Selling Power

By Shari Levitin

Many salespeople speak about sales through the language of warfare. To them, the idea of a warrior suggests power and conquest. They skirmish with customers, fight for leads, and talk about losing the battle but winning the war. They forget that what makes a warrior isn’t a weapon or a uniform, but sacrifice and doggedness. Great salespeople – like great soldiers – learn how to deliberate, practice, drill, and rehearse.

But let’s face it, most salespeople don’t wake up in the morning eager to train any more than your prospects line up to purchase your product. So how do you energize sales reps to fight for the skills they need to win more deals?

According to new research in the Harvard Business Review, titled “The Internet Makes You Think You’re Smarter than You Are,” Yale doctoral candidate Matthew Fisher and his colleagues concluded people are more confident that they’ve learned information by simply having access to that information.

This got me thinking. Do salespeople assume they know how to build trust – or move a customer through the pipeline – simply because they bought the book or signed up for the online course? Fisher’s research indicates an answer in the affirmative. Even more compelling is this: Just because you can find the information and understand it doesn’t mean you can apply it.

So how can you encourage your sales and marketing teams to open the books and courses at their disposal and apply the material inside? Employ these five methods.

1. Reward a Growth Mindset. Too many sales contests reward the top 20 percent, leaving the remaining reps discouraged. The solution? Offer incentives for learning and sales activities rather than simply sales outcomes. Create rewards and recognition for books read, leads generated, and courses taken.

2. Create Team-Based Contests. This will bolster bonds and increase creativity. Focus either on sales performance or mastery of learning objectives. At one of our Train the Trainer events, 10 teams of five demonstrated their understanding of the buying process by creating skits and clay models – and even performing rap songs! Of course, everyone won.

3. Present Learning in Small Chunks, Not in Large Assignments. The average attention span of people today has plummeted from 12 seconds to eight seconds. They say goldfish have a longer attention span than people! If you don’t believe me, go to the nearest pet store and have a staring contest with a goldfish. If you’re like most people, my money’s on the fish. Short, poppy pieces of wisdom will inspire and entertain. They’ll offer instant solutions to common problems – resulting in a series of small wins.

4. Make Training Interactive. A few years ago, I sat with a group of senior leaders who weren’t meeting their quotas. They were struggling to get salespeople to prospect correctly and to isolate objections. “The salespeople just don’t listen,” they complained. “We tell them over and over again what to do and it goes in one ear and out the other.” Their complaint revealed the underlying problem: them!

   According to Adult Learning Theory, people retain:

   * 10 percent of what they only hear.
   * 50 percent of what they see and hear.
   * 90 percent of what they see and do.

   Your reps learn by seeing and doing. Simply telling your reps what to do – rather than engaging them in role-plays, exercises, and interactive games – will cause frustration and result in low performance.

   People don’t want to listen to the conversation; they want to be part of the conversation.

5. Become a Master at Giving Feedback. No one likes being told what they did wrong. Before ever giving negative feedback, though, tell your reps what they did right. By hearing the good stuff first, their brains will be more receptive to the areas where they need to improve. In fact, a Harvard Business Review study confirms that individuals who receive at least a 6-to-1 ratio of positive-to-negative advice significantly outperform those who are more often criticized.

Apply these simple tips and you’ll not only lead your war horses to water, but you’ll also help them to think.

Shari Levitin is the author of Heart and Sell: 10 Universal Truths Every Salesperson Needs to Know. She is the founder of The Levitin Group, a global company operating in more than 40 countries to passionately inspire transformative change.

By Sherri Sklar

Recently I received the following email from a VP of Sales, asking for advice about his sales pipeline and sales forecast.

Dear Sherri,

I’m a Sales VP, it’s mid-March, and I’m sweating the end of quarter. Truth is, we don’t have enough good opportunities in our pipeline. I can only rely on 20 percent of what has been inputted into the CRM. Either reps are sandbagging or putting in fluff just to have something there. How can I get control of this situation so I’m not left to figure out where things stand so close to the end of the quarter?

