Manage circumstances equally as well as timing.

The obsession with time can’t be underestimated. Whether you are measuring your lifespan, war, microwave oven setting or sales cycle, these all involve a definitive time element. To better manage time elements, it’s important to manage circumstances equally well. Every month, week or day we sit down and try to make sense of our sales numbers. One of the greatest errors in our ‘subjective’ judgment may be our over-reliance on time as the driving factor. Like wars, deals are not set by time, rather by circumstance. So what does this mean?

Look for circumstances.

The Pareto Principal can come into play in a big way. It’s the 80-20 Rule. Think about your Pipeline in the same way: 80% of your sales will come from just 20% of your Pipeline Opportunities. As a salesperson or manager, we can never get away with violating the laws of nature without paying the consequences. Step off a building, and gravity will get you every time. With forecasting, while we may not experience consequences “every time” we ignore circumstances, sooner or later the laws of nature, like Pareto’s Principal, take effect. Usually it’s horribly inaccurate numbers and time lines that are difficult to make sense of.

Prima facie is Latin for ‘at first view’.

Whenever you forecast, Prima facie means you should see it the first time e.g. it should be obvious. But before it becomes so obvious there’s some homework to do. It’s important for any forecaster to know the circumstances that make up alternative directions of action. When it comes to Pipelines, analyze the number of circumstances and the order of magnitude of each.

This analysis can be as simple as a Ben Franklin plus and minus columns or more a definitive set of criteria. The circumstances affecting opportunities for your organization probably fall into five or six categories e.g. Delivery, Credit, Pricing, Customer Service, Customer Loyalty are a few. You might want to spend a few minutes creating your own list and ranking the order of magnitude each has with your pipeline opportunity.

 Two circumstances affect your Pipeline Opportunities.

1:Listing those customers that have the fewest reasons not to buy from you.

2: Define the biggest reasons why they won’t buy from you.

In either example, there will likely be a number of items. However, your task now is to separate the vital few from the trivial many. Then assign a value to each item, naturally, ranking the highest value items first. And it’s these high value items that you have to solve/analyze first.  

Set priorities for action.

Just like a general, you have to set your priorities based not so much on your wishes but what reality looks like. How this affects your forecasting accuracy will become obvious. You will now look closer at what will make the most difference in your sales success. The circumstances have a time line of their own. You simply can’t ignore a major item. Now you have to establish a timeline to the circumstance, or series of circumstances. This will result in a more accurate completion date.

The stronger the confidence in your pipeline, the less threatened you are.

We have to accept the fact that some customers are going to react irrationally. Maybe I can call it the ‘Irrational Principal’ where out of the blue you get broadsided by 20% of your opportunities. In these cases you can’t control the game, only your reactions to it.  I’ll bet that the stronger the confidence you have in your pipeline, the less threatened you will be by what happens around each opportunity. Having a high level of confidence in the vital issues surrounding your pipeline can be as a result of good ‘circumstance’ management.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Pipeline Triangulation

Triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end. In MosaicCRM terms, triangulation is the process of determining the points that make up your pipeline and its ability to hone in on opportunities that have a high probability of closing. Click on the Icon for more information on how this works!

Not unlike the logic behind a Credit Score, it pays off to have a formula that gauges and monitors the level of customer commitment. This might seem obvious, but commitment is often misconstrued somewhere between your splatter of features and benefits and the ensuing oohs and ahhs from the client. So it is vital to know and manage the difference between being simply involved in the selling process, and the customer being committed to its success.

One of the biggest gripes or gaps in traditional CRM landscape is the inaccuracy of Sales Projections. The traditional rating schemes ‘Probability % and Stage’ are relatively useless categorizations to define commitment to success.

The real key is evaluating ‘commitment’ at each ‘Stage’ of the sales process and not just the sales opportunity phase. Rather than inserting a Probability % based on little more than your eagerness to wish it so, it is more effective to equate the potential outcome based on the Commitment % Level. This adds an interesting twist, rationale and accuracy when commitment levels equate to a level of certainty (probability).

MosaicCRM Experts Tips

So many factors affect the transition from the prospect to customer that they seemingly appear beyond control. In reality, many CRM selling processes simply lack a structured and regularly timed commitment report card. Here are a few examples of info fields you can add to CRM to back up your Commitment rationale:

• Project Finalized  (or not)
• Budget in place (or not)
• Valid change prompting need
• Prime business application for product (or not)
• Clear competitive advantage is…

Pipeline Triangulation

Triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end. In MosaicCRM terms, triangulation is the process of determining the points that make up individual pipeline opportunities and its ability to hone in on opportunities that have a high probability e.g. commitment to close. Click on the image to view how Pipeline Triangulation works.

