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.

Please stop telling me your ridiculous fairy-tale rhymes about how “yes is the new no”… No means “No.”  It means “no way”…  It means “you lost”…  It means that you have “wasted your time”… It never means “yes”. I am not sure why there is so much cognitive dissonance about this issue.  Does our willfully [...]

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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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?

Popularity: 7% [?]

Using questions as a critical component of successful selling is nothing new. Even those that just pay lip service to it know that it is the right thing to say. However knowing it and saying it are only a small step in the continuously evolving challenge of executing it in a winning way.

There are a couple of things that reps need to focus on to fully unleash the power of questions. In fact before you resolve to take your questioning skills to the next level, you should buy a great book that can help you in selling or raising teenage kids The 7 Powers of Questions, by Dorothy Leeds.

One thing that many can work on is the skill of asking questions that are less about the seller and more to the value as the buyer views it. To the credit of the profession many more reps are taking advantage of questions in selling, but more need to step back and think about asking questions that help the buyer make a complete decision. Many are still using questions are used to corner and coral clients in to fitting the product.

Questions should facilitate an exchange and discovery process that helps the buyer reach a decision based on their criteria, not the specs of the seller. This is not as difficult or mysterious as it sounds or some make it out to be. It does however require that the seller have an understanding of the business issues facing the prospect and build the sales around those. The good thing is that this approach once adopted is very inclusionary and as a result shortens the sales cycle because you have a willing participant and partner in the process.

At the same time, sellers need to be more willing to ask the tough questions. I am not sure if it is a result of sales people wanting to nurture “relationship” and feel they may offend the buyer asking direct, tough but necessary question.  Again let’s be clear we are not suggesting being difficult or controversial, but asking those things that are impacting the buyers business and realities they are facing day to day.

Often these questions are the most obvious things to ask, but maybe uncomfortable in some ways, so reps back away. However when done right, it is an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the others in the same sale. As an example, many reps will ask what the buyer’s priorities are, how they define success. Once they have an answer they use it as a launching point for their pitch rather than going a bit deeper. Why not ask why they are not where they want to be; why not ask what they attribute their inability to achieve certain things. Partly it is because we bring our assumptions and luggage with us and use the buyer’s initial answer as validation and a reason to jump in to our pitch. But by following through asking how they measure things, what they attribute things to, where they want to be and potential impact and risks involved in getting or not getting to where they want to and more. All these things will show you the buyer’s assumptions and preconceptions, their decision and action process, and with that what it takes to get the buyer to buy.

So it is true, questions are a powerful tool in sales, and as with any tool, make sure you use the right and best one for the task at hand.

Popularity: 10% [?]

According to Salesopedia.com, the definition of qualifying the prospect is “asking questions to discover whether a prospective buyer has a need for the product, can afford it, and has the authority to buy.”

Wow, that’s a lot, isn’t it? Qualifying the prospect includes discovering whether a prospective buyer has a need (that’s a subject for an entire book – or an entire series of books – not just a blog post!). It also includes determining if the prospect can afford your product, which can be one of the most challenging issues to address with prospects. And to top if off, we need to see if the prospect has the authority to buy? Wow. That…is…a…lot.

Despite the significant breadth and depth of this topic, I offer seven qualification tips to help you do a better job at completing one or more of the aforementioned tasks that we call “qualifying:”

1. When dealing with your prospect, develop in yourself a spirit of discovery, not a spirit of pitching. You can’t accurately qualify your prospect if you are in pitching mode all the time.

I was working with a client’s salesperson some time ago who had prepared a canned sales pitch for her product. In working with her, it was very difficult for her to break away from her pitch mentality in favor of the spirit of questioning, learning, and asking that I was advocating.

After several coaching sessions about this topic, her eyes lit up and she turned to me and said, “I think I get it now “ (you could almost see the light bulb over her head). “You’re telling me I need to have a spirit of discovery!”

I said, “YES, you’ve got it!” We continued to talk and I saw a transformation take shape before my very eyes. Almost everything you need to know to sell to your prospect is within your prospect. Discover if your prospect needs your product. Discover if they can afford your product. Discover if they’re authorized to make the purchase. You don’t get that information by pitching; you get it by discovering.

