Engaging with potential clients is one of those things that requires sales people to both suck and blow at the same time; not easy, but doable.

On the one hand you want to be client focused, thinking less about the ultimate sale and more about fully engaging with the buyer. This involves a full Discovery of the buyer’s objectives and environment, and more.  On the other hand, you also need to drive revenue for your company, acquiring new accounts which by nature are either already buying from someone else, or are not buyers at the moment you are trying to engage them.

The bridge between the two is in the preparation in advance of the initial call, and the entire Discovery process.  At the minimum you have to have a strong grasp of two things, first the specific value your product or service has delivered to other organizations similar to the buyer you are trying to engage.  Second, understand the specific issues and objectives your buyer is dealing with and is trying to achieve.  These two are not sequential, but unfold in a single flow, this is key, because you have to allow the buyer to get involved, engaged, which means you need to adopt a fluid approach rather than a linear step by step approach.  How do you do that?  Once you have handle on these you then need to connect them by formulating questions, the kind of questions that will indeed fully engage the buyer, not just get them interested, but engaged as in wanting to go further with process on their own rather than being pulled along.

We all know and accept that questions are the tools for success in engaging clients.  Questions, the right questions, get people to reflect and think, and once you get them thinking about something relevant to them, they respond and add questions of their own, which leads to conversation and engagement. 

The first, knowing successes and value delivered may seem easy, but there is more to it than many sales people are willing to do.  Most will rely on leveraging the “value propositions” prepared marketing departments.  Good start, but often too high level, you need to spend time and understand what the specific outcomes for your clients have been and talk to those.  The more quantifiable you can make it the better.  Now here is the twist, once you know, you have to develop a questioning routine that will raise the issue you want to target, and in he conversation that ensues you will be in a position to “demonstrate” (this is why specifics and quantifiable, data based examples are needed) the value, and get the customer to engage.

The second helps you set up questions that will help the results captured above resonate with potential buyers.  People often talk about solutions, but by definition, solutions address a objective, or in common sales speak, a “need”, a “pain”, etc.  Unless you talk to issues that are core to the buyer, they will not give you the opportunity to engage, because they will not want to have a conversation about things that are not core to them then and there, they have too many other things to do.  Either you talk about things on top of their hit parade, or you won’t be talking for long, which is not engaging.

When you are able to combine and maser these two, you will find two things.  One is that you will feel much more confident in your approach and resulting conversation.  Second you will be in a much better position to truly listen to the buyer, which makes for better conversation and by extension engagement.  When you have these under control your interview technique will evolve to where instead of thinking about what you are going to say next, you will be listening to the other person, and thinking what you can ask next based on what they said and your experience.  As a result each question builds engagement.  Feel free to contact me if you would like specific examples of this technique.

The process is straight forward, but don’t take that to mean easy.  It requires that you understand where you have delivered specific value to your customers, why they buy from you, what makes you different, and why despite of price or other factors you continue to win deals.  I guess what I am saying is you will have to do some work, talk to existing clients, understand trends, and be aware of business or role based issues.  But once you do the work, and get into the habit of understanding what makes you successful, it will pay dividends.

One last thought, if you are a new sales person, or new to a product line, you can still use this, you just have to use some of your colleagues and some of their clients to learn the data.  In some cases you can use testimonials or case studies, but just make sure they have some meat, as opposed to high level flowery statements.  Talk to the successful sales people to understand what the issues facing buyers are, talk to existing clients, even if you just adopted them, hey, they will se it as customer care, someone taking an interest in their world and trying to sell something right then and there, wow.  The goal is to learn, prepare, review, and do it again, often.

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2010 has certainly started off as a better year than 2009, but the scars and the holes left by 2009 will not be erased or made forgotten by a few good months.  It is always easy to make the recovery look better by comparing things to the through, but if you compare 2010 to 2008, [...]

Sales, like life, is an intricate blend of the straight forward and obvious, with the complex and mysterious, this is why both sales and life are just perfect for metaphors, and perfect metaphors for one another. Love is like a rose, life’s a bitch, (and all that stuff); selling is like sports, selling is art [...]