Sincerely,

“Sweating the Numbers”

In my reply, I assured this VP there are a number of things sales leaders can do to turn a situation like this around. Even starting with just a few of the actions below can make a huge difference in a single quarter, while also setting you up for sustainable growth.

1. Face the truth. When I was training for a triathlon, my coach used to say, “Face the truth,” so we knew where I was in terms of strength, endurance, stamina, and speed. You need to use the same “face the truth” type of information to determine where each deal truly is in the pipeline. You need factual evidence of where the opportunity is in the buyer’s process. Look at your reps’ letters of understanding, emails, and social interaction with the client, and ask yourself if your rep truly set all the right elements in motion for this to be categorized as an opportunity ready to close by the end of the quarter.Key information you need to look at includes: what is the buyer’s critical business issue keeping him or her up at night? What’s causing that issue? Who else is impacted and how? And is your rep calling on the right person? Other telltale signs will also tell you where this opportunity stands, such as, are they still demoing the product? Are they still meeting with other members of the buying committee? If the answers are yes, you’re looking at an earlier stage opportunity, not late-stage ready for closing.By getting a good grip on answers to these questions, you’ll know where the opportunity actually stands and if it’s fluff or real. Don’t just rely on your CRM system. You need to roll up your sleeves and have these concrete conversations to truly get the real picture. You’ll get a much more realistic view of the pipeline and be able to produce a solid forecast.
2. Get the real deals across the finish line. Once you’ve figured out what’s fluff and what’s real, you want to clear the pathways and make it easy for every deal that’s real to close. There are many things your reps will need. For instance, you can help your reps foster an even stronger relationship between your company and the client by developing meaningful dialogue with C-level executives from both companies. You can create account-based cross-functional SWAT teams to triage issues and ensure the most creative solutions emerge that will gain rapid agreement with other key managers in your company who are stakeholders in this deal.Where you need to, you can run pass interference for your reps to speed up any problematic legal issues or T’s and C’s. All these things can make an enormous difference in being able to close a deal faster and solidify the relationship for long-term success.
3. Accelerate sales with process. Simply put, you’re going to need a good systematic approach to deliver reliable, predictable numbers so this does not happen every quarter. You may hate the word “process,” but – call it what you will – the fastest and most dependable way to deliver an outstanding performance is to give your team a common language and a set of consistent, repeatable actions that work. It has been proven over and over that implementing some kind of method and process not only helps every rep grow into a better rep; it helps them make quota – and organizations as a whole perform a whole lot better. Putting in a process helps you avoid people “winging it” and gets people doing the right things at the right time so there are no surprises in the pipeline or forecast. Reps won’t be sandbagging or creating fluff anymore, because your clearly defined and articulated process will expose it right away. You will accelerate sales and, as a result, the performance of the entire team will improve.

Reps can be like kids. They’ll tell you they hate structure, but secretly – or maybe subconsciously – they crave it. They need your leadership, your guidance, and your process to review their opportunities in a way that gives you the accurate information you need to accurately predict the numbers. Only then will you not be sweating the numbers.

Want more predictability in hitting your numbers? Download GrowthTera’s free checklist for Sales Leaders and get control of your numbers.  Or, contact Sherri at:  212/500-2161 x 700 or sherri@growthtera.com.

Sherri Sklar is CEO of GrowthTera, a consulting firm that helps organizations elevate their performance to accelerate growth. For more than 20 years, she has helped companies deliver triple-digit growth, orchestrate liquidity exits, and emerge as market leaders in their field. She has trained, coached, and helped companies expand deal size, shorten sales cycles, build a robust pipeline, and convert stalled opportunities into multimillion dollar closed deals. Sherri received a BA from Tulane University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

By Jim Cathcart

In a speech years ago to the executive team of Wal-Mart at their Bentonville, AR, headquarters – after meeting Sam Walton himself in the hallway – I explored the concept of where power comes from in an organization.

The traditional view has always been that power “comes from the top” and flows downward through the organization. We use organization charts with boxes to indicate the players, with lines to show reporting roles between them.

The boss or owner is always at the top and the hourly workers are at the bottom in a wide row. It’s a pyramid. The problem with this structure is that it isn’t true to life. That is not how good organizations get results.

In truth the only power that really matters is the power of customers. As a company, we are working to find what the customer will value – and design and deliver it in a way they’ll be eager to pay for. We want the customer’s allegiance and enthusiastic loyalty. They give that both through money (revenue) and through support (testimonials, referrals, and feedback).

When I received my orientation to Wal-Mart prior to my speech, I discovered that they operate quite differently from most organizations. No wonder they are one of the world’s most successful! They refer to their coworkers as “associates” instead of employees, superiors, subordinates, or bosses. The store managers don’t have traditional offices because they are expected to spend most of their time walking around and actively engaging with others. They see their stores as outlets designed for the convenience of their customers and they negotiate the lowest possible prices from their suppliers. They were the originators of “greeters” at the front door and many other friend-building innovations in retailing.

Pyramid-shaped org charts don’t describe Wal-Mart. And, in actuality, neither does that structure describe any customer-facing organization. The owner or CEO, in truth, is at the bottom of a pyramid – with all of the weight of the organization on his or her shoulders. The people who touch the customers most are at the top, like the ice cream in a cone. But there’s another element that doesn’t show in this symbol: the resource network – the suppliers and industry colleagues.

A much better symbol, as I told the execs that day, is a tree. Trees have two systems: one seen and one hidden from view. The seen system is made up of the trunk, branches, and leaves reaching toward the sky (opportunity). The unseen system is made up of the root system and taproot reaching down for the resources and nutrients in the soil.

The branches represent the growth system of your organization: sales, marketing, customer service, product development, etc. The roots represent your strength system: suppliers, distributors, research, finance, engineering, quality control, etc.

If the strength system is weak, you might outgrow your ability to deliver or sustain growth; and, if the growth system is weak, you could die from lack of sales. Seeing ourselves in this way within the company gives us a much better sense of our responsibility to each other and to our marketplace. The purpose of selling is to make life better for people at a profit so it also makes life better for us.

Years later I encountered then-president of Wal-Mart, David Glass, at a banking conference where we were both speaking. He told me, “We are still using many of your ideas from that day.” Cool.

Jim Cathcart, CSP, CPAE is the original author of Relationship Selling and one of the world’s leading professional speakers. Jim is a regular contributor to Selling Power and a certified Peak Performance Mindset Trainer. Contact Jim at Cathcart.com.

By Kevin F. Davis

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes the difference between sales managers who fail their teams, those who do a competent job, and those who excel.

One of the factors that has the biggest impact on a manager’s success is how effective he or she is as a coach. Research has shown that effective coaching is part quantity and part quality. Doing more coaching means controlling your time and priorities – a topic I won’t go into for the purposes of this article. Better coaching is a matter of focusing on actions you can take that will do the most to help your reps improve in the long run, not just win one deal. Here are three tips to get you started down that path.

Tip #1: Don’t try to coach based on a scorecard. I’m an avid golfer and, like everyone, keep track of each game on a scorecard. Suppose you were a golf pro and I handed you the scorecard from my most recent round and asked you how I could get better. You couldn’t really help me because the scorecard tells you only the aftermath of what I did when I was golfing  – it doesn’t tell you where I made good and bad swings or what decisions I made. Any feedback you gave me would be based only on the results I got, and it couldn’t be specific enough to be helpful. All you could say is something like “try harder” or “don’t make a bogey on hole 5.”

If you really wanted to help me improve, you’d have to observe my game and come up with strategies to help me learn what I was doing wrong and what I could do better.

