The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

It’s an interesting fact in business that the people at the top don’t always know best. In fact, most of the time, the person who has the skills and experience to offer a solution to a particular customer is the salesperson.

A few years ago, I was negotiating a very large sale that involved complex discussions and choices to be finalized in order to send out a proposal. The standard sales cycle at our company closed in about three months, on average, and I was working with a decision maker to finalize the proposal.

We're bringing back a popular feature -- our weekly wrap-up along with the best posts we've read around from around the web this week. Today is pi day (get it, 3.14?) and we're celebrating by eating pi(e) -- how will you celebrate?

This Week at The Center for Sales Strategy

Below are some key pieces of wisdom found within this week's blog posts:

• From The Remediation Myth: Why You Can't fix Weaknesses:
  "We can get ten times better in an area of natural talent, but only ten percent better when we try to improve in area not supported by natural talent."

Think about a typical sales engagement. You’re trying to win the same business that your key competitor is hoping to get their hands on. You spend a massive amount of time and energy trying to prove why your product, service, or company deserves the business over your competitor. In other words, you’re trying to prove you’re better.

Then, when it comes down to the transaction, you learn the prospect is considering both options, and you are tempted—by either the prospect or your own paranoia—to drop your price. 

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

It is amazing how often I’ll hear sellers talk about those prospects (and even clients) that absolutely drive them crazy. I’m not just talking about those really demanding customers who expect the impossible or those who expect you to constantly deliver world-class champagne on a cheap-beer budget. I’m referring to those situations where there’s some kind of a personality conflict, or you’re dealing with a person who consistently makes you wonder if you still want to do this kind of work.

If it’s not really worth it, why do you continue to put yourself through it?

Gone are the days when the best prospects were storefront businesses lined up along Main Street. Back then, a salesperson could simply wander in, looking a little like a shopper, and have reasonable hope of engaging in a productive conversation with the proprietor. Today’s prospects look almost entirely different, ranging from less-accessible big-box and chain retailers to exclusively Web-based businesses to insurance providers, educational institutions, investment offerings, group medical practices, personal technology devices, and more—none of which can be approached casually.

And, just as you can no longer simply drop in, so too have the email and voicemail paths to the prospect become hellishly difficult to penetrate. Between the human gatekeepers and the electronic ones, today’s prospects are very well insulated. Some screen salespeople out simply because there are too darn many of them, a multitude of people selling advertising this and marketing that. But others do so because experience tells them that most of these salespeople are a colossal waste of time: Given how easily prospects can access product information online, information that’s often more accurate and useful than what they get from salespeople, why would any prospect take a meeting with a salesperson? 

“Happy Valentine’s Day. I love you, I appreciate you, and I think you’re amazing in every way.  You had me at hello!”

Those are words we express–and really like to hear–from those we love each year on February 14^th. But shouldn’t we express love and appreciation to people we care about everyday? And what about our customers? Shouldn’t our customers feel important everyday… rather than just certain days of the year?

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:

The total-revenue budget is historically a media property’s single most important measure of success. If that number is hit, the pressure to make some of the lesser targets is greatly relieved. But that pattern has been changing in recent years.  

Today, the digital-revenue budget is often the one that gets the most scrutiny—from the boardroom all the way down through the organization to the newest seller on the team. It’s not only because the total-revenue number is getting tougher and tougher to hit, but because everyone knows that revenue related to digital offerings represents the future, and most everything else is part of a past that is destined to decrease over time.

My 7-year old daughter loves frozen yogurt with toppings.  She loves going to one of those self-serve places where she can pull the lever for her yogurt and then create an artistic and culinary masterpiece from a wide variety of toppings. Typically she gets vanilla and chocolate yogurt and goes for a variety of toppings, including gummy bears, sprinkles, gummy worms, Oreos, chocolate chips, coconut, and kiwifruit. The other day I asked her which frozen yogurt she liked best and then which topping she liked best. She looked at me quizzically and said “Daddy, they only taste good together! Why would I eat a gummy bear and then some kiwifruit?!”