8 Ideas For Sweeter Sales.

Forest Gump said it best: ‘Life’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.’ Sales results often share the same fate. Here are a few ideas that might help you chose the best chocolates!

• A big part of any sales function is continuous and rapid prospect qualification. The key measurement is whether or not they are going to buy. This differs from what they want to do, as compared to what they can do.
• Focus on what you have to offer, and not just what you are selling.
• Continually expand your product applications to new markets and/or customers. This minimizes your reliance on fragile markets or domineering customers.
• Focus your creative energies on strategies that promote consistent wins. By doing so, you will lessen your natural tendency to fall back on the blasé behaviors that just can’t produce the long-term consistency you need.
• If your pipeline seems to be managing you, then manage your prospects much earlier in the sales cycle. Two aspects of managing prospects are rating them as a company and the value of their opportunities. If either doesn’t fit your business, move on.
• Once you have your customer’s attention, keep it focused only on them.
• Simple selling techniques work. If nothing else, try something simple to improve, innovate and demonstrate your product.
• Promote customer satisfaction, but sell loyalty. Loyalty is the reason customers want to buy from you.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Nobody said CRM is sweet but here are a few ideas to keep your sales process on track:

• Qualification: Set out predefined Rating and Profile descriptions for your Account and Contacts. How well  each fits the ideal target can speed up this all important sales step.
• Customer Retention/Loyalty Process: Don’t leave retention and loyalty programs to chance. MosaicCRM offers ‘Marvel’ a unique system of multiple contact processes that keep your organization in front of customers.
• Daily Activity Manager: This eloquent system makes daily activities a breeze so sales staff can concentrate their energy and time on selling.
  
• Deal Nurturing: Nothing is dropped or forgotten with PipelinePro methodology and alerts systems.
  

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Written by
Bill Noonan, Founder & CEO, MosaicCRM

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Pre-CRM Planning Tips for SMB’s

I’ve put together this slide presentation that covers a number of key elements that can help in your CRM Plan or Re-Start program.  Some of the topics include Beware of ‘Quick and Easy’ CRM promotions, The Human Factors, Competition Applications, Abilities, Resources and Sales Process Design, Budgeting and more.
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“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” Patton

Motivating your customer to buy the world’s best doodad requires some different thinking in this economy. Understanding what a client really thinks can help. Having good answers helps even more! Automating the thinking task.. not possible but CRM can help you think better!

1. What type of capital investment is required?
Client: Our new budgets have stopped everything. Who is going to cut what to do this project?

2. What’s the ROI on the world’s greatest doodad?
Client: The ROI has to pencil out to ‘immediate’ if we are to do anything new or even think to replace anything we already have.

3. How is your doodad going to improve on my current way of doing things?
Client: We need to be assured that it works, everything we do goes under a microscope.

4. How can your new doodad not add to my costs?
Client: Somehow these wonder cures always end up costing more. We really can’t add anything to the budget.

5. How can you and your doodad help in an immediate way?
Client: Time is money and that means I need tangible results today.

6. Is your doodad going to take more time and distract my staff?
Client: Training, implementation, added costs and changing the status quo are big distractions we don’t need.

7. How much money is it going to save me?
Client: What specific examples can you show? Fluff isn’t going to cut it this year.

8. What happens when we have problems?
Client: We cut support personnel to the bone. When we have a problem is it going to take us weeks to hunt you guys down?

9. What will happen if we don’t do anything?
Client: We’ve been doing this way for years so why all the urgency now? Heck, our level of performance is understandable in this economy.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

• Add topical fields to your CRM program that include the top buying issues facing your clients.  For example, Opportunity/Drawbacks/Challenges can be simple fields with drop down menus to aid in speedily adding the info and tracking changes throughout the sales cycle
• Add a new technique ‘Opportunity Rating’ unlike Probability weight the importance of each issue to Rate the Opportunity against a specific Pass-Fail number
  
• Decision delays? MosaicCRM offers a ‘Deal Nurturing Strategy’ to your Opportunity mix: use a prescribed contact schedule and script to keep value and timely contact with decision makers

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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When business was flying and financing was easy, getting the sale was sufficient enough and adopting a strict CRM protocol, along with a lot of other ‘protocols’, usually went by the wayside. Fast forward a couple of years into a deep recession to upset that status quo: Account Retention and Acquisition protocols are absolutely vital to success, mainly because nobody has the money or enough runway to wing it or buyers who have money or time to chance it.

