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!

W.A.I.T And See

I came across a very useful little acronym.

W.

A.

I.

T.

Why

Am

I

Talking

It works on 2 levels. Whether you’re infront of a prospect, a network contact or with family and friends, Stephen Covey’s 5th habit of highly effective people is “Seek first to understand then to be understood”. You’ve probably heard the cliche “You have 2 ears and one mouth, use them in that order”. Well if you ask yourself “why am I talking?”, you realise that either you may be talking drivvel or not listening to what your counterpart is actually saying. The other level it works on is that it helps you to find the time to actually consider what has been said by your prospect, and use that understanding to formulate your next question. It is a fatal flaw in many salespeople that they spend the time that should be listening, half listening and trying to work out what they’re going to ask or answer next. WAIT and you have time (at least 3-5 seconds) to demonstrate you’re taking in what was said by the other party and to formulate a better question. Does this make sense? Think about that for a moment. Playing the WAITing game also allows you to draw out so much more information from prospects by using listening noises, body language etc than you might otherwise gain. Remember …. YOUR JOB IN THE SALE IS TO GATHER INFORMATION NOT TO GIVE IT. Telling isn’t selling. So many of us in sales can’t wait to prove our worth, demonstrate our credibility by getting up and presenting. This is a big mistake and will cost you tens of thousands in personal income, year on year. And when you establish the cost in terms of lifetime customer value lost, modifying this one behaviour, the costs can run into the millions. What are you doing to make sure you or your people are WAITing for your prospects to tell you how to sell to them? How do you make sure you’re gathering the intelligence you need BEFORE you spill your candy and make your presentation. PRESENTING IS NOT SELLLING. Don’t you gain more credibility from the questions you ask NOT the information you give? (C) Marcus Cauchi & Sandler Systems Inc 2006

Why Aren’t You Having R.E.C.O.N. Conversations With Your Customers Too?

When I was growing up 30 years ago, I remember overhearing a young boy making a call from a public phone box in our local general store. He was so small he had to pull across a milk crate to reach the phone. “Hello, Mrs Jones?”, he said, “Mrs Jones, I’d like to cut your lawn”. It didn’t sound to me like the call was going especially well “Mrs Jones, I’m offering to cut your lawn and take away the cuttings when I finish”, he continued, “Mrs Jones, please give me an opportunity to show you how much I’d appreciate working for you. Not only will I cut your lawn and take away the trimmings, I’ll also prune your hedges” but still no he was having no lick. “But Mrs Jones, I’ll cut your lawn, take away the cuttings and trim your hedges all for £1 less than you’re paying now!”

The hard-nosed Mrs Jones apparently was having none of it, “but Mrs Jones …….Mrs Jones, please listen………” and eventually he put down the phone. I was sure I saw a faint smile fading from his lips. Mr Clark, the shopkeeper called the boy over to him. “Son, I’m impressed by your initiative and someone your age making such an effort to earn a crust. I want to give you a break. If you want a job, come and work here”, he said. The boy replied, “No thanks Mister. I’ve got a job cutting Mrs Jones’s lawn. I was just making sure I kept it!” and with that he got on his bike and rode off.

There’s a fabulous lesson here for all of us. To keep your customers, keep in touch with them, explore any weaknesses in your position and discover if their loyalty is in doubt so you can fix any problems before they cost you a customer.

Have you tried R.E.C.O.N.?

1. R – Remember the reasons you were originally asked to help them, review their pain and relive their previous position before they brought you in to help.

2. E – Evaluate your relationship. How are you doing? What’s worked? What hasn’t? What could have been done better?

3. C – Changed? – What’s changed since you stated working together? For better? For worse? How have you helped improve their lot? What’s changed in their business? In ours?

4. O – Opportunity? – what are the opportunities for them? For you? How can you collaborate so both sides benefit? What opportunities can we pursue together?

5. N – Next Steps? – What happens next? Put in place a clear, specific, certain up front contract so that you both know what will always happen next. Contract with your customer for the next point of contact, for the next piece of work, for the next phase of a project, for the next review or for referrals within and outside their organisation.

