Surviving a Sales Rep: 101

Hi, I'm Ted Smith and I'm Senior Vice President of CNET Networks Business to Business portfolio and today I'd like to share with you one of my favorite topics, "Surviving a sales rep: 101."

Now I know what you're saying to yourself. "What do I need to know about sales reps?" Well, let me tell you what I think you need to know about sales reps. For one thing they're trained and they're highly trained and I'm talking about, you know, a couple of hundred million dollars every year spent training sales people how to sell to you. Now let's think just for a minute how much money is spent training you to buy something. Well, I'm just going to go out on a limb here and guess that the number is zero because I've never met anybody that's gone to buyer training. I'm not talking about procurement people and I'm not talking about negotiation, I'm talking about literally being on the other side of the table from somebody who is trying to sell you something. So training is one part of the equation.

Let's think a little about the rest of it. Well, as it would turn out, sales professionals also have a bevy of tools available to them. Sales force automation systems, customer relationship management systems, business intelligence applications, a lot of stuff. Now let's think for a second about all of those things that you have. It's true you don't have any, not one.

So what are we going to do about this? Well, why don't we just go ahead for a minute and establish the playing field in the drama that it is, we have 2 people. The sales person and maybe you, the buyer. Now you probably know this from your own experience, but they're filling up that sales force automation system with something and let's think about some of the things that they ask you. Well, they probably want to know how many users there are in your organization. They definitely want to know how much budget you have. They probably want to know about existing contracts that you have with other providers and they probably want to know something about where you are in the organization chart. There is a lot more that they ask you and you know it. So it's a very long list of things that they're trying to get out of you to establish the kinds of business that they think they can do with you and there's nothing wrong or malicious about this except for when you look over here and you say, "well, what's on my list?" So they took a bunch of notes, they filled out some big complicated system and I had a nice meeting.

So what can we do to combat this? Well, let me just suggest this. Well, you don't have a really expensive application to work with. I can suggest that you open up a word processing document or something and actually start asking them some questions, be clear about it. How much budget pressure are you under? When did your fiscal quarter end, show me your org chart? Who else have you done work for, in exactly the same context that you're talking to me about? What's the lifecycle of the product or service that you're selling me? Are you under any pressure to get this sold now? Is this brand new? Am I the first person to use it, your discounting practices? What's your general philosophy around this? Can I get that out of the upfront so that I can save a lot of time in the back and in negotiations?

So as you can see, we established a long list of things that the sales professional wants from you and now a pretty nice list of things that you might want from them and the very good news is many of the items are exactly the same. So when they're busy asking you those questions, you can ask them right back. So just maintain the flow, information from you, information from them, and come to the table fully equipped. It's a level playing field, you'll make your best deal.