1: Break the Outlook habit to optimize sales potential.

CRM users always gripe it is time consuming to enter data. Well, in comparison to what, Outlook or a spreadsheet? Outlook is pathetically inefficient and like cigarettes, has everyone addicted to it and a habit that needs to be broken. There is no possible way a contact manager or excel can be more efficient and effective than CRM to optimize sales.

• Use CRM to maintain a customer relationship e.g. manage all things related to revenue

2: ‘Vital’ information minimums.

As a company, detail exactly the vital information needed to acquire and maintain a sales relationship with the customer. You don’t need a record of every voice mail message, or the type of dog the contact has. Yet typically vital info is ignored e.g. full names, telephone numbers, email addresses, decision making authority. The lack of vital communication factors makes for a crippled CRM database that can only reference historical data and not the future.

Warning: The Social media craze might be killing your efficiency. So much of the contact/account data included in these programs is useless to your mission. Rarely will it qualify or add to a sales opportunity. Be very wary here of value versus results.

• Set out the required info
• Insist on 100% compliance

3: Monitor Results, not Activities

It is simply all about the results and not the volume of activities. The value of recording activity numbers with non-result actions e.g. leaving a voice mail message or sending a generic email is negligible.

• Your CRM must be monitoring next step ‘results’ of activities.

4: Ratios

What is working really boils down to ratios: how many calls develop how many appointments that result in so many proposals etc. Sloppy activity management will come home to roost in a big way.  Measuring results is the only way to can find out e.g.

• Power Caller User: 100’s of calls and low appointment results are telling in so many ways
• Least Resistance User: Low Calls-High Email is this opening opportunities or not?

5: Get Maximum Activity Coverage

Scheduling one activity at a time by ‘opportunity’ is a really hard way to plan ahead. You’ve profiled and rated accounts right? Good, then sort your database and start scheduling en masse. Plus, dedicate a given time every week for scheduling.

• Insist there is a scheduled activity at all times for every Key Account, Pipeline Opportunity Account and Qualified Prospect. It is impossible to argue this from a sales person point of view… even harder to explain why not to management.
• Monitor activity ‘results’ associated with Opportunities: what’s open, closed, lost, a maybe… this is the most important criteria with which to measure activity efforts.
• Add another activity when completing one.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Helping users achieve their activity objectives and making each one count is the hallmark of MosaicCRM. Here are a few built in systems we deploy to manage customer retention  and acquisition activities:

• Automatic Reschedule: Past due activities are automatically rescheduled by the system
• Mosaic ‘Marvel’: This tool pre-configures any number of specific activities by specific users in one click. Superb for customer retention routines, lead nurturing and prospect hunting.
• Daily Activity Manager: One simple screen for adding and completing all activities
• Dynamic Activity Objectives: Set number goals for Calls, Appointments, Presentations and Email and get instant monitoring by day, week and month
• Activity Results: Monitor results achieved by activities across the board or by individual
• Comparison Results: Activity comparisons for scheduled, completed numbers and overall database coverage
• Priority Alerts: All activities affecting accounts are profiled  and instant alerts issued

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Mastering Simplicity

At MosaicCRM we try to imitate a paper clip: master simplicity and keeping it simple. The traditional paper clip is a wonder of simplicity and the essence of form follows function. For over a century, it still works in spite of the fact that a lot of imitators have come and gone. Seemingly everybody’s got a simple this CRM or a simple that CRM to sell. The reality is there’s nothing simple about selling. Making CRM look simple, however, is the mark of a professional.

