Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells the story of a road trip taken by an unnamed author and his son Chris, from Minnesota to Northern California on their motorbikes. The book holds the Guinness World Record as the most rejected bestseller in history, racking up a staggering 121 rejections by publishes all over the world. It went on to sell more than 5 million copies.

This book had a profound impact on me when I first read it as a 16 year old. As the books main protagonists debated the essence of ‘quality’, the balance between romanticism and rationality and the pursuit of ‘pure truth”, I knew without a shadow of a doubt I was way out of my intellectual depth. But at the same time I was intrigued. The book opened my eyes to concepts that still impact me to this day, like the search for meaning, enlightenment and purpose in our lives and in our work.

Sitting in a weekly sales forecast call, discussing the ‘close potential’ of a long list of deals, is about as far away as you can get from the search for truth and enlightenment which Pirsig so elegantly portrayed in his book…or is it? Once you start to peel the onion a little, some interesting parallels begin to emerge.

• The practice of Zen Buddhism often takes the form of intensive group meditation: That certainly holds true for most forecast meetings
• Zen Buddhism requires weekly if not daily dedication from its practitioners: In many B2B sales organisations, forecasting is now a daily ritual as well
• Zen Buddhism focuses the mind on removing doubt and uncertainty to expose truth: In theory, so does sales forecasting.
• Zen Buddhist meditation usually takes place in a seated position: With one notable exception, every sales forecast meeting I’ve been in I was sitting down.

“For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses” Robert M. Pirsig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

In my experience, and I must stress this is only my experience, these are some of the best and worst sales forecasting practices I have observed over the years:

Sales forecasting – The Bad

• Over or under forecasting (also known as ‘bottom drawering’) – There are many reasons this behaviour occurs, including inexperienced salespeople, a poor sales culture in the business and the lack of a consistent sales process.
• Lack of lead housekeeping (especially common with in-bound web leads and event follow-ups) – Duplicate data, deals which aren’t updated, lack of notes in relation to a deal, these and many more factors lead to poor lead housekeeping.
• Zombie deals that never die (deals that last longer at a company than you do!) – Lack of forecast accountability by sales managers often lead to deals which hang around for months or years, constantly being pushed out to the next quarter, only to pop up again like the undead.
• Naivety or happy ears (it can be tricky to balance optimism with pragmatism) – Most sales people are optimists, however a healthy dose of sales paranoia is also required, to avoid falling into the trap of believing everything you hear or want to hear.

Sales forecasting – The Good

• Consistently accurate forecast (usually within a few percent of your commit figure) – Sales people with an in-depth understanding of their opportunities, who have established strong lines of communication with the customer or prospect and manage expectations on both sides of the fence.
• Attention to detail (many salespeople struggle in this area) – Knowing your deal, the possible road-blocks, the compelling drivers, the sign-off steps, the competitive landscape etc. will invariably be the difference between accurate and inaccurate forecasting.
• Asking the right questions (objection handling is a critical skillset to master) – Intelligent and ongoing discovery questions throughout the sales cycle, coupled with active listening, objection handling and problem solving skills are key to hitting your forecast.
• A healthy dose of paranoia (the perfect antidote to happy ears) – Optimism is important in sales. However constantly testing, questioning and refining the information at your disposal is absolutely critical. Avoid making assumptions or using out of date information to infer outcomes

So how do you fix a broken sales forecasting process?

Step 1 – Start by creating a consistent sales process. Sounds simple doesn’t it? I wonder how many of you reading this post have a written down or visually represented sales process that the whole sales team follows, which you can share with your customers in some instances?

Step 2 is a tricky one because it involves having honest conversations, both internally and with your customer. In order to forecast accurately, you need to understand where they are at in their buying cycle and overlay that onto your sales process to determine the gaps. This single step should lead to a significant reduction in the confusion and misinformation which exists in the average sales forecast.

Step 3 – Once you’ve completed steps 1 and 2, things begin to get a little more interesting. As a sales leader, the onus is on you to create a culture of trust and honesty. Your sales team have to be allowed to provide an honest assessment of an opportunity, rather than feel they are being painted into a corner.

I was a classic ‘bottom drawer’ sales rep during my years carrying a quota. This became my default setting for some years, because I often felt forced to commit a number I was uncomfortable committing to. So I managed expectations downwards, assuming I needed a buffer to protect against a forced uplift on my commit number. This sort of game playing, creates a culture of doubt and uncertainty in a sales team and creates forecast inaccuracy

Step 4 – Make your sales team accountable for the number. It seems like an obvious statement, so let’s drill down on it. The symptoms are easy to spot:

• Lack of detail or understanding around key opportunities in their pipeline,
• Deals which regularly slip or are constantly pushing out to the next quarter,
• Consistently missing their forecast commits (either over or under).

