A couple of weeks ago my son and some of his schoolmates completed the Ten Tors Challenge, walking 35 miles unaccompanied across Dartmoor. His team came in smiling after over 19 hours walking and sleeping two nights on the moor, carrying all their food and kit. It's an achievement to make any parent proud. But it got me thinking about the rewards of investing in training. They had spent alternate weekends over the last 18 weeks training for the event, sacrificing their other interests (yes, grassroots football; and yes, grassroots rugby) to do so. It was all about incremental improvements, starting with modest <10 mile walks rising to a full rehearsal. Do you give up your evenings or weekends to better yourself? To train to be incrementally better than you were last time you completed some activity for work? Is suffering the pain of trying something new, because it might help your performance at work, something you've embraced or something you've avoided? Do you make yourself proud by investing in yourself? Do you make your boss proud of your self improvement? Perhaps most important, would your parents recognise and be proud of the effort that you are making to train yourself to higher levels of competence and capability?

I'm hearing first hand very conflicting things about the state of the global economy. I'm not an economist, and don't worry this won't be an article to bore you with economic arguments. But it will look at the first thing any sales leader should do if there appear to be economic headwinds, either at the macro level, as some claim now, or at the micro-level in their own business, industry or ecosystem. So what is it: double down on keeping existing customers happy. Do all the things you should always be doing, so go the extra mile, impress upon every department in your business that every client is precious and needs to be 'loved'. Dust off those account plans (what's that, you don't have any? Maybe give me a call then) and remember that most businesses survive recessions by maintaining revenue from existing customers. New customers may still turn up, but will be fewer and further between. If you definitely still need them, it really is time to get an outbound strategy in place rather than relying solely on marketing for lead gen. I'm not convinced there will be a downturn never mind a recession. Almost all my clients across all industries are absolutely flat out busy, and I have never been so busy since starting my own consultancy. I thought the days of 3:45am starts were well behind me since my children grew up! I didn't realise that sheer workload would get me back there. I hope you are flat out too and loving your business as much as I am. Enjoy the long weekend in the UK if you're reading this here. [Image from https://www.thewealthadvisor.com/ ]

Slight change of tack for this week's thoughts. With the buzz around electric vehicle launch after electric vehicle launch coming almost daily now, I've been thinking about when to make the switch myself and when sales team fleets could reliably switch. I would have already bought an electric car to be honest, but where I live for several months of the year I need a 4x4, and due to the size of the family I also need 7 seats. I'm sure large electric SUVs will eventually make it onto the market, but the Tesla Model X while desirable has build quality and overpricing issues in my opinion. So could your sales fleet switch to electric vehicles now? The factors to consider seem to be: Price/performance of the vehicles on the market Ease of charging, both at employees' homes and while travelling Tax, especially if your team still has company cars. To avoid becoming a full time car reviewer, let's assume the first point is largely dealt with, except for people like me with specific requirements. With respect to charging, public charge points at motorway services to suit salespeople on longer journeys are largely well maintained and plentiful, but a good electric vehicle will have sufficient range for most sales trips rather than needing to be charged on route. The question mark is whether the destination, the customer premises, will have a charging facility that the sales person can use while in a meeting. Anecdotally I don't think many offices are so equipped yet but I'd love to hear your own experiences if you think I'm out of date. With regards to tax, I'm not a tax advisor and offer no advice, but the tax advantage of a company electric vehicle over a company fossil fuelled car or even personal car seems to be significant in the UK at the moment. I'm worried how long that advantage will last before a Chancellor feels compelled to act to raise revenue. It is certainly commonplace for employers to be asked to offer salary sacrifice schemes for electric vehicles so that all staff can benefit from the tax advantages, and a number of schemes have sprung up to make this easy for employers. My feeling is that the recently announced electric cars, some with more realistic driving ranges, will move electric company cars off the green agenda and into the mainstream during 2022. I shall close by noting that there is no cross reference to my previous post about track day incentives in which electric cars were conspicuously absent...

