Great salespeople are made not born.
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Geoffrey James is one of the best sales expert bloggers and is the sales go-to guy for Inc. magazine. I’m pushing this along because he and I are in sync on the bestselling book, “The Challenger Sale” in that it’s mostly a retread of proven selling concepts combined with some original and flawed advice. It’s a good example of how attractive the marketing of “new selling ideas” can be. I know the industry very well and frankly, there aren’t any groundbreaking new methodologies that I’ve come across since Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling research and findings which Xerox sponsored over 25 years ago.
My advice is rather than looking for the flavour of the month, get your team mastering the fundamentals — setting goals, managing their time, prospecting, presenting and closing — by engaging in great training followed by relentless practice and implementation. Check out Geoff’s article in Inc. here.
When a company like Disney states that they consider training to be a key element in their company’s success, people should listen. They state accurately that training should be embedded in the company’s operation.
http://www.inc.com/disneyinstitute/james/operational.html
Well said!
Here’s a good post by another sales team development company that I respect (There are many I don’t!) It speaks of the uncompromising approach of Steve Jobs and how we need to take the same line with the design of our sales teams. I agree with the “no negotiation” attitude. As sales leaders, we need to do what we know is the right thing for our salespeople’s long term career growth, even if it means laying down the law in the short term.
We would be well be advised, however, do it in a manner that has more heart than Steve Jobs’ widely reported tyrannical style!
Check it out:
http://www.therainmakergroupinc.com/human-capital-strategy-blog/bid/155639/If-Steve-Jobs-Designed-Your-Sales-Team
I bet just a few minutes ago! This is a great article inspiring us to change the nasty habit of checking our phone hundreds of times per day into something more meaningful. So many of us mistake being “busy” with being productive. Salespeople, by nature, are very prone to this “busy-ness” syndrome. Doing things that get you closer to you goals is the key and checking emails and texting incessantly doesn’t usually help. Click here to check it out.
Our “Goal Aligned Time” workshop teaches powerful email management strategies and other time saving ideas.
I just read a very well written article in Profit from Mark Stuyt which spells the end of salespeople who customers have counted on in the past to be sources of product information. I couldn’t agree more. Salespeople can expect to find it increasingly hard to entice customers to engage with them if they don’t provide any value over what a few minutes of web research can do. Salespeople, on the other hand, who have been well trained to take a true consultative approach will find the transition to the new world of selling much easier.
Why? Because they will be able to uncover the problems, issues and needs with a potential buyer and armed with this deep knowledge and their industry experience, give advice on solutions that fit. A great salesperson can also help a customer see problems and opportunities that they might not even realize they have.
I recently read that the average buyer will be 65% of the way through the selling process before engaging a salesperson. If you are not much more than a “talking brochure or website” as a salesperson, there is nothing you can help the customer with and you will be left out of the process. This points to a need for sales professionals to be just that … more professional.
Exceptional training has never been more important!
This is a great article from Fast Company on the importance of daily practice in mastering anything – skateboarding or sales. It emphasizes that quantity, not quality is what needs to happen. Ask yourself, when was the last time I honed my selling skills by formal practice? Most salespeople should be practicing the fundamentals weekly and any new skill, daily, as the article suggests. See the full article here.
“What’s a reasonable amount of follow-up?” “If I’m not getting a response, when should I give up?” “Am I jeopardizing the sale if I’m too persistent?” These are all questions that often come up in our Power Prospecting workshop. How often to contact a prospect is a complex subject and one that I hope to clear up for you. Let’s take a deeper look at this issue.
The effort required to connect with someone, especially by phone, is dramatically greater today than it was even a few years ago. In the mid-90’s, just when voicemail was becoming commonplace, a business person could expect to connect to another business person 22% of the time or just shy of 1 in 5 times. Today, that number has jumped to 1 in 7. With the daily tsunami of email, getting people to respond by phone is more difficult than ever. This adds up to salespeople getting pushed to the bottom of the priority list in the business world.
