You would think after all the traveling I’ve done, I would learn how to pack.   Nope- I still don’t get it. Here I am in Amsterdam freezing and thinking of everything I left behind. I have a hooded coat with fur, big heavy boots, thick cashmere scarfs, wool tights and every hat imaginable. Where are they? Neatly folded in my closet back home.

So what goes through my mind when I have to fill my suitcase? I look out my window and see a sunny San Francisco day and an ocean view and believe the whole world looks like this. I’ve been known to dress in what I hope the weather will be and not by what it is.  I have to admit that I pack lighter now but the down side to packing light is when all the wrong things are sitting lightly in your suitcase, you have blown it.

I can relate this to our qualifying efforts. After dialing for hours, we finally get someone live on the phone. We are so excited to speak with them and qualify the opportunity that we fill up the time with conversation that doesn’t help move the sale forward. After we hang up and we are ready to document the call, we realize all the critical and essential questions we left out. We kick ourselves because we are so much better than that, we know better but haven’t learned how to pack the right things and keep it light.

 At holiday gatherings, I like standing under the mistletoe and waiting for a kiss. This simple ritual warms everyone’s hearts and brings romance in the air.

In sales, when we search for low-hanging fruit, it can seem like standing under the mistletoe. It is passive, we get a good feeling and we spend too much time waiting. There is nothing wrong with looking to sell low-hanging fruit but the problem is that nothing in sales is always that easy.

Closing a sale requires more skill than ever before. A salesperson must work and develop the opportunity, qualify it over and over and over and carefully listen for impact of not having the solution. They must present the solution based on the needs they identified and identify a compelling event to move the sale along. They must also become a resource for their prospect, an conduit for information and a champion in helping their prospect sell the solution internally. And when the sale actually closes, it’s a combination of luck, tenacity, motivation and very hard work.

Last week Adobe announced some restructuring in their sales organization and many talented field salespeople were let go. The good news is that their restructuring efforts will be focused on setting up a robust inside sales organization out of San Francisco. Good move. Adobe isn’t the first to do this, we will see a lot more of this in the coming year.

Setting up an inside sales organization isn’t as easy as it sounds and unfortunately many well-intentioned high level executives tend to set up inside sales organizations to fail. Here are some common traps to watch out for:

1. No defined structure- How will the organization be structured? Will there be Lead Development, Inside Sales, Renewals teams? What is the hand-off and sales process?

2. Not taking a stand- There is power in numbers and many don’t set up teams but individuals and keep them disbursed throughout the country. You must have continuity and uniformity.

3. Lack of respect from the field- If the reps in the field are weak, they rely too heavily on the inside team for the wrong reasons. They insist on half-baked leads, or cancel appts with well qualified leads, or ask the inside to help them on brainless admin tasks they could do themselves.

4. Long sales cycle- Inside sales team members need easy wins to keep them focused on the daily grind of pounding out calls. It’s important for the inside to have an easy low-cost solution to provide early adoption opportunities for their prospect. Product evals are a good vehicle and can convert to a potential sale.

5. New messaging = new confusion- When the product focus changes so much, it confuses the inside teams and this keeps them from positioning it effectively.

6. Who should buy it? Back to basics on who actually should buy your product or be a coach on buying your product.

7. Set unrealistic quota goals too late- It happens all the time, inside sales waits to get their quotas assigned and then they finally come around two quarters late and they are much higher than expected. This impacts their productivity and their focus. 

8. Marketing is disconnected- Marketing is off doing their own thing, blasting out to thousands of disqualified leads they never bothered to scrub and expect the inside teams to follow-up. When leads are so bad, this affects the lead conversion process and the inside gets blamed for it.

9. Providing training that is field focused- Skills training is great when it is most appropriate to the team receiving it. Inside sales requires a very different skill set than field sales and training that is appropriate makes more sense.

10. Too much- Before this group didn’t have enough and now they have way too much. Too much technology and tools can paralyze and create ways to avoid what they have been chartered to do. Picking up the phone and selling is a good start.

The holidays are here and everyone is shopping. According to comScore predictions,  online holiday shopping will total at least $30 billion this year. So, what are you doing shopping for a new GPS system while you are trying to prospect?  It’s easy to multitask when you have 15 different screens open on your desktop but statistics claim a lack of productivity when you multitask. Although some generations tend to multitask better than others, the brain simply doesn’t handle multitasking well.

The holiday selling months can be the toughest months to sell. Not so much because your prospects don’t want to buy but more because it’s more challenging to get yourself focused. Distractions and timebombs surround us on a daily basis, whether you are working remotely or within a team setting.

Yet, this becomes an excellent opportunity for new qualifying and needs discovery. Tkae advantage of this- especially when your competition is distracted.