Ordinary is something you are taught. You may have been infected with the idea that you are not to make waves, not to stand out, and not to draw attention to yourself. The people around you likely shared a set of common goals and beliefs like: go to school, get an education, get a good job, and work towards retirement. Even the people who love you will want to keep you safe, perhaps even telling you that using your gift is too dangerous, that you may get hurt.

what to do with under performing sales people When salespeople are not producing results?

#1 Not Enough Activity

The first reason you aren’t producing the results you want right now is because you aren’t taking enough action to produce them. There is no harvest in Autumn if you do not plant in the Spring.

Activity is what produces results, not desire, not intentions, and not luck. If you really desire a certain result, you’ll do the work necessary to produce it. Otherwise, it’s just talk. Intentions are important, but only when coupled with action. You can grow old waiting for luck to find you; she only looks for hustlers.

If you aren’t where you want to be right now, it’s very likely that you aren’t doing what is necessary to get there. If you were, you would already have what you want.

#2 Not The right Activity

Maybe you are taking massive action and still aren’t where you want to be, even though that’s less likely to be true.

You may believe that the activity you are taking isn’t the right activity. Before you decide that this is the case, you have to honestly determine whether or not you’ve done enough of that activity to get the results you want. Have you gone all in? Would some impartial party know exactly what you were trying to accomplish by looking at the actions you are taking, believing it to be an extraordinary effort?

You also have to decide whether you’ve done enough activity for long enough to get the results you want. Some outcomes you want require persistence, and that’s why so few produce those outcomes. It rarely makes sense to switch strategies and tactics without first executing against what you believe to be right.

All that said, if what you are doing isn’t working, treat each failure as feedback, and then change your approach. Find a model, someone who is already producing the result you want, and look for clues as to what they are doing differently. Repeat this until you find something that works, and then go all in.

The obstacles to success are almost exclusively internal. Even when they are not, with enough energy and effort applied consistently over time, the obstacle will yield.

6 Steps in the Right Direction

Step 1: Compare Yourself to Others

I don’t compare myself to anyone else. I just want to be better than the person I was yesterday.” This is one of those statements that sounds good on the surface, but is harmful when it comes to success (whatever that means to you). Comparing yourself to other people is necessary if you want to be more, do more, have more, and contribute more.

Lacking Knowledge

Without a point of comparison, you have no idea how you’re doing. Do you do excellent work? How do you know? How can you know without a point of comparison?

Do you have impeccable character, the kind of values that make you someone people want to work with, want to know, and want in their life? Do you know what impeccable character is without knowing what it is not?

How is your family and your health? How are you doing financially? To define how you are doing, you need some way to measure where you are.

The risk in trying only to be better than you were yesterday is that maybe you aren’t doing well enough for that to be a useful measurement.

Lacking Vision

When you compare yourself, you get an idea as to where you fall on some scale of measurement. Without that comparison, you would not know what’s possible. Without making observations as to how other people are doing, you don’t have an informed idea of what is possible for you.

Have you ever met someone and thought, “If that person can do that, so can I?” Exactly. You just needed to see it done, recognizing that the person succeeding in some area is really no different than you. Or at least the version of you who is willing to strive.

Comparing what you are doing to what other people are doing can help you develop a bigger vision of yourself.

Step 2: Spend Time with People More Successful Than You

You can’t see your potential from where you are now. It isn’t visible to you.

First, success is personal.

It isn’t measured on a curve. Your definition of success and my definition of success might be vastly different. They may even be at odds. In fact, you living my definition of success might make you miserable, while me living your definition of success might not make me the least bit happy.

There is a reason that you should spend time and develop relationships with people who are more successful than you are now. But before we get into all the reasons this is true, we need to cover a few important issues.

Second, success can get a bad rap, and some people make the very pursuit of success a divisive issue.

Success shouldn’t be divisive, and the idea that you need to surround yourself with people who have a greater level of success is not a judgment of the people you love and care about that aren’t experiencing the same level of success as the people you will need to spend time with.

The reason you need to spend time with people who are more successful than you is because you can’t see your real potential from where you are now.

Your potential is far greater than anything You can imagine. The only limit on your real potential is the limit of your awareness of what is possible for you. Your potential isn’t visible to you.

Think about where you were years ago, when you weren’t as successful as you are right now in some area of your life.

Your beliefs and behaviours were different than they are now. And even though you weren’t conscious of how they were limiting you, they acted as a governor on your success. At some point, you gained an awareness of these beliefs and behaviours and changed them.

