ummm…. so March sales?

Please stop telling me about your stupid pipeline.  I know you have all the answers teed up for me.  I don’t give a @#$%…

I’m not your mom or you sales manager so stop pitching me on how amazing your three month selling cycle is.  Frankly I don’t care.

I am sure your pipeline is magical.

By the way, can I go back to that word “pipeline”?  Of all the major “P” words that play into a selling discussion:

…..Presentation

……….Pitch

……………Practice

………………..Process

…………………….”Pain” points

…………………………Professionalism

……………………………..Poise

There is a word that I don’t often hear — people.

In case you are not quite sure what I am getting at, take a look at your rolodex.  It’s all those dudes…

Sadly, your sales force automation platform screaming at you in your local web browser doesn’t give a crap either.  Sure there are a nice couple of fields there to put in first and last names and possibly a birth date.  (oooh…. maybe you can even put in a Twitter name)/

<whatever…..>

But your platform (which by the way, I understand your sales manager is stalkerishly addicted to) isn’t the road map to predictably building a kick-ass solution in March right now pre-Christmas.

It’s people…  You. Them. Us.

People relate.  People object.  People buy.

It’s people that we need to focus on.

The mathematics of making sure you maximize your time and attention are givens.  I am guessing that if you have read this far that you have mastered the art of engineering your schedule to predict your sales in March.

If that’s not you, go read some of the content that the other blokes on this blog write about (some of these dudes are pretty witty).

Know the formula of prospects to leads to contacts to buyers to repeat customers…

Know it and then improve it.  That’s your homework to do.

What I want to inspire you about is your focus on the person.

…..The other side of the sales contract.

……….The line item in your CRM with a price tag attached.

……………The entity “cutting the check” to you when you close the deal.

The person you are trying to seduce with your sweet sales love story.

Those persons generally:

1. Want to be appreciated
2. Enjoy funny, witty messaging
3. Hate to feel abused
4. Want to help others
5. Hurt
6. Think about what’s in it for them
7. Will invest in you if you ask them to
8. Want to believe in something bigger than themselves
9. Fear change
10. Worry about paying the bills
11. Want to feel like they make a difference
12. Need money to survive
13. Live pretty stressed out
14. Tend to tell you the truth if you ask the right questions
15. Lie to protect their own best interests
16. Believe in karma
17. Like being appreciated
18. Know when you really care
19. Decide if they like you pretty fast
20. Will give you second chances if you ask

And a bunch of other drama that you learned in Sunday School.

Fall in love with people — the people spending money with you preferably — and watch as you close deals faster than ever.

Forget about  your sales numbers in March.  Hit your quota by February and take the whole damn month of March off…

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While they may not always admit it, sales people are really gatherers and hoarders at heart, that is why there is premium paid for real hunters.  When you ask most sales people what they need to do better they say “I need more accounts”,” I need more territory”, as though more stuff equals more results and output.  Completely ignoring the fact that having “more” means having to deal with manage and deal with more accounts and people.

Hunting on the other hand takes focus, concentration and elimination of unnecessary distractions.  Think cheetah; pick his prey and goes after it with determined precision.

So while people will tell you they are hunters, closers, deal makers, what have you, they really are not.  You know what gives them away, their pipeline, full of crap, noise and distractions.  They gather, hoard and hang on to everything because one day it may close, and eight-track will make a comeback along with Jethro Tull.

Let’s look at your pipeline in a couple of different ways.  As one great sales person, Mark Pfeifer, once said, pipelines are like a vast lawn in a garden.  When you are sitting on the patio of your 30th floor penthouse, it looks shiny and green, a thing of beauty to enjoy.  Then you go down and realize that half the lawn is weeds, man what do you do now?  If you pull the weeds, and you go back up to your patio, the view is not that nice, patches of brown remind of the poor state of your garden, and you realize that now you are going to have to work to make it all nice, green and pretty again.  As if, most sale people let the weed grow back and go back to pretending they have a full pipeline, which they do, but full of what?

