Living Sales Excellence - Dennis Connelly's Blog

Learning an effective sales process is easy. It usually fits on one sheet of paper, takes about an hour to memorize, and, having just come off of two weeks of travel to four different clients for intensive day-long training sessions, I can confidently share with you that salespeople and managers understand the simplicity and effectiveness of a fundamental sales process right away. There's a collective "a-ha" that occurs in every session at the moment when something that seemed so complicated at first is suddenly understood at its foundation. So why does it take months to impact sales results? I'm glad you asked. Read on to find out.

Think of the complexity of your product offering and how, while there are differences in ability on your team, most of your people can talk about the products and services in great detail. There could be hundreds of items or dozens of service combinations and options, but most seasoned salespeople can rattle them off like they are discussing backyard barbecue tips at a Little League game. With little investigation, one can see that most of your product offerings exceed the complexity of an effective sales process, often by an order of magnitude. So why does it take the team so long to adopt the sales process, use it on every call, and reap the rewards of regularly outselling their competition?

There are reasons of course, or if you prefer to use the language of elite salespeople (those possessing selling skill scores in the top 7% of all salespeople), then let's just call them excuses. Here's my list of the 7 excuses I hear the most related to the lack of adoption of sales process:

Top 7 Most Common Excuses for Delayed Sales Process Adoption

1. Management doesn't insist they use it.
2. They don't practice it enough to be comfortable using it on an actual call.
3. They aren't coached specifically to sales process.
4. They have too many hidden psychological barriers.
5. Managers can't identify their people's personal obstacles.
6. Their beliefs don't support acting on key steps in the process.
7. They don't have the right sales process.

1. Management
If management isn't insisting that salespeople follow sales process, then is it a corporate adoption and buy-in problem, or is it an accountability problem? Accountability runs all the way through the organization. Sometimes there's an expectation that because managers are tasked with achieving the overall outcome of their people, that they will do what it takes, ethically, to accomplish their goals and we don't need to tell them what to do.

This kind of thinking lets leadership off the hook. That would be like managers telling their salespeople to go out and sell "so I'll just leave you alone so you can get on with it." Who will motivate them, who will coach them, and who will hold them accountable to performing the activities that lead to hitting the goals? Sales management isn't the top of the chain of sales hierarchy. The top of the sales food chain is occupied by the party or parties responsible for the outcome of the business: Owner, CEO, Board of Directors. Insistence on something as fundamental as sales process starts there.

When it's important to find out how you are getting the results you are getting and why, it might be time to evaluate the sales organization as a whole. Click here to see if a Sales Force Evaluation makes sense for your team.

2. Practice
Try it out in practice sessions first, using role-play, ideally with a manager or between salespeople and an observant manager helping to facilitate or play one of the roles. You wouldn't change your grip in the middle of a golf tournament. You would try it out on the practice green first. Do the same with sales process. Ask yourself what this call should sound like? Look for places it could get derailed and work through each one. Then be prepared for the call to go nothing like what you planned.

3. Coaching
Think of the greatest player you know in a sport you love to follow. That person has a coach, right? And if that person happens to be the best player in the world in that sport, they still have a coach. From this perspective, it means the coach is, by definition, not as good at the sport as the player, or they would be number one. Yet, the star player wouldn't want to lose them as their coach and they would never stop wanting to be coached. That's how they got where they are. In sales, formal scheduled coaching should happen daily. It's the most important role of the manager. You can read several articles on coaching by selecting from the list found by clicking here.

4. Psychological Barriers
What is blocking a salesperson from saying or doing something that they know they should say or do? The answer is often based on certain barriers that lie within their own head? It might not be a lack of ability or understanding; it might instead result from how they stop themselves due to habit, discomfort, or fear. Thanks to the magic of the OMG sales assessment, we now know that among many, there are six major hidden weaknesses that can cause a barrier to success and lead to slow improvement. They include:

• Non-supportive Buy Cycle
• Excessive Need for Approval
• Getting Too Emotionally Involved
• Discomfort Talking about Money
• Non-Supportive Beliefs
• Difficulty Recovering from Rejection

Rather than explain each one of these in detail, I would direct you to our upcoming one-hour live webinar on this very topic scheduled for June 14th at 11:00 am U.S. Eastern Time. It's free of charge and you can register by clicking here.