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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The numbers game is dead. Long live strategic ratios.

The business climate in 2011 is projected to be brutal with less money, tighter budgets, fewer sales people and scarcer customers. In spite of this many companies will thrive. How? By changing the way they view prospects and the selling process.

Method 1: High Volume Low Results

The traditional approach to sales activity has been volume gets results. In other words, given enough volume, anyone can reach the desired results. The approach to the high volume is often too costly or too many factors skew the results. Take for example, simply adding more telemarketers to make more calls. If they are poor quality personnel with low skill levels, two things occur: The number of calls goes way, way up. The quality of the prospect goes way, way down.

A point of diminishing return becomes apparent.  Processing tons of prospects doesn’t guarantee more sales. Worse, numbers game activities can eat up valuable runway space and results in closed opportunities that carry a terrible, even unaffordable, price. It’s no longer sufficient to say any organization can sell (or manage) to the tune of just numbers.

Method 2: Regulated Volume – Strategic Results

The key management factor here is to regulate the volume to better qualify the prospects before engaging the costly sales process. With fewer resources or even with the same resources but higher quotas, defining the prospect, managing the prospecting process and inspecting what you expect are time- tested actions.

+ Don’t allow prospects into the pipeline (or prospecting channel) that don’t fit simple yet concrete parameters.

+ Deal with the ripe bananas, only the ones that can take advantage of a limited window of opportunity.

+ Deals won will increase because you have much fewer distractions and more on top of your game.

MosaicCRM Experts Tips – Looking at an improved management role for CRM

Allocating resources is critical, so is monitoring results to optimize these resources. Our CRM platforms provide a number of methods that go beyond traditional ‘activity measurement’ reports.

• Manage Call Ratios & Results: The key analytics determine how good the prospect demographics are.
• Monitor promotions with ‘Opportunity Source’ analytics: From Prospect to Customer can be a tricky course. Analyzing what prospects become customers  reinforces the call ratio and delivers a ‘success’ criteria blueprint to copy

• Aging Analysis: Tracking the time periods through the sales stages provides data to modify promotions/sales processes to shorten the sales cycle.
• Measure Deals Lost Analytics: Lost Deals tell a lot about customers, competitors, pricing, timing and more that will enable you to fine tune the next offering.

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Alchemy was the medieval attempt to turn lead into gold. Jean Dubuis described alchemy as the “art of manipulating life and consciousness in matter to help it evolve, or to solve problems of inner disharmonies”.

Modern CRM isn’t so different: data bases follow the alchemies operation of separating the ‘the prima material’ or so called chaos by taking this unstructured data and putting it into a structure to capture, index and store it.

On a simpler plane of thought, alchemy could easily be used as a metaphor of transforming prospects into customers. It’s this process that is almost magic, but not quite. It does involve a simple, yet demanding process of turning dumb or chaotic data (leads) into usable information (customers).

This is where the magic ends: CRM by itself does little to help you turn data into information and knowledge. Let’s take a look at how to make your CRM task a whole lot easier and beneficial.

1. Get better outcomes in less time with strategically focused sales behavior.

Begin at the beginning: rank and prioritize your leads. After all, who or what makes it into your database, and then subsequently into your pipeline, will determine to a great degree your success in turning these leads into customers.

2. Set out a clear and easily defined selling stage process.

I hear it all the time: my database is no good… bad info, leads are crap, I need more accounts…etc. Sales automation provides a huge volume of information; however, separating what’s needed to advance the sales process can often be an excruciating exercise that too often bears too little fruit. If everything makes it into your pipeline then you have a fantastic bowl of goop and nothing tasty. Unlike poor Oliver, you don’t want more of the same no matter how hungry you are for a deal.

