So what is the standard response from sales leaders (VPs/Directors/managers) to this situation?  Unfortunately it is often to focus on the wrong things, let’s try an analogy using golf (click the picture to emlarge).  The sales person is on the tee, driver in hand and the sales leader is nowhere to be seen.  The sales person can drive it straight (unlikely in my experience), slice it into the rough or pull it out of bounds.  Whatever the outcome the sales leader probably has no idea what has taken place.

The good news is that we got lucky; we are in the light rough on the right and take a long iron for our second shot.  Again no sales leader is watching and we have similar potential outcomes except this time we hit it into the bunker at the side of the green.  As we reach our ball the sales leader wanders past and says that they need it down in three from there, and could we do it in the next five minutes (something about quarter end).

We splash out to 18 feet and the sales leader is now standing over the putt with us giving advice and coaching us with phrases like “Remember, whatever you do don’t screw up!”.  We putt to 3 feet, always a tricky one, and notice the sales leader is now joined by their boss – great we are getting plenty of advice now.

The good news is that we make the putt, the sales leader and their boss leave without a word, and you go to the next tee by yourself.  OK, so it’s an analogy, but it works for me on a number of levels.  Firstly, the sales leaders only got involved in the dying moments of the sale and had little understanding of what has gone on in previous meetings with the customer.  In fact, the first meeting you had may have been so bad that you went out of bounds and never got a second shot.  Secondly, we are focusing on outputs from previous work rather than shaping the business development efforts of the sales team by coming up with a clear set of practical strategies that can drive results.  There are other parts to the analogy – and can you get it in the hole for quarter end – which I am sure you understand from your own personal experience, so I won’t labour the point.

In the next four posts I am going to explore what steps I believe sales leaders can take that will impact medium and long term business, and create a solid platform for business development.  The four areas are:

• Creating meaningful value propositions
• Fishing where the fish are – segmentation
• Knowing your metrics – driving the pipeline
• Coaching for sales success

I hope you enjoy the ideas.

I

K

E

A

And I say these are the 4 things that a customer wants to see in a sales person (especially if they are Swedish!). So I is for?
Integrity – honesty, transparency, a relationship based on truth
K is easy
Knowledge – but what knowledge? Your products and services, your company’s processes, your customer’s company – their offerings, their market, their industry, their competition
E is more difficult and takes a bit of time to get.
E is for Empathy – putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, what’s it like to do their job, what are the key priorities and issues they face
Finally A – I sometimes have to spell out the first few letters A-U-T – famously on one course a delegate shouted out Autism (you wonder what’s going on in people’s minds sometimes).
A is for Authority – the customer will be evaluating you in this regard, so that if something goes wrong will this sales person have the authority and gravitas within their company to resolve the problem.

I find this very useful for getting sales people to think from the customer’s perspective rather than their own. Let me know if this approach is useful for you.

So back to the objections, here is a generic list that I have built from my workshops:
1. AAA (company) offers more options than you.
2. Your price is too high (what never heard that before!)
3. I don’t like your BBB (product/solution)
4. CCC (company) are doing a better job in this area
5. Solve all my problems, then I’ll listen to your suggestions for new products
6. Your product/solution doesn’t have the features we are looking for
7. My boss isn’t authorizing anything at the moment
8. I’d love to do it, but I just don’t have budget
9. I don’t have time now, send me some literature
10. I’m happy with my current supplier
11. You’re the third sales person this year
12. Company DDD does it cheaper
13. I bought from you 3 years ago and it was a horrible experience, why should I do business with you now

So there are 13 on the list, some that are almost duplicates. I always say that the 10 most common objections that you hear will cover 90% of all the objections you face, so why not learn how to resolve them? I will cover a structured way to resolve objections in a later post (or posts). In the meantime are there any I should add to my list from your experience, please let me know.

But selling isn’t the only profession that needs to excel at asking questions. In journalism, the Five Ws (also known as the Five Ws (and one H), or Six Ws) is a concept in news style and research, and in police investigations it is regarded as a formula for getting the “full” story on something. The maxim of the Five Ws (and one H) is that for a report to be considered complete it must answer a checklist of six questions, each of which comprises an interrogative word:

• Who? Who was involved?
• What? What happened (what’s the story)?
• Where? Where did it take place?
• When? When did it take place?
• Why? Why did it happen?
• How? How did it happen?

