Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
We talk a lot about the importance of using a consultative approach instead of a transactional approach to better differentiate and sell value instead of price. When we explain consultative selling, we usually emphasize the importance of listening and questioning. When we further explain effective listening and questioning, it becomes much more difficult to describe in a paragraph or in the absence of a demonstration or role-play.
Until today.
Snorkeling, or moving along the surface of the ocean, is akin to poor questioning, moving from fish to fish or question to question, never finding anything of significance and only seeing that which is near the surface.
Scuba diving, or doing a deep dive, is akin to good, tough, timely questions that lead to the buried treasure of selling - a prospect's compelling reason to buy from you. When you scuba dive, you explore a single site, but when you snorkel you go sight-seeing and continue traveling without really stopping to explore.
Dive in, continue your dive, and don't stop the dive until you find the treasure.
I'll be giving the keynote at an Executive Luncheon in Boston on Wednesday May 21 at the Westin Copley Hotel. My topic is Changing Trends in Sales and How They Will Impact Your Revenue. If you live in New England or will be visting next week and would like to attend, send me an email and I'll send you a discount code so that you can attend as my guest.
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Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
We are in the middle of the first day of our 2-day Sales Leadership Intensive. While most attendees admit that they must be more effective at coaching, many who said they have some kind of sales process in place didn't come to the same conclusion. So, why is it so obvious to sales leaders that they need to improve their coaching, but so elusive that they need to improve their sales process?
Change occurs in direct proportion to the availability of immediate feedback.
You get instant feedback from coaching. Your coaching either makes a profound difference - right here and now - and leads to an otherwise unobtainable sale; or it makes no difference, falls on deaf ears, gets an insincere thank you, and causes a salesperson to avoid future coaching.
Of course, there is a gray area where coaching is sometimes or moderately effective, but even that provides some immediate feedback.
With sales process, the feedback is either delayed - by months or years - or non-existent to the point where you can't determine whether your process had any impact on your success or failure. Without feedback, you lose perspective on whether you have the right stages, steps, milestones, to-do's, or sequence. It might be even more important to get your sequence right than your steps and milestones.
Here's the catch. As crucial as it is to be more effective at coaching, coaching conducted outside of an effective sales process and without the context of a staged, optimized sales process may be far less effective than it should be. [update - Frank just posted this related article]
So, how can you determine whether your existing process is any good? There's an app for that. Not really, but we do have a free tool that you can use to find out. It will give you a score and that comes in the form of immediate feedback.
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Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
Selling value.
What comes so easily to the top 6% and some of the top 26% is so very difficult for others.
Most salespeople have little capability to effectively build value. Talking about what your company does better or differently or telling a prospect what your value proposition is does not build value. Instead, value comes from 3 things:
- Uncovering the compelling reason(s) to buy and buy from you,
- Understanding the impact, ripple effect and cost of those compelling reasons, and
- Positioning yourself and company as the clear choice to help with numbers one and two. Then the salesperson becomes the added value.
Here are a few random thoughts accumulated through the combined efforts of evaluating more than 650,000 salespeople and training tens of thousands of others. In no particular order:
- The moment a salesperson attempts to be competitive on price, any value he or she may have built is forgotten and can no longer be leveraged. All the focus is on price.
- Compromising or negotiating on price sets a precedent. All future discussions about pricing will be based on this compromise.
- If a salesperson does successfully build or create value, or position himself/herself as the added value, they must not allow price to be one of the decision-making criteria.
- 53% of all salespeople are too uncomfortable with the subject to have a conversation about money. How important is it that your salespeople have a conversation about money?
- 33% of all salespeople think that just $500 is a lot of money. How much money are your salespeople supposed to be asking for?
- 40% of all salespeople don't determine whether their prospect is able to spend what they are about to propose.
- 64% of all salespeople make their own major purchases in a way that will not support the sales outcomes they must achieve.
- 86% of all salespeople believe what their prospects tell them, even when the prospect is bluffing about needing a lower/better price or that the decision will be based on price.
- 52% of all salespeople become emotional as soon as they hear that their price may be too high.
- 47% of all salespeople believe that if they hold their ground on price, regardless of how they do it, their prospect won't like them anymore.
All of these statistics come from
Objective Management Group. What does it all mean? Not only don't most salespeople know how to build value, but even when they do, they quickly undermine it with their self-limting beliefs, inappropriate behaviors, outdated experiences, and desire to have a competitive price.
It's as if coming in with the right pricing will make them a hero. Unfortunately, it makes them just like everyone else and there isn't much value in that.© Copyright Dave Kurlan All Rights Reserved
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Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
So you have your sales force evaluated and in addition to learning why you are getting the results you are getting, and what you can do to significantly improve those results, you are suprised by some of the individual findings on some of your salespeople. One of the findings that generates the most push-back is Lack of Commitment to sales success.
