Optimize Your Sales Pipeline Management for Animal science

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okay we're going to talk about uh the real issue that i see facing a lot of us today every company in here regardless of your size has a sales program you can be a one man or one woman band but you have a program or it could be 10 or 15 sales people and you have a program what i want to ask you is are you running the program or is the program running you some symptoms that we're going to help you walk through is how to analyze your current program against best practices if the program's running you the symptoms are frustration the symptoms are the squirrel cage phenomenon the symptoms are the msp that started the business 5 6 7 8 9 10 years ago is still doing what he or she was doing 10 years ago does that sound familiar that's the man or woman who's starting to get a little frustrated that's a man or woman who isn't building a business let me start by defining a business from my point of view a business is an entity that will produce wealth for the owners of that business whether they're working or not if you can't take a six-month trip to fiji and come back with more wealth than you had when you left assuming you're not gambling while you're down there and when then you don't have a business you have a job and i think jlb should become an acronym in our sea of alphabets as randy just said and it should stand for just over broke so he wants you to get out of the cycle and the only way out is to focus on the program that allows you to find acquire and retain customers so we're going to take a look at how the program really should work and this is a dove this is a forehead flattening concept but you have to compete more to win more so i don't want anyone to shout this out but how many first meetings are in your calendars today to meet with new prospects with the view of selling them something in the next 30 days how many first meetings have you had in the last 30 minutes and as i said this morning if there are no first meetings there'll be no first orders that's just man and too many of us have a sales program based on hope i hope someone calls me today i hope someone i know will introduce me to someone they know who needs some technology and hope is not a very viable strategy although it seems to be very punitive now one of the things i advocate and i've shared this with many of the people that i've coached i won't take a coaching client i won't take your money i won't take an engagement unless you have a strategic plan because i can't help you get to where you want to go unless you can put in writing the destination and too many of us don't have that destination in mind and consequently we can't build a plan there's a website that i refer my clients to it's called 6-0 msp it doesn't stand for managed service provider but it stands for 60-minute strategic plan that website will provide you with a template and you'll invest an hour of your life i guarantee you that you'll see things within your business within your program that are missing that will help you achieve your goals so 60msp.com is someplace i encourage you to go to cargill's law action drives results everything else is just a talking point we can't spend our lives our careers getting ready to get ready we can't spend our lives waiting for the next hot product to come down hoping someone will call because i'm going to talk to you like a civilian for a minute or two i'm not a technology guy i know it doesn't show cobalt was a good language but the civilians out there don't understand the new technology so they're already confused something new or comes up they're still confused and if you're confused by the lowest price spread okay one of the things that i want us to start talking about i love granny's presentation because price doesn't matter and let me prove this to you all right now i know this is counterintuitive first of all i learned to sell at ibm back in 1907 in the days when computers were heavy and our motto was you can always buy better but you can't pay more and we were very proficient in selling the most expensive least productive equipment on the planet okay very proficient in doing that my hobby my passion is flying airplanes and when i fly robotics i wear a parachute how many of you want to take a stab as to which end of the pricing spectrum i shot or like a friend of mine has embroidered on the back of his parachute pack in case of failure returned from full refund okay so i will make a parallel an analogy to a parachute the server because if a company's data goes to put what happens that company in six months or less could put it's gone so your services could be analogous to a parachute so how much is it worth to have your services if the risk is the business could go out of business without you and that's essentially randy's approach don't talk about your price talk about the cost of not having a relationship with you what does it cost to company in terms of stress in terms of production in terms of errors to not have a relationship with you there's some more questions that i'd like you to answer if you don't change your activity from a quantitative and qualitative point of view we're only going to be a year from now basically where you work 10 years from now if you haven't changed where we will be at the end of this quarter we will be at the end of this year is it good enough what needs to change to make this year your best year these are issues that that msp and do this by yourself you don't need to share with anybody but if you don't know where you're going no co-pilot can help you get there you are pilots in command of your respective airplanes how much