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Breathe
When I’m working out, my trainer always tells me to breathe. My response is that breathing comes pretty naturally, so why would I stop.
I learned that whenever somebody comes under stress, physically or emotionally, the natural tendency is to take a breath in and hold it; almost as if the mind thinks that it can hold the oxygen for later use. When we hold our breath, our body tenses up and we actually become more vulnerable.
I’m see this happen in sales situations all the time. With more pressure and tighter markets, it is increasingly likely that whenever we encounter an opportunity, we tense up – we hold our “sales breath.”
We have thought like, “Don’t lose this one,” or “What do I need to do to make the customer happy?” When this happens we press, and the likelihood of success decreases markedly.
So, as we continue to gain traction in the emerging recovery, remember to breathe – and let the sales happen.
When The Sale Is Won
In my post on Monday, I asked you what game do you want to win. That night, I saw an interview with Washington Redskins quarterback Donovan McNabb talking about the Redskins win over the Cowboys. I was particularly struck by one of his comments.
McNabb then said, “Sunday (game day) is when we have fun. The game is won during the week – that’s when we work.” He was referring to Head Coach Mike Shannahan’s belief that practice and preparation are where the games are won.
I thought to myself how different that attitude is from most people – especially in sales. They think the sale is won when they’re in front of the customer performing. Great salespeople know that the sale is won long, long before they get in front of the customer. Being in front of the customer is the time for you to have fun.
The sale is won as you:
- Develop your business acumen.
- Practice your conversations.
- Develop your active listening skills.
- Develop an inventory of powerful questions that provoke and deepen the awareness of the problems and consequences your customers face.
- Study how customers in your market do business and consider ways that you could help them do it better.
As my coach used to tell me, if you’re not doing it off the field, you won’t do it on the field. So, what are you doing to win the game?
Do You Know Your Customers?
Anyone who’s ever heard me speak or been exposed to our training programs knows just how much importance I put on knowing your customer – better than they know themselves!
So I ask you – Do you know your customers?
Now before you answer, I’m not asking if you know what they like in their coffee, who their favorite team is, or what part their daughter is playing in the school play. I’m not even talking about knowing what their preferences are when buying your products.
I’m talking about knowing what drives the results your customers are seeking. I’m asking do you know:
- What drives their value proposition?
- What their competitive advantage is (and not just what they say on their website)?
- What the company is doing to exploit that advantage and what barriers are preventing them from exploiting it even further?
- What their profit formula is and what drives the formula?
- What initiatives their company is engaged in to support their value proposition and profit formula.
I constantly hear salespeople claim, “We want to show them some value;” only to learn that the salesperson doesn’t really know what’s going on in their customer’s business.
Let me be clear – the only way you are going to “show value” is by demonstrating how you impact
- your customer’s value proposition,
- their competitive advantage or
- their profit formula.
If you’re not impacting one of those, then there is no value to show.
And you certainly can demonstrate that if you don’t understand their business model to know, as well or better than they do, what’s working, what’s not working, and what you can do to drive results.
By all means, build that personal relationship – people do buy from people they like; but don’t forget to dig deeper for the real knowledge.
10,000 Times
I’ve been fascinated with the feedback I’ve gotten from my post last Thursday, “In Pursuit of the ‘Ah-ha!’” The opening quote has received the most attention, and as I was talking about it with a friend and client of mine, I gained an insight that I’d like to share.
In case you haven’t seen the post, here’s the quote I’m referring to:
Don’t fear the man who has tried 10,000 kicks,
Fear the man who has tried 1 kick 10,000 times. – Bruce Lee
Here’s what happens after the proverbial 1,000th kick — you stop making progress. You stop learning things. If you’re not careful, the entire exercise of learning becomes rote. Even though most people realize they haven’t yet mastered the skill, they get bored by the activity. As a result, they move on.
Those who stick with it and maintain a learning posture gain a breakthrough at some point, say around the 2,500th proverbial kick. It hits them that when they adjust their foot a degree to the left, it has one effect, while a degree to the right has a very different effect. It’s an “ah-ha” of amazing proportions. Here’s the thing, if they had stopped after 2,000 kicks they wouldn’t have gained the insight. That’s why mastery is such a challenge, and why the great ones never – NEVER – stop learning. They never feel as though it’s good enough.
That’s why coaches are so important. They can provide the leadership and the guidance to ensure that your learning doesn’t become rote and to keep you on the path.
Think about this discovery from Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule in his book Outliers. K. Anders Ericsson and two colleagues at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music found that what separated the best violinists from the good and average performers was not talent, but rather the amount of time they practiced throughout their life. By the age of 20, the best performers had practiced for a total of 10,000 hours, the good performers practiced a total of 8,000 hours and the average performers practiced only 4,000 hours.
