Last week www.smartcompany.com.au ran a story saying that the Federal Government may include business numbers in the Do Not Call register. What are they talking about?

Prospecting for new business via the telephone (referred to as unsolicited phone calls) is still a legitimate and critical business activity necessary for anyone in sales and in business, especially in business to business sales where consumer marketing and advertising strategies do not work effectively. It is a vital activity any business or sales person worth their salt should be doing on a regular basis. Therefore I do not believe that the government should include business numbers in the DO NOT CALL register.

Good sales people have done their homework on who they want to call and are prepared to approach the prospecting phone call with a clear client centred purpose and professional manner. They don’t just pick up the phone willy nilly and dial anyone. Many businesses have won loyal clients and large projects by prospecting to new businesses. How do you think we did if before the internet? How do you think we still do it? Whilst the internet and SEO is helpful it has not replaced prospecting as a key source of new business development. Prospecting it still a key strategy to grow sales for any business.

Unless someone can come up with alternative, cost effective sales prospecting / new business development strategies that can bypass using the telephone as a prospecting tool and are fair for all concerned (meaning it doesn’t leave small businesses at a disadvantage to bigger players who can afford others means more easily) we need to be able to prospect via the phone to continue to find new viable customers and grow our businesses.

Using the phone to source new business is a cost effective sales tool that gives parity to anyone from a start up business to a large corporate. Placing businesses on the DO NO CALL register would discriminate against smaller businesses and start ups. It would further kill off diversity in this already over-corporatised country. So using the phone to prospect should be here to stay. If not for fairness and the ease and cost of doing business but for the environmental factors as well. I mean who wants more junk mail? (Which would probably replace the phone calls). I would rather field a few calls (many of which are legitimate) than get copious amounts of emails or mail to deal with everyday.

As you know I spend my much of my business life demystifying what good sales and prospecting practices are versus unethical and incompetent practices. While there are those people and businesses who give sales and prospecting a bad name, fortunately they are in the minority. This type of proposal is at risk of basing its findings on the minority of ‘bad’ operators at the expense of the majority who do the right thing.

Let’s make sure we do not kill off initiative, common sense and the entrepreneurial spirit by denying us the opportunity to use a legitimate business tool in a legitimate business tool box.

My only hope is that whatever happens on this proposal the government has the common sense and foresight to put business people and competent sales people onto its task force to ensure the ‘real world’ view is heard and acted upon. So I am putting my hand up and am happy to contribute to the debate if the government wants my point of view.

As markets tighten and people’s sentiment can tend towards the negative it is critical that we don’t get spooked. As mentioned before in the article about “Watch who you let near your mind” we need to examine all the evidence at hand, make informed decisions about our market and continue to ensure that our prospecting and sales efforts are targeted and at the forefront of our business activities. We also need to make sure that we continue to conduct ourselves in an ethical and professional manner working with our clients not against them.However in desperate times (and maybe it is all the time for some) some people stoop to new lows to try and get a sale. Here are a few examples of unethical and fraudulent behavior masquerading as sales activities. So beware.

For instance, last week, Carla, our Client Services Admin Manager, took a phone call from a man who said:

”Your fax machine is up for a maintenance review and I am wanting to organise a time to come in.”

There had been no mention in our business about a fax machine review. We are small enough for most things to be in our public domain so Carla knew something wasn’t right. She passed the call onto our Business Manager, Jobst who deals with all our office equipment. The man tried the same line on Jobst who, of course, was having none of it. The long and the short of it was this man was trying to get an appointment to see us to sell in new equipment but did so by deceptive means.

As Carla mentioned to me later what if you were new or not very experienced or were not kept in the loop you could have inadvertently let a person into your business who had not earned the right to be there in the first place. Why couldn’t that person have been upfront and told us what they wanted? Because sure as anything if they had got in our front door we would have kicked them straight back out again for trying to trick us.

I call this ‘Hit and miss – spot the victim’. They try and find a ‘victim’ who they can trick into seeing them and then try and bully them into buying something. While these types of stories do not make the news they are at one end of an ugly spectrum of lying and deception. At the other end of this spectrum are the tragic stories we hear and read about in the press of the elderly and vulnerable letting people into their homes for some sort of maintenance work only to be robbed or worse, badly injured or killed.

