved. As a result their efforts can fail. So when is the right time? A lot depends upon the kind of company you have, the kind of market that you're in, the kind of products that you sell, the gross margins that you earn, and the resources that you have in order to invest in international sales and marketing.

An easy way for a company to start out in the international market is through third party distribution channels. Distributors, resellers, agents, OEMs, and the other forms of third party channels represent an excellent way for a company to start it's international sales and marketing efforts without expending too much fixed costs. Other companies decide that it makes sense for them to wait to go international until their capable of actually adding their own international sales force to sell directly. In some companies this makes perfect sense because selling directly is by far the most cost effective method to get their products to market.

Many companies pursue a hybrid solution where they develop their international sales channels through third parties to start, and then begin layering direct sales forces onto those channels in order to manage them effectively. As countries begin to generate enough revenue to justify it, they begin to add direct sales forces in country to augment their capabilities in key markets. This is what I did in both Europe and the Far East. I started through third party distribution channels and then added into major markets such as Germany, France, Italy, the UK and then the Far East into Japan, China, and South East Asia and ultimately into Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

Many American companies overlook the great opportunities that there are to boost their revenues and profits by building a global sales effort. In fact, American manufacturers are way behind other companies in terms of their dependence on exports and their realization of how exports can help them to grow their business. Why do I think this is? For one thing, America has it’s own vast internal market and as a result of that, many business owners can find plenty of opportunities to sell their products locally, regionally, or nationally and even the national program is quite difficult for many business owners to foresee as within their scope of capabilities. But for American companies with our innovative spirit and our technology prowess, we have great opportunities to compete overseas.

Developing an international mindset is a very important part of setting the foundation for going international with your company. If you've traveled overseas or had extensive experience in dealing with foreign languages and cultures, and you're interested in other parts of the world besides the US, this sets an excellent foundation for taking your own company international. In particular, if you're thinking about going international and you have these sorts of interests but you don’t have the time to personally develop this, it's quite possible to go find talent that is capable of focusing on this effort.

Starting an international sales and marketing effort begins with finding a talented, experienced, global sales professional who has the knowledge and understanding to set up and develop overseas distribution channels for your company. It's quite easy to recruit this kind of international sales and marketing talent if you know where to look. Finding professionals with regional interests and language skills of European, Latin American, or Asian focus is an important part of expanding your international sales. Companies that are serious about expanding their business internationally and selling in key markets throughout the globe typically regionalize their efforts and add sales and marketing professionals with the right ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds in order to match up with the markets they’re trying to attack.

The great news about recruiting these types of individuals is that many of them are readily available living here in the US. Why is that? Because we're a melting pot! We have immigrants from all over the world who come to this country to live, yet still posses the knowledge of language, cultural, and even travel experience back to their homelands. If you're thinking about taking your company international and you're thinking in particular about a certain market or set or markets, start thinking about recruiting the right sales talent to direct your efforts with the right experience and skills as I've mentioned above.

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You Don't Need To Be An Ecommerce Company To Generate Online Leads

Many companies, particularly in the B2B space, who don't have an ecommerce site mistakenly believe that because they don't have an online transaction presence they shouldn't be focused on generating leads through the Internet. Why is this? Well they mistakenly equate online lead generation with online sales. They are two different things.

Many companies that sell through traditional sales channels are turning to online lead generation as a key component of their overall marketing strategy. Why? Because it works. Most companies that are doing internet marketing these days understand the benefits, but the vast majority of business to business companies still don't understand the power of using internet marketing to generate leads online that can be converted into sales. Internet marketing is quickly eclipsing traditional forms of advertising, trade shows, and other types of marketing communications when it comes to both efficiency and cost effectiveness. A company that's missing this opportunity today is not competitive in the marketplace anymore. The company that embraces internet marketing and learns how to effectively use it as a tool to generate leads for it's sales force, is one that's going to survive and prosper over the next several years.

