Evan Carmichael just posted his “Top 50 Sales Blogs to Watch in 2010” and yes, Sell, Sell, Sell! is ranked among them.  We’re at #38 so, we’ve got lots of room to grow!

Seriously, Evan’s put together a list that includes all the best blogs covering sales and selling and done a good job of grouping them by topic.  There are also some blogs I hadn’t heard of before that are well worth reading.

There are blogs for sales people, blogs for sales leaders, blogs on sales tools like web based CRM and every selling topic you can imagine.

Special congratulations to Jonathan Farrington, who’s blog is ranked #1 on Evan’s list!

Any business owner, sales manager or sales person could do well to benefit from the wisdom shared daily by this group of seasoned sales gurus!

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What does “sales process” really mean anyway? It seems like everywhere you look, sales trainers and gurus are talking about sales process. At the same time, small businesses are struggling to manage sales people and meet revenue targets and they’re not even sure why they need a “sales process”.

I think that the sales training and consulting business has a huge opportunity to help small businesses if they communicate what the benefits of their methodologies and expertise more clearly.

I also think small businesses have tremendous opportunities to increase their top and bottom lines if they begin to think about their approach to selling as a process.

We just all need to get on the same page. In working with small businesses to implement web based CRM software, what I see is that business owners and sales leaders hope the CRM solution provides them insight into the behavior of their sales team, the ability to collaborate as a team easily and some visibility of future sales.

Unfortunately, many sales leaders expect the CRM solution to establish the process for them. Equally unfortunate is the fact that many CRM vendors are happy to pretend that their CRM software can provide that process. It just doesn’t work. One size does not fit all. In fact, even two competitors in the same market will follow very different approaches to marketing and selling and those differences are often their competitive strengths.

So what is a “sales process” anyway?

Well, at the risk of offending some of my more brainiac friends in the sales training world, I think the answer is pretty simple.

A sales process is a series of steps designed to accomplish two things –

First, match the company’s interaction with the prospect or potential buyer to the typical process that buyer follows in investigating and selecting solutions. Example: If you’re selling something that people buy all the time, then they want to know how your product or service is different from what they normally buy. You contrast your product to the popular competitors in your niche and ask for the order. However, if you’re selling business solutions that are purchased once in a lifetime or once every few years, then your first challenge is more to help the prospect determine if they really need your solution. That becomes a much more drawn out and educational series of activities.

Second, the sales process should be measurable. It’s a series of objective steps taken by the buyer and by the sales team that tell you how close you are to an order. It’s not different that establishing a manufacturing process. If you build homes, you don’t send the painting crew to the site while you’re still pouring the slab, even if the customer tells you he wants to see how the kitchen colors are going to look in the morning light. These steps should be designed to be followed in a certain order. The steps in the process are sequenced so as to ensure that time consuming and costly sales activities are reserved for the most qualified and high value prospects and to provide prospects and potential buyers with information about your products and services and the problems they address in a way that opens their mind to a new way of doing things.

I find that most companies shopping for web based CRM software are focused on analyzing and measuring what’s happening in their sales efforts but, they’re not really sure what the process is. They see sales as a sort of art that they often don’t understand. Many times they’re hesitant to tell their sales people how to do their jobs. The business founder may not have any selling experience and therefore feels it best to leave the method to the sales people.

On the other hand, most sales trainers and marketers are focused on creating a specific way of introducing and selling products and services based on the unique characteristics of the niche you’re going after.

So, we have the vast majority of small businesses trying to measure sales where there is no process which limits the measurement to vague and generic things like number of calls made, number of meetings held, number of proposals created, etc. These are all great things to measure for many businesses but, can encourage the wrong behavior and be extremely harmful to sales. If you begin to track the number and dollar volume of proposals sent by each sales person and even reward the “leaders” in this area, what you’ll get is sales people spending way too much time with prospects that are not likely to buy just so they can send them a proposal. There has to be some data about the prospect that qualifies the proposal as being worthwhile and the customer as being a likely buyer.