One of the things that attracted me to sales was the ability to “write my own ticket”; the ability to commit and put in the effort needed to have as much success as possible, financial or otherwise. Part of the package is responsibility and accountability that comes with unlimited returns, and that includes continuous development. [...]

A couple of weeks ago I finally sold a program to someone I had been prospecting for some time, close to 20 months. In the end it was a good sale, hard to say if it was a typical sale, but certainly one that represents a portion of the way some sales go, and eventually turn out.
 
One of the familiar characteristics of this sale was the fact that I heard “no” as many time as I heard “yes”.  Of course the thing that made it gratifying was not so much getting the “yes” at the end, but the level of value the “no’s” brought to the sale along the way.

This is not one of those feel good post that will tell you to embrace the “no”, or that every “no” gets you one step closer to a yes.  What I want to highlight is that it is how you use those “no” to build value or move the sale along.

Hearing no should not come as surprise to anyone in sales.  Sales by nature is not a linier process, it is a series of starts and stops that needs to be managed by able professionals, you.  I guess of you are selling pizza slices at the mall food court that may not be the case, but in B2B sales it is a fact, anyone that say other wise is likely an order taker rather than a sales professional.  Which in and of itself is not bad, because if it was easy or simple, they wouldn’t need us.

So there two things to take advantage of here, first the simple one, is how to deal with the “no’s”.  The second, perhaps less obvious, is how to specifically engineer “no’s”.  This is a concept that many sales people often can’t or won’t fathom, but executed well, it could lead to a lot of opportunity to not only learn a lot while solidifying the sale, but also develop and reinforce trust with he buyer. 

We all know that selling is not pitching, if you have any doubts, read Jim Keenan’s Telling is Not Selling; and as you can glean from other posts by my fellow Sales Bloggers Union members, it is more about a conversation that leads to a mutually satisfying conclusion.  Unfortunately buyers have been so conditioned by bad sales experiences that they often are reluctant to open up right away, before they have developed a level of trust, or more accurately, we have earned trust.  One way to do that in sales is to listen, and of course to listen you have to ask questions.

Now some questions will get you answers right away, and those answers will help you because they provide information and guidance.  But at times, prospects may be reluctant to answer certain questions, feel they may reveal too much information too early, perhaps feeling they would be at a disadvantage, or other reasons for holding back.  So if you can ask a question that you know will solicit a “no”, one where you hypothesis about something specific, you will not only get your “no”, but often the buyer will go on to tell you, why not, and what they are in fact doing, thinking or planning.  Often this will go over and above what they may disclose in response to a direct question.

Further, keep in mind that when you hear “no”, it is almost always an invitation to ask why not?  What would have to be in place or what would have allowed them to say “yes”.  So if you are comfortable with the fact that sales is a jagged line experience as opposed to a straight line, getting to “no”, can at times deliver more value that strictly hearing a bunch of “yeses” along the way, and still getting a “no” at the end.

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Don’t we all want to sell more, I know I do, I am sure you do, and good news is that you can.  Now you can do it the hard way, or you can do it the easy way.  Me I don’t like doing things the hard way, don’t get me wrong, I am not lazy, but doing things right doesn’t have to be hard. 

The key challenge or problem with the hard way is that it often involves changing a whole lot of things, usually all at once, and with all the things sales people have to juggle, sudden and major changes are often disruptive, and quickly abandoned. 

The easy way also involves change, but it will involve changing just one thing, so it is manageable, productive, and rewarding.  Ok, ok, I’m not going to string you along, the easy way is to get a hold of your time.  How you allocate your time has the most dramatic impact on you selling success.  I’m making the assumption that you all know how to sell, so if you could practice your craft more, then you will realize more success. 

Now if you think this is too simplistic, think again.  There a re number of studies that suggest that sales people engage in actual selling or activities directly related to selling less than 50% of their time, so if you can take proactive steps to increase the amount of time you sell, you will sell more.  Start the by examining what you need to do to succeed with what you sell.  Just look at how much, percentage wise, you should allocate to each activity needed to close deals. Once you have done that just focus on managing the activities in the time allocated.  Also look at all the crap you do in the course of the day, things like surfing the web, updating your Facebook, getting coffee down the block, talking to your buds, planning the weekend, etc.  Now I am not saying get rid of all the crap, crap is good, I do it, but just make sure that you do a bit less of it. 

