In about two weeks, the first quarter of 2010 will expire.  No doubt, it will have been a tough start for many.  Sales leadership will undoubtedly begin the process of assessment.  What’s right?  What needs to be fixed?  How can we avoid the dismal results of 2009?  How can we make 2010 a banner year, despite the slow recovery, tight capital, depleted inventories, and tepid customer demand?

The assessment will entail a great deal of head-scratching.  The numbers speak for themselves – but what really needs to be addressed?  Leaders will meet.  And, most likely, solutions will surface without thorough analysis of the problem(s) and causes.  Suggestions will emerge:

• We need a compensation plan change!
• We need a contest!
• We need to hire!
• We need to restructure!
• We need to train!
• We need to track!
• We need a new CRM approach!

An on, and on, and on…until one solution becomes dominant.  Yet, the team still misses the mark.  Without a thorough analysis of all components that contribute to sales force success, leadership could waste a lot of time and money…and at the end of June, lack the desired performance for the first half of 2010.

At Crossbow Solutions, we promote the utilization of a formal problem-solving process to help leadership assess the causes of performance shortfall by providing facts and data.  We deploy Crossbow personnel to interview all levels of sales personnel to help define performance issues.  We analyze proposals, the sales process, sales skills, management capabilities, the vision, coaching techniques, the pipeline, retention strategy, etc.  In short, we provide sales leadership with facts and data useful for effective decision-making.  With this data, leadership can confidently brainstorm solutions and pick the the best approach.

Of course, leadership can get lucky without using data.  But, many will miss the mark.  They will spend a lot of money on solution after solution, only to find that upfront analysis and assessment would have helped them save 2010.

As a past Xerox executive and business consultant for over 20 years, I’ve had the pleasure and heartbreak of watching different styles of leadership and sales management.  The best, an ex-Xerox colleague of mine, routinely achieved the pinnacle of success by teaching his sales team to identify and solve their own problems. 

At first, I was astounded by Bob’s seemingly effortless approach to sales management.  He arrived to the office a full hour after I did and departed at 5pm on the dot, while I churned past 7pm daily.  Bob routinely enjoyed tennis with his wife after work, while I routinely sifted and resifted my in-basket, roaming the halls for people willing to help me solve my sales rep’s problems.   I operated under the ludicrous idea that if I solved my rep’s problems, they would have more time for selling.  I could not have been more misguided.   Bob grew his people, their skills, their confidence, their talent, and their ability to perform.  My people stagnated;  I grew my distaste for long, unproductive hours in the office.

Over the years at Xerox, Bob also helped me grow.  Due to his unselfish desire to share wisdom, Bob taught me the power of individual and team-based problem-solving.  I learned to expect my people to fully articulate their problems and issues, to analyze causes, to identify at least three potential solutions, and to promote at least one solution, with a plan for implementation, prior to barfing their problems all over my desk.  My job was that of a coach.

As I mastered a coaching style of sales leadership and went on to start my own sales consulting firm, it became easy for me to spot sales managers who didn’t get it.  One manager who comes to mind actually held a V.P. title.  As I worked inside his company to assess opportunities to improve sales success, I could not help but witness a long line of people continuously queued outside his office – day in and day out.  They each held stacks of papers along with their laptops, as they waited impatiently for their turn with “the boss”.  Why were they there and not out in the field selling – or at the least – on the phone making appointments?  You got it.  They were there because “the boss” made them dependent upon him to get problems solved.  The longer the line, the bigger this guy’s ego grew because he felt needed.  Keith had no idea that this style of management crushed performance, motivation, and creativity. 

Thanks to lessons learned from Bob and the now formal, disciplined ,step-by-step approach to problem-solving we embrace at Crossbow Solutions, I have been able to help the Keith’s of the world grow their coaching skills – and their team’s sales confidence and performance.

As sales consultants, we often hear our clients express “our business is different – our competition is fierce, customers see our products as commodities, and the only way we win is on price.”  What they are really saying is that Crossbow Solutions, cannot help them. I always beg to differ, and I’d like to share my story to illustrate why.

Upon graduating from UCLA in 1978, I began working for the Xerox Corporation.  Luckily, I interviewed and received offers from the only two main “high tech” companies in existence in 1979 – IBM and Xerox.  I chose Xerox because the people were fun. I had no idea that within minutes of joining Xerox, the Japanese would destroy our monopoly by introducing Savin, Canon, Minolta, Toshiba, Konica copiers.  Compared to Xerox, the new Japanese competitors provided copiers that were feature’s rich, less expensive, more reliable, readily available, easy to service, and backed by internal support organizations quick to respond to customer needs.  Seemingly, overnight, the Xerox monopoly in the personal copier business plunged from 90% to 30%.

Given this dire position, couldn’t Xerox just lower prices in order to compete?  That was one option, and we tried it!  We even tried to give product away for free, in hopes of stimulating multiple paid sales.  Xerox faced the challenge of its corporate lifetime – how to compete and win against much stronger competitive offerings.  Moreover, the days of “order taking” were over for the sales force.  We were demoralized, stymied in our predicament, and spent many an hour a Coco’s coffee shop complaining about our jobs, our company, our products, our pricing, our service – you name it – we were lost.

