Recently, I was working with a foreign company that wanted to launch their effort in the US. The effort is not going well. Not because their product isn’t good enough for the US. In fact, it’s probably the most comprehensive product on the market. It’s not because they don’t understand the value of the US market. In fact, they are very clear that if they have any chance of future success, it will be in the US and selling to US companies.

The reason they are failing and will ultimately fail, is that they are not committed to the effort. They are taking half-measures.

I have successfully brought foreign companies to the US and launched their efforts, but the companies that succeeded understood that they needed to make a real commitment to the effort. You can’t stick a salesperson in the US and then think that is all you need. You can’t sign up partners and not support them. Yet, this is exactly what this company is doing.

They don’t have local storage, local customer success teams, local sales support, local marketing, or even local thinking about the outreach effort. They are taking half-measures to try to short-cut the sales effort in the US, but it won’t work.

The worst part is they have a strong desire to fall back to the comfortable, and the easy – when launching an effort like this will not be comfortable… it will not be easy. Selling into a new market takes time and money and patience.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this company will figure it out before they waste a lot of money because ironically, they are not spending enough to make this work.

This tactic proves absolutely NOTHING about the candidate and I have no idea why anyone uses this tactic. In fact, it speaks more to the immaturity of the interviewer than it does to the talent of the candidate.

This candidate will have to base their ENTIRE pitch on your marketing materials, website, etc. and do so without any context or training. In addition, a great sales rep will research your company and ask questions and have prepped how the product could be used in your company. There is no opportunity for this. If your website and your marketing materials are SO good at describing the product and making the sale, then the question I have is why do you need this sales person?

You are asking the rep to come to a sales call UNPREPARED, without training, and without having done any research. You are just watching them squirm and struggle and judging them on this.

Again… this says NOTHING about whether or not they will be able to succeed.

Don’t ask them to sell you THEIR product. Don’t ask them to sell you a pencil. Don’t engage in role-play at all. It will not get you any closer to figuring out if they will be successful.

Actually have a conversation with the prospect. See how they engage in real conversation. How they talk about past wins and past losses. How they think about pipeline creation, and follow-up.

It is your job to train them on your product. And most likely, your marketing materials don’t tell the story.

I’ve hired dozens and dozens of successful sales reps and I’ve NEVER asked them to sell me my product BEFORE they were hired.

https://bdstratpartners.com/best-questions-to-ask-a-sales-candidate/

The best sales people for the past few centuries have known that in order to sell, you need to build a brand, build a rapport, become a trusted quantity, and all of those things that somehow have become some sort of magic revelation in “social selling”.

Twenty-five years ago, when I started selling, I was on the bleeding edge of wireless technology.   I identified people who I would love to sell to, and I started MAILING and then emailing information about the rising wireless industry trends, and new innovations, and what my company was doing.  I created a name for myself, and my company grew.  I found these people by reading magazines in the industries I was targeting (LTL Trucking, Energy, Logistics, and more).  I found the names, researched the titles, and then started my selling technique.  I watched for “trigger events” by reading the Wall Street Journal and Red Herring.  I networked by going to events, and lectures, and calling on university contacts and more.

I did not invent this method of building a brand/following/sales strategy.  I did this because I saw what successful salespeople did.  I mimicked what they did.

Suddenly, in the 21st century we got to a place where no one picks up the phone, and so called “social tools” make us less social.  And now we talk about “social selling” as is if it is a new technique – but its not.

We need to stop calling this “social selling” and call it “selling” because when we try to put it in a new box, it makes people think that they can’t learn from old techniques that have worked – and it puts WAY too much emphasis on the tools to do the work. I am selling, successfully, the way I always have – I just use new tools.  I dont read Red Herring, I look at Crunchbase.  I don’t read the Wall Street Journal, I look at a dozen news sites online.  And I have lots of tools to automate a bunch of the work.

But… none of the tools takes the place of the human interaction that actually gets the sale done, and too many people focused on social selling are expecting tools to do most of the hard work – when in fact, all that has really happened is that a lot of the busy work has been removed from you.   You can set up alerts and send emails with little to no effort.  But then you need to actually sell – the same way its always been done – human interaction.

Indeed, the sales process has changed with a more educated buyer, and with a lot of the sales process completed before you get on the call – so it means the busy work that used to be done is now replaced with needing to be just as educated, if not more, educated that the prospects.  And it means you need to have more prospects, and more data, and deal with their data overload – so indeed much about the sales process is different than before – but its not the parts that social selling claims to have changed.

