Can Your Dog Sell?

Selling continues to be the least taught profession in the world! Does anyone think that’s strange? Sales drives every company, yet most of the top business schools in the world don’t offer a sales curriculum. Somehow we rely on the thought that salespeople inherently already know “how” to sell. Maybe it’s supposed to be in our DNA? 

Consider the amount of training necessary to become an architect, attorney, doctor, engineer, teacher, nurse, pharmacist or city planner. There is a minimum scholastic requirement followed by rigorous testing and continuing education. Whew! To say that you are a sales professional only requires that you print business cards.

Case in point: In the state of Georgia (my home state), you have to have a license to catch a fish, or own a dog, but you can sell many things including sophisticated products and services without any required training whatsoever. Note that I am NOT speaking out for more legislation. Just wanted to point out the parallel between skills development and your probability of success in sales.

Need a Good Closing Line?

The end of a month, quarter, or year usually brings along with it some pressure to wrap up pending sales transactions. Some trainers tout closing tricks or gimmicks as if they are sure-fire ways close the deal. I find that very few customers want to be tricked into buying a product or service. Closing is still an important skill set in sales, so here are a few tips that might help.

First, closing a deal is not something that should sound self-serving. Anything that starts with "I would like to suggest that you…", invites more risk into the equation than value. A better approach would be to simply say, "Mr. Customer, would it make sense to ______?" Simply insert an appropriate next step, which could easily be wrapping up the transaction, and you are in a very good spot.

Rather than risk sounding like you are prematurely counting your chickens before they’ve hatched, you instead are inserting logic into the equation, where if it does make sense to take the suggested next step, then it’s logical and reasonable to suggest moving forward. If not, you have a perfect opportunity to find out what might be holding up the decision.

Don’t forget that deals need to be ready to ‘be closed’ before any suggestion to move forward with a transaction would be appropriate. Does the customer see and appreciate the full value of your product or service? Do they recognize the existence of multiple needs? Are the right people involved? do they have enough ‘ammunition’ to sell your proposed solution internally to their boss or approval committee?

Lastly, there’s no edict that requires sellers to wait until the last minute to complete a transaction. In fact, with some deals, it’s smart to give incentives to wrap up the transaction earlier rather than waiting until the eleventh hour. And, as some of you already know, if a December deal isn’t pretty much iced by the 15th or 16th, then it’s probably not going to happen.  The “trick” is having candid conversations with customers early enough so they can then help you navigate the buying process mid-month as opposed to worrying over the holidays about whether Santa will put a bluebird in your stocking this year.

Developing Highly Effective Sales Teams

Who’s responsible for developing your team’s sales capabilities? It’s a fair question, but one that doesn’t seem to have a very consistent answer.

There’s one school of thought that the key to having effective salespeople is to simply hire the top performers in your respective industry. That is easier said than done. Successful salespeople are probably already making a hefty living as is, and oftentimes, they feel very comfortable and secure with their current job. Why give up a good thing?

Even if you are able to snag a perennial top performer from another company, there’s a catch. Performance, when measured by numbers alone, can be very misleading. For example, a salesperson who achieved their goals because they happened to be the rep on one giant account, or because they inherited a ripe territory, doesn’t mean they know how to build a book of business from scratch.

If ‘ready-made’ top performance isn’t available, the other option organizations have is to bring solid people aboard with a commitment to then develop those people into quality sales professionals. 

Developing top performing salespeople then becomes the actual challenge.

When I was invited to speak to a group of seniors at Clemson University earlier this year, I posed this question: "How many of you (who are about to graduate) have ever taken a sales course?" Not surprisingly, zero hands went up–as sales continues to be the least taught profession in the world. Even with experienced professionals, you can’t count on their previous training for high performance.

Sure, there are lots of trainers and speakers who would love to have a shot at "motivating your people to achieve their true potential." Ironically, much of the sales training content that’s currently available is contradicted by other course content, in which case, sellers are left to their own devices to figure out how to succeed.

I can relate to these contradictions in content because Question Based Selling is often brought in to "un-teach" approaches that no longer yield positive results. 

Whether you saddle up with QBS or choose someone else’s methodology, I encourage clients to enable the full implementation. The assumption that sellers are already capable of being highly successful has led to a ‘one-&-done’ mentality (that’s what we call it in the training business), where companies looking for instant results end up diluting their sales team’s effectiveness by shifting to a new training model at subsequent sales meetings, whose only link to the previous paradigm can be seen in the use of common industry buzzwords.

The questions for developing productive salespeople are pretty simple:

Q:"What are you doing to leverage curiosity in the sales process?"

Q:"How are you differentiating yourself from your toughest competitors?"