2. If you sell to businesses, ask, “Who else—in addition to yourself—will be involved in deciding to move ahead with this purchase.” If you sell to consumers and have only one individual who is part of a couple in front of you, ask “How do you want your husband (or wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/partner/etc.) involved in the decision to move ahead with this purchase? Then, follow up with the second question: “How will your husband want to be involved in the decision to move ahead with this purchase.” These are two similar questions, but they’re very different, and will often garner two different responses.

There are other good ways to address this issue, too, of course, but what we need to accomplish is finding out who has authorization to make the purchase, and where that authorizer is on this potential purchase at the moment. The more complex the sale and the bigger the purchase for the prospect, the more care needs to be taken with making this determination.

[I dislike talk about “decision-makers” That’s a term that we use in the sales profession, but it should never be used with a prospect. I cringe when I hear a salesperson as, “Who’s the decision-maker on this purchase?” Argh. I just cringed typing that question.]

3. Whenever possible, link your future sales activity to getting increased clarity from your prospect about the authorization for the purchase. Get the prospect to walk with you down the path to the sale. Don’t let the prospect stand on the sidelines as an observer.

Get and give. Get information and then give information. Get that prospect alongside you!

4. In selling to businesses it’s okay to ask about “budget” but if you sell to consumers, avoid using the word budget.

Instead, ask about what investment level the prospect is comfortable with. Even if they lie (and prospects do often lie when asking this question), you’ve succeeded in getting the price issue on the table where it can see the light of day. Once there, it can be examined, analyzed, studied, debated, and verified.

5. One of the greatest qualification questions ever is “If I can get you what you need for a price you’re comfortable with, tell me what would prevent you from moving ahead with this purchase?”

Prospects love to shop and dream and hope and get ideas. But as salespeople, we need to understand if they’re shopping and dreaming and hoping and getting ideas, or if they’re in the process of buying. The best way to develop this understanding is to ask closed questions that will encourage the prospect to give accurate answers and not avoid the subject. It can be uncomfortable, but I’d rather be a bit uncomfortable early in the selling process rather than going home and kicking my dog later on because I missed out on the sale.

[WARNING: Don't try this at home. I've never kicked my dog. Or any of the dogs I've owned. I love dogs. A lot. I don't condone kicking animals, especially dogs. I was just trying to dramatize the frustration salespeople feel when they lose a sale they thought they had in the bag. This illustration was for literary purposes only, not a suggestion about how to treat your dog or any other animal.]

6. Never assume anything.

Yes, I said anything.

But, I guess you can assume one thing, and that one thing is this: if you assume something about your prospect’s qualifications, go ahead and assume you will have unsuccessfully qualified your prospect, because your assumption will probably be correct.

7. Be skeptical of everything.

Yes, I said everything. Especially things that appear to be obvious. And don’t kick your dog.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Early in my sales career, I thought a referral was nothing more than getting a phone number and a name from one of my customers. After calling a few of these supposed prospects, it didn’t take me long to realize that this was nothing more than a glorified cold call. Check that, calling it glorified would be unfair to the word itself.

The thing is, getting a “real” referral requires much more than asking for a name, phone number, or email address for a prospective customer. What you are really asking for (when asking for a proper referral) is for your customer to put his or her credibility on the line in order to get you in the door to make a sale. This means that your customer will need to communicate in some form (i.e. a letter or phone call) on your behalf to the referred party. If you obtain a referral without having your customer communicating on your behalf, all you have at “best” is a qualified prospect to call on.

When you think about referrals along those lines, the process becomes far more dynamic and difficult. However, the odds of successfully executing a sale or picking up a new customer will go up dramatically. Make sure to get your customers involved in your referral process by having them communicate on your behalf.

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The one area that people seem to ignore the need for consistent and thorough follow up is early in the process, the area we refer to as above the pipe. Most sales people tend to have a very Glengarry Glen Ross approach, give a lead one try, and if you do not get the desired result, toss the lead. Some baseball fans are more open minded, they take the three strikes and out approach, they don’t toss it till after the third try.

I understand that sales people would rather be selling than prospecting, sad that some even see these as different things as opposed to part of the same process; but if your customers don’t come to you like they do at Burger King, you need to prospect.

The raw material for creating prospects is leads, the way to convert leads to prospect is follow through. In these days of genteel euphemisms, our marketing friends have coined the expression “lead nurturing”, which is exactly correct.

