Before You Can “Fix” Your Sales, Master The Fundamentals

In the hierarchy of things that you can do to improve your sales
performance, there are both simple and complex solutions. Depending on your
company’s particular situation, both the simple and the complex solution could
provide value to your organization. They are not mutually exclusive. The
question is: what should you do first?

The difficulty with sales problems is that they can be hard to
diagnose and solve. There are lots of interlocking pieces to the sales puzzle,
and the temptation is to assume that hard problems require complex and
expensive solutions. Therefore, depending on your company’s size and resources,
this could mean that your most pressing sales problem doesn’t get addressed
because there is no budget or that a large investment is made to implement a
new selling process and train your entire sales force how to sell to that
model.

My experience has shown that a company with ample resources will
typically default to the complex solution because CEOs and sales managers make
the often faulty assumption that the simple solutions are already in place. A
company with more limited resources will also tend to overlook the simple
solutions to their sales problems because they have been conditioned to believe
that the only answer to a hard problem costs money. If they search online they
will find a parade of reputable sales training and consulting firms promoting
selling systems that promise to fix their sales problems. But those approaches
often require a substantial investment of money over a substantial period of
time.

However, irrespective of company size, if management were to
investigate and do a little digging they will usually find that the fundamental
disciplines every company needs to flawlessly execute their sales plan, and
that they believed were in place, have either faded due to management
inattention or never existed to begin with. They assumed that all sales leads
were promptly being followed up. They assumed that all salespeople were being
responsive to their prospects and customers in zero-time with the information
and answers to the questions they need to move forward in the buying process.
They assumed that customers were receiving the level of unconditional support
required to turn them into loyal repeat customers. They assumed that their
frontline salespeople knew their products inside and out, or at least better
than their customers did. Well, we all know what happens when you assume.

As with any investment, the dollars invested in new selling
systems and sales training involve a certain element of risk. You can’t
precisely predict the outcome although the potential payoff of improved sales
productivity, over an extended period of time, can be large as well. So,
imagine a company’s surprise when, after they have invested in an expensive new
selling system. modified their sales model and re-trained their entire sales
team, they determine that they are experiencing the same sales problems as
before.

The fault doesn’t lie with the new selling system. The problem
is that the company is trying to build a new sales house on a shaky foundation.
The biggest return on the dollars you invest in your sales team will come from
ensuring that you are mastering the fundamental sales disciplines ( and
incorporating those into your daily routines. Before you embark on an upgrade
program do the simple things first. Then take the next step to renovate and
upgrade your sales house.

Are you Walking the Dog or is the Dog Walking You?

There exists a touch of schizophrenia in some of the writing and
blogging on sales, sales improvement and sales training today. On one hand,
there is general agreement that the world has changed, that universally easy
access to information has shifted the balance of power in any sales transaction
from the seller to the customer, converting the old familiar sales cycle into
the buying cycle. Selling has become a “customer-oriented.”

And yet, on the other hand, there still remains a major emphasis
in selling today on the notion of controlling the sales process and controlling
your prospect and customers. (If you Google “controlling the sales process”
you’ll get 31,400,000 results.) However, there is perhaps no bigger myth in
sales today than that of a salesperson controlling the sales process or their
prospects.

Many companies and salespeople still nominally employ the
traditional “control-oriented” sales model today. It is easy to understand why
people gravitate towards this approach to selling. Being in “control” is
comforting. It is a hard habit for sales managers and salespeople to break.
Even though it doesn’t work.

I like to believe that I am in control when I’m taking my dogs
for a walk. Unless they decide that a compelling new smell emanating from the
bushes demands to be investigated. Or some yappy purse dogs straining on their
leashes in the opposite direction on the other side of the street need to be
greeted and sniffed from stem to stern. Like prospects, my dogs indulge my need
to appear to be in control.

Paradoxically, the primary tactic a salesperson often employs in
a vain effort to control the sales process centers on controlling and metering
the flow of information to the prospect. Rather than helping the salesperson
with his or her control issues, the prospect experiences this absence of
information as poor responsiveness and poor sales service. Whatever advantage
the salesperson had hoped to gain by “controlling the prospect,” he
or she will have lost.