Once you do that, you just do the sales related things you always did, in the same proportions, but now you have more to portion it into.

Another thing you need to do is embrace the tools available to you.  Once you get past the neon lights, the real appeal of Sales 2.0 is the ability to reclaim time.  Marketing automation, lead sourcing and nurturing, process automation.  They help you do the “must do” things in a more efficient way, the bottom line is that you can do it with less effort and better.  Looked at differently, these tools free up your time from previously time consuming tedious “must do” things, and allow you to use your time and skills for other, important selling activities.

The frustrating thing, is that often when these productivity tools are introduced, many use the time gained to do more crap.  “Hey, those leads coming in means I don’t have to do that three hours a week, cool, now I can work a bit more on the office football pool, maybe I’ll win now that I can focus.”

Now if you want to take it to the next level, you could take on some skills training, formal training or on your own.  So let say you go out and read a few sales books a year, say three books.  Doesn’t sound like much, but it is said that the average sales person, (I know you are not average), reads at best one sales book a year; read three and you can like Superman, better yet, Lex Luthor.  Now take this newly acquired knowledge, (the headaches will pass), and apply them “more” in the time you gain by making full use of the tools available to you and cutting out some, not all, crap.

So it’s up to you, you can go out and take on big things, change this, change that, hope that the new way doesn’t take too long to stick, cause if it does, that is time you can’t get back, ever, (talk about crap, ha).  Or you can step back, and free up some time to do more of what you already do well.  And hey, you can start this weekend when we play with our clocks anyways, make use of it.

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It may be time that sales organizations re-examined a core belief that may in fact be limiting their revenue growth rather than helping it.  The question revolves around the need or practicality of having a dedicated sales force.  I’ll state my bias right from the top, I don’t think it is always necessary, and I think there is very much room for alternatives.  In addition I also believe that success in sales come from ones ability to “sell” not their knowledge of “product”.

There are numerous functions in today’s corporations that are key, yet being executed by temps, contractors, or other non-employees.  Let’s be clear, we are not talking about people on the loading dock, but people in important functions such as finance, IT, marketing and more.  These people bring their expertise not just in their function, but they also bring a blend of “best practices” gained in their stints with other corporations they have worked with.  There are many top notch professionals in these fields who have either never worked full time for a given company, or not worked for one in many years, reason being that they have the sought after skills many companies need and are willing to pay for, even if their pay is above average, the total cost to the corporation (pensions, health care and other sundry costs considered).  So why not sales?

I can hear the “Relationship” camp fidgeting, hang on, I’ll get to you in a second.

It seems to be a requirement in sales to buy into and accept the 80/20, the Pareto Principle; or even if you are a convert to the Shanto Principle, the 70/30 rule, either way, the pundits always tell you that 20% of your team brings in 80% of the revenue, (I guess the other 80% are there for weight distribution on the bus), the cost of carrying the 80% must be a real burn.  When you ask why, more often than not they tell you that the 20% understand how to sell, not pitch product, how to work with buyers to uncover the objectives, and then present and deliver a solution that delivers value to the buyer and revenue (usually not discounted) to their company.

Well what if you could have team of those 20% types who deliver based on their ability to sell, not their skill at pitching product?  Let’s face it, when it comes to selling certain products, you can swap one seller for the next, when it comes to some base products, transport, wireless, office supply, and others, success is based on the sellers ability to sell, not product knowledge or how well they manage relationships.   So why not outsource it to a team of pros, with a track record, up to date training, willing to execute even the nasty activities required and a willingness to get things done.         

