Ali Ghaemi Online

Summary Of The Most Popular ERP Products

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Mar 282016

EnterpriseAppsToday has a short summary of today’s leading ERP vendors. It is noteworthy that each listed vendor has multiple suites for different purposes with different names, but the website lists one specific offering per vendor. Interestingly, there is the comment by an analyst who dismisses other vendors in that fragmented market. He may have a point.

ERP buying Guide: Top Tier Vendors

The site also offers an interesting analysis of the CRM Market. The elephant in the room is the actual ROI of CRM and the user base’s resistance to the product. Is it too controversial to believe Microsoft Excel is the largest ‘CRM’ in the world?

CRM Market Leaders

*Things That Need To Go Away: Ignoring vertical specialist ERP and CRM solutions

Pareidolia! Where Is My Prospect? What Happened To The Customer?

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Mar 202016

It is one of the biggest challenges in the sales world. The salesperson has a process with his or her customer and the customer goes dark. AWOL. MIA. Radio silence.

What is going on?

Manners, etiquette and social politesse aside, the sum of the situation is that the selling party has received his or her answer. The customer is either not interested in moving forward or is not quite ready yet.

These pages have written about the actions that need to transpire before this point:

Salespersons must ask the ‘why’ question
Salespersons must be well acquainted with their customer (and if your prospect does not allow for it then the action speaks for itself)
Salespersons must interact with at least three employees at the customer’s company.
Customer must have demonstrated the MAN acronym, which is comprised of Money, Authority and Need (Desire).

As it turns out humans like to succumb to inertia and dislike change (ironically, hence the million and one quotations about how change is normal). The customer has decided to stick with the status quo, do nothing and let inaction prevail. So, the question really becomes ‘what does it take for you/customer to undertake a change?’ and ‘do you/your employer want to change the situation?’

Either a customer can answer the question to both parties’ satisfaction or the answer comes indirectly through conversation, questions, change action and triangulation. Do not allow your sales pipeline resemble a menagerie of company names.

In addition, it is important to track the customer’s decisions and choices online in the same manner that one listens for indirect verbal cues. Which one of your marketing activities is engaging the customers? Which e-mail campaigns elicited clicks from your customers? Which of your web pages or assets is the customer touching and in which other websites are they engaged? That is, hopefully, your marketing team is tracking the online world for you. Are they?

*Things That Need To Go Away: Lack of Bi-Directional Communication

Product Managers And Sales

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Mar 142016

Wikipedia defines a Product Manager’s role as, “investigates, selects and drives the development of products for an organization, performing the activities of product management.” These activities include researching intended demographic, the products offered by the competition and how they fits with the company’s business model.

Product managers are the bridges between the company’s line items, developers and sales and marketing.

The job is both becoming more simple and more arduous at the same time. The advent of Internet and sources of research and communication at one’s fingertips have made the collection of data almost seamless compared to days of yore (a.k.a. 20 years ago). The same efficiencies have made the market that much more fast-moving and prone to shifts.

Elsewhere, the buying process has changed drastically. Buyers come to the table much better informed, less dependent on sales and marketing. The old spectrum and funnel definitions and directions do not apply. In such an environment it behoves any company to use the job function closest to the market and its customers. Who are these mystery people? Why the sales team of course.

This is why it is such a surprise that in an informal survey of my contacts in sales and sales management the grand total number of companies in which there existed a formal process of communication between sales and product management was…. One.

The market is more competitive, products are commoditized, customer demands and appetites are changing and changing more rapidly and alignment is minimal or one-way at best.

Should product management at all companies not have a formal, standardized and consistent standard for using the sales team as the company’s canaries in the mine so to speak?

Sales need product management’s assistance and input. Product management needs input from the individuals who are on the front lines and most exposed to customers.

Does your company have a formal sales-to-product management process?

*Things That Need To Go Away: Product Managers Who Have No Time For Sales

Employee Retention – Why Employees Stay And Why They leave

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Mar 132016

These pages have often featured articles on why employees choose to stay with an employer and why they may choose to depart to other companies.

Here are a few past posts:

Most managers and employees agree that ‘bad’ bosses are the main reason employees quit. The anecdotal evidence and conventional wisdom only add to my own observation from both sides of the divide.

Here comes the Harvard Business Review with a new study which claims, “employees leave both good and bad bosses at almost comparable rates.” The researchers reached their conclusion by studying and interview 700 employees in the IT sector. The conclusions being counterintuitive it is possible that the study confused its cause and effect. In other words, better employees left and were also the same ones who ‘kept their chin up’ and remained positive in the face of bad bosses or other reasons that motivate employees to decamp. Above average employees are likely to have a passion for and be deserving of more senior jobs and better pay, which are already identified as employee incentives. The key is whether it would be at their present job or elsewhere. This is where companies need to be diligent and retain talent.