A good sales manager creates an environment conducive to an accurate sales forecast. They foster a culture of trust and honesty within the team, provide advice and support, whilst ensuring each member of the sales team is held accountable for their own forecast accuracy.

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‘FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT’…….Is a mantra most people in business understand and one many of us have used as the cornerstone of our professional lives. Without occasionally ‘faking it’ along the way, we would never move up the corporate ladder or overcome the crippling Impostor Syndrome which afflicts so many people (myself included) in our daily lives.

The problem with faking it however, is knowing where to draw the line….For example when asked: “Are you proficient in the use of Excel”

The natural response would be…“Yes, I know my way around a spreadsheet or two” ….followed by a quick Google search and 2 hours of rapid, self-taught excel skills.

This strategy tends to unravel however when you try to fake your knowledge, credibility or authority in more important areas of business or life. I’m incredibly fortunate to spend a lot of time interviewing senior decision makers, shortly after they have made significant (often multi-million dollar) purchasing decisions. It never ceases to amaze me how frequently these individuals cite issues such as lack of professionalism, poor cultural fit or lack of emotional connection, as key factors for their decision not to pursue business with a particular vendor.

What they are effectively telling me is that these sales people were still faking it. They lacked the interest, the aptitude or worst of all the empathy to be create cut-through and connection with the stakeholders in these businesses.

What I’ve come to realise across these thousands of hours of interviews and countless Win Loss Reviews is that customers aren’t just buying the product or service that you are pitching, they are actually buying you. More than that, they actually see you as the personification of the product or service you represent. If you are professional, knowledgeable and responsive, by definition your company is seen in a positive light. Equally if you are sloppy, slow to follow-up or lack basic knowledge, by association the business you represent gets marked down immediately.

The harsh reality of business is that your product and price-point are simply your ticket to the dance, they get you in the door, but that’s all. At that stage the customer is wondering:

• Do I like and trust them?
• Will they be good people to work with?
• Do I know someone who can vouch for them?
• Can they help me mitigate my risks?
• What will happen when we run into problems?

For maximum effectiveness in B2B sales, you’ve got to be able to get past the feature/function conversation, to break through the walls of professional courtesy and form a real relationship. The power of a smile with intent, as Tony Hughes so aptly describes it.

For this reason, empathy is arguably one of the most important, though often neglected, sales skills. Neglected because in a formal sales training program, it’s easier for trainers to focus on more tangible IQ related skills and behaviours, than the softer, more esoteric character traits.

My own sales enablement activities tend to be a little different. When working with sales team, I prefer to focus on attributes like strong discovery and active listening skills, understanding and harnessing the power of storytelling and recognising the need to create an empathetic and authentic human connection. It sounds very warm and fuzzy doesn’t it…far away from the important, serious work of closing big deals and hitting quarterly quotas…but believe me when I tell you, as humans we invariably decide with our hearts and then justify with our heads.

“People prefer to do business with those they know, like and trust”

This sales truism has been handed down from generation to generation. Some sales experts will tell you that times have changed, that salespeople are far less integral to the process than they used to be, however my own extensive research simply doesn’t support this new reality. The vast majority of times I interview a senior decision maker about how they reached their purchasing decision, the quality of the vendor’s team and the cultural fit of their people are among their key decision criteria.

Typically, when you think of sales skills, your mind goes to meeting sales goals, lead generation and handling objections. But too often we neglect the most fundamental aspect of relating to another human? At the core of any relationship is the ability to understand another person and to find common ground. This is just as true for business as personal relationships, which is why empathy remains so important.

So how can human empathy really impact sales?

Empathy is the ability to perceive and understand how another person is feeling, to put yourself in their shoes for a time and feel what it feels like to be them. It’s the basis of many social interactions and explains how we create bonds with other individuals. Without it, business deals and most human interactions for that matter, would be devoid of humanity and become robotic, emotionless transactions.

Developing empathy is crucial for establishing rapport and increasing the trust factor. It sends the message that you have the prospect’s best interest in mind. Salespeople who harness their own empathy tend to be more successful, because they intrinsically understand their buyers at a deeper level and form more meaningful relationships. It’s human nature to naturally open up to someone whom you trust and you believe has your best interests in mind.

Empathetic individuals also recognise that every prospect has different motivators and objections and are adept at using empathy to unearth what their prospects are really feeling, making it far easier to find the best solution to their problems. In contrast, failing to display empathy or focusing solely on our own needs, triggers a silent alarm in most people, causing us to very subtly disengage from the individual displaying those traits.

Can I learn empathy?

With empathy being at the core of sales success, it begs the question, “Does everyone have empathy?”