The next time you don’t get the results you want, ask yourself if you spent enough time practicing.
Go Deep & Shorten The Sales Cycle
The importance of asking questions in selling is, well, unquestionable. Much (some may say too much) has been written about the what’s, how’s and why’s of asking questions in sales. What has not received much attention, however, is the importance of assessing what level of information salespeople learn from the questions they ask.
In my experience, there are three levels of information (or knowledge) that salespeople get from asking their questions. The deeper you get, the more valuable the knowledge and the greater your selling advantage. To make The Shift to selling results it is necessary that you get to Level 3.
- Level 1 – All about the transaction. You gain surface knowledge only. The questions are all aimed to assess the “need” for the “stuff” you sell.
- Level 2 – Moves below the transaction to the impact your product/service can have. This is a significant improvement from Level 1. The weakness here is that it’s still all about the product/service and not about the customer/client. If you’re involved in a simple sale and/or you are selling something that fits all of the buyers criteria (budget, specs, process, etc.), Level 2 information is often enough.
However, if you’re involved in a complex sale where multiple people play a role on the buyer side and their desires don’t align, you customer is unclear about their needs or yours, and the buyers assessment don’t immediately align (say, you’d like to earn a premium margin), then Level 2 information is not enough.
- Level 3 – Moves beyond the product or service your are selling and is all about the business results, and the barriers to those results, your customer/client is pursuing. Level 3 knowledge is critical if you want to radically differentiate your company and offerings or if you want to be in the “What’s it Worth ?” conversation that allows you to enhance your margins while shortening the sales cycle.
Gaining Level 3 knowledge is not as simple of merely asking a question and writing down the answer. It requires active listening and an reasonable understanding of your customers business and what drives their results. It requires the salesperson engage with the customer in a true dialogue for two primary reasons:
- The salesperson needs to earn “a seat at the table.” Customers are extraordinarily busy today and don’t have the time to spend with most salespeople.
- The bigger and more common reason though is that in the vast majority of situations the customer isn’t clear on the results they’re pursuing or the barriers that are preventing those results. Far more often than not, the customer/client is treating a symptom and not the cause of the problem. If all you, as a salesperson, do is address the issues as your customer understands them, it is unlikely that a) you’ll create any real value or b) gain any type of advantage in the sales process.
So, next time you come back from a sales call debrief your notes and analyze what level your conversation is taking place at. If you’re not spending half your time or more at Level 3, determine what changes you need to make to get there.
In Pursuit of the Ah-ha!
Don’t fear the man who has tried 10,000 kicks,
Fear the man who has tried 1 kick 10,000 times. – Bruce Lee
I’ve spent the last 20 years working with salespeople and entrepreneurs supporting their journey to do great things. What I’ve learned in that time (often, much to my personal frustration) is that success means doing things that seem small, trivial, and almost irrelevant. Success, or more appropriately the discipline that leads to success, can be quite boring.
We’re all guilty of pursuing the “Ah-ha moment.” “Ah-ha’s” are a lot of fun. They’re exciting and they make us feel good. Whenever you begin to learn something, the ah-ha’s are easy to get. The problem with the early ah-ha’s is that despite the endorphins they release, they don’t lead to significant results. They’re valuable, because they give you confidence while you’re trying something new and that allows you to continue.
The problem is that in due time (often a short time), the frustration of learning and mastering is still there, but the ah-ha’s are fewer and much farther in between. It’s so frustrating, and the ah-ha’s can become so rare that you begin to think that either:
- The task is no longer worth mastering, or
- Worse, that you’ve mastered the task.
I’ve learned that the biggest, most significant difference between the great ones and the average ones is that the great ones deal with the boring tasks of mastery. They get frustrated like everyone else, but they understand that it’s part of the process. As one of my coaches used to tell me, they turn the frustration into inspiration.
Great performers understand that most people won’t slough through the boring, minutiae of mastery. They know that they’ll get frustrated and jump on the next exciting, new idea. But please, please don’t fall for that trap. Stay focused and remember that your ability to get through the boring, frustrating stage of master is your advantage – and great results await!
Asking The Obvious
Let me share what, in hindsight, is an obvious lesson. People work to solve their problems with or without you. Further, people (and customers) don’t typically think that much about you (or sellers) when figuring out what to do.
I was reminded of this lesson recently while conducting a sales briefing for a client’s sales team. We were introducing a new tool designed to support deeper conversation and problem discovery. We asked for some examples of how the reps could use it and one brought up how he’d asked a question related to the tool that he thought was pretty obvious.