At the same time, the business owner wants to see this type of information before they invest in relatively expensive sales training and consulting.

So you see the quandary of small business selling… Business owners trying to measure a process that doesn’t exist by making a small investment in CRM solutions before spending larger amounts on sales consulting to define a sales process!

We’ve just released a simple guide to identifying your own sales process so it can be managed in a web based CRM here.

As mentioned before, I think that web based CRM providers are feeding this quandary by trying to give small businesses what they want – a process. They say “Don’t have your own process, well take mine!” That’s not likely to work out well.

I suggest that a more successful approach would be for the business to determine what process is in place today. There is one, even if leadership doesn’t know it. Ask the top producing sales people. They’ve worked it out for themselves. Start measuring that process. That way your measurement of the process is not likely to encourage any behaviors that they aren’t already focused on. The data you gather will provide insight into where the greatest opportunities for improvement are.

Clearly, you’ll need to select a web based CRM solution that allows you to easily create and measure your own process. There are some out there

We’ve released a very simple 10 step guide that allows non-sales guru business owners to determine what their sales process is and begin measuring it from the beginning. That way 2 or 3 months into implementing your web based CRM software, you’re not staring at useless reports of calls made knowing that many of the calls being counted weren’t even related to moving a sale forward. You’ll be looking at data that has meaning in your business.

The fringe benefit of this approach is to involve your sales team in the process from the outset. You’re starting with their process not yours. When you suggest areas of improvement, it will be based on hard data they entered into your web based CRM.

Check out our step by step guide to identifying your sales process so it can be managed in a web based CRM here.

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Calling all sales teams!  If you manage, are part of or know someone who is a member of a sales team that can benefit from nationwide Television exposure, you’ve got to check out The Great American Sales Challenge!

My long time friend and colleague, Larry Poe, has been selected to host an exciting new TV show, The Great American Sales Challenge.

The show is being produced by the same folks that produced the hit show the Biggest Loser.

Its a great honor for Larry and I’m so proud of him.  He’s going to be great!  Larry’s in a class by himself when it comes to taking a team’s sales game to new heights.

Now, Larry’s searching for sales teams that want to get involved. 

Watch the video, this will get you pumped up!

This Powerpoint will explain what type of company/sales team they’re looking for and what you’ll get if you participate - Great-American-Sales-Challenge

I think this is going to be a great show.  Show casing what its like to be under the pressure that sales people perform under and highlighting the difference between typical selling and top producing sales excellence, as taught by Larry.

What’s also super cool is that I know Larry is going to focus on the importance of managing sales performance through measurement.  Larry has made the SalesNexus Web Based CRM software a cornerstone of his sales performance consulting practice for years now.  We’ve even developed a custom version of the SalesNexus Web Based CRM solution for Larry’s customers.

If you or someone you know might be a good candidate for the show, Larry would like to talk to you ASAP.  Contact me here to be connected with Larry.  Be sure to tell me a bit about your team.

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I love the posts by Dave Brock and Tibor Shanto this month – “Want To Sell More, Disqualify More!” and “So You Want To Sell More? It’s Easy!”. Tibor suggests better prioritization and time management and Dave suggests disqualifying prospects early so you have more time for the qualified ones.
Both are extremely worthy concepts and in my experience, the two most valuable and timeless ways to multiply selling results.

Allow me to attempt to take these two concepts to a philosophical plane please.

Selling is a profession that has taken its share of lumps over the years. Mostly due to the manipulative techniques oft employed. Don’t get me wrong… I love selling and I love sales people but, I believe that the failure of many sales people to raise their game and adopt the many tried and true techniques available to them right here on this blog and in countless books and training programs is that they can make the sales person feel manipulative.

What if we see the profession of selling as an act of kindness? We are helping customers find solutions to problems or paths to opportunity!
Your sales manager may not want to hear it but, if you go into each and every conversation with customers with the objective of identifying that customer’s greatest and most pressing need and helping them meet that need, good things are bound to happen.

