Virtual Team Management

How do you manage a team of sales people who you don't see in person?  

This is all about relationships and building them in a virtual environment even though you may get to see your team once a year or so at the sales kick off. You need to continue to create touch points with your team to keep in touch such as email, phone, IM, text, Skype, and etc.

In the past, I have always done a one hour weekly team call and then a 30 minute individual call each week to allow people to brainstorm and share successes etc on the former and to go over individual opportunities and issues on the latter.

In order to keep the team call focused on adding value and brainstorming about how to find deals or close deals, you need to have a solid system in Salesforce so you don't have to spend a lot of time getting caught up on deal details.

Once your reps commit to this input into the system, however, it is your management responsibility to always be checking in the system when you have questions and not just defaulting to a call or email that will distract your reps.  Learn to use your system. Learn to create reports.  So that you can begin to interact with it naturally throughout the course of your week and keep a finger on the pulse of your business while providing minimum interruption to your reps. 

One of the reasons I started this blog was to be able to more effectively communicate to my team tips about selling virtually without having to tell them.  Now, if they have an interest in a particular post then can read it and if not they don't.

This isn't exactly new news but make sure your meetings also have an agenda so your rep(s) no what to expect and can prepare.  If they are prepared and have thought through things in advance they will be more proactive in the meeting and add more value.  If they no what to expect they will not worry about what they might not be expecting.

Also, make sure to start all of your meetings right on time.  Eventually, your laggards will learn their lesson and start getting their on time. Meanwhile, the team members who do get there on time will feel that you respect their time as much as yours.

During the meeting, make sure you have one scribe taking the action items and distributing them after the meeting so that you can go over them as part of the next meeting.  You need to create a culture of execution so that everything is getting done in a timely manner and so that people expect to be asked about their commitments and are not able to just let them slip.  A great book on this whole subject is Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.

Also a great tool to check out for helping you manage your virtual meetings, enforcing an agenda and creating a culture of execution is MeetingSense.  Go check it out and take it for a test drive. I have used it successfully so far at three different companies. 

What is Sales 2.0?

There were several questions recently that I saw on the Customer Collective as well as on several LinkedIn groups that asked the question, what is Sales 2.0. My answer is below. I think that this is an important question as many people I think view the answer as being about technology where as I believe it is more of an evolution of a state of mind:

Sales 2.0 to most people I think means simply using Web 2.0 tools such as Google and SEO, Social Media, Inbound Marketing and etc. to help you sell. However, I think that there is a much larger revolution going on in selling these days that is driven by the environment, the stagnant but also changing economy, by the internet and just generally by people's feeling of empowerment in the information economy. I have been seeing a lot of things point to this recently and have started a blog to talk about it at www.virtualsales.blogspot.com

For example, the economy, reduced budgets, higher travel costs and a drive towards being green, has drastically reduced the amount of travel we salespeople do, are expected to do and are allowed to do. In order to adapt we must utilize Web 2.0 tools to help us continue to build relationships, educate our target audience and add value to our customers without regularly being in front of them.

Also, since emergence of the Web and now even more so with Web 2.0, people feel empowered to take control of their own lives and enabled to research and manage many more things that they once outsourced to professionals like lawyers, stockbrokers and accountants. In this world, the saleseperson has to learn to embrace an educated public, learn to engage in this ongoing discussion as opposed to trying to leverage a lack of information. A great example here would be looking up the price of a car on a site like Edmund's before going into a negotiating with a dealer or owner. In this case the seller has to differentiate and add value through service or value added extras or knowledge as opposed to just on a lack of information.

So, given these two major changes in the environment of sales, I think people will absolutely have to adapt to be more focused on adding value, being knowledgeable, embracing the new web of information and being able to communicate and build relationships in a virtual world.