The easiest method is to plainly and clearly describe each phase of your sales process, even a basic rating scheme will work. Then when a lead doesn’t make it to the next desired stage you know why and when and can manage your time and efforts much more confidently.

3.    Manage your pipeline on a daily basis.

Regardless of the advances in CRM, you still need to figure out not only what to do, but what to do next. It’s often too late for management to have any significant impact on the outcome when they are only managing what’s closing this week or only get involved at the later stages. Rather they should be involved on a daily basis and knowledge of what works, what doesn’t and guidance on plan b.

Daily attention should not be an issue. CRM technology allows us to sort through leads, pipeline candidates and sales opportunities easily and effectively. Properly designed, it now forms the way we manage sales and activities by dictating what strategic value or action is necessary as opposed to blind sporadic oriented actions e.g. call everyone again.

4. Nurturing long term leads.

We all wish everything happened today. Alas that genie never seems to come out when we need it. Eventually it may by adding a structure to the lead nurturing process including understanding how each customer wants to be contacted and frequency. CRM make this a relatively brainless task of turning data into buying cycles.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

At the end of the day, any CRM is only as good as the data in it and how the users manage that information. To make CRM outstanding, we follow a strict methodology so users avoid the chaos:

• Implement sound business process and logic by concentrating on a vital few objectives that gain sales
• Eliminate fluff and duplication: ignore anything that doesn’t add immediate value
• Constantly improve the system: Step by step, month by month
• Vital tasks like qualification, stages and pipelines require little effort and are easy to understand
• Tracking, maintaining and developing contact points that match customer buying cycles

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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P.S. We ask questions that no CRM vendor wants to ask:

CRM Discussion Points – Getting CRM right begins with asking the right questions.

I have written this comprehensive discussion points guide that covers topics that no CRM vendor wants to ask mainly because they can’t pass you off to a junior menu list type techie. That’s because now you know what it takes to meet your CRM objectives and it is a lot of work to demonstrate how to get there. Far too many CRM vendors won’t put in that sort of time.

What this worksheet creates is the right atmosphere for discussion and strategy building your CRM. Let me know if it would help you on your CRM journey. Use the ‘Contact Us’ tab on the website and I would be pleased to email it to you.

Bill

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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There is a flurry of Top Selling – Best Selling  ads coming your way.

Stop by a book stand or music retailer and notice how we are all drawn to the Top Ten Best sellers. So when it comes to top seller, have you ever stopped to ponder what this really means to your sales and marketing efforts?

Well it means instant sales qualification if we are to believe the admen. Our psyche seems glued to associating top selling with either the best buy, or seemingly the least risky purchase option. So next to the word ‘free” I believe ‘best seller’ or ‘top seller’ or even ‘hottest selling’ nomenclatures grabs our customers attention more effectively than anything else we can do. The power doesn’t stop there. What could be more exciting than that? Next we will see the inevitable sale prices on our ‘top sellers’ come January.

Here are a few ‘Top Selling’ sales accelerator factors to consider:

1. It removes the clutter of verbal nonsense so often made between the buyer and seller.

2. These claims focus the buyer (and often the sales person) on what’s important by reducing the time necessary for confidence building.

3. It shortens the ‘thinking about it’ phase.

Unfortunately sales personnel don’t reiterate often enough, or powerfully enough, the words ‘our best seller!

You know it, your boss does, and maybe the customer vaguely remembers it. Therefore, your task is to remember to use it in every presentation. Ford won’t let you forget its F Series has been the number one seller for decades. Yet I can’t remember the Ford salesperson mentioning that to me. Or the Lexus is the top selling luxury car in America and I can assure you the salesperson didn’t mention that either. I have no doubt these salespeople knew the gas mileage, tire size and minute details but they completely missed out on the one item that would make me believe all their other statements: “This is the best selling truck (car) in America.”

Best makes for a fantastic fallback when the customer says they want to think about it.

“Almost one million people thought about it and bought it making it the all time…..” The point here is that information of this caliber is the first thing that should come out of our spiel and not be something that is forgotten or muddled through.

