Yes, I’m talking to you. You knew exactly what I meant when you saw the headline: itinerant salespeople who move from company to company on about a two-year cycle. Of course they hope that this time will be different, that this gig will last. The problem is they are going to sell as they have before while hoping for a different outcome. The companies that hire them reinforce that false hope, and set them up for one more spin through the failure cycle. It’s ugly. And it’s expensive.

B2B business development has changed almost completely over the past ten years. Using legacy methods to sell to B2B customers now is fruitless and frustrating. The actual work of effective selling has changed substantially. One aspect of the change, and a good example – social selling.

It’s not news that product and service information is searchable and readily available to customers long before a salesperson makes contact. That means the old model of salesperson = animated brochure is useless. The disappearance of traditional “buyers” for all except commodities created a demand for real business literacy. That’s because an understanding of the customer’s organization is essential to connect with and relate to actual decision-makers, often at higher levels. That interaction also requires interpersonal communication skills that are deeper and more nuanced than what legacy salespeople have needed to demonstrate.

The major tools for social selling have been available for nearly ten years. I started training and coaching salespeople in social selling in 2007. LinkedIn already had 20 million members at that point. [Few people realize that LinkedIn is now nearly a dozen years old.] Data.com (formerly jigsaw.com) was acquired by Salesforce five years ago, and in 2007 jigsaw.com was already a very useful, crowd-sharing contact source for salespeople. Using the advanced search tools within Google made background research and actionable information easy to find on a desktop.

Social selling requires different methods and different skills. And that’s the problem with retreads. Too many are still hoping that legacy methods and formerly effective skills will work if they can only apply them with the right company and in the right customer pool. It is as effective as whistling past the graveyard. Many are afraid to ask for help, for training, for coaching, or for continuing education for fear it will make them less attractive as candidates. Tragically, companies are enabling both the behavior and the false hope. Here’s how:

Companies that don’t understand how significantly business-to-business selling has changed over the last decade, or who deny that anything is different, tend to recruit and select salespeople much as they always have. In far too many cases, industry selling experience trumps everything else as a selection criterion. And that perpetuates the ugly and expensive cycle.

Stop Blaming the Recruiters! I pity the poor recruiters. Almost never is a recruiter provided with a performance or outcome based position description from which to begin a search. The conventional job descriptions they receive are heavy on experience, lighter on education, and typically have nothing to say about applied skills and specific outcomes. Then recruiters get blamed when a new sales hire fails. They get blamed even though the search and position descriptions demanded that they present candidates with a high likelihood of failure — retreads. Is it any wonder that recruiters want to be paid in full well before you can determine whether the new hire will succeed and become productive?

Demanding “industry experience” signals an unwillingness to invest time, effort, or money to onboard a new salesperson well and manage, coach, and train them to be effective. It also signals a belief that “he did it before, he can do it again.” Demanding a “track record” signals that your product and service offering is so generic that the new salesperson can sell it because it is exactly like what she has sold before. Demanding a “book of business” or “a following” is a pipe dream. High performers don’t move unless their company is closing. And most of the really high performers saw it coming and moved well in advance. When owners and CEO’s talk about wanting to hire a top performer with a book of business I ask for an example (just one) where that happened. I’m still waiting for the example.

Bad Hires are Expensive. Consider the costs of a bad hiring decision:

• The recruiter’s fee for the bad hire.
• The recruiter’s fee for a replacement.
• Two years of salary and benefits for the bad hire.
• The net profit of lost opportunities.
• Wasted sales management time.
• Wasted administrative and executive time.
• Wasted sales support (estimating, pricing, proposal development) time.
• Wasted time of other salespeople who are distracted by the bad hire.
• Alienated prospects and customers.
• Lost referrals.
• Erosion of brand equity due to the ineffectiveness of the bad hire.
• Travel, entertainment, office and other expenses for the bad hire.
• Time spent talking, worrying, or hand-wringing about the bad hire.
• Time invested in a misguided turnaround or “rescue attempt” for the bad hire.
• Potential legal expenses to terminate the bad hire.

