Sale (Photo credit: Gerard Stolk (vers le Mardi gras))

High-Profit Selling. Win the sale without compromising on price. Mark Hunter. 2012. ISBN 9780814420096. This a core book for your sales library on selling value and not discounting on price.  But that’s not all this book is, it is chock full of great sales strategies and the tactics to pull them off.  In a slump , and had a really bad sales call?  Bounce back by calling your best customer and rebuild your confidence.  Torn with what to do with RFPs, here are four approaches that you may want to consider before you do not respond. ie how to win even if you chose to lose the bid. What you want to work through the Christmas to New Years break.   How to get a sale from a buyer on a Friday afternoon.  A very valuable, clearly organized and well written book. A must buy for sales and sales managers.  His blog is a great resource.

Related articles

• Value-Added Selling. How to sell more profitably, confidently and professionally by competing on value not price. Tom Reilly (regnordman.com)
• How to Say It:Business to Business Selling. Geoffrey James. (regnordman.com)
• Accelerate the sale. Kick start your personal selling style to close more sales, faster. Mark Roberts. (regnordman.com)
• Bottom-Line Selling. The sale’s professional’s guide to improving customer profits. Jack Malcolm. (regnordman.com)
• Hunter and farmers – it’s time to change sales strategy – A STC Classic (customerthink.com)
• What Great Salespeople Do. The science of selling through emotional connection and the power of story. Michael Bosworth & Ben Zoldan (regnordman.com)
• Sell Now! Adaptive Strategies for Today’s Marketplace.Stacia Skinner. (regnordman.com)
• Pricing and Profitability Management. A practical guide for business leaders. Meehan, Simonetto, Montan & Goodin. (regnordman.com)
• Selling to Sales People With War Stories (frontofficebox.com)

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Pricing and Profitability Management. A practical guide for business leaders. Meehan, Simonetto, Montan & Goodin. 2011. ISBN 9780470825273.   I chatted to Michael Simonetto a few months back while doing pricing strategy research. He  sent along this recent Deloitte‘s publication and I am very glad he did. My research was already indicating the multi-layered needs in a company when looking at strategic pricing . This book carries that thought through into a very comprehensive analysis and several work plans.  The case studies are very appropriate and reflect what happens in the marketplace.

Among several great quotes;

• “  Pricing strategies simply cannot, and should not, be developed without obtaining direct and meaningful input from customers.”
• “Fix the process first, than add technology,”

The authors have a good emphasis on sales execution and how that one needs to very competent in this area well before making any changes to pricing.

This is not a book for the trivial reader,yet it should be read by every CEO and the leaders of Sales, Marketing, Finance and Customer Service.

Related articles

• Develop the best pricing strategy and structure-”Minimum Acceptable Profit (MAP)” (algtaxservices.wordpress.com)
• Value-Based Pricing. Harry MacDivitt & Mike Wilinson. (regnordman.com)
• Value-Added Selling. How to sell more profitably, confidently and professionally by competing on value not price. Tom Reilly (regnordman.com)
• The Art of Pricing: How to find the hidden profits in your business. Rafi Mohammed. (regnordman.com)
• Six Steps to Creating a Profit. A guide for the small and mid-sized service-based businesses. Patricia Sigmon (regnordman.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Marketing automation (MA)  is likely a really bad idea for you.   At one time I was selling accounting software for the first micro-computers.  Quickly we would discover (as we were implementing) that we were trying to shoehorn into a perfectly good solution,  a company that had very poor or almost no accounting systems beyond a shoebox, i.e. no  process at all.  Yah technology was going to solve their problem.  We had to step back and  first create a paper accounting system (their dime, our time so it  hurt)   Lots of scars.

The same mistakes were then made with ERP and CRM implementations (automating a bad or nonexistent process). Lots of money spent on these and on implementation. (Bigger shoehorns)   And now it is being played out with MAutomation. Since 95% of companies do not have a well thought out, strategic, successful  lead gen/nurturing process,  MA will be a waste of their money.