The study itself believes that the silver lining in this is that employees leaving good managers become better ambassadors and alumni. Even so, the finding is at odds with what has been this writer’s personal and professional experience. Still, the conflicting findings are not a reason to exclude writing about them or to immediately assign a false value to them.

If – and this should not be construed as a leading sentence – the article is mistaken it could be due to it being one sample studying one industry, although it is doubtful to me personally that employee retention fundamentals are that different from industry to industry.

What do you think?

*Things That Need To Go Away: Companies Without A Growth Plan For Employees Who want It.

With How Many Of Your Customer’s Employees Are You Interacting?

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Mar 062016

It is often noted that successful salespersons interact with the right employees of their prospects/customers.

What is less often discussed is with how many of these folk a salesperson should interact. The question is more and more relevant because decision-making is increasingly and more and more diffused.

IDC’s 2010-2012 survey has something to say about this question.

In a survey of IT buyers (see figure 8) customers/buyers report the following statistics when asked “How many people were on your buying team including yourself — that is, the group actively involved in influencing the short list of vendors considered and making the purchase decision?”:

Companies with 100-499 employees: 3 to 4 people
Companies with 500-999 employees: 4 to 6 people
Companies with over 1,000 employees: 5 to 7 people

Noteworthy is that in two out of three scenarios the number of employees involved in making a decision is increasing.

What a salesperson needs to know is that buying is a collaborative effort. As such, not only a wider view of the process is needed the typical marketing funnel and CRM single-person view of leads is lacking in a broader view of how customers buy unless used by sales as a single strand in a larger weave.

*Things That Need To Go Away: Marketing and sales efforts, which focus on persons, contacts and a decision-maker and are not holistically geared at accounts i.e. multiple persons.

Sales Organization

Articles, Prospecting, Selling, Selling More 1 Comment »

Mar 022016

You may have come across the phrase ‘sales strategy’ or ‘sales process’ on this site. Moreover, several book reviews on the website contemplate and discuss the subjects. Either way, you have seen or read about the same elsewhere.

I have come to understand that the difference between the two is not always clear however. A sales organization or department needs both complementary concepts to function or, at least, to do so well. Here are the distinctions:

Sales Strategy

Organizational goals and plans especially vis-a-vis customers
Your objective SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threats) analysis
Financial actuals and reality
Interaction with other departments
What is the internal and external story that aligns to, and addresses, your SWOT

Sales Process

How the sales strategy is executed
How do the junior and senior, inside and outside, farmers and hunters, pre, post-sales, sales professionals and their hierarchy do their job? Moreover, are roles and responsibilities clear to everyone?
The degree of autonomy and self-management versus scripted and regimented methodology
Which tools and skills are required and leveraged in the sales organization

*Things That Need To Go Away: Expectation of success without a sales strategy, process and consultation with sales.

E-mail’s Slow Demise (Not What You Think)

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Mar 022016

There have been multiple articles and statistical reports in recent months and near-term years about the demise of e-mail as a mode of communication. Culprits vary according to the source who, nonetheless, reach the same conclusion about the depreciation of a mode of communication that for practical purposes is less than 25 years old.

Compare that to postal services, which have a history dating back 5,000 years, carrier pigeons which were in service for 1,000 years or telegraph/telex which lasted 150 years and are still in use in parts of the world.

Research and reports have e-mail dying because:

It is just “noise” according to one Facebook cofounder.

There are smarter ways to do the electronic communication thing according to the co-founder of Evernote.

The old, and by now famous, ‘teenagers are shunning e-mail in favour of Social Media and IM’ evidence or, to keep the ‘blame’ on teenagers again this study that shows six percent of teens use e-mail daily.

Finally, there is spam. According to a 2009 Microsoft study 97% of all e-mail is unwanted.

Otherwise, and obviously, e-mail is not conducive to instantaneous communication like IM, collaboration for large groups or invulnerable to forked offshoot conversations.

The aforementioned studies and citations have merit and, whether cause or effect, valid. I would suggest, however, there is another and more profound reason e-mail may be going out of fashion: a lack of an ability to construct a basic sentence. We all suffer from it and it is getting worse.

I am not taking about your run-of-the-mill ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re/you are’ (as in ‘your good to go’ or ‘your the man’) or illogical expressions of time in a sentence (as in ‘Every Monday, they play tennis’ as opposed to the correct ‘They play tennis every Monday.’) either. While these, and many similar sentences, have their order of words backwards the problem extends to nearly every aspect of written communication.