‘Best’ power is almost hypnotic when it comes to the buyer’s insatiable need for zero risk.

After all, the psychology behind buying is essentially mapping your product or service against the buyer’s equation of least risk. When you find that magic XY line you have a sale. The nub is simply that if your customers perceive there is a minimal risk in doing business with you then you will likely get the sale.

An effective method for rubbing the risk genie bottle is associating your product with the herd mentality of the buyer. Hey, if everyone else is buying it why shouldn’t I? Best, Hottest, Most, and Number 1 adjectives are just a few of the statements that are excellent for this purpose. I also think these serve to fend off the fuzzy objections and put more focus to what’s important to the customer.

What do you think of when you hear your product associated with ‘Consumer Reports’ or J.D Powers Top Ten Report? The ‘best’, ‘highest rating’ or similar accolade will guarantee more sales. However, remember to tell the customer just in case they have forgotten, or are confusing you with your competitor or any other myriad of things that put our brains into deep freeze.

If not the best seller, perhaps you can claim top quality.

Naturally not everyone can lay claim to top seller. Even though these categories are broken down into minute details e.g. ‘top selling blue van with power steering made on a Friday’ there is an end to what’s believable or what has any value. The demonstrative word here is ‘value’. If appropriate, you could claim the prestigious mention as ‘top quality’ or ‘best value’ both of which have similar impact on buyers.

MosaicCRM Experts Tips

• Orient your CRM program to maximize its marketing potential: Create and track a ‘Best’ Sales Plan
• Utilize a closed loop reporting process to measure what’s working
• Nurture your leads with a prescribed process until they are in a sales ready state
• Add ‘Best ‘components to your marketing templates, even in your email signatures
• Tell it to the media! Add media contacts and promotion venues to your database and track where your organization is being seen.

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Social Media ROI

Time Magazine named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Person of The Year. The digital elite followed with dozens of accolades suggesting that social networking has replaced main stream business networking? Maybe that is because many a marketing guru can’t wait to spend your time and money on the next new idea, all the while ignoring what already works and ignoring how it must integrate into what is working.

New Media ‘Returns’

For my 2011 sales plan I took the time to evaluate the return that the ‘new media’ social networks promise to deliver. So I asked myself these questions:

1. How much time am I frittering away with these new media tools and not spending on tried and true things that are working for me?
   
2. Did I build stronger Client relationships with them at the expense of not improving what I am already doing?
3. Did prospecting measurably improve e.g. did all this reach really generate good quality prospects and/or professional relationships?
4. Did I rely too heavily on digital ‘magic’ to generate prospects as opposed to doing the hard stuff like picking up the phone?
5. Did my existing clients benefit in real ways with these tools?

Just delivering information is not selling and building long term relationships.

Social networking looks tantalizing easy with equally easy returns. Besides, who doesn’t like easy. But looking at the massive ‘subscriber’, it is a numbers game played out in those industries with low value customer relations requirements like selling a CD or Pepsi drinks. So it is not for every organization. Another way to look at it is will the return deliver only low value customers.

Here’s my take: Delivering information via social networks is not the same as selling, although many who don’t sell for a living will have you believe so. It seems everyone is supposed to ignore the highly effective network tools e.g. email, personal calls and face-to-face meetings by declaring everyone get with the new ‘reach and connect’ media venues or die.

While I’m the first to admit that while these have garnered some traction for my company in very specific applications, there’s nothing universal about them. Especially when compared to the universality of email or the telephone for exemplary two way communication.

High value relationships are vital to my business.

The ever changing mosaic of social networking and ensuing chaos is not yet a place for organizations that require high value contact and deep relationships with their customers. So I question the ‘value’ of a twitter post, especially when big posters are paid by Twitter to post. High value anything is difficult, time consuming and expensive to do. Improperly done, these easy networks appear to magnify all the wrong things about relationships: spam, impersonal experiences, and low value, and ultra short term engagements, some lasting under just so many letters.

