The Worst Sales Direction EVER! “Treat it like it’s your own business.”

I've just heard this story too many times not to share it as a learning moment.
I received a call from a salesperson asking for advice as he struggled to meet his quarterly sales quota. I assumed he was calling looking for new sales techniques or particular guidance on moving a client to close. But this was not the case at all. Here is how the dialogue went:
Salesperson says, “I’m selling a product in a market where I have a competitor selling the exact same thing.”
I replied, “Same thing? You mean same features, same everything?”
“Yes”
“Are you more price competitive?”
“No, not really. We offer trade in of older equipment to bring the price down but so does our competitor”
“What about service?”

“Yeah, we do support the customer better than they do.”
”That’s good. But will your customer pay more for this better service?”
“No.”
“Interesting, so tell me what kind of direction have you received from the owner of the business you work for?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, given the market realities you’ve outlined, how does your owner expect you to win new business? Is he doing things to separate you from this competitor? For example, specializing in a certain niche (becoming experts and thus the preferred vendor) or using marketing and strong advertising techniques to build brand preference (aka, Colgate vs Crest toothpaste)?”
“No, the only guidance I was given was, “Treat it like it’s your business.”
Even the best salesperson will under-perform or fail under these conditions. It is not the salesperson's job to identify target customers and invent ways to differentiate. The role of the owner, President and/or CEO of a business is to equip your sales team with the tools to be successful. At a minimum this includes the following:

• A list of “target customers” 
• those inline with the customer mix outlined in your short and long-range growth plan
• who match the profile of those who will value your product, expertise and/or differentiators
• The compelling story to support why clients should buy your product over competitors
• Who are the competitors the sales team can expect to face and what differentiates us from each
• A supportive marketing (lead generating, branding, demo tools, social media, samples, brochures, etc...) strategy
• The right sales tools and support (travel budget, conference attendance, CRM, bid and proposal, quoting, etc...) - tools that actually help the sales team do their job versus those that help the owner monitor the sales force.

Given that only 28% of a salesperson’s time is spent in front of the customer and about 50% of that time is actually selling (the rest is prospecting (35%), relationship building (10%), and training (5%)), it is imperative, you the owner, equip him/her with the tools to ensure it is the right prospect and that he maximizes the productivity of that time.

In my 12 years of consulting "under-performing sales" has been by far the number one pain point with the blame typically placed squarely on the salesperson or VP of Sales. It is not long into the engagement when humility kicks in as the owner discovers it is their lack of a long-range plan, a clear understanding of what makes them different, a detailed knowledge of their competitors, and an ineffective or non-existent marketing strategy that are the real culprits.

Want to grow your metro Atlanta business?  Let's talk over a cup of coffee about what we can do to give your sales team the right tools for success? Contact me here.

About the author. Mike Gomez is President of Allegro Consulting, a growth specialty firm helping businesses plan and execute aggressive growth strategies. He grew his very first client’s business from $8M to $35M in just two years. Mike is a sales process evangelist, prolific speaker, writer, three-time marathoner, a former military officer and pilot of both aircraft and helicopters. www.allegroconsultant.com

8 Growth Tools Every Business Owner Should Know, Have and Use

You need a good nail-gun, a saw and more to be a carpenter. To be a car mechanic you need a wrench, a computer code reader and a good socket-set to name a few of the essential tools. If you are a regular mountain climber then you likely have good rope, and plenty of high quality caribiners in your tool chest.  So, what are some of the important tools required if you are the CEO of your start-up or established business. 

#1 Business Plan (for start-ups): An exercise and accompanying document you complete PRIOR to launching a new business. Properly done it will force you to be clear on what your business is all about, the product or service you deliver, how you plan to deliver it, and supporting evidence for why customers will buy from you over competing alternatives. It will also tell you how much money you need to keep the business operating effectively before you are producing sufficient cash flow to cover operating expenses. Experience says you will find this document will be obsolete in the first six months of operations as real life will be surprisingly different than your assumptions. Regardless, this step is critical to success.

 #2 Strategic Plan (for established businesses): An exercise and accompanying document that combines your future vision of the business and real life market realities to define in a measurable way what your company will look like 2 to 3 years from now. It is the spot on the map you select before getting into your car for a road trip. Customer mix, revenue, market penetration, operations and people are all addressed in this document. A well done strategic plan will leverage you current strengths, acknowledge and address weaknesses, exploit market opportunities, and counter external threats. Everyone in your company should know your strategic plan - this is how you create an “aligned” workforce.

 #3 Tactical Plan: An annual document that defines specific actions (beyond day to day operations) to be taken by specific individuals in a specific time-frame (usually quarterly) that will incrementally move your company one step closer to the Strategic Plan goals. If you were to envision your business as a movie, this would be the “script”. You are the director and your employees, the actors. You are tasked with completing this movie on time and with no overruns.

 #4 Targeted Customer: Exactly who did you design your product/service for? It is not “everyone”. Your target customer is the bullseye of your sales dart board. The better you are able to describe the critical attributes (job, race, gender, age, income, business, hobby, etc...) the better and more efficient your marketing and sales force will be in finding and winning them.

 #5 Sales Strategy: A process where you analyze the depth and breadth of your market opportunities, the intensity of the competition you expect to face, and given resources you possess to devise a sales plan of attack. Similar to war planning you may choose a broad strategy that secures a large number of small victories or concentrate your resources to score a big impactful strategic win. It defines how and where you will deploy your limited resources as well as the weaknesses of you competition you plan to exploit to win new business.

 #6 Marketing Strategy: Marketing is all about generating qualified leads for your sales team to close on. Developing a marketing strategy is a left brain activity as it involves analysis and critical thinking. A well done marketing strategy involves analyzing your customers (who they are and how they buy) then exploring and selecting the most effective tools (web, social media, billboard, collateral, TV commercials, car wrap) within given financial constraints to garner their interest. You compete and hire marketing experts and service providers for their right brain creative skills to implement your strategy.

