What happened at the end of 2008 and through 2009 was remarkable. It was an historic downturn and the worst economic crisis that any of us have ever experienced. If you worked in sales, you faced the hurricane force headwinds of demand for your product or service declining by an order of magnitude. If you worked in sales you worked much harder to produce results—results that may not have been what you or your company desired. It was the worst of times.

The end of 2008 and all of 2009 was as difficult a sales environment as any of us have ever experienced, and with luck, something we will never have to experience again. But the real trouble with going through periods that cause the kind of deep stress and entrenching that was required to survive the Great Recession is that the mindset that is required to survive sticks. You hang on to the entrenched, survival mindset longer than is necessary and longer than is useful.

At some point, you have to move from keeping your head down and plowing through in darkness to lifting your eyes to capture a new vision of a better and brighter future.

Will You Notice the Light?

I usually save my question for the end of my posts. But this post is really about the questions that you need to ask yourself now. Your sales results are the result of what you believe and how you act on those beliefs. At the halfway point of this year, let’s do some checking in.

Have you shed your entrenched, head down, nose to the grindstone, survivalist mentality for something more useful?

Have you lifted your eyes yet?

Have you traded old fears for new hope?

Have you traded your goal of survival for a new ambition?

Do you still believe that nobody is buying?

Have you made the choice to act?

Have you captured a new vision of what 2010 means to you? Has it changed from what it was in 2009?

A New Vision for 2010

The great danger in retaining the fear and the behaviors of the past few years is that they prevent you from capturing new opportunities. Those that believe there is a better future act on those beliefs and make it their reality. The find opportunity and they make opportunities. The first do so win, and they win big.

There is still time in 2010 to make of it what you will. There is still plenty of time for you to attach a new meaning to 2010, to create a new vision for what it will mean to you and your company (if you haven’t already). And there is still time to take the actions that will produce the results that can and will define 2010 for you.

But to see that vision, to really capture that vision, you have to lift your eyes and look up. Then you have to march forward and act on your new vision. There are lots of people who are counting on you to both provide the vision and to act on it.

Be changed by what you experienced during 2009. But be changed in a positive way. Capture the lessons that allowed you to survive; you may someday need them again. But don’t allow the fear of the darkness to prevent you from going out into the light.

Is it the easiest time in history to make sales? No, it probably isn’t. But there is no reason to believe it is still December 2008, either.

Lift your eyes.

Make your future.

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Your personal development can and will do more to improve your success in sales than any other single factor. Personal development focuses on the one factor that is common to every sale in which you will ever be involved: you. Developing the foundational attributes of success in any endeavor and the foundational attributes of sales are the key to developing both your confidence and your competence in sales.

The word “simple” means that something is not complicated. It doesn’t mean that something is without difficulty. Selling is difficult. Here are five simple (but not easy) ways you can sell more.

Focus Less on Closing and More on Being Effective at Every Stage

Salespeople place far too much emphasis on closing. The problem with focusing on closing sales is that you are focused on the scoreboard instead of on playing the game well and playing the game to win.

Instead of spending your time on the eventual outcome, spend your time, your effort, and your energy on prospecting effectively to open new relationships, on making effective sales calls that lead to an advance in the sale, on building the consensus necessary to selling your solutions, and on building a compelling presentation.

Spend your time and your energy on ensuring that you are effective at every stage, and the score will take care of itself.

Focus More on Solving Business Problems

Making more sales means solving more business problems. Making bigger sales means solving bigger sales problems. Becoming the lifelong partner and provider of choice means solving the most challenging problems your customers face, and in doing so, helping them build a competitive advantage in their space.

To sell more, spend more time discovering these problems and helping your clients solve them.

Stop Selling to Prospects Who Can’t Buy

Your time is limited. You have to use great discretion in how and where you spend your time. There is no reason to spend time with prospects that cannot buy. The faster you can qualify prospects out, the faster you can move on to prospects and clients where you, your company, and your products and services can be of value and of service.

This means that you cannot pad your activity with sales calls that will result in no sales simply to make the activity goals. In the long run, your time is far better spent doing the heavy lifting and prospecting like crazy to identify prospects that can buy.