It’s true some people are naturally gifted at displaying empathy, while others may struggle to tap into this emotion. No matter where you find yourself along this empathy continuum, virtually anyone can learn to become more aware of and empathetic towards those around them, with the right support and coaching.

My Top 3 Tips for learning empathy in sales

A well-balanced sales team is one that can see beyond the basics of sales: cold calling, performance metrics, handling objections, closing the sale, and actively infuse empathy-based behaviours into their sales process. Teams embracing this approach have a much easier time establishing rapport, progressing deals and ultimately converting sales.

Listen intently. 

You need to hone your listening skills in order to identify and accurately pinpoint your prospect’s point of view. This is the core of empathy-based selling. It’s quite simple: the better you listen, the more clearly you can replay what you have heard back to your customer and the more comfortable and trusting they will feel towards you. This won’t necessarily increase the likelihood of you closing a deal, but it will undoubtedly ensure your calls get returned and you get an accurate and honest picture of what’s happening on your deal. It may sound trivial, but creating a genuine connection with your prospective customer, is the best way to avoid being blindsided in a sale.

Pay attention to nonverbal cues. 

Closely tied to listening carefully is tuning into subtle nuances, tone, pauses, and nonverbal cues that can paint a more vivid picture of what your prospect needs or wants. There is plenty of valuable intel revealed when you slow down and pay attention to details. A simple way to understand this topic is to split the feedback you recieve from your customer into above the line and below the line information. Above the line is the kind of information that might be contained in an RFP document or vendor briefing, its factual, its specific and it speaks to the business reasons this customer has gone out to market. Below the line information is harder to garner, but often much more valuable in terms of understanding how a specific decision will be reached. Below the line includes the political and career motivations of your customers, any major frustrations or aspirations they may be experiencing. People are less likely to tell you this information outright, but over time, with the right relationships and intelligent questions, you can often get to the heart of these issues, which can often be the key to unlocking the entire sale.

Clarify and ask questions. 

After listening and gathering the facts, it’s time to clarify any uncertainty and confirm what you have just heard before strategizing. Try to step into their shoes for a moment and observe how they might see your product or service. It’s also the time to look for opportunities to demonstrate to your prospect that you are their ally not their enemy, by demonstrating you understand where they are coming from.

Empathy is an incredibly valuable trait not only to close more sales, but to bring a greater degree of human connection into business and elevate the perception of the sales profession. If empathetic-selling does become more pervasive in business dealings, perhaps we can begin to change people’s long-standing perceptions of salespeople. Maybe one day the word ‘empathy’ will be synonymous with salespeople and the negative stereotypes can finally be put to rest.

The post Could Empathy Be The B2B Key? appeared first on Head Of Sales.

It’s the culmination of weeks or months of blood, sweat and tears and determines whether all that effort was really worthwhile or not.

For a seasoned sales professional, with a well-honed gut instinct and plenty of sales battle scars, the close phase of any deal is often the most tense and stressful period. Even for these battle-hardened sales veterans, things can and do go wrong at the 11th hour. For less-experienced sales reps, closing deals is often an achilles heel, where even the slightest misstep can turn a hot prospect to ice, faster than Jon Snow can say 

“Winter is Coming”.

Regardless of where you are on the sales experience spectrum, it’s likely you’re missing out on some proven strategies to increase your close rate, overcome objections confidently, and protect your most important asset – ‘time’. –

What’s the main cause of lost sales?

A lot of factors can contribute to lost sales, but what’s interesting is that the issues we often perceive as the root cause of our losses are often just symptoms of a bigger issue.

What if I told you the reason so many of your leads are going cold isn’t that your customers aren’t ready to buy what you are selling, but that they aren’t ready to buy you? This is a bold statement, but in the B2B sales world, make no mistake customers are buying you, as much, if not more, than what’s in your kitbag.

The B2B sales world has been turned on its head over the last few years, as technology and buying behaviours have shifted the balance of power from sellers firmly in favour of buyers. Prospects no longer take a back seat in sales conversations; they are extremely savvy, leveraging peer reviews and easy access to research material. They are also highly sensitive to unethical sales tactics and phony sale pitches.

At the first sign of dishonesty or high-pressure sales, most B2B customers will disengage with a vendor. To close more sales, you must become the sort of salesperson whom customers actually want to buy from.

Where do you start? Well, we’ve done some of the legwork for you.

At Trinity, we spend our days focusing on the intersection of your sales cycle and your customer’s buying cycle, that magical place where the deal actually gets done. By speaking directly to your customers at the conclusion of the sales process, through our Win/Loss Review services, we’re able to help B2B sales companies answer one simple but profoundly important question: “Why do we win and lose the deals we pitch for, and what can we do about it?”

