New School Book Review: Nonstop Sales Boom (Colleen Francis)

After hearing Colleen Francis speak at the Salesforce.com event in Dallas called Salesforce Essentials for Sales Performance last month, I decided to read her book Nonstop Sales Boom. This book is deeply researched and has some real nuggets that will help any C-Level Salesperson, but its true intended audience is sales management.

Nonstop Sales Boom argues for a new way of thinking about sales – gone is the simple linear progression from suspect to prospect to customer, then onto the next one. Rather, she persuasively argues that selling today require a sort of “Sales Radar”, wherein a sales organization is always working with prospects, suspects and customers that can be placed somewhere in quadrants that she calls Attraction, Participation, Growth, and Leverage. Often a large customer can be in more than one of these categories at once.

The premise is that if we work each of these quadrants effectively, we can “even out” the typical boom, then bust, sales pattern. I said earlier that this book’s true intended audience is managers. Here’s why: To truly benefit from the advice, an organization would require implementation across domains that won’t typically be the province of any single C-Level salesperson. The changes would need to ripple across sales to marketing to compensation etc.

On the other hand, any salesperson that is working inside an organization that is implementing the advice contained in Nonstop Sales Boom should see both a benefit from the modern approach, and also a demand that each rep really know their numbers – How many contacts end up as leads, how many leads become qualified leads, how many customers those qualified leads yield.

A few nuggets: In the “Attraction” section, Ms. Francis contrasts the “Traditional Selling Process” with the “Modern Buying Process”. Read this – it encapsulates how much of the process happens on the buyer side before you might typically become aware of the potential suspect. Know your sales conversion numbers. My favorite nugget came not from the book, but from the talk Ms. Francis gave at the event. She discussed how the velocity that B2B customers expect is being driven by the B2C experiences they have – Don’t be afraid to reach out to a prospect that your web analytics tells you was just browsing your website. Rather than thinking that would be “A little creepy, like Big Brother is watching you” as was stated by one of the sales leaders on the panel, Ms. Francis cited data that showed that people actually felt good when a company seemed that responsive. Also, the closer the potential buyer is to the millennial generation, the more likely they were to appreciate that timely outreach.