How did we do it?  We invested in the only sustainable competitive advantage – sales skills.  Xerox sent all of us to sales training.  Every single sales rep and sales managers – all 6,000+ of us – spent one week in a classroom learning how to sell. Our managers learned how to coach us and reinforce what we learned in class. We became experts in how to ask questions, uncover and/or create needs, deliver effective demos, and deliver compelling proposals.  We spent very little time learning how to close or handle objections;  our new selling style helped us eliminate objections before they became roadblocks to a sale.  We learned how to out-sell our competition, regardless of their product and service strengths.  And we began to win…again and again…and again.

As a result of being a part of this astounding Xerox come-back, I’ve developed a passion for helping sellers and their managers recognize the importance of sales skills.  Product knowledge is not enough;  skills, practiced consistently and deployed effectively, make the difference between success and failure.  Product and pricing superiority – they’re a distance second.

Today is the official launch of the Crossbow Solutions’ blog!  Our intent is to supply valuable information, insights, and tips to individuals, managers, and organizations engaged in selling.   It has been quite a journey to get to this point.  I have to thank my new business partner, Mary Stefanki Davis, for her knowledge and encouragement in the area of Social Networking as it relates to building a business and an effective sales strategy.  Through Mary, I have become a true believer in the power of utilizing multiple online resources – Websites, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs, etc., in combination with traditional selling activities – appointments, sales calls, proposals, and demonstrations – to research companies and reach key personnel in order to strengthen sales effectiveness.

In this publication, I will reveal a snapshot of our journey thus far in hopes of helping you create an online presence that increases your selling success.

The Crossbow Website

Our first online efforts involved the redesign of our Crossbow Solutions, Inc. website http://www.crossbow-solutions.com/. We decided to develop the website on our own and selected Serif Software, www.serif.com, as the platform.  We find Serif Software extremely user-friendly and the support staff, available by telephone (!) unbelievably accessible and helpful.   Mary and I are not at all software developers or savvy website engineers; with Serif, we did not have to learn any code and found we could create, customize, and change our site on our own!  However, we did spend countless hours looking at websites to determine what we liked and disliked in order to create Crossbow’s web presence.  Once we built the site, we chose www.GoDaddy.com for domain registration and hosting.  So far, our site has cost us a meager $100 to build and publish!  More on how we developed our site in later blogs….and now onto our journey into social media and how it will help promote and grow our business.

Crossbow on Facebook

Our adventure into Facebook, although not yet complete, included building Facebook sites for our company, Crossbow Solutions, Inc., as well as sites for both Mary and me.  We are still learning about permissions, risks, upsides, downsides, etc. of the Facebook world…while our teenagers spend effortless hours exposing the most intimate details of their lives to their friends on their Facebook sites.  I found it hilarious that my first official “friend” on Facebook is a dear, dear friend of mine who I’ve known for 30 years.  I just needed Facebook to notify me that “You and Brier are now Friends”.  Ha!

We’re Linked on LinkedIn!

Just as with Facebook, we built three LinkedIn sites – one company site and one for each of us individually.  In our short time using LinkedIn, we have found it to be the ideal method to research potential client contacts and find old colleagues in positions of authority to engage with firms like Crossbow.  Every sales person and sales manager should build a LinkedIn presence and definitely use it as a tool for prospecting, research, and account due diligence. We also found that joining groups could inundate our email so be careful what you join and how much social media you can manage effectively.   We built our LinkedIn presence ourselves – and you can do the same, without any monetary investment.  We’ve got some interesting stories to share on the power of LinkedIn, so stay tuned…

We Tweet!

To be honest, we’re really not sure how we will use Twitter, but we can Tweet!  Seems like everyone in the world sends Tweets these days, and you can be sure we will become prolific in sending simple sales tips and management advice through Twitter.

Ah – The Blog

So here we are, finally blogging!  Unlike our other efforts to connect our business to the online Social Media Network, building a blog really stumped us.  Our “do it yourself” proclivity crashed, as we stumbled around trying to learn how to use FTP, CSS, Wordpress, and Thesis Theme.  We started by finding on line help through Don Campbell  http://www.expand2web.com/blog.  We watched his videos and downloaded his word press and thesis instructions and found them to be quite helpful so if you need some on line support he is a great resource.  After countless Skype sessions with Mary, conference calls with bloggers, endless hours of online research, and days of frustration, we hired a professional to help with word press and Thesis.  I Googled “San Clemente website design” and found our savior, Debbie Foley.  I called Debbie about six days into the Blog project at about 1:00pm.  She was at my house by 3:00pm, helping us purchase and install Thesis Theme, upload files to FTP, and get really started on our blog site.  After Debbie left, I spent another day (wasted!) trying to upload our Crossbow logo and Social Media widgets to the site, only to again to turn to Debbie for support.  She is great and you can find her at www.sanclementewebsitedesign.com.  And we are now bloggers…

The Crossbow Solutions Promise

Mary and I will share the publishing role on our Crossbow Blog.  We intend to provide tools to help people in sales and sales management create a sustainable competitive advantage beyond the products or services they sell.  We will make a difference in the lives of our readers, and hope to make you chuckle along the way, as well.

Best,

Cyndi Bridges Mosk