Month: October 2020

Sales Success for the Individual Contributor

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Let’s start with two of my favorite personal quotes:

“Luck is what happens when Preparation meets Opportunity.” – Seneca, Roman Philosopher.

“Become the person who would attract the results you seek.” – Jim Cathcart, Author of “Relationship Selling”

Why are those quotes important? Because they point out that you are responsible for your own success.

Picture of a hand holding several twenty dollar bills

Great companies with great products or services and great management teams make it much easier to be successful, but anyone who is prepared, curious, focused, motivated, and has a system they follow can succeed anywhere.

My experience has shown the following to be true:

  1. You are unlikely to succeed without preparation and understanding of your prospects, their customers, and their competition. This understanding provides the foundation for asking relevant questions to understand the real need and effectively qualify a deal in or out.
  2. Most sales occur because a Product or Service solves real and immediate business problems or ties into strategic business initiatives.
  3. Your early goals should be around getting the meeting, having real discussions, understanding problems from your prospect’s perspective (including the terminology they use to describe those problems), and helping them describe what success “looks like to them” and why that is important (logically and emotionally). At this stage, you are learning and positioning, not selling.
  4. Deal qualification is an essential skill that enables you to focus your time and efforts where you are most likely to succeed. The faster you can “qualify out” a prospect that is not a good fit, the better it is for you and that prospect. Eternal optimism is not a plan for filling your pipeline.
  5. If you have a supporting team, ensure that everyone understands the situation, their role and contribution to success, and what you want them to focus on. Never assume that things will just fall into place on their own.
  6. Have a repeatable process to track activities, measure progress, and identify the best next steps. Remember, “To measure is to know.” (Lord Kelvin)
  7. The sale is not over until your new Customer is happy. Become their internal advocate within your organization, and you will be rewarded with the customer’s trust, loyalty, and repeat business.

Ideally, your Sales Leadership Team has defined a Sales Strategy and created a couple of repeatable Sales Plays and compelling supporting materials such as Success Stories; Case Studies; ROI and TCO charts; brief but targeted Demos; and realistic Product Comparison information for internal use. These become the foundation for repeatable and scalable success.

But, if that is missing, collaborate with your peers, seek guidance from your leadership, and get creative. Remember, you are ultimately responsible for your success, so don’t allow things to become excuses or a crutch. In the words of the Buddha, “There are three solutions to every problem: Accept it, Change it, or Leave it.”

To help ensure success, you will need to follow a Sales Methodology. Here is a link to a good high-level overview from Spotio.com. I’ve used several and there are pros and cons to each. None of them effectively addresses the successful progression from:

  1. Initiation, Understanding, and Qualification.
  2. Defining a compelling Solution and successfully positioning it against the competition.
  3. Closing the Sale is an area in which many salespeople fall short.

The sales methodology that I personally believe is one of the easiest to use and most effective is MEDDIC. It is a Deal Qualification process, which is more encompassing than a simple Lead Qualification approach. The biggest blind spot is that it fails to address these four key areas:

  1. Influencers within a buyer’s organization. Knowing who these people are and their biases will allow you to direct various resources towards each and ideally provide a multi-threaded approach for each deal.
  2. Incumbents and the sentiment towards those vendors and their products. This is key to not wasting time on an opportunity you would unlikely win.
  3. Related/Adjacent needs. Being able to tie success to multiple areas provides leverage and increases the value of your solution.
  4. Timeline/Urgency. This allows you to work backward from milestone dates for efforts like typical lead times for Legal and Purchasing, Integration Testing, QA/QC, Training and Documentation, etc.

Being prepared, creating a common vision of success based on the outcome rather than the approach, being responsive, and developing relationships and trust based on knowledge and a desire to help are easy ways to differentiate yourself from many lesser salespeople. Invest in your skills, set aggressive goals, and always hold yourself accountable for success.

Do this and you will become part of the 20% of any sales team that ‘moves the dial.’

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Biometric Identity Theft

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Recently, I have been researching the potential for fraud and identity theft using fingerprints from photos posted on social media. Last week Amazon released its “Amazon One” Palm Scanner to pay for purchases when shopping. That announcement made me wonder, what are the potential implications for fraud and identity theft using biometric data taken from images?

Man's forearm and hand, index finger extended to point to one of a series of "digital keys"
Could Photos posted on Social Media sites become the Key to Digital Identify Theft?

Technology continues to improve rapidly, which often means, “Where there is the will, there’s a way.”

There are a surprising number of ways to accurately identify someone from a photo or video. Moreover, there is technology to copy fingerprints from social media photos taken up to three meters away. New technology has been proven effective at using 3D printing technology to create “fake fingerprints” that bypass many fingerprint scanners.

Since fingerprints can be copied from photos taken up to three meters away, can a palm print be copied from a photo taken 5-10 meters away? That question led to an interesting but unscientific experiment where I took pictures of my hand, enlarged them, measured the distance between the ridges and furrows of my fingers and my palm, and compared the results. Spoiler – probably not (yet) – but likely not far away given the rapid advancement of AI.

There are several areas where that distance was similar for both my fingers and palm. But, there were also areas on my palm where the average distance between “landmarks” was 3-5+ times greater. It turns out that a palm image is often segmented into 3-4 distinct regions for identification purposes, likely due to this type of variation. This link was helpful in understanding the process.

This research led to an idea for a chip-based embedded filter for smart devices and laptops. It would obfuscate key biometric information when extracting the data for display without affecting the integrity of the original stored image. This functionality would automatically provide an additional layer of privacy and data protection. It would require optimized object detection capabilities (possibly R-CNN) that were highly efficient and run on a capable but low-energy processor like the Arm Cortex-M. Retraining and upgrades would be accomplished with firmware updates.

Edit 2020-10-13: This article on “Tiny ML” from Medium.com is the perfect tie-in to the abovementioned idea.

While Amazon’s technology is much newer and presumably at least partially based on their 2019 Patent Application (which does look impressive), it makes you wonder how susceptible these devices might be to fraud given reports of the scans occurring “almost instantaneously.” Speed is one aspect of successful large-scale commercial adoption, but the accuracy and integrity of the system are far more important from my perspective.

Time will tell how robust and foolproof Amazon’s new technology really is. Given their reach, this could occur sooner rather than later. Ultimately, multiple forms of biometric scans (such as a full handprint with shape, palm, and fingerprints or a retina scan 2-3 minutes prior to the palm scan to maintain performance) may be required for enhanced security, especially with mobile devices.

Additional Resources:

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