The Virtuous Sales Cycle: How to Build and Sustain a Consistently Strong Sales Process

Key Points

1.     Most sales people
find themselves trapped in a vicious sales cycle.

2.     Consistent sales
success depends on following a virtuous sales cycle

3.     3 behaviors that lead
to virtuous sales cycle

4.     What are you doing to
stay fresh professionally?

5.     Without renewal you
can become stale.

6.     Sellers have to
factor the customer’s needs into their sales processes.

7.     The Uncertainty
Principle in Sales states that how you sell to the customer changes how the
customer will make their decisions and the process you need to use to sell to
them.

8.     Uncertainty Principle requires flexibility and in its application leads to a Virtuous Sales Cycle.

The Virtuous Sales Cycle: How to Build and Sustain a Consistently Strong Sales Process



Is Yours A Vicious Sales Cycle? Or A Virtuous Sales Cycle?

Which One Are You In?

Most
everyone is familiar with the concept of a vicious cycle, or vicious circle
(i.e., a repeating sequence of connected events in which each cycle reinforces
the previous one, in this case, negatively).

In
sales, a Vicious Sales Cycle stems
from bad sales practices that lead to poor results combined with an inability
or unwillingness to change, which leads in turn to a never-ending,
self-reinforcing cycle of unacceptable sales performance. Unfortunately too
many sales professionals operate within a Vicious Sales Cycle.

What
are some key behaviors that open the door to a vicious sales cycle?

1.
Lack of consistently applied sales
processes. Success in sales is based on a foundation of well-defined,
documented sales processes (and associated metrics) that establish clear
expectations for how selling should occur in your organization.

2.
Lack of responsiveness. Today’s
customer is substantially pre-educated about your product or service before
they ever engage with your sales team. By definition, when they do contact you
for the first time their need for information in order to make a decision is
urgent.

3.
Lack of urgency. See #2 above. The
timeframe for every sales action should be immediate. It’s what customers
expect. Anything less is the start of a slippery slope.

4.
Lack of product knowledge and business
acumen. Customers rely on you to provide the necessary content and context
they require to make a fully informed purchase decision. Customers will be
reluctant to invest their time to build relationships with sellers who can’t
provide value.

Your
goal should be to build a Virtuous Sales
Cycle. A virtuous cycle is defined as a “Self-propagating advantageous
situation in which a successful solution leads to more of a
desired result or another success which
generates still more desired results or
successes in a chain.”

A
Virtuous Sales Cycle is what happens when best sales practices are consistently
applied to produce above-average results, which in turn create a chain of
positive results that feed off of each other to generate even better
performance.

Therefore,
the aim of every salesperson should be to convert their sales efforts into Virtuous
Sales Cycles rather than the all-too-typical Vicious Sales Cycle in which
unresponsive, time-wasting sales behaviors spiral downwards into a never-ending
series of poor performance.

What
are a few of the behaviors you should use to create and perpetuate a Virtuous
Sales Cycle?

1.
Sell with Maximum Impact in the Least
Time. Selling with Maximum Impact in the Least Time means that every
interaction with a customer must be pre-planned to achieve the maximum impact
and provide the maximum value for the customer with the least investment of
their time possible.

2.
Be absolutely responsive to the customer
in Zero-Time. Because the timeframe for every sales action is immediate
anything that you put off, any customer interaction that you defer until later,
is less likely to ever occur. In my training courses I teach that “later” lives
on the same street as “never.”

3.
Continually fine-tune your sales
processes. Nothing stays the same. Products change. Customers change.
Technology changes. How you sell your product, and the metrics used to measure
the effectiveness of your processes, have to evolve to keep pace with these changes.

Let’s
put this in context and see how you can use these to initiate your Virtuous
Sales Cycle. What happens when you consistently sell with Maximum Impact and
enable your customers to make informed purchase decisions with a smaller
investment of their time? By virtue of selling more effectively you will
naturally compress the customers’ buying cycle. Compressing their buying cycle
will not only win you more orders it will also create more selling time for you
to sell to additional prospects. (Reduce your prospects’ buying cycle by 5%
then you will suddenly have 5% more sales time. This could be equal to an extra
13 selling days per year. How many more orders could you win with that extra
time?) If you sell to these additional prospects in the same effective manner
then this process of positive sales outcomes becomes self-propagating. Success
begets success and you have kick-started your Virtuous Sales Cycle.

