The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Most people put either their right shoe or left shoe on first. Every single time they put on shoes, they put them on in the same order. Pay attention to your habits the next time you put on your shoes! Try to put the other one on first—it will feel awkward.

But as ingrained and habitual as this is, can you tell me which shoe you put on first this morning? Probably not.

We follow patterns in other areas in our lives, too, without giving them much thought. Not all our habits are neutral, like the order of our shoes, or even good, like remembering to brush and floss our teeth everyday. In fact, in B2B selling, we can get into some pretty bad habits that can hurt our chances at closing a sale.

An Unfinished Needs Analysis

Picture this: You’re on a call with a prospect who seems interested in what you have to say. They’re actively listening, and responding like they want to buy. You’re in the needs-analysis part of the conversation, when the prospect asks about cost. 

It’s easy to jump ahead, to blaze forward. They’re talking cost! You think you can close the sale! So you bulldoze the rest of the conversation and throw a lot of facts, phrases, and terms in your prospect’s direction. You even go so far as to suggest a solution that might not be the best for your prospect. Their interest wanes, their eyes glaze over. They tell you they’ll have to think about it.

Slow Down Instead

I see more and more companies investing in their future by focusing on the next generation of leaders, the up-and-comers who they expect to drive corporate growth in the years, even decades, ahead. These companies are adding more people to their corporate staff to build programs and experiences that grow hard and soft skills (you know, mid-level managers go away for a few days, several times a year, to learn how) as well as to create mentoring programs and to provide opportunities that allow future leaders to emerge.

But once they're trained to lead, do they have the opportunity to implement what they learned?

Often, the answer is no. They're not allowed to lead. Consider the irony. At the same time that I see so many firms spending all this time and money on training future leadership, I see too many of them pulling decision-making away from their managers—removing the need for these leaders actually to lead. The irony is painful to observe.

Workshop experiences and mentoring programs go only so far. If you want managers to make good decisions, the first step is to let them make decisions. And too many companies are going the other way—transferring decisions to corporate staffs such as HR or Legal, defaulting to various algorithms, or just replacing field decisions with standardized responses listed in a rule book.

This is a very dangerous pattern. Managers with prodigious potential and tons of training, but no decisions to make, atrophy. Not only do they not hone their decision-making abilities in the real world, they lose confidence in themselves and interest in the job. Those that don’t seek a better position elsewhere simply learn how to hide behind the cape of their corporate Superman or Superwoman. 

Only pregnant mosquitos bite people. They bite to suck the blood, which feeds their eggs. The female mosquito needs the additional nutrition found in blood because it provides the protein and iron necessary for her eggs to develop. 

As a salesperson, you need to keep the mindset of a pregnant mosquito. The “blood” you need is new customers with needs. Many b2b salespeople move into this mindset only when they need to—when they lose a big account or get behind budget. If you want to be the best, this month, next month, and every month, stay on the hunt for new blood customers—not occasionally, but all the time. You always need fresh blood.

We're regularly asked by clients to help them create compensation plans for salespeople and others in their sales operation.

They want to know how to make sales compensation effective for the salespeople and good for their bottom line.

We generally start consulting by suggesting they break the process up into the following three steps.

It’s springtime in the United States. The birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and we’re hoping our long stint of April showers is about over. It’s time to plant the seeds that will become your summer garden. When you plant a garden, the final step is to pull out your garden hose and give the ground a good soaking.

If you spring a big leak in the hose, near where the faucet is, what you just planted is not going to get much water. If you spring a leak at the end of the hose, that water is just going to leak out onto your new seedlings and your garden will grow nearly as well. It’s easy to see that a leak near the beginning of the hose (pipeline) is the bigger problem.

A Leak in the Sales Pipeline

While the economy has shown general improvement the last few years, most of the clients I work with remain in a difficult business climate. The job of sales management is much tougher than before the recent recession. Their sales engine needs to be firing on all cylinders if there’s any hope of exceeding goals.

While helping several clients work through some tough problems, a powerful truth occurred to me:

Talent doesn’t fix every problem, but you can’t fix any problem without the right talent.

I was with one particular client for a few days, meeting with various managers and hearing about their problems, one after another. Each time, I probed for more information, asking for specific data, drilling down, so I could provide useful insight. One issue stood out every time: The organization was expecting outstanding sales numbers from someone who didn’t have sales talent.

You can have a great product to sell and the right prospects to talk to, but if the salesperson on the account doesn't have the talent needed for success, there isn't going to be a good outcome. In these situations, there was very little in the way of useful advice I could give, other than replace the salesperson.

In the last few months, I have been involved in helping several clients refine job descriptions. Someone besides the sales managers usually created the rough drafts that have been sent to me. Sometimes they come from inside the organization and sometimes from outside, but in 100% of the cases I have found myself thinking that what I was reading was not very useful. Sales managers are in a better position to write these than anyone else, but they don’t want to do it.

Advertisers have always been obsessed with measuring the results of campaigns they buy (and, as media veterans reading this know, most have shown a proclivity to pin too much credit or blame on the medium and not nearly enough on the message). For salespeople, the challenge has been manageable in the past because everyone—advertiser and salesperson alike—knew the data was skimpy and shaky.

It’s still shaky at times, but it’s no longer skimpy! Online marketing campaigns of all types automatically generate a sea of data, enough to drown all but the most intrepid analyst. Visits, views, clicks, downloads, form-fills, re-visits, shopping cart additions, shopping cart desertions, everything is tracked, databased, calculated, and reported. The easy availability of online-campaign metrics has raised the bar for all media. More and more, advertisers expect the legacy media to be as accountable as the digital media—to prove their performance—even if they can’t duplicate the density of data. The Great Recession, arriving just as digital-campaign metrics became universally available, made lots of advertisers more cautious and more demanding. With advertisers now accustomed to swimming in this data, the tepid recovery hasn’t tempered their expectations of accountability.

Selling Ads is Increasingly Difficult

I am currently reading the New York Times bestseller called “Influencer, The New Science of Leading Change.”  This book is based on the in-field work of the team at VitalSmarts. I like books that are based on real-life observations. I generally find ways to apply the principles. Influencer is written to a broad audience, not merely those of us in sales. But there are some good lessons in the book that we can apply to sales.     

The authors point the reader to three keys to being an Influencer:

Take off your seller hat just for a minute and put on your buyer (consumer) hat. You walk into a Verizon store to check out all the new tablets available. The salesperson calls your number (because you had to wait your turn). Instead of asking you about how you plan to use the tablet and showing you some of the options available on the two contrasting tablets they think are most suitable to your needs, they take a different approach. They ask you how much you make, how you currently spend your money and start to brainstorm things you might consider doing without so you can afford the tablet. That would be an odd approach don't you think?