Selling used to be simple, but it was never easy.
Now it’s complex. And it still isn’t easy.
When my friend Dave started with Cummins Engine they made a couple of engines, which they sold in the United States. Today they make many different engines, and they sell them in a variety of countries around the World. The engines are more sophisticated and so is the competition. Now other engine makers from outside the United States are part of their competition.
Buyers have gotten tougher and more sophisticated. They want to make sure that the material they’re buying meets all of the appropriate regulations. They want to make sure they're getting good quality. They want to make sure they’re getting the best price and the best life cycle cost.
Sales, is where the company and the customer come together first. The old saying is still true, "Nothing happens until something is sold."
That means there’s a man or a woman doing the day-to-day sales-work for just about every company. Sometimes they’re called salespeople. Sometimes they’re called representatives or detail people. Sometimes they even have quaint titles like “solution specialists.” But they all have to sell.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the greatest marketing program in the World of the slickest advertising. It doesn’t matter how great your Web site is. At some point somebody’s got to pick up the sales kit or the phone and go from door to door, or office to office, or plant to plant, and make the sale.
Some things haven't changed. Every salesperson wants to increase the amount of quality selling time and decrease the time he or she spends staring through the windshield or answering routine questions on the phone. Every salesperson wants to sell more in the same number of calls.
The bad news is that the complexity and competition make it harder than ever to achieve those goals. The good news is that there are Digital Age tools that can help.
If you're a good salesperson you need to know the competition. You need to know what kind of offers they’re making and the technical specifications of their products. Every good salesperson I’ve ever known keeps a competitive profile on hand. You learn to pick up data sheets that competitors leave behind. You learn to pump purchasing agents for pricing information.
Now you also use the Web. You can go visit the Web sites for your competition and find out an awful lot about their product specifications and what they’re offering. Search tools will help you find information about your customers and your competitors. You can use e-mail alerts to get that information delivered to you.
When you pull that information off the Web you can store it in digital form. That means it doesn't take up a lot of space. It's right there on your computer whenever you need to look at it. Even better, because it's in digital form, it's easy to search through it for just the right information.
If you’re a good salesperson you need to know your products. You have to know their specifications and how your customers use them. The Digital Age can come to the rescue on this one, too.
Many companies put technical details about their products on their Intranets so salespeople can get the information whenever they need it. That’s only a start.
In addition to having the information there, there should be e-mail and phone contact information so salespeople can contact technical people for advice and consultation. Some companies also keep a record of the technical questions that customers ask and the answers to those questions. That creates a great, practical database of technical knowledge. Then they put that on the intranet, too, so that salespeople can get to it from anywhere.
If you're a good salesperson you need to know your customers. It might be a pain to keep a record of every call, but that information can be essential and may even save a sale. Today it's possible to use sophisticated contact management databases like Act! and Goldmine to store and coordinate all your records. Those programs have built-in features that can also help manage the sales process.
It might seem like what we're talking about so far are just fancy ways to keep even more records. The records are part of it, but more important is the ability to pull together all the right information from a variety of sources when you need it. One salesperson that I interviewed for one of my books explained to me how it worked for him.
Back before the Digital Age when he needed to make a presentation to a major account or prospect, he spent about 80% of his time going from department to department to gather information. He picked up information on the account and their buying history. He picked up background on the key buyers and users. He gathered technical data from a couple of places.
Sometimes, if it was an especially important account, he’d get some help from marketing. They'd put together a special slide show, or maybe a 16mm movie for him to use. The lead time for this was long and the process was expensive and time consuming, so he would be able to use it for the very best customers.
Back then that was 80% of his time. Today, it takes him about 20% of his time to gather that information, and he hardly has to walk a step. I sat in a hotel room in Dallas and watched this fellow pull together the information for a major presentation that he was going to make the following day. It took him about fifteen minutes.
He grabbed the customer information that he needed. Some of that came from his contact manager, right there on his laptop. More came from his company records of the customer's detailed buying and credit history.
He gathered product information by pulling it directly from the sources used by technical support. He also was able to download some PowerPoint files that had been used as presentations by technical people. He be cut out material from their presentation and pasted it into his.
That wasn’t the end, though. He still had some questions. The questions weren’t so much technical as they were about how to make his sales presentation, so he fired off an e-mail to the sales discussion group that his company maintains.
Within an hour he had four replies. Every one of them helped. One was from a salesperson who had sold the same product in a different part of the country. He talked about some of the usage issues that would need to be covered. He also shared some statistics on his customer's successful use of the product and a reference the customer in Dallas could contact for an endorsement.
Another salesperson chipped in with some particular techniques he had used to sell this product. He even shared a couple of the slides he had developed as well as some of his own data. Two other salespeople chipped in their success stories and things to watch for.
With information gathering done, the salesperson was able to spend a significant amount of time customizing and preparing the presentation. When he walked into that customer's office the next day he knew what he wanted to say, knew how his product could solve problems for the customer, and knew where he stood relative to the competition. It didn’t make his sales job easy, but it did give him a bit of an edge.
Information that helps sales directly is only part of the story. In the Digital Age Web sites can also make the sales force more productive by lifting a lot of the administrative burden from their shoulders. Just about anybody who has ever sold can tell you about that administrative stuff.
Administrative stuff includes customer calls, asking about the status of delivery or with simple questions about product usage. It includes simple pricing questions.
Many companies have put systems in place to make it easier for their customers to handle routine orders and basic customer service online. When they want to find out about pricing, order status, or simple technical stuff, they go to the Web. Several of those companies have measured the impact on the sales force, and found an increase in productivity between 25 and 33%.
Many salespeople and their companies use the Net and the Web to reach more of their customers and potential customers more often. Salespeople use e-mail to increase the touches with folks who are customers on their “A”, “B,” and “C” lists. Personal e-mails go to the “As” and “Bs”. The “Cs” get hit with the more generic stuff.
Regular mailings with information of interest, sent by permission, are a powerful marketing tool for the Digital Age. Customers like them. And salespeople benefit from in the increase in quality contacts.
Email is the tool of choice for contact. Each email can contain a link to a specific Web page that includes detailed information. Customers who are interested can click through to the information they want. And you can provide that information, in detail, on your company Web site.
If you're selling today you can use digital tools of many kinds to improve your results. Use databases, contact managers and the net and Web to find and store data and information that will help you. Then use the communications tools of the Digital Age to bring information together and shape it into powerful presentations. Finally, use email and the Web to send your customers the specific information that helps them and keeps your name alive in their memory.
In this age of incredible complexity, vicious competition, and escalating challenges, a salesperson’s life hasn’t gotten any easier, but Digital Age tools can help the salesperson master the complexity, overcome the competition and make more sales.
This feature appeared on 28 October 2002