What’s
Your Sales Expiration Date?



What Are You Doing To Stay Fresh?

Pick
up nearly any food product you can find on the shelves of your local
supermarket and it will be stamped with an expiration date. Look on the bottom
of the carton, or on the cap, and you’ll see “Best if used by June 21, 2012” or “Sell by June 21, 2012.” This useful bit of regulation is
designed to protect consumers from products that sat on the shelves too long at
the store and didn’t sell or that have been hidden in the back of your cupboard
behind the cans of baked beans and slowly turning moldy and inedible over the
years.

Who’s
protecting your customers from salespeople that have turned moldy and stale.

Have You Gone Stale?

Salespeople
have an expiration date as well. If you don’t adapt your selling to keep pace
with your customer’s rapidly changing buying behaviors, then you risk turning
into the sales equivalent of an expired credit card. Are you keeping fully
informed of the economic and technological changes that are affecting your
customers business? Are you fully educated about the new technologies and
products at your company? Do you know more about your products and services
than your customers? Not really? Then, like a credit card past its expiration
date, you are of  no value to anyone.

Who’s Checking Your Expiration Date?

With
new clients I often see sales managers that keep chronically underperforming
sales people onboard well past their expiration dates. Why? Sales managers are
human and, like most people, they are averse to change. They find it easier to
follow the path of least resistance and to work around a sluggard rather than
go through the hassle of firing them. Even if it places an extra burden on the
rest of their sales team to pick up the slack.

If
you have salespeople who are no
longer suited to sell your product or service then every minute you keep them onboard is a minute too
long. It is a myth that good salespeople can sell anything. To ensure the
growth of your company, salespeople
must have relevant experience and skills that will enable them to be completely responsive to the
information requirements of their customers in Zero-Time. If they don’t, they
must go. Period. Just like that month-old carton of leftover Chinese takeout
that’s turned into black mush in its little white carton in the back of your
fridge.

What Can You Do To Stay Fresh?

The
only constant in selling is change. Products change. Technology changes.
Services change. Customers change. As a salesperson, or sales manager, you have
to confront and adapt to change as well if you want to remain fresh and
competitive. There is no one right answer but there are a variety of choices
you can make:

1.
Make Your Numbers for a Change: It
is amazing what can happen to a salesperson if they put in that extra effort,
step up their responsiveness, make that extra cold call (or two or three) and
start hitting quota on a regular basis. Nothing breeds confidence, and success,
like success.

2.
Stay Current With New Thinking and
Trends in Your Profession: For instance, when was the last time you read a
book about sales? I urge everyone in sales, salespeople and managers alike, to
read at least one new sales book per month. (For instance, you could start by
reading my book, Zero-Time Selling, 10 Essential Steps to Accelerate Every Company’s
Sales.) Sales has undergone a rapid change in past 10-15 years and the
evolution isn’t stopping. Going about your job the “old-fashioned”
way is not going to get it done. It is essential to keep an open mind about new
ways to achieve your sales objectives.

3.
Try Something New: Take something
from that book you’ve just read and apply it to your selling. Take one new
technique from the book and apply it in your daily routine for a week. And then
add something new each week thereafter.

4.
Educate Yourself About Your Customers:
Set up a series of Google Alerts to keep abreast of the news about your
customers, their industry, their technology, their competitors and your
competitors. Use Alltop to survey and read the best blogs that address
your customers’ industry(s) from a market, financial and technological
perspective. In today’s market, it is not enough to just do your job. You have
to be a good business person, who can add value to the customer through your
business knowledge.

