The pandemic has caused fewer face to face meetings, and many salespeople have yet to make the pivot (successfully) to virtual relationship building. 

In this article, we cover the impact and importance of speaking your prospect's "love language" when setting a meeting and engaging them further in conversation.

According to the Mayo Clinic, the terrible twos has long been used to describe the changes that parents often observe in 2-year-old children. Generally, this perception comes as parents observe rapid shifts in their child’s mood and behaviors.

This brings me to the subject of prospects… and how they react to poorly prepared salespeople who fail to “tailor their message for resonance.” By that, I mean the salesperson fails to speak their prospect’s love language. And what exactly is the prospect’s love language? That means two things:

1. The problems or challenges that the prospect is dealing with
2. Future growth opportunities that the prospect may see on the horizon

If you talk about anything other than those two things, congratulations… you are guilty of wasting the prospect’s time (and yours).

As a national sales training and sales coaching firm, Anthony Cole Training Group has a front-row seat to the financial services industry and the problems they are facing in the first quarter of 2021. And we know there are two main concerns:

1. The pandemic has caused fewer face to face meetings, and many salespeople have yet to make the pivot (successfully) to virtual relationship building. They are unable to deal with the resistance that prospects have to meeting face to face. Fewer prospect meetings have greatly reduced opportunities entering the early stages of the pipeline.
2. And because of that, if the salesperson does get a deal cooking, they are all too willing to cave on rate or price to simply push the deal across the finish line. And that is eroding margin.

So, guess what? We lead with those two things… and nothing else. 

I may have been born yesterday, but I stayed up all night studying, and I figured out we would have more conversations with prospects if we led with things that prospects wanted to talk about.

So maybe the twos are not so terrible after all. But then again, you don’t have to change if you don’t want to change. But I would encourage you to be ready for the time-out chair the prospect will ask you to sit in while they spend time with another salesperson who is speaking their love language.

Go sell like a champion today!

In today's world of selling, it is increasingly more difficult to get the attention of a prospective buyer after only a few outreach attempts.

We know that they're busy but let's face it, we're all busy. So, how do you stay consistent (and persistent) in your outreach with a prospect while remaining sensitive to their daily lives and the distractions they face?

From the dawn of time until present day, it has always been a difficult task for salespeople to be able to reach the prospects they call and email each day. They call…and they email…and they keep following up, wondering if anybody will ever do one of two things:

1. Answer the phone.
2. Return a voicemail/reply to an email.

While certainly not a new development in selling, engaging with prospects has become increasingly and dramatically more difficult in the last 10 years. If we go back to 2009, it took around 8-10 outreaches on average to engage with a prospect. In 2019, that number has risen to 16-18 attempts. Keep in mind that these are averages. Sometimes it takes even more attempts to get the prospect to pay attention to you.

Recently, I was leading a sales training workshop in Dallas and a high-ranking bank executive asked me why I thought the number of outreaches required had basically doubled in the last decade. In my judgment, there are three main reasons:

1. Distraction: Prospects are busier than ever before and are constantly battling the numerous distractions that come their way. Their mobile device buzzes and they have to look. The email notification on their computer sounds and they can’t resist. Some have estimated that the typical person picks up and puts down their mobile device between 600-700 times each day.
2. Competition: There is more of it than ever before and it’s fiercer than ever before!
3. Commodity: The belief of the prospect that, in at least some industries, the vendor calling them and the vendor they currently use are essentially the same. The prospect just doesn’t see any meaningful difference. To them, a bank is a bank.  An insurance broker is an insurance broker.  A technology provider is a technology provider.

Of these three reasons, #3 is the most concerning (or it should be). And here's why...

If you don’t differentiate yourself from your competition by providing value, your prospect will do the differentiating for you. 

But they won’t use a measuring stick of value. They will more often than not use a measuring stick of price.

Finally, here is another sobering statistic about the world of modern day selling. While the average number of attempts has increased to 16-18, most salespeople quit after less than 5 attempts. 

Maybe they think the prospect is being rude by not replying. Maybe they think that, "in the good old days", people used to return calls. Regardless, the world has changed. Prospects are a hard fish to catch. 

You might need to be out there fishing just a bit longer than you would like.

