Understanding the Sales Force

Top 25 Prerequisites for Successful Sales Training and Sales Development

Dave Kurlan — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:03:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

Before an inside or outside expert can help you develop your sales force, there are at least 25 milestones that must take place or the initiative will probably fail. Development has much less to do with content, curriculum, and methodology than it does with the person, or people who will do the developing. I am not saying that content, curriculum and methodology are unimportant! They are very important. I am saying that much like everything else you do, the people have more impact on the success or failure of the initiative than the tools being used.

When I, or members of my team are involved in developing a client's salespeople and sales managers, we make certain that the following milestones take place very early on - in our very first session. We must:

Help them feel safe

Get them to believe we can help

Get them to want the help

Develop credibility

Understand their challenges

Be viewed as a resource, not a threat

Develop a relationship

Add value through the effective strategies and tactics we share

Encourage them

Challenge them

Question them

Demonstrate, through role-play, exactly how a strategy or tactic plays out

Entertain them

Engage them

Make them want more

Provide them with several perspectives

Give them assignments

Be committed to their success

Get them to commit to their success

Poll them often for their lessons learned

Make sure they understand their assessment results

Prepare sales management to coach to the training

Have systems and processes in place to support the training

Create a no excuses environment

Get them to practice.

There are many more things that take place along the way, but when these things don't take place day 1, it's an uphill climb.

Key Account Sales - More Than Just Important Accounts

Dave Kurlan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:33:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

Over the last several months I have engaged in several on line disagreements about the importance of asking questions early in the sales process. More than one sales expert has claimed that asking questions violates trust. More than one marketing expert has claimed that asking questions is offensive. My position is that unless your salespeople are asking lots of good, tough, timely questions, they won't uncover their prospects' compelling reasons to buy and buy from you instead of your competition. In addition, you won't create the urgency you need to move the opportunity forward and prevent delays, put-offs and ambivalence.

My guest on last week's edition of Meet the Sales Experts was Sales Development Expert Hal Thorsvig. We were talking about psychology, the art of asking questions and listening and he said that "when people are sharing their emotional reasons for buying they are into the highest level of rapport there is!" He added that you should "ask questions with a true sense of wonderment and curiosity".

Hal also had some interesting thoughts on Key Account Sales where, according to Hal, there is much more to it than just identifying important accounts and assigning account managers to them. He said you must have:

strategy to ward off competition
ability to deal with multiple buying influences
great control/understanding of the needs of each of those influences
ability to maintain the account (maintain should be interpreted as retain)
ability to grow the account

Are you or your salespeople struggling with ways to justify pricing that is being attacked with unrealistically low prices from your competition? Listen to the show for the great Uncle Charlie story that Hal told. Hal's story is bound to put an end to that problem!

Click here to listen to the show. Click here to contact Hal.

Comparison of Sales, Personality and Behavioral Styles Assessments

Dave Kurlan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:01:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

This is my series of articles on Sales Assessments and there are some incredible, demystifying, myth-busting, exposes in the following articles. Enjoy!

Personality Assessments for Sales - The Definitive Case Study

Exposed - Personality Assessments Disguised as Sales Assessments

Sales Assessments vs. Personality Assessments - The PHD's Strike Back

Personality Assessments - They Still Don't Get it

Sales Assessment Comparision - Objective Management Group vs. Devine

It's a Misunderstanding

Why Personality Tests Don't Predict Sales Success

A Behavioral Styles Assessment vs. Objective Management Group's Sales Assessment

Cultural Differences in a Sales Force Evaluation

Personality Tests - Are They Worth the Risk?

More Push Back From Assessments

180 and 360 Degree Assessments for the Sales Force

Stupid Choices in the Selection of Sales Assessments

Dave Kurlan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:11:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

We had a conversation with someone who was using the CPQ Assessment. The person who was providing it to them claims it is a sales assessment but it's a personality test marketed as a sales assessment. If you're not familiar with my series on this then click here. They were also told that it was predictive, especially with insurance salespeople, and that they could use the same criteria for selecting their salespeople (selling a business consulting package to CEO's) as is used for hiring life insurance salespeople.