5.
Get Some Extra Sales Training:
Invest in some extra sales training. Pick an area where you need to sharpen
your skills and attend an online class. It could be social selling,
prospecting, writing, whatever will help you communicate more effectively with
your prospects and customers. Make this an annual event. Don’t rely on your
management to provide training that addresses your weaknesses. Be proactive.

6.
Hang with the Engineers: There is no
better way to learn the ins and outs of new products than to hang with the
product development people in your company. The most important relationships
you need are not necessarily with your customers.

I’ve
heard a lot of other good suggestions lately about how to re-energize and
re-motivate yourself in selling. One friend is taking an acting class to help
him break out of his “mold.” Another has started seeing a therapist
to help him shed some negative habits that are holding him back in his dealings
with customers. And, before you snicker at that suggestion you might ask
yourself why millionaire professional athletes from all sports around the globe
flock to talk with Dr Bob Rotella, the world’s leading sports psychologist.

How
do you stay fresh?

The Uncertainty Principle in Selling



Using Change to Your Competitive Advantage

You probably don’t consider the impact of
physics on your sales efforts. But you should.

You should evaluate your prospects’ buying
processes in terms of Heisenberg’s famous principle of uncertainty. Werner
Heisenberg, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932, is most well known
for his Uncertainty Principle in which he demonstrated that the act of
observing or measuring a process will necessarily change its outcome. While
Heisenberg arrived at his famous formulation through his work with the behavior
of sub-atomic particles, I have always found that a variation of the
Uncertainty Principle applies to sales as well.

My Uncertainty Principle of Selling states: The
process of selling to your prospect invariably changes their requirements and
decision criteria moving forward. The very process of discovery, of helping the
prospect define their requirements, and providing the data and information in
response to their questions, forces them to re-assess their needs and what the
criteria will be that they use in evaluating sellers and making an informed
purchase decision.

What happens when your prospect learns that
your SaaS product provides a feature, and associated value, that they hadn’t
anticipated when they first put together their requirements? Or, what happens
when your prospect’s expectations for the new machine tool they are looking to
acquire aren’t fully met by any of the products that they have evaluated? The
trajectory of their buying process changes and necessarily forces immediate
strategy adjustments on the part of the seller, otherwise known as you.

Why is this “Uncertainty” important
to you? Because too many sales people fall into the trap of thinking about
their sales process, and their prospects’ buying process, like the instructions
on your shampoo bottle: just lather, rinse and repeat.

You need to factor into your selling strategies
the fact that your prospect’s buying process isn’t a linear, inflexible string
of events. You should always make a detailed account plan for a sales
opportunity. For instance, your account strategy can consist of steps 1 through
N, that you believe will take the prospect through their buying process. But
then, as soon as the customer has completed step 1, the situation will likely
change and render your plans moot. This means that you have to be flexible in
your approach to selling.

The second reason that the Uncertainty
Principle of Selling is important to you is that it reinforces the necessity of
being completely and rapidly responsive to your prospect in their search for
the information they need to gather and evaluate in order to make a good
decision. Studies show that if you can be the seller who provides the
information that shapes your prospect’s “buying paradigm” or
“buyer’s vision” then your odds of winning their business rise fairly
substantially. It is always a much stronger position to be in if you are
proactively shaping your selling strategy by providing the value to the
prospect that shapes their buying process, rather than having to be completely
reactive to the actions of your competitors.

Conduct a review of your pipeline and ask the
following questions about each one of your qualified prospects:

1. What can I do for this prospect right now,
this minute, today, that will have the maximum sales impact in the least time
possible? Make a list of the actions you can proactively and immediately take
to shape the buyer’s paradigm and use the Uncertainty Principle to your
competitive advantage.

2. What can I do today that will create value
for this prospect and differentiate my product, company and me from my
competitors? Define one step you can take that will set your offering apart in
a meaningful, tangible way. If this takes too long to figure out what this
should be then you haven’t been paying attention to your prospect.

3. What information does this prospect still
require from me in order to make an informed purchase decision in the shortest
time possible? You should know what this is at any point in the sales process.

The key is to use the Uncertainty Principle to
your advantage. Plan your account strategy but be alert and alive to the
possibility of change.

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