2010 Archive - Salespodder: because today’s salespeople should be tomorrow’s chief execs

Nov 20, 2010 0

True Or False Game

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At a fundraiser for their local community initiatives, I came across a cracking idea for a moment of levity at an internal sales meeting. One which can also lead whoever introduces it onto making a serious point or two.

walsall-ticket

At these Walsall Football Club events you pay a pound to take part in their True or False Game. All 250 people in attendance expectantly went for it.

The master of ceremonies makes statements based on the theme of the evening. You simply have to decide whether it’s True or False. If you agree, then hands-on-heads indicates your belief in True. If you fancy it’s misleading, then hands-on-backsides shows you suspect it’s False. Everybody stands up to play.

As the night was all about “Remembering Cloughie” and his football management genius, the first poser was “Brian Clough began his playing career at Hartlepool”. I knew this to be False. It was his managerial career that began there, not his playing days which were at Middlesborough. Remarkably, around three-quarters presented their hands on their heads, thinking it was a True statement. So they all had to sit down straight away.

A few rounds in, and the final dozen or so were invited to stand at the front of the venue under the stage. I was still in and thoroughly enjoying myself. I made it into the last three by knowing that Trevor Francis scored his European Cup Final winner in old Olympic stadium in Munich, not Rome.

Bizarrely, the lad to my left confided pure guesswork was consistently his saviour. My knowledge though then ran dry, and the prize of a bottle of Moet went to a deserving victor, one that wasn’t guessing.

As an activity, it seemed to go down very well. People were talking about the answers long into the night.

It immediately struck me that for any internal get together with at least a dozen attendees, it would be a terrific idea to adapt to your sales arena.

A few tips for a similar sales meeting twenty-minute agenda item of your own occur to me.

Topic – chose a theme that aligns to a key current strand of your sales efforts
Timeline – try and pick a logical chronology or theme to run along
Detail – make sure there’s plenty to say about the reasoning for each answer as it’ll stick
Difficulty – try and make the questions start off easy-ish and progress from there
Involvement – don’t be afraid to ask the crowd no longer ‘in’ for a vote on a statement that splits the remaining contestants
Blindfold – when the final stages arrive, make people turn around so that they can’t see each other and be (subconsciously) influenced
Prize – a small token would add a little competitive spice and provide incentive to concentrate
Point – bear in mind a serious point you want the questions to make

Nov 18, 2010 0

Big Picture Wordle

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I came across this image in reference to what the creators saw as a disastrous Copenhagen cimate change summit. There’s just over a hundred words highlighted here.

I was immediately smitten. What a brilliant idea. Surely you must be able to deploy something similar on a sale. The most obvious example would be as a cool presentation slide. There’s also merit in a proposal page, maybe even as a title sheet.

In terms of a slide, all sorts of actions could be used to draw attention to particular threads, or create motion by pasting say huge white-fonted slogans across the entire piece.

Either way, how tricky can it be to sit down with Powerpoint and play around with a few dozen words to create a similar bang? If this sounds tedious, the slightest of further surfing uncovered plenty of sites that create these marvels for you. Your all-new favourite presentation tool. The daddy appears to be wordle. I played around with several, and here’s a couple of productions from an alternative (as recommended by wordle’s founder now that he’s got a job inside google), tagxedo.

The first uses words I’ve written on salespodder, the second, a list of random sales-related words I typed up in a jif myself. Hours of endless fun await your first use in the field, I promise. And the impact really could be special too.

podder-tagxedo-any-orientation-tnr-v2-crop

random-sales-word-v2-tagxedo

Nov 17, 2010 0

Rumour to Fact

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According to a talking head I caught as background the other day, apparently stockbrokers enjoy living by the phrase;

buy the rumour, sell the fact

Intriguing, if a little cheeky. Yet it does introduce aligned thinking for the solution seller.

Get a sniff of a ‘problem’, and you’re only part way towards your goal of earning money for its resolution.

Dig around all you can for proof of the damage.

Delve deep into the consequences.

Validate that your solution fixes the problem.

Document thoroughly where it does, and those that agree.

Demonstrate acceptance that acting now is the desired course.

Then you can readily ’sell the fact’.

Nov 16, 2010 0

Active Listening

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I first came across the concept of Active Listening back in the mid-90s. A sales manager led training session raised the question of its definition. I stepped up to successfully provide one.

To me, it was always about gently summarising what you’d just heard when the person has finished, with a comforting paraphrasing clarification question if necessary, or a delving directional small prompt. It seemed a way of getting the other party to genuinely feel that you were interested, really trying to get a handle on what they were saying.