Frankly, I found that few clients have ever visited my network pages and have little inclination to do so. It just doesn’t seem all that imperative or important to them. That leaves getting spammed, open-prospecting and self-aggrandizement to stroke my ego in digital networks.

Is Social Media just a product looking for an application?

If you’re still confused by the social and business media digital age, you are not alone. Perhaps social networks may just be a phenomenon where product was looking for a market application. In my situation, it was damn hard to quantify success. I don’t feel so bad because media giants have failed miserably and lost billions on it. Does Time Warner’s AOL acquisition fiasco ring a bell? Compared to their traditional media empire, that included Time Magazine, that worked and how AOL destroyed it.

MosaicCRM Experts Tips – Social Media is radically different.

If relationship marketing is important to your organization, managing and collecting social network data is radically different from the traditional historical based ‘interaction-transaction’ type recording.

• Adapt your CRM to recognize the instant real time data provided by network media venues
• More than ever customer centric response models are vital – re-engineer your CRM to address this closed loop marketing process
• Evaluate the type and degree of customer information needed to assist sales efforts
• Use CRM to spread the results of the customer experience within your organization

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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The best way to be lucky is to be smart. To this point, let’s expand upon the concept of doing the right things, versus doing everything right, as selling smart. Time and again I have seen the salesperson doing everything right, but for some reason they just weren’t successful. The subtle, yet big difference was they were not doing the ‘right things’.

I was reminded of doing the ‘right things’ during a sales process meeting with a label printing company. The owner of the company remarked that sometimes his sales staff skipped doing one ‘right thing’ or another.

For the most part, his people were doing everything right: good prospecting, follow up and eventually they got around to bidding. However, in their haste, the sales staff often ignored most important ‘right thing’: preparing a sample for their customers to see and hold.

“But you don’t understand” they pleaded, “The customer is all ready to go… all they need is a price.” Then POOF! Things went decidedly unlucky and obviously more than a price was needed to close the deal.

Dumb luck works too.

Unquestionably there’s always ample pressure on sales people to produce. It’s at these times we have to step back and give luck it due chance. Sometimes it’s just a matter of dumb luck. You know, when out of the blue you pursue that opportunity, you did the right things because the customer is allowing you to, and presto, the deal’s done.

Often it’s not as simple or as dumb as it appears. Likely you did all the right things. Be very alert to Customers that try to short change you doing the right things.

Hard luck stories.

There’s no shortage of hard luck stories. Everyone’s had a fair share of them. But when it comes to hard luck, maybe a bit of good luck can change your predicament. To get out of a hard luck spot, stop selling: Stop selling what isn’t selling that is.

Too often we get all hung up on a product or program and ignore what will sell, even if it is less glamorous or less profitable. The point here is if you’re on a lengthy dry streak, it’s unlikely your cadre of fine prospects can change your predicament unless you change. So the good luck part is when you finally give up on chasing rainbows and move on to what will sell.

Worst Luck Yet: You’ve got a lottery sales style.

The worst luck yet is when you blindly believe selling is a numbers game. In this case you will probably do everything right. You’ll make the calls, follow ups etc. Unfortunately, you won’t be doing the right things. It’s very much like a lottery: you throw your numbers in and hope you win. Improving you luck here is to think smarter. Besides, if you’re smart you won’t buy lottery tickets, but that’s a whole other matter.

Define what your very best customer looks like and stick to those. It’s usually an easily managed and finite number. Now that’s selling smart. Makes you lucky too!

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Some simple process techniques to your CRM program can improve your luck many times over:

• Define: At every stage of the sales process, define what has to occur e.g. Sample Sent
• Set Activities: Include specific activity types that include the ‘must do’ right things
• Profile: Scrub lists that match your ideal customer, competitive advantage and sales ability then ignore the rest
• Track: Look at Closed Deal Analysis, Aging, Customer Retention and other parameters to tell you what is and is not selling

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Big $$$ in Unlucky Things.
Even though we seek luck, we are also reminded to avoid unlucky things. The whole Feng Shui craze is based on the unlucky ways we organize our lives. The list goes on: the number 13, broken mirrors, black cats, even being born under an unlucky star.

