Strike while the leads are hot
- Josh Mehlman
- 3 November 2009
- Page 1 of 2 : single page
about the art of selling, how most companies don't use email as an effective sales tool and how they can fix it.Chances are you sell things every day, even if your only knowledge of salespeople comes from the swear word-laden dialogue of the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Signing up a new customer is, obviously, a sale. Negotiating a better deal on supplies requires sales skills, as does convincing your partner you should get a leave pass for a night out or a game of golf.
Yet very few business owners - even the ones who swear a lot - consider themselves good salespeople. That's how Strike Force Sales got started in 2006.
A happy accident
The company was formed when former journalist, publisher and marketer Chris Moriarty (pictured) was introduced to Ciaran McGuigan, an expert in sales and sales training.
"We never really had an intention to start the business; it happened in the slipstream of another business opportunity," says Moriarty.
"I had a mate who I did my MBA with and we came across this business and we looked at it and we thought, ‘What a great business, all it needs is access to a professional sales team and it will succeed'.
"We thought we would need at least three people to have a professional team. We figured out that we could sell a whole year's worth of supply in only 12 weeks. And we thought that would be terrible, because we'd have to hire them, train them, work them and then sack them.
"So instead we decided to see if there was a way that we could give other businesses access to the sales team, to share the cost of running the sales team with other businesses.
"The other bloke said he knew someone who was a guru at selling crap and introduced me to Ciaran."
The idea of providing an outsourced sales team turned out to be more successful than the original business; Strike Force Sales succeeded while the other business "doesn't exist anymore", says Moriarty.
When outsourcing makes sense
But why should businesses of any size outsource their sales functions to another company?
A smaller company would most likely not have the wherewithal to pay for an external sales force, while a larger firm could hire, train and keep a close eye on its own staff.
"In truth, a lot of businesses would do better if they had a professional sales capability," says Moriarty. "One of my favourite sayings is to misquote Mao Zedong, ‘All power comes from the barrel of revenue' ... lots of businesses have really good ideas and they plan them strategically, but they don't have the revenue."
In smaller businesses, the owner tends to specialise in something he or she is very passionate about; that something is very rarely the sales process.
"We discovered that most of our clients ... really don't have a methodical, structured approach to client acquisition," says McGuigan. "And a by-product of what we did with clients was [sit] them down [and]engineer them to have a better sales process."
Free-range sales people
For any sales person, the telephone is the primary tool of trade. However, the founders insist their approach is nothing like a traditional call centre.
"The contact centre industry is run by a platform and it's all about micro-managing process down to the hundredths of a second," says Moriarty. "That's not what we do. We don't have any visibility at that level. We're not interested."
Many clients approach Strike Force Sales after having unsatisfactory experiences with a contact centre, says McGuigan.
"If you've got unmotivated people with a badly written script, ringing people who don't want to receive your phone call, why would you expect to get a great outcome?" he says.
"We employ motivated people who want to have a career in sales and business development. We train them to have the freedom and confidence and capabilities to have conversations with clients - rather than reading scripts - and to engage the person on the other side of the telephone."
A traditional contact centre is "a battery chicken-type environment, as opposed to the free range environment", says McGuigan. "One egg looks like the other one, but we think it tastes better."
Sales fail
Where most call centres get it wrong, Moriarty believes, is that they try to deliver the most efficient possible sales process from an accountant's point of view, which means minimising the contact between staff and customers.
"The whole purpose of a contact centre is to enable a company to engage directly with their client base and to improve the experience from the customer's point of view," he says. "But the way most contact centres are run is they do everything they can to minimise contact. Wrong! You want to spend more time talking to them."
Similarly, many retailers put phone enquiries through to the shop-floor staff, who are often busy or unmotivated.
“one of my favourite sayings is to misquote mao zedong, ‘all power comes from the barrel of revenue’”
"In that situation, they [can lose] the opportunity to sell a pair of shoes, let's say," says Moriarty. "But they've actually got a customer on the phone who is going to be a bridesmaid at a wedding. And it turns out there's actually three other bridesmaids who are also looking for shoes and they want stockings and they're prepared to spend $400 each on a dress.
"There are all these opportunities, but because they want to reduce the cost of communicating with customers ..."
Many companies also approach sales on the basis of logic - if they deliver the right price, quantities, height and weight, they expect the customer will buy.
"They ignore the emotion of the customer wanting to buy it," says McGuigan. "They take out of consideration the human being who is thinking, ‘No, I don't like you'.
"We all make decisions based on what we like. We pop into one pub instead of another pub. The beer is the same, but we like one rather than the other. So, we all make emotional decisions. In business, in particular, sales people tend to forget that."
Surviving the GFC
The global financial crisis was not particularly kind to Strike Force Sales, with staff numbers down to around 30 from a peak of 50 during the good times of 2008. While he acknowledges there have been "a few bad months", Moriarty says in hindsight it will look more like a "bit of a flat period" and that overall the company has stayed on an upwards course.
"Since Lehman Brothers, there has still been a lot of activity in the market, with lots and lots of meetings," he says. "Any business that has a reasonable sales process in place has been very busy through the whole of the global downturn, going to lots of meetings, talking to lots of prospects. The problem has been that there have been no decisions."