In Adversity Lies Opportunity

For people looking for inspiration and positives thoughts in this economy and new year, there is a great column in Forbes recently by Rich Karlgaard called "Pessiimism's Bull"

Essentially, he talks about how many great things and companies were started during the leaner times and people that get laid off sometimes go on to start bigger and better things.

Here is the last paragraph.

"Need some optimism? Here are ten great companies started in rotten times: General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people ) (1892, one year prior to the panic of 1893); Disney (nyse: DIS- news - people ) (recession of 1923--24); Hewlett-Packard(nyse: HPQ - news - people ) (1939); Hyatt Corp. (1957--58 recession); Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) (1968, a year of assassinations and political upheaval); FedEx (nyse:FDX - news - people ) (founded in 1971 but launched in 1973, the same year as the Arab oil embargo); Microsoft (1975); Apple (1976); Genentech (1976); Wikipedia (2001)."

Karlgaard also has a blog if you are interested in other things he has to say.

Top Three List for Sales Managers

In a post by, Dave Brock on the Customer Collective, he wrote that David Batup raised an interesting question on the Sales Best Practices group in LinkedIn. He posed the question: As a sales manager, what would your top 3 activities be?"

My top three would be:

1) Communicate with your team. Get feedback, give advice, brainstorm, find out what drives them, what scares them. Especially in today's virtual world, where you are rarely in the same room with your team, it is important to make the calls, text message, IM, I even write a blog and post info to a wiki so that I can communicate with them more.

2) Talk to your customers. Make sure they are happy. Get feedback on your products, your service and your team. Ask them about their problems, plans and goals. You could blog for customers as well or do a video on why customers should care about your company and put it up on your website.

3) Create a solid sales process that you can employ using a tool like Salesforce.com and then make sure everyone is using it. This will help them become better salespeople but more importantly it gives you the time to do the first two.

What are yours?

Is selling right brained or left brained

I just read the book, "A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future" by Daniel Pink and I strongly recommend reading it (see my Amazon widget). It begs the question for me, however, aren't salespeople or perhaps more accurately great salespeople more right-brained than most people? Full disclosure IBM actually assessed this for their management trainees as part of their Management Training program and I came out very right-brained. I had always thought of this as a handicap in the business world until now. Yeah.

The book's premise is that automation, outsourcing and our own success have led to the need for less and less left-brain types of activities (programming and etc) and more and more right-brain activities (relationships, art, design and etc.).

So lets look at what makes a great salesperson in the context of the book?

1) Relationships - great salespeople have to be able to build relationships with people because people ultimately buy from people not companies, even at IBM. They trust people not companies and they communicate better with people not companies.

2) Empathy - great salespeople must put themselves in other people's shoes to understand their needs, their pain and their dreams and then be able to create a path that gets their customers there.

3) Symphony - as Dan Pink states, symphony is the ability to bring things together, to be able to see the big picture and marry different things into one. This sounds like solution selling 101 and is a big part of what we salespeople do every day.

4) Story - great salespeople need to be able to tell stories and communicate in ways that people can relate to personally and understand as opposed to through endless statistics, numbers and Powerpoint slides.

5) Design - Great salespeople need to be able to design a pursuit of an opportunity, bringing all the players together in a project that makes things happen. They also need to be able to design how they want to communicate their message in various different media such as public speaking, presenting, webinars, video, Powerpoint and etc.

Over all great salespeople need to be able to understand their customers and their customers' businesses, be able to see the forest for the trees, solve problems creatively, communicate through stories and well-designed presentations that don't rely on endless text in Powerpoint. They need to use the right-side of the brain.

So, good right-brained sales people who create solutions, create value, build relationships, see connections where others don't are already successful and well thought of. The problem is that there are a lot more of the other type of salesperson, someone who is more left-brained, more transaction driven, more focused on money than meaning to paraphrase Guy Kawasaki. So, if you are creating value and driving benefits for your customers just keep it up and according to Daniel Pink your time to shine even more is just around the corner.

