31 July 2007 
Close the Sale: Make the Pain Worse
30% of people admitted to a hospital’s emergency room feel no pain.
There might be a sucking chest wound or a missing limb, but nothing hurts.
An anesthesiologist will still administer an anesthetic not only for the pain, which might come eventually, but to also still the patient. To keep the patient quiet, sedated, compliant.
So even though the patient was not in pain, he still got a pain relieving solution.
(The Alert Reader will remember that Your Business Blogger once worked for Mallinckrodt — but only on the medical device side, not the drugs.)
Sales is sometimes the same way. A solution to the customer’s problem should be provided even if the patient customer feels no pain.
So how does the professional sales representative sell when there is no pain?
Your Business Blogger suggests that the sales rep doesn’t.
Don’t waste time “selling” to those who are not in pain. Find the pain and the sale will be easier to make.
But.
But there are times when the sales account manager must sell to a particular customer.
For example, Your Business Blogger was once a national account manager selling to Sears.
I had to sell my product lines to Sears, competing for shelf space; and budget buying dollars; advertising; and staff and management training time. No Sears, no sales.
Or a sales rep could have a narrow sales territory with a few accounts.
Or the sales rep could be selling a single product to a single buyer — a government account. F-18’s with USA-only avionics, for instance.
So how does the sale get made when the only pain is with the sale’s guy?
Alert Reader, Karl Goldfield shares this question from his LinkedIn network,
How do you close deals with hesitant prospects?
There have been more than one occasion where I’ve encountered prospective clients who, despite their willingness to work on proposals and have face-to-face meetings, were slow to commit to anything, whether it be a full-blown DR project or a three-day assessment of their IT infrastructure.
In one such case, everything was dragged out for nearly seven months before the relationship fell apart due to the lack of commitment on the prospect’s side… which was a bit disheartening for me.
For those who have worked in outside sales, specifically in the systems integration arena (although general sales experience I’m sure can be applied here too, regardless of vertical), have you encountered such prospects during your career?
If so, what did you do in order to finally get them to close?
Here is Karl’s advice,
There are two phases post qualification that make or break a good salesperson.
Without the assets to deliver these phases, it is almost impossible to sell high value offerings in increasingly competitive markets.
1. Value proposition
People tend to jump from qualification to presenting to pain and never ask themselves, “If I were the customer what would get me to say yes immediately.”
Now in this case I am assuming that you are talking to one or all of the decision makers, and if one, the financial authority. What makes people buy ANYTHING is perceived value.
If someone buys an expensive car, it is not because it gets you from point A to point B, all cars do that. It is THE PERCEPTION OF HOW IT GETS YOU THERE THAT MAKES THE SALE. People pay more for hybrids, to be gas conscious, more for luxury to be more comfortable.
The problem most sales representatives have, is they listen to the facts of qualification, but do not account for the desires. People buy from one company instead of the myriad of others competing in the SI space, because they think the company has the most to offer.
Get them talking to your customers, the ones that they can relate to. Determine early on in qualification, what the hottest points are and build your value proposition around that. Sell to the DESIRE AND THE NEED. This when done effectively closes a deal for you.
2. Closing
Ask for the sale, ASK for the sale, ASK FOR THE SALE. Once you have presented value, any delay tactics by your prospect are as good as a NO.
If a prospect has a logical timeline and plan that they can share with you, then wait to close them until it is close to the end. Otherwise, what do you have to lose?
Waiting four months for something to fall apart is hard on your ego, your patience, and your time management. If you present to the value and the need, while maintaining a clear focus on what will get them to buy, then close hard and get a yes or a no.
Karl’s advice is sound.
As he outlines, let us review the basics.
First, the account rep should be doing the ABC’s of sales:
Always Be Closing
This is the single bit of advice that every sales guy must be reminded of: We don’t get thrown out, we far too often bail out of a sales appointment.
Don’t know what to do? Ask for the order. Go for the “No” and move to the next appointment.
Second, Sales is the transference of emotion for our product or service. So we should sell the Desire and Need.
