Workplace2Go blog

The Hackett Group published an interesting research study about cash flow and sales forecasting.  According to their study, 1 out of 6 (16.7%) companies’ sales forecast is within 5%.  Some of the companies may have a pleasant surprise of sales exceeding forecast by more than 5%, but I’m guessing the majority come up short.

Many executives I’ve talked to mentioned that they have no idea what’s going on in their sales organization.  While these companies implemented structured processes for other aspects of their business (i.e. order – cash), sales tends to be ad hoc.  It’s common for each sales person to have their own process for managing sales.  This approach not only makes it impossible to forecast sales, prospects have an inconsistent experience across sales reps.  Existing customers are leery of referring other businesses when your customer isn’t confident you’ll deliver a consistent and positive experience.

The objective of sales predictability is not to just improve accuracy.  The goal is to ultimately increase sales.  Implementing a structured sales process followed by passionately managing and improving it will drive more sales.  You need to learn how to better predict sales before you can increase sales.

If you are passionate about improving sales predictability, these five steps will help you get there.

1. Determine attributes of a good/profitable customer.  Analyze your current customers and identify attributes of profitable customers.  These are the customers you want your sales team to target.  Add these attributes to your CRM system and require your sales team to get this information for each prospect.
2. Define a sales process and require sales reps to follow it.  Defining the process is a team effort – avoid doing this without your sales team’s input.  Work with your top produces and document the process they follow.  Your other sales reps will push back (most people don’t like change) so be prepared.
3. Define criterion for moving an opportunity from one stage to the next and manage this religiously.  Do not allow your sales team to move a deal to the next stage until they collected the information that helps you evaluate the opportunity.  Keep in mind, your organization spends much more time on each opportunity as it move further through the pipeline.  Don’t spend a lot of time pursuing deals that you have little or no chance of winning.
4. Determine sales management metrics that make sense for your company and set targets for each metric.  For example, track the percentage of deals won when your company submits a proposal and set a goal of 50%.  For each opportunity that your company submits a proposal, track why you won or lost.  This feedback will help you improve your sales process.
5. Conduct weekly sales meetings with your entire team.  These are mandatory meetings for everyone so no excuses for missing the meeting.  These meetings should be educational; the objective is continuous improvement.  Listen to your sales teams’ ideas to improve the process and trial those ideas that make sense.  You want your team’s input because their feedback not only improves the process; it also creates buy-in.  Your team is more likely to follow a process that they helped create.

Follow these 5 steps and you’ll not only improve your sales forecasting, your company will significantly increase sales.

Spam filters unfortunately are a necessity in today’s world, no different than desktop security software.  It is too bad we live in a world where people have nothing better to do than bombard us with vulgar or unethical email.  As a result, we have to be aware of the subject lines used in an email or newsletter or your email may not be delivered to a waiting customer or prospect.

Most people associate spam filters with stopping bulk email blasts and don’t think about how spam filters may impact an email sent to an individual such as a customer or prospect.  One of our customers was trying to send an email to customer about a deal they were working on and the subject line was “close out sale items”.  The email never made it to its destination.  Their customer’s spam filter determined an email with the subject “close out sale” was unwanted and blocked it.  Avoid using subject lines that contain words such as free, save money, cash bonus, etc so you don’t have to follow-up with a phone call to confirm your customer/prospect received the email.

Spam filters are especially hard on eNewsletters.  First of all, I assume your eNewsletter contains content that interests your target audience.  It’s imperative your newsletter is designed to help subscribers improve their business/lives.  That said, follow these steps when you create a newsletter and you’ll improve your delivery rates.

1. Don’t worry about the subject line until after you’ve created the newsletter.  When creating your newsletter, know your audience and provide content that makes sense for them.
2. Ideally your subject line will match one of the headings in your newsletter or is slightly different.  Spam filters compare the subject line with the newsletter content.
3. When you send a newsletter, it should come from you rather than info@ or sales@.
4. Send a test email to yourself (use an email address that has a different domain and uses a quality spam filter such as Postini).  You’ll be surprised to find out how many well intentioned subject lines can’t make it passed the first gate keeper (spam filter).
5. Adjust the subject line until it is delivered to your inbox.  Even though an email makes it passed the first gate keeper, it may end up in the Junk folder which is almost as bad.

You can also use a spam checking tool as well.

http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/ameq.html
http://www.swiftpage.com/support/spamcheck.htm

Now that you have started growing your contact list for your email marketing campaigns, another point I would like to share is that email marketing is an ongoing process. Your ultimate goal is not just to increase the number of messages going out, but to increase the number of interactions.

