Practical Eloquence Blog |

The Not-So-Magic Formula for Sales Success

By Jack Malcolm / 3.4.2013 / No Comment

The reality is more impressive than the illusion

The wonderful thing about sales is that it’s so competitive and performance-driven. Unlike many professions, you have to be at the top of your game all the time if you want to have any success, because others at the top of their game are working hard to take food off your table. Most salespeople understand this, which is why salespeople in general are always looking for the magical formula that will guarantee success.

There is no magic formula that guarantees you will outsell your competition, no magic formula that guarantees you will get others to do what you want them to do. If there was, what possible reason would anyone have for sharing it?

But if you can never guarantee success, you can deserve it. And there is a formula for that, comprising four simple ingredients:

Care: It all starts with caring because no one will ever persevere in the face of difficulties and rejection for very long only for the money or other external motivators. Michael Jordan got paid a lot of money, but from everything I’ve read about him, he would have played for free if only for the fierce need to compete and win at everything he did. Do you care about something bigger than yourself? Do you care about improving the lives of your customers? Do you care about your prospect as a person and not just as a name on a decision making chart? Do you care about the good of the company you work for? Do you take personal responsibility for a 3-win outcome? A good sale should be a win/win/win. The customer wins, your employer wins, and you win. If the deal you’re trying to put together doesn’t benefit all three, you shouldn’t be going after it, or you should think harder about how to change it so that everyone wins.

Think: Richard Feynman, the great physicist, tells how, as a kid, he would fix broken radios. He would ask the owner what was wrong with the radio, then he would quietly ponder for a few minutes. Once, an owner impatiently asked him what he was doing. He said, “I’m fixing your radio.” Only after thinking for a few minutes would he open the back of the radio, and usually be able to make the repair on the spot.

Selling is similar to radio repair in that it’s about asking smart questions, thinking about the answers you get, and then providing valuable insights to the customer. Thinking is about not merely accepting the situation as you see it, but about analyzing it, understanding it, asking the right questions about it, and actively imagining ways to change and improve it. Thinking is about learning, about taking an active role in your own professional and personal education every day of your life, not just when someone sends you to training. It’s about having the humility to learn from everyone and everything, about not taking the first answer you get at face value.

In selling, it’s also about outside-in thinking: looking at the situation from the other’s point of view and taking their perspective. It’s about clearly understanding and expressing what makes you unique, and why the customer should care.

Plan: Success in any complex endeavor is always the result of a process, whether you knowingly follow the process or not. Knowing the process allows you to have a clearer picture, gives you better control of the outcomes, and helps you to constantly improve it. Planning is about making that process transparent and lining up the resources and actions to increase your efficiency and effectiveness. Salespeople would much rather spend their time in front of customers than writing down a plan, but that little extra time up front is about the most highly leveraged time you spend. Besides, if selling is about improving outcomes for customers, the time you spend planning how to accomplish that is selling time just as much as making a presentation is.

Even if things happen in real time that don’t go according to plan—which will always happen—the insights gained from the planning process will help you react faster and more intelligently. As Kelly Riggs says, planning is the great equalizer; it’s what enables a small competitor to beat the bigger ones.

Work: I hate the phrase “work smarter, not harder.” Why should they be mutually exclusive? Working smarter should not be an excuse for slacking off. The guy who works smarter not harder will lose to the one who works smarter and harder. Sales is partly a numbers game, and the numbers that count include the hours you put in, the calls you make, and the number of opportunities you pursue.

Of course, it’s not just about putting in the hours; it’s about what you put into the hours. If hard work by itself were enough, there would not be billions of people around the world earning less than two dollars a day who work harder than you do. In truth, if you are fortunate enough to earn a living by selling, your hard work is more likely to be rewarded than almost any other profession.

Care. Think. Plan. Work. It’s not a magic formula, but if you do these four things consistently, your results will be magical.

