Dennis Connelly is a Sales Growth Expert at Kurlan & Associates and Author of the Living Sales Excellence Blog.
What happens when you walk into a large, expensive tradeshow booth stocked with company staff, but are greeted only by a young woman who was hired for the show to explain the products to attendees who wander into the booth? The answer is that you get to witness a common tradeshow strategy fail. This happened to me recently and I thought it was time to expose the folly of such a tactic and suggest what might be a better approach.
I walked into this booth to see five company representatives talking with each other. They never looked up because they had hired not one but two young woman to greet me and anyone else who walked in to their well-constructed 30 x 30 island booth. I don’t want to sound completely naïve, but these young women might have been hired for reasons other than selling skills and product knowledge. She delivered a memorized script. It didn't matter that I wasn't in the market for such a product. She never asked. The company staff never stopped their own discussion to find out if I was a prospect. After a few questions, the woman confessed that she was hired the previous day and given a briefing on the product. It showed.
Rather than bore you with what needed to be different in that booth, let’s examine what was happening and why. Often, in the absence of clear objectives, companies default to what they have done in the past – whether or not it has proven to be successful. The above experience is only one example. It could be a flat-screen panel giving a running loop of product demos. It could be a beanbag toss or mini-golf competition. When uncoupled with purposeful conversation and good selling skills, the apparent tradeshow strategy is the following:
1) Make a showing.
2) Demonstrate your industry commitment.
3) Attract attention.
4) Get the product “out there” so you’re seen as a player.
5) Collect a bunch of business cards.
6) Have a good time in Vegas (or wherever).
Does this sound familiar? Have you ever seen it lead to tremendous amounts of new business? I mentioned in a previous article that Frank Belzer, author of the new book, Sales Shift, calls this the “Denial = Visibility Model.” Companies who adopt this strategy are accepting the low standard of mere visibility and denying that there is another way that might even reap multiples of their investment. So let’s unpack the scenario above a bit further.
The five company employees missed at least 100 people who walked by in 10 minutes. That might sound like an exaggeration, but this was a show with 40,000 attendees. It’s likely that this is how sales works in their office as well: “Let someone else attract leads. Call us when you’re ready for a proposal.” It’s the easy route, and yet it’s a tough road. Dave Kurlan described this paradox perfectly in this recent article.
And what about using this “attraction-distraction” method, as I like to call it, in a tradeshow booth? That the hired booth personnel know very little about the product is not even the real issue. It’s that they have no idea how to sell.
Instead of the strategy outlined above, maybe it’s time to update our view of tradeshows and what they can produce for our companies. Here are a few tactics which compose a strategy that you might find more helpful:
1) Have preset goals on the number of prospects which the booth must generate to be worth the investment. This is fairly simple math and it’s based on your critical sales ratios and margins. Email me if you need help with this.
2) Only real sales people should greet prospects. A good salesperson knows how to lower resistance sufficiently to allow for a more in-depth product discussion. This is the art of sales. More on that in another article.
3) Visitors should be asked questions to find out if they fit the customer profile, so that time is not wasted on tire kickers while real prospects walk by. You spent too much money in a short period of time to veer away from your tradeshow goals.
4) At large shows, booth personnel should stand in the aisle to ask questions filtering the thousands of people passing by, rather than waiting for someone to wander in. This is an obvious point, but it takes leadership to get it done. Elect or appoint a team captain for the booth each day.
5) The sales process is updated, reviewed, and executed. It should follow time-tested methods of consultation, discovery, needs-assessment, urgency, and qualification. Dave Kurlan’s bestseller, Baseline Selling is a great resource describing these skill sets in more detail. The sales conversation must leverage the many potential customers walking by your extremely short-term store front.
6) Salespeople who stand out from their competitors know how to have a business discussion which can lead to how they can genuinely help a prospect through their product or service. This is the most consistently effective way to be seen as different, and is an especially critical sales tool in commodities or when differences are otherwise subtle. In non-commodities, the right kind of discussion can even eliminate competition from the mix altogether. If you want to understand how that works, send me an email.
7) All salespeople should be committed to their share of the total prospects needed for that show by relentlessly pursuing attendees and maybe even competing with each other to make it fun.
