Passion is the key to great virtual presentations!

The key to presenting a subject in a compelling manner I believe is defined by one thing: passion. When presenting in a virtual world, passion and enthusiasm become even more important because whatever you possess will be repeatedly diminished by distance, bad speaker phones, distractions on the other end that you don't see or hear and etc.

All other things being equal or even failing, passion can sometimes, maybe most of the time, win the day.

I have just finished reading the book iCon Steve Jobs by Jeffrey Young and William Simon. And, among other things, I was really struck by how a passionate person who believes in himself and what he is doing can convince many smart people to do many crazy or seemingly impossible things. While you may be able to argue that he is not a saint, Steve Jobs is passionate and he is one of the best presenters I have ever seen.

So, how do you build passion and sustain enthusiasm throughout the day so that you can deliver probably mostly repetitive presentations in a compelling manner over and over again. How do you build passion and sustain enthusiasm throughout the day in this world now in early 2009 when you wake every morning to news of bad earnings and layoffs, political corruption and squabbling, scandals and foreclosures. It ain't easy.

For me, there have always been three tricks for creating passion and enthusiasm for a presentation, for a visit to the gym or sometimes to just get out of bed.

Number One is Inspiration: Find someone or a number of people who inspire you and then surround yourself with reminders of their hard work, dedication and success. For me it is Steve Prefontaine (a runner), Lance Armstrong (a cyclist) among many others. Think about the sacrifices that others have made to get where they are and how little you really need to do to get up for this next presentation. Another way to get inspired is to watch/listen to great presentations from the past. I would highly recommend listening the old Apple MacWorld keynotes by Steve Jobs (available on iTunes). There are also a good number of great presentations available for free now from the TED Conference. (www.TED.com and also available on iTunes). I would recommend listening to Majora Carter's presentation on Greening the Ghetto, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin and Sir Ken Robinson on How Schools Kill Creativity for starters. Then just follow your muse. You can also find some good presentations by Guy Kawasaki online.

Number Two is Music: Get an iPod or an iPhone or any MP3 player or use your laptop but get some inspirational music that you can play whenever you need it. In the elevator on the way up to your in person presentation or in your office for a few minutes before you pick up the phone. Whenever you can listen to the music that gets you going. Then on the way home at night listen to something more relaxing to bring you back down to a more relaxed state.

Number Three is Exercise: If I am bogged down during the day, feeling out of it, losing momentum, saying dumb things on the phone, I try to squeeze in a 30-45 minute run or a trip to the gym. Pushing yourself to talk to prospects and customers when you feel out of it doesn't do either of you any good. You can't create a sustainable value to your company or your customers without energy and health so you should be exercising anyway. However, sometimes it pays to time the exercise so that it also helps you get up for your job.

And, one last thing, unless you are in the investment business, I would try to minimize the contact with the bad news in newspapers and TV or save it for the end of the day when your down mood will not be shared with your customers and prospects. Of course, your family might not like that.

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.