Study and Practice the Fundamentals

Sales isn’t about gimmicks, tricks, shortcuts, or secrets. If something sounds to good to be true, it is. You should leave it alone. The only certain way to success in sales, and to selling more, is to study and practice the fundamentals.

Instead of resisting the fundamentals, embrace them. Go to your bookshelf and pull off all of the books on sales whose titles include the word “never” or “secrets” or “closing“ or “shortcuts.” Take these books to your fireplace and burn them. You may as well search your computer for all of the similar PDF’s you have downloaded, as well. You don’t have to burn them, but you sure as Hell need to delete them. Let this purging serve as a clean break from any of this kind of thinking that may have crept into your thinking.

Embrace prospecting. Embrace cold calling. Embracing studying sales. Embrace writing a set of needs analysis questions that demonstrate you understand your business and your client’s business. Embrace learning to be a masterful listener, and masterful presenter. And most of all . . .

Learn to Close and to Obtain Commitments

Closing is not the single event at the end of the sales cycle. Closing is the ability to ask for and obtain the commitments that move a sale forward. These commitments have to be gained from the time you ask for the commitment to meet for an appointment all the way through the execution of the sale when it is eventually closed.

Closing should be natural and easy—if you have created value during each and every sales encounter. Asking for the commitment to move forward together is as simple as saying something like “I believe we have learned enough to be confident that we can move forward from here together. Can we schedule to take this next step together, or is there something you would still need from us?”

Is it perfect? No. Do you have something better? I am certain you do, and I hope you’ll share. But is it a Hell of a lot better than the Ben Franklin close? It’s not even a contest.

Conclusion

To sell more, stop focusing on the scoreboard and play the game. Spend you time solving your clients most pressing business problems, and stop spending time with people who cannot buy. Forget the shortcuts, the tips, the gimmicks, and the tricks and spend your time learning the fundamentals. Following these first four ideas will help you create the value that makes obtaining commitments natural and easy. Now go sell more!

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“How do you make an orange?”

When I ask business owners and groups of sales professionals that question, I get a lot of different responses (as well as the occasional mystified look):

“I buy them at the store.”

“I pick them off a tree.”

“I start with a seed.”

“So what you’re telling me,” I reply, “is that you have no idea how to make an orange.”  After a few nervous glances around the room, everyone usually admits that, in fact, they do not.  I’m sure you feel the same, but don’t worry: neither does anyone else.  Even an orange farmer will tell you that all he can do is plant the seed and water the tree, then step back and let nature take its course.  That’s a bit of an oversimplification, obviously, but you get the point.  Unless you have access to a genetics lab and several million dollars, making oranges is impossible; all you can do is initiate and support the process that enables oranges to grow.

The same is true of sales: a sale (a new contract, client or other piece of business) is the result, the fruit, of a process.  And, as with oranges, you can’t make the sale happen; all you can do is initiate and manage the process.  That may be a little different from what you’re used to hearing from your sales manager.  After all, the majority of sales managers and executives are concerned with only one thing: trying to make the sale happen. They talk about “closing the sale”, “getting the yes” and “making the deal”.  Those are all different ways of implying that you can somehow learn the magical art of making oranges.

I’d like to challenge you stop trying to make oranges.  You can’t do it, but don’t feel bad: neither can your manager.  I want you to shift your focus, instead, to the science of planting seeds and watering trees and let the oranges, the sales, come as a result of a well-managed process.  What is the process?

First, you have to plant seeds.  If you want to harvest a good crop, you have to be careful about how you do this.  You need the right kind of soil, and you have to give attention to planting in a location that will get the right amount of sunlight.  The same is true with selling.  You want to be careful about how you plant your seeds through your prospecting efforts.  Make sure that you are prospecting in the right places and in front of the right people.  Just casting your seeds far and wide is wasteful; focus your efforts on your target market and watch your results soar.  Take your cue from the orange farmer: the planting phase is well-thought out and highly organized.  Your efforts to plant seeds should be, as well.