Q:"What are you doing to earn credibility rather than just trying to claim it?"

Q: "What’s your strategy for causing prospective customers to ‘want to’ share information with a salesperson they don’t yet know or trust?"

Q: "How can you lessen the effects of increased customer skepticism toward vendors to actually close more deals faster?"

Putting the answer to these questions into practice and becoming a student of the sales process may require a little effort mixed with some honest introspection.

The question now is… When would you like to get started?

To join our QBS Group on LinkedIn, simply click Here.

2012 January QBS Summit: January 5-6

“There has never been a better time for sellers to do everything possible to make themselves invaluable to their customers, colleagues, and their company.”         -T. Freese

We are very pleased to announce our next QBS Summit! If you would like to renew your focus on increasing your own sales effectiveness or give your entire sales team an unfair advantage over the competition, join us on January 5 - 6 for the 2012 January QBS Summit.

The boot-camp style event, featuring QBS Research founder Tom Freese in Atlanta and will be held on Thursday, January 5th and Friday, January 6th.

The learning environment will be highly interactive, with participants from a variety of industries including technology, financial services, healthcare, consulting, insurance, real estate, manufacturing, advertising, hospitality, and retail, and feedback from previous QBS Summit events has been “off the charts.”

With limited seating, reserve your seats early since we are expecting a full house. You might also want to bring extra pencils and a stack of writing pads for note taking.

“Tom! I wanted to thank you for an amazing training two weeks ago-my head is still spinning from all of the great info. I met with our Regional Manager yesterday and he wants you to train the rest of our team. You will be hearing from us very soon…”    -Liz B., Michigan…your newest QBS groupie!

Click for Early Enrollment Discount &  SUMMIT DETAILS.

Coaching: Backwards & Forward

When a QBS salesperson runs into an roadblock within one of their accounts, the question that tends to come to mind is, "What should I do now?" Or, "How do I deal with this situation moving forward?"

Of course, whenever someone gets into a tough spot, it’s perfectly natural to wonder, "How can I get out of this predicament?"

I am often asked about specific scenarios, like: "Tom, the customer has discounted our value as being the same as our competitors’, so what should I do now that they are only focusing on price?" Or, another weekly favorite, "Tom, I have called and called and have left many messages for the decision maker, but they won’t return my voice-mail messages or emails. What do you suggest I do now?"

Part of coaching is to evaluate the situation and decide what the person being coached can do to increase their probability of success. And, that’s where most of the coaching in sales ends, with everyone trying to figure out what to do next.

The more important part of sales mentoring is identifying what it was that brought your salesperson to this place, in order to prevent it from happening in the future.

Theoretically, it is possible that a salesperson on a certain account has done such a poor job that the sale is unrecoverable. That happens, and in reality, you are not going to win each and every sale anyway.

But, if history keeps repeating itself with the same predicament occurring over and over again, then the real opportunity to better performance is to look backward and figure out what got you into this predicament in the first place.

For example, if a salesperson delivers their best elevator pitch that’s chock full of the same buzzwords all of your competitors are using, then let’s not be surprised if the customer discounts the value of whatever claims are being made, and instead fixates on price. The solution here is not to figure out some way to recover from customers fixating on price. Rather, the solution to this situation has more to do with not commoditizing your value with a standard ‘elevator pitch.’

Likewise, if you have salespeople who are frustrated because decision makers are not returning their calls, the solution is not to figure out how to recover from this. In fact, my first question to the frustrated salesperson would be, "What do the messages you are leaving look (or sound) like?" If they are not compelling, in a world where skeptical buyers are quick to discount sales callers anyway, let’s not be surprised if you don’t get a call back. Also, let’s upgrade the messages you are leaving in order to boost your call back rate from a measly 2% to 50% plus.

Most clients who train their sales teams on Question Based Selling truly want the methodology to work. Similarly, most students who participate in a QBS training session want it to work just as badly. But in my experience, most people are fairly realistic in their expectations that positive change doesn’t happen overnight. That said, your ongoing coaching efforts need to have two components–some thoughts about what the sales person can do next. But even more importantly, some forensic insight into what (specifically) brought you to this point in the sale?

I can tell you with absolute certainty that being proactive and preventing a sales issue from arising is much easier than having a difficult circumstance pop up and then try to figure out how to make it go away.

This proactive thought process also fosters the benefits of self-coaching on an ongoing basis. Once reps start asking themselves questions like, "What could I have done differently to prevent this?", or, "How might I tweak my approach in the future?", you will win more than your fair share of deals. And so will your reps! 
                                                                   —Thomas A. Freese
                                                                       President, QBS Research, Inc.

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