Our own company is a good case in point. Because we have invested in SEO and have a conversion-efficient website, we receive a regular stream of online sales leads from prospects across the country. As a result, we are now doing sales and marketing recruiting and consulting for businesses across the US, from our base in Portland, OR.

This didn't happen on its own. It happened because we have harnessed the power of internet marketing to create an advantage for our company that is disproportionate to our size.

What are you doing in this regard?

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Don't Wait Until It's Too Late To Work On Your Sales Turnaround

I'm doing a sales turnaround assessment and planning project right now for a company that's lost a large percentage of it's sales in the last year. The CEO has come to us and asked us to help him devise a strategy to quickly get revenues back up to their previous levels. The company is losing money and while it has scaled back on it's employee headcount and other costs, it's still struggling to get close to breaking even. The company needs an immediate sales fix.

As most people know, there is no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to boosting revenues and accelerating sales. It takes time to design and execute a sales turnaround strategy. A lot of time the sales cycle itself can be the biggest impediment. Even when management knows what to do and how to do it, it still takes time to boost your top line revenues. Even worse, when management is either in denial about the sales problem or waiting, wishing and hoping for things to improve on their own, often times they will wait until the situation is unsolveable.

If your company is losing money and losing its sales momentum, don't wait until it is too late to bring in an outside resource to diagnose and fix the problem.


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Don't Blame The Economy For Poor Sales Performance

If your company's not hitting its revenue targets and underselling its competition, it's really easy for senior managers and executives to blame the economy. The fact is though, that the economy is very robust right now, and despite high energy prices, it’s pretty clear that the economy is going to stay on a strong track. So unless your market is in a slump, the chances are that your company needs to take a hard look at sales from the perspective of its strategy, process, and people.

It's not easy to look inward, and we all have a tendency to blame external factors when it comes to underperformance in our sales teams, but the fact is that those of us who have been in the trenches leading and running sales teams for a long time, know that the buck stops with us.

While its hard to point fingers at ourselves, it's absolutely the mark of a top sales leader to do that and to do it quickly when the company is not hitting its sales goals. If you're a sales leader and your company's not achieving its targets, the first question you should ask yourself is, "am I satisfied with the efforts of my people?" If the answer to this is yes, move on to the next subject. "Are we focusing on the right customers with the right sales process?" If the answer is yes, then we need to dig in and take a look deeper to figure out exactly which of these areas is deficient.

I find that it's very useful to use a sales score carding processes with my team in order to achieve this result. We use this scorecard with our clients. If you go to the homepage of our website, you'll find a copy of our sales scorecard to download. My suggestion is this: take that scorecard and make copies for all of your team members. Then each of you individually complete the scorecard and rate yourself in the critical areas of strategy, process, and people. Then after each of you have done this exercise individually, come together as a team and walk through the scores that you’ve assigned to each of those areas, one by one. Circle the areas where you have the lowest scores, and talk about them as a team. Once you've gained agreement on the root cause of the problems, discuss potential performance improvement programs that you can implement as a team.

Why would you do this you ask? Well, some people would think its probably a downer to spend time talking about your weaknesses, but top sales teams are constantly evaluating their own performance and looking for ways to continuously improve their sales effectiveness. By doing this, there's a great opportunity for you to actually build consensus amongst your team about what the biggest challenges are that you face in your team, and what to do about them. By using the sales scorecard process, and building consensus about change, you'll get everyone on the same page and create a sense of ownership and responsibility for creating a new outcome. We've used this with the Western regional sales team for the largest insurance brokerage in the U.S., and is formed the basis for their performance improvement plan. This is a very healthy way to bring your team along and empower them to be part of the solution to whatever ills your sales.

So if the economy continues to stay strong, and your company is still underselling, ask yourself , "why is it?"

Is it the economy? Or is it us?

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Sales Performance Planning

Does your company have a good sales performance planning process? Are your people on your sales team fully benchmarked against a measurable set of annual goals? Do they understand exactly what it is that they're tasked with over the next year, to drive revenue growth for your company?