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Commitment Separates You from the Competition

Meet a Marine and you begin to recognize the character of people deeply committed to something. Their exuberance is contagious. It’s no wonder why. They did more than just join the Marines they have now become Marines. Their level of commitment is expressed as total and only total excellence is the goal.

Their example is a reminder how just how important it is to be committed because customers sense a superior and sincere level of commitment every time. It’s often the one and only thing that separates you from the competition.

In the world seemingly on a rudderless course steered by automated ‘personalized’ marketing; we are inundated with the latest and greatest sales behavior predictions using social media, networking, blogging, video platforms… a digital cornucopia of the ‘it’ factors pointed at customers that will buy.

Beware of sales behavior predictions.

Some of the statistical data is downright poor and maybe that’s because simple statistics rely too much on buying habits under a limited number of situations, markets or conditions that bear little resemblance to what you sell. Few experts are willing to debunk these easy and simple hypothetic links e.g. a social network platform that works for selling Pepsi may have little relativity for selling houses.

Yet many a marketing guru would have your company totally revamp its selling process based on these statistics; worse yet with relatively ‘green fielding’ methodologies in lieu of tried and true methods.

Social Media Sales Stats: Does this mean the end of Wal-Mart?

Even when demographic and econometric modeling is added, a statistic hypothesis of a certain sales behavior doesn’t necessarily mean anything. For example, Twitter touts 200 million users. Even with such screaming growth, does this new wave of internet marketing spell the end to Wal-Mart? Hardly, for many solid reasons, not the least is new internet platforms are a figurative drop in the bucket. The 176 million living and breathing customers that visit Wal-Mart stores weekly and ‘stay’ awhile and ‘buy’ vastly outnumber Twitter and MySpace.

Stats tell you what customers aren’t buying.

Car crashes killed 34,000 people in 2009 and in 2008 there were six million accidents, about a one in five chance it will be your time. No one could possibly sell cars based on these statistics alone. Car manufacturers avoid the poor statistics and replaced them with items that do not change the statistical facts: zero interest loans, free this and more that. They have used poor stats to their benefit: ignore what customers aren’t buying.

Great stats can fail to sell.

Airlines can statistically prove air travel is many times safer than traveling by car. However, many a travel plan is based on a perceived and intense decision not to fly for safety reasons. As infinitesimal as the risk may be, the buying decision for air travel is not based on favorable safety statistics. So airlines ignore statistics that won’t sell: a hugely favorable safety statistic is something they can’t sell because many passengers aren’t buying it.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner
Maximize your statistical edge: “Sell a ‘Trend”

Even with exposure to the unlimited ‘customers’ on the net, selling a trend is possibly the only edge over blanket numerical statistics. What makes a trend is selling to good markets and ignoring weak markets, niches or products with proven methods and options that accentuate your edge.

At MosaicCRM we rely on tried and true statistics, particularly in the two vital areas of activities and sales opportunities.

• Market Analytics show aging, margin, unit volumes and revenue distribution is a single step
• Track Stalled Opportunities as an indicator of competition, sales programs and sales cycles
• Identify Customer Buying Cycles to minimize the selling cycle and maximize personnel deployment

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Protocols for Measuring and Optimizing Activity Results

Helping organizations and their users achieve their activity objectives is the hallmark of MosaicCRM. Our business processes offer a unique and important approach to measuring activity ‘results’.  This differentiation is particularity valuable when it comes to Account Retention and Acquisition: our activity protocols are vital to optimize activity effectiveness and success.

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Mirroring our Masters

In America over 77 million dogs have owners. Then it’s not so unreasonable to imagine that in the scheme of modern urban life that they have an affinity to look like their owners. During a recent lunch my guests discussed this phenomenon and for an added wrinkle we even went so far as to match a few business associates with the dog they owned. One commented how uncanny it was that their General Manager looked remarkably like his mutt. Upon further reflection the business too was beginning to look unremarkable, like her GM. This was not an appealing spectacle.

How does the leader look?

With dogs or business, one reason we might mirror our master is that we tend to seek out those things that are most familiar to us and readily adopt those traits. Some may argue that it starts out when owners pick their dogs, or staff, they unconsciously choose them because they truly reflect the owner, or boss as the case may be. The lesson learned is be careful of what you want your business to look like as it will invariably reflect just how the leader looks.

The Customer’s perception is everything.

I believe the same logic applies for customers: a reflection of them. They find what appeals to them and what doesn’t. This is beyond nettlesome because the ‘look’ or perception for most customers is everything. Worry too about the fact that most people don’t necessarily act in accordance with your reality quite as much as they do on their own individual perception of ‘reality’. To that end, our customer’s reality, good, bad or indifferent, is formed to a large extent by what companies do and not what they say.

Follow the bouncing ball.