After years of interviewing senior decision makers across a wide variety of industries, we’ve identified several factors which can turn a hot deal cold and have also identified a number of characteristics consistently displayed by successful salespeople.

Here are five of the best sales techniques we’ve observed for closing a deal and why they work.

5 sales closing techniques for success

Play the long game. The reason so many sales people fall short when closing sales is often related to being too aggressive or too eager to prove yourself. It can work against you and send the message that you’re not focused on building a relationship. Contrary to what you might think, closing the sale starts long before your customer agrees to sign on the dotted line. It begins in the discovery phase and continues to build as you get to know them throughout the sales cycle.

There needs to be a shift in focus from conquering the sale to taking your time to listen and connect with your customer and earning the right to progress to the next stage of the sales cycle. This is a crucial step to developing sufficient trust, credibility, and authority to do business with a prospective customer.

At its simplest, B2B sales doesn’t actually require any selling, you simply earn the right to progress to the next stage of the process, until you run out of stages and the deal is done.

This may sound simplistic, but then again, sales can and should be a simple process.

Become a great storyteller.  One reason deals go cold so often is that we fail to establish a proper connection with the people we’re trying to sell to. The most successful salespeople understand that stories have the ability to create an emotional connection and fire up the limbic side of your customer’s brain, where feelings and memory reside.

These individuals are avid collectors of war stories, quotes, anecdotes, and case studies, anything in fact that can act as a hook and aid in articulating a compelling story. Being a great storyteller makes you more memorable, a more effective communicator, and establishes rapport with your prospects. By equipping yourself with an arsenal of interesting and relevant stories to pepper your conversations, you will cement your position as a leader in closing the sale. Listen to how Bernadette Jiwa explains the power of stories in her fascinating TedTalk – The Secret to Spreading Ideas

Scrap high-pressure sales. Remember when you last felt pressured into doing something you weren’t ready or comfortable doing? It might have been signing a petition, answering a survey, or listening to a pitch for a product or service you had no interest in.

Your response may have been one of anger, defiance, or simply quiet frustration. It’s human nature to resist high-pressure sales tactics, which is why so many countries have created ‘do not call’ registries for consumers who don’t wish to be called at home by telesales people. If a sales technique is being regulated against by the government, it’s probably time to find a new way to create traction with your customers.

Being too pushy gives the impression of desperation, which in turn leads to doubt and mistrust. If they feel pressured, prospective customers will start to look for an escape route, which in the world of B2B sales is invariably what happens when a deal goes quiet.

Customization is key. If you’ve been relying on canned sales methods, it’s time to trade in your outdated sales techniques for a more personalized approach. Customers are tired of canned sales presentations that aren’t pertinent to them. This method only repels interest in what you have to offer and can quickly make a deal go south.

Instead, the most successful salespeople seek out creative ways to add value to every customer engagement, and customize it to show you are addressing their specific needs. A simple strategy is to apply the “So What” test to all of your customer presentations. During your dry-run before a customer presentation, ask your colleagues to hold up a sign which reads ‘So What’ every time you say something which either a) isn’t relevant for your audience or b) may be relevant but where you have failed to create the connection for your customer.

This one simple strategy could serve to transform the impact of your sales presentations and ensure that win, lose, or draw, your customers will be very happy to invite you back in to present to them in the future.

Customer memory is king. What sets sales all-stars apart from the rest is their ability to recall details about their customers, and utilize these insights to form a clearer picture of their customers’ needs. Nowadays, with easy access to CRM systems and digital information, you are expected to be able to capture, retain, and apply personal information and insights that your customers share with you.

By capturing and leveraging these details, you should be able to establish a deeper and more personal connection with your customers and prospects. It also serves to help you close more sales and increases the likelihood of gaining warm referrals from their network.

If you really want to succeed in sales, then you need to reach the elevated heights of ‘trusted advisor status’ with your customers. Where they not only know, like, and trust you, but value your opinion, your network, and your commitment to helping them achieve a great outcome from your product or service.

To do this, you first need to solidify yourself as a credible source of valuable information, and eventually be seen as an extended member of their internal team. By putting these five best sales techniques into action, you can start closing more sales and building lasting relationships with customers based on rapport, trust, and credibility.

The post Why Do The Hottest Deals Go Cold? appeared first on Head Of Sales.

In our media saturated world, cutting a path through the forest of fake news and content clutter, can be a herculean task. Even now, as I sit down to write this post, I’m pausing to wonder what image I should use to grab your attention, as you casually scroll through your LinkedIn feed on the way to work. And in that moment of fleeting attention, I’m weighing up the title and tagline I’ll craft, to entice you to actually read this post. Don’t even get me started on the question of which hashtags to use!