That’s why I hear owners and CEO’s telling me that their bad sales hires are hurting them and badly. A single bad hire can exceed $250,000 in direct expenses. Add in the indirect costs, and the total expense goes much higher. So what can you do differently? What should you be looking for in a new salesperson in the current environment, and how?

Reframe the Position: An effective process begins with framing the position with the results you expect and the timeframe within which you expect them. Those results need to be expressed in tangible, measurable terms. For example, one objective could be: “billings at an annualized pace of $500,000, to between four and six new customers, in (target business market), by close of the tenth full month following your hire date.” That’s impossible to debate or dispute. And it will separate the “wheat from the chaff” instantly. No retread who has been through previous failure cycles will sign up for that kind of measurable result. But without that kind of specificity, what you’re telling the new hire is “We’re paying you to do the best you can.” It should take no more than half a dozen specific statements like that example to build a position description that’s clear and powerful.

Test and Vet: An effective process includes several steps to vet a candidate before any sort of interview. I’m a strong believer in testing candidates and in more than one way. I especially like using a Harrison Assessment to gauge both eligibility and suitability. We’ve gone way beyond the days when a personality assessment was the best we could get. We can now use data analytics to assess work preferences, attitudes and motivation, work values, task preferences, and interests. That lets us predict both fit and performance.

I also use a writing test to see if candidates can write a cogent and effective business communication (letter, email). We’re seeing college graduates appear as candidates who cannot write effectively. That’s tragic but true. So a college degree is no longer a useful confirmation that good, basic communication skills have been developed. And boilerplate cover letters aren’t trustworthy writing samples either. If a candidate cannot write effectively, the candidate should be screened out of the pipeline early.

Rethink Your Interviews: An effective process includes a planned and structured interview that’s focused on results and outcomes. Backward looking “what have you done” questions are much less useful than forward looking “what would you do” or “how would you handle” questions. And the interview should always be done by groups of two or three people at a time with a candidate. An “interview” with a candidate conducted by a manager who may have looked at the candidate’s resume once, and only ten minutes before the meeting is worse than useless. Those “interviews” are actively misleading because they support decisions like this one: “Who knows? I don’t. Let’s take a shot and see how she does.”

Demonstrate Capabilities: An effective process recognizes that selling has changed utterly. Therefore, a candidate who cannot demonstrate how he uses research and social selling methods gets screened out early. One of the best screening methods is to task candidates to research your company, your executives, your services and your customers. Then have them present a profile of your own company as if you were the target customer. Newsflash: for the candidate, you are. Recruiting is very much a courtship process, the candidate should be actively courting you while you are courting them. What better way to confirm that the candidate can both learn about and understand a business organization than by having them tell you about yours? Then have him describe exactly how he would turn that understanding into an opportunity to do business with you.

On-board Effectively: An effective hiring process includes an on-boarding plan. When I reported to work on Day One of my first sales job, I was shown to my new desk and phone. I was given a key to get in and out (in the expectation I’d be working all kinds of hours). I was given a box of business cards. And I was told by my new boss: “Go get ‘em, Tiger.” Literally. That was it. I fell flat on my face.

An on-boarding process is intended to immerse the new salesperson into your particular enterprise and to make invaluable connections. Understanding your processes and your systems is the easiest part. The much harder part for a new salesperson is knowing where to go and who to approach in order to get something done. An on-boarding process that completely immerses the new salesperson into your company is vital if they are going to create the relationships inside that will enable them to be effective outside. And your people need to feel a vested interest in the success of the new hire.

Develop: Your written development plan for the new salesperson should be on the table at least by the time you conduct the first face-to-face interview. The reactions of candidates to your development plan will be very telling. If you’re sitting across the table from a retread who has no desire to adapt, to learn, or to change then your development plan should bring that reluctance to the surface quickly. Too many conversations with potential salespeople focus almost entirely on what we sell. We don’t tend to talk much about how we sell. But since how you sell your products and services affects your brand, that’s an important conversation. A salesperson can strengthen your brand if her methods and behaviors align with it. A salesperson can undermine your brand if his methods and behaviors contradict or are in conflict with it. So the “how” is as important as the “what.”

