“Those damn sales guys won’t use the system,” the Chief Information Officer (CIO) grumbled with the highest level of contempt for salespeople. And yet, there I was, one of those rotten sales guys standing at the entryway of his supersized corner office.
We salespeople are a hard bunch to please when it comes to crappy software. The CIO was finishing a meeting with his senior staff, but they lingered around his oval glass conference table.
“Thank God we were good friends,” I thought as I quietly considered what this scene would feel like if it was my first meeting with the CIO.
As his staff trailed out of his office, one of his VPs caught my attention and asked what brought me into town. He was not one of my supporters since I made it a regular habit of ignoring him during my visits.
After attempting to work with this VP for several months, it was clear he wanted to be the gatekeeper and prevent me from speaking to anyone above his rank. He was highly skilled at wasting my time and my team’s time, but he never supported our efforts. I gave him a fake smile and closed the door to the office.
As I made my way to a seat in front of the CIO’s paper-strewn desk, I took the opportunity to poke some fun at this situation I just witnessed.
Those Sorry Sales Guys
“I’m one of the sorry salespeople who won’t use your shitty software,” I said with a smirk.
He looked at me like he had no earthly idea what I meant with my self-deprecating humor. After reminding him what he said to his staff just a few minutes ago, he fumbled through a half apology, trying to explain that he didn’t mean people like me.
“Oh, you mean sales guys you like don’t qualify?” I continued on with the fun at his expense.
After we stopped laughing, I explained in all seriousness that I was one of those sales guys who wouldn’t use his lousy sales system. We spent the next 30 minutes discussing what he knew and didn’t know about sales.
I wondered if any of his staff actually sat with the company’s salespeople to see how they do their job. Then, I showed him the totally useless sales system from my employer, making sure that he knew I didn’t use it, either.
Repeating Failed Processes
The CIO was a really good friend and great company over a beer or two. But he ruled his organization with an iron fist and created all the typical chasms that separate the business folks from the technology folks. Our conversation was probably nothing more than validation that his company wasn’t the only one that couldn’t execute on a basic sales system.
Selling Is Simple
“Sales is simple; salespeople make selling hard,” announced Chuck Stralendorff, one of the very best sales guys I know. He made his pronouncement to a lethargic group of sales guys assembled in an Orlando hotel conference room five times the size needed for our group.
“Absolute genius,” I thought. And I’m one of those salespeople who makes stuff harder than it needs to be. Come to think of it, it seems that most of the individual sellers, to sales management, to those who support sales and the systems we use to track and supposedly enhance sales are overly complex. When selling is done well, it really is a simple process. A system to support sales opportunities should be elementary, too.
Instead of simply describing what new software-based sales solutions should look like, let’s go back in time and see how things were done before software ate the world.
Sales Time Travel
Let’s take a trip with the Time-Turner to 1980.
The personal computer revolution was about to invade corporate America, destroy the minicomputer business, and make fools of those who railed against the PC as nothing more than a toy. Ken Olsen, the founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (which was the second-largest computer company in the world during that time) famously lashed out against the PC with the statement, “The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business.” The software that would ignite the invasion was Visicalc, the first spreadsheet for PCs.
Visicalc made the PC a required business tool, establishing electronic spreadsheets as the most ubiquitous business software tool ever used. Even today, Microsoft Excel and all the other spreadsheet variants infest companies like a disease, much to the chagrin of corporate technology executives.
In part one of this post, I noted that the poor quality of the data in sales systems pushed sales executives to revert to using spreadsheets to track their pipeline and forecast. Poor data quality isn’t limited to sales systems as you’ll see in the linked article. Companies often invest tens of millions of dollars in core systems used to run their business, but no one seems to trust the data.
A Manual Sales Tracking System
The list of things you’ll need to manually track your sales is pretty small. It might be as few items as a manila folder for each of your clients and opportunities, some paper, and a pen or pencil. If you really want to get fancy, you can add a Rolodex to your list of office stuff.
