Inside Our Head

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."
Peter Drucker

As the Student you studied the changes affecting your prospects. This was during the Need stage of the Buy-Learning Process. Then, as the Doctor, also during this Need stage of customer focused selling, you diagnosed "little problems" and uncovered BIG needs.

When the customer recognizes a real need to buy, they have moved from the Need stage to the Learn stage.

Now you are ready to fulfill your role as Architect as the focus shifts to selecting the solutions that best meet your buyers' needs. The objective now is address the buyer's fear of making a mistake, and keep your competitors out.

THE ARCHITECT DESIGNS UNIQUE SOLUTIONS AND DEMONSTRATES INCOMPARABLE CAPABILITIES SO THE COMPETITION IS STYMIED.

Sometimes you don't get involved in the deal until after the Need stage has been completed by one of your competitors, and so you have to play catchup. Other times, if you are the only sales person involved up to and through the Learning stage, you still are not immune from competitive interference because soon your prospect will take time to Compare and consult your competitors. Playing the Architect role is pivotal regardless of your circumstances because it gives you the best opportunity to influence the prospect's buying criteria.

For more information, please visit our sales training section of our website.

Selling is the process of uncovering urgency, and defining it, in the mind of your customer. The more momentum you generate early on in the process, the greater the probability that you’ll make a sale.

When doing your competitive analysis, be sure to include criteria that reflect the requirements of all decision makers on the Complex Buying Team—operational requirements of interest to users; compatibility information of interest to the Integrator; purchase price and full lifecycle costs for the ROI Authority, and so on.

In professional selling, you can lose credibility when you present a capability that the customer doesn’t need. So the simple answer at this step of the buying process is to first discuss the problems your capability solves. If the customer is unconcerned about some types of problems, you can then adjust your sales process to focus on what does matter to them. The result is that you'll deliver a solution that better matches customer needs.

Winning a complex sale is difficult. Complex sales are bigger-ticket sales, and because your competition wants them as much as you do, success takes more than simple desire and a strong will. Winning also takes skill, the ability to separate yourself from the pack and make a difference for your customer.

Complex sales are also difficult because each decision maker has his or her own buy-learning process. What you need to learn is how to help each person complete each step of the process better and faster. The sales consulting roles provide a game plan for persuading each decision maker to give you and your solution a thumbs up.

Preparation is important, but it’s not everything. You also need to understand how to work effectively during the heat of the moment when you are confronted with a skilled negotiator.

Specifically, you should understand the guidelines for effective negotiations and conduct your activities in accordance with them—listening for your customer’s interests, creating innovative win/win alternatives, and gaining commitment.

The negotiation will begin in earnest when your buyer presents a demand. The first demand is often an extreme one. At precisely this moment, many salespeople make a big mistake: they immediately react. As human beings, when someone pushes us, our knee-jerk response is to push back. When we push back, we react emotionally in some way. We either confront and “fight it out,” or we concede immediately in order to end the conflict. Either way, it is bad for us.

Salespeople need to change their attitude about a buyer’s initial demand. Don’t confront it, welcome it. Tom Crum, the author of The Magic of Conflict, says we need to change how we respond to confrontation. Crum uses the martial art of Aikido as a metaphor for handling conflict. The purpose of Aikido is to render an attack harmless without harming the attacker. This is the result you want from your sales negotiations.

In Aikido, you handle an attack by moving toward the source of the attack, not away from it. Think about it. A punch is relatively harmless if your face is two inches away from your attacker. Another example might be how you regain control of your car in a skid. You turn your wheels toward the skid, not away from it. You go with the energy, not against it.

When presented with an unrealistic demand in a sales negotiation, don’t dig in and fight. Instead, use indirect action, the opposite of what your buyer thinks you’ll do (and what you feel like doing). Accept their demand as a positive development.

Companies interested in increasing the professionalism and productivity of their sales force often select a sales training program to solve this need. This decision, however, places the cart before the horse.

The success of a company’s sales training initiative is absolutely affected, both positively and negatively, by the company’s sales managers’ ability and commitment to coach and reinforce the sales training after the event. Our clients have come to recognize that improving the coaching skills of their sales managers is a necessary precursor to delivering effective sales training that achieves lasting results.

Recently, one of our clients, a $10 billion industry leader, conducted and in-depth assessment of their sales managers. First, they asked their sales reps to grade their manager’s abilities on several sales leadership skills. From a collection of 35 skills, the top three weaknesses identified were:

• My sales manager doesn’t identify my obstacles to performance.
• My sales manager doesn’t provide ongoing coaching, encouragement and feedback.
• My manager doesn’t review my performance on a regular basis and make plans for me to improve.

Obviously, for a sales training initiative to succeed each of the above three skills must be performed effectively by sales managers. So, it’s easy to see why so many sales training initiatives fail: they fail because the sales managers don’t possess the skill and will to coach and reinforce these new behaviors in the field. Investing in a sales training program, without managers who are committed and capable at holding salespeople accountable for implementing those new skills, is just an expense.

So, the solution is simple, right? First train sales managers to coach the sales process, then deliver sales training to the field. Right? WRONG! The same client previously mentioned also asked their sales managers, "What are the top challenges you face that prevent you from being more effective on the job?" The top four reasons were:

• Too much time on email.
• Too much time reacting to unplanned events.
• Too little time available to devote to my sales reps.
• I’m unsure- where should I spend my time so as to have the greatest impact on goal achievement?

The four preceding barriers to effective coaching have nothing to do with coaching the sales process! Rather, they are related to self management skills – the sales managers’ ability to manage themselves differently: to eliminate time-wasters, be more proactive, build more self reliance in salespeople so the manager is not perceived as the chief firefighter in charge, have a plan and stick to it, etc.