The first year development plan is the roadmap. It identifies the destination, but it also identifies the route and specific milestones along the way. Including that development plan in any interview conversation insures that your objectives are understood, and the methods and resources you expect to see in use are also understood. If you don’t know or can’t describe what works, and therefore what an effective salesperson for your company will be doing and how, you’re not ready to start recruiting.

Sidestep the retreads: Embedding a multi-step, carefully crafted process for recruiting, on-boarding, and developing a new salesperson takes some real thought and investment. But the payback is usually 10X if it keeps you from hiring even one more retread who fails.

What do you think?

__________

Part of my practice is building processes for recruiting, on-boarding, and developing salespeople — processes that really work. If your company could benefit, let’s talk.

Carl (name changed to protect the guilty) stood in front of my desk, furious. He was clutching two fistful’s of paperwork. If he’d had hair, it would have been on fire. Carl was a salesperson, and had been for years. I was his newly-minted boss, and the target of his fury. And it was all about “my” new CRM system.

Carl was holding prospect sheets, his personal records of years of contact activity. And he was furious that a prospective customer he claimed as his own had contacted the company, asked for a salesperson, and I had assigned the prospect to someone else. Set aside for the moment that Carl’s prospect had contacted us to ask for a salesperson. My assignment wasn’t arbitrary or capricious. My first step was to look for the prospect in our new CRM system. Lo and behold, I found nothing. No record. So I made a decision, made the assignment, and spoke to the prospective customer. Carl found out about it after the fact.

There’s another piece of the puzzle necessary to complete the picture. When I implemented the new CRM system I didn’t require the salespeople to enter their own records. I provided someone to do that work for them. The salespeople had the opportunity to provide their information in any form, including paper records. I did that for two reasons. First, I wanted the database built cleanly and well. Second, I wanted the implementation done on schedule. Carl chose not to provide his prospect sheets for data entry. I don’t know why.

I patiently explained to Carl that the only thing that mattered was what I could see in the system. If it wasn’t in the CRM system, it didn’t exist. Period. This had been made explicit from the beginning of the project, I reminded him. He stormed away, shouting back that he wasn’t going to forget this. It was an amazing display of emotional maturity. A day later he approached the administrative resource for help getting his records into the system.

Under the best of conditions, implementing a CRM system is tough. It’s not for the fainthearted or weak-willed. Most implementations I have seen firsthand were not planned well, done well, or used well. As a result, CRM systems are widely criticized. Salespeople tend to despise them. However, the technology itself is rarely the culprit. For the bad ones I’ve seen, the technology was fine and the implementation itself was miserable. Here’s why:

Lousy planning. If you believe the CRM system is going to be easy to implement, and will require minimal customization, there is swamp land in Florida I’d like to sell you. That pair of assumptions is beyond naïve. Careful and thorough planning is vital. If the system is not configured well and customized before the salespeople are required to use it, noncompliance and chaos will follow.

Insufficient support. It’s foolish to expect salespeople to invest the necessary time to build their own records at the beginning. Wherever those records are coming from, one individual needs to own the task of building the database. Elimination of duplications is only one of the reasons. Accuracy, consistency, and speed are the others.

No ground rules. For any database to work well, every entry in each record needs to follow a pattern. Naming conventions are a great example. One vital ground rule is that no account name (the name of a prospect or customer organization) can include an abbreviation. Therefore, the American Society of Association Executives can never be shortened in a record to ‘Am. Soc. of Assn. Exec’s.” or to ASAE. Never. Otherwise, tracking down and eliminating duplicate records is nearly impossible.

No discipline. This one is chronic. Unless and until salespeople are required to manage their work through the CRM system, they won’t. If sales managers look the other way when a salesperson is managing their calendar, their communications, or their record-keeping outside of the CRM system, the data inside the CRM system will never be trustworthy. Two things cannot be negotiable. First, there is no alternative. Salespeople must use the system and only the system. Second, the simple ground rules must be followed. All the time.

At intervals, I found myself sending a query to one of my salespeople to find out what they were planning to do during a two-week block where they had calendared no activity for themselves. My point was twofold: First, I wanted them to know that I was interested enough in how they were managing themselves to ask. Second, I wanted to leverage the learning opportunity. The most effective time to plan and schedule the next act or activity is when completing the current one. Salespeople that do always have larger pipelines and more deals in development. But they usually need help developing the habit.

