How about never, does never work for you?

(Editor's note: By inserting the image of this upstanding gentleman, my paragraph spacing got tasered. It's a bug with the software. It's a good read but the paragraphs are huddled together like plane crash victims waiting for Search and Rescue).

The dreaded Sales Technique.

If you're in your in your thirties or beyond, you've probably been exposed to books and training whose purpose was to impart the wisdom of various sales techniques. Essentially they are methods of manipulation in an attempt to trap or get a prospective buyer in a position they may otherwise resist. The example below is parody but this is what buyers typically associate with strangers trying to solicit their business...even in the year 2008.

Salesperson: Hey..listen, just so happens, I'll be in your neck of the woods Tuesday and Thursday.

Prospective Buyer: Who is this?

Salesperson: ABSOLUTELY!

Prospective Buyer: What are you trying to sell me? Who is this?

Salesperson: I ABSOLUTELY hear you on that!...are mornings better for you?

*********************************

The marketing part of any sales position is definitely a contact sport. If things eventually align correctly, you don't want to be calling strangers asking them for their time and money. They hate it, you hate it. But in the short run, you may not be so lucky. You will likely have to reach out to someone who isn't expecting your call or correspondence. In almost all cases, they will be engaged in something else and you will be an interruption. Put yourself in their shoes. Don't be an idiot.

Be concise. Give them an out. If they give you the floor, don't talk about how freakin' incredible your products are. Don't ask them "what keeps you up at night". Telemarketers keep them up at night. That milk carton's expiration date of a phrase is six weeks old. Buyers are sick of it.

Ask them if they have any business problems that, potentially, your company can solve. Most important, work on the rapport part without being a phony. It isn't easy and if you're incapable of the nascent building blocks of building rapport with a complete stranger, you might be in the wrong business. (Doesn't make you a bad person. Very few can pull this off. It's very difficult.)

Bottom line: There are plenty of companies that can solve their business problem, several might already be on their rolodex.

But if you've gotten this far, you're in the game.

Again, if given the opportunity, try to have a conversation. The rest (e.g. next actions, their buying process, drilling down a little, etc..) should come as a natural part of the conversation and not be forced.

Pretend you are they, chaos is in full session and, for whatever reason, you decided to pick up the ringing telephone.

Kim Jong IL, Inc.

The next time I'm on a company's website and they use the language "the leading"... as in Strategic Cyber Paradigm Shift Solutions, the leading Enterprise Application Integration company, today announced it will be entering a strategic partnership with Win Win Solutions.

Says Strategic Cyber Paradigm Shift Solutions (SCPSS) CEO, Tucker Buffington, "Being a dynamic, customer-centric, client-focused global leader means, among other things, we hope the value-add created synergies will clearly exhibit our penchant for entering utterly meaningless partnerships, issuing inane press releases and using the word strategic as frequently as possible-including but not limited to- all written descriptions of our senior management's trips to the restroom"

Where was I again? (not to worry- I'll tie this in to that little menace Kim Jong IL in a moment)

Oh yeah, the insistence of companies in describing themselves as "the leading" no matter who they are, what they do or, perhaps the most patently absurd-if indeed they are the "leading" anything.

I casually glance at the text of hundreds of business websites a month. It’s riveting stuff, really. They basically all say the same thing. And that thing is “we are an un-freakin’ believable company..”!! Read what random people are saying on our website!! We’re the leading company in our space!! We might even be the leading company in Outer Space! You say IBM is in that space? We’ll take their lunch money and issue a press release about a strategic partnership we just formed with IBM’s lunch money!

North Korea’s state media has stated several times that Kim Jong Il is an avid golfer and routinely nails three or four holes-in-one per round. That just one of several dozen whoppers that they feed their incredibly oppressed people.

Here’s where I'm going with this.

There’s a marketing guy named Perry Marshall whose writing I enjoy. Several months ago he stated that the promotional materials that typically emanates from totalitarian states-past and present- hardly differs in bombast from the promotional materials/drivel marketing departments of U.S. Corporations churn out every day. I had been thinking this for years but he beat me to the punch.

I understand an organization wants and needs to present themselves in a most favorable manner to their customers, potential customers and the investment community. One can tell a very nice narrative of an organizations history as well as their present and future directives without sounding like some cement-head from The World Wrestling Federation.