needs to be changed critical activities if you're really going to drive your business and you've seen funnels you've seen pipelines and all of the speakers in the world have slightly different variations on this but at the end of the day you have to have a whole lot at the top to get a little at the bottom is that correct how much do you need at the top to meet your goal for mrr this year or for new accounts this year or for new projects this year we don't know how much is needed up here we can only hope to get to the bottom you see the only aspect of this funnel that i can control as a sales professional is the top because stuff happens doesn't it and it's happening faster today than ever before back in my ibm days if i met a prospect they said come back in september i went back in september they're still there in today's world september could be two weeks away you go back in two weeks and they've been merged purge deduped or on the job in my day you could shake hands and have a deal today the contract is the beginning of the lawsuit isn't it it's just a matter of when that will occur so i can control because of work the top of the funnel your sales program must count measure and hold accountable the number of first meetings in your account i was talking to somebody at the pavilion earlier they said well is that more work is that adding work to it and maybe if you want to look at it that way but by measuring yourself against some metrics and these are the critical activities what you're really doing is increasing your chance of hitting your goal what you're really doing is reducing your stress because without this what we tend to do is we start working harder and harder and harder and pretty soon we're at maximum rpm mr amis sole practitioner the seller doer you can't work more in 24 hours a day i know many of us try to but the day you hit that wall don't you then you start saying things that you request okay one of the things that a good program will allow you to do is predict the future this man is reading his future because he's an msp that understands the correlation between today's activities and tomorrow's results now any spreadsheet will help you track this connect wise will help you track this auto task will help you track this tiger call will help you track this but how many first meetings do i need to get a new account has to be an answer that you all have otherwise you have a job and you're just working harder and harder and harder we can control first meetings everything else is subject to some of the wins of change i have to be able to correlate activities to the future here's why today's activities are tomorrow's bank account balances and i know that if i do the right quantity and quality of activities this week 93 days from now that's our average sales cycle i'll know how many first quarters i'll have from new accounts so my life is less stressful than the sales professional says i gotta work harder gotta work harder gotta work harder because you run out of benefits sooner or later so based on the companies that are here and i live here in california so i understand the state's economy and the uh the potential there i think the potential for smb focused msps or vars or affiliates or whatever you refer to yourself as is huge just huge and most of us are barely scratching the surface the last time i checked in the united states there were 6.2 million small medium businesses in los angeles county i think i saw a number of something like 57 58 000 that employed enough people to have five or more pcs and to some degree isn't that the sweet spot we all want to look at so how many are in your databases benchmark yourself start measuring the activity metrics that produce the revenue define your shortfall if you don't change anything how much new revenue will you produce by the end of the year if you don't have that in hand then you will find yourself at the end of the year hoping to hit your numbers and those numbers are difficult to hit that late in the year i like to measure kpi's key performance indicators a key performance indicator is how many first meetings did i have last week how many quotes did i publish last week how many dollars do those quotes represent or if you don't do quotes how many proposals and how many dollars if you give demonstrations how many demonstrations do you have to get to get a new account you see we can go through the motions of selling and produce nothing and become very frustrated or we can become a little more precise and have a very predictable income flow now one thing i'd like to talk about that i did not talk about this morning is a concept called closed loop marketing every one of the crm systems sold in this space has the ability to run puzzle marketing i'm going to share a true story with you that i hope will motivate you to turn on that capability in the software that you own in 1970 i was a rookie sales rep with ibm as all rookies i was floundering a little bit i've had a lot of people say no get out of here heck no back in those days we canvassed office buildings and guards would chase me out of the building and i realized that if i canvassed every alternate floor going up and down the building the guard was always on the wrong floor that was selling back in the day but i was frustrated with this i wasn't getting the results that i wanted and one day i saw a book that's whose title was how to sell anything to anybody and i bought the book because i needed to sell something to somebody okay and i read the book it was written by a gentleman named joe gerard some of you may have heard of him he holds the guinness book of world records for the number of new cars sold in one year from a retail