Reviewing your reps’ sales results once a month or every quarter works the same way. You can’t help your reps improve if all you do is examine their results  – their “scorecard” – after the fact. You have to start looking closely at what they’re doing upstream. Talk to your reps during the early stages of working a sales opportunity, and observe their call preparation and interactions with customers. When you ask questions that challenge them on what they know and don’t know about their customers’ needs, you provide more specific and helpful coaching that they’ll be very motivated to implement.

Tip #2: Focus more on identifying deficiencies of skill and will. Back in 2014 and 2015, the Sales Management Association did some research on how often sales managers discussed 13 specific topics when coaching their salespeople. The kicker is that they also studied the connection between how often each topic was discussed and revenue growth in the organization.

By a big margin, the topic that had the biggest positive influence on revenue growth was “identifying skill deficiencies.” Now, can you guess how often that topic was discussed in coaching conversations? It ranked 12th out of the 13 topics. That means talking with reps about their skill deficiencies happened far less often than discussions about things like “advancing a sales opportunity” and “crafting proposals” – and even the 11th-ranked item, “instruction on administrative processes.”

In my mind, if you are not having regular conversations with your reps around their skill deficiencies, then you’re not really coaching. At least you’re not providing the kind of coaching that will have the biggest impact on your team’s results and your company’s revenue. To help your reps be more successful, you have to make the time to identify each rep’s skill and will shortfalls. And you have to coach them on how to improve in those specific areas.

Tip #3: Take your sales coaching to your reps. There’s a well-known principle in the field of psychology called “the self-serving bias.” It’s the tendency for a person to take credit for their successes but blame external factors for failures. You see it when, for example, sales reps who have a great month attribute their success to their strong work ethic and top-notch skills. But, when that same rep has a bad month, they blame external factors such as lousy leads from marketing. Sound familiar? I fell into that trap at one point of my sales career, and think most salespeople do the same.

Here’s the thing: people with a self-serving bias think they’re doing better than they really are. They are blind to their own mistakes. So they will NOT come to you to ask for coaching. And that means they’re losing deals they should win – and they may not know why.

The best way to combat self-serving bias is to be a strategic sales coach! Take coaching to your salespeople. Don’t sit back and wait for them to ask you for coaching.

A sales manager may well be the most talented sales professional on the team, but what matters now is whether they can transfer that greatness into the hearts and minds of your team members. Great sales coaches focus their attention on the input side of the sales performance equation – the behaviors and activities – not just the results. Great sales coaches make “identifying skill deficiencies” in a sales rep a key objective during every coaching conversation. And great sales coaches are proactive – they don’t sit back and wait to be asked for coaching. They take coaching to their people. Follow these guidelines and you’ll be on your way to building a championship team.

Kevin F. Davis is the founder and president of TopLine Leadership, which has provided sales and sales management training to leading corporations around the globe. One client put more than 3,000 sales managers through Kevin’s two-day workshop. He’s the author of three books, including The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness (March 2017).

By Adrian Davis

Are you facing increasing sales targets and increasing challenges in achieving these targets? Well, it’s going to get even harder because of some fundamental shifts in our economy.

I’m currently working in the robotics industry. Exposure to this has sensitized me to the growing prevalence of automation. Many professionals feel that automation is not something we have to worry about. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Automation: Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!

Sales is polarizing into two approaches. The first path is transactional. Salespeople who engage in transactional selling are order takers. Order takers deal with problems that are well defined. Furthermore, the solutions purchased are well understood.

The only questions in buyers’ minds are: how much and how soon? The sales rep who is cheapest and fastest wins the business. More and more, that sales rep is showing up as not a person, but a slick e-commerce Website. E-commerce sites work 24/7. They respond to buyers with unprecedented speed. They guarantee the lowest price. The traditional sales rep is becoming obsolete.

Is Consultative Selling the Answer? (No.)

This is driving sales leaders to get their teams to focus on “consultative selling.” In a previous blog post, I explained that the consultative sales approach is obsolete. Sales reps who show up asking too many questions end up annoying buyers instead of pleasing them. Buyers complain about reps who take their time before they provide anything of value.

Sales leaders realize they have to up the ante. They have to teach their salespeople how to create value for the buyer up front. The buyer must immediately recognize the benefit of developing a relationship with them.

Debating with the Younger Generation

But wait! Isn’t challenging buyers safe from the encroaching threat of sweeping and inevitable automation? That’s what I thought…but an article I tripped over jolted me awake.

Years ago, my son Ryan – who is very articulate – said he wanted to pursue a career as a software developer. Being a seasoned and passionate sales guy, I tried to discourage him. I explained that companies are automating back-office jobs. Companies will outsource those that aren’t automated to China and India. I asked him to leverage his incredible communication skills. I asked him to focus on being in front of the customer because that’s where he could create real value.

This conversation took place about five years ago – which, as we all know, was a long, long time ago! So much has changed since then. Ryan recently shared a YouTube video with me called “Humans Need Not Apply.” This video captures the implications of the work my son is now doing. I watched the video. I thought, “Yes, but companies will not automate professional work. Professional work requires human judgment!”

I woke up when I read an article in the Harvard Business Review. It was “Technology Will Replace Many Doctors, Lawyers and Other Professionals.” The gist of this article is artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives are now unstoppable. AI machines are outperforming human beings in many cognitive tasks. Professionals use approaches that seem immune to automation. Unfortunately, AI enables new approaches. Moreover, AI learns from itself and teaches itself how to be even more efficient.

In the next 5-10 years, professionals all over the world will get the shock of their lives. Automation and AI will replace routine and mechanical tasks. It will also replace “sacred” and insulated professional roles. This relentless drive toward automation will challenge us. It will, most likely, unravel our entire capitalism-based economy. In the future, the majority of human beings will be unemployable. Automation and AI will do meaningful work instead of humans. Humans may only find meaningful work in activities of social unrest. Economies may no longer find it possible to be based on the upward mobility of the middle class. Unemployable people may demand socialistic or communistic approaches to the distribution of wealth.

In the meantime, today’s sales leaders must execute the following imperatives:

1. Stop messing around with your CRM. Embrace it. Master it. Enhance it and use it to understand your most important customers.
2. Acknowledge that “Thing-to-Thing” selling will completely replace order-taking salespeople as the Internet of Things matures and sellers’ devices transact and negotiate with buyers’ devices.
3. Invest in mastering Human-to-Human Selling. Invest in your best salespeople. Develop them to become even greater strategic, critical, and creative thinkers. Encourage them to up the ante. Find new, unprecedented ways of creating value. Be committed to work with your customers who must also cope with the seismic shifts in our economy.

Adrian Davis is president of Whetstone, Inc, where he has worked with organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Motorola, PwC, Phonak, Aviva, and Dupont. His highly talented team has developed a reputation for leading organizations to innovative and practical solutions that enhance customer value and dramatically increase sales. Adrian is the author of Human to Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World, a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a certified professional in Business Process Management (P.BPM) and a certified Competitive Intelligence Professional (CIP).

By Mike Kunkle

I’ve written recently about why we should focus more on sales manager enablement in 2017 and shared a story about what often gets in the way. It’s important to clear those obstacles since sales managers play critical roles in driving sales productivity.

As a next step, in this post, I’ll share how you can work with frontline sales managers to significantly improve sales results by helping them apply a little logic along with simple field training and coaching methods.

The Back Story: What Impact Will Coaching Training Have?

I once approached a potential client cold and created an opportunity to train sales managers on how to be better coaches. I was able to get everyone on board and aligned except, oddly, the senior sales leader, who was skeptical that it would be worth the time investment for his managers. This leader had come up through the ranks, hadn’t been coached a lot himself, and wasn’t convinced of the impact the coaching training would have. And, while the CEO was a believer, he wouldn’t overrule the sales leader and do a full implementation without the leader’s support.