I’m not just putting new, more altruistic labels on the same old tactics of asking leading questions to help the customer realize that they need what you’re selling. I’m suggesting that we’ve all been trained by society to think of what we do as manipulative but, it’s not.

So, if you want to sell more, leave all your preconceived notions about ABC (Always Be Closing) at home open your mind when you enter a meeting with your prospect or customer. Try making your sole goal to serve as a friend, trusted advisor or mentor for your customer.

Each and every core sales tactic can be re-imagined in this light and not much changes about the techniques but, everything changes in terms of the simplicity and attitude that you’re able to bring to the table, which leads to far more effective execution.

Such as bonding with the customer – we all know we should take time in the beginning of a conversation with the prospect to “get to know them”. How’s the wife?, kids?, etc. Of course, sometimes you get more than you bargained for. The sales person, knowing that they’re expected to report meaningful progress forward in the sales pipeline to their management, eventually feels compelled to cut the personal conversation short and direct it toward the potential purchase. Actually, the fact that the customer feels like talking about the wife or whatever indicates that they NEED to talk about that subject. Maybe they have some frustrations, fears or recent successes that are dominating their thoughts. What better way to establish a relationship of trust and respect with a customer than to just talk with them about what’s on their mind. Let them share their pride in their kid’s success. Listen to them if they just need to vent. You may run out of time before you get to talk about business and you won’t be able to tell your sales manager that you’re any closer to getting the order but, you’ll know that you can expect honest answers based on their trust in you from this customer in the future. That’s truly valuable.

What about qualifying or disqualifying? Well, if your goal is to listen carefully, ask probing questions and really understand what your customer needs the most, then you may find that they don’t need your product or service that badly. Fine. Give them your best recommendation for a solution that will fit their needs. Now you can spend more time with prospects that do need what you’re selling and this customer now sees you as someone they can trust. If things don’t work out with the solution you recommend for them or their needs change and your solutions are a fit for them, they’ll know it and they’ll truly want to do business with you.

So, you’re not a salesperson anymore are you? You’re just a very kind, understanding and helpful person. Trust me, people like to buy from those types of people.

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Doyle Slayton had a great article on his SalesBlogcast – 8 Follow Up Strategies to Keep Your Prospect Engaged – with some awesome tips. I especially like his suggestion of giving your prospect a referral!

If you add up the average number of times you call a sales prospect without reaching them, multiply that by the 1 or 2 minutes it takes to make the call and leave the voice mail and then multiply that by the number of new prospects you pursue each month, it adds up to a LOT of time!

I believe it’s a key reason that sales people can get so frustrated and discouraged by cold calling. They’re not in control. They can’t even get to talk to their prospect. You can get a feeling of inadequacy because it feels like you’re dialing the phone a lot but, you’re not talking to anyone that can buy. Most sales people find themselves calling the same list of prospects that they called last week and wondering, how many times have I called this guy? How many more time will I have to call to get to talk to him? Will his secretary be inviting me to her birthday party after all the compliments I’ve thrown her way?

Well, there are many things you can do to improve your results. You can work on your “script” for talking to the gate keeper, your script for voice mails, as well as your emails. You can look at new sources of leads that you can connect with more easily. In all cases though, you need to have a prospecting plan that tells you what to do on each attempt to contact the sales prospect. On the first call, you take one approach – you might have an introductory script for the gate keeper, you might choose not to leave a voice mail or you could choose to leave one introducing yourself. On the second call you mix it up again, and so on…

Of course, this means you have to know how many times you’ve called each prospect. That means you’ll need a basic contact management system or CRM. Imagine if every day you could pull up a call list that told you who to call, how many times you’ve already called and what to do on this call! Believe it or not, that’s pretty basic stuff in most CRMs or contact management systems.

