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To Err is Human – and When It Sells It’s Divine!0

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

Too many sales people spend way too much time and effort trying to be or look perfect. Whether it is refining that radio voice for telephone selling, or the right look for the call, using the fashionable buzzwords, or a host of other things sellers do. An awful amount of energy and resources go into image and looking good, to the point where the polish detracts and distracts from the purpose at hand.

The reality is that people are not perfect, at least not in the real world, and the perfection some seek could be at odds with the expectations of the buyer. Take the popular notion and adhered to buzz-phrase, popular among sales types is that “people buy from people”, implicit in that is that people by from people like them. Being too polished to the point where we resemble the cover of GQ more than we do the people the buyer is used to dealing with on a daily basis, may lead to the opposite outcome to the one desired.

Being human, including the frailties and blemishes may put a seller in a better stead than trying to be the Madison Avenue or Hollywood version of a sales professional. In fact imperfections can often work in your favour by making us look and feel human rather than something artificial. Trying to be something most of us are not, that is perfect, can distance a buyer.

A common attribute of good sales people is being genuine, and one buyers appreciate and look for in a seller, if they sense a seller is not themselves or disingenuous they begin to question the seller’s intent. Intent counts for a lot, and many will tell you that intent trumps skill, product knowledge, and certainly outranks polish, image or smoothness.

No matter how experienced or good you are as a sales person, it is better to focus and demonstrate that in the quality of your selling, your ability to gather the right information about the right issues, than relying on strictly polish. To this day I do not have or use a radio voice when cold calling, I stumble and stutter at times in the same way I did 20 years ago, but he content of my talk track, the underlying intent helps me content with buyers and set appointments.

We have all been in meetings where you may dropped something, or something goes wrong with technology you are relying on, but instead of the meeting going south, that awkward moment removes a layer of the barrier between buyer and seller. I remember a meeting where the buyer was cold, tough, hardly engaged, and while reaching for something the sales person spilt a bottle of water on the conference room table and on her pants. The buyer sprang into action, genuinely concerned for and her dilemma, and remained very engaged for the rest of the meeting, and ultimately bought. The spill changed the dynamics and I would say the outcome of the interaction and the meeting.

Time and time again, common unintended errors, lead to an instant human connection that facilitates the connection between buyer and seller. While I am not suggesting you go out and look to err on purpose, I am saying that the energy and time we spend trying to be perfect or avoid looking or being human, can be better invested in understanding the buyer, their objective and how you can help them. If we do that in a genuinely human way, warts and all, rather than a superhuman way, we’ll see a much more genuine response from prospects, and achieve better results faster.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

Sports have trade deadlines, sales organizations have trade season, usually at the start of the year, just after bonuses are paid. What I never understand is why companies, and sales leaders participate in this silly ritual.

You see this in almost every industry, employees, specifically sales people, move from one market player to another. Doesn’t matter if I am working with software companies, wireless, service providers, you name it, it is much the same. I ask people to tell me about their sales background, and inevitably, they’ll tell they have been in the business 12 years, four with one company, five with another, and three at their current place of employment. I once had someone who was on their third tour with the company I was training and had done stints with three other.

Why?

Unlike sports, there is no free agency where top players can go to the highest bidder. In fact I would argue the opposite exists, the journeymen sellers are almost always B or C players. The rock star sellers, the real proven A player are not very inclined to move, and companies who thrive on cultivating and keeping A players go out of their way to do everything they can to keep them happy and rocking.

Companies hiring the journeymen rarely understand the error of their ways, and as in sports when things go wrong they go after the coach, in the case of sales the front line manager. The poor soul who is supposed to deliver results with other companies’ discards. I am not saying that the managers don’t share in the blame, they do, but senior leadership should know better. They pressure the manager to perform, fair demand, and the manager succumbs and hires an available body; not just any body, but an “experienced” body with a “book” of clients. Right!

These sellers rarely become big hitters, some become “80 per centers”, but most continue to be lack luster performers, doing no better than they did at the last company that discarded them. At time they manage to get out of Dodge before they are booted, but their ineffectiveness does not, it is something they carry from place to place.

Just go on LnkedIn and you can see it clear as day. One seller I trained at two different companies in the same vertical has had five sales positions with four different companies in the same industry. Never fired, always managing to jump before their employer’s suspicions were confirmed. The only reason they got a second stint with their current employer was because a buddy was promoted to hiring status.

