What is Topline and Bottomline in Sales?

Hey friends, If you recently took up a role in Sales, then you would have frequently heard the two terms Topline and Bottomline from your executive level bosses. If you want know what are those, you have come to the right place.

These two Business Jargons have simpler meaning than they appear to be. Let me tell you what do they mean.

In any business, while you are doing sales, you would make revenue by selling something. Obviously, Once you sell the products or services, you cannot keep the whole revenue with yourself or organization. Major chunk of that revenue goes towards meeting the cost of making the product, income taxes, hr and administration costs involved in managing staff, etc. After deducting all these operating expenses and taxes, what we are left with is the net profit or net income which we can keep which belongs to shareholders and if they wish to, can be invested further into the business.

In this case, the revenue which you generate on making sales is called Topline and the net profit or net income which you generated after deducting all operating expenses and taxes from the revenue is what is known as Bottomline.

Whenever business executives discuss their financials, they monitor these two numbers very closely. Increasing Topline is one of the priority for them to increase the organization growth. However, with this they cannot ignore Bottomline growth because, if they are not left with enough cash after selling products and services, the business cannot survive for long and is not sustainable for long. 

Hence both the metrics should be monitored together since both go hand in hand for a sustainable growth of business.

3 Sales Tips to get response from C-suite executives

Getting a meeting from a C-suite executive of a mid or large corporation is one of the most daunting task for a sales person. This is because unlike other prospects who are in the lower hierarchy of an organization where sales person can pitch in multiple times and try out different ways to approach the prospect, with a C-suite executive, the sales person stands just one shot.

That's the reason why sales professionals should have a fool proof strategy while approaching a C-suite executive while trying to get him for a sales meeting.

Here are 3 tips from my experience which can help you get a reply from CXOs while trying to get their response for a sales meeting:

1. Try asking for a referral within the organization.

Most of the time, top level executives especially CEO, CMO, CFO or COO would be involved with multiple internal tasks that they would hardly get any time for an external sales person which is you. Even if they find your short sales pitch to be interesting, they would hardly have bandwidth for a meeting. This is the reason they would try to defer it. But most of the time, CXOs would be ready to delegate it to their Subordinates or Executive Assistants. 

A few of the executives would refer you to another person in their organization on their own, but not the case with everyone until you ask them for that. So, next time you send a cold email, try asking them for a referral in their organization whom you can talk for discovery interviews or sales meetings.

2. KISS - Keep It Short & Simple

Almost every CXO of an organization is a busy person hardly having any time even for self. During these moments, if you get a chance to talk to him on phone, don't waste his time asking long discovery questions which you can ask others within the same organization. Try to keep your talk short, crisp and to the point instead of trying to blabber round and round about a concept just to gain his attention. Instead of getting his attention, chances are there that you would lose his interest which is lethal in sales.

Hence, the next time you get to talk to a C level executive, try presenting key benefits for him which you can offer via your products, instead of asking him his 5 year vision of his organization and asking generic time consuming questions as to what are their challenges. Ideally you should ask these questions, only if you have a longer meeting planned with the executive especially for discovery interview.

3. Follow Up

Following up is the key to sales success. But it takes a key precedence if you are trying to sell to busy C-suite executives. Often CXOs would be travelling a lot, meeting people around the world. This means he would stay away from his base office often. Chances are there that in his run up to catch up his own work, he would forget about your last meeting. This necessitates that you follow up with the executive by cut-off date before any competitor pitch in and grab the deal.

So, the next time you finish off a meeting with an executive, make sure you ask him when he shall be available for a next meeting and make sure to add that date to your CRM so that it can remind you for another meet up.

I hope you enjoyed reading the post. Do let me know your thoughts on this.

3 Traits of Successful Sales Managers

Often you would observe the best salesperson when promoted to Sales Manager would sometimes fail to become a good at it and sometimes you might also find few instances where an average sales person went on to become a good Sales Manager.

Why is that so?

This is because of certain fundamental differences in the work performed by Sales Person and Sales Manager. The former is a individual contributor role while the later is the management role where the sales manager has to take the whole team into picture and think of every team member's growth in order to achieve the sales targets of the whole sales team.

Leading Sales teams towards team goals

[Image Credits - IMI]

Let us look at 3 key traits every Sales Manager should possess to be super successful in his profession.

