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.

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.

Moving from an ad-hoc approach fostered by all the other vendors to a systematic approach requires some guts on our customers parts.  After all, all of the above entrenched players are much bigger and have much more cash than Jesubi does.  Why can’t one of them just throw a few developers at the problem and solve it – I ask you it’s been 25 years and it hasn’t been addressed yet, why would they change now. 

The title of my blog is David versus Goliath.  Many, many times in the history of the technology sector, the David’s have overcome insurmountable odds to win and win big.  Microsoft versus IBM in the early 80′s, Parametric Technology versus IBM, Computervision, EDS and SDRC in the early 90′s.  Now it’s Jesubi’s turn.  We’ll win because we understand SaaS not only includes software but SERVICE.  Talk to our clients and they will tell you we want our customers to win like we want to win.  Talk to our clients and they will tell you the unprecedented productivity they are receiving from Jesubi.  Talk to our clients and they will tell you we not only talk to them we LISTEN to them.

We used to be excited when a new name customer came in within the quarter, now we are seeing multiple new names every week.  Let us know when you want to be LISTENED to by your SFA/CRM vendor.  Let us show you why Jesubi is helping customers sell more everyday.

Right now in my inbox I have 7500 unopened emails – the proliferation of un-solicited email has made it hard to get messages through with all the noise. Suppose you were one of the 125 plus internet security software vendors who was funded by Venture Capital in the past 5 years, is it possible to differentiate yourself solely on your email content, website and white papers? I don’t think so.

What if you have a brand new product that is revolutionizing a functional area, but have not raised $ 10 Million from Kleiner Perkins or Benchmark Capital yet, can you get all the white papers you need created and analysts following you? Probably not.

As I have stated in earlier posts, when I was the VP of Sales for Aprimo in the early days, there were no analysts covering what became the EMM, EMA, MRM space, the space didn’t exist. Marketers weren’t waking up and saying “gee, I have to solve this Enterprise Marketing problem I have”, had we relied solely on the e-marketing play and nurturing prospects we would have been out of business a long time ago. Instead, through all of the e-channel strategies as well as dedicated cold-calling efforts, we were able to secure 75 new name accounts within the biggest companies in America, as well as secure clients on two other continents! All but two of those clients came from dedicated prospecting efforts by not only our direct sales team, but our inside sales team as well. I venture to say, none of those 73 new name clients would have been clients in the first 5 years had Aprimo waited for the leads to score high enough or them to place an inbound inquiry.

For Jesubi’s own purposes, we use every channel we can, but of the 490 plus demonstrations we have done, 14 have come from email, 476 have come because our sales team picked up the phone and called someone. We have a 15% response rate from the leads we’ve talked to in securing a demonstration. Is it expensive, to have a team making those calls, yes!! Would the cost of not having all the customers we’ve secured by doing those initial demos be more expensive absolutely yes, we’d be out of business.

In the B2C game, the web and the e-channel are powerful drivers, in the B2B game, every channel must be used and used effectively and efficiently to drive customer wins. Cold-calling isn’t going away soon unless American Entrepreneurialism dies a sudden death or the need to drive increased revenues dies as well.