Minimal customization. An effective CRM implementation requires some counterintuitive thinking. The best outcome is a system that is clean enough and simple enough to be easy and fast to use. That takes real work in the beginning. It is very easy to add complexity to a CRM system. It is much harder to make it simple. Left unchecked, fields multiply. Lots of things would be nice to know. But there is an inverse relationship between how much information you ask the sales organization to provide and how much information they actually will provide. While marketing and some other managers would love to have extensive data that can be parsed down to the granular level, asking the sales organization to provide it is silly. They simply won’t.

Therefore, there are two critical guiding principles as the system is customized. First, simplicity is paramount. That means most of the “nice to have” or “good to know” fields need to vanish. Don’t gray them out, make them vanish. Ask only for the information vital to move opportunities forward and to manage the sales organization.

Second, begin with the end in mind. Design the reports first. Figure out what information is necessary to lead and manage the sales organization. Keep the reports simple and focused. Make them meaningful, easy to understand, and easy to interpret. Then customize and enable only the fields necessary to gather that information and paint a clear picture. It’s probably much less than you expect.

A perfunctory rollout. For sales organization, this is a very big deal. Implementing a CRM system goes to the core of how individual salespeople work, of how they manage themselves. Therefore, an effective rollout will involve more investment in the salespeople than simply a couple of group sessions to show them the application and answer their initial questions. A good rollout will require group training, and more than one session. A good rollout will also require individual training and support. Some salespeople will not happily put their limited technical literacy on display in front of their peers. That means one-on-one support will be essential as they learn to use the system. And a good rollout will require coaching — sales managers using system data as the context for account and opportunity planning and coaching with individual salespeople. Until they see the data put to use for their own benefit, to make them more effective and give them the opportunity to win more deals, any CRM system will be interpreted as a club. Usage will remain spotty, and compliance will remain grudging.

No ownership. Someone needs to own responsibility for the system and data. That cannot be the individual salesperson. Salespeople are myopic about information, and information sharing. It’s very difficult for a salesperson to understand and hold in mind why information is important to others and how it is going to be used. So corner-cutting (which looks to a salesperson to be a reasonable time-saving measure) is almost unavoidable. Someone needs to police and own the data. The best candidate could be the individual responsible for generating reports from the data. But some of this is organization-specific, and a one-size-fits-all policy is impossible to recommend.

Limited visibility. This is my favorite example of being penny wise and pound foolish: implementing a CRM system for a sales organization that cannot be accessed by anyone else. A good CRM implementation will enable marketing and sales to create a thorough and rich profile of a potential customer and each of the key players in that organization. The entire arc of the deal can be captured and tracked. Every key factor affecting the customer’s decision can and should be described.

Too many times, motivated primarily by a desire to limit the number of seats or licenses, companies will lock out customer service and other workgroups who are tasked with delivering on the commitments made to the customer. In other words, for those who need to deliver the promised value, there’s no access to the understanding of the customer that has been carefully created. No, that is not hyperbole. Yes, it is as idiotic as I made it sound.

If the salesperson has done her job well, not only will she capture the specific commitments made to the customer, but she will also have discovered what, for that customer, are the unforgivable sins — the things we must never do. If we expect the salesperson to know those things, to capture and to share them, why would we not make them available inside the CRM system? The CRM system should be the single place anyone goes to find vital customer information. Always.

Therefore: Choosing the CRM system that is the best fit for a given company is pretty straightforward. The decision factors are obvious: cost, vendor reliability, easy integration with an ERP or other enterprise system, and ease of customization. That’s the easiest part. The hard part is always the implementation. Any good implementation depends on thorough planning, careful customization, and disciplined use. If you’re not planning to make those investments, then don’t bother. No CRM system is a magic bullet no matter what the system vendor might want you to believe.

What do you think?

__________

Part of my practice is planning, designing and mapping CRM implementations that really work. If you could benefit, call me and let’s talk.

