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By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
In the heat of a sale, it is sometimes easy to confuse a condition to the sale with an objection. The key is to understand what you are really dealing with, and respond accordingly. Done right, it could solidify the sale and the resulting relationship with the buyer.
Take a look, then download the Objection Handling Handbook, and let me know your thought.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
In Part I of this series, I looked at the importance of asking powerful impactful questions if you are looking to have something powerful to listen to, and impactful engagements. The other attribute of good listening mentioned in the piece was patience. Seems straight forward, but we have all jumped in to soon, unintentionally interrupting the buyer in mid-sentence or mid-thought. By developing the discipline of patience, we can enhance the buy/sell experience for both parties.
In a world where most leading products/solutions look very much the same, how you sell, or more specifically, the buyer’s experience during your sale, could be the best way to differentiate yourself and product from the pack. Sellers have been pitched to death, they unfortunately expect Muzak like questions, and have fallen in to the habit of giving Muzak like answers; in effect they have become conditioned by previous sellers, who have trained buyers to give shallow and brief answers. Every time they start answering a question in meaningful and detailed way, and they are cut off by a seller, they are conditioned to answer with shorter and less detailed and useful answers. The interruption may be rooted in excitement about the fit, unfortunately the message the buyer gets, is “this guy is not interested in the full answer, just what serves his needs”. Each time they are unable to fully express themselves, they “learn” that the seller may not be really interested in the answer, so they provide the bare minimum.
If you decide to take on the suggestions in Part I, and move towards asking very direct and provocative questions, you need to prepare, and more importantly allow for longer and more detailed answers, which requires a patient listening style that encourages the buyer to speak in detail, and create a meaningful dialogue. It is up to you to recondition and reshape the buyer’s expectations and experience.
The reality is that there are a lot of things going on in a sales meeting, sellers have to keep track of and balance various inputs and cues, at the same time analysing and formulating how to piece the information together in a usable way, while at the same time finding ways to move the sale forward. It takes effort and practice not to jump in when presented with an opening. But with a little practice and effort, you can change the experience and the outcome.
In light of the fact that we think and speak faster than people talk or we listen, we need to work hard at slowing down, and being patient enough to succeed, it does take effort not to add to the buyer’s negative conditioning. As a young seller I was taught a simple two step technique that encourages the buyer to speak more and in greater detail, while allowing me to differentiate from other sellers. As you ask provocative and open ended questions, divide your note page in half, on the left side take notes as you normally would. On the left side write down two things, first, all the things the buyer says that you want to jump in and comment on, and save them for later. The other are questions you can ask based on what the buyer is saying. This forces you to listen more intently, not race ahead or make assumptions, but patiently and tactically listening with purpose. Once the buyer has finished (on their) own, you can ask the questions you wrote down, demonstrating that you did indeed listen. You can also go back and review and build on the points you wrote down rather than interrupting, again encouraging the buyer to expand and elaborate further, and see you as a listener, and someone worth talking to.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
We have all heard the expression that an empty wagon makes the most noise, no doubt from an older relative trying to tell us that that we were talking a lot, saying very little of substance, worth hearing, or had as near the level of impact as the noise we were making saying it. Well, I can tell you that there are a lot of empty wagons when it comes to sales and sellers, usually in lack of substance or delivering on the hype.
You see this when sellers embrace half of an idea, usually the easy half, but fail to follow through on the entire concept and end up making a lot of noise as a result. Specifically in the early stages of the sale, when they resort to talking about how their product/service will improve Productivity, increase efficiencies, reduce Costs, minimize Risk, enhance their work-flow, and a few other generic variations of the same thing.
The half they bought into is the need to go beyond feature – benefit, and venture forth to where they are presenting their offering from the “what’s in it for the client” perspective. Where they fail to follow through, is in adding specific substance to the above phrases, leaving them beige and generic. This unnecessarily extends the length of their sale cycle, or kills the sale all together.
Picture yourself as the person getting the calls, dozens of calls every week, from the copier rep, the wireless rep, the IT integrator rep, the office supply rep, the transportation rep, the sales training rep, and the oodles of other reps. All telling you that they CAN improve your productivity, not HOW they could do that, what the actual impact would be, but just that they can improve your productivity. Multiple that by all the “buzz-phrases” and by the number of calls, and by Tuesday afternoon, it all sounds like an empty wagon.
