One of the more interesting principles upon which the book is based is the idea that when the economy is down, decisions go up. This means that decisions that were made at lower levels of the company in a good economy are now likely to be made at more senior levels of the company when the economy is challenging. No doubt that risk aversion plays a role in this trend.  And have you checked out the economy lately? It is not very good.

Objective Management Group has a considerable amount of data that shows the importance of sales skills as compared to the difficulty of the sales assignment.  In short, your skills do not matter nearly as much if you are selling a product that people are coming to you to buy as opposed to a conceptual sales context where you are selling a service to a person you had to go find.  Here is a sports analogy – you might be an excellent basketball player in high school in Small Town USA…but what happens when you are faced with the increase in competition at UCLA, Duke, Kentucky, or Kansas?

It is no different in selling. If you want to venture in the C-Suite, you will want to remember the following keys.

4 Keys to Selling to the C-Suite

1. You better get referred or better yet introduced by someone in the senior executive’s network. Several studies have shown that senior level executives do not engage with salespeople that have not been referred to them.  One study went as far to conclude that only 1 in 5 senior executives will even talk to a salesperson they don’t know.
2. You better get there early. By that I mean early in the sales process.  If you get there late and the ship has already sailed, you will likely find your path to the C-Suite blocked by lower-level executives who are not interested in returning the boat to the dock so you can board.
3. You better think like senior executives think. They think big picture and they think about opportunities for growth, and they think about the threats that could interfere with that growth.
4. And finally, you better have your sales game in order. You must be confident, and you must be consultative.  If you act like a traditional salesperson, you have no chance.

Ask yourself one question – if you were a senior level executive, and you called on yourself…would you take the call? As Socrates once said, the unexamined life is not worth living.

 

 

 

But to me, it is important to back up the bus just a few stops and ask the question – who is your competition? Most training participants would say the name of another service provider that their prospect could choose at the conclusion of the sales process. Some other introspective training participants would say their greatest competition is themselves, meaning they need to stay out of their own way and deal with some head trash that interferes with them doing some of the harder things in sales. They recognize that they must become “comfortable with being uncomfortable” in order to be more assertive and ask more questions (and some of those questions need to be tough questions).

I can’t argue any of the above – they are all valid points. It is just that I believe something is missing. I have long held a deep conviction that the fiercest competition you will face in selling is what I refer to as “prospect indifference.” This is the dreaded moment at the conclusion of the sales process when they prospect says “we are just going to hold tight for the time being.”

Sometimes this is caused by fear of the unknown – with the prospect concluding maybe it is better to deal with the devil they know (the flawed incumbent provider) than to roll the dice with the devil they don’t know (you and your solution). Other times prospect indifference is the resistive inertia or the gravitational pull back to the incumbent. Regardless of why it occurs it is stiff competition.

Here are five keys to dealing with prospect indifference:

1. You better be bold in your approach and your conversations. You must be willing to rattle the windows a little bit as you probe for the impact of the problem the prospect is dealing with.
2. You better be sure that you know the difference between a problem that is just a problem and a problem that has become a priority that must be addressed.
3. You must be in front of all the decision makers – and one of those decision makers must be the person who is feeling the deepest impact of the problem.
4. You must provide “emotional transportation” to your prospect by using a story to move them to a future point where the problem has been solved to measure their reaction to that future state.
5. You can’t be afraid to lose….and you must recognize that the best time to lose is early rather than late.

So, know your competition. And deal with your competition – even if it is you!

 

 

 

How should you coach your salespeople on how to respond to rate reduction requests from clients? Share this article or the information you've learned from it with them. These three immutable truths will help guide them to the best response. 

There are three immutable truths about rate reduction requests.

#1: It doesn’t cost a client anything to ask for a better deal. The worst thing that can happen to the prospect is that somebody will tell them no. It doesn’t cost anything to ask. In fact, you’ve probably been trained as a consumer to ask.

#2: Your attitude and your response to the request that your prospects and clients are making will have everything to do with setting the tone for future negotiations.

#3: Probably the most important of the three immutable truths; If you don’t move the conversation away from rate towards value, you will always be negotiating on rate for the rest of your relationship with that client.

Here’s the truth: What you win them with, is what you win them to. If you've used a very aggressive pricing model to win the business, then you have won them to that. And you have also created the expectation that is what the relationship is going to look like. You have created the reality for yourself that you’ll have them for a customer up until the point that somebody comes behind you that is just a little bit more aggressive. And they cut the rate. I mean, stop and think about that. The reality is what you win them with, how you win the business, is exactly what you’re winning them to.

