salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

I gotta lot of time for Derren Brown’s shows.  It’s really the way he has balls of steel to fool people, but without ever quite saying ‘I’m too clever for you’, like a sleight of hand magician too often does, and just doing enough to expose something whilst admitting to use trickery.  In his Messiah show, he posed as a John Edward’s type the-dead-talk-to-me guy.  (If you’ve never seen Crossing Over, don’t worry, it’s best to live life without.)

Derren Brown ends his show in Manhattan passing on messages from the grave to 3 New Yorkers.  It was classic Brown.  In a church.  Lights out.  Flickering candles.  Anyway, before he went in, he mentioned a key technique he would use was Cold Reading.  It’d also been used by “psychics” for 150+ years.

Popping round the web, two elements of Cold Reading can have a direct impact on selling.

Shotgunning

Imagine, you feel you’ve got someone on the verge of opening up, maybe it’s to divulge initial requirements, or dish the dirt on internal politics.  Shotgunning will generate more info for you, allow you to dig deeper.  You know several of the things that normally apply for a customer situation to exist, so rattle some off as many as you can and see which gains a flicker of an eyebrow lift, and home in on it.

Forer Effect/Barnum Statements

This is saying something essentially incredibly vague, yet the listener will feel you’re on the right lines and begin to elaborate for you.  I surfed about Forer and found long paragraphs that describe “you” and how you might feel.  By the end of the prose, some of it rings true, so you feel he really has got inside you, yet in reality, the same amount would resonate with absolutely anyone.  An application for this is knowing what pain, circumstance and aspiration is typical for your customers, and develop a page that describes it all.

I feel very lucky sometimes that, being an enthusiastic student of selling, every single day something happens that either teaches me something new, or reinforces something I may well have forgotten.

Yesterday I was having a business lunch.  Sounds decadent for 2006, but in reality was a simple burger and chips.  It was on London’s South Bank, at an eaterie called Giraffe.  Most of their staff are South Africans or Eastern Europeans.  Our waitron (S African speak for waiter/waitress!) did something incredible.

When I’d finished my (healthy option) freshly squeezed orange juice, she asked if I’d like another drink.  As she asked me she was nodding her head in the ‘yes’ manner.  I noticed this and thought it strange.  And ordered a (fat boy) hot chocolate with marshmallows.  Yum.

In my very first year of sales, a confidant of mine was Richard Lowther.  He’s now scaled the dizzying heights of HR Director for Oracle UK, yet at that time was a humble rep, just like me.  He taught me a load of comedy sales tactics.  And one of them was when you ask someone a question, depending on the response you want, you nod your head vigorously in the appropriate manner, and they’ll likely answer your way.

Having seen off my hot chocolate, she came back.  She was from Somerset West, just outside of Cape Town as it happens.  And asked me once more if I’d like another drink.  And once more the head was wagging up and down.

How impressed was I?!  Use of this in a subtle way is a winner.  I hope she goes far.

I got a great idea from a first-time meeting just now.  I’ve been in several such forums recently, as I’ve just taken on lots of bright new sales people.  Anyway, without giving the crown jewels of my prospect away, the particular service they sell lends itself beautifully to a ‘FUD’ approach; fear, uncertainty, doubt.  This is all about making the prospect worried about the consequences of NOT going ahead with your proposal.

You don’t need to know what their service is at all to appreciate their FUD question is a cracker: “what happens if your competition brought out a product and you didn’t know about it?”

And of course, this got me thinking, is there a simple, single question that I can develop for my salesguys that can be an if-all-else-fails back-up safety net to get suspects thinking?

Yet more body-language type techniques I came across today.  I was with a sales force that 2-years prior had a boat-load of skills training around pitching and posturing.  During our discussion (and bear in mind we spent only 30 secs on this) it seemed to me like reading a page from a pop-hypnosis book.

The idea is a prospect remembers something more because you’ve amplified it, so it becomes an anchor in their mind, forever lodging what you said with them.

The example I was given I may well work on in a comedy-sty-lee.  Let’s wait and see I s’pose.  Anyhow, imagine saying the sentence “this’ll be a real success”.  Then on the word “success”, you bang the table with your palm.  And that’s it.  The theory goes your prospect audience will associate you with success.

(nb: I came across this concept again when listening to a Chris Howard CD)

In a first meeting in the morning, the potential customer started off by saying how they remembered the initial cold call from one of my guys as it was all about “retreat and repeat”.  I’d never heard this description before so asked what it meant.

Apparently, it’s where you get objections and basically keep going through the loop of saying something along the vibe of ’that’s alright, it doesn’t matter, meet me and it’ll be apparent and worthwhile’.  So rather than handle perfectly an objection, you focus on re-saying what you’ve already said and hope the person gets out the diary.

I kinda get this…. if you think in the context of an overall concept, rather than the two-steps the name implies.  Afterall, if you’re selling something slightly different, through to totally new, then as long as the benefits appeal, why should the minutiae not wait until the meet?

I took a step back during a meeting with a fella called Paul Walker recently.  He was giving me insight into how come his salesrep retention rates were the envy of his industry.  And impressive they are; average tenure being seven-and-a-half years.

He believed a major reason was down to his company’s incentive approach.  One element that has really got me thinking is less carrott, more in-yer-face stick.  Their sales people have three separate targets, each for a different type of sale.  One contributes 50% of their commission, the other two 25% apiece.

If someone fails to reach their numbers for a quarter, then any commission they’re due against the individual target, is “banked”.  This means the rep does not receive their bonus at that time.  They only get it when they’ve hit their targets again.  Any commission so banked at year-end, is lost.

Apparently when they launched this scheme, they experienced a 15% churn of reps.  Yet now, they are proud market leaders, with a queue of people wanting to join them.

Is it seriously worth considering implementing such a regime in my sales team, I wonder?

Kyosei is pronounced, so I’m told, ‘kay-o-say’. 

Had an entertaining meeting early today with a guy called Phil Browne, with terrific growth plans for his Canon (photocopier to document management) reseller business.  His company has been going for several years, and we discussed their strategic theme; Kyosei.

It’s about a Japanese process where capitalism embraces social, environmental responsibility.  I’m sure a zip around the internet would tell me more, but what I was interested in, was its impact on Sales.

Phil thought it was fundamentally understanding, and getting across, you are genuinely concerned with acting in both party’s long-term interest and horizons.  To say he was pushing an open door citing such philosophy to me would be an understatement.  I often talk about being in a sale for the long-term.  It could be earning the right to gain further business at a later stage, or ensuring Returns over several milestones/periods.  And now I can mention the Japanese word for it!

I’m involved in 3 sales cycles at the moment that are all suffering from the same distraction.  Jam Tomorrow is a phrase, the origins of which eluded me during those dark, pre-internet days.  In sales circles it simply refers to a hollow promise of more business to come, if you hold on in there, which how ever much the buyer talks it up, never actually happens. 

It apparently comes from Lewis Carroll’s Though the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, in which Alice is offered ‘jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today’.

There are two times Jam Tomorrow rises up to smack you in the face.  The first is to help the buyer’s negotiation efforts for a bigger discount, thinking that they can play off the hope of extra business for discount today.  Never Fall For This Rubbish.

The second is when an initial sales campaign appears to be going so well, that your buyer contact offers to introduce your wares to someone else within the organisation, but who is critically, in a tenuously related area.  What the inexperienced rep does is rub their hands with glee.  ‘What a result it is to have even more people talking about buying from us’ is their naive thinking. This is becuase all this has ever done, in my humble experience, is delay everything, and often leads to no decision being made.

Of the examples I’m currently mixed up in, the real sticky one is where the UK wanted what we have, and thought they’d be able to get Europe to buy it for them.  3 months later we’re still to meet the Europeans and are in danger of seeing the UK priorities move on.  The way to avoid this kind of nonsense is to focus on one part of the pie first, and know you can be like the two bulls in the old story where they spy a field of cows in the distance.  The young one says to the old one, ‘let’s charge in and get ourself a lady’.  The old one retorts, ‘let’s walk over and get them all’.

I was reminded of the difference in the approaches of the sexes to selling, when running through an ideal first meeting template with one of my new winners.  When I entered sales over 15 years ago now, it was a rare occurrence indeed to find girls with order pads, and the boys revelled in this state of affairs.  Yet now, there is thankfully an imbalance correction fully underway.

There seems to be a general trend that those of us with a Y chromosome view life as a destination, whereas those without, see it more as a journey.  And this certainly comes across in our selling strategies.

When conducting an initial meeting - one where you need to establish requirements, order priorities, propose initial solution options, give credibility - there’s a theme of boys going for the jugular early.  Within seconds they go straight for the belt-buckle.  “You can see my wonderful product changing your life, right” type thing.  Yet they forget to nibble the earlobe first.  More the “any occasion spring to mind where this might be of use?” type line is often the most satisfying way forward for both parties.

The clear dangers of trying to force said hand down pantees so quickly, include the implicit lack of sincerity, the questions as to why the rush, and the lack of full appreciation as to what is wanted. So, boys, when you next think about closing someone, think about whether a succession of closes, increasing in amplification will get you better to where you ultimately want to go….

My boiler room guys are progressing nicely in London.  They’ve been getting a decent number of pitches out there to gain meetings with companies in our sweet spot.  A couple of times though, with a pitch only half-delivered, literally a nano-second into it, some people have simply said they’re “not interested”.

The first point about such an approach, is that they presumably expect their sales guys to call up people in exactly the same way as we’re doing, so this is unwarranted and hypocritical.

Moving on from this, I was reminded about a story I heard when someone was going for an interview, at post-code software wunder-haus QAS in London.  I’m indebted to my pals Rich and Stu for this.  It’s all about how to handle snap decisions that potentially don’t give you time to react.  The founder grew them from nothing to tens of millions inside a decade and was I understand, a sales animal.

A high-pressured sales environment, when someone arrived for interview he’d often make them wait an uncomfortably long time.  Then pop into reception and say something like “you not dressed right, leave now” and turn around.

What he was looking for, was for someone to say something along the lines of “….. I see, if something’s amiss, we can look at that, how about we sit down and talk it through so you can make an informed decision about me….?”  The Informed Decision part is the key.

So, when someone says they’re ‘not interested’ without even seeming to have the courtesy to hear you out, ask them to please make an ‘informed decision’ and see how you quell their storm….