Third, Perception is reality. See Reality, Marketing and Aristotle
Fourth, Value Propositions are important, but I would avoid the “Bear Trap Close,” If I could solve your problem today, would you buy now? Savvy buyers and normal people get annoyed with this line. But the seller should ask if a benefit fits. Then, and only then can the feature can be applied.
The sale’s rep should note if the buyer is still not interested or not in enough pain to appreciate the benefits — whether faster, better, or cheaper. The seller should have enough features to find a fit, to find a solution.
Fifth, the hesitant buyer is not in enough pain — yet. Your Business Blogger has been selling tangibles and intangibles to single-sole buyers, like the government for decades.
If the buyer is reluctant, the seller might have to adopt a public policy maneuver favored by politicos:
If you can’t get to a solution, make the problem bigger.
Dave Sandler would teach this opening,
Are you happy?
Are you delighted?
If not, why not?
Delighted, contented customers would be very slow to make a new decision.
If there is the slightest dissatisfaction, a hint of unhappiness, the sales rep must exacerbate the problem, make the wound bigger — big enough for the client to notice. This is done to learn if the customer is sincere or not. If the customer has a problem or not.
Let us assume that the sales rep cannot simply walk away and look for low hanging fruit on another orchard.
Let us return to that last customer on earth that our sales rep must sell to.
This account manager is now dealing in the purest of politics. Yes, the Features, Advantages and Benefits must be matched to the needs of the customer.
However, the professional sales representative knows that nearly every decision maker has multiple points of accountability.
Here is where customer — the key influencers and decision makers — must be known completely by our sales rep. Every habit, every vice and virtue, must be cataloged by the sales rep. Every connection, personal, professional, social must be uncovered and managed.
The sales rep must know every detail of the client. I do not recommend stalking, but I have been trained by sales guys who tried this. (One trainer admitted ambushing a decision maker in the parking lot. A sales pitch-fork. It didn’t work.)
Good account management works to control events and the decision process.
These personal and professional details are necessary — an end result — because the sales rep loves the customer. And, like wooing and wowing a bride, our sales guy wants to know everything about her.
And her parents and extended family and friends and relationships and trust.
The sole-customer decision process probably uses some kind of committee clearing. Every member, every meeting, every move is known by our professional sales rep — because he will have found a friend — an insider to champion his cause.
The customer must like the company representative.
And if all else fails. The sales rep can simply hire the customer. See how I did it here.
26 July 2007
Sandler Sales Technique: Look for Pain
Sandler Sales Technique: Selling Tangible and Intangibles and Management Training in persuasion.
Your Business Blogger has always been a peddler. A very lazy peddler, which meant two things:
1) I had to learn shortcuts, and,
2) I was destined for management.
A hundred years ago, I started out selling vacuum cleaners cold-calling door to door.
Cold. Calling. O Joy.
Yes, that law of large numbers worked — wearing out shoe leather knocking on hundreds of doors — but it really wasn’t much fun for me. And not much fun for the home owner either.
Around 1986 or so, I sought out the smartest sales guy on the planet who had the same latitude for lazy as me.
I decided to meet with David Sandler, the founder of the Sandler Sales Institute.
After listening to him for a few minutes, I was intrigued by his system and his style, but I wanted to know more.
I ventured a timid question.
He looked at me. Then he told me to get out of the room.
He wasn’t smiling.
He was selling.
He got my attention: I come, willing to sit through his sales pitch and he tells me, me! to get lost.
The program was expensive and lightweight nobodies couldn’t afford his sales program.
Those weren’t his exact words. But close.
And, of course, I couldn’t afford it.
And, of course, I had to have it.
Among The Sandler Rules,
When faced with stalls, objections, or put-offs, you must eliminate them or it’s over.
Inspect what you expect.
You can’t lose what you don’t have.
If you wait until the presentation to close the sale, you put too much pressure on the prospect and yourself.
It was the best 850 bucks I ever spent.
I learned to ask stupid questions (which comes quite naturally to me) like,
What does that mean?
Why am I here?
It doesn’t look like you’re interested?
None of this sound like your traditional sales training, eh?
And when all else fails,
Is it over?
