80% of our Sales People work hard, but the successful ones work SMART.
How do you ensure that all of your sales people work smart? To be honest, it has never been easy to get all of our sales people doing the same things. In most cases you will have one or two exceptional sales people, several average ones and a couple of poor ones.
It just seems to be the way.
Do we find out what our best sales people are doing and share it as best practice?
In most cases we probably do, but the trouble is most smart sales people don’t really like sharing the whole truth to their success because they like to stay one step ahead.
You have probably heard the story of the salesman who was the best in his industry and sold more shatter-proof glass than any other sales person in the land. When he was asked what his secret was at an annual conference he reluctantly revealed that he would wallop the glass with a hammer and then ask; how much glass would you like to order sir?
Every sales person in the company thereafter was given a hammer as a tool to sell more glass, and sell more glass they did, sales were up 60%, but at the next annual conference the same salesman was still top of the company. When he was asked why?? He revealed that he gave the hammer to his prospect and allowed them to wallop the glass before taking their order.
A smart salesman will rarely reveal the whole truth behind his or her success; it is just in their nature.
You are unlikely to get the same performance from all of you sales people. But if you give them a hammer you will increase sales and get a more consistent performance.
The new hammer for sales successes is Sales Intelligence or (SI). I’m sure is a term that you may have heard.
The business of the future will use Sales Intelligence the ones that don’t may get left behind.
What is Sales Intelligence?
Sales Intelligence Systems (SI) is often referred to as the infrastructure that enables your business to grow and increase profits. Your business already has this valuable information locked away in your transaction data and that very data is your Sales Intelligence.
When you hear the term Sales Intelligence or SI people are usually referring to a Sales Intelligence system, this is the engine that helps you interpreted that valuable data into very usable sales information.
Well what Sales Intelligence does your company have? Your company already knows
- which customers you’ve sold to
- Where those customers are
- You also know what products they bought
- When they bought them.
- How much you sold
- How much profit you made.
- How many they bought
- How your products are grouped
- What outstanding orders you have
You may also know if your customers are a member of a group and what industry they are in.
Having this information is important, but using this information is essential. Sales Intelligence Systems trawl through this data and identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities as well as highlighting customer drift, they then send this information to your sales people in the form of alerts, i.e.
This customer has bought product A and not Product B – Find out why?
This customer has not bought core product from us this week – Find out why?
This customer is in (X,Y,Z) industry and has not bought this linked product – Find out why?
This customer is up on spend but down on margin – Find out why?
The secret to sales success is Sales Intelligence.
Give your sales people the tools they need to succeed.
Really good article. My boss has got me looking into business intelligence at the moment however this maybe a better alternative.
Do you know where I can get further information on sales intelligence or who the best provider/s are?
Kind Regards,
Greg
Take a look at Sales Intelligence in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_intelligence
You might also find it under CRM in Wikipedia
Good Luck!
Regards
Adam
It seems Sales Intelligence is but a subset of Business Intelligence.
To some extent you are correct, but the difference is that sales intelligence includes an element of CRM and is specifically designed for use by sales people and sales managers. As a result of this it is easy to use and after initial setup it requires very little intervention.
Business intelligence requires you to ask questions in order to get answers, whereas sales intelligence will spot and highlight opportunities to your sales people; for example, say you run a wholesale stationery company and your sales people had hundreds of customers and thousands of products; how easy is it to spot those potential sales opportunities?
If your reps were receiving automatic alerts saying: This customer is buying envelopes but not paper – find out why? (Are they buying paper elsewhere?)
Or this customer is up on spend but down on margin – find out why? (Is there a switch-sell opportunity? Higher margin product or own brand)
Sales Intelligence tools are great at leveraging the information that already exists in your business, if you can get to this information fast and distribute it to the troops quickly then you don’t need a Sales Intelligence Tool. But you will always need the intelligent information that feeds Sales Intelligence tools.
Thanks for your comment.
Best wishes
Adam
I have previously introduced Vecta and found it to be a real eye opener!
Thanks for your comment Tim.
LinkedIn
Patrick A. Lusse has sent you a message.
On 09/16/09 7:56 AM, Patrick A. Lusse wrote:
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Hello Adam, just read your blog and I agree.
That flow of information (you call it it SI) is best managed by a highly skilled back office. An inside sales person that forms a seamless team with the outside sales person. Challenging each other to peak the results.
Unfortunately inside sales is a low prestige job that hardly ever has very qualified personel and certainly no bonus scheme sharing with the outside sales person.
I have set this up once where the results were super. Unfortunately it was stopped when reorganization was done and inside sales was looked at in a traditional way again. Surprise suprise, the set trend going upwards was flattening out.
Hi Adam
We try to do look for these opportunites using our CRM and BI tools and we get great results from sales but the effort in getting the right opportunity data is huge. I guess we now have as many people in sales support including marketing as we have sales-people on the road. As a result we have grown to be market leader – if there is a way of streamlining this it will be worth its weight in gold
JB
Hi John,
What you are doing is great… you are obviously a very pro-active company. What do you sell?
Vecta does streamline this process, this is exactly what it is designed for.
Thanks for your comment.
Adam.
We got a CRM system to try and achieve this but it hasn’t given us the result we hoped for. The problem is the difficulty of keeping the data current and relevant so its now not much more than a contact management tool and we have fallen back on the sales analysis reporting from the ERP system. This is very useful but as you say you have to ask the questions and keep the reports running regularly. Because of the time delays in getting the information its often to late to be useful to the account manager. The perfect solution would be a perpetual monitoring system that the salesmen could access from the web but I guess that is a long way off yet.
Best Regards
Chandra Patel
Hi Chandra,
This is not as far away as you think. We have our Vecta version 7 in Quality Assessment at the moment it is a browser based version.
Take a look at my blog titled “A CRM solution isn’t going to help sales people sell.”
http://adamsmobile.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/help-sales-people-sell/
Thanks
Regards
Adam
Interesting stuff. Problem is we are all so cynical, I have about 50 salespeople who all claim to know everthing already so you could be fooled into thinking we have loads of sales intelligence. Getting them to change their ways and use something rather than nothing is the trick.
Dick
Hi Dick,
I agree…
It is a problem to get sales people using intelligent tools to help them sell more, but this is because it is often perceived to be a task or chore, something else they have to do in their day.
When they realise that it saves them time and more importantly it makes them more commission, you get a complete turnaround in attitude.
I have a customer who recently implemented Vecta and he bought it for the Management team and two of his lesser performing sales people.
His whole Sales Team were introduced to the product when we demonstrated Vecta but most of them insisted they didn’t need it.
Less than 4 weeks later he called me and asked for another 22 users. The other Sales People were on his case when they saw the results.
Money talks! (sometimes)