Someone with extensive experience dealing with special needs children was telling me the other day how you should frame a request in a way that doesn’t tell somebody to do something.

As most of us will acknowledge, issuing a military-style command can miserably miss the desired results. Screaming “you’re naughty, don’t do that again!” fails to stem the unwanted behaviour in a similar fashion to yelled instruction, whether to prospect or colleague.

Apparently, two simple ways to start off sentences can avoid this type of disaster:

I like it when …

It’d be nice if …

When I was first introduced to these, it was in the context of not slamming a car door shut (!) and immediately their power in the cauldron of a sales meeting struck me.

It’d be nice if we had verified figures for that …

I like it when we have all the facts to forecast this …

The list is pretty endless.

I’m often asked to run ‘training’ sessions among my clients. The nature of the actual ‘event’ is typically either a session around 90-minutes as part of a broader Sales Conference-style agenda, homing-in on one specific sales element (most commonly about selling new products at the moment) or a full day’s workshop tying several skills or themes together (the most recent being a detailed and live-account walk-through of Political Mapping).

My customer-base are aware I that possess such capabilities as most of my project work includes a similarly chargeable component to kick-start the support of their current key initiative. As such, when they feel that a need exists to improve upon or introduce a particular skill, I’m often an obvious port of call.

Such discussions do not then tend to be framed in terms of expected returns. This makes me feel that selling training as a standalone activity must be hellish.  Today’s environment for this reminds me a little of what faced PR agencies fifteen or so years ago. What is the sales trainer’s equivalent of going beyond mere column inches? And how on earth does this relate to pure sales revenue?

I mention this as I’m somehow on the email list of a small training company that just encouraged me to sign-up for evening classes.  I neither know them personally nor have any familiarity with their services, but one paragraph in their blurb did intrigue me:

“It seems odd to think of training as a means to generate profit however, an internal Accenture investigation indicates that we should do so. They carried out an extensive long-term study to measure the value created by their internal training. Their results revealed a 353% return on the money invested. In other words, for every £1 spent on training, they got back £3.53.”

Even setting aside the grammar and structure of this direct marketing message, I still find this disturbing on many levels.  First of all, I shudder when I think of how the bean counters and coders inside Andersen Consulting as-was calculated this Return figure.

There are of course, certain tasks that neatly lend itself to such calculations.  A made-up example.  Let’s say that I pay a reasonable amount for personal touch-typing tuition.  Whereas I once two-finger typed 19 words a minute, I leap to 67.  Is it then fair to say that for every £1 initially invested on this task, I’ve made the Andersen £3.53 (as 67 words are 3.53-times more than the original 19)?

If right, then how this relates to solution-selling is a minefield.  Furthermore where does their figure sit across the training universe?  Is it aspirational, or merely the bottom rung of expectations?

Here’s another angle.  If you charge $1,000 for your services, would you struggle to get work if you promised the company would recoup precisely $3,530?

Perhaps the difficulty is in attributing future success solely to the training delivered.  What is it you’re looking to have direct impact on?  Top-line sales would surely be a notoriously slippy pole to hang on to.  A raft of alternative KPIs exist, but again, how do you filter out the impact of outside factors?

Maybe this is why firms traditionally spend so little on training.  And that’s without introducing the really darkened deal-breaker of how to guarantee and maintain the training’s take-up, through whatever coaching or monitoring programmes are available.

I could riff on this all day, but I’ll restrict myself to a single take-away.  If salespeople pick a single skill that they want to learn, re-inforce, introduce or refresh, then as in most things, if you can express what you wish the impact to be in a single sentence, that includes numbers and timescales, then you’re half-way there.  Here’s a cheeky example I just thought of by way of example related to my days in the b2b software solutions jungle:

I will increase my new appointments from 4 to 5 each week by adopting [insert new behaviour just learned] starting now so that by the end of the quarter I’ve half-a-dozen better-qualified prospects than I have now to deliver 3.53-times more commission than I currently make : -)

Everyone has nothing but praise for Warren Buffett. He even manages to be self-confessed best-friends with his rival for Planet’s Richest Person, Bill Gates, in a world where surely Hollywood would dictate they are bitterly sworn enemies. As judged by the S&P 500, which has grown by a factor of merely 65 during his forty-year operation, his stellar performance is a ginormous 3,623.

