The "email apocalypse" began on an otherwise uneventful day in April. Driving down winding roads flanked by the golden Mt. Diablo foothills with a crisp morning breeze drifting through my open windows as Audioslave pumped from my car speakers, the moment seemed idyllic. It was idyllic, that is, until the inevitable moment when my morning drive coincided with the rush of commuters pressing toward Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in San Francisco's East Bay Area. Brake lights interrupted the pleasantry as traffic slowed to a halt. Beneath the brake lights sat a single bumper sticker: As a matter of fact, I am a rocket scientist.
Had it been twenty years later, my phone likely would have apprised me of the crisis that awaited me on the other end of that standstill traffic. Nonetheless, my boss was too cheap to provide Blackberries so it was just Chris Cornell and me as chaos reigned in the early opening hours at work. It was April 3, 2003.
A year before, I was hired by a narcissistic British man to help his copier company break out of their 1980's business model. If you pictured Ricky Gervis from The Office (UK) when I said "narcissistic British man," you'd be fairly accurate. As my purview included sales and marketing, I inherited the company's poorly adopted CRM system. In my first year I completed the company's rebrand and managed to improve CRM adoption. My second year focused on optimizing the CRM system.
In the years to come I would start my own consulting business, where I regularly advised clients that the problem wasn't their technology. It was their process. Dunder Mifflin (name changed to protect the not-entirely-innocent) in this context was no exception. When the CRM was introduced in 1997, salespeople opted to avoid management scrutiny by postponing their opportunity close dates rather than marking them as "lost." They settled on an arbitrary date - October 3, 2003 - so that they could easily identify the opportunities that were held in stasis.
As a copier company, Dunder Mifflin was in the lease replacement business. To keep competitors at bay, our salespeople were expected to create opportunities for each customer at least twelve months in advance of their lease expiration. They used the lease expiration date as the opportunity close date.
The CEO had surmised over the years that our risk of customer churn increased in the six months prior to the lease expiration, so I programmed our system to look for opportunities with no recorded activity and a close date within the next six months. The system automatically scheduled a task that displayed on their dashboard and sent an email to the salesperson and their manager. Over the years, the typical salesperson moved 3-5 opportunities per month to the arbitrary October close date, and the typical manager oversaw six salespeople.
As I pulled into the parking lot on the morning of April 3, 2003, I had just auto-spammed 24 salespeople with 100-200 emails, and each sales manager received upwards of 500 emails. Our budget cut email server ground to a halt.
My cautionary tale boasts a few, intertwined lessons. It speaks to CRM systems that primarily serve as measurement tools, and the tendency for sales reps to enter false, self-preserving information into them. It speaks to the dangers of too much automation. It also highlights one of the most vexing challenges in sales: the dreaded "no decision."
While research suggests that roughly a third of B2B sales end without a vendor award, diagnosing - let alone solving - the problem is elusive. Changing priorities, internal and external pressures, and a company's own procurement process can contribute to scuttled projects. As salespeople, these factors are unfortunately beyond our control. Then, of course, there's the data problem that I outlined above. Sometimes the sales team's own policies, processes, and priorities encourage salespeople to push close dates rather than accept lost opportunities. And of course, sometimes the customer just never planned to buy anything.
This is the point at which most blog posts would tell you that you need to challenge the status quo and find a champion within the account. Our posts on the AIM Methodology and Ensuring Executive Buy-In cover those topics as well. Then of course there's your Mutual Action Plan which, if executed well and in the customer's best interest, can keep a seller ahead of a customer's changing priorities and pressures. But what if we told you that roughly half of your "no decision" deals came from something else entirely? Simply put, half of your "no decision" deals come from human psychology: risk aversion.
While many sales processes and Mutual Action Plans address the operational elements of a sale (pictured above), few of them address the psychological components of the sale. As you manage the operational components of the sale, you can also mitigate the impact of risk aversion by developing a Point of View that considers these three factors:
As we kick off our next installment in the Smarter Selling Series, we're going to take a closer look at your Point of View. Specifically, we'll explore why the Point of View is important, how to craft an effective Point of View, and common pitfalls to avoid in developing your Point of View. And of course, don't miss our next Smarter Selling Webinar, where we'll dive into these topics in greater detail.
Kahuoi's Conversation Starters service is designed to help sellers get noticed by delivering a strategic perspective and customer-centric Point of View. We provide valuable customer insights, strategic and value-based messaging, and customer-specific presentation templates that help you to inspire your customer to take the next step in evaluating your solution.
To learn more, please visit our Conversation Starters page or fill out the form below and we'll be in touch!