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There have been many studies researching the main reason that some sales reps are extremely successful and some are less so. Virtually all of the research comes to the same conclusion and it is surprising in its simplicity.

Sales managers want to know this predictor because it can help them hire the right people and provide focused sales tips in order to teach them how to sell. Sales reps want to know in order to improve their sales skills in an area that will have the biggest impact. This quest for the magic pill is one of the reasons that there’s a new sales blog around every corner.

“This predictor of success is not one that you have any control over…but in a way you do.”

What is it? Time in territory. That’s right, the longer a sales rep is in his or her territory the more likely he or she is to be successful. In the math world they call this a positive correlation. As the length of time increases, so does sales volume.

I think the implications for this are significant:

• If you’re a sales rep and thinking about changing jobs, remember that you’ll have to start the clock over again. Be careful about throwing away the time in territory that you’ve already earned with your current employer.
• Sales managers, do you have a long term sales rep that is not performing like you think they could? Then get out there and encourage and nurture them. You don’t want to lose his or her time in territory.
• Changing jobs frequently can hurt a sales rep’s career and a high sales rep turnover in a company can hurt an employer.

The bottom line sales tip is that hanging in there with our sales job or, if you’re a sales manager, hanging in there with a struggling long term sales rep might be the best thing you can do for your sales volume.

To receive this sales blog by email <click here> to receive by RSS <click here>. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

[I had the opportunity recently to ask Jim Fowler, CEO of Jigsaw, some questions about his company. Jigsaw is a fast growing company with interesting concepts regarding leads that will be of interest to many sales professionals.]

1. You are the CEO of Jigsaw. What is the history of Jigsaw?

Jigsaw was founded in late 2003 with the mission of mapping every business organization on the planet. The concept was that salespeople could work together to build a gigantic shared Rolodex.

Jigsaw launched in late 2004, has raised $18M in venture funding, currently has ninety employees and has over 500K members (mostly sales professionals) who build and maintain the collaborative database.

2. Who do you consider your biggest competitors and what are the differentiators?

Jigsaw competes most directly with traditional data companies like Hoovers and InfoUSA. Jigsaw differs from them in several key ways:

They build and maintain their own databases. We believe there is no way a few dozen or even a few hundred employees can compete with an army of 500K motivated salespeople who build and maintain the Jigsaw shared Rolodex.

We have many more contacts and they are much better. Specifically, every single Jigsaw contact is complete – including email address and phone number. Seventy-two percent of Jigsaw contact records have a direct dial phone number. Virtually none of our competitors’ records have either an email address or a phone number.

We give our company data away for free. Members can download up to 50K complete company records at a time in the format of all of the major CRM systems.

3. As a sales professional what are some of the compelling reasons for me to use Jigsaw for leads versus more traditional ways of lead attainment such as leads lists and networking groups?

Jigsaw’s data is not only complete, but it is also much fresher than any other lead list. Jigsaw’s 500K members constantly clean the data, updating records and graveyarding dead ones.

Jigsaw is, in essence, the largest networking group around. There are currently almost nine million complete contact records on Jigsaw.

In essence, Jigsaw is doing to the traditional data companies what Wikipedia has done to Encyclopedia Britannica.

4. Is Jigsaw responding to a change in how professional salespeople network and acquire leads?

We prefer to think that Jigsaw is changing the way sales professionals network and acquire leads. Never before have leads of this quality been so easily obtainable. We believe the increase in transparency of data will fundamentally change the way salespeople sell. We believe that it will no longer be about just getting the data, but about how to rise above the noise. We believe salespeople are going to have to become better marketers in order to get a prospect’s time.

5. What is your sales demographic and industry demographic? In other words, are you marketing Jigsaw to certain types of sales professionals that operate in certain industries?

Technology sales professionals were the early adopters, but now sales professionals from all industries and company sizes use Jigsaw. We offer a Jigsaw Team product that allows entire sales teams to use Jigsaw. We have over 600 of these corporate accounts.

