There are a great many internal relationships which you should build and improve upon when working sales.  While all of them are important, I want to explain why focusing on building a relationship with your credit department can be of huge consequence to your sales performance.

The automation of the credit approval process will lead many to say that the line between getting credit and being refused credit is black & white.  On top of that (with a full recession underway), credit has tightened even further as of late for prospective customers with marginal credit.  If this is all true – then why in the world would building a relationship with your credit department still matter?

While your credit guy might not be able to put together a $25,000 line of credit for a prospect with poor credit, he can still do several things for you.  I have listed below three critical items that your credit guy or gal will usually have control over that could affect your sales:

1) For customers which buy on a regular basis, your credit contact might be able to extend terms slightly. For instance – if a customer is past due by 60 days and is cut off, your credit contact might be able to squeeze another order in for your customer with a promise of payment.  We all have accounts that pay slow, but the accounts I’m talking about here are the ones we know will pay eventually. Not only does this make it easier when an order is needed by your customer before a check can be cut, it also shows your customer that you have a sphere of influence and power within your company.  In short, you end up looking like a more powerful and influential individual in the eyes of your customer.

2) We all need credit limit increases on our accounts from time to time, especially on customers who don’t have a great payment history. While many will say this is another black & white issue in credit, I disagree.  As long as companies put a human in charge of approving or denying credit, there is still a human decision in play that can be influenced.  Having a great relationship can possibly allow you to up a customer’s credit limit to the needed level.  Without being able to influence your credit department in this area, you leave yourself wide open to lose future sales and get egg on your face when a credit increase request is denied.

3) For smaller prospective customers with marginal credit, a small credit line with heavy monitoring could be approved by your credit department. In our current economic climate of shrinking sales, this could be of huge importance in attracting new customers.  While this will usually apply primarily to smaller potential customers, never forget that big customers were at one time small customers.  While you need to use good judgment on whom you are willing to pull the trigger on in this area, having a small customer on board that has good growth potential can be very beneficial to your sales numbers in the future.  If they can build a good payment history, a customer in this arena will also already have the needed credit line in place for when they actually become a bigger customer.

A quick word of caution to everyone, please make sure to perform an internal “gut check” with every credit request that you might be able to influence.  You need to build your internal credit relationship on trust and you must not hang your credit department out to dry.  If you don’t have a reasonable belief that a prospective customer will be credit worthy, you will end up using all of your “juice” with them rather quickly.  There will come a time when you will certainly need it, and you cannot expect a favor with your credit department if you have a poor history with them.  If you take the time to build a great relationship with your credit folks, I promise you it will increase your goodwill and loyalty among your customers.

Popularity: 13% [?]

In professional service firms, some of the greatest opportunities for growth lie in the area of cross-selling. For example, a consulting firm selling their technology services to a client of their business advisory services, or a law firm selling their employment law services to a client of their intellectual property offering.

The theory is that deep relationships built with clients by one practice area within the firm can be “leveraged” to sell services from the firm’s other service areas.

Since the firm already knows how the client’s business works and what the key client individuals value, and the client knows and trusts the firm’s capabilities and key staff, it seems to offer a win-win scenario for both parties.

The reality is often starkly different.

Despite cross-selling obviously being a highly profitable strategy, many professional firms struggle to make it work. They often find themselves “siloed” in one practice area – and surprised when the client brings in a competitor to perform work their team could have done.

Firms let high value opportunities slip through their grasp through failings in three key areas:

• Their front-line business development and delivery teams often fail to spot opportunities for cross-selling.
• Even if an opportunity is identified – client partners and business developers in one practice rarely have the knowledge and skills to effectively position the services of their other practices.
• Finally, there is often a high degree of reluctance to bring in partners from other areas of the firm: a fear that a misstep may damage a hard-won client relationship, or perhaps worse, that success may lead to a relationship being “taken over” by the other partner.

Addressing these issues is not simple – it requires key staff to upgrade their skills, their knowledge, and crucially, their level of trust in their colleagues in other practices.