Someone standing higher up on a mountain can see further than you can. They can also more easily see the path that is available to you, even if it isn’t yet clear to you. They have a greater view of your potential. By spending time with people who are more successful, you start to become conscious of what you believe and how it limits you. You also gain the advantage of transforming faster by finding people whose beliefs and behaviours you can model.

Develop relationships with people who are more successful than you. Find mentors. Develop a mastermind group of people who have something you want, whatever that is, be it financial success or being a great parent, or whatever you call success.

If you are going to listen to
advice, first determine whose
advice is worth taking.

STEP 3: Avoid bad advice.

A lot of people will offer you advice. Most of it, you should avoid.

Avoid people who:

Part 2 will be published next month or you can download the e-book today.

The post What To Do With Under Performing Sales People Who Are Not Producing Results?(part 1) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Without meaning to, my friend Jeb Blount created quite a clamour on LinkedIn. The poll he posted asked which medium to use first in a prospecting sequence: phone, email, social media, or an in-person visit. He argued (and I agree) that the phone should start your sequence. The reason is simple and straightforward: if the person who answers your call agrees to a meeting, you no longer need a sequence.

The comments on Jeb’s poll were both revealing and incredibly disappointing. Cold calling has consistently been a lightning rod on social media, with a few salespeople advocating for an “all of the above” approach, including the telephone. But I want to set aside that debate for a few minutes, because the comments highlighted a much larger potential threat: fear of sales.

The Mass Infection of Fear

One vocal opponent of cold calling, an entrepreneur, commented on Jeb’s thread that his approach was to buy ads on Facebook, providing a link that a prospective client might click on. Only after the prospect clicked the link did this person believe he could reach out them. The problems with this approach would overflow a week’s worth of posts, so in the interests of time I’ll just note a couple. First, one-to-many messaging is marketing, not sales. Second, no individual salesperson has a Facebook pixel and a budget to run ads. Relying on Facebook ads may be the right choice for entrepreneurs but its awful advice for a salesperson. What’s underneath that advice, however, is worse: the entrepreneur was too afraid to call his prospective clients.

Other comments suggested that one must warm up the prospective client by sending them an email, claiming that it is important for the client to see your name on an email before they get your call. To be honest, I’m having trouble following that logic. How exactly does getting a cold email create the desire to speak to the person who sent it? Unless you spend your day starting at your phone, hoping against hope that the people who just spammed you will call you to spam you again, then you cannot possibly believe that an email makes it safer to dial a prospect’s number. And there’s the rub: when email-first salespeople talk about safety, they broadcast the same fear of calling a stranger. An odd thing, that, given that every good thing that ever happens to you in sales is the result of meeting a stranger.

Finally, one person suggested that the best way to start a prospecting sequence is with a warm referral. His response gave a very long explanation of how to respond to an introduction over email or on LinkedIn, again emphasizing the asynchronous communication tools that so many salespeople hide behind. The same people who are afraid of calling a stranger are also reluctant to call up their clients and ask for a referral. They worry about imposing on their client, so they avoid asking for the referral in a real conversation and instead defer it to email.

With all this fear floating around, here’s a reminder: no salesperson has ever been scarred for life by making a cold call, although many have experienced incredibly negative consequences because they didn’t create enough opportunities.

The Long-term Harm of Fearing Your Clients

There are deleterious effects of teaching salespeople to fear their prospective clients. If a ten-minute phone conversation is so dangerous, then I can only imagine how much the salesperson should fear advising the client on what they need to do to improve their results. And just imagine those poor salespeople working on big deals, with multi-year, multi-million dollar payoffs, the kind that require the salesperson to negotiate with the client, or worse, their purchasing department. Terrifying, I tell you. Just terrifying.

This fear-based approach goes hand in hand with the idea that marketing is responsible for creating sales opportunities and that sales appointments should be handled by crude robots. Conflict aversion is harmful to the development of a salesperson, simply because embracing conflict is the only way to make a positive difference for your clients. No one is ever going to find a compliant, conflict-averse, namby-pamby, order-taker to be consultative, nor will they ever find them to be a trusted advisor.

What makes one a trusted advisor is their willingness to tell the truth at any price, even the price of the deal. The need to be liked is not the same as being likable. The first is detrimental, the other is an advantage. But the advantage of being likable is not available to one who fears their client, especially when it prevents them from having the necessary conversations around change.

A New Hope

In my view, the new hope is the SDR. While salespeople in this category are rarely deployed as effectively as they should be, at least they aren’t being infected with the result-crushing belief that they should fear making a phone call: cold, hot, or indifferent. Their willingness to keep making cold calls will help them develop crucial character traits for sales effectiveness: comfort with conflict, understanding how to trade value for time, unafraid of proposing next steps, able to handle objections, and unaffected by what others would call rejection.