Perhaps  Freemium companies think they need MA to sort through the hordes of unqualified down-loaders. I suggest they take the money they would spend on automation and really work on their message, segmentation, targeting and building relevant compelling content .  At the same time really nail down a proven process.  Then use MA to  help grow your business.   Remember,  think,  then act. Things just work better that way.  (You move your spend to an investment that pays back.)

Of course this would require the CEO to know this stuff. Tell me when you meet one of these, since its always easier to buy technology than to solve the problems you have created yourself.   Marketing Automation is likely a waste of your money, but  its not the software, its you.
And that’s 30

• Confession: I Am a Marketing Automation Fanboy (funnelholic.com)
• Keys to B2B Marketing Automation Success: Experts from IDC and Quaero Weigh In (customerthink.com)
• Top 4 Benefits Gained from Adopting Marketing Automation (customerthink.com)
• The Trifecta or: How Marketing Automation, Lead Management, and CRM Are Related (customerthink.com)
• Marketing Automation Preparedness (marketinginteractions.typepad.com)
• Salesforce.com vs. Marketing Automation (demandmetric.com)
• Marketing Automation: The Beginning of the End? (mpdailyfix.com)

Achieve Sales Excellence. The 7 customer rules for becoming the new sales professional.  Howard Stevens & Theodore Kinni. 2007. ISBN 9781593376512.  (Thanks to David Moulton for passing this book onto me.)  Not since Neil Rakham did his in-depth interviews/research that resulted in SPIN Selling, has there been a  comparable professional study done of what customers want from salespeople.  The HR Chally Group ( Stevens is CEO)  interviewed 210 000 salespeople and 80 000 companies as well as interacted with hundreds of companies through their proprietary sales assessment tool.   This is based on their observations that:

• Two-thirds of college graduates now take sales jobs upon completion of their formal education and
• 0.8% of colleges and universities prepare them for those jobs.

This is a very valuable book.  It is easily the best foundational book on sales success in the market today. It aligns what we find over and over, companies are often blissfully unaware of how little they know about their customers.  If you really want to make the change to be a top performing sales professional or customer driven company here is how you start.

Stage One:  A customer wants you to know that (this is the lion’s share of your work)

• You must be personally accountable for our desired results
• You must understand our business
• You must be on our side.

Stage two (after you have become on of the better performing sales types) they you want to know that:

• You must bring us applications
• You must be easily accessible
• You must solve our problem
• You must be innovative in responding to our need.

Customers see the salesperson as the most influential component in a sale.

If you want to make the serious sales coin,  this is the book for you to start your journey with.

Related articles

• There is No Place for “Buyers Are Liars” in the Sales Profession (customerthink.com)

Are you still using Groupthink to set prices?   I mean, the big meetings where the products group with perhaps marketing sit around a big conference table for a really good naval gazing session.  We are still finding companies that set product value and pricing without any independent 3rd party validation.   If you are guilty, you have lots of company.  Most are really busy with “doing the business”.  Getting a realistic view of the market is almost impossible in the hothouse atmosphere of fast moving companies.

Compounding group think is the  cart-before-the-horse setting of the product price at the end, not the beginning of the product development cycle.  To do this properly, companies would need to acknowledge their bad habits around poor customer requirements setting which leads to vague estimates.  Improper/inadequate estimating is most  likely responsible for holding 90% of technology companies back from a break through to profits and eventual market success.   News flash to dev teams, the sales and marketing folks are positioned to really understand the customers and what they value vs need.  Even if your dev team is  talking regularly to customers, they still should be joined-at-the-hip to sales and marketing.  You must build value, not features.

