2010 QBS Methodology Fall Summit: October 7-8

“Given the ongoing shifts that will continue to occur in the business marketplace, sellers must do everything possible to make themselves invaluable to their customers, colleagues, and company.”         -T. Freese

We’re happy to announce our upcoming 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 October 7 - 8 for the Fall 2010 QBS Methodology Summit.

The boot-camp style event, featuring Alan Rohrer (QBS Certified Trainer) in Phoenix will be held on Thursday, October 7th and Friday, October 8th.

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.

What were you doing on Jan. 1st?

When I first started out in sales, I always felt like an underdog. I was scratching and clawing to make ends meet, and each sales opportunity seemed like a battle. Honestly, it was overwhelming on many occasions to feel like an under-achiever.

It turns out that people respond to pressure in different ways. Some people, when they start to feel overwhelmed, fade into the background, not wanting to bring attention to the fact that they are struggling. As for me, increased pressure tends to make me more indignant. If I am going to fail at something, I would rather go down in flames.

Thus, on January 1, 1988, I made a career-changing New Year’s resolution. I had just finished yet another mediocre sales year, and damn it, it wasn’t going to happen again. So, I headed to the office on New Years Day. While everyone else nursed their post New Year’s Eve party hangovers, and watched college football, I cleaned out my office. I worked the entire day and got seriously organized.

It was no surprise that my SUV was the only car in the parking lot since it was a holiday. But by the time I left the office, I felt a very clear sense of satisfaction and preparedness. I was ready for the New Year.

Have you ever noticed how good it feels to be ahead of the game? That first week of January, everyone else was trying to catch up, while I was moving forward and feeling productive. In fact, it felt so good that it motivated me to want to stay ahead. Consequently, I often stayed at the office late into the evening and came in frequently on weekends, each time noticing that mine was the only car in the parking lot.

My strategy was simple. I was determined to outwork everyone else on the sales team. That way, if I did fail, I wouldn’t have any excuses. Besides putting in the time, I also made it a goal to work harder than everyone else. I made more cold calls than anyone else and scheduled more appointments. I also asked more questions in order to uncover more needs. I even made it a point to take the most notes at every meeting.

After a very short period of time, I had become more knowledgeable about our product offerings and target industry, which in turn, made me a much more credible resource to my prospects and customers. As the year progressed, I began to feel less overwhelmed and more in control.

It didn’t take long before I became the “go to” guy in the office. When someone had a question, they came to me for help. Lo and behold, the sales manager started sending opportunities my way, knowing they would be handled with a greater sense of urgency. By year-end, I had become the top producing salesperson in our office. Essentially, I had earned the right to outperform everyone else whose car wasn’t parked in the lot back on New Year’s Day.

*Excerpted my second book, It Only Takes 1% to have a Competitive Edge in Sales.

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2009 was a difficult business year for many. If you were fortunate enough to not among the masses who saw declining opportunities as the result of a recent back-flip in the economy, I’m sure you have customers, friends, colleagues, employees, or coworkers who have felt the impact in a very personal way.

Perhaps the economic gods with wave a wand and return everything to normalcy. Me, I’m not sure what normal is at the moment, nor have I ever been one to bet my lot on magic.

I have said before, “The best way out of any recession is to sell your way out.” The difference this time is the game of selling has changed—I call it a Darwinian-style recalibration, where the salesperson will play a more important role in their own success than ever before.

With that, I hope you enjoyed a nice holiday break with your friends and family. But, please realize that the new sales year begins tomorrow. Me, I might dedicate some time to get a jump on the competition because who knows, they might be reading this as well!

Conversational Layering

In sales, having a good strategy is no longer enough to be successful. Your strategy must also be consistent and repeatable. Simply put, you need a good recipe.

At the risk of overstating the obvious, let’s suppose you enjoyed cooking and you wanted to make a delicious cake. Then, you would need a good recipe. A bad recipe would likely produce an unsatisfactory result.

Be aware that a “recipe” actually consists of two component parts. The first part is an ingredients list, right? I mean, to bake a decent cake, you need certain ingredients like eggs, flour, sugar, water, oil, and possibly rum. An effective recipe also requires a procedure for implementation. For example, if you take a cake out of the oven after baking 35 minutes at 375 degrees, and then you add the flour, you get a ‘dusty’ omelet.

What ingredients are necessary to be successful and consistent in sales? The Conversational Layering model is an important concept in Question Based Selling because it disrupts traditional thinking.

In traditional selling approaches, the first step is either relationship building or uncovering needs. These are important ingredients to be sure. However, in today’s increasingly competitive environment, you have to first earn the right to have a relationship and uncover needs.

Ironically, the two most important ingredients in the sales process, and prerequisites for being successful in sales, also happen to be the two least talked about subjects in sales training over the last thirty years—piquing curiosity & earning credibility.

