Selling Power Blog

What Does Selling Mean to You?

Gerhard Gschwandtner is founder and publisher of Selling Power magazine and host of the Sales 2.0 Conference.

 

 

Take a moment to think about what the word ”selling” means to you. Every time I ask sales executives to define ”selling,” I get answers like these:



Selling is a process of persuasion to get a prospect to take action. 


Selling is finding a need and filling that need. 


Selling is an exchange of goods or services for money.


Selling is walking the road of agreement with the customer. 


Selling is an art. 


Selling is a science.


Selling is a transaction. 


Selling is relationship building. 


Selling is a consultative process. 


Selling is hustling. 


Selling is all about trust.



There are as many definitions of selling as there are stars in the sky. Everyone has a different definition of the word “selling.”

Once You Define Anything, Your Definition Will Define You



What’s important in this conversation? Once you define what selling is, the definition will influence how you sell. If you believe that selling is an art, then you will try to grow your art, and chances are that you will try to find creative ways to overcome all obstacles that stand in the way of the sale. If you define selling as a science, then you will try to deploy more scientific tools to achieve greater sales. If you believe that selling is all about relationships, chances are that you will focus more on establishing a meaningful emotional and cognitive connection with your prospect. 



When Sales Managers Have Finished Defining, They’ve Ended Refining 



Sales managers often impose their beliefs about selling to their salespeople. They try to turn every salesperson into a ”mini me.” “Dress like me, act like me, speak like me, and close like me.” They often elevate their definition of selling into a higher level of philosophy that prevents awareness of reality and inhibits growth and professional development. The moment you believe that you can shape what selling means – like a sculptor chips away at a stone until a beautiful statue emerges – you’ve frozen yourself into an untenable position. Someone once said that in order to maintain an untenable position, we must choose to be actively ignorant.



Is There a Better Way of Looking at What Selling Means? 



So what’s wrong with sales managers imposing their definition of selling on their salespeople? After all, they are the leaders and salespeople are their subordinates. Isn’t the typical choice, “my way or the highway"? Is there another way of looking at this? 



Here is a better way of looking at selling. What we think selling means isn’t relevant. What the sales manager thinks selling means isn’t helping anybody sell more. What we think doesn’t matter as much as what our customers think and what our customers expect from a salesperson. We can’t freeze salespeople into a definition and expect them to warm up to a prospect.

Take a look at salespeople in a typical car dealership. Most of them are as rigid as a camshaft. They operate on the good cop/bad cop formula: “Let me ask my sales manager if he will approve that deal.” 

The Internet has shifted the power from the seller to the buyer. We’ve shifted from a delay economy to a real-time economy. We have shifted from a predictive approach to an adaptive approach. We’ve shifted from pitching deals to co-creating solutions with our customers.

In the Peter Drucker era, companies created customers; in the real-time economy, we have to cocreate with our customers. At the heart of selling is value, the value as defined by the customer’s unique situation. The dynamic of selling will continue to shift. In the future it will be the customer who creates our company.



What Do Customers Want? 



Part of good selling is learning up front how our prospects want to buy. If customers want to buy online, we need to offer that choice. If prospects want a simple transaction, don’t go through your relationship mating dance. If a prospect has mapped out a more scientific approach to the buying process, match your selling style to the prospect’s buying style. If prospects want more creative ideas that lead to an artful solution to their problems, tap into your artistic side. Sell the way your customer wants to buy. If you are in doubt about what selling means, just ask your customers. If you want to learn how to sell better, ask your customers. Once you reach the top of your profession, your customers will tell you that you are the best, and you will say, "I still have a lot to learn."
 

How to Fulfill Your Big Dreams of Sales Success in 2016

Gerhard Gschwandtner is founder and publisher of Selling Power magazine and host of the Sales 2.0 Conference.

 

 

I spend many days on the road each year speaking to audiences of salespeople and sales leaders. Many of them have big dreams. They want to build success for themselves and their companies. But they are allowing certain elements to hold them back from making those dreams a reality.

To win in sales and life, we need three things: knowledge, ability, and courage. Because it is the end of the year, we will all be thinking about resolutions, goals, and ways to improve ourselves. As this year winds down, I think about one of my good friends, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who passed away earlier this year. As a psychologist, speaker, and bestselling author, Dyer told me we have all we need to succeed – the problem is that most of us look in the wrong place.

To make your life all you want it to be, stop wishing. Years ago, Dr. Dyer shared these five steps with me to make success happen for yourself. In honor of his life and the New Year, I share them with you now.

