I was flying with a senior engineer from one of the top 5 aerospace companies in the world this week as he was on a trip to meet with a number of his suppliers around the country. He’s been an engineer on the supply chain management side for years in several different very large companies. I asked him his thoughts on smaller suppliers- how can they get into a big company, how can they grow their business and what are some of the common mistakes. A couple things I got from our conversation include:

Getting In The traditional answers came up, but some nuggets came out. Industry networking – figure out a way to connect to the senior people at trade shows. Read the papers and articles in the industry and contact those authors who are active engineers in the companies with whom you would like to do business. LinkedIn is an emerging way to reach out to senior people and he is seeing more social media connection going on, especially in the specialty groups that are formed inside of LinkedIn and other SM platforms.

Procurement He saw my eyes roll and he laughed, but he tried to reassure me that this is still a good way to get in. His point was that starting at the top and working on getting an executive sponsor in Procurement/Purchasing/SCM is still the right move. Most small companies look at these areas as processes to follow or areas to avoid. However, his point is that the executives in these areas get big points for bringing in good suppliers who solve problems. If there is a mix of smaller suppliers who make the grade, they get every bit as much credit as working with a big supplier. In addition, smaller suppliers are easier to move into the “Top Supplier of the Year” winner’s circle at the end of the year because they are easier to develop, which is another way those executives keep score. His point was that the executives in this area of the business are getting their heat from the company for failing suppliers of any size. If they can get a quick resolution to a real problem by bringing in a smaller but successful supplier, it is a big win.

Main Suppliers Being a second to a prime supplier is a successful route and often leads to the second becoming a prime over time. His emphasis was the “over time.” The route is second, co-developed parts, prime, and this cycle moves slowly.

Here’s what he said about growing your business: Small companies are often looking for the fast win and fast growth, so they push too early. By being painstakingly perfect on initial orders, the follow-on orders and projects will come more quickly. Go slow to move fast.

Also, he said that smaller companies who ask for help, collaborate and are transparent rocket to the top of the list. The ones who hide their issues, close down or try to solve everything themselves do not look like good partners- they look suspicious.

Visibility Is Big Bring more people to the meetings when the big company comes to your site. Use the visits not only as quality control and education sessions but do in-services, brainstorming, and problem-solving sessions. When you visit the big company, take more people. Take senior people, take the president, when the big company is in the offices regardless of the level of person who comes, the executives of the smaller company need to show up and spend time.

Also, who is directly working the account is a HUGE issue. Don’t use younger, inexperienced people in any way on the account. Senior people need to handle the account management, the regular touch point work, any engineering, production or logistics areas.  If the bigger company makes a comment about a person they like or dislike, take it very seriously. Those relationships are very impacting to the overall companies’ relationships in many ways behind the scenes.

I think for many of us who work in the small business to big business arena, these thoughts echo our own impressions and experience of how this works: a good reminder and all of that.

However, I found the conversation interesting because of some general tones that were worth noting:

1. Smaller is better: The general sense was that his experience was that he preferred smaller vendors because of responsiveness, leverage and quality. His big issues were resources and that he felt that as those companies grew they sometimes “forgot who brought them to the dance.”
2. Playing favorites: Once a smaller company became a “go to guy for me,” he would maneuver the system to favor that company very aggressively. However, that company had to be able to respond with the same energy, quality and success on the next project or they became pigeonholed and would not get many new opportunities.
3. Whining v. collaborating: His point was that he and his people would work tirelessly with a company that they liked, who demonstrated that they were working just as hard and who collaborated. They cut off the whiners – those companies who had no ideas, who waited for his group to make all of the revisions and who seemed to sit on the other end of the rope waiting to be pulled up instead of at least grabbing onto the rope and to start climbing.

For most everyone reading this I think you will feel as I did about this conversation, invigorated. It clarifies from behind the curtain what the market thinks about your efforts and how it will respond to your approach.

Referrals, references, connections, networking, social media: they’re all about access and leverage. You get access to the people who make things happen and are able to leverage these relationships.

I want to focus on the second part: Leverage. How do you get the most leverage during the sales process from your past successful client relationships? If you have read my materials, you know that your prospects have to overcome their fears and concerns in buying from a small company before they buy from you and not from a better-known, bigger company. References can be a tremendous asset in getting a buyer to overcome that fear, or they can be perceived as worthless commentary delivered by your buddies. So, how do you get the most out of your best client relationships?

