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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Books That Taught Me How to Sell appeared first on Head Of Sales.

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

Finding Opportunities

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

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

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

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

Creating Opportunities

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

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

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

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

How to Stop Falling Behind

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

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

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

Not Mutually Exclusive

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

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

The post Why You Need Create Opportunities and Not Just Find Them appeared first on Head Of Sales.

I’ve worked with thousands of sales people in many different industries. Professional selling is changing rapidly with technology-driven automation and commoditisation resulting in more than one-third of sellers losing their jobs in the coming years.

For any sales person to prosper in their career they need to move beyond being good at building relationships to also embrace the holy trinity of sales mastery:

• Lead with insight as a domain expert
• Create tangible business value for clients
• Leverage technology to be effective and efficient

Make no mistake, relationships alone are not enough. Buyers today are busy and stressed. They are not looking for new friends. They instead want greater value from fewer relationships. They care about how you can help them achieve their goals and manage their risks.

Lead with insight: Don’t wait for your employer to hand you mythical silver bullets… you instead need to self-educate by researching and writing about the disruptive and transformative trends in your customer’s world.

If you can’t write then you can’t sell.

There are four reasons to create and publish content:

1. Educate yourself and develop domain knowledge and expertise
2. Connect with industry leaders to build your sphere of influence
3. Attract clients and an audience to support your business goals
4. Build your personal brand evidencing credibility, value and insight

In an online world we are known by who we associate with (connections) and what we publish (insights). According to IDC research, 75% of buyers research the seller before engaging. What do they see when they view your profile? Do they see a credible domain expert worthy of trust and an investment of their time or do they see a mere salesperson? We must create own own narrative that sets us apart and earns engagement at the most senior levels. It is vitally important to publish thoughtful posts in your LinkedIn profile.

Creating business value: Move away from talking about who you are, what you do and how you do it to instead lead with why a conversation matters. What business outcomes can you deliver for them and what risks can you manage?

The language of business is numbers not words

Lead with why it is important and what it can do for them at a business level. Have evidence to support your claims. Know your best customers and why they decided to implement change within their organization. Understand their business case and the challenges they faced in change management. Bring this wisdom to new prospective clients and set an agenda that sets you apart from the competition.

Leverage technology: The best sales people combine proven old world practices with modern ways of executing. Building relationships and evidencing credentials and value can be done online. Buyers expect the sellers to arrive having done their research. Don’t waste the customer’s time asking them to educate you about publicly available information. Embrace a social selling framework to modernize the way you sell.

Social Selling Definition: The strategy and process of building quality networks online that attract clients and accelerates the speed of business and efficiency of selling, as achieved with a strong personal brand and human engagement through social listening, social publishing, social research, social engagement, and social collaboration.

Also use your company’s CRM system better than anyone else. Work with marketing for lead nurturing with automation tools that keep prospects in your orbit without you annoying them or them wasting your time.

While sales individuals need to focus on ‘sales mastery’, the sales organization needs to focus on ‘sales enablement’.

Sales Enablement

Most businesses do a good job in segmenting their markets, customers and products but what is often missed is the insidious impact of commoditization. Every product or service becomes a commodity over time as features that once differentiated drift back to parity as competitors catch up. According to Corporate Executive Board research, 86% of the time that sellers pitch their ‘compelling value,’ buyers perceive it as neither unique or compelling but merely features also offered by other suppliers. Every business needs to look at itself from the outside – how do customers really view us comparatively? If you sell a commodity, then face the awful truth rather than cling to expensive sales models where customers are unwilling to pay for the low value and high costs associated with a field sales force.

There is no such thing as a high margin commodity and the value they offer must stem from insight and wisdom rather than mere information and service. The first law of selling is that people buy from those they like and trust. They then seek best value and lowest risk. The key for every seller is to understand that ‘value’ and ‘risk’ are all defined by the customer. In selling, we are delegated down to people we sound like and this means that salespeople need to learn the language of leadership if they want to engage at senior levels. They need to be equipped to discuss the business case, delivering outcomes and managing risk.

If a product or service is a commodity then the sales model should be engineered accordingly; make it easy for the customer to obtain information, become convinced and then transact in a way that’s easiest for them including web, phone or channels. For products and services that actually are high value solutions then force the field sales team toward value through insight. Support them in developing domain expertise, genuine insights and business acumen to enable them to operate at a higher level. Product marketing needs to focus on differentiating what is being sold; and sales people need to differentiate by how they sell.

What are the critical elements of sales enablement and how do you create a framework for effective sales execution? There are three essential ingredients plus the catalyst of sales management leadership. The three ingredients are sales methodology, sales process and technology platform.

Few people can articulate the difference between methodologies and process yet these elements are distinctly different in complex B2B selling.