Second, you must water the tree!  This is really where you have the most control over the outcome of your harvest.  Again, you have to understand what the right amount of water is for the kind of crop you want to see grow: too little water is not good, but neither is too much.  You want to find the “just right” level of watering and stick with it.  The same is true of your prospects: too little follow up isn’t good, but neither is too much.  You have to find the “just right” combination of amount and content of follow up and stick with it.  Take your cue from your prospects on this one; if you have a properly developed sense of awareness, you should be able to sense when a prospect is feeling either neglected or smothered.

This phase of the process is where you begin to develop a relationship with your prospects.  You do this by asking the right questions, questions that not only help you identify the needs of your prospect but that begin to build rapport between the two of you.  This rapport building is essential to the success of your process; without it, the likelihood of your gaining a customer is significantly diminished.  This is also where you will be presenting solutions that meet the needs of the prospect and doing so in a way that makes sense to their particular way of processing information and making decisions.  Properly executed, these two steps, coupled with carefully planned prospecting will almost always lead to a bumper crop of sales.

All of which brings us, logically, to the next step in the process: your harvest, the legendary “closing of the deal”.  First of all, I prefer to think of this as conversion, not closing.  “Closing” carries a note of finality that is inappropriate to most selling situations; what you are actually doing is converting a prospect into a client, and hopefully one that will buy from you (and refer other business to you) for years to come.

After all the work you’ve put into the process, this should actually be the easiest step, much like picking a ripe orange from a healthy tree.  You simply ask the prospect, “Does this make sense to you?”  If you’ve followed the process correctly, the answer will almost always be “Yes.”  At this point, all that remains to be done is the paperwork…after which you can enjoy a well-deserved taste of all those oranges!

Happy selling!

By Jerry Kennedy

Inside Out Business Solutions

Check out my Motivation 101 blog!

I also have a fantastic Motivational Audio Program.

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Far too many salespeople turn to their boss or company for their personal motivation to be successful in sales. This is a huge mistake, as salespeople need to be responsible for their own motivation if they want to become successful.

You might have had a sales manager or boss that was an excellent motivator in your past or you might even have one in the present. While there is nothing wrong this, you can never count on it or expect it from your management team. Just like your success, you must own and be responsible for keeping yourself motivated.

A lack of motivation is usually the result of not having goals. If you have been planning goals for your sales career and still find yourself not having the proper motivation, chances are that your goals are either too obtainable or they are not very realistic within the timeframe you have given them. Perhaps it is time that you access your current goals and put some time aside for goal setting.

Having a career in sales is a difficult. Anybody who has worked in sales capacity knows that very well. Even the most optimistic and successful salespeople wake up to days where it is hard for them to get motivated. But make no mistake; these same sales superstars understand that their motivation is their own responsibility.

Putting your own success, motivation, or happiness in the hands of others is always a bad idea. It is like the voter who relies on a politician to bring them economic prosperity within his or her term. It could be the husband or wife who relies completely on their partner to make them happy. In the real world it just doesn’t happen, that same voter, husband, or wife will always be disappointed with the results, if there are any to speak of in the first place. When we decide to own responsibility for ourselves, we take action. And action will eventually lead to the success we are on the path to finding.

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Two weeks ago I wrote a post called What Is The Primary Role Of A Sales Manager?. In that post I basically asserted the primary role of a sales manager is to facillitate an enviroment where people can be productive, but in retrospect I missed one key point. In addition to facillitating the proper environment free of distraction you also need to properly motivate your staff. I’m not going to rehash the different ways sales people can be motivated because Skip Anderson did such a great job in his post “Dear Sales Manager: Please Motivate Me” (honestly it’s the post I had planned to write… I guess it pays to be earlier in the rotation!). What I will do instead is add to both my previous post and build off of Skips a bit for you.

So we are now moving towards a drama free environment that is free of distraction, and we now recognize the different types of motivation, but how do we use this knowledge to motivate our staff? It starts by getting to know them in their one on one meetings, asking good questions, and listening.

I try to do a one on one with every member of my staff every week and we cover 3 topics: A brief discussion of their funnel and conversions plus whatever else I feel is important that week, next we talk about what they want help with, and the final 10 minutes is to talk about whatever we want and can cover anything from family to football. These discussions are important, and no one part is more important than any other… it is the trust and relationship you build in this process that are going to make it easier to have the difficult discussions later on… Finally the information you learn about your staff through this process will be invaluable to you later on when you are trying to motivate your staff.