5. Identifying Issues
Often, even when salespeople have barriers to their success slowing down their progress, it goes unrecognized, either because the manager isn't looking for it, or the manager has the same issue herself and doesn't recognize the weakness in her people. To find out how your people compare with respect to the 21 Sales Core Competencies measured in the OMG assessment tool, against other salespeople, click here.

6. Beliefs
Beliefs are at the heart of all of our outcomes. Our beliefs, especially the ones about which we feel most certain, determine how we view our potential. Our beliefs about our potential determine the actions we take. And our actions produce the results we get. Each time we get a result, it reinforces our beliefs and the process starts again. I first learned of this cycle of success from neuro-strategist, Steve Linder of Strategic Brain, who had learned it from Anthony Robbins over 20 years prior.

When we come to terms with the fact that our beliefs are the driving force of our personal success machine, it can feel quite energizing. When I conduct Belief-System workshops with clients, we cover over 90 self-limiting beliefs that can impact sales outcomes, drawn from the original work of Dave Kurlan along with others such as Nassim Taleb, Robbins, Linder, Napoleon Hill, Milton Erickson, and repeated personal observations from my work with clients.

Of the over 90 self-limiting beliefs addressed in the workshop, here are seven:

• My prospects usually buy on price.
• My prospects don't have the time we really need.
• My territory is the hardest.
• My lack of result was due to the competition.
• My prospects are often unreachable.
• It takes several meetings to build rapport.
• I need my prospects to like me.

If you are interested in having your own facilitated Self-Limiting Belief Workshop, click here to book me as a speaker.

7. Wrong Sales Process
The sales process should be a customized, optimized, staged set of steps that naturally describes and directs your actions and conversations with a prospect as you move them from lead to close.  If you are using the wrong sales process or if your sales process is inadequate, what should you do? Click here to take our eye-opening Sales Process Grader to find out.

Summary
To re-cap, all that is required to ensure speedy and effective adoption of your sales process is to address and resolve each of the seven most common excuses listed above. I'm willing to bet you could memorize this list in under five minutes. See how easy that was. And here is your perfect success formula if you are willing to accept it. Create a to-do list to address each of the seven excuses for not getting total early buy-in on your world class sales process. Then do the items on the list!

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Book Dennis Connelly to speak at your event.

Photo Credit - Chalkboard: Denis Ismagilov  (123RF)
Photo Credit - Road Barriers Elena Elisseeva (123RF)

There are many sales processes out there with lots of catchy names. SPIN Selling, N.E.A.T. Selling, Conceptual Selling, SNAP Selling, The Challenger Sale, The Sandler System, CustomerCentric Selling, MEDDIC, The 7-Step Sales Process, The 8-Step Sales Process, The 10-Step Sales Process, no joke, and there's even a Selling for Dummies because who wouldn't want to buy from a dummy? I think you get the picture. And I particularly love this diagram:

Even though there's a big arrow that says, "Start Here," I still couldn't figure out where to start. Maybe I'm one of the dummies. And in case the author of this Rube Goldberg selling diagram catches wind of this article, let me add that it probably works very well - once it's perfectly understood and properly executed. Most sales processes do what they are supposed to do. Even No-Sales-Process works some of the time. Imagine being an iPhone salesperson, for example, where the key sales candidate selection tool is a stethoscope and the sales process has two steps, 1. Avoid people; and 2. When they demand to buy something, insert their credit card. The question is whether your sales process can be understood by your people and do they have the skills, sales DNA, and beliefs to execute it.

It seems like a book comes out every month with a new sales process - a new way that's seemingly the only way to be successful selling. It's as if they are all saying, for example, "Before The Challenger Sale, there was only spinning your wheels and wandering aimlessly."

The Harvard Business Review article introducing that particular methodology seemed to imply that no one understood selling before "these guys" figured it out. I like HBR generally, but that turned out to be a pitch for their contributor's consulting firm rather than an enlightening academic article. The methodology is a useful imitation of pre-existing similar methodologies and works well when used in the appropriate place in the sales process, the description of which was absent from the article. I'm reminded of a sub-chapter in Antifragile by Nassim Taleb entitled, "Teaching Birds How to Fly," reminding us of the tendency for non-practitioners to "teach" us what we already know and then claim credit for our success.

