Airline pilots receive countless hours of training and must pass rigorous exams before they are allowed to solo. Before each flight they must check out the plane; the drill is the same every time and of course saves lives.

Pilots do not leave the pre-flight checklist solely up to memory, even though it has been drilled into their heads countless times. To make sure they do not miss anything they run down a paper based checklist, to make sure they are not leaving anything to chance.

The checklist is not a substitute for the training they received, only a tool to make sure they are on track. Similarly, the single most favorite tool of sales reps everywhere is the “Two Pager” for lack of a better name.

Two Pagers typically cover:

·         basic background demographics on the competitor,

·         their typical sales pitch,

·         where their  offering is strong/weak,

·          areas to attack,

·         common landmines the competitor will set for you and how to diffuse them,

·         and maybe even a short SWOT analysis.

Some people would argue that sales reps prefer Two Pagers over other sales tools because they hate to read more than a single sheet of paper front and back. If you have burdened your sales force with 100 page play books than I would guarantee that they would pick the Two Pager any day.

Just like the pre flight checklist, Two Pagers are not meant to replace baseline training, but can serve to remind the rep of what’s most important minutes before it’s needed.

Solid Two Pagers are even more important if your sales force faces a number of competitors in a given day. Keeping all competitors straight can be a challenge, and quick reminders can help reps emphasize key differentiators on every deal versus every competitor.

If departments other than sales need to access the Two Pagers, it may take you some time to nail down the format. Err on the side of giving sales what it needs, and do not let them creep up in size since it is hard to find three sided paper for your printer.

Just as pre flight check lists save lives, Two Pagers save deals and serve to increase your win rates.

Avoiding Telemarketer Voice

When it comes to doing win/loss analysis there seems to be two schools of thought.

One is to get an experienced caller and have them actively engage the targets in a free form manner without a formulaic set of questions. 

The other camp has endless detailed questions and the responder ranking items on a scale of 1 to 5 in a mind numbing fashion. These ranking are then run through some sort of statistical model and voila-recommendations aplenty are spit out.

Once people catch on that you are calling from a list of questions you fall into the only group of workers beneath used car salesmen and lawyers - the telemarketers.

Maybe it’s their voice or cheery greeting that gives them away. But there is no doubt that people do not like talking to telemarketers, hearing their seemingly pre-recorded scripts, or giving them any meaningful competitive information.

The goal of any good Competitive Intelligence project is to gain greater insight and win more deals. By talking to people in a more meaningful manner, you can get much better information than a bunch of rankings from 1 to 5 would ever be able to tell you.

By using experienced callers, instead of the hourly paid drones that most credit card companies employ, you can branch down lines of questioning you may have never imagined at the onset of the project. You are also much less likely to tip off the competition as to what you are up to by using experienced callers.

Whoever you have call, make sure that they avoid telemarketer voice at all costs. And don’t have them call during dinner.

Most organizations invest dearly to round up their field sales forces for offsite training. While this may be one of the most effective ways to train, motivate, and reinforce your culture; it can never be done often enough.

In addition to ever increasing travel costs, short term productivity takes a hit with all your reps out of the field. Of course there are offsetting benefits to having a well trained sales force or these meetings would never be approved by the friendly folks in finance.

The question then becomes how to economically reinforce the teachings of these meetings on a much more frequent basis without impacting sales productivity.

The answer lies in taking advantage of what all sales reps have in common - unproductive time that can be taken back for training purposes. This is not meant to insult sales reps, but to point out the fact that they spend a large percentage of their day in transit, lots of nights in hotels, and countless hours in waiting rooms.

One of the main goals of offsite training is to make sure everyone is delivering the same message consistently. By enabling your sales force with better tools, you can reinforce the message on a daily basis, ensuring less variability.

If you are not providing your sales force with sales friendly, on demand tools that they can quickly review when they have non-productive time, you probably have significant variability in the message that they are delivering and are not maximizing the impact of your training investment and your likelihood of crushing quota.

