How To Win New Business Without Sounding Salesy

Here sales improvement specialist Marcus Cauchi uncovers techniques that anyone selling their products and services can use to quickly bond and build rapport with prospects so that they are more open to a sales conversation.

•    Why prospects hate salespeople
•    Why being different works
•    How to differentiate your business through the way you sell

It’s Monday morning at Shiny Widget Co and the sales team are hitting the phones.

Salesman: “Hello Mr Jones we sell shiny widgets. We are in your area on Monday at 4pm and on Wed. When can I come in a show you what I’ve got? I‘m sure we can save you money or make your life easier.”

Bob Jones: “Erm, what’s this about?”

Salesman: “Let me tell you,”

15 minutes later yarn.

Bob Jones: “Can you send me something?”

Salesman: “Sure, our online brochure is on its way.”

Next day and the salesman is following up on what he thought were hot buying signals.

Dring dring.

Bob Jones’ voicemail: “This is Bob Jones’ voice mail, please leave me a message and I will get straight back to you.”

What it is really saying: “This is Bob Jones’ voice mail jail, please leave your message after the tone and I promise I won’t get back to you. Your PDF went straight into trash and if by accident I pick up the phone I promise to give you a stream of excuses and if I’m really weak, I’ll ask you to send it again.”

Who hasn’t had that special someone keep you from your busy day, waste your valuable time, read like a robot from their script and rush towards the close promising you savings or a happier, more efficient life?

So who wants to be one of them? The clown in a suit with the bone crusher handshake, wearing his comedy tie who thinks that by telling you all his reasons for you to buy from him that his unwelcome interruption will cut through the noise of your real life; the 139 decisions you’ve still got to make that morning, your child being bullied at school and you being behind on your numbers by 47% for the quarter.

If you want to sell more, stop selling. Salespeople suffer from a disease called PPS, Premature Presentation Syndrome, where they have to tell the prospect about themselves, their company, their solutions, differences, competitiveness, return on invest, etc. In 99% of cases they do this without ever having heard the prospect specifically ask them to do so.

You sell to go to the bank. To go to the bank you have to gather information not give it. The moment you give information you’ve wet your powder and the buyer no longer needs you. You become a tick in the box and they know just which shelf to get you off. An educated prospect is no prospect at all.  Let me repeat that because it’s important, an educated prospect is no prospect at all.

The moment you start discussing your features and benefits without having the context of the personal reasons they have explicited stated that are motivating them to buy what you have now, you run the risk of dragging them into a pricing conversation. If you are selling on price, you are taking orders.

A client of mine told me that their frustration with being sold to is that they feel like it is all about the seller. They are running their agenda only, which is to reach the close and to get them to buy something. The seller rattles through their questions like it’s a checklist and their answers don’t really matter because the seller is only looking for the answers that fits their script. So my client protects themselves by giving wishy washy answers, being non-committal and non-specific.

When my client buys they want to believe and feel that the seller has their agenda, their best interests and their welfare in mind. They want the seller to take them through a process that helps them to discover their reasons for buying, the causes of their problems and to feel that they are leading them through to the hope that their problems can be fixed.

For that certainty my client would be happy to pay a premium. For the elimination of doubt that this is the right decision; for the belief that the other person’s interests can only be served by serving their interests; for leadership and a safe pair of hands, they’ll pay a premium and if they are willing to pay a premium they will take you to the bank.

Whatever business you think you are in, first and foremost you are in the going to the bank business.

Happy Selling!

What Opportunity To Improve Are You Wasting

No matter how much the world of business may change, one factor will never change: Your most valuable sources of information are your customers. They will tell you what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what you need to change immediately to remain competitive. Customer advisory groups may be the best consultants you’ll retain. There are some guidelines you can follow to get the most out of the group.

If customers believe they’re only doing you a favour, getting them to join will be a difficult sell. Make sure potential members understand that membership provides an opportunity to improve their business as they help you redesign yours.

Select advisory group members who are perceptive, vocal and motivated to participate. “Figurehead” members selected for their fame or position, but who won’t attend group meetings or give follow-up a high priority, will be of little value. It’s up to you to demonstrate to members that you need their advice to serve them better. Unless there’s a crisis, schedule no more than two meetings per year. Gathering more often will be seen as a chore and an unreasonable imposition.

Membership in your customer advisory group should be an honour and a privilege. You want members to feel good about service. Treat them to the best transportation, parking, refreshments, meals and meeting space. Have the CEO give them their charge and put in an appearance now and then at meetings. Write up their recommendations in prestigious company publications, and thank them publicly.