Oh yeah, a Rolodex. Does anyone know what those are anymore?
A Rolodex functioned as your contact list. Yes, our time travel took us back to a day before mobile phones, too. The cards, a little smaller than a 3×5” index card, could be pulled out so you could write your contact’s info or staple a client’s business card to it. They were pretty handy devices while you were in the office, but a Rolodex didn’t do you much good while you were on the road.
So, how do you manually track an opportunity?
Start with writing the prospect’s or client’s name on the tab of a manila folder. Next, say you make a call or have a meeting with your client. This information needs to be tracked somewhere. One approach is to use the inside page of the manila folder to track all your interactions with your client. These might be calls, letters, product documentation, and meetings with the client.
Did you catch the part about letters?
You might be wondering why you’d ever send a letter to a client. A good business practice back in the day was to follow up meetings with a thank-you letter to the meeting sponsor. You might get fancy and carbon copy (CC) everyone who was in the meeting too. Maybe we’d cut down on half of the emails swirling through corporate America if more people knew the proper business etiquette for email communications, especially the use of CC.
Nothing has changed on the value of follow-up letters in today’s world. Very few of your peers are following up with a handwritten letter or even typed letter. Doing something different and positive like a follow up letter is sure to make you stand out among the throngs of salespeople calling on your client.
The Manila Folder
Noting your client call on the manila folder would require the call date, notes about the conversation, the next contact date, and the next steps. The manila folder is also where you stored copies of all the stuff you sent to your client. It might include contracts and a sketch of the company’s organization chart. All the business cards from your client would be stapled to the backside of the folder.
That’s all there was to it. The simplicity of this approach to tracking sales has many positive benefits.
Other devices in your sales arsenal include a paper calendar and maybe a tickler file. In 2019, your sales system likely prompts you for the next date to make a sales call and much more. Before electronic systems, though, a tickler file was a common method to track important dates requiring action.
Imagine you open your file drawer and one section of it held folders labeled with each month of the year. Inside of each monthly folder were paper reminders of activities due during that month. Another approach would be to place a prospect’s folder in the month when the next action was required. A tickler system could get pretty elaborate, but like anything that’s effective, keeping it really simple was critical to success.
The beauty of a manual system is the need to regularly review your client files. The next actions needed to move your sale forward came from daily reviews of your client and prospect files. Unlike the automated systems we use today, your client folder put everything about your client right in front of you.
A daily scan of the client file made you see what you had or hadn’t done. It allowed you to quickly assess your position in the sale and, for me, provided a better perspective of the work needed to continue to push the sale forward.
Applying the Manual Sales System Simplicity
The goal of this post was to strip away technology and highlight how very, very simple sales tracking can be. In my relentless effort to keep things simple, here’s how I use my sales system today.
It functions as my automated tickler file system to track the activities. The system tracks my opportunities through the sales cycle too. The app I use today synchronizes with my contacts to eliminate duplicate entry. Emails are synchronized too so I can easily see all my interactions with my clients and prospects. The most important function my sales app provides is an easy way to track my opportunities and forecasted deals. My company can see all of the opportunities in play across all of the sellers and gain visibility into future business.
That’s it. My approach is simple and keeps the data entry to a minimum. It allows me to focus more on what important actions I should be taking next when I review my client’s manila folder.
Oh yeah, I still have a manila folder for each client. This is the home for all client notes. It’s where I make notes to myself about activities, company politics, and other stuff happening within the account.
More Complexity, Please
Instead of making sales systems easier, software publishers continue to pile on more complexity in the race to have more features than the competition. One such useless feature is the claim that artificial intelligence will now help your salesforce make a better decision on what to do next for your client. Step back and think about the insanity of this claim. I believe that anyone who thinks a machine is going to make a better decision than the person intimately familiar with their client is about to drive the entire sales force off a cliff.