Many English teachers cannot construct a sentence correctly. Couple that with the increasingly multicultural society of ours where individuals’ mother tongues are something other than English and the situation is in fact, when one thinks about it, more dire than imagined.

That is the main reason e-mail is dying. How many times have you personally received an e-mail, looked at it, not been able to decipher it, reread and focused on it and given up? How many times has a colleague or family member asked you to come over only to show you an e-mail, which he or she has trouble making head or tails of (‘of which make heads or tails’) or you have had to begrudgingly pick up the telephone to speak to someone because their e-mail was simply incomprehensible?

Give me a call and let me know what you think.

*Things That Need To Go Away: Language instructors and there spelling and grammar mistakes.

Year Over Year Compensation Increases And Variables

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Feb 152016

Sometimes it is a wonder how easily a percentage of sales management professionals forget or never learnt the fundamentals of sales compensation and motivation.

This is not a knock against the vital and, if the job is being done correctly, difficult sales management position. However, for different reasons sales managers act counterproductively to the desired outcome when it comes time to set goals and define compensation plans.

Reasons may include:

Sales managers forget what being in a sales (individual contributor) position was like.
Sales manager was never in a direct sales position.
Sales manager is junior and has not found his or her rationale or voice. This person would go with flow and not make waves.
The sales compensation model is of course derived from the company’s strategic plan for the year and is handed down from the office of the Chief Financial Officer and, by extension, board of directors. The sales chain of command was unable to wholly or partly contribute to the puzzle.

Here are examples of what I term counterproductive sales compensation modelling. Before doing that though let us remember that we are not dealing in absolutes. This is not a black and white edict. A compensation plan could very well lie on a spectrum between ‘good’ and the ‘bad.’

Sales professionals are often vocal, and correctly so, with sales compensations when:

The numbers are not what the company has in fact budgeted. By the time the sales manager has adds his 5%, the director had added her 10% and the vice-president has tacked on a discretionary 5% the number has ballooned by 20% and is demotivating the sales team. With the team finding the number out of reach sales people react in several ways. They check out when concluding that the target is not realistic. Worse, they become resentful believing the cards are stacked against them. Moreover, when facing a tough market and competitive landscape sales comes to fret a lack of friendly cover. You might be thinking how would the team know (that the numbers have been altered)? It is not the absolute number that poses a challenge, but the delta between numbers and the path to achieving it.
Sales numbers are based on one-offs or special circumstances. If a salesperson who happened to walk into a large sale or had a major sale based on a special circumstance that is not repeatable finds the new quota follow the (FY -1 Special Circumstance * FY0 Uplift%) formula he is likely to balk at the number calling it irrational along the way.
Similarly, salespersons with spectacular achievements are given congruently higher quota than counterparts based on last year’s success. The message is ‘Thou Shalt Be Punished For Thine Hard Work.’ Looked at conversely weaker salespeople were rewarded.
Under adverse circumstances, salespeople hold back – it even has its own term ‘sand bag’ – possible sales from one quarter to the next or worse from fiscal year to the next. Forget helping salespersons over-achieve; under such circumstances sales is actively not achieving.

It is important to not create sales compensation in isolation from the very salespeople who are tasked to execute it. It is also critical that salespersons do not be handed a disincentive and be demotivated by sales management and their compensation plans. Most importantly, managers must examine the compensation plan to eliminate any perceived or actual unfairness. Operating in an environment that is not a level playing field will have the opposite of the intended effect and lead to charges of favouritism or unprofessionalism.

Keep the numbers above board, uniformly applied and view the sales team as mature allies.

*Things That Need To Go Away: not soliciting the sales team’s feedback on the sales compensation model or, worse, soliciting and subsequently ignoring it.

What Technology Means To Sales Jobs

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Jan 252016

There have been predictions that gains in productivity, robotics and computerization will mean an increase in leisure hours, dangerous societal repercussions or alternately a dearth of jobs for human beings. As early as the 1960s both popular and scientific literature predicted that with the advent of automation and productivity future humans – they meant us – would be working minimal hours or be out of work.

The predictions turned out to be wrong. Firstly, advances in technology have been uneven. Secondly, change in technology has also translated into the need for more input, toil and income and thus requiring contemporary men and women to work more to be able to afford said technology. In plain English, we need to work even more to be able to buy all the things we want that we did not even know about fifty years ago. Sorry, Scientific American. Growth in productivity has been accompanied by a growth in technological Joneses.

