I caught a radio interview with an American chap called Bill Powers the other day. He was moved to change his life when he identified the drain of the “vanishing family trick”.  People that ought be really close fade away from each other in search of their screen. His resulting book was called Hamlet’s Blackberry.

He also mentioned the trauma of recovery time. He quoted research that looked into what happens when someone is interrupted by the internet in the middle of a task. Whether checking an email, facebook or tweeting the results are startling.

It takes anywhere between 10 and 20 times longer to get back into your task than the length of the technological distraction in the first place.

Here’s a direct quote:

“Psychologists tell us that when you abandon a mental task to attend to an interruption, your emotional and cognitive engagement with the main task immediately begins to decay, and the longer and more distracting the interruption, the harder it is to reverse this process.

“By some estimates, recovering focus can take ten to twenty times the length of the interruption. So a one-minute interruption could require fifteen minutes of recovery time.”

Yet there’s greater alarm. Within what he terms the “Conundrum of Connected Life“, he believes that such recovery time takes up a whopping 28% of the workday. If over a quarter of your selling time is so crushed, then how on earth will you make quota?

This in itself should be quite a wake-up for personal selling productivity, but it also raises an allied thought.

What is your prospect’s recovery time?

When you sell to them, they have countless diversions from your pitch. How long after each one does it take to regain their full attention?

Another way of thinking about this is with the lag between each conversation. Without becoming a stalker, what’s the optimum frequency with which to engage your prospects that ensures you maintain a winning momentum?

I’d like to think it’s quite often an attractive lady approaches me in public and asks if I’m married.

When this happened yesterday, sadly the woman in question was on duty selling skin care products in a shopping mall concourse. Moisturiser is not one of my priorities in life.

Still, bright and bubbly, I sensed the chance to check out some sales spiel.

I must have at least one special lady in my life, right? It always looks good to buy a little gift, doesn’t it? Surely these products are nicer than those in England? Let me show you something that’ll change your life…

Well, the nail varnish scrub gizmo that followed won’t do that. And now I can’t remove the gleam from the particular nail press ganged for the demo for a fortnight.

On the whole, the exchange was what you’d expect. Little by way of eliciting my desires, although plenty on the pleasant chat front.

One tactic did stand out though. Each time I tried to escape, the youngster chirped;

Let me just ask you one question…

This happened four or five times. It was clearly either her ‘thing’ or trained behaviour. Whichever, I was compliant and allowed the one question to follow.

It reminded me a touch of news interrogators that, as their prey starts to run down the street, ask the Columbo, or Morse, style killer question ‘after’ the end, just when the suspect thinks they can relax, thinking that the real grilling is over. Reporters are also prone to say, ‘and my final question…’, when it is in fact the penultimate one for similar affect.

It did remind me of one truth too. There’s always one more question we should be asking. What was it on your last call?

In the run up to the release of his latest book, The Undercover Economist shared why and where he feels failure leads to success. Key finding;

I’ve concluded that adapting in the face of failure is absolutely vital – and a more painful challenge than I at first expected.

So, is there a way to minimise this pain? Well, in his own words here’s his trio of ground-rules;

1. try lots of different things,
2. make sure the experiments are at a small scale so that when things go wrong, it’s not a catastrophe and,
3. make sure there’s a reliable way to tell the difference between success and failure.

This reminded me of many conversations I’ve had with people before they launch a new product. I find it difficult to advocate the big bang approach. Yet it is the way almost every such program goes. Global announcement and instant wet launch.

I’ve always liked the idea of piloting alternatives before unleashing the idea to the whole world. Such ‘damp launches’ could feature just a small proportion of salespeople, territory or singular variant of an overall product set.

The lessons learned can be invaluable. I once did this myself with a software module add-on. I consequently changed both price (raising it 33%) and upcoming enhancement priorities and nailed a smooth successful launch across the whole team. This helped enormously. For instance, in our entry-level marketplace average order value rose by over twenty-five percent.