I know this is simple, common sense. But what can I say? How many of us really do this type of account development behaviour regularly and routinely to protect our lifeblood income and then hold up our hands in despair when they drop us and go to a competitor or worse still, we lose them to apathy. Now that is a crime against our families and our businesses isn’t it?

Next time there’ll probably be another good story …… which might even be true. If you have any questions or want to engage in a discussion, drop me a line here or call me to chat on 07876 616983.

Happy selling!

Regards

Marcus

How to Eliminate Your Excuses For Failing in Sales

Thank you Mr Prospect for the thousands of times when I tried to cold call you and you carved out my liver for being too bland, too much like the competition, too weak and too stupid to recognise you were busy, you don’t care about my needs or my agenda, my company or my product, you taught me to understand you first, what matters to you, what keeps you up at night, what prevents you from getting the important things done that make a difference to you (apart from my calls of course). You taught me that I needed to break the pattern of the usual cold calls you receive, to get your permission to tell you what I do and to be mindful of how precious you feel your time is.

You taught me not to waste your time or mine if I couldn’t help you, but you also taught me to uncover the real reasons why you’ll buy from me without beating me to death on price. And thank you for the times you promised you’d be at the appointed place when we agreed to meet and you didn’t show up or you showed up without the necessary people so I had a wasted journey or wet my powder giving premature presentations to an incomplete decision making committee (probably after having worried about our meeting all weekend!!). You taught me to stand firm, plant my feet and not tolerate your unreasonable behaviour, to recognise rejection is a rejection of my offer and not me, and not to worry about things I can’t control.

Thank you Mr Prospect for all the times you messed me around and changed your mind, you taught me to take nothing for granted. Thank you Mr Prospect for every time you lied to me, misled me and deceived me though you always said it was salespeople who were untrustworthy, self-interested and deceitful, you taught me to qualify hard and recognise you aren’t the king, you’re my equal; nothing more, nothing less. Thank you Mr Prospect for every time you manipulated, bullied and pressured me into abdicating my rights and for teaching me only I could give away my self respect and dignity.

Thank you Mr Prospect for everytime you gave me false hope so that you could get me to give you free consulting and confidential procing so you could you use my skills, knowledge and expertise to get more from your other suppliers, shop my proposals around town or ddevelop a solution for yourself using all I’d told you as the foundation for that solution. that you for helping me to realise the syntax of qualify, present, close, follow up was wrong. Just because that’s the way you’ve taught other salespeople to behave doesn’t mean I have to do it that way. Moses didn’t come down and the lost 11th commandment was “thou shalt do proposals” nor is it “thou shalt sell the way everyone else has sold in your industry”. I’ve learned that if the competition is doing, I should probably find a different way to do things. I’ve also learned that wirting proposals unless I know I’m going to win them in 90%+ of instances is a hiding to nothing and will probably hurt my credibility and success in the sale later on, let alone leave myself vulnerable to yoru using objections against me.

Thank you Mr Prospect for every time you asked me the one question I was hoping you wouldn’t ask. You taught me to prepare better and practice more, but above all, you taught me not to hide my weaknesses or my fears, and to confront them early, even making myself vulnerable by disclosing them to you up front. You taught me how to build and maintain lasting trust by being direct and honest. And you taught me through your tough and unrelenting questions, objections and stalls that I wasn’t the one qualified to handle your objections, you are.

Thank you Mr Prospect for all the dragonesque gatekeepers you regularly put in my way to block me from speaking to you and other key decision makers in your oganisation , some were sweet, others were sour and a fair number were just as scared and frustrated as me. I learned how to use the psycholological blocks I created around cold calling and asking for referrals into a potent referral and new business habit.

Thank you Mr Prospect for pitting me against my competition in bid after bid, tender after tender, preferred supplier review after preferred supplier review. You taught me to value my time more highly, relish the time I spend with my family and never do anythign unless I know why I’m doing it. You also taught me to call you to account when I sense that something is wrong, your intentions behind certain behaviour is that of someone trying to gain the upper hand not your “equal partner”. Thank you.