One of the most significant features of email marketing the ability to immediately determine the success of your messaging by seeing exactly how recipients interacted with your email.  You are able to determine who opened your email and what they clicked on. Every email campaign you send out generates a host of actionable data you can use to refine your approach and messages.

To find out what works best for your target audience, break your email list into two random groups.  Then select one concept to test in each campaign, such as the day of the week to send out your messages.  Keep everything the same in your messaging except for the item you are testing. In the example of testing the day of the week, send the exact same email to both groups but on two different days.  Then see which day resulted in getting the most opened emails.  Continue to use this same method to test other things like subject line messaging, the use of images, and placement and wordsmithing of links and downloads.

I recently tested the concept of including images in one of my newsletters.  I sent the exact same content to two different groups of recipients; only in the second one I included an eye-catching image along with the heading for each topic in the newsletter.  The results were fascinating.  The percentage of those who opened the email that clicked on a link was 40% higher from the email with the images.  These test results reminded me of the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  It showed that incorporating a related image in my emails may be more influential in soliciting a response than even the best written text.

This ability to continuously test content has made email one of the best marketing tools for companies today. And it is very important that you do not stop testing just because you found something that worked.  Opinions and tastes change, your competition changes, and your recipient’s familiarity with your company and products change.  Always being tapped into those changes will bring you the best chance for success.

Buying a list sounds very appealing.  Easily “touching” tens or hundreds of thousand people with the click of a button sounds good.  It’s so easy and that’s exactly the problem and why spam is an issue (81% of emails sent are spam).  While I’ve heard success stories using purchased email lists, most businesses have very little or no success.  Companies with strong brands tend to have the most success.  If your brand is not well known, think twice before investing in a bulk email list.

I’ve worked with clients that bought an email list and none of them experienced success.  According to SwiftPage, a respectable email campaign will have 30%+ open rate and 5%+ of those that open an email will click on one or more links.  For example, if you send out a campaign to 10,000 people, 3,000 or more should open the email with 150+ of those people clicking on one or more links.

My experience with purchased email lists is significantly less – about 6 – 8% open rate and less than 1% click through rates.  Whereas our clients that target existing customers and opt in contacts have open rates exceeding 40% and click through rates north of 10%.

The other problem you may encounter with a purchased email list is when people report your email as spam.  People that don’t know you are much more likely to report your emails as spam.  If a recipient of one of your email campaigns reports the message as spam, the recipient company’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) may block any future correspondence from your entire domain.  This can be very costly, as it impacts not only marketing, but also sales, accounting and customer service — every piece of email communication.

Whether or not you purchase a bulk email list is your decision, however, I would not recommend it unless you have a strong brand – even then I’m not a fan of purchasing email lists.  It’s a much better strategy to build your list organically.  Start out targeting existing customers and people you know.  Every month, ask each sales and marketing person to get permission to send emails to 5 people.  If you have 10 sales and marketing people, that’s 600 new contacts each year.

People love to write about bad experiences.  Software implementations have given writers plenty of content.  Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects experienced failure rates that range from 18% – 70% since 2001.  However, the same data indicates success is as high as 82%.   The 8 steps outlined below will increase your probability of success.

Since 1990, I’ve been involved with several large and small scale software implementations and learned a great deal along the way, sometimes I learned the hard way which is invaluable.

Successful projects all share a similar process.  Follow this process and your success rates will be significantly higher.

1. Why is your company implementing CRM?
2. Get the right people on the project team.
3. Document existing processes and management metrics.
4. Define target management metrics (expands on the first point)
5. Document what the system needs to support.
6. Evaluate CRM solutions based on point 5.
7. Detailed evaluation of top 2 – 3 CRM solutions
8. Review the evaluation results and go.

Why is your company implementing CRM? – This is the most important step.  Successful projects have a powerful “why” behind them which is compelling enough to keep the team motivated throughout the evaluation and implementation process.  Without a strong sense of purpose, projects often flounder.

Get the right people on the project team. – Borrowing a line from Jim Collins, get the right people on the bus.  Each person on the team must buy-in to the “why” and share a strong passion for doing what is necessary to achieve success.  People that don’t buy-in are likely to derail the project.

Document existing processes and management metrics. – Before you can get to where you want to go, you have to know where you are.  This step can also further strengthen the “why” as existing processes are likely more convoluted than anyone imagined and management metrics are usually lower than expected – in many cases metrics are undefined.

Define target management metrics. –  This step further expands on step 1 and is the definition for project success.  For example, the team expects sales close rates to increase from 10% to 20% as a result of the project.  Make sure your management metrics are designed to drive revenue.  I’ve seen several sales organizations manipulate data so they hit the metric, but miss revenue.