For a long time now, I have been telling sales leaders to prioritize the development of their sales force. Those who take this advice are doing well. Those who don’t often arrest their salespeople’s development, whether it’s by giving into fear or falling for other get-out-of-work-free promises by faux-experts—few of which even consider the long-term effects of their decisions or recommendations.

Do Good Work:

• Look for advice that serves your results.
• Avoid people who would infect you with their fears.
• Never be afraid of calling anyone when you believe you may be able to help them—even if they reject or ignore you.

The post The Fear And Generational Shift Against Cold Calling appeared first on Head Of Sales.

You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in…

• How Seth distinguishes between career and work.
• Why Seth believes there is no such thing as writer’s block.
• What makes you an artist and how to find your voice.
• What people can do to start trusting themselves in their work.
• Why generosity cannot be transactional.
• What Seth sees as the job of the future.

Career vs. Work

I had a discussion with a friend recently regarding the difference between having a career and having what I consider my work. We didn’t necessarily agree about the distinction.

I asked Seth to clarify for me.

Seth replied that the subtitle of his book is “Ship Creative Work,” so he HAS to know how to define “work”. He defines it as something we don’t do as a hobby and something we don’t do for ourselves. It has to have an “otherness” to it as well as a level of professionalism. If we make something and call it our work, it is a reflection of our choices about how we decided to contribute to whatever situation that we are in.

Doing the work is a fulfilling way to spend one’s day. Your work is NOT your career. The word “career” implies that the industrial system is in charge of the arc of your work. More than ever before, many people don’t have careers — they have a series of projects that reflect THEIR choices, instead of what their employer decided they should do. Listen to this episode to hear this and several more of Seth’s revolutionary ideas. They are sure to cause a paradigm shift in the way you see things!

There is no such thing as writer’s block.

Many people believe writer’s block is real. Seth counters by saying there is no such thing. He says The Practice contains thirty to forty ideas that counter what people believe — writer’s block is one of those ideas. Writer’s block is really just fear of bad writing. If you’re willing to do bad writing, then good writing will slip through — it can’t be helped. When people say “I don’t have any ideas,” what they mean is they don’t have any guaranteed-to-work ideas.

Seth believes that creativity is a professional practice just as much as any other professional practice. Professionals show up every day. They don’t wait for the muse or the right emotions or “flow”. They don’t know if it’s going to work. They just DO the work. They can’t be the critic or determine what will create value for someone. They just have to put it out there consistently and see what happens. Listen to hear more about the fascinating views Seth shares on creativity, consistency, and value!

What is Seth selling?

Seth says that with this latest book, he wants to sell people on finding their potential to contribute to our culture in a way they are proud of. To stop hiding and whining and scamming. To start trusting themselves. To start showing up and creating art with generosity. And to learn that trust is worth WAY more than attention on social media.

There are so many fantastic ideas we touched on that I can’t even begin to tell you about them all here. You’re going to want to hop on the podcast and listen to this episode to get all the wisdom Seth shares!

Resources & People Mentioned

• The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
• Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson

Connect with Seth Godin

• Seth’s Website
• Seth’s Amazon Author Page 
• Follow Seth on Medium
• Follow Seth on Twitter
• Follow Seth on Instagram
• Follow Seth on Facebook
• Seth can be found on LinkedIn at Akimbo Workshops and altMBA

The post Selling with Seth Godin (Podcast) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

There are, however, many things you are not going to lose during our emergency. This list is also what you must retain, even though some will require considerable effort as we face our global crisis.

Your Relationships: You are not going to lose the lifetime of relationships you have built and nurtured over a lifetime. On the other side, you are going to have your family, your friends, your clients, and your partners. They will be thrilled to have you still, and you will be here to help each other.

Your Attitude: It is natural to feel fear and doubt. But it’s essential you keep a positive, optimistic, future-oriented, and empowered attitude and belief system. There is nothing to gain by being pessimistic, especially when you need to take action. You need to keep your attitude positive, even though it isn’t always going to be easy.

Your Knowledge: It has been a very long time since I have heard anyone say, “No one can take your education away from you.” Even though some of what we believed may be proven wrong, like the idea that “it can’t happen here,” what you know will still be intact, and it will be beneficial in the future.

Your Experience: Another form of knowledge, and one that you will also retain in the future. Your experience is still going to be valuable, and it may be worth even more when we reach the other side, as we begin to rebuild. Your situational knowledge is an advantage in the future.