Relationships can still be managed by those built to manage relationships trying to pawn themselves off as sales people, you just don’t need as many.  With the tools available today, and truly integrating marketing and sales to focus on the market and buyers, you could probably make progress over the state of affairs today.  In the end you can probably save money as you would save on unearned commissions.  The reality is, and it was demonstrated over and over again in the economic down turn, relationships are very different in up markets than they are in down markets.  Keep the ones that really managed and grew relationships in 2009, bring in some hired guns to find new buyers and opportunities in existing accounts and you could have the model for the 21st century.

Tibor Shanto

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Commissions are a very subjective thing, and for most sales people, a very personal thing, and rightfully so.  Sales is one of the last professions where your income is directly dependent on your abilities and the execution of those skills. In most cases, except in organizations where the sales force is unionized. (Talk about an oxymoron, have you ever seen two words that do not belong in the same sentence, union and sales.) 

The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that the incentive plan should drive results. Of course, that assumes that you have the right plan in place.  After that, you get little agreement. 

There are the purists who say that incentives should only be paid for results; deal is closed, invoice issued, revenue realized, the rep is paid. While its simplicity makes it hard to argue with, it also leaves it much less effective than it should be, even in positions where there is no base, it is 100% commission.

If in fact incentives are supposed to drive behaviour, and let’s for the remainder of this post agree that behaviour equals activity, (the right activity), then why do most people only incent results?  Is it not the activities that ultimately lead to results, results, the close, is the end of the process, I guess that’s why they call it “closed”.  Why not then incent the right activities, the right behaviour that leads to the results.

Paying only for results seems to have an element of gambling to it.  At the risk of over dramatizing it, you roll the dice and hope the right numbers come up.  Sort of like taking a rep, giving him a territory, pump him, train him, and then send them out, and hopefully they come back with the right number.  And hey if it is a smaller number, it is a smaller payout.  But the savings on that incentive will never equal the lost opportunities.

One of the reasons to have a properly documented sales process is so that you sales organization can execute the sale in a logical and sequential way.  So then why not incent along the same line. So as an example let’s say a rep can potentially earn 10% on a given deal; assume the average deal is $100,000, $10,000 commission up for grabs.  Assume you have a five step process, and you know that based on past history, if specific activities are properly executed, the probability of closing the deal successful in a proper time frame goes up exponentially.  Would it not make more sense to incent the behaviours and activities that ensure that those steps are consistently executed?

Appointments are key, so you may pay 10% or $1,000 for qualified initial appointments, you would have to have qualified defined.  You know that if you can get people at a high enough level in the hierarchy to tour you facility, you stats show that you probability of closing those that tour is over 60%.  Why not pay another 10% for completing that.  Same stats show that (real) proposals have a closing rate of 70% or greater, so you pay 10% for real proposals.  This still leaves 70% for the close, but you have directly impacted behaviour by incenting it, which is the premise after all?

There are a number of issues that need to be considered, I do understand the view that the base salary is meant to pay for those activities, and the commission is reward for success.  I would not argue with that, as a concept it is valid and good, in reality it seems to lead to a vast majority of B2B reps not hitting their financial targets.  Some will tell you that this is where management by objective or some KPI scheme will help, again in concept great, let’s examine reality once more.  Under the conventional schemes you often find reps who will close a couple of large deals a year, get their commission, and the company still doesn’t get what it wants.

So while the details do need to be worked out, seems to me a much better way to impact and alter behaviour and drive execution in a way that is financially rewarding and fair for all.

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I am a sucker for those movies where they start with a dramatic scene, build up the suspense, then fade just before the natural ending , and come back to a completely different scene and the bottom of the screen reads: “Three months earlier”.  You just have to hope that they weave a good story that brings meaning to climax scene you saw at the start, which in fact was the closing scene to the plot.

To me it is a lot like sales, we know there is going to be a close, assuming we execute the sale as we should.  Part of that “should” needs to be the timing, that is knowing how long your sales cycle is.  Some sales folks know this, others don’t, the ones I love most are the ones that answer “depends” when you ask how long their sales cycle is.  Of course I point out that Depends are an adult diaper, in fact I would give them a coupon for two dollar discount if that was the choice they stuck with.  But after some reflection they do come up with a number.  While it varies greatly, many sales cycles seem to be between three to six months, let’s go with the lower end of the range and use three months for the rest of this post. 

