I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Anyone in a sales focussed company is aware of The Call.
The Call can be horrible thing that causes stress to all people in the sales team. People loose sleep over The Call.
The Call is: What do you commit you will sell this month (or quarter)?
The Call is not your target, it is the deals and revenue you commit to for the period.
The Call cascades down the organisation. The board asks the CEO. What’s your call for this quarter? The CEO asks the same of the global sales manager, who picks up the phone to each national sales manager, to each divisional sales team leads and down to each sales rep.
The Call is therefore necessary, especially in a public company. I first learnt about The Call at Quest (I got sales educated at Quest which I’m very grateful for).
In our team at Quest we had a simple deal classification model. Pipeline were deals you were working on, Stretch were deals you might make, but the important number is your Commit. What do you commit you will close? You call your Commit number.
The trick with The Call is put a number that is high enough that you won’t get fired and low enough that you are 100% going to make it. You do not want to miss your call number as you can imagine the cascading questions that come down from the top. You don’t want a question from the top.
Another phenomena in sales land is ‘the secret deal’. The secret deal comes directly out of the call. It is the deal your sales manager does not know about. You don’t want it in your call number. It’s your ‘get of jail card’, it’s your big commission cheque. Every sales person has their secret deal.
Selling is one of the big buzzes in the tech world. You can build great stuff but it means nothing until you sell it. But until you make your quarter number, you live under the pressure of: The Call.
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Who told you about the secret deal? That supposed to be secret…damn, I hope management aren’t reading this…
The ‘Call’ is a really great concept and method. We do use it as well…
However, I wonder what the equivalent would be in a non-selling based software business..
What I mean is, many web businesses (SaaS and others) are designed for auto trials, auto sales (autoresponder followup), auto signups. The aim being the ‘low inertia’ sales approach - This is great for scalability (Because selling manually = expensive / hard to scale).
With low inertia or automatic selling systems/autoresponders etc, profit can increase as the cost per sale drops and it’s then just an issue of marketing and conversion rates.
SO… This means the ‘Call’ should possibly be applied in a marketing sense? ie: You must put 100 leads in the pipeline this week (rather than you must CLOSE 10 leads in the pipeline this week).
Thoughts anyone?
PS: Regarding ‘the secret deal’ - there’s also such a thing as ‘the secret marketing push’. I like other marketers have some tricks up my sleeve that mean if needed, I can push (for free) huge relevant traffic at the site for a few days… ;-)
To sum up… Should the ‘Call’ be applied to marketers too?
Looking spot on with the call on Xero for May!
The secret deal remind of my years in broadcasting sales management.
We used to ask our sales people to fill out call sheets every week, where they were going ,who they were seeing what was in the pipeline etc etc…
Our sales people used to call them “lie sheets” so if you do run this call, pipeline and secret deal strategy… monitor it, monitor it, monitor it weekly, daily and hourly- then there will be no secret deals to lie about…