This approach is the exact opposite of how effective sellers
today are using responsiveness, content and speed as competitive advantages to
help the buyer make an informed purchased decision in the least time possible.
Notice the emphasis on “helping the buyer.” Selling must be a service
in support of the buyer. And service, by definition, is about giving, not
holding back.

Rather than making life harder for salespeople, openly
relinquishing any claim to controlling the sales process and the prospect frees
a salesperson to develop more effective ways to create value for the customer
and differentiate their product and company through how they sell.

Acknowledging that you are not in control of the prospect forces
you to focus on your prospect’s requirements, specifically in terms of the
information they must have to make an informed purchase decision. And, how you
can meet their needs by using the resources that actually are under your
control to sell with the maximum impact in the least time possible to win more
orders in less time.

I read a blog posting recently about what a salesperson could do
to increase sales. The title was something catchy like “A Billion and One Tips to Increase Sales.” It was hard
to argue with the premise of the post. Everyone in sales can use good advice on
increasing sales. It’s the reason I continue to read everything I can about
sales. There is always something new to learn.

In this case, this author’s useful quick tips were all about
creating more sales activity. He was asking the question ‘What should you do if
you have prospects but they aren’t moving forward fast enough?’ and providing
answers that were designed to create a flurry of sales activity around
prospects to stimulate them to engage and move forward with the seller.

But is selling the same as sales activity? And, if a prospect is
not yet fully committed to the buying process, is random sales activity the way
to get them engaged?

Nothing is sometimes better than something

I had a salesperson, named Arte, working for me once who had
confused activity with selling. He came into my office one day and told me that
he had invented his own method of selling that he called SWARM. The acronym
stood for Surround With Activity to Regain Momentum. His thought was to envelop
his prospects in a constant swarm of sales activities such as of phone calls,
visits, emails, voice messages, invitations to webinars and seminars, product
demonstrations in the hope that eventually something would stick and the
prospect would relent and engage.

How’d that work for Arte? Not so well. But he got high marks for
creativity.

Unfortunately, similar to Arte, many salespeople fall into the
trap of believing that doing something, anything, with a prospect is better
than doing nothing. This happens all the time when the prospect has gone radio
silent. There are lots of reasons why this occurs and it is the job of the
salesperson to determine the answer and respond appropriately and with content
that has value for the prospect. But rarely is the correct response to bombard
the prospect with trivial, time-wasting requests and interactions.

Keep in mind the customer’s objective

In a sales situation, or buying situation, it is important to
keep in mind that the goal of the customer is to gather the information or data
they need to make an informed purchase decision with the least investment of
their time possible. This is not to say that customers won’t spend the
appropriate time to purchase a product or service. This just means that they
won’t spend a minute more than they have to.

Create and deliver value each time you talk to your prospects and customers

If you are selling you should only be taking actions with a
customer that have a defined purpose, deliver clear value and support the
customer’s goal. To that end, instead of unthinkingly reaching out to the
customer and demanding some of his or her time with a trivial request, consider
the opposite approach: make sure that every interaction you have with a
prospect or customer achieves Maximum Impact in the Least Time (MILT) possible.
It requires planning and thought to make certain that each time you interact
with the prospect or customer you are providing information that will bring
them closer to their goal of making an informed decision. But the result is
that you will bring value to the customer through your selling. If you want a
customer to engage, create value for them by your actions. Wasting their
limited time with “sales activities” does the opposite.

Selling has a purpose. It is not the goal of your prospects or
customers to spend time with you. In fact, the opposite is true. They want to
accomplish their job, which is to buy a product or service, while spending as
little time with the salesperson as possible. The winning salesperson will
usually be the one who knows how to make that happen.

Which is more important in selling: Process or selling skills?

This is one of the classic debates about sales and selling. It
is very similar to the ‘nature vs. nurture’ debates that young adults
without kids and too much time on their hands indulge in. (Anyone with kids
quickly learns the answer to this…) 
The answer is that both process and skill are required to succeed in
sales. However, process provides the platform for skills to flourish.