Applying good selling skills to a tradeshow environment, setting clear goals for sales outcomes, and keeping everyone energized and engaged in the effort is the key to an effective tradeshow strategy, especially when so much time and money is invested. There are many articles written on the subject of tradeshow etiquette and best practices, and they are helpful (e.g. don’t talk on the cell phone in the booth.) I believe that the problem is even more fundamental and ties directly to the basics of sales effectiveness.
After drawing data from over 600,000 empirically assessed sales people in thousands of companies across hundreds of industries as Objective Management Group has, we know that 74% of all sales people do not have the skill sets and sales “DNA” to be effective. Where could your organization make a sales shift to match the changing market dynamics? How is management impacting salespeople and their effectiveness at meeting company goals? Do you have the right people, systems, processes, and metrics to meet the expanding marketplace challenges? Even if business is on the rise, is your boat rising faster than the others? How can you ensure that will be true a year from now?
Improving the entire sales function in your company will carry over to the tradeshow floor. In this dynamic and shifting business climate, with ever increasing time constraints, it’s no place for amateurs, no matter how good looking.
Dennis Connelly is a Sales Growth Expert at Kurlan & Associates and Author of the Living Sales Excellence Blog.
I recently attended a large tradeshow in the building materials space and wrote an article for a popular national trade magazine, Building Products Digest (Pages 30 and 31). I’d like to share it with my blog followers because I think that it is relevant beyond the show and that the concerns, which I heard from many CEOs, cut across many industries.
I most often heard these two questions: 1.) Is our company capable of adding enough new growth to meet corporate objectives? and 2.) Can our current sales staff grow and keep pace with the changing demands of the market? I spoke with a company founder who was genuinely concerned that while their business was growing, so was the market in his space. He had a sinking feeling that they weren’t able to take business from the competition without lowering their price. Yes, all boats were lifted by the new tide, but he admitted that is ultimately not a success formula.
Outside of that common refrain, there were five great questions which came up that are worth sharing with all of you who will be impacted by your level of growth in 2013.
Five Questions from the IBS Show Floor
One: How do we know whether the improvement in the sales force is fantasy or reality? Yes, sales are up. But are sales up due to organic growth caused by better selling skills, stronger prospecting, perfect positioning statements, insightful problem-solving and needs analysis, thorough qualifying, well-timed proposals, and excellent closing skills? If you aren’t certain you know, then you might be along for the ride, and maybe even being taken for a ride. Maybe it’s time for a sales force evaluation.
Two: How do we take business from the competition without lowering the price?
This is the true test of our ability to stand apart from the competition. To have the customer pay more attention to us than anyone else requires an ability to have a conversation that is more than just ‘what do you need’ and ‘how much is your budget.’ To gain the full attention of your customer above all of the competition, one must have a business discussion where you drill down and find a hidden or indirect problem that your product will solve. To give one example, you could think about the price of, say, your decking vs. the lower price of the other guy’s decking. We’re all probably good at calculating the cost of the other guy’s decking problems and tacking it onto his price. But who is the person that is dealing with those problems at your customer’s company? What is that person’s regular job? And what is he or she not doing when distracted by and dealing with those problems? And how important is that job that he is she is supposed to be doing? And what is that costing you? Now you are onto a different discussion and that will help you stand out from the crowd. And now your higher price is less important.
Three: How can we fend off a full court press from the competition on our existing accounts without meeting their price?
This is an account management problem. Having long-standing accounts can lead to complacency. If you are like most building material sales people, you have hundreds of potential customers in your territory but perhaps ten of them account for the majority of your business. Have you ever seen a basketball team up by 30 points and go on to lose the game? The Celtics lost to the Knicks that way in one game which I watched way back in 1986. You could see the meltdown happening to the Celtics and if you were a fan as I am, it put a pit in your stomach. They stopped having fun. They stopped taking chances. They stopped playing to win and starting playing not to lose. Don’t do that with your customers. Once a quarter, act like you’re competing for their business all over again. It is also incumbent on sales management to motivate the staff and hold them accountable to the goals of the organization. Click here to see the top ten sales management functions.
Four: Can all of our sales people leverage their relationships with existing customers to sell our entire product line?