Another “profession” where gathering information is a top priority is espionage or spying. Rudyard Kipling’s story Kim published in 1901 unfolds against the backdrop of The Great Game, the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. Throughout the story Kim is trained by a British spymaster in the art of information gathering, and some have suggested that Kipling himself was a British spy.

Interestingly, a year later in 1902 The “Five Ws” (and one H) were memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his “Just So Stories” (1902), in which a poem accompanying the tale of “The Elephant’s Child” opens with:

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

For sales people remembering to ask good, open questions is important. But just as important is your attitude in your dialogue with the customer. I found treating the information gathering process as a game where I was fully focused on understanding everything I could about the whole situation meant that not only did I got lots of information but the customer felt that I was really interested in them – great empathy.

Tell me how you develop questions for your customers.

Personally, I think we all have to move away from what we are selling and towards what problems the customer is grappling with, and how we can help them solve them. But that’s obvious, that’s what we do today! Well actually when I listen to sale people, 90% of them are still trying to force their “square” products into the customer’s “round” problem hole. They just aren’t listening to their customers and their questions are veiled attempts to position their products and solutions for selling.

So, how can we change our approach? I like to use the 4 stages of a customer/supplier relationship to graphically illustrate the point – and actually this makes a great sales team energizer. Individually get each sales person to say where they think they are on the left hand axis with an average customer. Go round the group and mark their answers on a pre-drawn flipchart of the diagram.

Remember to challenge people who claim they are trusted advisors – so you work at board level shaping the customer’s future strategy? Most people will acknowledge a relationship around the Preferred Supplier level. The question is “where do you need to be in the customer’s eyes to sell more effectively?” My view is that for most suppliers the Problem Solver level is a good level – where the customer values your opinion on problems they have and use you as an independent sounding board.

So, the second part of the energiser is to get the group to come up with what actions they can take to fill the GAP between, say, Preferred Supplier and Problem Solver. This is a great discussion point, and can lead to a powerful debate around how the sales force should engage with their customers and prospects. Fundamentally, it is a question of attitude, of wanting to really understand and explore the issues that are key priorities for the customer. Never lead with products, but lead with an attitude of coaching and helping the customer work through their issues.

Do you think I am right, or do you have a better engagement strategy – let me know!

One thing I quickly realised as a sales person is that all sales people tend to ask their customers the same situational questions.  By situational I mean questions that ask for purely factual information around their current situation e.g. who is your current supplier, how many years have you owned XXXX, etc.  These are questions you need to know, but just think how boring this is for the customer!

So, the idea of SMARTER questions is to ask questions that make the customer think, evaluate or speculate and offer an opinion, after all we all love to offer opinions.  This helps you position yourself higher up the food chain than other sales people, enhancing the customer’s opinion of the value of your call.  I will talk about the vendor – preferred supplier – problem solver – trusted advisor curve in a later post, but the aim of SMARTER questions is to get you to the problem solver level.

SMARTER questions invite customer involvement, asking them to focus on the most important business issues and will often expose underlying issues and produce high-quality information.  Dare to be different, ask SMARTER questions and get ahead of the sales pack!

Take the IT industry, years ago it wasn’t uncommon for a company to have a product advantage over the competition for a number of years – the example that comes to mind is the DEC VAX, where they had 2/3 years of market dominance over all competitors. Today, I cannot think of any examples of such dominance unless the market is distorted by government regulation. I was interested to see that when Costa Coffee launched its new “flat white” premium coffee, Starbucks responded with their own product within 4 days!

The Smart phone market is also very competitive, not only between Blackberry and Apple iPhone, but with the phone industry giant Nokia with Symbian, Microsoft’s mobile Windows and now various versions of Google’s Android operating system. Any market where there is growth and money to be made is competitive. This means that your customers will probably always have good BATNAs (see previous article) and hence can squeeze your price due to a competitor offering a similar solution. Of course, if you have failed to link your unique value to the customer’s business drivers, then it will always become a price auction!