Yeah, right.

Let's compare the life insurance (LI) sale and this business consulting package sale (BCP):

LI is a must have while the BCP is a nice to have.
People need but don't want LI while CEO's want but don't need BCP.
LI salespeople are selling a traditional why you should buy from me vs them. The BCP salesperson is selling the more difficult why should you buy at all.
The LI sale is to any consumer while the BCP sale is to CEO's
The LI salesperson is selling a guaranteed result while the best our BCP salesperson can offer is hope.
The LI salesperson is more often selling a term policy for as little as $10 per month while the BCP salesperson is selling a package for $12,000 or $1000 per month.
The LI prospect knows that LI is needed, it's only a question of who to get it from. The BCP prospect does not know and may not even agree that the consulting is needed and needs to be convinced of why it's important to have in the first place.
The LI sales cycle is a 2-call close and the BCP sales cycle is a 1-call close.
The LI salesperson is selling a commodity with a lot of competition. The BCP salesperson is selling a consulting service with little to no competition.
The LI salesperson typcially has a sales manager for coaching, motivation and accountability. The BCP salesperson will be working out of a home office with no sales manager.

Aside from the fact that 90% of the salespeople hired for life insurance sales turnover in the first year, is there anything similar about the sales challenges the LI salesperson and the BCP salesperson must face?

When you use an assessment in the sales recruiting process, it must be customizable so that criteria unique to your business, like I described above, can be factored in. That way, in addition to whether the candidate meets our criteria of a successful salesperson, we must be able to determine whether the candidate will be able to succeed in the face of the company's unique challenges.

Would you use an assessment whose claim to fame was insurance sales (think 90% turnover) to hire salespeople for a key position in your company?

10th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies that are Key to Building a Sales Culture

Dave Kurlan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:54:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

This is the 10th in my series of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That Are Key to Building a Sales Culture.

#10 THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN OBJECTION

There is nothing worse than when salespeople handle objections. Not only does it cause them to rack up reverse progress, they are usually not even handling the real problem.

Here are the things you need to know about objection handling that should cause you to stop handling them forever:

if you handle one you'll get another one
they object when you get too close (to closing time) for comfort
handling objection increases their resistance
the objection is not usually the real problem
objection handling, by nature, is a correction and people don't like being corrected
how often have you handled an objection, only to have the prospect say, "then let's do it!"? Right.

So if you can't handle objections what should you do instead?

First, it's even more important to stop getting objections all together. Sounds good, doesn't it? Just the simple act of identifying an objection will cause trouble for you. Every time your prospect says something and you say to yourself, "@#$%, a !@#$% objection", you'll tend to become emotionally involved, and then go into some kind of presentation mode (bad), and while causing an increase in your prospect's resistance, attempt to solve the wrong problem.

Do you remember the singer formerly known as Prince, who before that and after that WAS Prince? Do the same thing with objections, except skip the formally known as part. When your prospect says something that you used to identify as an objection, simply hear it as their opinion. You don't handle opinions, you engage in discussions. So if your prospect has an opinion that is different from yours, you can ask any of the following questions:

why do you feel that way?
when did you start feeling that way?
what if that wasn't the case?
how does that manifest itself?

And you would use words like:

Of course
I agree
I understand
You're right

The other thing you can do to eliminate objections is to sell the right way! See Sales Competency #4 - Get a Sales GPS.

Speaking of objections and #4, putting them in the same sentence causes me to object to just how quickly people can steal material these days. Thanks to this platform and the fact that most people aren't creative enough to come up with their own content, they just borrow it from others. Don't believe me? You just reread #4 - Get a Sales GPS, which I posted on Sunday, October 18 and the title, "Get a Sales GPS" was listed in my original article for this series on October 5. Now check out the this post to someone else's Blog, which was posted just one week later, on October 26. She claims to talk about this concept in her most recent book. So I checked. "GPS" is not in the book. Neither is "Navigation". She uses the word "navigate" four times in the entire book. Coincidence?

