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By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of discussing sales and selling with Charles Adler, Canada’s Boss of Talk. Charles had read my piece in the Globe and Mail on the difference between a blue-collar approach to selling and the white-collar approach. We explored other aspects of sales and successful people, take a listen, and let me know or Charles (@charlesadler), know what you think.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
All this week I have posted clips from a recent interview with Ago Cluytens, for his Coaching Masters Series. We dealt with a number of issues around selling to buyers who are traditionally referred to as being Status Quo. Being the weekend, I thought it a good time to post the whole interview for your weekend lounging pleasure.
Always interested in what you think, and whether you are more prepared to go forth and sell where many sellers and pundits fear to go. Take a look, and let me know.
If you enjoy this there are more on Ago’s site.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
Monday I shared a clip from a discussion with Ago Cluytens, for one his Coaching Masters Series. Today’s second clip looks at the need to be provocative in gaining traction with entrenched potential buyers.
The challenge many of in sales face is the entrenched buyer who is reluctant to look at new or alternative means of achieving his/her goals. This is usually due to the fact that they are entrenched in how they are doing things now, feels there are too many resources needed to make a change, and a host of other reasons. In order to get engagement, we need to demonstrate the results we can deliver and the positive and measurable impact we will directly deliver to their business and attaining their goals. In a WIIFM world it is about the What, not how of how they get there.
Here is more:
If you would like to see the entire discussion you can either visit my You Tube channel, or go the Ago’ site by clicking here. Always open to comments and views.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
A few weeks back I had the opportunity to sit down with Ago Cluytens, for one his Coaching Masters Series interviews. All this week, the posts will feature snippets of the interview, below we will also tell you where you can find the whole interview, but now let’s go to the first extract.
Trigger Events are fine, but there is no escaping that you have to wait for the “event”. But here’s the deal, what you are leveraging is not the event, but the buyer’s reaction to the event. So why not take the training wheels off, forget the “event”, and learn to trigger the reaction without having to wait, with the others looking for the same sign.
Take a look at what I mean.
If you would like to see the entire discussion you can either visit my You Tube channel, or go the Ago’ site by clicking here. Always open to comments and views.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
People are always looking for the formula to sales success, so here’s the deal: there ain’t one! There are a number of things that when executed consistently will lead to more continuous and predictable success; those that tell you a otherwise are selling their book – there are no silver bullets – just work.
Having said that, there are some specific things that are consistently present in successful sales and successful sales people, let’s look at three that when combined can give you a powerful advantage:
Ability – While most sales professionals have ability, especially at the start of their initial success phase, it is often a filleting thing. As markets and clients change and evolve, so must your ability; at the same time as you have some success, you get drawn away from practicing those abilities that made you a success to begin with, strengthening your abilities in one part of the sale, while weakening them in others. This imbalance can come back to haunt us unless we proactively focus on always improving our abilities. I wish I had $100 for every time a sales person has told me that they know what they are doing, they have 15 or more years of experience. The fact is that if they have not delivered consistently better results, then it is likely that they have had the same year 15 times over, and it is time to focus on their ability. Probably the easiest of the three elements in this piece to address.
Action – There is a lot of talk in sales, all kinds of theory, but as I have said in the past, sales is all about Execution – everything else is just talk. The challenge is often not just the complete lack of action, but more of selective action. Many sales people do what they like and avoid those things they don’t, but to be a complete sales person, you need to take action right across the cycle. There is a lot of people who are good at planning, but then fail to act on it; as in other areas in life an OK plan one acts on leads to greater results than a perfect plan that is never executed. How many sales strategies, account and territory plans sit gathering dust on a shelf, right next to the last sales training manual, the one that focuses on execution. I know at times things can get daunting, I know at times we are prone to over analyse; but it is amazing how when you take action, steps to change the course of events, and put things into motion, the enormity of the challenge shrinks. I recently read about a marathoner who when asked what was the hardest part of daily training, replied “getting out the door”.
Accountability – If sales people had to buy excuses or rationalizations by the pound, many would either go broke – or better yet quit relying on them. Yes the product sucks, the market is down, buyers are hiding, Jupiter just doesn’t want to align with Mars, but none of that changes the fact that we alone are responsible for our own success. It is up to me to be resourceful and figure out how I can sell what I am paid to sell (legally and ethically) no matter what. While at times one can positively show that it is not their fault, that is not the issues, it is up to us to be accountable and figure how to overcome the hurdles and make the sale. If someone is not a buyer, either figure out what you can do to change that, or find someone who is – everything else is an excuse and avoiding the accountability that professional sales requires. As a friend once said “isn’t sales great, and if it was easy they wouldn’t need us!” Embrace accountability – realize sales success.