On the skills front, business developers need to gain the ability to engage clients in business discussions outside their area of expertise. They need to know the current business and industry issues facing their clients – to be able to talk about recent competitor moves, market and customer trends. If all they can discuss is their own specialty and how the current engagement is going then the client will never open up and give them the clues to potential cross-selling opportunities they need.

They also need the ability to turn general or business discussions into specific sales discussions. If a client mentions challenges they face in another area, they must be able to “put on their sales hat” (usually by signposting this to the client) and make a transition in the discussion to exploring the issue and creating the opportunity for a sales-focused follow-up. And they must be able to do this gently without creating the impression that they’re a hungry salesperson only interested in selling more.

To develop those opportunities further they also need knowledge. Knowledge of what to look or listen for in a client organisation to identify an opportunity. Knowledge of what questions to ask to probe a little further to qualify and clarify the opportunity. And critically, they must carry with them a handful of stories and anecdotes of work their firm has done in the area (or more helpfully – stories of the problems they have helped clients solve).

Finally – and often the most difficult element – they need to trust that the people they bring in from the other practice to further develop and close the opportunity are going to do a good job. The business developers or partners must treat the client with respect and ensure they sell “the right thing” to the client – working in a seamless manner with the original partner. And the delivery team must perform high quality work in a way that enhances the overall client relationship. Sadly, many cross-selling opportunities fall at this hurdle. The current client-facing team simply don’t have enough confidence in their own colleagues in other practices to risk damaging a valuable client relationship by introducing them.

Of course, building these skills, knowledge and trust doesn’t happen overnight. But it can be done through both informal and planned interventions. For example:

• Cross-practice awareness building sessions sharing information in useful forms (e.g. “what to look for”, “what we do”, “benefits we deliver”, “case studies of our work”).
• In-depth showcases of specific engagements to built both knowledge and (more importantly) trust in the quality of work being delivered by other practices.
• Cross-practice client visits – for example using partners from other practices as “quality control” partners for engagements.
• Cross-practice account teams and account planning sessions.
• Incentives for partners to introduce and cross-sell for other practices.
• Visible celebration of cross-selling successes.

Most importantly, the firm’s leadership must be seen to actively support cross-selling and inter-firm collaboration. It must become viewed by staff as “the way we do business round here”. And there is no better way than for the senior partners to actively role-model good collaborative behaviours.

Popularity: 12% [?]

This might seem like a digression from my constant tying of the topic to the Sales Evangelist. Well, some advice is universal no matter how you sell, who you sell to, and how old your company may be.

It is definite that the more you ostracize your co-workers, especially those in other vital departments, the steeper the climb to the pinnacle of greatness. Sales people who truly want to build an engine that motors them to the highest possible achievements look at the teams in their organization as essential parts of the organization.

“We are a sales driven company.” One of the CEO’s I worked for used to tell me. It was a great mantra to hear. As the sales director with 60 reports, I faced many challenges. Having the CEO believe everything revolved around me was refreshing. There were 3 problems with this foolhardy assessment:

1. He said this in director meetings; to marketing and IT, to support and service, and to anyone who was willing to hear. It did not help my interactions with other departments.

2. At the core of any company is the transactions that make money. You could analyze an organization and say that they are all sales driven. It is a silly statement. We were a company with no focus, no real message of unique offering, and we did not have the marketing to brand our quality of service. The mentality that we were sales driven was a cop out of sorts. It meant we did not have to find a better way to do things.

3. The subtle message from our CEO was that sales was the most important department. Sales people already feel high and mighty and the last thing they need is an excuse to mismanage other departments. I spent far too much time on managing the damage of this bravado.

What we should have become is a customer focused and service driven company. In this environment a group can thrive. Support feels just as valuable as sales, for they aid in the customer experience. IT can thrive on the simple victory of getting marketing the tools to launch an email campaign. We work together and it begins at the top.