Why do I and countless other writers, journalists and business professionals worry about these insignificant details, instead of focusing all our creative powers on writing the best possible content we can? It’s a great question and I’m not sure I know the answer. What I do know is that the business world (and the world at large) has an unquenchable thirst for content, coupled with an incredibly short attention span. We’re constantly searching for:

• Newer, fresher, more disruptive or provocative.
• Stimulating, gamified, controversial or counter-intuitive

I sometimes wonder how long the the merry-go-round of content creation, consumption and commoditization can continue? In a business context, the question we often ask ourselves is…

“How can we create a compelling impression, so our product or service remains top of mind long after we’ve left the building?”

If message transfer is the goal we seek, then Storytelling is undoubtedly the best vehicle to help us to achieve this goal.

The Science of Stories

I know from personal experience that selling is first and foremost about making human connection. But scientific evidence also shows us that one of the best ways for humans to connect, to transfer knowledge or embed new ideas is through the medium of storytelling.

Our innate love of stories is unlocked for most of us in childhood, where we learn important life lessons and family values at the knee of our parents and grandparents, but storytelling runs far deeper than that.

The Harvard Business Reviewpublished some of Paul Zak’s enlightening research on how the human brain responds to a good story. Zak is the founder of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies. His research team measured the blood, heart rate, and skin conductors of test subjects to see how the human brain reacts to storytelling. They found out that two primary emotions occur when a compelling story is heard: distress and empathy. When these emotions are triggered, the brain releases two hormones. One is cortisol, which focuses our attention, the other is oxytocin, which stimulates the empathy we feel.

This compelling research yielded one startling fact: A good story can actually change our brain chemistry in a way that influences our behavior.

Expanding Influence Through Storytelling

The real power of a great story is it’s ability to transport us into the lives of other people. In business, you can tap into this natural human curiosity and empathy by sharing a character driven story, which includes an emotional component which your audience can connect to. The story of your company founder perhaps and what prompted them to strike out on their own. Of course, Paul Zak and his research team figured this out more than a decade ago.

Can You Teach Someone To Be A Great Storyteller?

In theory, sales training should help sales professionals tell the story of their products and services in a way that compels prospects interest and attention. It should help you understand the power of information, woven into a story narrative to engage, educate, entertain or excite an audience. It should help you tease out the most impactful elements of your story and use these as a way to draw people into your world. It should….but unfortunately it rarely does.

So how can you incorporate storytelling into your day to day sales activities and create a story arc for the products or services you sell? Here are a few tips…

• Select a lead character that your prospect can identify with. Your founder, a current customer with a similar problem, even an ‘future version’ of your prospect could do the trick.
• Encapsulate the problem they were/are facing. Think of this as the hero’s journey part of your story.
• Tell the story of how your product, service or team helped them succeed. Don’t just focus on the positives, explore the complexity of the problem, the personal and professional impacts and the risk of doing nothing.
• Focus on the details of the story itself, the sights, sounds and sensations, not just a pitch dressed up to look like a story.

Knowing where and how to start your storytelling journey can often be the hardest first step to take. So with the kind permission of Andrew Griffith’s (one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met) consider using this storytelling framework as your starting point.

I’d like to leave the final word in this post to another wonderful Storyteller, Bernadette Jiwa. Through her business The Story of Telling, and her fascinating Ted Talk “The Secret to Spreading Ideas” Bernadette explores every aspect of telling impactful, engaging and empowering stories, that transcend business and allow people to connect with one another on a human level.

The post The Art Of Storytelling appeared first on Head Of Sales.

The other half is learning the rules of the game, how to plan, how to prepare, how to ask intelligent questions and really listen to the answers. How to hear and capture what people are saying, but also recognise what they are not saying, how to read between the lines, interpret, recognise the nuances, the eyebrow raises, the exchange of glances between colleagues when you hit on a hot button topic. The other half as you’ve probably guessed by now, is experience.

If you’re going to be a super hero salesperson, you need to be able make sense of what people are saying, even what it doesn’t strictly add up. I can’t teach you “experience” in this article, nor can I give you the drive, ambition or stubbornness you’ll need to acquire it on your own, but I can share a little of what I’ve learned about how to become a really great salesperson, which may just help you along your path to greatness.

You must do the research

The first step to being a great salesperson happens long before you step into the room with a customer. Increasingly we live in an online world – the Internet is rapidly replacing the traditional role of salespeople to educate and inform customers. Customers are conducting in-depth research and peer reviewing not just your company (but you) on the Internet, before their first contact. So that’s exactly where you need to start also.