9th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That are Key to Building a Sales Culture

Dave Kurlan — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:20:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

This is the 9th in the series of articles on the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That are Key to Building a Sales Culture.

#9 - PRACTICE MAKES PERMANENT

I was at Dave Pelz' short game (golf) school in February of 2008 when I learned this important competency and wrote two articles about it at the time, without actually mentioning PRACTICE MAKES PERMANENT. This one made me look prophetic. This one had to do with today's lesson.

Let's take the last piece first. Permanent. Without question, the biggest challenge for me, my colleagues, associates, and the salespeople and sales managers we develop is the permanent problem. All of the stuff they have been doing, including the order in which they have been doing it, is usually wrong when we begin working with them - and permanently so. It's harder to stop doing the permanent stuff than it is to learn a more effective way. Think of an elastic band. The information from the new lesson stretches the band a lot. Then the natural tendency to do what has become permanent snaps the band back into its original shape. Solution?

Repetition - as with exercising
Let go - as with a massage
Reinforcement - as with variations of the same messages
Role playing - as in practice
Mistakes - as in golf or tennis
Coaching - as in private golf or tennis lessons
Commitment and Discipline (see this article)

Now comes the Practice part. What exactly does one practice so that excellence becomes permanent?

Strategies - only the effective ones please
Tactics - only the ones that work consistently
The difficult scenarios - not the easy stuff - like:

resistance
push-back
ambivalence
pricing
competition
incumbents
relationships
renewals
delays
complaints

How often should one practice "selling"? Most salespeople never practice - ever! Let's take a look at some of the top professional athletes in the world. Not only do they all have coaches, but their practice schedules and disciplines should embarrass you.

Tiger Woods, the best golfer of all time, practices 6.5 hours a day - after he works out!

1.5 Hours fitness
4 Hours of ball striking
2 Hours of playing
2 Hours of short game

Michael Jordan used to take from 125-300 practice shots, sometimes after the actual game!

It doesn't happen any more since the advent of batting gloves, but most of the members of baseball's Hall of Fame, as well as former major leaguers who weren't elected, used to take batting practice until and after their hands were bleeding. Pete Rose, Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, were among the known bleeders.

So if the best professional athletes in history practice more hours than they spend performing, how can salespeople complain about practicing for 30-60 minutes per day?

Practice makes permanent.

8th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That Are Key to Building a Sales Culture

Dave Kurlan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:57:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

This is the 8th in the series of articles based on the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies that are Key to Building a Sales Culture.

#8 - It's Only a Numbers Game if You Use the Right Numbers

We received a bank reconciliation statement yesterday - not the checking account statement, but the statement that justifies their monthly fees. Take a look- they charge us:

$1.00 each time we make a deposit
$50.00 for having a digital deposit device attached to my PC
$ 0.05 for each check we deposit digitally
$ 0.15 for each check we deposit
$ 0.14 for each credit card deposit to the account

I expect to be charged for checks and debits for money taken from the account but our bank has found 5 ways to charge us when we put money into the bank! Believe me, it's not about how much this account to each month, it's about their stupidity in two areas:

They are paying attention to the wrong numbers. We expect banks to charge us for using their money. We don't expect banks to charge us when they get to use our money!
They are successfully unselling the commercial customers who choose to do business with them. Airlines have figured this out too. Not only are most of them (not Southwest) charging to check bags (creating a chronic scenario where there is never enough overhead space anymore and it takes longer to board and deboard planes), but this week I was charged $50 just to get on an earlier shuttle. Instead of "happy we could accommodate you - thanks for your loyalty" I heard, "that will be an additional $50". If it was a bargain economy fare to begin with, I could understand it. But this was a $738 one-hour round-trip between Boston and Washington DC! More unselling at its ugliest.