Once you, as a seller, realize, that social selling is just a set of tools that helps you get to the person in a more automated fashion, you will realize that selling is as it always was:  finding people, explaining and identifying pain, showing how to fix that pain, and getting them to agree to have you fix that pain.   That part has not changed.

I’ve written before about what types of things you should look for in a candidate, such as expensive hobbies, but one thing that I’ve never written about is the value of hiring people you already know.  Interestingly, I’ve been known to continue to blast the idea of a large rolodex when it comes to prospects for customers, but I actually feel the exact opposite when it comes to prospects for potential hires.  The value of knowing your candidate is simply the single best barometer for success in a role in sales.

Given the choice between a sales candidate you know, and a sales candidate you source over the internet, you should, in most situations, select the candidate you know.  Unless of course, through knowing them, you know that they cannot do the job.  For example, if you sell enterprise items, and you know they can’t traverse an organization and are only good at transactional sales.  But, if you know that they are honest, hard-working, coachable, and have the ability to close, then you should not think twice about hiring them – and you should not second guess yourself over a candidate that has a pretty resume or a nice interview.

One of the best tests for a great VP of Sales is asking them who they would pull over into your organization.   If they do not have an answer, be leery of their leadership.   Most if not all of the best sales leaders know a few killer reps they will pull with them when they join a new place.  Why?  Because they know that their key to success is having people they know and trust on their team.  Granted, a VP may not be able to always pull their best people to your organization, but they should at least know a few they would WANT on their team. These VPs know that they can train a person of your product, sales methodology, pitch, pricing, etc way faster than they can teach another rep how to sell.

While first degree connections are ideal, second degree referrals matter as well, and you should value these introductions.   Many of my best candidates have come thru mentors, and other sales organizations to which I am connected.  You should be able to really probe to find out where the candidates will shine and where they wont.

This is NOT to say that you should not hire people you just meet.  By default, MOST of your hires will be people you have just met, but you should be very aware that sales people are masters of making you feel good about a conversation, but that does not mean that they are great closers.  (the classic good vs great argument that I speak about) .  I’ve hired enough people that look good on paper, and do great in the interview, but just can’t seem to get deals over the finish line, or do not follow the playbook, or are not good at time management, or challenge authority, etc.  There are SO many reasons why a sales person/sales manager can’t perform, and it takes a while to uncover these items.  That is why when you have the opportunity to hire someone you trust, you need to seize the opportunity.

When a sales hire is wrong, it is VERY costly.  Bad sales hires can burn through leads, existing customers, time, good will, in addition to lots of cash.  This is why hiring for sales people and leaders is so important.  If you have the chance to hire someone you have a built-in trust for and with and you believe they can sell your product, you should never hesitate to hire them.

Ten years ago, I was running the Northeast for a mobile marketing firm, and she was planning the mobile strategy for a Fortune 100 financial services firm.  By being persistent, I was able to secure a meeting with her, and pitch my company’s product.  I had several meetings with her over the next several weeks, and I was consistent and persistent.  At the end of the day, she did not buy the product.  It was not a perfect match for what they wanted, so we connected on LinkedIn and we went our separate ways.

As I sat down with her yesterday, she proceeded to remind me of this story and how my interaction with her has affected her career in many ways.  In fact, she has said that she has modeled much of how she has conducted dealing with customers and prospects after my interaction.

I was quite honored to hear this and I post this here NOT to simply brag about the affect that I’ve had on this person, but to re-iterate just exactly how important it is to conduct yourself as a representative of sales.  As readers of this blog know, my “swingers” story is one that I use to illustrate how acting badly can affect your career.  In this case, it shows how doing the RIGHT thing can affect your career – even many years later.  The conversation was quite humbling because, as this was early in my career, I hadn’t fully formed my style and was just doing what felt right to me – even if it upset my superiors and affected my own compensation.

But I know I did the right thing because ten years later, my interaction with her still resonated in her brain for several reasons:

1. I was able to break into a large company with relative ease thru persistent, convincing cold calling.
2. I was (in her words) “persistent but not pushy or salesy” as we went thru the process.
3. I respected that I only needed to sell her what she needed and didn’t try to change her need to fit my product
4. I respected her as a business person and not a “target”

To be clear… she was one of my key prospect/targets, and I know the CEO of the company that I was working for was not happy that I did not close the deal.  But as I have written about many times before, you should always be selling value to your prospects – and only if you have something of value for them.  Our company did NOT have the perfect solution for them, and while I could have force-fed something to them, they would not have been happy with the result.

Ten years later, this woman has an opportunity for us to work together, and we will likely work together. I fully expect that in our new relationship, I will make significantly more money than the commission I would have made on the small “likely to make the customer unhappy” project ten years ago.