What Would Michael Do?

Take the case of an elite athlete like Michael Phelps, the world
champion swimmer. Michael Phelps trains like a demon, spending hours face down
in a pool every day, to showcase his skills on the world’s biggest stage, the
Olympics. He won an unprecedented 8 gold medals in swimming at the Beijing
Games in 2008. There is no doubting his obvious skills. Having conquered the
world once, the question was would he return to the London games in 2012 and
try again?

In preparation for the Beijing Olympics, Michael followed the
training regimen put together by his coach, Bob Bowman. It was a process that
focused on the quality of the daily work Michael did in preparation for
competition. Every workout he swam and the details of how he performed in that
workout, every weightlifting session, every cross-training session were
meticulously recorded, tracked and analyzed. Bowman and Phelps knew that the
most accurate predictor of how Michael would perform in the big competitions
was the data collected about his daily training process over the previous
months and years.

The Day-to-Day Process

This is similar to selling. How you execute your sales process
on a day-to-day basis will be the most accurate predictor of whether you will
win orders and meet your objectives. An effective and disciplined sales process
can do for you what it does for Michael Phelps. If you work hard, it will put
you in a position to compete for and win orders. It is how well you execute the
basic sales activities that comprise the steps of your process, and how often,
that will ultimately lead to the order.

As he began his preparations for the London Olympics
Phelps strayed from the process that had led him to the podium eight times in
Beijing. And, with all the skills in the world, his results in competition
suffered. He was losing to swimmers that previously couldn’t compare to him.
What did he do? He redoubled his commitment to the process laid out by his
coach. He might have rebelled against the process but he returned to it because
he knew that if he invested his hard work into it results would follow.

Listen to Michael Phelps being interviewed after a competition
today and he defaults to talking about his process. The race result might now
have been a first place finish but he will talk about how well his training is
going instead. His focus is on how is he performing each day in each step of
his training process. He knows that if he executes his process he’ll put
himself in the position to achieve the results he expects.

In the same way sales process can provide a much clearer
snapshot of potential sales than simply looking at your pipeline of prospects.
Well-defined sales processes provide a method to continually assess and measure
the underlying sales activities that will lead to orders. Using metrics to
continually measure and fine-tune sales processes, just as Bob Bowman did with
Phelps’ training regimen, leads to improved outcomes for salespeople of all
skill levels.

Your Process Enhances Your Skills

I had a client where one of the more senior salespeople, a
grizzled sales professional, Ollie, was determined to resist management’s
efforts to implement some fundamental and essential sales processes to respond
to a changing sales environment. Ollie had always managed his sales territory
his own way and while he possessed great sales skills and experience he was
floundering. He found himself at odds with evolving prospect and customer
expectations for salespeople in terms of responsiveness, follow-up, content
delivery and service.

The processes that Ollie’s management implemented saved his
sales career by requiring Ollie to become more responsive, more proactive and
timely in follow-up, more knowledgeable of the products he sold, more conscious
of eliminating time-wasting sales calls and making every customer interaction
achieve the maximum impact in the least time possible in order to compress
buying cycles.

This does not mean that a salesperson should ignore the skill
components of selling. We should always be working to improve our sales skills
no matter how much experience we have. But sales skills need to be utilized in
support of defined sales process to create the most value for the customer. And
the salesperson.

Why are your sales so slow? I’m not referring to your order
rate. I am talking about the activities and processes that have to be happening
in Zero-Time in order for you to achieve your sales goals. One thing leads to
another and if you are running in place in February, you’ll be running to catch
up by March and hopelessly behind by June.

Here we are, still near the beginning of a new year, when hopes
for the next twelve months should be running high. And your selling efforts
feel like they are stuck in the thick mud. Just like they were last year. This
is not the way to kick off what should be your most successful sales year ever.