 #7 Sales Process: A replicable and thus written method for how you take a warm lead and turn him/her into a happy customer. As you might expect this is one of the most important steps in your business processes and should not be relegated to the personal techniques of any given salesperson. In addition to more consistent win rates, a defined sales process will allow you the owner to engage in a conversation with any of your sales team and know exactly who is in the funnel and where they are in the sales cycle.

 #8 Critical Processes: Those unique, replicable steps your company completes to generate leads, win business, deliver a consistent product or service and collect financial compensation. Documenting these steps provides two major benefits, (1) reduces risk by creating a back-up should you be unfortunate to lose a critical employee with all of the corporate memory due to a job change or accident and, (2) it establishes a baseline upon which to develop improvements. Say your company name is XYZ then what makes your product an XYZ product or service performed and delivered the XYZ way?  

Are you a metro Atlanta business who may need to 'borrow' some of these tools to help your business grow? Let's talk over a cup of coffee.  Contact me here.


About the author. Mike Gomez is President of Allegro Consulting, a growth specialty firm helping startups and establish businesses plan and execute aggressive growth strategies. He grew his very first client’s business from $8M to $35M in just two years. Mike is a growth strategy and complex sales expert, prolific speaker, writer, three-time marathoner, a former military officer and pilot of both aircraft and helicopters. www.allegroconsultant.com

The Formula for a Successful Start-up

Towards the end of an engaging coffee meeting with Harold Brown, a well known and self defined serial entrepreneur and investor in the rising tech community of metro Atlanta, he made this observation, “As I am getting to know you Mike I’ve come to the conclusion you are not a ‘creator’ you are instead a ‘doer’ and I bet if we paired you with a good creator we’d get one heck of a start-up.”   

I wasn’t insulted by that observation at all.  In fact he captured me perfectly.  I am a doer and always have been.  My consulting company is all about helping business owners become more disciplined doers.  There is no doubt the aircraft engineering degree (process orientation) and military upbringing (Dad was career USAF) contributed to these traits.  The whole conversation got me thinking about what the necessary ingredients are for a successful start-up – outside the risk taking, free spirit characteristics you hear about most often. Here’s what I concluded:

(C + D) + Fr = SSu

or

(Creator + Doer) + Financial resources = Successful Start-up

Leave it to a former engineer to turn an observation into an equation. Let’s take a moment to dissect this formula.

Financial resources:  The inclusion of this in the equation should not be a surprise to anyone. It takes money or equivalent to start a company.  We all know that - whether that means going without pay for years or writing checks for website, business cards, office space, travel, capital equipment, etc…. I read somewhere that one of the top three reasons for a start-up failure is being under-capitalized.  In other words they simply run out of money before sales revenues are sufficient to support the business.  Now I will argue that a vast majority run out of money because they spent unwisely namely because they lacked a Doer who would ensure a plan was in place to control precious cash.

Creator:  This is the passionate idea person who can see a problem or need as well as the business solutions to address it.  Though there are common traits between a creator and an inventor the difference is dramatic.  A creator in this case conceptualizes a business solution before a technology solution. Sadly an inventor‘s approach is exactly opposite, which explains why so many inventors are flat broke.  Jeff Stibell wrote this in a Harvard Business Review article titled, Are you an Inventor or an Entrepreneur?

“But don’t confuse being an entrepreneur with being an inventor. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Action is what differentiates an entrepreneur from an inventor. If you want to focus on ideas, become an inventor — not an entrepreneur.”

Guys like Henry Buckley typify the definition of a creator. He conceived and started 10 businesses, the latest a jogger-based door-to-door pamphlet delivery service called JogPost.

Doer:  This is a person (a) with the discipline and skills to develop and execute a credible business plan, (b) who possess fundamental selling and marketing skills, and (c) who is versed enough in financial balance sheets to make critical and timely decisions, (d) who knows how to find, hire and motivate a talented workforce, and (e) who knows when and how to engage outside experts (legal, accounting, etc…). 

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that this is an entirely different person from the creator.  Though quite rare, a creator may in fact possess some or all of these traits.  The important message is a business cannot make it without a well thought out plan, good marketing, strong sales and a disciplined approach to how capital is being utilized.  Take away any one of these and you’ve significantly impacted your chances of success.

Jim Flannery, Founder of the Four Athens technology incubator, reinforces this formula when he shared with me the reason the word “Four” is in his incubator name.  His experience says that you need the following four things to make a successful start-up:

• A business person
• A marketing/sales person 
• A technical person that can implement an MVP (software/hardware start-ups exclusively) 
• A service provider (legal/accounting) 

“I am very fearful of solo founders,” Jim says.  “My advice, rather than say "do you possess these traits", is "can you find two other people that possess one of these traits each AND believe in your (creator) vision"  

My strong message to those creators is to be brutally honest when assessing your skill-sets and if you lack any of those under the category of doer don’t make the mistake of thinking you can get by without it. I’ve seen enough to confidently say you can’t and won’t.

Want some growth advice for your metro Atlanta start-up from a proven "doer"?  Let's chat over a cup of coffee.  Contact me here.

Mike Gomez is the founder of Allegro Consulting, a business growth specialty firm.  He has served as a program manager and business development executive in both Fortune 100 companies as well as small businesses. Through the use of sound yet simplified business processes he has helped Georgia companies achieve remarkable sales growth. Mike is a growth strategy and complex sales expert, prolific writer, speaker, guest lecturer at GaTech and UGA, and a mentor at FourAthen technology incubator and Atlanta Tech Village.  http://allegroconsultant.com