dealership in 1965 joe gerard sold enough chevrolets from a chevy dealer in detroit to earn 400 000 commission as a commission-only chevrolet building the top-of-the-line corvette the most expensive car they sold that year sold for forty eight hundred dollars with a nature if you don't know what an 8-track is your agent my wife and i just had a great conversation with our granddaughter because my family is very musical my grandmother was a musician my mother was a musician my grandmother's brother played with count macy and wrote music for count basing so our granddaughter said and my wife is a retired music teacher and a professional musician so our granddaughter said great dad are you musical and i said yeah i used to play the a-track and she went huh i tried to explain that at one point in time we had these boxes with a tape inside and you know if you had a good one you got three or four songs on it and she pulled out a little money square i ipod granddad i have 38 000 songs right here so just pertain to the world but anyhow joe gerard's secret and i was frustrated i wanted to know what a secret was so i read his book everybody that said not now no need no budget just wanted to shop wanted to come in and look at the new cars everybody that didn't buy went into a process he had a program and every month every one of those people got a postcard from joe gerard postcards i thought had magic words on him so i was looking through the book speed reading to find the content of those postcards because he averaged write this down he closed eight cars per day for 365 days back to back non-stop his w-2 was 400 000 the number two salesman in the same business in the same dealership getting the same leads from the same marketplace with the same demographics had a w-2 of 14 000 and the rest of the guys called joe lucky his secret sauce was these postcards went out every month to everyone and they were beyond hokey happy new year if you're going to buy a new car this year come see joe happy valentine's day if you're going to get a new car for your honey come see joe go forth with the luck nourish in a brand new green chevrolet come see jeff not very good marketing copy at all but what he prevented was he prevented the prospects from forgetting about it how many people did you talk to last year that said not now no need no budget good idea but i have to wait that this year buying from your competitor because we didn't stay in touch and too many of us don't use the power to close the market you've got it in the technology you're already paying for turn it on send them anything every month a newsletter a postcard hey how you doing we're going to have a meeting come on by let me come by uh what do you think of the clinton grounds game i don't care literally carver did a study and they found that as long as the reader sees your logo you maintain top of mind awareness so for those of you that are killing yourselves right trying to write expert marketing company just send them your logo absolutely makes some sense because we humans forget information that we don't use with a half-life of 30 days read joe gerard's book if you aren't uh optimizing your website shame on you we're in the industry 84 of who purchases last year ing to the sales lead management association were bought were initiated i'm sorry from a web search so they're looking for you if you don't have any of the devices on your websites that identify visitors like business staff visitor leads act on them you heard those names are using any of those any some yes maybe no okay very inexpensive but what we'll do is tell you who's visiting your website when you'd like to know who's there today google analytics will tell you how many people were there but i can't do anything with that i need to know what company they came from does that make some sense very inexpensive i don't care who you use but i care that you do set something up okay google analytics will tell you who's traveling who's coming through there but i want you to compare the analytics on in terms of local search or national to the number of quotes that you're producing i believe most of us don't compete enough i believe most of us are too busy avoiding competition because we're busy serving and i know you have to do that but you can compete more often and your phone won't ring take a look at your websites i've seen a lot of msp websites some of them i can't understand i'm relatively proficient in english i went to college and everything but the problem is there's too much tech talking too many of our websites so if a prospect was there we prospects will say things like i don't want to know that you're the premier provider of managed service technology in such as such a state or accounting i want to know what you're going to do for me so what results have you produced for your customers how do your customers value those results what would it cost them to not have a relationship with you and here's a question to ask your teams when you get back please ask this question what does it cost somebody to say no to the opportunity to do business with you what does it cost them to say no i'm not going to do business with it say what well let me disagree with that if it costs them nothing to say no then the other side of the point is they believe they get nothing when they say yes you see what i'm saying so let's focus on boy if you don't do this here's what it's going to cost you you'll lose over time you'll have productivity issues you'll have data security issues let's focus on those results and let's talk about fun fear uncertainty and doubt here's the cost stress-wise psychologically i'm not changing and let's present palm palm is a human motivator we