As part of my research for my forthcoming book, Strategic Sales Presentations, I interviewed dozens of senior level executives to understand how they perceive the presentations they receive from salespeople. One of the questions that really got most of them talking was “What are the top mistakes that you see salespeople making during presentations?” Here are the Top 10:
Try too hard to sell me. When you reach my level, you have been vetted by people in my organization whose opinions I trust, so make your presentation educational and factual. Teach me something new.
Talk too long. “By slide #2, most salespeople have already used up 75-80% of my patience and I’m looking for the exit.” Get to the point. On a related note, don’t use too many slides, especially about your corporate “story”. Sometimes even you look bored with it.
Ask me what keeps me awake at night. That’s one of the most overused questions in sales. You should already have a pretty good idea of my problems.
Be too sure that you know all about my problem already. This is the opposite extreme of the previous one. If you act like you know it all, we will push back and expose what you don’t know. Be humble and ask a lot of questions.
Not listen. Don’t be so wrapped up in getting your message out that you don’t listen to us. If we interrupt you to ask a question or say something, there is a pretty good reason for it.
Try to circumvent our buying process. “Don’t force your sales cycle on me.” On rare occasions, we will bend this rule, but you’d better have a damn good reason to do it. Also, “If you get in too easily to see me, that’s not a good sign. It means everyone else can too.”
Be too canned. We like to talk to real people who know our business. If you’re too slick or too “coiffed”, we’ll get suspicious.
Use “$75 words”. When you make something more complicated than it is, it “makes us think like you’re full of it.” On a related note, a CFO said that you should not use terms like ROI and payback unless you really know what they mean.
Bring too many people. Too many teams bring in many more people than are necessary. If they don’t have a reason for being there, or don’t play an active role, leave them home. If you have that many people to spare, I may end up paying too much.
Wear a Gator tie when selling to the University of Georgia. Yes, this actually happened. The big picture point is that you should know your customer and tailor your presentation to them. On a related note, don’t show me a generic slide presentation that could have been seen by anybody.
The latest issue of Harvard Business Review contains several fine articles on sales, and it’s nice to see that magazine spending more time on such an important topic.
Jim Koch, the founder of Boston Beer Company, tells the story of how he had to learn how tough selling can be. When he founded the company in 1984, he already had three degrees from Harvard and seven years of consulting experience. After all, that was what you did when you had that background. As he puts it, “No self-respecting Ivy League graduate aspired to be a salesman.”
He quickly found out that distributors had no interest in taking on a new brand, so he had to go bar to bar selling his beer. (The demos were the best part of the sale, I’m sure.) When he made his first sale, he was so excited he left without taking the order. As any self-taught salesperson does, he begn by buying a book and then proceeded to learn the hard way. Boston Beer now has 320 salespeople and over half a billion dollars in revenue, but Koch still spends more time on sales calls than anything else except brewing.
What has he learned in the past 28 years? Three points stand out, in his own words:
“I’ve come to see making a sales call as one of the most challenging intellectual activities there is—certainly more immediately challenging than anything I did at BCG.”
“The essence of selling is figuring out how what you’re offering will help customers accomplish their objectives—not your objective, their objectives.”
“But even if Ivy Leaguers prefer to talk about marketing and management, sales remains the core function of every company. Without sales, there is no business to manage.”
Have you ever had the awkward experience of joining a conversation in progress and feeling a bit unwelcome?
I admit that I’m not exactly an early adopter when it comes to using social media, but apparently I’m far from alone. According to statistics cited in “Tweet Me, Friend Me, Make Me Buy”, by Barbara Giamanco and Kent Gregoire in the latest Harvard Business Review, only 5% of B2B marketers said social media was a mature and optimized part of their marketing efforts. 58% said they are in the early stages, (which is where I am), and 17% don’t use it at all.
Here’s why all but the top 5% are making a BIG mistake: in B2B buying decisions, buyers are far more active in gathering information than they used to be. The old days where sellers “pushed” information to prospects have given way to a “pull” model; potential buyers are actually beginning the sales cycle long before you get involved. (Those who’ve read Dixon and Adamson’s The Challenger Sale won’t be surprised by this). At this very moment, potential buyers are becoming aware of problems, searching for possible solutions, comparing alternatives, forming positive or negative impressions—and you aren’t even involved yet!
And they’re not just getting their information from websites. They are reaching out to others for their information, knowledge, and insights. 55% of buyers access social media when they’re looking for information. (What percentage do you suppose get their initial information from your cold call? According to an InsideView survey, over 90% of C-Level executives say they never respond to cold calls or e-mail blasts.)