For any sales process to be successful, it must tap into the fundamental nature of how people are moved to change. Many of them do this. Some don't. By process, I mean the steps, to-do's, and milestones accomplished in a specific order that takes a potential customer/client from lead to suspect to prospect to qualified to closed. After analyzing dozens of sales processes over the past few years, I've noticed the effective ones overlap with what we might call a fundamental sales process, one that includes a consultative approach to the conversation (methodology) in addition to other vital stages and milestones (process).

Even Challenger has elements of a Consultative approach. They point out that challenging prospects is important. Objective Management Group (OMG) has data from over a million assessed salespeople and point out that half of all salespeople have a hidden weakness called "Need For Approval," that prevents them from challenging prospects, even if you teach it to them. This hidden weakness must be addressed before they can effectively "challenge" their prospects.

Consultative Selling

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, how it differs from other forms of selling?  For bonus points, who could tell you why consultative selling is a more desirable approach in 2018?  If your company didn’t score high on this test, it might be time to question why some of your sales people consistently miss their targets.

Most believe they're selling using the latest tools and methodologies.  “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 that 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.

It's worth repeating in this context of sales processes and consultative selling methodologies what I described in an article a few years ago about a scene from The King's Speech with Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, the speech therapist, and Colin Firth as the prince, and future King George VI.

In the movie, Lionel Logue, a commoner from Australia, was the service provider.  The prince, who was known by his family as Bertie, 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 any more 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," he said angrily.
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,” he yells.
Logue:  “Why are you here, then?”

Logue’s probing inquiry eventually uncovers that the prince's 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 that SOB-Quality or Speed on the Bases. He's differentiated himself and 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, knighted, 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?

This month is a terrific time to reflect on questions like these.  Rather than wondering whether you can hit your 2018 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.

If you are looking for a sales process, you can reach your hand into a plain brown bag and pull one out, or you can ask for help so you get a proven process based on fundamental human behavior that fully accounts for how people are moved to change. If you would like to become an expert at the kind of consultative selling described in this article, using a fundamental sales process that's as easy to learn as naming the base paths on a baseball field, sign up for our Baseline Selling 12-week online training course, by clicking here. Don't worry about the catchy name; focus on how easy it is to learn, even for self-proclaimed Dummies!

Can you learn something about selling from a trip to the beach? I hope so, or I'll have a hard time writing off part of my trip. When I go there, which for reasons that will become apparent is not often, I cover myself completely and sit in the shade of a large umbrella. Then, like a pre-historic sundial, the umbrella is moved around the chair as the day passes, keeping me in the shade. It's a lot of work. Clearly, visiting a sunny place wasn't my idea, but let's make the most of it, shall we? Have you ever noticed the people who walk along the beach selling stuff? How would you like that job? At some resorts, there will even be a few vendors invited onto the property to sell people by the poolside, and this is where I got the chance to observe hand-to-hand sales up close. What fun!

Two salespeople walked from person to person: one with a parrot, and one with a camera. The offering was to have your picture taken with the bird, and later in the day, prospects would go to their office and purchase the picture. Before I get too far in this discussion, I want to be clear that this is not an article about how to sell stuff at the beach. So if you sell cloud computing, staffing solutions, mobile apps, building materials, construction equipment, television advertising or one of 732 other product and service categories, I promise there are lessons for all of us. 

One of the more simple rules in sales, that some find difficult to execute, is that one should be focused more on the prospect than on the product, at least in the early stages of the discussion. Yet when most of us first start working at a new firm as a salesperson, among the first things we learn are the products and services we offer. So this is where the confusion starts. To be sure, knowing your products is critical to your success, after all, and your ability to present them is often the prerequisite for the sales manager letting you get out there all by yourself. There is little attention paid to your ability to sell, because most companies do not measure it, or don't measure it correctly. In the movie, Tommy Boy, we see that the "teacher" wasn't much better than the student in this area, even though he could say, "the spectrometer readout on the nickel-cadmium alloy mix indicates a good rich strobe and fade, decreasing incidence of wear to the pressure plate," as though he was describing the omelet he had for breakfast.

Seldom is sales taught by companies specifically to improve selling skills. It’s like when teachers know their subject matter, but not how to teach it. Have you ever had a teacher like that? How was that class for you? What did you learn? One could ask the same about salespeople who haven't mastered selling. Have you ever run into a salesperson like that? How was that experience? At some stores, you’d grow old waiting for someone who could do more than simply read the product description on the shelf tag as easily as you can.