Is selling a numbers game? Not the numbers your grandfather used to pay attention to!

Key Performance Indicators or KPI's abound for sales. However, most companies choose to pay attention to the wrong ones. They look at lagging indicators like:

revenue
margin
number of accounts
average sale
revenue by salesperson

Instead, they should be looking at leading indicators that can be used for coaching, accountability, motivation, recruiting and development, like conversion ratios:

attempts to contacts
contacts to conversations
conversations to appointments
1st meetings (suspects) to prospects
prospects to qualified
qualified to closable
closable to closed
length of sales cycle
new opportunities in existing accounts
new opportunities in new accounts
new opportunities in new markets
opportunities from inbound marketing
opportunities from advertising
opportunities from referrals
opportunities from trade shows
opportunities from cold calling

Those KPI's will tell you more about what will happen than numbers that tell you what already happened. Additionally, these statistics will tell you who is selling versus who is taking orders, managing accounts and living off their past efforts or worse, somebody else's efforts.

Where do you begin? You must start with the pipeline. Using a monthly goal, average sale, and closing percentage, you must determine, for each salesperson, the quantity - how many opportunities and how much in dollar value - must be in each of the four stages of the pipeline at any given time, in order for the goals to be achieved or surpassed Then, staging the actual opportunities using the criteria established for each stage, compare what is necessary for each stage to what is actually in each stage. You'll be shocked - frightened and angry - when you do this comparison. Then, you must determine what each salesperson must do - each day - to fill the first stage of the pipeline with the number and value of opportunities required each month.

If you pay attention to the right numbers, the game is on and you guarantee your sales force repeated wins each month. Look at the wrong numbers and it's game over. You lose again.

7th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies that are Key to Building a Sales Culture

Dave Kurlan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:36:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

Everyone likes options, right? So here are three options:

I'll be the guest on Hubspot TV on this Friday's show which airs at 4PM ET. You can watch it live from your desktop.
Speaking of guests, Ed Kleinman was my guest on this week's edition of Meet the Sales Experts. Listen to the the show (we spent a lot of time talking about John Lennon). Ed, who is a well-respected coach to sales experts, provided an excellent demonstration of what happens when great salespeople, who do it naturally, are promoted to sales managers, and aren't able to articulate how they do what they do.
Continue to read this article, the 7th in my series on the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies that are Key to Building a Sales Culture.

They aren't really options because you may do all three whereas with options, you can usually choose only one.

Competency #7 - Present No Options

Salespeople love to present options. It makes them feel like they have more chances to win the business. It's such a popular approach that it's one of the few parts of the sales process that is universally accepted and named. You know it as Good, Better and Best. Companies actually have alignment on Good, Better and Best, sometimes using it in their retail stores and catalogs to provide category options. How many times have salespeople presented you with 3 options? Just last week, I was presented with 3 options at the Lexus Dealer where I got my LS460.

So, what happens when you present 3 options to your prospects and customers? Do they think to themselves, "Wow, isn't this great? - I have options"?

To understand what happens with options we need to differentiate between salespeople who sell the right way and those who don't.

Salespeople who don't sell the right way typically spend most of their time presenting, talking about capabilities, giving demonstrations, presentations, and tours, creating proposals, giving quotes, and explaining features and benefits. They do it almost from the beginning of the sales call, meeting or cycle. The typical reaction of a prospect that is provided with 3 options, after being presented to in this way is, "I'm confused, I don't know what I need, I don't even know if I need this at all, at least right now, so I need time to figure this all out and better understand my choices." That's right - your salespeople either get a "think it over", a "no" or a put-off. As you can guess, when it was time for me to sign the paperwork last week, I was presented with my 3 options. I was in a hurry, and I'm not smart enough and certainly wasn't focused enough to process everything I heard in a two-minute presentation of the 3 options. As a result, I was not able to decide what was best for me at that moment. So, unable to decide, I said, "None of the above", and simply drove my new car home.