Members use Jigsaw for two main purposes – to find prospects and to map organizations in order to understand the buying influencers for deals farther in the pipe. Our market must almost always perform one or both of these tasks on a regular basis.

We also sell our CRM cleaning and maintenance services to CRM owners/administrators. This is the fastest growing part of our business.

[Thank you, Jim, for answering my questions. I think many readers will be interested in looking into Jigsaw further. Scott]

To receive this blog by email <click here> to receive by RSS <click here>. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

[I recently interviewed Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex. This company is representative of the tools and resources that are increasingly becoming available to sales professionals and are fundamentally changing how we work.]

1. You are the CEO of NetProspex. What is NetProspex and how did it all start?

I’ve been a part of several successful online business information companies (President of Thompson Financial/Intelligence Data and President of ZoomInfo) that all shared one thing in common - technology transition - which always lets you do things differently and find new ways to deliver value to an online community. The power of user-contribution and Web 2.0 blew me away as soon as I saw it. While user contribution increases quantity tremendously, the lovely chaotic creative environments of sites like MySpace lack an aspect critical to the business user. Simply put, a business user needs accurate information. Why? Because they are going to take important actions in their workday on the basis of that information.

We thought there was a great opportunity to leap ahead of the competition by solving this issue. Jeff Clewley (NetProspex’s CTO and co-founder) and I both come from backgrounds in financial electronic markets where quality is paramount because the information is used to support multi-million dollar decisions. Our experience serving business users made us very aware that success in the space was going to be dictated not just by the amount of data collected but also by the quality of the information presented back to the user. We believe the majority of the early entrants were more Web 2.0 than Business 2.0 and have lacked this appreciation. NetProspex is a B2B sales contact exchange marketplace built on the premise that sales people need accurate content so they don’t waste important time in the sales process.

Fundamentally, Jigsaw relies on the user community to “clean” their data. We don’t think that makes sense. Sales people don’t want to spend precious hours fixing problems in a sales contact database; they have a job to do and that is to make money. NetProspex takes responsibility for cleaning data completely off the shoulders of users. Our trading system is designed to be quick and easy so users can upload contacts in less than 1% of the time it would take on Jigsaw. Then we put the data through rigorous quality processing, so that only validated contacts are added to the system. The result is that new contacts added to NetProspex are 100% validated when they are added to the database.

Before a contact is made available to users it undergoes a validation process that is the most rigorous in the industry. And we don’t stop there. Contacts are assigned an accuracy rating based on their age between 1% and 100%. When we add a contact to the database, it is 100% validated. Then, as the contact ages in the database we know the probability of that person being in that role decreases. This reflects the issue that people turn over at companies, and any group of contacts will get progressively inaccurate. We know this happens at an average rate of 20% per year, so we provide an accuracy rating to the contact that reflects the average accuracy for contacts as they age in the database.

Anything less than 50% is simply thrown out. Over time we continuously re-validate and re-score each contact. Because contacts are a perishable commodity, like fish, they go off after a while, so we purge all contacts more than two years old.

Yes, technologies like NetProspex provide a definite evolution of traditional sales processes, improving and scaling those processes to the point where information useful to business is becoming more network-like, rather than created by a single source. To illustrate, cooperation in the sales environment has always happened at a human level. If you knew someone who could help you get into an account, you’d probably ask them for the name and contact of that person. Executive directories grew out of this fundamental demand. The change is that the community is clearly prepared to share certain types of information like contact information, and the common benefit is that we can now start to see more deeply into a wider array of target organizations and find mid-management decision makers. That’s a big change and benefit to a sales person that speeds up the sales cycle enormously.

We cover a very wide range of industries as our customer is basically anyone who needs to find and reach another business person or group of business people. That is a fairly broad user base when you think about it. We have concentrations in B2B industries such as technology and business services, but we also range into healthcare, financial and manufacturing. The sales demographic is very broad and includes most transactional B2B sales environments where the sales person simply needs a targeted, accurate contact name.