The answer is that some can do that, but most cannot. The follow-up question is can those who cannot do that, learn to do it? Are there hidden issues causing them to get in their own way? Is the little voice in their head (let’s call it head trash) telling them that their customer needs to diversify, that we can’t be all things to all people, and that we’re good at some things and not others. Or is there another excuse you’re hearing? If your products are the right products for the market, then lack of selling skills might be standing in the way of growing sales within your current base of customers. Take this handy questionnaire to see if a sales force evaluation might help you.
Five: What are we getting out of this show?
That’s a great question. Some are getting lot out of it; others see little result. The difference was often found in the mindset of the staff and their understanding as to why they were there. If the purpose was merely to be visible and show support for the industry, then there was commonly disappointment. When people with whom I spoke were actively looking for new qualified opportunities, they had a different experience. Without an active, thoughtful show strategy, the default of using it as “visibility” results in the opposite effect. My colleague, Frank Belzer, calls it the Denial = Visibility Model. The denial comes from the preconceived notion that you cannot really sell at the show. But you can, quite successfully, which I will cover in a future article. Speaking of Frank, check out his new book, Sales Shift: How inbound marketing has turned sales upside down making it more difficult and more lucrative at the same time.
Dennis Connelly is a Sales Growth Expert at Kurlan & Associates and Author of the Living Sales Excellence Blog.
There was a discussion in our recent sales meeting about the lack of excellent sales processes at most companies. We ought to know. Led by Dave Kurlan, we've written over a thousand articles combined to help companies better understand their sales force. While many of these articles are about process, he noted in a recent article that there has not been a significant shift in this area by most companies.
The structure behind a sales force's activities is the process which they follow to bring a potential customer from lead to suspect to prospect to qualified to closed. Your CRM tool, in part, should be designed to help with process. Following it carefully and in the right sequence, can make an enormous difference on the outcome. It ensures that every good lead has the best chance of a successful close.
I was recently in lower Manhattan and noticed the progress which was being made on the Freedom Tower. It occured to me that the sales process is similar to building a skyscraper. To an outside observer, it looks like a magic trick. How do they get the crane to go continuously higher as the building gets taller? Don’t you need something higher than the building to lift it up? How do you attach enormously heavy windows and cladding to the outside of the building which is a thousand feet up? How do you accomplish seemingly simple things like getting water to come out of a sink on the top floor? It seems impossibly complicated and daunting.
How they build it is beyond me, but it's clear that they have a process. They do things in order. The order makes sense. They are experts in their field. All of the contractors and suppliers work together so that each piece fits on the next one in the proper order and at the proper time. They are aligned in their purpose. Without this process, the building can’t be built. If they do it out of order, they have to tear part of it down and redo it in the proper order.
A sales process works the same way. For sales to be effective, there must be a structure and a process. It must be executed in the proper order. If it’s out of order, it gets stuck. Think about the specifics of your sales process for a moment and ask yourself some questions:
- Do we have a process?
- Do our people use it?
- Does management insist that it be followed, in the right order?
- Is the sales organization aligned with my view that the process is important?
- Is our CRM tool a good fit for our business?
- Am I concerned about pushing my people too hard?
- Am I fearful of the consequences of change?
For even more sales process issues, read Frank Belzer’s recent article. While you’re at it, download his new E-Book on having a great 2013. Your team must be experts at selling your products to your market. Are they working together with management in alignment with your corporate mission and standards? Are they helping to build an edifice of effectiveness where strong growth is standard and where your business stands out above the competition like a skyscraper?
Take a few minutes to grade your sales process. It’s free. Whether you take it any further or not, it could be valuable and useful information. Increasingly, companies are asking us to rebuild their sales process. They're looking for greater accountability, better metrics, clear action items, measurable progress and outstanding results. If you're interested in having a conversation like this, let me know.
Dennis Connelly is a Sales Growth Expert at Kurlan & Associates and Author of the Living Sales Excellence Blog.
Take a quick look at your sales organization and count the number who are consistently selling consultatively. If it's less than 100%, then count the salespeople who at least know what the term means. Of that group, who could tell you with clarity and passion, how it differs from other forms of selling? For bonus points, who could tell you why consultative selling is a more desirable approach in 2013? If your company didn’t score high on this test, it might be time to question why some of your sales people consistently miss your targets.