Depending who you read, it could take a minimum of six touch points to gain the attention of a lead enough to engage them in a conversation that will determine if they are in fact a potential prospect. Depending on the number of prospects you need to hit your number, that’s a lot of follow up, that’s a lot of planning, that means you’ll need a process.

We recommend and use a process we call T – C – E:

Touch – Everyone we meet (contextually), is added to our monthly newsletter data base, The Pipeline, they have the opportunity to safely unsubscribe, but we also make an effort to have interesting articles relevant to all involved in B2B sales.  This way at least once a month, and at times with special announcements each of these leads sees us, our name our logo at least 15 to 16 times a year.

Thanks to the tools built in to e-mail marketing tools this also give us great visibility into what diffe3rent people are reading, what is of interest, what is not.  Specifically to follow up, we reach out if someone demonstrates strong interest in a specific article.  A few years back, I saw that a lead, one who I met with six months prior, and had called about 60 days before the article appeared, seemed very interested in an article on cold calling.  How do we define interested, he accessed the article 18 in three days; I followed up with a call, “Tom how you doing?” I asked; he said “you know Tibor, I was just thinking about you.”  No kidding I thought.  We met, we did the program, and we are still meeting on an ongoing basis.

Contact – With each lead we devise a plan to contact them directly over and above the regular e-mail campaign cycle.  These are usually calls, but at times direct e-mails, special invitations to events directed at them specifically as opposed to broad based generic mailings.  This dictates that you do rank your leads, we use a simple 1 – 2 – 3 ranking, with one getting the greatest focus, 2 next, etc.  It is important that you have clear definitions for each of the rankings, and depending on your business, you could have prospect that rank as 1 for one service, and maybe rank as a 3 for another product.  The clear definitions will allow you to move leads up and down the rank scale and make sure that your best shots are always visible.

Since we sell to sales organizations, our 1 ranked leads get a direct call – Contact – every three months, since most sales organization seem to live their lives quarterly, (some these days monthly).  When we contact with them we have a specific objective, getting a face to face meeting; so we know what is a good outcome from the follow up, and what is not.  If we do get the appointment, and it leads to a conversation they get moved to the Engage category, and enter our pipeline management process.  If they do not engage, we reassess their ranking, and place them back accordingly.  Or sometimes not, if their circumstances had changed to the point where they are no longer a viable lead, they get put back in to the general pool, and start the process from zero.

Engage – Engage is the most straight forward of the three, if the appointment is good (we have a mutually agreed on next step), they, as stated above, they move into the next phase of the process, the pipeline.  If they do not progress through to a transaction, they are either removed from the lead pool for specific reasons; they are put into the general pool for re-engagement at some point in the future, or placed back into the Contact phase.  They always, with rare exception or if they have been removes from the lead pool, continue to get touched and receive our newsletter and related monitoring.

While this may seem laborious, it is not, you can systemize and automate most of it except the monitoring, which allow us to be aware of trends and other things that benefit us in other ways.  But a thorough follow through regime at the point above the pipe gives us and those clients that adopt is a great jump on sales, accelerating the velocity of the sales and shortening their sales cycles, not to mention a great deal of insight that pays other dividends.

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There are a great many internal relationships which you should build and improve upon when working sales.  While all of them are important, I want to explain why focusing on building a relationship with your credit department can be of huge consequence to your sales performance.

The automation of the credit approval process will lead many to say that the line between getting credit and being refused credit is black & white.  On top of that (with a full recession underway), credit has tightened even further as of late for prospective customers with marginal credit.  If this is all true – then why in the world would building a relationship with your credit department still matter?

While your credit guy might not be able to put together a $25,000 line of credit for a prospect with poor credit, he can still do several things for you.  I have listed below three critical items that your credit guy or gal will usually have control over that could affect your sales:

1) For customers which buy on a regular basis, your credit contact might be able to extend terms slightly. For instance – if a customer is past due by 60 days and is cut off, your credit contact might be able to squeeze another order in for your customer with a promise of payment.  We all have accounts that pay slow, but the accounts I’m talking about here are the ones we know will pay eventually. Not only does this make it easier when an order is needed by your customer before a check can be cut, it also shows your customer that you have a sphere of influence and power within your company.  In short, you end up looking like a more powerful and influential individual in the eyes of your customer.

