I was judging presentations as part of a sales training exercise for a client when the first team up ended with a close routine suggesting the prospect be flown around the world to visit as a reference an undeniably aspirational location.

The three following teams picked up on this and dangled ever more exotic jollies.  Not happy to merely settle for reference visits, they also threw in hospitality ideas, including meeting F1 stars in Monaco.

Much merriment was had by all as each team tried to outdo the preceding promises.  There are though serious points to be taken from this.

I would personally avoid using hospitality as part of a first-time sale campaign.  If competition offers it first then I accept that it can be tough to hold your nerve, especially if they’re an incumbent.  It means you have to achieve better and deeper politicking, which can be an unattractive pursuit.

If the relationship is established, then as tricky as it is you ought really consider what development of your shared agenda the privilege should create.  I myself have attended all manner of envy-inducing sporting events across the globe on the most tenuous of connections which I’m sure would have made each paying firm’s boss apoplectic.

As for reference visits, the reality is that they are rarely truly required.  In a beauty parade there may well be some stipulation for one across all prospective vendors, but even then you can still frame the process to suit you, if you think about it hard enough and also utilise several communication options.

When you’re in a single bid situation, insistence on a reference visit can easily extend a buying cycle with all the associated trauma of potentially letting in an eleventh hour bidder or sideways obstacle to derail you.  I got so tired of this a few years ago that I made the visit part of post-signing acceptance (between delivery and invoicing to a max number of days) which seemed to work well.  This policy was especially useful given how irrelevant such corroboration turns out to be once the product’s already arrived.

Which brings me on to the best way to handle reference requests.  Validate instead.  If there is any way that you can let the prospect experience your prodcut for themselves, in their own (often simulated, but that’s fine) environment, then the benefits will be bountiful.

A main conclusion of this book should spark any solution seller into action: First impressions (and its sibling “rapid cognition”) are so powerful and so open to subconscious prejudice, that you must do all you can to control them in your favour.

Apparently many of us are expert in a particular thing. And when confronted with something in that arena, we instantly know the right judgement about it. This ‘thin-slicing’ means that as an expert, you can take only the slightest morsel of information, or a slim snapshot in time when exposed to it, and make an absolute decision, with clarity and correctness.

The book is terrific at taking you through the funnels, visors, constraints and freedoms that you must deploy in order to make the most of this stunning innate ability. Many can be readily adapted for the solution sale environment.

Thin-Slice Success

The first insight I’d say I gleaned, is to thin-slice your own deal success. What little things happen every single time you win a deal? They might occur in the blink of an eye, or they may be seemingly trivial (re)actions, steps or conversations, but each time they take place, you win. Once identified, what can you do to get them cropping up more often on every campaign?

Spot Emotional Override

From a psychological viewpoint, I found myself knowingly nod along to descriptions of positive or negative sentiment override. It cropped up in relation to whether married couples would survive (the answer always being no if Contempt surfaced) and can be felt whenever either +ve or -ve emotion overrides irritability. If you sense the latter, you’re losing the deal.

First Word Game

A new game I invented reading this, was to ask prospects for the very first word that enters their head when you mention … [choose a relevant topic of your choice]. Experts think differently, and as every buyer will think they’re an expert in their field, this test will uncover their true thoughts - and note that if they delay in any way, then perhaps they’re not on your side.

Never Pre-judge

One salesman was referenced, a car rep called Bob Golomob. A pair of atypical traits made him top achiever in his field. He’d always call visitors up the next day, and he never let initial impressions alter his approach. The latter proved critical. Scruffy students would bring their rich parent the next day to pay, as would confused wives their husbands and vice versa.

Crucial Decision Criteria

Learn the lessons of heart attack diagnosis taken from America’s Cook County Chicago hospital. Faced with iffy results and rising costs, they eventually focused on just 4 key criteria that provided diagnosis more accurate than deploying the dozens of criteria together that doctors heuristically used. What are the handful of key points that’ll determine your project success and put all others into the shade?

Exposing Prejudice

Before candidates were shielded from view, conductors never took on female musicians. With screens, they flourished. Where could in-built (yet hidden, subconscious) prejudice hinder your proposal, and what can you do to expose it?

And here’s a few one-liners

• according to topic guru Gary Klein, the key to decision making under pressure is simply to act. (ie make that decision and make it now)
• often a sign of expertise is noticing what isn’t there, or doesn’t happen
• for snap purchase decisions, limit the choice (the jam story was classic - only 3% of shoppers shopping at a display with 24 types of jam bought, whereas a whopping 30% stopped when the same space featured just 6 labels)
• margarine didn’t sell until changing its colour from white to yellow
• it’s the new and different products that a re always the most vulnerable to market research (in which cases it can’t be trusted)
• I loved how a ‘triangle test’ can fudge and confuse people’s expectations and answers (wiktionary definition: A test in which a potential consumer is asked to determine blindly which of three similar items is not identical to the other two.)
• Avoid ‘mind-blindness’ - the inability to make a correct decision - by making sure your heartbeat is not raised (no ‘arousal’) and that you have plenty of time

And finally, possibly my favourite passage is a brilliant lesson for any sales manager in how best to work with the people reporting for you. (It happens to be the musing of a war veteran who went on to become a hugely successful maverick commander):

On Paul Van Riper’s first tour in South East Asia, when he was out in the bush, serving as an advisor for the South Vietnamese, he would often hear gunfire in the distance.