Related articles

• Groupthink Conflicts and Norms (brighthub.com)
• Groupthink at Zappos? (ikiw.org)
• Groupthink in Society (socyberty.com)
• The inevitable 10:10 remix (hotair.com)
• Has social media caused Groupthink & shift away from pattern recognition/analysis? – Ahead of the Curve (fredzimny.wordpress.com)

I needed to review Sales Compensation resources for a recent pricing panel I was on.  I was looking for definitions of compensating for value selling . (Which is most likely determined at the point of persuasion.  This point is sometimes at the commitment stage but could as easily be at the demand creation or order fulfillment stages)  Despite this importance , only Nagle lays out a method to reward value (margin  contribution) selling.   In no particular order:

Compensating the Sales Force. A practical guide to designing winning sales reward programs. David j. Cichelli . 2010 . ISBN 9780071739023.  McGraw Hill puts out really good stuff. Thorough, well researched and put into a easy to read style.  If you want an all in one book this one will do it. Lots of good examples. I especially liked his chapter on plans for the difficult roles, which was quite helpful

Sales Compensation Handbook. Stockton B. Colt (ed) . Towers Perrin. 1998. ISBN 0814404111.  Another good book from Amacom. Good layout, easy to find your way around and put together by a company that knows its stuff.

Compensating the New Sales Roles. How to design rewards that work in today’s selling environment. Jerome A Colletti & Mary S. Fiss. 2001. ISBN 0814471064. Another excellent Amacom resource. It addresses how the use of the Internet has changed how you should set up your sales comp plans.  They also stress that a comp plan supports, not drives, the sales strategy.  Good easy to ready to use format. I liked the sales comp audit they included – very useful.

The Successful Sales managers Guide to Business to Business Telephone Sales. Everything you need to start, reposition and manage a telesales department.  Lee R. Vechten. 1999. ISBN 1881081095.  Still a classic and so useful if you have a telesales department. I found his section on selling the plan to management to be so relevant.  Vechten also points out some of the folks that need rewards the are often forgotten, including customer service reps, and how to do it effectively.

Managing Channels of Distribution. The marketing executives complete guide. Kenneth Rolnicki. 1998. ISBN 0814403352.  Amacom seems to have a lock on really good books in this space.   This is a whole book dedicated on what is often only part of one chapter in other sales management books.  Easy to read, thorough and well researched, the author talks just like he is working in the space . He gives you the full answer to deal with any and all problems you may have in the channel. I know they work as I have used many in my history. But he gives you lots more!  There is even a well done section on ethics.

• Sneak Preview: 2010 Inside Sales Compensation Study (customerthink.com)
• Three Ways to Motivate Sales Superstars (prnewswire.com)
• Compensation Drives Sales Behavior? Is Compensation The Only Tool For Managing Sales Performance? (customerthink.com)
• Give Your Teams Swiss Army Knives (bothsidesofthetable.com)
• Inside Sales and Field Sales Harmony (customerthink.com)
• Startup Strategies: You Can’t Grow Without Process (gigaom.com)
• SaaS’s Impact on the Inside Sales Model (customerthink.com)
• Forecast Fatale (customerthink.com)

Image via Wikipedia

How to Create an Unstoppable Marketing & Sales machine. An introduction to Fusion Marketing.  Christopher Ryan. 2010. ISBN 9780982539729.  Sub  head:.  This book promises lots and delivers much more. I have followed Chris Ryan’s blog for quite some time and it always very usable advice. This book is one of the few that addresses the need to align sales and marketing from the get go.  He also like ourselves stresses the need for a framework to get the most out of sales and marketing. As well he tells exactly why,  how to and what to do to “get” marketing , regardless of budget.  His chapter on rescuing a failing marketing org is worth the price of the book alone. The chapter on producing big results with a small budget is jammed full of great ideas.  A must buy for the C-Suite and all sales and marketers out there. He does not miss much in a well written, easy to read and understand instant classic.