I like to say it this way. If a prospect or customer is not the least bit curious about who you are or what you can do for them, and they don’t think you are a valuable resource, then chances are pretty slim that they would want to engage in a conversation about their needs or your offerings. Conversely, the extent to which you are able to induce curiosity and establish your own credibility will largely determine your effectiveness in sales.

Increase Voice-mail/Email Responses by 1000%

Voice-mail and email are very effective communication tools. As such, your target list of prospects and customers is being inundated with voice-mails and email messages from your direct competitors, in addition to any number of other vendors who compete with you indirectly—for budget dollars.

The are only two reasons people respond to voice and email messages—obligation and curiosity. If your boss calls and leaves a message, you will likely return the call. If your largest customer calls, you will surely return their call as well, because that’s what you do when you have important customers, or a boss.

But, what about decision makers who don’t feel “obligated” to return cold calls from vendors? Besides obligation, the only other thing that causes people to return voice-mail messages or email is curiosity.

The challenge is, most voice-mails and email messages that get lobbed into potential decision makers do more to satisfy their curiosity than create it. Oops! As a result, the average return call rate on voice-mail has dropped below 5%, and the odds of getting replies to email can be just as bleak.

Sample messages of Curiosity Inducing Voice-mails:

i.) “Hi, George, this is Pat Wilkins calling from Dynamic Systems—I’m on the team that works with industrial accounts in Central Florida. I was on a conference call with one of our products managers last Wednesday afternoon just after lunch, and two issues came up that I thought might impact your current manufacturing platform, one of which is time sensitive. I wanted to be proactive and try to catch you in the office this afternoon. If you get a chance today, could you please call me back at (770) 123-4567? I should be here until around 5:30pm.”

ii) “Hi, Dale, this is Lane Patterson with HLM Corporation. I’m on the team that supports healthcare accounts for the Midwest region. I was hoping to catch you for a minute because we’ve had 13 new announcements in the last three and a half months, two of which I believe might impact your diagnostic assessments under the new legislation. If you get a chance today, could you please call me at (770) 123-4567?”

(iii) “Hi, Steve, this is Joe Tomlin calling from Templeton Partners. I manage a team that works with financial brokers in the tri-cities area. A note came across my desk yesterday morning that caught my eye regarding (insert something relevant) and I wanted to try and catch up with you today if possible. When you get a chance, could you please call me at (770) 123-4567?”

Key Point: If I sent 5 different voice-mails or email messages, they would have five different sets of words depending on what information I had about the account, my purpose for calling, and the objective of the call. But in every case, my intention would be to leave (or send) a purposeful message, that was specific and relevant. Do that in your business, and you can easily realize a 50%+ response rate, which represents a whopping 1000% increase over industry averages.

Try Using Humbling Disclaimers

Sellers are encouraged to ask specific qualifying questions, most notably about decision makers, timeframe, and budget. A fine line exists between appropriately qualifying an opportunity and probing too invasively.

To minimize the risk of being shut down by a defensive prospect, and to maximize the quality of the information you receive, you simply precede your most delicate questions with a humbling disclaimer.

A humbling disclaimer creates a permission of sorts which makes it easy for the salesperson to ask, and also paves the way for the other person to be more receptive to the question. For example:

Salesperson:  “Mr. Customer, I don’t want to overstep my boundaries and ask too many questions, but I would like to understand the big picture before recommending a solution. Do you mind if I ask a couple of specifics about how this project might impact your long-range growth plans?”

Other examples of humbling disclaimers include:

           Salesperson:   “I’m not sure the best way to ask, but would you mind if…”

                                       “Without stepping on anyone’s toes, would it be okay if we…”

                                       “I don’t want to step out of bounds, but would it be too forward to ask…”

Key Point: If you are respectful of someone else’s right to not to share with you, it’s amazing how much information you can get. Humility is a very attractive human quality, and one that people are naturally drawn toward. Thus, you can significantly enhance the value of the responses from the questions you ask by strategically preceding your most sensitive questions with a humbling disclaimer. Simply put, causing people to “want to” share more information with you gives you a strategic advantage over other sellers who are just out there probing for needs.

Diagnostic Questions to Initiate Needs Development

For decades, salespeople have been taught that open-ended questions are the best tools for causing prospects to “open up.” This thinking is incorrect. In fact, asking for too much too soon is one of the quickest ways to cause someone to shut down and not share anything with you.

Open-ended questions can be valuable conversational tools, but only after you have successfully piqued someone’s interest and have established some credibility. Hence, in QBS, a technique called Diagnostic Questions becomes the most effective way to kick off your needs development conversations.

Salesperson:  “Can I ask you a couple specifics about _________?”