Building Relationships in a Virtual World

The picture at left is of my front walk south of Boston. It shows what happens when you choose not to shovel after a big snow and then it melts and freezes. I have put a load of salt on it but as you can tell it didn't really work.

As I attempted to skate/stumble through this mess this morning with my dog, it occurred to me that this could also be a metaphor for nurturing your pipeline, especially in a virtual world.

In my past at IBM, I spent a lot of time roaming the customers' halls and created a lot of opportunity and made many friends a long the way. Obviously you don't have this luxury when you mostly sell virtually.

In the virtual world, you have to work hard to create and nurture relationships and multiple touch points with your prospects and customers because it won't happen naturally or by mistake. You have to add value to these relationships by understanding your customers business and by being able to understand and help solve their problems.

Some tips to do this:

1) Use the news: Try to read through the headlines each day for business news as well as sports news that is relevant so that you have fodder for your conversations or better yet a reason to call or email someone with an FYI or how would this affect you email, even if it is just to congratulate them on the college team they follow winning their conference.

2) Get specific: Follow your target verticals or industries. Educate yourself and again reach out to customers with relevant news to ask them what they think, how it affects them or better yet with ideas how your product or service might be able to help them with a problem.

3) Get more specific: Try to to read the news on the specific companies you do business with everyday and use this for context in your meetings or again, better yet, a reason to reach out by phone or email. I use RSS feeds for this because it is impossible to keep up with any significant number of companies without it. I also use Google Alerts to follow companies. I recommend doing this for your own company as well to see what people are saying about you. Your prospects will Google you before you talk again.

4) Follow your ecosystem: If your company is aligned formally or informally with other companies follow them as well to help you find leads or again to give you a reason to reach out. For example, my company's product automates the creation of contracts. It works particularly well automating the documents and contracts in the sales cycle like NDAs, business cases, proposals, SOWs, and sales contracts and we have reduced our customers time and expense in this process by up to 70%. We also are integrated with Salesforce. So I follow Salesforce.com's press. And, recently, a large potential prospect of mine announced that they were committing all of their sales people to Salesforce. I called the person in the article and lo and behold, I now have a great opportunity for 2009.

So what does this have to do with shovelling? Well, shovel every day. Shovel when it snows. Don't wait for something bad to happen like rain, a bad economy or really cold weather because then it can be too late. Create a cadence of contact. Build your relationships and work hard to add value to your customers by bringing them information and solutions every day. 

Good luck.

Surviving a Tough Year for Tech Sales

As companies lay off workers and freeze spending, sales people need to become laser focused on building solid solutions and business cases and leveraging relationships to get deals done.

According to Forrester, businesses have cut back on tech purchases as they try to weather the recession. Worldwide spending on information-technology goods and services is expected to fall 3% year-on-year in 2009. Software sales are expected to hold flat.

But not all companies will adhere to the average so if you want your company to have above average growth, I would focus on building a solution to a problem that is top of mind for your customers hopefully that increases their revenue and/or cuts costs. Then I would build a bullet proof business case and make sure everyone has bought in.

Unfortunately if you are selling virtually it gets even harder to do this. So:

- Create a strong business case tool in Excel or whatever you prefer that can you can send to the customer and let them play with the assumptions to see how your solution could work. We have even played with exposing the tool at the end of our online demo to let people begin to see what kind of return they can get.

- Validate your assumptions with as many stakeholders and influencers as possible to head off objections later in the sales cycle. There are hints below on how to build relationships with these other people in a virtual environment.

- Continue to build consensus around your solution. You are fighting to the end with each sales in this environment. No matter how many people say yes there is always a chance that things get frozen at the very end.

Good luck.

Cell Phone as Mobile Office

Cell phones. Blackberries. iPhones. Everyone has one but in today's environment, they have become a virtual office for some of us as well. You never know when a customer or prospect will call and you can't afford to miss an opportunity.

