Jonathan Farrington

CEO, Editor, Author, Keynote Speaker, Customer Experience Evangelist, Sales Futurist

The Sales Futurists - coming soon ...

What Defines a “Sales Winner”?

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This is a question that I am asked so often, and my response is always the same… I describe the “Running Away” personality and the “Running Towards” personality.

The running away person is awoken by their alarm clock and they immediately hit the snooze button. Ten minutes later, the buzzer goes off again. “Just ten more minutes” they say to themselves, “I won’t exercise this morning”… and they again activate their friend, Mr Snooze. This happens three more times and each time they determine that they will skip a vital activity in order to enjoy a few more minutes slumber. They have already decided to skip breakfast and they will shave/put on make-up in the car on the way to the office. Finally, a full hour after their first alarm call, they leap out of bed, the image of their boss standing outside the office door, purple with rage at their continual poor time keeping is just too horrible to contemplate and it acts as their spur.

As someone famously once said: “Some people make things happen whilst others just stand and watch what happens” My take on that is: “A few people make things happen, others just watch what happens, but the vast majority wonder what the heck happened”!!  The running away mind-set falls into the last category.

Let’s look at the other side of the coin, let’s see how a running towards personality handles their relationship with their alarm clock…

To begin with, our running towards person has invested some of their time the previous evening preparing for the next day – the suit has been pressed, shoes cleaned, notes prepared for those important meetings, etc. In fact, all of the next day’s objectives have been thoroughly rehearsed mentally and planned for.

When the alarm clock goes off, our running towards person typically awakes refreshed and completes final preparations for the day. They have plenty of time for exercising, for bathing, and to eat a proper breakfast with their family – they are in control. They arrive at the office before most of their colleagues (80% of whom arrive at 8.55 am, just in time, only because they fear the consequences of being late!) so that they can respond to e-mails and attend to essential administrative tasks, which would otherwise take up valuable business time. Life for these people appears effortless, relatively stress free, because they have made it that way!

These people are “Winners” – are you?

You Are a “Generalist” – Unless of Course You Are a “Specialist?”

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I have been thinking a lot about this recently – the differences between so called “specialists” and the alternative, which must logically be “generalists”

It is easy to imagine what a specialist is; someone who is perceived to be if not an expert, then certainly someone who is focused; has chosen to focus on one specific area, thing, sector, topic, subject … you see what I mean. Whereas a generalist is described thus: “One who has broad general knowledge and skills in several areas”

Maybe generalists could also be labelled a “Jack (Jill) of all trades” which insinuates “master of none” but actually that is far from true. When I think about the sales space, and some of my acquaintances, colleagues and friends, it is very easy – well for me anyway – to categorize most of them.

So who is better, the generalist or the specialist?

In that environment there isn’t a better: Some have chosen to concentrate on a particular aspect or area; others cannot be confined to one “discipline”

What’s the correlation with front-line selling? Well it is simply this: Commentators like me evangelise about the need – as a professional salesman or woman – to become an industry expert; to know everything there is to know about what is happening in your sector and in your market, so that you can have meaningful dialogue with your clients and prospects. I highlighted this point in a recent post, when I suggested that buyers today are only interested in having interactions that are “wholly relevant” But here there is a dichotomy …

What if you are selling into a variety of industries? What if you cannot select your customers, and you have to rely on them selecting you? What if you have no control of your typical buying/selling cycle? Then of course you are having a much more difficult time – you have, by the very nature of your role, to become a “jack of all industries” and logically you will probably be “master of none”

I have said it so many times before, all customers/prospects/clients are unique, and so are salespeople – and their development needs.

Oh, and me? I am a specialist … and a generalist: I used to be indecisive, but now I am less certain.

In Search of the “Sales Holy Grail”

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Frequently, there are two main pitfalls that even experienced salespeople can fall into in terms of activities. First, they simply aren’t doing enough. What’s enough? Enough telephone calls to make appointments, enough face-to-face calls, enough calls that involve or influence decision-makers. In general, the more focused sales activity salespeople generate, the greater the number of sales opportunities they can create.

Poor Quality Activity
Second, but equally important, salespeople often aren’t clear about how to identify the prospects most likely to have a genuine need for their product or service. Without an objective way to priorities which prospects to contact first and/or an efficient strategy for contacting them, salespeople are doomed to waste a large percentage of their time.

Another huge dilemma for many salespeople is how to divide their time between servicing existing clients and generating new business from new prospects. Existing clients frequently make requests for service that could be dealt with by support staff. But salespeople, who lack a disciplined, future-orientated plan for generating new contacts and sales, often find themselves spending more time attending to urgent tasks for existing accounts instead.