1. He looks at the bigger picture instead of focusing on a few team members.

Often Sales Manager's tend to focus on a few top performing sales persons for achieving the team's sales quota rather than working with all the team members. This behavior usually leads to unhappiness among the other team members, who would start feeling alienated. This impacts their performance and ultimately makes it difficult for sales managers to achieve team's goals with a handful of top performers. Top performers should be given preference in giving costly and big deals, but it shouldn't become the case that a sales manager start becoming over dependent on those team members to cover his complete team's quota.

2. Sales Manager should mentor and guide the newer folks.

The Manager should not look only at the short term picture where his only goal is to extract out revenue from his folks. Often sales team would have a range of members with varied sales experience each having his own strengths and weakness. The Manager should identify those gaps and try to mentor the team members and help them overcome their shortcomings which in turn would help the team achieve revenue targets. This would also help boost self esteem of the team member and hence he would like to work within your organization for longer rather than planning for a job switch.

3. He should be a team contributor instead of Individual contributor.

Third and most important as I already wrote in the beginning, an individual contributor sales person is not a good fit for becoming a sales manager. This is where I mentioned if a top performer sales person is given a responsibility of becoming a sales manager, he should also start working with the whole team for their development in addition to his own individual performance in sales closures. Individual contributor should start empathizing with other folks and work with them to achieve the whole team's sales quota. If this is not the case, then manager would sometime get frustrated and would think that he himself can complete the quota alone rather than guiding the team members. This would ultimately lead to disaster because the ultimate purpose of sales management is actually to manage bigger sales teams, not doing everything alone. Sales Manager's job is to focus on bigger things rather than doing the sale himself.

Hope you would have liked this post. Do comment your opinions and let me know.

3 Price Negotiation Mistakes every Salesperson should avoid

Often, Salespersons tend to make mistakes during their Sales Negotiation conversations and tend to lose out on the sales wondering what exactly happened. The lead which they have been following up for many month now is lost just at the last phase of the sales cycle at the time of Sales Negotiation. These are the 3 expensive mistakes which every sales person should avoid at the time of negotiation.

1. Price Negotiation on High Cost Products

Avoid negotiation with Customers for reducing the price of high cost products. Always try to negotiate with customers only for the low cost products having a high perceived value in the minds of the customers. If you reduce the price of High Cost Products, then customers would expect that every time they buy from you. This is detrimental for your business growth since you would find it difficult to run your business on thin margin for a prolonged period of time.

2. Not knowing the Urgency for Customers

As a Salesperson, you would stand good at negotiating position if you are aware of the extent of urgency of the customer who wants to buy from you. If they are having less time and the purchase of the product you are selling is urgent for them, then you stand a better chance. In this kind of situation, you have more chances to crack the sales deal with lesser amount of negotiation with the customer. This is because since customer doesn’t have much time to search for another vendor, they would happily agree with your price. 

3. Starting Negotiation without understanding the needs of the customer

You should never start sales negotiation at the start of the sales cycle even without understanding the needs of the customer in the discovery phases of the sales cycle. The more questions you ask to your customer during the Need Discovery phases of the sales cycle, the more information you will get on the needs and requirements of the customers. This will help you set the expectations of the customers and would help you negotiate better. The more you know about the expectations of the client, the more you would be able to point out those facts during your sales negotiation conversations and hence customers would be willing to pay a higher price if their expectations are met.

What is RFI, RFP and RFQ in B2B Sales

Often, Sales Professionals in B2B Direct Sales would come across these 3 important sales terminologies.

1. RFI

2. RFP

3. RFQ

In this post, Let’s go through each of these sales terms.

1. RFI

RFI is the first step in B2B purchase step. This acronym stands for “Request for Information”. As the name suggests, the client who is looking for purchasing a solution is looking for some information from the vendors. Usually, Purchaser would float a “Request for Information” from the available vendors when it is new in that particular product’s market. For. e.g. A company might be looking for a solution for improving sales productivity but might be lacking much information in that area or domain. So they would seek RFI from multiple vendors seeking information on the available solutions and problems those solutions can tackle.

2. RFP

RFP is ideally the next step after RFI. This acronym stands for “Request for Proposal”. In this step, the client who is looking for purchasing a solution floats a RFP from vendors asking them to propose for a solution to the problems of the vendor. In this, the purchaser usually mentions specific problems which it is facing and would like to have an answer or solution to those specific problems. For E.g. A company might be looking for CRM solution, but it might be specifically interested in solving its problem of managing customer contacts. In that case, the buyer would be specifically interested in getting proposal for vendors for solving the problem of managing or organizing customer contacts. In this step, sometimes buyer also expects a high level overview of the cost for the proposed solution from the vendor. 

3. RFQ

RFQ is ideally the next step after RFP provided the purchaser doesn’t mix it up in the RFP stage. RFQ stands for “Request for Quotation”. If the purchaser had not asked for detailed costs for each solution item in RFP stage, then they would float a request for quotation asking the vendors to provide detailed cost structure for their proposed solution. Sometimes, purchasers who are directly looking for a list of goods with certain predefined specifications instead of solutions provided by the vendors would directly jump to RFQ stage without even floating any RFP. In this case they are looking for commodity type of goods with industry standard specification rather than looking for any consulting support from vendor on these.

I hope you found the explanation of these 3 terms to be useful. Do comment below and let me know your thoughts.

What is Sales Prospecting

Any Sales Lifecycle comprises of various stages which starts with Prospecting. But very often newbie salespersons or enthusiasts asks "What exactly is Sales Prospecting?".

In this post, I would like to address those newbie and ambitious sales persons to understand what exactly is Sales Prospecting.

If you are in Sales, you would most certainly have following ways to get business:

1. Leads from Networks.
2. Leads from Inbound Marketing.
3. Leads from Outbound Prospecting.

Aaron Ross, the author of Predictable Revenue mentions Outbound Prospecting to be one of the powerful weapon in your sales arsenal to achieve 10x revenue growth.

The reason for this is simple. First, Leads that you can get from your Network is limited and hence for 10x revenue growth you cannot always rely on networks for your whole business. Second, Getting Leads from Inbound Marketing takes time. You need to get your SEO right, you need to carve out a lot of contents to be absorbed by visitors before you get your first lead subscribing to your mailing list. Both of the above techniques are little unpredictable though they do have significance in the long future. This is the reason companies should never ignore Outbound Prospecting.

Ideally Outbound Prospecting is done by Sales Development Representatives wherein they try to find out new leads for the business. Prospecting is an act of finding or hunting for new leads. This is done by trying to contact the leads via cold calls, cold emails, etc. Sometimes this may also include calling or trying to contact the leads who went cold after some time in the past (technically, this comes under Lead Nurturing).

Contrary to the age old belief that Prospecting is a kind of tele-calling job, it has actually changed a lot in the recent years of modern Sales and Marketing. The quality of work done during Prospecting stage can truly break or make a company. This is an important determinant for the Business Development Representatives to be able to convert the deals given to them by Sales Development Representatives. If Prospecting is not done on the right customer persona and lead qualification is not done correct by the Prospecting team, it can ultimately waste months of lead nurturing time given by the Business Development Rep.

Hence Prospecting should be done very carefully.

While doing Prospecting, a Sales Development representative should clearly prepare the persona of a prospective client by preparing a checklist by acquiring data of the customer profiles acquired in the past. This can include the typical industry where the clients come from, the typical revenue which clients have, the typical budget they have for the product which you are selling, job role of the person who took the decision to buy your product, job roles of the key influencers in those deals, etc.

Once the customer profile persona is ready, the prospector should start Prospecting by trying to contact the leads in appropriately applicable ways and try to analyse if they fit in the persona. If the lead fits in, it should be advanced to the next stage of the sales process to the Business Development representative so that he can take it to closure.

Prospecting is like Going to Gym for Exercise. It should be done regularly and with adequate frequency. If you do not exercise regularly, sometimes you will feel tired, some times energized but you will never get to your ultimate objective of attaining fitness. Similarly, if you do not do Prospecting regularly, your Sales Pipeline would have inconsistent and unpredictable flow of revenue. A few months you would have a surge of leads for your Business Development reps to work on, which would become unmanageable and they would end of losing many of them. While a few months would have very less leads for your Business Development team to work on rendering them underutilized or less productive. This will also hit back in the form of inconsistent revenue flow.

Hence to keep your revenues in control, Prospecting should be done by dedicated sales development representatives and should be done regularly.

Hope you found this post useful. Do comment below and let me know your thoughts.

5 features to look before buying a Sales CRM

Very often CEOs and CMOs of startups who are searching for a CRM for their Sales Team find themselves in a confused state. With numerous CRM applications available in the market, they are in a dilemma to choose from various available options.

To decide which CRM is the best for you, you need to list down the functionalities you expect from a CRM system. After my interaction with multiple people in sales on LinkedIn, I found a number of things which are being expected from a CRM.

Sales Manager [Image Credits]

In short, modern sales teams consider following 5 things to be must have functionalities in a CRM without which a CEO or CMO should never purchase a CRM from any vendor.

1. Deals or Leads tracker.

A Good CRM should have a Deals or Leads tracker within it as a primary functionality. With this functionality, your sales team members should be able to add Deals or Leads into your CRM system so that it can be tracked as it traverses through various stages of the sales process which might be analogous to sales stages of New, Contact Made, Meeting Scheduled, Presentation Made, Negotiation, Won or Lost Deals stage, etc. 

• This gives a transparent view to the sales manager who can visualize as to which deal is stuck at a particular stage for long and need attention or follow ups. 
• It also helps forecast the sales for upcoming months based on the number of deals or Leads which are present in the sales pipeline based on the conversion ratio of each stage. 
• This helps you plan the number of deals required at each stage of sales process to have a steady flow of revenue every month.
• This also helps Sales Managers prioritize the Deals based on multiple parameters like Deal size or Winning probability, etc.

2. Contact Management Functionality

Your CRM should have a Contact Management functionality which helps you organize the contact information of your clients whom you need to interact with regards to the various deals in your sales pipeline. A good Contact Management feature should allow the sales team members to not only add contacts of people but also contact details of a company with which the deal is in sales pipeline. 

• Most importantly, the contact management functionality should have a sync with your Deals or Leads tracker rather than acting as a separate functionality in silos. 
• This feature should allow you to visualize the relationship with contacts and deals. Hence, if you view a contact, your CRM should be in a position to give you information on which all deals you are interacting with that contact, the past conversations you had with the concerned contact and other information about the contact which can help you crack the concerned deal.

3. Sales Reporting & Analytics

Your CRM contains lots of data entered into the system about deals, contacts and associated activities happening on each of them. But as a Sales Manager or a CMO or a CEO, what you need to know is the status in terms of numbers. Hence your CRM should give a bird eye view of where do your sales team stand in terms of sales status. 

• It can be in terms of numbers of upcoming deals in the pipeline, Deals Won or Lost in a specified time period, Reason for winning or losing the deals, Revenue forecast, Deviation of actual revenue from the forecast or sales goal, etc.
• This helps Sales Managers act instantaneously as and when they observe any anomaly in the Real Time Reports & Analytics 

4. Multi User functionality

Since CRM is to be used by your sales team it should have functionality to support multiple users. Unlike shared spreadsheets shared among multiple users which has no logs of which user updated the excel file, your CRM should track activities of each individual user. 

• It should enable the team members to stay accountable for their activities and not avoid accountability while entering status trackers which might happen when people are just editing a single excel file shared at a common location as it happens in a conventional companies which are yet to go Digital.

5. Flexibility in designing Sales Processes

Every business is different both in terms of the way they manage their sales process. Hence your sales CRM shouldn't force you to follow a rigid sales process which is difficult for your business due to complexities involved. 

I believe CRM should empower the sales teams rather than creating difficulties for your sales personnel. This means your CRM should be flexible enough to fit in your sales team within it rather than your sales team trying to fit their already established processes as per the CRM.

• Hence your CRM should allow you to design and re-design your Sales Stages. 
• Some Organizations might follow sales stages as New Deal, Contacted, Presentation, Negotiation, Won. 
• While at the same time another Organization might want to design sales stages as New, Contacted via Phone, Proposal Made, Presentation, Demo,  Negotiation, Contract Preparation, Contract Approval etc. 
• At the same time, some startup Sales Manager would like to experiment with different sales processes until they hit across a process which works out right for them.

Hence a good CRM should empower the sales managers with the flexibility to design their sales processes as and when they require.

Hence before buying your first CRM, do checkout these 5 must have functionalities for your CRM.