Are you on a diet? Have you ever been on one? I’m going to guess the answer to one of those questions is "yes", considering that the Boston Medical Center approximates that over 45 million Americans diet each year…
With that, what did you measure? How did you know you were on track to accomplish your goal?
I’m going to assume that you set a goal to lose a certain number of pounds within a certain timeframe, as measured by your numerical weight. But then, did you just go about doing what you always have done, then measure your weight at the end of the timeframe to see how you did? Or, did you start to look at your metrics day one…like calorie intake and/or carb / sugar intake. Did you start to also look at your ratios…like the number of calories burned in a day through exercise compared to the number of calories you consumed?
Why did you measure? Was it because your partner / spouse made you?
Let’s shift the conversation to your sales world. Your goal is your bookings / quota. However, how many of you actually measure metrics and ratios that contribute to your ability to achieve that target? Or, do you just get to the end of the quarter, get on the scale (i.e., look at your CRM dashboard), and say to yourself, “Oh, crap! Didn’t make it…”
So often, we think of metric and ratio measurement as a big-brother activity, where our bosses use it to understand whether we’re actually doing our job when they’re not watching. However, metrics drive your ability to control your own destiny. Much like the ratio of calorie intake to calorie burn controls your ability to hit your weight loss goal, there are activities and ratios you can measure immediately that control your ability to hit your targets.
How many outbound prospecting calls do you make per day? How many result in scheduled appointments (and what’s the ratio)? Of those appointments, how many result in qualified opportunities (and what’s the ratio)? Then, how many of those qualified opportunities result in closed deals (and what’s the ratio)? Finally, what’s your average sale value?
From there, it becomes a relatively easy activity to work backwards from the target you want to achieve. When you know those ratios, you begin to know exactly how many calls you’ll need to generate the results needed. You also immediately know what ratios you can focus on to improve yourself professionally.
Metrics play a key role in that for your overall business for many of the same reasons…your company’s ability to proactively predict and adjust to help achieve the business targets. The business knows what proactive measures it needs to look at, and often drives those measures down to the sales org.
In your diets, and in your focus to attain your 2013 targets and beyond, control your destiny by focusing on your metrics and ratios today. Happy to help you figure out where to start…
Todd
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Four Fundamentals of Building Presentations
Every presentation has a person who is speaking, and an audience that is listening. To be successful, knowing how the human brain works is vitally important. The more you know about human cognitive function, the more likely you'll be able to put together a presentation that inspires, challenges and motivates your audience to take some sort of action…which is likely your ultimate objective.
Over the past few years, I've collected some nuggets that can quickly help you put together a vastly improved experience for your audience. Here are the four primary areas to keep in mind when creating and structuring a presentation that will ensure it has the greatest impact:
Number 1: People learn in small chunks…not a long firehose of PowerPoints. I encourage you to check out www.ted.com. It's a collection of great talks by people on a whole host of topics. You'll notice that the majority of those talks are less than 20 minutes long. Why is that? Realize that the "sustained" attention span of an adult is thought to be no longer than 15-20 minutes. And, that's for someone performing surgery, handling fragile objects, or anything else requiring consistent results on a task over time. Listening to your presentation likely isn't one of those things…so count on your audience's attention span being much less.
With that, when a person loses focus, they can choose to re-focus as well…but it's our job to create that re-focus. When putting together your presentation, think about that. If the presentation has to be longer than 20 minutes, then think about how you can give the audience a brain rest every 5-10 minutes. The best ways to do that are to tell a relevant story, engage the audience with a question or an activity, or anything else that forces the disengagement then re-engagement.
Number 2: Remember that most people can't read and listen at the same time. If they're reading your text laden slides, they're not listening. If your slides are covered in text, it will take a while for your audience to start listening to you. When possible, use pictures to emphasize your points rather than words. When putting together a presentation, try to build it out without using ANY slides first. Then decide what a slide can do to emphasize the points you're making.
If you have to use text, keep them short. Don't use sentences unless you're showing a quotation or a definition. Also, keep in mind that most people can only hold around 5 items in short term memory.