A note to the sales person: Your role in this is paramount. You need your team to feel the sales you make. If you make a point to publicly and privately promote the efforts on non sales people that were influential in you winning business, you will build a support team that roots you to victory. Even the network support guy that comes up and fixes the printer deserves an occasional pat on the back. When he starts popping by your desk to see if you need any help to have a great month, well it feels good.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I remember one of my favourite questions while interviewing new candidates for a sales position was:

Tell me about a time when you have to convince someone in product development, or marketing or credit, that something needed to be done for a client that was out of the ordinary but important to close the opportunity”

The answer I was looking for had to work on two levels, it had to relate to a real situation, as this was a common occurrence at our company; as importantly it was a window on how they really sold.

Getting other departments to buy in to your objective is in fact a sales cycle on to itself.  How a sales person achieves, their interactions with the other departments, generally accurately reflects how they interact with prospect and clients, it has all the earmarks, traps and potential as any other process that leads to mutual gain.

First there is the recognition of the need, at times sales people try to offload issues that they should be managing or dealing with.  It is easy to go and let some steam off at a developer or someone in credit rather than dealing with the issue head on.  This is especially true with product issues, sales people often say “if only it did this” or “well the competition does that”.  The reality is that if the product or service was so perfect that it fit like a glove, and everyone know it, there would be no need for sales people.  Similar issues come up with marketing and sales.

I find the best solution for this type of excuse is to get take the sales rep right to the head of the group he is blaming for his sorrows and have him articulate the issue and proposed solutions.  This does one of two things, it either shuts them up, and they go back to they are supposed to do; or as often, they do have a genuine challenge that they have thought out, and while they may not always have a perfect solution, they present their thought and begin a productive dialogue.  I guess that is selling their view to the other department head, a good thing.

Assuming it is the latter; it really should and often unfolds like a sale.  To do it right the sales rep will have had to think through the issue, including researching potential solutions.  Then engage the person who can deal with the issue and make a decision.  This last part is key, we all recognize that we need to be dealing with decision makers on the prospect side, but sales people often spend an inordinate amount of time talking to people in other departments that are simply not in a position to change or influence change.  They are empathetic to the sales person, sympathetic, all kinds of ‘athetic’, but that’s it, no next step, no deal in the end.  While we can not overlook the realities of corporate politics (talk about under statements), sales people need to ‘pitch’ the right audience to get something done by other departments.

The rest unfold much like a sale, engaging the other department, understanding what they have to deal with, and how they are currently dealing with it, that is a proper discovery process.  They then have to demonstrate the upside of their solution to the issue and how it is more advantageous than the status quo, gain a commitment.

Last they have to deliver. Often when sales people interact and make demands of other departments, and the other departments deliver, the sales person fails to deliver the “big deal” that predicated the whole thing.  This throws off everyone, precious time and resources are wasted with nothing but heightened emotions to show for it and a tarnished reputation not just for the sales rep, but the whole sales department.

To me interdepartmental relations, where sales is one of the departments, is always an interesting dynamic, since the collective goal of the organization is to generate profit from revenue, sales should not only spearhead the drive, but be able to sell the others on the right course of action based on market demands.  If a rep can’t do that, then could they do it with someone whose interests are not naturally aligned?

Popularity: 15% [?]

Hillary Clinton wrote her best-selling book, It Takes a Village, back in the 1990’s. Whether you agree or disagree with the politics of the book (I have not read it), it makes sense to me that we could legitimately transfer the overarching concept of the book to a business application: It takes more than just a sales person to sell successfully.

Although the sales department is usually the most visible in a sales organization, the contributions of most other departments must be added into the organizational mix in order for the sales person to succeed. Sales people are (or should be) intensely customer focused, which means sometimes they don’t focus on developing fruitful relationships with other employee groups within the company.

What follows are five ways to develop stronger relationships with other departments within your company so you can leverage those relationships in your selling career.

1. Relationships first.

Meet and greet the people in your company who work in non-sales jobs. Do this before you need to ask them for a favor or to complain about something. Get to know people in the areas of marketing, installation and delivery, production, accounting, and all other departments within the organization. It’s a good thing to reach out to others (we do it in selling all the time, right?).