Methodology is the framework for formulating strategy and tactics to win; it’s also how you create your competitive deal strategy, identify risks, cover the political power base within the relationship map, and identify the best way to create compelling value for the buyer. But which methodology should you use? There are a number of well-proven methodologies including TAS, Miller Heiman, RSVPselling, and others. Success with methodology does not depend on which one you select but simply on how well you use it for opportunity coaching with the team.

Process is how you build a sales funnel and execute the sale; it’s how you qualify opportunities and progress through the deal stages with discovery, proposal, demonstration, closing, contracting, on-boarding and then doing win/loss reviews and case studies. Process steps need to be supported by the right tools such as a call planner, qualification tool, discovery questionnaire, proposal templates, win/loss review forms, and territory and account plan templates.

Platform is the technology you use to enable and automate your sales methodology and sales process. It is where you have a single source of truth about customers and opportunities. It must also be your coaching platform where there is transparency concerning pipeline depth and opportunity quality. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the ideal platform but CRM needs to be a strategy, not just a technology and reporting tool. To be implemented successfully, it must go beyond the mere functions of accounts, opportunities, pipeline and forecasting; it must instead enable the mapping of relationships and force discipline in deal stage progression with qualification scoring and action tracking. It must also include close plans with customer validation of critical dates. Finally, CRM needs to incorporate tight integration with both marketing, social (such as LinkedIn) and after sales support to provide a single view of the entire customer lifecycle from targeting, marketing, lead nurturing and selling through to account management, support, service, satisfaction and upselling.

This approach uses CRM to place customers at the heart of everything you do and provides the platform for being truly customer-centric. It also delivers transparency with deal quality and revenue predictability. It’s where sales people manage their opportunities and the tool that sales managers use to coach their people. This approach is designed to serve the sales people in improving their efficiency and effectiveness. Because it provides them with value and enables their manager to coach for improved win rates, they actually populate the systems with accurate and useful information.

When CRM is implemented with customers and sales people as the priority, and when it’s the platform for deal coaching and the enabler for sales process; then system success is assured. The synergistic outcome for management is accurate reporting and revenue predictability. The corollary of this is that CRM failure comes from implementing it as a reporting tool with poor alignment to sales methodology and sales processes. Many CRM implementation fail and it has nothing to do with the technology provider; here are the critical success factors for successful CRM:

• Obsessively focus on the system serving sales and customer support staff
• Integrate with social platforms such as LinkedIn and InsideView (for easy sales research and insight into Trigger Events)
• Integrate with marketing for lead nurturing (to build sales pipeline)
• Create a single view of customers and prospects (to be informed)
• Embed methodology and process coaching (qualify, call plan, close plan, etc.)
• Simplify reports and KPIs which can actually be managed (activities)
• Support customer lifecycle post sale (cases, complaints, renewals, etc.)

With accurate data in a CRM the next issue to decide is what metrics provide meaningful reporting. A common mistake made by management at all levels is to seek to manage by results. Jason Jordan writes insightfully on this topic in his book, Cracking The Sales Management Code, highlighting that only 17% of the 300+ possible sales metrics measured are actually manageable. As an example, you cannot manage revenue, but you can manage the activities that create it. Rather than command sales people to bring in more revenue, they need to be guided in which activities are most likely to create the type of revenue you are seeking. Managing activities is the key to delivering the right results and this leads us to the catalyst that brings methodology, process and platform technology together for successful sales enablement – the sales manager.

Sales management is without doubt the most important link in the revenue chain for any organization. The right sales manager creates emotional commitment and belief within their team, they coach and mentor for sales success, they develop the right strategies to focus effort where the team can competitively win and they drive the right conversations with the right roles within the right targeted prospects. They also create organizational alignment with upstream marketing and downstream delivery, support and service to build a business with quality customers.

Sales management leadership is the catalyst that brings it all together: people, process and technology within the right strategy and a culture of excellence in execution. The type of person capable of delivering all this is an engineer rather than a warrior, they have empathy yet hold people to account. But the best sales manager in the world cannot be successful if their boss has them endlessly in internal meetings and reporting up. The sales manager needs to be a coach rather than an administrator. She needs to spend more time in the field than in the office, and more time strategizing and reviewing opportunities with sales people than managing reports. A great coach does not jump in and take over, nor do they do the sales person’s job for them. They don’t feel the need to rescue people and instead understand that people are best motivated by reasons they themselves discover. They focus on planning and debriefing to create constant improvement.

The Holy Grail of sales enablement is the seamless integration of the right methodology, efficient sales process, all enabled by Social Selling and CRM technology used to coach sales people by an effective sales leader focused on strategy, execution and building a positive team culture.

The very best sales operations bring people, process and technology together to be obsessively customer-centric.