I love Bogart movies. And among my favorites is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.Humphrey Bogart plays the character Fred C. Dobbs, a penniless American expatriate in Mexico who becomes a gold miner and strikes it rich with his two partners. Late in the film, trying to flee with the gold and losing his mind, Dobbs encounters a band of bandits pretending to be Federales. Dobbs confronts them.

Dobbs: ‘If you’re the police where are your badges?’

Gold Hat: ‘Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!’

I’m still hearing executives give me almost the same response when I ask about business development processes. “We don’t need a company-wide process. Each salesperson has developed his or her own process that is comfortable and suited to that individual.”

It isn’t difficult to identify when a business development process is missing or badly damaged. Here are five telltale signs:

• Revenue fluctuates, sometimes wildly, while the selling cycle lengthens and the percentage of deals won declines.
• The time to make a new salesperson productive is long, getting longer, is expensive, and is painful.
• Forecasts are unreliable, and no trustworthy view of opportunities is available. Frustration with your CRM data is high.
• Features and benefits are sold in a transactional fashion rather than value and results in a consultative fashion.
• Learning and improvement isn’t easy to reapply and multiply across the sales organization. If coaching and development are going on at all, they are unfocused, unstructured and not systematic.

If most or all of these telltale signs are showing, why support and defend “every salesperson for herself” as your business development method? In truth, that’s just abdicating responsibility to actively manage the business development process while avoiding the hard work of so doing.

Where a discrete business development process is created and consistently applied, especially where it is mapped onto the buyer’s process, the cost of sales drops as sales effectiveness climbs. Selling cycles shorten and the percentage of deals won climbs.

An intentionally designed and robust business development process creates tools, resources, and measurements that have impact across the whole sales organization and all of the opportunities being pursued. Individual processes, chosen and used by individual salespeople, don’t produce those same results. That’s why it is vital to create a virtuous cycle that can be sustained and accelerated. A commitment to build a strong business development process could be the best decision you make for 2015.

What could arguably be deemed the strongest of the printing industry trade associations is now surveying its members, asking them to describe whether the future of “print” is grim or bright.  They will get a wide range of responses, and setting aside the value of reporting to their members what those members already think, the question itself is much too broad.  Instead, I’d like to propose a series of different questions that cut to the core.  Here they are:

What is the future of print as a process?
What is the future of print as a medium?
What is the future of print as a business model?
What is the future of print as an industry?
What is the future of print as a trade association?

The Future of Print as a Process

Print as a process has a bright future because our industrialized society continues to “mark on substrates.”  For most of us, that means applying text and images (often together) to paper and other substrates for a wide variety of purposes.  The versatility and diversity of applications guarantee that “print” will thrive.  Certainly digital technology will displace some uses of print.  However, many of those printed products whose demise has long been a foregone conclusion refuse to vanish.  From the telephone directory to the lowly business card, there are applications for which print remains competitive with any digital alternative.  While offset lithography is diminishing, inkjet and other digital imaging technologies are delivering the same sorts of printed products which are fulfilling the same applications.  Will overall demand continue to trend downward?  Certainly.  Will pricing pressure continue as demand falls? Absolutely. But will print as a process vanish?  I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Future of Print as a Communication Medium

Print as a communication medium is certainly diminishing.  Newspapers are the sharp point of that spear.  Magazines and other periodicals have declined more slowly, because even younger readers often prefer the tactile experience and all the other characteristics of print.  The print v. digital discussion often misses attributes of print that help it resist erosion.  Print is self-archiving.  Print requires no external power source.  Print requires no separate device with which to interface.  Print is easily and inexpensively replaceable if damaged or lost.  Print requires no learning of a user interface beyond a third grade education, which is where most of us really began learning to read with comprehension.  Print’s chief disadvantage is distribution.  And its future as a communication medium is largely tied to the fortunes of the USPS.  When distribution is simply far too expensive to sustain, print declines.  And every USPS rate case which has raised periodical and standard mail rates has been mirrored by a decline in print volume.  Will print as a medium vanish?  That’s also very unlikely.  For certain purposes, print’s effectiveness will be worth its expense, even with the distribution challenge it faces. Direct Mail marketing is proving that every day.