Step One: Feel Worthy

“Knowing you’re worthy means understanding your connection to that which causes things to show up in the first place. If you feel separate from it, or if you feel that you’re not worthy, or if you feel that God or divinity or whatever that energy might be is something external to yourself and that you’re not worthy of having it, then it will always elude you,” Dyer says. “It’s like thinking of God as the ocean and yourself as a glass. When you dip that glass into the ocean, what you have is a glass of God. It’s not as big, it’s not as strong, but it is still a piece of God, and is connected to that source.”

Step Two: Love Without Limits

When you can harness the power of unconditional love, Dyer says, you’re a big step closer to manifesting your destiny. “I think if you want to master anything in your life,” he says, “whether it’s selling, singing, dancing the Macarena or hitting a tennis ball, you go through pathways. The first is discipline, then you move to what we call wisdom. But the third pathway to mastery is called the pathway of unconditional love.” With unconditional love, he says, limitations and fears disappear and leave power and joy in their place.

Step Three: Make a Joyful Noise

In his explanation of the seventh principle of manifestation in Manifest Your Destiny, Dyer presents sound as a link between the material and the spiritual worlds. He explains that all sounds are vibrations made of waves oscillating at a particular frequency. Solid forms occur at low frequencies of those vibrations, and, Dyer says, it is theorized that thoughts occur at frequencies too high to measure with available technology. By repeating the sounds of creation (ahhh) and the sounds of manifestation (om) during meditation each morning and evening and carefully observing the remaining eight principles of manifestation, you can put yourself in harmony with your environment, attain peace and enlightenment, and gather the energy of creation.

Step Four: Stay Separate from the Outcome

To manifest the things you want in your life, you can’t be preoccupied with when or how they arrive. Dyer says many salespeople don’t understand how to detach themselves from the outcome of what they’re doing, but that very highly functioning people “are not motivated by what’s in it for them, what their quotas are, how much money they’re going to make, and how good they’re going to look. They’re motivated by knowing within that they’re on the right path and can let the universe or God handle all of the details.” By recognizing your oneness with what you want to manifest and your connection to a universal intelligence, Dyer says, you can be so certain that your desires will appear that you don’t have to worry about when and how they will.

Step Five: Be Grateful for What You’ve Got

When you acknowledge and show your appreciation of the energy that flows through all things, Dyer says, your gratitude becomes a key to fulfilling your desires. Only by being thankful for what you’ve got can you make progress toward getting more. To develop a sense of gratitude, abandon any tendencies you may have toward fault finding, complaining, or taking what you already have for granted. Instead, think of yourself as a recipient, not as a victim. Tell the people around you how much you appreciate them. Begin and end your days with expressions of gratitude and remember to be thankful for hard times so you won’t take the good times for granted.

Finally, Dyer recommends cultivating a generous spirit, which he says helps you release the ego that tells you that you can’t – instead of reassuring you that you can.

Tooting Your Own Horn: A Sales Management Best Practice

Today's post is by Jason Jordan, a founding partner of Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm, and co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code. Jordan is a recognized thought leader in the domain of B2B sales and teaches sales and sales management at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business.

 

The role of a salesperson has always been fundamentally the same – to create value for customers.

The nature of that “value” has changed over time – from a distribution channel in the 1800s, to a source of information in the 1900s, to a problem-solver in the 2000s. And, no matter how the profession of selling develops in the 21st century, a salesperson’s role will always be to provide some unique value for their customer – or else the buyer will find another vendor with which to transact at a lower cost.

Communicators of Value?

Therefore, it was no surprise to find that salespeople in our various studies of world-class sales forces were creating tremendous value for their customers. What did strike us, though, was the sales forces’ diligence in communicating value to their customers. No, they were not communicating the value of their products and services to their customers – that task has been largely overtaken by the Internet. These world-class salespeople were extremely adept at communicating their own value as a seller.

Lest you think these were sales forces populated by braggarts and blowhards, they were, in fact, salespeople who were able to express – in concrete financial terms – the value they had created for their customers. They were essentially business consultants who were able to uncover opportunities, bring them to life, then measure and (most importantly) report the customer’s realized return on investment. They created real monetary improvements for the customer and were not afraid to point this out.

Three Conversations of Varying Impact

Many salespeople mistakenly assume that prospects will connect the dots – from buying their company’s products to realizing future financial returns. They say things like, “This product has been proven to save money for all of our customers who use it.” However, prospects are not experts at taking a generic claim and applying it to their specific situation. All they hear is, “The product you are selling has saved money for some other people.”