Wrongly or rightly, predictions that human jobs will be replaced by technology and robotics has already partly happened. Telephone operators or typists are obvious examples. Now, let us assume for the moment that Replicants, Skynet or Cylons are either not going to come into being or, if they do, which is the likely scenario will not seek to usurp their short-sighted creators, but that did not stop Oxford University professors Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne from publishing a much-discussed paper on mankind’s employability resilience. They also hypothesized that advances in technology vis-a-vis human happiness and employment do not constitute a linear path from the 19th to 20th to the 21st century. Moreover, the composition of the employment market will change. They argue that employment will shift to industries where productivity is growing. Except, this time there is a caveat. The famous ‘knowledge worker’ will not be able to out-smart or out-knowledge computerisation.

skynet

What I find interesting is the discussion of ‘big data.’ This term could mean many things and refers to concepts as related, but diverse, as HADOOP, social media, IOT (Internet Of Things) or the digitization of all human knowledge. For once, computers or robots will not be asked to replace human activity in a specific environment or domain. They are being fashioned to do it all inclusive of tasks unforeseen. Think about it. This is not a robotic assembly line. This is a domain-less knowledge worker. The said ‘worker’ can do legal analysis, drive, conduct surgery or do something as mundane as find one a telephone number on the Internet.

So, what do the researchers think about the chances of sales becoming automated and job losses in the occupation. We have all heard the adage that ‘people buy from people.’ Is it true or merely another in the long list of dated, or patently false, tidbits?

Before answering it is useful to note that the researchers explain that there is a smaller chance that position which require “creative intelligence” (basically the ability to be clever and non-routine) and “social intelligence” (essentially the ability to understand others and react) will fall prey to obsolescence. In another cruel and Darwinian twist of fate, the model therefore predicts that lower paid jobs (included the dreaded McJobs) will be susceptible to automation more than higher paid jobs. Generally speaking, executive positions, business and healthcare jobs are at a lower risk of replacement. Construction, transportation and production jobs are in the higher risk category. More specifically for us, telemarketers (the single most endangered position in the Appendix), retail and insurance sales are highly likely to be replaced. Negotiators, which potentially might include, very experienced salespersons or management are not. Junior or mid-experience salespersons do not fare well in the modelling however.

In the meanwhile, whatever the pace of automation, it is important for salespersons to not be robotic, impersonal and uninformed.

*Things That Need To Go Away: low energy and boring ‘sales’ with no creativity, knowledge or appeal.

Differentiation In An Undifferentiated Environment

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Jan 112016

Several years ago I wrote about Not Competing On Price. Sales organizations are in an unenviable state of affairs where competition is more fierce than ever, pressure on sales margins is unrelenting and, due to both information overload and borderline fantasy marketing by sellers, customers are either blind to what sets you apart or, more likely, do not want to pick up enough cues, which would set you apart from the competition.

I say “more likely” because customers are in fact more informed than ever. Partly as a result, Gartner believes that buyers see their interaction with sales as their least valuable part of their buying process.

How should organizations and sales departments respond? Put another way, the question is, how do organizations and sales departments differentiate themselves enough to hold a competitive edge? The answer should be simple. Have a better product and convey the strength to customers already suffering from cognitive dissonance. Easier said than done of course. Where it exists sales must know it and articulate it. Among other things a sales process must become

Better aligned to the contemporary buying process, which means not being strict about the pipeline and funnel milestones as defined in your CRM
Offer more domain knowledge,
A much better understanding of vertical KBRs is a must because you would want to align it to the customer’s purchase
Moreover, support and maintenance are tangible factors that remain dissimilar across companies.

Notice that, given our dilemma, these are still non-product differentiators. To keep our feet firmly planted in reality we are not going to see sales managers measuring their salespersons differently. Why? Wall Street, Bay Street, whatever quarterly measuring street.

Where a competitive edge does not exist the price pressure is even more acute.

What to do when a customer sees you as a commodity? What to do when a customer sees you as one of many? The answer is ‘disruption.’ A seller has to disrupt current customer thinking through one or more of the below:

Know yourself. If you cannot educate your customer to your differences then you are at a disadvantage. Do you have superior communication and articulation? Either way, you must get better. Do you have valid reasons, experience and stories? If so, maximize their utility. Importantly, be careful assuming that your customer’s knowledge of you is perfect. What they may know may not match what you know. Check and compare.
Know your competition. Educate your customer on the competition. Do you know their limitations? Do you know how they are processing their sales strategy?
Know your customer. This includes their hot buttons, preferred relationship parameters and interaction style preferences and big picture. The last item implies that the seller could go beyond the point solution and make truly constructive suggestions to customers. The triangulation of engineering, marketing and sales becomes more important than ever. Is this wishful thinking? Quite possibly. Selling organizations are as resource and time challenged as buyers. However, the extra effort and fastidiousness is worth it.

All products being roughly equal, or being perceived as such, something has to give. It will either be the price or your non-product differentiators.

*Things That Need To Go Away: companies and sellers who cannot articulate why they have a raison d’etre.

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