The Fork In The Road

The Art of Knowing When It’s Time to Give Up

Success sales today are part mathematics and part art.  Sales teams are assisted by a number of programs that help assess the readiness of a lead to move through the sales process. 

Marketing automation solutions such as Marketo and Eloqua include advanced lead scoring capabilities.  Marketing campaigns can now be created to automatically initiate depending on a lead’s reaction to a previous campaign.  For example, because Mr. Jones registered and attended our webinar about online security, he is sent an email through which he can download a related white paper.

Meanwhile, sales teams can also access real-time business and social intelligence through companies like InsideView.  Knowing the latest of what’s happening with prospects in real-time is something that wasn’t possible a few years ago.

When you add to all these solutions measurement and predictive analytics, it’s plain to see how much investment has been made in creating solutions to help the sales process.  To close a deal, it comes down to the art of the sale, which includes both skill and the gut feeling of how to approach and interact with any given individual.

With all the tools that are available to find leads and advance the sales process, what could be missing?  The answer: when to give up on a deal. 

By now, 100s of millions of dollars have been invested in helping marketing people qualify and nurture leads, and sales people to gather data on any company.  However, when it comes to when to give up on a lead, it is all left to art. 

Sales reps are by nature optimistic people.  They look at a prospect and think “I can convince them to purchase my product.”  To the credit of some of the great sales people I’ve known, they often close deals that initially seemed to be long shots.  Unfortunately, not every long shot is worth pursuing.

There seem to be a few reasons for this. First, if a lead is qualified, but the person is not the likely buyer within the target organization, the sales rep may get trapped in a cycle of having “good conversations” with one person after another, but never with the true decision maker or buyer.  A sales cycle that should be 45-60 days could easily become 9+ months if the initial lead doesn’t hold the budget.

Second, culturally, it may be impossible or unlikely that the sales target will come out and say no.  For example, this is often a surprise to US-centric sales teams, who may come out of a meeting in China thinking their project is moving forward only to learn later it wasn’t approved or would take several more trips to gain approval.  China is not the only place on the globe where people avoid saying no to a salesperson’s face, but it is known for it.

Third, if the sales process extends too long, it raises questions with the lead’s company.  “If we haven’t purchased already, do we really need it?”  In the end, these sales fall apart simply because there is no longer any momentum behind the project.

Honestly, I don’t have an answer for how to know when a deal is artificially lingering.  I’d love to see someone develop a formula that would help companies know when it’s time to pull the plug on a deal that will never close.  Sadly, as many a salesperson has realized firsthand, it is more popular to push revenue generators than something that will save time and money.  This means that in the end, we must continue to rely on the art of sale to not only close deals, but to know when to give up on them.

 

 

What’s Coming and What Could Hold Us Back

Last week, I attended Dreamforce, Salesforce’s conference. Like the now defunct TechCrunch 50, it is a great place to see a lot of very different companies; in this case with a thin layer of similarity. It is the common ground of Salesforce integration that makes the companies so ripe for assessment and comparison. 

I met some old friends, saw the next version of some familiar technology and had a few people lie to my face.

I’m not necessarily in the market for new vendors/technology, so for me it is a perfect time to skim the surface of new companies. There are definitely some interesting things happening.

Without a doubt, social has become more integrated into the mainstream consumer experience over the last 18 months and will continue to expand into the enterprise in creative ways. Having said this, the next significant wave seems to be new ways to leverage business intelligence and predictive analytics. This makes sense given both the technology evolution and the desire for companies to prepare for whichever direction the economy/business may go.

So getting back to the people lying to my face. Enterprise sales and marketing have often sold ahead of what is actually generally available. I get this. If you assume it will take at least two to three months to roll out new software that could push the software into the next release. With the increasing adoption of SaaS and PaaS, this is becoming less likely, but in many cases could still be a legitimate assumption. For startup companies with limited resources, there is also the development plan that builds what customers want, also called customer-sponsored development. If customers understand the timeframe of receiving newly-developed capabilities, this also seems a legitimate approach. I am not labeling either version of this selling technique as a bold-faced lie. 

Unfortunately, there are companies so eager to close deals, they promise features and capabilities that are several releases into the future. If prospective customers don’t know this timing, this can only be seen as intentionally misleading, and if the company in question is promising what it does not intend to deliver, it can be defined as fraud. This has happened throughout the history of business, but combatting it is more important than ever. 

Although the percentage of companies guilty of this might be small, their reach is large. Dreamforce is a good illustration of the reach of SaaS companies. Obviously, main companies around the world use Salesforce. Now these companies are starting to, or are about to start making significant investments with other SaaS vendors. If what they purchase does not meet baseline expectations, it damages the reputation of that vendor, the cloud computing sector and potentially the bottom line of the business that purchased it. “Bad seed” companies can only survive for so long, but it’s the potential for them to drag the rest of us down a peg or two on their way down that will hurt.

 I love startup companies and I love optimism. All I need now is a BS meter for the next conference.