Football provides a wonderful metaphor for sales.

Whether the team you follow was in the Super Bowl last night, whether you are a New York Giants fan, or whether you are a Patriots fan, there are lessons about competing and winning that easily apply to sales.

Both Teams Were Packed with Talent

Both of the teams that make it to the big game are packed with talent. Each side has exceptional players on offense, defense, and special teams.

Like sales organizations, football teams have budget, and they have a limited number of positions that they are allowed to fill. Unlike many of us in sales organizations, football teams focus a great deal of their effort and energy in acquiring the best talent they can afford. They invest the rest of their energy in training and developing their people, and rehearsing the plays that they believe that will allow them to win.

You don’t make it to the big game without having the talent, without developing that talent, and without continually rehearsing their game plan.

We in sales could learn a lot from this model. We could spend more time working on identifying, recruiting, and hiring the right talent. And we could absolutely learn about training, development, and rehearsing our plays. Instead, we are so busy working that we spend too little time working on improving our only assets.

Both Teams Can Win

The spread on last night’s game was 3.5 points. Both teams were capable of winning, and no one would have been surprised had the outcome been different.

For those of us in sales, we often find ourselves up against competitors that have an ability to win that is equal—or greater—than our own. Teams that play at the highest level don’t underestimate their competitors. They know that they have the ability to win, and they know that they are going to have to bring their A-game and leave everything on the field if they are to win.

Both Teams Know How the Other Team Competes

Both teams have studied the other team’s films. They have watched all of their games, they have studied them, and they know how they are likely to compete.

There are no secrets. They understand the other team’s strategy, and they adjust their own strategy to take advantage of the weaknesses they perceive in their opponent’s strategy.

Occasionally a team can run a trick play and succeed, but no team counts on winning by running novelty plays. They play their game. We should do the same.

Winning Means Executing Your Game Plan, Making Fewer Mistakes, and Putting Up Points

To win the big game, both teams rely on executing their game plan and preventing their competitor from executing theirs. Both teams run the plays that they have developed, studied, and run over and over again throughout the season.

Executing these plays well and preventing your competitor from disrupting your strategy leads to victory. Failing to execute leads to a loss. Mental errors, missing your block, missing your tackle, or dropping the ball that hits you in the hands all lead to loss.

It’s often the team that makes the fewest mistakes that wins the game.

The team that wins puts up more points than their competitor. When they have opportunities, they capitalize on those opportunities. They keep moving the chains and, when they are in the red zone, they score.

Execute your game plan. Minimize your mistakes by rehearsing until what you do is second nature. And capitalize on the opportunities that  present themselves. This is how you win the big game in sales.

Questions

How much of a role does talent play in competing and winning?

How much does talent count for in your ability to execute your strategy?

Do you compete as if your competitor is just as likely to win as you are? How does this help you compete?

Do you know how your competitors compete and win? Do you know that they know how you intend to compete?

Can you execute on your game plan, minimize your mistakes, and capitalize on opportunities? Can you put points up when you are in the red zone?

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As a native of Columbus, Ohio, I have been fascinated by the stories about The Ohio State Buckeye’s new head coach, Urban Meyer, and his recruiting efforts. Other Big Ten coaches are critical of Meyer for recruiting players that had already made verbal commitments to other schools. The complaining coaches suggest that there is a longstanding gentlemen’s agreement forbidding the practice of recruiting players that have already made a verbal commitment. He is also accused–or credited–for bringing this practice to the SEC (an SEC that continues to dominate the BCS).

Meyer is also freeing up limited scholarships by suggesting that some players would be better off playing for another school and for suggesting that he doesn’t have a place for them in his program. It is also rumored that the strength-training regime is so physically and emotionally grueling that it is designed to eliminate players that don’t play with heart, that aren’t going to leave everything on the playing field.

All of these practices have lessons for sales organizations and salespeople.

The War for Talent

There is an ongoing war for talent.

The sales organizations that reach their goals are the sales organizations with the talent to execute on their strategy.

The best strategy without the talent to execute it will fail. A poor strategy with exceptional talent and leadership can often overcome a poor strategy, and talented people often compete above their weight class. It’s tough to beat a sales organization where the entire company is engaged and aligned around executing their sales strategies.

You must have the right people on your sales team in order to execute on your strategy. Because this is true, sales organizations are engaged in a war for talent. You may not want to be involved in a war for talent, and you may not be interested in the war for talent, but the war for talent is interested in you.