The post Sales Mastery or Sales Enablement? appeared first on Head Of Sales.

• Relationship Selling – Develop strong trust-based relationships to encourage buyers to make a commitment (1990’s – Mike Bosworth)
• Solutions Selling – Work with customers to develop a mutual understanding of the solutions that would be a best fit (2000’s)
• Challenger Sale – Challenge customers to think differently while controlling the sales process (2011 – The Corporate Executive Board)

1990s to 2000s

Mike Bosworth began his career in 1972 with Xerox and from 1976 to 1982 was the primary architect and deliverer of Xerox sales training – PSS. In 1983, Bosworth founded his company Solution Selling – a sales training organisation. In 1993 he published Customer Centric Selling, proposing a solutions orientation to sales. Like Needs Satisfaction and SPIN, this version of solution selling proposed a number of distinct phases:

1. Pre-call planning and research
2. Stimulating interest
3. Establishing the critical business issues
4. Mapping the organisation
5. Negotiating access to senior decision-makers
6. Managing the product evolution
7. Negotiating
8. Closing

The flaw in this version of solution selling is that it’s not “solution selling” oriented. Phase 6 “Managing the product evolution” indicates that this system is still about the product, solution selling is not. What research has shown is that Solution Selling is about how customers view solutions, not how salespeople define them. In fact, all of the methods that support real Solution Selling encourage salespeople to work with their customers to gain an understanding of what the customer believes is an ideal fit solution.

As in the Blue Sheet approach used by Miller Heiman in Strategic Selling, solutions salespeople are expected to master a process for establishing strategic alignment between themselves and the buyer by going through the visioning process model described above.

Since the 1990s sales organisations have been bombarded with a host of methodologies; almost all of them shades of either PSS (Needs Satisfaction Selling) or SPIN (Consultative Selling).

2010s

Now we have many different sales specialists, consultants, psychologists and academics all working closely with salespeople and customers with the purpose of trying to identify what is really required in the world of selling.

No one individual that we could find can lay claim to being the parent (or founder) of Solution Selling. Equally important, not one authority can lay claim to having identified the perfect solution selling proposition. It’s been a process of synthesis and observation, trial and error but most importantly, it’s been the observation and the discussions with customers that has finally resulted in the realities of solution selling today.

Historically, customers needed salespeople. Initially they needed salespeople to inform them because they had little access to information. They also had limited choice. Over the last century, but more particularly, over the last decade or so, the same customers have been overwhelmed with information. They don’t need salespeople to provide information, they need salespeople to help them wade through the masses of available information to find the salient facts and identify the best fit solution.

Salespeople are no longer purveyors of the latest news about the latest gadgets, inventions and ideas. They certainly aren’t necessarily the first port of call for customers who are looking for a particular solution to a pressing challenge. They most definitely are not even a consideration for the purchase of commoditised items that require little technical knowledge or understanding.

In this paradigm the role of the sales professional has changed. Now, even more than when the concept was first developed in the 1970s, salespeople have to be consultative. They need to be business people who can sell, rather than salespeople who understand business. They need to have the skills to establish and fast track trusted relationships with a range of decision-makers in the variety of organisations with which they work.

One need only spend a week in the field, meeting with customers to know the game has changed. Sales strategies and tactics that worked well in the not too distant past, are no longer enough. Yes, salespeople should bring ideas to customers to help them grow their business and solve business problems. That’s nothing new. That was proposed as the underlying premise of PSS in 1968; by Miller Heiman (Strategic Selling) in the late 1970s, by Neil Rackham (SPIN) in the 1980s; by Mike Bosworth in the 1990s (Customer Centric Selling) and even by Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People – 1938).

Perhaps the closest to a revolution in selling since the 1968-1970s metamorphosis was the evolution of Solution Selling around 2000 – a method that evolved as a result of customer demands and expectations that forced sales professionals to re-think their approach.

The over-load of information, access to massive choice of hardly differentiated products and services (even at a complex level), and the increase in influence that buyers had on sales, coupled with pressure to reduce costs and improve profits of the buying organisations, forced salespeople to open up, share control of the sales and partner with customers to identify real and meaningful solutions.

In this era, buyers were (and still are) willing to identify preferred vendors, supplies and service providers, but they expect them to be more flexible. They want their suppliers to invest in understanding their business imperatives and then develop solutions that deliver more profits at both lower cost and less risk. Customers, not salespeople, define a solution and sales learned quickly that it would either adapt to this new environment or perish.

Solution Selling is a sales method that has been, and continues to be, driven by customer demands.