That last one is my favorite. When at the end of the sales process and it doesn’t look like the sale is coming and you are about to get thrown out, ask,
Is it over?
In decades a-peddling I’ve only had two prospects say yes, it’s over, now get lost.
(Hint: Guys, don’t be asking this question when you’re dating. You will get many, many yes’s. Not that I’d know.)
Sandler’s Sales System is not for everyone — but it works even for those who don’t like it.
I try to steer clients to Sandler because my small business owners/clients work too hard.
This is an unfortunate trend. The Boss should never work too hard.
And this is where the Managing Management Time Training comes in.
The core concept of this sales program is of hyper-sales-qualification. Do not attempt without adult supervision. There is no better skill set to sell tangibles or intangibles. Selling things or ideas, Sandler is best.
I haven’t made a cold-call since.
My prospective clients call me.
(Mostly.)
###
Thank you (foot)notes:
This is an unpaid endorsement for continuing education and the Sandler sales process. David Sandler died in 1995. And left the world a better place through his training programs.
24 July 2007
Getting Business Done in the Values Vacuum
The Holiday Inn in Colorado Springs has the notice “Certified Breakfast Bar” proudly displayed above the juice and jelly. I understand certifying elevators, accountants and jet engines, but a breakfast bar?
What has happened in America where even my croissants must now be credentialed?
Originally Published for the
Scripps Howard News Service
The answer reveals important changes in our culture. There was a time when a man’s word was his bond. Today your every thought must be bonded. From the cynicism of Dilbert to the wariness of Harvey Mackay’s advice on swimming with sharks, everywhere you look in the business world, trust has evaporated.
Business abhors a vacuum just as much as nature does. In 1950 there were 184,000 lawyers; today there are 966,270 “and counting,” according to the American Bar Association — a five-fold increase.
Alienation and litigation have replaced trust and relationships as the ruling order. You can’t sell a cup of coffee in this country today without a warning label attached. Certification, whether it is croissants or CPAs, is a trend emerging as an answer to a growing cultural anomie.
Significantly, our increasing reliance on litigation has paralleled our decreasing consensus on character. Forty years ago we had “In God We Trust” inscribed on our coinage and script. Indeed, President Eisenhower once said: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”
But today, America is a post-Christian nation, says Chuck Colson, former Nixon aid and now leader of Prison Fellowship. This is significant because without common moral commitments there is no basis for trust. The biblical injunction, “Thou shall not steal,” provides business a boundary. With its command to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Scripture’s Golden Rule provides a check on unfettered capitalism.
[There are some aspects of management training that are more challenging than others: ethics.]
Today in business the Golden Rule is mocked: “He who has the gold rules.” The result? Trust and trust worthiness are not common and are not given and received without extensive “due diligence.”
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman has said that a cultural prerequisite of capitalism is the holding of truthfulness as a common virtue. When you can trust a merchant’s word, says Friedman, “it cut[s] down transaction costs.” Without adherence to common moral principles we must substitute external controls to govern business behavior; efficiency demands a framework of standards and accountability.
The 18th-century atheist philosphe, Voltaire, recognized this problem. Even though he believed Christianity was an “infamy,” he wrote that “I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God.”
Voltaire wanted this accountability to God not for his vendors’ eternal salvation, but as a Total Quality Management System. “…Then I shall be robbed and cuckolded less often,” he concluded.
Voltaire’s earthly needs were best met when his suppliers had some accountability to a third party. Nevertheless, even though it might be a good idea, I don’t see corporate chaplains becoming a growth industry.
American government, however, is a growth industry. Not surprisingly, legislation is cropping up in this area. Reacting to the vacuum left by the demise of trust, legislators are looking at mandating professional integrity and quality by establishing regulatory parameters for certification. This year [1997], for example, Virginia introduced legislation for “licensing …to promote competent management….” Fortunately, the bill died in committee.
Facing a regulatory solution to the trust vacuum, the private sector must catch up. We need certification, not legislative fiat. The International Standards Organization (or ISO 9000) certification has now expanded beyond product and process to include people for precisely this reason.
