Travel time. Sales Success. And flight delays are profitable

Travel is a huge part of most Proxima Sales team member's sales time. No, we don't go door to door or even town to town. We have a system for making conventions and trade shows profitable and we use it very successfully. Proxima Sales reviews thousands of potential meeting possibilities each year and matches our existing relationships, our client portfolio, market demand, and a couple of semi-secret matrices, to select which meetings to attend. Our performance based outsourced sales model is lean and our travel budget does not end up on our client's bill, so we're pretty picky about which meetings we return to each year.

Some meetings seem to attract trade-show bozos who hawk beer and um-pretty girls, more than their software, medical devices, logistics platforms, or other wares. We tend to avoid as many of those as we can. There are exceptions. Disrupt and Ad:Tech, RSA, and a few others can get a bit loud, but results count.

We like meetings that are small, regional events where we can really dig in to conversations, catch up, and leave with both new business and great intelligence for Proxima Sales reviewers for portfolio development. When we're really lucky we also find great new employees and clients at these meetings.

Proxima Sales reviews our results on all sales activities. We're thrilled to see the best first quarter ever for the company and many of our clients. We see each and every increase in meeting attendance as driving up sales over the past few years. The economy is back, people are flying to trade shows again, and we're closing sales.

Speaking of flying, we've been on more delayed flights this year than over the past seven. This is, oddly good. We have closed three great deals while stranded with fellow travelers, generally from the convention we all just left, in not-so-swank airport lounges and waiting areas. When flights are late, we all relate. People let down their guard and talk about what's really happening in the materials handling business or college finance. They tell Proxima's people their reviews of the devices and software that we missed at the big CES and NRF gigs. They complain about what is stuck on their desks. We learn, we create relationships, and then we take notes.

If you're looking for fresh sales, give Kate Parker a call and see if one of our teams can take you to new sales, on the road. If you're looking for a new sales position and you have expertise in one or more of our technology or industry cores, please apply. We love to travel but we would love to have more of us to spread around.

Proxima B2B the brand that NASA lost and found. Welcome Proxima b

Proxima B2B is a company full of science geeks, NASA nerds, and even some left over Apollo addicts. So when NASA news blew up recently with all of the great news about Proxima Centauri and the many possibilities, we were all hooked on the @NASAtelescope Twitter feed.

the JPL and NASA site  was bursting with the exoplanet news and we're pretty excited about the new find.

To quote briefly, "The new planet circles Proxima Centauri, the smallest member of a triple star system known to science fiction fans everywhere as Alpha Centauri. Just over 4 light-years away, Proxima is the closest star to Earth, besides our own sun.

"This is really a game-changer in our field," said Olivier Guyon, a planet-hunting affiliate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and associate professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "The closest star to us has a possible rocky planet in the habitable zone. That's a huge deal. It also boosts the already existing, mounting body of evidence that such planets are near, and that several of them are probably sitting quite close to us. This is extremely exciting."

So as you might guess, the latest updates from the NASA site and JPL, are frequent quick stops on our morning coffee, pre-dawn,  virtual meeting. Yes, NASA news pumps us up for a day selling complex intangible, innovative, solutions for technology companies.

The new planet, dubbed Proxima b, is at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth. It orbits its star far more closely than Mercury orbits our sun, taking only 11 days to complete a single orbit -- a "year" on Proxima b.

Proxima B2B reviews the news and so do our clients. We're not holding it against JPL, or NASA, or the fine folks who made the discovery of Proxima b but if you find this post, you're doing better than lots of our own staff. Yes, big baby b, Proxima b, that is, has virtually buried all of our nifty notes on clients who have made huge sales, been acquired with glee by Oracle, and other recent news. 

It's all a matter of perspective. Proxima B2B is excited that our 2016 is the best sales year on record for our company, and that our clients are growing and building new revenue. 

It took a newly discovered exo-planet to bury our last press release. I think we'll call that great news for us all. Keep up the good work NASA and ESO. And, thanks to the Proxima B2B marketing team - we know you're putting the news out there and people will discover it in due time.

After Brexit, The Only Certainty is Uncertainty

The United Kingdom’s vote to depart the European Union has shocked virtually every segment of the global economy and caused immediate, wild gyrations in financial and business markets across the planet.

First: Let’s admit that absolutely no one genuinely knows what will happen next. Proxima B2B reviews dozens of definitive news sources daily; from around the EU and the United Kingdom, as well as the American business media, very little is agreed upon by even the most authoritative voices.

Each and every constituency is trying to drill down through the uncertainty and figure out how the vote--much less the actual exit--would or could impact everything business touches. From currencies to tax and trade structures, to the rules and costs affecting operations outside the UK, to the daily realities of employing staff, business travel across borders, and exactly where and how operations can function effectively…uncertainty rules the day. Credit Suisse, in an immediate post-vote note, described the vote as “the most significant pullback to-date from the post-WWII consensus of closer integration and open trade.”