Your Memories: A life is made up of experiences, the best and most important of which include your friends and your family. The best things in life are not things; they are our memories, and particularly the ones we make with the ones we love.

Your Goals and Dreams: Your goals and dreams might take a hit, but when something is important to you, it is still going to be important to you in the future. You can, should, must keep your achievable goals and your dreams. Let them fuel you through this challenge.

Your Hunger: The key to reaching your goals and finding wild success is mostly hunger. If you were hungry before, you will be even hungrier on the other side of this crisis. Let the desire wake you up in the morning and taking action as soon as your feet hit the floor.

Your Ability to Help: Your ability to help, to share, to create value for others is only going to grow stronger during difficult times. It is difficult to worry about yourself and your future if you are focused on helping others who need you.

Your Soul: The part of you that is unique isn’t going to go missing. The Buddhist koan, “show me your original face before your mother and father were born” is an attempt to help you recognize this part of you. There is no threat of losing what is essentially you.

Your Spiritual Faith: In times of crisis, it is easy to doubt your faith, to question what you believe, what you know. The word faith is to believe without physical proof, but trusting what your spirit perceives. Your faith will endure this test.

Please remember that we are in the middle chapters of our story, not the ending.

The post What You Will Not Lose in A Crisis appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Synchronous mediums are far more valuable to effective selling, but many sales organizations and salespeople choose asynchronous methods—especially email—to communicate with their clients and their prospects. Don’t choose a medium based on preference (yours or your client’s) or on what you find to be most efficient. Instead, select one based on the importance of your message’s outcome.

The Problem with Voicemail

Say you need to speak with your client. When you call them, they are away from their phone, so you leave them a voicemail to tell them that you had a couple questions about some topic that is critically important to their results and your chances of winning their business. At the end of that message, you inform your contact that you are going to be away for the afternoon and to please leave their response on your voicemail, so you can make sure you understand their need well enough to get their solution right.

Later, you listen to your prospective client’s voicemail message and gain a better understanding of their needs. It’s after work hours, so you call and leave your client another voicemail message, asking them to clarify something they said. And because they are in a different time zone, you again ask them to leave the answer on your voicemail, so you can take care of any necessary changes when you start work the next day.

You’re probably thinking that this is an absurdly inefficient way to have a conversation, and you’re right. If you are like most people, you believe this conversation would be better had over email, even though the human voice conveys exponentially more information than the written word. But in sales, you’re not trying to improve your communicative efficiency. You are trying to create the kind of value that serves your client in producing better results, in such a way that it creates a preference to buy from you instead of one of your many competitors. Using any asynchronous medium—go ahead and tell me how email is significantly different from voicemail tag—is a poor approach, since both provide “efficiency” while lessening your ability to create value and a preference.

Is Conversation Necessary?

I am expecting an email today to tell me when I can expect a package to be delivered. I bought the item from a store in Cincinnati, and the item needs to be shipped to the store before it can be shipped to me. While it would be nice for the shop owner to call me to tell me personally when I will receive my order, it isn’t necessary because there is no conversation needed. Were the shop owner to call me, however, I would feel a greater obligation to buy from them because a personal call shows a stronger commitment to our working relationship. I would recognize that they appreciate my business enough to do more than what is now customary, something that would almost certainly prompt repeat business.

The right way to determine when to use synchronous or asynchronous mediums is to weigh the importance of the conversation. Let’s use another two categories here: sales conversations and transactional conversations. Let’s define a sales conversation as any conversation where you are trying to create value for a client, create a preference to buy from you, advance your sales process, or ask your contact for some commitment. Transactional conversations, by contrast, don’t require a conversation.

Since prospecting is part of your sales process, asking a prospect for the commitment of time is important enough that you should use a synchronous medium. Because discovery is where you do the most work differentiating yourself and where you create much of your consultative value, those conversations do not in any way benefit from a back-and-forth over email or voicemail. In fact, if your plan is to send your proposal and pricing over email without actually walking the client through their solution and the investment, you’re offering a transactional sale, not a consultative one.

None of this, by the way, means that transactional communication is useless. For instance, I received a transactional email yesterday, following up on a conversation the sender and I had two days ago, to remind me about our next meeting and asking me to sign a document. Emails like that are part of how we communicate, and they are useful when the communication would not be improved by a synchronous conversation.

Ranking Sales Mediums

Face-to-Face: This is the platinum standard in communication, and it should be your first choice for all sales conversations—even if it is inconvenient, and even if you or your client would prefer another medium.