So you have a decision to make on the front end, and you have a decision to make on the back end when they come and ask about these different requests. If you want to be good at responding, you need to be assertive. Why not use the word aggressive? It’s a fight to grow business. Don’t we need to be aggressive?

No, I want you to be assertive. The difference between an assertive and aggressive is emotion. Assertive people are under emotional control. Aggressive people are not, their emotions are in control of them. We want you to be assertive, standing up for what you believe is right. Asking all of the right questions, but with your emotions under control.

Number two is no surprise. You need to be skilled at asking questions and listening. We believe at Anthony Cole Training Group that the two most important attributes for a salesperson is that they are:

• Great at asking questions
• Great listeners

Let’s talk about listening for just a moment. Here’s the problem today. Most people (and particularly sales people) do not listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intention or desire to interrupt.

Great sales people are great listeners.

Number three, you have to be able to sell value.  You must believe that your offering has value, that you have value, that your institution has value. You must believe it. You have to be willing to walk away if the prospect doesn’t believe it.

 

I am an admirer of all the brave men and women who serve in the armed forces. Their service and their sacrifice make them the best our nation has to offer. Lately, I have had the extreme honor to meet a few Navy Seals. Those meetings have propelled me to learn as much as I can about how they think and how they build the discipline that is necessary to do what they do.

While physical strength and endurance are obviously key requirements to become a Seal, it turns out what really makes them unique is their mental strength, specifically their ability to process information quickly and under extremely adverse circumstances. They build an incredibly strong and resilient mindset – and that term is defined as how they see and process the world around them. 

One of things I have discovered really resonated with me.  I have always known that “Hell Week” is one of the times that cause many in the training program to quit. The attrition rate for Navy Seal training is about 80%. The training is designed to make you quit…to sort those people out and to sort them out early. What I find fascinating is that many of the trainees quit on day 1 over a fairly simply running exercise. 

Think about it for just a minute. If you go to Seal training, you are certainly in excellent physical condition, so running should not be much of a challenge. But here is the catch – the instructors don’t tell the trainees how far they are running, nor do they tell them how long they will be running. Not knowing those answers causes many to quit. They can’t deal with that uncertainty. And one more thing – the run is not timed. You don’t have to run fast…you just can’t quit running.

This makes me think of the incredible challenges that bankers have had to deal with in recent months. It has been far from easy. And your mindset has been tested like perhaps no other time in recent years. This applies to selling as well. Selling is a tough lonely road to travel.  Selling is a process and if you fall in love with the process, (making calls, asking for referrals, attending networking events) the process will always love you back. But the challenge is you don’t know when it will love you back. And that uncertainty, just like the uncertainty of an indefinite run, can cause great discouragement. Some even quit.

My encouragement to you today is simple – just keep running. Maybe even keep walking. Skip if you want or crawl if you must.  Just keep moving because the process (if loved) will eventually love you back.

It will not be easy.  But as the Seals say…the only easy day was yesterday.

 

There are four critical things that separate high-performing banks from others in the industry in terms of their sales and revenue growth.

We know that there are four things that separate high-performing banks from their peers in terms of their sales and revenue growth.  Banks who embrace these four things will almost always outperform their peers. These activities are validated by the Objective Management Group's 30-year stats history of sales assessments across the country. 

First, top-performing banks assess the skills sets of the existing lenders and relationship managers. They do this because it is really hard to change that which you cannot see. There are a set of specific 21 core sales competencies that drive success in selling, and CEOs across the country are accessing this information to understand and improve the skills of their current teams as well as hire new high-performing lenders and relationship managers.

Secondly, top-performing banks don’t make the mistake of hiring new lenders without assessing them using a sales skills assessment that is both sales-specific and also predictively valid. Sure, there are plenty of assessments out there but the vast majority are personality-based and do not uncover if a salesperson can and will sell for your bank. When looking at sales skills assessments, make sure that it comes with a proven history of working as well as a recommendation to hire or not hire.

Third, top-performing banks adopt a sales process that is both stage-based and milestone-centric. Then they hold their lenders and relationship managers accountable to following that process.  On average, this step alone generates a 15% increase in loan production. This focus on stage-based allows a leader and sales coach to see where in the sales process a lender may need help and targeted coaching. It is a fact that “elite salespeople”, those in the top 7% of all salespeople, follow a consistent sales process.

Fourth and finally, top-performing banks make an investment in sales leader and sales management training before they even think about training their salesperson.  They equip their leaders with skills in setting standards and accountability, coaching, recruiting, and motivation. These are the top four skills that sales managers should be spending 85% of their time doing. Since most sales managers typically are promoted up through their specialty area in banking, the sales management skills assessment consistently shows that sales leaders do not have the skills or a process needed to drive consistent sales growth with their teams.