So, as you think about reasons why you should sell value, remember that its a LONG career and people are fluid (which is why Rolodex’s matter less), so do the right thing and success will follow.

I’m very much in favor of the trend to social tools.  Social tools has given tremendous power to sales people.  LinkedIn, Jigsaw, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, etc.  are all great ways to research, network and get yourself into a company in ways that were not possible 20 years ago.   However, there is this trend in younger generation people on the over-reliance on these tools to get the job done.    Its true that many younger people will meet their spouses on-line, and will keep in touch with people on-line, and will continue to interact on-line, but deals get done when people talk to people.

The best salespeople that I have dealt with aren’t afraid to pick up the phone and talk to people – and are especially not afraid to get in front of people.  When I started in sales, trying to get a sale over email was frowned upon, yet today I meet salespeople who don’t leave email / twitter / facebook to try and get 90% of the way to a sale.  Its this over-reliance on the tools that holds them back.

I see start-up after start-up thinking that the magic of “being viral” and the social glue will propel them in sales.  These Sales people and start-up founders think that somehow the magic of the social internet will make their company profitable.  But far fewer companies succeed in this way.  Sales people need to reach out and connect to get the product sold – and cannot be afraid to do so.   The more successful the salesperson, the more likely that person is out talking to people.

In order to crush sales, you need to be a social being.  And that does NOT mean that you have 600 friends on Facebook, 10,000 followers on twitter, and 800 connections on LinkedIn.  It means that you are actually connecting with people one on one.  That device in your hand is a phone – and it has voice capabilities – so use them.  Its very likely that you will see your sales explode.

No.. I’m not referring to actually spewing your chewed Shakeshack burger onto your customer – but spewing WAY too much information.

The easiest thing to do in a sales call is to just talk and talk and talk.  Yet – this rarely leads to a sale.  When you are more focused on getting all of your points out, and less on what the customer wants to hear – you are essentially losing lots of opportunities to learn what the customer needs – and responding to that need.

One of my least favorite phrases that a salesperson says is, “Thats a great question and I’m going to answer that later in my presentation…”  This is the sign of a salesperson more concerned about getting all 27 of his points out rather than identifying the needs of THIS customer.  Sales meetings should be ways of identifying how and whether you can solve a problem that they have.  Your product may have hundreds of great things in it – but there may be one small feature which solves such a large pain that its enough to make the sale – and the rest is gravy.  You need to route out and identify that pain and then focus on that feature and identify how to solve that problem.  When the customer asks something, rather than tell them you will tell them about it later – take that opportunity to learn about why they are asking that question and find the problem they are trying to figure out if you solve.

Yes… this will derail your presentation – but you must know your product well enough to allow the customer to take you in any direction they want.  After all, the meeting is about THEM not you.  Take every opportunity to listen to them and close your mouth.  Avoid vomiting.

Another time when salespeople vomit is answering a question.  For example, “Does your product work internationally?”  Wow!  For a vomiter, this is a great chance to spew out 10 minutes on how great the product is internationally.  Whats the right answer?  “Why is that important to you?”  And then sit and learn some more.

To be clear, I do not mean to make light of all of the tragedy in the world relative to land mines, but it is a term that describes a particular sales tactic well.

Land mines, in sales-speak, are tactics that make sure that when you are not around, your sales pitch will resonate and continue to work for you after you are gone.

Please remember me always

The first type of land mine that you should be using is the one you leave after they have said no or not now.  You will be using words to set a land mine that will sit in the back of the prospects brain and then <boom>  go off at just the right time and trigger a call to you.

For example, I did some selling for an e-commerce company a few years ago, and we knew that in that industry, Black Friday & Cyber Monday, was a very, very critical initiative for all of the companies.  It was so important that most of the year, there was still thought around what and how the Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales would affect the rest of the year.  Therefore, whenever I got a final “no” from clients, I would leave them with the phrase, “I completely understand and appreciate your time.  I will let you know that our current customers have had a lot of success using our technology to significantly improve their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.  And many of those customers benefitted by having our technology in place long before.  So, as you think about your November plans, don’t hesitate to call me, and I’d be happy to talk about whether we can be helpful or not helpful based on those plans.”

<CLICK>

The land mine was set.

What very often happened, was 1 to 3 months later, my phone would ring or I would get an email requesting another meeting.  WITHOUT my prompting.

Why?  In most cases, my prospect sat down in a meeting with a superior and talked about the current strategy.   And more often then not, this person was asked about their Cyber Monday strategy, and/or if they were doing absolutely everything they needed to do and/or if they had exhausted all possible ways to make Cyber Monday successful.

