M & A Rainmaker

Lichfield businesses have been subjected to an incredible outbreak of Wahooliganism. Wahooliganism first emerged in Minneapolis in the U.S. last year and then spread globally via highly connected individuals and internet influencers.

It gained serious Klout along the way but suffered a setback in early February. It is expected to re-emerge over the coming weeks stronger than ever and businesses in Lichfield and indeed globally are advised to prepare.

What is Wahooliganism ??

A short description proffered by Wahooly founder Dana Severson is  ” Accelerating Start-up growth through online influence. “

There’s a good description of Wahooly in TechCrunch here:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/wahooly-launches-its-crowdfunding-experiment-with-first-3-startups-ready-for-social-capital/

Wahooly ( a start-up itself ) is helping it’s first 3 start-up’s ( actually on the website there are 4 now – http://wahooly.com/ ) to gain traction by having ” influential people ” invest time, effort and skills in them and promote them on a global basis.

Does this actually work ???

Well I think it does. Word of Mouth Marketing,Networking and Referrals are established ways of ” getting the word out ” and ” growing the business “.

For those of you who have read Gladwell’s ” The Tipping Point ” you will know that “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” These people are Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople.

According to Gladwell, economists call this the “80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the ‘work’ will be done by 20 percent of the participants.”

The 20% are defined by Klout ( arguably ) as those who have a Klout score of greater than 45. ( Klout is only one company that is measuring Internet ” influence ).

This is not really rocket science – you get influential people ( in real life and virtual life ) to promote your company, products and services and this helps you grow your business.

Let’s take two examples:

Twylah ( http://www.twylah.com/ )

Twylah is a company that wants to take your Twitter Tweets and ” Tell your story and get you noticed ” by making an awesome looking website out of your Tweets. Twylah is based in San Franciso and is a start-up with co-founders Kelly and Eric Kim. Kelly is the community manager for Twylah and the marketing face of @Twylah.

Twylah has some VERY famous clients already ( see http://www.twylah.com/featured ) which include Lady GaGa, Britney Spears, Bon Jovi and Arnold Shwarzenegger !! This might give you the impression that only famous people need apply ! Here is David Skok of Matrix Partners Twylah page http://www.twylah.com/bostonvc/topics/matrix ( A Boston based VC investor  ) and here’s my Twylah page  http://www.twylah.com/cwindley .

From small beginnings Twylah has spread globally – mainly by using Twitter. Kelly has some 13,000 or so followers on Twitter. By picking certain people ( famous, influential, interesting ) Kelly has spread the word on Twylah and now Twylah users are spreading the word further.

Coco Meli Bakery ( http://www.cocomelibakery.co.uk/ )

More locally, Meli Nicolaou, of Coco Meli Bakery is using various means to promote her Artisan Bakery business and newly launched refreshments van at Trent Valley Railway Station.

Meli (  @CocoMeliBakery on Twitter )

has a relatively small ( well at least to Kelly !! ) Twitter follower base ( 500 odd ) but she has used this to help spread the word about her business. She now has a Twylah page http://www.twylah.com/CocoMeliBakery .

Again, physically and online she is spreading the word and others are spreading the word for her – some of them are influential people.

The involvement of influential people is having an actual positive effect on the growth of the business. What is the value of a new Twylah customer or a new Coco Meli Bakery customer ?? I don’t know but Eric Kim’s background is in the monetisation of Internet platforms and to him ( and the industry he has worked in for the last 10 years or so ) each follower, retweeter, circler, favouriter, liker and email address has a dollar or pound ( or part of ) value !!

Do you remember this blog???

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/16/the-perfect-salesperson-and-the-perfect-sales-meeting-structure/

Well, my client and I have been doing some more work on this. We reckoned that we needed to get down into a bit more detail and sub-divide some of these areas.

Activity

Here we had a discussion about what we think the activity targets should be.

Based around a week as follows, approximately:

1 day cold calling

1 day proposal writing

3 days meetings ( or if no meetings then calls to get meetings )

The target number of cold calling phone calls per week ( my recommendation is to go for researched, targeted phone calls rather than purely numbers based ) -should be say 30 per day? ( Any meaningful conversations to be followed up by a letter, so say 15 letters ? )

The target number of meetings per week – say 3 per day for 3 days = should be  9 ?? ( All appointments confirmed by email/letter )

The target number of proposals per week – should be, say, 6 ? ( All proposals to have summary of meeting, key needs and objectives, how we meet those needs/objectives, pricing and ideally ROI )

Knowledge

Here we divided knowledge up into various segments:

Company – ( The companies background/history, key philosophies and main strengths )

Products –  ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company, 1. Telephony, 2. Computer Hardware – Switches, Routers, PC’s,

Servers 3. ????? TBD )

Services – ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company, 1. IT Support, 2. Billing Services – Lines, Minutes 3. ???? TBD etc)

Competition –  ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company 1. ABC Ltd. 2.  DEF Ltd. 3. GHI Ltd. 4.  JKL Ltd. 5. ???  We would highlight thier strengths and weaknesses ).

Suppliers –  ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company 1. Cisco, 2. Microsoft, 3. HP )

Marketplace –  e.g for an ICT company – Hosted Computing versus Premises Based, Virtualisation trends, Cloud computing trends ( SaaS etc )

Skills

Here we divided skills up into seperate areas:

Meeting structure ( as before )

Proposal structure ( eg summary of meeting, key needs and objectives, how we meet those needs/objectives, pricing and ideally ROI )

Presentation structure ( eg Intro, summary of needs/objectives, how we meet them, discussion, agreement on way forward )

Demo structure ( eg Understand what we need to prove, prove it, next step )

Questioning skills

Closing skills

Objection Handling

Negotiation Skills

Psychometric profiling ( this is an advanced selling skill )

With each of these areas we can either record achievement as a percentage of the target or mark each area out of 10 as before. 

Now we had some way of focussing on the areas that needed to be addressed.

We could sit down amongst ourselves and give our own targets and also agree these with the salesperson.

Then we could write an action plan to address any areas of weakness or shortfall.

 Forecasting is one of the most important activities in a salespersons calendar; it needs to be both reliable and consistent.

Over many years I have seen some amazing forecasting methods most are too complicated and require the salesperson to complete endless forms and questions which is time consuming and totally unnecessary.

KISS – keep it simple, stupid: is my motto

Traditional forecasting tends to be rear view mirror stuff with the salesperson often justifying why the sales haven’t closed.

Lets take a fresh look at the subject and consider our forecast looking forward and from the buyer’s standpoint.

Key questions:

What is your customers buying cycle?

Where are you relation to this?

What level of commitment do you have?

What level of commitment do you still need?

Are there any compelling events?

What are their buying criteria?

If your sales people don’t know the answers to these questions then your forecast  could be at risk.

Have a simple step x step approach to your information gathering.

Qualification using ‘MANU’ for smaller deals and ‘SPORTSMAN’ (which I have trademarked) as the most comprehensive approach to the larger high value sales.

If you want to know more about how to achieve reliable, accurate and consistent sales forecasting: 

Contact Richard Spooner +44 (0)7887 720006

Answer – it’s both an Art and a Science!