One last thing to keep in mind, each of these is in you power to impact, change or ignore.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
Last Monday I posted about the overlooked opportunity in that segment of buyers know as Status Quo, pundits and sellers alike commiserating each other about the difficulty of selling to a ready group of buyers, vs. taking orders from self-declared buyers.
I’ll be the first to admit change is hard, especially for business buyers who have their handful, trying to make headway in a competitive market. Change is time consuming, a drain on resources, creates upheaval, usually expensive, and fraught with risk, for the organization and the individual at the centre of the decision. Moving the dial with these types of buyers requires more than a bit of effort, which is why change is also hard for sellers; it is much easier and safer to rationalize, and wait for a referral.
This is why there is a healthy and growing industry of sages ready to sell indisposed sellers every mean of just waiting at the edge of the forest, encouraging them to wait for something to come out to them, rather than entering the fray and winning business most sellers seem reluctant to peruse.
How much effort does it take? Well take a minute, step back and look around you and study what it takes for people to make critical changes in key their lives. Frighteningly, you discover that people don’t often make big changes, right changes, preferring to avoid and live with the consequences of the Status Quo. Even when they know that the new state is preferable to their existing one. The naive notion which many buy into that people will move to a better mouse trap has cost both sellers and buyers much time and money. You can build the better mouse trap, Trap 2.0, and people will rodent infestation will maybe look your way, then rationalize why they shouldn’t beat a path to your door.
Don’t believe me, how many people do you know who continue to smoke, even after their father expired due to lung cancer; how many people do you know who continue to biggie size it, despite the fact that they have to buy a new wardrobe every six months? People can change these with a effort if they wanted to, but it takes effort. How many times have you watched companies go to the brink or beyond because the devil they knew was a better alternative to the one they didn’t know?
The answer is not offering the “right” or “better” solution, or in becoming their friend. It is about penetrating the barriers the buyers have erected to protect their current state. Your only choice is to shock them, shock your way past their fortress of hope. Hope it will work out, hope it will last, and hope no one will notice. For the “be found crowd”, this is not an issue, the buyer has dismantled the barriers, and are ready to change, but for the Status Quo, intervention time.
Now I am not talking about clamping a couple of electrodes to your buyer’s temples (or elsewhere); but I am talking about asking hard and very direct questions, which at best could be called provocative, at worst a punch below their reality belt. One does not have to be rude, but one does have to shake things up, which means the ultimate relationship you have starts out a bit rough, but ends up being a solid one, built on being a reliable resource, not a cuddly friend.
There is plenty of writing and thinking out there about how to succeed with the Status Quo, mine, others who provide means and questions you can use. But the first step is for you as a seller to recognize and decide how you want to deliver value to your buyer. Once you decide that you can do more than just take orders from ready buyers, and win more business who may not think they need you or your offering, there are plenty of resources to help you, but as with other changes, you need to first admit that you are a card carrying member of the Status Quo.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
There seems to be wide agreement that at any given time, only a small percentage of your target market is Actively Looking for what your are selling, estimates seem to be about 15%. A similar percentage, fall into a group I call Passively Looking, leaving about 70% of the target group is removed from the market, not looking, or working hard to look the other way, the Status Quo. Many pundits will tell you to stay away from the 70%, erroneously telling to avoid these apparently entrenched potential buyers, and spend your time with the other two groups.
Sure that is easier prey, but at the same time it is prey that is surrounded and stalked by every other sales person looking for an easy kill. Although you have to ask why it is easy, well, not only are these Passive and Active buyers, self declared, but they have been engaged gathering information, (if not knowledge). One bit of information they have is that most leading products’ feature overlap as much as 80% – 90%, leaving sellers a small and narrow platform to succeed from, leaving little more than price to lean on. Just like on the savannah, the weakest go first, the sale goes to the lowest price.
Time to be contrarian, stop chasing the obvious, and sell to those who may not be in the market, but still have objectives and opportunities they want to achieve in their business. The conventional wisdom is that you spend no time with the Status Quo, as one pundit insists:
“They are happy, not looking, satisfied with things as they are”.
The notion that they are satisfied, does not limit their desire to improve their situation, or that they are not open to better ideas. Sadly that view makes one a victim of selective perception, see what you want to see, in this case a sale that will require effort and skill, rather than the easy fray of the self-declared buyer. Believing that business people and business owners would ignore a means of improving or doing things better is just naive and dangerous; if you are reading this and are a business owner or executive – would you ignore something that could improve things even as little as 5%?
The reality, is that satisfaction is a poor measure of selling opportunities, more and more buyer are looking at how they can move forward rather than why they should stay where they are, especially when where they are is not optimal to their business now or moving forward. It is clear that many sellers are leaving money on the table using satisfaction as a threshold for change, for example, according to Bell & Patterson, in their “Customer Loyalty Guaranteed’, they show that “75% of customers who leave or switch vendors for a competitor, when asked, say they were ‘satisfied or completely satisfied’ with the vendor they left, at the time they switched.”
It is clear that those in the Status Quo are more likely :
“Buyers who have yet to be presented with, or perceive the right solution required to achieve their objectives or market opportunities.”
Getting to those buyers involves work, you need to use efforts and ideas that, not apps and tools. This may not be new, fresh, simple or specific economy dependent. It involves proactively engaging with buyers based on their current objectives, and presenting innovative thinking. Not necessarily products or solutions, again with 80% – 90% overlap, success comes down to how they can use the product to impact their business, their objectives, their opportunities.
Stop following the crowd, and track your target market, the big market. Ditch the product, and embrace their objectives, engage on that level and the product follows, more importantly, you have an unhurried sales cycle, as there is no crowd nipping at your heals, and you have a client that buys and pays full price for value, not negotiating on price.
You can start by reading Mine The GAP, and go from there; come back next Monday to see how you can shock the process forward with the Status Quo.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
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By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
Not long ago I posted a piece about the positive side of “closed ended” questions, and their place in the sale cycle. As with many things it is rarely the case of one versus the other but more of which is more appropriate for the scenario, and in sales for achieving the objective you set out to accomplish.
Sellers can and should take the concept of open ended and closed ended, and apply it to actual sales meetings. What you’ll find is that sales meeting properly executed should be more of a closed ended event, but all too often they end up being an open ended, in fact too open-ended, often becoming ever meandering affairs. The kind meeting which seem like they may never end, especially when you add a torturous layer of PowerPoint; or they end without a specific conclusion or direction. The meetings which follow frequently seem to be another try at getting it right, instead of moving things forward.
The problem usually comes down to what the objective is going into the meeting. I have written in the past about sales people not having a handle on the length of their sales cycle, saying things like “It depends”, or offering an unrealistic “oh 3 – 6 months”; that’s a big variable given that time is your most precious resources, and non-renewable to boot. Taken a step further and asking them how many meetings it may take to close the deal, they answer with less confidence and more ambiguity.
Well if you don’t know how many meetings it may take, (live or by phone, webinar, smoke signals), it becomes really hard to have specific outcomes or objectives for each meeting. This is why sellers at time lose control of meetings, leaving the client to take the meeting to a conclusion, one with no real next step.
Knowing what you want out of each meeting allows you to plan objectives, primary and secondary, plan next steps, and build a structure for the meeting, including questions, that will help you and the buyer meet mutual objectives. Absent that, it begins to look like an experience with the “Be found” camp, having abdicate their role as sellers, they are hoping the buyer will find something to continue for, something to buy. I propose they are hoping the client has a need, hoping they can strike a relationship based on something other than the buyer’s objective, hoping for the order.
Having clear objectives, measures and next steps defined and planned in advance will also allow you to do one other thing with great confidence, that is disqualify buyers. If you cannot achieve your stated objective, having executed your plan, you have to seriously consider that you are not dealing with a real buyer, real like the ones who buy when you achieve your mutually stated objectives.
I remember working with a “rock star” in Boston, he confidently told me his deals on average take four meetings, great, what was his measure of success for the first meeting, his objective? With expected bravado, he proclaimed “to close the deal man!” He did not have an answers as to why he bothered going back three other times if he was going to close the sale during the first meeting. Although there is a prospect I have, who will never buy from me, but he loves the same bands I do, and makes a great espresso, I love going there, but I leave my order pad in the car.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
Back in the 80′s or maybe even earlier, the purveyors of Consultative Selling, put a lot of emphasis on Open Ended Questions, for all the right reasons. It took some effort and focus to get sales people to adopt this style of interaction, especially after years of pitching and doing things the traditional (old) way.