humans are attracted to pump and repelled by fun and we have to have a sales program that articulates flood and pond to get people to initiate the process of change and then to get involved with changing i'd like you all monday to or tomorrow actually i forgot well we have two more days what week what day is it i'd like tomorrow okay the next business day you should do this but call any list broker i don't care who it is and ask the man or woman at the sales desk of that list broker to give you a count of the number of demographically identical companies that exist in the geography you serve to the services that you want to deliver so if you have let's say 2 000 names in your database and you call a list broker and you say how many companies exist within 30 miles of where i'm sitting that are like this and they say they're 50 000 you have 48 000 strangers you need to go meet does that make some sense to you guys and this is a free take to five minutes market penetration exercise because while we're hammering on that one field they want to see another server any of you dealing with any seymours seymours or the prospects that say i need to see more you know can you bring another one out can i see more can i talk to this guy well while you're wrestling with that guy you're not talking to the 48 000 people who have cash so that delta equals your opportunity quick exercise but if you do that then i want you to design a program to impact the 48 000 strangers in your geography that you're not talking to because without that you'll be in trouble you see all of us operate in two universes and i'm not talking about science fiction there's the universe of known opportunities they're in your marketing system and or in your accounting system and there is a universe of the unknown our wealth lies in the unknown universe and we have to go attack that universe it won't come to us you know no one's waking up tomorrow morning saying i wish i could find an msp that i could pay on a monthly basis to take care of my i.t that isn't going to happen we may hope it'll happen but you can certainly go out and convince people to make that happen take a hard look at your crm system do you have any typographical errors in it are all of the fields populated a crm system that isn't accurately populated is a crm system that you can't use for marketing and frequently i inspect my client's crm system and i see a phone number in the first name field i see you know no appropriate citation dear ms you know george smiggle friends i see incomplete zip codes you have to have an accurate and up-to-date crm system and that has to be a condition of employment if you employ sales people and some sales people will say no i have my own system well that doesn't fly with me if you have your own system you're well and goodly entitled to work for someone else but you have to work in my system i shared this with the ascii group last year but my father was one of the tough ski gear and he gave me my love for aviation and those men flew 15 000 combat missions in world war ii and were never defeated their box score was 15 333 pretty good box score what'd you say they weren't allowed to do anything their own way part of the secret of their success is uh colonel davis who was the leader of that that entire group was a very strict disciplinarian some of the uh stories i heard is that he may have shot at his own guys just to get him back in line so there was no way yeah do what you like you know it's cloudy today stay in bed what the heck so we have to have structure we have to have process we have to have discipline we have to have a program without a program you're going to work too hard and achieve too low benchmark i like to see sales funnels that have three times the annual revenue goal in them so if your goal is to grow by a land box this year you need to have three million dollars worth of worth of i.t opportunities targeted and identified not that they'll all close but if you don't know of 3 billion the odds of getting 1 million is somewhere between slim and none so your real job is to broaden your reach and frequency okay make sure you're you are measuring yourself if you're a seller doer there are some critical activities that have to be done now many of my seller newer clients say gil i get so busy i don't have time to do the selling does that sound familiar i get so busy i can't prospect yes sir question this were an auction soldier the young man in the front five out of the balance uh but uh quick tip put yourself into your contact management system as if you were a prospect and set appointments with yourself i can get very very crazy busy taking phone calls from clients and doing work in the office and whatever but i set sacred time and sacred for prospecting and the easiest way for me to do that is i entered myself into my crm system and i scheduled appointments with myself that keeps me from double booking does that make sense and every time i look at putting an appointment into that time i go no that's sacred i've got to spend time developing my business if you are an msp seller doer and you don't block time and spend time working on your own to build your business 10 years from now you're going to be spending the same wheel and i want to help you build businesses and remember a business is an entity that produces wealth for you without you working 24 7 365. i met an msp at the ascii ascii session last year great guy he was engaged to be married and i said congratulations he says yeah i don't think i'd take the honeymoon i said well you know i haven't been married almost 30 years i think you got to take the honey i don't do much marriage counseling but you know that's blocking attacking