You May Have Missed This In Sales Training
August 1, 2004
Working in telecom, I have learned some of lifes lessons the hard way. As a former sales executive in companies as small as USTeleCenters and as large as AT&T, I want to pass on a few ideas that may smooth your way over the road ahead.
You dont ask, you dont get
You dont ask, you dont get is a top-10 insight I first saw in an article by Norm Brodsky in INC Magazine. It is a durable idea with a genesis back to the Bible, Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. Why is asking so important?
It is important because if you dont ask, you dont get. There are some sound reasons for directly asking. Reason one: it demonstrates your confidence. Brodsky says, You always hear that to be a good salesperson, you have to overcome rejection, but what you really need to overcome is the fear of asking for what you want. Try it!
Reason two: asking affects your prospects behavior, also. Will you commit to set up three interviews with the GMs? In sales, getting a prospect on record is a powerful tactic because it improves the likelihood of compliance. Her commitment drives what psychologists describe as a desire for consistency. We comply with our commitments to appear consistent to ourselves and others. Who wants to be seen as unreliable or two-faced? Children use this tactic expertly. Daddy, you promised! You said you would take us to Mt. Splashmore!
Feeling motivated is not required for sales success
Recently we saw again the film All that Jazz. It is based on the real-life story of talented choreographer Bob Fosse. In the film, Fosse is Joe Gideon who awakens every morning hung over and half-dead. He demonstrates that action trumps needing to feel up to attain success. After a shower, some speed, eye drops and rousing music, he slaps on a smile and declares, Its showtime!
If he had to rely upon feeling up for his job, he would not go to work most days. Likewise, average sales people avoid prospecting because they dont like it. However, exceptional sales people are professional and know what they must do no matter how they feel about doing it. At year-end, your results will speak for themselves without any footnotes telling how you felt while creating them.
Intuition can be a false barometer
Relying on intuition, which can be good or bad, may serve as a lazy-mans substitute for a careful examination of the facts in a selling situation. Our work shows that relying on intuition alone is a low-odds strategy. Those who play the intuition gamble squander their precious resources on deals they will never close. Additionally, they bypass good opportunities because they do not have a good sense about them.
In his groundbreaking book, Educating Intuition, Robin Hogarth explains that intuition is not a mystical voice of truth. What we perceive as intuition, he says, is actually the internal voice of past observations applying their learning to the current situation. The big question is whether the quality of past, unconscious observation is good or bad. Intuition has the same honest-sounding whisper even if it is dead wrong.
Here is an example. With my wife out of town and the children campaigning to make a cake, I told them to go ahead as I finished this article. They mixed three tablespoons of salt into their frosting. Their intuition then suggested doubling, then tripling the sweet ingredients to neutralize the salt. They should have thrown it out and started over, since it would have required a ten-fold batch to dilute the salt. This is a textbook example of the sunk-cost fallacy. Acting on bad intuition now compounded their predicament, wasting more resources. Nevertheless, as a good dad, I did have to eat some cake.
Treat them like dirt and they will stick to you like mud
A perky, celebrity photographer shared this lesson she learned from her mother. Lynn photographs prima donnas regularly, but never lets them forget who runs the photography studio. She knows that being needy or overly deferential are not valid demonstrations of her professionalism in photography. People come to her because she knows her business.
Likewise, prospects rely on your competence. Extra points for groveling dont translate into more sales. Adding a smarmy element weakens your position by making you appear too eager to close the deal. Any appearance of being less than an equal debases your position and raises the question of whether you may be actually compensating for a solution in which you lack full confidence. Lynns demeanor says she has confidence in her offer. You can take it or leave it. Its not a taunt, its the truth.
There is a reason for everything
Lets say youve just received an unexpected RFP worth five years sales quota. Congratulations! The prospect has selected you as the designated loser.
In one sales organization, we analyzed more than 700 proposals, half of which were in response to unsolicited RFPs. They lost nearly every unsolicited RFP. The RFPs were used to gain leverage with the prospects current or favored vendor. In this company, responding to RFPs where the winner was pre-determined consumed more than $10 million in sales, technical and support resources. It was no wonder the sales team was not achieving its quota. It had only half its resources working on real deals.
What can you do when you suspect you are being shopped? Aggressively qualify the customer. At the company above the average cost per proposal was $14,286. Are you confident enough to commit resources like this? Treat the companys money as if it were your own. If you suspect you are being shopped, ask for changes in the process that will provide you odds worthy of your investment. Go on to another opportunity if you perceive someone is using you.
So there you have it.
You dont ask, you dont get. Commitment improves compliance.
Feeling motivated is not required for sales success. Professionals take action regardless of how they feel.
Intuition can be a false barometer. Dont blindly accept it as truth.
Treat them like dirt and they will stick to you like mud. Executives prefer to deal with equals.
There is a reason for everything. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Author Wayne Thomas, D.B.A. is CEO of Thomas & Company, Inc. (www.ThomasAndCompany.com) a management consultancy that helps sales executives make mid-course corrections and then develop sustainable long-term strategies. He is also an expert executive coach and author of the Sales Agency Handbook published by Nortel. You can reach him at [email protected].
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