Happy 4th !!!
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Barely at sunrise this morning, I took a walk on the beach before setting off for the office. I needed to clear my head from yesterday’s tough deal and a big cancellation which arrived in an unexpected email last night at 11. More of a reschedule than a cancellation, but the impact is the same-nothing happening this month.
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When I graduated from BC and was facing the gloom and rigors of graduate school, I came up with what I thought was a much better idea, and to the great consternation of my father, joined the Peace Corps, landing six months later in Moshi, Tanzania at the base of Kilimanjaro. Fluent in Swahili, I taught English and had what became a life changing experience. During the next couple of years, I taught, built libraries, inoculated hundreds of people, and as a group, we changed the lives of countless people. Would heartily recommend the Peace Corps to anyone!
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Just when I thought that it was ok to pop my head out of my bunker and look out at what I thought was shaping up to be a pretty good Q2,
WHAM, good ol’ Uncle Bernanke slammed me down like a Whack-a-Mole this week as those wonderful phrases of "worst financial crisis”, “most severe housing bust”, “facing additional headwinds”, “Japanese disaster” and my personal catchall favorite of “additional global pressures” hit the airways. The market this week, already reeling from the effects of last week’s very poor job market results, collided into a stone wall just as hard as Wiley Coyote trying to outmaneuver the Road Runner. Unfortunately, there’s not much that can change either the laws of physics for Mr. Coyote or the effects of macroeconomics when Uncle Ben speaks.
Somehow, my portfolio hopefully will make it through the financial machinations of Obamanomics. All I know is that for all of us out there selling our products and services this month, we now have just one more barrier thrown in front of us this week as a reason not to buy. Nothing slows down a big purchase more than the Fear Factor.
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9 out of 10 sales calls are going to end up in outright rejection or at least an entry pass into the valley of despair with such heartwarming comments like, “We need to discuss this internally…for a while”, or even after you’ve used all of your considerable closing skills to get a commitment, the response continues to be, “We’re still kicking this around, I'll call you in the next couple of weeks”.
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Tufts’ graduation is coming up this weekend, and many of my students over the years will make the big jump from student to wage-earner. For me, my most important metric as a professor is how many of my ex-students have I directly assisted in getting jobs, and it’s very rewarding for me to see them get offers this semester from Deloitte, HubSpot, Brainshark and IBS just to name a few.
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It certainly applied to the Celtics before last night’s devastating loss to the Heat, and it certainly applies to those sales professionals who are struggling half way through the quarter with not enough points yet on the board. Did the Celtics get outplayed by the Heat the holy trinity of LeBron, Wade and Bosh? Sure, but the die was cast going into the game last night. Tough enough that the Celtics were being outplayed throughout the series by the Miami Machine. Tougher still was the fact that the Celtics looked and acted like the old men that they are. Add to all of that the fact that they were up against the wall, crushed by their prior losses and facing an enormous hill to climb. Take all of this into the equation, throw in superb young athletes, and it was impossible to survive.
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End of one sales month, and the beginning of another. Just a turn of the page in the digital sales book, but a wakeup to the fact that the quarter is one third over and rapidly racing towards the end of June. I actually love the 2nd quarter since it still retains all of the excitement and energy of the new year kickoff...way back in January... plus we now have four months of real customer experience under our belts. Better to update sales plans and tweak selling tactics for the balance of the year.
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Sales forecasting is always a tough requirement. After all, you’re forecasting the future, and, almost by definition, it’s going to be wrong. It’s merely a question of the degree of wrongness, which becomes the much vaulted new metric of “forecast accuracy”. When you’re in sales, it’s part of the badge, and anyone who complains that “it’s tough to forecast the future” should start looking for a job on the shipping dock.
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Bumped into Chris Sheehan, one of the two Managing Directors at Common Angels, the other day, and we quickly got into a discussion about inside sales, and did I know of a good manager for one of his portfolio companies. Off the top of my head, no one came to mind, (Qualified Lead Opportunity to anyone reading this to ping me), but then I hesitated since I'm not sure that the terms "inside sales/outside sales" apply any longer, and when they do apply, they exist with very different meanings today from the context in which they historically (three to five years ago) had been used.
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