Be Different or be dead

August 3, 2020

6 simple roles sales should play to be the best

Source : Unsplash

6 simple roles sales should play to be the best.

Forget that you’re in sales and that your role is sales.

Cast off this old school notion; you need to do other more important things to be successful in the sales profession.

Selling doesn’t come first, it comes last.

Sales is not the means to the end, it’s the end. It’s not the antecedent, it’s the consequence.

The biggest problem I see is that ‘get the sale’ drives sales behaviour as opposed to creating the right climate which consistently results in a sale.

The emphasis is on selling techniques — funnel management, cold calling, overcoming resistance and a plethora of other aspects of achieving a sale. Teaching focuses on making the sales process more efficient by emphasizing micro tools for managing the client.

The emphasis is on the wrong stuff if enhancing sales effectiveness is the end game.

Yes, the sales job requires a toolset to make it as efficient as it can be, but it more importantly in my view requires skills and competencies to create the right customer climate that nurtures buying — not selling. Making the customer want to buy as opposed to equipping the salesperson to flog their wares in a more productive fashion is the new sales approach.

These roles, and the training required to play each, should precede traditional sales training.

1. Relationship manager

If you’re selling anything, it’s a strong, healthy, intimate long term relationship with a client. A relationship based on mutual respect and trust and one which will produce sales results over the long term.

Building relationships is complicated and requires a specific skill set. And it starts with ‘loving humans’, the innate proclivity to like another person, get close to them and want to help them.

2. Strategist

The ability to develop a successful course of action in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability is critical to help a client. Proven competencies in considering market demand and competitive factors to formulate the appropriate way forward for a client is essential for consulting salespeople.

Business planning builds context for the solution sales eventually has to play into; no context = no sale.

3. Behavioural psychologist

If you can’t interpret your client’s actions how can you understand where they are coming from on a particular issue? You must acquire the skills to interpret the nonverbal clues they communicate — body language, tone of voice, facial expressions.

In many cases it’s the unspoken words that tell their story because sometimes they simply won’t tell you what they need, want or feel in words.
Your actions must be in sync with what your client is thinking; their behaviour says it. You must be able to understand it.

4. Conflict resolution specialist

Relationships always have conflict at one point or another, and it behooves the salesperson to know how to manage it with a client. Successful progress is only made when there is meaningful compromise that meets the needs of both parties.
If the salesperson doesn’t understand this reality and continues to ‘sell’, they will never get the client to buy.

5. Coach

Providing guidance and advice is often a required in a meaningful relationship. The ability to listen to what your client is saying, ask questions for clarification and offer a logical opinion based on your understanding of the client is invaluable.

And the fact that the client trusts you enough to engage you in one of their issues speaks volumes about the trust they have in your abilities.

6. A rock

Every once in a while a client has a crisis. Something unexpected strikes them. They lose a highly profitable customer to the competition. Their employees vote to strike after a lengthy labour relations negotiations. Their stock takes a tumble after their financial results underperform analyst expectations.

Your client needs someone to talk to; an ear to listen. They don’t want you to fix anything, just listen. And when you do, you’ve just earned the right to serve them a while longer.

Selling techniques are the entry stakes to sales; know them and participate in the game, but don’t rely on them to take you over the top.

Winning sales has much more to do with buying than selling.

Be competent at understanding what motivates people to buy and step away from the crowd; ignore them and be like every other struggling salesperson who may be amazing at the details of their craft but who never is in the top 10.

Cheers
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series.

• Posted 8.3.20 at 06:09 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

June 29, 2020

8 proven ways to quickly and easily grow your business

Source: Pexels

8 proven ways to quickly and easily grow your business.

Sources of growth the fast-and-easy way.

As a small business you are generally limited in terms of resources; cash reserves can get depleted, customers can dwindle in numbers and growth in your business is difficult to achieve — in fact in the COVID world, survival is your prime objective.

Here’s a quick way you can get your business back on the growth path.

Set the context for growth by a quick review of your business strategy — Survival and growth should be a function of what overall direction you want to follow based on your basic business.