Book reviews

In Praise of Middle Managers: A Review of Engineers of Victory, by Paul Kennedy

By Jack Malcolm / 2.25.2013 / No Comment

It’s the people in the middle who make things happen.

Most books on military history focus either on the super-sized personalities and dazzling strategic vision of the generals at the top, or on the dramatic and courageous exploits of the grunts on the ground, sea or air. My father was one of the warfighters, so I have immense respect for everything they experienced and achieved.

Yet I’m glad that Paul Kennedy has written a book that focuses on the achievements of the middle managers, the nameless scientists, engineers, logisticians and trainers who worked tirelessly to solve the problems and provide the tools needed for victory. In hindsight, the outcome of the war may seem inevitable, but to those in the thick of it, it was a very close-run thing.

In January 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, along with their top generals and military advisers, met in Casablanca to plot their grand strategy to defeat the Axis powers. At the time, their situation was perhaps not as bleak as it had been just a few months prior—the allies had averted disaster and were no longer in imminent danger of losing the war—but they were still a long way from winning it. At the summit, the strategists agreed on a clear recipe for winning the war. It was actually pretty simple:

First, they had to stop the German U-boats from sinking ships faster that they could build them, so they could feed England and build up the forces necessary to invade Europe.
Second, they had to destroy the vaunted German air force so that they could weaken German industry and control the air to make an invasion possible.
They also had to keep from losing the war in the meantime, by figuring out how to defeat the German blitzkrieg tactics, a task that every other country in Europe had previously found impossible to achieve.
Finally, they had to get a vast army ashore against a well-defended and so-far invincible army.
Oh, and by the way, they simultaneously had to figure out how to beat the Japanese across thousands of miles of empty ocean dotted with impregnable fortresses.

The strategy was a masterpiece, and in the end it turned out to be exactly how the war was won. The only problem is that no one knew how to do any of these simple tasks. It’s like the recipe for rabbit soup: First, catch one rabbit. (Except that this rabbit bites back, and is as well-armed as you are.)

The goals were like interlocking pieces of a puzzle—failure at one meant likely failure of the others. At the time those five goals were set, no one knew exactly how or if any of them could be accomplished. The strategic genius of the leaders depended on whether the middle managers could figure out the approaches and get things done. These were the organizers, scientists, engineers, and trainers that solved the problems, made things work, invented the necessary tools.

In the book, the engineers of victory included the operations analysts who figured out the proper distribution and depth settings for depth charges; the trainers who turned out crews (as many as 10 in the B-17) to man the tens of thousands of aircraft produced yearly; the logisticians who fed, armed, and clothed millions of troops spread literally around the world; the engineers who designed, built and transported mobile pontoon bridges to span the wide Russian rivers; the organizers who coordinated the movements of an incredible 2,700 vessels, 130,000 men and 12,000 aircraft on D-Day—without a single computer.

Kennedy defines the term engineers broadly as any problem solver, so the book is not just about technology. In fact, individual technological breakthroughs are not as effective unless they are part of a system. A great example of this is the P-51 Mustang fighter, which was a mediocre performer until an RAF test pilot got the idea to put in a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine into it. Then, the various people involved had to beat the Not Invented Here attitude of the Army Air Force to push through the idea. The marriage of the Mustang’s superb aerodynamics and the Merlin engines—plus auxiliary gas tanks—created a plane that could accompany the bombers all the way to Berlin and outfly anything it came up against on the way, and helped solve the second problem.

What are the lessons for business today?

Rapid learning. In war, learning is not a luxury—it’s the key to survival. The Allies won because the people in the middle provided feedback loops that connected all levels and ensured that even defeats such as the failed raid on Dieppe in 1942 provided benefits in the form of valuable lessons. By contrast, the Japanese had superb ships and aircraft at the beginning of the war, but made little or no improvements to them for the rest of the war.