He was then a young lieutenant new to combat, and his first thought was always to get on the radio and ask the troops in the field what was happening.

After several weeks of this, however, he realised that the people he was calling on the radio had no more idea than he did about what the gunfire meant.

It was just gunfire.

It was the beginning of something - but what that something was was not yet clear.

So Van Riper stopped asking.

On his second tour of Vietnam, whenever he heard gunfire, he would wait.

“I would look at my watch,” Van Riper says, “and the reason I looked was that I wasn’t going to do a thing for five minutes.

If they needed help, they were going to holler.

And after five minutes, if things had settled down, I still wouldn’t do anything.

You’ve got to let people work out the situation and work out what’s happening.

The danger in calling is that they’ll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake.

Plus you are diverting them.

Now they are looking upward instead of downward.

You’re preventing them from resolving the situation.”

Serena Williams is still on top of her game, yet looked down and out in her Aussie Open Quarter when four-love adrift to Victoria Azarenka in the second set, having also lost the opener.

But somehow she turned it around to triumph  4-6, 7-6 (7/4), 6-2.

As she walked towards the dressing room upon victory, Todd Woodbridge asked her what she was thinking at four-nil down.

Her first admission was, “oh well, at least I’m still in the doubles“, before astonishingly going on with, “I was actually thinking ‘If I lose today and I lose in doubles I think I can catch a flight on Friday’. That’s not what a champion is supposed to think, but that’s what I was thinking“.

I subsequently read that at 0-4, she shook herself up. Literally. The turnaround was incredible. It just goes to show, even when you think you’re history, a renewed attitude and starting over can heave you all the way back and lead to being perched on top of the podium.

As a footnote, it’s a shame that Jim Courier wasn’t on duty courtside (it looks like he only interviews the men) as his performances with the mic have been revelatory and often hilarious, and one of his mantras during his rise to world number one was that ‘it’s never over until it’s over’. They could have riffed together on that for a while I bet.

A BBC News  Hard Talk interview with Graham Poll turned up an interesting gem. He’s a former football ref who officiated at two World Cups.

The questioner asked whether he shared the lay-man’s commonly held belief that a good referee is an invisible one.

Poll replied that this was not the case for him. A good referee is one that you spot for doing something good. His examples included playing an intelligent advantage, or a visibly healthy rapport with the players.

It struck me that in many sales campaigns, salespeople can tread a line of neutrality. Yet to differentiate by striving to do something ‘good’ is a better policy.

And when it comes to what constitutes ‘good’, it is surely less about freebies and acquiescence but more about acting in a way that genuinely adds value to the buying process.

Whenever you first move into the seemingly murky world of solution selling, someone usually takes you to one side and suggests that the fog of war can be lifted by “mapping the process”.

With specific regard to sign-off procedures, I had a reminder of this when recently helping out on a deal worth around $150k.

Everyone had acknowledged a sense of urgency, so panic set in when the buyer-side uncovered that a ludicrously imminent deadline had been imposed. It was by the official purchasing unit for any end-of-period spend to be “committed”. There’d be no exceptions and any project that did not have such committed funds would be shelved for at least the next quarter.  This practically could mean shelving forever. It was harrowing news.

We rushed to map the process of everything that needed to be done together. Among the (documented) steps were:

1. The number of signatories and each person required
2. Proposal approval from Legal actions
3. Forms required by the Supply Chain Manager for authorised supply compliance
4. Another set of Forms required by Finance for budgetary reconciliation
5. Quotation process to effectively trigger Order Number generation

The precise tasks seemed pretty daunting considering the number of people we’d have to mobilise, but in the end it was managed within the tight stipulation.

Interestingly, only one task was not accepted before the deadline, and the reason for this was not foreseen at the outset. It also lead to another item being presented as a requirement. As these were both unknown by the buyer-team at the time of our meeting, an extension was granted to gather both extra pieces of information. Common sense prevailed and how refreshing it was to see from a procurement operation.

I recently spent a couple of hours in the wonderful company of a baboon troop, one of eleven around South Africa’s Cape Point Peninsula. I was fascinated not only by our cousin’s behaviour, but just as much by the story surrounding the fight to protect them.

It seems that as man encroaches upon their habitat, they’ve become seen as ‘problem animals’. Literally backed into a corner, their raids on human land have been greeted with the ultimate sanction.

Here’s six sales tips from the work of Jenni to protect the Chacma Baboons.

Cause

From what I can gather, Jenni’s passion was stirred when a troop of 18 baboons were all shot dead. They were culled because someone got irritated by frequent raids into a village. The raids though, were in fact only being done by a lone single baboon. The shooting of all 18 was therefore needless and savage. Jenni strove to educate the locals and protect the baboons through management, with monitors to keep them away from people. Can you put your latest sales campaign into such a compelling call-to-arms?

