salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Quite a few courtroom based movies have lessons for sales people.  The way lawyers ask questions is always fertile ground for learning.  In this case, the movie sees Jack Nicholson’s old school military leader duped by Tom Cruise’s young gun lawyer into admitting wrong-doing.  Based on a stage play, the dialogue at times is electric, as anyone remembering the final scene will attest.  Thanks to pals of mine in sales at British Telecom, here’s that very ending, as it could play out between a salesman, and one particular flavour of the sales-prevention department, Finance, when discussing the murky world of expense accounts…

Sales: “You want answers?”

Finance: “I think we are entitled to them!”

Sales: “You want answers?!”

Finance: “I want the truth!”

Sales: “You can’t handle the truth!!!”

Sales (continuing): “Son, we live in a world that requires revenue.  And that revenue must be brought in by people with elite skills.  Who’s going to find it?  You?  You, Mr. Operations?  We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.

You scoff at sales division and you curse our lucrative incentives.  You have that luxury.  You have the luxury of not knowing what we know: that while the cost of business results are excessive, it drives in revenue.
And my very existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, drives REVENUE!  You don’t want to know the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at staff meetings … you want me on that call.  You NEED me on that call!

We use words like comps, migration, discounts, flex licensing, global purchase agreements, butt-fusion.  We use these words as the backbone of a life spent negotiating something.  You use them as a punch line!

I have neither the time nor inclination to explain myself to people who rise and sleep under the very blanket of revenue I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it.  I would rather you just said “thank you” and went on your way.  Otherwise I suggest you pick up a phone and make some sales calls.  Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to!”

Finance: “Did you expense the lap dances?”

Sales: “I did the job I was hired to do.”

Finance: “Did you expense the lap dances?”

Sales: “You’re goddamn right I did!”

A couple of my customers recently have shown me a one-page doc they use to assess deal Qualification.  In the main, most sales training materials will have some kind of qualification checklist element. 

Probably the most widely known is “scotsman”.  It suggests you should conjure up questions/scenarios that come under the headings: Solution, Competition, Only us, Timeframes, Size, Money, Authority, Need.  The checklist part is that you have a scale of responses to each question, ranging from the one where you feel if applicable you are bound to be in a strong position, right through to one you don’t like the sound of. 

So, as an example under ‘time’, you may have a question that says “when is delivery required”.  Possible responses could be ’yesterday, today, tomorrow, next week, whenever’. And depending on which one of these applies, the trick is in finding or influencing an account so that your preferred response is theirs also.

The problem with such checklists, are that they’re a stand-alone word doc, and sales guys - whilst all acknowledging their usefulness - rarely fill one in.  Consequently, such an imprtant part of the process is rarely embedded as part of the sales persons campaign routine.

People have different names for them as well.  The two I just came across are called “Key Security Indicators” & “Opportunity Assessment Worksheet”.  Just these names alone should provide insight into why they are useful.  The former relates more to questions on scale and relationship, helping to identify areas where we are weak and need addresssing.  The latter sees more whether a deal is in a sweet-spot range, and if not how it could be moulded so.

Not only great for salesreps, I believe that if you as a sales manager say that nothing can go on the forecast without your Qualification Checklist, then you will make more sales.  So, to help, I’ll dig out some of my old ones to illustrate further….

I was having one of those semi-intellectual chats you have after a bottle of fine 12-year old single malt whisky, with a top pal of mine.  He’s quite into reading books on business and gave me a hefty tome from 91, called The Great Reckoning by James Davidson & Wiliam Rees-Mogg.  I was quite intrigued, because when I first got into reading the (so-called) quality press, The Independent launched, and Rees-Mogg used to write pretty insightful political analysis in a column for them.  Also, my friend Henry mentioned that it’s a book of predictions, and what they’d forseen before had come true.

Their topics are political and economic.  And I began enjoying the use of words, but a bit frustrated at how unwelcoming the flow of the text actually was (not that mine is any better, but if I was being paid to write, I’d make sure it wasn’t impenetrable!).  Then I started to become increasingly annoyed at how many times I gestured to throw the book down, and started swearing out loud about bits.

The deal is, I was hoping to glean pointers as to what business and sales opportunities I could take from it.  Yet absolutely everything was negative, negative and negative.  They don’t have a single word to say that was optimistic.  I hate people like this. 

There’s nothing worse in a sales team than someone always moaning.  If you can’t see the half-full part of the glass, then you should do something else.  If you think the Japanese, American and European economies will collapse within months, that’s fine, but how would you ameliorate the situation?  Or how would you survive in its aftermath?  Who wants to hear someone all doom and gloom, with no remedy profferred?  Sales people are fixers, problem-solvers, do’ers.  So such a book full of ‘the end is nigh’ for me is a complete waste of time.

Even in 91, with global recession, technology removing layers of jobs and middle-management being eradicated, you knew things would get better.  And would you know it, the later nineties saw the internet open people’s eyes, and the noughties heralded the new Indian-Chinese wild west.  Both signify huge opportunities.

Whenever someone thinks something is on a downer, you’ll be seen of in better light if you can justify an argument that says at the end of the rainbow, there is indeed a pot of gold.

There.  Got that off my chest.

My new boiler room guys in London have been having fun today.  They’re going through the building-a-funnel phase from scratch.  To do so, they need to i.d. suitable companies that could well be our customers of tomorrow.  What they’re occasionally encountering is the British disease of gatekeeping, masquerading usually as “why do you need to know that” and “we don’t give out that kind of information” and “send me a mail and we’ll see if we can tell you”.  All nonsense.

As I told my guys, we’re only doing precisely what they expect their sales people to do, so to give it the old ‘high and mighty’ is a bit rich, and hypocritical.  Every now and then of course, some clown will be all jobsworth.  The general rules to follow, I’d suggest are fourfold:

1. Remind them you’re not after anything confidential, the crown jewels and coca-cola’s ingredient ‘x’ are safe. 
2. You’re not trying to sell something, merely give someone relevant the opportunity to see/hear some info.
3. You’d like to make contact with someone relevant, provided certain criteria apply…. and does that criteria apply again, please?
4. If this fails, ask to be put through to someone else, preferrably an admin person from the department concerned, to speak to direct, and ask required qualification questions to them personally.

Been doing some work with my customer service guys which I realise can help sales people.  I’ve never been a fan of seeing the same word used more than once within a piece of prose, and I kept seeing ‘increase’ & ‘decrease’ cropping up in their reports with irritating regularity.  So I got them to do an exercise to think of alternative “impact words” to ‘increase’ & ‘decrease’.   For more, slip into something comfortable, like www.thesaurus.com! For now, here’s my guys’ quick brainstorm:

‘increase’ is better presented as….

jump, gain, conquer, dominate, brighten, soar, rocket, strengthen, add, develop, build, reinforce, multiply, bolster, construct, heighten, elevate, magnify

‘decrease’ is more evocative as….

waste, delay, rob, cost, plummet, loss, fall, decline, drop, squander, wreck, destroy, ruin, reduce, weaken, erode, collapse, obliterate, pilfer, taint

The outcome is clear, a more colourful picture is painted in the prospect mind’s eye through use of such words, so is there a word you repeat all the time? If so, simply swap in a powerful alternative every now and then.

Just been training up a couple of super ‘boiler room’ guys in our London office.  They’ll be spending most of their time over the next quarter getting up to speed and building a funnel.  During our first few sessions, one of them asked how they should handle it when a prospect tries to quickly fob us off by simply saying they’re doing so well in general, that they can’t see themselves wanting any help in any respect, let alone with whatever-it-is we’re peddling.

It occured to me that this objection is actually one of the real ‘pats’, in other words, one that people tell you over the phone just to get rid of you in a flash.  There are not real objections, and overcoming them can earn you instant respect from the person at the receiving end of the line.

I came up with 3 approaches that we workshopped around:

Can’t see around corners

How can you be sure about not wanting something without knowing what we can help you with?

Sunshine investment

Surely the best time to look into new ideas, is when the good times are here!  Industrial history is littered with former top dogs that ended up having a short-lived time at the top, and one reason for this is that they perhaps didn’t feel they’d ever be toppled, so didn’t look at anything at the time.  Who’d want to fall into the same trap, eh…?

Not about problems

Many people may feel when someone cold-calls them, it’s to solve a problem.  How about if you don’t talk negatives, and rather than resolve thorny issues, you instead lead to lands of milk and honey?

Heard about the “freakonomics” phenomenon?  It’s all about the book written by a self-styled rogue economist, Steven Levitt, who feels that the discipline should be used to explain how the world really works, but lamentably seldom is.  And pretty impressive a read it is too. 

He poses 5 random questions about life, and during explanation runs through insights that leave you aghast with inspiration.  His daytime-TV-type headline grabber revolves around ‘where have all the criminals gone?’ with the answer being that legalised abortion prevented them existing.  The data and methodology used to compile his thoughts makes for compelling hypotheses.  As with many of these books penned by Americans, it is far too insular, and the total absence of scenarios and evidence from any other country can prove a barrier, but by persevering, I realised there are 5 awesome tips on how to win more sales.  Here they are (with page numbers added for reference from the UK Penguin Culture paperback printed 2006):

Information Asymmetry (p68)

This occurs anywhere an expert uses their superior knowledge for their personal benefit, rather than the pooled gain of both buyer and vendor.  The jugular he goes for belongs to estate agents, a popular choice I’m sure.  The lesson for salespeople on this one, is simply remembering to expose where a rival sales person, or seemingly trusted 3rd-party advisor, may have incorrectly said something to sway credence away from your solution.  Uncovering Information Asymmetry successfully, would provide you more sales.

What determines a Job’s pay? (p105)

Interesting if you are wondering how much you are worth, or how much a new position you want filling should merit.  A job’s rate of pay is determined by 4 factors:

1. Number of people willing/able to do the job
2. Specialised skills required
3. Unpleasantness of job
4. Demand for services job fulfils

Cause or Correlation? (p139, 161)

Understanding the difference between these two can throw several bones your way.  When it rains it is cold.  Yet is does not rain because it is cold.  Just because two things tend to happen in sync, does not mean they make each other happen.  It struck me this is a great questioning technique to have when uncovering needs.  What typically happens when… what causes that…. And so on.

Conventional Wisdom (pp89-92)

There is a huge tirade against Conventional Wisdom.  I immediately bought into this, as I remember when I first got into sales I read a lot around the subject, and Harvey Mackay’s ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ was an enjoyable anti-convention romp I fondly recall.  The point for sales people, often you have to challenge the ‘conventional wisdom’ to progress your sale. He uses arguments you can use too, like the inventor of the phrase, economist JK Galbraith doing so to expose its flaws, and the Iraq war being founded upon such misplaced principles.

Incentives (p20)

He believes economics is the study of incentives; how people get what they want/need, especially when others want the same thing.  This is worthwhile as it focuses on what incentivises someone to truly make a decision in our favour, something often neglected in the rush to prove feature-worthiness.