Document what your CRM needs to support. – Focus on the “what” the system needs to do rather than the “how.  CRM systems have been around long enough so that many incorporate best practices.  At this point, you want to make sure you capture important functions.  Also, do your best to eliminate anomaly functions.  I’ve seen many teams spend a lot of time on things that rarely happen.

Evaluate CRM Solutions. – Most companies skip over the previous 4 steps and go right to step 5.  Not surprising, most of those companies end up with a failed project.  The Internet has made this step much easier as CRM providers include a list of features on their web site that you can use for your initial evaluation.  Evaluate 6 – 8 solutions (i.e. Google, top CRM for small business) based on the functions you identified in the previous step.  During the evaluation, you may find features you want to include on your list.  The top 2 – 3 make it to the next round.

Detailed CRM Evaluation. – I’m a fan of hosted CRM because the implementation is much quicker, no capital, and short term contracts.  Hosted CRMs typically offer a free month trial.  Use the trial to test how well the system supports your high priority features and ease of use.  Ease of use is important, especially for sales people.  You want your sales team selling rather than entering data.

Review the results and go. – Make sure the team supports the top rated CRM solution.  Good teams will debate the results, many times in a heated fashion.  You want this to happen because the team is passionate about doing the right thing.  It’s common for a team member or two to be disappointed because their solution was not recommended.  That’s fine as long as they are supportive of the team’s decision.

If you follow these 8 steps, the implementation process should go smoothly.

Guest Blogger: Kimberly Lucas, Chief People Connector, Goldstone Partners

Unless you’ve been underground for the past few months you’ve probably noticed that businesses are feeling more optimistic about the economy lately.  This is especially true in the Rocky Mountain Region.  There is a significant uptick in hiring happening in just the last few weeks.  This activity is also being felt by your employees – and you need to be paying attention.

In following industry trends, I’ve noted trusted sources quoting employee unrest ranging from between 30% and 80% of the working population.  Why is this important?  Because it means that a large portion of your employees are tired, frustrated and keeping their eyes open for new opportunities.  Let’s examine this a bit:

1. What would happen to your business momentum if 50% of your workforce left in the next 6 months?
2. Are you equipped to handle this turnover?
3. Do you have adequate recruiting staff and a candidate pipeline to fill the voids?
4. Is there enough knowledge capital at the staff level to handle diminished capacity?
5. What would happen if your VP of Sales left tomorrow?  Would the sales team follow them?  Where is the team’s loyalty?
6. Assuming a conservative 30% turnover, do you think (honestly) that it will be the bottom 30%?

The good news for business is that we’re beginning to emerge from the worst downturn in our lifetime, the bad news is that we’ve cut benefits, overworked our best people and have been forced to make decisions that will have far reaching consequences.

I’ve been in the Talent Acquisition (recruiting) business for over twenty years and this is what I know.  Happy employees cannot be tempted away.  However tired, unappreciated and poorly led employees are easy pickin’!

So what are you supposed to do?  Show some love toward your keepers.  There is a bunch of talk about employee engagement right now and I think that’s just terrific.  However, turning the dial too far will result in 1. Distrust and 2. Entitlement.  Therefore, I suggest taking a more subtle approach.  Identify the individuals in your organization who are the top performers – the folks you simply cannot (or don’t) want to do without.  Rally your executive team to identify these people at every level and launch a pre-emptive campaign to minimize the potential of losing them.  Here are some ideas – I’m sure you can come up with more:

1. Training and development – these programs went away 2 years ago – it’s time to bring them back.  Help your top guns build their marketability, they’ll remember it.
2. Reward great performance with balance – a day off, a dinner out, playoff tickets – be creative and make the reward a personal experience.
3. Get your CEO involved – make sure your top executive knows who your keepers are and makes a concentrated effort to notice them, talk with them and get to know them on a personal level.
4. Challenge them with a cool project.  That doesn’t mean pile more work on them, rather move stuff around within your team to give some of the really meaty work to your keepers.  They will love the challenge and appreciate your confidence in them.  This builds loyalty.
5. If you have some cash use it!  I’m not a fan of throwing money at a problem; employees rarely leave because of salary.  But if you had to hold back increases, or were forced to cut salaries last year, make it right just as soon as you can.

On the other side of the coin is good business – risk management.  You are going to lose people this year – good ones.  Make sure that you have cross training and documentation processes in place.