But this could still be merely a bad dream for the technology companies, enterprise software makers, professional services firms and start-ups that Proxima B2B sales teams represent in the US market. The very same Credit Suisse release features a flow-chart (included below) that sets forth a labyrinthine set of (phenomenally complex and confusing) potential political routes to this whole episode ending with the EU intact--with the UK’s special status perhaps revised, but in place.

Nothing in the chart offers relief from huge uncertainty or the pressing need for businesses, in the UK especially and elsewhere in the European Union, to have a plan for stability in place absolutely as soon as possible.

The timeline for the whole unraveling--should it take place at all--is completely unclear as well. EU leaders said, after the vote, that they preferred an immediate beginning to the exit of the UK and the myriad processes involved in accomplishing the withdrawal. That sounds fairly definitive.

But German chancellor Angela Merkel said over the weekend, “Great Britain has not put into motion this proposal, and also the agreement isn't finished." Her tone and comments suggest that she hopes that this leap into an abyss of Brexit uncertainty can be reversed. She continued, “Great Britain continues to be a full member of the EU with all rights and responsibilities.”

Our international teams at Proxima B2B and Northstar Services are convinced that the German record--of holding sway on important EU matters--will likely be extended, making Chancellor Merkel very active in every way she can assist any UK party prepared to roll up their sleeves and reverse the exit.

In everything about to come after the Brexit vote, “uncertainty” is the only consensus.

Proxima B2B specializes in assisting companies with all aspects of sales and marketing, particularly in the US and Canadian markets. There has never been a better time for firms in Great Britain and in the European Union to establish a presence, and a pipeline of revenue in dollars, in the relatively predictable business climate of the United States. The US economy is stable, profitable and welcomes Proxima B2B’s European and UK-based client firms.

2016 Q1 results are in...

And they are interesting.

With our fully implemented data tools--see below--we've run some numbers on first quarter. They look good for our business, and good for our clients. Reach rates are up, close rates are up, and time off is being booked and used by our team members.

So, to restate that: the promise of CRM has been realized at Proxima B2B. We're doing more for our clients in less staff time. This means better retention of our stronger team members, better quality of life and work-life balance for everyone who works here, and it means no mid-year rate hikes for our clients (we can compensate our people fairly for their time with the same percentage commission when we make more sales happen in fewer calls).

Thanks for working with us while we ramped up, if you did. Your reward is a skilled team of sales professionals who will continue to deliver results on your project.

If you haven't asked for a proposal from Proxima B2B yet, your timing is perfect. Give us a call. We'll be happy to tell you what, who, where and how much to light up your sales for 2016.

Losing Buckets of Money by Chasing the Wrong Leads

Proxima B2B is a company that was built by salespeople, for salespeople. We select new hires in part based on whether they share our group aversion to time-wasting "sales systems" that take salespeople out of the field. Many of us were known at former corporate sales positions for being the rule-breaking lone-rangers who never seemed to enter all of our data into the CRM. We didn't care if it was Salesforce or one of the more tedious predecessors like ACT, Goldmine Sales Tracking, or some custom dBBASE system (yes we are dating ourselves if you're of a certain vintage along the PC timeline).

Some of us were frequently called to the sales manager's office, at our previous jobs, to discuss our chronically over-due or undone paperwork that would have gotten us reimbursed for our travel and other expenses. We did the math, though, and figured out that time spent reporting for pennies cost us dollars of earned commissions. In short, we're an experienced bunch and one of our common attributes is a deep distrust of spending sales time adding data to the computer.

Why all this preamble? It's necessary background for what follows:

Proxima B2B is now a company making more money every month--for our clients, and for ourselves--using a sophisticated predictive data analytics and sales planning platform that most of us fought building and implementing tooth-and-nail. We're still resisting naming it something cliche like LeadNet. 

We were wrong! After years of being asked to waste time doing everything from entering contacts into CRM systems to participating in meaningless quarterly forecasting games, arcane expense planning and reporting,  to the more recent time-sinks of social media threads, logging AdWords leads, and the flavor-of-the-year account planning technologies, we were pretty committed to staying the course. Some of us had become experts at resisting any new gizmo that would eat our time for the promise of better sales results. It never seemed worth the weekends of data entry.

About four years ago, one of our project managers pointed out that most sales technology, new and old, is focused on rewarding the wrong behaviors. The tools provide sales leadership with ever-increasing quantities of data about every lead and prospect that has ever come anywhere near the company's sales message, but delivers nothing but a longer to-do/call list to the field force. Every web site visit. Every ad-word inquiry. Every convention badge swipe. All sliced, diced, entered, regurgitated, rated, tagged over-due for follow-up, and becoming ever more quickly dated bit of data.

