Sales Blog for Sales and Sales Management

Guaranteed?  Only if you execute what is outlined below.  I'm sure you've been asked by a prospect if you can guarantee a product or service that you offer.  In the world of sales, that can be one of the toughest questions to answer.  When I am asked that question, I tell them "yes, if": if they can guarantee that they (the company or sales person) can guarantee that they will do everything that we teach them.  No one makes that guarantee. Here are my steps to guaranteed sales success for next year.  You do these things and you will succeed.

1. Take time to establish personal (not business sales goals) goals that you have to accomplish (non-negotiable). Set time lines for, and share these goals with people that will make sure you are doing everything possible to succeed.
2. Build a success formula (link to our resources) so that you can translate your personal goals and the associated income required into an action plan that, when executed, will allow you to reach your goals. (The key here is that you must know your business to arrive at the various critial converstion ratios from one sales step to the next.)
3. Report your sales activity results weekly (huddles)to someone that cares enough to congratulate you on success or coach you when you are failing.
4. Undertand that missing an activity target by just 1% is still failing.
5. Review your actual sales activity results monthly against your success formula assumptions and make adjustments if your are falling short in effort or execution requirements. 
6. Once you identify gaps in your performance, reach out and get professional coaching help from someone that can help you, not just coddle you.
7. Take responsibility.  Don't blame the economy, the competition or your company for failure.  You are in control of your own outcomes, good or bad.
8. Manage yourself to success.  Do not let yourself get sideways with tasks and activities that make you feel good at the expense of the hard stuff like prospecting.  Prospecting is the job. It is what separates you from account managers.
9. Reward yourself for success and establish consequences for failure.

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.

In today's market place, you can survive the short term by making quick adjustments to your sales plan, your pricing and market strategy.  These adjustments will reflect in your sales pipeline and in your monthly sales results; however, what you will see in the end is that these adjustments will do little to secure consistent and predictable sales growth, which is what you need to focus on in addition to surviving the current environment.  How do you do that? 

Sales Fundamentals

1. As sensitive as the marketplace is to pricing - don't automatically reduce your pricing or margins just to get a sale. Yes, this will help you today, but if you keep that client, you will have re-established your brand as the low cost provider or a price based resource.
2. As difficult as it might be to maintain your pricing, I understand that you may have to sharpen your pencil in order to get a deal. Ok, then start selling additional services so that you can increase the revenue value of that client. Start focusing on average revenue per account instead of average size sale.
3. Focus on the client. The marketplace today certainly wants good pricing; however, they also are seeking ‘comfort' in a relationship. As much as we have discussed 'not showing up and throwing up', the market has changed. They want assurance that your product will work; you will be there when they need you; and that your business is sustainable. Start early by providing them information that will satisfy their need for security.
4. ABP = Always be prospecting. You need to step up your prospecting activity. If your normal mode of penetrating the market is through introductions, then you need to increase the number of meetings that you have with centers of influence. If you market yourself through networking, then do more networking.
5. One-time hits are valuable right now to prop up your sales and to support your financials, but understand that the one-time hit is exactly that, a one-time hit. If that hit is a $100,000 deal, then your strategy for next year needs to include how to replace that revenue event. You are better off transitioning those one-time hits into long term clients by closing the immediate deal and then entering discussions as a valued advisor.

Certainly, these are unprecedented times, but fundamentals are fundamentals.  When you stray from them, you get into trouble.  When in trouble, return to the fundamentals and return to consistent success.

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.

I hate having these discussions because the typically come out the wrong way in writing. When I read articles like the one from Fast Company - The Most Valuable Player in Sports - I can't help but think about sales people, selling and sales results.  Check this out.  In 2006 major league baseball spent $311,000,000 (14% of payroll) on players that didn't play.  I automatically think - hmm, how much money was spent by companies on sales people that didn't play / perform?

I also think how many goals were washed out because the sales professional in charge lacked the desire, commitment, or responsibility to overcome obstacles to executing the game / goal plan to make sure they got the sales results they stated they would get.  And, as a result, failed to achieve some, if not all, the personal goals they had set?

The article goes on to talk about how Dr. Andrews, in addition to his orthopedic wizardry, developed and honed his therapeutic  mastery as well.  He would engage the prospective athlete in dialog that allowed him to identify a multitude of success factors ‘post' operative procedure.  Here are just 6 of his questions ‘translated' into sales talk to assess a sales person's acumen and preparedness for recovery.

1. What exactly is your current sales problem? Where is / are the choke points to successful selling?
2. What happens if you don't fix it?
3. What are your short- term, intermediate and long term sales goals?
4. How committed are you to rehabbing or turbo charging your sales career?
5. What is your appetite for change?
6. What are the other external factors that will help or hinder your success?

Powerful and insightful questions that need to be asked before engaging in any sales training, individual coaching or on-going development plan.    Too often people jump into the fray of training and or self - help only to find themselves light in the checking account, lost investment of time and very little improvement in results. 