It takes little extra effort to replace the generic phrases with actual example. How do you in fact increase efficiencies, what has been the actual impact of that increased productivity, and how can you best present it in a way that the buyer can relate to in their world. All you need to do is go past where marketing leaves you, and study some real world examples, be they your customers specifically, or any client your company has helped. Understand what their reality was before they used your product and service, and where they after taking your offering on board. Yes, this requires effort, but in the end a lot less effort than the effort it take to push things up the generic hill, the hill where you and every other generic rep looks frighteningly the same and unappealing.
You will quickly move from saying “we help companies like yours increase your efficiency…” to “clients implementing our software have seen an average increase of 8% in the number of units produced per hour, with a reduction of 5% in rejected product, and a 6% reduction in materials used; this has allowed them to increase revenues by 7%, and a 10% rise in profit margin as a result of cost take out”. Sure there are a couple of extra words, but the substance, weight and specifics they communicate to a potential buyer are more direct and make a lot less noise than the emptiness of the generic descriptions used by most.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
by Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
At the risk of stating the obvious, the job of a sales person is to sell their company’s offering in order to deliver revenue AND Profits for their company. This can be a challenge at times, but should not be so as a result of our doing. Some sales people seem to want to sell things they don’t have, at times they do this on their own, other times they let their prospects lead them down a dead end path.
How many times have you heard sales people say that they could sell their product, or more of their product “If Only…..”. All too many times we allow ourselves to be distracted from what we can sell, and end up losing sales for all the wrong reason. I am always surprised how many sales people act as though they were in product development rather than sales, sadly some would be better at that than sales; but until they do officially transfer, they need to focus on selling what they have, not what they or the buyer wish they had.
Don’t get me wrong, sales people play a crucial role in the feedback loop that helps your company develop and market your offering better. But that should not be at the expense of selling what they have now, that is job one.
Part of this comes down to knowledge not only of your own product, you’d be surprised how many sales people know little more than what’s in the brochure or on their websites, but also that of the competition. It is hard to sell what you have if you don’t know, it is harder to sell if you don’t know how what you have can help the buyer, and harder still if you can’t discuss how what you have applies to the buyer’s world. You quickly go from an exercise in creative selling to being on your heels in a defensive posture.
The challenge is that with an 80% overlap between most leading products, it mostly comes down to how you sell that will determine the difference. Your ability to align the attributes of your “solution” to the real requirements of the buyer, based on their objectives, and their obligations to their organizations. For example, last week I was out with a rep I am tasked with helping, during a routine sales call, the buyer kept interjecting “can your product do this?”, “can your product do that?” Each time the seller apologizing for the products inability to do some of the things the buyer raised.
The seller clearly had not prepared for the meeting by knowing what his competitors offered and did not offer. Most of the things the buyer put on the table with their questions were not available from any of the products in the market. Had he established that this was a wish list, not a requirement, the issue could have resolved. I finally had to ask the buyer, “I am just curious which product that you currently use allows you to do that?” A long pause, and a shrug allowed us to move forward. By asking that simple question we were able to get back to what was required, available and affordable.
Sell what you have, if they are not the right buyer, prospect another, but sell what you have, or you may find that you have all prospects for what you don’t have, and no buyers for what you do.
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
This time of year is an interesting time for the retail trade. As memories of the holiday season begin to fade and the last of the Boxing Day (week, month) sales come to a close, retailers begin another annual ritual, the “Inventory Clearance Sale”. Makes sense, retailers want to clear old and non-selling inventory, freeing up cash, so they can reinvest it in more profitable inventory. In the process the can also open up shelf and storage space, again to make way for newer more salable goods; not so much out with the old in with the new, more like out with lower potential goods and in with better margin and turnover potential.
There are some lessons here for B2B sales people as well. Consider your pipeline as your inventory of prospects and opportunities, add to that the notion of time representing your shelf space, both finite, both needing active management. As such, applying the concept of inventory clearance could be very beneficial for B2B sellers.