Certification provides a benchmark for the two essential moorings of capitalist business: standards and accountability. The French observer Tocqueville noted that we Americans were a nation of joiners — of private association. Certification is one such association.
Bonding members of a professional community together adherence to a common code of ethics and behavior provides both standards and accountability. While the growing certification trend is an important one, we should not be too sanguine about the loss of trust it represents. Certification is not a complete replacement for personal integrity and the Judeo-Chnstian world view. It is simply a narrow substitute in the post-Nietzchian age.
Looking to Europe’s example, clearly demonstrates the dangers of giving up on old-fashioned American virtues and relying on the law. Bob Buzzell [now deceased], professor of international marketing at George Mason University, says that, to the detriment of European business life, “What is not forbidden, is mandatory.” Integrity and honor are internal controls upon men and women that external artifice cannot hope to replicate.
There is, however, an important place in public life for recognition of an honorable man. The military provides a model for external certification of internal value.
Napoleon once remarked that men would make great sacrifices, even be killed for a scrap of ribbon. The ribbons were marks of distinction to certify the bravery of the soldier. The military understands the centrality of trust. “I will not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate anyone who does” is chiseled in stone prominently in our service academies.
Likewise, those words need to be chiseled into every businessman’s soul. Certification would then recognize that integrity, as battle ribbons recognize courage, and provide us a compass for finding the road back to trust.
John Wesley Yoest Jr. is [the former] vice president of Certified Marketing Services International, a consulting firm in Northern Virginia. December 1997
17 July 2007
Management Time
Your Business Blogger was, at one time, decades ago, accused of being a “rescuer.” Semper Paratus
And I wasn’t in the Coast Guard.
No, my business adviser pointed out that I worked too hard to solve problems. That didn’t belong to me.
I was “Always Ready” to solve staff problems — to do their work.
And I’m not the only one. Most management training programs encourage such ‘creativity’ in solving staff-borne problems.
One result is that the manager does not have time to work on his own self-directed projects. He’s too busy solving problems bubbling up from below.
Our manager is constantly under siege by problems created by other people — staff, and, most important, The Boss.
The manager is working longer hours and weekends and never catches up.
And this affects relations with kith and kin. If the manager could come up for air, and had a moment of discretionary time, he might notice the source of his problems.
Preferably, the manager should be the person on the payroll to supervisor the work of the subordinate.
Far too often these roles are reversed.
###
Also see
Carnival of Leadership Development
9 July 2007
Management Training Tip #1, Office Politics
Learn to Love Office Politics.
The first prerequisite in management training is learning the ability to persuade. To be a salesman.
Sales is sometimes seen as backslapping and glad handing and greeting the world with a “shoe shine and a smile.”
And perhaps this style fits some managers. Though not Your Business Blogger.
But what ever the external characteristics, the manager must get the active support of his organization to get his job done.
Bill Gentry at the Center for Creative Leadership says,
Politics is a normal part of leadership and organizational life, and political skill is one of the many factors that contribute to effective leadership, according to Gentry. The term “political skill” can be defined as the ability to effectively understand and influence others for personal and/or organizational benefit. Leaders need to know the relationships and cultural dynamics of the organization and understand how to respond to and affect their environment.
Yes, it may be true that each supporting silo is required by the org chart to provide the resources that our manager requires.
Instead, we know that support staff have limited resources to fulfill the seemingly unlimited demand for support services. Or there are hidden agendas.
The manager cannot simply demand or bark out an order for the support.
The manager must sell.
And the manager has the most challenging of sales jobs:
To sell an intangible.
What one insurance salesman called, “Selling air.”
This manager-sales-persuasion talent is necessary to enlist the active support of the manager’s boss, internal peers (HR, Administration), external peers (customers, vendors) and the manager’s staff — his direct reports.
The manager must, well, think like a politician.
The manager should sell the request, sell the requirement, sell the proposal, close the sale and get a deal.
To be a good manager, one must always be thinking like a sales guy.
And this is hard work. It can be learned. Management is, as Peter Drucker says, a practice.
A practice that can be mastered with Office Politics.