To close out this topic I’ll share with you some insight I gained from one of my own managers back when I was a new salesperson.

My wife and I were planning on having a baby, but it was very important to both of us for her to be a stay at home mom (meaning I needed to earn a lot more money). However, my primary motivation was recognition and ego. I was winning regional contests regularly and was far and ahead the leading person in my location so both of these needs were being fulfilled completely… However, my manager recognized that there was untapped potential in me and that I was easily capable of producing even more than I currently was. I just wasn’t… and she couldn’t figure out why. I was basically complacent in my current position because I was kicking everyone’s @$$ around me, making great money and having a good time. No amount of feeding the ego, or giving praise and recognition helped, but there was something we were both missing. While it was clear I did not place my own salary as a determining factor of my self worth there was a untapped source of motivation. I wanted my wife to be a stay at home mom and for that I needed to earn a bit more than I was for us to be comfortable. To cut to the chase, once my manager pointed this fact out to me I was off to the races… I set new records, increased my salary and got 2 promotions all in about 18 months.

I tell this story because it’s important to recognize that many sales people only know part of the story about what motivates them, and while money still wasn’t my motivation it was the only thing that could feed what was… My family.

If my manager had not had years of quality one on one time with me we would have never came to that conclusion and we would probably both still be where we were then happy and complacent. Remember motivation is not something we do only for the team… The biggest bang for your buck comes from individual interactions that can only be achieved by regular, honest, one one interaction.

Takeaways: Think about your team and reflect on what motivates each of them as individuals. Now think about your team as a whole what motivates the group? Are you having weekly one on ones? Why not? What are the potential benefits of spending this one on one time with each of them? Do you have people that could produce more but are not? What could you do differently for that individual that would help them move forward?

For some more great information on this topic check out these two podcast episodes:

Steve Farber: Greater Than Yourself and Will Fultz: Rewarding Top Producers

Have a great rest of the week and happy selling everyone!

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About a month ago I went to the garden centre and purchased some seeds. I planted the seeds in a tray with some top grade compost and placed it in a prominent position in the green house making sure every day that the compost was watered enough and not dried out. Short of singing to it every day, I provided all the ingredients necessary for growing healthy plants. Yet, weeks later nothing grew. With a little disgust I dug up the seeds and found out that they were barren – I had wasted weeks trying to grow something that wouldn’t grow. No matter how much I provided the right environment, I was never going to get a result.

The analogy to be drawn is that in some ways people in general need to have that initial spark within themselves that you can motivate. There are many ways of motivating people to succeed but the kernel or spirit of success comes from within. Very deep, but you can motivate as much as you like but if a person you are trying to motivate isn’t inclined to improve or change or try… then you will undeniably waste your time.

The most productive and successful people in any field are the ones who are personally driven; they need little encouragement because they already have the ambition, the drive, the will to achieve. However, along the way they have learned from their mentors and have been encouraged and motivated to learn until they realised a certain truth, that they were incredibly capable people in their respective field. The confidence you have that you know you are good at something, you have the tools to make things happen and that you possess the skill to fulfil is one of the greatest motivators – and ultimately that realisation has to come from the individual and no one else.

What can be done to help those who haven’t attained this confidence? The greatest asset one can give any person is a business environment where that person can learn, build and realise. I was drawn to a particular article this week courtesy of Christian Maurer on twitter (@camaurer) on HP’s reaction to motivating sales people in the recession. I was mentally applauding the attitude that a corporate company could take by making a ‘human’ decision to revise sales targets and create the opportunity that a recession provides in learning. Many companies now are responding to the recession by offering more pressure and the weaker, newer, greener, potential sales people are being driven out before they have had a chance to bloom. The HP case acknowledges that in a recession the ones who are being de-motivated are the sales people – the life blood of the company – putting more pressure on them isn’t motivating but disheartening. In this case, HP have created a work atmosphere where sale people have the power and self-motivation to learn and prosper and what could be more motivating than that?

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Question: What motivates salespeople? Answer: It depends upon the salesperson.