My suggestion to you is that you should look at those 6 questions before  you begin to re-invent yourself or re-commit yourself to ‘really getting it done this year'.  Honestly answer those questions and then decide on what your sales goals will be, what your goal plan will look like and how you will hold yourself accountable over the next 12 months.  Oh, and one more question once you've decided that this time you are really going to get it done:

Why should I believe you?

Too many times salespeople fail to close business simply because they didn't muster the courage required in the beginning of the sales cycle - when they were prospecting.  Instead of calling at the top of the organization or as Anthony Parinello describes this person "VITO - Very Important Top Officer" the timid sales person calls somewhere below that level where the only qualifying capabilities of the HR director or Risk Manager is to say ‘no'.

You want to close more business more quickly at higher margins do the following:

1. Always call at the level where the person as the authority to say yes to your proposal. Even if you get shifted down to another level you can always get back to your initial contact
2. In those situations where you do your best to call at the top and can't get there, but the prospect is on your top ten list, then make sure your inside coach will get you to the decision maker before presenting
3. When preparing for your closing meeting make sure you always - ALWAYS - send an ‘as we agreed to letter', follow the letter with a phone call and then, before you present to the decision maker, review everything discussed so far, the purpose of the meeting (make a decision) and close your review by asking, ‘what's changed'.

For more great information on calling on the right people follow this link to Dave Kurlan's blog: sales development blog.

I look at about a dozen blogs and newsletters a week.  That is not a lot of browsing according to standards set by Seth Godin, Verne Harnish, Dave Kurlan or Guy Kawasaki, just to name a few.  It is enough to know that when it comes to selling, sales training, sales coaches and driving sales results, no one person has all the answers and no one person is right or wrong. Therefore, here are a couple of links to blog post that I'm sure you will find helpful:

• Marketing: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/10/waiting-for-the.html
• Selling on price: http://www.sellingtoconsumers.com/art_offering_the_lowest_price_is_overrated.htm
• Quality Selling Activity: http://www.sixsigmaselling.com/six_sigma_selling/2008/04/how-to-avoid-th.html
• Sales training: http://www.omghub.com/salesdevelopmentblog/tabid/5809/bid/6914/10-Types-of-Sales-Advisers-and-How-to-Choose-the-One-That-s-Best-For-You.aspx
• Effective Prospecting: http://www.referralcoach.com/individuals/
• Closing: http://blog.anthonycoletraining.com/Sales-Training-Sales-Java/bid/4767/How-to-Sell-to-Close-the-Business

I just did a search on Google for ‘sales techniques'.  In .19 seconds, I had over 7 million listings for sales techniques.  If prospecting, qualifying or closing seems to be problems for you, it certainly can't be because you can't get information on ‘how to'.  Maybe you haven't taken the time to learn how to, or are comfortable with the position that you've been selling for 20 plus years.  As the song goes, ‘the times they are a changing'.  If you haven't changed, then I'm guessing that in many cases, neither have your results.  Oh, you may be selling as much as you used to, but I'd guess it's not as easy as it used to be.  Come on, take a few minutes every week and brush up those sales skills.  It will make a difference.

I landed at the Bradley International Airport outside of Hartford Connecticut when I was 18.  I flew out of there a couple of days ago, 35 years later, after one of our sales training sessions with an insurance company's  salesforce.  I can't believe the changes. Though I didn't remember all the details of the airport, I do remember it being small and unremarkable.  Today it is a bright, vibrant and a much-expanded hub of air transportation; the improvements are mark able.

As I sat there having lunch, I wondered how much I had changed over that same time-period.  Certainly, the physical changes were obvious.  When I was 18, I was there as a recruit to play football for the University of Connecticut.  Today, I'm a 53 year old consultant to companies that are trying to change / improve their sales force, align sales efforts, and build systems and resources that support extra-ordinary sales growth.  Money isn't the measure of everything that happens, but it is one way to keep score and to track how far you have come.  35 years ago, if you had told me that someday I would own a company with 8 employees and generating 2 million dollars a year, I would have thought you were nuts.  My goal at that time was to graduate and become a college football coach.  How did I go from football coach to entrepreneur?   The following list isn't meant to be all inclusive answer to that question, but maybe it will give you some idea of what it takes to change from an average doing ok sales person, to one that is considered extra-ordinary and best in class.