If Proxima B2B sales staff were going to use technology to add to our database of career contacts and the business intelligence we've learned along the the road, it was going to have to look for opportunities. It couldn't be another platform gathering input to tell management what we were behind on. The platform had to look forward, dredge through the junk leads and dead prospects and help us spend our time on the best cases. The best prospects have already done their homework and know they are shopping. We had to build a system that helped us know which ones were ready to buy so we could spend our time learning about the business, the needs, and what was between the prospect's own research and making a sale for a Proxima B2B client.

Truly game-changing predictive sales analytics have arrived at Proxima B2B, over the complaints. The system focuses on showing our team members where to never waste another minute. It takes incoming data and uses algorithms and the accrued expertise of 300+ combined sales years to help us decide who not to call on. It sorts through mountains of available budgetary and purchasing information, technology utilization at prospect firms, professional services utilization, press and results notices, hiring patterns and another 48 metrics that add precision to our decision to NOT LOSE MONEY CHASING THE WRONG LEADS.

Time is money, as somebody famous and many motivational posters have said. Not wasting time chasing garbage leads, means we have time to lavish detailed, new century customized attention and research  on the prospects who are likely to actually buy the solutions and services we sell on behalf of our technology and professional services clients.

Different times call for different tools and the Proxima B2B predictive sales analytics and revenue cycle management platform are changing our results. We may be able to put our new platform, and our experienced people, to work building your revenue pipeline. Call for your consultation today--it's no-risk expertise, and you decide whether to buy more when you know more. Because we believe that an educated shopper is a great client.

Sales management tips for growing companies

Many days, I have to dig around for material for this blog, but with help like this I can take time for a lunch away from my desk:

A company Proxima B2B has never represented requires its sales staff to accept 24-hour monitoring of their whereabouts as a condition of release condition of employment. To accomplish this feat of 'management', the firm uses a 'productivity' app we've never represented either. (Neither is getting a link out of me. Because 24-hour monitoring is for suspects, not salespeople.)

Today's free sales management tip is: Treat your staff like valuable members of your team, and they'll act like it. Treat them like low-level criminals, and soon the only people who will work that sales position will be individuals who think that is an appropriate level of oversight for them. And they would know.

So good luck hiring and managing your professional sales staff, and let us know if you decide that it's worth a few minutes to evaluate outsourcing your sales function as you grow.

The End of Solution Sales is in the Rearview Mirror. Good News for Salespeople.

Proxima B2B is a company full of very experienced salespeople. We have all been selling technology and professional services for long enough to have been through several waves of what-everyone-knows-is-true-about-solutions-sales. Most of us can quote chapter and verse from Xerox, Hewlett Packard, Pfizer, or a dozen other sales training qualification processes, regimens and systems. 

Give us a chance and you'll likely hear more than interests you about the pros and cons of various sales fads that have swept through companies where we have worked. Each had some good stuff, often buried in 4 inch binders full of pretty useless consultant speak. But there is this one article, that ran in the Harvard Business Review, way back in 2012, The end of Solution Selling that is required reading for new Proxima B2B hires and comes up fairly frequently in discussions when we're putting together sales campaigns for a new client company.

If you can, click on the link and read the article. It isn't MBA final exam dense. It's a simple, straight forward expose of why the model most people use out on the road, at their hard-won sales call, is dead on arrival. 

The punchline, yep I'm giving it to you because I'm betting that unless your flight is late, you don't think you have time for a HBR article, is that since customers can completely spec out purchases, carefully define their own needs, and fill in their knowledge gaps, the last thing they need is a salesperson winging in to ask them all of the questions they've already answered. In short, the salesperson is generally not adding value using "solutions sales" techniques because the customer doesn't need us salespeople to help them through the steps we were taught in all those hotel conference room sales trainings.

But wait, you say, sales can't be dead. Nope. Far from it. Salespeople who respect how many answers their prospects already have can build business faster and better than ever before.

You have to be willing to change. Rinse and repeat. You have to be willing to change everything you KNOW about how to interact with sales prospects.
Quoting from the article:

• evaluate prospects according to criteria different from those used by other reps, targeting agile organizations in a state of flux rather than ones with a clear understanding of their needs

• seek out a very different set of stakeholders, preferring skeptical change agents over friendly informants

• coach those change agents on how to buy, instead of quizzing them about their company’s purchasing process

These sales professionals don’t just sell more effectively—they sell differently. This means that boosting the performance of average salespeople isn’t a matter of improving how they currently sell; it involves altogether changing how they sell.

You can find Katherine Parker kparker@proximab2b.com and other Proxima B2B company contributors in lots of places:

@proximaB2B on Twitter

www.proximab2b.com

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