Brian Sullivan

Put Time on Your Team

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The sales cycles can be long and drawn out when selling to large enterprise organizations. Months, and even years, may pass in a significant opportunity with a large account: And as time adds up in pursuits, doubt, uncertainty, risks, and costs do as well. The commitment of finances, organizational energy, and resources – human and otherwise – can be daunting. But with of all of the difficulties the passing months bring, positives do present themselves for selling teams that are effective and organized. Every action you take is being evaluated by the buying organization – actions that give your potential client a keen view of your responsiveness, follow-up, and attention to detail. Leaving positive impressions in these areas can be huge. Because regardless of how formidable or sophisticated your competitors are in the pursuit, it is possible they might become just a bit forgetful as the seasons pass. They may take their eyes off the ball for just a moment. They may completely neglect a request or thoughtlessly issue a boilerplate response instead of devoting the deserving hours to a meaningful reply. At just the right time to leave just the wrong impression.

[wcm_restrict]Over the course of these long enterprise pursuits, you will be dealing with wide, diverse buyer networks. While the concept and strategy of team selling is widely known, there is less talk about the fact that prospect organizations buy in teams as well. You will be facing a buyer network likely consisting of representatives from purchasing, finance, legal, and other corporate functions relevant to the organization’s specific needs. This diversity in the buyer network is one of the key complexities in enterprise selling and it calls on the selling team to perform the due diligence required to understand the roles and impacts of each of the buyers. You must understand, for example, what level of authority purchasing or supply chain has and how actively involved in the decision the actual business users of the product or service will be. You must also understand what the real power of the legal and contracts team has in the process. These are complex and critical issues indeed, and while all of these buyers wear different functional hats, they are all subject matter experts. They are not only subject matter experts in the functions they represent, but also in the organization whose business you are actively seeking. And in this challenge of buyer network complexity also comes opportunity: The opportunity to show, over the long course of the pursuit, the depth and breadth of your organization; as well as the opportunity to map organizational “Ducks with Ducks”. Consider the power of aligning your accounting team with the prospect organization’s accountants. Or how about attorney-to-attorney contact? Have you ever noticed how disconnected conversations can be when a sales representative communicates with a buying organization’s lawyer? Or how smoothly conversations go when the attorneys connect voice-to-voice? Not only do these function-to-function connections provide smooth communication in the pursuit; they also give the buying organization a view into the depth and breadth of your organization. As time passes, just as your actions showcase your dependability and give your potential client a view of how you’ll conduct yourself as a partner, these functional connections show the capability and depth of your organization. They lay the groundwork for some rewarding functional relationship-building as well, increasing your likelihood of winning the deal and smoothing out any future road bumps after the business is won. The most important functional bond to create – no doubt – is the executive-to-executive.

Of course there will be pursuits in which certain levels of contact are difficult to establish, or in some cases, even forbidden. And by no means is it proposed that you put your significant investment at risk by playing loosely with the rules. Be smart. But never neglect any opportunity to enrich the budding business relationship by creating functional alignment. Doing so, very simply stated, increases your chances of winning.

So stay focused. Trusting that you have done your due diligence and that the deal is well worth pursuing, make sure your actions show that the deal is worth pursuing well. Be certain that you give the prospect organization a clear view as to what they can expect of you after you’ve won the business. Show them, in the pursuit, what they will ultimately see in you as their partner.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Brian W. SullivanBrian W. Sullivan is co-author, with David H. Mattson, of Sandler Enterprise Selling: Winning, Growing, and Retaining Major Accounts (McGraw-Hill / 2016). Brian is Vice President of Sandler Enterprise Selling at Sandler Training. David is CEO and President of Sandler Training.

Sandler Training dominates the global training market through an unparalleled network of more than 250 offices worldwide, with professional trainers providing more than 450,000 hours per year of instruction in 23 languages. For more information about Sandler Enterprise Selling please visit www.sandler.com/resources/sandler-books/sandler-enterprise-selling.

Karl Scheible

Three Strategies for the Sales Organizations of Fast Growth Companies

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After working with countless fast growth companies in numerous industries, some obvious patterns have emerged as the senior leaders are trying to scale their sales organizations quickly. The issues typically appear in three specific areas: their choice in sales leadership, hiring standards for the salespeople, and how they coach and hold the salespeople accountable. These problems are often the underlying cause of inaccurate sales forecasts.