There are some who believe that the goal is to build a system and a process that allows mediocre salespeople to win. They believe that with the right process, the right systems, anyone can be taught to execute the process, to create opportunities, and to win these opportunities. This isn’t true. Selling well is more difficult now than ever.

To build a championship team, you need to identify and acquire the talent you need, or you need to build that talent. It is people that execute your strategy, and it is your people that make a difference for your dream clients.

What Meyer is doing is acquiring the talent he needs to execute and win. To compete and win in your space, you need to do the same.

A Weeding Out and Self-Selecting Out

Not everyone is going to want to play the game that you play. Not everyone is going to want to compete the way you need to compete to win. There may be salespeople on your team who simply aren’t going to have a place in your strategy. If you are a salesperson, the game your sales organization wants to play may not fit you. I have seen salespeople that are exceptionally good salespeople in one sales organization fail miserably in another, and I have seen the opposite also be true. Both the salesperson and the sales organization may be more successful—and happier—apart from one another.

As a sales leader, you need to make sure you have the right people on your team to compete and win. As a salesperson, you need to be on the right team to compete and win. For the sales leader, there are only so many places on the org chart, and you need to fill them with the best talent you can find. As a salesperson, you need to work somewhere that you can do meaningful work and where you can make a real contribution.

This weeding out is a two way street. You may need to help a salesperson into a new role where they can succeed, and a salesperson has every right to self-select out of a position that doesn’t allow them to do meaningful work and succeed.

A Few Words About Heart

I don’t believe there has ever been a more challenging time for salespeople. But this being true also makes this a time of tremendous opportunity for salespeople that are willing to play full out, for those that are willing to do the heavy lifting it takes to develop themselves as value creators.

The sales organizations and salespeople that succeed are going to have to bring their A-game, and they are going to have to play with head, heart, and guts. Playing with anything less isn’t going to do it. It’s too tough, it’s too competitive, and your competitors are going to do everything they can to buy and to build the talent they need to win.

If you have to make a decision as to who belongs on your team, salespeople that play with heart count for a lot. You can build salespeople that play with heart over time.

Questions

Can you execute your strategy without the right talent?

Do you have the ability to build the talent that you need?

Do you have salespeople sitting in spots that are wrong for your strategy? As a salesperson, are you in a role that allows you to play to your strengths?

Why does selling require more from salespeople and sales organizations now? Why does talent count for more now?

How much does playing with heart count for in sales now?

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I am at the National Speaker’s Association conference in Dallas, Texas. Yesterday I had a chance to meet the legendary Brian Tracy, someone whose work I have admired for a long time. Today, in one of the sessions, I met Brendon Burchard. Both of these gentlemen, as well as Shep Hyken (who I met on a plane a few months ago), were sitting in the same workshop that I chose to attend. My friend, Mark Hunter, went to the workshop two rooms down from the workshop that I attended.

What’s interesting about this?

All of these gentlemen are at the top of their game. They know enough to have the careers that they have, and yet, here they are sitting in workshops learning even more. You might wonder why.

The very best people at any game keep the beginner’s mind.

They Believe There Is More to Learn

The most successful people in any endeavor believe that there is more to learn. They never stop learning.

The masters have conquered the fundamentals, and then they work to develop new distinctions that allow them to produce even greater results. New ideas allow them to continue to make these distinctions. New ideas provide them with a new way of looking at what they do and how they do it, and to make adjustments that allow them to become even more effective.

They keep the beginner’s mind, continuously learning more.

They Believe They Need to Know What’s New

The masters never rest on their laurels. They know that as things change, there are new ideas and new discoveries. There are new methods for producing results, and there are new tools and technologies.

One of the reasons that successful people can sustain their performance over long periods of time is that continually work to discover what’s new and how they might use it.

They look at new ideas as a beginner, never judging it, never being critical. Instead, they are open to what’s new.

They Believe That They Can Improve

For my money, this is the root of the mindset of successful people. The most successful people may be pleased with their performance, but they are never satisfied. They believe that there is more that that can learn. They believe that there is more that they can do.

And, they believe that they can improve their performance. They believe they are responsible for improving their performance. The proof that this what they believe is that you see them continually improving their game, building even greater success on their earlier successes.

They Believe They Can Learn from Others

The best teachers are the best students.

Many of the people attending this conference could be teaching a workshop of their own (and many have). They are here because they believe that they can—and will—learn from others. They want to hear other people’s ideas and opinions. They are open to taking in new information, even when it conflicts with what they believe they already know. And more importantly, even when it conflicts with what has already made them successful.