A common approach among salespeople can be summarized in the saying “If you throw enough mud against the wall, some of it is bound to stick.”  This approach is exhausting, demoralizing, extremely unproductive, and very expensive in the long term.

Speed of Relaying Customer Information
Marketing now provides another interesting dimension to activity management. Apart from product or service knowledge, salespeople require knowledge about prospects, clients, and market trends. Therefore, if the information those salespeople require isn’t relayed in an efficient manner, their face-to-face selling activities are dramatically reduced.

Harder Rather Than Smarter
In the book Emerson’s Essays, there is a section on “Law of Compensation” which can be summarized simply as “give more, get more.”  This is what most salespeople try to do, so they end up working harder when they could be working smarter. This begs the question, are your sales activities deciding your strategy or is your strategy deciding your sales activities?

Developing a Consultative Sales Process
From the Sales Director’s perspective, developing a consultative sales process means developing a comprehensive, formal, realistic and step-by-step outline of what salespeople are expected to do. This is just as appropriate for internal and totally reactive sales teams, as it is for external pro-active ones.

This outline includes the activity and calls they must make, the relationships they should establish with prospects, the documentation they should use in sales calls, the issues they must discuss and resolve with prospects and the tangible goals they must achieve in sequence along the path to each sale, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness.

It’s only when such an outline is in place that sales management can be in a position to:

  • Monitor the sales force’s activity, progress and results
  • Assess issues as they arise and take appropriate action
  • Redirect individual sales representative’s efforts efficiently

Although many organizations appreciate the importance of being customer-focused and talk in vague terms about their “consultative sales process” surprisingly few sales leaders invest the time and energy required to develop a formal sales process – a process that is at once detailed and resilient enough to guide their salespeople and permit effective management of their efforts.

Overcoming Implementation Inertia
Even when a consultative sales process has been developed, understood by sales managers, written down and circulated, it’s often not enough. No matter how brilliant, a sales process will only be effective to the extent it is followed and used by frontline sales staff. And this is where most organizations fall down: overcoming inertia among managers and salespeople alike and implementing the process.

The hurdles that must be cleared, in order to get people throughout the organization to actually implement it, are enough to cause Sales Directors to tear their hair out!

But a select few, of the very best, have found some innovative strategies that have enabled them to achieve the Holy Grail: Sustained sales growth achieved efficiently, reliably and by design.

Winning Is All About Influencing

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A sales leader’s level of success or failure may be determined on their ability to influence people within their own organization, as well as those operating in other companies. Sales leaders who use their influencing skills well are exciting to be around and they exude a positive energy that attracts people towards them. Your ability to influence others can empower people development, accelerate results and ultimately ensures an easier working environment.

Influencing is about understanding yourself and the effect or impact you have on others. Though, it can on occasion be one way, the primary relationship is two way, and it is about changing how others perceive you. Truly excellent influencing skills require a healthy combination of interpersonal, communication, presentation and assertiveness techniques. It is about adapting and modifying your personal style when you become aware of the affect you are having on other people, while still being true to yourself.

Behavior and attitude change are what’s important, not changing who you are or how you feel and think. You may try to exert your influence through coercion and manipulation. You might even succeed in getting things done, but that isn’t really influencing. That’s forcing people to do what you want, often against their will. You won’t have succeeded in winning support. Pushing, bullying, bludgeoning or haranguing DOES NOT WORK! Like elephants, people will remember the experience. Indeed, if you force someone to do something you want without taking their point of view into consideration, then the impression that person is left with is how they will see you forever. You’re stuck with it, unless you deliberately change what you do in order to be seen differently. People are far more willing to come halfway (or more) if they feel acknowledged, understood and appreciated. They may even end up doing or agreeing to something they wouldn’t previously have done, because they feel good about making the choice.

What Makes An Effective Influencer?

They:

Find alternative ways to influence others and demonstrate high levels of flexibility. This means that if the approach they are taking doesn’t get them their desired results they try a different approach. If this doesn’t work they try another approach. Ultimately, the person with the greatest flexibility will always have control over the situation. They also:

  • Listen attentively to what others say because this improves mutual understanding and conveys respect for the opinions of others. Giving good attention to people makes them more intelligent. Poor attention makes them stumble over their words and seem stupid.
  • Uncover needs and wants because they appreciate that every individual is unique. They have their needs, their own set of problems and their own motives for doing what they do.
  • Empathize continuously and are able to adopt different perceptual positions to connect with the feelings of others in different situations. Not only do effective influencers manage to put themselves in their customers’ shoes, they are also able to wear the shoes of individuals in their sales team.
  • Have developed high levels of sensory awareness. This means that their senses are fine-tuned to pick-up on the smallest details include non-verbal signals that are sometimes different to what a person is saying.
  • Create and maintain rapport throughout their communication that enables them to deepen relationships, build higher amounts of trust and minimize resistance.
  • Eliminate weak statements from their language and are able to create multiple positive associations by avoiding negative words and using negations in a positive way. For example; “I’m not going to say that this strategy will be totally successful.” The unconscious mind has to think about the strategy being totally successful, irrespective if the word ‘not’ is contained within the statement.
  • Base the success of their communication on the response it produces in others. If other people don’t respond in the way that the influencer was wanting, they accept responsibility and change their communication until they do achieve their desired outcome.

The “winners in life” know all about influencing!

If a Salesperson Possessed Just Three Characteristics …

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One of the most interesting and enjoyable exercises I perform before I engage with a new client is to conduct a full audit of the prospect’s commercial functions specifically the sales and marketing teams. One of the first results I always look for are those from the “Attitude to Change” assessment: It measures three personal characteristics, which have nothing to do with selling skills whatsoever  – or so you may think.

Creativity and Flair is the ability to look outside the square and to challenge paradigms when necessary; it means, for example, the ability to create solutions to meet client’s needs, the ability to think laterally when the situation requires it and the capability to constantly think, “How can we improve this” rather than accepting the status quo.

Discipline is all about being in control; it’s about working in an organized and efficient way, setting and achieving daily/weekly/monthly/annual objectives. It’s also about having a game plan and being in charge of one’s life and understanding what one both wants and needs.

Realism is slightly more difficult to articulate, but essentially it means that all of the hurdles that are likely to be encountered on the “road to success” have been taken into account.

Realistic individuals understand that success – whatever measure is used – will not be handed to them on a plate.

How do you think you measure up? Want to find out?

You can take this very quick test, which will give you an instant result. HERE

What’s it Like in “Me Only Territory?”

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The very best consultative sales professionals operate exclusively in “me only territory” and that demands an explanation, so let’s begin by examining the traditional sales environment ..

For the sake of this explanation, let’s use a baseball park (not that I know too much about baseball): So traditional salesmen and women are operating left field, they are usually totally focused on a single sales event, and they sell products.

If asked to describe the value they bring, they would simply offer you product options, and they are always willing to compete on price to get the order. They typically sell to “users” which requires them to be consistently reactive, and of course, their achievement levels are as unpredictable as the British weather.

Finally, if asked to describe commercial politics, they would stare blankly at you; that isn’t their fault, it is simply that they have never been exposed to it – and the same goes for ROI.

These people are all operating exclusively in “me-too territory”

When we move into center field, we find ourselves in “me-first territory:” These salespeople bring much more to the table and have a much wider commercial bandwidth.

They are pre-occupied with business process; they focus both on the customer and their competitors; they don’t simply sell products, but rather “application solutions;” they are acutely aware of the need to make a profit, and usually they deal with recommenders, so they have taken a giant stride up the food-chain.

These salespeople understand that reliability is more important to customers than speed of response (reactivity) and they are also politically agile. Naturally they can sell using ROI arguments, and finally, their achievement levels are consistent.

You might be forgiven for thinking that must be as good as it gets – after all, the two scenarios that we have described account for around 95% of the global sales population. But actually, no, it gets even better!

Now we are entering “only-me” territory – the hallowed turf of the sales world. We are very much right-field, and the population is made up of the biggest hitters, whose primary pre-occupation is long-term outcomes, and their focus is entirely on the customer’s commercial objectives and how they can assist the customer in achieving them: The value they bring is strategic direction, and they only see long-term ROI. Their dealings are exclusively with key decision makers, and they penetrate formal the DMU as easily as a knife slicing through butter.

These salespeople are always on the front foot – deliberately pro-active. They identify the business they want, and they go after it. They are not just politically agile, they are politically astute, and they use politics to win whenever they need or have to; they always secure high ROI, and they consistently exceed quotas. They have complete account control.

And you, where do you spend most of your selling time?

In the precarious left field, where you are totally at the mercy of your prospects and customers, hoping that they will call you?

Maybe you are center field, which does indeed feel much more secure when compared to your colleagues to the left of you, even though you frequently cast envious glances to those colleagues on your right.

Or maybe, just maybe, you really are a top 5% achiever? If you are, congratulations, I know precisely what it took for you to get there.

What Does Your “Ideal Customer” Look Like?

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“All customers are good” – No they are not!

“All business is good” – No it isn’t!

