You Must be Willing to Say, “No.”

Not every opportunity is good for both parties, and thus not every deal is worth chasing. But, be careful disqualifying potential opportunities too early. Sometimes you have to say "No" before you can come to terms.

One of my best current clients (at first) rejected almost every point in the engagement agreement we use to schedule and confirm QBS events. My price was too high, they didn’t want to provide a wireless lapel microphone, their company’s expense policy was overtly stringent, and host of other gotchas.

My initial instinct was to try and work through the details in order to find common ground that would allow us to move forward. "There is no middle ground," was the response I got from the Development Manager. So, after pondering the predicament for a couple hours, I sent an email respectfully declining the opportunity. 

My wife suggested that I was crazy to walk away from such a big company. But to me, when it becomes clear that we are not working toward a mutual solution, I would rather decline the opportunity than have an unhappy customer.

Lo and behold, the client immediately came back to me apologizing for a "misunderstanding," and within a few minutes, we came to terms on literally everything in the contract. When I look back, I have experienced many situations where if I wasn’t willing to say, "No," the customer would not have been so quick to say, "Yes."

There are different ways to say, "No," however, which is why I dedicated an entire chapter in my second book to the concept of "Delivering Bad News Gracefully."  (Excerpt below).

Delivering Bad News Gracefully

Particularly in larger deals, after you have already negotiated your best and final price, what do you do when the prospect starts hitting you up for additional discounts? Do you say, "No," or do you just cave in to every client request.

Giving prospects everything they ask for is a bad strategy because the more you give, the more they will want, until the deal becomes bad business for you and your company. But for salespeople, saying, "No," can be a frightening proposition because it represents that moment of truth in the sale where prospects will either move forward with a decision to purchase or turn their backs and walk away.

Therefore, sellers must know when giving a little extra will help to consummate a sale, and they also have to know when to say, "There is no more to give." This doesn’t make delivering the actual bad news any easier, however.

Saying "No" is difficult because it puts you on the other side of the argument. The prospect is essentially asking for your help, in the form of either a lower price or free add-ons, and you are essentially telling them, "No, I am no longer willing to help."

Communicating that you are "no longer willing to help" is not the message you want to convey at the end of a sale, especially when you are trying to make prospects feel comfortable enough to pull the trigger on a favorable decision. Fortunately there is an alternative, a way that allows you to deliver bad news gracefully.

The technique is simple. If a prospect asks for something that is unreasonable or beyond what you are willing to provide as part of the sales transaction, you simply start your response with, "I’d be happy to…" For example, if you have already negotiated down to your best and final price and the prospect says, "We need another 10% off the price."           With this technique, you can confidently begin your response saying, "I’d be happy to take another 10% off the price…" Now, this is not the entire answer because this analogy assumes that the buyer is asking for something you are not willing or able to provide.

Here’s the rest of the answer. After saying, "I would be happy to take another 10% off the price…", you simply add, "…but here’s the problem. We don’t have another 10% discount to give." I would reiterate that we want their business very much, but I would also be very direct in explaining that there was no extra ‘fluff’ built into the price from which to provide additional discounts.

The beauty of this technique is when you deliver the bad news gracefully you no longer have to be bad guy. You no longer have to be the one who says, "No, I am not going to help you." While this approach allows you to be very direct in communicating that there is no extra room for discounting, you are softening the blow. You can still provide value to your customers by suggesting, "Mr. Prospect, if budget is the issue, perhaps we could remove certain line items from the proposal to reduce the bottom line price." Or, "Since your project includes a second and third phase, perhaps we could bundle the entire purchase together to make the deal size bigger, which would give us some additional room to provide discounts."

This technique for delivering bad news gracefully has many practical applications in real life. For example: "Son, I would be happy to do your math homework for you…but here’s the problem. I’m not the one who will be taking the math test on Friday."

"Honey, I would be happy to buy you a new diamond necklace…but here’s the problem. In order to spend that much money on jewelry, we would have to dip into the kid’s college fund."

"Jim, I’d be happy to be an usher in church next Sunday…but here’s the problem. I will be flying in from London next Sunday morning."

You will find that there is a huge difference between saying, "No," and saying, "I would be happy to, but…" Simply re-phrasing your response allows you to deliver your bad news more gracefully. At the end of the day, you will be much more successful in sales (and in life) if you can position your words so you spend less time on the other side of the argument.

                                                                                 –Thomas A. Freese

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?

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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.

Selling Power Magazine Puts Freese’s Books on Their Top 10 Summer Reading List

Summer time is an opportunity to catch up on your rest and relaxation. It’s also a good time to think about retooling your selling skills in order to gain an advantage over the competition. Selling Power Magazine’s Top Ten Summer Reading List for 2011 is out and it includes Sell Yourself First, a 250 page hardcover bestseller by Thomas A. Freese, Author of Secrets of Question Based Selling.

Freese says, “I wrote Sell Yourself First, my fifth book, as a direct commentary on how a salesperson is perceived is more important than the products they sell or company they represent.”

Special offer: Mention this blog post in the comments section while ordering and receive 50% off the retail price.

Tom Freese vs. Zig Ziglar & Other Motivational Speakers

Check out this video excerpt where Tom speaks about the difference between motivational speakers, and instead, actually teaching salespeople how to be exponentially more effective.