<BOOM>  

The minute that superior made those comments, my voice was in their head saying “I can help you with your Cyber Monday plans… I have had success in the past.”

By making sure I left with my critical pain point firmly placed in their heads, I knew that I could rely on this land mine to do the work when I was gone.

What is the one major problem that you solve that you have a reasonable expectation that your prospect’s boss will ask about needing a solution later on?  If you don’t have one, then you should certainly think of one, because not only is that the perfect land mine, but its a perfect way to grease the close.

Beware all those who follow me!

The second type of land mine is one you place for competitors.  In order to properly place this type of land mine, you must truly understand your unique advantage over the competition and how you can use that information.

If you know that you are part of a bake-off, or even if you aren’t sure, you can place land mines that will give your prospect pause when he or she hears from that competitor or does the research into your competitors.  What I typically do, is to treat my unique advantage as a pure given of all great products which, rather than bashing your competition, gives you a way to discredit their approach without mentioning them – and instead letting them blow themselves up.

For example, the first company I founded was a dispatch and vehicle location software firm, and what made us very unique was that our software was very device and network agnostic which meant that customers had a lot of flexibility – which we considered very important at the time because wireless networks were in their infancy and you couldn’t rely on a single network easily across your entire fleet.  So, whenever I went into prospects, my pitch always included some words like this, “Since coverage is so spotty everywhere and the market for wireless providers is so fluid, you will see that the best products in the market will support all the major networks and also a variety of devices so that you have flexibility in a system that you will likely need to have last a decade.”  I knew that none of my competitors had the beadth of network and device coverage that we had, and I also knew that their pitch was that having tight integration with a single network and device gave you the best experience.”

I, however, placed a land mine that said, “My flexibility will give your system longevity”

<CLICK>

When my competitors walked in, they had to answer the barrage of questions about, “What happens if that device manufacturer goes belly up?”  “What happens if that network goes away or is acquired?” “How do I make sure your system will still be able to support me in 6-10 years.”

 <BOOM>  

The land mine that I set for my competitors allowed THEM to have to deal with the aftermath of doubt I placed in them.  Since I told them the best systems all did what I did, then they immediately were not one of the best systems.  They had to explain why they didn’t support something so basic to a great system.

What is the one unique advantage that you have, that you HONESTLY believe that every system should have?  Make that a given.  Rather than talk about it as if you are unique in delivering that – treat this as if its should be a given in every great system  and let your competition explain why it doesn’t matter.  You are immediately elevated, and you will find that more deals will close.

Set those land mines!

What land mines are you setting that let a deal work for you when you are not around?

But, if I ever send a blast email, it is clear that it is a blast email.  I personally subscribe to the notion that you should be doing your homework and researching companies to make sure that you are responding in a way that matters to the prospects.  If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be spending so much time on FunnelFire.

Last week, I received a request for a meeting, and I was very busy, and I did not respond.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, because I was honestly busy and trying to ensure a successful launch of a major partnership for FunnelFire.  Second, because it was very clear that it was a very bland and generic request for a meeting and not directed at all to me.  The email did not show any understanding or appreciation for my business.  It had no knowledge of where my company was at, or how we were going to market.  All of this information is readily available, and had this sales rep been using FunnelFire – available to him in a matter of seconds.

I still planned to respond because, as I said, I believe in sales karma, and then his follow-up email came thru.

OK… so the original email was clearly a blanket email that pretended to be a custom email, but I was willing to let this go. However, the follow-up email is SO clearly a cut and paste, that I’m not going to respond NOR will I grant him a meeting.  (I do plan to respond with a link to this blog post but that is it.).  What makes it obvious?  The fonts that he used to insert my name and company name into the email are different from the rest of the email.  This action makes it 100% clear that this person doesn’t really care about MY business nor does he care about taking 5 minutes to learn if I’m even a candidate for his product.  And to make matters worse… the product he is trying to sell is about customer success!  How does he think I will believe he knows ANYTHING about customer success when he has proven to me that he is sloppy in his communication with prospects?

This sales rep has lost any chance of doing business with me because he was sloppy.  How many of your efforts are being lost because of being sloppy or lazy?  If you want your prospects to pay attention, don’t PRETEND to care about their company and how you solve their pain.  ACTUALLY care.  Take the time to research them, and their companies problems, and where they are in the life of their company and more.  Prospects are 5X more likely to talk to you when you have insights into their company.  Take the time to do the research.  Fill the email or call with information that helps them understand that you understand the value that you will provide for them.

Fonts matter.