A couple of techniques for high-impact leveraging of your references: (more…)

Recently I was interviewed by Paul Diamond from the Vistage organization. We discussed the vast array of social media sites for salespeople and the fact that there are a lot of these sites out there, but not all of them are good. I think that Paul’s take on the topic and what he uncovered in his research is helpful. Check out his blog post on the topic on Bizmore.com.

First, let me apologize for the big gap in my blogging. I have been all over the country in the last 6 weeks with the Inc. Magazine presentation tour. We made stops in New York, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was a fantastic experience and I met some remarkable new entrepreneurs (those “newpreneurs” I’ve been talking about). Between those travels and my client work I have not had a moment to write to you. But, I’M BACK!

Follow this link below to a video of a the presentation I gave in Seattle. I covered the 5 Best Practices of Explosive Growth Companies.

Scroll down the landing page and click on the video box at the bottom.

The presentations went very well and we had a great exchange of ideas. The Q & A is worth watching as well because I respond to some of the questions typically asked by people who want to hunt big, but are not yet sure how.

It’s good to be back. Enjoy the video.

I’m working with a team of sales people right now—good sales people—who have one teensy-weensy problem: follow up.

The sales process for all of us includes a large number of transactional communications. They may include coordinating a meeting, securing a key piece of information, getting approval from Procurement or Purchasing, sign-off from a superior, the review of the proposal, signing the contract and so on. Every one of these communications must be completed in order to land the deal. If you participate in the sales process, you understand that rarely have you suffered more indignity or unprofessionalism than in this cycle of unanswered, unreturned or ignored emails, voicemail messages and sent and unsigned documents.  And it’s done WILLINGLY.

I’ve watched frothy-mouthed-screaming-at-officials-soccer-moms, who when faced with following up with a prospect who agreed to an action and hasn’t done it, say “Well, I’ll just give it another week.  I don’t want to be too pushy.”

I’ve seen bar-pounding-get-me-my-beer-now-guys wait for weeks for a response on a proposal. Weeks!

What is the right amount of time to wait before following up with a prospect? Not just any prospect, but a big prospect.  I know that you don’t want to be pushy or desperate.  I get that.  But you also need to keep moving the process along. We are looking for the Goldilocks “just right” level. Here are some pointers before I give you the timing guidelines:

• Ask. My favorite approach came from a guy in Ireland pitching me some commercial real-estate. He said, “Thomas, the line between persistence and annoyance is a fine one, and I wouldn’t want to be crossing it. When should I be getting back to you so I’ll know you’ll be picking up the phone.” In every direct communication, ask when they want to have you get back to them and be specific. “Early next week” is not specific. “Tuesday at 10am” is specific.
• Set expectations. It starts with setting expectations. In voicemails, emails, face to face or by phone, never end the conversation without setting the next time. Tell them when you will be calling or sending an email, specifically.
• Be impeccable. Never miss a time or date. Not by a minute. If you are going to set the time for follow up with precision in your email or voicemail, then you have to hit it. You are creating a perception of attention detail and reliability. Just because they are not impeccable does not give you a pass not to be.
• Allow some leeway. Sometimes, my calls for appointments and follow ups are missed by the person whom I am calling. I leave this message, “I have us scheduled for a meeting today at 9am. I probably just missed you or one of your other meetings is running over. I will call back in 15 minutes to connect. I look forward to our conversation. Thanks.” Then I call back. If I don’t reach the person, my message sounds like this, “I’m sorry we didn’t get connected today, I was looking forward to our conversation. Your day may have just gotten away from you, I know that happens to me sometimes. I’ll call you back at end of day today, say 5:00pm, to reschedule this call. Thanks.”  Don’t wait for a call back or an email.  Keep pressing forward.
• Drive, don’t ride. I don’t expect that people will be calling me back. I’m driving the process, so it’s my job to drive the communication. I am always willing to be surprised in a good way with a responsive person, but my control needs dictate that I can’t be waiting.  I have to drive. How about you?
• Walk away. Like the movie title says, maybe “He’s Just Not That Into You.” At some point, continued follow up is groveling. Don’t grovel. (see Brando Don’t Audition)

If they are not responding, it means that they have moved on. I send an email or leave a voice message that sounds like this:  “I’ve been in this business a long time, and when I stop being able to connect with someone it usually means that the timing for us to work together is not good. This is my last call to you for 6 months. I’ll circle back around then to see if timing is better for us to work together. If something changes for you between now and then, please feel free to call me. “

Having said all of this, here are some guidelines for proper Hunt Big Sales Prospect Follow Up Etiquette:

Prospecting Calls

• 1st Prospecting Call- You can call or email an unresponsive person within 48 hours.
• 2nd Prospecting Call– Within 48 hours of last call
• 3rd Prospecting Call– Within 48 hours of last call
• 4th Prospecting Call– Within 72 hours of last call
• Final Prospecting Call– Within 72 hours of last call

Trade Show Follow-Up – This gets trickier depending upon the volume of contacts.