2. Combat self-centeredness.

Sales people are often caught criticizing the marketing department, the operations department, the IT folks, sales management, and others. It’s not difficult to see why some in our company can think of us as prima donnas.

Yes, we’d like to have things run our way, but we’re more likely to be seen as a valuable part of the team if we remember we’re not the center of the universe. And others will be more likely to help you out in a time of need if they see you as a team-oriented individual rather than a self-centered sales superstar (even if you are a superstar in reality). Chill your ego, and instead, warm-up the egos of others you work with.

3. For every critical comment you make, make five positive comments.

Okay, so I get that you don’t think the marketing department advertised the right product in the advertisement this week. It’s understandable that you would complain that the visual display department placed a sweater on the mannequin in that’s almost sold out. It makes sense that you’d be frustrated about the lack of new company-supplied leads for you to contact even though you were told just last month that the new marketing initiative would keep the sales department very busy..

But before you go bulldozing your way through the organization criticizing everybody else, consider how many compliments and positive strokes you’ve given to the folks in other departments. None? Oops, that’s a big error.

Make five positive comments before you give one critical one. Calling your advertising contact to tell them you love the ad would be unexpected and welcomed by most marketing employees. Telling the visual display person in your store that the displays look fantastic will bring a smile to his face. Offering to help your manager with an undesirable project will help foster positive teamwork within your organization.

4. Ask before you tell.

Many sales people are creative and knowledgeable, and some are even critical. But before you share your abundant knowledge with other departments, ask questions first. Just as in selling, we need to spend more time asking questions than we do giving answers.

“How do we go about scheduling deliveries?” “Who makes the decision on mark-downs?” “How are buyers compensated?” “When does HR post a new job opening for employees?” Get information first.

Be seen as a person in your organization who is thirsting for knowledge, not thirsting to tell everybody else how to do their job.

5. Don’t forget the power of a thank you.

There are probably people in your company you’ve never spoken to, or if you have, it’s been to ask them for something or to complain about something. Resolve to share thanks with others in your company who help you do your job. Even if they don’t accomplish everything in the way you would like them to, give them a sincere “thank you.” Human beings love to be thanked and recognized for their contributions.

You just might make somebody’s day.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Jared comes to me with a look on his face that is half perplexity, half anger and all irritation.  He has just had a run-in with a department head within our organization.

“You’ve got to have a talk with her, Tim” he says between clenched teeth.

“What would you like me to talk with her about,” I ask a little too cheerfully.

“Why she won’t do her job.  Why everything is such a hassle with her.  Why she doesn’t understand that the work I am asking her to do is necessary and important and dictated by the customer.”

I keep my sigh bottled up inside and feel another gray hair forcing its way out of my scalp in exchange.  Jared does have a point.  He is in sales and when he writes an order a slew of action works it way throughout the organization with various departments needing to execute flawlessly in order for the client to receive that which they bought.

On the other hand, I am sure that when I go to speak to the department head with whom he has a conflict I’m going to hear a different story.  So, I go and ask,

“Hey, what’s going on between you and Jared?”

“Jared?  Oh, the problem with him and about half the sales staff is they don’t follow rules.  They completely disregard our procedures, tell customers whatever they think will help them make the sale and come in here with an attitude on top of it all.”

“I’m sorry he’s acting that way.  I hear his gall bladder has been acting up again.  Look, if I promise not to make him Sales Person of the Month, can you take care of the rest so that we can get this order on the books?”

“Will you make him wear a dunce hat?”

“Is it absolutely necessary?”

“I guess not.  But, I’m not doing it for Jared, I’m doing it for you and the company.”

There’s a reason why this happens in most companies.  The people hired to do sales are very different from those who are hired to do bookkeeping or fulfillment or customer service.  The majority of sellers believe that the rules generally don’t apply to them or, at least, don’t apply to every situation.  Obstacles to their success are stepping stones or hurdles and they treat them all the same regardless of their origination.

But, those who seek out jobs in the business department or human resources or administration do not usually share those values.  These folks believe that rules are put in place for a very good reason and that “fair” means “equal” and that applies to enforcement of policies and deadlines.

