Cold calling has been served notice, a new era beckons and with it an altogether different way of working. Social networking has arrived and will soon replace cold calling as the predominant method of prospecting in business, argues Matthew Brazil.

I have profoundly changed the way I do business and have firmly embraced social media and the networking possibilities it has created. To that end I have reduced to a very small percentage the amount of time I spend cold calling.

As someone who has been in sales all of my working life, has been a sales director and managed large teams of sales people, I know many people will think that there is no replacement for activity, specifically picking up the phone. Yet, no matter how intelligent you are about cold calling, it is what it is – speculative, scatter gun selling, not to mention costly and increasingly ineffective.

Cotoco sales director Steve Smith asks whether sales systems ever really deliver.

Just stop for a second and think back to the good old days when you were a young, enthusiastic and motivated salesperson. The pick of the bunch…  do you remember?

‘I didn’t join up to do admin, I’m a salesperson, and a good one! I want to be out talking to customers, that’s what I’m best at. How is filling out back-office forms going to help persuade a new prospect to say yes? If I show the slightest hint of my biggest prospect, I’ll just get micro-managed to death… I know, I’ll just shove in a low figure for now. Forms, forms, forms, surely there’s a better way!’

Nothing has really changed, so why have you?

Cumbersome

The current crop of corporate ‘sales’ tools are back-office systems designed to capture data and collate forecasts – from the sales teams, for the financial teams. They are generally cumbersome and tiresome and only as good as the potentially inaccurate data that is entered. They are available online but not remotely, ie they aren’t available in the field, where a salesperson might actually need support.

The fundamental flaw of these sales back-office systems is that they do not assist your salespeople to actually sell. They do not make it easy for a customer to say ‘yes’, where it matters, on the frontline. And yet, sometimes forcefully, you insist that these systems must be used daily and in earnest for ‘the good of the company’!

What future for sales training asks Reed Learning’s managing director, Hugh Greenway?

If you type ‘sales training’ into Google you get over 18 million hits. This is compared with 64 million for ‘management training’. However, if you want to advertise the fact that your company sells sales training you currently need to pay £3.75 per click to get into position four in Google’s paid-for list; this compared with £0.85 for management training.

Competitive market

All this clearly suggests that the market for sales training (on the supply side at least) is very competitive. And yet companies buying the training remain sceptical, if not downright cynical, about the benefits of it. This may be, with apologies to all salespeople for this, due to the fact that salespeople bend the truth for a living (is this entirely fair – Ed?). Thus, salespeople who train other salespeople must be so far removed from veracity as not to be trusted at all.

Andrew Dugdale of ICDL asks: if companies have stopped spending, how are we to survive?

Where have all the buyers gone? A salesperson told me just the other day that the only response they seem to get from customers today is ‘budgets are on hold until we see how the “credit crunch” is going to affect us’.

That’s a challenge, because if companies have stopped spending, how is everyone else going to survive?

Peter Elgar asks why CRM system implementations sometimes fail in a sales environment.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems should (note the word ‘should’) improve productivity throughout the sales cycle.

From choosing the right prospects, lead handling and appointment setting to producing quotes, converting them to orders and forecasting future sales, they should streamline the whole sales process. They should be at the heart of the majority of successful sales departments, and, once implemented, they should leave sales staff wondering how they ever coped without one.

In fact, if you believe some of the hype of the past few years, they should do almost anything a salesperson wants them to bar buying them a drink after work.

It’s that word ‘should’ that’s the problem. According to research from Gartner, as many as 60% of all CRM implementations fail. So given that CRM systems can help in many aspects of a salespersons’ role, why do they go wrong?

Callidus Software’s VP Europe, Bill Schuh explains why managing sales performance is key to sales professionalism.

Scratch the surface of poorly performing sales teams and you’ll find any number of reasons for not hitting targets, from low morale, heavy competition, lack of belief in the products or company, to incentive programmes that don’t work – or just plain bad management. Whatever the cause, the main issue for sales directors is having the facility to see what is happening within their team so it can be fixed before it damages the bottom line – rather than after the end of an unsuccessful sales quarter.

Traditionally, sales organisations have struggled to measure performance in real-time and, in many cases, haven’t been expected to on an ongoing basis. After all, sales is something of a black art that can’t be quantified: someone is bound to pull the multi-million pound contract out of the bag in the last hour of the last day of the quarter, aren’t they?

Head of the national standards setting body for marketing and sales, Dr Chahid Fourali asks whether we will eventually need a licence to sell.

It is hard to imagine the existence of any profession without established standards of good practice. Whether we are talking about driving, dentistry or brain surgery, the ‘qualified’ person must have met some established standards of best practice. Selling is no different.

It’s time to equip school leavers for the world of work and introduce a sales GCSE, argues Russell Ward of Silent Edge.

The sales profession is estimated to comprise 750,000 individuals and is the largest business sector in Britain. Beyond this core of people directly involved in sales, many other activities also incorporates some aspect of selling. Despite this central place in our lives, salesmanship barely registers in the national curriculum, and even graduate trainees can present themselves for employment in sales environments without any knowledge of selling. 

Vulgar?

Perhaps the problem is our native diffidence; the belief that selling is rather vulgar and not an appropriate subject for academic study. The view would seem to be that selling is an ability a person is either born with or picks up on the hoof. Unfortunately this laissez faire approach is proving a disaster for British business: research from Silent Edge and the Cranfield School of Management shows that only 12% of salespeople adhere to best practice and fewer than half possess ‘closing’ skills – which means that only one in five deals gets successfully closed.