Salespeople who do sell the right way spend time doing what I talked about in Sales Competency #6 - they slow down to speed up. They build a strong relationship, demonstrate their expertise and create a sense of trust and credibility. They ask lots of good, tough, timely questions and learn about the issues and problems they can solve. If they continue to work their way through the sales process by asking questions, stimulating productive conversation, and thoroughly qualifying their prospects, there can be only a single, ideal solution that is both needs and cost appropriate. If salespeople who sell the right way present 3 options at closing time, not only would they turn an easy decision into a "think it over", they will have contradicted the notion that they are experts. If your salesperson is an expert, and fully understands his prospect's issues, problems and finances, yet ignores all of the data points collected and presents options instead, then what kind of expert could he really be? Only one of those options could possibly address and solve the issues and problems at the right price point. So it must be another salesperson who doesn't listen to his prospects!

Directors Want Better Boards - and Rightly So!

Dave Kurlan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:46:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

I'm off topic a little bit for this Blog, but not off topic for the work we do in companies each day.

Frederic' pointed me to the October 19 edition of Harvard's Daily Stat - "Directors Want Better Boards". One of the quotes from this article is, Boards should view the current crisis as an opportunity to review the way they function. A healthy self-assessment can go a long way toward improving a company's performance.

It's that self-assessment phrase that makes this post only slightly off topic.

One of the many issues we identify is when Board Chairs and CEO's take the lead in areas in which they don't have the strengths or skills to justify taking the lead. They often discount the contributions, thoughts and ideas of directors or executives who are stronger than they are in that area. As a result, the company is not always choosing the best strategies and ideas, or having the right discussions, asking the right questions, or making the right decisions at the right times.

Another issue we identify is where the board or executive team doesn't have anyone who is particularly strong in an area. These voids need to be filled, either from inside or outside, in order for the board or team to function at its fullest capabilities.

These issues are examples of board and team limitations which, in normal times, only cause delays and missteps. But in these trying times, these limitations can be fatal.

Objective Management Group has a unique, kick-ass assessment that we conceived, developed and refined specifically for boards and executive teams of organizations. There are even versions for profit and non-profit boards and they identify the limitations discussed above and many more like them. This powerful, insightful assessment will get boards and executive teams firing on all 8 cylinders very quickly.

If you would like to learn whether our Key Management Dynamics Assessment can help your Executive Team or Board, simply send me an email. Please include your zip code.

6th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That are Key to Building a Sales Culture

Dave Kurlan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:24:00 GMT

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan

This is the 6th is my series of articles on the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That Are Key to Building a Sales Culture.

SLOW DOWN TO SPEED UP

Your salespeople can't wait to do the things at which they are:

most competent
most comfortable
having the most fun
in control
in the spot light

The problem with all of that is with what they do:

present
demo
tell your story
provide capabilities
give references
do proposals
give quotes
use company resources

and when they do it:

as soon as they can!

When your salespeople do what they are most comfortable with and most adept at, and they do it early in the sales cycle, they fail to develop any urgency for action and the result is an opportunity that doesn't gain traction, move, or close.

In the process I introduced in Baseline Selling, all of the above activity would take place between 3rd Base and Home Plate, but your salespeople are doing it between 1st Base and 2nd Base.

So what should they be doing between 1st and 2nd Bases?

slow down
ask more questions than anyone else
ask better questions than anyone else
ask tougher questions than anyone else
listen
care
identify problems they can solve
develop a relationship
demonstrate their expertise (through questions, not presenting)
develop trust
slow down some more
when they think they've asked enough questions, continue asking questions

The slower they go between 1st and 2nd Base, the more quickly the sales cycle will flow. If you want to shorten their sales cycle, get them to slow down!