The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

If you've been online lately, you may have noticed LinkedIn's prospecting tools geared to help salespeople. Some of those services include tools to efficiently prospect within LinkedIn's network, premium services that allow greater depth and information on those you wish to contact, and even a Reference Search where you can get a list of people in your network who can (if they choose) provide a reference for someone you want to connect with.

These services may interest you and may be worth $24 a month or more, but don't attempt to let technology and social media do the prospecting or networking for you. LinkedIn claims that a premium account will help you find and contact the right people but what you say when you approach a prospect will make all the difference—it will either make that subscription fee worth it or make you feel like you've wasted your money. 

Unfortunately, I come across more salespeople who feel they wasted their money than those who actually make progress. And here's why: No amount of additional services can take the place of your own ability to attract quality prospects through empathy, expertise, and problem solving capabilities. There are plenty of other salespeople prospecting and requesting to connect on LinkedIn every day. You can either be seen as one of many who letting the technology speak for them—or as one of the few who know how to approach a human prospect. 

Here at The Center for Sales Strategy, we strive to make our clients happy. In fact, we pride ourselves on client satisfaction and retention. Read below for four ways to achieve client satisfaction as a B2B salesperson.

Now, you know the keys to making sure your clients are happy. Are you holding up your end of the bargain when it comes to client satisfaction?

A young account manager asked my advice recently about how to handle his first meeting with a particular prospect. It was memorable because the seller who got the first appointment admitted  he was surprised this big prospect gave him an appointment at all… and now he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it.

I started by asking what Valid Business Reason he used to gain the prospect’s interest and attention. Turns out the VBR was “okay,” but not great… focusing a little too much on the product the seller was hoping to pitch, and only slightly on a community service initiative that he thought might appeal to the prospect. But it was the latter that got the CEO’s attention and got the salesperson this appointment.

So, we went online to explore the prospect’s website and learned what we could about the organization’s community involvement. Studying their efforts led us to understand the prospect’s passions. We spent a little time browsing the site further, for other press releases and to get an idea of what the company’s priorities were (based on the way the website was designed). Then a quick stop at LinkedIn revealed some of the CEO’s additional accomplishments and a visit to his Facebook page shed light on his personal interests.

This week, we wrote about flipping generally held beliefs upside down, putting on our shoes, misconceptions about talent, and the keys to sustainable sales performance. We ran the gamut! Get a cup of coffee, and cozy up to read these, if you missed them.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• On Monday, Steve Marx wrote about Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule, and how it fails without a key piece.

• Tuesday, John Henley asked (and answered!) what B2B selling has to do with putting on your shoes.

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’m not the kind of guy who tends to do a victory dance when he finds his point of view vindicated. But I came close the other day when I read about the Princeton University study that put the kibosh on Malcolm Gladwell’s famous—and utterly misleading—assertion that all it takes to be successful in any field is 10,000 hours of practice.

I knew Malcolm Gladwell was wrong the moment I heard his crazy claim. The 10,000-hour nonsense is the central theme, the activating idea, in Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, published in 2008. Gladwell observed that the best NHL players grew up on the ice in Canada; most were skating by age three, and they had something like, umm, 10,000 hours’ practice by the time the NHL scouts came to watch them play. And he noted that Bill Gates grew up in a rare (for that era) environment where he had access to computers from an early age and was able to devote, hmm, 10,000 hours to try his hand at programming these new contraptions and get good at it. The Beatles? You guessed it, 10,000 hours in the basement or in empty or crowded dance halls in Liverpool. It’s not talent, Gladwell kept repeating, it’s simply 10,000 hours. 

That was his axiom. And the corollary? You—yes, you!—can be as successful as John Lennon, Bill Gates, or Wayne Gretzky… if you simply commit to 10,000 hours of practice. Gladwell specifically claimed that his observation about practice time proved that all that talk about talent was just wrong. Perhaps even more surprising than Gladwell’s allegation was that so many people fell for it, hook, line, and career. Pundits wrote about it, teachers preached it, and young people rearranged their life to fit in 10,000 hours of practice. That’s 5 years of 40-hour practice weeks, if my arithmetic is right. Most didn’t last 10,000 hours. Is that why they’re not gazillionnaires today? Not exactly.

This week, we wrote about a variety of topics, and one blog post included homework! From sinking ships to athletic coaching, from empathy and accountability to two-paragraph emails, we've covered a lot of ground, and if you've missed anything, now's your chance to play catch up.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• On Monday, Mike Anderson warned us of the dangers of holding onto our ideas like someone going down with a sinking ship.

• Tuesday, Jeff Roth told us that great emails get ten things done in just two paragraphs, then he gave us homework. Did you send him an email?

We would probably all agree that strong athletic coaching is key to maximizing the performance of an athlete.  Effective sales coaching is just as essential for maximizing sales performance!

If you are a regular reader of our blog or a current client of The Center for Sales Strategy, you know that we believe strong coaching plays an enormous role in the development of people and their natural talents.  This slide show presentation will depict for you the five ways that sales coaching and athletic coaching are most similar and give you some important things to consider when coaching others.

 5 Parallels Between Athletic Coaching and Sales Coaching

Like you, I get a ton of emails in a typical day. If I read them all, I’d get little else done. So if I don’t see something in the subject line that grabs my attention because it’s relevant to me, that message is gone! That takes care of 50% of the email crowding my Inbox. If I do actually start reading, but there’s nothing intriguing in the first few sentences, there goes another 30% of the daily onslaught. Another 10% or so is internal mail, and my boss reads this blog, so I’m saying for the record that I read those. Which brings us to that last 10% of email, items I may actually read.

How can you be included in my 10%? Or the 10% of the other strangers you’re trying to reach? Make it stand out. Be intriguing and, include a call to action, and keep it short. Sounds simple, right? Try it. You’ll find it’s much harder than you think. Below are 10 message goals that fit into two concise paragraphs and will keep your email message “above the fold,” giving it a good chance of capturing the reader:

Example: Sending an Email to an IT Company

1. Subject Line – Here’s your one and only chance to make a good first impression. “Less than 30% of IT administrators are certified in Cloud Computing.” Pretty intriguing if I’m an IT company transitioning from servers and desktop applications to a cloud-based, software-as-a-service environment.
2. Introduction – The reader needs to know who you are and the company you work for… “My name is… and I work for…”

Not long ago, I had the chance to watch a role-play workshop. The consultant from The Center for Sales strategy was playing “the client,” and an account manager was playing “the salesperson.” 

A few minutes into this hypothetical needs analysis, a light bulb turned on in the account manager’s head. It was as if the clouds parted, and a ray of inspired genius shone down on the salesperson from high heaven. (Or at least, that’s how the salesperson felt, based on the look on his face and the way he started fidgeting.)

Unable to contain his enthusiasm, he interrupted the client with, “Hey! I have an idea. You know what we could do…?” And of course, he dove into a thorough explanation of his epiphany. The idea was okay but not great. The client was patient and polite, but her reaction was subdued; not nearly as positive as the account manager had clearly anticipated. So the seller re-approached: “Yes, but you don’t understand. The reason this is a great idea is…” And he repeated his idea three times, in three different ways. Each time, the client was becoming less patient, less interested, and understandably less polite.