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In over a quarter-century of training salespeople, I’ve run across an elite few who exemplify what it means to be a true sales professional. Here’s what it takes, and why it matters.
This podcast is based on a series I’ve previously written about sales professionalism. Here are the links to those posts.
The Four PROs of Sales Professionalism
I’ve always been a huge proponent of the benefits of planning at all levels of sales, including territory plans, key account plans, opportunity plans, and especially sales call plans.
Most salespeople don’t do enough planning, preferring instead to rely on their gift of gab and their natural ability to go with the flow during the sales conversation. But when they actually do it, they find that planning helps salespeople think from the customer’s point of view; it ensures that major holes in their knowledge or positioning are identified and addressed, and it also can provide a generous jolt of confidence going into the meeting.
That’s why, when I teach sales planning, I often remind students of the “5 Ps of Planning: Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.”[1]
Better planning is a powerful prescription for poor sales results, but like any powerful medicine it has to be taken in the proper dose. There are some salespeople who take it a bit too far, and work hard to produce perfect plans. They try to craft just the right questions, word them very carefully, anticipate every possible objection and have just the right answer for them. For them, I need to add an advanced reminder in the form of 3 More Ps of Planning: “Perfect Plans Are Pointless.”
There are at least four reasons I can think of.
The customer has a vote. The first reason is so obvious that it has become a military cliché: no plan survives contact with the enemy. Substitute the word “customer” for enemy and it applies just as well to sales. You can craft your opening moves very carefully, and then be completely flummoxed when the customer tells you they have a totally different idea of what they want to accomplish during the call.
You will never have perfect knowledge. Despite the common misconception that we have unlimited knowledge at our fingertips, you can never know enough. For example, I strongly recommend trying to think from the customer’s point of view, but as recent research suggests we’re just not as good at it as we think we are. If even long-married couples have trouble anticipating how their spouse will answer some basic questions, you can’t know what your customer will think or say.
And even when you do have proper information, things are always changing (particularly since there are competitors involved), so a perfect plan is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge; by the time you get to the end you need to start over at the beginning. As Scott Sonenshein says in his excellent book Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less – and Achieve More than You Ever Imagined: “We end up planning for a world that no longer exists, while tricking ourselves into believing that it does exist because that’s what we planned for.”
Planning can lock in your thinking. Planning is about making choices, so the more you refine your plan, the more you narrow your focus and restrict your imagination. This has two consequences when things go off track during the actual contact with the customer. First, by limiting your thinking about other possibilities, you leave yourself unprepared for the unexpected. Second, you may have become so invested in your plan that carrying out the plan becomes more important than making the sale. I’ve seen salespeople fall so in love with their plan, that they ask their questions and then don’t really listen to the customer’s answer. They listen for the answer they’re expecting, and when they don’t hear it, they plow obliviously on to the next question. Or they keep going even when the customer is practically screaming buying signals at them!
Planning can give the illusion that something is happening. You take time to plan, to research the customer, and to think. When you produce that great plan, it can certainly give you a sense of achievement. And these are all necessary and important activities. But remember, nothing happens until you actually connect with the customer. The entire purpose of sales is to communicate useful information to help customers make a decision. Planning by itself is sterile, because it does not move the sale through the buying cycle one iota—and in fact the sale may be moving through the cycle on its own, or under the influence of someone else’s plan.
But please don’t take this post as advice to drop planning altogether. Remember the first word in the 5 Ps: Proper planning. Proper planning is not perfect planning. As the saying goes:
“Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”
[1] Yes, I know there is a 6 P version, but this is a family blog
For most salespeople, B2B means “business to business”, but the most successful ones take the “2” literally. Simply put, they know that their selling task works in two directions, and they focus just as much on selling internally as externally. A key account manager’s task is no different than that of the ambassador to Botswana, who represents America over there and Botswana over here. Being good at one makes them more effective in the other.
If you are a key account manager, you know how important it is to take very special care of your most important accounts. You know what drives them, how they measure success, and who the key people are. You cultivate business and personal relationships at all levels that your product or service touches, and you take extra special care to ensure that you pay close attention to all the key people who influence your success. But you must never forget that you serve n + 1 accounts, with the 1 being your own employer.
If you think about it, you need to take as good care of your internal customers as you do of your external ones. It’s not just for self-preservation—it actually helps your external accounts as well. The salesperson who knows where to go and what strings to pull to get things done internally for their external customers is worth a lot, especially when customers are competing for scarce resources. For example, one of my clients was an international dairy company which took a portfolio approach to its products, and allocated resources to where they produced the greatest profit or strategic benefit. Invariably, the key account managers who were most adept at selling internally on behalf of their clients were always among the top performers.
In his book Achieve Sales Excellence, Howard Stevens states that “the ability to get things done internally” is one of the key attributes that senior level executives value in their sales contacts. You become more valuable to your customers by being a strong customer advocate, and that value makes you more valuable to your employer as well.
