Avoid The Mumble Zone

Had a thoroughly enjoyable lunch in the first London sunshine of the Summer yesterday with the head of one of my customer’s sales teams.  He’d a process of “CCRs” (client contact reports) which unsurprisingly the reps never filled out.  He knew that his post-sales Services team became party to killer intel from their clients when going in for training and consultancy and the like.

My service in part makes it simple to capture this – critically without replicating the low compliance or necessity of CCR input – and so the boss can easily see what Leads may be triggered from around his base from projects that his reps can explore.

One current initiative involves selling a new add-on module.  A few contact reports showed there could be a need for it, so he asked the reps concerned if they knew anything about them.  Most times, they did not (which is actually alright).  Where they did though, he then asked what they were doing about it, and he said his experience was that “they entered the mumble zone“.

I love this expression.  He was saying that they tried to justify actions where no activity existed.  The clear lesson for sales people, is that if you become aware of a potential project, at least have one solid documented activity around something to do with exploring it further!