Natasha David worked for me a number of years ago as Marketing Manager in a technology company where I was Managing Director. One morning I received a call… her husband had died and was in his late twenties. “I’m so, so sorry Tash… what happened?” an awkward silence followed. How do you talk about a loved one who commits suicide? How do you cope with the feelings of guilt about failing to save them or not being close enough to recognise what was about to happen? I felt paralysed but we did our best to give her all the space and time she needed to be able to manage.

Many questions and emotions swam around in my head in the months following this experience. Two years earlier in the same company where Natasha lost her husband, our Professional Services Manager lost his 20 year old son to Leukemia. There was a dramatic relapse just days from the twelve month anniversary of cancer treatment when he would be officially pronounced as being in remission. It was heart wrenching to witness let alone live through. We also supported him by removing all work pressure and providing complete flexibility on full pay for as long as he needed. Without any fuss, his team rallied and covered all work demands. He slowly re-joined work and we were able to tentatively talk about his son with him. There would be stilted conversations and tears but it was okay… all part of the process of creating a meaningful life without his beloved son as well as honoring his son’s memory.

For friends and colleagues, what is the boundary between showing care and prying into someone’s personal life when they suffer loss or are seeking to deal with their own demons of depression or other mental illness? Is the workplace somewhere the grieving person goes to escape or can it be a place of healing? Is the workplace where those with invisible disabilities come to hide and deny or can they be accepted and respected?

Suicide seems to be different… a social taboo with stigma attached to the death of a loved one. I never did manage to have a conversation with Natasha; just a few hugs and as much workplace support as I could provide. She withdrew and coped in her own way… I did the same when I lost my mother at 25 – it was at times a bleak lonely place. After losing her husband to suicide Natasha was pulled into a dark void and checked herself into hospital where she had a profound realisation that can save lives …

The Life Saving Truth: “Suicide only transfers the pain to everyone else.”

This is something we should all share with anyone we think is in a bad place with depression or other mental health issues. Natasha is one of the most courageous people I have met and she is about to publish her book, Marrying Bipolar. It provides amazing insight for anyone wanting to understand mental illness. Winston Churchill described depression as the black dog but it is far more complex than applying labels.

Natasha decided that if she was to push on, she would make it the best life she could live. She has done exactly that and her book will make a difference in many lives.

Natasha’s story shows the devastating impact for those around someone suffering from mental illness but what if you are directly managing or working with someone who has a mental illness? I’ve managed sales people for many years and I am sensitive to the tell-tale signs. I have a personal experience with mental illness as the son and then the business partner of a bi-polar father. Others in my family also suffer from mental illness but I thank God not my wife, children or me.

Professional selling is brutal… it is not for the faint-hearted. High levels of emotional intelligence (EQ), business acumen, strong work ethic and resilience are all essential. I’ve seen sales people battle through massive highs and devastating lows, damaging the very relationships they need to succeed, going troppo on drugs and alcohol, going missing for days until they emerge from their dark fog.

All this raises two important questions for sales leadership:

1. Does selling attract those who are inadequately equipped to cope with the demands of the role?
2. What can sales leaders do to help and manage those in their teams that suffer from a mental illness?

1. Does selling attract people who are poorly equipped psychologically?

The research has evidenced that mental illness does not discriminate by ethnicity, age, gender or career choice (Meadows, Farhall, Fossey, Grigg, McDermott & Singh, 2012). Throughout my professional career, the most common mental condition I have encountered in sales people is bi-polar. This term used to be identified as manic-depression and both are apt descriptions for the huge mood swings that can damage relationships with clients, staff and partners. On top of this they require persistent, consistent management therefore consuming disproportionate amounts of a manager’s time and energy. Although anyone with a disability – physical or mental – can be a productive and valued member of a team, they need to find the right job position, have a supportive manager and work environment.

The biggest mistake a manager can make is to hire the wrong person and the second biggest mistake they make is holding onto staff that need to be moved on.

This sounds very harsh but it’s a truth all managers must face. The best way to do so is with empathy and compassion in seeking to help people work in roles that best suit them. A lack of compassion combined with relentless pressure and judgment exacerbates the risks and highlights a sales manger’s poor values or interpersonal skills.