You've got your inbound marketing sorted, am I right? You are inundated with high quality leads so don't need to treat them carefully or with respect to maximise sales? No? In which case, you'd better look after the few hard-won inbound leads that you do generate as best you possibly can. Which can be measured to give you an RoI. According to close.com and in my experience, if your team phone an enquirer within 5 minutes of them submitting a web form, emailing your sales team or receiving a phone message from them, they are 100 times more likely to accept your call back. I'd actually go further: if you call a prospect within 15 minutes of their enquiry, they are not only more likely to take your call, but will also still have the browser window open so can accurately tell you their keywords for all important lead source tracking, as well as the project still being front-of-mind and a priority for them. Even better, I have known it happen that the sales rep can call to qualify the prospect, arrange a meeting, hold the meeting, prepare and present a proposal over the next week or two, and still be the only vendor to have responded to the prospect's enquiries by the time the prospect is ready to make a decision on your proposal. So get your sales team onto a strict rota for responding to inbound leads, then set them an SLA to respond within. And automate as much of the process as possible: do not rely on them checking their email for new leads when they walk out of a meeting, make sure your systems have sent them an SMS alert which they are much more likely to check even if in a rush.

Two weeks ago I was driving south on the Fosse Way in Somerset on a lovely sunny winter's afternoon on my way home from a really productive meeting with a client. I passed a cider farm advertising "Cider for sale" which got me thinking about use of language in sales. I advocate using the client's language wherever possible: in meetings and proposals mirror the client's use of language if possible, so for example don't talk about a spade if they've called it a shovel. This isn't as simple as it first appears, as it's not just about appealing to them at the surface but also reprogramming yourself or your team to think in the client's shoes. Remember, the buyer doesn't want to do a project for its own sake, or to help you sell more cider for that matter. They want to achieve a business goal or outcome, or perhaps want some refreshment. So when you're writing for business, don't copy that farm's mistake and say that your equivalent of cider is for sale. How about "Refreshing cider to take home" to make the language about the buyer's needs. [Image from the Dorset Echo ]

Today is the end of my financial year in Effective Interim Ltd. Luckily I don't have a plethora of investors to report to, to keep happy and demanding ever higher returns. I answer only to myself. So nothing is ever good enough! But it happens to every business every month, quarter and annually: financial periods end, and sales leaders are either satisfied with their teams performance or dissatisfied by underperformance, but either way probably want just a bit more. So should you offer incentives or gimmicks to prospects on days like today at the end of a financial period just to get the deal over the line? It might work in retail and product businesses, with stock to sell and obvious benefits you can offer. It might work in certain sales situations where a buyer is not showing urgency in their own business and where you've failed to convince them of urgency already, or where you know there is a competitive problem and you need to secure the sale before a competitor does. But in general, I'd say that in complex B2B solution sales all you'll achieve by offering a month end deal is giving away margin, sacrificing control of the sale, and looking weak in the buyer's eyes. So don't do it.

As promised last week, some thoughts on what makes a good sales kick off event. 2022. The year we put the pandemic behind us and GROW GROW GROW, right? Well, I'm not going to predict that my kids' sunflowers are going to do any better this year than last year, nor that the pandemic is finally becoming endemic, but I will predict that if you organise a fantastic sales kick off event then you'll see better achievement of target by your team than you might otherwise. It might not be possible to have a face to face kick off, depending on current restrictions when you operate, but online events can save travel expenses and time, giving you more money to underpin either a keynote at this event or a future event when everyone can travel. Plus, less travel equals more selling time. Far too many sales leaders and marketers believe a kick off is about conveying data to their team: the company's achievements last year, the business plan headlines this year and therefore what each sales person's target/quota is this year. Impersonal, boring and probably using PowerPoint. I find that you get the best results from making those formal comms as informal, and incidental, as possible. Make anything backward looking no more than 10% of time on the agenda. Instead, focus on (safely) getting the team together to learn best practice from each other, deliver training that they find valuable to help their sales technique but by far most important to motivate them . Roleplay How to motivate a sales team? Refer to last week's blog for one idea. Remember that motivation can strike an individual from any number of subconscious places as well as from incentives; conveying an idea how to increase their average deal size could motivate someone just as much as offering a driving day. Your sales leaders should know your individual sales people well enough to know what to put on the agenda to motivate them. "Roleplay?" I hear you and your team wail. Maybe get an external expert to help (no, not me, an actor) play a prospect, and the sales leader should observe to deliver feedback alongside the actor afterwards. The single most useful skill to teach subliminally? Active listening. Measure with a stopwatch (or online tools can do it during a Teams meeting) what percentage of the mock sales meeting the sales person speaks compared to the prospect. Get them to roleplay a blind qualification call that you know the outcome they should reach by identifying, probing and listening, but the sales person doesn't at the outset. Then, if qualified in, roleplay the first face to face meeting. Improvisation Another useful way to teach active listening is to get a world expert to do it for you. Nowhere is a person more exposed than on stage doing an improv gig where they forgot to listen to the actor delivering the line that should prompt them. I very highly recommend asking John Cremer to deliver his famous half day improv session to your sales team. I've done it before and the results in terms of teaching old sales dogs how to listen are remarkable. Plus, John will make sure everyone has a real laugh, one of the best motivators and best retention tools I've come across. Sales kick offs may involve other team building events, but alcohol mixed with improv will be more fun than mixed with PowerPoint! If you focus on motivating you'll achieve more than focusing on delivering formal data. I can't promise growth, growth and more growth to my kids or to your business, but I can promise to help you make it all seem a bit easier and more predictable. Everyone prefers forecasting certainty and reliable growth over uncertainty and feast and famine sales results, so contact me now to transform your sales. [Photo by Anastasia Shuraeva from Pexels ]