he says well we want to go to hawaii but all my clients are east coast in the time zone and if something happens they won't be able to reach me and i said you don't have a business you have a job doesn't and he works for the worst boss in the world himself and you know if you're that kind of person let's change that but build metrics your program must have benchmarks the one i've been hammering is first meetings it's pretty easy for us to track that but be specific make sure they're measurable achievable results oriented and time gated if you fail to do that you're going to have some issues now if you're setting these up for an employee make sure everyone understands what you're talking about failing to plan is planning to fail so if you don't have a sales plan most of us don't if you don't have a strategic plan most of us don't then you've got to get one because if you don't plan you're actually de facto planning to fail the only question is what excuse will we have so what do you want to do in the next 12 months the next three years what's in it for you to achieve these goals do you want more freedom do you want to do more flying you want to do fishing or golfing whatever it may be build the metrics so that you can control activities today to get you to where you want to go is this making some sense for you guys okay i'm seeing some eyes i don't know if it's the hour of the day or whatever but i really want you to make a commitment to yourself not to me but to yourself that you're gonna do this and you're gonna start tomorrow morning and you know what are you gonna do tomorrow and how will you measure by tomorrow night and if it's waiting for the phone to ring that's the wrong strategy by the way that's a picture of the first telephone sales force in los angeles back in the 1919 1920 time frame you can't see their sign but their value proposition was have you a telephone in your home okay and they didn't need to be very sophisticated because they were selling against a technology that sounded like this run down the block and tell your sister it's dinner time today you just dialed the little girls self different world so we've changed significantly now perfect practice builds perfection one of the way the tuskegee airmen were able to achieve what they achieved is they practice air-to-air combat 100 hours for every hour of actual air-to-air combat when you're flying at 400 miles an hour your enemy is flying at 400 miles an hour and he gets paid a bounty for killing you you don't have time to say where's that switch i thought it was over here so how much sales practice do we do in our lives and no one should know us and if you don't have a partner if you don't have a sales person you have a smartphone with a recorder show hands okay turn on your recorder and record your best presentation record it as if you were trying to submit your services does that make some sense and uh what's your name susan what company are you with ts computers in lavinia and video where are you located how old are you another company company she's getting ready to throw that class at me 37 years okay so if i were one of your sales people my presentation would sound like this hi my name is bill cargill i represent ts computers and video headquartered in north hollywood and for the past 37 years we've specialized in helping companies like yours optimize the impact of technology on their p l most of our current clients view us as their partner in profit and we look to add you to that list i don't know whether or not you qualify for our services but a brief technology impact assessment will let both of us know whether or not it makes sense for us to pursue a mutually beneficial relationship what day next week doesn't work for us to get together sound good i'm going to break my recorder out again but that's you know and i've just done that for hundreds of years it seems but i want each of us to have our own presentation for your company every company in here has a way of doing business every company in here has a set of results that are beneficial to your customers or you wouldn't be here and your smartphone with the recorder is the best sales coach you can get it's already paid for so just record yourself and listen to yourself are you speaking english or tech talk are you talking about results or technology and do the results talk and resonate with a business man or woman do they focus on profit productivity and cash flow or are you addressing technology i don't care about megabits and megabytes and all that i care about what's in it for me what will it do for my company go through your market planning most of us have a pretty good definition of our markets who do we want to sell to if you do that count you'll get a good understanding of what your market looks like i want you to have the game plan do you have a marketing calendar for every month of the year what are you going to do marketing wise in march what are you going to do marketing wise in april and so on and so forth don't just plan to wake up and go to work don't just plan to wake up and go get your email make sure that you focus on that i did that already okay i'm sorry where will you be at the year end of this year if you change nothing and is that satisfactory what will one or two more accounts in the monthly recurring revenue that they could produce do for you by the end of the year i think they'll agree that could be pretty substantial what do you need to change how much in my room had to throw in a picture of a pocket we pilots worry about things in front of us i never worry about and back but my wife and i fly a lot and we fly at night fly through the clouds and i have instruments to let me know where the