There’s an annual British Science Festival on at the moment. It slyly never fails to generate endless hours of material for afternoon radio phone-ins. One of this year’s headlines though happily had some decent meat to it from a sales perspective. In their own spin, the New Psychology of Leadership, sought to change accepted wisdom on leaders.

“Traditional approaches to leadership see it as very much an ‘I’ thing - as something that resides in the character and qualities of leaders in isolation. Fresh research, however, shows that leadership is much more of a ‘we’-thing and that to be effective, leaders need to build a sense of shared identity with followers.”

As you’d expect, there’s all sorts of broadsheet assessment of the event itself, this story included. As noted by the FT’s correspondent, it heralds the end of the “Big I Am”, the Daily Mail leant towards how great leaders listen, rather than bully, and the Irish Times liked the finding that leadership was now about ’social identity management’.

I’ll try and extract the main points for any of us sales people that either manage an overall sales team, a specific bid team, or even seek to ‘manage’ a customer-side unit, that come from this study of 81 world leaders and 85 self-help books. Starting with the Irish Times,

[The] study of [81] world leaders by Prof Alex Haslam and Prof Kim Peters of the University of Exeter has established seven “leadership secrets” for success:

1. Be sensitive to followers;
2. Be positive and inspirational;
3. Treat followers with respect;
4. Work hard for the group;
5. Meet or exceed followers’ expectations;
6. Support followers;
7. Don’t be overbearing or arrogant.

From the Daily Mail,

[A leader is] someone who is always looking to their followers and who is concerned about their relationship with them.’

The researchers identified a ‘leadership trajectory’ which eventually sees leaders fall from grace.

This happens when, instead of recognising that their success depends on keeping a good relationship with their followers, they begin to believe their own hype and the decline in popularity begins.

Good leaders must also hide the fact they are trying to be ‘one of the people’.

And from the FT,

“The patterns that emerge challenge traditional models of leadership which suggest that this is simply about the character of the people at the top,” said Prof Haslam.
“Instead they suggest that leadership is always bound up with followership, and that groups work best when leaders and followers perceive themselves to share a common sense of identity.”

Spurs boss Harry Redknapp enjoyed the bonhomie of a Football Focus interview today which chose to major on his England and Champions League aspirations rather than dodgy transfer dealings.

With a nod to his reputation for astute man-management, when asked how he gets the most out of players he answered that it was “all common sense really“. I normally switch off when anyone starts an explanation this way, because it is never normally common sense. And so Harry proved.

To paraphrase, he rattled off a pair of important aspects to him.

play people in their proper positions &

make them want to play together

Leaving aside the astonishingly obvious observation that these appear to be polar opposites of Fabio Capello’s current England regime, I couldn’t help but think of how well sales teams would do to heed this creed. The number of initiatives I’ve seen where the ingrained farmer is now expected to hunt, people immersed in one sector are mysteriously transferred to an alien other, guys prefer to operate in their secretive silos and an absence of teamwork that can’t be magically created by a jolly night out are legion.

One of the two biggest wastes of a new business salesperson’s time is post-signature firefighting. Similarly Account Managers hate having to be the frontman for delivery problem apologies.

Zappos are an American-only billion dollar shoe etailer. Founded in 99 they are, according to the Bloomberg Venture show I saw where Cris Valerio interviewed chief exec Tony Hsieh, renowned for legendary customer service. So much so that they’ve branched out into corporate culture consultancy.

Before the solution sales punch, a few entertaining asides. Hsieh helped start what he thought was a pioneering banner ad firm in 96. They simply emailed a handful of sites asking if they’d be interested in having their ads managed, and several replied saying ‘yes’. This happened within a week and prompted the team to give it a go as a proper business. Link Exchange was sold two years later for $265m. Hsieh was 24. One problem he noted was that in the run-up to selling, he used to fear getting out of bed in the morning. He felt he’d lost cultural control. A big mistake firms make, he believes, are that growing companies are desperate to put any body into a seat, most hire too quickly and fire too slowly.

Having joined Zappos a couple of months after launch, buying-in during 2002, success was built on free shipping both ways, free returns, and delivery that day. They deliberately morphed their mission from wanting to be the best shoe store on the web, to being the best service experience online.

One fascinating mistake was spending $75k on a marketing billboard at the San Francisco Giant’s baseball stadium. They tracked its impact during the season and analysis showed that they only won three new customers from it. Yes, $25k a new customer.

In terms of solution selling, the interviewer lifted the lid on their gross sales being $860m yet after accounting for returns, they were only $520m. Far from being a negative, this was incredibly positive according to the response. The 50% margins and relatively small shipping costs meant they still made a profit. Then the killer point.