Take a moment to review the business plan that has worked for you in the past; decide if you want to stay your course or if deviating from it is necessary given the new circumstances you face. It’s ok to make a change; your survival is at stake. And you just may find a new opportunity for your business in the post-pandemic era.

Dumb it down — Keep your approach simple; quick and easy sales is your objective with as little risk and investment as possible. Figure it out on the back of an envelope; it doesn’t have to be fancy just fast.
What demand seems to be there at this moment and how can you morph your basic business to take advantage of it? What assets for you have that can be used for a different purpose?

Some organizations with unused warehouse space launched manufacturing of personal protective equipment when things went sideways. Can you do a similar approach?
Decide how much revenue you need — Calculate how much revenue you need over what timeframe to turn the corner. Have a specific growth target and make it about top line revenue.

Even though the intent is to keep it simple and move fast, it’s important that you know approximately how many sales (and at what price points) you need so you can track your short term performance. You need to know if you’re making progress or not.

Declare your objective and be ok with not knowing how specifically to achieve it. Use ‘I don’t know’ to drive creativity and get your juices flowing.

Be short sighted — Look at short term performance; you don’t really have the luxury of looking far out into the future. Normally I would be recommending a planning horizon of not more than 24 months, however as I’m writing this piece three months into the COVID-19 era I’m now of the opinion that small businesses — no, all businesses — should be looking at what they need to do over the next 24 hours to achieve survival grade performance.

The shorter the planning period the more you have to execute to survive

Be clear on who you need to target — In the midst of chaos it’s really easy to start running all over and chasing opportunities. I’m not saying this is necessarily bad as long as it’s focused on customers you know have the potential to generate the sales you need to keep on breathing.

The easiest growth is achieved from the customers who buy from you repeatedly and often.
You should know who they are when they phone in an order or order something online; if you don’t, start capturing customer information ASAP so you can do everything possible to encourage them to return.

Organic growth is best achieved through the loyal customers you currently serve. Focus on THEM. Trust that with the right value proposition they will do more business with you and tell their friends and family.
Forget about trying to get new customers. If you happen to get some from word-of-mouth that’s ok but don’t try to be proactive. It’s time consuming, risky and takes your eyes off serving your existing base extremely well.

Think ‘fast-and-easy’ — An effective way to choose customers to target is what I call the fast-and-easy method.

It means choosing customers that:

Can be sold quickly — Customers you can get to fast with your current selling methods. If you have to build new sales channels, it will consume energy and precious time that you can ill afford without generating additional revenue.

In addition, as I’ve said elsewhere, it is critical to focus your efforts on the things that matter; those activities that you believe have a good chance at helping to grow your business.

Stick with what you know. Bear down on what you’re good at. Concentrate on customers you know. Ask yourself ‘Is this consistent with fast-and-easy?’ when considering chasing new stuff.

Are ‘close to home’ — In a geographic sense, explore the territory immediately around you before trying to exploit distant ones. If you have a good online presence, stay with the market focus you have.
Exploring new virtual or physical markets — probably with the need to establish new sales channels— can gobble up your time with questionable short term results.

Penetrate and dominate your current markets before you wander afar. This is an area where I’ve seen small business leaders fall flat on their face. They spot something new to do that is interesting and at least theoretically is a good idea and they decide to chase it, reducing the energy that is applied to fast-and-easy activities. They lose on both accounts: the new stuff doesn’t materialize and the current stuff suffers.

The fast-and-easy approach: get sales fast and don’t spend much time to get them.

Don’t need much selling — Where closing a sale can occur relatively quickly and revenue realized soon thereafter. An opportunity requiring a 12-month sales cycle won’t be terribly productive when you are in the survival mode.
Work with clients who will give you revenue tomorrow if you want to hit your sales targets.

And avoid customers who ask for proposals. Responding to the request and waiting for a decision will gobble up precious time you don’t have. The formal sales process is a time consumer; focus on people who are willing to deal you their business based on trust and past success with you.                         

Can give you quality referrals — Again, a short planning period requires closing as many high value deals as possible which generally means getting to deal closure without a lengthy sales preamble. High quality referrals should mean that your brand comes recommended and you can get to the solution presentation quickly.