Another way to look at it is to acknowledge that your pipeline is much like an artery carrying the precious lifeblood of sales success.  Yet most reps just allow the plaque and crap to build up, causing clots and reduced flow of deals, activities and things that need to pass unencumbered to create deals and success.

Reps need to have enough confidence in their ability to qualify, or more accurately disqualify those things that are not going to happen.  If it you have had some success selling, just look at the attributes of those successes, and any thing that does not look like it, get it out of your pipeline.  Yes, everyone is allowed a long shot or two, but not a bag full of date cheese clinging to the artery, waiting for a sales stroke and financial heart attack.

So, What’s in Your Pipeline?

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At the risk of sounding old and cynical, (not burnt out), I have to share with you one of my favourite things in presenting sales effectiveness programs to senior sales executives, and the thing that makes it even more fun, is that it happens regularly and therefore I am sure to be amused regularly.

The scenario usually unfolds when sitting with a VP or Director of sales, whether it is a formal sales call or just a discussion at an event; it happens more often where the organization is challenged in meeting, rather than exceeding objectives.  There comes a point when the other party in the conversation says something like:

“Well Tibor, the thing you have to understand is that our people know this industry, they are very experienced, most of them have 15 or years under their belts, and even when we hire, we only hire from the industry, you know, people who bring the same type of experience to the job and can hit the ground running.”

My response usually is something along the lines of:

“Well George, I certainly appreciate that, in fact many people do tell me the same.  I just curious if you don’t mind me asking, your average rep, say with 13 years, would you say that they have had 13 years of continuous growth and development, or the same year 13 times over?”

Then I just sit back.

Some people don’t get it, but the ones that do, we are able to move to the real issues quite quickly.  One of the recurring themes is what most would call sales burn out.  In general, a lot of sales professional do not maintain the consistency and pace they initially demonstrated when stepping into the role.  They either become victims of their own success or never fully realize success and slowly accept their fate and settle into acceptance of less than their full potential.

I argue that at either end of this spectrum, the root cause is the same: a lack of training and basic skill development, but to a much greater degree a lack of planning that prevents even those who may possess the skills to fully execute.  As a result, many end up completing task but rarely achieving objectives and results.

Let me say right here that the reason I started this piece by talking about my discussions with senior sales leaders or management, is that I believe that they are to a great degree responsible for this, and at the same time have the ability to reverse it should they choose (sadly they often don’t).

I say this because they are there when the young sales professional shows up malleable, pliable and full of energy, open to being shaped and focused.  This is the time that the basics of planning, time allocation and process should be stressed, but instead they are given minimal training, usually mostly around product not selling, and then sent out to conquer.

The young reps run fast and run hard, and quickly begin to gravitate into one of the two groups cited above.  In fact there are three groups, using the old 80/20 rule, it breaks down as follows: 20% get the need for planning, managing activity based on required time and metrics; they focus on executing the sales process.  These people are often held out as the anomalies, “it’d be great if everyone could sell like Charlie, but he is different.”  No new kid wants to be different.  The manager and the rep should be working to these differences, but they are usually distracted and over whelmed by the 80%.

The other 80%, the burn out group, fall into to the two groups, half flaming out under the weight of their success.  They run get prospects, write proposals, win clients, busy busy busy.  They spend less and less time selling and more time managing the base.  It’s good for a while but they get out of shape (not having run in some time), they never did have the form right, and as the base erodes and the competition (internal and external) grows, they realize they have to do something to change the tide.  It is then that they face a hard choice, do they learn the basics and practice them, some do; or do they put their old track suit on and try running hard again.  Out of shape out of practice: the burn out.