Customers that do not return are not as profitable as those that do.
The more that customers returned, the more profitable they become.
They get more experimental, order more styles and brands etc, and overall buy more

The implications for this are far-reaching. It brings to mind research I was once presented by a direct marketing expert that found the more outrageous the offered no-quibble guarantee, increased sales result. Can you identify a similar ethos for your products and get buy-in to this from above in your sales operation?

Iain Barclay is Hunter. His detective exploits first appeared in the BBC’s Five Days mini-series.

When under the triple pressure of abhorrent case, lack of manpower and sleep deprivation, we see him either make snap decisions then changing his mind straight away or pausing for reflection, head in hands, before making a decision and forcefully going with it.

When he needs some specific, key info from one of the victim’s family, he’s reminded by his partner (Amy Foster) that direct questioning would be unlikely to reveal the true answer.

This reminded me so much of meetings arranged with prospects maintaining a deliberate distance to glean a pivotal piece of intel. An outright question can so often lead to the shutters going up for good.

The Hunter’s response?

Cloak it

He recommended that you ask a broader question, the answer of which would unwittingly lead those interrogated to uncover the vital info.

We’re often taught not to shy away from the direct approach, but as we all learn, a sideways route can sometimes be the only way around.

Mix the science of why people buy with the evangelic vigour of television reps and you get the optimum behavioural economic infomercial pitch.

I know this via the FT’s deliciously irreverent Undercover Economist’s suggestion of a perfect pitch based on such principles.

He believes there are half-a-dozen main psycho-strands of the field a salesrep should deploy to nail the sale. They are:

1. Make them feel like they already own it
2. Create aura of losing out if you miss out
3. Drop higher anchor price than actually applies in their mind
4. Shroud reality in complex pricing models
5. Tell them everyone’s buying
6. Chuck in a freebie at the death

And here’s the application of these he imagines for a mythical product from the mouth of a rogue rep.

“The TimCo smokemaster doesn’t retail for £200; it doesn’t retail for £100; it doesn’t retail for £50” (anchoring to a price of £200)

“if our lines are busy, please try later” (social approval)

“the smokemaster is not available in regular stores” (loss aversion)

“but wait! When you buy the TimCo smokemaster you get the TimCo soup knife absolutely free” (complex pricing and use of “free”)

I had a dental check-up today. The dentist and I were chortling about how infrequently grown-ups visit the chair of torment when he mentioned something remarkable.

You can normally halve it

…referred to how long people think it is since they last attended surgery. If they say it’s a year, then it’s likely been nearer two.

He didn’t say this in a Dr House “all patients lie” way, merely that time flies and people often lack any tangible reference point to pin down the precise lag from their previous consult.

I immediately wondered whether the same effect impacts prospects when they try and quantify an issue? I leant towards thinking that it indeed does.

In fact, it probably works both ways. A number is likely to be either halved or doubled.

Ask them how many hours they lose because of some bottleneck, or how much more productive they’d be if it were cleared, and these two phrasings of the question (experienced versus desired) could yield two wildly differing figures.

The trick is, you suspect, to be able to apply the Dentist’s Fix to them so that you sufficiently interrogate until the real amount emerges.

The Westminster village prefers to peddle irrelevant tittle tattle these days rather than offer practical assessment of Government action. So I was happy to catch almost by fluke the current Coalition’s intent to instil an horizon shift in their approach to management. Cameron and Clegg determine their horizon shift as,

“moving away from short-term obsessions towards investment in the future”

One manifestation of this will, we are told, be seen with ministerial tenures. I was horrified to learn that under the previous regime, the average time a minister held particular office was only a remarkably unjust 1.3 years.

As the combined Centre-Right are jumping to point out, this had more to do with generating annual headlines through an unnecessary reshuffle rather than the important business of a guiding long-term purpose. Barely giving people long enough to get to grips with their post inevitably hampers prosperous performance. As Clegg explains, longer occupation will result,

“This Government recognises that constant reshuffling of the ministerial deck… is not conducive to good government, and that we will aspire to greater stability in the way ministers are allowed to govern.”

Regardless of political colour, once these remarks sank in, I felt that I’ve seen countless sales people, managers and teams flounder because they focused on short-term fixes instead of trouble-free long-term running.

There’s always next month, quarter or year. In many ways it helps to be the person taking over after a disastrous preceding period, right?

My suspicion is that a similar horizon shift would benefit most salesforces out there. Refusing to chop and change for the sake of it, to be replaced by commitment to seeing out the year and a focus on paying  structural attention to underlying causes of instability would fundamentally improve results. To the extent that manageable, sustainable growth would be assured.

