Emphasize Revenue Generation
On “Price of Business” Kevin Price talks with Walter Roger about sales enablement
[Kevin Price]: Welcome back to the Price of Business. I am your host Kevin Price. Talking to you about you and your business. Real quick, we want to mention some of the articles that you need to check out at Houstonbusinessdaily.com, before I go to my next guest Walter Rogers at Baker Communications. “Five Ways To Overcome The Fears Associated With Business Networking”, great article by my friend Ken Marsh. “Top Things to Know About Protecting a Business and Its Intellectual Property” by Gordon Arnold, one of the city’s premier intellectual property attorneys with Arnold and Knobloch, and Ken March is nationally known as, with fearlessnetworkers.com. “Year End Business Gifts: Things to Watch Out for if You Plan to Deduct Them,” George Connelly Jr. attorney at law wrote that excellent article and several more. Make sure you check him out. George Connelly, he’s with the Chamberlain law firm. You need to read his content. His content is creating a lot of buzz and we just love the great work that he’s doing. Plus another guy who’s got some great information on there is our next guest, Walter Rogers. He’s wrote an excellent article on the focus is on sales managers. We talked about that quite a bit last week. He is with Baker Communications. I’m looking forward to what we’re going to discuss this week, welcome to the show.
[Walter Rogers]: Hey, thank you Kevin, nice to be back.
[KP]: Tell us real quick what you’ve got line up for us here on Christmas eve eve.
[WR]: Well, today’s topic is going to be all about revenue generation. The last couple of weeks we’ve talked about the importance of gaining executive sponsorship when you’re launching a CRM. Then last week we talked about the importance of sales managers and how they’re really the field generals, leading the battle and leading the good fight. Then this week we’re starting to bring it down now to the level of what’s important to the sales reps which is revenue generation.
[KP]: Got it, got it. So tell me, practically, how your systems and how your programs help with that objective.
[WR]: Yeah, it’s not so much about our systems and programs. It’s more around what we’ve noticed that sales people care about. At the end of the day the sales people don’t care at all about CRM. They don’t really care about sales training. They don’t care about many of the things that corporate America is pushing on them. In fact most sales people spend less than 20 or 30 percent of their time actually selling. The rest of their time is spent on administration, internal meetings, creating reports, etc. So, really by taking a different perspective on how to properly implement CRMs and how to really transform sales culture, by focusing on what they do care about which is generating revenue, what we find is that you get a lot of adoption of any tools, systems, techniques, procedures that actually help them increase the size of their paycheck.
[KP]: Okay, so what you is have the people who are in sales to really focus on sales and redistribute some of those other responsibilities in areas where it makes more sense.
[WR]: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes that comes in the form of rearchitecturing your sales organization so that you have administrative support for sales professionals that, you know, can take care of quoting and things like that. In other cases it’s really just understanding what those repetitive processes are and then streamlining them and automating them with CRM products so that they can perform more work in less time, spend less time on administration and more time on customer facing revenue generation practices.
[KP]: Right. Following up, making sure the customer is happy, because the single most important thing is keeping that customer, almost more so that getting new ones, because it’s so much cheaper to keep what you’ve got than to get new ones.
[WR]: Yeah, it really is. It’s cheaper to keep them. It’s cheaper to expand inside that customer base that have a loyalty to you already, you know, assuming that you’ve done a good job for them. And knowing which customers to spend time on, knowing what that customer profile looks like so that you can associate the amount, you know, the appropriate amount of resources to those customers is really important. And without internal systems that can tell you how much revenue each customer generated, the gross margin that it contributed, whether they’re trending up or down, when their renewals are coming up, all of those are, you know, items that a system could generate programmatically for a sales professional, without that sales professional having to spend an inordinate amount of time assessing, which means they have more time actually acting upon sales opportunities versus administration work.
[KP]: Talking to Walter Rogers. He is with Baker Communications which is really one of the premier business training, consulting, CRM firms and so much more, and really talking about what it matters to your business. As you close 2009, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned about your business that you think are of value as we enter 2010?
[WR]: You know, one of the notions that our guest last week introduced, Mike Clayville, was around the concept of selling at the intersections, right? Which is identifying where a customer is likely to have a pain because of some change or some event that is going to occur based on a predictable purchasing pattern. That helps you fish much better. If you have a better understanding of where the fish are, if you’ve got a fishing radar, so to speak, right? It’s a lot easier to go find the fish and bring them in and that’s what selling at the intersections does. Now, what a CRM can help you do of course, is figure out where the fish are. There’s another very important part that ties right back to adding value to the sales reps every single day, and that’s what I call coaching at the intersection. So many times we take sales professionals and dip them in sales training programs that are one size fits all, everybody gets the same training, but the reality is not everybody needs the same training. Not even people that have the same level of experience need the same training. So, just because you have two sales reps that have both sold ten years, doesn’t mean that they’re both good at the same things. So, you need to coach at the intersections. What that means is identifying, inside of your sales process, where these sales professionals are going awry. A properly deployed CRM can do that for you. You can take a look at which stages sales professionals are abandoning opportunities and they’re moving from maybe qualified to lost, or maybe proposed to lost, or plan to lost. All of those are indicators of where skill deficiencies exist within specific sales people, which gives the sales manager the opportunity to coach at the intersection, which is where they abandon the deals. It really improves the skills that each individual needs to improve upon instead of trying to improve everybody’s skill in the same exact way, which sales people don’t appreciate.