The ideas that you get from your customer advisory group will enable you to advance the fortunes of your business. Implement the ideas that will work, and tell participants why you might choose not to implement others. If you ignore their suggestions or drag your feet in applying them, you may never again have customers who are willing to serve on the advisory group.

(c) Sandler Systems Inc, 2006

Happy selling!

Regards

A fish rots from the head down

Bad selling and management habits are rife in today’s businesses. Company heads that allow these behaviours to persist could be leaving money behind that is equal to or greater than their current profits. Stuck in traditional selling paradigms, many company heads are actively encouraging these inefficient behaviours. Tough times need tough, disciplined management. CEOs, owners and investors that fail to weed these habits out now, only have themselves to blame when their plans for growth or exit deadline is inevitably threatened by poor sales performance.

In the good times, selling was easy. No-one’s balance sheet showed the true cost to win each sale. A discount here, another pitch, proposal or 200 page tender document there. It didn’t matter, as long as deals kept on coming. Revenue came in by taking orders, not by selling; really selling. Company heads who encourage these same selling habits will find themselves betrayed by them, because the success they think they bring has been revealed as an illusion.

Selling in recession requires real selling skills and a systematic, disciplined execution of the plan. Companies with order-taking habits are feeling the pinch as buyers ratchet up the pressure and exploit struggling salespeople’s psychological vulnerability and need to be busy.

If you lead, own or invest in companies delivering disappointing sales performance, look to yourself and your own behaviour. A fish rots from the head down.

When you discount, you subconsciously tell your people it is OK to discount. When you accept a “think it over”, you indicate it is OK to leave without closing or establishing a clear next step. When you give free consulting, your salespeople will spill their guts too. All these behaviours waste your scarce, technical and management resource and end in drawn out, expensive and hopeless sales cycles.

Look at your compensation and management systems, what habits do they really drive? Are they encouraging the opposite behaviour to what your company needs?

Sales people are creatures of how they’re paid and managed. If your systems encourage your people to chase revenue rather than profit, you are in real trouble. Chasing revenue means that they will hunt any suspect who can fog a mirror. They will spend their time and the company’s money writing proposals to non-prospects and taking part in unqualified beauty parades, only to find that they have nothing to show for it.

They will continue to forlornly forecast deals that died months ago just to keep the pipeline looking full and won’t ever close the file because they’re too emotionally involved in the outcome. Why does this happen? It happens when management allows it to and doesn’t know how to fix these problems or hold their salespeople accountable.

Managers who fail to dig deep and ask why a salesperson is about to eat into company resources or is still working long-dead deals need a wake up call. Wouldn’t you rather know early on if the prospect is wasting your time, rather than 2 or more months down the line, when you have already wasted £1,000s in time and resource chasing a mirage?

Never do anything unless you know why you are doing it. Always get commitment from the prospect as to what will happen next. Don’t accept non-committal, wishy-washy answers. Ask the difficult questions early, even if you don’t want the answers.

Stop trying to control the numbers. Face the cold hard truth. You can’t. You can only control the behaviour that generates the results. Teach your sales teams the right behaviours. Perfect practice makes perfect. Enforce a selling system that drives agreement between the salesperson and prospect and delivers predictable, timely results. Enforce consequences if commitments on behaviour are not delivered.

Before getting involved in an ITT, RFP or any other kind of beauty parade, make sure it is in the best interests of the company to do so. Demand that your sales team find out if the prospect really needs your help before they commit any resources to the sales process. Discourage easy yeses. There is no such thing. A positive prospect is no prospect. Get them to go for the ‘no’, to cut the deadwood out of your pipeline quickly. Send timewasters and your worst customers to the competition. Let them ruin their balance sheet.

You may think that it’s the market. You might accuse your salespeople of losing their courage. You could even believe it’s because no one is buying. These are all excuses. Seize responsibility for what is happening. Plan for the best, expect the worst and then take decisive action towards your goals. That last bit is essential for any plan to succeed.

Death By Discounting

The sales floor is a torrid place to be these days. A black cloud of doom has blown in and there’s no silver lining. The prevailing wind says, “no-one is buying” or “everyone is playing it safe.” So to get money in salespeople are dropping their prices and company profits are taking a beating. Unfortunately, the decision to discount leaves more than just a few bruises and a hole in the bank balance. It’s potentially fatal.

Discounting is a disease that eats away at the guts of a company. It kills profits, buys bad business and rots integrity. Discounting is not just dropping your trousers on price. That is only the stuff you can see.