[wcm_restrict]1. Prepare the people before you promote. Many sales teams are made up of the combination of a handful of superstars: those in the middle who are floating along and those holding up the rear of the pack. We see companies take their top salesperson and make them a sales manager. The logic is amazingly similar. Let’s assume that they see “Debbie” as the top performer. The wisdom is that if they had 10 more “Debbies”, sales would never be a problem. So they promote Debbie with one mission: we see that she can do it, so Debbie should be able to get others to be top performers. What people don’t know is that the sales skills possessed by Debbie are not quickly and easily transferable to others on the team. Most importantly, Debbie was never formally trained on how to coach, mentor, motivate, recruit, and most importantly, hold people accountable without killing the team’s morale. So the team usually gains a lousy manager and loses a great salesperson. What is the alternative? Assess your people ahead of time and start to train the most promising talent well before they are promoted. This preserves the company culture and demonstrates the company’s commitment to personal growth. Often, hiring most of management talent from the outside can stress the company’s ability to maintain its culture and operate under a consistent set of values. Invest in your most promising talent. If you think that training them is expensive, try not training them and then having them stay a long time.

2. Define the hiring criteria and never compromise. This one is tricky. We see a lot of companies panic with an empty territory. They want to get the best possible candidate as fast as possible because they are afraid of losing revenue. If you take the time to carefully analyze the cost of a bad hire, it is staggering. Consider the cost of all the hours of interviewing, training, and coaching. Add in the salary and other sunk costs. Then take the opportunity costs of the lost sales if the hire was a poor producer and blowing good chances. We have seen companies that were only paying a base salary of $50k losing over $100k for a single bad hire. If they have four sales failures that cost them $400k, think of the gross sales that need to be made in order to cover that loss. It’s staggering. In most cases the companies are mathematically better off to wait for the perfect hire while a territory sits empty a little while longer. We know that about 7% of all salespeople are elite and another 22% are good. The rest are horrible and their best sales call is usually made on the hiring manager to get the job. Be patient.

3. Don’t attempt to fix conceptual problems with discipline. All salespeople have issues. They are either technical or conceptual in nature. If a rep does not know what to say, how to say it, or when to say it, then they have a conceptual problem. I will use money as an example when explaining this. Most reps either bring up the topic of money far too soon, or way too late in the sales process. For example, discussing the money before the emotional compelling reasons for buying your product have been established, leads to the salesperson having to typically negotiate in the end to close the deal. The prospect simply does not see the value and in a lot of cases, neither does the salesperson. Let’s look at money as a conceptual problem. Let’s assume the rep was told that it was impolite to talk about money as they were raised as a child. Then they will usually avoid the topic of money as long as possible, and at best, act very nervous when finally broaching the topic. This, in turn, sends unspoken signals to the buyer that the rep may lack the conviction that it’s in their best interest to pay that price for the product. Here is the key: the manager will never fix this issue with the conventional “PIP” workout plan or harsh threats. Instead, they need to coach and mentor the rep to adopt the proper belief system to sell better. This takes time, patience, and great coaching skills. So why do many sales managers default to discipline when a rep’s numbers are off? They were never trained on how to coach. They have probably never been assessed for their own hidden conceptual weaknesses. As a result, they are not even aware of their own conceptual weaknesses. So we are right back at full circle. Train your sales leaders on how to coach the most common conceptual weaknesses: money, emotional involvement, and need for approval, to name a few.

If at all possible, don’t allow the pressure of growth to force you to compromise your leadership choices, your sales hires, and how you drive improvement.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Adam BoydKarl ScheibleKarl Scheible and Adam Boyd are co-authors of Succeed The Sandler Way: 14 Personal and Professional Breakthroughs, and experienced Sandler trainers who play important roles in Sandler’s worldwide organization and are recognized as business development experts specializing in executive sales training and sales productivity training.

For more information visit www.Sandler.com.

Cindy Novotny

Selling is not a ‘common’ practice.

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Selling is not a ‘common’ practice. It is NOT easy. There are so many people who believe anyone can sell anything and really believe that if you can ‘schmooze’, drink the ‘booze,’ and work the room, you can sell. That is so far from the truth and anyone who has made a lot of money in sales will be able to give you consistent guidelines as to how they achieved their success. So let’s take a simple but serious look at these guidelines to success in selling.
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  1. Practice makes perfect. Yes, you must practice your openers, your pitch, how you handle objections, how you get through the gatekeeper and how to grab an executives’ attention in one minute or less.
  2. You need a plan. Strategies make for a solid sales approach. Running all over town, calling everyone you find online, ignoring the competition and losing sight of the consumers’ needs will never win you more business.
  3. You must create a solid sales plan and follow it religiously.
  4. Know your product(s) better than anyone.
  5. Know your competitions’ products and how to show the observable differences between you and the competition.