So what can sales people do – sell harder? Well, think about today’s buyer, they have more information than ever before literally at their fingertips, with the click of a mouse. Think about buying a laptop and search for comparison websites – how many do you want – every detail of every option is discussed, analysed and rated against all of the competition. So if you are a laptop sales person, what can you do?

The first thing is to embrace the new world order, it isn’t going to go away, and information that creates savvy buyers is here to stay. So treat buyers as intelligent, computer literate people who will have done their research.

Secondly, rather than selling laptops can you sell a service/relationship advantage – sales people repeating facts they have already pulled off the web won’t interest them – what can you offer that’s new and engaging? Having case studies of people similar to them – vertical market, business challenge, application – and showing how they successfully implemented the solution is a good place to start.
Additionally, if you can also advise of potential risks and issues they may face during the implementation then they will listen. One of the key complaints of buyers is that sales people only focus up to getting the order, whereas the customer is interested in a successful implementation and return on investment of the project. Demonstrate that you are a different type of sales person who is really interested in the success of the project (back to the business issues).

Remember, buyers will not let you into their buying cycle early if you cannot demonstrate that there is a value to them in doing this. And, as we all know, if you aren’t in early then someone else is setting the agenda and so you are likely to become a purely price discounted option.

Do you have any ideas about how you can change your selling approach to be more effective? Let me know, post a comment.

The buying cycle is the steps in the process that the customer has to work through starting with idea of doing something (an awareness of needs) through to implementation and achievement of results. This is a customer internal process that needs to be respected by sales people trying to short cut the process to a quicker order. In customer interviews this is one of the most heinous crimes that sales people commit – not taking time to understand and work with the customer’s buying cycle.

So what are the advantages of understanding the buying cycle for a sales person? Well, firstly, they all differ – every customer is different, and so to sell well, we need to know what the customer is doing at each stage. This allows us to align our selling efforts with the appropriate buying steps. So, if the customer is still clarifying their needs, if the sales person puts in a proposal it is likely to be inappropriate as it is based on incomplete information. Similarly, if the customer is evaluating options, trying to close them can only make them angry and less likely to buy from you.

So, as a selling organization, you should have a sales cycle. These are the steps (the process) that you go through to ensure the best chance of winning the business. Sales organizations with a well defined sales process have a far better chance of executing business effectively and efficiently. These are the steps that are often linked to the stages in a CRM system for the % chance of winning the business. This process ensures that nothing is missed out, especially early in the cycle.

Knowing your own selling cycle and the customer’s buying cycle allows you to analyse whether the actions you are taking are synchronised with the customer’s actions. Again, the better the synchronisation between you and the customer, the better your chance of winning the business.

Throughout the process there should be an ongoing qualification of the prospect – are we talking to the right people, who will make the decision, how will it be made, what criteria will they use, etc. Interestingly, there is no timescale on these processes, and in some cases the whole cycle can be completed in one telephone call, whereas the process could take 50 meetings spread over 2 years. This is why it is important not to use generic processes (like the ones I have created), but to actually understand the real customer process.

When I run this session, I write the acronym IKEA vertically down the flipchart and ask people to come up with qualities that start with the four initials, sometimes adding letters if they get stuck.
And the answer is?

• I for Integrity, people want to deal with people they can trust especially if this is a relationship sale.
• K for knowledge, which should include the sales person’s own company, processes, products/services and people; the industry and market; and last but not least as much about the customer’s business as they can.
• E for Empathy, make me special and show that you care about me as an individual. I answer the phone “Hello, John Fowler” and get incredibly annoyed when the person at the other end says “er, can I speak to John Fowler”.
• A is the one most people don’t get so I start giving more clues – Au, Aut and in one workshop at this point one of the sales people shouted out “Autustic” – hmmm. Of course, A for Authority, because when things go wrong the customer wants to ensure the sales person has the authority within their own company to make things happen. This could also be seen as a certain gravitas and standing.

Sales managers can use this as a team builder, getting pairs of sales people to come up with ways of demonstrating the IKEA qualities. Let me know what qualities you think sales people need to succeed in today’s business climate.