Salespeople may tend to have certain traits in common, but there is wide diversity in the ranks of sales professionals. We are not the same. And so it is with motivating salespeople: what works for one individual won’t work for another.

motivation

If, as a sales manager, you want to motivate your direct reports, focus less on what you do to them, and more on what you do for them. Everybody is self-motivated to do something. You just need to find out what that motivation is, and then use it to everybody’s (your company’s, your salesperson’s, your customer’s) best advantage. Assuming your sales team has adequate or better selling skills, you need to find out what type of motivation works for each of your individual players.

The following lists what motivation looks like for different members of the sales profession. Once we know what motivation exists within each individual sales representative, we can create opportunities for that motivation and help them sell more:

1. Money. It’s commonly understood that “money motivation” is at the core of sales performance, especially in commission sales, but beware: it is not universal to sales success, nor is it a requirement of sales success. I’m thinking right now of all the monetary incentives put on the tables at sales meetings, and a month later, all the sales managers scratching their heads why the incentive didn’t achieve the results it was designed to provide. Having said that, money (and the stuff that it buys) is a very strong motivator for many in our profession.

2. Recognition. Some salespeople crave attention. Some may prefer attention from their manager, others from the owner of their company, and others from their spouse. Still others need public recognition in front of peers or others. To motivate these salespeople, managers need to provide copious opportunities for increased attention from the appropriate parties in a way that will resonate with that individual. When I was a sales manager, I would ask new hires, “How do you prefer to be recognized for a job well done?” Some would say, “Put a thank-you card on my computer” and others would say “put my picture in the company newsletter.” And I would do just that. And it worked.

3. Competition. Some may assume that money is behind the competitive nature in salespeople. But the two motivations are very different. Some people find competition extraordinarily motivating, whether money is involved or not. Try “the first person to turn in a contract with an XYZ option on it gets a dinner at Ben’s Steakhouse.” For this salesperson, it’s not the steak that matters; it’s winning the steak.

4. Pleasing someone. Pleasers scour their realm for opportunities to please. Some are motivated by pleasing their manager, others by pleasing their boyfriends, and others by pleasing their customers. Identify this motivation in your salespeople and you can provide ample opportunity for lots and lots of pleasing. You don’t have to provide money, or a contest, or anything else…except being pleased!

5. Belonging. Just as some Americans buy certain models of European luxury sedans so they can become members of the socio-economic group of Americans that own European luxury sedans, so do salespeople strive for a certain level of sales success so they can belong to a group. For some, belonging to a company or a department or a subgroup provides the motivation to keep selling and keep pushing ahead. Find out what these people want to belong to, then give them an opportunity to become a member (hint: it’s not about money; it might be getting the title of Senior Designer to belong to the group of other Senior Designers, or people that go out after work on Thursday afternoons).

6. Security. People who are security motivated will seek out paths to attain that security. Very different from competitive people, these people will keep performing at high levels if the security they long for is provided to them. Competitive people thrive in a world of no security, whereas security-motivated salespeople thrive in the opposite. Although traditionally these people are not thought to be a good fit for sales positions, I disagree. It’s the performance that matters, not how you get there.

7. Ego. Again often confused with competitiveness or money-motivation, ego-motivation is different. What motivates these individuals is having their ego fed to an acceptable level. This need could be met simply by complimenting a salesperson on their clothing, or it might require hanging their portrait in your showroom (complete with recessed lights shining not-so-subtly on the subject) when they receive the salesperson of the year award. If these individuals’ egos are full, the sales will keep coming; but when the ego is depleted, these people can quickly become low sales performers.

8. Perks. There is a broad array of possibilities here; different things matter to different people. I once managed one salesperson who would do anything if she didn’t have to run sales appointments in a particular neighborhood. As long as I kept her out of that neighborhood, she maintained high sales performance. Another salesperson I managed hated one-on-one coaching meetings so much that I let her skip them. As important as I thought these meetings were (and as hard as I tried to make them valuable to her), they weren’t important to her, and were in fact a demotivator. So we made a deal that got both of us what we wanted: she got to miss the one-on-ones and I got consistent top performance from her.

How can you do a better job of motivating each of your sales representatives?

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