When you look at your inventory of prospects, the reality is that no matter how much potential they had when you first decided to carry them, over time and as a result of a number of factors, the likelihood of that inventory turning over changes, usually diminishes, often to a point where they have a negative impact on your pipeline and success. Prospects are similar, in as much that some will close, many more don’t. Either way they need to be removed from the pipeline, or else you can’t bring in new inventory.
This is why sales people need to develop rules for purging their pipeline of bad prospects. Sales people hang on to bad inventory, many look at their pipelines emotionally, the fuller they perceive their pipeline to be, the lesser the propensity to prospect for new opportunities, fresh inventory, confusing a lot of inventory with quality salable inventory.
Bringing shelf space into this in the form of time, you can begin to remove bad inventory before it hit “best by date”. Prospects and opportunities time out, if 80% of your sales close in 75 days, what’s the point in keeping it in the pipeline on day 121; if 80% of the time you can complete the Discovery stage in 3 weeks, should you really continue the Discovery into its 10th week?
It is important to remember that these concepts also apply to your account base, not just prospects. How many low margin accounts are using up resources that if applied to other accounts or new ones would make for better revenues, margins and all around customers. Putting those accounts on the clearance list would allow you to achieve more, be happier, and probably have a better attitude towards new opportunities.
Clearing out bad inventory, be they clients or prospects, should be an ongoing process throughout the year, but even for where it is not year-round, doing it at least once a year, at the start of the year, can bring immediate and yearlong benefits. So good ahead, develop your policies, and hold that “Inventory Clearance”
The Art of Sales Contest Winners!
Congratulations to:
Kristin Geenty and Alan Hart, they are the winners of the tickets to the Art Of Sales, in Toronto next Tuesday January 29.
Enjoy and profit!
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
Nothing bothers me more than when a rep uses any expression relating to selling that includes a variation of “throw me a bone”. You hear this a lot especially in industries that are highly competitive, the buyers have viable options, and the risk of commoditization looms large.
Usually while discussing their prospecting efforts with an account currently serviced by a competitor, reps tells me how they follow up with and touch the client, in the hope that the buyer will “throw me a bone, and I can prove myself.”
You may say this is not prevalent, but it is much broader than most want to believe; especially when you look past the semantics, and focus on the underlying reality. Many will phrase it differently, but the underlying attitude, is passive and lacks a cohesive action plan that permeates sales at all levels.
It certainly symptomatic of sellers who don’t understand the real value they can bring to a client, cannot articulate the value in a meaningful way, or both. This in itself is not the worst thing sellers can face, as overcoming this is a question of will, learning and practice. But the reps are not alone to blame in perpetuating this sheepish way of selling. Many are left to themselves to figure things out, to define their value and how to communicate that to the various audiences involved in buying their offerings. Many managers, who are really just old sellers with an “attaboy”, encourage their teams to do as they did, after all they must know what they are doing, they got the “attaboy”.
Some get no support from their marketing teams. They produce lovely brochures, cool 3-D picture of the product, specs galore, not one line about business application, or how it may help the buyer beyond what the buyer already knows. All culminating in the product comparing columns on the back page, with of course our product having the most check marks (even when no one cares about any of the features).
What angers me is the lack of willingness by many to do anything about the situation. Not realizing that the effort to change it is not only less than the effort needed to continue to sell in this submissive and ineffective way. Yes there is a learning curve that requires time and effort, and may at times cause bruising. But once mastered, it require less ongoing effort to maintain, especially if you put processes in place. Processes that include reviewing current engagements to understand, get a head of and respond to market trends and continue to be of value to the market and your buyers.
You may think this is only prevalent in simple, perhaps commoditized type of sales, not true. I recently met with a counterpart who works with large ticket items, high six figures, what many may call a complex sale, and he sees the same issue, what he calls “bone catchers”. Now I am all for relationships, but there has to be more to a relationship than a seller standing on his hind legs wagging his tail waiting for a buyer to flick a bone and some crumbs their way.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
You know how they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder; we can take a variation of that and apply to prospecting and many sales reps. Beyond the obvious, that attitude has a direct impact on execution and success, how you view a specific sales activity determines the outcome and quality of execution.
Many sales people see prospecting, especially telephone prospecting, as an undesirable task, a dreaded chore, and approach it in that way, making it a negative activity long before they even begin. This in turn very much affects how they do the task, leading to no results or even worse, and it’s all downhill from there when it comes to pipeline success. While they may blame the market, the process or the prospect, they need to look closer to home.
