The Silver Bullet in Sales

When I ran a marketing consultancy, I would periodically have to remind clients that no silver bullet exists in marketing. I assumed that marketing was more concerned about this silver bullet than sales and was surprised to find that Google lists 1.2 million results for "silver bullet sales" and just under 400,000 results for "silver bullet marketing."

Clearly many people are looking for that simple answer in sales too. Well, Virginia, there is no simple answer, although in doing this search I did find one company who suggests that "timing" is the silver bullet in sales. Timing certainly is important, but the definition of the "silver bullet" is something that cures all problems, and good timing won't make up for other inadequacies. I also found a sweet silver BMW Z4 convertible, but that's a different story.

Clients keep asking for that silver bullet. "Lee, what you're telling us is what we have been telling them to do (or think or say). We want something different, something better, something that will work right away. You know, a silver bullet."

The truth is that selling is hard. It's a mix of art and science. And building the right environment behind the sales person is hard. In a large organization (over $1B in revenues) it gets extremely complicated.

The typical $1B software company has 300-500 sales people and spends anywhere from $75M-$200M on their sales organization annually. There are a lot of moving parts in an organization of this size and these moving parts can create friction.

In small technology companies, the product managers and marketers are pretty closely aligned both with the sales team and the needs of their customers. Once a company reaches $1B in revenues, these product managers and marketers become somewhat detached from customer needs (unless they work hard at staying connected.) As a result, the marketing messages and assets tend to be pretty internally focused -- why our technology is better, etc.

Similarly, as the organization grows, sales operations tends to increasingly focus on the internal mechanisms of ensuring that forecasts and quotas and proposals and contracts and everything else gets delivered properly. What gets lost is the connection between all of these functions and processes and the concerns of the buyer.

Now the language of the sales person -- the conversations that they are holding with prospects and clients -- starts to decay. It starts to get stale and less effective. Good sales people instinctively sense this and adapt. But good sales people represent 10-20% of your sales organization.

It's the rest of the sales organization that's left hanging. They're still carrying on the 2006 or 2007 conversations about architecture or single sign-on or federated identity management or server clouds. And these conversations are falling on the deaf ears of 2009 era customers most concerned about capital preservation and making it past the next layoff and improving departmental performance this quarter!

Improved sales productivity...and higher customer satisfaction...and higher contribution margin...are all attainable. With no silver bullet available, we need to focus on ensuring that each and every sales professional is holding the right conversation with their prospects and customers.

In some cases, that means handholding a customer who will not spend a dime with you for 18 months. In other cases, it means pushing a customer to consider the cost and risk of not undertaking a specific project.

In this new economic climate, high performing organizations are questioning all of their assumptions. We can assume that only a few things that have worked in the past will continue to work in the future. One of those things is proper attention to sales methodology, sales enablement and sales management. This triumvirate, along with good customer intelligence and good people, will ensure continued selling success.

The details will be different, but the core processes are sound. By the way, most companies still struggle with these core processes. IDC found in a recent survey that just over half of all tech companies have a single consistent sales methodology.

So if you're looking for the silver bullet in sales, look inside. Are your core processes sound? Do you have a single consistent sales methodology? How is your sales enablement? Are your sales managers spending their time coaching reps or filling out reports?

Higher sales productivity is possible. It takes hard work and attention to process detail. Then it takes leadership to inspire your sales people to really connect with prospects and customers in ways they never have before.