It’s long been part of my selling fabric and was reminded of it via an email from my alumni network. It featured a short review of a talk given by a chap evidently making a living on presentation skills. He clearly understands a key solution selling skill too. Apparently,

[He] stressed the need to develop listening skills, emphasising that there is a good reason why the letters in the word listen are the same as in the word silent. He said:

“The opposite of talking is not listening, it’s waiting”

and argued that it is essential to be interested when listening to someone.

Seems like another gripping advert for active listening, with a couple of lovely soundbites to help those discovering anew to truly understand its power.

postscript: here’s wikipedia’s juicy pic:
active listening

For solution selling, I’d recommend an evolution though, and as a starter here’s the next three phases that get you towards a ‘close’,

Clarifying -> Interpreting -> Agreeing

Nov 13, 2010 0

Great Run Feats

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Extreme athlete (and fantastic eco-warrior) Braam Malherbe recently ran 4,218km along the Great Wall of China. It took 98 days, at an average of 43km a day. It was the latest in a long list of fund-raising efforts and climate and inequality awareness projects.

Also apparently one of South Africa’s most in-demand motivational speakers, he has his own take on how you generate success. Here’s an intro of quotes attributed to him:

if you pursue your passion the money will follow

to find direction in your life you have to leave your comfort zone behind

what’s the point of drifting along with a twisted knot or hole in the pit of your stomach

in nature you are either an asset or liability

always remember that nothing is as difficult as it seems as first

nothing is impossible if you commit

Despite wobbling towards the general motivational direction, his sporting achievements allow me to rate his overall approach. Especially when his mental fabric as demonstrated above meant that he secured sponsorship for his Great Run only on the departing runway steps. He clearly believed in his sales process.

Nov 10, 2010 0

Chief Exec Involvement

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The Miller-Heiman solution selling mailing list received an invite to participate in their annual best-practice survey last week. They teasingly included their favourite finding from last year’s.

miller-heimen-2010-study

Only 7% of companies qualified inside their definition of “world-class”. I realise that you could cloud recommendations through blurred survey definitions.

What precisely qualifies as “executive leadership”? What does “actively engaged” look like? What is meant by “sales process”?

Wheeling out the big boss for a closing presentation slot at a flagship new client hopefully does not count.

Yet the point remains inescapable that if you have a process properly formulated, documented and communicated in which the overall leadership is involved, in both monitoring and execution, you will outperform your competition.

Do you need to enlighten your CEO with this finding?

Nov 9, 2010 0

Where Do We Go From Here?

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I recently saw the moving quest of father John Kerr who’s son Paul was killed in 1992 by a drink-drive criminal, seeking to get the hard-hitting graphic adverts on mainland television that in Northern Ireland have apparently saved 15,000 lives.

He was off to see the Minister, confident he had a ‘pretty strong case’. As he finished being interviewed, he stated,

the last thing I’ll say to him is ‘where do we go from here’?

Now, as a “close” this opens an interesting debate. The ‘what shall we do next?’ close is considered a standard as used by newbie reps. It is dismissed by elder pros as ineffective and lacking panache.

Yet this kind of approach is gaining traction today because it is thought not to put ‘pressure’ on a buyer, and by default is supposedly more consultative and ‘genuine’, less pushy and ‘traditional’.

Whilst I agree that it’s a fairly lame close, I certainly don’t suggest ditching the concept of trying to sit on the same side of the table as your prospect.

The problem with it though, is the typical response it generates. If you think this is along the lines “can I borrow your pen, where do I sign?” try again.

Unfortunately, it’s commonplace that you cede deal control with this close. You all too frequently see your ambitions kicked into the long grass. “Let us go away, think about it, and get back to you.”

The worse thing you can do upon hearing this is to accept it.

The issue with letting buyers dictate what happens next is, they rarely (indeed, never) suggest your ideal way ahead or ask for your advice on shaping activities.

Instead you get either the blind alley already outlined, or the awkwardness of your prospect feeling a touch of pressure because they secretly don’t have a clue how they’d proceed, something you were possibly keen to avoid in the first place.

To be most effective, you need to tweak this approach. Offering options can disarm and charm. You should know the types of activity that can lead to success along your best-practice sales process. So why not tee these up?

Saying that most people you’ve met have chosen to commit to one of a pair of actions after such a meeting, ‘but where would you like to go from here?’ can reduce the chances of oblivion and still give the feeling of prospect self-determination.

Nov 4, 2010 0

My 1000th Blog Post!

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The warm glow of accomplishment. In a little under five years I’ve blogged 1,000 times. One thousand posts. All from my experiences in the real world of sales and nuggets picked up through life in general. With the allied aim of showing how salespeople should be running the show and to help any seller that wants to one day assume such mantle. Sales CEOs are a must, aren’t they?

As I’ve blogged before, I don’t aim to necessarily proactively advertise myself, it’s more that I do like to let people thinking of doing business with me to have a way of knowing how I think. Thankfully many kindred souls have gone on to provide highly pleasurable opportunities.