In November 2011 Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson published The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. This book rapidly became a bestseller based on the premise that sales success isn’t just about building relationships with customers, it is also about challenging them. Authors of the book, Dixon and Adamson, studied thousands of sales representatives, across an array of industries around the US. This conclusion validated what David Ogilvy (1911–1999), the advertising guru responsible for developing relationship marketing as a concept, said back in the early 1990s, that relationships opened the door and gave the salesperson an opportunity to pitch their argument. Relationships even allowed the salesperson and sales organisation to make a mistake or two. Because a relationship existed the salesperson was given a second chance. But “in and of itself” (Ogilvy quotations) relationships won’t generate business…”

The Challenger Sale also says that the model shouldn’t just be a sales process but rather a company-wide initiative that incorporates other functional areas including marketing, product development, manufacturing and strategy, which is what Peter Drucker referred to in his book The Age of Discontinuity (1953): Organisations keen on being customer focused needed to adapt their approach to helping their customers realise their goals and objectives. “The purpose of business is to satisfy the customer’s needs. The consequence of satisfying customer needs, is making a profit.”

According to the authors (of The Challenger Sale), to sell in a business-to-business context solutions salespeople must approach customers with unique insights that show them how they can save or make money, as it was stated by PSS, in the way of pushing salespeople to introduce benefits in the form of dollars that could be created or saved, and later Strategic Selling (Miller Heiman – 1995) which stressed the importance of selling dollars earned or saved.

The Challenger Sale also recommends that instead of a bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about the company and products, salespeople should tailor their sales message to the customer’s specific needs and objectives. This reflects what the Fuller Brush company did in 1928 with its massive door-to-door sales force and powerful sales management led by Albert Teetsel. Teetsel told salespeople not to overwhelm housewives with too many facts about the different brushes they had to offer. “Quickly establish what the best brush would be for the housewife and then stick to the basic feature of making the house cleaning easier and quicker, giving the lady of the house time to enjoy listening to the radio. Facts and figures only confuse customers”, said Teesel.

This sales methodology also recommends that salespeople should be more assertive pushing back when necessary in taking control of the sale. This advice was shown to be flawed by Miller Heiman in Strategic Selling, Mike Bosworth in Customer Centric Selling and even Neil Rackham in SPIN, simply because customers do not like to be antagonised, and certainly resist being controlled.

That doesn’t mean that salespeople have to be wimps. Customers expect salespeople to have strong views. They want salespeople to understand the world in which they are operating, and to have sufficient confidence in their own organisation and the solutions they are proposing, to put up some argument based on a valid business reason. But they don’t expect salespeople to try to manipulate them.

The Challenger Sale defines the attributes of successful salespeople. But, the logic is somewhat flawed. For example, by attempting to present salespeople who are good at relationship building as being too supportive and too generous with their time, as opposed to what they identify as the “ideal” – The Challenger – who loves to debate.

Challenger Salespeople do several things that, according to the authors, make them different and successful: they always have a different view of things, they love to debate, they love to control the sales call, they understand the customer’s business and they push their customers.

However:
• If a salesperson didn’t have a different point of view, what would be the reason for a prospect to meet with them? If all the salesperson has to offer is already known, then the buyer can more cost-effectively do their own research.
• If a salesperson is simply going to meet with customers to prove a point (debate) they are more likely to get thrown out of the meeting, unless the discussion is on equal terms with both buyer and seller sharing opinions with neither striving for one-upmanship.
• And if salespeople still believe they can control the sales call they are living in a fools-paradise. Customers are equal partners in the sale. They share the interaction and would never allow salespeople to control them – the risks are just too high.
• But if salespeople fail to push their customers, if they fail to come up with concepts, ideas and solutions that are radical, then they are offering pedestrian solutions, usually undifferentiated and hardly enough to excite discerning buyers.

What customers do strenuously resist today is dealing with salespeople who know it all; salespeople who attempt to take control or confront decision-making processes.

Customers, particularly in the Australian market and increasingly worldwide, are looking for a collaborative approach to buying and selling, where they can work with sales professionals who bring their in-depth knowledge and understanding of how solutions can be applied and who work with their customers who also have an in-depth knowledge of their own business and challenges. The two – buyer and seller – work collaboratively, in partnership, to develop solutions that deliver the greatest effectiveness and improved efficiency, with the least possible risk at a total cost of ownership that is bearable and justifiable.

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 1 (1900 -1950s)

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 2 (late 1950s – 1980s)

The post The History of Sales Methodology – Part 3 (1990s – 2010’s) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

• Formula / AIDA Selling – Use the same, fixed approach to get Attention, Interest, Desire and Action (1950s – David Ogilvy).
• Needs Satisfaction Selling – 7 step process to uncover needs and introduce benefits (1968 – Don Hammalian and Xerox Corporation).
• Strategic Selling – Use fixed planning process to highlight danger areas and penetrate decision-making process (1970s – Miller Heiman).
• Consultative Selling – Use in-depth questioning techniques to understand customer pain and then consult by helping buyer see impact for themselves (1980’s – Neil Rackham).