To get someone’s attention and raise the level of urgency requires more frequent contact attempts than most salespeople are initially comfortable with. I think you’ll agree that proper business etiquette is to return voicemails within a day. For this reason, if you don’t connect live and instead, have to leave a voicemail, I recommend you give your prospective customer a day or so to return it. It’s helpful to set the expectation in your voicemail by saying something like, “If you don’t have a chance to get back to me in the next couple of days, I’ll try you again at your desk on Thursday morning.” When you call them on Thursday, this does a couple of things for you. First, it separates you from some salespeople in that you kept your promise. Second, your prospect will quickly understand that you’re going to be persistent in a polite, professional way.
A popular mistake by some salespeople is the mind reading they do of their prospect. “Gee, they haven’t called me back so I guess that means they aren’t interested. I don’t want to annoy them.” This assumption is very wrong. In the vast majority of cases, your prospects are busy people, just like you are, and unfortunately, returning sales calls falls to the bottom of their to-do list. When you eventually do connect, you will find that your polite persistence will most often generate a response something like, “I got your voicemails. I’m really sorry I haven’t called you back. We’ve just been crazy busy around here.” Frankly, I’ve made over 3000 prospecting calls since founding Northbound and I’ve only had one person ever say, “If I were interested, I would have called you back.” That’s right … ONE! Just last week, I finally got through to two prospective customers who I had left several voicemails and emails with. Did they say, “Michael, you are annoying me. I’m obviously not interested.” Not at all. In fact, both of them apologized profusely for not getting back to me and I booked meetings with each of them.
Polite, professional persistence is what often separates low performers from the great ones.
Your actions this week:
Northbound’s “Connecting to Mr. Big Cheese” workshop teaches you a proven system to connect with high level decision makers and motivate them to want to meet. To learn more or for pricing, contact Michael at [email protected] or 416.456.1440.
Happy prospecting!
Being an optimist by choice, I don’t usually recommend that people spend much time focusing on problems. In the case of making additional sales to our customers however, it’s a great idea. I’m sure you’re scratching your head right now trying to figure out my point. Let me explain.
Consultative selling, the powerful selling methodology that emerged in the early 90’s, is based on the idea that to sell something, you have to be able to demonstrate how it’s going to solve someone’s problem, challenge or issue. Companies were quick to get on the bandwagon by touting that they sell “solutions” but in most cases, it’s nothing more that marketing lip service. How can they sell solutions when their salespeople don’t even know what their customers’ specific problems are? Many sales forces promote solutions in search of problems. The right way, of course, is to find the problems and then show our customers how we can help.
This selling strategy requires some research and preparation to do effectively. There are 3 steps:
Start with a crystal clear understanding of what your competitive advantages are. Where do you have a leg up on our competition? It might be better selection, higher quality or time savings. Naturally your competitive advantages will vary according to the local branch and competitive landscape. You need to know how you compare to your competition’s strengths and weaknesses if you are going to persuade a customer to use your company over them.
Now, for each competitive advantage, ask, “What problems does this solve for the customer?” Keep drilling down by asking “So what?” until you think you’ve hit an issue that is of high importance to your customer. Often, it will boil down to factors such as saving time, saving money, increasing quality or reducing hassle. If you have a competitive advantage of an easy, quick and hassle free order system, you ask again, “So what?”. You might answer that this means that he saves time & money allowing him to focus on more important priorities in his role at his own business. Bingo! You’ve hit on problems that your customer deeply cares about. The last step ties everything together.
The final step in this process is to come up with a set of pre-planned questions that you can ask your customer that will uncover a problem, issue or challenge in this area. In this example, you might ask, “How do you go about ordering product currently” You might continue with something like, “How much time does that take you do you think?” or “Does that take away from your other responsibilities in your role?” The customer replies with, “Yeah. I spend a few hours per week doing it I guess.” You follow with, “Well, does that affect your costs and productivity?” Depending on his answer, you might respond with, “So would it help if you could work with a company that has an easier ordering system?” “Sure it would,” the customer might say. You then explain how we can help and provide some proof.