[KP]: Right. They don’t appreciate it because they’re not, you know, there’s nothing cookie cutter about people. And there’s actually various different types of sales people that if every personality was the same…You know, in a personality assessment, no surprise, I show up as an expressive. I guess I’d better for what I do for a living. , but you know, there’s the analytical types, and there’s various types and they all can be very effective sales people because they can attract mirror personalities.
[WR]: Yeah, and I always took you for an introvert Kevin, I’m surprised to hear you’re expressive.
[KP]: Yeah, that’s what every test says, that I’m an expressive. I was shocked too. I can barely get a word in, you know what I mean? I can barely talk, but yeah, according to that…So, yeah, I think that’s a pretty big role is that, is the fact is, is that there’s a lot of different types of buyers, so you want a lot of different types of sales people.
[WR]: You really do, you really do. And there’s, you know, there’s lots of psychological instruments out there that will tell you if you’re a Doer, Talker, Thinker, Guardian, or whatever, you know, words they choose to use. The reality is that all of these instruments measure the same, roughly the same things. There’s typically 4 or 5 types, and they all trace back to an instrument that was actually invented by the Greeks 2,000 years ago which tells people haven’t really changed in 2,000 years. But most people will sell to others in the way in which they like to be sold to themselves. Of course, that works for 25% of the population, but not the other 75% that’s different from you. So, recognizing what those different types are is absolutely important, and back to the example of coaching at the intersection, you know, when a sales manager and a sales rep get together and identify those specific coaching opportunities whether it’s that they can’t close, or they can’t get past the Gatekeeper, or they don’t understand how to properly position a solution. Those two individuals also have different personality types, the sales manager and the sales rep, and really understanding and recognizing where the other person lives, thinks, eats, and breathes substantially improves the communication between those two people and really helps take that coaching to the next level, which goes right down to adding value to the sales person’s life, which is all about generating revenue, which is what they care about. You just have to boil everything down to that lowest common denominator.
[KP]: Right, absolutely. We’re talking to Walter Rogers and we are talking about Baker Communications. When I listen to the whole scope and field of your services, your consulting services, what you’re all about, where are you seeing the most dynamic change?
[WR]: You know, we’re just continuing to see more and more change in form of the transformation of the role between inside and outside sales reps. A lot of organizations are starting to really pare back and have been paring back for many years the volume of field sales reps and increasing the volume of inside sales reps which, you know, in some ways is good, because you can process a lot more transactions, you can build relationships over the phone effectively using tools like WebEx or a number of other virtual collaboration products, but in matrix organizations where inside and outside have to work together, which is what we’re finding more and more right, it’s this whole notion of, “You need bricks and mortar and online?” Same concept applies for field sales and inside sales. How those individuals collaborate and communicate becomes incredibly important because inside sales reps can really take a deal awry if they get sideways, if they’re not communicating well with their field rep that’s also working inside of the same account, which goes back to the importance of virtual collaboration tools. They can really document, log and enable the entire selling transaction and give you the 360 degree view of the customer regardless of who’s peering into that customer record.
[KP]: Yeah, absolutely. It’s exciting to see what’s going on and it really is interesting because, you know, there’s been this perception for years that sales is a soft skill. There’s a perception out there sales…either you got it or you don’t got it. And it really is far more scientific than that isn’t it?
[WR]: It is, and you know we like to say that there’re artist and there’re scientists. Your top 20% of sales professionals are artists. They just have a natural tendency to sell. They know how to get along with people. They understand needs. They have a way of translating those needs into solutions that a customer can then, you know, see value in and purchase and you almost can’t teach those top 20% anything. But what’s interesting about them is that they’re eager to learn. They seek out their own learning opportunities and those learning opportunities come in all types of shapes and sizes. Now the remaining 80%, that’s where you have to apply science, because they’re not artists, they’re not natural sales professionals. So, they need a little bit more structure and technique in how to properly execute a sales process. That’s where a lot of these tools like CRM and sales training and sales coaching, all of those things are just incredibly invaluable, because, you know, the company that focuses only on the top 20% of their resources isn’t going to get massive gain. But if you focus on that next layer down, the next 40% and you make them like your 20 percenters, you’re going to have massive gain.
[KP]: Sorry my friend, we are out of time. They’re telling me finger signs meaning that…they’re not being rude, but they are telling me that we’re out of time. Baker Communications, Merry Christmas my friend. Looking forward to helping to launch the new year next week. The number is 713-627-7700 or Bakercommunications.com. 713-627-7700. Thanks Walter Rogers. More for you right after this on CNN650.