But here’s the payoff! You’ve got to “give up” on a prospect after some number of calls. You wouldn’t want your contact management or CRM system to remind you to call the same person every week for the next 12 months! So, when it’s time to give up, you get to Fire Them! That’s right! You, the salesperson, get to FIRE your prospect! I know, it sounds crazy and also fun doesn’t it?

The good news is that this is not just a way to get some “pay back” after a prospect has repeatedly ignored your messages. Done right, as soon as your fire a prospect, they will call you back post-haste.

How can that be? Well, your customers are used to being chased by sales people. They expect it. In fact, your aggressive pursuit of them relieves the sales prospect from the need to remember to stay in touch with you, even when they’re genuinely interested in your products and services. If they’re too busy to worry about it now, they can delete your message knowing that you’ll call again in a few days.

Well not anymore! Now your CRM or contact management system is going to tell you to call them 3 or 4 times, leaving various messages and then on the 5^th call, the CRM will say “5^th attempt – Fire Them” and you’re going to leave a message like this –

“Hi, this is Craig Klein, with SalesNexus online CRM. We help companies like yours grow sales by helping them market and sell more effectively. I’ve left a few voice mails and sent a couple of emails and haven’t heard back from you. At this point, I’m going to assume that this is just not a priority for you at this time and I’M GOING TO TAKE YOU OFF MY CALL LIST. If there is anything I can do for you, please feel free to contact me at 800.862.0134”

The key phrase is “I’m going to take you off my call list”. No one wants to be taken off the list. You’ve just told your prospect that you value your own time and won’t be calling again. Believe me. If they have any interest in your company, your product or your service, they will respond. At a minimum, they’ll shoot you a quick email saying “Sorry, I’ve been swamped. I do want to talk. Can you call me in 2 weeks?” or something to that effect.

This really works! If you don’t trust me, then just try it 3 or 4 times this week. Print out this tip sheet I’ve prepared for you –

Download Printable Tip Sheet

You’ll be amazed how often genuinely qualified prospects respond to your firing them by calling you back straight away!

So put a couple of leads in your CRM or contact management system and set yourself reminders to call them 3 or 4 times and then a 5^th time to fire them.

It’s going to be fun and it’s going to work. Enjoy!

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But you need to know right? You need to be able to direct your advertising and marketing dollars to things that work. Things that generate profitable results. But typically all you can do is look at sales results in aggregate and try to make judgments about many discrete marketing channels.

The big guys do it by spending even more money on research, surveys, etc. That’s great if you’ve got the time and money. In most small businesses, you find out how the marketing is working by asking your sales people. After all, they’re the ones in the organization that speaks to most of the respondents to your marketing. This seems perfectly logical but it’s not.

Part of this is obvious. Bonus and commission plans can incentivize sales people to paint a skewed picture of the situation.

This is not to disparage sales people. They’re just trying to increase their commissions by selling more. However, if your sales compensation structure and your business priorities are not aligned well, this can amplify their perception of the value of certain types of leads.

#1 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG – Sales people see volume as good.

You have to search long and hard to find a sales person that won’t tell you they can use more leads. More leads means more opportunity to them. More leads means more need for the services of a sales person. You may believe more leads is better also. If so, please see Reason #2 below!

You may sell into multiple markets or sell an assortment of different products or services which require marketing in different channels. So, you run an ad in a trade magazine for product A, attend trade shows to market product B and do “pay per click” search ads for product C. It’s very common for sales people to perceive leads from a trade show to be far more valuable than others. They’ll even “feel” like there are more of these leads than others when trade show leads are the lowest by volume.

I say “feel” because most sales people have no means of actually knowing how many leads they’re getting. Frankly, unless they’re paying you for the leads, they have little incentive to keep track.

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Trade show leads “seem” important and valuable to sales people because of the amount of time spent on trade shows and because they actually have met these people already. Sales people are relationship oriented. When they’re looking at a stack of 50 business cards from the trade show that they spend 2 days on last week, all of whom they met personally, they’re going to see those as “warmer” leads than the 500 names of CFOs in an excel file that you just purchased for them to cold call. Also, if they are more experienced with a certain type of lead or product or company, they’ll perceive those as more valuable. So, when you ask your sales people about the leads, they’re going to over emphasize the ones that are warmer and most familiar to them.