Video Conference: The gold standard is now the face-to-face video call. Human communication is greatly improved by the visual and audio cues that, even seen through a webcam darkly, are much better than any asynchronous communication available.

The Phone: While it is missing the visual component in the first two preferred mediums, a phone call is synchronous and the audio connection gives it a boost over asynchronous mediums. Let’s call this the silver standard.

When possible, choose one of these synchronous mediums for important client conversations. The others are inadequate to the outcomes of creating value for the client and a preference to buy from you.

Voicemail: Voicemail, containing an audio component, is more valuable than an email. Your client gets to hear your voice. Even if you are going to send an email, leave a voicemail first.

Text Message: This medium is no longer new. When it was new, the responses from your contacts were almost instantaneous. Now, your texts are sometimes treated like an email.

Email: If face-to-face is the platinum standard, then email might be called the “sand standard,” something glorified by Silicon Valley and its microchips, but little more than a trap for serious salespeople.

Do Good Work:

• Stop using asynchronous mediums for important sales conversations.
• Develop an active preference for synchronous communication mediums.
• Teach and train your clients that when they email, you will pick up the phone and call them back.

The post Why Asynchronous Communication Isn’t Effective Selling appeared first on Head Of Sales.

While I consider you my sisters and brothers, we need to talk. Every day, you fill my inbox and my LinkedIn inbox with notes straight pitching me what you sell. No one wants you to succeed in sales as much as I do, including you, and whomever it was that taught you that pitching over email is your best choice for acquiring new clients or customers.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with pitching under the right circumstances pitching strangers without any context or conversation is extremely poor form. An approach that starts with pitching is what one does when they either don’t know better or when they hold weak beliefs, specifically the idea that everyone is a prospect (everyone is not a prospect).

As far as one can tell, the negative feedback and poor results do nothing to persuade you to change your approach. Please accept my advice in the spirit in which I deliver it, as one who wants you to succeed in sales if that is indeed the path you have chosen.

Selling Is Other-Oriented. You Are Self-Oriented.

When you pitch your product or service by describing what you sell in the first paragraph of your email, you project that your email is about nothing more than you gaining a sale. Your approach has a significant problem that causes most people to tune you out. Your first problem is that you repel people because you appear to be self-oriented.

When the sale you make is about you, it’s about the result that you want for you. You would improve your approach by focusing your conversation about what your client wants and needs, their challenges, their opportunities, and their goals. Acquiring what you want is only possible when you help someone else get what they want, as Zig never tired of reminding us.

You will improve your approach by becoming other-oriented. Instead of focusing on straight pitching people, you might spend the time to understand their world, develop a theory about what they might be struggling with, and develop an approach that speaks to what they might want. You’ll also want to slow down.

Don’t Sell Too Soon.

If what you sell is something people buy all the time, and if there is no serious consequence for making a mistake, by all means, pitch away. Maybe you sell batteries in a convenient store, the example Rackham provided in SPIN Selling. There is no reason not to ask for a sale if there can be no adverse consequences.

When the opposite is true, when your prospect doesn’t make the purchase decision you are going to ask them to make frequently, and when bad choices come with significant consequences, pitching means you are selling too soon.

When you pitch in email or Linkedin, requesting a meeting at the end of the note does nothing to mitigate the fact that your approach is transactional, as are all “spray and pray” approaches to sales. To sell a prospective client, you first have to create an opportunity by prospecting.

If you want a better, modern approach to prospecting, please see Mike Weinberg’s New Sales Simplified, Jeb Blount’s Fanatical Prospecting, Mark Hunter’s High-Profit Prospecting, Tony Hughes’s Combo Prospecting. Also, please read the first three chapters of Eat Their Lunch for a consultative approach for complex B2B sales, especially one that requires you to displace a competitor to win new business. Win customers away from your competition. Check out Eat Their Lunch

And then, there is the question about the value you create.

No Value Creation

B2B selling has changed quite a bit over the last decade. You may have heard advice about “social selling” or “the digital transformation of sales,” or some other overhyped fad that captured salespeople’s attention by promising that the new toolkit would make selling easier.

For all of my criticism of social, no one who believed in “social selling” would recommend you pitch people directly. The first rule of social selling is to do no selling. No one would train or teach you to do what you are doing now.

One of the most substantial changes in sales has been the b2b buyer’s expectations about the value they expect salespeople to create through the process. Your email does nothing to create value for the contacts you spam each day. There are several prerequisites to creating value.