Providing wide latitude to the people in the middle. The Allies found out how to get the right people in the proper positions and then get out of their way. As Churchill said in a memo to his generals: “We are now at war, fighting for our lives, and we cannot afford to confine Army appointments to officers who have excited no hostile comment in their career.”

Complete systems approach. The Germans showed how the mere possession of wonder weapons such as the V-2 and jet fighters were not enough by themselves. They needed to fit within a complete and balanced system that could deliver the goods, withstand shocks, adapt, and grow.

We glorify our business leaders, pay them insane amounts of money, and eagerly snap up their biographies after they retire or die. Maybe we need to read more books about the middle level managers who make their success possible. Engineers of Victory would be a good start.

Sales

Has Daniel Pink Gone Too Far?

By Jack Malcolm / 2.20.2013 / 8 Comments

The premise of Daniel Pink’s new book, To Sell Is Human, is that almost everyone sells. Regardless of whether you are a quota-carrying salesperson, you need to influence and persuade others to be effective in what you do. I’ve said the same thing many times in my blog, but it’s also time to throw a note of caution into the discussion.

We need a reminder that there’s a huge difference between selling as a part of what you do on a regular basis, and selling as a profession. When your ability to put food on the table depends on your performance of a specific skill, it requires a huge qualitative difference in how you approach that skill.

To illustrate my point, let’s look at an analogy. In knowledge work, everyone also writes. It may only be emails, or it may be longer and more elaborate reports, but the ability to write definitely makes a difference in your career progression. But writing as part of your job does not make you a writer—certainly not one who could be mentioned in the same sentence as a Daniel Pink.

It’s like the difference between a churchgoer and the pastor, or the difference between coaching your kid’s T-ball team and being a professional coach. To use a cliché, it’s like the difference between the chicken and the pig when it comes to ham and eggs. One is involved and the other is committed.

Professional salespeople are committed because they get measured and paid primarily for their success at selling—they can get fired for not accomplishing their primary task. If an engineer has trouble selling his or her ideas, their career progression might be slowed, but they won’t get fired. If a health care worker is ineffective at selling a treatment plan to a patient (one of Pink’s favorite examples), the patient suffers the consequences. If a salesperson is unable to sell something the customer needs, the customer may suffer, but the salesperson is going to feel the immediate consequences.

Professionals have to produce. When you make a living by doing something, you have to do it even when you don’t feel like it, like a shark that has to keep swimming. That’s why professional salespeople have to sell even when they don’t want to. They also know the drudgery of “dialing for dollars”, and of having to be on at all times, in a way that amateurs don’t. In the same vein, professional writers know that they have to write even when they don’t feel like it. Pink, for example, holds himself to a daily word count, because no one pays you for words you don’t write.

Because of this, the bar for sales performance is much higher, and the commitment to the craft and skill is correspondingly in a different league entirely.

Why does this matter? Because if selling is to be taken seriously as a profession, it’s critical to dispel the myth that anyone with no training or skill can be a successful salesperson, and the related idea that sales is just a refuge for those who couldn’t handle the more difficult subjects in college. Let’s keep in mind that a professional salesperson (especially in the B2B arena) has to become proficient in a wide range of general disciplines, including complex technologies embedded in their product, general business and industry acumen, psychology, persuasive expression (including writing—although it doesn’t make them writers). Added to those general disciplines are skills directly related to sales, such as questions, dealing with objections, sales strategies and processes, connecting features to benefits, and territory management, to name just a few. They have to thoroughly learn these skills (and keep learning, because things are changing so fast), because they are committed.

I really like To Sell Is Human, partially because it does a great job in dispelling harmful sales myths, especially the one that selling is somehow slimy or distasteful. But I am afraid that taking too literally his idea that everyone is in sales risks propagating another harmful myth.

Expression - Persuasive communication

Why You Talk Too Much and Seven Things You Can Do about It

By Jack Malcolm / 2.18.2013 / No Comment

We’ve all been on the receiving end of long and convoluted explanations. We ask someone a simple question and get a dissertation in response. When it happens, we get impatient, interrupt, look for a graceful way out, while the oblivious talker merrily keeps right on going. We often leave those conversations feeling like we know less than we did when we began.

