The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

There is a pattern I have seen repeated over the nearly 20 years I have been involved in trying to help sales organizations improve their performance. A new product or service is launched, lots of product training is created to support the launch, and sales people are given incentives to sell the new offering. In most cases, sales start to happen, but after several months, overall sales are not reaching the lofty goals that have been set. This is often where I get involved and what I typically see is that a lot of sales have been made (often as many as the organization had projected), but the average sale is much smaller than they had hoped.

At this point, I look at the proposals behind the sales that were made. In nearly 100% of these proposals, the seller has done a good job of pitching the new product or service (good enough that they made the sale). But rarely is the proposal tailored to a need. Even great needs-based sellers tend to forget about this proven approach when they’re asked to sell the hot, shiny, new product.

Visualize the person on your sales team with the most relationship talent. Can you picture her? Your social butterfly? She cares deeply about other people. She knows all her clients like personal friends and can easily recite the names of their kids. She brings clients their favorite coffee “just because” and gets the order right every time. She genuinely wants to know these things and prides herself on it. She is good at building instant connections with prospects as well as creating long term meaningful relationships with clients. She spends time at the water cooler and knows her teammates. Everyone loves her.

Now, take a moment and picture the opposite. Visualize the sort of lone ranger salesperson. Do you see him? He is on a bit more of a solo mission. He does not “sense” how others are feeling and even if he thought he did he might be wrong. This seller does not run on emotions,. He runs on data, facts, and numbers. Ask him the names of his clients’ kids or how the client likes their coffee and you may be met with a blank stare. He doesn’t know and probably doesn’t really care! I don’t mean that he is a bad person or hates people—he just doesn’t feel the need to know the names of all their kids or whether they take cream and sugar in their java. He doesn’t care what you watched on TV last night, so it would never occur to him to ask. Does he work hard for his clients? Absolutely! Do they always feel like he cares about them and understands them as people, not merely as clients? Maybe not.

Happy September! We're fully embracing back-to-school season by brushing up on our sales skills! If you missed any of our great sales strategy posts this week, this wrap-up is for you.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Monday, John Henley told us not to obsess about the decision maker in sales, and what to focus on instead.

• Tuesday, Kurt Sima told sales managers to ask themselves five tough questions when one of their salespeople is underperforming.

I just read this headline in a book I am reading:

"Obsess about the Decision Making Process, not the Decision Maker."

It stopped me in my tracks. 

The book is called Predictable Revenue, by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to managers. The book highlights the sales process that Salesforce.com uses.

In the book, the authors suggest you lead with questions like: 

• How have you evaluated similar products or services?
• How will the decision be made?
• Who is involved in the decision-making process?

The basic point the authors make is that when you are first approaching a prospect it’s more important to understand the decision-making process than it is to get an audience with the actual decision-maker. Part of the reason this is true is that there are often many people who can influence the decision—people the decision-maker invites into the process. You want to find out who these people are and what role they play. Often you will be more effective with the decision-maker if you have first invested time with the various decision-influencers.

We have been teaching for years about the role and importance of decision-influencers (in a piece called The Decision Maker and Decision Influencers), but this book brought the concept to life in new ways for me. The point that connects to what we have taught for years is the idea that there are many decision-influencers.  While these influencers may not be able to give the big Yes the salesperson is seeking, they can and do vote No—and the decision-maker in the corner office rarely overrules them.

The air is starting to cool, or at least we think it might soon, the leaves are changing, it's football season, and the kids are back to school. That's right, it's the unofficial start of fall! We talked about what to track, how to add tracking to stories, and the second round of how to spot sales talent without asking questions.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• On Tuesday, Matt Sunshine told us that if we only had to track four metrics for our salespeople, these are the four he suggests.

In a recent post, I observed how easy it can be for parents to see talents that are obvious (or conspicuous by their absence) in their kids. The article was inspired by a conversation with the proud father of three grown sons, two of whom were natural arguers as kids and became successful lawyers and the other of whom was the reserved, studious, analytical kid who became—you guessed it—an engineer.

Lawyers aren’t the only people who need to convince others and bring them around to their point of view. And engineers aren’t the only ones who need to find problems, pick them apart, and develop solutions. B2B salespeople need both those talents to perform at a high level. And they need half a dozen more talents as well (as we know from our research and our continuing success with our Sales Talent Interview assessment system). Let’s talk about these other six.

1. Work Intensity

One measures how hard someone likes to work, and the pace at which they work. That is the talent we call Work Intensity. To spot this talent, watch for people who are always busy, who have a lot going on, and who fill every waking hour with activity. They often walk fast, check their watch a lot, tap their pen, or seem impatient. They want things to happen now, and they have very clear short-term and long-term goals.

When I was about 10 years old, I was chosen to represent my school in a storytelling festival. I spent weeks rehearsing a story about a terrifying gorilla. I can still remember that nervous feeling as I began to tell my story to a room full of strangers. As I told my story, that feeling quickly turned to excitement and a sense of accomplishment. It was at that moment that I first realized the tremenous power of storytelling.

That power is more relevant than ever today—when salespeople are challenged to explain Google Analytics to their clients. And to make those analytics tell a powerful story.

Over the past few months, I have had a lot of questions from salespeople regarding Google Analytics. They want to know how website analytics can help them show the performance of the campaigns they’re running for clients. The answer is not just in the numbers, but also in how you use the numbers in a narrative that makes the performance come alive.

Website analytics are loaded with information, and with thoughtful analysis, insight as well. Simply communicating numbers from a client’s Google Analytics report might put your client to sleep, but you can strike gold if you can draw them in with a story of how the campaign is achieving results. In order to tell your story, you need to gain access to their analytics, of course, but equally important, you need to have a clear picture of what they want to accomplish with their campaign.  

For some clients, you can look to the basic metrics like site traffic, time spent on site, or bounce rate. These can provide a general understanding of the traffic that you might be driving to a website, or if visitors are spending more time on the site as a result of a campaign. But the lines begin to blur if there are multiple resources directing potential consumers to a website. 

So where do you start?  

Today is Labor Day, the unofficial "end" of summer. We hope you're relaxing with your family today, and spending some time outside, before the weather starts to turn.

This week, we talked about talent trumping desire, how to increase referrals, how winning is everything, and what's changed (and what hasn't!) in sales this century.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• On Monday, Kurt Sima taught us how to build a referral machine in five steps.

• Tuesday, Dana Bojcic told a story about taking up tennis with her husband, and how she learned that talent trumps desire, every time.

Approaching new prospects with a customer-needs focus used to be the smartest thing you could do. No longer. 

Today it’s the only thing you can do, the only way to win an appointment with a decision influencer. 

Rewind back to the 1990s. It was that recently that prospects needed to meet with a salesperson to learn about the products and services that company was offering. Yes, there were brochures, and sometimes a company would make a brochure available by mail to prospects, but to get questions answered and to learn about specific applications, buyers knew they needed salespeople.

Today, that notion is downright quaint. Product information, answers to most questions, insights into specific applications via case studies, and user reviews/raves/rants are all found online. Prospects learn almost everything they need to know faster, and with more accuracy and reliability, on the web than they do from salespeople.

They can make a buying decision quicker, easier, and with less annoyance without a salesperson than with one!

As a result, it’s pretty rare these days that a salesperson can get an audience with a buyer to talk about what he or she is selling. What used to be the path to a weak deal at a dirtball price—talking about what you’re selling—is now even worse: It just gets your email, your voicemail, and you deleted.