This may seem like a minor point but, it can be huge in terms of dollars! If you spend $10,000 on a trade show plus 2 days of your sales person’s time and get 50 leads, you’ve got to close at least 20% of them or your average sale better be well over $2,000 or both or its just unprofitable after you take sales compensation and operational costs out. On the other hand, if you may be able to spend $5,000 to get 100 leads via your website and your sales person hasn’t invested a minute yet.

Which brings us to…

#2 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG – Can’t measure sales results from leads any better than you can

It’s really all about the quality of the lead. If you’re not using contact management software or a CRM solution to track the leads by source and tie that to results, then you can bet your sales people aren’t either. Sure, you probably have one or two sales people on your team that tell you they use Outlook or contact management systems like ACT! or Goldmine to track the leads you give them but, the fact is that’s not really their job as you’ve defined it and so, it’s likely to get inconsistent attention at best.

Even if you are using an online CRM to capture contact information for all leads that come in, where it came from and which sales person it was given to and your sales people are adding in the actual results once they make contact with the lead, it’s probably not happening all the time. If a sales person is given 100 leads in a month and they forget to log in the results for 5 or 10 of them, it can skew the analysis of this information tremendously.

What you want to know is how many leads came in, tied to each marketing channel and whether they were qualified and if they made a purchase. Seems simple doesn’t it? It’s simple for your CRM system to give you a nice analysis of this information but, it’s another thing to get to the point where you have it all in one place so the analysis can begin. If you’re not using any kind of CRM today, just try and track the leads that come in next month. If you are using a CRM solution already, you know what I mean.

You may be able to capture and track all leads that come in via your website. You may even have the front office trained to track all the call ins that happen when your ad runs in the local business journal. But what about referrals or trade show leads? Those go straight into your sales people’s hands… Even once you’ve figured out how to capture all the leads, it’s getting a good read on the quality of those leads that’s key. And it’s the most difficult part of the equation.

After all, it has to be objective for it to be really useful. Just like your sales people will have a tendency to see volume as good for its own sake, they’ll also have vague “feelings” about the quality of leads from certain sources that have more to do with the difficulty of getting in touch with those leads and generating the first real conversation about need than anything else.

To make it work you have to boil down lead “quality” to a series of objective measurements. Are they in the right industry for you? How much are the currently spending on products or services like yours? Maybe for you it’s as simple as how many employees they have or what their annual revenue is or how much they spend on telecom each month. For many small businesses trying to carve out a niche for themselves, it has to be much more specific.

If you’re using a contact management system or CRM solution, put fields in the system for your staff to enter the answer to these questions. If not, use a spreadsheet or even a printed “lead sheet” with blanks to input these answers. This way you’ll be able to measure leads based on each of these criteria and you’ll know which of your sales people just aren’t asking the right questions.

Remember, this is the 4th chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

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If you work on the pit crew for Jimmie Johnson and you keep forgetting to put 1 out of 5 lug nuts on the wheels, you probably wouldn’t make it through the first race would you?

Yet each week, as we hold our Wednesday Webinar presenting our online CRM solution to small businesses, I ask the audience what their greatest need is in a CRM. Week after week I hear business owners and sales executives complain that their sales people fail to make their follow up calls.

I could go on with analogies but, really, when you compare it with just about any other profession, we are guilty of letting sales people get away with murder!

At McDonald’s you’d end up with very unhappy customers standing around waiting for their meal. At the race track, you’d probably end up with a serious accident, a expensively damaged vehicle and possibly and injury or two. The point is, in most other businesses, when virtually any employee habitually overlook a key part of their job, customers and other employees are quickly faced with the consequences and action is taken. You’re reprimanded, retrained or fired.

In sales, when you get a new lead and then forget to call them for two weeks, no one really knows it.