We could hear any of the following comments as push-back to this finding:
- our best salesperson,
- nobody tries harder,
- works longer hours than anyone,
- been here for years,
- landed our biggest customer,
- an up-and-comer and/or
- we really like her.
The list could go on and on, but none of the rebuttals actually addresses commitment - one's willingness to do whatever it takes (ethically of course) to achieve sales success. For the record, I believe that this particular finding is 100% accurate.
One such example of this occurred last fall, when after a sales force evaluation, one rep's results showed that she lacked commitment. Their sales manager spoke with her and was cautious, but optimistic that she was committed. A month or so later, he spoke with her a second time, pointed out a few concerns of his, and after listening to her responses, came away from the meeting feeling more optimistic, but still cautious.
Today the sales manager - a terrific guy and very effective sales manager - sent me a note saying that this rep is getting married and leaving the company - and sales - to spend more time working in her church ministry.
Sometimes, it takes several months to see what
we only can measure, but it always shows up sooner or later.
That's the danger in moving forward with salespeople who lack commitment. The proof might not be as dramatic as in the example above, but there will always be proof, like:
- lack of improvement from training,
- lack of improvement from coaching,
- inability to change their thinking,
- inability to change their behaviors,
- inability to embrace a new sales process,
- inability to embrace a new sales methodology,
- inability to embrace a company's new policies,
- inability to become engaged in a company's new culture and/or
- many more.
It's one thing to learn that one of your existing salespeople is not committed to their own sales success. It's another to learn that a sales candidate lacks commitment. Why would anyone fight that finding? You're not invested in that candidate and there are other qualified candidates out there; so why would any manager insist on hiring someone with a lack of commitment to sales success?
The simple answer is that employers fall in love - not in a romantic way as much as a hopeful way - with the wrong candidates all the time. Sometimes they fall in love because of their:
- personality,
- energy,
- experience,
- expertise,
- sense of humor,
- book of business,
- previous employers and/or
- good looks.
Whatever the reason, if they lack Commitment to sales success, they should not, under any circumstances, consider that candidate for a sales position at their company. Unless of course you like wasting time and starting over.
This is Dave saying over and out.
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Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
At dinner on Saturday night, our guest, a friend who recently changed careers and now finds himself in the financial services world, mentioned that he isn't selling the way that the other successful brokers are doing it. (He doesn't have any business either.) He mentioned that he read my book, Baseline Selling, and said that he didn't find anything useful in there. You've got to be kidding me! Anyway, those 3 data points (not following best practices, no business, nothing useful there) would be quite useful to a sales manager who wanted to coach him up or hold him accountable for change. While reinventing the wheel doesn't work, in his industry, it's simply a case of survival of the fittest. Proactive coaching and accountability are rare and often mutually exclusive with first year salespeople. As a matter of fact, one financial services sales management team found nothing of value in an entire two-day sales leadership event last year, while the other 45 attendees (from mixed industries) all provided testimonials saying it was the single best training event that they ever attended. Like I always say, consider the source...
Without a doubt, the highlight of any Sales Management or Sales Leadership program is always the 6 hours we spend on coaching. We look at coaching from 3 perspectives:
- Creating an environment where coaching can be successful - A terrific sales coach would fail if brought into an environment where:
- people are resistant,
- they don't trust his intentions,
- they are disrespectful of her experience and expertise,
- they haven't yet developed good relationships
- and more...
- The theory, logic and flow of effective coaching - There is absolutely a right way versus a wrong way; and an effective versus an ineffective approach to coaching salespeople and more importantly, coaching them up, to improve, to change.
- Examples, demonstrations, role-plays and discussion of effective coaching - This is the nitty gritty of the coaching time - 3 hours of real, live, recorded coaching with discussion - attendees listen, observe, question, challenge, emulate and master. Then they have an opportunity to put it into practice prior to presenting their experience and settling in for 1 more hour of work on coaching. I assembled a collage of coaching calls to give you a sense of what I'm talking about. Think of this as the movie trailer or the introduction to a sporting event. You don't get the entire scene or play, just a snippet before moving to another snippet. Click here for a 3-minute preview.
Coaching is crucial to the success of any sales force; however, coaching without the context of an effective sales process, pipeline, metrics to drive revenue, motivation and accountability aren't enough. So, our events integrate these additional elements to make for a well-rounded, comprehensive two days.
We have 4 seats remaining for our Sales Leadership Intensive in Boston next week (May 14-15, 2013) and if you or your sales leadership/management team want to make arrangements to attend,
send me an email and we'll find a way to make it work on short notice.
Event details are here.
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