Think “Pareto”

Use of ‘Pareto Thinking’ is highly relevant and important when applied to salespeople. For example, 20% of salespeople’s activities will create 80% of sales achieved, which has enormous consequences on how to optimise and manage lead generation activities.

Generating leads is an important sales activity that plants the seeds of growth for sustainable business development. A lead is purely a name that you could refer to as a SUSPECT because their potential to buy is unknown. Before you can qualify leads to determine whether they have the money, authority and desire to buy your products/services you need to generate them!

When deciding upon which lead generation methods work best for you and your organisation, it helps to have clarity on the type of customers that you’d like to attract. This means creating an Ideal Customer Profile that can begin to provide direction to your lead generation activities.

The following questions will stimulate your thinking when it comes to developing an Ideal Customer Profile:

  • What size of organisation would you prefer to deal with?
  • Typically, how many people will they employ?
  • What market sector(s) do these organisations operate within?
  • Who specifically will be buying your products/services and what are their titles?
  • Where geographically would you like these organisations to be located?
  • What does your organisation offer that is unique?
  • What types of organisations will be attracted by this uniqueness?
  • What do your best customers possess that you would like to replicate in others?
  • Which of your existing customers were the easiest and quickest to convert?
  • What similarities do these customers possess?
  • Are there any specific criteria that prospective organisations should have in place, so that your products/services can be optimised?

Having a well-defined profile of your ‘ideal customer’ can prove to be invaluable when determining which methods to use for lead generation, and improves the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.

You may also discover that the process for asking for referrals becomes easier and generates a better response, because you are providing the person with a tighter specification of what you are looking for – this concentrates their thinking towards the direction you have defined.

Sales Leaders need to be “Models of Excellence”

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Unfortunately, most salesmen and women believe that a successful career in sales culminates in sales management, and yet there are of course far less management positions up for grabs than sales positions.

As a consequence, salespeople with this attitude concentrate on making sales rather than investing in themselves in order to become Top 5 % players and eventually most become disillusioned, resulting in a significant dip in achievements levels.

The knock-on effect of this is that most salespeople who move into management, take with them an underdeveloped view of selling – a “traditional” orientation and as consequence they help to create or maintain an unrealistic and short sighted vision of what will be needed to develop their teams.

Because they lack Top 5% experience themselves, and an insight into the skills needed to make it at the highest level, the environment that they help to create fails to recognise the need for outstanding performers, and this is particularly noticeable in the compensation structures they build, which neither supports nor encourages their teams to break through that final glass ceiling.

As I have said often enough, both here, and on numerous other occasions, the single most common mistake that organizations make is promoting their number one salesperson into the role of sales manager, thereby depriving themselves in a single stroke of their best producer and hamstringing their sales force with an ineffective manager.

The skills required for managing, mentoring and developing a sales team are totally different from those required for selling. As a result, it’s not uncommon to find newly promoted sales managers who regret having taken a management position and may even leave to get back into sales – that is if they are not pushed first!

The majority of sales managers – new and experienced alike – say they do not have sufficient time to train and develop their sales teams. They are so focused on sales results – and so accustomed to achieving success through their personal pursuit of those results – that they overlook their greatest potential source of power, the power to increase sales performance by developing their people.

“The sales manager’s role is transforming from evaluator to developer, from expert to resource, from teller to questioner. This change is no mere tweaking adjustment, it is a 180° shift from how most sales managers manage and how they are managed. Most organizations profess to want coaching, but they don’t really do anything about it. Just as students are lucky to have one or two special teachers in a lifetime, most sales professionals are lucky if they get one real coach. Organizations don’t have role models for coaching, they don’t train for it, and they don’t hold people accountable for it.”  Sales Coaching by Linda Richardson

In “Tougher at the Top” which Linda and I will be publishing next year, you can be certain that these are just some of the issues we will be addressing.

You see, today, the role of sales manager is pivotal. It is the vital link, and ineffective sales leadership is the main reason why so many sales teams are failing.

All the current excitement surrounds lead generation – it seems that everything I read everywhere, is totally focused on finding, qualifying, and weighting leads. But what is the point of continually creating new opportunities and passing them to sales managers who are unable to cope?

Depending on which sets of statistics you believe, sales performance is spiralling downwards, and yet compensation packages are increasing? But that topic is for another day.

At the end of the day, the sales leader needs to be a “model of excellence” – only then will the pack faithfully follow.

The Don Quixote Approach To Opportunity Assessment

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Emerging salespeople typically believe that all business is good business and to an extent, I can understand this viewpoint. If you are trying to make a name for yourself, being put under pressure by your sales manager to get “runs on the board” and earn the respect of the more experienced and successful members of the team, it is difficult to walk away from any opportunity if you believe you have the remotest chance of winning it.