Customer:  “Sure, go ahead.”

The first question is the easiest part. At some point in most sales conversations, there will be an opportunity for discovery. When these opportunities to ask questions arise, there is only one time in Question Based Selling where I recommend exact wording (above). Basically, you are asking permission. This is a low risk approach.

Once the customer grants you permission (99%), you ask a series of short-answer questions to understand specific facts about their current situation. Selling technology, for example, you might ask:

Salesperson:  “How many servers do you currently have installed?”

                           “Supporting how many users?”

                           “In how many locations?”

                           “Do you manage the network in-house, or do you outsource?”

                           “How many engineers do you have on staff?”

                           “How many are Microsoft certified?”

Within a short time window (generally less than 60 seconds), this technique of Diagnostic Questions enables the strategic salesperson to kick off needs development conversations in a non-threatening manner, gather valuable information that guides the conversation, establish credibility as a valuable resource, and earn the right to transition into more depth.

From here, you can easily broaden the Scope to ask open-ended questions

Utilize Broadening ‘Agents’

In the process of developing Question Based Selling, I have invested significant time and effort studying Conversational Dynamics, which refers to the science not just of ‘what’ you might choose to say, but also ‘how’ you choose to say it.

Once you have successfully piqued the customer’s interest and established your own credibility, using Diagnostic Questions, there are certain conversational devices we call broadening agents that will expand the scope of the dialogue. These include:

Q:  “How familiar are you with _____________?”

Q:  “To what extent is ____________ important to your project?” 

Q:  “What types of __________ are you focusing on the most?”

Essentially, the deliverer of the question is asking the other person to quantify, describe, or characterize their thoughts regarding a given issue or topic.

Key Point: Since you, as the salesperson, are ultimately in control of the questions you ask, how you formulate and deliver the question will likely how productively prospects and customers will choose to respond.

Work Backwards to Move Your Sales Forward

Whether it’s fair or not, salespeople are often presumed to be self-serving. Some of that reputation has been earned by the way some sellers have behaved. That said, it’s totally acceptable that a salesperson receives a bonus or commission for their efforts. Your incentive just can’t be the primary impetus that’s driving the purchase of your product or service.

Too often, sellers chase deals by focusing on the transaction. “When can we get a PO?” Or they ask, “Do you have all the approvals?” Sometimes, sellers just ask, “Mr. Customer, can we wrap this deal up by the end of the week?”

For those items where the value doesn’t get realized at the point of transaction, like in technology purchases, certain healthcare devices, or when implementing new financial programs, the actual value to the customer may not come until long after the purchase.

In those cases, the question that will ultimately determine the timing of your deal is:

Salesperson: “Ms. Customer, if we look past the purchase decision and transaction for a moment, if you do choose to move forward with this proposal, when would you like to start realizing the benefits we’ve discussed?”

Ask for Feedback and Ye’ Shall Receive

Constructive feedback can be invaluable. How else can you assess how you are progressing in the eyes of your customers, partners, colleagues, employees, or other constituents like family and friends. Asking for feedback is the hard part. Getting an accurate perspective is difficult because people don’t want to hurt your feelings.

The following three questions are guaranteed to generate valuable insight and feedback.

Q:  “If you were me, would you be doing anything differently?”

Q:  “Do you see a better way to handle this?”

Q:  “If you were in my shoes, what approach would you take?”

Humbling oneself to the point where you are able to outwardly admit that you don’t have all the answers is the quickest way to cause other people to open up and share their perspective.

Kicking-off Interactive Sales Presentations

Let me guess…your best sales presentations are the ones that end up being bi-directional, back-and-forth conversations between the salesperson and customer about how your product or service adds value…as opposed to a monologue pitch of features and benefits.

Some customers will jump into the conversation and actively participate. Too often, however, skeptical customers will sit back with their arms folded, essentially causing the presentation to fall flat.

A proactive salesperson can easily prevent this by using a question-based approach that brings customers into the discussion from the onset.

Salesperson: “Thanks everyone for taking time out of your busy schedules. In preparation for today’s meeting, I’ve had several conversations with Robert from Accounting and Lisa in Purchasing in an effort to understand your needs. Although I don’t yet know everything about your business, I have put together some ideas that I think will help.

Frankly, there are a couple of ways we can do this. One options is for me to simply deliver a generic sales presentation. We have lots of PowerPoint slides and I can talk for a long time. Or, we could put aside the standard ‘pitch,’ roll up our sleeves, and have a more specific conversation about how our solutions would impact your business.

Let me throw it out to the group…which would you rather do?”

If you can pause long enough to get an answer, in addition to choosing the more specific second option, they will also breathe a sigh of relief that they don’t have to sit through a standard sales presentation.

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