Remove Demarcation

Dealing with the National Park authority is an on-going challenge. They feel that anything that happens outside their boundaries isn’t their problem. With baboons though, they appear wrong. The issue is around pine trees. Baboons, as I can now testify, love the pine nuts. Yet an unmanaged campaign to remove all non-indigenous fauna from the park destroyed a favourite food source. This encourages the baboons to congregate on the borders of the National Park, where the trees have not been cut down, but, as you’ve probably guessed, the borders are next to villages. Where does someone’s action in your prospect buying team have implications beyond its borders?

Personalities

A stroke of fortune occurred when a vocal enemy of the baboons complained when he heard one baboon referred to by a nickname. He was annoyed that they were being humanised. Every baboon was then named. What scope lies for personalising your bid language?

Inaction Consequence

A government officer was procrastinating on a key decision. The unreasonable delay was frustrating the baboon’s friends. This exploded the day somebody needlessly shot a baboon - a shooting that a positive decision would have avoided. They picked up the shot animal, went to the offices, and put it on the desk of the person concerned. How dramatic is the urgency you can show for your proposal?

Special Events

George is almost 21. Although no longer an alpha male, he is still respected in his troop and is enjoying a few years longer than the normal mid-to late-teen lifespan. To celebrate this upcoming big anniversary, a special fundraiser is being held in his honour. What event can grab your prospect’s attention?

Awareness then Action

Fans of “aida” take note. From the very start, the protection team sought to raise awareness alone. Only after a groundswell was created, did they begin to ask for action. They felt that this was the only way and worked well.

I had a meeting with a chap called Francois tasked with setting up a new division for a firm that, in his words, provide software and services around ‘incident and warranty management’. This past decade they grew, mainly by acquisition, from 70 to 700 people.

They’verecently rolled out one single crm platform (which happens to be salesforce, but that’s pretty irrelevant) across the whole company.

Can you guess what’s happened?

He made three startling observations:

1. the worst offenders in failing to update are all the senior people (right upto the Board sponsor!)
2. there are too many items that they’re supposed to fill-in that surely don’t matter (also meaning it takes far too much time to update)
3. their management focus on the usage stats now available meant that people were spending way too much time trying to look busy for the report when they should be selling instead

The approach he’s implemented for his new team sees each group of four reps have weekly hour-long one-on-ones with their team PA who then does all their updates for them.

Will the lengthy and deep downturn trigger a long period of almost static economic performance or worse still, become a double-dip recession? This is a question taxing the financial press, yet many of the people I speak to, working in the field day-in, day-out, seem more optimistic.

One such chirpy soul is Ernest, Manager of business banking at a suburban branch of a multi-national bank. He informed me that his HQ had told him lending criteria would be relaxed during this year’s second quarter.

He then divulged that nearly all the business plans he receives are flawed. His observations were twofold.

1. They only tell me what money they can make, without saying how they’ll make it.
2. They’ve simply filled-in some web template, shrouding the real essence of the business.

These struck me as telling insight. When I delved a little deeper, on the first point details of how and when the bank would be repaid were always missing. And on the second, many of the plans he saw were ’supported’ by dept-of-trade officially endorsed service providers, which he felt were taking the money and running. Their lack of real interest in the long-term success of the business always came through.

An exchange I was privy to the other day reminded me of how often I’ve cringed when hearing a sales manager talk to one of their charges about a deal.

How is it that so often senior people forget how they themselves wanted to be treated when they were merely junior?

The infuriating ‘have you done this have you done that’ type commands are always so much better presented as a conversation. And such a journey can start with a question that strikes at the core of what it is to be a successful salesperson.

“What happens next?”

I cannot think off hand of any decent sales manager I know that wouldn’t be impressed by hearing a salesperson trot out a list of next actions (both desired and agreed) when first talking about any specific deal.

One sure-fire way to detect the experience of a solution seller is from their readiness to shoot-off their best piece of armoury.

My favoured general rule is to ignore what many would think that logic may suggest. For instance, if you feel that your best sales point is your price, cubreps habitually start off by talking about it (a lot), whereas real success only comes when you leave mentioning it until as late as possible.

One commonplace magic bullet for me has always been introducing a chief tekkie into the proceedings. In several arenas in which I’ve operated, buyers have adored meeting with such people. Their awkwardness, transparently non-sales ability, knowledge and ‘honesty’ can easily combine to outscore any opposition.

At a recent planning session I was involved with, a key pitch was being formulated. One person suggested that the chief tekkie (in this case, effectively an inventor) should be wheeled out in the initial forum.

I managed to alert them to the folly of this tactic. The main point I made was that as solution selling is a process, firing-off not just your magic one, but in this case all of your bullets, would leave no scope for genuine progression.

Not only must you always try and leave yourself with something else to go back with, but you should try and leave deployment of your best weapon until this last possible moment.

I realise that this assertion may be contentious. Yet for me, adopting this mindset both forces the salesperson to focus on the true solution benefits from the prospect point of view, whilst also enabing you to have a bankable close routine should you come down to a tight shortlist-of-two decision.