With so many options on line these days, sales professionals need to know how to crack the email code and get potential customers to talk to them either on the phone or face to face. The best way to accomplish this is to set phone appointments after the first inquiry that comes via a website or an online RFP system. A sense of urgency will set you apart from other competitors right from the beginning. Follow these simple steps to ensure you increase your conversion rate of closing more business.

  1. Make sure someone is looking constantly at your online inquiries.
  2. Immediately respond to the request by asking for a specific time to speak to a sales professional.
  3. Once you get a response, set up an official phone appointment with an Outlook invite.

By jumping on these online requests immediately and illustrating your commitment by setting an appointment, you are already showing your professionalism that in most cases goes far beyond the competition. Based on recent focus groups with clients who are involved in buying/procurement departments, we heard loud and clear their frustration with trying to get someone on the phone to quote prices. Let’s not make it harder for customers to buy something! In a decade of on demand purchasing through APPs and other sources, we need to improve our ability to create a seamless process in delivering service to our potential clients.
Remember; nothing in this world happens in business unless someone sells something. I am a firm believer that follow through, sense of urgency and a commitment to excellence will build more rapport than the ‘smooching, boozing, and chit chat’ with a customer. Do yourself a favor and organize your day, manage your time and make a commitment to immediate follow through. There is no time like the present to clean up your act and take charge of your destiny.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Cindy NovotnyCindy Novotny has been branded a “Radical Mentor” by thousands of executives around the world for her straight forward, no nonsense approach to leadership. She began her company, Master Connection Associates, in 1989. MCA is a premiere international consulting and training organization that specializes in service delivery, sales and leadership performance. MCA’s work contributed to client success including The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company earning an unprecedented two Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards. For more information, visit Cindy’s website at www.CindyNovotny.com.

Jeffrey Gitomer

Leaving for greener pastures? Do you know why? Are you sure they’re green?

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Why do salespeople quit their job?

More money?
Better job opportunity?
Don’t like what they are doing?
Don’t like their boss?
Don’t like their corporate politics?
Don’t like how you’re being treated as a person?
Don’t feel the company is supporting you as a salesperson?
Just had their commissions cut?
Company going back on their word about paying or deal structure?
Not paid what you felt you were owed?
Just lost their best customer to the competition?

Answer: some or all of the above.

Salespeople seem to hopscotch jobs as moths flutter from one light bulb to the next, trying to find the brightest one. I don’t think the question is just, “reason for leaving.” I think it goes deeper. I think it’s “cause and effect,” and even deeper, “motive.” Motive being a short word for motivation.

This issue is further complicated by the fact that most people, when they do leave a job, won’t tell the boss their real reason for leaving. Oh, they give a stated reason like better opportunity, more money, but there’s always an underlying motive. An unspoken reason. Like, “I hate you.”

And then there’s the boss, who has to tell his other people why the salesperson quit. Standard reasons, better opportunity or more money.

It’s interesting to note that more than 74% of people who quit their job do so because of bad boss or bad company policies. Yet, no boss that I have ever spoken to ever told me: my best salesperson quit and it’s all my fault.

NOTE WELL: The departing salesperson will soon become the scapegoat for everything bad that’s ever happened in the history of the company within one week of their departure.

If you’re the boss, and you throw the person who quit under the bus and back up, it sends a message to every other person on the team that you’re going to do the same thing to them if they leave. Not a real boost to moral. If you’re the salesperson and you don’t have the guts to tell the boss the real reason why you’re leaving then you’re going to have to be willing to accept your fate with respect to the trashing that you’re going to take.

There’s no easy answers here. Some industries are more incestuous than others. Banking, personnel, accounting, and advertising seem to have an excessive amount of job hop scotching going on.

The subject is WHY are you quitting and what can you do to build your career, rather than having to start it over?

I get a minimum of ten requests a week from salespeople wanting to quit their job and asking for advice. What I tell them is what I’m going to tell you:

1. List the real reasons that you dislike what you’re currently doing.

2. Now, list the reasons that you like what you’re doing.

3. Add a one sentence description to both the dislike and the like column to give yourself further insight as to “why.”

4. Ask yourself which one of the bad things will be eliminated at the new job and which one of the good things will continue at the new job. This way you give yourself an evaluation before you enter your new position.

5. Call people at the place you want to work or that you’ve just been hired to work at and find out what they like and dislike.

6. Write down what you feel you gain (other than money) at your new position and ask yourself could you have gained the same thing at your old position?

NOTE WELL: As you know, if you read my column, we’re about to get to the .5. You will not like the .5. The .5 will make you grimace but the .5 will show you the real reality of where you are and where you seek to grow.