[Thank you to Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex, for answering my questions. If you are currently using NetProspex please feel free to provide us with your review of the site and its benefits by commenting on this post.]

Please tell your business associates about Scott R. Sheaffer’s Sales Tips and Sales Advice Blog. To subscribe: <click here> to receive by email or <click here> for the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

In the 1973 movie, Magnum Force, Harry Callahan (played by Clint Eastwood) says his now famous line, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

No matter how inflated our ego is or how much we suffer from low self esteem, we all have two things in common: a key selling strength that must be optimized and a key sales weakness we must navigate around. It’s how we are put together by the big man upstairs. No one is exempt.

Highly successful athletes, politicians and actors are examples of people that showcase their greatest strength and do their best to conceal their greatest weakness. The key to all of this is that they know these things about themselves.

Since sales success is so critically dependent on a number of skill sets, doesn’t it make sense that we should be aware of our greatest strength and use it to our advantage? At the same time wouldn’t it be helpful for us to be cognizant of where we are not strong?

Tiger Woods is generally considered to be one of the best golfers that has ever lived. He acknowledges that his short-irons are a weakness for him, but he also knows that he can hit a driver like no other. Guess what his game strategy is? He uses his driver (his strength) in a way to avoid as many short-iron shots (his weakness) as possible.

We might be tempted to ask, should we work on our weakest sales skill in order to make it stronger? Yes, but I have a few rules for this:

1. We must work on our weak area only after we are sure that our strongest area is razor sharp. Our strongest area is our money maker.
2. When in front of a customer we must be sure to leverage our strength to the maximum; this is not a time to be experimenting with improving our weakness.
3. We can and should use a coach (e.g., sales trainer, sales manager) to help us with our weak area.
4. We can’t always avoid exposing our weak area, so we should ensure that we have at least an adequate and acceptable strategy for handling it.

Sales professionals can be either weak or strong in the following areas: prospecting, account management, presentations, customer meetings, product knowledge, account planning, time management, record keeping, etc. This is a concept where sales management can play a valuable role in helping their individual team members fortify their strength and manage their weakness.

Now go to work on making your sales strength even stronger and your weakness manageable.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

For us to be most effective in attacking our target markets we must first define them and, secondly, be able to identify individual companies within them. This sounds really simple but it is amazing how many companies haven’t taken the time to do this.

One of the primary ways that we have traditionally identified markets and individual companies within those markets is by assigning them SIC codes. You remember SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes; they’ve been around since the 1930’s. The problem with SIC codes today is twofold. They were created when the U.S. was predominantly a manufacturing oriented country and SIC codes only have four digits, which can be limiting.

SIC codes needed to be updated to better reflect a changing North American economy and provide more options for classification. To do that, NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes were created and are replacing the old SIC codes. This industry coding system was jointly developed by the U.S., Canada and Mexico and has six digits. The Federal Government has been using NAICS codes since 1997.

NAICS codes can help us in several ways:

1. SIC codes are falling out of favor and are being rapidly replaced by NAICS codes. What a golden opportunity for us to take a fresh look at how we segment our markets.
2. Many industry reports that are now available either from public or private sources use NAICS codes. If we are still using SIC codes we won’t be able to use this new information very effectively as a benchmark for our own businesses.
3. NAICS codes can open our eyes to many service industry opportunities that were missing in the old SIC codes, which could play a prominent role in how we re-segment our markets.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are giving us increasing abilities to segment our markets through automation and NAICS codes are playing a key role. NAICS codes can be a very helpful tool in helping us focus our sales efforts. For a complete list of NAICS codes please see 2007 NAICS Codes.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Neuro Linguistic Programming (also known as NLP) was created in the 1970’s. The idea behind it was to understand human communication beyond just the words being used, with obvious implications to sales. Over the last 30 years most researchers have come to the conclusion that it is a highly subjective semi-science that should be used with caution, if at all.