So, shame on you sales people for not getting organized on your own so this won’t happen. But, you know it does, too often. Maybe you get a few referrals at the networking breakfast you attend and just never get around to calling them until you discover your notes in your briefcase and can’t remember why they were supposed to be good leads.

That makes it feel less like a blatant failure but, if your responsibility is to find new customers for your business, which we know is a matter of diligence and a bit of luck, isn’t it your responsibility to turn over EVERY rock?

More importantly, shame on you business owners and sales managers. All the most successful human enterprises in history have thrived on common purpose and common procedures that drive efficiency and consistency. You know that. Yet you fail to require it of your sales people.

How many of the leads your marketing delivered in 2009 did your sales people fail to make appropriate follow up to? Based on what I hear from customers every day, its got to be 25 to 50% for many businesses. What did that cost you? A lot of marketing expense wasted. More importantly, a lot of opportunity for new accounts and new sales just left for dead.

As a business owner that spent many years selling, I’ve seen it from both sides of the table. I know as a sales person its easy to get distracted with more urgent matters. If you’re hip deep in closing the biggest deal of the year, you might be right in staying focused on that. The problem is that most sales reps just don’t have a system to be sure that they get back to those leads when the big deal is in the bag.

I also know that as a business owner, its tough to get your sales people to adopt any sort of new system. They will kick and scream and act like the new system is ruining their unique and finely tuned approach to the art of selling.

Well, didn’t 2009 teach us all that we’ve got to grab hold of every new opportunity like its golden?

As we begin a new year in which we’re all hopeful businesses will begin to grow more rapidly and a rising tide will float all of our boats, I suggest that the opportunity to create your own rising tide is only a few hours of work away.

Really. If all your leads get prompt and appropriate follow up, what would that mean to your 2010 sales? Is that worth a few hours of preparation?

It really is simple. All you need is a simple contact management system for new leads to be captured and follow ups to be scheduled.

Salespeople - just because a follow up is scheduled, it doesn’t mean your boss is going to come reprimand you if you’re a day late. It only means you won’t forget anymore and each day you won’t have to spend 30 minutes rummaging through your briefcase to find the leads you need to call.

A good web based contact management system or online CRM should be able to capture and track leads and remind sales people about follow ups literally out of the box. It shouldn’t cost much either. $1 to $2 per day per person is all you should pay for an online CRM with more capabilities than you can imagine. What is a new lead worth to you? Isn’t the expense worth it?

In fact, for that sort of cost, your new online CRM or web based contact management should also be able to do a lot of other very valuable things for you:

Track notes and important details about each lead
Manage documents related to each lead
Create professional quality letters and emails using templates
Email blasts to entire lists of leads
Automatic drip email marketing campaigns

And, Analytics. The interesting thing about analytics is that sales people tend to think they’re just for management.

Even with a basic web based contact management set up that tracks the follow up to leads, you’ll be able to easily and accurately track the number of leads coming in and the results. In my experience, the best sales people are constantly coming up with creative marketing ideas to get more leads. The problem is that their normally working from their gut instincts and can’t express the idea in terms of cost or potential return.

Well, if you know how many leads came in last month and what you spent on your normal marketing activities, then you know the cost. If you know how many turned into real prospects or customers, you know something about the value of those leads. Now you have a benchmark.

With very simple, out of the box, online contact management or CRM capability, you can easily gauge potential new marketing efforts against your benchmark. In fact, what I find is very common is that new online CRM users will discover that some of their most expensive marketing efforts are NOT delivering the results they think they are. That’s a good thing!

When we discover that a regular expense is not delivering the return we thought it was, we can redirect those dollars. We can reduce what we’re spending on the under performing marketing efforts and increase expenditures on more profitable marketing. Now the business and the salesperson win! More leads and more profit!

I know this sounds like a big sales pitch. Honestly, I want to see as many small businesses succeed as possible.