As business management and customers accelerate even further away from each other, success is often influenced to an immense degree by decision makers who have little experience or a ‘look’ for sales. In fact, your surroundings can begin to look astonishingly unfriendly, even somewhat dog-eared; particularly when the company’s current nirvana is simply the latest Guerrilla tactic that entirely ignores ‘reality’. Or the brains behind the new budget has patently little appreciation for brand or value; like the premier airline I flew last week whose management believes a fraction of an ounce of pretzels, a half of a can of soda, with questionable housekeeping and seats so close I could perform dental work will, of course, endear me to fly with them again.

Solution: Perception Truths.

If you find yourself or a client in this position what are you to do? Well there are a few Perception Truths I devised you can always use as a fall back.

• Brand Personality: Product Excellence and Superiority a.k.a. Value

Be ever vigilant for someone mucking it up. Your fundamental task is to correctly identify the customer’s preference for brand over price.  Look for customer clues where they value the significance of a great reputation, or beneficial cost of ownership matters like durability, warranties, multi task applications and even pretentiousness and esteem are striking buying qualities. If you’re not attracting enough of these types, then either you, the company’s marketing or its business style needs correction.

• Service

Practically nothing beats a high level of customer satisfaction, it’s not hard to understand why: customers want a pleasant buying experience together with attentive and responsive customer service, from both the sales and support staff. Lose this and you have lost the profitability associated with ‘value’ …and likely the customer. Now tell me again how much airline ‘A’ saved on those pretzels?

• Costs

Everyone knows that better products cost more and cheap products are made up of cheap bits and pieces. When it comes to cost, it’s the thing your customer perceives as price, your task is to hone in on what’s superior about your product or service. That’s because surprisingly few customers will bother to take the effort to figure it out on their own. Worse yet I am given to wonder why some salespeople can’t let go of customers that have little conscience of cost.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

There is no better tool than a well configured CRM program to monitor and manage perception truths. At MosaicCRM, we add simple yet effective fields to account monitors and specific reports in these key areas:

• Buying Qualities:
  

  Monitor and record customer preferences and translate that data into optimized sales cycle management tools

• Service Factors:
  

  Customer satisfaction, service and Case Management components tie the entire company relationship to the customer experience

• Value:
  

  Monitor where you are wining against competition, one click recording of sales factors, value milestones, even managing road blocks

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Flipping a coin and determining whether it will come up heads or tails depends more on the fact that a tossed coin obeys Newton’s laws of motion than a simple random chance. With sales opportunities, like pennies, a bias has a huge bearing on the result. So if you want to improve your odds flipping a coin or managing a sales opportunity, spend some time thinking about how to create and maintain a bias in the mind of your customer.

How do you forecast a bias?

As with predicting the outcome of a coin toss, you might be surprised that a bias will skew your forecast. Ivars Petersen is a mathematician who illustrates why unexpected results shouldn’t come as such a surprise. The Lincoln penny provides a striking example of such a bias. Stand a dozen or so pennies on edge on the surface of a table. Then bang the table so that the pennies topple over. You’ll find that nearly always more heads than tails are face up. Sometimes all the coins end up heads. On the other hand, spinning pennies tend to land tails more often than heads.

Probing creates awareness that creates a bias.

April is Mathematics Awareness month. I’ve instantly created a bias in your mind about April, besides the first day being All Fools Day and showers that bring May flowers and that fact that there are 22 selling days in April. Now you have a mind full of data and awareness about April.

It’s no different than creating a sense of awareness with your customer. Just answering a customer’s question creates no advantage when new bias data is added to the customers mind. Essentially he now perceives everyone your response as the same as any other response.

By probing the customer for more information and understanding what’s driving their need, you now have ample opportunity to create a greater awareness (bias) of your products and services. This is not to say that you should stand there and rattle off 100 of your best features. Quite the opposite is required. Give them only the information they will value the most. You now have the bias on your side of the coin. Find out too if your competitor has a bias e.g. brand name, better warranty, less risk and ‘one up’ your own bias.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Beyond the operational aspect of CRM, most databases are chucked full of analytical data. One problem we see is that this analytical data is rarely configured for optimal ‘bias’ applications e.g. learning what customers want to buy at this very moment.  What do they look like, how much do they spend, when, how often is too often seen as information overload when in fact just the opposite is true: customers now get exactly what they want because you know them inside out.

As a side note, we do see social media as collaborative CRM data used as a vehicle that communicates with customers but this isn’t the same as using your CRM database for predictions analysis.

To maximize CRM’s return, it operates best in a forward looking mode and least optimal in a rear view looking transactional recording mode. For example, one of the best known predictors is credit analysis. Wouldn’t every organization want the same level of predictability with their customer base or at least their pipeline? Start with defining CRM data models and routines to optimize predictable outcomes and biases for:

• Cross Selling/Up Selling
• Supporting Customer Loyalty/Retention
• Minimize Customer Attrition
• Improving Sales Forecasting/Decision Making
• Better marketing relationship with the customer

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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