Sales Blog for Sales and Sales Management

Like many sales training and development companies that focus on selling and sales management, we had our way of describing the sales process but nothing seemed to stick.  A couple of years ago, Dave Kurlan wrote a book called Baseline Selling.  It is a description of the sales process that Dave had been using a for a couple of years, and as a distributor for the  Objective Management Group, of which Dave is president, I was familiar with his approach.  So, I sought permission to use the diamond and here we are today. Our clients now describe where they are in a sales opportunity by the current base they are on.  Finally, a 'sticky' way to get people to remember the sales process. In this post, I focus on getting to first.  According to answers.com, there are 8 methods a batter can use to arrive at first:

1. Get a hit
2. Get walked
3. Get hit by a pitch
4. Fielder's choice
5. Reach on and error
6. Dropped third strike
7. Catcher's interference
8. Fielders obstruction

This is how I see it:

1. Get a hit - getting referral by a center of influence
2. Walk - you get introduced by a client
3. Hit by a pitch - someone responds to a direct mail piece 
4. Fielder's choice - cold call appointment
5. Reached on an error -get an appointment with a non-decision maker
6. Dropped third strike - You begged for the appointment with something like "I would like to come by for a few minutes to show you the kind of work that I do.
7. Catcher's interference - referred 'down' by the real decision maker
8. Fielder's obstruction - meeting with someone that is open minded, in the process of, looking at, thinking about.

In baseball, a batter usually wants to get onto first base any way possible.  But how about you?  When you look at the list, is there one of the 8 that seems to be the best way to get there?  If so, ask yourself how you are taking advantage of that 'best' way.  Ask yourself if you are taking advantage of your greatest skills and greatest resources to maximize your opportunity to get to first base.

My questions to you are:

If you are not spending most of your time and effort on the best way, why not?

What impact does this have on your effort, your results and your effectiveness?

What do you need to stop doing in order to start doing what would provide you the best and most effective results?

When are you going to start?

I work with CEOs that are afraid of what the current economic environment will do to top line sales revenue.  Certainly they can get more creative with expenses, but eventually that will have a negative impact on leveraging  new opportunities.  It doesn't take talent to cut expenses;  it is a math formula.  However, it does take talent and creativity to drive new business sales when markets are like they are today.  That is where we come in.

At Anthony Cole Training Group,  we use an assessment built and constantly perfected by Objective Management Group.  The assessment and the resulting findings provides information about sales strengths, sales weaknesses and sale skills as they relate to 21 core sales competencies.  My question today, and in 2 additional blog posts, will be:  How are you addressing these core competencies in your sales development program (either individually or corporately?)  If you are reading this as a participant of one or our training programs, then this information will have a tone of familiarity, so you will be able to relate to the content.  However, you may have been more recently focused on technique rather than the core issues that may be hindering your sales success.  I encourage you to read these posts and identify how they can be additive to your current program.  If you are not one of our participants, feel free to go to our website and take the sales grader to find out how you are doing against best practices in sales.  Here are the first 7 core competencies:

1. Has written goals: this is where your courage and passion come from. Without written goals you won't have the passion or commitment necessary to ask the tough questions, continue to prospect when the market is tough and to consistently ask for introductions
2. Follows a written goal plan: Often people have goals that are written, but then fail this next critical step - establish a written goal plan. Without a plan your goals lack clarity and therefore the activity required to accomplish your goals is unclear as well. And when the required activities are unclear then they won't get executed.
3. Positive attitude: This isn't about looking through rose colored glasses. This is about keeping your head about you when all those around you are losing theirs. It is easy to get caught up the water cooler talk and the complaining about the company, economy, or what the competition is doing. Ignore the talk and focus on what you have to do to be successful.
4. Take responsibility: Excuses are like opinions - everyone or most everyone has them and, unfortunately in selling, we use them when we fail to accomplish our goals. The easy thing to do is to blame something or someone for our shortcomings. If you've been in sales long enough you know that something is always going to happen to make selling difficult for you, but if you are committed to your own personal goals, then you won't let anything get in the way.
5. Strong self confidence: This is critical to succeed. You certainly can't expect yourself to perform well if you don't feel fully confident in what you are doing, what you are representing and what you are saying to the market. But what drives all of this is how you feel about yourself. You must have the confidence to maintain your ‘posture' when you are faced with difficult selling situations. Keep in mind that external gimmicks and crutches won't support you when things are tough. You must consider yourself a ‘10' and maintain that assessment of yourself no matter what happens in your roles.
6. Supportive beliefs: What you believe dictates what you do. If you believe that the economy is too tough to sell in, then you'll be right and won't sell anything. If you believe that people don't want to talk about spending additional dollars in a tight budget environment, then you will have trouble scheduling appointments. You get the point?
7. Control emotions: You must focus on executing your sales system and be prepared for curve balls, and ‘tough' questions. If you anticipate ‘what can go wrong' then when something does come at you that ordinarily would be considered unusual then you will be prepared to handle the situation. If you haven't thought through your phone call, or sales call or presentation, then you will be vulnerable to surprises. When these surprises happen, instead of continuing to execute without ‘panic', you will ‘choke' and deviate from your tried and true sales methods and approach. The symptoms of losing control of emotions are during review of a meeting your self-dialog contains words and phrases like: "should have, shouldn't have, could have, why didn't I, I can't believe that". These are indicative of losing control of emotions.

The best thing to do is to pick just one of these that seem to be the area where you need the most work.  Tackle that one first.  Not the one that is easy, but the one that will have the most positive dramatic impact on your business.  And if you need me call me @ 513 791 3458.

I'm reading the book ‘Who'.  No, the author is not Dr. Seuss it is Geoff Smart and Randy Street of ‘Topgrading' fame and fortune.  The book is about prospecting, evaluating, assessing, interviewing and selecting the right candidate for the job.  The job could be sales, management, finance, or operations; it doesn't matter.  As Jim Collins states in his book ‘Good to Great', "it is about getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats."  I'm thinking the same thing applies to you and your sales business.  You need a sales scorecard.

The best way to upgrade your client is to have a preferred customer or client base.  In banking, they identify segments such as business banking, middle market, retail and private banking,  just to name a couple.  Why wouldn't this make sense in all sales?  The short answer is that it does.  I was with a group yesterday, Melink, a company that specializes in helping companies and entities build or retro build ‘green buildings'.  They have sales people that specialize in specific market segments.

If your company doesn't look at marketing and sales that way, it doesn't mean that you can't.  You should have a scorecard of sorts to make sure that the people you are getting introduced to fit the mold of the ‘perfect client' for you.  When you work with your ‘perfect client', you provide greater value because you are more familiar with that particular market segment, you know the solutions they typically need and you have a product that fits their specific needs.  However, the problem is that you don't have a system or process in place to make sure that you are really getting the ‘ideal' client for your ‘book of business'.  You need a sales scorecard.  So here you go.  Feel free to use, edit or reproduce any way you feel is appropriate to your specific business, but keep the concepts in place and make sure that you have some sort of accountability process in place to ensure you adhere to your scorecard.  If you would like further discussion on this feel free to call.

Once completed, share this scorecard with anyone that can potentially interface with your clients to make sure there is synchronization in focus, effort and support for this type of client.