The beautiful thing about this strategy is that you are uncovering problems that you know you have a solution for, almost like a consultant, hence the term “consultative selling.” “Sounds great but does it work in the real world?” you ask? You bet it does. This technique is the gold standard for selling around the world and across virtually all industries.
Good selling involves leveraging your competitive strengths. To get customers to buy from us and/or pay more for our products, we have to give them good reasons to. Your ability to help them solve a problem, overcome a challenge or reach an important goal will motivate them to choose us over our competition. When you master the powerful and proven consultative selling approach, watch your sales grow!
Happy selling.
Michael
Call them what you want but technically they’re the same thing – resolutions or goals. Typically, however, resolutions are goals that most people start the year with and are usually accompanied by short lived passion. The sad fact is that while almost one out of two of us make new years resolutions, by the end of the year, only 12% of them are achieved. That’s an 88% failure rate, not much better than those who don’t even bother to set some. A recent study showed that 1 out of 4 people can’t even stick to their resolutions through the first week!
Why is this? The simple answer is because most people don’t manage their goals as an ongoing process. They simply “set ‘em and forget ‘em.” We’ve all done it. We sit at a blank piece of paper or computer screen (I bet many will be looking at it on their iPad they got for Christmas) and write some stuff down that we think are goals. At this stage, I’d call them wishes rather than goals because most often they don’t fit the SMART criteria.
(Hunter: insert the SMART graphic here)
In working with salespeople for many years, where do I see people fall down?
Failure Strategy #1: They don’t know why?
Sure, it sounds good to say, “I’d like to make $X more this year” or “I’m going to get in shape” but where did these goals come from? Did you just pull them out of your ear or other body orifice because they sounded good? Doing things differently to get different results is hard. If it were easy, everyone would be rich, healthy and good looking. OK, maybe not good looking but you know what I mean. If it’s not clear what the fantastic benefits are of reaching your goal and what awful things happen when you don’t, you won’t have the drive to carry you through the rough spots. If making more sales commissions this year means you can provide for your child’s university education, you’ll feel like making a couple more sales calls on a Friday when your colleagues have wrapped things up for the week. Greig Clark, the founder of College Pro Painters and an early mentor of mine used to say, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Hell might be a strong word but the point that success takes a lot more than just hope is clear.
Failure Strategy #2: No weekly and monthly review.
When an airliner takes off from Toronto to Vancouver, it corrects its course thousands of times to land safely at YVR. We need to do the same thing. Every month, you should pull out your annual goals (all of them – not just your business goals) and ask one important question, “What do I need to achieve this month that will let me hit my goal by the end of the year?” Stuff will start falling out of your head. Writing these down will take you about 30 minutes. For example, an annual goal of increasing your sales by 15% might lead you to a monthly goal of “Do sales interviews & strategy with 10 customers who favour the competition over our company.”
Each week, you’ll need to do the same routine with your monthly goals to turn them into weekly goals. At this point, they will be quite tactical and will look very much like activities or tasks. That’s OK as they have to be bite-sized so you can plug them into your time management system. This will take you about 15 minutes.
Failure Strategy #3: No accountability.
If you like to be held accountable, put your hand up. Uh huh, sure you do. Most people like to be held accountable as much as they like multiple root canals. The fact is that people who are accountable achieve more — period! It’s not open to debate as several studies show. Think about the best coach you ever had in your life and I’ll bet they didn’t say, “Let’s not bother checking in to see if you did what you said you were going to do.” Like the famous cough medicine ad, accountability “tastes bad but it works.” If you agreed with someone to hold you to a higher level of accountability, would you invite it or fight it? The ones who invite it will achieve more sales success and I’m willing to bet on it.
At our “Bulls Eye!” workshop, we help people design individual sales plans for the year. For more information and pricing, contact us at [email protected].
I’ve got my annual goals done and one of them is to help each of you toss out the notion of a “New Years resolution” and instead, help you build a solid blueprint for sales success in 2013.
Happy New Year!
Michael