What I know is that your sales and marketing efforts will not be at peak performance without some basic contact management or CRM in place. Sure, I’d love it if you choose to take a look at SalesNexus. In fact, you can start a free trial of SalesNexus today and literally be capturing leads and managing follow ups today.

However, I encourage you to do something. Go to the computer store and get ACT! Do some searches and find the right solution for your business. There are a lot of contact management and CRM options. Just please, do something. Your 2010 will be a much more profitable journey.

Happy New Year!

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Here are a few examples -
“The trick to double sales lies in ‘Laws of Attraction’. Though we can’t stop calling on and reaching out to prospects and clients, we must double our efforts on creating the value that attracts them to us.”
“The thing that I believe will increase sales the most in 2010 is implementing more creative ways to sell and “connect” with decision-makers of ones product/service. - Social Media, Blogging, anything to “connect” and Attract” with decision-makers - I think that will help increase sales the most.”
“All kidding aside, that is the secret…More conversations = More Appointments = More Opportunities = More Deals. I live it every day, and I never speak with less than 20 people in a day. Amaxingly (believe it or not), it only takes 2-3 hours of my time.”

To my highly trained and perhaps somewhat jaded eye, the common theme here is those who are planning to increase sales significantly in 2010 are looking for faster and better ways to generate more quality prospects. Essentially, our car needs more high performance fuel to go farther next year.

In my experience as a sales manager and coach, most sales people point to the need for more leads first when asked what you can do to help them.

In order to actually achieve breakthrough growth in sales, I believe a broader perspective is helpful. Staying with our auto analogy, the defining elements of how far and how fast we can go include not just the fuel (leads), but also engine (the sales process) and the road (the market).

What if we take a step back and look at all the choices and alternatives we have in choosing the fuel,the engine and the road we take? The likelihood of radically improving sales performance increases if we’re willing to adjust all these elements so that they are all tuned to work perfectly with the others.

If I’m on a dirt road through rough terrain, I might be best served with a powerful 4×4 machine and deisel fuel.

If my market is chemical refineries and the decision maker is typically the production supervisor, then I’ll want to start spending time at the bowling alley near the plant and drinking beer at Gilly’s (forgive me, I live in Houston).

For the average sales person, sales manager or VP of Sales, we may not be able make changes to the market we’re targeting or even the way we sell to the market. Another reason we tend to focus on leads is its what we have the most control over.

However, we all have some measure of control over the entire selling process and can adjust in valuable ways, whether officially endorsed or not.

We’ve put together this list of important, substantive adjustments to our lead generation and selling processes that don’t generally require board approval or cost much money. In other words, there’s no reason not to do it! The payoff can be 2x your sales this year!

The Road (Who You Sell To)
Get to the decision maker. I know you already know that one but, how well do you practice it? How often do you find your self spending hours and hours with information gatherers, influencers and end users in hopes that they’ll put you in front of the decision maker eventually? Stop it. When presented with the supporting cast, start with questions about what the decision making process is, if the budget has been approved and when you’re going to get to meet the big cheese. Don’t answer their questions unless you’re getting answers to yours.

Find the right decision maker. Start with decision makers that have a big budget. Don’t follow the path of least resistance and spend your time chasing the easy ones, the ones you can get to easily. Do the research and figure out who’s got the potential to make your quarter or your year and go after them.

The Engine (How You Sell)
Learn first, deliver last. Doing presentations and preparing proposals can be the most time consuming things you do. If you’re not sure you’re talking to someone that’s going to like what you show them and will spend the money required, then don’t spend your time. Focus on setting the table through strong qualifying and asking great questions to get commitment that if you do the presentation and it meets the requirements they’ve shared, they’re going to move forward. Essentially, you want to re-order the sequence of the things you do for each prospect so that the most time consuming and costly are reserved for the sure things. For a more in depth discussion of how to sell more by presenting less, read our free ebook, “Double Your Sales in 2010“.