Late 1950’s – 1980’s

Towards the latter part of the 1950s salespeople were struggling. Although competition was not as intense as it is today, in a post-war society where factories were overproducing, merely to take up slack in their factory production, there was more product than buyers. Many organisations turned to marketing for assistance. And one of the major recommendations from marketing was to develop niche markets in order to enable sales to focus more effectively on potential buyers. The marketing argument was that if organisations clustered buyers into homogeneous segments – where their needs and behaviour were similar, if not totally identical – sales could develop a formula that would deliver greater success.

Formula Selling is a standardised (canned) approach to selling, based on a fixed sequence of steps, such as that outlined in the very popular “AIDA process”, which does not permit any variation due to changed circumstances or innovative ideas.

AIDA – which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – is the acronym for the standardised protocol used by salespeople to grab the Attention of a prospect, encourage an Interest in what the salesperson had to offer, stimulate a Desire to buy and then generate an Action which was committing to making a purchase. Although it became prevalent in the 1950s, Formula Selling is still very much in use today by telesales operators in call centres around the world. And AIDA still works in a simple and uncomplicated sales situation, where
the buyer is relatively uninformed and with products or services that are essentially commoditised.

1968

Perhaps the most important evolution in selling took place in 1968 with the development of Needs Satisfaction Selling by Xerox Corporation of the United States.

Interestingly, the stimulus for this revolutionary sales methodology was the need to provide support and assistance to Xerox salespeople who were starting to lose deals to competition, as the Xerox patent on dryphotocopying came to an end.

Investing more than $10 million Xerox developed this powerful sales methodology and sales training programme – a concept that has influenced all training and sales methodologies ever since. The essence of this sales method was that almost nobody wanted to be sold anything. However, people did want to make informed decisions and it was the responsibility of professional salespeople to be in a position to a) understand what customers wanted, and b) be competent in explaining how the benefits of a product would help customers make that informed decision.

Needs Satisfaction Selling was the first structured sales process designed to facilitate the buyer’s decision-making process and assist salespeople overcome some of the resistance prospective customers may have and, at the same time, build stronger working relationships. The phenomenal success of the Xerox method of selling led the organisation to commercialise the concept. Xerox formed a new company (Xerox Learning Systems – XLS) in 1972 with the purpose of selling its sales method and training, known as Professional Selling Skills (PSS), together with a range of other sales development programmes (including speed reading, customer service skills, sales management and interviewing skills).

Don Hammalian who, along with Neill Rackham, was the co-author of PSS explained that at the time Xerox Corporation developed the sales method, it was looking for some way in which it could teach Xerox salespeople to sell solutions in what was rapidly becoming a complex, price sensitive and competitive environment. However, Hammalian did admit that in its initial iterations PSS was a highly manipulative model that was product focused and not one that should be advocated today.

Accepting that the number of steps in the sales method was somewhat arbitrary, Hammalian is justifiably proud that PSS / Needs Satisfaction Selling was the first programme of its type that introduced a sales philosophy, methodology and that was supported with a clear set of skills that could be learned using what was then the latest method in adult learning – Linear Learning.

This process, developed by Xerox and still very much in play today, includes the following seven stages:

1. Planning the sales call
2. Introduce yourself / company and start the sales call
3. Asking questions and probing for insight into the prospect’s business
4. Introduce benefits that would satisfy the needs of the customer
5. Identify and handle objections and other buyer attitudes (scepticism
   and indifference)
6. Close the deal and negotiate terms
7. Follow up the call to ensure customer satisfaction

Since the commercialisation of Needs Satisfaction Selling (in PSS) in the 1970s more and more organisations have introduced different selling techniques, with supporting methodologies, styles and most importantly, training. In fact, one of the major differences between pre and post Needs Satisfaction Selling is that the sales methods developed prior to PSS were attempts (even if they were flawed) at finding ways to improve sales by improving methodologies. Post PSS the development of new sales methods seem to be more like sales training programmes.

Mid 1970s

Although by the mid-1970s customers were really enjoying the power of being better informed and having more choice, there was some gloom on the horizon. OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) became a real threat to the global economy with its grip on oil prices that saw oil prices jump from a low of $3 to $12 a barrel, increasing production and transport costs and making buyers more risk averse, more cautious and at the same time, more demanding.

In response to the additional pressure salespeople faced Robert Miller (Kepner Tregoe Consulting) and Stephen Heiman (a former IBM salesman) introduced Strategic Selling.