1. Goal setting - you have to establish non-negotiable goals that extend who you are
2. Commitment - you have to demonstrate your commitment with consistent behaviors
3. Persistence - nothing that you want will be easy, you have to persist beyond obstacles
4. Passion - I love what I'm doing. If you don't love what you are doing get out
5. Learning - you can't stop learning. If you do you'll stop earning and growing

Certainly, you can make a living and probably do ok, but is that why you chose professional selling as a career, to be average and ok?  Challenge yourself in the following ways:

1. Set new goals for yourself that are way beyond what you think is possible
2. Commit to write down your goals, share them with others and then execute activities consistent with those goals.
3. Persist - Do not let yourself or others convince you that you are too old, too young or already good enough to take on a challenge of getting better.
4. Re-ignite the passion that you had the first day you started. Think that you have nothing and you have everything to gain and prove. Start over again as if you had to prove something.
5. Read a book at least every other week. Learn something new about yourself, your business and about selling. Expand your knowledge and skill to become best in class.

Again this isn't the end all and you may actually be thinking is it worth the effort?  I can't tell you the answer to that and only once you accepted this challenge will you know your return on investment.

The economy is in a tailspin?  Yes, that is a question because every sales person I've talked to this week tells me how great things are.  Every one of them has told me that they are getting calls and getting appointments.  People are willing to talk, people are worried, concerned, and they want help. That's the good news.  The bad news is that they'll talk to anyone, and in many cases, they want free advice.  Neither of those are good if you don't stick to a sales process that focuses on qualifying, asking questions and getting to a decision making process.

I want you to understand and put into practice the following:

1. Just because someone wants to talk to you because they are worried doesn't mean that they want to make a change or want to buy something. So your job isn't to just offer some comfort, but also to make sure that the ‘worry' is significant enough to do something. Take action, make decisions to change.
2. Yes, they want advice. But remember that they already have other advisors, and in many cases, they are working to ‘round out' the advice that they are getting. In other words, they are working to get a 360^o on their current status as it relates to risk they have or they might be facing. So as part of your advisory role and consultative approach, again, you have the opportunity to make yourself unique among the other advisors. That opportunity is to take the prospect to a point where they make decisions relative to the seriousness of their problem. If there is a compelling reason to do something, whether new or different, you must position yourself in the role of the one that will execute this change.
3. If your prospect or client needs to take action, you must now put yourself in a qualifying position to make sure that you are the one that they go to when they take action i.e. make a change or make a new or different purchase of a product or service. DO NOT, provide the advice, especially to a new prospect, free of charge. DO NOT let yourself believe that your expert advice alone will get you the opportunity to get paid in exchange for this advice. If they are a prospect they are most likely doing business with someone that is in your line of work. They are the incumbent and so they are already on third base ready to capitalize on any expert advice that you have provided THEIR client. Make sure that you get commitments from these prospects to take action and take it with you.
4. Be patient. I know from our own personal circumstances that we are in the process of making changes. Yes we are making changes, but we are a little more deliberate now about the timing of those changes. We are doing more risk and reward analysis than normal because we feel that there is more at stake currently, given the uncertainly of the marketplace. Chances are your clients and prospects are feeling the same way. So there are two really important steps here:

• Be patient. Set timelines for follow up and have clear expectations and outcomes for each step or meeting. Make sure that the ball keeps moving in a direction of a decision every time you talk or meet.
• Prospect like you've never prospected before. Again, now is the time that people are looking to get advice and help. The more people you contact the more you expand your database for current opportunities as well as in the future.

This too shall pass.  If you've always had a consistent and predictable approach to building your business your business will now zoom.  If you haven't had that kind of approach now is a GREAT time to start.

No need to go into a lot of detail about how the fall of 3 financial giants impacts sales and selling of financial products across the country.  If you are in the banking, investments or any financial services business, your clients and prospects are more than a little hesitant to buy your sales pitch.

On Tuesday September 16^th your pipeline automatically shrunk, and anyone that was close to buying is now either back on the fence, or clearly over the fence and running the other way.  Your intense qualifying of any new prospects has to include their appetite for buying in an uncertain marketplace.

A year ago, only a few people in ‘the know' would have predicted that three financial giants would fall within a week of each other.  Look at the stats of these companies:

Can you believe it?  In an instant they are gone, Poof.  Sure, their names still exist, but the entities are gone.  The financial pendants and experts are saying that they just forgot the fundamentals in pursuit of short term, high payoff risky business.  They diversified into areas and ignored basic principles, which made them great, and provided sustainability.  One of the company's websites talks about ‘doing the right thing' and ‘sustainability'; so much for marketing talk.

What are you counting on to sustain your business?  Are you counting on:

• Your Brand
• Your years in the business
• Your current revenue stream that makes you financially comfortable

Here's an idea.  If you want to make sure that your sales business doesn't collapse in a heap overnight, make sure that you are counting on these 3 critical sales fundamentals:

1. Prospect for NEW business from NEW clients every day
2. Qualify your prospects for compelling reasons to buy; time, money and resources to invest; and decision making ability
3. Make sure that the opportunities in your pipeline look like the top 10% of your current book of business, and every time you sell one, eliminate one of the accounts in the bottom 10%.

Focus on these fundamentals and your business will thrive in any economic environment.