NLP was initially used in psychology and counseling. It wasn’t long until sales practitioners of one sort or another started applying NLP theories to sales training. Am I the only one that has noticed that every new type of pop-psychology is ultimately applied to sales? My most displeasurable example of this was the distortion of the data about the importance of body language in communication (The Myth of Body Language in Communication). I still hear sales trainers refer to that and it makes my skin crawl.

The meta-model of NLP says that when one human being communicates with another they go through the following steps: the speaker first has a thought, it’s coded into words, the words are spoken, the hearer receives those words, the hearer decodes those words and then interprets the thoughts. The concept is actually fairly interesting to consider because, after all of those steps, the potential for misinterpretation in human communication can be better understood. Clearly we can see how this could apply to interactions with our customers.

As appealing as the theory sounds, it is generally accepted that NLP has not withstood the test of time (especially in the area of sales training). It has not been adequately supported by legitimate research and smacks of “new age” thinking, which has more of a spiritual or philosophical appeal.

My feeling is that NLP sales training is unproven and if it were advertised on TV you’d find it at 3:00 in the morning on an infomercial.

Stick with the sales basics that are proven over time and represented in Sales Vitamins™. There are no magic pills in sales.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

I used to find that some salespeople would inexplicably go into a “blue funk” for an indefinite period and then snap out of it and be fine. During this period their sales would suffer and they seemed unhappy with their job and even their personal life. I looked for a long time to identify the cause of this “blue funk” and eventually figured it out.

Depression. Yes, the common cold of mental illness that afflicts 10% of the U.S. population each year. Once I learned more about depression I could see possible signs of it in some of the salespeople that I managed.

Most importantly, this knowledge helped me to get help for some of them in order to get them back on their feet. Job stress is one of the most common triggers of depression. Sales can be a very stressful job. Sadly, 80% of those that are depressed don’t seek help even though it’s commonly just a chemical imbalance that can be successfully treated with short term medication and counseling.

I know this is something we don’t like to talk about but I’ve seen it as a real issue in countless sales organizations. An issue, by the way, that can effectively be dealt with and once resolved can get the salesperson firing on all cylinders again. Win-win.

Sales management frequently misses this not-so-uncommon cause for sales performance issues. What are some of the common signs?

1. Loss of joy in one’s life and career
2. Weight gain or loss accompanied with a lowered level of energy
3. Trouble concentrating and lowered self esteem
4. Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
5. Irritability

As you can see, all of these common symptoms are going to hinder someone’s sales abilities.

A smart, experienced and knowledgeable sales manager knows to consider all possibilities when it comes to performance issues with a salesperson, including depression. If we feel one of our employees might be struggling with depression, then we need to get them help. Obviously we would want to confidentially work through our HR organization before approaching the salesperson.

If you feel you are personally struggling with depression, then get help for yourself.

We don’t have to live with this problem; it’s not permanent. Those wrestling with depression are not alone. We don’t need to let this get in the way of our, or anyone else’s, sales career.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

The sales profession is increasingly moving toward a more scientific approach. Students of sales are demanding a more objective and scientific orientation to the science of sales. As evidence of that, there are a number of outstanding universities in the US that have top flight programs where you can major in sales.

I’ve noted in past posts (What Colleges Teach you About Sales Careers) that many university environments are not too sales friendly. Fortunately, that is changing, as evidenced by the top quality sales degree programs being offered by the universities listed below.

There are many different choices to consider when it comes to a sales career; no longer can we just say that we want to be in “sales.” Please see As a career salesperson where do you best fit? for more information. Sales degree programs can really help a young person (or even someone with years of sales experience) hone their skills in the type of sales career they want to pursue.

If you have a son or daughter that is interested in a formal sales education, one of the following universities might be a great place to steer them. Of course it’s also never too late to consider a formal sales degree program for yourself or someone in your organization.

The following list of universities offers some of the best sales education degree programs in the US. All of the following are accredited universities where students can major in sales.