Selling is one of the toughest jobs; for anyone to sustain success they need the following attributes:

• Resilience: The ability to cope with rejection and disappointment amidst relentless pressure to perform and deliver results
• Emotional Intelligence (EQ): The ability to truly understand your personal strengths and weaknesses while being able to read people and politics
• Good work ethic: The discipline and ethos of doing what it takes rather than your best by committing the required time and energy in paying attention to every detail
• Curiosity and intelligence: Beyond being smart, this is also being obsessed about the customer’s world, how results can be delivered and how risks can be managed
• Insight and domain knowledge: Specialisation in an area that matters to the customer with you being able to provide genuine insight to the people who make decisions.

Track record, qualifications and work history are easy to validate. Every hiring manager needs to go beyond these and be clear about what defines a ‘cultural fit’ for sales people by evaluating candidates against the above criteria.

2. What can we do to fulfil our duty of care for those who are struggling?

Make no mistake; leadership carries a burden both morally and legally. We have a duty of care to those we employ and to those with whom we share our lives. We need to create person-centered cultures rather than toxic performance-based furnaces. I’ve written previously about two contrasting corporate cultures (love vs greed) and we need to create environments where work has purpose, value and respect for those around us.

A healthy workplace is a community where employees are valued members of a team rather than mere units of production. Where relationships are real and the corporate values play out in the positive behavior of the leaders.

We need to ask people if they are okay and really mean it. The best way to create a high performance culture is to be authentic about delivering value for clients and building relationships of trust and respect. Executing this requires leaders who are the real deal and able to rally people to their cause; yet becoming a great leader in an inside job rather than projecting a persona.

Capitalism without compassion is commerce without a soul. We all want to make a positive different in the lives of others but not everyone can be a winner who stands on the podium in first place. Great leaders embrace diversity and leverage individual strengths within teams. As a leader, seek balance and value individuals as people who have their own fears and shortcomings as they pursue their aspirations. Have the courage to talk with an employee or colleague about how they are really going with genuine empathy.

Ask ‘how are you going… really?’ Then listen like you’ve never listened before. Everyone needs to be heard. Everyone needs someone who cares and believes in them.

For more on this important topic, please read The Darker Side of Selling by my good friend Bernadette McClelland. She provides three examples of the unhealthy pressure and destructive behaviours that plague many sales environments.

Reference: Meadows, G., Farrell, J., Fossey, E., Grigg, M., McDermott, F., & Singh, B. (2012). Mental Health in Australia: Collaborative community practice (3rd ed.). South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.

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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.

If you believe there is an easy button for success in sales, the joke’s on you! While there’s tremendous value in a vast array of digital tools, all emerging technologies have a dark side.

Take the internet itself and its use for nefarious purposes: I wish the majority of its usage were for knowledge. How many people are studying the rich tradition of human history, MOOC learning, culture and fostering communal collaboration to break down cultural barriers, cure cancer and end the common cold?

It’s overwhelming to fathom that the internet has become a TV substitute. The Social Networks are laughing all the way to the bank monetizing your time. But you can be laughing all the way to the bank, too, if you realize this.

One of the most powerful things in the world that you can personally do to improve your life and business career, sales or otherwise is to turn off TV and social media. Understand where the new school tools fit in and acknowledge their place in the cosmos. Modernized sellers who are deadly serious about being elite performers in their field use them differently, I assure you. A cautionary tale privately emailed to me:

“Tony, Building our sales team and I just had to fire a sales rep who was only emailing and messaging on LinkedIn and logging fake sales on our CRM. He tanked our company and I’m back to square one building from the ground up. Your post resonated with me and reinforces my belief that HUMAN not ‘social’ connections are the best. Picking up the phone, sitting down for a coffee, flying in for a meeting…are irreplaceable experiences.” – Anonymous

I’ve polled thousands of you from every continent and walk of life, from transactional to enterprise flights, to massively matrixed, complex government procurement cycles that can take 36 months. The jury is in that the phone is still absolutely essential to develop business at every stage of the funnel.