Most believe they're selling the best possible way. “I’m asking lots of questions,” they might say, adding “I have the solution to their problem, have great relationships and they trust me.” All sounds right until you consider that almost any seasoned salesperson can say all of that.
What makes one salesperson so much more effective than another? It’s not about asking questions; it’s about asking the right questions. It’s about drilling down to uncover issues which weren’t on the table beforehand. It’s not about having a solution to their problem; it’s about defining the problem in a new way which plays to your strengths. It’s not about having great relationships; it’s about standing apart from the competition so much so that you command your customer’s attention. This is what Dave Kurlan calls “Speed On the Bases” or SOB Quality. You want to be like the great base-stealer who forces the pitcher to pay more attention to you than the batter. If consultative selling is the lock, then SOB Quality is its key.
There was a movie not long ago which demonstrated SOB Quality (among many other sales lessons) called The King’s Speech. In it, Lionel Logue, a commoner from Australia, was the service provider. The prince, the future King George VI, known as Bertie to his family, was the potential client. The prince had a speech impediment which others hadn’t been able to correct. Logue came recommended, but couldn’t prove that he could solve his problem anymore than the knighted doctors who'd previously tried. Here’s an excerpt from their first encounter, before any agreement is made to contract his services:
Logue: “Please call me Lionel.”
Bertie: “I prefer Doctor.”
Logue: “I prefer Lionel. What’ll I call you?”
Bertie: “Your Royal Highness. Then Sir after that.”
Logue: “A bit formal for here. What about your name?”
Bertie: “Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George”
Logue: “How about Bertie?”
Bertie: “Only my family uses that.”
Logue: “Perfect. In here, it’s better if we’re equals.”
Bertie: “If we were equal, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be home with my wife and no one would give a damn.” Bertie lights a cigarette.
Logue: “Don’t do that.”
Bertie: With astonished look, “I’m sorry?”
Logue: “Sucking smoke into your lungs will kill you.”
Bertie: “My physicians say it relaxes the throat.”
Logue: “They’re idiots.”
Bertie: “They’ve all been knighted.”
Logue: “Makes it official then. My ‘castle,’ my rules. What was your earliest memory?”
Bertie: “What on earth do you mean.” Now visibly irritated.
Logue: “First recollection.”
Bertie: “I’m not here to discuss personal matters.”
Logue: “Why are you here, then?”
What Lionel Logue goes on to uncover is that the Prince’s stammering problem, regardless of its original cause, might have been compounded by personal issues such as the unkind treatment he had received by members of his family. Logue’s probing inquiry eventually uncovers that his self-image is more important than the stammering. In fact, the breakthrough comes when Logue sits in the king’s cathedral throne before the coronation, angering and challenging the king, until he finally yells at Logue, “I have a voice!” Logue calmly replies, “Yes, you do.” and gets up out of his throne. The King never questions his credentials again. Logue has become a trusted advisor.
That’s how a commoner with no credentials, title, formal training nor guarantee of success took the business away from his high-powered competitors who possessed the inside track. That’s SOB Quality and it’s at the heart of consultative selling.
Do your salespeople push back and uncover the underlying problems? Do they challenge the decision-maker and ask questions which could cause discomfort or even irritation? Do they look past the original inquiry, listen intently and ask follow-up questions until something interesting emerges? Are they always looking to disqualify (“Why are you here, then?”) and letting the prospect sell themselves? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘No’, could they be trained? What would a sales force evaluation reveal about your company's potential for change and opportunity for massive growth? Do you have the right people to help you realize your organization's full potential as you envision it?
January is a terrific time to reflect on questions like these. Rather than wondering whether you can hit your 2013 goals, perhaps you should be looking further and asking which sales force changes you must make in order to achieve sustained, double-digit, year-over-year growth.
Dennis Connelly is a Sales Growth Expert at Kurlan & Associates and Author of the Living Sales Excellence Blog.
The TechServe Alliance 2012 Annual Conference in Miami last month provided a great chance to meet up, share ideas, and forge new partnerships with many tech staffing people. I can now share some insights which I think will resonate with many of you. The theme that emerged for me was “growth”. Firms are hiring. They’re looking ahead with a positive outlook and their growth goals are audacious enough to make Jim Collins smile.