• Pre-Set Personal meeting – Within 48 hours of trade show closing.
• Good conversation on floor – Within 48 hours of trade show closing
• Passing conversation on floor – Within 72 hours of trade show closing
• Fish bowl business card – Within 7 calendar days of trade show closing
• Prospect listed in program – Do you really have time to chase someone who you never met at the show? Don’t be a psycho stalker. Let it go.

Proposals. Assuming that you are sending a requested proposal, rather than an unsolicited one, your follow-up cycle should be declared in the cover letter. It should be within 24 hours to confirm receipt and distribution if appropriate. The time should be set at that time for a full review of the proposal within 72 hours. The house goes on fire outside of 8 calendar days—you must get connection and confirmation of interest and progress within 8 calendar days or you are dead.

Contracts. Who is driving? You are. Contract cycles within clients are a misty and dark area of the sales process. Lawyers think of themselves in this process as the stewards of their company’s risk, which they probably are. Because of this, they are slow, methodical and indifferent to you. First, get an understanding from your champion how long the cycle usually takes. Cut this time by two-thirds and follow up at the one-third mark in the cycle. Work both the attorney and the champion. Your approach should always be helpful: “What areas are of the most concern in the agreement? Which parts of the agreement are we going to be able to leave the same? How can we help to work through this agreement?”

Getting the prospect’s team to move. Stuck. I hate being stuck. Usually it’s IT, but not always. The process gets tends to get bogged down while your champion of your new client is waiting for someone in his or her organization to do something. Now everybody is waiting. Your follow up here has to be vigorous and consistent but friendly. You are working within 4 hour cycles of commitments. Any time that a time or date has been missed on a commitment, you follow up within 4 hours. If they are not missing commitments, then your follow up is within 1 hour of commitment completion to thank them for completing the commitment. 20 commitments? 20 thank you’s.

Information requests. Use the same guidelines as “Getting the prospect’s team to move.”

Guidelines are not laws.  When in doubt, use your own judgment. Always remember though, YOU ARE DRIVING.

I just finished Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, an oldie but a goodie. It tells the story of the Oakland A’s and their manager Billy Beane’s fight against the Conventional Wisdom of professional baseball. Beane guided his team in a battle against the “system”—the well established conventions of what it takes to make a great baseball team (or a baseball team great)—and won. Beane understood that his team was not just a group of players, but a group of people whose individual skills are needed to orchestrate a win. The same can be said for your sales team. The sales person, sales manager, designers, engineers, operations and client services personnel all have a hand in hunting a big sale. It’s the combination of skills they bring to the table that will help accomplish the goal.

What can hunters learn from Beane and his team?

Go Against Conventional Wisdom (CW) Let’s start with some of the “Conventional Wisdom” that organizations use when fielding their sales teams. Remember, these are the things you’ll be working against when putting together your team.

• “Our team must come from our industry.” I hear this statement 90+% of the time. This is true for some positions, but as I will discuss later, not all. This CW is limiting and can be expensive.
• “Have a set of deep contacts in the prospect base.” People like the idea of having access to large accounts via previous contacts, but with all the turnover and reorganization in the marketplace, this is not as valuable or as relevant as it once was.
• “Sales people are the most important part of the sale.” I have railed against the “rockstar” idea before. In the complex sale, one person may be the most important part of a single step, but is still, in the end, just one part of the overall team.
• Rockstar pedigree. You may be looking for players with the “big company” background, but in what way is experience from a behemoth, matrixed, highly-resourced and deeply branded company going to benefit a company like yours? In other words, how will those players’ backgrounds serve you?
• Look the part. There is a widely-held belief as to what a sales person looks, talks and “feels” like. In reality, there’s no real “look” to a great sales person. It’s his or her skill that will make the sale.

Team Building on Your Payroll (or lack thereof) Like Beane, small and mid-size companies don’t always have big league budgets to hire the “rockstars” to play for their teams. But since we play in the big leagues, we need to figure out a strategy to win… (more…)

At some point, we all say dumb things. It is natural and human, but for all our communication abilities, salespeople can say the darnedest things! I have compiled some classic ones below, but hope that you will add to the list with your own. Think of this as the list of things to never say if you are a salesperson.