To make the most money possible, the top reps in your company and industry have figured out how to manage their time, leverage old and new tools to position themselves as a trusted advisor and subject matter expert. They’ve figured out which opportunities to prioritise in a pipeline and what they need to close to hit their number.

The simplest way to get there is to build ultra-targeted prospect lists, dial on them yourself with a razor sharp value proposition and set the appointment, don’t try to sell the product. Social is a phenomenal tool for locating which prospects to go after and getting foreknowledge of what they’ll care about but paradoxically, super personalized communication can be a repellent.

Sales Managers who work for ambitious CFOs often prognosticate fantastical growth rates. 30% is not an industry standard, it’s a mass delusion. This is why there’s blowtorch management going on where 10 lemmings get hired so they can systematically fire 7. I can’t help you if you are inside a blowtorch culture. If you have a fair management system, quality product market fit, and you are on a global team in which 20-40% of your peers are hitting their number or exceeding it, so can you!

There’s no secret to sales. You need to hustle and work harder than anyone else to make it pay off for you. “It’s no longer a numbers game,” is a band-aid for the lazy modern seller. I want to contort that statement the other way: it’s harder than it’s ever been. If you truly knew how hard you’d have to work to be successful in this game, you’d probably quit.

Maintain a good sense of humour. See things more clearly, don’t buy into things being more different than the same. Observe the actual day-to-day behaviour of top reps on your team and in your industry. Study the old school and fuse it with the new school. Look at your PHONE as the ultimate social device: “the social phone.” Invest in the best tools money can buy and read your company the Riot Act if they don’t invest in you. They spent 15-25K to recruit you, they can spend the price of a cell phone getting you the best tech for prospecting due diligence.

20% of any system will drive 80% of the results. 20% of any given day’s work will engender 80% of output. That means shockingly 80% of every day is waste, friends! The Pareto Principle is alive and well in all human systems. So in order to optimise the levers that will get you to your financial goal, it’s critical to focus on the most constructive revenue producing daily activities. That’s “tripling” a targeted list – call, text – LinkedIn invite. That’s methodically attacking the same 50 targets for an entire quarter top down, bottom up, middle out, lateral, by bee swarm, referrals, and teamlinks.

After decades years of looking at this stuff, I would say that chasing the wrong people to sell them things they’ll never need is the biggest error. You need to get crystal clear about your target list.

Step one: Go after the competitors of your existing clients. Go after the companies your own direct competitor is working with and are listed on their website.

Step two: You are only as strong as your own intel, just like in war. If you can get an edge, it’s massive. If you can read any LinkedIn Profile, even one that’s hidden to you, it’s pivotal. If you can get a direct phone number to add the power of your tone, intention, and warmth to the sales cycle, it’s imperative.

Elite athletes spend 10,000 hours honing their craft and know every stat down to the wire. They will spend any amount of money getting their driver in golf to weigh one less ounce or having one more component on their racing bike, be made of carbon fibre seeking aerodynamics to crest the hill faster in the Tour de France.

Per Einstein, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” You can’t do what hundreds of millions of people are doing and get an elite, unusual, uncommon result. You can’t just social sell or just pound phones, or just use one method of sales.

You’ll get noticed by swimming upstream against the current. You’ll stand out like a sore thumb by doing anachronistic things like writing handwritten notes. You’ll make waves by blending multiple channels in combinations. You’ll jut out by exhibiting business acumen and understanding the fundamentals of how your prospect makes money and SWOTTING where they’re weak.

You’ll get VIP status if you have a confident, sardonic and knowing chuckle because, like them, you are laughing all the way to the bank. You can bank on my methods in these posts, field tested by thousands, and influenced by thousands.

I wish I could tell you, cold calls are dead and it’s all just social selling. The savviest sellers are using both. Top reps are interrupting their “dream prospects” and landing meetings which are converting into rich opportunity pipeline and closing millions in new business. You’ve gotta spark people to realise and react the “pain of same is greater than the pain of change.”