2) We all need credit limit increases on our accounts from time to time, especially on customers who don’t have a great payment history. While many will say this is another black & white issue in credit, I disagree.  As long as companies put a human in charge of approving or denying credit, there is still a human decision in play that can be influenced.  Having a great relationship can possibly allow you to up a customer’s credit limit to the needed level.  Without being able to influence your credit department in this area, you leave yourself wide open to lose future sales and get egg on your face when a credit increase request is denied.

3) For smaller prospective customers with marginal credit, a small credit line with heavy monitoring could be approved by your credit department. In our current economic climate of shrinking sales, this could be of huge importance in attracting new customers.  While this will usually apply primarily to smaller potential customers, never forget that big customers were at one time small customers.  While you need to use good judgment on whom you are willing to pull the trigger on in this area, having a small customer on board that has good growth potential can be very beneficial to your sales numbers in the future.  If they can build a good payment history, a customer in this arena will also already have the needed credit line in place for when they actually become a bigger customer.

A quick word of caution to everyone, please make sure to perform an internal “gut check” with every credit request that you might be able to influence.  You need to build your internal credit relationship on trust and you must not hang your credit department out to dry.  If you don’t have a reasonable belief that a prospective customer will be credit worthy, you will end up using all of your “juice” with them rather quickly.  There will come a time when you will certainly need it, and you cannot expect a favor with your credit department if you have a poor history with them.  If you take the time to build a great relationship with your credit folks, I promise you it will increase your goodwill and loyalty among your customers.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I remember one of my favourite questions while interviewing new candidates for a sales position was:

Tell me about a time when you have to convince someone in product development, or marketing or credit, that something needed to be done for a client that was out of the ordinary but important to close the opportunity”

The answer I was looking for had to work on two levels, it had to relate to a real situation, as this was a common occurrence at our company; as importantly it was a window on how they really sold.

Getting other departments to buy in to your objective is in fact a sales cycle on to itself.  How a sales person achieves, their interactions with the other departments, generally accurately reflects how they interact with prospect and clients, it has all the earmarks, traps and potential as any other process that leads to mutual gain.

First there is the recognition of the need, at times sales people try to offload issues that they should be managing or dealing with.  It is easy to go and let some steam off at a developer or someone in credit rather than dealing with the issue head on.  This is especially true with product issues, sales people often say “if only it did this” or “well the competition does that”.  The reality is that if the product or service was so perfect that it fit like a glove, and everyone know it, there would be no need for sales people.  Similar issues come up with marketing and sales.

I find the best solution for this type of excuse is to get take the sales rep right to the head of the group he is blaming for his sorrows and have him articulate the issue and proposed solutions.  This does one of two things, it either shuts them up, and they go back to they are supposed to do; or as often, they do have a genuine challenge that they have thought out, and while they may not always have a perfect solution, they present their thought and begin a productive dialogue.  I guess that is selling their view to the other department head, a good thing.

Assuming it is the latter; it really should and often unfolds like a sale.  To do it right the sales rep will have had to think through the issue, including researching potential solutions.  Then engage the person who can deal with the issue and make a decision.  This last part is key, we all recognize that we need to be dealing with decision makers on the prospect side, but sales people often spend an inordinate amount of time talking to people in other departments that are simply not in a position to change or influence change.  They are empathetic to the sales person, sympathetic, all kinds of ‘athetic’, but that’s it, no next step, no deal in the end.  While we can not overlook the realities of corporate politics (talk about under statements), sales people need to ‘pitch’ the right audience to get something done by other departments.

The rest unfold much like a sale, engaging the other department, understanding what they have to deal with, and how they are currently dealing with it, that is a proper discovery process.  They then have to demonstrate the upside of their solution to the issue and how it is more advantageous than the status quo, gain a commitment.

Last they have to deliver. Often when sales people interact and make demands of other departments, and the other departments deliver, the sales person fails to deliver the “big deal” that predicated the whole thing.  This throws off everyone, precious time and resources are wasted with nothing but heightened emotions to show for it and a tarnished reputation not just for the sales rep, but the whole sales department.

To me interdepartmental relations, where sales is one of the departments, is always an interesting dynamic, since the collective goal of the organization is to generate profit from revenue, sales should not only spearhead the drive, but be able to sell the others on the right course of action based on market demands.  If a rep can’t do that, then could they do it with someone whose interests are not naturally aligned?

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