The fascinating thing about your social profile or online personal brand is that, to a large extent, you have the ability to craft and curate it exactly the way you want. You get to choose the photo that graces your LinkedIn page, how you introduce yourself to the professional world, the recommendations you show from happy colleagues, former bosses, or – better yet – prior customers.

You need to be the master of what your customer sees when they are trying to find you. If you sell lawnmowers, you must know exactly which site your customer visits when they search for “lawnmowers” on Google, the problems they are trying to solve and the latest industry trends. You must know what they’ve read, and ensure that they see you as a credible, knowledge expert on the topic of lawnmowers.

When a customer has a problem that you can solve, they have options. They can do nothing, they can work with a competitor or find some totally different solution to ther problem. Without knowing your customer’s options and where you fit into them, you’ll be flying blind.

Given we occupy an increasingly online world, it makes sense to harness the power of technology to help you in your research. There are some amazing tools and software packages you can use to tap into the mind of your customer, for example Spyfu, which helps you see your market from the eyes of a customer.

You must be a great listener

The time when all salespeople did was regurgitate their canned “pitches” is long since past, a relic of a bygone era where professional salespeople were often little more than walking, talking product brochures. Assume that the customers you will come into contact with already know what your product does, what’s good and bad about it and where it fits in the industry pecking order. They will know this because they’ve gone online and read reviews, spoken to their industry peers, and validated this knowledge in the market.

As Dan Pink explains in his fascinating book To Sell Is Human there’s no longer any room for deception in the sales world, because the knowledge imbalance which used to exist has disappeared, leveling the playing field completely. This is a great thing for the sales profession as a whole, as it is pushing the high-pressure and unscrupulous salespeople to the brink of extinction.

It may sound strange advice to provide but hear me out. When you walk into a room with a customer, it needs to be all about their problem and how you may be able to help. Leave your “pitch” at the door.

You must call yourself a salesperson

I did an interesting exercise recently, I dug out my old business cards from down through the years. It’s always interesting to take a trip down memory lane this way, recalling the different company’s, cultures and most importantly colleagues that you’ve worked with over the years. When I looked at these cards though, one thing struck me immediately. Can you guess what it was?

If you look closely, you’ll notice that not a single card contains any reference to the word sales, although in each of these roles I was carrying a sales quota and engaging with customers (and sometimes partners) to close deals. At the time I think this suited me, because it took me a long time to reconcile my image of the sales industry with my self-image. What I ultimately realised was that in many respects we are all in sales in some way, shape or form. As Pink explains in his book, teachers are selling information, in exchange for attention. Project managers are selling outcomes, in exchange for access to company resources. The list goes on and on.

You can’t be a great salesperson if, as many people do, you have an aversion to the very idea of sales. Sales is what makes business run – unless you’re misleading people or behaving in an unethical manner, then sales can and should be a noble profession. You’re connecting people with the products and services they need. You’re helping the wheels of industry turn, you’re providing for your family and the families of all your colleagues in the business. Embrace your profession, be confident and do your job with all the energy, enthusiasm and professionalism that you can.

A key corollary to this point is . . .

You must believe in your product

The best salespeople don’t just believe in themselves, they absolutely believe in the products or services which they sell. Why? Because the best salespeople are ethical, honest and decent people, who want to add value to their customers with every interaction and they couldn’t look themselves in the mirror each morning, if they didn’t have a burning belief they were really adding value to the customers they serve.

Lee Bartlett explains this concept well in his book The No.1 Bestseller.The product or service you’re selling has got to be a good fit for you, something which you have researched in advance and recognise the value of. You’ve got to be able to see things from someone else’s point of view, fully understand their situation, and honestly say to them, “I may just have the solution to your problem”.

If you can’t, then it doesn’t mean you cannot achieve great things in your career, it may just mean that sales isn’t the right path for you

You must embrace (and learn) from failure

They say that ‘Failure is the best teacher’.

On the road to sales greatness, it is a simple truth that your pride and ego will take more than their fair share of bumps and bruises along the way. I’m not going to sugar coat it, this can be draining and at times demoralising. It takes character, grit and determination to endure and enjoy the ride. To set aside your ego, become humble and make the success of your customer the most important thing in your life.

The funny thing about failure though is that you rarely make the same mistake twice. Stuff up badly in a customer meeting or fall flat during a presentation and rest assured you’re going to learn an important lesson, one which will stay with you for the remainder of your career. The Sales Super Hero’s that I have known in my career learn from their own mistakes and from those around them. They are constantly looking for ways to improve, to get incrementally better and close the gap. The ability to keep learning, keep testing and improving is an innate quality in great sales professionals and one which ensures they keep turning up ready for action every day, every week, every month, every quarter and every year.

Once you are a great salesperson. . .

