The vendor presented to our class of 300 and announced if you follow my message you can sell a lot of these products.  As you go thru your neighborhood, he said, when someone answers the door ask them ” would you like to buy some trash? ” he said you will get their attention 100% of the time.  Then you explain that it’s actually recycled paper products made into this great stationery and you can help the freshman class out by purchasing some today.  He went on to say it’s hard work but the close ratio was very high when one utilized this process.

Now to the motivation part, the freshman class said for every student who sold 6 sets you got x prize, for 12 you got y and so on.  If you sold 100 you got to go to a really nice restaurant paid for by the school.  If you sold 300 you would receive a Johnny Horizon wristwatch which was the symbol for save the earth back then…  I set a goal to get a watch.  I followed the instructor’s process and script religiously and within two weeks I had sold over 300 sets of stationery.   The average student sold 10 sets of stationery back then.  The difference – motivation and a process that if followed worked and worked well.  I remember walking out of the presentation and people saying “can you imagine asking someone to buy trash – how stupid would that be?”.   Three weeks later my classmates were asking me how I sold so much -  I said it was simple I followed the process and the script. 

How much of that goes on today?  More than any of us want to know in sales management.  Due to the ad-hoc nature of today’s CRM tools, every rep can create his or her own process.  Management has no way of knowing nor enforcing a process, nor can management compare the results easily with the exception of what’s on the forecast.  It’s no wonder there are superstars and there is everybody else.  The superstars I have known have been religious about the process.

The above statistics regarding the increase in sales conversations is exactly what Jesubi has enabled for a $ 4 billion company.  They have witnessed a 72% productivity increase in the number of sales conversations their sales team had in a year over year comparison with one of the major CRM vendors.  Imagine what that 72% increase could do to your teams forecast.  The forecast won’t change by itself – the sales team needs to drive more activity earlier in the sales funnel. 

Jesubi enables our clients to track their sales more closely than ever before.  You can know what leads are tracking thru the process.  You can know which reps are converting clients to proposals at the highest rates.

As I shared the above metrics with our sales team today, I pointed out to them that I don’t know of a single sales manager, business owner or sales rep that would not want to have that same 72% increase.  It’s a question of credibility.  We have to be able to share the value that our solution is providing, by helping clients optimize their sales funnel in the most efficient means possible.   The only way to drive the increases our clients are seeing is to a: enable a systematic approach and b: make it easy for sales reps to utilize.  Both are being accomplished every day with Jesubi. 

Let us show you in a 30 minute demonstration how Jesubi can give you that 72% increase – after the demonstration we’ll be happy to let you take Jesubi for a 30 to 60 day test drive with some minimal training requirements. 

Just think what  a 72% increase to your forecast would be worth…

Good selling!

My first successful selling experience started when I was 9 years old and taught me one of the basic facets that have stayed with me all my life.  Many of you gen x – gen y won’t know what I am talking about but those of my generation absolutely will recognize the story.  Pre-internet as a 9 year old I enjoyed my share of comic books, in the back of those comic books were many opportunities to make money.  One of those caught my eye.  SELL FLOWER SEEDS and make LOTS OF MONEY!!  That caught my eye.  I took the initiative and sent in the form and 2 weeks later I had a box of flower seeds to sell.  It was a straight commission engagement.  I sold the flower seed packets for 50 cents and got to keep 16 cents per package sold.  The company sent me 96 packages of flower seeds to sell.

It wasn’t easy, but I hit every house in my neighborhood as well as surrounding neighborhoods.  I even hit some house’s twice as my supply dwindled.  By the end of 4 weeks I had sold every package.   The first real dilemna of my young sales career hit me then.  I had worked really hard and now had $ 48 in my shoe box.  Unfortunately the agreement with the company was after selling all the packages I was to send them their money back which meant taking $ 32 out of my shoe box and sending it back to the company.  To a 9 year old $ 32 extra dollars in the shoe box seemed like a million bucks.  I sat on the money for a couple of weeks when finally my mom asked me what I was doing with the money.   I told her that I thought I had earned the money that it wasn’t fair to have to give the company $ 32 when I only got to keep $ 16.   That’s when I got my first true mentoring experience and it came from my mom who wasn’t a sales manager, but had a great moral character driving her.  She said “A deal is a deal, you signed up for it, they did what they said they were going to do, it’s up to you to honor your end of the deal”.  I sent the money in that day.  I have never forgotten those words, both on the buying side or the selling side.

Thanks Mom!

Fundamentally, at Jesubi we spend our waking moments trying to figure out how we can help our clients sell more.  One of our clients saw a 3x improvement in number of sales meetings that occurred, another client saw a 58% increase in “reach rates”.   If you can get in front of more people you should be able to fundamentally sell more assuming the people you are getting in front of fit the profile of companies you sell to. 

Within the next 90 days, you will see Jesubi release solutions that address what we’re calling “total funnel management”.  How many leads does a company start with, moving to how many activities does it take to drive a sales meeting, how many meetings does it take to drive a proposal/quote, how many proposals/quotes does it take to close a deal.  It’s not rocket science, but according to our customers no one does it well today.  We think by providing that insight we can indeed help our clients sell more.

We find that more and more companies adopting Jesubi want the level of accountability Jesubi provides for funnel management.  Its hard to have a great forecast without having great activity front ending the forecast.   Our customers now understand for every 10 conversations they have they get 3 meetings and from every 3 meetings they get a new name customer.  When you have metrics like that you can instill that culture of accountability and have everyone contributing at a similar level.

As a sales manager, it’s great to have a tool like Jesubi available. But doubling sales productivity is only good if a sales team knows the competitive landscape, objection handling and other sales basics. The really nice thing is Jesubi reports on conversation results, so once a teams prospecting efforts are more than doubled, Jesubi can provide insights as to what happens when a prospect or customer is on the phone by answering questions like “Is everyone converting at the same rate”, “what is the no interest rate by sales rep”, “Which reps are getting brushed off more often” and various other categories of conversations.

For the first time, a sales manager gains not only forecast information, but everything that goes into getting an opportunity to the forecast while doubling a sales reps productivity and prospecting efforts

At Jesubi we are trying to change all that. We have introduced a report called Prospecting Velocity™ which enables clients to understand the efforts it takes to get a prospect into the sales pipeline. Prospecting Velocity™ takes a look at the number of attempts to reach someone, the number of conversations that occur, the time interval between calls and presents a report that shows connect rates, conversion rates at each step of the process. With this information a Jesubi customer can understand by industry, by title, by size of company what the best Prospecting Velocity™ to utilize going forward.

Jesubi has enough customer feedback to show new clients that no two clients are the same and the need for Prospecting Velocity™ in this economy is invaluable.

Wouldn’t any sales rep like to know that if he calls into a client 8 times over a 6 week period he has a 75% better connect and conversion rate than calling in once a month for 8 months? Wouldn’t a sales rep want to know that he has a 90% connect and conversion rate in 2 calls versus making 4 additional calls that add no lift. Our clients at Jesubi believe so.

Sales Management has the opportunity with Prospecting Velocity™ to understand the knowledge within the sales team as to what best practices really are instead of guessing what they are.