Some of the best reps inevitably get promoted into sales management, but they have never had to teach others how they became successful. This group of folks is unconsciously competent in sales. They know what to do innately, but have never been forced to explain, or teach it to others.

Sales representatives’ most valuable asset is time. Ever increasing quotas, ever decreasing territory size and tougher competition makes every available prime selling hour a precious commodity. The most successful reps jealously guard their schedules and focus on the task at hand.

As new managers transition from a direct contributor role into a mentoring role they need to become consciously competent. By figuring out why they did the things they needed to do to win, they can start to teach others. Many managers never make this transition.

Imagine a coach telling their team to go out and win before the big game. Not real helpful advice. They need to be told how to win, or better yet how to help the competitor lose.

This brings us back to an important group of folks, the successful reps that have not jumped into management roles. These are the very folks who know how to win, but do not have the time or the monetary incentives to teach others.

It would become a tremendous burden on your top reps if every new hire constantly interrupted them to tap their knowledge. In fact they may be more incented to guard their time and not help. This is not a judgment of their personal qualities; they are being driven by their compensation plans.

No senior rep knows it all. They can benefit from the knowledge of their counterparts, but often do not have the time to comprehensively survey.

Imagine the gains in knowledge, if your best reps were interrupted just once. Their knowledge catalogued, their best practices gleaned, and their hard lessons shared.

In every company there are a handful of reps who have figured out how to beat a targeted competitor. Typically they are not incented to spread this knowledge, so it cannot be leveraged across all reps.

By sacrificing a small amount of time one time, everyone can elevate their game. Many companies do not have the internal expertise or the resources to complete this vital task. Others get the research right then fail on the rollout.

If you do not have the time, resource availability or expertise to capture this data internally then consider an experienced third party to help quickly harness and spread this critical knowledge throughout your organization. The quicker this is accomplished the quicker you can start giving better guidance than “go out and win”.

Every time I interview a bunch of sales reps for a competitive analysis, I am amazed by the diversity of how much each of them knows about a targeted competitor. After only a few minutes on the phone you can quickly tell if the rep barely sees them or is a seasoned expert with a high kill rate.

Sales reps are pressed for time and do not have the time to embark on primary research to up their odds of winning. Your best reps guard their time wisely and have the least incentive to share since they already have it figured out.

Even your experts do not have all the pieces to the puzzle; but have differing knowledge and deploy varying tactics to win.

Some sales reps may form informal networks of their peers to share tips and tricks; but this can often be localized and lots of the puzzle pieces can go missing.

There just are not hours in the day for a rep to call everyone necessary to figure out the best way to attack a competitor or to handle a prospect’s objection.

There are a couple of ways that you can tap into the expertise of your star performers. The first is to interview them, preferably when they have some downtime in the car, and roll the information out via formalized tools.

The second way is to tap into their talent at your next team meeting. By breaking you reps into two opposing teams, you can have them whiteboard out the best ways to attack and defend, or the relative strengths and weaknesses of your offering. Make one team represent your company, and the other your toughest competitor. This will force everyone to think like your competition.

Make sure that you put at least one star in each team. If you are short on stars, put them on the competitor’s team since you are looking to gain insights into how your competition thinks.

I bet your stars will be more than willing to share their thoughts in this type of environment. Their natural sales abilities will help the other team mates learn how to think like a top performer.

If everyone could think and act more like your stars, your competition is going to become very uncomfortable.

Keep in mind that just figuring out why your star performers are more effective is only half the battle. Unless this information is rolled out to the masses it is simply an academic exercise.

If you are short handed, can’t wait for your next planned meeting or do not want to spend months figuring out the best way to create and test tools, consider a third party to speed up your efforts.

There is endless debate surrounding how Google ranks pages and if using H1 header tags has any affect on scoring. Whilst not the most important tag it is still a useful way to emphasize the meaning of your content; both to search engines and human readers.

A few things are clear:

·         H1 tags are easy to set up, highly controllable, and often overlooked

·         judicious use of H1 tags can bring order to your site,

·         properly deployed H1’s make it easier for searchers to understand what content likely lives on each page and how they differ from other pages on your site

·        and more importantly, click through conversion rates increase if searchers sense you have a well organized site containing the information that they desire.

