Selling

You are the best sales person your company will ever have—most likely. Your passion, your product knowledge and your understanding of customer needs are essential to the startup from the get-go. True, you may not have direct selling experience, but do not underestimate yourself. It is likely that you are what is called un an unconscious competent.

If you do need sales training, go get it. You will certainly be able to improve your skills. Choose the kind of sales training that suits you. When I first set up in business, one of the first mistakes I made was to feel that I needed to recruit sales professionals and underrated my own abilities. I lacked certain skills, talked too much and listened not enough, but those were things I was able to learn, both on the job and in little bursts of training

When your business grows to a considerable size, you will need to think about a little more sophistication, like customer relations management systems, sales management and territories, but at the start, all I think you need do is to:

set sales targets and monitor variances—a spreadsheet or even a word processing table will do;
create a simple pipeline, using a spreadsheet and later download an open source CRM system (opencrx and concursive are examples) to follow leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities, forecasts, activities, time management. products, territories;
collect prospect names like a vulture—newspaper clippings, overheard conversations, business cards, friends friends, ask prospects for referrals;
keep a dedicated card index system of the list above by customer on your desk.

As the entrepreneur, chances are high that you will be doing most of the selling. But everyone in the company must sell. Nobody is excused, but nobody. Period. If they need help and support, give it freely.

This is not a traditional sales training page, but is designed to give you some very special tools to help you on your way to getting your startup into orbit and the revenue flowing.

WOM Selling

wom According to McKinsey, three-quarters of all industries are driven by WOM (word of mouth). Consultants Bain says there is no better force to drive sales growth than strong customer advocacy. Booz Allen says, “Make your consumer an advocate: Shift marketing objectives from sending a message to facilitating conversations with and between consumers.”

Word of mouth marketing makes use of many media. It is not just a matter of telling your neighbors. More than three quarters of buyers trust WOM—more than any other medium. For the purpose, direct and indirect means are available to you.

The direct methods, apart from the neighbors and the sales call itself, include:

public speaking,
customer referrals,
user conferences,
training events,
demonstrations.

The indirect methods include:

podcasts,
online forums,
live chat,
email newsletters,
articles.

With either means, bear in mind that the message must:

come from the right source
be relevant to the customer
be coherent and simply presented
be believable
be in a context relevant to the customer.

Dabbawala Selling

tiffin When I was a boy in Britain over 50 years ago, I often heard the expression 'time for tiffin', never even questioning the origin of the word. Now, the tiffin box dabbawalas are the toast of the sales world and the business model that social entrepreneurs rave about. Tiffin is an English Imperial word for a light lunch, and sometimes for the box it is carried in. For this reason, the dabbawalas are sometimes called Tiffin Wallahs.

A dabbawalla is a man in Mumbai, India who delivers a home-made lunch in a tiffin (box) to city workers. A walla or wallah is someone in the trade of the prefix word, as in punkah (fan), or dohbi (laundry man).

It is a 125 year old trade formed by a network of 5,000 men with the complex task of delivering 200,000 lunches Mumbai within approximately 3 hours, with all deliveries complete by 12.30 pm every day. According to a recent survey, there is only one mistake in every 6,000,000 deliveries, statistically equivalent to a Six Sigma (99.9999) rating. The industry started during the Raj in about 1880 and still grows at 5-10% a year.

It is the biggest example of relationship selling that I know about. It is very effective.

Why does it work? It is based on

trust and relationship (e.g., delivering Corporation Bank account forms)
meticulous teamwork (e.g., 3 hand-offs between kitchen production and office client)
a healthy product (home-made food, not junk)
faultless time management (200,000 lunches in 3 hours)
a human delivery chain (low-tech and personal)
continually updated systems (e.g., text message ordering)
introducing add-ons (e.g., delivery of Airtel cell phone cards)
security and quality control (Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association)
everyone in the system is treated as an equal (and paid $100 a month about double the average wage)
word of mouth marketing (and Mumbaicha Dabewala, a film, is out, in India at least).

What can you learn from the Dabbawallas?

Sensory Selling

brain When you sell paper clips or power stations, you will be using relationship. Yours. So start with yourself. Work at a personal appreciation. Who are you; how do you like to work; what is your predominant interpersonal style; how do you best collect information.

The sensory part of you defines who you are and therefore the person with whom you want to relate. The traditional five senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, but humans have at least six additional senses including nociception (pain), equilibrioception (balance), proprioception & kinesthesia (joint motion and acceleration), sense of time, thermoception (temperature differences), and in some, a weak magnetoception (direction).

When you have some confidence and before you take to the road, you need to do some other preparation. Dress the part, be timely, choose your moment, be sure you have relevant information to hand, be well-documented about your prospect.

Above all bear in mind how you are going to approach the prospect. Think about him or her, whether it is direct of indirect selling. Natural born salespeople will do this without thought, but most of the rest of us will need to do a bit of analyzing. What you will be able to figure out is how the customer most prefers to deal with you.

It will be on the basis of

facts: company, product or service—hard data, numbers and performance
support: nature, speed, length or quality—who will respond and how
vision: concepts and plans—the end results
logic: pricing, guarantees—a matter of keeping score.

The there is the matter of how you get and give information. Make sure you are using all your senses to get information from the prospect and do not just rely on your preferred one. You may like to see things in print, but if the other person does most of his work through speaking, you may get nothing if your hearing is switched off.

On the other hand try to play to his preferred means of receiving information. Bear in mind, for example, that the eyes take in a third more info per second than the ears, so if someone is more visual you better have something the prospect can see. Good social skills probably will not cut the mustard, and you will leave wondering why you did not close the sale.

Here is a sensory check list:

reflexes: how your mind and body react; personal space or habits are examples;
cognition: the way you process information; thinking style or association, for instance;
emotion: psychological state based on feelings, thoughts or behavior; watch for body language, facial expressions.

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