Better salespeople will actually do the math for the prospect and make a more tactile statement, such as, “Based on your historical usage, switching to our product will save your organization $213,432 each year in reduced rework.” In this instance, the prospect hears, “There’s a chance that, if I trust this salesperson, I might actually save two hundred grand and beat my cost projections for the year.” A better sales approach indeed.

But the top-tier sales forces we studied had conversations like this: “Last year, we projected that using our products would save you $213,432. But, in fact, we saved you $343,238, according to your plant managers whom we recently interviewed.” In this case, the customer has no choice but to appreciate what the salesperson has done – created value that would not have been realized without the salesperson’s help.

Which of these three salespeople would gain your loyalty?

One Process Worth $1 Billion

It is important to note the sales forces we studied were not staffed with CPAs and PhDs – their salespeople were math mortals like the rest of us. However, sales leadership had equipped their sellers with sophisticated processes and tools that helped them calculate and communicate the financial returns their customers were receiving. They eliminated the chance that the first two conversations could take place in the field, implementing systems to ensure that the third conversation was standard practice.

One of the sales forces went so far as to trademark a sales process that helped them demonstrate the impact on their manufacturing customers’ bottom lines. Salespeople use a computer application to calculate the value created for their customers through reduced maintenance costs, increased productivity, and other means. They work with local plant managers to identify the specific sources of improvement and to quantify the economic impact of the changes. They then document the impact and obtain sign-off from the plant managers as proof that the value was realized.

The vice president of strategic accounts described the system’s impact on customer relationships in this way: “Too often, customers simply do not remember all the good things that you do. Through this process we have documented over a billion dollars’ worth of savings for our customers. It is fun to go into a customer and say, ‘You bought $200,000 last year from us, but we saved you $85,000 in your plant.’ That takes the sting off of a 3 percent or 4 percent price increase – or a competitive offer that might be a few points better than ours. It allows us to clearly convey to the customer, in terms the customer understands, what we are doing for them.”

The Takeaway for Sales Leaders

The lesson from our studies of world-class sales forces is this: it is not enough to promise or even to create value for your customers. You must demonstrate to the customer that your salespeople are creating explicit economic value that demands their patronage and loyalty. It’s one thing to say you offer value. It’s slightly more convincing to quantify the value you offer. Yet the most powerful sales pitch you will ever make is to point backward in time and prove that you actually delivered as you said you would.

Two Reasons iPad BYOD Programs Never Work for Field Sales

Today's post is by Scott Eidle, an evangelist for sales best practices, including sales process, enablement, and operations. He leverages more than 20 years of sales and marketing experience to share insight about the top trends in the software and technology sales space, and is currently a global sales enablement executive for an enterprise software company. 

 

With the iPad® Pro™ hitting the market, companies will once again try to figure out if and how they can incorporate a cool, exciting piece of technology into their sales programs…and the concept of BYOD (bring your own device) will likely get serious considerations as a cheap and fast alternative to laying out a lot of cash for yet another piece of hardware. But are the results worth it?

In my opinion, no. Many companies should just forget about BYOD tablet programs and focus on other ways to support their field sales teams. Here are four reasons why.

Reason #1: Most BYOD programs have 30 percent participation rates.

I’ve had first-hand experience with sales-enablement professionals at world-class, enterprise sales organizations that had attempted BYOD programs for tablets. These clients set the standards for excellent sales operations and were implementing methodical, tested rollout strategies. They had great ideas and a fair amount of money. And the resounding results reported by their sales enablement and operations executives? A 30 percent participation rate. Of that 30 percent, user engagement was never high enough for them to consider even their 30 percent as active participants in the programs. If companies operating at this level get these results, other companies can probably expect even less.

Reason #2: BYOD programs come with hidden costs.

It starts off with best intentions. “Let’s give the sales teams iPads! They will rock in front of customers! We’ll be so much more impressive than our competitors!” The enthusiasm is great, but most of these intentions end up on the cutting-room floor when budgets get down to the nitty-gritty.

The reality is that fully-connected iPads will double your costs in terms of technology support. This is for various reasons:

• No one buys an iPad to replace their field laptops,
• iPads aren’t cheap to begin with,
• Wireless programs for iPad data are expensive, and
• You need special programs to adequately present all those Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentations you’ve created over the years.

Reason #3: The iPad is too “personal.”  

Most people view their phones and iPads in different lights. While a phone is a personal device, we also use it to call, email, or text our professional colleagues and contacts. (This is why the business world has learned to accept brief responses, misspellings, and the occasional funny autocorrect when we see the “sent from my iPhone” line at the end of an email.)   