There are too many paradoxes in sales to simplify something that is really an art form. E.g., reconcile these two quotes for me:

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Abraham Lincoln

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Bruce Lee

I’d look at these two quotes like this to master the art of sales. Abe Lincoln is the strategy piece and Bruce Lee is the tactical piece. There is no Strategy without effective tactics and effective tactics fall down without a stellar strategy.

The post What The Best Sales People Do! 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.

1. Be a market expert

A successful Business Development person knows the playing field of their industry. They understand the ebbs and flows of the market. They know the key players and their respective unique selling points.

Most salespeople know information on their own business, but not necessarily that of the competitors whom they are up against. These are the alternatives that your prospect may be weighing up and comparing you to. When you know the fuller picture, you know what questions you need to ask, you know the types of problems the client may be encountering. You know how those problems can be fixed and which businesses (including yours) can resolve them.

As you ask better questions (and knowledgeable of the pain points and solutions) your value increases and the client see you as an industry expert.

Be and act as thought leader of your field – be seen as the authority

2. Mindset

Success, your opinion of the world and how you operate, all starts in your own head. It starts with how you decide to view the world.

Empowered are those that have decided to adopt the stance of:

‘I choose how I view my situation’,

‘I’m in charge of my thoughts’

‘I don’t let what is happening outside of me affect my mindset’.

Seeing each interaction as a lesson of how you could have made better choices – being able to rise above and think ‘what can I learn from this, what can I improve next time’.

Planning and practising what you could say next time to hard wiring the circuits of your brain and reprogram your mind to choosing a better future response.

Take time to breathe, to slow the mind down. Ditch what may not be serving you, be it alcohol, caffeine, bad choice of foods, recognising and managing any other negative influences. Reframe yourself positively on what you do have and look at the situation through new eyes. Take care of your number one asset – you.

Adopt a position of gratitude, put things into perspective.

3. Be aware of your value

Often, we get caught up in our own product that we don’t see what the implications are for the buyer. To know this, you need to know innately what pain your prospect is experiencing, for how long, what solutions they have tried, what they liked and didn’t like. Be informed about the different solutions available to them and the uniqueness of each.

What do you personally bring to the table? Are you professional, reliable, consistent, helpful? People ‘buy into’ people. They are buying into you to trust what you are selling them. Ensure you are always operating at your best, so they (and indeed your colleagues) see the best version of you.

4. Work smart

Working smart starts with planning days, weeks and months ahead.

“He who fails to plans is planning to fail”. Winston Churchill

Know who to target, when, how much time it will take. Know which prospects and clients will have the biggest positive impact on your bottom line. Prioritise the most profitable clients and focus on how you can engage with and bring them value.

The best Business Development people remove distractions. They know what approach to take and have practiced and refined what questions to ask and what compelling solution(s) they can put forward.

5. Get more business

Do what others will not do.

The client says ‘no’. So what? Learn, be resilient and move on. The world will not stop spinning. Lessons are everywhere. Opportunities are far and wide.

When you are with a potential client, abandon all assumptions and baggage of what they will or will not buy. Be present and focused on them and their situation. The more you understand them, the more you can help them.

Unfortunately, most salespeople are too preoccupied with getting their own message across, without first fully understanding the client. This mistake means the client doesn’t feel heard, isn’t fully understood and all opportunities to serve them are missed.

If you are regimented in your engagement you will be running the meeting your way, missing signals and not putting the client first. Your job is to run every engagement in a meaningful, relevant way – make it about them.

The person with the most behavioural flexibility gets the sale.

6. Take action consistently

Most salespeople are stuck in a reactive mode and not in a proactive mode.
Knowing that when you engage with more people, you will get more business. This means you have to carve off time to focus on giving the more profitable potentials more of your time and energy.

Conclusions

Sales is a profession. To demonstrate to the client that you are professional, trustworthy and a leader in your field, you need to act likewise.

Sales is an intelligent interaction where you are using sophisticated interpersonal skills and communication methods to help a client solve a problem.

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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.

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Here are 17 sales truths and why understanding each one helps you win more deals.

(1) Everyone is overwhelmed. 

Focus only on what’s relevant, actionable and valuable to your prospect. Minimize complexity. 

(2) Your prospects are pretty OK with what they’re doing now.