Conflicts are not only likely – they are nearly impossible to avoid.  Nearly impossible, however, does not mean impossible and it is that sliver of hope that must motivate all sales managers to seek harmony within the organization.  Here is how to get sellers to reduce their inter-departmental conflicts:

1) Explain to sales people that they have two sets of customers.  One is the customer who buys the products and the other is the internal workers that make it possible to earn a commission.  Make sure that internal customer satisfaction scores count towards their overall ranking.

2) Implement an internal evaluation process where the support staff in each department ranks the sellers every month for efficiency, effectiveness and general, all-around goodness.  Let one department per month come to a sales meeting and present an award to the highest ranking seller in their eyes.  Give those departments some money so they can pay for the award and take the best seller to lunch.

3) Take 15 minutes out of one sales meeting per month to brainstorm ways for the sellers to demonstrate their love of the support and administrative staffs.  Make sure that everyone takes action on at least one idea.

4) Meet with the other department heads once per month to discuss procedural solutions to the most common conflicts.

5) Don’t get overly worked up about minor conflicts.  People who are very different from each other and find success at work in very different ways are going to have the occasional conflict.  Work towards solutions and don’t expect those that have a natural conflict to become best friends.

The bottom line is that people all come to work for their own reasons.  Success at work depends on your position, your duties and your perspective.  Help your sellers keep that in mind.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Us humans are social creatures that actively seek belonging to a group and identifying with common ideas. Scientists explain that this as a product of our evolution from tribalism where being a part of a tribal community and cooperation within the group meant a greater control over territory, resources and food.

I remember watching a programme a few years ago about the pyschology of violence and the research studies that showed some of the sociological reasoning behind why violence happens. One study conducted by Mark Levine experimented with the theory of bystander intervention based around the idea of group association. In the experiment a carefully selected group of people were selected who all supported one particular football team and were exposed to a staged incident where an actor passed by them and pretended to fall in pain with a broken ankle. In some of the incidents the actor would wear the football shirt of the team the participant supported and in others the actor would wear a rival football shirt or unrecognisable shirt. In cases where the actor wore the supported teams shirt almost 75% of the participants responded by helping the injured actor but only 35% helped the actor who wore the rival or unrecognised shirt.

What does this study have to do with running a company? Well, in larger companies where there are clear boundaries between departments this same psychological group mentality can be created within departments. The benefits to building powerful group dynamics within a company are that collective cooperation within the department can be heightened but as the pre-discussed research study shows by creating a group boundary the willingness to cooperate with those outside the department can be dangerously low.

How many times have you heard reasons for a deparments performance failure blamed on those outside the department. “We could not achieve our sales because marketing failed to provide the right leads”, “The marketing department provided the right amount of leads but sales failed to convert them”, “Operations failed to implement the solution because sales over sold our ability to perform the required actions” etc.

With such demarcations between responsibility and culpability such company dynamics can hamper the whole process of offering services to the customer because each department clearly segments their own responsibilty within the whole process and cares little for what happens outside their own remit. In such a case what results is a lack of communication between departments, poor relationships between company personnel and ultimately a disjointed and ineffective sales offering to the customer.

Understanding basic human behaviour is hugely important in keeping the overall company infrastructure working to its optimal limit. In getting departments to work effectively there should be a careful balance between department identity and identity within the company. Changing human psychological behaviour is beyond the capability of a business. Divisions of “us and them” are always going to happen, the question however is how you best nurture that within the company. If employees feel collectively with the entire company then this “us and them” behaviour can be used against the intended target of competition, your competitor. Achieving this can also create a harmonised atmosphere between departments within the company and a collective will to achieve sales.

The moral of the story: All departments should be working for the same goal, therefore they should care equally about the effectiveness of every department and how they relate to them. Understanding the psychological dynamics of human behaviour should be something understood so that cooperation and communication can be achieved. If competition between departments is employed as a performance incentive then it should be carefully managed so as not to foster clear boundaries between groups.

Popularity: 15% [?]