But alas, there’s no end to helping you find luck, for a price. There is a web site that promotes, for a fee, how to command more luck. I’m not making this up. They come complete with savvy lines like “Are you suffering from the illusion of lousy luck?” not to be outdone by “Exciting breakthrough for the terminally unlucky”. Maybe I should try my luck out selling this crap. They even promise a 55% commission. How lucky is that?

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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The tightening of business expenses often leads to squeezing every drop out of each and every sales activity. Surprisingly, many organizations cannot pinpoint the priority, type, and volume of sales activities they are conducting, even less so on which ones are producing the best results.

I have come across a number of sales and management styles which, in one form or another, fit into a prescribed activity type. Generally described as activity focused, close focused or buying-cycle focused, the question now is: Do you know what sales activity profile will gain the highest return?

For most organizations the answer is painfully obvious: today’s priority selling activities are buying-cycle focused. Unfortunately for some, nobody told marketing, sales support and a host of other departments that touch the customer. Are they confused? You bet and it is wasting a lot of time and money.

CRM’s highest and best use is the leading role in managing buying cycles.

The buying-cycle is comprised of those steps that the customer must go through to purchase and to become a continuing customer, as opposed to those activities that the company’s sales and marketing force must perform in order to achieve the same result (the selling-cycle).

In the past, sales activities have been selling-cycle oriented. These days the common wisdom is to focus on the buying-cycle. It is not a trivial distinction. The old selling-cycle approach is “me” oriented …products and features driven 1950’s salesmanship. Buying-cycle selling concerns the customer’s needs wants and timing.

It is essential that all selling and marketing activities be buying-cycle focused to gain the highest ROI on sales activities. Imagine the return if every call your sales team made was to a prospect closing in the next 90 days. That’s what we mean by buying cycle management.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner: Manage buying cycles over generalized activity management.

The emphasis in sales and marketing for the past thirty years or so has been ‘solution selling’, at least in the progressive corporations. The buying-cycle approach is a relatively new development and extension of the solution selling approach. The influence of customers buying habits and the influence of Internet reinforce the need for your CRM program to manage buying cycles over generalized activity management.

Many SMB’s fall victim to CRM systems that are too often designed around 1950’s selling styles e.g. designs that measure activity and not sales processes that manage buying cycles. I see it all the time where practically every field is ‘me’ oriented and very little is designed specifically around the ‘client needs, wants and directions. Beyond solution sales processes, a properly designed CRM plays a vital role in defining the buying cycle and it stands that its highest and best use is as a leading role in managing buying cycles.

Prioritize Buying Cycle Habits  in CRM.

The customer is of paramount importance to your business. Get into the habit of clearly defining the buying-cycle of your customers, individually, by type or even by whole. Even short buying cycles e.g. a simple online purchase includes at least a few of the following basics that should be a part of your CRM:

• Defined ‘steps’ in the buying cycle; paired with optimized activities for each step
• Contract Start and End dates paired with internal and external notices
  
• Budget Dates: When do your customers finalize annual budgets?
  
• Manage Product Life cycles adds value to specific customers
  
• Sales Stages paired to Buying Cycle Stages
• Activities tied to Buying Cycle priorities
• Identify Win Back Programs/Retention Programs focused on buying cycle
• Eliminate data fields, historical reports and activities that do not meet “buying-cycle” processes

Some day we can reflect back on the enormous volume (and cost) of non-buying cycle focused selling. I remember the ‘positioning’ ads; feel good brochures and reams of useless trinkets and brochures. What I wouldn’t give to have that money today and get it buying cycle focused!

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Written by Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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