mountains are and if you are worried about things in back of you then you're worried about the wrong things what's in front of you how many calls do you need to make how many quotes do you need to publish what are the kpis you see sales this is a sales criticism sales as a profession has traditionally been managed with lagging indicators and i want us to measure ourselves with leading indicators if your sales meetings start with how many dollars did we bring in last week month or quarter you're measuring yourself with lagging indicators i could do nothing about things in backing can only do something about things in front of me make sure that you exceed all kpis key performance indicators weekly measure the activity and correlate the activity to the results that you want at the end of the year now i didn't say this this morning but everyone that gave me a business card will not only get my sales training but i'm going to send everyone my sales manager's toolkit if you're in the ascii meeting last year you're going to wind up with two of them but in the tool kit is a goal setting and review form and i want you to use it as a self check it's an excel spreadsheet just print one every week and fill it out and look at what you did you can manage yourself much better than anybody else can make sure that you're measuring yourself on a scoreboard of kpis for sales for your website how many people visited what's the trend who are those people what information did they ask for what are your conversions and your bounces make sure you have kpis in place for marketing marketing's only responsibility in my opinion and i'm a little bit simplistic in this is to produce sales ready leads if marketing isn't producing sales ready leads why have marketing and i know there's some people who argue well we want a brand new want to look good and all that and at the end of the day looking good is nice but it's much more important to have celebrity leads none of the guys that flew with my dad ever got upset if there was mud on the plane they got upset when there were no bullets and the machine guns make some sense especially they want to see who was loading the machine which is why they loaded them themselves in the middle of the night so make sure you look at the number of appointments grow and fill your funnel that's the thing to worry about your program has to focus on filling the phone right now make sure the 3x factory is in place this is and in that toolkit that i'm going to send everybody is a sample closed loop marketing manual all you have to do is copy modify and paste the documents that are in that manual into connect wise or auto task follow the flow charts and the sequences and you'll have a puzzle marketing system in a few days okay the initial plan will guide you through avoiding selling to the dead this is a phenomenon that i've observed where we invest our optimism in a dead opportunity and we keep saying to ourselves well i just write one more quote if i just change this it'll come back a lot and it's dead go to the next code okay have rules in place to qualify your prospects and i don't care what your acronym is but i always want to make sure i'm talking to the man or woman who controls the money has the authority to spend the money who can recognize the need to spend the money and i know the timing if i don't know the timing i'm not going to pursue them make sure your marketing list is fresh rules are every list of accounts will go stagnant at the rate of about 25 per year so if you had a thousand names a year ago that were usable odds are 750 are still accurate and that's a function of the way people move and change and get promoted what have you if you have a pr firm in place make sure you're reviewing the number of sales ready leads if they're not producing leads then you're in trouble make sure you check yourself at the end of every month against your goals and your ambitions review your funnel monthly and manage all of your activities metrically once you're controlling your program with metrics your life will get a lot simpler your plan should be written out because i gave you the website that will help you through building your plan make sure you have thresholds in place for every step always look at year in shortfall what do you want to look like at the end of the year okay make sure you don't paint yourself into the proverbial corner use close book marketing stay in touch with everybody and practice practice practice like your life depends on it your financial life depends on how good you are eight to five is selling time to the degree possible i know the seller and doer that isn't necessarily true step one go back to all of your old accounts find out what they did ones that said not necessarily now i want to leave you all with one story about dad i didn't know this until he passed but one of the guys came up to me at his funeral and said did your father share very much with you about world war ii i said not a whole lot i knew he was there and some of the other airmen came together once a month to play bridge that lived in cleveland and he said let me tell you about something that happened to your dad in a mission over italy they were scoring b-24s they were jumped by german fighters a melee ensued and my father was separated from the group and when he realized that he was flying by himself clouds blocked his view of the rest of the americans and blocked their view of him eight germans attacked him at once dad got on the radio and said i have these sobs cornered if you want some put it over again so attitude drives your altitude ladies and gentlemen let's have a positive attitude get out there and sell somebody something thank you for your time