·        The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you’re using a <h1> tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page.

Some folks will argue whether to limit them to 65 versus 70 characters and if they should or should not repeat words from your title tag or body text.  If you feel the urge to use more than one H1 tag on a page, resist and consider breaking the page into two. Feel free to use multiple H2 and H3 tags as necessary to highlight your postings and content.

Since H1’s give searchers clues as to the content contained on a page, it does not make sense to have more than one.  By sending confusing clues to the content on your pages, humans will likely skip over your site in the search engine results page, even if you manage to rank high.

If your heading text appears too large, do not demote it to H2 to reduce its size - By default, H1 tags aren’t the prettiest in terms of formatting, so using a CSS style to override the default look is usually a good idea: H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px }.

The key to getting the most mileage from your H1’s is to use them once per page, make sure they contain keywords that accurately describe the content on the page they represent, and make sense to humans and search engine robots alike.

It’s not always about SEO. Your headlines should give the reader a fair idea of what the page contains. If done properly, it will both generate interest, and help your reader decide if your web page contains the information he or she is looking for. Even if they go somewhere else, they’ll appreciate your copy content for helping them make a quick decision.

The default mission of robots, more commonly known as spiders, is to crawl the web and meticulously index each site, archive important data and follow every link.  Since they have been programmed to do this at birth, you do not have to tell them to act naturally.

The question then becomes why would you not want them to index, archive or track down the links on your site? Although nobody knows the specific algorithms that  search giants use to calculate page rank, we can safely assume that duplicate data does not help your cause.

If you haven’t done so already, make it your goal to get the “right” pages to rank well. Picking those pages should be a fairly straightforward task. If you would like the robots to focus on your product centric pages, make sure you direct them to not look at shopping carts, account login pages, driving directions and your returns or shipping policies.

Many sites include tons of duplicate data, CGI scripts, and temporary data that can be easily made to be overlooked by the robots with the robots.txt file or a robots meta tag.

Think of a site that includes multiple pages for items that are sold in the various colors under the sun. One sweater may have 10 or more pages, plus the master item page. By having the robots skip over the various flavors, you can have them concentrate on the more important item master.

Many sites include “printer friendly” versions of each page, or Adobe PDF versions available for download. These provide another rich source of repetitive data that should be made off limits to the robots, to help them do their job better.

Similarly you can direct the robots to not archive certain pages as well. This is of particular importance if you run “buy it now” type sales and hate negotiating after the sale expiration date with aggressive bargain hunters.

A couple of cases come to mind where you may want to have the robots skip over some select links. First, if your website has pages that must be read in a specific order, such as a multiple page registration form, they could easily be mis-interpreted if taken out of context by the robots. The second is if you remove pages often and wish to avoid unnecessary Error 404’s.

By helping robots do their job better, ultimately you help searchers. On your quest to eliminate duplicate data and steer the robots away from non-essential parts of your website, you make it easier for searchers to get what they need faster without wading through duplicate listings. A worthy cause for both robots and humans alike.

Less than 20% of companies[1] have an active win/loss program. Others try to gather this vital information but make some basic and costly errors. 

The most frequent error we see is having the sales rep or sales manager who lost the deal call into the account for feedback. It is human nature to let people down easy, apparent to anyone who has ever watched an episode of Seinfeld is aware of the “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse.

Too often, sales managers debrief their sales reps or account managers to try to understand why they lost a specific deal in their pipeline. Really, what is the incentive of a sales rep to explain where he was unable to communicate value? And, even if integrity is not an issue, how can a sales rep possibly understand all of the client-side dynamics that were in play?

Some companies task the marketing organization with these calls, but they risk sending biased information up the chain of command. One recent study found that the reason the reps were losing deals was not on product features as they initially hypothesized, but because they rarely returned the prospect’s repeated calls. Since sales did not want this type of bad behavior broadcast throughout the organization, the results were squelched, and the wrong never righted.