Of course, the cut and thrust of selling would mean that such a mindset alteration could only work if it came from the very top. How many sales leaders have the appetite for such a worthwhile revolution?

No! Not another pie! I rail against any seller that parades a pie chart or histogram in their deck of slides. Doughnut slices and skyscraper landscapes are surely a major bane of an audience’s life. They are useless. They are not fit for purpose. They are not memorable. They shroud the real point.

So what joy, courtesy of background CNN in an office reception, that I saw the Google Newsmap. It visually trends news stories by volume of recently published articles. Here’s a thumbnail screengrab from lunchtime today, Wednesday 8 September, with the UK tab clicked.

I loved it. You can play with topics, and thereby colours, timelines and territories.

Now. Ever heard of the ‘billion-dollar-o-gram’? The genius that is self-styled “data journalist” David McCandless created it. He aims to make sense of incomprehensibly huge numbers, comparing different billion-laden amounts. Here’s another screengrab.

They both open up a whole bunch of winning ideas for alternatives to the outdated pie and bar charts.

I immediately wished that the last prezz I witnessed had rather have applied this technique when it came to describing the financial breakdown of a new venture’s business plan. Why on earth show the summarised balance sheet as a table, and the odd donut, when you can do this?

Next time you’ve several different classes of ‘data’, especially if there are sub-sets within them, fill your Powerpoint page with boxes, corresponding to their weight, point out a key measure that is of surprising size, and your audience will actually remember that slide for sure.

I happened across spirited Techcrunch praise for a 20-yr old that’s just had her fledgling firm funded. Intriguingly, there’s a 2-minute video where she’s asked to explain the wonders of her invention.

You’d expect a sassy, snappy pitch. Surely someone in this position would have a seasoned approach, and have the sell off-pat. I know you can argue this was all a tad informal and the like, but really, this stuff is important and should be second nature so is unlikely to be far removed from how the pitch ran in meetings with prospective funders.

Watching it yourself, there’s strangely only three noteworthy tips, along with a general lesson to avoid unnecessary waffle. There’s a decent start from an intro summing-up sentence.

A real-time financial dashboard for businesses

But there’s a snag. There’s no differentiator hammered home here.

What’s the angle? Where’s the edge? Why could I not live without this? How will it change my life?

Unfortunately, there then follows 30secs of redundant nuts ‘n bolt feature-style description. Things eventually pick up with this proof.

We launched just about a month ago
We have a few thousand businesses using us
We’re tracking a few hundred million dollars already

Great evidence, albeit in woolly roundabout language. No need to be so modest in dropping it casually in as an afterthought though… how bizarrely un-American.

Then there’s the meat. Everyone loves a good demo. The prevailing venture capital wisdom appears to be get into the demo as early as poss. I tend to concur.

It seems harsh to critique her demo technique, as the purpose of showing her pet client’s superb custom-made table tennis ball sales on her iPad appears more to do with proving the service exists and looks App-y enough rather than showing any key benefit. It would have been cool to see the one figure (or game-changing click) either she herself thinks is so unique or her Mr Ping Pong always goes to.

The pitch ends with a tantalising statement from the cameraman.

So it’s basically Mint for businesses?

I do like the approach of using established market leaders as frames of reference. Even though I myself am unfamiliar with ‘Mint’, hopefully it means something to her target demographic, as marketers like to say.

All in all, a pitch with clinch is always a good one, even if there’s room for improvement. Nevertheless, congrats go out to Jessica Mah for securing inDinero’s sought seeding, and all the best for future growth.

As you’ll gather from my blogsite straps, a wish I hold dear is for more sales people to become chief execs.  Flicking through an old back-up drive from 2003, I discovered a document from a thoroughly engaging chap I knew back then called Paul Morris.  In 2004/5 I learned that after 33 years at one of my then customers (Lexmark, previously a division of IBM), during which time he progressed from sales exec to chief exec, he then left to branch out on his own.

When he gave me the doc I remember him lamenting that he reckoned it contained the basics to which many a salesrep forgot to adhere.

It was from a presentation on selling fundamentals that he believed stood the test of time, and was called “10 Ways To Win”.  His sage view was that these provided a platform of “professionalism” (the eleventh way to win) which could exert he felt up to 20% more influence on any given sales situation.  Here’s the ten tips, and see if there’s one ‘basic’ that you could re-introduce into your process from the famed blue-suited IBM old school of sales:

1 Confirm In Writing

With the advent of email there really is no excuse. Even the laziest of reps should fire off some kind of summary or call to arms. Each meeting should generate two pieces of documentation at a minimum; one confirming what will happen beforehand, one confirming what did happen afterwards.
It is vital to keep on selling while you are not there. Quality documentation achieves this.