The advice about knowing success from failure is also interesting. What’s the point if your anchor client(s) got outrageous preferential discounts, would buy anything anyway or ate way more sales time than later prospects would get?

I’ve listened to American Anne Miller discuss her book and read her blogs. Having done so, I’m surprised she kept to such a technical and even exclusionist title. A number of alternatives occurred to me taking her own medicine (see what I did there) right away;

Lightbulb moment selling
Turning words into pictures selling
Gold ring selling

That last one is from her own words. Although ending each as she does, with the term selling, the focus is rather on specific sales skills such as pitching and explaining rather than a soup to nuts (I couldn’t help myself) sitting. Nevertheless, there is an excellent central idea here.

Want to lock in your message? Need to grab attention more? Then a metaphor’s yer man. Here’s her formula;

Information + Metaphor = I can see what you mean

As a grammatical point, she doesn’t restrict herself to just metaphors. Similes and analogies also count. As probably do allegories and fables. Anything that helps the prospect ‘get’ a comparison that’s both memorable and visual is good. As she quotes Einstein;

“If I can’t see it, I can’t understand it”

Her explanation of why you need to deploy this tactic is excellent (even if slightly out of kilter with the progression of today’s leading brain scientists such as Susan Greenfield - with her content (’meaning’) versus process (’pleasure’) battles - and Iain McGilchrist - and his narrow focus, big picture dilemma). It goes like this.

The left brain processes data, facts and numbers. The right brain, images, feelings, emotions, colour. Most people sell using features and benefits, facts and figures. This means that the essential right side goes ignored. Unsold. A metaphor makes you unique because it crucially helps people see things right away.

As for examples, even though hers aren’t what I’d consider brilliant, they do indeed open your eyes. Addressing the left-right brain difference, she mentions that you could simply stop at “300,000 people die each year from cigarettes”. Or you could continue, “which is equivalent to two jumbo jets crashing every day”.

The construct you should force yourself into the habit of using is also good;

“Y’know, it’s just like…”

Every time you say ‘just like’ you should follow up with a ‘metaphor’.

Although her favourite metaphor doesn’t quite chime with me, it does explain the process. When trying to penetrate a prospect happy with their current supplier, she asks, “do you play tennis?” The incumbent supply is like having a good forehand, but no backhand. You can do well with just that. But to excel you could do with a backhand. And I’m that backhand.

I was party to a metaphor many years ago about Mike Tyson. A load of Americans loved using it. The competition were always saying that their next upgrade would have all the features then lacking. Their clients were prone to believe them. Time and again, though, they failed to materialise. It was a “not taken to market yet” scenario.

The stateside response was to say it was like being the best heavyweight boxer around. Knockers always attacked by saying Tyson’s the best. Yet he was in prison at the time. How can you fight someone when they’re incarcerated? When he eventually came out of course, he was no longer the best. The yanks loved it, but there was a flaw or two really.

Anyway, I had a favourite metaphor of my own back in the Nineties. It helped me win an awesome amount of business when selling a particular ‘plug and play’ or ‘off-the-shelf’ solution. Inferior but established competition was pitched as more functionally rich. It came unassembled, as a toolkit, one where you had to create it all for yourself but where the final results were, allegedly, infinite. Rather than sell on price, one routine in this case I used asked variations on, “when did you last buy a washing machine?” (Other brown goods, like microwave or coffee machine, also worked).

“How many wash cycles does it have?” The answer was always dozens. “How many do you use?” The answer was never more than two. If you can see where this conversation was going, then you can see the power of Anne Miller’s meme.

Greenmarket Sq, central Cape Town. Stalls set out with Africana bric-a-brac. A magnet for tourists. Much of it invokes memories of donkeys and sombreros for someone of my generation, via Seventies Spanish package holidays. Yet dig for it and you can find genuine craftsmanship and a bargain.