If they weren’t, they’d have already changed. Your  job is to help them see why it’s worth doing things differently. 

(3) Prospects don’t like change. 

Crazy-busy people don’t want MORE work. Help them envision how your solution will get them to their goals with greater ease. 

(4) It’s your responsibility to pique curiosity. 

Experiment with creative ways to get people to say, “Hmm. That’s interesting. I’d like to learn more.”

(5) Your ideal prospects have a lot in common. 

Leverage what you already know about your customers to ask better questions, deepen conversations and establish credibility. 

(6) Prospects want to deal with experts. 

Demonstrate familiarity with your prospects’ business, processes, industry, issues and challenges to set yourself apart from the competition. 

(7) Assume responsibility when you fail. 

If your prospects buy from another vendor or decide to do nothing, analyse what you could have done differently. If you don’t learn from your mistakes you’re guaranteed to repeat them. 

(8) 50% of your forecasted deals won’t close. 

(That’s about average.) To exceed your goals, ruthlessly inspect your pipeline to eliminate “hope” and fix lurking deal killers. Clear out “dud” opportunities to make room for real ones. 

(9) Prospects act in their own self interest. 

If they can’t see how they will win by making a change, they won’t take the risk. Ask them how they’re evaluated. Explore how your product/service helps them achieve their goals. 

(10) Prospects will struggle to get buy-in. 

Arm them with the tools they’ll need. Prep them about the common obstacles. Help them facilitate change conversations with internal stakeholders. 

(11) You’ll hit the world’s worst traffic snarl on your way to a big meeting. 

Give yourself ample (2x) time to arrive stress-free. Get there early. Review your strategy. It’s the only way to be at the top of your game.

(12) Technology will fail. 

Have Plan B ready to go. Have handouts to support presentations. Prepare to jump on a white board to facilitate a conversation … Hey! That might even be a better idea in the first place!

(13) People will use devices during meetings. 

Think about how you’ll get them so engaged that they won’t want to. 

(14) Buyers won’t remember anything. 

After a phone or in-person conversation, follow up with a summary of key points and next steps. Take the burden off of them. 

(15) Your top accounts are at-risk. 

Bring fresh ideas, insights and information to help your customers achieve their goals. It’s the single best way to keep your competitors at bay. 

(16) Buyers don’t know how to buy. 

Review typical hurdles your customers had to overcome at each phase of their buying process. Ask how “similar” decisions were made—from concept to signed contract. 

(17) Your contact will leave the company, get downsized or go on an unexpected medical leave. 

To protect yourself from a shake-up, make sure you have multiple relationships in an account. Never leave your future in the hands of one person.

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I ran a sales management masterclass for a global client and here are the key points I made to 30 sales managers about the way we all need to lead and inspire teams.

1. Purpose.

No sense of mission or purpose for the difference you’re making in the lives of others.Intent is everything… potential customers can smell it. There is nothing more repelling than having ‘sales breath’ where you’re all about yourself and making your sale rather than being all about them and the outcomes they need to achieve while managing risk. What difference do you make in the lives of your customers… personally and professionally? Be clear about the answer and ensure all of your salespeople are too. As a sales manager, make sure you’re all about your people rather than yourself and that you act in the best interests of your people, your customers, and your company.

2. Strategy. 

Every organization is political in nature and this means that there are competing priorities and hidden agendas. You need a strategy for managing relationships and engineering best value for the customer while creating a comparative bias toward the strengths of your team, your company, and your solution. Strategy need not be complicated but you must know how you can change the rules on the competition, kill the customer’s apathy, and embed yourself in a compelling business case where there is an inbuilt bias toward what you do best in the market.

3. Technology and Data.

Failure to be data-driven and leverage technologies. Average deal size is shrinking, the number of people to cover in an account is increasing, sales cycles are taking longer, and there is increased competition. All of this means that you and your salespeople must apply effort where it will be most productive. Treasure time, fully embrace your CRM system, leverage LinkedIn’s, harness data intelligence tools that provide direct dials and the insights that create context and ‘warm’ engagement. Leverage the strengths of weak ties to never make cold calls yet go get punch drunk on the phone while your competition has slipped into ‘snoozer mode’ of passive social selling. Combinations of technology and driving concurrent channels of outreach are how the best are crushing quota.