Related articles

• Fusion Marketing Partners Offers Webinar Series Emerging Strategies to Drive More Awareness, Leads and Revenue (prweb.com)
• Is FusionHQ The Answer? – We’re Hosting A Webinar To Find Out (entrepreneurs-journey.com)
• B2B Marketing Lead “Phoenix” Reactivation Project by Christopher Ryan (customerthink.com)
• Use Social Media and Pull Marketing to Generate Business (customerthink.com)

Customer history. Pricing part 5.  If you have not made price raising part of your regular company history, this makes the job a bit harder.   This will be a change for clients and most people resist  change.  If you  have trained your customers to expect discounts, especially at quarter end and year end you are in seriously bad shape . In essence your customers are driving your prices, whether if it is through your training or your own weak negotiation position.  Compounding this is  the  ongoing corporate  reinforcement of weak selling approaches for your sales team.   To improve this  situation requires a group effort of marketing, sales and the C suite. no one of these groups can do it by themselves.

Related articles

• Pricing survey indicates you are dropping prices, but for the right reasons? Part 1. (regnordman.com)
• Playing Favorites: Identify Your Best Customers (entrepreneur.com)
• Skillcoaching.com Offers Book on Applying and Coaching Selling Skills (prweb.com)
• So You Think You Can Sell, Do You? (frontofficebox.com)
• How to Become a Good Sales Rep (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
• How to Build Credibility with Your Sales Copy (copyblogger.com)

Practical Pricing. Translating pricing theory into sustainable profit improvement. Michael Calogridis.2010. ISBN 9780230614604.  A different book on the subject than Thomas Nagles.  Calogridis gets you very quickly into the hows of pricing and gives the reader very useful tools to display the concepts to others clearly and efficiently.  It works well as a first serious book on pricing and reads quickly and easily. I really enjoyed his “here’s how to do this” style and his obvious experience with how utterly unprepared companies are to make strategic pricing decisions.  It is not always the sales guys fault that they ask for all those discounts to get the sale.  There are numerous approaches, tactics and assumptions that companies can use to be fully  ready well before the sales guy has to sell.  Once sales guys sell (and get comp’d) on value, they will start to complain about all the ways the company fails to deliver on their value promise, which will make you a better company.

Related articles

• Getting Your Pricing Right – A BCTIA Panel Discussion in Vancouver (leveragepoint.com)
• Resources on Value Management for Product Development, Pricing, Marketing and Sales (leveragepoint.com)
• Sales and Marketing Alignment (demandmetric.com)

Cover via Amazon

The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. A guide to growing more profitably. Thomas T. Nagle, John E. Hogan, Joseph Zale. 2011ISBn 9780136106814.  As my due diligence for a panel on pricing next week (Oct 20)  in Vancouver (http://www.regonline.ca/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=900801)  I have been reading Nagles 5th edition of his textbook on the subject and am thoroughly enjoying this book. It is as much the application of psychology as analytics.  He makes the best arguments and execution strategies for value pricing I have ever read.

In his thoroughness I am finding lots of sales aha moments. These are the times when you encountered types of  buyer  and competitor behaviour, made a decision, learned to regret it, lost  $$$$$$ , and over time  developed/learned better responses. Nagle describes the theory behind why the better responses worked and how to improve even more . This is a very similar experience I had when first reading Geoffrey Moore.  ”All the time spent learning through doing when someone had already written this down”. Of course had I known much of this sooner I would have been even more of a pain in the ass to my superiors/employers.

There may not be one book that contains everything on pricing,  but this one comes extremely close. His generous use of examples pulls tired brains like mine through some of the numeric analysis. I know I will be a much better salesperson from reading this book. I suggest this is a book for CEOs, VPs Sales, Marketing and Finance in any type of company. Thanks Steven Forth for dropping this copy off to me.

Related articles

• Resources on Value Management for Product Development, Pricing, Marketing and Sales (leveragepoint.com)
• Getting Your Pricing Right – A BCTIA Panel Discussion in Vancouver (leveragepoint.com)
• Are Software as a Service Vendors Innovating on Pricing Metrics? (leveragepoint.com)
• The Real Growth Driver: Blending Commoditization and Differentiation (leveragepoint.com)