First, you have to possess the business acumen to be able to understand your business, your contact’s business, and the intersection that is how you create value for them. These things are necessary to consultative sales. Second, you need to trade something of value for the time you are asking your contact to give you.

The only thing you need to sell at the start of your relationship with a connection is a meeting. Please watch this video about trading value about the time you are asking your contact to give you.

It is poor form to sell over email in your first communication with a contact. A contact is not a prospect, and you will not create an opportunity before you acquire a meeting. It will be helpful for you to think about this as “sell the meeting,” “sell the process,” and then “sell your solution.” Reversing the order here also reverses the outcome.

Stop Taking Bad Advice About Lead Generation

Almost daily, I receive an email pitch from someone who wants to mine LinkedIn for qualified leads. The people sending these notes mistakenly believe that anyone upright, breathing, with a body temperature in the neighborhood of 98.6 degrees, is a prospect. Why they think people want to spam other people as a way to acquire the new relationships that might result in a new opportunity is baffling. Please stop taking bad advice about lead generation.

B2B salespeople, please do your homework. Read books, take courses, get the training and development you need to succeed in sales. Become someone people want to buy from, not someone that repels people by spamming them over email and LinkedIn.

The post What You Need to Know About Pitching Over Email appeared first on Head Of Sales.

It’s an exercise I have found helpful for setting goals and developing plans, even if I have often found a way to retain a theme simply by changing the word.

I have kept this practice since 2013 and here is my history of this exercise.

2013: Platform. Lean. Tribes.
2014: Pivot. Frames. Margin.
2015: Order. Depth. Lifestyle.
2016: Growth. Multiplier. Focus
2017: Integrated. Impeccable. Essential.
2018: Polaris. Via Negativa. Leverage.
2019: Velocity. Execution. Potential.
2020: Intentional. Lines. Performance.

A year is 8,760 hours. We perceive time as scarce because we overestimate what we can do in a day (and by a wide margin, deluding ourselves about what is possible in twenty-four hours). However, we underestimate–by an even wider margin–what we can accomplish in a week, a month, a quarter, a year, or especially a decade.

My Three Words for 2021

Here are my three words for 2021 with a short description.

1. Deepen

The charge here is to go deeper. To read deeper. To think deeper and produce works with greater depth, work of greater import, and weight. It’s also an intention to improve by working on the internal, to be more introspective, to deepen all my practices.

2. Polish

Polish commands that one make something smooth and shiny. It is to refine something, and by doing so, improving it. Apple is an excellent example of a company that excels at “polish,” where even the box that contains a device is beautiful, positively contributing to the experience. “Polish” also speaks to the surface of things, making it the perfect counter to deepen. Every holon has an inside and an outside.

3. Slow

There is no mystery around this word. Productivity, a measure of work, is often confused with tasks and busywork. Real productivity is a measure of the value of the work you complete, the work’s outcome, the impact of the work, and the contribution it makes towards your goals. Going slow gets more done at a higher level of quality, increasing your effectiveness.

Whenever you set a standard, it’s worth writing down a set of questions to test whether you are meeting it.

• Is this work deep enough to be both meaningful and useful?
• Is this work polished? Is it beautiful?
• Does this work need more time?

Happy New Year!

The post Three Words appeared first on Head Of Sales.

While I had always been a reader, during my recovery, I started reading a book a day. I told my neurologist that I was sure my brain was making new neural pathways and that it was on fire. He listened patiently and then told me there was no evidence that my theory was accurate and that it was more likely I was compensating for losing a significant part of my brain. We didn’t yet fully understand neuroplasticity, and it turns out both of us may have been correct.

At some point, I started picking up books on sales and business. The first book I stumbled upon was SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham. If you heard my story behind my book, The Lost Art of Closing, it was the three pages where Rackham described “the advance” as a key to success in sales. Once I understood I needed a commitment for another meeting, selling got quite a bit easier. I wrote a list of questions for each part of the SPIN model and started to work towards Implications (clumsily, I might add) and needed payoffs.

The book was so helpful that I picked up Major Account Sales Strategy, Rackham’s second book—and in some ways, his better book. I had been winning large accounts in California, but I didn’t have a very strategic view or a process. Mostly I just called on people who spent a lot of money in my category. Major Account Sales Strategy provided me with frameworks for thinking about big deals. I eventually read everything Rackham wrote and multiple times.

One book I picked up appeared to be new, but it was quite old at the time I picked it up. The book was Consultative Selling by Mack Hanan. Parts of the book were difficult for me, but what I learned that was useful was Hanan’s idea that you shift the conversation away from price to the increased profit the client will make by adopting your solution. The application of this idea made it easier for me to start sharing the soft costs my clients were not calculating in their overall costs.