4. The right conversations. 

No-one is interested in what you do and how it works until they first see you as someone who can help them achieve the important outcomes they are accountable for in their role. Lead with why conversations matter and be specific about the opportunities you see for them to improve revenue, reduce costs, increase profitability and have a positive impact on the metrics by which they are measured and personally that matter to them. Have a ‘hypothesis of value’ about how they could improve their business based on what you’re seeing with other customers who have a similar profile. Make your narrative all about them rather than yourself!

5. Sense of urgency. 

Time kills deals. Momentum is difficult to create and so very easy to lose. Treasure every opportunity and constantly think about how you can create progression every day with each stakeholder in every opportunity. What’s the next step? What are the key milestones and dates? Who needs to be on board to achieve consensus and in order for a decision to be made? Hope and prayer is not a strategy… success is earned. Between the opening and the close is the middle… the middle is the place where many deals die. Your biggest risk is usually complacency. Constantly ask why it matters and what happens if it slips. If there is a not a ‘compelling event’ then there had better be a compelling business case.

6. Discipline. 

We must do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and regardless of how we feel. Beyond going through the motions, we need to also execute masterfully. The discipline of training and repetitive correct execution is the hallmark of the very best in their field.

“Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody want to lift no heavy-ass weights. But I Do”

Ronnie Coleman

7. Execution. 

Having a rubbish narrative and not executing the fundamentals is the most common reason for sales failure. If you can’t secure meaningful conversations with the people of power and set the right agenda, then you’re working with someone else’s agenda. The customer forms an opinion of us quickly and we need to earn their trust and respect at every stage and through every interaction. Many deals are lost by the seller tripping over their own shoelaces. Can we write professionally and do we proof-read? Do we turn up on time? Have we done our research? Do we have insight? Is our demo relevant? Are our slides on point and all about them not us? Do we ask the right open questions? The list goes on… make every post a winner. You and your team need to all do the basics well.

8. Managing Expectations. 

Let’s face it… your boss is a lunatic who has an insatiable appetite for ever-increasing performance results and no regard for your personal life. They are happy to burn you out, throw you under the bus or melt you with their blow torch. You must manage their expectations. Customers are also crazy as they bark orders for you to jump through hoops and dance to their discord. They adopt ill-conceived strategies for managing their risks and often unwittingly work against themselves. It’s essential to positively influence their process, set the right agenda, then ‘culturally’ align. Ensure you have alignment with their process and reasonable goals and achievable time-frames. Be proactive early and know that yes-people are not respected.

9. Humility and the willingness to learn. 

Lifelong learning is the hallmark of the smartest humble people on the planet. Conversely, salespeople must be the worst readers on the planet. So many sellers think they know it all and have no need of improvement. Curiosity and a willingness to learn is what transforms a sales career. The best sales managers have their people on a reading program and they test whether they actually read or listen to the books, watch the videos, do the research. They turn sales meeting into sessions that actually provide value for the salespeople rather than cadence forecast meetings.

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“I don’t believe in burnout.” – Grant Cardone

Do something you love and you’ll never truly work a day in your life.

People ask me, “Tony, how do you keep up the frenetic pace of 25 hours every day? How are you not beyond burnt out on selling, calling, and traveling across continents incessantly after 3 decades?” It doesn’t mean I love every element of what I do on a daily basis or enjoy the rejection laden gauntlet… even I run from dawn until dusk and I’ve had moments of near-implosion this year with finishing my next book, meeting client commitments and continuing to publish blog articles .

I blast ahead by getting off on the high I feel miles into a bike ride. I thrive on challenging myself daily for the breakthrough. When you really don’t care about hearing a ‘no’, the yeses are sweet! When all possible rain is water off a duck’s back because you’re making a positive difference, then you’ll make money rain too.

It’s possible to be joyful about this thing called SALES if you’re making a positive difference in the lives of all those you touch.