In an eleven-minute segment with the always watchable Evan Davis, the near-octogenarian was quizzed on how he’s made so much money, in a maintained respected manner and through such turbulence (find the video and more Beeb content here). Three philosophies immediately strike me.

Investment Bucking

He elaborated on his creed to “be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy”. He appears to feel that you should always be doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

Asset Incomes

His long-term view was startling. Most people look only at realisation values, when the ‘right’ way is to look at “the stream of income that the asset will produce over time”. So many solution sales campaigns fall when the buyers do not share this outlook. You can but also only admire his remarks about how everyone ought to think of what business they run as being theirs and their family’s for the next hundred years, and make decisions accordingly.

Remove Complication

And to quote from the Beeb, “He believes that if a deal needs complicated calculations before you can decide if it is right, then it probably is not. He always leaves a “margin of safety”, he says, so that if things don’t work out as he’d hoped, he does not lose money.” That first sentence is a must for any solution seller to get their head around.

Fads and buzzwords can come and go, yet can you think of another concept that has spread so widely throughout selling in the last two decades?

A sales trainer told me that this seminal 1988 guide is the biggest shifting business book that its publisher, McGraw-Hill, ever had.  Ask any cubrep what “spin” is and they’re bound to recite the four types of questions behind the mnemonic; Situation - Problem - Implication - Need/Pay-off.  So widely embraced as a winning tactical approach is Spin that a review seems unnecessary of such a worthy addition to the sales canon.  Instead, here’s as simple a summary as I can muster on the key recommendations.

You could get hyper-critical about the data-gathering methodology flaws, or bemoan the unashamed shock-tactics to try and establish a firm ‘new’ category for the concept, but at the end of the day, the cricket-loving English-born author observes 35,000 sales calls in 20 countries and passes on irrefutable secrets of success.

Before briefly outlining Spin Selling, he does offer a few gentle reminders about the “larger sales” arena in general.  Here’s a few decent steers:

• Understand the extent to which purchases that once bought will be ‘visible’ by those who can readily associate failure with the purchaser. Such ‘visible’ scenarios are more tricky to sell into.
• Remember that buyer enthusiasm and recollection drop dramatically after your sales call.
• You must focus on the perceived value of your offering in the buyer’s mind and build it in their eyes.
• And one of my long-time soap-box rants, you really can think of Closing as the nice new lick of paint that puts the finishing touches outside your house. What is really important are actually the foundations, the structure.

A beauty of Spin is in its simplicity. Its first underlying theme is that there are four stages to every successful sales call:

1. Preliminaries
2. Investigation
3. Demonstrating Capability
4. Obtaining Commitment

The second, Investigation phase is the vital one where it’s all at.  During this phase it is essential to distinguish between the two types of Needs:

Implied Needs are ones that ineffective salesreps focus on more, they involve “mere” ‘problems’, ‘issues’, or ‘gripes’ and have little bearing on any final decision.
Explicit Needs are ones when the prospect actually mentions a potential solution. Where a concrete ‘action’ is a feature of the language used. Absolutely and completely latch onto these.

Clearly the former tend to be woolly whereas the latter comes with defined, tangible and measurable desires.

To satisfactorily uncover explicit needs, there are four categories of questions you must ask - the Spin questions:

Situation. Understand the general background but beware, as “buyers become bored or impatient at too many Situation questions”.
Problem. First, you must know what problems produce what values to the customer and make those outweigh your purchase price. Identify any drawbacks, dissatisfactions or problems.
Implication. Amplify the effect of the problem in the prospect’s words.
Need/Pay-off. What are ‘impacts’? Why are they important? What benefits do you see? Really draw out the eventual bonus.

Rackham provides the delightful Quincy’s Rule, after the 8-year old that said Implications are “Sad”, and Need/Pay-offs are “Happy”, to guide you further.

Also, think of a good doctor…
Situation is about your General Health.
Problems are Symptons.
Implications are the Causes.
And Needs are what the Cure will let you do.