1. Alleviate single points of failure (only one person knows this, does this or has this relationship).
2. Review your information backup policies to make sure that you have copies of all work material.  Then when some of it walks with an employee (and it will) at least you have it too.
3. Make sure that all customers are well known at multiple levels of your organization.  You want your customer loyalty with your company, not your employee.
4. Invest in proper documentation.  Just before the vacation season begins is a great time to have everyone update (or create) documentation so that business can keep flowing while employees are out – there’s your justification.

Turnover is a fact of life – no one stays with a single company their entire career.  This year however, is beginning to display signs of a fairly significant rotation and if you are unprepared, the results could slow your progress or potentially damage your business in the mid-term.

Fact #1 – 80% of your workforce is actively or passively looking for something new

Fact #2 – Top performers are expensive to replace but inexpensive to retain

Fact #3 – The most effective loyalty programs don’t cost a lot of money

I met with a good friend of mine last week and we were discussing Apple’s iPad.  He believes the iPad is a game changer, but I’m not convinced.  It’s a $500 device that allows you to access content, but it is not great for creating content since it doesn’t have a keyboard – you can purchase a keyboard to $70.  With 16 GB of memory, it’s basically a Netbook.

Virtually everyone I know that purchased an iPad are raving Apple fans.  What the rest of us need is an inexpensive device that offers quick and easy access to the Internet.

The $100 laptop is a great initiative designed to make computers affordable to developing countries.  In order to make this initiative viable there has got to be significant volume which I’m not sure developing countries can sustain.  The question is: Why wouldn’t the manufacturer also offer this computer in Europe or North America?  There are a lot of people in these countries that can’t afford a computer and would jump at the chance to purchase a $100 laptop.  There are also a lot of people that don’t need a lot of computing power and use it mainly to surf the Internet and access email.

Every day more and more processing is done via the web rather than on the computer.  Reminds me of the old mainframe days when everyone had a “dumb” terminal at their desk.  There are a significant number of people that want something similar to a “dumb” terminal which would allow them quick and easy access the Internet.  I would buy one if the price was right (i.e. $100) because there are numerous times either my wife or I want to search the Internet for something.  Since both of us use our laptops for business, we want to keep it out of the way so it doesn’t get damaged.  Also, it takes 10 minutes to boot up my computer.  I’m too impatient to wait.

An inexpensive “dumb” terminal (aka thin client) that only allows access the Internet would be perfect.  Since the device would be have limited features, boot up time should be instantaneous and access to the Internet would never be more than seconds away.

I believe it is a matter of time before an Internet only computer takes off.  Here is my prediction of how it will materialize.  The technology will be adopted in developing countries as well as consumers in Europe and North America.  People will love the simplicity of the computer – no upgrade hassles and they can turn it on in seconds.  With a low price point, they will be less concerned about damaging it so it will be in places such as the kitchen which often spells disaster for laptops.

In the mean time, more and more cloud applications will become available and Internet access will continue to improve – faster, less expensive, and reliable with greater reach.  Most consumers work and some will start using these inexpensive devices at work.  Initially, SMB office workers (people that don’t travel) will use the device because it is not only inexpensive to buy, but it is also less expensive to maintain.  Less complexity equals less cost to operate.  As cloud applications and Internet access continues to improve, other employees will adopt these devices.  As the eco-system becomes more reliable, bigger firms will start using the devices because of the significant cost savings without the drop in productivity.  Power users would be the last group to adopt if they adopt at all.

The point is there are a significant number of people that are over served with today’s PCs and software.  There are a lot of low tech people out there that just need to do a few basic things.  If they can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars, scores of people will adopt this technology.

Last week, I met with the leadership team for a local business association in the Denver area.  We were discussing ideas that would help them accomplish the following:

• Increase membership
• Strengthen their relationship with members
• Strengthen relationships between members

Let’s face it, most people join an association to increase their network as well as increase their knowledge.  However, the former is far more important than the latter for most people.  People want to grow their network so that they can grow their business.

One idea we discussed involved creating educational workshops where participants would develop and implement a plan for a specific topic.  For example if the workshop was marketing related, at the end of each session participants would develop a deliverable (i.e. marketing plan), review it with group, and present progress during the following session.  The group holds each person accountable – similar to a Mastermind Alliance.   I can’t think of a better way to accomplish the objectives mentioned above.

The association had a company lined up that would develop the content and run the first workshop.  The challenge – getting the first workshop off the ground and ensuring it is a success.  The leadership team was very excited about the workshop concept until we talked about the work necessary to market it.  The look in their eyes said it all – who is going to do the work required to market the workshop.  Anyone who has implemented a new service, product, etc. understands how much work is involved to get it off the ground.