In the 3rd article of our series Hiring No Assembly Required Salespeople, we cover the Sales DNA competencies a successful candidate must have and how to identify these traits prior to making a hiring decision.

If you’ve been in sales management, hiring, or skill development for any length of time, you have experienced a “Groundhog Day” in sales. In the movie, starring Bill Murray and Andi MacDowell, Bill’s character wakes up every morning to the same day, doing the same things and having the same experiences. He eventually figures out how to get out of the re-cycling of Groundhog Day.

Can you relate?

How many times in a week or month do you find yourself covering the same tactics, talk tracks, and opportunity development strategies? As the late Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes would ask, “Did you ever wonder why”? Wonder no longer.

If the Will to Sell is the fuel (see the second article in our series), then the Sales DNA (audio explanation of Sales DNA) acts either as friction that stops/slows your sales vehicle or as a superset of tires that smooths the road and improves performance.

Looking at the chart, you can see this candidate is “supercharged” based on the green markers. No assembly is required here. The questions now become:

• As of today, are you looking for this data before hiring?
• If a candidate has weak Sales DNA, but you decide to hire them, how do you train and improve the root causes or drivers of sales outcomes?
• Do you have the capacity to address these competencies?
• How is your current vetting process uncovering sales-specific behaviors and beliefs?
• If you are not using any assessment, how would you know if your candidate is weak or strong in these areas?
• Suppose you could hire the candidate assessed above vs. the candidate you see below?

Stop taking chances with your new hire investment. Start taking an extra step-up front to identify if the candidate you are talking to has what it takes to become part of the top 10% of your sales company.

Let's discuss changing your hiring success to 92% positive predictive validity! Email me at tony@anthonycoletraining.com, provide your name and subject line "Hire Better".

In our first blog on How to Hire No Assembly Required Salespeople series, we discussed the four critical steps you must take to minimize hiring mistakes and identify top talent.

In this article, we cover critical selling competencies you must look for when sourcing and interviewing salespeople for your organization.

Indeed produces a series of ads on the radio discussing the value of their recruiting business solution. During the ad, the narrator describes the process as: “looking for a needle in a haystack.” Webster.com defines it as someone or something exceedingly difficult to find. E.g., Searching for an earring at the park is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Suppose you find a needle and it’s the wrong needle?

Not all needles are appropriate for every job. The same is true for salespeople. 

Unfortunately, when companies recruit salespeople, those responsible for profiling, attracting, vetting, interviewing, assessing, and eventually hiring and onboarding, fail to take the time to get the first step right.

Step #1: Know exactly what you are looking for

The primary criteria you should use to define the role/opportunity is: “Someone that will sell vs. someone that has sold or can sell.” The components of Will to Sell, as defined by the worlds #1 Sales Evaluation by The Objective Management Group Sales Assessment, are:

• Desire
• Commitment
• Outlook
• Motivation
• Responsibility

Dave Kurlan and his team have evaluated over 2,000,000 salespeople from over 25,000 different companies. The assessment they have created has a 92.5% predictive validity. The findings indicate that if a candidate does not score well in the Will to Sell then they are less likely to:

• Succeed compared to those that score well
• Be coachable and trainable
• Have the longevity needed to reach profitability

Let's look at the graphic to the left. This is what you should be looking for first and foremost when hiring a “no assembly required” candidate! The Will to Sell is the fuel that drives the engine of a successful salesperson.

For this article, let’s assume that green is good and red is bad. If you knew nothing else about a candidate other than what you see in this chart, what do you know based on the colors? That’s right. This candidate has a strong desire and commitment to be successful in selling, they have a great outlook no matter what, they own their sales outcomes and personal goals, and they have strong motivation.

I assure you that you won’t find this information in the resume, the job application, or during your interview process. Why? Because:

• A candidate will not admit they are weak in desire and commitment
• They will not tell you that they make excuses
• Those responsible for hiring are not asking questions about what motivates them

• The candidate has one job when they talk to you over coffee or when they show up for the interview – convince you they are the best thing since sliced bread!

Based on the graphic to the right, an example of a candidate with weak Will to Sell competencies, the question I always ask is: how soon would you want to know this information? The answer is as soon as possible.

Better yet, how about before you hire them?