He offers three major thrusts of his Spin technique:

1. You focus on Opening sales, not Closing them
2. Choose benefits that solve Explicit Needs, and
3. Remove the need to handle objections, by preventing them coming up in the first place

With this most powerful of weapons in your arsenal, take a tip from The Man Himself: “treat [spin] as a guideline, not a formula“.

And as if all this wasn’t enough, consider if you will his quartet of self-training Golden Rules:

1. Practice only one ‘behaviour’ at a time
2. Try the new ‘behaviour’ at least three times
3. Remember Quality before Quantity
4. Practice in safe situations

There’s a Global Sport Summit that this year is in London. Sport Coaches from around the world gather to swap ideas, and three major England coaches were caught by the BBC discussing how to get the best out of their star players.

Confidence

Fabio Capello begins by stressing that you must take into account cultural differences, before the startling admission that when he first took training, he was surprised at just how good his footballers were. But when they floundered in their first, and on paper relatively simple, match against Switzerland, he could see why. The players in training that shone, froze in the game, plagued by fear and a lack of confidence. He identified remedying this as his prime challenge. When later playing France, although a one-nil loss, he was pleased that at least for 35 minutes they played without fear. The next step was to prolong that period.

Perspective

Cricketer Andy Flower talked about the need for perspective, especially when dealing with “personalities”, typically a euphemism for trouble-makers. In this sense, everyone should know where what they’re doing fits in with the wider world.

Support Team

Rugby giant Martin Johnson then talked up the importance of planning training ‘to the minute, and to the metre’. Specialists can add value even for the smallest of tasks. Why rely on one sales trainer, when you could tap into the services of experts in tightly-defined fields?

I just saw a document presented to someone in the hope of gaining an order. It was one single sheet of paper and featured, rather prominently, a figure in the region of $75,000.

It included payment terms, bank details for electronic funds transfer, and seven ‘product lines’, none with accompanying individual amounts but which when aggregated, amounted to the aforementioned total.

For all the world, it looked like an invoice, plain and simple.

The recipient was baffled. To the point of annoyance. There was neither breakdown nor explanation. Their feeling was one of bewilderment as to what they were truly due to get for their outlay.

This recalled one of the first elements of training I ever received as a cubrep; Never let your quote look like an invoice.

There’s all sorts of intelligent tactics you can deploy. For instance, I usually use the word ‘investment’ in any heading that trumpets the arrival of figures.

A popular technique I utilise provides for different options. This is always a solution sale winner and whilst I know how buying-behaviour psychologists differ on whether you should propose a pair or trio of options for optimum influence, I’ve found simply that the key is to make sure you do at least put forward more than one.

It’s also worthwhile separating out costs along CapEx and OpEx lines. They often come out of different budgets in my world, so why muddy the waters and make the overall tot-up look bigger than it needs?

The bottom-line is that if your quote looks like a draft invoice, you’re missing several opportunities to further your cause.

In a doctor’s waiting room the other day I flicked through a pamphlet with tips to deal with ADHD children. Quite bizarrely I found most of them offered highly applicable tactics when faced with a difficult prospect - tricky in the sense of where you find attention often seems to wane whilst promoting your cause. Here’s a few extrapolated examples:

Get Attention. When they allow people to enter the room with something else, answer their mobile, or nip out to tend to something ‘urgent’, you’re in a bad space. So remove the chance of such disturbances happening.

Make Clear Rules. A sneaky one, but one that can really work if you set out the rules of engagement, so to speak, as early as possible. This will ensure you stay on your turf.

Set Up Routines. Another tidy tip. Ever instigated a weekly review of the campaign with a prospect or other such pattern?

Reward. Again, cheeky. Agreed upon rewards to deliver (typically but crucially not always the all-embracing ‘corporate entertainment’) when something has happened during the pitch process can be winners.

Can’t Or Won’t.  I do like this one. Understanding the real difference with these can be a clincher.

I’ve unhappily borne witness to bosses that are bullies. Pressure cooker sales environments can cause the unacceptable to appear mundane. Yet it needn’t become pervasive.