You've had a good break, I hope. You and your team are dragging yourselves back to your laptops at home or in the office and probably making a slightly stronger coffee than usual. Of course your team need to catch up with each other and gossip a bit, but far too many companies seem to accept that the first working day of the calendar year is unproductive. For some, it will also be the first day of a new financial year, so what's the first step a sales leader should be taking to set the year up right? It seems obvious to suggest that cold prospecting will be nigh-on impossible on the first day back to work, and I would advise against tarnishing your brand by contacting buyers who aren't ready to talk as it's also their own first day back to work. But existing prospects may be easier to get hold of than usual today, so you could direct your team to follow-ups. My recommendation, though, especially for sales teams who are working remotely, is to introduce some competitiveness to the team - don't let them hide behind the excuse of catching up on email all day, instead set your team a competition with a decent prize for the first to achieve something. I favour a Red Letter Days type ' Drive a Porsche ' type reward if that would motivate your team, giving a day at the Porsche Experience Centre to whoever achieves the first new logo sale in 2022 - but customise the incentive and reward to your business targets. More next week on kicking off the year in the right way, looking at organising a sales kick off. [Header photo from Porsche Experience Centre website , body photo by Anastasia Shuraeva from Pexels ]

Partnering, sales channels, call it what you will, partnering is an important part of the marketing and sales mix for many B2B businesses. Partnering can mean a number of things: A simple referral relationship, which might be one way or two way, or A strategic partnership where a partner resells a vendor's products or services, adding value for their customer, and often receiving incentives for sales volume, or even A joint venture, where two businesses form a jointly-owned subsidiary to offer relevant products/services usually with a cross-selling opportunity into their existing customer bases as well as potential equity value. And, in my opinion, far too many vendors, especially targeting financial services verticals, grandly use 'partnering announcements' to obfuscate and make grandiose an announcement about a new customer signing. Signing a contract with a customer for them to pay you for your products or services is not partnering, it's normal course of business. Partnering can open up a world of indirect sales opportunities by leveraging the partners' existing client list and own marketing efforts, but done wrong can simply cost you margin. There are many many details to consider and nuances to explore when setting up a partnering arrangement. For example, it's important when considering introducing partnering as a route to market not to compete with your existing direct sale model, or vice versa. The share of revenue between the vendor and the partner is also crucial to get right: how to avoid pricing your offering above competitors', but retain a good profit margin for both the vendor and the partner? How to incentivise the partner sufficiently that they recommend your solution over a competitor's who they could potentially also partner with. How to manage your partners, because they need nurturing and strategic input just like key accounts... the list goes on. You know how to contact me to explore this or anything else sales related. This will be my last blog for a little while due to the Christmas break, have a very good break from work if you're celebrating. [Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com . Main image from Microsoft.com ]