Upcoming OPM public workshop Feb 11

Sales Training:

You’ve probably been to many sales training workshops and sales seminars that present methods for winning sales. Sales tactics, different ways to approach a potential customer, and the kinds of questions you should ask are all important aspects of your personal development as a sales professional. You can never sharpen your skills too much when it comes to keeping your edge as a salesperson. It’s all about winning more sales!

Winning more sales overall:

It’s important to have the skills and experience to be able to win an individual sale, but have you considered your whole portfolio of sales opportunities? After all, the bottom line is the sum of all deals, so how can you grow your bottom line without getting too distracted by any one deal? Using a good CRM tool is essential, but that won’t necessarily help you decide how to manage your time most effectively.

How do you know which of your opportunities deserves your attention today?

Which of your many potential deals do you focus on first? The one that is easiest to close? The one that represents the most revenue? The one that you are most comfortable in selling?

Should you work primarily on new leads or business for existing customers? Should you spend your time fighting against your biggest competitors, or go after the low hanging fruit? How do you maximize your overall performance as a salesperson?

This is where OPM (Opportunity Portfolio Management) comes in: to help you build a framework for understanding your overall sales opportunity portfolio and prioritize your efforts to get the most out of it. It’s all about winning more sales overall!

There are still a few spots remaining for our next OPM Public Workshop next week, Thursday February 11, 2010, in Toronto.

Click here to learn more about OPM Sales Training

Click here to register for OPM Sales Methodology Public Workshop

The attendee feedback is in for the 1 day public SalesWays OPM Workshop held last month at the Skytek facilities in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada, and by all accounts the event was a great success.  Everyone involved felt it was a great course to help understand the fundamentals of the selling process, and how sales people need to manage their portfolio of opportunities to maximize the potential of success.  Below is a quote from one of the attendees of the workshop that touches on some of the benefits gained from attending the course.

“We attended the SalesWays Workshop on October 28th.  The course is excellent, and very different from other training courses.  SalesWays OPM has a framework that will help us to standardize sales practices, and ensure that no business opportunity will fall through the cracks!  I would highly recommend this course to anyone looking to improve sales.”

- Gerry Cellucci, Yorkland Controls

Good news – the next session is scheduling for January, in Toronto.  Click here for more information!

We have begun a number of exciting new projects here at SalesWays recently that I wanted to share with the world.

For a long time now, we have been aware of the need for individual salespeople and small teams of salespeople to have an improved method for managing their sales opportunities. To date, we have aimed at helping sales people and sales organizations through education with our books (SADR, OPM), training courses (OPM), Sales Cycle Manager products, and CRM integrations.

Our existing suite of tools for the solo salesperson or small sales teams targeted Windows PCs (Sales Cycle Manager for Windows, Sales Cycle Manager for Excel) and Lotus Notes (Sales Cycle Manager for Lotus Notes). Our new project underway is to extend Sales Cycle Manager to mobile device platforms such as iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android. SalesWays support for mobile devices such as BlackBerry has existed in some CRM integrations (eg. Ardexus MODE, Ardexus WebMODE), but will now be available to solo salespeople regardless of their CRM system.

As part of this new effort we are looking for talented, motivated developers who have experience developing mobile applications. Some of the key skills we are looking for are; 

• Mobile Development (eg. Java (Eclipse), xCode, C++)
• Web development experience (eg. HTML5, Java, Javascript, Flash (Action script), ASP.NET, Perl/PHP/Python
• Relational database experience/knowledge (eg. MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, DB2)
• Knowledge or experience in building on-demand web based applications

If you are excited by the thought of developing cutting edge applications for business and would like to join us in our efforts, please check out our job posting at http://salesways.com/careers.php

Welcome to the new SalesWays web site!

Who are we? SalesWays represents new, breakthrough ideas on how sales people approach selling. Our patented sales methodology, SalesWays OPM, can be found at the core of our books, software, and sales training; helping salespeople treat their opportunities like an investment portfolio, ultimately spending less time on winning more business.

Our previous site focused on our first book, Sales Automation Done Right (SADR), which introduced an innovative selling methodology born from the idea of how the computer can radically improve sales effectiveness. The sales methodology has advanced much further, and now stands alone outside the sphere of technology. It has been the subject of a sales training course for over 3 years, refined over a decade across thousands of sales people.

Today, we have a widely available book, software programs, and training courses. We have a lot of exciting developments in the works:

• a second book, OPM, that will focus primarily on the sales method
• more software platforms
• additional training options

We look forward to connecting with sales professionals, trainers, and anyone generally interested in the process of selling!

A while ago, I tuned into a conversation between two of our salespeople. One of them, a relative newcomer to sales, was commenting that given the experience of his first year in sales, selling was easy.

I’ve been selling for a long time, and I have never thought selling was easy.

In earlier entries, I had talked about sales as a profession. As in any profession, it’s difficult to make a call on how easy it is until you have a lot of experience under your belt. Early success in sales can be the result of factors outside of your native selling skills.

I remember my first order was for about $10,000. I was elated. The problem was that most people in the sales department are nice, and they pat you on the back for your first sale. But it wasn’t a sale; it was an order. I just took the customer’s call and wrote down the information. The guy whose territory I had just taken over did the spadework.

The more experienced you become at selling, the higher you rise, and the more challenging it becomes. You are now up against competitors whose maturity evolved from the same torturous path that you followed to become successful. If selling is easy, you have no competition and sometimes that is the case. Or, someone else is doing the work for you. But if your product is much the same as your competitors, and the salesperson you are working against has the same experience as you, selling will not be easy.

Every salesperson has to make presentations to their customers, and the most common tool they use is Microsoft PowerPoint. In an earlier post, I even talked about PowerPoint as a form of “persuasion technology” in sales. But PowerPoint is not without critics; some feel that it encourages a lazy way to deliver information: first, you get the bullets into PowerPoint, then, you read the bullets to the audience. Presentation done.

Lots of stuff has been written about how to do it better, but if you are already prone to using PowerPoint, are there any alternatives?

Flypaper is interesting, because it is free. No caveats or hitches here.

Download this software and you can immediately design impressive presentations for delivery locally on your computer, or over the web. You can include video, audio, animation, and choose from predesigned models and templates. Flypaper works using a “story model” of building your presentation, and it breaks away from the “bullet method” of doing things. With Flypaper, the emphasis is on Flash-based animation that is easy to put together. Highly recommended and well worth a try.

What I findparticularly interesting is that the man behind Flypaper is Pat Sullivan. As you may already know, Pat was the founder of ACT! and later, SalesLogix; two commercially successful customer relationship management solutions. Given Pat’s background in sales, it comes as no surprise to me that he would be involved with persuasion technology.

Strategic customer relationship management has been my focus for the last twelve years. During this time I have worked with sales executives, managers and directors at major software vendors and consulting firms. I have always faced one major challenge: how to sell software or services to people who just don’t believe it can help them. “This is going to waste my time,” they say.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why CRM still does not have the same impact on sales as it does for marketing and service organizations.

Recently, I have completed some research which asked sales executives the major benefits that CRM brought to sales organizations. Most of them said that even considering indirect benefits related to their activities such as communications or reduction in administrative overhead, CRM did not help on its main promise: to increase sales productivity and revenues.

In fact, sales automation, when associated to mobile order entry is quite well recognized as an important tool. However, when associated with increased sales effectiveness with any kind of structured methodology, sales reps just turn their faces: “I’m afraid that it will take me too much time,” they say, “I do not see it as something that could make me work better.”

Working in the consulting business for the last 5 years, I could not find anything really new in this business. That is until a sales rep at one of my clients said to me: “Hey Enio, I´m in control of all my opportunities,” and showed me a PDA running a piece of software with an interesting dashboard. According to him, it was the first software that was worth using, because time invested on data entry results in fantastic results. He said, “You should try it yourself!”

It was the first time in many years that a sales rep told me that sales software was helping him to sell. I decided to check the methodology behind that software. And guess what? I found the book Sales Automation Done Right. Based on the ideas in the book, SalesWays was able to build Sales Cycle Manager, the software that makes the methodology come alive.

Enio Klein
Principal at K&G

Sales Automation Done Right (SADR) is Now Available as an eBook

The world of eCommerce is truly amazing. It took SalesWays Press several months to publish the paper version of Sales Automation Done Right and arrange distribution through Amazon.Com. Publishing the eBook version was much easier.

The first task was finding a reliable partner to convert the manuscript into the forms required by the eBook stores we had targeted to distribute. These are MobiPocket, a French company acquired by Amazon a couple of years ago; eReader, a subsidiary of Motricity and the Palm Software Store (operated by eReader). MobiPocket has its own proprietary format for text and illustrations, as does eReader.

We chose Scribe, based in Philadelphia and Miami to do the conversions. David Rech, Andy Brown and their teams worked with us to ensure that the book’s vital illustrations would be faithfully reproduced and usable on small PDA and smart phone screens. Scribe accomplished this by the use of magnified images that can be scrolled left and right, up and down to view all the information. They worked with us to create a system of hot links between chapters, sections and to illustrations to allow readers to move quickly to the information they need. They did a great job!

We worked with Jeremie Le Proust in Paris to upload the book into the MobiPocket eBook Store, and to solve a humorous problem that evolved over their use of the “customers who bought this book also bought” category. It seemed that the first few purchasers of SADR were also interested in purchasing other material that didn’t quite fit the same genre. We were hesitant to move forward with an inappropriate association linked to our book. We explained our position to Jeremie and he readily fixed it.

We worked with Jim Harvey, the head of content and developer services at Motricity to keep our project on track with eReader, and with Sarah Janoch at Publishing Dimensions, who manages the product library for eReader. Sarah helped us clear the last hurdles and publish versions on eReader and the Palm Store just as 1996 came to an end.

Some books are too valuable to leave at home on the shelf. The obvious problem is that most are too heavy and too bulky to carry around all of the time. The best example for medical professionals is the PDR, the phone book sized Physician’s Desk Reference that lists critical information about pharmaceuticals and drug interactions. Until eBooks arrived, these were impossible to carry around. Now they live comfortably in smart phones, PDAs and notebook computers, always available for reference at a moment’s notice. As eBooks, they can be digitally searched, bookmarked and notated without damaging the pages. Information links can make them even more useful.

SADR is the PDR for sales professionals. The paper version is not as big, but still too bulky to easily carry around all of the time. SADR is my CRM and sales automation bible. I refer to its glossary of CRM terminology frequently, and have book marks in about fifty places to help me when I’m planning marketing campaigns, plotting selling strategies, managing opportunities and looking for ideas.

To celebrate the publication of our first eBook, SalesWays is offering free registration codes for our SalesCycle Manager Software for Palm and Windows to purchasers of the eBook from any of the three publishers. Download a trial version of the software from the SalesWays Store, and send us the information requested in the registration instructions along with a copy of your sales receipt. As always, the Excel version is already available free of charge.

The combination of the SADR eBook and Sales Cycle Manager software is the perfect combination to empower you to unleash the potential of the SalesWays methodology and apply it to your personal needs.

I’m writing this on the way to Hawaii, on a cruise ship, a planned attempt at avoiding part of the long Canadian winter (which has actually been very forgiving this year). Cruises are always a good opportunity to read books, something that I find tough to do in life back home.