Can we just, for openers, put an immediate moratorium on the usage of the adjective phrase “the leading”?

Any study of the truly great people who’ve walked among us and before us reveals they didn’t spend a helluva lot of time wordsmithing their press releases.

Cost of Acquiring a new Customer

The cost of acquiring a new customer and the formula that goes with it are very simple.

Take your complete marketing budget, add in the salaries and bonuses of Inside/Outside salespeople, take the cost of pre and post sales support and add in the price of a barrel of crude oil on the commodities market, blend in the estimated yearly cost of toner cartridges, pare in the variable cost of picked lobster meat, divide it by the number of business days in a year and take the piece of paper in which you detailed this elaborate formula and promptly set it ablaze.

The only thing smart business people know is it costs A LOT of dough. So much that most businesses concentrate all their efforts on their best prospects…their customers.

And that’s not a bad idea. Reward is not the only thing that comes with Risk.

But if real, organic growth is targeted, you better figure out a way to find new, profitable customers- hopefully within a budget that isn’t going to reduce your business to a third rate lemonade stand. Or the Business Boneyard.

No matter how you slice it, it’s going to cost money and it’s NEVER easy.

Most senior managers choose to beat the crap out of their existing, salaried Sales Managers and salespeople. “Open some new doors!!...what the hell do you do all day?..”

If you’re the guy either meeting payroll or answering to the people responsible for direct-deposit checks arriving in a timely fashion, you probably feel more than entitled to asking that question. I been asked that question many times, usually accompanied with a menacing stare.

If it was easy, every business that sells to other business would be operating at 20-40% gross operating margins.

If your team is smiling-n-dialing with their hats in their hand, good luck with that. I mention this many times in these pieces. Have you or anyone you’ve ever know EVER bought ANYTHING from a cold, telemarketing solicitation?

At best, you fielded a cold call from a highly skilled, very patient sales/businessperson professional and, over a period of time, the relationship grew and a mutual understanding of each other’s unique business challenges and offerings evolved. Eventually, a business problem materialized. You selected that vendor to solve the problem. I just laid out what takes place in approximately .00000401 percent of business-to-business cold telesales calls.

If you’re not creative or the people you’re paying to sell are not creative, things are not going to get any easier. And I don’t mean Guerilla Marketing creative though some of that can be effective. If you’re not positioning your outbound sales and marketing efforts to where the prospects are eventually calling you, it might be time to take a step back.

Sales Guy on Line Two

Has anyone since the fall of Rome ever purchased anything from a cold-call Telemarketing call.

I'm not speaking of the androids who call you at home at night (though they have a special place in heart), I'm talking about this nation's estimated 29 billion ham-n-eggers who refer to themselves as anything from "Senior Account Executives" to "Senior Strategic Marketing Specialist Courtesy Calling Carbon-based B2B Executive Special Advisor to Other Specialists".

Seriously. Since we've been keeping the records, has anyone ever bought anything from one of these calls?

And it's not just the outsourced boiler room telemarketing "firms" that do this. Most of the Fortune 1000 that are in the product or professional services business do this to their customers and the people and companies they want to be their customers. And here we are, early in the year Two Thousand and Eight, waiting for the first big "close"; the first transaction.

While waiting, I advise us all to pack a lunch four times the size of the buffet line @Uncle Tony's Wicked Huge All You Can Ingest Pasta Factory".

Nobody is buying because Cold Call Telemarketing stopped working shortly after that Mother of an Asteroid took down those four-story lizards that the children love so much.

Ask 100 businesspeople who routinely buy things from vendors...Ask them about any recent purchase/transaction. Go ahead, ask them. "How many of you cats bought that widget because some stranger interrupted you in the middle of the work day and pitched you on how you can leverage their strategic, mission-critical, scalable, critical mass, dashboard,infrastructure solution...with two tablespoons of levergable strategery".

Now I'm going to flip this, completely.

Some of those 100 businesspeople have bought from a stranger who approached them first. In fact, several.They just don't think of these people/vendors as strangers because now they think of them as friends or at least advisors or trustworthy vendors.

So how do you do that?

I know how to do that.