By looking at it as a task they create unnecessary challenges and obstacle. The goal, and if you talk to people who are successful telephone prospectors, is to change a chore into a habit. Habits are life long, tasks are onetime events, requiring different preparation, different energy. By adopting a habit you don’t get bogged down in the rituals one has to go through to complete a task.
This not to say that developing, adopting and mastering a habit is easy, except maybe bad habits. I believe it was Stephen Covey, who said it takes 21 days, and putting something into practice seven time before it becomes a habit. So if you only prospect occasionally, “when I have time”, how will it ever become a habit? Especially when you have made a habit of find fires to put out when it is time to prospect.
Much like adopting a fitness routine, you need to do more than buy a membership, go once in a while and hope for the best.
Start by knowing how many of your prospects need to come from telephone prospecting, you may be surprised how much less has to come from this source than you estimate. Often when I ask groups how much of their time needs to go to prospecting they will tell me 25% – 30%, that 12 hours a week, more than two hours a day. Right away I know they do not have the prospecting habit, they haven’t got a clue how much they have to do. Work backwards from your goal to determine how many prospects you need on a weekly or monthly basis. Once you know that, you’ll be able to know how much time you’ll need to allocate, and then set that time aside, every day, every week, put it in your calendar, just like you would any other important activity, like a closing meeting, or gym time.
At first it will be hard, not pretty, but like the gym, you will develop your technique, improve your execution, and over a short period of time it will become a habit. You can look at it as an ugly task, or reap the benefits of your habit in the form of prospects and sales, you are the beholder.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
All the pundits tell us that in “today’s economy”, buyers are just too busy to deal with anything unless they deem it to be critical to their success. This is why many sellers have difficulty getting through, they fail to penetrate the “prove value to me” wall erected by prospects, and in effect they fail the BS test. So if one does get through, it should not only be recognized, but should at the very least begin a real exchange about the buyers objectives and how the seller is in a position to advance or help the prospect achieve them. But as it turns out, this is not always the case.
It seems that in many instances, buyers and sellers enter a game of “Sales Hide and Seek”, rather than a real business discussion, taking an ambiguous and unproductive approach rather than a direct discussion of the issues and potential answers. Both parties are guilty, and both pay the price by extending the sales cycle, costing time, money and opportunity. The buyer takes longer to implement the solution, at times the wrong solution, taking longer to realize the benefits delivered. Sellers extend their cycle and limit their opportunity to sell and engage with more buyers or other real buyers. Even as the buyer becomes a customer, they are impacted by the company spending more money and resources to selling than to R&D and product improvement which directly impacts the customer base.
Sellers are told to go for relationships rather than dealing directly with issues, trying too hard to be genteel, rather than provoking, and getting to the root of the issue. Winning the buyer’s respect and trust by willing to deal with tough situations, not hiding from them. Rather than missing repeated opportunities to demonstrate their understanding, their expertise and ability to make a difference especially in though areas. Sellers talk about “finding the pain”, but only go for superficial pain which leads the buyer to hide their intent, as they lose confidence in the buyer due to their inability to deal with the buyer’s real challenges. Circling issues, only focusing on “pain” they can see and think they can solve. With this soft approach, rather than being provocative and relevant, makes these sellers look like kids playing hide and seek.
The buyers are no better, one can argue worse. They give up an hour of their valuable “crazy busy time”, only to make it unproductive for them, their companies, and the seller. They clam up when asked direct questions, as though the seller was the opposition, rather than a professional investing time and resources to help the buyer reach their objectives. Again one can’t blame them if they figure out early that they are meeting with a light weight sellers. But I have attended a number of sales calls where the rep had prepared well, asked the right questions, going to the root of the buyers objectives and barriers to reaching them, only to be met with an evasive buyer, incomplete in their answers, not sharing key data, or access to those who have answers. Again, looking more like a game of hide and seek rather than a process for improvement.
In the end, the goal is not to lay blame for the almost counterproductive time wasted by both sellers and buyers, but to encourage both parties to work towards a common goal, if one is plausible and/or possible, rather than playing a time consuming game of hide and seek. The game has no winner, just adds cost and time to the sale.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
