Sales Methodologies - Why you should have one

There are a lot of great sales methodologies out there that will result in increased average sales productivity. A lot of sales people confuse a sales methodology with taking away their individual style with a top down process. Nothing is further from the truth. The words you choose and say, your communication style, your tenacity are not guided by a sales methodology, those things are uniquely you. So, how should you choose a sales methodology?

• Using the process should be non-intrusive and increase the sales reps productivity (more of an aha moment than you might think)

• The sales methodology needs to focus on the buying process, not your selling process

• The process must include all steps in the sales cycle, from the effective first call to getting the signature

• The sales cycle measured in the CRM needs to match exactly the objective steps completed in the buy/sell cycle and tell us what needs to happen next to get a positive decision

• The methodology should provide sales tools to the sales person to make them more productive, more quickly than stumbling around until they figure it out

• Use of the methodology should generate management reports that are the direct output of the process

A sales methodology should enhance the management process and set expectations of productivity and sales output. If the sales team and management are in alignment, then sales reviews, territory reviews and pipeline reports should naturally flow out of the process. Watch for future blogs on specific sales methodologies, as I have been trained in and implemented several, I have some opinions. For the ones I have selected and used, they are all good but success is dependent on matching the right methodology to your products, sales cycle, customers and average sales prices.

Email - It's not what it used to be, nor will it ever be again

I was just looking through my Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail personal email accounts and I've discovered something, my friends don't send me many emails anymore. I communicate with them through Facebook, Twitter and MySpace (for my musician friends). The only emails I receive are from companies trying to sell me stuff. I'm still habituated to looking through my personal emails in the morning but I know my sons, all in their 20's only check email once per week or less and it's only because they can read it on their phones that they check it at all. My high school aged daughter has completely abandoned email and communicates primarily using Facebook and more specifically the IM client buried in Facebook. Text based messaging has really replaced long phone calls for most inter-personal communication. Actually, it's pretty remarkable that we've spent a fortune buying expensive phones to primarily send text messages.

For business communications, I and my customers and prospects still rely heavily on email for communications. You can flesh out ideas more completely and attach documents to emails, something not easily supported or secure using Facebook, Twitter and the like. Although you can read a lot of articles on "The Revolution of Social Networking for Marketing," I believe there is something more profound going on under the covers. People are changing the way they socially interact using one to many communication methods for personal relationships sharing, events, ideas and social calendars.

In business, prospects and potential buyers still want to hide in anonymity, but I see customers (people who have purchased your products) wanting to open up their business processes to tools like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the like to accelerate business and reduce friction. I also see a day where there will be one-to-many tools where prospects will want to interact with potential vendors on a one-to-many basis. I know that one of my colleagues has just been scheduled into a weekly conference call with a large systems integrator working on winning a massive federal procurement. The call includes their employees and vendors to update the team and provide a strategic view into the status of this opportunity. Imagine an application running 7 X 24 where everyone could share and update, provide levels of security (not everyone can see everything) and become a project repository and have it be as easy to use as Facebook. I know I’ll hear… SharePoint, but it is too rigid and not friendly. Here’s an opportunity for new kind of communications tool aimed at business users.