So here are some of my ideas about how to optimize this new outpost.

Customize your ring tones so you to know right away who is calling. Try to use a specific ring for customers so that you are prepared and up for the call. Use a song that gets you in the right mood to answer a call from a customer. Use another ring tone for people who call you and typically waste your time and energy so you know that you can skip those when you are on a roll.

Get a headset or earphone preferably with noise cancellation technology so you can have a conversation no matter where you are without interference. I use the Jawbone and it works very well but there are others that I have heard are great as well. The stereo headphones that come with iPhone work pretty well too since they are in both ears but I don't think they technically have noice cancellation.

CRM on the phone. My company uses Salesforce.com and I know that this is available on the iPhone and I know that Siebel was available on the Blackberry when I was at IBM. This is definitely worth it at a reasonable cost if you are usually taking calls from customers or prospects on your cell phone. This way you can look things up in real time while on the phone or update the record right after the call while it is fresh in your mind.

Keep a presentation on your PDA or better yet a demo because you never know. Make sure it is a good presentation i.e. graphics, photos and etc. Not a lot of text. As a matter of fact, I would argue if the presentation doesn't look good on an iPhone it won't at a larger size either. Better yet get a demo on your phone. My software is used to automate contracts through a browser-based interview and it demos very well on a PDA. Soon we will be coming out with an iPhone version as well so it works out very well. Try it. Get a teenager you know to write you an iPhone App.

Enthusiasm in your presentations

The first order of a presentation is to translate your enthusiasm and passion for whatever you are presenting to those to whom you are presenting. 

This is a tall enough order when you are standing in the room with them but is even more difficult when you are on the phone presenting sometimes to multiple people.  When you are presenting in a webinar, you are presenting over the phone and sometimes to a group of people in a large room listening to you on a tiny little speaker phone.  Not exactly ideal circumstances. 

So what to do.

Talk Loud. Louder than you think you should.

Pretend that you are talking to someone across the room about 10 feet away not to someone right next to you. Project your voice and enunciate.

Also, I listen to music before a presentation to get myself in an upbeat mood that can carry through the presentation.

Finally, to reiterate a previous post, make sure that you ask questions throughout the presentation not just at regulary scheduled breaks or at the end.  This keeps people engaged and listening to you.

What does "presentation" mean and how can we change that?

Present. For many years in the business world, this word meant Powerpoint. Now, however, due to many different things, that misconception is beginning to change. For the little part of the world that I have started to blog about i.e. selling in a virtual environment things simply have to change.

The economy, budget cut backs, the environment and fuel costs will demand that we in sales will have to get better at spreading the word about our products and services, building relationships with customers and prospects and closing deals without standing in front of the customer, taking them out to dinner or taking them out for a round of golf.

And, Powerpoint is simply not the way to communicate passion in a virtual environment. It is not the way to engage and delight your audience. And, most importantly, it will not help you build relationships and close deals in a virtual world.

I just read a great post on the Presentation Zen blog that has some great ideas on Powerpoint and banning Powerpoint. You can link to it here. In his post, Garr Reynold's talks about a book called The Designful Company: How to buidl a culture of nonstop innovation, by Marty Neumeier. This looks like a great book that I have ordered but not yet read (review to come). Speaking of books, if you haven't read Presentation Zen that is also a must read (another review to come). Both of these books are available on my Amazon widget on this blog.

Here are some of my ideas:

1) Surprise - Everyone who comes to your presentation is expecting the same thing. Powerpoint slides with lots of text. Don't do it. Start your presenation with a video or a photo or a story or something that starts things off in a way that is unexpected. Get your audience off their heels and onto their toes. Get your audience to put down their Blackberries and shut down their laptops. If you are selling virtually, your audience can be doing all of these attention-sapping things without your knowledge, so nip it in the bud from the first interaction.