This situation is far too common when experts on a particular topic explain things to others. A lot of explanations proceed like a sailboat against the wind; they tack back and forth and take a long time to reach their destination; “on the one hand, on the other hand…”

It’s bad enough to have to listen to those who talk too much, but what if you are the one on the transmitting end of those explanations?

Why it’s a problem

Short memory and attention spans. Attention spans are shorter than ever, so it’s important to get your point in as quickly as possible. Since they won’t remember every detail you told them, don’t bury your main point in interesting but irrelevant detail. It’s especially important as you talk to higher-ranking executives.

It erodes your credibility. When you talk too much, you appear insecure and unsure of yourself and your position. Most people believe, like Einstein, that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough. That may not always be true, but that is the impression they get when you over-explain. Concise explanations convey confidence.

Talking past the close. When you’re trying to sell others, they generally listen until they’ve heard enough to make a decision. If you keep talking after they’ve decided to accept your idea, you run the risk of giving them a reason to change their minds.

Loss of influence. Over time, people will stop coming to you for information if it takes them too long. They’ll stop asking for your input at meetings; they’ll turn and go the other way when they see you coming down the hall.

Possible causes

You’ve learned about the topic from the ground up, so you think that’s the best way to “teach” it.

You may be more concerned about seeming smart than about the needs of the questioner. Short, simple answers don’t show how much work it took to arrive at the conclusion.

You’re passionate about the topic, and you overestimate the interest that others take in it.

Because you know so much about the topic, small differences that are inconsequential to the questioner seem major to you.

You’re not prepared. When you hear a question for the first time, your answer is always going to be a rough draft. As any writer knows, the first version that comes out of your head can always be improved.

Solutions

Know your audience. If you know why they want to know, you can tailor your explanation to fit. It does not hurt to simply ask them why they want to know, or ask them a question or two to gauge their level of familiarity with the topic.

Prepare for conversations. This is related to knowing your audience, but also takes into account the specific topic and their relationship to it. Why do they care? What concerns or questions are they likely to have? What do they need to know to make the decision? If you’re giving a presentation, rehearsal helps you shave away unnecessary detail. For example, you’ve probably noticed that when you tell a story several times, it tends to get shorter.

Listen carefully. It’s hard to give just the right amount of information if you didn’t fully hear or understand the question. Give the other person your full focus. Even when speaking, you want to keep an eye on their reactions. It may not be as obvious as looking at their watch, but you can generally tell when you’re giving them more than they need.

Think briefly before opening your mouth. You’re not on a game show, where you have to answer as quickly as possible. Because you can think much faster than you can talk, even a very brief pause can help you compose your thoughts and formulate a shorter and better explanation.

Start with the headline. Make your explanations like a newspaper article. Give them the gist of the entire story in your opening statement, and then drill deeper as needed or asked. For example, if they ask you, “Will it work?” you don’t begin by saying, “Well that’s a complicated issue. There are a lot of factors that go into an accurate answer to that question, depending on the situation…”

Instead, you can say, “In most cases, the answer is yes (or no), although there are certain factors which might affect that.” By putting out qualifiers like in most cases, you signal to the other person that there are nuances they might want to explore further, but the choice is theirs.

Go for quality over quantity. As Churchill said, you should treat your facts like cigars: Choose only the strongest and the finest. One strong reason to do something is better than one strong reason plus three weaker reasons. You can keep the weaker reasons in reserve, and send them in only if needed.

Be as precise as necessary, but not more so. It’s better to be roughly right than precisely ignored.[1]

[1] Is there ever a time for long explanations? Of course: when the other person asks for it, or when they are about to make a decision based on dangerously incomplete information. The first one is easy, the second is a judgment call you need to make.