The rest is the hidden cost of sales. Free consulting. Getting paid late. Behaving like the Bank of “1-Born Every Minute” because you either have no credit control or you’re not enforcing your policy. Pitching, proposals and tenders without any commitment from the buyer’s side on what happens next. They don’t appear on the balance sheet, but the results are the same. Profits drop. Shareholders don’t get paid their divvies. Exits are delayed. Jobs lost. Companies closed. Fights. Estrangement. Divorce. Alimony. Stress. Heart attack. Death.

Why? All because you couldn’t plant your feet and tell someone who was pushing you to pay less than you’re worth, “No! My price is my price. My terms are my terms. Thanks but no thanks.”

The figures don’t lie. Discounting by 10% when you work on a 30% GP means that to make up the profit you’ve just handed to your customer requires you to sell 50% more the next time. That’s 50% more prospecting. Given salespeople’s natural propensity to do anything to avoid making sales calls either on the phone or in person, you basically have to double the activity that your sales people probably aren’t doing anyway. Getting cash into the coffers in almost any business is tough enough without making your life even tougher. Buyers know this and rely on you and your salespeople to get emotionally involved in this deal.

Conversely, if you make 30% gross margin and you raise your prices by 10%, you can afford to lose a quarter of your current client base and maintain your current bottom line. In my experience no company that has raised its prices by 10% has ever lost more than 10-20% of its customer base. Experience tells me that when you do raise prices, your best customers stay and the lowest profit, highest effort clients leave to blight someone else’s balance sheet.

Business leaders who allow a discounting culture to develop around them are the architects of their own disappointment. They don’t see it for what it really is – a long term cost that will probably hurt you throughout the lifetime of that customer relationship, disguised as a shot in the arm for cash flow.

Tough times require tough sales people. If customers and prospects are dictating your prices, you’ve just become part of their plan, not yours. Surviving this difficult market requires determination, resilience and conviction. This means a change in mindset.

Do you have a bunch of salespeople and account managers going out with their heads full of crappy programming, e.g. “The customer is king.” “The buyer is always right.” “They’ll buy if they like me, best not rock the boat.” Couple bad beliefs with a poor money concept that says, “don’t talk about money, its rude”, “money doesn’t grow on trees”, etc and you get a culture of subservience, where the buyer is in complete control of the sales process because you and your team are projecting fear and neediness.

These are just limiting beliefs. Bad coding that has been passed down to us. It’s nonsense. Moses did not come down from the mountain with an 11th commandment that said that the customer calls the shots. If he did, he dropped that tablet on the way down the mountain.

Retailers came up with the concept of the customer is king. What a crock! The customer is never more than your equal. They may have the cash but that is all they have. Many prospects probably don’t even have that much. What every potential customer does have is a deep stack of problems that they’re incapable of dealing with, without help …. your help. And they’ll pay whatever it takes if you find enough reasons that are important to them. They don’t give a damn about you, your company, your investors, your products, your people – they worry about their selfish self-interest.

You, on the other hand, can take their problems away. That’s why they really come to you. Your job is to help them discover their problems and what they are costing their business. Once they realise how badly they need what you have, it is no longer about the money.

Yet don’t we usually do the opposite. If we look at how we train, manage and pay sales people in this country, almost everything that we do is like a Government policy before an election. On paper, it looks good, smells good and makes for a great bit of news. But if you look under the bonnet you can see just how divisive and crappy it is.

We teach our sales teams to go after revenue instead of profit. The problem is that if we don’t have much cash, then we go after anything. We buy bad business. We allow our salespeople to state their price and then tell their customers that they don’t believe it. Their credibility is shot to pieces. It’s no wonder prospects take advantage of them. If you buy business at a loss the one certainty is you will go bankrupt. Every percentage point you discount comes of BOTTOM line and requires much more effort to just stand still.

If your salespeople don’t believe that they have the right to play at top table and ask for a lot of money, they are never going to ask for a lot of money and will probably discount like double glazing salesman. When they get down to negotiations and the pressure builds, they’ll probably cave and give away just as much as you, their boss, have allowed them to.

Now is the time to break the bad programming. That means getting out of your head and into your gut. Listen to what it tells you. If you want to be successful in sales you have to be tough, determined and resilient. No more pussy footing around. Don’t worry whether the prospect likes you or not. You have to qualify for both sides. They never bring you the real problem, just a mishmash of symptoms. Dig deep. Find their pain. Do they have the conviction to do something about it? Force the issue. Drive the process forward. If they are not able to make a decision, then they are never going to buy.