If you have more than 5 bullets on a slide, the majority of the audience won't be able to remember them without re-reading the slide…which means they're not going to be listening to you. Remember, your slides aren't your speaker notes.
Number 3: If you want people to act, you have to call them to action. At the end of the presentation, be specific about what you want your audience to do. Will your audience be motivated to do something at the end of the presentation? If so, what is that something?
Number 4: Have passion for your topic. The words you use only equate to part of your audience's engagement. If you're passionate about the topic, don't bottle that excitement up…let it flow. Your audience will mirror your emotion. If you're excited and passionate about a topic, they will be more likely to be excited and passionate about it as well.
So much of that passion needs to come through in your first two minutes…when the audience is deciding whether to invest the cognitive attention to listen and engage. When practicing, record your first few minutes, then ask yourself while playing it back, "Would I want to listen to me for the time allotted?"
Take these four learnings to heart, and I promise you your next presentation will do more to inspire, challenge & motivate your audience.
Todd
Over the past few years, I've collected some nuggets that can quickly help you put together a vastly improved experience for your audience. Here are the four primary areas to keep in mind when creating and structuring a presentation that will ensure it has the greatest impact:
Number 1: People learn in small chunks…not a long firehose of PowerPoints. I encourage you to check out www.ted.com. It's a collection of great talks by people on a whole host of topics. You'll notice that the majority of those talks are less than 20 minutes long. Why is that? Realize that the "sustained" attention span of an adult is thought to be no longer than 15-20 minutes. And, that's for someone performing surgery, handling fragile objects, or anything else requiring consistent results on a task over time. Listening to your presentation likely isn't one of those things…so count on your audience's attention span being much less.
With that, when a person loses focus, they can choose to re-focus as well…but it's our job to create that re-focus. When putting together your presentation, think about that. If the presentation has to be longer than 20 minutes, then think about how you can give the audience a brain rest every 5-10 minutes. The best ways to do that are to tell a relevant story, engage the audience with a question or an activity, or anything else that forces the disengagement then re-engagement.
Number 2: Remember that most people can't read and listen at the same time. If they're reading your text laden slides, they're not listening. If your slides are covered in text, it will take a while for your audience to start listening to you. When possible, use pictures to emphasize your points rather than words. When putting together a presentation, try to build it out without using ANY slides first. Then decide what a slide can do to emphasize the points you're making.
If you have to use text, keep them short. Don't use sentences unless you're showing a quotation or a definition. Also, keep in mind that most people can only hold around 5 items in short term memory.
If you have more than 5 bullets on a slide, the majority of the audience won't be able to remember them without re-reading the slide…which means they're not going to be listening to you. Remember, your slides aren't your speaker notes.
Number 3: If you want people to act, you have to call them to action. At the end of the presentation, be specific about what you want your audience to do. Will your audience be motivated to do something at the end of the presentation? If so, what is that something?
Number 4: Have passion for your topic. The words you use only equate to part of your audience's engagement. If you're passionate about the topic, don't bottle that excitement up…let it flow. Your audience will mirror your emotion. If you're excited and passionate about a topic, they will be more likely to be excited and passionate about it as well.
So much of that passion needs to come through in your first two minutes…when the audience is deciding whether to invest the cognitive attention to listen and engage. When practicing, record your first few minutes, then ask yourself while playing it back, "Would I want to listen to me for the time allotted?"
Take these four learnings to heart, and I promise you your next presentation will do more to inspire, challenge & motivate your audience.
Todd
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Say "No" to BANT, & Take Your Prospect’s TEMP Instead
I published this on my blog three years ago this week, and I just heard BANT come up again, so I thought I'd republish.
Since the beginning of time, the acronym BANT has been the basis for qualification of potential opportunities.
B – Budget
A – Authority
N – Needs
T – Timing
With the changing of the selling "era" comes the necessary change in the way we decide what opportunities to pursue. It's time to throw out BANT. In its place, I'm coining and proposing the creation of a new acronym. We should start taking the TEMP of our opportunities instead.
Waiting to check off all the boxes on BANT will inevitably either (a) cause you to pre-maturely decide not to work on / disqualify an opportunity, or (b) result in a highly competitive, highly discounted, low margin deal.