So, as a test run, I sold a pilot with one of five divisions. I interviewed all the sales managers and selected the one I thought would truly try to use the training and give it a fair shot.

What We Did: Facilitating Real Change with Sales Reps

For the pilot, I trained the manager – on using reports and discovery with each rep to create a performance gap hypothesis and on applying observation to validate the hypothesis and diagnose issues.

Then, I taught the manager Ferdinand Fournies’ acclaimed 16 reasons why employees don’t do what they’re supposed to do – so he could overcome employee inertia and select and approach an appropriate solution (involving training, coaching, counseling, or changing something). The analytics, hypothesis, diagnosis, and reasons are the logic behind this powerful approach.  

In addition, so he could engage with reps in ways that would lead to real change, I taught the manager a simple and effective field training model (Tell/Show/Do/Review), which incorporates role play and reinforcement, and a coaching model (Diagnose/Plan/Do/Review).

Practice what you preach, right? When teaching and coaching the manager, I used the same methods I expected him to use. Then, to help him transfer and apply the skills, I guided him on using those methods with his reps. I also helped him implement a management operating rhythm in his division – with regular team and individual pipeline coaching meetings as well as targeted ride-alongs with coaching.

Results You Will Want

In four months (at the end of the next quarter), the manager’s division performance had improved by 36 percent over the previous quarter – and he led the country. His team also had improved profitability by 11 percent; plus, had a greatly improved win rate, with fewer and higher-quality opportunities to focus on since he had culled garbage from the pipeline.

When the sales leader and CEO saw these results, they did a company-wide implementation and went on to surpass their annual quota by 16 percent – achieving their best company performance in four years.

Models & Takeaways

Confession: None of what I or my pilot sales manager did was incredibly difficult. However, it did require some practice, commitment, and the flexibility to work differently for a while. The results were worth it and the implementation of new processes and efforts – led by the frontline sales managers – transformed the sales organization from the inside out.

As sales leaders, you, too, can get dramatic results by enabling managers to

• Use sales analytics wisely: Train managers how to use reporting to identify where sales reps may need help and to form a hypothesis about what behavior gaps exist and are causing performance lapses. We assume managers make these connections, but we rarely train them to do so or enable them to validate their observations. With a better foundation, managers can focus their coaching on real issues that improve productivity rather than conducting haphazard sessions or allowing reps (or themselves!) to settle into a “comfort zone.”
• Dig deeper with dialogue and observation: Interestingly, many managers – formerly top sales reps – previously did deep discovery with prospects to understand their pain points and needs. But now, as managers, they don’t default to using the same discovery skills when coaching their reps (moving into “tell” mode instead). So train managers to conduct discovery sessions with reps and observe live calls to validate or modify a performance hypothesis and decide how to best address it. This is a quick hit that can dramatically improve coaching quality in your company.
• Field train for skills, when appropriate: When individual field training is required for skills (e.g., reps don’t know what to do, why to do it, or how to do it), train managers so they can train reps effectively.
• Coach reps to mastery: Teach managers to help reps apply their training through the use of an effective coaching model. I recommend the models discussed here to guide reps over time to achieve mastery.
• Get into a cadence: Get your frontline sales managers into an organization-wide, agreed-upon management operating rhythm with performance management methods, such as pipeline meetings, forecast calls, team meetings, one-on-one meetings, and coaching ride-alongs.

Once again, when applied and executed consistently through frontline sales managers, a little logic backed by simple field training and coaching methods can radically improve your company’s sales results.

Mike Kunkle is a renowned sales transformation strategist, practitioner, speaker, and writer. He’s spent 22 years as a corporate leader or consultant, helping companies drive dramatic revenue growth through best-in-class learning strategies and his proven-effective sales transformation methodology. Today, Mike is freelancing as a writer, speaker, webinar leader, and sales transformation consultant, while exploring the market for his next career adventure. You can connect with Mike on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter at @Mike_Kunkle.