• “It could be huge!” We have used this four-word exclamation in almost every seminar we have ever given.   However, when a salesperson says it, they’re asking for the owner to either berate them for exaggeration, or pepper them with questions. A salesperson knows that both of these reactions are  painful, and yet can’t help but say it anyway.
• “It could be the next . . .!” Like the previous statement, this statement comes jam-packed with assumptions and pixie dust. Of course, the worst of it is that the salesperson thinks that the last really big deal that was brought in looked just like this one. Now, he/she is not only subject to the wrath and ire of the boss, but also to that of all of his/her co-workers, since they’re going to have clean up the mess that “the next” creates.
• “This is going to be fairly easy … We only have to do a couple things different than usual.” Whenever the salesperson starts talking about how easy someone else’s work is going to be, she has lost the audience. It is never as easy as they think, because they don’t have to do the work.
• “We have the inside track on this one.” I know that I shouldn’t be superstitious, but I’ve found that the minute you taunt the world by declaring how good you are, or how something is definite when it isn’t, you invite trouble. Trouble usually comes in the form of the unexpected, the unanticipated, and the unstoppable. Don’t brag to the sales gods.
• “Now . . . this is full commission, right?” Any salesperson dumb enough to ask this question already knows that the answer is most likely “no.” Salespeople that worry that they won’t receive full commission are either cutting a deal that doesn’t deserve it, or working for firms that have a history of not paying.

As a lifelong salesperson, I am certain that I’ve said all of these things before. This, of course, is why they are so familiar. What assumptive phrases have you heard before from either your own mouth, or a salesperson you know?

I’m working on some big sales right now with my clients. I act as either a member of their team or as a key advisor. We’re aiming at accounts ranging from $500,000 to $100,000,000. This is a great part of my professional life. People hire me typically for one or more of three reasons:

1. They’re looking to “double their double.” They want to double the speed with which they can double the size of their company and they believe that landing large accounts is the way to do it.
2. They want a manageable and scalable approach to running their sales process, measuring it and improving their success rates.
3. They have a mega-sale that they want to land and they want me to be their adviser and coach. I play the role of “deal-doctor” for lack of a better description.

I’m doing all of this work right now for a variety of clients, but it just so happens that in the area of mega-hunts, we’re in a very busy hunting season.

Every one of these deals is different – different size, industry, competitive landscape, personality mix… You get the idea.

But there are a few things that each of these mega-hunts has in common…

(more…)

With the help of the TAS Group, Dave Stein and his company ES Research Group just completed a very interesting study–“The New Social Media: Do They Enable B2B Selling?”–which measures the top social media tools’ effectiveness in B2B selling. You can take a look at the key findings at www.esresearch.com/socialmedia (the executive summary is available here). The survey was filled out by nearly 400 sales professionals in the U.S.

For the lazy or only mildly interested, here is where they ranked in order of effectiveness:

1. Hoover’s/OneSource is the most helpful in winning B2B Sales at 54%, although 61% of those surveyed used it
2. LinkedIn is more widely used than other social media platforms, with 86% of those surveyed using it, but it helped in winning sales for 42% of those surveyed
3. Twitter is being used by almost a third of those surveyed (31%), but is only producing results for 13% (more thoughts on this later)
4. Plaxo and Facebook are being used by about half of those surveyed (50% and 48% respectively), who claim be to similar traction as with Twitter – (13% and 15% respectively)

The report’s conclusions were…

(more…)

Hi All,

It occurred to me recently that we have a TON of free sales resources scattered throughout our site. From e-books to podcasts, and webinars to essays, we’ve definitely taken this thought leadership stuff to heart. And now we’ve gone one step further and wrapped it all up nicely into one lovely package we’ve aptly named our “Resource Center.”

So now, instead of registering for every e-book or download, you will simply register once for the Resource Center (it’s still free, of course), and you’ll never have to fill out another form again. (Registration is only required for e-books, webinars and podcasts.) Your email address will become your login, although our center should recognize you if you enter from a computer that you’ve previously used to login. I’m not one to brag (which is a trait that my marketing agency cites as a fatal weakness), but it is pretty snazzy…

In all seriousness, though, I invite you to check it out and take advantage of all of our free tools, including a brand NEW e-book that we just introduced today. (I’ll write about that separately later.) “How to Get into Big Companies for Big Sales… and What to Do Once You Get There” details a variety of new challenges that big sale hunters face and then provides extensive pointers, tips and insight that will allow them to greet those challenges head on.

I would love your feedback on the new resource center and e-book, so please feel free to email me or leave a comment if you have a chance.

Now, let’s hunt! Tom