However, it is essential that more seasoned professionals fully understand both the value and importance of rigorous objective qualification – not just at the front end, but right the way through the sales cycle. Qualification is a process, not a single event, and even internal and reactive salespeople should be fully skilled in asking a small number of basic questions regarding precise requirements, time scales, budget, competition, etc. before they are prepared to reveal their price and delivery.

As the value of the product, service or solution increases, the depth of the qualification should increase proportionally.

External salespeople have the opportunity to meet with prospective customers and it is far easier to extract information face to face than it is via the telephone. However, it is vital that some initial answers are elicited prior the that first exploratory meeting in order to ensure that the meeting will be worthwhile to both parties. With sales costs spiraling upwards and sales time becoming limited, considerable prudence is required on the part of the salesperson.

During that first meeting, a considerable amount of detail can and should be uncovered – e.g. background and history of the company, the key individuals, the composition of the DMU (Decision Making Unit) if there is one, timescales, budget, competition, current suppliers, buying criteria, etc.

Only by rigorous questioning will the salesperson be able to answer the following questions when they get back to the office:

  • Is there a requirement/need that my company can satisfy?
  • Is it winnable?
  • Do I want it?

The very best sales professionals will not pursue the opportunity, after proper objective analysis, if the answer to any of those questions is ‘No’. They will rather invest their precious selling time seeking out and closing opportunities that will provide a profitable return on that investment.

At the very highest selling levels – i.e. strategic “big-ticket” selling and marketing, clearly the sales cycle is much more protracted, complex and typically moves through four stages:

  • Rigorous opportunity assessment
  • Develop a strategy
  • Present the solution and re-assess the opportunity
  • Gain formal commitment, sign the order and develop

In Summary

Having a tilt at every windmill that presents itself is neither practical, nor profitable.

Qualification is a core competency that every professional salesperson should take on board as quickly as possible. Working to the maxim that “All business is good business” is unrealistic and totally erroneous. It takes just as long to work an unprofitable opportunity through the pipeline, only to lose it at the death, as it does a profitable one. The ability to determine which is which can have a huge impact on your ultimate success in a front-line sales role.

What Makes a Successful Sales Team?

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An organization’s vision is a guiding image of success formed in terms of a huge goal. It is a description in words that conjures up a picture of the organization’s destination. A compelling vision will stretch expectations, aspirations, and performance. Without that powerful, attractive, valuable vision, why bother?

A mission statement communicates the essence of an organization to its stakeholders and customers, and failure to clearly state and communicate an organization’s mission can have harmful consequences around its purpose.

As Lewis Caroll, through the words of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland says, “If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

Guiding principles are the consequence of a mission statement that are intended to inform or shape all subsequent decision-making, which also provides normative criteria allowing policy-makers to accept, reject or modify policy interventions and activities. They are a guiding set of ideas that are articulated, understood and supported by the organization’s workforce.

Values are beliefs which the organization’s workforce hold in common and endeavor to put into practice. The values guide their performance and the decisions that are taken. Ideally, an individual’s personal values will align with the spoken and unspoken values of the organization. By developing a written statement of the values of the organization, individuals have a chance to contribute to the articulation of these values, as well as to evaluate how well their personal values and motivation match those of the organization.

The “Human Capital Development Model,” created by Krauthammer International, is a logical process that can take top management concepts, and translate them into a context that has real meaning for staff at all levels.

The key to bringing this model to life is to answer the following questions:

  • Do my team understand the organization’s vision and how their role moves the organization closer to achieving it?
  • How can my sales team translate the organization’s mission into one that is relevant to them?
  • How does the organization’s guiding principles impact on the day-to-day responsibilities of sales people?
  • Which of the organization’s values does my sales team relate to?
  • How can we interpret these values so they become compelling for each sales person?

An effective sales team understands the big picture and the context of their team’s work to the greatest degree possible. That includes understanding the relevance of their job and how it impacts the effectiveness of others and the overall team effort.

Too often, sales people are asked to work on an activity without being told how their role contributes to organization’s vision, much less how their efforts are impacting the ability of others to do their work. Understanding the organization’s vision promotes collaboration, increases commitment and improves quality.

An effective team works collaboratively and with a keen awareness of interdependency.

Collaboration and a solid sense of interdependency in a team will defuse blaming behavior and stimulate opportunities for learning and improvement.

Without this sense of interdependency in responsibility and reward, blaming behaviors can occur which will quickly erode team effectiveness and morale.