New grads are on the loose! Hide your best leads!

If you've been in sales for any period of time, you know that this is a delicate season.

On one hand, you want the help that many organizations bring on board in summer, to increase the volume of contacts with your prospects. On the other hand, the founders' nephews' boyfriends who really need a job after they've earned a business degree...can make you question the value of our nation's educational institutions.

If you're in line for the gift horse, as we like to call our newly hired new grads at SJN Sales, here are a couple of tips to get the most from them:

1. Know your best leads. If you have a strong, positive relationship with a particular prospect, do not do not do not delegate any contact to someone who is new to your company. If you've invested in a connection, passing it to someone junior sends the wrong message.
2. Dish the ones that look good on paper. If you have a company in your sights that fits into your high probability matrix, you've worked your process, and you just have not gotten to first base--hand it off. Sometimes, despite your mom and the nicer sales managers' denying it, what is not working in the relationship really is just you. If you stay in sales, you'll learn not to personalize this.

So use your database or CRM, sort your leads and ask for a bonus on whatever the new kid sells. Congratulations to the graduates, and good luck to all.

Recovery indicator: Sales hiring has been budgeted for summer

Great news--the economy is inching toward employment recovery. We're predicting this because SMB hiring in sales jobs is showing signs of life--longtime clients are wrapping up their contracts with SJN Sales and moving to increase head count!

Perhaps this is contrary, but we're delighted. More new hires by SaaS and software developers means more prospecting, more presentations and more demos being delivered. SJN Sales' new offering in lead conversion--we will now carry out followups on your existing leads as a stand-alone project--fits into this trend perfectly. More about our new followup campaigns here.

Pricing: Two cautionary tales

The first, from a geneticist blogger, shows the perils of letting your competition do all your thinking to set price...then automating with an algorithm. Needless to say, the case of the $23 million textbook carries a couple of lessons with it. Never assume that you've automated a process so perfectly that you don't need to check on the results, and don't distract grad students who spend their time studying flies because--ooh shiny!

Then we get the small business beat from the NY Times, telling a story of entrepreneurs raising their prices. Take-away: Price is just one factor in your customers' minds . Provide a valuable product or service at a profitable rate, and ignore your competition's pricing. Odd that the reporter never thought to add, Because all too often intangibles have to compete with something "free", copying prices or even payment model (this much a month, yearly subscription, this much an hour) isn't a strategy.

What did your least productive 20% of staff do today?

Please assure yourself that if you don't yet have a network security/filtering device, none of these folks works for you.

Because there is no cognitive surplus at your business, right?

"It sells itself."

Can't count how many times I've been told about newly developed software: It sells itself.

You know, the odds are that it doesn't. Or we wouldn't be having this conversation. Seriously, some percentage of our clients apparently find that everyone who sees their product buys it. And that's great!

It means that they've built a solution that responds to a real, painful business problem. However, there are a number of steps that happen before a new prospect sees the product, and that's where we  come in.

More on this tomorrow--the SaaS product on my desk isn't selling itself at this hour, which is why we're busy around here.

Is this thing on?

Social media bubble--it's like the South Seas, tulips and Fresno starter homes, all rolled into one! You, yes you, have got to plant your business's flag in all the social media.

Meaning, user-generated content. Meaning, what Clay Shirky approves of (cognitive surplus: it's a new world of labors of love, paid for in unicorn dust!) and Nick Carr disapproves of (go outside and play, you're rotting your brain!) has become required for all serious businesses.

Even those of us who are pretty sure that no one buys complex intangibles because they got 'liked' on Facebook.