What I have also found is that rarely are these journeymen counter offered by their current employers, sure there is feigned regrets, “sad to see you go” as they hold the door open. Whereas with the rock stars, everything is done to avoid the situation at all.

In the end I think it comes down to a lack of conviction on the part of sales leadership. While they always talk about quality over quantity, when it comes to hiring, they seem to favour quantity over quality, preferring to have a body in a territory vs. the patience to wait for the right body. As for the argument that at least having a performing body is better than an empty territory, I am not sure. The journeymen will underperform, as will the territory, but a bigger cost is opportunity cost. Who will the journeymen turn off during their stint, how much money will they leave on the table or discount in deals they do get, and how many deals will they miss just because who they are. Their book never follows, but their bad habits that got them their do, and now instead of forging forward, you are left to deal with their mediocrity.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

Reviewd by Linda Beck – MBA, EQi Coach, Chief Learning Officer, Pillar Performance

Tibor Shanto asked me to review the book Emotional Equations by Chip Conley because he knows I have been studying the topic of emotional intelligence (EQ) over the past 10 years and have incorporated the importance of understanding one’s EQ into my corporate training business. The title of Mr. Conley’s book intrigued me. As I read it, I liked the idea of attaching equations to emotions to add meaning and to help manage the hold our emotions can sometimes have on us. From an EQ perspective, labeling our emotions is the first step in being able to manage them effectively.

Despair = Suffering – Meaning

The above equation is the first one Chip (I’ll use his first name now as we are getting a bit more intimate with his story) uses to illustrate how this equation helped him rise above some extreme hardships he was experiencing in his life. Within about a 2 year time span Chip lost 5 friends to suicide (one close friend who was also named Chip), his son was wrongly convicted and sent to prison, and his business was close to bankruptcy. During this difficult time Chip turned to a variety of sources that inspired him to overcome his despair. One was Abraham Maslow’s theory of motivation which inspired a previous book Chip had written, Peak. The other was by psychologist Viktor Frankl who wrote the compelling memoir Man’s Search for Meaning which documents Frankl’s daily life in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. I have read Frankl’s book and it is a powerful read. If you or anyone you know is currently feeling sorry for themselves, have them read this book. It illustrates the extremes human beings can endure and it is that perspective that led Chip to attach the above equation to his current experience. As Frankl postulates in his psychological analysis of his 3-year concentration experience, man can endure virtually anything as long as he can find meaning to the suffering. Chip applied this idea to his own situation and created the equation Despair = Suffering – Meaning.

Once Chip created this equation, he continued his research and sought out various experts in different disciplines including mathematics and psychology, and found that equations were used in a number of different ways. Chip continued his research by going to the Kingdom of Bhutan to study happiness where Gross National Happiness is an indicator of the country’s success. Chip clearly conducted a substantial amount of research prior to writing his book and cites many experts in a variety of disciplines.

Shortly after I finished reading Emotional Equations, my mother was hospitalized and while undergoing a procedure she experienced a heart attack on the table. I was with her in the hospital before and after the procedure and as her only daughter wanted to do whatever I could to make the situation better. My mother can be difficult, from her daughter’s perspective, at the best of times and while I was trying to do everything to assist her, it was very stressful for both of us. From my perspective, I felt I was bending over backwards to meet all her needs yet it never seemed to be enough. My emotions were being taxed. So this is where I tried to incorporate the main focus of Chip’s book and that is to attach an equation to a difficult situation in order to potentially see it in a new light and diminish the overall stress. The equation that developed for me over the stress with my mother is as follows….

Duty = Compassion - Resentment

In analyzing the situation, I felt I had a sense of duty to do all I could for my mother. She, again from my point of view, did not seem to appreciate my efforts, so while I was trying to be compassionate about her situation with respect to her poor health and the dynamics of working our way through hospital administrivia, I was feeling some resentment that I could not be fully appreciated by my mother. Once I documented my own emotional equation I did feel that it added a higher level of understanding to my situation and I was able to continue to perform my duty, by increasing my compassion and lowering my resentment.

Because of my personal and business interest in the topic of emotions and emotional intelligence, I did enjoy Chip Conley’s book. The timing with my personal situation with my mother, added a practical application which made it that much more meaningful.

Please connect with Linda Beck, www.pillarperformance.com; lindabeck@pillarperformance.com; for dynamic learning workshops on the Many Faces of Emotional Intelligence; Engaging Employees; Critical Decision-Making; Dynamic Teams; Exceptional Customer Service; True Colors; Leadership is a Choice….