When I’ve seen sales management resort to bullying tactics it’s difficult to rein it in. Especially when the protagonist is answerable to no-one. Here’s why researchers believe bullying occurs in the workplace, as entertainingly reported by The Telegraph as the Basil Fawlty effect:

“Incompetence alone doesn’t lead to aggression. It’s the combination of having a high-power role and fearing that one is not up to the task that causes power holders to lash out. And our data suggest it’s ultimately about self-worth.”

Worryingly, the professor went on to say that,

‘the only way for a boss to permanently stop bullying was to either work hard enough to improve their competence or to resign’.

In terms of solutions, that could sound pretty bleak if you’re the victim, but at least one type of remedial action is absolutely not to be recommended, which I’ve also noted that people try to use. Do not placate the bully. As hard as it may be in the pursuit of self-preservation;

“excessive flattery — long the refuge of the frustrated subordinate — may not work in the long run because it might ultimately cause the boss “to lose touch with reality”

Over a round of toast laden with wonderful organic honey, my morning tea break led me to this delightfully paranoid article in the Times exposing 10 tips for spotting an unfaithful partner.

I instantly visualised the parallels between these relationship signals and Account Management disasters. For each one an interesting analytical door opens in the Farming world. For starters, here’s ideas from three initial eye-catchers:

Harmless Flirting - do you believe them when they say they’re ‘just keeping up-to-date’ on the competition and why would they need to?

Constantly Awol - why are they never around for you, nor returning your calls or forever late for your vital meetings?

They’re suddenly all over you - is the corporate equivalent of flowers and chocolates merely meant to soften the ultimate blow?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book has the deliciously sounding subtitle of The Impact Of The Highly Improbable.  For much of its first two-thirds, it fairly races along, making even the casual reader consider that they can indeed understand ‘philosophy’. You cannot fail but to be impressed by his constant insistence and reasoning that a financial crash was just around the corner, for instance.

The final third fails to ram home the promise.  I wanted to learn more around what I could do about (inevitable, unforeseeable) Black Swans, rather than detailed rebuttals of say, bell-curve theory.  And despite the author’s permission given to skip such sections, as the book wears on, the examples lack the earlier clarity and spark and seem more about settling academic fraternity scores.

Nevertheless, for solution selling salespeople, there are some ‘wow’ concepts that really make you think about how you can sell better.  Over the accumulated nine hours I invested in reading this book, I filled two sides of A4 (8½ by 11 for Americans) with notes to try and remind me later of such triggers.

The gist of the book is not to bother with prediction (or a forecast).  It is never accurate.  And some Black Swan always comes along to change the game.  These are rare and wild events, totally unexpected, that lie outside the bounds of the tunnel of possibilities and are ‘unknown unknowns’.

Here, often in the writer’s own awesome words, I restrict myself to twenty of the best sales take-aways:

1. the money’s in idea generation and organising your know-how into action
2. it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right
3. “retrospective plausibility causes a discounting of the rarity and conceivability of an event creating an illusion of understanding”, so avoid the “narrative fallacy” of weaving facts into a reality that could just as easily mean the opposite (”retrospective determinisms”)
4. add ’cause’ to a statement (”how likely is it that…”)
5. focus on process, not results
6. expose ’silent evidence’
7. it’s much easier to sell ‘look what I did for you’ rather than ‘look what I avoided for you’
8. more info never makes better decisions (”statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not necessarily provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones”)
9. question error rates of supposed expert’s predictions
10. beware that people ‘herd’ in their predictions closer to each other, rather than what really ends up happening
11. plans fail because of tunnelling - the neglect of sources of uncertainty outside the plan itself
12. the unexpected nearly always pushes in a single direction; higher costs and longer to completion
13. true serendipity only happens when you are on some kind of Quest
14. acknowledge the law of iterated expectations - if you expect something then it’s probably already happened (& similarly, when you think of tomorrow do you merely project it as another yesterday?)
15. randomness is just unknowledge
16. drive a culture that encourages the process of failure rather one where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment
17. invest in preparedness, not prediction (Pasteur said “chance favours the prepared”)
18. make a decision focusing on the consequences (what you know) rather than the probability (which you never can)
19. understand ‘preferential attachment’ style epidemics (the big get bigger)
20. The 80/20 rule can also be expressed as 50/01