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…
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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…

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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…

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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

There are so many “experts” in the world today—people from every angle and media source. They are friends, clients, vendors, family, talking heads on TV, bleeps on Twitter, posts on Facebook and on and on…

Every once in a while it’s good to dial the noise back and ask the question: “Which voices should I let through and listen to…?” Here are my answers to that question, at least for the moment. I guess I should add that some of these voices are as much guilty pleasures as they are credible sources…
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I write you at the behest of my marketing agency, who pretty much has a gun to my head on this one. Evidently our little blog has been added to the Executive Coaching category over at Alltop, which is marketing guru Guy Kawasaki‘s online “magazine rack.” I’m told this is a very good thing and because I like very good things, I thought I’d pass along the news.

I went over and took a look at Alltop.com and I must say that I’ve never felt so marketing or media-savvy as I do now. Alas, marketing and sales have come together in perfect harmony. Who would have thought it? Anyway, this is what it is: You’ve got a bunch of categories–from A to Z–and within those categories there are feeds from trusted websites and blogs. But why would anyone need a site like that when there’s google? Well, these sites are pre-screened for good content. So if you don’t necessarily have a specific question to type into google but want to find out more about a general topic, you can head over to Alltop to find really good sources on the subject at hand.

So there you have it. I’m really honored and hope to live up to my new status as a “prominent blogger.” Help?!?

Guest post by Tim Searcy

When I grew up, social networking was code for cocktails at 5:30 PM. Now I find out that it’s code for just about anything and everything digital that brings disparate individuals and groups together: blog postings, topic-based forums and many other platforms I’m just now getting my head wrapped around.

My friend and colleague Azlin Happley sent the old timers in the office some clear rules of engagement for Social Networking, and I thought it would be nice to let you weigh in as well. She is classified into whatever the sociologists call the most recent generation, and I trust her knowledge of the technology that makes me go “WOW!”

Social networking is often about reading a lot of postings, and carefully selecting the person that you want to engage in conversation. However, instead of the blast nature of some other forms of marketing, you have to be very one-on-one when the promise is a one-to-one relationship. This means you will have to e-mail the person you want to connect with, and this is where it can get hairy…

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*A small town in southern Indiana. What did you think I meant?

The power of words…

Grab attention, communicate an idea, provoke, engage, energize… If you hunt large sales, you know that the turn of a phrase or the capturing of a concept hinge on powerful words. I just read Frank Luntz’ article “Words That Pack Power” in the November 3rd issue of BusinessWeek. He picks out five words from the executive lexicon that should be used regularly in the current business world…

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If you spend much time with sales people there is always the scene-referencing-line-quoting-bad-impersonating portion of the conversation. Every conversation. Certain company cultures are rampant with it.  So, let’s embrace that part of our shared consciousness.

Your challenge:   what are the best sales movies ever?  (more…)

I just read Businessweek’s September 15th article, “The Best Places to Launch a Career.” It listed accounting firms and the government as two of the top three. Did we just step into upside-down-world? Bureaucrats and bean-counters made the top spots? Really? Both of these groups are like coroners: they can’t tell you much about how to stay healthy, but they are great at telling you what killed the body and who’s to blame.

If accounting and government are the launching pads, what are the space shuttle destinations?

Here are my picks for “Best Places to Launch a Career”… (more…)