Wired for Sales

People often look at my smiling and mustachioed face and see a resemblance to the KFC’s Honorable Colonel Sanders. Early on, I was caught off guard when strangers pointed out the similarities. After a quarter century, I have decided to just play along.

Yesterday, while dashing into the grocery store on a mission of mercy for my lovely bride, a guy walked up to me and with a genuinely serious look, asked if I could help him out with a recipe for fried chicken. With tongue fully in cheek, I told him the main ingredient was chicken, followed by 11 totally secret herbs and spices.

On my way home, my mind wandered. Just how secret is the Colonel’s recipe? A quick Google search revealed over 151,000 recipes for chicken frying success. Based on my research, I could rattle off each and every one of those secret ingredients.

After spending just a few minutes on the topic, I now understand why my personal attempts to produce the proper fried fowl always turn out greasy, limp, unappetizing, and practically inedible. Why had I not looked up the recipe before? Herein lies the issue.

I have been cooking for over half a century. Really cooking, at home, in restaurants, church fundraisers, and other events. I even won a couple of chili cookoff awards and barbeque contests. I thought I was a pro, so why look up something as rudimentary as fried chicken?

As my mind wandered down this winding path, thoughts migrated from culinary skills to sales skills. Is there possibly a recipe for selling? I am convinced there is – or, at the very least, recipes for portions of the whole selling phenomenon. We’ll not attempt to spell out the entire recipe book, but let’s look at the not-so-secret ingredients.

Process is an ingredient. In the very first iteration of this column, I said: “Research indicates companies with documented and formal targeting plans are 40% more effective at meeting their goals. The same research points to a direct correlation between how customers think about the selling organization. Nearly all the companies described as solution-driven partners have a formalized targeting process.”

RayKroc of McDonald’s fame built a detailed, 100-page process around the lowly french fry. Our previously mentioned pal, Colonel Sanders, did the same for chicken. They were total sticklers for process. Yet most distributors allow their sales teams to dance to the beat of their own bucket.

Organization is an ingredient. This manifests itself in sellers who don’t set up customer appointments, choosing instead to just do a milk run through their territories dropping by and seeing whoever is available. Since top-level people rarely, if ever, have time to see someone without an appointment, managers discover their teams have never met the top brass of their strategically important accounts.

This issue also rears its ugly head during important product launches. One of the major complaints from our supply partners indicates distributors take six or eight months to introduce new products to targeted customers. Many feel this impacts competitive strategies and allows competitors to react with countermeasures.

Attention to customer-centric information is increasingly important to the recipe. This manifests itself with poorly collected and out-of-date customer information stored in CRM systems. The results are lagging behind marketing success. The head of marketing for one distributor told me they had correct emails for less than half of their customer contacts, and when they did an experimental “snail mail” program they got phone calls from customers indicating the intended recipient was long retired or had died several years before.

Lingering on the CRM thing, salespeople often claim they use Outlook to maintain their contacts and the CRM is a time-waster. Yet, most distributors launching a pricing process initiative tell us the hardest part of their job is cleaning and correcting customer classifications. Salespeople operating outside of the recipe wrongly move every customer to the Large User or Large OEM classification regardless of reality. Distributors face similar challenges with opportunity tracking and any form of forecasting required to create sound projects of the future.

Whether it’s maintaining a solid process, staying organized, or keeping customer data accurate, these key ingredients can transform your sales efforts. Just as I learned with fried chicken, the right approach makes all the difference. Master the recipe for sales, and you’ll deliver truly satisfying results.