I quickly read two excellent books, the kind that you can’t put down once you start. One of them was Bob Woodward’s account of “deep throat,” the contact who gave him and Carl Bernstein guidance while investigating the Watergate break-in. In a short postscript, Bernstein said something that caught my attention: “Reporters may believe they control the story, but the story always controls the reporters.” This triggered something. I have often talked about the story that resides within our OPM sales method, which originated out of my first book and which has been expanded and augmented within the framework of OPM sales training. A sales method must have a story, because it has to follow real life experiences involved in the process of selling. A good many sales methods have been developed over the past decades and only a few of them have survived and are accepted. The test of a sales method is that it has to work, and it takes a lot of time to establish that. It’s extremely difficult to get salespeople to switch methods, even to a good one. They don’t have much patience, and if they try something new that detracts them from their normal routine, they had better see results quickly. If not, they revert to their previous way of doing things. The point is, that it is difficult to introduce new methods to salespeople if they have spent any significant time in the field and have confidence in what they believe is the right way to do it. Because of this, bad sales methods will never go mainstream–they are like bad news stories, unless they stand up to scrutiny, people won’t believe them.

Bernstein says the “story” controls the reporters. He’s right. Nothing can change the story, because it should be, by definition the truth. Reporters grapple with the task of finding the truth. It’s the same with sale methods. We try to discover a sales “method” Sometime, under scrutiny the method breaks down, because we haven’t got it right. The method only works if it truly reflects what goes on in the sales process—figuring that out is as difficult as a reporter trying to unearth the details that will piece together the “story”.

If I seem like I’m belaboring this point, it’s because I sometimes wonder how we got to where OPM is today. We started in the early nineties in assembling the components and here we are fifteen years later with a method, a book, a training course, and a patent. But the process was evolutionary, just like Woodward and Bernstein figuring out Watergate. There’s no doubt that the OPM method controlled us. Sometimes when we tried to add stuff the method fought back—with the new material the method broke down. We had to change it and test again, until it was right. As we added pieces to the puzzle, the basis for truth was tested. If we passed, we locked up that stage, and moved on.

The method controlled us, as the story controlled the reporters.

In my last post I referred to Michael Schrage’s comment that the 2×2 matrix rated along with PowerPoint as the two most popular business tools. I don’t rate them equal—PowerPoint does not have the same depth as the 2×2 in the power to unravel problems—it is more a set of tools to get a more effective portrayal of an idea or message. In an effort to learn more, I went over to Wikipedia to check on PowerPoint. This led to a digression that is worth blogging about.

Wikipedia says that PowerPoint is a ubiquitous presentation program. I guess we all knew that, and the reason it is ubiquitous is because of Microsoft’s marketing clout. It goes on to say that PowerPoint “is among the most prevalent forms of persuasion technology.” That last term caught my interest—I’ve heard of information technology, change technology, but this is the first I’ve heard of persuasion technology. I ploughed on:

“Persuasion technology is technology that can be used for presenting or promoting a point-of-view. Any technology designed and deployed for those purposes can be considered a persuasion technology. Such aids are regularly used in sales, diplomacy, politics, religion, military training, cult recruiting and management, and may potentially be used in any area of human interaction.”

Wow, look at what heads up the list–sales! Click on sales and you get this:

“Sales, or the activity of selling, forms an integral part of commercial activity. It could be argued that it is the cornerstone of business as it is the meeting of buyers and sellers and all other areas of business has the goal of making that meeting successful. Mastering sales is considered by many as some sort of persuading ‘art.’ On the contrary, the methodological approach of selling refers to it as a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesperson relates his offering, enabling the buyer to visualize how to achieve his goal in an economic way.”

I need to say “wow” a second time. That definition of sales is right on. I try to emphasize the true meaning of sales in our OPM course. I use a slide that says “sales is the business of doing business.” One of our trainers asked to take it out. I let him do it—but on sober second thought, I won’t do that again.

There is so much to talk about just in this simple wander through Wikipedia (sales is a persuading “art”, wow number 3!!)

Must do this again.