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.

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!

Why don’t sales people want to go over their current contact’s head? I think it comes down to fear – fear of the unknown, fear of upsetting the person, fear of upsetting the relationship and fear of dealing with a more senior person. In fact, there is no clear answer as every case is different and it comes down to a judgment call. If you are taking £1m out of the account every year – would you risk it? If you are taking £5k and you can see projects you are being blocked from – why not?

When I worked for a particularly aggressive comms company, we would use the phrase “burn them” – you called higher, won more business or lost the account and focused your energies elsewhere. The interesting thing about this for me is what actually happens in reality in 90% of the cases. What do you think, how does the relationship with the current contact develop?

Well, my experience is once you have called higher you free yourself from the shackles of being keep in the dark. Your current contact wanted to keep you in their control, but now you have a route to their boss and access to information and power they cannot control.  The balance of power changes in your relationship and business often improves.

Some techniques that you can use to approach the current contact about going higher include:

• Using your boss to engineer the contact (my boss/your boss)
• There’s a campaign to sell X, which is outside the current contact’s remit
• Marketing are running a “one level higher” campaign and we have to do it in all our accounts

One final quote that I have heard is “It is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission” – so you go do it and tell your contact later.  My preference is to forewarn my contact and ask them to help me to get access.  Let me know how you go about calling higher.

So I start by saying “In a Europe wide survey of sales people, they said there four key reasons for sale people not calling higher. In your teams, come up with your top four reasons in order of significance and then we will play Family Forunes!” You may just want to spend a minute thinking about how you would answer this. After a few minutes (probably about three just to keep the pressure on) we play the game and I do the “ding” and “u-er” (you know what I mean) noises, and allocate points on a purely arbitrary basis.

The answers I suggest in order of significance are:

• Don’t want to upset your current contact by going over their head
• Can’t think of what to say on the call
• Can’t think of a mechanism to get to them – gatekeepers, voice mail, etc
• Fear – can’t talk their language, might ask me thing I don’t know, might just mess up

The idea is to get them thinking and discussing the issues and then we move on to why you need to talk to them, why they want to talk to you and how you make the call. I will cover these topics in later posts, and again I would suggest that this is a great team exercise in sales meetings for sales managers to introduce the subject of getting access to people who make the decisions. Please let me know if you agree with my top four suggestions, and any other ideas you may have.

By the way, do you recognise the guy in the picture – no it’s not me – it’s Bernard Madoff, as in made off with the money.