Sales conversations always start with the right intent in mind (at least in my happy place they do)—figure out the problem, put a recommendation together, connect the dots so that my prospect believes in the value I will bring to the situation. Somewhere in that stream of events it seems that things go awry.

Our focus and intent goes away from helping our prospect. Suddenly, we’re more concerned about being right—concerned about beating the competition—concerned about getting our way—concerned about looking good to everyone BUT the prospect.

Who loses in this situation? Is it you, the competition, the opposing viewpoint? No. It’s the person that had the problem to begin with. When we lose our intent on fixing problems and instead focus on being right, the person we set out to help doesn’t get the best of us.

Remember what you’re “fighting” for. If you’re fighting to “get,” the majority of the time you’ll lose.

One of the things they have to be better at is “creating influence” within their niche. In other words, “getting a voice.” Yet, one thing that stops us all from taking that risk of being a thought leader is our “fear of of opinion.”

The Time For Innovation Is When Everyone’s Afraid But…

is exactly the time when you must innovate and step out to give voice to your ideas. It’s the paradox…the time I need to speak up is the time I feel afraid (so most don’t).

One answer is detachment. That’s the propensity you have to be unattached to the outcome or results.”

In other words, ‘put your ideas out there’ and care not whether anyone likes them or adopts them. Now, you must communicate those ideas in a way that people can consume them–but you can’t control whether someone falls in love with them or not.

Push into the fear–the very thing we are afraid of is the thing we should act into. If you’re afraid of putting forth your ideas, then that is probably the very thing you should work on today.

But I often wonder what those conversations sound like in the customer’s strategy room.  It’s probably not, How do we get a deal? How do we get the Smith Group to do business with us? How do we get the value that the Smith Group has in our organization?  Their strategy rooms are probably filled with discussions about how to reduce cost, how to be better operationally, how to achieve and execute goals, etc.

So my question is, how are you inserting your conversation in their strategy room?  And the answer is, you probably aren’t. And you’re not because you don’t have solutions to the problem they’re talking about. It’s just you’ve never thought about your solutions in the context of what they’ve discussed in their strategy sessions.

Case and Point

We have a client in Arizona who is an electrical contractor.  They know that the conversations going on inside the General Contractor’s Office are:
•    How do we get the job done faster?
•    How do we reduce our cost?
•    How to improve safety of the jobs?
•    How do we satisfy our customer so that they hire us for more business?

So across town, my client needs to be having those exact conversations in their strategy session, and then figuring out a way to insert themselves in the customer’s room.  One way we recommended, and they’ve had success at, is writing a series of articles about what we know to be the general contractor’s biggest problems on the job.  In this case it was safety. So my client wrote a special white paper/report on the 10 Most Common Accidents on a general job site and how to prevent them, and they did a calculation on what a 10% decrease in job time loss equated to in the bottom line.

You don’t think that was important to the customer strategy?

Then they proceeded to print the article and send it to a couple dozen contractors who they knew were having those problems. Now when the contractor passes that out inside their next strategy session, my contractor’s name will be on that material and will be seen as a valued resource to them accomplishing their strategies, not as a vendor who sells products.

So what are you doing to get inside your customer’s strategy room?  It’s not all that hard as long as you think about what problems you solve in doing what you do, and how the solving of those problems leads to the customer discussion of, How do we accomplish our goals? How do we meet our customer demands? How do we grow our business?  If you can do that, you now have inserted yourself into their dialogue, and everyone wins.

This event happened November, 2009.

The essence of this program is to change how you think about selling.

]]> http://www.leadershipinstituteofindianapolis.com/rewire-the-sales-mind/feed/ 0 http://www.leadershipinstituteofindianapolis.com/5-tips-for-sales-managers/ http://www.leadershipinstituteofindianapolis.com/5-tips-for-sales-managers/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:17:34 +0000 Terry Sarbinoff http://gator1037.hostgator.com/~caskey11/?p=1814 Every sales manager knows how difficult it is to lead, manage and motivate people. But did you know that many times you’re looking in the wrong place for answers? You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?

Here’s the problem: You’re managing several people…