Sales organizations used to try and motivate salespeople as a way to increase productivity. Today, the opposite is true. If you take the time to show salespeople how to be exponentially more effective, they will absolutely be motivated to repeat their successes. There’s nothing more fun or rewarding that having an ‘unfair’ advantage throughout the sales process.

“Zig Ziglar is the king of the podium, and he is by far he is the best motivational speaker I have ever experienced. The problem is, after I went back out into my territory all excited and ready to conquer the world, when I basically reverted to using the same approach, I got the same results. Thus, my newfound levels of enthusiasm tended to dissipate very quickly.”    - T. Freese

SellingPower: Sales Makeovers

Heather Baldwin of Selling Power Magazine called me, having heard about some of the success our clients were having with Question Based Selling. “Do you have any real life examples,” she asked.

That was easy enough. Since I had already trained several sales teams within IBM, I called Jim Hardee, Vice President Teleweb Sales, and asked if anyone wanted to participate in a laboratory experiment to ‘field test’ the QBS Methodology. We got tons of volunteers and the article about what happened with one person in particular.

“The results have been remarkable. Freese’s guidance has given him more confidence, made him more relaxed, and he sounds more natural. Now, Scott gets to the heart of the customer’s issues every time.” –Jim Hardee

In the article, Scott Fletcher attests that his conversations with customers have definitely become more meaningful. “Without a doubt,” he says, “This process makes customers ‘want to’ engage with you instead of pushing you away. Once you can get customers to open up, it makes the sales process a whole lot easier and the QBS approach does just that.”

[Read Entire PDF Article]

Did you see my Centerfold in “Go?”

You know those wonderful in-flight magazines that keep passengers occupied and entertained while stranded on the tarmac? Well, I trained the sales team for Ink Publishing earlier this year in London. They are the company that produces most of the leading in-flight magazines. As a result of their sales training, Ink Publishing has featured me and Question Based Selling in an article called "Selling Points", to appear in Go Magazine, which will be in the seatback pocket of every Air Tran Airways flight starting January 1st.

Not scheduled for an Air Tran Airways flight any time soon? You can simply download the article right here. Hope you enjoy!

The Business of Giving Awards

If you owned a shoe manufacturing company and one of your ships unexpectedly came upon an island inhabited by thousands of locals walking around barefoot, one could think, “There’s no opportunity here. These people don’t even wear shoes.” On the other hand, the person looking at the proverbial glass as being “half-full” might realize, “Hey, look at all the bare feet! Quick, unload the ship!”

Last week, I worked with a client in St. Paul, Minnesota who faces a similarly interesting phenomenon. Crystal D is a leading manufacturer of awards. And, as their name indicates, much of what they produce is employee and customer recognition pieces made of fine crystal. Whether it’s a custom design etched with the recipient’s name and the host company’s logo, or a standard crystal bowl, recognizing the value of people and relationships with these awards creates a lasting impression.

So, what do you suppose happens when a financial downturn puts the squeeze on client budgets, or corporate cutbacks significantly curtail discretionary spending? Just as you might hold off buying that huge hunk of jewelry for your spouse, one could assume that the current economic climate is bad for the crystal award business.

Au contraire! It turns out that Crystal D’s business isn’t really about just giving awards or manufacturing products. Rather, they are in the recognition and appreciation business. Especially given the recent turbulence, it turns out that retaining valuable employees, preserving partnerships, and enhancing customer loyalty is more important than ever before! What can be done to retain employees, motivate partners, and enhance customer relationships? One option is to throw money at them.

For years, financial incentives have been the primary reward companies used to entice customers, motivate employees, reward talent, and increase productivity. Now that we’ve entered a period where payrolls are being radically trimmed, however, bonus checks have become less frequent and noticeably smaller—to the point where opportunities to provide financial compensation are probably going to be much more limited into the foreseeable future.

If you look beyond monetary compensation, you will notice that employees, partners, and customers actually desire two things. In addition to being fairly compensated, most people also yearn to be “appreciated” by those with whom they do business. Therefore, particularly in the midst of financial stress, it’s more important than ever to communicate and to demonstrate to employees, partners, and customers that they are indeed valuable to you and your business.

The fact that crystal is “more expensive” is also a waning objection. Dollar for dollar, nothing can provide the same initial impact or lasting value as a crystal recognition piece. Personally, I have accumulated a number of crystal awards over the years and they will forever occupy prominent places on my desk and bookshelves. Giving out gift cards or holiday turkeys is nice, but it doesn’t compare to the lasting emotions that come from a lasting reminder that says, “You are important to us.”

As companies seek to motivate employees, stay ahead of the competition, acknowledge partner relationships, differentiate new product launches, and inspire loyalty through their existing customers, the trend is actually moving toward enhanced recognition programs where companies give more and more frequent awards. Hence, the upside for using recognition to offset lean economic times has actually bolstered Crystal D’s business, much like pulling a ship full of shoes up to an island inhabited with barefoot people.

Note that this article is not a paid endorsement or a commercial advertisement. Besides being a timely idea you may want to use in your own business, this blog post is simply an example of how thinking outside the box is what will ultimately enable to the strong to survive. Maybe I’ll even win an award!

It’s Never a Good Time for Training

More than any time since the industrial revolution, companies and individuals in all industries are looking for ways to retain customers, boost top line revenue, and maintain overall profit margins. To survive, and ultimately flourish in this new environment, we must reexamine the way we deal with customers; and frankly, some of the necessary adjustments may be long overdue. (Click here to download the entire document.)