We find that many companies under-perform in doing proper sales performance planning with their sales people. As a result, their sales representatives under-perform and so do their companies. If your company is moving towards its fiscal year end, now's the best time to engage in sales performance planning with your sales team; particularly if you're having a kick-off event to celebrate the end of your fiscal year and start a new one. It's a great time to make sure you've set proper objectives and talk with each team member about what their upcoming revenue, margin and activity goals will be for the upcoming year.

Many companies that do sales performance planning feel that it's absolutely a key part of their overall performance management system. Performance management is key to holding your people accountable and driving your sales team to achieve your company's revenue targets. If your company has not enacted a sales performance planning system yet, consider doing so immediately. If you need outside help, there are many sales consulting firms that can help you to put together a framework and system for effectively planning and measuring your sales teams overall effectiveness.

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Integrating Marketing and Sales

We see many companies still suffering from the traditional struggle between the marketing silo and the sales silo inside their businesses. Is this happening in your firm? It doesn’t have to be that way. Frequently, marketing and sales spend too much time and energy competing with each other for resources and a CEO’s attention, as opposed to taking a more enlightened approach: focusing on integrating their efforts in order to optimize the company’s overall revenue growth.

Why is this traditional rivalry so acute in so many businesses today? Well for one thing, part of the root cause stems from the fact that salespeople and marketing often come up through different tracks of the company and are taught different skill sets. Another reason is because they often vie for the same budget resources. As a result, sales and marketing people are sometimes suspicious of each other and view themselves as competitors. Salespeople believe that sales are the only solution for generating more revenue, and often times complain about sales lead quality or promotional program effectiveness. On the other hand, marketing people feel that they provide a much more efficient means for capturing new customers at a lot lower cost, than salespeople.

What most companies fail to understand is the integration of marketing and sales can be a very powerful tool for transforming your company’s business.

If your company is looking to try to integrate its marketing and sales department, you need to start by hiring or recruiting marketing and sales leadership that takes an enlightened, holistic approach to the two disciplines and can integrate the interests of both into a single well-optimized function inside your company. Finding marketing and sales talent at the executive level that understands both disciplines is not an easy task for the reasons that I mentioned before. It’s often difficult to find someone who has both marketing and sales backgrounds, but it’s essential.

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Telemarketing Vendors Can’t Compete With Internal Operations

Lots of companies look to outsource their lead generation to telemarketing vendors that provide turnkey services for calling into prospect accounts and qualifying leads. In fact, our own company has experience providing these services to clients. I’m here to tell you today that this process of outsourcing your telemarketing to a tele-services firm probably is not a very efficient or cost effective way to do business in today’s day and age.

Why? Well, it’s been proven that telesales and telemarketing is a strategic part of most companies’ competitive arsenal today. Companies that outsource telemarketing or telesales typically pay a much higher price per lead and gain a lot lower lead intake, than companies that actually perform those functions in-house.

If your company has been outsourcing its lead generation to a teleservices firm, you might want to consider taking this function in-house. If you’re concerned that you don’t have the expertise to do telemarketing, consider employing the services of a good inside sales consulting firm. The good ones have experienced inside sales managers who are capable of setting up the process, recruiting the people, training them to the process and managing them to a defined set of outcomes or metrics. A good telesales consulting firm can help you to take a core competency away from your telemarketing vendor and convert it into a core competency within your company. In the process, you’ll improve your overall sales efficiency and gain improved oversight and the ability to continuously improve your selling model. You’ll also lower your cost per lead.


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Capture The Power of Online Lead Generation

Most companies underestimate the power of doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). As a result, their businesses are failing to capture the opportunity to drive online sales leads to their company. Many CEO’s and top marketing people don’t understand that you no longer have to be in the e-commerce business to care about search engine optimization. Why? Over 90% of all business buyers go to Google, Yahoo, or MSN to search for a vendor. Our own company has benefited enormously from its SEO and PPC efforts. Today, we’ve evolved from being a local practice providing sales and marketing recruiting & consulting, to having a national clientele with a regular stream of inquiries coming from companies throughout the United States who are interested in using our services.