The solution was fairly obvious.  Let the company running the workshop do the marketing for you.  They understand the workshop better than anyone else.  The association would provide a list of people interested in attending and the company running the workshop would be responsible for marketing it to them (the association needs to protect its members so they will need to define ground rules).

The leadership team loved the idea since it took a huge burden off their shoulders.  The point is look for opportunities to leverage your partners when rolling out a new service.  If the partner generates business as well, they would welcome the opportunity to get involved.  Plus, they are probably better it at so leverage their strength.

I don’t know about you, but for years Outlook was controlling my work day.  All I was doing was responding to email and my inbox was out of control.  With thousands of emails in my inbox, it was difficult to remember which emails I addressed and which emails required my attention.  God forbid a customer or partner request went unanswered.  It’s tough enough to win business, no need to make it more difficult (see my February 1, 2010 post “Gain Competitive Advantage during the Sales Process”).

Not only was it difficult to keep track of emails that required follow-up, but Outlook 2007 coupled with Exchange runs like a wounded animal when you have a lot of emails in your inbox.  It felt like an eternity for Outlook to open so I could start the daily grind of staying on top of email.

About 2 years ago, a friend of mine, John Wittry, invited me to attend a seminar his company, McGhee Productivity Solutions, offered.  The seminar teaches people how to better manage Outlook allowing them to spend more time on other activities and reduce the likelihood of emails following through the cracks.  If you get a chance, I highly recommend attending one of their seminars.

I do my best to follow the four points below and it has helped me significantly improve productivity:

1. Schedule 2 – 3 times per day where you attend to email.  I read email first thing in the morning, after lunch, and at the end of the day.  Every now and then, I peek more often, but try to avoid it.
2. Turn off the Outlook indicator that alerts you when a new message arrives.  I can’t think of many people that have the ability to completely tune that out.  To turn this off in Outlook 2007 go to Tools -> Options -> Email Options -> Advanced Email Options and uncheck the box “Display a New Mail Alert”
3. When checking email, do one of the following three things:

• Reply to the email and then delete the email or file it for future reference.  If you need to stay on top of the email, file it another Outlook folder, create a task with a due date, and attached the email to the task.  For more detail on using tasks effectively, check out McGhee’s book “Take Back Your Life”.
• If the email does not require any action on your part, delete it or file it in another folder for future reference. Get it out of your inbox
• If you need to act on the email, but not right away, file it in another folder and create a task so you don’t forget about it.

1. At the end of the day, your inbox should be empty.  I’m able to do this 95% percent of the time and it feels pretty good having an empty inbox.

If you decide to implement some or all of these ideas, I recommend reading the McGhee’s book first.  It goes into a lot more detail especially about how to use Outlook tasks to stay on top of email.

A couple of months ago, I attended Chuck Blakeman’s weekly luncheon.  Each week he covers a different topic, but the topic a few months ago really caught my attention.  The topic – Bad Profit versus Good Profit.  There are a lot of executives and business owners that believe any profit (as long as it hits target margins) is good.

If you only plan to sell to a customer one time and never see that customer again, you may not care if the customer feels like you ripped them off.  Even if you only sell to a customer once, you want them to have a positive experience because you never know who they will tell.  All businesses should evaluate customers from a lifetime value perspective.  Most businesses are focused on running and growing their business and don’t want to spend time any more time with vendors/partners (I hate the word vendor – it has negative connotations) than they have to.  Those are the customers that you want to keep.  Businesses that are constantly calling looking for additional discounts for every order and claiming you screwed up are the customers that need to go.  Fire them on your own terms.

Airlines, wireless providers, credit card companies are all guilty of bad profit.  Charging people for each piece of luggage is ridiculous.  Encouraging people to carry on as much as possible is beyond stupid.  Wireless providers love to penalize you heavily if you exceed your plan minutes.  That just never made sense to me.  Why would any company charge $0.40 per minute when you exceed your plan?  Isn’t it a good thing when people want to use your service?  Credit card companies – enough said.

The goal of every business should be a quality customer experience.  If you need to get rid of customers, do it on your own terms.  Don’t treat them poorly and hope they leave.  And never treat a good customer poorly.  Chuck also mentioned an interesting statistic, if you share a bad experience with other people; they are 6 times less likely to use that company’s services than you are.  It makes perfect sense as most people embellish a story focusing only on the bad to improve the quality of their story.  The people listening are petrified.  While I enjoy a good story, I don’t want our company to get top billing in a story like this.

Any profit that makes customers feel like they were ripped off is bad profit.