Baylor University, Waco, Texas, Internship Required
Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia
University of Akron, Akron, Ohio
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, Internship Required
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

I am very pleased to see that the sales profession is becoming more academic. These university programs provide a career launching point for young people interested in a sales career. They also are an avenue for experienced sales professionals to sharpen their sales skills and earn a degree in the process.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

We all know the Pareto Principle, which broadly states that 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes. Countless sales organizations have gotten themselves into deep trouble by mindlessly applying this principle to their sales organizations. I call it the Pareto Protocol.

Sales management thinks something like the following, “We’ve done an analysis and find that 80% of our sales comes from only 20% of our sales force. We need to fire 80% of our salesforce, which will lower our overhead and increase our profits!”

They think that if they can increase the sales of the 20%-super-producers by just 25% they won’t see any decline in revenues, while simultaneously realizing an 80% reduction in their base sales payroll. It sounds too good to be true, because it is.

I’ve seen the results when the Pareto Protocol is applied to sales organizations and it is consistently a disaster. I am fully aware that every sales organization has salespersons that need to find another career, or at the least be encouraged to work for a competitor.

I am also fully aware that every sales organization has its high producing heavy lifters, but to think that they can and will do even more lifting, all the time, is an ill-advised sales strategy.

Before your sales organization is tempted to partially or fully implement the Pareto Protocol, please consider the following:

1. Your top producers are in that position because they are already working at high capacity. Do they really have an additional 25%+ of bandwidth to give you?
2. You have salespeople at differing levels of development. Firing 80% of the sales force will undoubtedly nip many future super stars in the bud.
3. After applying the Pareto Protocol your sales force is now theoretically comprised exclusively of superstars; you’ve unintentionally created headhunter heaven. Be prepared for your superstars to be rapidly and easily gobbled up by your competitors.
4. Sometimes sales management tends to put their heads in the sand and pretend that everyone on the sales force has exactly the same opportunities. Not true. Accounts, products, geography, experience, sales management, etc. are variables that have to be accounted for and leveraged for each salesperson.

There is a normal distribution of sales capabilities within all sales organizations. Please see Sales Managers, Invest in Your Average Performers.

Sales management needs to focus on improving/removing the bottom 15%, improving the middle 70% and rewarding the top 15%. Sales management also has to look at its own skill levels at managing the sales force most effectively, but that’s for another post.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

We’ve all done it. We throw a wrench in things with our prospects and customers by not getting them information on time, ordering and shipping the wrong parts, offending one of the decision makers, making promises that we aren’t able to keep, misquoting prices, etc.

There are a million things we can do to damage customer relationships.

When we find ourselves in situations like this we know to initiate all the standard recovery techniques such as bringing in our sales manager for help, readily admitting our errors, etc.

But what if those things don’t work? What if things are stalled and the customer doesn’t appear to budge or, even worse, appears indifferent?

When we find ourselves in this predicament we have a back door. I call it the Control-Alt-Delete Recovery. We’re all familiar with control-alt-delete; it’s the key sequence we hit when we want to reboot and start from scratch with our Windows computer when all else has failed.

When we initiate a Control-Alt-Delete Recovery with prospects and customers we attempt to initiate a second chance with them. By starting all over they see us differently and many times will be open to reconnecting.

There are three primary components of this strategy:

1. New sales team. We need to bring in a new sales team, both salesperson and sales manager. The prospect or customer needs to see all new faces. Once things start to recover there is a possibility that the original team could be slowly re-introduced.
2. Additional decision makers. Obviously we want to continue the relationship with existing decision makers, but we need to add additional decision makers into the mix to help create a new chemistry.
3. New products and services. Not only do we want to bring in new sales faces and add decision makers but we want to introduce some new products and services as well.

The objective is to create a whole new look for our sales approach so that the customer sees us in a different and favorable light. This strategy will take a degree of boldness and humility but it can help us regain momentum.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer