I hope you’re well fed because in sales terms, you won’t survive if you eat like a bird. I’m not suggesting you actually stuff your face but rather make sure you get your plate full of higher calorie deals in your sales pipeline. Calories are a measurement of energy and if you remember back to your 10th grade chemistry class, it all boils down to joules (units of energy - 4.18 joules = 1 calorie ). So while we think about adequate calories to satiate our palates, we also need to think about calories in our daily energy and make sure we’re consuming the enough calories to progress. It’s only fitting that we speak about energy and calories when we’re selling energy dispensing systems.
In sales, not all deals are alike. Some deals are small, some deals are large, some deals take a year to cultivate and some deals happen overnight. What are the best deals? What are the worst deals? The answer lies in a simple calculation of caloric intake. The calculation is a function of profit per deal / total hours spent. In this case, the higher the calorie intake, the better. A deal that takes hours of resources is fine if it’s profitable is enough to fund the business operations - high caloric intake. A deal that takes hours of resources but is small and generates minimal profit is low caloric intake. A deal that takes virtually no time but falls in your lap…well that’s a unicorn. This calculation though needs to be front of mind for a sales professional and needs to be communicated either directly (or indirectly) to a customer in a very delicate way.
One of my sales reps called me the other day and was perplexed. He said, “Eric, why am I spending hours and hours going back and forth coordinating site walks for this client, who I hope one day will turn into a large customer, for such a small first deal when this other client just feeds me deals?” My answer to him was rather pointed - I think you should fire the customer. The reality is that he won’t get on the phone and say “You’re fired” in Donald Trump’s voice but rather he needs to push back and say to the customer something along the lines of “Hey, these smaller projects aren’t something our internal project management team can coordinate on your behalf. This is something that we’re more than willing to coordinate when we do a larger engagement but for a one-off need, we can provide you the contact info and suggest you reach out to them. These contact are quite familiar with our product and when you’re ready to purchase, I’ll work with you to get the order together.” That customer may not like that answer but then that customer doesn’t respect you and your business. They’re the ones that want the world given to them but don’t want to pay for it. A reasonable customer should understand this and will respect you for sharing the larger business objectives. In this scenario, my sales rep is recognizing that the calories are better spent elsewhere.
This notion of calories and resources was one of the driving factors that helped us at Xeal recognize the value of channel partnerships - especially ones that benefit from the installation and labor work that comes with our projects. I hate to say the cliche that “one man’s trash is another one’s treasure” but the truth is that some people are better spent quarterbacking a project than others and in some cases, our channel partners are better off playing single point of contact than one of our sales reps to our end customer - and that’s OK. In fact, it’s more than OK, it’s a scalable solution if you have the right product in market and you have the partners that can benefit from the caloric intake.
So the next time a sales rep doesn’t give you the attention you want, it may because you’re not worth the calories and you should ask them to connect you to their Goldilock calorie match.