Just do a few things — It’s critical to focus on doing the right one or two things that will kick in with sales; trying to do too much won’t work. You don’t have the resources or working cycles to pull it off. The secret is to pick a few critical objectives that you believe will give you an 80% chance of hitting your sales needs.

Avoid brainstorming as the way of setting priorities; if an action cannot be directly aligned with generating revenue from your loyal customer base, don’t chase it!

Stop! — It goes without saying that you can’t keep doing stuff that was part of your ‘yesterday’ unless you are absolutely confident it will make the survival sales you need.
Every time you’re tempted to do a comfortable ‘yesterday’ activity, stop and ask yourself whether it is necessary to meet your 24-hour sales goals.
You can’t afford to do unproductive things when you’re fighting for your life.

Yesterday’s relevance is today’s irrelevance.

Know where you are — Measure progress regularly to know if you are on track to hit your survival sales objectives or not. COVID has changed the meaning of time in this regard; you have to know literally every day where you stand. It’s the only way you will know if you have to change your plans on the run.
Pandemic notwithstanding, it takes discipline to grow your business; it doesn’t happen by serendipity.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.29.20 at 03:34 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 27, 2020

Why salespeople don’t like talking to you if you’re not buying

Why salespeople don’t like talking to you if you’re not buying.

How often do you get the feeling that once the salesperson you are dealing with finally gets that you’re not interested in buying from them, they abruptly start to close down the conversation and usher you to the door?

It’s like “Now that I see that you’re not going to but anything from me, I’m not prepared to invest anymore time in you.”

This type of salesperson is looking for the easy sale and when they sense it’s not coming they want to dump you and move on to their next target.

Effective and honest sales is NOT about the quick and easy sale that can be scaled.

These quick hitters spend their time designing their sales process to minimize the amount of face-time they have with a potential client and maximize the number of pitches they make during the day to yield as many sales as they can.

And some sales organizations add an additional component to the sales process — “the closer”. This is the dude or dudette that enters the client meeting when it’s obvious the client resists buying.

The closer’s role is to harden the interaction even further and push for the sale. The logic is simple: if the client isn’t buying from the first salesperson, maybe, with more push and a different person they will soften up and buy.

This “get ‘em in — get ‘em out” pressure process gives the sales profession a bad name. It’s the stereotypical hard sell approach devoid of any meaningful human interaction with the potential client.

The salesperson in this scenario cares little about the person and more about the product.

It’s about leadership

This is not a sales issue per se, it’s a leadership one. The reason the sales process is based on speed and superficiality and not quality is because leadership actually believes that it’s the only way to meet sales and revenue objectives.

And they prioritize getting sales over anything else, including building long lasting relationships that will not only spawn a regular flow of sales, it will also create a referral network that will increase sales beyond expectations.

It’s hard to believe in the sales world today, replete with experts pronouncing how critical it is to focus on building intimacy with clients that the impersonal hard sales process is still practiced by many if not most organizations.

Either the pundits have it wrong — and they don’t — or leaders don’t trust that people will hand over their money if they are treated to an amazing experience with one of their sales professionals.

I think leadership is so focussed on showing good performance in the short term that they simply cannot risk investing resources to build long term health.

They say the priority is to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty but their actions belie their intent. I mean how can you even promulgate a relationship building strategy when sales compensation is driven by how many dollars they generate today?

Also, what’s the response if customer feedback is extremely negative; that people absolutely hate the sales approach used?

My experience so far is that your views are politely listened to and abruptly ignored; organizations generally are not interested in forsaking a immediacy in favour of a longer term horizon.

What’s the solution? Will a person continue to be subjected to the pusher and the closer who are only interested in you saying “yes”?

I suspect so, because I don’t believe leadership has the jam to make the change.

If you’re in sales I ask that you push back if you are being asked to push or close products. Take a stand for the people you engage everyday to buy from you, and push for a sales process that is sensitive and responsive to the needs of the client.