So if our Movie was called “Got That Sale”, and the dramatic opening was our heroin sales professional Sally, deftly played by Uma Thurman, looking the buyer in the eye waiting for positive response; fade out, the fade back in had to be three months earlier when she first prospected the buyer in question.  She did that because she knew that if she was going to close a deal in three months, she needed to put a prospect in the top of the pipe, three months ago, or no deal at the end of the movie, no Oscar, no endorsements, no sequel.

This is why I can never understand why some sales people don’t have time to prospect, they are too busy selling.  Now let’s not confuse account management with selling, let’s not confuse order taking with selling.  If you are selling, B2B new business acquisition, it is a straight forward process, Engage, Discovery, Gain commitment, Execute.  No engage, no Execute.

So if it takes three months to complete the EDGE process, you should be cognisant and fixated on two things: making sure you are moving the sale along, and that you are engaging someone new every day to close in three months.  If you know these, you will know your conversion rate, and you will know how many prospects you need to engage today, to make quota in three months.

Unfortunately many sales people don’t take this into account and focus strictly on the close, the ABC crowd.  But if you close one of three prospects, you need to have 12 at the top of the pipe now if you are going to close your quota of four in March.  Opening is related to closing.  So while it may seem a bit far away, if you have a three month sales cycle you should be able to sit down now and see how your March will be.

An old favourite, I was with a sales director this afternoon, he told me their cycle is four months, I said how was your February?  He said “Not sure yet, but give me a call towards the end of January and I’ll tell you”.  Hmm?

So How Were Your March Sales?

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Engaging with new customers has always reminded me of a fine musician approaching an new piece of music or composition, there is a delicate balance of forces, energies and expectations.  Add to that the fact that these emanate from and impact multiple participants in the process, the musician, the composer and the audience.

Playing the role of the musician is the sales professional.  He has to balance his knowledge of the market, product and selling with the fact that he does not want to push the prospect or over sell.  As a result a great challenge a rep has is to first master each of the above, if he is weak in any of the above, the balance cannot be achieved and you have a bad engagement and sale.  Often this is the case, some reps have strong product knowledge, but lack basic sales skills, which alienates the buyer, and causes the engagement to either go bad, or the sale to take much longer than it should.  We always tell sales people and sales leaders that sales is a lot like music in that you need to master the basics, just eight notes, before you can be great.  Even Charlie Parker and Ian Anderson had to learn those before they could wail and improvise like they do.

Even after the musician/seller has honed his skills, for both a never ending process, they need to sit down and learn each piece, interpret it with in the confines of the composer’s original, and then set out a plan.  The plan needs then to be executed, and reviewed, and revised, and repeated. 

The other big thing that links good musicians and good sales professionals is practice, practice and more practice.  This is one of the real things that separate great sales people, their willingness, in fact need to practice, get better and not rest on their laurels.  Always adding to their repertoire, i.e. new prospects – new clients – new genres.

Playing the role of the composer is the company and sales organization.  They like the composer have specific vision and expectations from the music, read product, and the sales person.  Consider revenue targets, market share, company image/reputation, and more.  While these might be easily communicated, but alas, unless you play the piece yourself, it is always open to interpretation, by the musician and the audience.  Short of doing it doing/playing it themselves, they need to ensure that there is a proper and evolving sales process in place, clearly documented, a sheet music, so that improvisation is limited to those things that add to the sale rather than detract from it.

Finally the role of the audience is left to the buyer, looking to be entertained, but not always clear on what they want.  Even when they know which music the want to or need to hear, they have choice, sometimes too much choice, which may lead to confusion or just a resignation to stick to what they know: the status quo.

So as the lights dim, the excitement builds as the sales professional takes the stage and begins the process of creating the balance, the dynamic tension that when performed properly not only entertains, but draws the audience in, involves them in a shared vision with the player and the composer.  When the balance is struck, the crescendo leads to an equally great experience for all three participants.  You know, on a good night Frank Zappa could have sold me anything.

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