It’s bad enough that these people try getting in your front door by deceptive means but some companies don’t even call you and still try and get your money.

One of our clients informed me recently that some companies don’t even bother trying to see you instead, they just send you a bogus invoice hoping no one will notice and that you will pay it along with all your other accounts.

He mentioned two specific examples he had happen to him:

1. An industry magazine in his market send his business an invoice with a fictitious order number for a $600 advertisement he never ordered.
2. In applying for a trademark through his lawyer (who always invoiced all work done via his law firm) our client received a separate invoice for $1,200 from a company claiming to be a trademark firm. The official looking invoice arrived on his desk ready for payment having been approved by his accounts department. Knowing that he received all invoicing via his lawyer he rang his lawyer and found that this ‘trademark’ company was probably tapping into the trademark office data base somehow and sending out fraudulent invoices to people applying for trademarks hoping that the people were not vigilant and their invoice as well.

It made me wonder how many of us have paid an ‘invoice’ for work we never authorised and received. How many have slipped through the net?

These types of examples just remind us of the importance of being vigilant and to properly assess the credentials of anyone or any invoice claiming to do business with us.

Here is the second of two articles about recruiting top performing sales people and daring to do so from outside of your industry.

Even though I have not worked as a traditional recruitment consultant for more than 14 years many of my long standing clients still talk about those ‘out of the box’ placements we made. Was it just the recruitment approach that made the difference. Well NO. What these savvy mangers is did was make sure the culture and the business could accommodate these ‘new’ types of people.

They took their current team along on the journey to the new as well. Sure it wasn’t all smooth sailing but they knew what they needed to do. As we know when we bring in difference we can often cause the current people to feel uncomfortable and if not addressed they can kill off the ‘new’ way.

So be aware.
If the overall culture of your business is not set up for excellent sales performance, all your efforts could implode. Here is an example of what I mean. A key client came to us saying they didn’t want to hire people from their industry because they just weren’t competitive in the current market. They wanted to refresh the gene pool and bring in fit sales people who were not tarnished by the industry and its way of doing things. They knew that in this over commoditised marketplace that their sales people where their competitive edge. They were on the right track but didn’t know where and how to start. So here is what we did to help them find elite sales performers:

• Reviewed sales strategy and path to market
• Defined Sales DNA & ‘ideal’ role/person specification
• Built a structured sales recruitment process and kit
• Targeted the industries the new breed of sales people could come from
• Built and implemented the induction company sales training process
• Implemented a sales management support system
• Mapped & measured sales metrics

The results were fabulous from a sales initiative perspective:

The new breed of elites sales performers achieved a sales closing ratio of 4:3 within 2 months and sold annual sales budget within 5 months.

Now wouldn’t you think everyone would have been jumping for joy? You’d like to think so but sadly the new team was a small part of a very large business that had been operating in an entirely different manner (i.e. slow, internally focused, transaction product selling). Rather than embrace the new ‘fitter’ sales way of life and find more success across the board, the broader business killed off the team because it was too successful just so they didn’t have to change.

Sadly this is not an isolated incident, many a successful competent sales person or sales manager with new ideas, a healthy can-do attitude have been passed over for promotion or eliminated from the team because they were too different and too good. They did not fit the often buttoned down, compliant thinking, follow-the-rules-or-else culture that many larger business can have.

And what I still see, all too often, are senior managers and sales mangers recruiting from within their own industry sector recycling the same old people getting the same old ideas and the same old results. Relying on ‘industry experience’ as a major determining factor in your sales selection process can severely limit your potential to develop a competitive edge in your industry and find elite sales performers. This strategy has left many businesses vulnerable today as they now struggle to transform existing transactional product focused sales teams to savvy business people how can sell.
Which raises key questions:

• How we can we find top sales performers to refresh our gene pool and revitalise our culture, our bench strength, our results, etc.?
• How does an organisation create and the promote transparent sales performance in the field and at leadership level?
• How do we encourage diversity, innovative thinking and outsiders into our thinking, our team and our business?

I encourage you to challenge the prevailing views and attitudes of your business and industry and really examine what your sales strategy needs by way of talent now and into the future and select and develop those people how meet your business needs accordingly.

If you do it can really pay big dividends.