There are no Advanced Selling Skills only the right behaviours

One of the things I often get asked by sales leaders is

“How can I improve the selling skills of my people?”

To paraphrase the reply to “How do I get to the Albert Hall?” the answer is

“You have to practice”

Sales Directors talk about needing to have a sales team with Advanced Selling Skills what I would say is “no, you need sales people who regularly, every day, every sales call, practice ADVANCED SELLING BEHAVIOUR”

I recently attended an “Advanced Selling Skills” workshop. The content was good and so were the two guys delivering it. So what is wrong with that I hear you ask. Well nothing other than the skills trained in were not “advanced”; they were good, standard skills around asking good Questions to understand what is going on, Listening intently to evaluate, diagnose, comprehend etc, handling Objections and Negotiating.

All good stuff but......

I have a issue with this and it is nothing to do with the content or trainers - both were good. The problem is more for the Sales Director of the client buying the training. That problem is that none of this content is new, it is what his people should already be doing. The challenge is “what will change as a result of your people attending the training workshop”?

Their problem is the challenge of achieving target in a difficult market (but it exists in a buoyant market too) will only go away if as salespeople they not only understand “Advanced Selling Skills” but practice them every time they speak to a customer.

The other issue I have is with many people’s ATTITUDE. Fortunately for me mine is positive. Fool that I am, I really believe that working hard, developing new skills and applying them everyday in my work will move me forward psychologically and move my business forward fiscally.

What I witnessed in this training workshop was a poor attitude of everything being negative - “why do we need more training, our prices are not competitive, even if I could sell in these difficult times we can’t deliver” etc etc etc. Boring, boring, boring.

How about this as another way of looking at the world - “My sales director cares. He cares about his job, his company and his sales teams. He cares enough to spend money on my education even in these difficult times when it is really, really hard for my company to justify spending their money on my education. So I am going to take this opportunity by the scruff of the neck. I am going to go away from this workshop and practice these skills over and over until I get really good at selling such that my clients benefit from the great solutions my company offers, my company earns much needed revenue and I earn a great big, fat bonus”.

Attitudinally that sounds and feels a lot better

I feel better too having written this blog today. So everyone’s a winner

PS I just read the Rambler’s Association blog - it went on and on and on and on........

Why are so any managers busy doing nothing?

Have you noticed how so many managers (and not just sales managers) seem to be incredibly busy, but actually achieving very little? If I were unkind I would say that there seems to be an outbreak of headless chickens in senior positions. So what is going on and what can we do about it?

Clearly the current economic climate has a part to play in this outbreak of headless chickens. There are a lot of people worried about their jobs and when this happens we all focus on trying to look indispensable. Look around you. How many of your colleagues are 100% focused on managing upwards? If your manager is deciding who stays and who goes it seems sensible to focus on them!

So why is this an issue?

From a sales effectiveness perspective we are unfortunately seeing the following symptoms:

• Measuring the wrong things - Sales teams seem to be focussing ever more on activity - number of customer visits, number of calls, number of quotes sent out, size of pipeline, without having an equal focus on quality of activity. If you are seeing this in your organisation you need re-dress the balance.
• Visiting customers who are not going to buy may achieve customer-facing time but will it bring success?
• Ringing lots of people without an effective message or objective will only increase your phone bills.
• Having a large pipeline, which is not properly qualified, only makes you feel better in the short term
• Lack of focus - As a simple sales person I like to be told what I am selling and to whom, and then be left alone for a period of time to get on with it. However, currently organisations are constantly “re-focussing” whether it is to drive margins, clear stock, help a specific product line etc. There are clearly good reasons for this, but it does drive specific behaviours:
• Clients will constantly be looking for the last minute offer, hence driving down your prices.
• Sales move away from a “solution-led sale” (solving clients problems) towards a “product push sale”. This may actually result in less sales and confused customers.
• Even less Sales Management - We constantly comment that Sales Managers need to focus more on coaching and managing the focus of their teams and not trying to be “super sales people”. But with human nature being what it is, as the numbers look less and less achievable, more and more sales managers think the answer is to get back out and sell themselves.

Beyond this, sales managers are under even more pressure from their managers, constantly being asked to update reports, join conference calls, review their people. Leaving very little time, even if they had the desire, to do coaching.

However all is not lost. If you look towards Stephen Covey and his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Habit 3: Put First Things First. The most important lesson is balancing those “Urgent” (reactive) activities with the “Important” (Strategic) activities. By focussing on the Important activities you will discover that the number of Urgent activities reduce as you are in control of your strategy. If you want to know more look at http://www.sales-accredit.com/docs/urgent-vs-important.pdf which is Accredit’s take on this

So why is this an opportunity
As many of the commentators are constantly pointing out, even in a recession some companies flourish. This is because they take advantage of the chaos to stand out from the crowd. This is where the opportunity lies.

Out sell your competitors
If your competitors internal sales engine is not functioning properly, then think what impact it has on prospects who want to solve a problem. The prospects do not care about sales peoples internal issues, they will buy from whoever addresses their need and makes it easy to buy. This could be you!

To take advantage of this opportunity you must ensure you are not making the same mistakes as your competitors:

• Sort out your measurements - measure the right things and be accurate with your measurements
• Have a clear focus - know your message, practice the delivery of the message, monitor the effective delivery of the message. Most important of all “Listen to your customers
• Get your sales managers to manage. You know that 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your people. Make those 20% even better and drag the next 20% into that group, imagine what that will do to your sales.