By contrast, the iPad is a symbol of escape – relaxing, browsing at one’s leisure, everything that is associated with avoiding work. Expecting anyone to willingly and intentionally use an iPad for doing yet more work is just a fantasy.

Reason #4: Real business is still done on Windows, and it’s just not that easy to do real work on an iPad.  

Even with the introduction of the iPad Pro, which is taking huge strides to make itself more like a Windows® Surface™ machine, trying to conduct business on an iPad just isn’t that easy. The apps don’t work the same way they do on a laptop – no matter how they are advertised – and, while word processing and typing emails has gotten much better (thank you, third-party keypads!), trying to do anything with an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation is just an awful experience. And let’s not forget that the majority of salespeople are not the best at paperwork or PowerPointing anyway!  You don’t want to add the frustration of trying to finger-tap an Excel box on their screen or move and resize a graphic in a presentation.

I understand that operations and enablement teams want to help salespeople and make their lives easier. But, given all these considerations, I think it’s best to steer clear of BYOD programs and invest in other forms of support.

Why Artificial Intelligence is a Huge Gift for Salespeople

Today's post is by Alex Terry, CEO of Conversica.

 

 

I recently read a report that said the inside sales market is growing at rate of over 42,000 new jobs per year in this country. That’s three times faster than outside sales and a real testament to the fact that this part of your sales organization deserves a lot of attention – if you are not already providing it. 

There are any number of best practices that can increase the results from your inside sales team. Five that readily come to mind are

1. motivation techniques
2. establishing a strong culture
3. outstanding training and development
4. establishing specific goals and metrics
5. optimizing productivity

At the same time, you need to make sure you have the right recruitment, retention, benefits, and salaries that allow you to find and keep the right people. Each of those areas requires time, money, energy, management, and focus you may or may not have. But you really don’t have a choice.

Or do you? What if you could hire your next inside salesperson and not bother with any of that?

Technology may once again have found the answer. Artificial intelligence, which has captured our imaginations for decades, is finally beginning to make headway into the workplace. According to Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, we are in an AI “Spring” and will start to see more artificial intelligence applied across sales and marketing. Companies are already starting to use AI virtual sales “assistants” that can take the most onerous of inside sales jobs – slogging through a mountain of leads to find out which are hot and which are not. Once found, they can be passed over to a “real person” to do what they do best: sell and close. If you haven’t looked into this area yet, let me give you five reasons you should.

1. Artificial intelligence can handle an unlimited number of leads.

Many sales executives run into the problem of how to efficiently increase lead engagement and conversion. Good marketing automation tools and techniques can generate mountains of leads, but who has the time to get through even a portion of them? Inevitably, your people end up wasting a great deal of their time trying. But AI software today can actually engage an unlimited number of leads in email conversations to find out who is ready to talk to a salesperson…and they can engage so convincingly that most prospects would swear they are interacting with a human. 

2. Artificial intelligence can create a more positive workplace.

Speaking of frustrating, the atmosphere in the office can make or break your department. If your salespeople are not happy or are feeling even slightly discouraged, their productivity will take a nosedive. If you can eliminate the grunt work so your salespeople don’t have to waste their limited time chasing cold leads, it can definitely lift their spirits – along with the bottom line.

3. Artificial intelligence never asks for a raise, vacation, or time off.

Your virtual assistant is never going to ask for a raise. You’ll never have to worry about scheduling vacation time because “she” will never take one. No benefits, no time off, no sick leave, and a total workaholic putting in as many hours and as many days as you choose. No complaints over working the early or late shifts here. And HR will love you.

4. Artificial intelligence never resigns, so you don’t have to deal with turnover or training.

This “employee” doesn’t require training. She’s a professional lead engagement machine that already knows how to do her job, having learned from millions of email conversations. She quickly learns the intricacies of your business and never departs for a sweeter offer or to go to the competition.

5. Artificial intelligence could cost less than a quarter of the average salesperson and is probably the best hire you’ll ever make.

In a nutshell, humans cost more a lot more than software and aren’t nearly as scalable. Artificial intelligence software doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, in most cases the cost per “assistant” is a fraction of what you would pay a new human employee. And you’re not replacing people with technology; instead, you’re removing the boring and inefficient work and freeing up your human team to do their best work closing deals.

So, instead of considering that next human hire to build out your inside sales team, take a look at how artificial intelligence can scale your existing team. If AI can handle repetitive, boring tasks and free up the rest of us to ring the bell, then I’m all for it. It’s certainly worth exploring. You can bet your competition already is.

