Archives for August 2018

Consistency in any endeavor is the basis for skill development and compound growth. Deposit money consistently in your retirement account and you will experience true exponential growth in your savings. The same is true in many things. If you are consistent in your workout routine muscles will develop and your growth as an athlete will amaze you. Unfortunately, the same salesperson who routinely saves money and works out might also be erratic in how and when they apply a sales process. Their sales call pattern may also be very uneven, 12 calls today then nothing for a week while they work on other things. In order to grow at a rapid pace, it is necessary to use your sales process on every call and in every conversation not just when the mood strikes you. That is the only way to build skill and to internalize the sales process and the sales tactics. If you do not routinely use your sales process, then it will never become internalized and your results will be uneven and unpredictable. Likewise, your calling pattern should be relatively consistent. Your monthly call volume should be spared as evenly as possible over the workdays in the month. Wildly varying call patterns will most likely lead to not being consistent in how you approach each call. So, the problem compounds itself. Consistency in your work ethic and in your approach will yield compound growth in both your sales effectiveness and in your bank account.

Do your deals get stuck? Maybe you are addressing symptoms instead of consequences. Most salespeople are pouncers. They hear something that sounds like a problem and they pounce. The prospect says that “deliveries have been a little slow” and the salesperson pounces on that hint of pain. They say “well mister prospect, we have an excellent expediting department and we are able to guarantee a 98.34 percent on-time delivery”. The prospect nods and the conversation moves on to the next topic. What the salesperson should do is ask more questions of the prospect to uncover what the consequences of the late deliveries are. For example, the late deliveries could be causing a problem in their production lines leading to production down time and lost productivity. That would possibly be a problem worth paying money to solve. However, the elite salespeople go even deeper. They realize that a true compelling reason to buy requires that significant consequences must result from the problem under discussion or the prospect will not be “compelled” to take action. Having a compelling reason to buy I s the first element in having a truly qualified prospect. A few more questions and the elite salesperson might discover that the prospect is a subcontractor to a major government contractor and late deliveries are causing their vendor rating to be depressed which has the effect of prohibiting purchasing agents to issue subcontracts to them no matter how good the product or how low the price. This severe consequence will most likely demand that the prospect take action. so the lesson is, don’t solve symptoms dig deeper to get to the consequences that will cause action to be taken.

When prospects make statements they are often based on unstated assumptions. Often these assumptions are not based in fact. If you challenge the assumption you can get to pain much more quickly and you can get into a deeper conversation. It is also more likely that you will be having a conversation with the prospect that the competitor is not having. What better way to differentiate yourself? The only problem is recognizing that the prospect is making an implicit assumption. That I can’t help you with since it is entirely dependent on the situation and to a very large extent dependent on a deep understanding of the domain, the technology or the application. But, once you recognize the assumption you should challenge the assumption. For example, in a software application, if you realize that the prospect is assuming that average delay in response is 2 minutes when they make a problem statement, you should ask something like “how do you know it is 2 minutes”? They might respond with “well we made an assumption”. You could then ask “based on What”? and now you are into a discussion of the problem at a deeper level. This might lead to a discovery that the prospect does not have a complete understanding of the origin or magnitude of the problem which could lead you in a whole different direction. For instance, it might lead to a contract to define the problem. The lesson is to listen for what is not being said as you uncover pain and challenge any implicit assumptions you “hear”.

Sales calls sometimes get bogged down and go nowhere. Did you ever lose the thread of a conversation and end up having the conversation go in a direction that was not helping to move the pursuit along the way it should have? One way to combat that is to become a pain seeking missile. Just follow the pain where ever it leads, even if it seems like it is going nowhere. When you get to the real pain the prospect is more likely to act. Once you can get the prospect to open up and discuss what is really bothering them (at the deepest level) you will accomplish two things. First you will know what problem to work on solving and the prospect will more than likely move the ball forward. And second you will discover that you have a closer bond to the prospect. And the bonus is that if your missile fizzles without finding any pain, you can move on to a prospect who does.