Job, Career, Passion

When people join your sales organisation it’s important to get the ones who will become passionate.  But how can you tell if someone is going to be passionate about the job? We all know those types who just want a ‘job’. The only important things are getting paid on time, and that the commission is correct.  Career types are a little more engaged with the business and the concept that they will have a to do a little more than show up every day to get recognised. 

Passionate types get obsessed with the job. They are the ones who get there early, miss breaks and lunch, stay late, have to be told to take a holiday. They feel genuinely upset when they miss their targets (which we all do from time to time) and not just because they will miss out on commission, but mostly because they feel they’ve let themselves down and those around them.

The passionate ones are where most of the positive energy comes from and they need to be cultivated. But how do you know who is passionate at recruitment time?  Not difficult really.  Passionate people tend to exhibit that trait in many areas of their lives.  They have a tendency to be passionate about all kinds of things. 

Summary: Job, Career, Passion. Surround yourself with the passionate types.

Action: Ask yourself who around me is passionate about the job. Am I passionate about the job? What would it take for me to get passionate?  Next time your interviewing, ask the question “What are you passionate about in life?”

Closing techniques

Closing techniques are an outmoded form of psychological manipulation designed to make a salesperson confident in the final stages of a sales cycle and designed to hassle or trick a prospect into signing. They are most used by direct sales organisations – mainly telesales operations. They really don’t have a role in today’s professional selling environment.

That’s not to say that salespeople shouldn’t aim to close deals, they should, but more importantly they should concentrate on creating the circumstances where prospects want to buy without having to be pressured.

Generally speaking the poorer the product the more the salesperson needs closing techniques. Undoubtedly there is in society a soft underbelly of gullible prospects that quite frankly will buy anything if the salesperson is relentless enough.

But if you’ve got a good product you shouldn’t ever have to ‘close’ a deal. If it’s a good product and you’ve presented it well, why wouldn’t the prospect but it? Why would you need a closing technique?

There is one factor that comes into play that all salespeople need to be aware of and that is a natural hesitation that many buyers experience once they have made the decision in their minds to go ahead with you. It’s a last minute nervousness but it’s a dangerous time for the sales cycle. All that is needed here is a light-hearted approach to get them over the hurdle. But very important – once you’ve popped the question – keep quiet till you’ve had an answer. Most salespeople are tempted to jump in before the prospect has answered and that let’s the prospect of the hook.

Summary: Leave closing techniques out of your professional sales skill set.

Action: Once you’ve asked for the order – keep quiet.

Career progression in sales

Sales people often ask about career progression thinking that somehow it is separate from progression in the rest of their lives and that it exists outside of themselves. In other words progression is a feature of a company more than a personal characteristic.

In the background they are probably asking about money and status which is to be expected and indeed welcomed. But they don’t necessarily understand that career progression and development is closely related to personal progression and development.

At this point we mention again the word that comes up most often in relationships of all kinds – trust.

In this diagram you can see where people fit on the trust scale. The degree to which you can be trusted correlates very highly with the amount of status and probably money that you will have confered on you.

Early on as a baby you are not trusted with anything. And then as a child you might hopefully be trusted to tie your own shoe laces and get a snack from the fridge. As a teenager you might be trusted with pocket money but not the family finances. As you leave home – perhaps become a student or get a job for the first time – you are trusted with your own finances. Later, people might trust you with their emotions and you might get a partner and that partner might trust you to become a parent and look after children. Maybe at work you might be entrusted with a couple of employees to look after and train, or a large group of valuable customers. As life progresses you are given more and more valuable resources to look after until ultimately you might become someone looking after thousands of people and billions of pounds.

It’s all about trust and what can be entrusted to you. No one is going to entrust valuable company resources to you if you can’t even look after yourself. Ask yourself, if someone gives me something to look after, and they go away for a while, when they come back, is that something in better shape than before they gave it to me? What is my reputation for being able to look after people, cash, resources? How can I improve that reputation?

It’s a fact that the people who get promoted are the ones that prove themselves able to take on ever increasing amounts of responsibility and look after an ever increasing range and value of resources.

Summary; Career progression is something you make happen by becoming able to look after ever greater amounts of resources, people, customers, suppliers, revenue, cash, budgets etc. It isn’t a feature of your employers organisation.

Action; Ask yourself – what is in my care? Anything? Can I learn to look after the things around me? Will people see that I can be trusted to look after things, people, resources? Because if they do, then I will progress. My relationships will progress at home and at work.

Note for employers; A great question to ask in an interview. What are you responsible for? What are you trusted to look after?

Decision Makers – Questions they ask

Remember decision makers have a history of making good decisions.

Where you are concerned, they will probably be asking the following;

Value – Am I going to do this?

• What will the return be?
• How confident am I that I will get this return?
• What are the risks?

Competition – Am I going to do this with you?

• Can I get better value elsewhere?
• Do I trust you and have rapport with you?

Urgency – Am I going to do this with you now?

• Why shouldn’t I wait
• What will I lose if I wait

If the DM has got the right answers to all these questions you will certainly get the deal – simple really!

Qualification – “What’s the budget?”

We all want to know before we put in a lot of time and effort if the client is going to be able to afford the product or service we are offering.

The mistake we make however is that we ask the question “What’s the budget?”

This question gets several answers most of them misleading;

• We don’t have a budget for this [often misinterpreted as "you might as well stop now"]
• Budget is no issue [time to worry!]
• We haven’t bought one of these so we don’t know [reasonable response if true]
• Sorry our budgets are confidential [probably true if not very helpful]

Prospects have an instinct that if they tell you what they are prepared to spend, then magically your proposal will represent their budget and not what they really need.