Many sales people had difficulty being comfortable and effective in the vast openness provided by this style of questions. It was difficult to fight the urge to regress to their previous comfort zones, many sellers had to be continuously managed to adopt the new more effective question based selling.
One practice was to paint closed ended questions as being inferior, substandard, in those days, even communist in nature; may sound extreme, but in reality, closed ended question were uniformly vilified. In fact the pendulum swung so far that closed ended question were just plain bad. Today, in many workshops, you still hear people demonizing closed ended questions.
Well I am here to tell you that there are no such things as bad questions. There are very few if any absolutes in sales. It’s more accurate to look at how appropriate a question is for a given circumstance. If you look at questions as tools of the trade, there is no such thing as one tool fits all; there may be tools that are appropriate to various tasks, others may be useful less often
Which is why I am here to say that the much maligned closed ended question does have a place in B2B selling in 2013; hell I’ll go further to say it has a place in Sales 2.0 and/or Social Selling. It is about the situation, what is the desired outcome, and what the next step needs to be from both parties perspectives.
Given the above there are regular occurrences in sales where closed ended question makes perfect sense. So I am on a mission to reintroduce this tool to your sales tool kit. A few years ago Timberlake made it his goal to being Sexy Back, so I am advocating the same for closed ended questions (although I am certain they will never be sexy, but the positive results delivered may be).
I am calling the updated version Impact Questions, a marketing friend told me that one needs to rebrand for re-launch; change the name and you change focus from potential negative connotations.
Let’s face it, there are times when you do want to focus things, narrow down the possibilities. Often you want close things off so you can move the process forward, or to realize that there is no forward to move to with a prospect and it may be time to move to the next opportunity.
During a cold call, oops, prospecting call, (need to be politically correct), open ended questions can take you off track; a question that works well in a sales call can be negative during a prospecting call. There are other times when you do want a clear one or the other, a yes or a no. It comes down to how the response serves the purpose. What is the impact of the answer, and how that answer impacts the outcome. For example, when I ask someone I called the first time if they “have ever worked with a third party trainer like Renbor?”, either answer serves to move the process forward, and could prove to be a benefit for both. Rather than using a series of open ended questions to arrive at the same point, a simple impact question focuses bith the prospect and I on the same critical turning point.
So know where you are trying to go, know how you can help a prospect or a customer, then ask the Impact Question, and deal with the impact, not whether it is open ended, closed ended, or some other ended, work to achieve positive impact for the buyer and yourself.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
I think (hope ) it is safe to say that every seller, especially B2B, has a Plan A. A road map or process for how they plan to engage with a buyer, and work with them to mutually navigate the buy and sale process to arrive at a mutually beneficial situation, each party attaining their objectives. Having said that, I still see many who wing it.
What surprises me is the number of sales people or organizations who have a game plan or playbook, that is totally one dimensional in nature. It starts by completing a pastel coloured sheet, same info, same way, every time; some have a Plan B, they go to it based on the push back to Plan A. Now this would not be a big problem if you are selling a commodity, in what can be described as a “binary” sale, but it is an absolute killer if you are selling anything that involves more than a price decision.
Rather than using a “plan” or playbook approach, it is more effective to use a mind map approach. This allows you to evolve with the buyer as you uncover facts, opportunities and aspirations. You can use Plan A to engage, and begin the process, but as each client is different (in big or small ways) you need to adapt rather than try to get the client to fit the plan or playbook.
The way to achieve this is to commit to two basic disciplines. First, is to commit to reviewing all sales transactions you are involved in, whether you won them or not. This will allow you to anticipate broad and narrow trends, and adjust your game in real time. Think of this like watching the game tapes.
To support this, you need to adopt the practice of follow through questions, not question, but questions. Most sellers tend to stay narrow and shallow, they hear something that sounds like what they need to hear, and they go with it. But if you develop the skill to ask several layers of “impact questions”, you not only get to the root of the opportunity, but differentiate yourself from those who stop at the surface or layer two. Combined these give you the grounding to go beyond what you practiced with on the nice coloured sheet, while not meandering, because in the end you still need to bring home the revenue.
Discipline is one thing, rigidity is another, this is why we introduce the concept of fluidity. Visually it may be easiest to think of this approach as a three dimensional “Sales Mind Map”. It forces you to think, anticipate and respond based on client input, while leveraging market and sales experience. It allows you to not only have a Plan A, Plan B, but a method for having options that may take you to Plan Z, all based on the buyer’s objectives and requirements.
Enter the Art of Sales Contest – Win Tickets
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