He was surprised to learn that the customer had just begun an initiative that he could support. He’d become aware of it just in time to be able to enter into discussion about how his company could support the initiative (which will lead to a meaningful increase in both volume and margin). Had he not asked, the customer would have proceeded with their idea and he would have had no chance to get the additional business (and it would have caused his existing business to become vulnerable to competitors). The rep mentioned to me that he had no idea that such initiatives were even being discussed, let alone acted upon.
There’s an old phrase about assuming that I don’t need to repeat. A great salesperson is always asking “obvious” questions of customers to assure that nothing is taking place that they don’t know about. Because they’ve made The Shift to selling results, they’ve got the ability to ask revealing questions and, more importantly, to get them answered.
Great sellers realize that it is the sellers’ job to understand the customer and the customer’s needs better than anyone – even the customer themselves; not the customer’s job to understand what the seller is capable of doing. Great sellers realize that the key to radical differentiation is their expertise in the customer’s problems (rather than the seller’s solution) and their ability to diagnose those problems in such a way that the seller’s solution becomes the obvious cure.
So, the next time you hesitate to ask a question that seems obvious, remember that the failure to ask that question can cost you your indispensability.
How To Tell If You’re Focused on the Problem
If I had but one wish I could grant to anyone selling, it would be the ability to recognize whether they are having a conversation about a problem or a conversation about a solution.
- A conversation about a solution is highly commoditized and causes the focus to be on what’s it cost.
- A conversation about a problem creates value and causes the focus to be on what’s it worth.
At Imagine, we define a problem as something important to someone not performing the way they want it to. By that definition, there are two types of problems; what we call opportunity problems (sort of like good problems) and trouble problems. The key to getting your product/service properly valued is to ensure that the context of your sales effort is focused on the problem the customer has and the consequences of not addressing it.
The problem with the vast, vast majority of salespeople (defined as anyone selling) is that even when they think they’re focused on the problem, they’re really focused on the solution. Until they become aware of that, they can’t do anything about it.
The first step in getting from a left-side (commodity/cost) focus to the right side (differentiating/worth) focus is to identify a clear gap in performance.
Example:
You help people reduce the costs of their operation by implementing a technology that enhances workflow processes.
If the conversation is focused on your ability to enhance workflow processes and its impact, then you are having a solution-oriented conversation and in all likelihood you will be commoditized. That means lower closing rates and tighter margins.
If the conversation is focused on the customer/prospects costs, cost structure, and their efforts to control and reduce costs – you are on your way to a radically different sales conversation that creates value.
If, further, you are discussing the gaps and shortfalls in the customer/prospects approach and the total impact those gaps are causing – you’re having a problem-focused conversation and will be rewarded with dramatically higher closing rates and enhanced margins.
Next time you’re having a sales conversation, be certain which type you are having.
There Are No Shortcuts
As I was preparing for our webinar today on Building High Performance Sales Teams, I was reminded just how difficult the task is. In the webinar, I dispel several myths:
- Great talent = great success: The idea that all you need to do is hire a superstar salesperson and your sales problems will be solved is probably the biggest myth of all. While there are a few (far, far fewer than you most people think) true superstars who can come into virtually any sales situation and succeed, the reality is they are virtually impossible to find and so expensive that while they may be successful, often times they are not profitable. An effective sales process will have far more impact on your business.
- If you can sell one thing, you can sell anything: This myth manifests itself in several ways. The most common is the effort to “hire away” one of your competitor’s salespeople. The reality is there are many contributors to a salesperson’s success and/or struggles. Unless you can recreate the environment where the salesperson was successful, there is no guarantee.
- The only measurement for salespeople is closing: This myth also manifests itself in many ways. The most common manifestation is the time companies take until they determine whether the rep is successful. The single, biggest and most costly mistake I see in building successful sales teams is taking too long to make the judgment on salespeople. A high-performance sales team understands what causes sales and is able to judge a salesperson’s performance within 90 – 180 days.
- Sales is different from other business disciplines: The number one reason companies fail to implement effective sales processes (well, actually number two behind the difficulty of creating effective sales processes) is the misbegotten belief that salespeople are different. That it’s more creative and salespeople need to be freer to do what they do. The reality is that just because sales is difficult to understand does not mean that it’s different than any other business discipline.
- Predictable Sales is an Oxymoron: The problem with most sales organizations is that they play the equivalent game of pool without having to call their shots. It’s like they’re constantly breaking, they hit their cue ball as hard as they can and then take credit for the balls that go in. That worked (barely) in the past when demand was growing exponentially and money was free, but in the future, successful sales organizations and salespeople will need to call their shots. One of the advantages great sales organizations have is the predictability of their sales forecasts.