Much better questions than “What’s the budget?” are;

• What do you expect this to cost? [less invasive]
• What did the last one you bought cost?
• How much are you spending with the current provider?

As we’ve said before affordability is directly related to need. If someone wants something badly enough they’ll find a way to afford it whatever is in the budget.

Affordability can also be established by other questions you can ask;

• How many people do you employ? [A company employing 40 people is probably spending several thousand a month on premises, phone calls, expenses etc etc]
• How many offices do you have?
• How long have you been trading?
• Are you VAT registered? [If not then his turnover is less than £64,000 pa or just over 5k per month, or he's evading VAT!]
• What’s your company number?

The first three questions are just polite taking-an-interest type of questions. The second two have to be used when appropriate.

If your product has no tangible financial benefit than affordability is all important because they cannot pay for your product with new income. But if your product has a direct financial benefit and causes new income to arise then the whole budget question becomes irrelevant except for the cash-flow implications if there is a delay to that income. If you can show that your product will bring in new money or save money then the costs should come out that profit/saving.

Qualification – “Money’s no object”

When a prospect says to you “Don’t worry – money’s no object” – start worrying!

Every successful business runs on budgets, forecast and projections.

Even successful sole traders know the importance of financial planning.

Either;

• You are not talking to the Decision Maker
• You are talking to the DM but he’s about to be replaced or go bust
• You are not being taken seriously as a business person
• You are talking to someone who doesn’t know what the budgets are
• You made the mistake of asking “What’s the budget?”

Qualification – The existing supplier

If a prospect already has a supplier for a service you are aiming to provide, then whatever he says the most likely outcome is that he will stay with that supplier. For a whole host of reasons. These could be;

• Existing relationships
• Volume discounts
• Part way through a long term contract
• Terms and conditions already negotiated
• Me plays golf with their MD

So why is he interested in talking to us? Possibly…

• He wants to see if we offer anything clever that he can get his existing supplier to start offering
• He wants to see if his supplier is still offering a competitive price
• He’s maybe starting to think about switching at the end of the current contract

…none of which help us now.

Prospects who are in this position are not necessarily telling us the whole story and often can put us to a lot of time and trouble while they go through these checks with no intention whatever of switching. They are often very persuasive in getting us to make proposals to support their research.

Summary; The most dangerous competitor is the existing supplier.

Action: The prospect must want something that only we provide (USP) and that the existing supplier could never provide before he will genuinely consider switching.

Qualification – Only Me – Notes

The “Only Me” part of the qualification process is often not well understood. We are talking about “uniques” or USPs (unique selling points).

Sales people often focus on all the things that are the same as their competition.

In this diagram you can see us and the competition with slightly different solutions to the same business need. The average salesperson concentrates on the stuff that is in the overlap area. The good salesperson concentrates on the uniques (My USPs). The Super Sales Person gets the prospect to commit his USPs to the decision criteria early on.

This means that you must know what your uniques are versus all of the competition and indeed individual competitors.

By the way those uniques are to do with every aspect of interaction with the client and could even be do with your sales approach as much as the product.

Summary: The best people sell to their uniques, and get the prospect to accept early on that they cannot live without those uniques.

Action: Get your prospect to include your USPs in his selection criteria. Make a list of your uniques with respect to individual competitors and with respect to all competitors. Get to know your competition and know what they present as their USPs.

Qualification – What is it?

Every company has limited resources and aims to deploy those resources to best effect. Sales people and sales deals can use up those resources very quickly and not necessarily on the best opportunities.

Companies will often implement a method for assessing the quality of sales opportunities to make sure that those limited resources are used on the best sales opportunities. One such method is SCOTSMAN. There are many lesser and more detailed forms of this tool but here is a quick introduction;

S – Solution – Do we have a product or service that directly addresses their business need or are they wanting something that we don’t sell

C – Competition – Are there many competitors on this deal or are we in on our own

O – Only Me – Is there something that the prospect can only get from me that is critical to his decision or are we selling a “me too” solution?

T – Timescale – What is the prospects timescale? Will we get a rapid decision?

S – Size – Is the opportunity big enough to be interesting?

M – Money – Has the prospect got the money to afford the solution?

A – Authority – Are we talking to the decision maker?

N – Need – Why do they NEED to do this NOW, and why can’t they just wait.

Decision Makers – How to get to them

Decision Makers are often protected by the people that ‘elected’ them. Often directly by for example a PA or receptionist. But often indirectly by the management structure of a business. But all genuine DMs have similar work habits that provide clues on how to get access to them.

• They work the longest hours [Call outside the working hours of the receptionist/PA]
• They tend to work through lunch [Call during lunch]
• They tend to be meeting people during the hours that those people work – normal work hours

If as a regular salesperson you work normal hours and take lunch you’re going to find it difficult to speak to Decision Makers!

Decision Makers are focused on profit.  So in all your discussions with a DM you should translate your product benefits into how that translates into a profit. If you do that then you will get more access.

Examples of Decision Maker thinking;

“We sell water coolers” – not interesting, everyone knows what a water-cooler is and where to get one

“Our water coolers have an in-built ambient temperature sensor  (ATS)” – Not interesting – It’s a feature – So what?

“Our water coolers have an ATS which saves 50% on energy consumption” – OK that’s quite interesting, a benefit rather than a feature, and it could be that you could save us some money, but I bet everyone’s got an ATS.

“Our water coolers are the only ones to have an ATS which saves 50% on energy consumption meaning an average saving of £200 per annum per cooler” – OK very interesting because we have 100 water coolers and that could save us £20,000 pa off our energy bill and it would be irresponsible of me in my position as Decision Maker not to explore this.