Jonathan Farrington

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

Sandler Research Center - Survey results

All Business is Good Business – Oh No it Isn’t!

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It would be very easy to be seduced into believing that in today’s selling environment the need to rigorously qualify every opportunity at the front end of the sales/buying cycle is becoming irrelevant: Competition is tougher than ever before; customers are choosing us, rather than the other way round; quotas are being missed by a country mile; the playing field has never been flatter … all compelling reasons to conclude that all business is good business, right? No, very, very wrong!

Seasoned professionals fully understand both the value and importance of thorough 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 to that first exploratory meeting in order to ensure that the meeting will be worthwhile to both parties. With sales costs spiralling upwards and sales time becoming limited, considerable prudence is required on the part of the salesperson.

What we do now have at our fingertips, is a host of excellent software solutions that allow us access to so much valuable information, but in “big-ticket selling” nothing replaces a face to face first meeting.

During that first meeting, a considerable amount of detail can and should be confirmed – 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, and most important of all, 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 at an appropriate profit level?
  • Do I want to win 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, in Quixotic fashion, 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.

Are You Really Up to the Challenge of Change Required to Become a Top 5% Player?

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Becoming a Top 5% sales performer requires significant changes in your “world view” – how you think about yourself, and how you think about your relationships with key stakeholders. You are faced with new ways of thinking, many of which directly challenge what you have been taught and believe.

When faced with significant innovations in thinking, we tend initially to find ourselves in one of the following three characterizations:

The “Authoritative Critic”

The “Authoritative Expert”

The “Enthusiastic Apprentice”

We can think about these three characters as being on a spectrum that runs from outright rejection to eager acceptance. 

As we take a brief look at each of these, allow yourself to wonder where on the spectrum you fall.

The Authoritative Critic

This individual quickly dismisses new ways of thinking, rejecting them as ridiculous, foolish and unwise.

What is this individual’s motivation? Fear of change, of loss.

The Authoritative Expert

This individual is one who typically responds to the introduction of innovative ideas by rejecting the reality that the ideas are indeed innovative. This individual is typically thinking “What’s the big deal? I’ve always done it this way.”

What is this individual’s motivation? Fear of losing face, of appearing inadequate.

The Enthusiastic Apprentice

This individual is excited by innovative thinking and is eager to learn. He/she may not understand or totally embrace the innovative concepts, but they are excited about the possibilities that well-informed change may bring about.

What is this individual’s motivation? It is hunger for knowledge and excitement about the possibilities that may come with that new knowledge.

The nature of change is dynamic. As much as we might like to believe that change is linear, the truth is that deep transformative change develops in a spiral pattern.

As you reviewed the above characteristics, you may have seen parts of yourself in each description.

Knowledge is the power. The more aware you can become of your own process of “spiralling” through the cycle of change, the more conscious and intentional you can be about choosing change, choosing growth, and choosing to become a genuine Top 5% player in the game of sales.

Using Pareto’s Principle to Highlight the Current Malaise Within the Sales Space

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I have to confess that I was 25 years old before I discovered Vilfredo Pareto and whilst I cannot claim that I experienced an epiphany of “Damascus Highway” proportions, it did cause me to make fundamental changes to the way I organized myself. I think even at that young age, I knew precisely what I wanted to achieve both in my commercial life and, indeed, my personal life – it was simply a question of re-adjusting my 80/20 balance.

Vilfredo who?

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that 20% of the people owned 80% of the wealth.

Where It Came From

After Pareto made his discovery and created his formula, many others observed similar phenomena in their own areas of expertise. Quality Management pioneer, Dr. Joseph Juran, working in the US in the 1930s and 40s, recognized a universal principle he called the “vital few and trivial many” and put it down in writing.

As a result, Dr Juran’s observation of the “vital few and trivial many”, the principle that 20% of something always are responsible for 80% of the results, became known as Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 Rule.

What It Means

At a very basic level, you know that 80% of sales will come from 20% of the sales team. 20% of staff will cause 80% of the problems, but another 20% of staff will provide 80% of the production – it works both ways.

How It Can Help Us?

The value of the Pareto Principle for all of us is that it reminds us to focus on the 20 % that matters. Of the things we do during our day, only 20% really matter. Those 20% produce 80% of our results and we should identify and focus on those things.  If something in the schedule has to slip, if something isn’t going to get done – we should make sure it’s not part of that 20%.

Digging a Little Deeper

When thinking about the overall annual performance of a sales team, the harsh reality is that only 20% typically smash their targets – these are the “sales superstars”. Of the remaining 80%, 30% just scrape through – rather like a high jumper just grazes the bar but gets over. That leaves a significant 50% who fail, often quite miserably, year after year. The reasons are numerous but right now, much of my work is focusing on sales leadership because, not only are these people critical to the overall success of the company’s engine room – the sales team – most are in a very precarious position. They are relying on their “super achievers” to over-perform in order to make up the deficit of the rest of the team. But what if a few of the best left? Total vulnerability!

In fact, there is a management theory floating around at the moment that proposes to interpret Pareto’s Principle in such a way as to produce what is called ‘Superstar Management’. The theory’s supporters claim that, since 20% of your people produce 80% of your results, you should focus your limited time on managing only that 20% – the ‘superstars’.

The theory is flawed because it overlooks the fact that 80% of your time should be spent doing what is really important. Helping the good become better has to be more effective – in the medium and long-term – than helping the great become terrific.

Thinking About the Wider Sales Space

You will know that 80% of what you read, hear or witness is dedicated to lead generation, winning new business, prospect attraction, etc. It is all about cold calling, social selling, email marketing, inbound, outbound – in other words, hunting. It has become an obsession.

That logically means only 20% of a company’s efforts (here 20% is probably very generous) is dedicated to managing, developing, consolidating existing customers. And yet we know that 80% of a typical commercial organization’s revenue, every year, will arrive from those same existing customers. Total madness!

Unfortunately, there is no consolation for any sales leader reading this – 80% of your sales teams are incapable of sustaining long-term relationships because they are commercially promiscuous. They would much prefer to close the deal and then move on to the next shiny, bright new opportunity, leaving that newly acquired customer to fend for themselves – after all, they will call us if they need to buy anything else, won’t they?

Actually, no! At any given time, almost 80% of buyers would be receptive to changing suppliers. They don’t necessarily want a better deal, more discount, greater value – although all of that helps. They want to feel valued, respected and loved. They want to do business with a company that is prepared to work hard to earn the right to their custom.

In summary, I would say this: You can apply the Pareto Principle to all that you do, but my advice is to use it wisely. It should serve as a daily reminder to focus 80% of your time and energy on the 20% of your work that is really important. Don’t just “work smart” – work smart on the right things.

 

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.