The other half of the 80% never really took off.  They worked the base they adopted as part of their territory, seeing “lower hanging fruit” as the big time.  They ran in to some new opportunities much like a blind squirrel runs into a nut sometimes.  But they hardly take off, usually just enough to gently crash; it takes slightly less effort to keep them than to replace them (I hope some people take issue with that statement, but this is what I hear managers say everyday); much like a log on a fire, they are just there, giving less light and less heat, eventually replaced by a new log, new rep.

The sad reality is sales burn out is unique among professions. In sports they would get traded.  In law, or aviation they would have to keep up or be replaced.  It is funny how sales is one of the only professions where one can make lots of money, have impact on the success of others and their own company,  but is not required to continuously educate and upgrade ones self.  If we did have to, we would be able to avoid sales burn out, both at the front line level and management level.

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Closing has always been an interesting concept in sales, while “it is” clearly the object of the game, it takes on different connotations in different circumstances, ranging from being a dirty word one day to being the epitome of sales achievement the next.

What I have come to learn is the thing that determines the one’s reaction to  “Closing” directly relates to ones intent and sales culture.

There is no denying that sales, especially B2B sales, is a predatory pursuit. We can spend a lot of time parsing and redefining that, it is what it is regardless of where on the sales spectrum you are.  Once all is said and done, your boss sends you out in to the big wide world to sell, that is exchange money for something you have. The hope is that you provide value for the customer, bring pride and sunshine to your company and that at the end of the process achieve the preverbal win-win.  But let’s face we have all worked for and there continues to be a lot of companies and sales managers who will settle for less, much less, in fact almost anything as long as you deliver the one thing that counts to them: revenue!

Now this pursuit can be done in a civilized fashion, where if you are truly consultative in your approach, (call it solution selling, value selling, complex selling…), we call it interactive selling, then closing for you will mean something different for the wham-bam-thank-you-meme type of seller.

For the FFF type of sales reps who are truly transaction oriented, where getting the sale is the only important element, with little regard for what follows, closing is very simple: closing all means for the prospect to avoid buying.  Closing is a tactical approach, often very formulaic, you say this, they will have to say that, one leads to the next, and you’ve closed all exits, got a transaction, whether you have an ongoing customer is somewhat secondary, if that.  In some environments, especially where the game is understood by both parties, this “closing” in many ways works, and brings efficiencies to simple commodity sales.  Of course it is becoming more of a concern because so many things that in the past were not seen as commodities are now becoming “a commoditized sale”.  This can be a shock for both buyers and sellers.  Many customers who were accustomed to a high touch approach have been designated to an impersonal trans-active interaction with their providers.  In many cases providers have used available metrics to re-segment their client base and have realise that some clients are better served in an automated or indirect way where clients are dealt with as a pool rather than individual representation.  Here the client is commoditised.  Just as in other instances for similar reasons, the product provider and as a result the sales rep, find themselves being dealt with in an indirect way.  Just talk to a “solutions” sales professional who has been “shunted” to purchasing or procurement.  Done right, putting feelings and “relationships” aside, the process works.  We need a ton of this piece with these specs, how much?  Using factors such as credit terms, availability, reliability (product, invoicing, etc.)  and relationship, the seller and the buyer play a the “closing” game and a deal is done.

For the consultative seller the game is different, closing becomes more an issue of helping the client/prospect clarify objectives, then address opportunities and obstacles to reaching those objectives.   Closing becomes the skill of closing areas of concern based on the objectives. 

This type of closing is much more client oriented vs. transaction oriented. While the end goal is to make the sale, that sale is meant to be the first step in an ongoing mutually interdependent relationship between buyer and seller, on both a company to company level and more often on the level of the individuals who first came together in the initial sales. This is why we prefer to see this type of selling as interactive rather than consultative (a whole different discussion).

It is also the reason many sales professionals shy away from the term “close”, their view is that things are just beginning, the real opportunity has just begun, just opened not closed. Again we can spend time discussing the importance of that first sale to the relationship that results, we can discuss how the process, approach and tactics may differ (or not).

The key remains that as with many things, it’s not the words but one’s intent in the process.

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