If springbok hide cushion covers are your thing, they’re half the price of the shopping malls. If you seek a funky chunky ring, the intricate and the bold are cheaply and freely available.

So my sister likes penguins. Hardly a surprise, metal framed, beaded penguins were on offer. At just a few centimetres high, they are not large, and the instant I picked one up I heard the stall-holder pipe up with “only 45”.

The typical too-ing and fro-ing ensued. I could buy a pair for 80. But what if I wanted a different, third, animal for 80 all in? We agreed on this. I’d also thrown in the potential for a fourth item, but that slipped away. Right up until I came to pay.

This was with a 200 note. Right at the death, with trinkets in a bag, I was offered that said fourth item and all I had to do was accept 100 in change, rather than the presently expected 120.

It was a pretty good show.

I instantly noted how few pen-hovering moments seek to sell more.

Perhaps it’s the worry that further thinking will introduce a pause. And such delay brings significant risk of the deal slipping away for good. Perhaps it’s the eagerness to secure any signature, whatever the reasoning, and rush across to the next victim, I mean, customer.

Whichever, I recalled my first ever order form. Although for software modules, it resembled a wholesaler’s PLOF. Such ‘price list order forms’ have line items pre-printed, with boxes somewhere close eagerly awaiting a tick or large number manually entered into them.

When challenged, we could say that it was to help the sales ledger clerks, as the last thing anyone would want was inaccurate billing. Yet the salesteam were of the opinion such a design gave the best chance of someone adding to our juicy commission. And I experienced this for myself, when someone enquired on the merits of Cash Book and Fixed Assets register as ink dripped from quill, and promptly added one to their order.

Where’s your enticing extra chocolate bar at the checkout till?

With the season of stuffing now past, I’ve read a slew of articles recently on the battles people have with over-indulgence. It is eye watering that one in four people in my homeland are currently considered obese.

One such article quoted celebrity high-protein diet creator, Frenchman Pierre Dukan, as saying that students should be awarded extra marks for watching their weight (specifically, when maintaining an acceptable BMI).

As is often the way with these pieces, the headline was slightly misleading. It read that “students should be graded on their weight”.

The issue of grading stuck in my subconscious for some time.

On forecasts, I often see a percentage applied to a possible deal. It typically represents the likelihood of closing. Yet I cannot recall seeing a grade applied on such like.

The more I thought about this, the more it puzzled me. Yes, I fully understand the simplicity of a percentage weighting, yet the immediacy of an A to E mark ascribed seems so powerful.

Imagine applying this to a qualification routine for instance. Whether you go for such formulisation as Miller-Heiman’s ideal customer profile or not, everyone has a pretty clear idea of when a deal excites them. I’m referring to when you feel the wind is right behind you. Everything seems to gel. The ‘fit’, the relationships, the desire, the strategic marriage.

So why not take a moment to assess your funnel in this way. The beauty is it doesn’t even need to be scientific. If you sense a perfect deal in play, it’s an A. If unease prevails at almost every turn, then you’ve snagged an E.

My suspicion is that this may indeed add a level of clarity to your forecasting.

Groupon. The scourge of the growing small business. Even bigger bullies than Google, apparently. This was a competition-cum-recruitment ad for selling staff they placed last weekend in a Capetonian paper I read.

These self-styled “innovators in collective buying”, they wonder if you are :

an activist in ingenuity …
the circle that makes everyone else look square …
someone that makes opportunities from lines drawn in the sand

I could hardly believe what I read in the ad, let alone what the 90sec video threw up.

It’s straightforward 80s claptrap. Serving it in contemporary clothing doesn’t make it any less misguided.

Whilst I’m all in favour of anything aiming to “highlight the hard work done by those in sales positions“, I’m disturbed by the fingernails on the blackboard the language and tone they adopt conjures.

I’ll get you your shark.

It’s just all a bit too me-me-me, isn’t it. Of course, hitting your numbers is a fundamental component. But what about legacy? What about acknowledging sustainable business won? How do they highlight real hardcore problems removed from grateful buyers’ shoulders?