Strategic Selling was an approach that provided salespeople, already equipped with the basic skills propagated by PSS, with the tools for planning and managing large and complex accounts. Strategic Selling added very little to sales processes, though it did introduce a methodology of planning for large and complex accounts. The methodology that underpins the Strategic Selling approach is, however, flawed, given that no actual skillset was outlined in order to enable salespeople to change their behaviour from product focused selling to complex, consultative selling in large and key accounts.

1980s to early 1990s

One of the more successful sales methodologies that evolved after Needs Satisfaction Selling, was Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling (Consultative Selling).
The protocol developed and in use in Needs Satisfaction Selling (which by now had become the standard for selling on a global scale), was no longer adequate. Something more was needed. In his classic work, SPIN Selling (Neil Rackham – 1988) showed how fundamental sales skills and techniques (as proposed by PSS) could be used to ask the right kind of questions and actually reduce the need to sell, stimulating the opportunity for professional salespeople to consult.

One of the most common strategies in almost all of the post PSS sales methods (and most particularly in Rackham’s SPIN) is best described as the “hurt and rescue” approach to selling. The salesperson finds out the problem the customer has and identifies what “hurts” the customer and then “rescues” the customer by introducing the features and benefits of the products being sold.

SPIN took the concept of “hurt and rescue” to a new level. Gone was the concept of identifying and handling customer objections. Although SPIN still relied on an introduction and pre-call research, the entire focus of this Consultative Selling method was based on using questioning techniques to help customers become self-aware. SPIN relied on four different questions to help customers “rescue” themselves:

Situational Questions in which the salesperson made an attempt to find out some background that could be used to gauge the buyer’s business situation and understand the context of the issues that would be used in the sales process.

Problem Questions were asked to uncover what “hurt” the prospect. The trap here, created by asking these types of questions so early in the sales cycle, was that salespeople would ask questions related to the problems the customer had, that could be rescued by the salesperson’s
products. So, although SPIN positioned itself as a consultative, solutions oriented sales method, very much like PSS, it was another way to sell the company’s products rather than to really solve the buyer’s problems by providing a solution. Perhaps the only real difference was the depth to which SPIN took the questioning techniques in its more consultative approach.

Implication Questions were asked to bridge the gap between what the salesperson’s products or services could do, and the “hurt” uncovered by the salesperson. So instead of telling the customer what the features and benefits were, the salesperson would ask the customer to visualise the implications of the problem without having the product / solution.

Needs Payoff Questions represented the final phrase of SPIN. Having identified what hurt the prospect it was now up to the salesperson to rescue them by giving them something to identify how a solution would resolve the pain that was being felt.

Overall, SPIN was, together with PSS, a combination of the most revolutionary approaches to selling. Whilst PSS introduced features and benefits with a focus on understanding the customer, SPIN took that process further and involved the customer in a consultative approach to selling. The key issue is why these two programmes – Need Satisfaction Selling and the Consultative Selling approach – were so successful? The reality is quite simple – they were both developed in response to the increased sophistication and demands of customers.

As far back as 1968 Xerox recognised that customers want choice. They don’t want salespeople to come in and tell them what to do, they want salespeople to consult with them, to be advisers and to help them make the right decision from a plethora of choices. They want salespeople to be sufficiently well trained to understand business and brave enough to propose new and sometimes revolutionary concepts as solutions. They expect professional salespeople to challenge their thinking and in that way, introduce new ideas.

Certainly in the case of SPIN, with its highly consultative approach to selling, the sales method is about the salesperson gaining an understanding of the customer. That foundation, laid by people such as Hammalian and Rackham is as relevant today, as it was then. Most of the sales methods offered today are based on PSS and/or SPIN, with added input from psychology and new research. In doing so, the new methodologies have clarified some elements of the former methods and given us a more refined evolution of what PSS and SPIN were.

Since the 1980s a range of other organisations also started developing sales methods, usually designed to support and promote their sales training programmes rather than to introduce improvements in sales methodology.

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 1 (1900 -1950s)

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 3 (1990s – 2010’s)

The post The History of Sales Methodology – Part 2 (late 1950s – 1980s) appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Methodology and Philosophy (1900 -1950s)

• Trust Based Selling – Improve professional image by building trust (1916 – DM Barrett / Patterson)
• Scientific Selling – Use phrenology to identify prime prospects (1916 – Phrenologists)
• Mood Selling – Use emotion to persuade customers to buy (1920’s – American Bible Society & American Bible Tract)
• Fuller Brush Men – Focused on people. Strong management helping sales teams (1920’s – Fuller Brush Co. / Alfred C. Fuller / Albert E. Teetsel)
• Psychological Selling – Learn to understand what makes buyers tick (1930’s – Dale Carnegie / Ford Motor Company)
• Barrier Selling – Get prospects to say ‘yes’ often enough to be trapped (1930’s – Insurance companies and Britannica Encyclopaedia)
• SELL – Tell-Sell process leading customer to a commitment (1940-50’s)
• ADAPT – Develop some pseudo technical jargon to keep buyers intrigued (1940-50’s)
• ARC – Cross selling and up selling in retail (1940-50’s)