The Bottom Line
Everyone of these myths is supported by the desire to find a shortcut. The reality is that great salespeople are made – they are not born. This is true for great selling organizations as well. Going forward good is no longer good enough, and the only sustainable strategy is to be great at what you do. The sooner you give up on finding the shortcuts, the sooner you’ll get to experience the rewards of great.
How To Win With Purchasing
Let me tell you a secret that all great Demand Creators know – purchasing or procurement is your friend. That’s right, Demand Creators love the purchasing and procurement function.
How? Why? Here are some reasons:
- Purchasing is a brick wall that prevents good salespeople from breaking through, so Demand Creators gain a significant advantage.
- Purchasing is the grand commoditizer and, as such, plays right into a Demand Creator’s ability to radically differentiate.
- Demand Creators realize that purchasing people are people too, and are motivated just like everyone else. This knowledge allows them to gain significant control in guiding how purchasers make decisions.
If you want to be one of the few (probably less than 5%) of salespeople who know how to gain an advantage, here are some important tips to keep in mind:
- Purchasers, like everyone else, are motivated by achieving business results. The problem for sellers is that the results they seek often are not in alignment with the purpose of the sellers’ core offerings. Your job, as a seller, is to first understand the results that they want, then demonstrate how you can achieve them.
- Purchasers rarely live with the pain that your offering is designed to solve. So, the more you talk about superiority and expertise, the less you are going to impact them. You must talk with purchasers about critical issues for them.
- Most importantly, you need to understand the people in purchasing are responsible for one primary function: purchasing the proper specs at the lowest possible price.
So, if you want to impact the decision without lowering your price, you must get the buying organization to change the specs. Simply put, if you change what it is that purchasing is looking to purchase, then the budget and the decision that purchasing makes will change as well.
To truly succeed when procurement is involved, you must influence the [decision criteria] that determine the specs. You must remember that procurement is not responsible for setting the specs – they’re responsible for fulfilling them. Other people, those who live with the pain, set the specs. Make sure you talking to them before they think they know what they want.
Please do not misunderstand this post. I am in no way saying that procurement is unimportant or should be avoided. They should be embraced and supported in the context of enabling your customers to achieve their critical results.
The Most Important Thing to Know in Sales
Anyone who has heard me speak knows that I believe business acumen is the most important capability for a successful selling. One of my goals in writing this blog is to support the development of business acumen in the sales process.
I started reading the book Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal. I found the title interesting because I often advise executives to “seek the white space.”
Mark Johnson provides one of the simplest and powerful descriptions of what a business model is, how to understand it, and how to affect it. Looking briefly at the four elements from the four box business model, they are:
Customer Value Proposition (CVP) – An offering that helps customers more effectively, reliably, conveniently, or affordably solve an important problem (or satisfy a job-to-be-done) at a given price.
Profit Formula – The economic blueprint that defines how the company will create value for itself and its shareholders. It specifies the assets and fixed cost structure, as well as the margins and velocity required to cover them.
Key Resources – The unique people, technology, products, facilities, equipment, funding, and brand required to deliver the value proposition to customers.
Key Processes – The means by which a company delivers on the customer value proposition in a sustainable, repeatable, scalable, and manageable way.
Understanding your customer/prospect’s business model is critical – I repeat CRITICAL – to becoming indispensable. If you don’t understand, you cannot make The Shift to selling results, and you’ll find your company, your offerings, and your sales efforts increasingly marginalized.
When you do understand their business model, you can begin to answer important questions like:
- Which boxes do we impact?
- How do we impact them?
- How will our customers business model improve as a result of our impact?
- What is that worth?
With those answers in place, your customers will be far more interested in talking with you and far more open to sharing their needs with you.
Getting Past Awkward
Interlock the fingers of your two hands together. Look down to see which fingers are on top – your right or your left.
Now switch them, so if you if the pattern of your thumb and fingers is left, right, left, right, etc. you change to right, left, right, left, etc. Keep them like this for at least 30 seconds.
How did if feel? My bet is it felt pretty awkward, initially but the longer your fingers were in the new position the more normal it felt. If you practiced this exercise a couple of times, you’d be able to go with either configuration without a thought.
This is a typical exercise used to demonstrate that change, initially, feels out of place, and relatively quickly becomes normal.
I write a lot about focusing on the results your customers desire and on asking the difficult questions that provoke the awareness of gaps in performance that you may be able to fill. Recently I was sharing this approach – what we call Diagnostic Protocol – with a client.