They are masters because they are willing to learn from others.

Questions

Do you have the beginner’s mind?

What should you be learning?

What new ideas are you studying and applying to your work?

In what areas should you still be improving?

From who you could you be learning?

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There is a reason that an outside coach can often be more effective than a sales manager that coaches their sales team. The reason that an external coach can be more effective is that the external coach is a stakeholder in a different set of outcomes.

What a Coaching Sales Manager Wants

The coaching sales manager needs his salespeople to make their number. She needs them to produce the results for which she is being held accountable. It’s easy to focus all of your coaching efforts on making the number when your quota as a sales manager is the sum total of your team’s individual quotas. That makes it easy to view everything you do through the lens that is making the number.

But being tied to the outcome only of making the number, coaching less effective. It makes it easy to focus always on pipeline coaching, opportunity coaching, and deal strategy—all of which are critically important. But focusing only in these areas misses one of the primary outcomes of coaching: the salesperson’s personal and professional growth.

Coaching is about the growth that helps the salesperson to make their number.

The Benefit of Being Divorced from the Number

An external coach has the great benefit of being divorced from the outcome of making the number. Instead of coaching only to the numbers, the external sales coach can more easily and more naturally focus on the development of the salesperson, personally and professionally.

Honestly, the indirect approach is often far faster and far more effective in producing the results that produce the numbers. Those results are an improved salesperson, a better salesperson.

How to Coach as a Sales Manager

Even though an outside coach can more easily focus on the salesperson instead of the number, a thoughtful sales manager can easily adopt a few practices to make their coaching more effective.

Remember the outcome: The first and most important way to improve your coaching is to focus on helping the salesperson get the outcomes that they need from coaching. Instead of focusing on what you see as the sales manager (which is really a performance review), you focus on the areas in which the salesperson wants to focus. Good coaching skills will allow you to get to the root cause issues that prevent them from succeeding, but it is easier to make an improvement when the salesperson gets what they need from coaching, not a performance review.

Build the salesperson: The goal of coaching is to help the salesperson improve and to perform better. You can’t get the “perform better” without first getting the “improve.” A good coach helps the salesperson understand their blind spots and helps them identify new possibilities, new choices, new beliefs, and new behaviors. You’ll know you’ve got this right when the salesperson is empowered and when they exercise their resourcefulness to improve their results.

You want coaching to provide salespeople with the ability to grow and to know how to improve their own results.

Learn to use non-directive coaching: If you find yourself telling your salesperson what to do, you aren’t coaching. There are times when you need to use directive coaching, but it should not be your primary coaching approach. When you use non-directive coaching, you require the salesperson to do all of the heavy lifting. They have to do all of thinking about how they will change and how they will make improvements. This also means they make the choices about what they are going to do and, because it is all theirs, they own it. They don’t have to buy-in because the decisions are theirs.

Your role is to help them take the decisions they need and hold them accountable, not to tell them what to do. If you find it difficult to not direct your salespeople, you aren’t alone. You will learn a lot about yourself while learning to get out of the way.

Remember that to make the number, you first make the sales rep: A sales manager only has one set of assets to produce results, and that is their sales force. If you want to improve your results, you improve your sales force. If you want to make your number, you make the sales rep.

This is one of those cases where slow is fast and where fast is slow. The more time you invest in coaching and developing your sales people, the faster they will improve in their performance.

When you need to manage, manage. When you need to coach, coach. They are different outcomes, and they require different approaches.

Questions

What are some of the obstacles to effectively coaching salespeople when you are also their manager?

How do you focus on the real outcomes of coaching?

How do you invest in building the salesperson that performs at a higher level?

How do you help salespeople to grow? How do you challenge them to find the resourcefulness within themselves?

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I was recently asked what the curriculum for sales coaching might include for a salesperson. It’s a tough question to answer, because good coaching isn’t very much like event training. There are some standard exercises, but it’s not curriculum driven like training. You don’t normally move from one topic to the next topic like you might in training.

Even though it shares some common outcomes, like improved skills and improved results, coaching is a markedly different from training.

Frequency and Understanding

Coaching isn’t an event. It is a relationship and, as such, it requires frequent communication. The frequency of the communication helps lay the groundwork for one of the major outcomes of coaching: a deep understanding.

By communicating with the salesperson frequently, their coach (or coaching sales manager) gets the opportunity to know the person being coached. They get to understand their world, their strengths, their weaknesses, and the obstacles that stand between them and greater success.