I have several secrets to preventing and avoiding burnout out over a 30 year career in sales. Here we go:

1. 80/20 rule. Isolate the 20% of your activity that yields 80% of the results or output. Do that before lunch. If I don’t do 2 major things that scare me before lunch, I shouldn’t have even worked that day. Yes, that means directly call 2 or 3 CEOs who could partner with me, who I could consult on revenue acceleration.
2. Curiosity. Yes, it killed the cat but not the human. You must become infinitely interested in other people. Even fascinated by buyer psychology… What makes them tick? How are each of their problems different like a snowflake or fingerprint? You could even take a course from Barry Rhein on Curiosity Based Selling. Prospects are fascinating. Peel the onion with open SPIN questions and turn your ‘listen to talk’ ratio on 20/80. Super hard to do and that discipline of “being fully there” (as I highlight in RSVPselling methodology) will “open doors where there were once walls,” per philosopher Joseph Campbell.
3. Exercise. You’re not going to hit 10X Massive action being sedentary hitting the red bull and jolt cola. Work/life balance comes from concentrating really hard and doing that ‘one thing’ as effectively (and highly leveraged) as possible in that moment. Exercise improves stamina and brain function. You can only become caffeinated for so long. The body’s natural energy systems bloom into a supernova of dopamine (not the Facebook cat video clicker kind), serotonin and endorphins when you can get your heart rate up. For me that’s cycling and not just weekend warrioring it. I often wake in the dark to strike out to put in 60 kilometers.
4. Altruism: I truly seek to help my partners, customers and network to PIF: pay it forward. There are some aspects to what I do that have more residual intrinsic value than money can ever buy. Mentoring wonderful people that exceed my ability. Truly stunning and humbling! Behavioral change at the client level and the client’s team is extremely rewarding when they grok the sales process, methodology and start to hammer high action down through the funnel to CLOSED-WON. Watching all the principles I espouse in these blogs, hardened in the trenches, come to fruition for those that would dare try apply COMBO literally, is what I live for!
5. Passion: You can call it Grant Cardone 10X or Obsession but I stay dedicated to setting 10X goals every day, every quarter and every year to push myself to the next level. I’ve hit many of them inadvertently by shooting for the stars and hitting a mountain.
6. Go off the grid: Every 90 days, shut off all your electronics and go into the outback on walkabout. You’ve gotta unplug from social media, your cell phone alerts, the screens, Netflix and chill, and inbox Zero false hope. Go back to nature or run across your country like Forest Gump. Get real and back to who you are as a human. Epiphanies flow to an open mind. Digital overload has deadened human creativity. Do you think Michaelangelo was rushing to respond to a tweet?
7. Life-Long Learning: Constantly strive for knowledge, wisdom, mentorship, reverse mentorship and read widely across many subject matter areas to cross-train. I absolutely loved this video by Jeb Blount. Readers are leaders and writers are sellers. Never stop learning! There’s truly a correlation between the level of success possible and how much one reads. Yes, you can learn by apprenticeship and doing but you need to get Zig, Bosworth, Eades, Thull, Holden, Rackham, Adamson, Holmes, et. al burned into your DNA! Turn your car into a classroom.

Instead of burning out, KTFB – keep the fire burning.

Sure there are days where you’ll feel overwhelmed (I have many), face the crippling defeat of a lost sale, be met with only silence and rejection, face the blowtorch of internal corporate politics, and flat out want to quit. You’re only human and that’s par for the course. But just like Billy Joel entreated, “Don’t forget your second wind!”

Persistence, tenacity, and grit will pay off in spades. Approach your life and your role with a “beginner’s mind” and growth mindset. Carpe Diem – Seize the day! Sometimes I feel like Benjamin Buttons. You’d be shocked that after reading hundreds of books, attending more seminars than I can remember, and coaching/closure of thousands of sales cycles, it’s still day one on the learning curve.

We’ve never lived in a more exciting time than right now. The machine age, the blossoming of the fourth industrial revolution (from automation to intelligence) where heart, man, machine and software automation are all simultaneously hitting a wild nexus point to finally carry the realm of B2B Complex Sales forward is incredibly invigorating!

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