So back to the beach. The pitch goes like this, “How about having your picture taken with a parrot?” Let's look at the components of that question more closely. First, they mentioned the picture, which is essentially a description of the service they are providing. (So far, it's about them.) Next, they mention taking “your picture” which is how you fit in, but it's still part of the description of their product. (Also about them.) They just hope you have a need for such a thing. That’s not selling; that’s hope. I recommend the book, Hooked on Hopium by Michael Shannon for more about that. Lastly, they mention the parrot, which even though you can see the parrot, it is a just another feature of their product. (Again, it's them-based.)

So how did this play out? Less than 3% of the people encountered said, "yes," and presumably some of them only because they felt pressure, but with no intention of purchasing later. That 3% might be enough for them of course, but why not double or triple it, if you can? I bought the photo shoot of course, because I wanted a picture for this blog article, a fact entirely lost on them due to their ineffective sales process and inability to uncover any reasons why I might want to buy what they were selling that day. They must believe that the reasons to purchase are self-evident. How many of your people know your products and services so well, they believe your prospects' reasons for buying it from them are also self-evident? Sometimes, you still get the sale, as they did in this instance.

So how could they improve their odds of success and close more deals? How about using some of the same strategies that my clients use? What if we focused on the prospect? What if we made it all about them? It might be impossible to do initial research on our prospects in this case, but we are at a resort, after all, so we could assume that they probably have a smartphone and a Facebook account and they probably plan to tell their friends about the trip. If we're savvy enough to understand generational differences, then if our prospect is under 30 years old, they probably don’t use their Facebook account, and if they are under 20, they might not even have one, though perhaps they have Instagram and Snapchat, instead.

So we might ask something like any one of these questions, not necessarily in this order and not without waiting for responses and making it more conversational: “Have you posted on Instagram today to all of your fans? What are they missing out on today? Is it fair to say that you’re probably having more fun than they are? Is that the kind of thing you like to show each other? What are they expecting to see when you send them a picture? Are they expecting just a shot of you and your friend and that cool drink in your hand? What would it take to surprise them? Do you like surprising them? Is that what you guys usually do for each other? So if they saw a picture of a bird licking your face, would that do it? Would that be a "win?" Would that make them laugh? Tell me about it.” And so on.

Okay, this is just one approach and there are lots more, and I was only giving you your half of the conversation. Use your sensory acuity to determine the best conversational direction for your prospect. The point is that you are focused on them, not you. You could ask them if they have a wall of photos at home.  “I bet you have lots of friends and family on that wall, and lots of faces, but no colorful tropical animals, right?” Once they are connected to the outcome – a unique post, a more interesting photo wall, or just more cheerful gloating – closing the deal follows naturally. "How about making that happen right now?"

As you read this, you might protest, “But the way they are currently asking is much quicker, ‘Would you like a picture with a parrot?’” See, they can quickly move from person to person, right? Yes, that’s true. But we aren’t interested in speedy conversations, we’re interested in closing more sales. Slow it down to speed it up. You've probably heard that many times before. In your business, ask yourself which part of the conversation you should slow down, in order to speed up the sale?

At a two-day sales training intensive in the mountains of Montana last week, we talked about slowing down the conversation to speed up the sale. “If they want a price now,” a salesperson asked, “why wouldn’t we give it to them?” And she continued, “I can only spend so much time with each prospect.” Hmm, I thought. “How long is your sales cycle?” She responded, “Averages thirty days,” So I asked, “How much is an extra 45 minutes going to throw that off?,” adding, “What if 30 days turned into 15 days as a result, or five, or one?”

How many of your salespeople can move past product knowledge and become more effective at selling? How many of your sales managers recognize that the products, services, and the intricacies of your industry are only prerequisites to selling and that mastering selling skills is the difference required for high performance? How much of your onboarding includes learning an effective sales process and helping your people clear away the mental blocks and self-limiting beliefs so they can execute it? Take five minutes and fill out this sales force grader to see where you stack up compared to other companies. And if you're interested, click here to receive a white paper on the Modern Science of Sales Force Excellence. The next time you're looking to unwind away from home, I suggest someplace cool and cloudy. It's less labor-intensive.