Use your client internal management challenges as a trigger for a sale
The headless chicken syndrome is not just apparent in sales; it is prevalent across a wide variety of organisations. This is an opportunity as associated with the chaos will be frustrations, and these frustrations are the emotional triggers that lead to need, which lead to sales.


From a selling perspective we should understand our clients and prospects internal pressures and identify what are “Red” emotional hot buttons which will stop decisions and “Green” emotional hot buttons which will enable decision making. If you want to know more about this you can see/hear a 25 minute presentation at http://www.esquaredm.com/newcontentdemo.asp

Everything is fine, I am happy with what we do now, we do not need your help!

Have you noticed how satisfied with their existing supplier/solution all your prospects have suddenly become?

"We are very happy with the system we currently use, there is no reason to look at an alternative"

"Yes we already do that ourselves, we do not need any outside help"

You have to ask yourself the questions, "Is everyone happy, or is this the first objection I have to overcome?".

Experience tells me that in most cases it is the latter, as a colleague said to me "when the house is burning down around you, you are going to focus on your survival and not how you could improve the kitchen". This, I suspect, is the root cause of the sudden outbreak of satisfaction - heads down, don't rock the boat, no-one is going to fail because they stick with the status quo, etc.

So how can we overcome these.

1. Don't take the objection personally - clearly no-one can provide the service/product/solution as well as you.
2. Use this objection as an opportunity to find out why they are happy, how does their current solution deliver such an outstanding return. Be interested, "I would really like to understand what it is about your supplier you like so much, we are not perfect and it will help me understand how we could improve...."
3. Remember, people like to talk about themselves and I guarantee that in telling you what they like they will also tell you what they dislike.
4. Be bold, if you suspect that they are using the "we are happy" as a means of putting you off - ask them how they have measured the "happiness", is it a financial measure, a service level measure, a subjective measurement. Again this give you the opportunity to be benchmarked against that measure.
5. Be humble, "If you feel you are as effective as you can be then I congratulate you, there is clearly nothing I can do to help.......but if you think there is still room for improvement...."
6. Don't be put off - as Thomas Edison put it "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". You should not give up at the first hurdle.

If you believe that every objection provides an opportunity to further the conversation, then any statement from the prospect that they are happy is purely an invitation to find out why. Don't miss out on this, ask them the question and let them talk. The worse that will happen is that the prospect will qualify themselves out, which is of course good as it will free up valuable sales time you might otherwise have wasted chasing an opportunity you could not win.

Let's move away from "Fast Show" selling

I am sure you remember the Fast Show sketch when the character (Jesse) came out from his shed and said "This week I'ave been mostly wearing Dolce & Gabbana". It is strange to think that he has been the inspiration for many "sales campaigns" that I have come across of late. "This month I am mostly selling......"

Why do we think that customers will positively react to a sales approach that says, whatever your problem is the answer will always be X! Imagine how you would feel if you went into a shoe shop wanting a pair of walking boots to climb Kilimanjaro and the sales assistant patiently listened to your requirements and came back with a pair of football boots because they were having a promotion on football boots, how would you react. Badly I assume. So why do we ask our sales people to "pitch" solutions regardless of the customer need.

I fully appreciate that there are challenges about having excess stock of specific products and that we all need to focus our sales people on selling higher margin offerings, but when did we become so inwardly focussed as opposed to customer focussed.

Success for sales only comes by linking identified customer need to our offerings. Without this linkage there is no benefit to the customer in buying from us. The shoe shop maybe offering the best football boots in the world, at the cheapest possible price, but unless I play football (and want to replace my boots) I will not buy!

Now I am sure some of you are thinking "but this does not happen in professional business to business sales". But I am afraid you are wrong, let me give you two examples.

1. An account director from a global ICT solutions provider has been asked to arrange a workshop with their client to fully understand the strategic and operational business issues facing that client so they could jointly build a roadmap to addressing those needs. The account director sells the concept to the client, and is mildly surprised at how happy the client is to have the opportunity to discuss his business challenges, as opposed to discussing technology. Now hear comes the surprise - The account director rings me up (I am facilitating the workshop) and says "I am concerned that I will not be able to present our Unified Communications solutions at this meeting, I do not want to come away without a clear opportunity to sell UC as this is my quarter's focus".
Now here is a clear case of Fast Show mentality - whatever the customer says I want the answer to be UC.
2. A second example is of a manufacturer telling its sales team that the aim for the month was to have a focussed call out promoting a specific model, at a slightly reduced rate and that they were expected to offer this model to everyone as the first offer. Now this confused the sales team who immediately went into "pitch" mode, classic Fast Show selling resulting in telling not listening in there interaction with prospects, and they wondered why they were making no progress!

So what is the answer?

Let's put the customer back at the centre of our approach:

• By asking good questions at the facilitated workshop we will be able to identify the clients key challenges and if UC is relevant we will be able to introduce it. If it is not relevant we will be able to identify other opportunities, and the client will see we are listening to them, focussing on their priorities, and identifying how we can help them
• For the Manufacturer - Use of "broad" Reason to Call programmes which are based on the issues customers are trying to address and once a conversation has started, where appropriate, they can mention the offer, but only where appropriate.

You would think that this is all obvious, and I have never said that I do anything difficult, but go back and look at what many of your sales and marketing people are doing, and I guarantee you will find similar examples within your own company.

So if you want to do Fast Show selling make it "today I will be mostly discussing the customer's issues and identify how I can help"