Fall Tune Up for Distributors
Let’s face it, summer time is filled with
distractions. Our
Sometime around September 1st, we snap out of
our summer induced behavior and put our noses to the grindstone. For the next week or so, we are going to talk
about a few fall tune-ups for distributors.
Think summer end elixir for a better year end.
If ever you planned to institute a new habit, this is the
time. For the next four minutes, let’s
think about selling time. We’ll ask a
few questions: How much time do our
salespeople spend selling? What
distracts them? How might we put the beauty back into the process?
How much time do salespeople spend actually
selling?
Based on observations of hundreds of salespeople and
dozens of distributors, the answer is simple: not much. Without getting into anything earth
shattering, we can subtract vacation, holidays, training sessions, sales
meetings and sundry interruptions.
Vacation, holidays and personal time for life issues alone typically
account for nearly 8 percent of the work year.
Let’s add in a few sales meetings, training sessions, and off-site
vendor meetings and we could easily come to some interesting conclusions. First, let’s assume salespeople are paid to
“sell,” yet they’re away from their job for more than 10 percent of the
time. Secondly, the seller spends just
one day per week doing administrative “paperwork.” We’ve somehow managed to drop time spent
selling by another 15 or 20 percent.
Salespeople, please continue to read…
This is not about sales department slacking. While we may touch up against the need for
planning, scheduling and effective use of time, this article isn’t about
calendar management. Instead, it’s about
sales management.
What takes salespeople away from selling?
Operational issues are a major source of sales
distraction. Think back to the last time
you went out with a member of your sales team.
Was a portion of the sales call devoted to discussing shipping errors,
delivery issues or a poorly handled customer service issue? Nothing sours a well-planned sales call like
a little back peddling early in the meeting.
It’s hard to sell “ease of doing business” when you just cost your
customer money based on something easily avoidable.
What’s worse for many distributor managers is this: Most lack the data to determine if their
growth problems are based on a sloppy warehouse and a crappy customer service
department or an ineffective sales team.
Some wonder if customer issues with missed delivery dates or inaccurate
shipments are just part of the “distributor sales game.” With this in mind, one would wonder if
gathering administration and logistics data shouldn’t be a standard procedure
for every distributor. We think it
should be.
Pricing situations can spoil a selling situation. While we could argue that price negotiations
are an integral to selling, I believe we need to explore a couple of
points.
First, unless you have accurate pricing information
loaded into your ERP system, just arriving at a valid price provides a selling
distraction. Each transaction requires
additional research. Every time a
salesperson quotes an amount to a customer, a dozen questions flash through
their mind. Is the price right? What price did we use last time? Could someone in customer service have priced
this differently? Where do we sit compared
to the competition? And more.
Not only is time spent researching for the right price,
we also create doubt and uncertainty.
When the salesperson guesses incorrectly, it creates additional
distraction. The salesperson spends even
more precious selling time fixing the issue.
Secondly, when no selling process exists, the salesperson
is stuck negotiating every single sale.
To summon up something said by my friend and pricing expert David
Bauders of Cleveland-based Strategic Pricing Associates, you never see a dog
beg just once. His point is simple: If
you give your dog table scraps one time, they turn into constant beggars. When our salespeople lower their prices once,
the customer becomes conditioned to request a lower price on each
opportunity. Negotiations take away
from, you guessed it, selling.
Unless the distributor employs a full-on pricing process,
salespeople are left to determine price.
Customers bombard them with the message “your price is too high,” and it
ruins the selling moment. This constant
bombardment of negative energy causes many sellers to lose perspective on the
value their organization provides to customers. Sales experiences, without the presence of
value-creating solutions, are about as exciting as the paint page of the 1964
Sears catalog.
Management teams syphon selling time on a regular
basis. Earlier, we listed all of the
mundane consumers of time (vacation, sales meetings and so on,) but many times
managers hurt their own cause by not thinking of the sales team when they set
up meetings. Any meeting scheduled for
midday consumes the better part of a whole day, even if it only lasts an
hour. This is especially true when
ending times are not strongly enforced.
The office is not the salesperson’s friend, specifically,
the practice of starting a business day in the office. It puts the kibosh on selling
efficiency. Nothing cuts into sales time
like being readily available at the launch of a business day. Here’s why.
It’s natural for customers to ask for their salesperson
on some of the most routine issues. The
sales DNA steers the seller toward helpful behavior. They get wrapped up in lots of trivial tasks
that should be funneled to someone in customer service. What’s worse is this: Customer service people
often don’t understand it’s their job to get the salespeople out
of the office. I have seen inside salespeople
and customer service representatives complain when sellers refuse to handle
incoming calls. This quickly becomes a
management issue. You cannot afford for
salespeople to handle things like order entry, stock checks and routine
expedites.
How do we ramp up the real selling
activities?
It’s a management-driven process. First, you must ensure the distractions are
removed. Distributor selling today is a
team sport. Some of these are not
directly tied to outside salespeople.
Metrics and measures must be inserted throughout the whole of the
customer experience.
You must develop performance expectations for all
components of the selling machine.
Here’s a fact: Many sales types confuse routine reactive care with
selling. They feel good at the end of a
long day of handling administrative tasks and minutia associated with their
customers. Customer care is important,
but it’s not the best use of their time.
If they must step aside from real face-to-face selling, something is
wrong in another department.
Finally …
I believe in data.
Hand waving and opinions are nice.
No discussion of politics, religion or Olympic figure skating should go
without them. In our world, I’ll take
data. I regularly require my clients to
take inventory of their day. How did
they really spend their time?
Here’s how it works.
I ask every salesperson to log their day
At the end of the week, I ask for tabulations. How much time was spent in each of 10-
activities? I insist on real-time logs,
but leave the tabulation to the seller.
The end result is always eye opening for the seller and their manager. Most can radically improve their sales
effectiveness. Why? Well, if your sales time is hovering at
around 25 percent, just a few minutes a day can ramp you to 30 or 40 percent. That’s a big jump.
If you would like to see the 12 activities we tie to
times, drop me a line. You can log the
time spent under planning and process improvement.
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