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.

I have said earlier that most traditional Sales Force Automation solutions have focused their efforts on optimizing the opportunity side of business.  Here’s my challenge to that philosophy:  When I was the VP of Sales for Aprimo back in 1999 thru 2002, we had anywhere from 8 to 20 sales reps globally and on any given quarter 15 to 35 deals we were chasing.  I ask you if we managed everyone of those deals to 100% efficiency and effectiveness could I turn those 15 to 35 deals into 50 or 100 deals?  No.  Could I grow those deals sure, but could I double or triple each one and still close each one not a chance.  So my team was managing 15 to 35 deals per quarter, but we had over 50,000 people who we had touched either thru marketing activities or sales activities.  If we could have figured out a way to sell to those 50,000 people in a more efficient manner – isn’t it logical that it would have been a lot easier to find 50 to 70 more deals in that universe than closing 100% of the forecast and trying to double each opportunity while we were doing it??

That fundamental philosophy is at the core of our beliefs at Jesubi.  More systematic activity with analytics around what’s working and what’s not can truly help sales teams sell more.  By helping clients assess which industries are responding quicker, what size of company is responding quicker, which sales rep is the most effective – by doing all these things better than can be done with traditional solutions, Jesubi does in fact help clients sell more.

Don’t take our word for it, take our customers word for it.  We’ll be glad to put you in touch with those who have seen what a solution focused on helping customers sell more.  We wake up every morning trying to figure out how to enhance our product so every customer benefits from new features and reports.  Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.