In addition, one of your key roles as a salesperson is to communicate information to your customers that they can’t get anywhere else, and they can’t go on the internet and learn all about the internal workings of your company and figure out how to use it to help them. Only you can.
On the other hand you don’t want to push your customer advocacy too far. While you want to sell internally on behalf of your external customers, you need to balance that against the needs of your internal customer. Squeaky wheels may get the grease, but they also may get replaced if they squeak too much. That’s why it’s important to understand your own company’s business model, so you can take a bigger picture view of how you can develop your external accounts to provide value.
How to improve your ability to sell internally
Stevens says it’s important to develop the following three skills:
- Know your company
- Create your support network
- Communicate your customer’s needs and expectations
I’d like to put my own personal spin on those three tasks.
Know your company. When you are intimately familiar with how your company makes money, and its cost structure and which products or services are most profitable, you can help them by going after the right business. At the same time, knowing your own company’s capabilities protects your external customers because you won’t be making unrealistic promises. You also need to thoroughly understand your company’s values so you can apply them to make on-the-spot, day-to-day decisions about which products to push with customers and which to de-emphasize.
Create your own support network. When your customer has a major problem or an emergency need, can you quickly get to just the right person to help, and will they listen? One of the best ways to learn the decision process is to trace every step that a customer’s order goes through from invoice to delivery and successful implementation and servicing. Who is involved at each step? What do they care about? How are they measured? What concerns and challenges do they have? What do they know and don’t know and need to know to do their jobs easier? What value can you offer them in return?
Communicate your customer’s needs and expectations. I’ve touched on this already in terms of customer advocacy. The surest way to find the right balance and make “B2B” a true 2-way street, is to always be able to answer the SO WHAT? question. What is in it for the company and the internal person you’re talking to, to help the customer? Is it profitable? Does it provide insights that can be used to improve value-added or differentiation?
Finally, these three tasks become even more important in industries that are undergoing significant change, because key account managers are will face an accelerating barrage of new situations, new choices, and new decisions, and those who can sell just as well in both directions can be facilitators, not bottlenecks, to successful adaptation.
When you’re selling a differentiated product or service, you need to think about it forward, but sell it backward.
Think forward
Think forward simply means that you figure out how it’s going to help your customer in a linear fashion going forward. First, you identify your differentiators, determine how they will impact the customer’s business operations and processes, and then calculate the business and financial benefit.
Differentiators
Brainstorm what sets you apart from competing alternatives, including status quo. But you need to take a broad view of your differentiators and consider your complete offering. Too many salespeople focus only on the actual product differentiators, which is why I often hear them bemoaning the fact that theirs is a commodity. To which I reply: there is no such thing as a commodity. If you consider things such as packaging, delivery reliability, financing, convenience, durability, consistency, contract terms, your company’s financial strength, customer service, order size, time to implement, training, you can always find at least one edge to cut into commodity thinking.
Process Impact
A differentiator is only relevant to the customer if it affects their ground level operations in some way, so the obvious question to ask about each differentiator is SO WHAT? Every business conducts operations and processes in order to deliver value to their customers, and they are always happy to consider ways to improve them. There are four general types of improvements you can make, all of which fall under the acronym POCR (I call them POCR chips): problems to be solved, opportunities to exploit, changes to adapt to, and risks to mitigate. In a sense, you’re figuring out the actual physical impact, which moves the needle of one or more important process metrics, such as time, labor, throughput, yield, quality, etc.
Business Impact
With the “So What?” figured out, the next two questions are “How much?” and “Who cares?”. In other words, what’s the business and financial impact and who benefits from those? Financial impacts broadly fall into three buckets: revenues, costs, and asset efficiency. Additional business impacts include risk reduction, strategic impact, and personal satisfaction. This is the language you need to be comfortable with when speaking at top decision making levels, and it’s especially important when you’re selling a solution that is new enough to make possible disruptive change.
Sell backward
Once you have the broad outlines of your value figured out, your selling task is to get the customer’s agreement about it. But you can’t do it in the same forward linear fashion, for two reasons. First, jaded customers tend to tune out of product-first pitches, so you’ll be on the wrong foot from the start. Second, your analysis probably has a lot of holes in it, because until you talk to a customer and understand their particular situation, you won’t have the actual numbers. By asking questions to fill in the numbers, you get the customer involved in your thinking process and end up with credible numbers.
The solution is to structure your conversation or presentation backwards. Start with a discussion of their business goals and needs, then work backwards to get agreement on the process changes they need to make to achieve those goals. Once you have that, that’s when you talk about the specific differentiator that makes it possible. The most effective structure for backwards selling is the standard story structure: situation, conflict, and resolution. If you’re delivering a presentation, it’s a great narrative structure to pull them along, or if it’s a dialogue, you can order your questions to get them to tell you the story you want them to hear.
As I’ve said before, leave the product in the car. The best possible outcome, and I know it’s possible because I’ve done it a few times myself, is when the customer agrees to do business—and you have not even talked about the product at all. That’s the beauty of thinking forward and selling backward.