When you recruit (and reward) how do you truly allow those who are genuinely “more than just a salesperson” to emerge as role models and praised accordingly?

Over the festive season I had a traumatic experience at an eaterie. It was compounded by the fact that I regularly use the place. And now I will not. And I’ve told countless people to avoid them since too. They have lost crate loads of cash as a result.

Cape Town’s tourist trap V&A Waterfront has a seafood place inside called Willoughbys. Even as we waited to be seated, the maitre d’ was regaling us with their ‘best food and most consistent’ in town line. Yet pretty soon the wheels fell off. Four of the five of us dining (outside of peak times too) had a nightmare. For instance, my starter came after everyone else’s mains, and one grilled fish main went cold because the accompanying salad failed to arrive anywhere like on time.

So, what was the response of the previously bullish meet-and-greeter? So pathetic it was verging on abusive. He even tried to avoid saying sorry, instead reeling off his list of excuses that they “normally say” after such occurrences. When people don’t have to work hard for their money, this kind of arrogance abounds. Empty words, unmatched by actions.

How difficult was it to, say, charge half for the fish fiasco or knock off ten percent all round? I’ve blogged on this kind of disaster before. What about vouchers to entice us back to try them out again another time?

It’s just not rocket science.

And we solution sellers can fall into a similar trap. How often have the wheels come loose on a key delivery? Would it really hurt to offer a future upgrade discount? Ensure some free delivery resource arrives pronto for another aspect? Or create your equivalent voucher idea?

Preparation is helpful for the unwelcome day these tactics are needed. Whatever you do, do not eat at Willoughbys.

Small business information for the entrepreneur. That’s how America’s Inc. pitches itself. They have a section devoted to sales. Unfortunately, it leans towards the kind of vagueisms that the rest of its articles steadfastly avoid. Rather than hear fourth and fifth person lists of what works, I prefer the kind of angle they usually deploy when taking real-life stories ahead of desktop opinions. (Take for instance these insights into running a cupcake shop).

Still, how can you ignore clicking on a title such as How to Close a Sale - Here are some strategies to help create a win-win business relationship of customer satisfaction and longevity? Although frustratingly shorn of any proper examples, sales trainer Jeff Thull outlines his four step process (Discovery, Diagnosis, Design & Delivery) including a neat summary from the ‘diagnosis’ stage of the two major reasons why you fail to sell;

• They do not believe they have the problem the solution will solve (which includes thinking the problem is not big enough to require a change).
• They do not believe the solution will work.

I don’t buy this in its entirety (for instance, he cites a subset of point one, but none for point two when there are surely several for each, and crucially also ignores the ever-present underlying impact of reaction to ‘change’), nevertheless it is a worthy sanity check for your current bid.

Consulting behemoth BCG offer up testimonials on their website. They are unfortunately shorn of any real punch or memorability. Nevertheless, the structure they employ piqued my interest.

When I regale glowing references, I like to lather the full story on nice and thick. The crises, the conflict and the championship champagne.

They cut their success pies by four slices;

1. starting point
2. value levers
3. insight & advice
4. impact

The first is self explanatory. I always encourage wallowing in the depths of despair here. A gripping description of the ‘before’ picture does well to have a suitably imminent doomsday scenario rapidly approaching.

In typically impenetrable consultaspeak, they then mention value levers. Rather than struggle with the intricacies such babble shrouds, think of this part as what was changed.

Then there’s the tweaks, iterations and overall lessons learned.

Before we finally make the strike right between the eyes. With an unavoidably significant amount of money unleashed for good measure as your parting shot.

---

As an extra aside, if you are presenting these and there is some physical impact of your product, can you produce an image? One that allows a pictorial depiction of a before and after state? If not, next time you sell, take a few photos of your client’s environment. Then remember to go along and take some more when your wares have changed things.