TopLine Leadership’s Solution: Phase One

This is where TopLine Leadership’s comprehensive solution comes in. Our first component, Sales Management Leadership, is an intensive two, or three-day workshop that provides both the self management skills as well as the sales process coaching skills that sales managers need to make sales training stick.

Over 35,000 sales managers from many of the world’s most successful companies have participated in our program. The goal of our program is to provide sales managers with the skill, tools, and process for managing themselves differently, and coaching salespeople more effectively. Click here for more information, and a course description.

To help our clients achieve maximum impact we will often deliver a three-day Sales Management Leadership workshop as follows:

• Course pre-work
• Two-day session (during which each manager completes a 90-day implementation plan.)
• Conference call reinforcement at 30-day and 60 day and 90 days intervals after the initial session.
• Approximately four months after the initial training a second workshop, one day in length, is delivered. A second 90-day plan is created, which often includes how to successfully implement a sales training program.
• Conference call support

Phase Two: Sales Training

The second phase of our solution is Getting Into Your Customer’s Head sales training. For years, the focus of sales training has been on the selling process – while ignoring customer buying behavior. But tomorrow’s big winners in sales will be those who learn to join customers in their buying process.

When it comes to selling, have we had it all wrong?

At TopLine Leadership, our sales training programs are designed to help your sales team to think and feel like a customer, that is, how to get into the customer’s head. In short, your sales team will learn how to sell based on how customers buy.

The buying process unfolds in a series of eight predictable steps that your salespeople can anticipate.

Our sales training programs teach your salespeople eight easily understood sales rules that correspond directly to the steps of the buying process. Our sales rules: Student, Doctor, Architect, Coach, Therapist, Negotiator, Teacher and Farmer, provide a disciplined, repeatable method for closing more sales, faster, while your competition wonders why they lost out.

Most of our clients have salespeople who make complex sales – selling to multiple decision-makers for a single sales opportunity. For these clients we add on our Winning the Complex Sale.

Getting Into Your Customer’s Head is a sophisticated sales approach made simple.

Many of our clients are looking for a common language, a consistent and measurable process for solution selling. Without a common language salespeople tend to sell on their instincts, and some wander aimlessly through a sales process without a plan, missing many opportunities during the buying process to intensify the customers’ needs and differentiate your solution.

At TopLine Leadership, we understand what it takes to improve your team’s closing ratio – a thoughtful sales training strategy combined with effective sales tactics on each and every sales call. Our sales training programs will show your salespeople how to add more value, sooner, to your prospects and customers. Reinforcement tools include a hardcover book, CD book, Coaching Guide, and even a customizable web application tool.

Is your sales team lagging well behind where they should be? You’ve no doubt heard the saying, “success breeds success.” Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: failure can breed failure.

Here are some specifics about how you can turn around a lagging sales team. Even if your team is doing fairly well, you’re bound to pick up some tools and techniques for immediate sales improvement. Below are a few of the topics we will discuss at our upcoming Sales Management Training Seminar:

• How to set minimum standards with consequences for poor sales results.
• How to gain the buy-in for team development by involving your top salespeople in setting standards.
• De-hire those not making a positive contribution.
• How to leverage your best people to contribute more to the team’s development.
• How to manage yourself better, and make better decisions about how you allocate your time.
• Lead from the front. Get out in the field and make coaching salespeople your #1 priority.
• How to create a contest that will get everyone fired up and focused on making those extra sales calls that can make the difference.
• Coach sales skills. Coach sales strategy.

Click here for more information on our Sales Manager Training Seminars.

Webster’s defines the word solution as “the answer to a problem.” So why is it that so many sales organizations fervently believe that they are the “preferred solutions provider” in their marketplace, but their sales proposal document makes no mention whatsoever of the customer’s problems and issues? How can we call ourselves solutions providers if we don’t specify in our proposals the problems customers have that we can solve?

When I engage with a new sales training client my first request is for the client to send me what they consider to be their three best sales proposals. The sales proposal is the salesperson’s opportunity to communicate his/her solution to the customer, and sales proposals help me gain a better understanding of how that client’s salespeople sell. Nine times out of ten, I receive a sales proposal that is a comprehensive description of the seller’s “solution” but there’s no information whatsoever about the customer’s current situation and problems! More specifically, the capabilities of the seller’s solution are not linked to explicit customer needs (needs that your customer has described to you, in your customer’s terms). For example, one proposal I read recently espoused “Our focus will be on raising the bar within your Operations Department and empowering your personnel with robust data that can be used to reduce charge backs.” My questions about this “big fat claim” were:

1. What problems typically exist within the Operations Department that you can solve?
2. Specifically why does this client currently experience charge backs? What types of charge backs would be reduced by your more robust data, and by how much?
3. Your answers to questions 1 and 2 need to be differentiated from competitors, both major national competitors as well as “regional low-balls.” Remember, every capability that you present that is not differentiated from your competition moves you no closer to winning the sale.
   If your sales proposal is outdated, and does a poor job of communicating your solution to prospective customers, give me a call.

Paul Nutt, author of Why Decisions Fail, studied 400 decisions made by senior executives in medium and large businesses. Decisions studied include Disney's EuroDisney failure, various components of the Denver International Airport construction, etc.

Nutt's research found that fully half of the decisions had failed. A decision "failure" was defined as a decision that either was not implemented or a decision that was not still in effect two years after it had been made.

Professor Nutt found that the primary reason for decision failure is that decision makers make a premature commitment. They "latch-on" to the first solution, the quick fix, and that many of the buying process activities occurring after that are actually only efforts to justify their ready-made solution. Decision makers become anchored by the first information they observe and give it more weight than information that arrives later on.