2) Humor - You are human. Your audience is human. Humans like to laugh. They like to laugh so much that it has been found to signficantly reduce stress and even cure disease. So, don't be afraid to be yourself and use humor. Don't tell bad jokes or be inappropriate but don't force yourself to be all business either.

3) Mutlimedia - Bring in things that aren't expected, like drawing on a virtual whiteboard, or video, or a cartoon or create an innovative way to demo your product, use audience participation. The best place to go looking for ideas on this is to look towards Hollywood. Everyday we watch things on TV and film, where millions of dollars and a huge amount of creativity are spent to engage us. Take a look at a Ken Burns documentary or a film trailer to get an idea of how ideas are communicated in a major league way. Another great source of ideas is the TED website. TED is a conference where a lot of great presentations are given. I just found that TED has an iPHONE app as well (search for VenueM on the AppStore).

You only have a small window of time and, in the case of virtual presentations, only the small window of a computer monitor to get your point across. Shake things up. Do something different. Get your audience engaged. Build a relationship. Get them to remember who you are.

Good luck.

Virtual Sales LinkedIn Community

Since I have been doing a lot of networking, lead generation and recruiting on LinkedIn as well as participating in a number of great discussions in several different groups that relate to virtual sales, I have started a LinkedIn group just for discussing virtual selling techniques, best practices, success stories and such to compliment this blog.

If you would like to check it out, you can just Search for Virtual Sales in LinkedIn and then look for my name or the lighthouse logo.

I used the lighthouse by the way because A) I live near a neat one, and B) it reminds me of the virtual salesperson sitting in a room somewhere on their own (hopefully you have an office away from friends and family) attempting to shine their light out into the marketplace.

Maximixing the impact of web meetings.

There was a question on the Salesblogcast.com group on LinkedIn about webinars and how you can maximize your success when using them or more and more are forced to use them as travel budgets get cut. Below was my response. If you are on LinkedIn, I would recommend checking out this group.

Unfortunately, the economy sometimes forces us to slow down or stop our travel but virtual sales can also be very efficient even in good times depending on your product.

My two cents on how you can maximize virtual sales is below and you have some great comments above as well. The number of comments and the quality testifies to how important these virtual sales skills are these days. This has become so important to me lately and such a popular subject that I have started a blog to try to drive more best practices and discussion at http://virtualsales.blogspot.com/. I would welcome anyone who wants to continue this conversation with me.

Virtual sales is more than just a webinar. It starts with qualifying, moves through multiple touch points like your collateral, building a business case as well. it is important to create these multiple touch points with multiple people at your prospect to build the relationships that are easier to build in person. I spent 6 years at IBM in a face to face world where my presence and my brand gave me a big head start. You need to work harder in this environment.

You can use video to do a quick introduction of yourself to start to build the relationship in the webinar. It doesn't hurt to have people see you and I think video can be more powerful than a photo. I have also videotaped some of my key customers so that I can have video testimonials in the webinar.

Tell stories that get your points across instead of just talking about features and functionality. Stories resonate with people long after the features and functionality have passed.

Use graphics, photos and images to make your points instead of all text. Liek stories, the images create a more emotional response to your product or services and prevent people from just sitting there and reading your slides.

When you use text think about build the slide so that you don't have people sitting there reading your slides ahead of you and no longer listening to you. Keep this simple and don't overdo it as it can get cheesy

Ask questions throughout not just at the end or during periodic breaks in your slides. And, ask specific people on the call (if there are more than one) to make sure everyone is paying attention.

Send individual follow up emails to each participant and call them so that you can build a relationship with multiple people in the company since you don't have the luxury to speak to different people before, after and at the breaks.

Good luck.

Giving Presentations and Increasing Touchpoints

The first thing I have been thinking about is how you can build a better relationship with prospects and customers on the other side of a webinar. Since you don't see people, you can't access their body language or facial expressions. Sometimes you don't even know how many people are listening in or who they are. So here are some tips that we have been using and we are looking for anything else out there that has been successful.

