The Most Pervasive Problems in sales outreach

It's distribution that really makes documents powerful. When your prospective customer receives your sales letter, or when warehouse personnel receive the order dispatch advice, or when the shop floor manager receives the day's production schedule, your business gets moving. It's documents produced in a court of law that proves your claims, and so on. ™

1. Business transactions typically require collaborative working, which require effective communications among the workers. Well-designed document distribution systems can improve the speed and effectiveness of the communications, and even the performance of collaborator roles.

2. Electronic documents can be attached to predefined or ad hoc approval processses to ensure that they reach all persons who have to work on them. Electronic Document Management (EDM) systems will alert the recipients about the documents that need their attention and thus expedite work performance.

3. Documents can be distributed in different ways. In addition to the workflows that keep the document moving internally, there are e-mails, bulletin boards, Web conferences and intranets that can make documents available to persons inside and outside the organization.

4. One issue that can arise during collaborative working when multiple persons work on the same document is that of avoiding overwrites of each other's updates. If two or more persons work on the same document at the same time, it is possible that one person's updates can be overwritten by another person. To avoid this possibility, EDM systems typically offer check-in and check-out tools that permit only one person to make changes to a document at one time.

5. Different kinds of document distribution require different kinds of actions to ensure that the communication is received (or demonstrated as likely to be received) by the recipients. E-mails have to pass successfully through e-mail spam filters, postal mail might need to be posted under certificate of posting, and so on.

6. Where electronic documents are distributed widely to the public, as in the case of electronic white papers, readability can become an issue. If the document is prepared using a proprietary application, the recipients might not have the relevant software to read the document. Tools like the freely downloadable Adobe Reader seek to solve such problems.

7. Document distribution can also occur when relevant documents supporting your claim in litigation are sent to attorneys of the other party. In these cases, the issue of "redaction" becomes relevant. While you are obligated to produce information that supports your contentions, you are allowed to remove parts of the content that can harm your case. Care is needed to ensure that this is utilized. Careless distribution can mean that such data can reach the other party, say in the form of invisible metadata attached to electronic documents.

8. Instead of sending sensitive documents outside the organization, external parties can be allowed to inspect them in a data room, virtual or real, in the organization. This is the typical practice in the case of due diligence investigations as part of M&A and loan negotiations.

9. When electronic documents are distributed over the Web, there is a possibility that their content might be tampered with during transmission or at other points in the route. Encryption and document locking are often used to prevent this. Encrypted documents can be opened only by a recipient who has the relevant key. Locked documents cannot be modified further.

10. Document distribution can prove an expensive affair. To reduce costs, and increase effectiveness, you can entrust the task to third party fulfillment services. The service providers will typically have the facilities, procedures, and experience to ensure cost-effective document distribution.

Documents such as brochures and correspondence serve their purpose only when distributed to relevant recipients. Internally, it's the distribution of documents to concerned employees that gets the operations of the business to flow smoothly. Considering the variety of documents and the different document distribution practices, costs of distribution can reach unreasonable levels unless the process is systematized.

Sales are the life-blood to every business. Without sales there would be no income, and no means or justification for the business to exist. To justify the position of "sales representative" it is based upon one truth:

"The purpose of a sales representative is to close the sale. It's the only reason why the job exists."

Without this truth, the job of salesperson cannot be justified.

Before you can lead or coach anyone to become better, stronger and more successful in sales, as a sales leader you need to recognize these 3 realities about the selling process:

Selling is a system. You have to follow the system for it to work, but more importantly you have to know the system before you can follow it.

There's AirSales always the baseball analogy; if you hit .300 in baseball you're considered a success, which means you've failed 70% of the time. But let me take it a step further. Good hitters succeed because they know how to read the pitcher, how to read the game situation, how to recognize the pitch as it's coming at them, and know how to swing the bat differently to effectively hit each pitch. Good sales reps have the techniques to be able to do the same in a selling context. In short, good sales reps are able to think on their feet.

Selling is a competitive process. People who embrace competition and enjoy competing do well in sales. Like the marathon runner who has learned to ignore the voice that says "quit running", the star salesperson has learned to turn off the negative association with the word "NO" and has put it in the right "it's just business" context.

Salesmanship is a pattern of behaviors. It's an oversimplification to suggest that knowing the selling system itself will make you successful at sales. It's sad to say that many people have followed the system to the letter only to fail miserably at selling. This happens because selling systems fail to get to the heart of salesmanship. Salesmanship depends upon interpersonal behavior, which rely upon attitudes, assumptions, and conduct, but not formulas.

In the world of sales this translates into spending time with your salespeople so they learn the art of salesmanship from you. Not in team meetings, not with "hallway atta boys", but spending one-on-one time with them where the action is. You need to be right there when they're reacting, responding, and relating to a client during a live "as it happens" sales call.

Are You Demonstrating Good Salesmanship to Your Crew?

In my years of sales management, when the going became tough as we were challenged with a large goal I likened the role of a sales manager to the elder in a pre-modern time village.

A lion had been terrifying the camp, eating the normal hunt that surrounded the village that they counted on for food and making the villagers fearful that they're next on the lion's menu. It was up to the leaders of the village to go out, kill the lion and bring the head back on a stick to show everyone that it was dead so life could go on. It was a matter of survival between the villagers and the lion.

The analogy in sales leadership is that we have to kill the lions that have some of our salespeople scared.

Disbelief that people will buy today, low confidence in closing the deal, call reluctance. These are the lions that terrify a sales team. Especially with newer sales people who are asking for bigger dollars than they're used to. It's up to the leadership of the sales department to take on those "lions" in the form of companion calls and companion closes.

My definition of companion calls, or "shadow calls" to some is to be at the sales call with the sales rep who is in front of the client to observe the sales call first hand. If the sales rep stumbles during the presentation you're there to get it back on track and demonstrate how to do it correctly. An honest critique of what went right and wrong during the sales call also needs to be carried out after the call is made, and needs to be done in private. My critiques were usually carried out in the car as we were off to our next call. It's very important to teach your sales reps "how to do it" in a real world situation and in my opinion that means in front of a customer.

Fear of failure, rejection, or just not doing it right is as big as a lion if you're a new salesperson. With companion calls you'll hunt down the fear and inexperience that many new salespeople have. Sales leadership can show first hand how it can be done and the way that it is done successfully. A new salesperson or a veteran stuck in a rut who brings back a big order due to a companion call is the same as bringing back the head of the lion to the camp. "Look, the lion is gone. Just do like we did here with all your calls and you'll close more sales, guaranteed."

Given the choice between hunting an actual lion and making companion calls, companion calls win every time. Less dangerous and more profitable. Just as it is a matter of survival, a matter of who gets eaten first the lion or the villagers can still be analogized in sales.

Many sales representatives have failed because they were eaten by their own fears. Hands-on leadership could have saved them.

Bring back the lion's head with a companion call and you'll show each salesperson that you're not just sitting on the sidelines. They will see you as demonstrably involved, and interested in their professional success.

It's the best way to demonstrate good salesmanship yourself. Hands-on and directly from the person who expects the same.