You are now a very rare and highly valuable commodity, exceedingly important to the success of any business. But be careful! The way the sales industry works is subject to change. Today’s sales hero could easily become tomorrow’s sales zero. Stay humble, keep learning and you have a fighting chance of retaining your hero status for a little while longer!

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I get asked this question all the time, by customers, business acquaintances, even friends and family. There’s an underlying assumption in the question that certain people are simply born salesmen and women; arriving into this world with an impeccable set of communication skills, a high EQ to match their high IQ and an unquenchable thirst to close, close, close!

When I drill down on the question, I’m often confronted with a lengthy list of doubts and fears. These ‘non-salespeople’ simply can’t understand how a salesperson can continue each day, in the face of almost insurmountable opposition, without losing their energy, enthusiasm and the will to live! The thought of having to make cold-calls, persuade, influence and cajole strangers and deal with constant rejection is enough to make the vast majority of people run for the hills.

The unfortunate reality is that sales is no longer simply a career path, it’s a life skill that we all need to develop. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a restauranteur or a teacher in a classroom, the ability to influence, engage and ultimately convince your audience to take action is a critical skill-set to master.

I have a strong sense that many people’s fear of selling and all things sales related, stems less from a fear of the simple act of making a sale and more from their concerns about the perception of others.

• Won’t I lose credibility if I appear too ‘salesy’?
• Surely my product or service should sell itself?
• I’m happy to talk about what I do, but someone else needs to close the sale…

Negative Perceptions of Sales & Salespeople

Let’s be honest, the sales profession has gotten a pretty bad reputation over the years and often for good reason. The mental image most of us have of salespeople is manipulative, pushy and untrustworthy. In his fascinating book, ‘To Sell Is Human” the author Daniel H. Pink surveyed a large number of people to gauge their feelings about sales and salespeople in general. He posed the question:

“When you think of sales or selling, what’s the first word that comes to mind?”

Pink took the findings from this survey and created a word cloud of the 25 adjectives and interjections which people chose most frequently in response to this question. The size of each word in the cloud reflects how often it was mentioned. I’d like you to take a moment to look at this word cloud and see how it tally’s with your own gut instincts when it comes to sales and sales people?

For those of us who’ve spent many years in the sales profession, it’s pretty hard to read words like ‘manipulative’ and ‘sleazy’ without a sense of shame and embarrassment. Although this doesn’t reflect the behaviour of the vast majority of sales people, a small but vocal minority have managed to give the entire industry a bad name. Is it any wonder then that so many people feel uncomfortable with the thought of selling or being seen as a sales person?

The ‘New Normal’ for Sales and Salespeople

There’s no doubt the world of sales is evolving and that the balance of power has well and truly shifted from seller to buyer in recent years. The more interesting question to ask perhaps is what prompted this sudden shift and what impact it may have on the perception of sales and salespeople in years to come?

In the past salespeople were operating at a distinct advantage over their customers and prospects; they had all the information at their disposal: product specs, market intel or pricing charts were at their fingertips. Their customers and prospects on the other hand had to get by on snippets of information, company brochures and sales collateral, content which had often already been sanitized for public consumption. In a world where knowledge is power, sales people of old were playing with a loaded deck.

As Pink went on to explain in his book, as this information imbalance in the sales process gradually disappeared with the advent of the internet, the balance of power shifted irrevocably from the seller to the buyer. As Pink explains, the old world of ‘caveat emptor’ or ‘buyer beware’ slowly disappeared, to be replaced by the much more interesting world that we live in today of ‘caveat venditor’ or ‘seller beware’.

What did Pink mean by this? Simply that the crooked, shonky, used-car salesman image of old will no longer fly in this brave new world of information parity. Many potential customers will do their own research and become as informed, if not more so than the sales people they speak to. They’ll speak to previous buyers, use comparison websites, delve into the technical and product support history of your products. In reality, they’ll become so well informed that any lie, half-truth or deception a salesperson might be tempted to tell will be discovered in a heart-beat and all their credibility will instantly evaporate.

So perhaps its worth rephrasing the original question from: “How can I sell, I’m not a salesperson?” to “How can I sell, in this new world of information equality, I’m not a salesperson?”

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

It Starts with Trust: Instead of focusing your efforts on selling and pushing, focus on becoming trustworthy, knowledgeable, helpful and engaged in the eyes of your customer. The old sales cliché that ‘people buy from people’ still holds true, so embrace that as your mantra and aim for trusted advisor status.

Be Authentic: People want to do business with those who have experienced life, maybe even picked up a few bumps and bruises along the way and come out ahead despite these challenges. Don’t be afraid to share a little of yourself and your experiences, look for areas of commonality and mutual interest. Don’t slip into ‘sales mode’ and leave your personality behind.