Thank you Mr Prospect for the times when you promised me the order and then came back and tried to renegotiate on price, service, resources and timescales. Thank you for being hard-nosed, brutish, rude and abrasive, because you taught me who I am is not what I do and how to spearate the two. You also taught me to contract for every step of the sale and to give nothing away without getting something you valued giving, back in return. You taught me to question why you were asking me to do things instead of blindly syaing “yes” and if they didn’t work for me to say so. And above all else, thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me the insight to realise I can say “no”, even after we’re doing business.Thank you for teaching me it’s OK to fire a bad customer (or refer them on to a competitor) or one we’ve outgrown.

Thanks also for teaching me the hard way that I can never lose what I never had; I’m sorry for blaming you for my inadequacies, my terrible selling skills, my awful qualification, my clumsy techniques that you’d seen and heard a thousand times before from other incompetent and needy salespeople. I apologise for the times I cursed you and all your kin, for the times I had wicked and malevalent thoughts about you, for the times I wanted to do you physical harm because I was too weak as a salesperson, too stupid as a human being and too desparate for your business for you to trust me. Lord above, if I were in your shoes, I’d have kicked me out sooner, not been nearly as polite or tolerant as you were.

Thank you making me stronger, more effective and the professional salesman I’ve become. Without your prevarication, inconstancy, selfishness and bullying I’d be as green as I was when I started selling over 20 years ago. Thank you for the personal and spiritual growth I’ve enjoyed (sometime kicking and screaming but enjoyed nonetheless) and thank you for helping me to understand people.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________

If you want to accelerate your results in selling, I don’t suppose you’d write a letter to your prospects and identify the things they did to you that hurt you, the lessons they taught you and recognise that you have only yourself to blame for all your suffering and failure. I warn you, it will be a scary catharsis.

There’s no such thing as a bad prospect, only bad salespeople.

You have a chance to take control of your performance in the sale by recognising the problems and admitting them. Then you can do something about finding their causes and taking responsibility for fixing them. If you want to email me your thank you letter my email is ThankYouLetter@SALTeurope.com.

Marcus Cauchi
Sandler Sales Institute
London, UK

Top 5 Reasons Your Cold Calling Doesn’t Work & What To Do About It

Some people say cold calling is dead. I disagree. It can and should be part of many people’s mix of business development activity. And it is a skill that can be learned. I will agree however, that there is never a queue to cold call.

1. Lack of the Right Type of Preparation: Certainly you can prepare by researching your prospect, but do you prepare yourself mentally, physically, emotionally? Do you treat every call as if it’s your first? Do you stand up when you call? Do you recognise how your physiology, posture, breathing etc affect your call and how you sound? Do you prepare yourself and actively go for the “no”?

2. Sounding Like Every Other Person Selling Something: Are you just another salesperson on the phone? Do you sound like you’re selling something? Do you break the pattern so they can’t get you off the phone in the first 10 seconds by making them curious, by engaging them in your call?

3. Defending When Under Attack: When you’re under attack do you defend or fall back? Who handles their objections – you or the prospect?

4. Begging for a Meeting: Do you get invitied in or do you have to beg for a meeting? Do you use obvious deception and clumsy tactics? Do you qualify “easy” just to get in front of someone or do you qualify “hard” to make good use of your time in the field? Do you think “I’ve got a hot one” or do your alarm bells ring when you hear “Why don’t you come in and show me what you’ve got? We’re always interested in learning what’s new in our market.”

5. No Upfront Contract: What do you do in the first 30 seconds of a cold call by phone to get your prospect to commit to give you a decision at the end of your call? Do you steal your prospects time or do you tell them why you’re calling, how long the call will take, give them the power to say “no” and agree that if there is a fit you will either talk further or agree some next steps to advance your dialogue? Do you agree what your role will be and what their role will be?

There are hundreds more mistakes. You may even have thoughts on these you want to share. Now, post your thoughts. I’d welcome your comments and personal experience.

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.