FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS: It's not news to anyone we are in a lousy economic environment. Customers are spending less, less often, with greater scrutiny and higher expectations. Bad news seems like the only news and yet as sales people we have to look at the future with a positive attitude or the weight of a quota will drive us into the ground. But, that's sales, right? One thing that can help in tough times is keeping an eye on a few things that can make a huge difference. When everything is going great and deals are happening more easily, we are afforded a little more play in the process. When demand is not pulling as hard and every deal seems to take a colossal effort, there is much less give and the importance of these things is magnified. For this quarter, think renewed focus.

Separating Yourself from the Pack: Obviously we are most successful when we keep the customer's interests front and center. They know the difference in someone just trying to slam a deal into place and someone who cares about solving a customer problem. However, the great money makers in our world know how to allow the customer needs and interests to drive the deal while at the same time being hyper-aware of the deal factors that need to be born out of complete self-interest. Believe it or not, while you are looking out for the customer's interests, he is NOT often looking out for yours. To a prospect, your time and resources are simply expended as a cost of doing business. You have more at stake in a down market - protect your self-interest.

Three particular factors come to mind: decision-makers, spending, and commitment. In a world where deals are done by committee, sales execs can get muzzled by the process. Prospects know supply is pushing harder than demand is pulling and they feel little obligation to help you sell. They know it is highly likely that your pipeline is thin and you will not walk away from their opportunity. The truth is that you should be allocating your time based on your likelihood of winning the deal and there are few better indicators of your odds than access to every influencer on the decision team. No excuses, get access to the decision-makers.

Money is a touchy subject. Most sales people touch it once and then think they have done their job of qualifying the deal on the money. "Mr. Customer, what's your budget for this project? OK, good. Has it been approved? Great! So, where'd you go for vacation?" Five months later... The prospect has provided all necessary info, participated in due diligence, assigned you a "coach" to ensure you have everything you need, down-selected you and two of your best friends, and then says, "Oh yeah, I've been meaning to tell you. We are reevaluating our spend." Yes, in down markets spend does change, even when it was budgeted and approved. You didn't keep an eye on that one? Well, rats. In the course of your conversations with your prospect you better be working in the subject of spend, or you WILL be backpedaling on a pipeline call. It is no fun getting blind-sided by the We are reevaluating our spend bomb; it is also unnecessary. But you DO have to ask.

Are you truly committed to the idea that your solution is THE right thing for your prospect? In a great market, you can get so busy with multiple deals, you are juggling so much, you forget that selling does still require that you press. You won't win in a supply push market without pushing. Pushing doesn't mean being pushy. It means you unashamedly reiterate how your solution will solve the customer's issues. It means you revisit those issues often enough to ensure they are not changing and to ensure your prospect is not forgetting how painful life will be if they are not solved. Will it make the prospect uncomfortable? Absolutely, but no one buys anything to solve the problem of being too comfortable. Pushing takes commitment. Make sure you watch the video in the Check This Out section. It might seem manipulative at first, and is clearly driven by self-interest, the sales person DOES know his option is better for prospect than the one the prospect initially wants.

Happy Hunting: How much is your time worth? Take your W2 and divide it by 2000 (work hours) and you get the accountant's answer. The sales exec's answer is: It depends which chunk of time." Unfortunately, we never know which hour, half-hour, or five minutes will be the chunk that blows our quota out of the water. Call your top prospect at 3:30 every day for a monthy and miss them; call at 12:30 and spend 30 minutes in a detailed conversation. We never know where the magic time slot will be. Remember Wall Street (the movie, not the occupation)? If Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) had been playing Angry Birds on his prototype smartphone instead of making the 500th call to Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), his magnum opportunity would never have happened. That specific five minutes was the five minutes that made the difference. If we want to improve our odds, we need as many of those five-minute chunks of time as we can get - especially in a down market! But how?

Discipline and attitude will help you create more of those precious chunks of opportunity. Let's start with discipline. Not to be the hard-nosed sales manager, but kill every work-day distraction that could be used for selling. Every time you ping Facebook, every time you hit a sports blog, every time you kill a little time on Drudge, you have succeeded in killing one of those chunks of opportunity. Yes it stinks - those things are fun and break up the drudgery of the day, but the deals aren't falling from the sky. Every call counts.

Attitude feeds that discipline. Do you truly believe that every minute of your time is valuable and you alone should be determining how it is invested? This attitude is critical to sales productivity. If the activity is not helping you identify new opportunities or close the ones in the pipeline, scratch it from your to-do list. This is particularly true for deals destined for defeat. Just because you have invested a ton of time, effort, and resources in a deal does not mean you should pursue it to the very end. Your time is too valuable! You should only pursue deals you have a chance of winning. To invest one more dollar or minute in a lost cause only adds to your loss. Remember, all the investment in the pursuit to that point is a sunk cost. It is not coming back no matter the outcome and should not have a bearing on where you go from here. When it is time to walk away, WALK AWAY!

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