The Future of Print as a Business Model

The future of print as a business model is a more interesting and pertinent question.  For nearly a century, nearly all printing firms have had parallel business models.  Commercial print as a stand-alone business emerged as newspapers ceased being the community provider of print other than their own publications.  And commercial printers have nearly identical “job shop” business models.  I’d argue that the business model itself is creating the most pain.  In fact, it is the job shop business model that creates too little customer value to remain viable and relevant even while print as a process and print as a medium retain a good deal of viability.

The “job shop” business model has four simple components:  sell it, make it, ship it, and bill for it.  Inevitably, that’s led to businesses with very simple business structures:  sales, manufacturing, distribution, accounting.  While many printing industry firms have grown enough to add other functional departments, those four remain the core elements of their business models.  And that business model is turning into a sea anchor for far too many.  The job shop business model relies on winning the opportunity to do what someone else has already determined needs doing.  That means selling is all about capturing existing demand.  If demand is diminishing, the job shop business model has nothing to say and no means to respond.  Because nothing about it is focused on creating new demand where none existed before. So the viability of the commercial printing business model is under the most direct threat of irrelevance and obsolescence.  The great good news is that those legacy printing companies who have recognized this threat and altered their business models (which is much more than offering new products and services) are creating strong and sustainable futures for themselves. They just don’t define themselves as “printing companies” any longer.

The Future of Print as an Industry

What’s the future of print as an industry?  If “an industry” is defined as a large number of companies structured almost identically and offering the same products and services, then the “printing industry” is seriously threatened.  Every successful business strategy is based on differentiation.  Success depends on being and acting different than one’s competitors.  When it is more and more difficult to compare a company with others, a sustainable competitive advantage for that company is usually growing.  But if we pair that kind of change with the declining viability of the job shop business model and displacement of some print by digital alternatives, an industry of “printing companies” will continue to shrink and ultimately vanish.  That doesn’t mean that the companies themselves or the great people in them will disappear.  Rather, it means that those firms simply won’t be “printing companies” any longer. They will be something else, most likely many different “something elses.” And that’s a great thing.

The Future of Print as a Trade Association

So, what’s the future of print as a trade association?  That’s perhaps the most immediately pertinent question.  An “industry” of “printing companies” is being deconstructed as many of those companies reinvent themselves (many defining themselves as part of their customer’s industry segments). As that happens, the future for trade associations becomes murky indeed.  When the member business models aren’t almost identical, and their needs are no longer at least parallel (if not uniform) then any association is hard pressed to create meaningful value for a broad enough swath of member companies to sustain itself.  Let’s face it: association members remain members when sufficient value is being created for member companies, their owners, and their employees.  But when the needs of the members are sufficiently diverse, an association cannot create services and programs with an appeal broad enough to attract member participation and loyalty.  And that’s what’s facing the the legacy printing associations now.

Legacy printing associations are having a harder and harder time retaining members.  Attendance at meetings and conferences is declining.  Participation in educational programs of all kinds is more and more difficult to sustain or build.  It’s easy to blame those trends on the decline in the number of “printing establishments” or declining demand for print and the financial condition of printing companies. However, association programs intended to help member companies do more of what they’ve always done (selling, manufacturing, distributing, and accounting) are as much the problem.  Take selling and marketing as one good example.  Most conference presentations on sales and marketing are still focused on capturing existing demand.  Very few of them even mention creating demand.  Fewer still deal with methods to discover what customers want and need, and then develop services to fulfill those wants and needs.  So, if demand for print is declining and demand capture isn’t working well, then learning how to do better what’s already not really working isn’t helpful.  And association members know it. Owners of member companies tend to be bright folk. When association offerings aren’t speaking to what association members are having to face and to do, it’s easy to understand why those owners look elsewhere for actionable information and help.

Creating a Future for Print?

Two of the fastest ways to see a viable strategy are to look at the business model, and to look at how a company behaves with its customers. So don’t claim “transformation” if your business model is still based on “selling-making-distributing-billing” that which someone else has already decided to do. Don’t claim transformation if you’re fielding a sales force only equipped to capture existing demand. Real marketers do neither. And those are the firms that are growing.

© 2014 by Wayne M. Peterson. All rights reserved.

by Wayne M. Peterson, Principal
The Black Canyon Consulting Group Inc.