1916

A major milestone in sales methodology development took place in 1916 when the first World Salesmanship Congress took place in Detroit (USA). Its constitution vowed the event was to “promote the dignity of salesmanship by the elevation of the rank of the salesman to a higher
plane” and to “encourage contributions to the science of salesmanship in the form of books, lectures, courses and publications.” The idea for the event came from D.M. Barrett, who was the editor of Salesmanship magazine and who had already organised a sales club in Detroit whose slogan was “Business betterment through betterment in salesmanship”. The keynote speaker at the congress was Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA at that time. Here we can see how individuals and organisations made the first attempts at making sales a more prestigious career and also at giving sales a rightful place within businesses.

Patterson (NCR) was one of the major sponsors of the World Salesmanship Congress. The sales methodology being promoted then, as the most effective of the day, and the message given to the more than three thousand salespeople who attended the congress, was that to be effective salespeople needed to build trust with customers. Earning and keeping the customer’s trust, attendees heard, “was the only way to promote the dignity of salesmanship, elevating the salesman to a higher plane…”

Even at this early stage in the evolution of sales methodologies, new sales techniques were being promoted as the answer to the challenges salespeople faced.

Amongst the more dubious people that introduced alternative sales methods at the World Salesmanship Congress was one Grant Nablo, a phrenologist (someone who is supposed to be able to read a person’s character by the shape of their skull). His proposed sales methodology
hinged on salesmen learning to read the character of their prospects by observing the shape of their skull. The basis of this sales method, proposed as the “introduction of Science in Selling”, was that if salespeople identified prospects with high foreheads they could improve sales for new products because these people (with high foreheads) were more imaginative than others and were likely to be early adopters, making selling new ideas, products and services easier and quicker.

So popular was the Science in Selling (phrenology) method that the Ford Motor Company produced a primer for its sales force – “Ford Products and Their” Sale (1923) that contained the following instruction: “Sell the vehicle according to the shape of the prospect’s head. High foreheads leave room for larger development and indicate people who are less likely to resist new ideas…”

1920’s

The great depression in the US, caused by the stock market crash of 1929, gave impetus to a range of sales methodologies as more and more people – struggling to earn a living – turned to selling simply because of the low barriers to entry into the craft. Although efforts to organise and standardise sales systems had started already, they were the realm of big corporations and mostly those operating in the B2B arena. This left the majority of people coming into the sales profession with little or no training at all from the companies they joined –organisations such as the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society– so they developed their own methodologies. The more successful of these enjoyed a period in the sunshine as the techniques spread and appeared to have some success. Amongst the more familiar – vestiges of which still continue in selling today – are the sales methods of:

Mood Selling which was introduced at the time of the depression. It was developed by bible salesmen who called door-to-door and, without any sales training, attempted to appeal to the emotions of buyers by claiming that the purchase of a bible would not only be good for the customer’s soul, but would help the salesperson stave off the starvation of his children.

This method of selling relied on an emotional pull to the people being sold to. Popular appeals were the saving of a soul (bible) and helping the salesperson feed their children (who these salespeople often took with them on their sales calls).

For a time, Mood Selling was a successful, though less than ethical, sales methodology. But customers and prospects started to see through the techniques being used and began to resist the appeals made by these “salespeople”. The change in buyer attitude forced salespeople to take stock of what they were doing and how they were selling.

Amongst the myriad of methodologies that came to play during this time, was that of the Fuller Brush Company. The company had been founded in 1906 by Alfred C. Fuller, who would both manufacture the brushes by night and sell them by day. In 1908, his wife joined him in his selling efforts and had better results than he did on her first day, and almost every day for a couple of years. By the 1920s The Fuller Brush Company had people all over the country going door-to-door selling brushes. But there was something different about these salespeople. Fuller provided them with training on a system that gained them entry to the houses they called on almost every time. The sales method had been developed by Alfred C. Fuller and refined with the collaboration of his sales managers. Every call started with presenting a gift to the housewife, followed by a demonstration of their products – Fuller had worked out early on that the key was to sell what the brushes could do for his clients, not the brushes themselves. In 1922, these men started to be known as the “The Fuller Brush Men”. They were not employed by the company, they were distributors. They each had a territory and the tools and processes they needed to be successful. One of the most talented managers was Albert E. Teetsel who brought to the company the concept of positive thought. He encouraged every salesperson to always reply to “How are you?” with “Fine and dandy”, underscoring the company’s most distinctive feature – its emphasis on people. Each distributor had to sign a pledge which said, amongst other things, that the salesperson’s “obligation is one of
service to the customer, to the company I represent and to the community in which I live and work.”, and, “I will be courteous; I will be kind; I will be sincere; I will be helpful.” The commercial and popular success of the company was built on the focus on its people, in particular, the sales team.