1) Use video. Do a video of yourself as an introduction to who you are and why you have chosen to work at this company. This will at least allow them to see what you look like and you should be able to translate some more of your passion through video than through audio.
2) Regularly scheduled questions and polls. As opposed to going for fifteen minutes and then stopping to ask for questions, I find that it works better to build in short questions or a poll into your presentation or demo to force people to take a stand or make a comment. This gives you feedback on your pitch as well as hopefully giving you a window into the thoughts of more than just one person on the phone.
3) Make sure to get the names, titles, phone numbers and email addresses for everyone listening in and potentially anyone who was supposed to be there but wasn't. Then after the webinar or presentation send out a note to each person individually with a leave behind for your presentation. This leave behind should not be your deck but instead a more in-depth document in PDF. After these have been distributed follow up with a call to each to get feedback on the presentation and on the process going forward.  Try to leverage social media as well to connect with your prospects in other contexts such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
4) Finally, when scheduling follow up presentations or demos to go more in depth or to reach a different audience, consider bringing in someone else from the company so that they can go through the process above and try to build relationships as well. Chances are that each of you will hit it off with different people and that you will now have doubled your contacts at this company. We also have a senior manager make a call into a project sponsor to check in on how things are going so that we can add that one more touchpoint and get one more source of feedback.

Please let me know your feedback on these activities as well as anything else that has worked for you.

Why do we need another sales blog?

I follow 28 blogs in my Google Reader and read many more on an ad hoc basis. This is obviously just a tiny subset of the thousands of blogs that are out there somewhere. There are a number of sales and business development blogs as well. So, this begs the question, why do I want to start another one. Here is my answer:

1) Sales is hard and getting harder given the current economic environment and the more information, benchmarking, networking and available help the better. I hope to add value in some small way and will continue to read, participate in and link to relevant resources around the world.

2) In addition to being hard, sales, how we sell and what tools we use to sell are changing rapidly. We now talk more and more about inbound marketing and social media then we talk about cold calling and the sales cycle. I think that there is a lot of opportunity to use these new tools to ramp up sales for your company but at the same time we need to continue to block and tackle and execute close to the ground just like the old days. All of these online tools also create an unprecedented amount of visibility for customers and prospects into our companies and products. Therefore we need to spend even more time ensuring that we have great products and great customer service because if we don't, word will travel fast.

3) Virtual Sales are different. While there is a lot of information on sales, Sales 2.0, lead generation, marketing and etc available online, I didn't find much if any specifically focused on how to maximize sales for B2B products and services in a virtual environment with little to no in-person customer contact. If you know of some great content in this area, please let me know. Given the tight budgets and the potential return to high oil prices, we have to assume that direct in-person prospect and customer contact is going to be reduced. I also didn't find much about how to best manage, motivate and report on a virtual sales force that sit in multiple global corporate or home offices.

4) Different point view. Most of the blogs, white papers and information, that I have found on sales have been created by sales and marketing consultants who want you to hire them to either train your team, organize it or replace it. While many of these people are very knowledgeable and I believe outsourcing your lead gen or sales in certain cases works, I thought I could offer a point of view of someone actively selling and managing a sales force for a B2B product company who is interested in creating a discussion and learning as much as possible as opposed to looking to find customers for my consulting practice. (Full disclosure: If this blog becomes wildly successful, I reserve the right to leave my current job to start my own sales and marketing consulting company in order to leverage my new personal brand.)

5) Most of all, I want to create a discussion that will hopefully help me learn more about my craft and help me better create leads and sales for my company while exploring and keeping up with the new tools and sensibilities.

6) And, finally, football season is almost over and the Patriots didn't even make the playoffs so I needed something else to do. The Celtics are doing well and the Red Sox are getting ready to go to spring training but they never caught my attention as much as football.

7-10) I wanted to have enough to call this a Top Ten List.