And if you’re a potential buyer, go somewhere else where sales actually likes humans.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 1.27.20 at 04:42 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

December 30, 2019

Simple ways to make sales a strong strategic force

Source: Unsplash

Simple ways to make sales a strong strategic force.

How do you get sales viewed more as a strategic asset than a flogger of wares?

My experience is that most organizations underutilize sales because they treat it as a traditional tactical tool rather than as a strategic asset.

Today the focus tends to be on how traditional sales can be more efficient — providing the appropriate sales tools for enabling the sales process to work more in accordance with accepted (best) sales practices.

Tools to make sales more efficient

— tactics to push products
— a sales process everyone must follow
— a bonus plan based on the number of units sold
— a sales plan that takes guidance from the marketing plan
— a focus on the short term — achieve quota fast
— a micro training emphasizing how to be more efficient at the discipline of selling

There is a HUGE opportunity cost to the organization by treating sales as a tactic where efficiency is the prime concern.

As a customer-facing function, sales has the power to make or break the client loyalty relationship and materially affect the financials of the organization.

The focus needs to change to focus on how sales can be more effective — redefine sales as a strategic asset where their role is to create long term value for the organization.

Sales strategic tools

— develop relationships
— a bonus plan based on measures of strategic value creation set by executive leadership — share of wallet, life of sale, customer perception of relationship building — shared objectives with senior team
— sales planning takes direction from the business plan of the organization as opposed to marketing
— a planning horizon that is long term — a focus on building long term value for the organization through deep sales relationships
— achieve master relationship builder status fast
— dig for client “secrets” without the constraint of their products; examine the client holistically for what they want, desire and “lust for” as a person (eg. red wine) or organization (eg. better asset management capability)

What specific actions should be taken to make sales the ultimate strategic force?

Sales leaders

— first sales leaders must redefine the sales role to add the strategic function to its role; communicate the change to the organization
— begin with introducing the strategic value element to the annual bonus plan and increase its weight over time; THEN look for ways to make the sales team more efficient in playing the new strategic role; address effectiveness before efficiency
— revise the value statement of the sales organization to include adding strategic value
— shift the recruitment strategy to acquire individuals who have the competencies required to add strategic value
— develop an internal training program to teach the new skills required to the existing sales force
— exit those sales people who either don’t have the required strategic competencies needed, or refuse to shift from the selling products regime

Individual salespeople

— personally take action to begin the shift from tactician to strategist. Take personal ownership of the need to add more of the strategic emphasis to your role
— go to ‘boot camp’ with the strategic game plan of your organization. Get to know it at a VERY detailed level. You can’t translate it to what it specifically means for sales if your knowledge of the plan is skin deep
— go “under the covers” with clients to learn what they want and desire —  the source of delivering strategic value
Knowledge represents strategic power; sales is in the best position to secure it; competitive advantage follows
— build a draft sales plan that translates the business plan of the organization into what it means specifically for you as a salesperson
Your draft should be what you think would be a perfect expression of corporate goals
And do it in sufficient granularity — avoid being general with aspirational words — so as to define what specific new behaviours and actions are required and which current ones need to be stopped
— share your draft plan with others to show them how to shift sales from tactics to strategy. Start building interest and excitement around the idea; be an agent of change

Biggest challenges

What are the biggest challenges salespeople face when trying to put their sales game to a higher strategic level?
— personally being willing to accept the role change and to commit to lead in implementing it among peers and colleagues
— ‘getting permission’ to make the shift away from tactical sales
— putting their quota at risk
— attracting leadership attention by your actions — and being shut down
— demanding and pushing for a more strategic role in the organization when efficiency product pushing forces are at play and deeply engrained in the organization — fighting an uphill battle — maintaining your eyes on the prize in the face of pushback
— developing new skill sets associated with creating strategic value through building relationships — human psychology, business acumen, financial analysis, conflict resolution, problem solving and team building

Effective sales isn’t about how many products or services you sell; it’s about how effectively you advance the long term strategy of the organization.

Some will say that unit selling IS consistent with executing strategy, but that’s just a convenient excuse for sales to not change in any meaningful way.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 12.30.19 at 04:51 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink