I fondly recall mentoring a cubrep in the late-90s.  I’m delighted to report his progress has been suitably stellar, currently residing in New York selling BI solutions on three continents.

I went along with him to a widget box-shifter in the Midlands once ostensibly to say nothing.  My aim was to give him the confidence (not that he was ever lacking in that department) that he was along the right lines and feedback on his next areas of development.

As ever in such situations, it’s always way, way better for the person (in this case me) that is introduced as someone of demonstrably high seniority to keep schtuum for the duration.  The only exception being when invited to contribute (usually to handle a sticky one) by the rep.  This should help in the general aim, which is to elevate the rep’s position with the prospect.

After setting the agenda in fittingly enthusiastic tones, the cubrep duly turned to me and asked if there was anything I’d like to add.  He’d only missed one thing.

With a room full of five prospect people, I simply asked that each in turn detail what is was they were hoping to get out of the meeting.  It uncovered some real gems.  Years later, the rep still remembered how helpful this tip was.

So it was with great satisfaction that I discovered this same technique used at a meeting that I myself attended yesterday.  The ‘Chair’ was a consultant specialising in specific types of web-community building and in effect, I was one of a dozen ‘buyers’ around a large table.

The very first thing the said Kiwi in charge did was to ask us to share with the room our personal musings on three simple questions:

Who are you?
What do you do?
What are you here for?

The responses were fascinating (from the very off throwing up both previously unimagined opportunities and roadblocks) and set up a truly cracking session.  This approach is an essential element of any sales meeting where you have more than one person around the table, especially given attendees you’re in front of for the first time.

Yesterday I facilitated a thoroughly engaging solution sales workshop.  The intent was to introduce a twelve-strong team to what entering this arena entails, given their historical emphasis on relationship and product orientated selling.  The live projects this $40m team worked through typically shared around a dozen key players, long cycles with two year gestations commonplace and average annual contract values in the region of $1m.

The single biggest factor I find that distinguishes top performers is their ability to develop and follow a repeatable successsful sales formula.  It’s very much about the process that they pursue.

In terms of ’strategy’, a large chunk of the day opened their eyes to detailed political mapping and the exertion of influence that this enables.

At one point we discussed the typical responses of certian categories of buyer when the team chief commented about the issues surrounding “binary beasts”.  These are people that will only see things in black or white, who’s default stance is usually black.

In the jargon, these tend to be ‘technical’ buyers.  Subsequent analysis  means it is paramount that you understand both:

1. the impact of the change to each person as they perceive it that your proposal would bring, and
2. what their key self-interest is and how they feel this is served by your proposal

I came across a summary written by author Rosabeth Moss Kanter (first known to me for Change Masters and When Giants Learn To Dance) after her then latest insights on innovation earlier in the decade, “Evolve!”  Although I do hold an interest in the subject matter generally, this summary struck me as relevant to people specifically selling a new product.

Her 8-point checklist forms part of a drive to achieve what she calls “15 minute competitive advantage”.  This is one path to success that suggests how you can stay slightly ahead of competitors, sourced from researching 785 executives.  There is much written about following game changing innovation dreams, typically through disruptive thinking, so such a message of successful incremental, baby-step innovation is notable by its scarcity.

So, although formed for a different purpose, this suggests to me that you would help propel take-up of any new offering if you can attach it to any of her eight characteristics, each contributing to the mindset that the customer can avoid excessive change:

Provable - preferably allow pilot or small-scale introductory use
Divisible - adopted in segments or phases and in parallel with current solutions
Reversible - if it fails you can easily return to life without it
Tangible - improve the customer’s life in a way it needs/values
Fits Prior Investment - builds on or makes use of sunk costs
Familiar - feels like things customers already understand
Congruent With Future Direction - in line with where customer headed anyway, no rethinking required
Publicity Value - makes customer look better to itself and others

London’s Daily Telegraph stole an incredible march on its rivals by publishing the expense claims of UK MPs.  Whatever your moral or political stance on whether the elected representatives are underpaid and overworked or cosseted fraudsters, you cannot deny that three weeks down the line on the exposé, it’s been the remarkable story that keeps on giving.

From the perspective of the solution seller, what is truly fascinating is the focus on the small amounts.  When faced with a choice between enormous sums of misappropriation (ranging from the “flipping” of homes to avoid tens of thousands of capital gains tax or the trillions in growing public debt) or the seemingly small by comparison spend on trivial frivolity, amazingly it is the latter that has really gripped the public (and media’s) attention and raised their considerable ire.

There must be a message in here for sales pitches.  We all like to draw out a magnificently huge sum that we can either gift or quash, but who believes us anyway?  Perhaps it’s better to home in on a semi-jokey demonstration of what we’d enable that is so comic as to render larger figures irrelevant?  Here’s a list of what the reporters feel are the top 20 most outlandish claims so far.  What equivalents lurk unloved inside your current campaigns?

£5 eyeliner
£185 lightbulbs
£1,645 floating duck island
£1.50 ice cube tray
£134.30 carved elephant lamp
70p a bag horse manure
59p chocolate Santa
67p ginger crinkle biscuits
£1.31 jellied eels
£112.52 toilet seat
£2,115 moat cleaning
£609 hedge trimming around ‘helipad’
£598 overhaul of ride-on lawnmower
£600 hanging baskets
£1,200 leather rocking chair
£200 pair of Kenyan carpets
£4.47 dog food
£35 toilet roll holder
£1.19 tea light candles
£119 trouser press

Presentation skills training is a rare privilege in the career of a rep.  I myself had a solitary half-day course in some central Birmingham hotel given as part of a national roadshow by a national training company.  And the truth about their views are that they added for me practically zero value beyond what I had already gleaned from business academia exercises, as it was more about ‘overcoming the fear of public speaking’ and ‘preparation essentials’ (albeit the latter is vital) rather than structures, themes and delivery.

Similarly, Pitching skills are a woefully under-nourished area of selling needs.  The most I’ve enjoyed in classroom conditions is barely an hour on this, yet I found it spellbinding. When I give courses to my customers (usually of an ad hoc nature for a small session as part of an overall sales conference agenda) I often choose to polish people’s pitch skills and salespeople regularly comment gratefully afterwards on its usefulness.

Most of us progress such capabilities through in-field analysis.  A sentence that goes down well in one circumstance you tend to remember and use again, perhaps with some evolution, in as many other situations as you can.

As the soundbite culture becomes ubiquitous, the pressure is subconsciously on to utter a phrase, just a few seconds in length, that people favourably remember you by.  Whether making a formal presentation, or an informal pitch, I was introduced to a new slant on this by way of Clarence Mitchell, the official spokesman for the family of missing toddler Madeleine McCann.

With a possible new lead two years on, he’s again been receiving airtime this week.  And I realised he uses a specific technique that I suspect he hopes will hammer home his desired message to the casual listener.

People in his profession get precious little time to get their views across.  I counted the words he spoke (as shown every quarter of an hour on the rolling news channel summaries yesterday) and in both the two versions of his statement shown, I calculated that each featured just three sentences.  This screentime contained either 102 or a mere 47 words.

Could you get every (any) point across in just 47 words?

And even in such a short space of time, one technique was such that it must be deliberate.  He regularly emphasised one particular word, thensaid it again immediately afterwards, but preceded by an adjective, in a manner that makes you think he’s correcting himself.

For instance, I feel that he aimed to leave the viewer in no doubt that serious people were on his side, calling them “detectives, retired detectives”.  Each time he wanted to elevate the impact of a word, he would use this ploy.

It struck me as a fascinating oral technique.  How often do you find yourself wanting to really ram home one particular word, but realise that outright repetition could scupper your steer?  Perhaps what you can do instead is Mitchell-ise the word.  Think of as many enhancing adjectives, and each time you mention the key word, use a different phrase immediately after with the two words together and carry on as normal.

Flicking through Miller-Heiman’s online resources, a pdf entitled Phone Prospecting Strategies To Get Your Foot In The Door naturally caught my eye.  The meat was on a single page, which is always a winner, although not so good were the accompanying cover and back sheets.  They’re superfluous and with better design and judicious editing, a preferable single-sheet ethos could be deployed.  Minor points, hey-ho.

They focus on a pair of cold-calling aspects.  The first talked about the critical need to have a ‘valid business reason’ to make the call.  Most salespeople by now have probably heard about this essential concept.

Which is just as well, as somehow, they decline to expand upon the vital subsequent knowledge required, namely what precisely constitutes such compelling pitching and how to craft one for yourself.  All the more incentive to employ them as consultants I guess.  My thoughts on this are extensive, but for another time.  So what struck me most about the doc, was one suggestion new to me, regarding voicemail:

“Start the message with your name, company name, and phone number. The tendency of the recipient is to start writing down your information before they even know what you want. If you back that up with a solid VBR, and repeat your name and number at the end, you are much more likely to get a call back.”

They believe that as long as you do this at the right level and keep it down to under 20 seconds, then you’re in.

How desperate for you is your prospect?  It’s an interesting question because the more they need what you offer, the swifter you should be able to close and, even better, the less you will be required to discount which, in these credit crunch recession times, could define your year.

I recently read a published prison diary.  For the first twenty-two days of incarceration, the well-known perjurer was placed in a high-security jail. Of the many facets of life ‘banged up’ that struck him, one was the protocol around the “England in the thirteenth century” practice of bartering.

General provisions could be ordered only on a weekly basis from the authorities.  Towards the end of each week he could spot the ‘addicts’.   Committed smokers, for instance, would be smoking half-cigarettes.  People wanting a cigarette (or chocolate bar or any other vice) but with no immediate means of paying, could get someone to give them what they craved, but the price would be high.

Such re-payment terms were dubbed “double-bubble”.   Whatever they wanted today, in order to pay back they had to provide twice what they were given.   A cigarette would be cut in half and handed over today,  meaning tomorrow a whole cigarette would be required to clear the debt.

Can your hoped-for buyers be in such a similar, hopelessly addicted place?

Let’s think in terms of information.  How often do you get asked for some little tidbit, document, report, intel or figures?  Do you simply rush to hand it over, safe in your knowledge that swift compliance must surely solidify any emerging relationship, to the logical conclusion of the exclusion of competition?

Frame that element of information less like a mere commodity, to be handed across without question, but as a precious jewel, with priceless value.  If someone duly asked for whatever-it-was, then in these circumstances, wouldn’t you demand a price for it, and make sure it was extracted?

So the next time a prospect asks for something, don’t meekly acquiesce.  Have a list of similar types of thing that you’d like to have in your possession already drawn up, and make the proposal that if they provide one of the items that you request, then in return you’ll give them what they want.  I’m sure that you’ll both qualify and progress.

When men get together here’s proof that it’s not just sport, the battle of the sexes and general nonsense that we discuss.  My friend Murray and I were reminding ourselves that our heydays of cuemanship were well behind us when, upon my missing an easy straight pot, I informed him that I’d just succumbed to Murrayism.  I framed this as the ability to turn something simple complex and so fail.  We spent the entire next round coming up with fittingly offensive and derogatory ‘-ism’ definitions for each other’s name, whilst offering spectacular and heroic ‘isms’ for our own names.

Behind the matey banter I realised that a serious point existed here.  Ask friends, colleagues and clients what characteristics, emotions, or adjectives your name an ‘ism’ might trigger in their minds.  How would this differ from your own perception I wonder?  What would you want your ‘ism’ to represent and how can you get there?

There was an event I was unfortunately unable to attend that I recently received some collateral from afterwards. It was on a subject that interests me partly because I myself often get paid for providing a type of service in this arena to salesteams, namely competitive intel.

My analysis on this area stems from dozens of separate projects undertaken since 99. I’ve even documented my experiences here, specific to selling new products, in my free eBook.

One item that was news to me, is that there is a Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, and it appears that they endorse a seven step framework for competitor intel.  Here’s a quick summary:

1. choose the ‘right’ competition (it may not always be obvious)
2. distinguish between the nice-to-have and need-to-know
3. focus on the environment around which you and your customers fit
4. determine the inference and action sought
5. consider the entire process, from collection to analysis
6. and also understand what storage needs and share mechanisms you need
7. know where you stand on the ethics of your project

And in case you need reminding why doing all this is important, practitioners are keen to point out that “inattention to competitive intelligence in the sales process leads to price cutting”.

In a recent clearout of ancient files, I could hardly believe my eyes that I still had a couple of mags someone had given me from 1993.  Such hoarding would normally be inexcusable, but on this occasion they were part of a box crammed with sales advice I collected from early in my career.  This particular publication has long since disappeared from our shelves and as my copies are headed to the recycle plant, here’s a couple of anecdotes saved for posterity that struck me as ‘kinda neat’:

A 90% Close Rate

A schoolgirl managed to sell an incredible 40,000 cookies in a fundraising drive by first outright begging for her target to buy two raffle tickets at $95.  After apparently lots of emotional pressure and continual nagging, she relented and said “well, how about buying these cookies for just $2 instead then?”  Nine out of ten immediately stumped up the cash.

Plant Hire Increase

A chap selling mechanical diggers was getting nowhere trying to convince people on-site to hire his bright yellow machines.  So he changed his audience and went after the surveyors in their offices.  Nothing unusual about that, but what he took was radical for their time.  He got a load of miniature toy diggers.  He found that when he popped a couple on the desk, surveyors would play with them.  They’d do things like grab a pile of paper clips and see if the diggers could pick them up.  They even made ‘vroom vroom’ noises pushing them around their desks.  As a result he got to talk in detail about his product’s capabilities and found that not only did his sales figures rise, but that more technically advanced and higher-charge vehicles were taken.