The CEO shared with me that while he thought the questions we were developing were excellent, asking them in conversation felt quite awkward – even to him. His feeling is quite normal, and it’s the reason that many sales teams fully capable of becoming Demand Creators fail to do so and remain Commoditizers or Peddlers.
There are two types of questions you can ask in a sales interaction:
- Questions that your customer/prospect readily knows the answer to – these questions are designed to educate the salesperson and as such create no value whatsoever in the sales process and position you as a Peddler.
- Questions that force your customer/prospect to think and consider because they don’t know the answer – these questions are designed to educate the customer/prospect (as well as the salesperson) and as such are the only types of questions that can create any value and separate your from the Peddlers and Commoditizers.
The challenge with this second type of question is:
- They can make the customer uncomfortable
- They require the salesperson to be more prepared
- They’re different than the typical questions most salespeople ask, so it can feel awkward
However, just like changes to which hand is on top, the more frequently you ask these types of questions the more comfortable and valuable you will be.
Promise, Pitch & Pray
Increasingly, over the last twenty years “Promise, Pitch & Pray,” has become the battle cry of the sales profession. And, while I’ve never embraced that approach, in all honesty that’s probably all you needed to do to be successful in sales five to ten years ago.
For most of the last 20 years, you only needed to do three things well to succeed in sales:
- Make a strong clear promise
- Present the promise well
- Be likeable
However, as the complexity and pressures of business have increased the demands on salespeople have ratcheted up exponentially. In an “copy-cat” markets, where buyers don’t fully understand their problems, making a promise is not enough.
To be successful today, you must – MUST – become a resource for your customers and prospects. You must position yourself in a way that allows you to enter “sales” conversations before there is anything to buy.
In a world where every competitor makes a strong promise, merely promising is not enough. To succeed today and in the future, the only difference that matters lies in now you to go-to-market and how you sell. Invest in the capabilities of your salespeople to run them into “businesspeople who sell,” and you will build the unfair competitive advantage you need.
Managing Ambiguity In Sales
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go into a sales situation clearly knowing who is going to make the decision and how they’re going to make it? Even better, what if we could come up with that perfect question that elicits the ideal response that positions us for the proverbial “layup?”
Okay, now WAKE UP!
Selling can best be characterized as living life in the “ambiguity zone.” When I’m asked about the attributes that enable a salesperson to excel in today’s world, I liken it to the life of an investigative reporter. I think you’ll agree that their lives have an awful lot in common:
- They never have all of the information needed.
- No one tells the truth, partially because no one knows the truth.
- They’re always – ALWAYS – one question away from “the truth.”
- The ability to listen and ask great questions based upon what they are hearing and what they aren’t hearing is critical.
- They often make the people they are dealing with uncomfortable with their probing questions, but despite that they have an innate ability to get people to like and trust them.
- They spend their days taking all of the information they have and use that information to put together puzzles.
- A natural danger of their job is they may begin chasing the wrong scent, so to become successful, they learn how to switch gears and directions instantaneously.
I could go on, but I think you get the point.
It’s the nature of the world we live in today. To be successful, salespeople (and selling organizations) need to develop the abilities that enable them to create certainty and act with certainty in inherently ambiguous situations.
The #1 Sales Killer
Wouldn’t it be great if the first thing a potential customer said to you was that they were in the process of looking for exactly what you do? The reality is that it wouldn’t.
Outside of the high probability of commoditization that exists in this scenario, the bigger risk is that you will be overtaken by the biggest competitor of all: inertia; the dreaded status quo.
According to a recent sales survey, more than 40% of buying processes are ending with a “no decision.” That’s right – more than 40% of the time (and growing) buyers, despite the impetus to buy something and the costs associated with the buying process, are simply deciding to do nothing.
This is horrible (though not surprising) news for sellers. “No decisions” incur all of the costs associated with a successful sale with absolutely none of the benefit. Further, it bogs down available sales and operations resources, making business even less predictable.
It is for this reason that sellers must not miss the very first, and most important, “sale:” the decision that the status quo is unacceptable, that change must occur.
Unfortunately, very few sellers pay any attention to determining the cost of the status quo. With solutions in hand, they focus on demonstrating the value/benefit of buying from the seller.
The only way to break free from the status quo is to develop and implement a diagnostically-based sales approach. Rather than providing expertise on solutions, sellers must provide deep expertise on the problems their customers face, and utilize that expertise to:
- Help their customers understand the status quo and the problems associated with it,
- Quantify the cost of the problem, and
- Get customers to agree that the status quo is no longer a viable option.
Only then should a seller begin to focus on their solutions.
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Resources
Doug's Washington Business Journal Columns- Intelligent Growth Articles
Third Wave Selling Blog
Products to Grow