I must say a quick word to the “Water Coolers”, a music and comedy group, who managed to plant a few jingles in my brain – thanks guys. We weren’t even in Kansas, yet somehow Nowhere Close to My Quota brought a nervous laugh to the room, as if we were all going back to address exactly that with our staffs. As a sales growth expert working with Dave Kurlan, I was happy that his keynote address focused on tools which don’t require chasing rainbows.
Aside from the upbeat new growth push by many of our members, it’s not all South Beach sunshine out there. Ann Swain, CEO of APSCo, an overseas IT-staffing association, pointed out that a survey of over 1,500 CEOs across 33 industries found that the biggest concerns are volatility, uncertainty and complexity. “We are all operating in a massively interconnected system.”, she said. In the IT-staffing world, this is both a problem and an opportunity, as I suspect it is in others as well. Many members are taking advantage of this with new tools that exploit this complex, interconnected web of information. We saw new products from exhibiting firms which demonstrated that you can make it work to your advantage as well.
In my conversations, I found that staffing company CEOs voiced many common concerns. There are some helpful archived articles which address many of their questions. Here are some of the comments which I heard:
- “I’m not sure we have the right sales people.”
- “Why is it so hard to find great sales people?”
- “We’ve got people that have been with us a long time, but I’m not sure they can make the transition to the way we want to grow?”
- “How can we get immediate impact and drive more revenue?”
Here’s a link to Dave Kurlan speaking about evaluating your sales force.
Another question I heard from many companies was:
- “We haven’t had a great track record hiring the right candidates. What’s a better way?”
Here’s a link to several articles on selection and another to a white paper which Dave Kurlan wrote on selection. And here’s a helpful article about what it takes to hire great people, from my colleague, Frank Belzer.
Many people thought that Dave’s talk on assessments was extremely helpful. Over the years, he’s written articles which identify a particular finding from a real assessment. Here’s an article which describes a candidate who wasn’t recommended and the result was an email from the candidate which displayed exactly what the evaluation predicted!
I look forward to seeing you again at the next event.
Dennis Connelly is a Sales Growth Expert at Kurlan & Associates and Author of the Living Sales Excellence Blog.
If your sales career started more than a week ago, then it’s likely you've already experienced a prospect's rejection. And so has each member of your sales team. It might have been an unreturned call, a “no”, a hang up, or any other put-off. How deeply do you feel it? What impact does it have on your immediate effectiveness? How long does it take to recover? When are you back at your best with an easy, natural confidence? It's in these moments when you're most creative, insightful, powerful and effective, isn’t it? When you're in this confident state, you're not inside your head, but very much in the present, both thoughtful and cheerful. Wouldn’t it be great to have access to that feeling, anytime and all the time?
There's a rejection lesson to be learned from this year's presidential debates. Imagine for a moment that, instead of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the debates, they were you and Mitt Romney. And in the first debate, it was you who delivered Obama's performance (not the one which you know that you can do, but his). You know your stuff, of course. You’ve had years to prepare. You’re interviewing in front of 60 million people for a job which you already have and half of the interviewers already like you and have made up their minds to rehire you. You're simply off your game. That’s all. It apparently happens even to presidents.
The next morning, how would you have felt? You can’t just call your brother, sister nor mother to tell them it didn’t go well. They saw it. Everyone saw it. They watched your facial expressions even while the other guy was talking. There was no escape. And the other guy kicked butt. He was sharp. He was on top of his game hitting doubles and triples all night. Who’d want to sell against Mitt Romney? Like him or not, he’s pretty smooth.
What’s the result of that underwhelming performance? He’s now the leading candidate for the sale. And the professional pundits (or rather, influencers and judges from the sidelines) deride you to millions of people on TV talk shows. You’re washed up. You’re played out. You suck! Period.
Have any of your sales rejection experiences been bigger and tougher than that? Could you brush off that experience and return to that same audience again, as if it never happened? How did Obama do it? His own answer was that he’s not a big up and down person. He calmly thought about what went wrong and set out to do better the next time. He did it by not getting emotionally involved. He didn’t freak out. His rejection recovery was world-class.