If you’re a business owner or marketing manager and thinking about how to generate more sales leads for the lowest possible cost, consider investing in SEO and PPC advertising now. But only do it after your website gets fresh messaging, a compelling value proposition and strong offers with lead conversion mechanisms, so that when your prospects come to your website, they like what they see and want to engage with you.

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Give Your Website a Facelift (Part 2)

The good news is that it’s very easy to engage a web design firm to refresh your company website or provide you with new updated messaging. If it’s been more than a year since you looked at your website homepage, you should consider taking a critical look and decide whether you should freshen the image and messaging of your company. Many companies do a poor job of communicating their core value propositions to their customers on their website homepage, and as a result, while they may attracted many visitors, people quickly leave because they don’t find anything of particular interest.

One of our clients, a major custom application software development company, recently came to us to try to hire top sales and marketing talent for their company. When we sent candidates to their website, we got a ho-hum response from several of them and a decline of interest in pursuing the opportunity. This is a perfect example of how a website can damage your efforts, not just with potential prospects and clients, but also with the top sales and marketing talent that you need in order to grow your company.

Can you afford to leave your website old and outdated any longer? Consider a website facelift. Even better, think about what you can do to turn your website from static “brochure ware” into a lead generation machine.
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Give Your Website a Facelift (Part 1)

I’m amazed at how often we come across companies that are spending lots of money to grow their sales functions but don’t have the right marketing in place. They fundamentally haven’t got the right mix between sales and marketing investments. In particular, in the 21st Century, a company’s website is an absolutely key component of the marketing communications mix, especially since websites are now the primary vehicle for capturing and converting leads and turning them into sales prospects. Lots of companies that are trying to increase sales have outdated websites with stale messaging, poor positioning, outdated graphics, unexciting web copy and few offers or calls to action.

If your company falls into this category, how can you afford not to put your best foot forward when it comes to your corporate website? Lots of companies underestimate the importance that a website has for communicating your company value proposition to target customers.

Your website is your company’s most important first impression for most sales prospects. When a prospect is considering your company, the first thing they’ll often do is go to your website to try and get more information. If that website is outdated, isn’t fresh, or has ho-hum messaging, that’s the image that you’re going to be communicating to them.



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Why Marketing Strategy Is So Important

As globalization continues and competition becomes ultra-fierce, now more than ever, it’s important that your company is constantly assessing and reassessing its go-to-market strategy. This strategic marketing function is something that companies often believe that they do well, but the reality is that many firms don’t have the resources in-house to do it at all.

A company that is selling into competitive markets needs to be constantly assessing and reassessing its competitive positioning and its Unique Selling Proposition (USP), while realigning its targeting of market segments according to its best opportunities, in order to create lasting sustainable competitive advantage.

If a company is not hitting its sales goals, it may not be because its sales force is ineffective, but rather because it has the wrong marketing strategy -- e.g. it’s trying to sell the wrong products to the wrong customers through the wrong channels. This is why strategic marketing planning is so important. Strategic marketing helps companies to clearly define and refine their approach to the marketplace, focus their resources and shift their marketing strategy in order to align their company with their best opportunities and where the highest likelihood of actually gaining market leadership. If your company needs to increase sales, you may not have a sales problem, but a strategic marketing problem.

How do you know if your revenue shortfall is a sales or a marketing problem? Consider bringing in an outside strategic marketing consultant to do an assessment of your overall company marketing strategy, to talk to your current customers, to reassess the competitive landscape and to figure out whether or not your company is properly targeting the right markets and customers with the right products. This process can go a long way towards helping you figure out how to increase your company’s sales, or to stop a decline in sales.

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