The primary issue with BANT is in terms of B – Budget. Let's think about "Challenger" selling for a moment:
Thus, the creation of a new acronym…which should lead us to taking the TEMP of our customers and prospects regarding potential opportunities:
T – Trigger
E – Engagement
M – Mobilizer
P - Profile
T – Trigger: Simply put, has something occurred in the buyer's world that has them looking for a change? Whether we've created that trigger or not, this is also known as the "compelling event" or the understanding of what happens if a change does not occur.
E – Engagement: Is the customer / prospect Engaged? Do we have a scheduled next step? Evidence of a qualified opportunity is shown in the customer's willingness to set aside time in their calendar and start to create a plan of the buying journey with you. If they say they'll "call you next week" or you have to chase them down, you don't have the customer's engagement.
M – Mobilizer: Have we connected with the individual or individuals capable of Mobilizing an organization to make a change? This is a big shift in the way customers buy. We can't always get to the executive suite, but if we find "mobilizers" within an organization that have the trust and confidence of the executive suite, and can make change happen within an organization, you have the makings for a strong opportunity.
P – Profile: Does this customer fit the ideal customer Profile within a standard deviation or two? For example, if you're selling to large retailers, one can assume that a senior leader from Wal-Mart if a fit. Sometimes this is a no-brainer, while other times it takes a question or two…but if you know where your solution has high impact and where it doesn't, then does this target fit the profile?
Like the new acronym for qualification? Make sense? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject…
Thanks,
Todd
Since the beginning of time, the acronym BANT has been the basis for qualification of potential opportunities.
B – Budget
A – Authority
N – Needs
T – Timing
With the changing of the selling "era" comes the necessary change in the way we decide what opportunities to pursue. It's time to throw out BANT. In its place, I'm coining and proposing the creation of a new acronym. We should start taking the TEMP of our opportunities instead.
Waiting to check off all the boxes on BANT will inevitably either (a) cause you to pre-maturely decide not to work on / disqualify an opportunity, or (b) result in a highly competitive, highly discounted, low margin deal.
The primary issue with BANT is in terms of B – Budget. Let's think about "Challenger" selling for a moment:
- When a customer is already in-the-market (IMP) for our category of solution, they can find their way to just about any piece of information about us without ever talking to us. When we engage, our role is often to reframe and disrupt their thinking…to teach the customer that a potentially better solution exists versus the one they had in mind. By doing so, we often open the eyes and minds of the customer to a much bigger potential outcome, too. If we're working with or have access to the right people in the organization, the budget-creators versus the budget-spenders, budgets get created for high impact, high ROI projects attached to high priority business issues.
- When a customer is not in-the-market for our category of solution, and we're trying to teach them about an under-appreciated problem they don't even realize they have, they probably haven't created a budget for that unrecognized problem, right?
Thus, the creation of a new acronym…which should lead us to taking the TEMP of our customers and prospects regarding potential opportunities:
T – Trigger
E – Engagement
M – Mobilizer
P - Profile
T – Trigger: Simply put, has something occurred in the buyer's world that has them looking for a change? Whether we've created that trigger or not, this is also known as the "compelling event" or the understanding of what happens if a change does not occur.
E – Engagement: Is the customer / prospect Engaged? Do we have a scheduled next step? Evidence of a qualified opportunity is shown in the customer's willingness to set aside time in their calendar and start to create a plan of the buying journey with you. If they say they'll "call you next week" or you have to chase them down, you don't have the customer's engagement.
M – Mobilizer: Have we connected with the individual or individuals capable of Mobilizing an organization to make a change? This is a big shift in the way customers buy. We can't always get to the executive suite, but if we find "mobilizers" within an organization that have the trust and confidence of the executive suite, and can make change happen within an organization, you have the makings for a strong opportunity.
P – Profile: Does this customer fit the ideal customer Profile within a standard deviation or two? For example, if you're selling to large retailers, one can assume that a senior leader from Wal-Mart if a fit. Sometimes this is a no-brainer, while other times it takes a question or two…but if you know where your solution has high impact and where it doesn't, then does this target fit the profile?
Like the new acronym for qualification? Make sense? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject…
Thanks,
Todd
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