As a result, when you show up for that first call with them, they know far more about your company than you do about theirs. If the primary value that a salesperson brings to the prospect is information about how to improve their business and help them achieve their objectives, that equation puts power firmly in the hands of the customer, and leaves the salesperson playing catch-up against requirements set by someone else.
If you’re not using social media to engage them in those conversations early, you’re letting someone else dictate the terms of the conversation. You’re also letting someone else establish the anchor by which subsequent information is filtered and perceived—or even noticed.
The article is too brief to recommend much in the way of specific practical steps that sales organizations can take to change this. But they sold me—I’ve just ordered Giamanco’s book, The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media, and will post a more extensive review after I’ve read it (and begun applying the lessons to my own sales efforts.)
If you’re interested in improving sales performance the right way rather than throwing the usual quick fixes at it (training, incentives, threats), then Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way, by Michael Webb with Tom Gorman, would be worth your investment.[1]
Don’t be put off by the title. Six sigma is not an esoteric, cult-like system for turning your sales force into unthinking automatons. In practical terms, it’s simply the application of scientific method to understanding your sales processes and finding ways to improve it.
In fact, applied to sales, you might be able to think of it as two sigma. In production systems, six sigma is a quality measure that represents only 3.4 defects per million. Most sales organizations would be happy with a defect rate of one sigma, which is almost 700,000 defects per million. That sounds high, but it’s a close rate of 30%. Two sigma would be an improvement of more than 100%, or a close rate of 70%. These numbers show that there is tremendous room for improvement via the application of some of the tools and techniques outlined in this book—without going crazy. As Webb tells us, “When you’ve got a process operating at one sigma, you don’t have to worry about the design of experiments.”
What you do have to worry about is taking a methodological approach to defining, measuring, analyzing, improving and controlling (DMAIC) your sales process.
Yelling at the thermometer
It sounds like common sense, but it’s definitely not common practice in sales leadership, which often approaches sales problems intuitively, or merely throws training or incentives at the problem without taking the time to understand the underlying process. The way that many sales managers operate is like yelling at the thermometer because you don’t like the temperature.
It’s all about the process
Understanding the underlying sales process begins with mapping your customer’s buying process. How do customers become aware of problems and find solutions to them? In every prospect organization, there is an ongoing discussion about their business goals, the need to improve performance, problems that stand in their way, etc. The sales professional’s job is to contribute meaningfully to that conversation, by providing useful information (often in the form of questions, not simply telling) that helps the customer improve their business and personal outcomes.
Too often, sales processes are undefined, or are defined by what salespeople have traditionally done, or are the default process codified in the CRM system you bought. They are not based on how the customer decides and how you can smooth that path for them.
That in turn drives the definition of value in the sales process. Value is defined by the customer, and Webb defines it simply as “anything the customer will take action to obtain.” When you see value this way, you can design your sales process so that it provides that value at the various stages along the customer’s decision process. This provides measurable and meaningful progress, because it’s now measured not by how busy your salespeople are, but by what actions the customers take along the way.
It also lessens resistance. One of the major sources of “defects” in the sales process is customer resistance, and resistance occurs when customers feel like you are doing something to them, which either does not add value to them or forces them to act before they are ready.
The principles of six sigma are:
Viewing the sales and marketing process as a production process that produces profitable revenue. When you see it this way, you can apply many of the tools that have been so successful in manufacturing and demystify the “art” of sales.
Creating value for customers. As discussed above, if customers will take action to get the value you provide at each stage of the sales cycle, the sales path becomes much smoother.
Managing on data and facts. What a concept. Reminds me of the quote by Philip Dick: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Analyzing cause and effect. See above.
Minimizing waste and defects. Understanding what activities create value helps you identify and work on eliminating those that do not.
Collaboration. Sales and marketing, in this view, are not separate, often conflicting silos. The marketing process provides outputs for their customers: salespeople. In fact, Webb’s definition of good marketing is “anything that makes the salesperson’s job easier.”
There is a lot to cover in these six principles, but the book does a good job through detailed case studies that illuminate through example and furnish credibility. In fact, the appendix is worth studying carefully because it has real-life examples of some of the more important tools used. If you specialize in complex B2B sales, the example used can be a little simplistic, but you can extrapolate from there.
A common lament among sales professionals is that sales does not get enough respect as a profession and the major contributor to business success. Perhaps if we can learn to reliably and consistently improve revenue and profits by applying greater rigor to understanding and improving the sales process, that day will come.
[1] The reason I don’t include the hyperlink to the book on Amazon is that a new copy is priced at over $400! Astute shoppers will be able to pay much less.