Be an active listener: Prepare well, ask intelligent questions, really listen to and process the answers you’re getting back. There’s an old sales truism that customers will teach you how to sell to them if you just listen. They’ll tell you what’s annoys and frustrates them, what issues they have experienced with past products or services and if you really pay attention, they’ll often tell you exactly what’s required to win their business.

Have the Heart of a Teacher: When you place your focus on educating your prospect rather than selling to them, the impact of what you say will increase exponentially and you won’t feel any of that icky ‘salesy-ness’. Your perceived credibility and authority in the eyes of your customer has a huge bearing on their likelihood to want to do business with you.

Treat Them Like A Customer: This one might sound counter-intuitive, but as soon as they first engage with you, prospective customers are wondering what you would be like to work with. If you start treating them like a customer from the start, helping, supporting, educating and advising them, you give them an immediate sense of what it might be like to work with you and your business.

The sales profession can be a tough, stressful and uncompromising place to work, but it can also be a creative, fulfilling and rewarding environment in which to build a career. For those of you who believe you just can’t sell, my advice would be to dip your toe in the water, you may find it’s not as cold as you thought…

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The sales rep paused for a moment, ensuring all eyes in the room were fixed on him, before clicking through to his first slide. A kaleidoscope of company logo’s sprung up on the screen, wowing the audience with the vendor’s customer base and depth of industry experience. An audible gasp rippled through the room as a 2nd logo slide replaced the first, with even more customer logos. Whispered conversations broke out as the user community remarked on how lucky they were to be embarking on a project with a vendor of this experience.

When the sales rep casually mentioned his company was 100% Australian owned, you could feel the excitement beginning to build to a crescendo.

“We’ve won countless awards for our projects” he continued, sensing the audience were now eating out of the palm of his hand.

“Did I mention we’ve got very low employee attrition rates and are regarded as one of the best businesses for employee satisfaction in our industry?” he concluded, with an air of supreme confidence.

The spontaneous burst of applause took even the sales rep by surprise, as the CEO jumped out of her seat, hand extended and pen poised, ready to sign the waiting contract.

At least that was how it was mean’t to go…unfortunately even the best laid plans can sometimes go astray. What really happened went something like this:

• Sales rep puts up first logo slide – an audible groan emerges from the back of the room and what sounds like the word ‘Bingo’. This group have spent the past week sitting through PowerPoint presentations and have seen the same logo’s represented again and again across all three sets of vendor slides.
•  Sales rep puts up second logo slide – CEO looks at her watch, gives a disapproving stare to her key project sponsor, whose job it was to properly brief the vendors and makes a quick note on her iPad.
•  Sales rep explains his company is 100% Australian owned – The entire room collectively asks themselves “So what?”
•  In quick succession, the Sales rep highlights the awards, low attrition rate and high employee satisfaction which his company enjoys – By this stage half the room have zoned out completely and the other half are feeling bad for the rep, as they watch their CEO getting more and more irate.

For those sales professional who conduct dry-runs before an important customer presentation (and I hope that’s most sales professionals) you could do a lot worse than taking 3 or 4 pieces of cardboard and a marker pen and writing the following:

During your presentation dry-run, ask your colleagues to play the role of the customer. Every time you make a statement, particularly one which relates to your business or your solution, anyone in the room should be encouraged to hold up their ‘So What’ card, if they fail to see how your statement is relevant to them as a customer. Let’s look at a couple of quick examples:

• We’ve got lots and lots of customers, look at all their logos on the slide behind me

So what?

 “I’d like to highlight 3 specific customers from this slide to talk about, due to the similarity in the business pains they were experiencing and the fact that these might represent good customers for you to speak, when we move into the reference phase of your review process”

• We’ve won lots of awards for our projects over the years

So what?

 “We’re incredibly proud of the industry awards that we have received over the years, because we have won them in conjunction with our customers and they recognise the commitment of teams in delivering an exceptional project outcome. I sincerely hope the project we’re about to embark on might be nominated for an industry award also”

• We have a very low employee attrition rate in our business

So what?

 “Our employee attrition rate is well below industry standards. What that means for our customers is far greater continuity in terms of the resources working with you to deliver on your project outcomes. It also means that we have built deep domain and industry expertise in our business, which we leverage to deliver an even better outcome for our customers.”

Remember, as a prospective customer of yours:

• It’s not my job to care, it’s your job to make me care.
• It’s not my job to search for the relevance, it’s your job to highlight the relevance.
• It’s not my job to make the link, you need to ensure you create the link for me.

Add this 1 simple step into the way you prepare for presentations and it will transform the way your audience connects with your message. Oh and if you do try it, please send me a picture of your ‘So What’ sign for my collection!

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