A Bold Way to Hire and Retain the Right Salespeople

Today’s post is by Chad Bronstein, founder and CEO of Time to Hire.

 

 

 

 

 

As the leader of a sales organization, you’ve seen it a million times before. You recruit, hire, and train a candidate that fit the ideal model you had for the perfect salesperson – only to find they can’t meet minimum expectations or aren’t a cultural fit, forcing you to part ways.

It’s an easy loop to fall into once the first few candidates don’t work out and you become increasingly desperate to fill open sales positions. Not only can this take a toll on you as the sales leader, but can also negatively affect client relationships and company performance.

Common Hiring Pitfalls

Salespeople tend to be bright, outgoing, and best at selling themselves. As such, many sales leaders and business owners tend to pick the one who seems “shiniest,” even though it may turn out that person is a terrible fit for their organization. Moreover, most businesses hire only when the need arises, resulting in a hiring process that is not designed to hire the best, only the best available.

For companies that utilize commission-based or salary-plus-commission pay structures, there is a solution – hire multiple salespeople for the same position and have them “compete” for the job. With no long-term or high-dollar payroll commitment – other than earned commissions or small base salaries – hire as many as you can handle. Train them all at once, see how their different attributes and experience work in your organization, and keep only those who make the cut.

This may seem overly Darwinian and unfair, but that’s the paradigm in the sales arena: kill or be killed, sell or be fired. The key is to set expectations up front and provide clear metrics and goals in order to keep the position:

• How long will the trial/competition period last?
• How many new clients need to be signed or how much business needs be closed?
• How many calls need to be made or how many appointments need to be set?
• Who will manage and train the employees? Can you provide mentors and will you incent them to help?
• What happens if everyone hits their goals?

This fosters an environment with no surprises and a culture where the most competitive and motivated salespeople will “win.” It should also provide a steady stream of high-performing salespeople and help establish a culture of competitiveness within the organization from the ground up. Indeed, a recent study by TechnologyAdvice found that 55 percent of salespeople prefer to work in a competitive environment – with 30.5 percent hoping for a very competitive workplace.

The Link between Competition and Quota Attainment

Moreover, a report from Aberdeen Group found that companies do better on their quotas when there is competition: 85 percent of reps attain their quota and 51 percent of new hires achieve their numbers in their first year. On the other hand, in the absence of competition, only 78 percent of reps make quota and only 42 percent of new hires meet their numbers.

To further entrench a competitive culture within the organization, you should also provide ongoing incentives and recognition programs. This can be anything – weekly competitions on who brings in the most new customers, annual competitions on who sells the biggest deal, special competitions for a coveted territory that is finally opening up, and more.  

Companies we know who’ve taken a position competition approach are better at finding and retaining salespeople who perform better. Employees who’ve competed and earned their positions take extra ownership in the business, stay with the company longer, and are more interested in moving into management positions – helping grow and shape future employees into additional high-performing salespeople.

Thoughts on Self-Leadership and Call Preparation from Jim Cathcart

Gerhard Gschwandtner is founder and publisher of Selling Power magazine and host of the Sales 2.0 Conference.

 

 

 

 

One thing I love to do is conduct video interviews with a wide range of authors, experts, and industry practitioners. My friend Jim Cathcart, bestselling author and top industry speaker, shared with me that he recently created an extensive sales training library that's available at http://thrive15.com.

Call Preparation

In particular, I love one interview (which Jim allowed me to add to my YouTube channel) in which he discusses call preparation. Before calling on any customer, make a list. The list should include what you need to know about:

1. The customer and his/her company.
2. The customer's decision-making process about purchases.
3. Your competitors and their value proposition.
4. How people "read" you and how you come across in meetings.

I wholeheartedly agree with each of these points. If you walk into a customer meeting without the proper awareness, your risk of walking out empty-handed is high. (If you have been in sales long enough, you have probably felt the pain of this already.) 

Self Leadership

In a blog post a few years ago, I featured a video interview with Jim on the topic of self-leadership. As he says during the conversation, "People who practice self-leadership don't wait for others to motivate them, they go out and make things happen." 

How many people on your sales team practice self-leadership? If you believe in the 80/20 rule, you may say only 20%. If that's the case, it may be time to assess your own leadership style? If you are spending 80% of your time helping salespeople close business, then you are not providing an environment of self leadership. If you spend 80% of your time coaching salespeople, helping them build self-leadership, helping them build the necessary skills set for closing more business, then you'll create more self-leaders on your team.

For more insight, I encourage you to check out Jim's new library of insightful and entertaining videos at Thrive15.