I takes some time, at minimum several weeks. Typically a few if not SEVERAL months. But in the end you get a customer, hopefully one of those coveted 80/20 types, but there are NO FLIPPIN' SHORTCUTS. You don't manufacture relationships. It's not a helluva lot different than romantic relationships. It needs to be cultivated and nutured. You don't ask the person you were just introduced to to marry you. 99% of the people who have the words "Sales Weasel/Sales Manager/Sales Director/VP of Sales/ in the Occupation Field on their W2 do not understand this.

And the world keeps spinning.

Lawyer Up

I've heard the same as you. If I or a loved one was in a world of trouble, I would want would the best possible legal representation. One of the reasons my daily "to do's" includes stay the F%$k out of trouble.

I also know every lawyer- from the cub who just passed the bar to the uber-cuddly Alan Dershowitz-believes that due process and every person's right to a fair trial supersedes anything. ANYTHING. Anything like, you know, every fiber in their lawyerly being KNOWS the guy sitting across the table from them is the same guy who molested and carved his wife and children into roughly 4,486 pieces.

Better a bazillion guilty people walk than a single innocent getting locked up, right?

Completely Destroying America's Hopelessly Outdated Legal System and Re-Building It For Dummies...When is that hitting the bookshelves?

The United States Constitution and some of the documents that followed were and are extraordinary. They're not perfect or resistant to addendum. That's already been exhibited.

I understand the fear our founding fathers had in the total and absolute power of The State. The litany of historical horror stories that preceded the establishment of our Union is long and grotesque.

But when does a collective consciousness step in and say "..O'kay, enough. No more serial rapists are walking on technicalities." There is some breathing space between absolute power of the State and crippling everyone who's job it is to catch both the egregious rule breakers as well as the vermin who literally torture others while laughing at the system with their pin-striped posse' in tow.

Tony Robbins could crack a coconut with that lowel mandibel

Neither myself or the people I affiliate myself with would ever want to be called Sales Gurus. In fact, I might want to throw down if you called me that. Unless you are significantly larger than I. A calm, reasonable exchange of ideas would then suffice.

I think 90+ percent of that How to be a Super-Duper-Can Do Storm Trooper in sales is utter horse feces. 10-15 years ago I would have said all of it should be lining bird cages. The teachers and the messaging, however are getting better. That's a good thing. A discernable drop in the amount of sales automatons attempting to sell you should register soon.

Nothing of worth or value comes easy. Didn't your Grandpappy tell ya that? After he sobered up a little? No? He'd disappear for days, huh?

Let’s go the full-disclosure route, here . I’ve been fired from corporate sales jobs before for not selling enough, not selling fast enough, not selling aggressively enough, not watching and then emulating the ultra high testosterone-laden films like Boiler Room enough. Ho-hum.

Sell, damnit! Close them!! Find new customers…NOW. Close em’ out. You sell anything today, maggott?? That’s pretty much the message (after all these years) in the VAST majority of corporate sales groups. Especially when the numbers get a little light. Good times, huh? I wonder why salespeople are so universally loathed.

Flip side: I’ve approached hundreds of complete strangers in my career who didn’t know me from Batman, what I was representing or the company behind it. They ended up buying my stuff. And then, later, they bought more.

Oh, sure, I like to think it's in part because I’m a pretty clever guy, I learn fairly quickly, I present well and I know I can consistently make people laugh. All in all, fun guy to have a beer with. But that's a relatively small part of.

You know that old sales training line, People are not buying your product...they're buying you!! Unless what you sell is a pure commodity, that line is dog poop.

All joking aside-but only for a moment-I understand and employ some of the methodologies out there that are critical to get in front of the right companies, the right people, at the right time while maintaining and nurturing those relationship. Not exactly Sales 101 but not splitting the atom either.

But the people who buy or have bought my stuff did so because they either wanted it or, more importantly, they needed it. And when they were ready, THEY CONTACTED ME.

Need to buy me some more of them there banner ads

People buy from people they know. That’s the just the way it is. Ask Bruce Hornsby, he knows...he knows lots of stuff.

All your business is coming from your customers. That’s just ducky but, unless they’re receptive to all your new wrinkles, consistently buying new products and services/service agreements while grinning broadly and hitting their Net 30’s every month, not a lot of growth going is going on under your roof.

The short version: You want to grow the business. You’re spending a lot of dough on things that clearly aren’t working.

Not to hit you over the head with this but if you or your team is not consistently sitting across the table, eyeball-to-eyeball with companies and people who haven't done biz with you before, you’re not going to grow. Case closed, Judge Ito.