The Miller Heiman books were both beneficial, The New Strategic Selling and The New Conceptual Sale. The first had me looking at stakeholders differently, even though the evolution of my thought here shows up very differently in Eat Their Lunch, which you might expect since 34 years have passed since they first published Strategic Selling. I don’t remember New Conceptual as well, but I remember it caused me to take sales calls seriously enough to plan them.

I read all of Stephen Covey’s work before my brain surgery, and even those books were not on sales, they caused me to recognize I had to improve who I was before I could improve my sales results. They also led me to read a lot more books on business improvement.

Some books that were not sales-related on their face were valuable to me. One of those books was Tom Peter’s Circle of Innovation, a book that made me think deeply about differentiation and allowed me to put technological solutions long before my larger competitors could do so, grabbing a competitive advantage in big deals. Another was Michael Hammer’s The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade. From this work, I took the idea that my business existed to take care of its customers. I started to present how what I did for my clients helped them serve their customers. Pondering that idea for a while is an excellent way to get better at selling.

One of the more useful and transformative books I read was Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa. The ideas and the dialogue in this book massively improved my ability to have conversations about the changes the customer would have to make to produce the results they needed.

There were hundreds of other books on sales and business I read, all of which had some value, even if I didn’t recognize it right away. These few were core to my development and the ones I remember as changing my sales results.

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The Deal Manager – Manages Deals, Doesn’t Lead

The deal manager isn’t going to lead you. They are going to make you do a territory or account plan, and they aren’t going to provide you with any coaching. The deal manager does what you suspect; they manage deals. The deal manager isn’t concerned with your personal and professional development, your long terms goals, or the source of your motivation. The deal manager is only concerned with deals. You can learn a lot about deal management from this type of sales leaders, but you won’t gain much more during the time you work for them.

The Sycophant – Yes Man to Executive Leadership

I break out in hives when I interact with Sycophants. They’re difficult to talk to because they always have their lips pressed against their senior leader’s posterior. The sycophant tows the company line, come Hell or high water, providing a great sense of consistency and certainty, regardless of how bad, how unrealistic, or how difficult the initiative. They aren’t concerned at all with your performance, so long as it doesn’t reduce their standing with those above them in the hierarchy, as their strong desire is to climb up by sucking up.

Desk Jockey – Always Available by Email

If you have a desk jockey as a sales manager, you may not recognize them without first going to LinkedIn to view their profile, hoping that they updated their profile more recently than they updated you. The Desk Jockey will never join you in the field, and they’ll never visit clients with you. Their natural habit is sitting at their desk, working for their company instead of their team.

The Super Closer – Closes and Prevents You from Doing So

There may not be any more fun one can have as a sales manager as that of the super closer. You pretend your team needs you to close deals, and you insert yourself into the deal, knowing that you are going to bring it home safely. The Super Closer doesn’t trust their team to win deals on their own, believing the way they create value for the people on their team is helping them close deals. Working for a Super Closer will stunt your growth, preventing you from learning, and making the adjustments that allow you to win bigger and better accounts on your own.

The Reminiscer – The Blueprint for Your Success

The Reminiscer might also be called The Legend. The Reminiscer spends most of their time recounting their adventures in sales, and how they did it when they carried a bag. They are sure that worked for them must work for everyone, without exception, and without variation. The Reminiscer believes his people are not selling correctly and that his advice would work, if only they did what he did when he sold (even though he didn’t do very well himself). The Reminiscer doesn’t have any clue as to how to help his team improve, and he is modeling the sales managers for whom he worked.

Activity Manager – More is Better Than Better

The activity manager is a particular type of sales manager. They know that producing better results only comes from more activity. They are not concerned with the quality of a client interaction or anything that might require effectiveness. Activity Managers cannot help you improve and grow, so they go to what they know from their time in sales, that it is a numbers game. More calls are better than fewer calls, even if they are awful. A higher number of meetings are better than fewer, even if the meetings are with people and companies who are not qualified. While activity is essential, effective activity is considerably more critical.

The True Sales Leader

The Sales Leader is also just that, a leader. The sales leader will require much more of you than you would require of yourself. They’ll expect you to develop yourself personally and professionally. You will be required to do territory and account plans, to create new opportunities, to use your technological tools, and to win deals.