1936

In 1936 the iconic book ”How to Win Friends and Influence People” was published, catapulting Dale Carnegie to the head of the line of sales gurus. The huge success of his book is still being felt today and many of the modern sales techniques (including the concept of Customer Centric and Relationship Selling) have Carnegie to thank because they haven’t ventured too far from what he propagated as the way to effective relationship building and successful selling.

With everyone in sales trying to win friends and influence people, the advent of commission and sales incentives changed the paradigm once again and launched what was a successful, but massively flawed, sales methodology – Barrier Selling. This powerful technique evolved at the same time as salespeople were making the adjustment from earning a base salary to commission as an incentive for sales performance. The technique pushed salespeople to manipulate their customers.

Barrier Selling was (is) the sales method of asking customers leading questions to which the most logical answer would be “Yes.” Salespeople would ask several questions getting a string of affirmative (yes) responses before throwing in the key question “And of course, you want us to deliver this widget early next week?”

In using this method, two factors worked against the customer. One was the fact that salespeople seldom applied it without a spouse or child being present. So, for example, insurance salespeople – who were (and still are) notorious for using this technique – would never sell life insurance to a partner without the spouse being present. The kind of questions asked would be something like: “Obviously if something happened to you, you would want your partner to be looked after. Wouldn’t you?” It is unlikely that the person would say no in any circumstances, but even less so, with the partner present. Britannica Encyclopaedia salespeople were no different. They wouldn’t attempt to sell a set of Britannica without the
children being present. And the questions used to “trap” the buyer would be something like: “Obviously you want your child to have the very best education possible, don’t you?”

At the time that this technique was popular, salespeople still had a large role to play in providing information. Customers had little choice, limited access to information and relied heavily on what salespeople said and did, in order to learn about new products and services. In addition, there weren’t laws and controls to prohibit salespeople or protect consumers from this type of behaviour. Caveat Emptor – “let the buyer beware…” was the consumer mantra of the day. Salespeople made claims and promises, used techniques and methods simply to get a deal. And they did so with impunity and little fear of consequence. Because a large portion of a
salesperson’s income at the time (very often as much as 90%) was based on their ability to close the deal, salespeople were willing to risk everything with little thought to how customers felt or suffered as a result of their activities.

So destructive was this method of selling that governments introduced the cooling off period, allowing people to cancel agreements entered into under these circumstances.

1930s to early 1950s

In the period from around mid 1930s to early 1950s, just after the decline in the popularity of Barrier Selling, a range of alternative selling methods of little effectiveness, appeared on the scene. Each of these represented a different approach to selling that claimed, at the time, to revolutionise the way salespeople performed. Some of the more popular of these included:

SELL – Show, Explain advantage, Lead to benefit, Let them talk
This method encouraged salespeople to the Tell-Sell approach. Salespeople told their prospects success stories, in the process showing features of their products, explaining the product’s advantages and how other customers became successful or achieved staggering results (benefits) as a result of using this products.

ADAPT – Assessment, Discovery, Activation, Projection, Transition
Adapt was an acronym that became popular around the 1950s in Britain as a means of interacting with customers and prospects. The focus of this (at the time) popular method was to undertake some form of pseudotechnical assessment. The salesperson gave the appearance of using some methodology to assess the prospect’s business issues, though none of the records actually illustrate how this assessment was actually conducted. Once the assessment had been conducted, salespeople then directed the sales call, hoping that the prospect would discover how a product would benefit them. Once this discovery was made the salesperson would request a commitment which would transition the buyer from prospect to customer.

ARC – Ask, Recommend, Cross-sell and Close
In the early 1950s a sales method, uniquely designed to improve retail sales situations, evolved. ARC encouraged salespeople to ask customers what they wanted and then to introduce additional items to complement the initial interest. This method of cross-selling improved sales performance and enabled salespeople to increase the size of the original order. It wasn’t long before ARC spread to other areas of selling. Even in business-to-business selling the idea of cross-selling found traction and enabled salespeople to expand share of wallet. This technique was later used as part of Strategic Selling (Miller Heiman, 1975) to help salespeople cross and up-sell, and in the process increase share of wallet.

Coming up soon:

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 2 (late 1950s – 1980s)

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 3 (1990s – 2010’s)

The post The History of Sales Methodology – Part 1 (1900 -1950s) appeared first on Head Of Sales.