Remember the adage ‘people only remember 20% of what you said’? Well, even if its trying to recount what happened last night at the bar, or last week in the sales meeting, no-one ever remembers everything, so write and they always have a reminder.
Writing also gives an air of professionalism. Do not allow them to think ill of you in the age-old “idiots pre-sale means idiots post-sale” manner.
And of course, confirming in writing allows you to put your conclusion and its special spin in, and to emphasise the key points all over again.
Finally, wherever possible, develop and use standard letters. It both saves time and makes the whole process so much easier.

2 Smile

It is extremely difficult for someone to stay annoyed for any length of time. Everyone likes to deal with “mister nice guy”.
You can say virtually anything with a Smile on your face.
Smiling puts you and your prospect in the right frame of mind - think of all the telesales people that have a smiley face drawn on a post-it stuck on to their phones…. Smiling works.

3 Do Not Argue With The Customer

Arguing belittles customers.
Arguing makes you appear arrogant, and no-one buys anything off arrogant people.
Occasionally it is sensible to be fallible, and let the other person “win”.
There is an unwritten rule of sales-etiquette, that you never talk over, steam-roller and argue with a customer.

4 Listen To What They Are Saying

How often do you hear someone say “you’ve two ears and one mouth - use them in that proportion”?
Employ “Active Listening” where you summarise what has been said and test your understanding of it back to the customer.
People only buy from Listeners, as opposed to Pitchers.
Wait for your customer to finish. Not only is it courteous, the odds are butting in will lead you to miss out on a vital point.
Listening identifies what people really like about your solution.

5 Be Interested In Them & Their Company

How often have you been in a meeting and delivered a cracking opening pitch, for the customer to start by saying “let me tell you about our business”.. Everyone loves to talk about what they do.
Look at their share price. It’s a great way to open up someone as to how they’re really doing.
Look around the office. Even a calendar on the wall can betray a secret passion. The usual suspects are pictures of golf-days, trophies and children’s portraits. Probably in that order…
Show an interest in their job. What exactly does their role entail? I bet even their spouse doesn’t ask that…

6 Expectations

Never Guarantee Anything. There is nothing worse than setting an unrealistic expectation and then seeing your credibility completely shattered by falling short
Make yourself look good tomorrow, rather than today. If something can happen in a fortnight, quote a month, and be seen to exceed expectations and revel in the glory.
Provide Health Warnings. Be prepared to warn the prospect that everything might not be perfect. After all, it could be the first time you’ve ever worked in that environment, so teething troubles might crop up. And it’s not about what the settlement cracks are, it is how you sort them out that counts.

7 Repeat The Selling Campaign

Prospects only remember a fraction of what you talked about in a phone call, in a meeting. Studies into this suggests only ever as high as 20%. So, consider single-issue transactions where applicable - it’s like the old adage about eating an elephant, a mouthful at a time.
Many buyers will fail to realise the significance of what you say at the time you say it Ram home the message after, via email, letter, fax, carrier pigeon, and by their colleagues reminding them.
People forget. Constant reminders are necessary. There is a wonderful sales concept that being a “rep” is not about “representing” your firm, but about “re-presenting” your ideas.
Personnel change - how often do you find yourself having to build rapport with a brand new person?
Competitors are sneaky. Amazingly, some of them actually canvas our prospects regularly. Be prepared for this and their traps by repeating the selling campaign.

8 Remember The Short & Long Term Objective

Don’t get sidetracked.  It can be easy to go down a blind alley, getting back with different quotes or meeting someone deemed ‘influential’.  Understand where each task fits in the grand scheme of things.
Make sure you ask the Questions.  Find out if your objectives are feasible and the reasons why that’s the case.
Make sure your prospect understands your objectives.  After all, to truly succeed, aren’t they really shared objectives?

9 Sell To Everybody

Make Friends Not Enemies.
Anyone from the Janitor to the Chairman could tip the balance out of your favour, even programmers or PAs.
People Need To Feel Involved - so ask them to do things for you, and spend some time debriefing them, even if it’s only for 2 minutes in the canteen.

10 Cut & Run

Always leave them smiling - positive outcomes mean buying prospects.
Drip feed with information - don’t shoot all your bullets in the first 2 minutes.
Don’t talk yourself back into trouble - Once you’ve sold, shut up
Keep the ball in their court - get them to do something after you’ve gone - send info, arrange a phone call.