They’ll coach you, which will frequently feel more challenging than telling you what to do, but by making you work things out for yourself, they force you to grow. If you need them to help with a deal, they’re happy to give an assist, but they aren’t going to run your sale for you. When your leaders charge you with something difficult, they’ll challenge leadership, protecting you when it is called for, even if you eventually have to do what your leadership team asks of you.

You’ll sometimes find them at their desk, but you are just as likely to see them in a meeting with members of their team or sitting in front of a client or prospect, pursuing different outcomes than the desk jockey. While the sales leader will tell stories, their primary use will be to teach something about a principle that will drive you beliefs and your actions. What your real sales leader will want from you isn’t just activity. Instead, they’ll want you to take the initiative, the right and productive activity.

Young people often ask me what kind of company they should work for when they start in sales. They hope the answer includes cool companies in the technology space or companies where they can make a lot of money, none of which meet my criteria for how you learn to sell. If you want to work in sales—or any other role—pick a place with excellent leadership, great training, and great development opportunities. Spending a couple of years with people who care about your growth and development will serve you better than a job that pays a little more or has unicorn status.

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Finding new opportunities and creating them are two different outcomes. Those who struggle to create enough new opportunities often believe that they need to find opportunities when they need to create them, something that requires a different approach.

Finding Opportunities

The idea that one is trying to “find opportunities” starts with the belief that your prospects are already unhappy and that they are open to changing their solutions and their existing partners to improve their results. The belief that your prospective clients are already compelled to change drives your approach.

The primary idea here is to ask questions that will elicit the client’s existing “dissatisfaction.” The question that best describes this approach is the question, “What’s keeping you up at night?” This question is an attempt to fish for some “gap” you can use to start a conversation about your solution. The approach requires that you get your prospect to acknowledge some areas where they need better results.

There are still industries where this approach is valuable. There are also occasions when your contacts are well aware of their problems and are looking for someone to help them improve their results. You should not believe that because more powerful approaches sometimes replace this traditional approach, it isn’t valuable. You need different approaches for different scenarios, and this approach is still available to you when it enables the right sales conversation.

This traditional approach to discovery is about eliciting the client’s existing pain points, or hot buttons, or dissatisfaction. Here, you are trying to find new opportunities.

Creating Opportunities

What do you do when your dream client doesn’t believe they are dissatisfied? How do you find an opportunity when your prospective client doesn’t think they have any reason to explore change and that speaking with a salesperson is a waste of their time? What do you do when your contact doesn’t believe there is a gap?

The world we now find ourselves in is very different from ten years ago, let alone the forty years that have passed since some of the processes and methodologies we use to sell effectively were observed and documented. Evolution tends to transcend what exists while including what is still useful, which is true about b2b sales approaches. When change is more difficult and more disruptive, when it requires more time and consensus, and when the risks are greater, you will not be likely to find opportunities. Instead, you must create them.

The realities of business now require access to a different approach, one that allows you to have a conversation about change. It opens up the possibility of exploring change and creating an opportunity. You do this by helping your clients understand why they might need to change, by showing them the future implications of their status quo and illuminating their future potential. Asking the client what they believe their existing partner might do better falls flat when the change is going to require time and energy and consensus and risk. Your contacts aren’t likely looking for disruption in their business without an upside worth the effort of change.

To create new opportunities, you have to provide your clients with a higher resolution lens through which to see their business, assisting them in making decisions about the future of their business. Without the ability to show your clients why they should be compelled to change, you lack an approach that serves your client—and one that would allow you to create a new opportunity.

How to Stop Falling Behind

One of the reasons you fall behind in creating new opportunities is that you have fallen behind by not updating your sales methodologies, processes, and approach.

The new role of sales is built on creating compelling, differentiated value throughout the sales conversation, which serves the client and causes them to prefer the person who helps them understand their world, the decisions they need to make, and how best to make those decisions. The new role of sales is to provide insight and a higher resolution lens that provides a new vision of their business, potential, and future.

The ideas here are necessary for creating opportunities. When your approach to new opportunities starts with the idea that your clients are already aware of their problems and all they need to do is get them to admit their “pain,” you will limit the number and quality of your opportunities. When you use an approach that allows you to shape your client’s thinking and their view of their challenges in light of all the internal and external factors they haven’t considered, you open the possibility of creating opportunities, improving your results. This is the only way to succeed in sales.

Not Mutually Exclusive

If you aspire to be a trusted advisor, you will need the advice to accompany the trust. One of the ways to create the trust that your advice is sound is by demonstrating why you are offering the advice and how you came to that conclusion.

You don’t have to choose between the traditional approach and a modern approach. You do have to recognize when one approach might be better than the other and how to execute the approach that most benefits your client.

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