If you are serious about improving your win rate, your analysis should answer the following questions:

·         How is your company perceived by the marketplace?

·         Which of your competitors made the short list?

·         The real reasons for winning and losing business.

·         Product strengths and weaknesses.

·         How your pricing stacked up.

·         If your sales process is providing adequate differentiation; and most importantly

·         What could have been done differently to win lost business?

Many product managers and VPs of Sales think win/loss analysis is a good thing since it will help them build a wish list to go beat up engineering with. The truth is that a win/loss analysis is much more likely to uncover a process problem than product gaps as the major reason for losses.

Knowing that there is likely to be bad news about the sales process makes it even more sensible to have a third party complete the analysis and deliver the (bad) news. Unless there is an action plan that will be put in place and backed by the senior exec’s, the study is a complete waste of time and will offer no benefits.

Taking no action, after reviewing the painful truths that often emerges from a win/loss study is the second most egregious error I have ever seen.

Hiring someone to help with the process costs money, but the benefits will help you win more deals.

If you are interested in understanding your sales team’s performance, then you should get information from the only perspective that matters-the one who is in a position to write you a check.

Many folks concentrate all their SEO efforts on ranking highly with the various search engines, but this does you little good if nobody clicks through to your site. If you rushed the effort to create Meta Tags (or did not write them) for your website you are leaving your click-through rate up to chance.

Meta Tags are important because they serve to drive traffic to your web site from the search engines. They may not help you rank higher, but they definitely help increase conversions.

Many people have lost focus on Meta Tags since stuffing them full of key words no longer works to increase your page rank. Please don’t get misty eyed about the good old days just yet. You can use Meta Tags strategically since they allow you to control how your web page is described by many search engines.

By investing some time in nailing a truly descriptive tag, you make it easier for humans to know what content to expect from your site, from the many search engine results. This will help you dramatically increase your click-through rate.

The added information in the Meta Tags allows humans with varying search motivations to get to the site they need faster, with less frustration. By providing clues to the content on your site through these mini text advertisements, you provide a valuable service to searchers and start off your relationship with them in a positive manner.

If you are having a hard time coming up with an interesting Meta Tag, your problem may lie upstream with your website content. Avoid the temptation to try to drive business to an uninspired site with an overly ambitious description.

Since various search engines have not standardized on the lengths of Meta Tags, play it safe and try to stay under 160 characters to avoid an awkward truncation. Keeping them brief is tough, but like any good ad copy, shorter is usually better.

Whatever you do; don’t pass up on this critical link to driving traffic to your website.

In a never ending quest to make our work lives easier we constantly try to cut steps out of the process and eliminate mind numbing paperwork whenever possible. Some people actually like paperwork, but I do not hang out with those types.

Sometimes we over do it and end up making things worse off as opposed to better. Many organizations have done away with Creative Briefs in their productivity quest, and have suffered the consequences. Some telltale signs you need to re-examine your creative brief process:

·         The creative team or agency never seems to “get it”.

·         You have to constantly repeat what you are looking for.

·         You lost count of what revision you last saw.

There are hundreds of examples of creative briefs only a Google search away, so I am not proposing that my favorite flavor is better than the rest.  Most should cover the following: one key message, the target audience, some sort of call to action, the budget and how the solution helps solve a problem.

As mentioned earlier, I am not a big fan of paperwork, but by investing a little bit of time up front in developing a solid creative brief - versus a simple cut-and-paste job - you can avoid countless revision cycles down the road and greater success.

A solid creative brief actually simplifies your life since it is the easiest way to assure that all client requirements are followed and that everyone involved is in synch.

By nailing the creative brief you get buy in up front, which is much better than trying to herd everyone together halfway through the third round of edits. Can I get a hallelujah on that one?

Less rounds of edits, not only saves frustration, maintains momentum, and produces better end results but can also drive cost savings if you have outside creative staff working on your project.

Sometimes less is more, but not when it comes to Creative Briefs. Respect the Brief.