6.5 Become the number one salesperson at your existing company, then quit. If you’re thinking about leaving your job and you are not the number one salesperson, it is likely that you will not be the number one salesperson at your next job, and it is even more likely that you will bring half your disgruntlement to your next job. If you stay at your present job until you become the number one salesperson no boss will be able to throw you under the bus, you leave a hero of the company, you leave with pride, you leave with self-respect, and you leave with the attitude of a winner, not a whiner.

See? I told you you’d hate it.

So here’s your opportunity: quit complaining, quit whining about your job or your circumstance, quit trashing other people to make yourself look good, and just dig in. If you really consider yourself great at sales, then attaining the number one position shouldn’t be much of a problem. Heck, you’re always bragging about how great you are, prove it!

There’s rewards for being number one. People will be nicer to you in your company. You may even earn some degree of respect, your value in the marketplace will increase, you’ll have choices, genuine choices, and you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing that you’ve done it for the right reasons, not the negative reasons.

BOSSES BEWARE: If you’re salespeople are leaving you at a rate of greater than 20% per year, look in the mirror. If you “can’t find any good people out there” let me give you a big clue; there’s plenty of good people out there, they’re just not working for you.

SALESPEOPLE BE AWARE: Your next boss may be no better than your previous boss. He or she just may be sweeter in the interview process than in the day to day battle. You’re best tactical and strategic advantage is to arrive on the scene as the number one salesperson from your previous job rather than the number one whiner about your previous job.

If you do this you have set the stage for sales success. Your sales success.

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey GitomerJeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at salesman@gitomer.com.

Jon Mertz

What Is the Best Mindful Business Strategy?

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Mindfulness garners a lot of recent attention. Wisdom 2.0, a conference that blends mindfulness with technology, leadership, and culture, hosted over 2,400 participants earlier this year. Attendees come from all over the world to learn and engage in developing meaningful mindfulness practices.

A new area for mindfulness is how business strategies are developed. Strategy development and mindfulness are a great combination, and the best mindful business strategy starts with a simple concept – Be present.

Being present is a simple idea. However, many businesses are not present, especially when it comes to making a decision and moving forward with a strategy. The next generation of leaders are using mindful practices to gain meaningful results.

Strategically Stuck

[wcm_restrict]Businesses usually spend a reasonable amount of time conducting research, building spreadsheets, and presenting findings. Where things break down is making a decision on what to change and when to implement. Businesses get stuck.

What happens is ongoing discussions and a certain unwillingness to commit resources. The strategic step forward is frozen, and nothing happens.

Being Present: A Business Strategy

A business may be present in the discussions, but they are not being present in implementing a strategy. A direction needs to be selected, and then committing resources to implement the strategy is a vital next step. Changes will always be present:

  • Market shifts
  • New competitors
  • Better distribution models
  • Partnerships formed

The un-mindful thing to do is not to be present within the changes. Sitting on the sidelines is not being present.

A mindful strategy is to begin to build the add-on product, the new product, the new service offering, or whatever the strategy entails. Being present in the moment with a new strategy translates into being in the arena – leading, learning, adapting, and succeeding. Strategies will never be right the first time. However, by never being present with a new strategy means you will never be able to adjust, adapt, and capture new growth.

Mindful strategies are not action for action’s sake. Quite the opposite. Mindful strategies take the time to understand and evaluate what is relevant and then act on what is learned. Mindful strategies are in the presence of change, making a business statement in what we offer.

The key point is: By being present with the strategy, we will make more progress than if we are absent. What we start will likely change. Without starting, our presence is absent, and we will lose market traction and will be in a constant catch-up mode.

Millennials: Mindful Strategists

Millennials are adopting mindful practices. With their presence, they are not impatient. Millennials are patiently doing the work in the presence of strategic change. They are not waiting for certainty. Instead, Millennials know that if the work is not done now, opportunities will be missed. Continuing to be present during implementation means they can flex as new information is absorbed.

Millennial leaders know the power of building instead of waiting for the perfect time. As they build, they adapt. Being present means business relevance for the long term.

Older generations need to adopt a mindful strategic approach and embrace the next generation in their strategic efforts. The power of generational mindfulness will empower your business strategy to a new level of performance and market significance.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Jon MertzJon Mertz is one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business and highlighted as one of the Leaders to Watch in 2015 by the American Management Association. He also is the author of Activate Leadership: Aspen Truths to Empower Millennial Leaders. Jon serves as vice president of marketing at Corepoint Health. Outside of his professional life, Jon brings together a community to inspire Millennial leaders and close the gap between two generations of leaders. Follow him on Twitter @ThinDifference or Facebook /ThinDifference