Without any ’search engine optimisation’ or the kind of online activity that most pundits advocate, I’ve still managed to garner 45 comments. So thanks to all who’ve got in touch and joined in conversation.

Without becoming a multi-site-blogobore, I’ve also got myself on a couple of lists of ‘web’s best sales blogs‘, which is nice. Although you probably get where I’m coming from when I say that of the 350 featured in that link, I am one of only 14 that isn’t tweeting away feverishly. Some of us it seems, have a day job.

Having a large interest in the progression of sales skills, I was always aghast in my hardcore sales knowledge management days at how many reps not merely slack in pursuing their own self-improvement, but blatantly didn’t give a monkeys about working on getting better.

This classical two-by-two sums up my findings.

1000th-2x2

It’s an interesting dynamic by which to gauge both yourself or members of your team.

Winners. They stand out, obviously. But beware that not all who command lofty positions on the sales charts are true ‘winners’. At least half of 100%ers will be Islanders. They are often mavericks, but not in a good way. They are silos of intelligence. They rarely pass on anything of value, preferring to keep their tactics close to their chest rather than share best-practice. All the while that Winners are mentoring, testing ideas, generating healthy debate and being all-round team players, Islanders suck all they can out of the organisation for their own ends whilst claiming their results justify the means. And senior management falls for it.

When people lament with hindsight that they wrongly promoted their best selling person to become Sales Manager I’d bet that they plumped for an Islander over a Winner. And you can see why. Islanders are canny. They play the political game. They’re often slightly aloof. By coincidence they display the kind of distance many people fool themselves that sales management needs.

Tryers are not yet stellar performers, yet with appropriate nurturing they could well be. They need to be invested in. It’s so sad that I’ve seen highly paid, powerful leaders of sales teams stand up in meetings and berate salespeople for taking time out to learn. Tomorrow’s superstars need to be developed all the time.

Then there are the No-Hopers. They are in the departure lounge. It’ll probably be a mercy killing when you finally show them the door. If only you’d done it sooner, but hey, they were such a nice person.

The sales stats don’t lie. You can pinpoint performance with the easiest of spreadsheets. But how do you nail the intent to push oneself on?

Have you ever asked a salesperson what skill or tactic they’re working on improving for themselves right now?

A couple of years ago, I ran the kind of training day I’ve done scores of times over the past decade. It happened to be a broad introduction to Solution Selling. The dozen-strong sales team were of varying experience, and charged with roughly £40m between them. They sold high-value, complex kit with plenty of competition into bewildering environments.

A piece of best-practice I’d learned over time is to call up all trainees beforehand. By way of thanks, I sent an email. It confirmed what we’d discussed (in confidence) and included an invite to check me out on this very blog. How many do you think clicked through?

The answer tells you all you need to know about why so much in sales fails.

Nov 3, 2010 0

Tom Peters 111 Ridiculously Obvious Thoughts On Selling

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An entertaining management theorist, I first came across Tom Peters’ works with the seminal 1982 co-authored In Search Of Excellence. It sought to document America’s best companies and reveal their secrets. Don’t necessarily let detractor mocking that they all went down the pan soon after cloud judgement. The chap is a vibrant public speaker. So what does he know about sales?

This is a kindly uploaded free pdf by him. It was apparently delivered to a large company called GE on the opening day of the twenty-fourth month of 2006. You can download its 17 pages of bullets for yourself here.

tom-peters-111-ridiculously-changethis-cover

At less than ten bullets a page, it can be read in less time than it takes to countersign a contract. So on that basis it can hardly be called a waste of time. Does it though, add anything to the sales canon? Alas, not really.

This is unfortunate because the writer plays to a reputation for original, breakthrough thought. Perhaps this was never his intention here. After all, riding the corporate gravy podium his value likely lies in style over substance.

Having said all that, you get the feeling the best nuggets are those that seem to come from his own personal experience. Naturally such insights are always better than those passed on via third-parties, no matter how “eminent”.

He majors on paying attention to relationships, listening and presenting. Here’s his typical style. Bullet 33.

The Gold Standard in selling: INDISPENSABLE to the Client. No other goal is worthy.

He also uses the odd neat quote. Here’s one attributed to Jeff Thull, from The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale.

“The business of selling is not just about matching viable solutions to the customers that require them. It’s equally about managing the change process the customer will need to go through to implement the solution and achieve the value promised by the solution”

It’s not a checklist. It’s not a process. It’s not a new tactic. It’s not a new cause.

It is worth the quick minute or two of your screen time though. As is often the case with flimsy pamphlets, one point just might trigger a cool idea for that tricky deal you’re stuck in the middle of right now.

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