The Fuel (How You Connect With People to Sell To)
Ensure you have more than enough leads and be sure they’re the highest possible quality.
In some businesses, its easy to know who your prospects are. You can join the national association of whatever and get all their names. In that case, your challenge is to block off enough time each day to make meaningful progress in connecting with them. In these cases, I definitely recommend leveraging LinkedIn and other more industry specific sites to get connected.
If your universe of potential prospects is very large and your challenge is to figure out which ones are in need of your solution today, then I suggest putting a very basic “Attraction Marketing” program together. It can be simple:

1. Call, mail or email them and offer them something of intrinsic value to someone in that role for free. Ask for their permission to offer them similar things in the future.
2. Send them additional offers. Design some of them so that anyone interested in them can be consider to be interested in buying a product or service like yours. A “Buying Guide” for your product or service is a simple example of this.
3. Those who take advantage of this second offer are your sales prospects. Go to work.

For more discussion of how to leverage email and attraction marketing to generate quality prospects, read our free ebook, “Email Marketing - The Only Bailout Your Business Needs”

Being sure you have an ample supply of quality fuel (leads) is crucial. If you fail here, everything else in the overall process will be more difficult too. For this reason, its imperative that you get organized.

If picking up the phone and cold calling people is your plan to generate leads, then you need to allot time in your day to make it happen. You also need to be sure you’re as productive as possible during that time.

If emailing or mailing offers to leads is your plan, you’ll need to invest some time in creating the content of your campaign and then invest in an email marketing system to automate the delivery of the pieces in your campaign.

You’re going to need a contact management system or CRM and an email marketing system. Think of it this way… You’re going to do twice as much this year without cloning yourself. If you want to get any sleep, you’re going to need to automate things.

When selecting a CRM, contact management system or email marketing system, keep it simple. You need to be able to easily tailor the CRM around your business and your customers. It won’t help you double your sales in 2010 if you’ll need to spend 4 months selecting and implementing the system.

Write down what you need the CRM system to do for you. Not what you’d like. What it MUST do. Then go in search of it and don’t let yourself get enamored of shiny gadgets. Get what you need, nothing more. Be sure you’ve chosen a vendor who can help you get it set up and churning for you quickly.

I hope that you’re seeing your road, your car and your fuel more clearly. This not easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it. It is however completely do-able! If you’ve got questions about some of the decisions you must make to double sales yourself, join us on December 23, 2009, for our webinar, entitled “Building Your 2010 Sales Machine“.

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Crunch time. In sales, the end of the year is like what the stock brokers call the “triple witching hour”. You’ve got to wrap up the year strong and beat your quota, you’ve got holiday activities with clients, prospects and co-workers and you’ve got budget meetings planning for next year.

Just relax and enjoy the season right? Not for us friends. This is the two month stretch that defines the rest of the year.

In time for your 2010 planning, we’re releasing our free eBook, “Double Your Sales in 2010“! This free ebook shows you how to refocus your selling efforts on prospects most likely to buy and how to manage the rest efficiently.

The fact is, failure to meet your goals in selling is not usually due to lack of effort. Its due to spending too much time in the wrong places and not enough on activities that are most likely to bring closed deals.

In “Double Your Sales in 2010” we break down how to know which prospects are worthy of your full blown efforts and how to nurture the rest toward that point.

In truth, you can have a dramatic effect on your sales results simply through better qualifying earlier in the sales process and moving high cost activities to the later stages of your sales process. “Double Your Sales in 2010” shows you how to do it in simple steps that don’t involve hiring or firing anyone or spending thousands of dollars on training or consultants.

In January of 2009, we published “Double Your Sales in 2009″ at the height of the doom and gloom of the financial meltdown. It was popular beyond our wildest expectations. For “Double Your Sales in 2010“, we’ve updated and added to many of the fundamental elements and added specific examples of how to measure and manage the process as your reorganize it using affordable online CRM solutions.

Stay tuned, we’ll be announcing a webinar very soon where we’ll go through real business scenarios and show you how others have actually doubled their sales following these practices!

Download the free ebook - Double Your Sales in 2010 here.

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