Which of your sales rejections was that intense? Let’s look at the alternative. What would have happened if he woke up the next day and said to himself, “This guy’s good. He’s got my number. I’m not as good as I thought I was. I’m not as good as they thought I was.” If Obama’s performance in the following debate was as underwhelming as the first, we’d be in a lame duck period right now.
Obama simply moved past the rejection from the first debate, survived, thrived and proceeded to win the sale.
For salespeople, the severity of the rejection hurt is a factor. The speed of their recovery is critical. Negative self-talk will sabotage the desired outcome. Yet, we saw what happens when people don’t get caught up in the bad stuff nor get in their own way.
Is rejection a problem for you or anyone on your team? How do you get over it? How much selling time does it cost? Is it a possibility to immediately pick up the phone and make another call? Rejection is just one sales weakness among dozens which prevent salespeople from consistently achieving success. That inconsistency costs most companies millions of dollars in lost opportunities. A sales force evaluation can bring these issues to light.
Dennis Connelly is a Sales Growth Expert at Kurlan & Associates and Author of the Living Sales Excellence Blog.
What if you ordered a deli sandwich and after they thought about it for a moment, carefully made the perfect specimen, handed it to you with pride and suddenly took back the bread? After the initial shock of such odd behavior, I’m guessing you might feel a little unsatisfied and hungry for more. When coaching your staff, feedback is an important tool. However, we often use the same idea as the sandwich. We give useful criticism but sandwich it between two pieces of positive encouragement. Recent research has shown that this approach is surprisingly ineffective. It turns out it’s a bit like handing out a thoughtful criticism sandwich and then taking back the two pieces of bread. It’s more like “foodback” than feedback. Let’s find out why.
This practice was studied by Clifford Nass and described in his book, The Man Who Lied to His Computer. The brain goes into full alert when hearing negative criticism and enters a state called “retroactive interference” which results in nearly total memory loss of anything prior to the criticism. It might take minutes, hours or a couple days for the memory to disappear, but your brain simply forgets those previous words of praise. If asked later if there was any positive feedback in the discussion, one simply can’t remember. Oops! There goes one slice of bread from your sandwich.
But another interesting phenomenon occurs when giving criticism. In that same heightened alert state, one also experiences a new sense of awareness that Nass calls “proactive enhancement.” You’ve got their attention, so now they are ready to listen and absorb whatever you say next. This is where the opportunity is often wasted. Most managers provide what they regard as a soft landing by giving positive-sounding generalities. That’s the bread slice on the other side of the sandwich. Generalities, by their very nature, are hard to remember. So, we soon miss that slice as well. With the bread missing, what remains might leave us a little unsatisfied and hungry for more.
How can we improve on this model? When coaching your sales force, the goal is improving sales effectiveness with honest, useful feedback. Criticism is important if you want to improve a specific behavior. And positive comments are also important to ensure you get more of the behaviors that are already working. When both forms of feedback are delivered in the same conversation and you want both to be remembered, you need a better strategy.
Here are three crucial steps for effective criticism:
- Tone – How you say it is more important than what you say. Your tone provides the signal for how you feel about someone. Is the person the problem or is it just their behaviors? If we stick to the behaviors, then we can still smile at them, be filled with gratitude for them and remain firm that the behavior needs to change. Keep the list of negatives short and specific. Too many criticisms will feel like a barrage which can be depressing rather than instructive. A few helpful points will provide focus.
- Order – Negative first, positive second. Order matters. Tell them the positive comments after the negative ones and make the list of positives long and specific, rather than general. “You’re basically doing a great job.” can be replaced by, “You’ve been growing the front end of your pipeline by making more calls, which is really going to help you in the last quarter.”
- Actionable – We handle criticism better when given the recipe for improvement. Always provide actionable feedback alongside the criticism so that they understand how to correct the problem. Don’t leave them hanging and wondering what it all means. General negativity makes us anxious and frustrated. Specific criticism, with the steps to make it better, leaves us empowered and provides a sense that someone is looking out for us.
Is coaching an important part of your culture? Do your people regularly come to you for help? Do you look for advice and feedback in your own organization? When it’s time to serve feedback to your staff, what steps do you take to keep all food on their plate?