Let us add another question: when you hire a candidate that has this level of Will to Sell, when do you typically find out? Typically:

• The first 90 days post-hire
• Within the first 6 months of employment
• After they have failed to meet validation requirements
• When you start having discussions about performance improvement

The real answer is when it’s too late and expensive. This first step in your recruiting process is critical. I assure you that if you evaluate your team by doing an Ideal Fit, you would see that your top people, as well as some of your bottom, have a very strong Will to Sell.

If that is the case, then why do salespeople with a strong Will to Sell still fail? Stay tuned for part 3 in our series on the impact of Sale DNA.

Hiring sales talent is often a costly, difficult, and time-consuming task. However, it's mandatory in order to grow an organization and sales team.

In this blog, we discuss how to identify top talent and minimize hiring mistakes by following a 4 step process.

Hiring mistakes are expensive. Before we dive further into this topic, let's consider the following:

• According to the Department of Labor, the cost of a bad hire can be as high as 30% of first-year earnings
• Additionally, the CEO of Link Humans estimated the average cost to be as high as $240,000 plus expenses
• A study of CFOs said that not only do bad hires cost them productivity, but managers spend 17% of their time supervising underperforming employees
• Lastly, CareerBuilder reports that 74% of employers state they hired the wrong person for the job

If you have a salesforce of 25 people and 20% of your new hires fail due to lack of performance, the cost can be $100,000.00+. In a conversation with Roy Riley, President of Peel and Holland Insurance Agency, he stated that hiring mistakes are a 2-comma problem.

Maybe you are part of the 26% that have not admitted to making hiring mistakes. Perhaps a better piece to read would be this article, What Elite Salespeople Do Better, by David Kurlan.

Otherwise, here are four steps that, if followed and executed effectively, will cause you great excitement, create a more positive impact on revenue from new hires and drive a more profitable margin for your business.

Step #1: Hire for Will to Sell rather than Can Sell  

Most personality evaluations will tell you if a candidate has the personality traits consistent with successful salespeople. This information will tell you about characteristics like building relationships, being solution orientation, etc. 

What you want to know is their:

• Desire and commitment to be successful specifically in selling
• Ownership of outcomes
• Motivation to succeed (specifically what motivates them)
• Outlook when things aren’t going well

Step #2: Hire those that are big, fast, and strong

In other words, hire for specific sales DNA such as:

• Ability to Recover from rejection
• Beliefs about selling that support success in sales
• Not inhibited by their own need for approval
• Comfort asking about and discussing money
• Can overcome their own buying beliefs so that they can execute a milestone centric sales approach

Step #3: Always be prospecting 

100% of the time, when I ask if a company is pro-active or re-active in their recruiting, they will tell me re-active. Yes, they go into the market and talk to candidates. But hiring people when they don't need them or hiring people that they can’t afford are not consistent traits. Here are my recommendations:

• Schedule at least 20% of your time to focus on prospecting new sales candidates
• Have a system in your organization where key people are responsible for setting prospecting activity goals and asking for introductions to other talented salespeople
• Report recruiting activity just like you ask your salespeople to report sales activity in huddles or sales meetings

Step #4: Eliminate variability in the performance of your recruiting process

Too often, companies with a large footprint allow market executives to sway from the recruiting processes established by Human Resources. Companies assume that the local executive needs to have the flexibility to maximize the recruiting opportunities specific to their area. Which is causing ineffective results. Instead:

• All job attraction posts must work from the same format
• The first step is always to evaluate the potential candidate using a sales-specific skills assessment
• The next step is to do a 5-10 phone interview (unless phone skills are not important)
• The initial interview must operate like an audition
• Use scorecards for the assessment, phone interview, and initial interview so that decisions to move forward are objective
• Provide the next person in the selection process an interview guide with key focus points
• Make offers to only those candidates that are committed to making a transformational career change
• Prepare candidates to decide at the time of the offer by eliminating think it overs after you present your offer
• Confirm with the candidate that they are prepared to go through your 3-to-6-month onboarding process in its entirety. No Exceptions.

In the next article, I will go through the steps and provide some more detail about each, and share with you how data can help you select candidates so that you can improve your success rate to 92% and grow your business!