Everyone has a reason or an excuse for slow selling. Believe me,
we have all been in a situation where you question your sales manager about why
it is taking so long to move a customer along in their buying cycle, and they
don’t have an answer that makes sense. Or any answer at all.

I ask all my new clients to identify the reason, or reasons, why
they are not growing, why their sales efforts are stuck in neutral. The
responses I receive are typically all of a piece. As CEOs they can identify the
symptoms but not the causes of the problem. But as CEOs and sales managers of
SMBs you can’t be a doctor who can only diagnose the symptoms of the illness
without prescribing a cure.

I group the symptoms of sales lethargy into the S-L-O-W acronym.

S is for Status Quo.

Too many companies are just coasting along. The CEOs are not
really satisfied with their results but they are too worried about making any
changes that could rock the boat and potentially jeopardize the sales they do
manage to capture. Maintaining the status quo is not a way to thrive.

“Status Quo is ancient
Greek for ‘slow death.'”

Folks, say hi to Milt again. (To learn more about Milt, check
out my book, Zero-Time Selling, or this previous blog post. )

“Hey.”

Actually, Milt, Status Quo is not Greek. It is Latin for
“the current state of affairs.” But when an SMB’s sales are stuck,
maintaining the status quo is the same as slowly dying.

“As I said.”

L is for Lack of Urgency.

In today’s economy you can’t expect the customer to operate on
your schedule. The timeframe for every sales action has to be immediate.
Customers do a lot of online research on your product before they ever call you
and when they do they are single-mindedly looking for answers to their
questions. The first seller with the complete answers wins.

O is for Outdated sales practices.

Unfortunately many SMBs still operate their sales teams like it
is 1912 not 2012. Their only concessions to the 21st century are a website and
email.

“What would you call
my pager?”

Google d-i-n-o-s-a-u-r.

Your customer and their buying behavior have been irrevocably
altered by technology over the past 15-20 years. And if your sales practices
and sales methods haven’t changed in concert with your customer then you can’t
expect to effectively compete for their business against competitors who have
evolved.

“Google
N-E-A-N-D-E-R-T-H-A-L?”

W is for Weak sales management.

I don’t like to point fingers.

“But you will.”

SLOW starts at the top.

Even a highly self-motivated sales person will find it hard to
succeed in company where the status quo rules, where everyone’s motor revs at a
slower idle and where the sales systems and processes were obsolete before the
turn of the century. A successful sales culture begins and ends with
management. The CEO and sales management have to commit to change and urgency.

Make a change today to get your sales going!

Now, as you move further from the old sales year and deeper into
the new sales year, now is the time to evaluate what you can do to shake things
up, to change the routines your sales team have followed year after year. Break
some of your bad old habits and reach a level of sales success that you haven’t
achieved before.

Here are THREE tips you can put to use today. These are not
permanent fixes. Or suggestions for how to comprehensively revamp your sales
efforts. There are just small ideas you can put to use TODAY that can begin to
make a difference and break you out of the SLOW mold. It doesn’t matter which
one you choose. Just choose one of the following steps and put it into play.

Make One Change Today.

Take a close look at your sales routines; your sales processes.
Tell each of your salespeople to choose just one customer facing activity and change
it. Now. Don’t just pay lip service to change. Do something about it. This is
not a change that requires a committee to plan and implement. I’m advocating
something much more simple than that. Just choose one aspect of your day-to-day
sales activity and change it. Simple.

Create a Metric.

Every aspect of your sales process is measurable. Do you have
metrics for each step of your selling process? Are you measuring how long it
takes to respond to your sales leads? Or how long it takes you to write a quote
and deliver it to a prospect or customer? Choose a single aspect of one sales
process and assign a metric to it. Then measure it today and again tomorrow.

Be Accountable.

Tell someone about the change you made or the metric you’re tracking. Tell a colleague that you have undertaken to make a change in your sales routine. Tell your boss which part of your sales process you have begun to measure and what the goal is. When you tell someone else that you are making a change they will be interested to learn if it is helping you. As a result they will ask you how it is going. And you will need to have an answer for them. Being accountable for change is a big motivator.

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