As the coach gets to know and understand the salesperson being coached, they get an understanding as to what the salesperson really needs in order to succeed. They can leverage that understanding to help the salesperson gain their understanding of what they will need to do to improve.

Event training doesn’t offer the opportunity to gain this level of understanding, and it isn’t designed to do so. Helping the salesperson discover what they need to improve is a coaching outcome.

Overcoming Obstacles

As salespeople, we are extraordinarily resourceful when it comes to helping our clients produce better results. But when it comes to finding answers to our own challenges, we often have the same blind spots as anyone else might have. Coaching salespeople can help them to identify these blind spots and overcome them.

Sometimes you need a sounding board. You need to talk through ideas. You need to think through the possible choices of action you need to take to produce better results. Through non-directive coaching, a coach can help the salesperson to identify the resources available to them that may have been blind to before coaching. Through directive coaching (which is sometimes necessary), a good sales coach can share ideas that will help prevent the salesperson from making mistakes that might prevent them from succeeding.

Training isn’t this personal. It builds sales skills. It builds leadership skills. And it can help generate options. But coaching removes the personal obstacles that prevent salespeople from succeeding.

Accountability for Change and Feedback

A good coach holds the salesperson they are coaching accountable for the changes that they committed to make, as well as the actions they committed to take.

This is an outcome that isn’t obtained through event training by itself. That’s why, in my opinion, event training needs a follow-on coaching component if it is to truly achieve its outcomes.

Salespeople engaged in a coaching relationship want to be held accountable for their commitments. They want to be asked about the changes that are trying to make, and they want feedback on the new information they are taking in and the new results they are generating (or that they are not generating, as the case may be).

This accountability and feedback loop allows the coach to help notch the salesperson up by improving their effectiveness. Form week to week, month to month, and quarter to quarter, the salesperson acquires new beliefs, casts off old beliefs, and produces better and better results.

Questions

Do you have a personal or professional coach?

How do coaches improve performance in fields outside of sales?

How does coaching differ from training?

What outcomes does a coach help their coach achieve?

Who holds you accountable and helps you to see your blind spots?

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A few days ago I wrote a post about how to deal with haters and trolls. I wrote the post for my younger brother, and he found it very helpful for thinking about some issues he has in a new, and highly visible, job. But, I forgot the most important piece of advice for those who would wish for your failure.

If you really want to seek revenge on those who wish you would fail, that criticize you unfairly, or that disparage you and your efforts, the best thing you can do is to succeed.

Ignoring the haters is a good first step. But if you want to make them crazy, you succeed. You do your best work. You give it everything you’ve got. You show up early. You stay late. You dig in, and you make a difference.

The ultimate act of defiance isn’t to argue with trolls. It isn’t to try to win them over (although there is something to be said for killing them with kindness). It isn’t trying to convince them to leave you alone.

The sweetest revenge is success. That’s where you put your effort and energy.

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This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Over time, selling to and working with your clients, you gather a lot of information. You gather insights about how to create value for your clients, their individual preferences, and their unique needs. All of this information is useful in serving your clients and executing on the solution that you sold.

It’s inevitable that there will be changes in the team that serves your clients. These changes can be disruptive to both you and your clients. When you have changes to your team, you can lose some of the situational knowledge that helps you serve your client. Losing this information can be mean service interruptions, missed commitments, and it can mean mistakes.

It’s frustrating to your clients to have to provide the same information over and over again. They don’t want to retrain your team.

Retraining You and Your Team

Most of us in sales could do a better job of capturing the information we acquire in a format that we can share with our team. When we do capture the information and share it, we often transfer that information through the conversations we have with our teams, instead of providing a more permanent record.

Not providing the information in a format that can be retrieved and referred to later by your team makes for a poor handoff. By making a poor handoff, we set up the conditions that cause us to lose the information that allows us to help a new team member serve that client.

Sometimes the information we lose causes problems in execution early. More often, the failures occur later, after you have been serving your client for some time. When you lose a member of your team or they are moved into another position, the lack of a retrievable source of all of the information on how to serve your client means that the information left with the employee.

Now your client must provide the information again. Your client then has to retrain you and your team in how best to serve them.

Capture Information and Preferences

There is some situational knowledge that is going to be lost when you lose a key member of the team that serves your client. But the capturing of critical information about your client’s needs, their preferences, and their issues over time can make it much easier to bring a new team member up to speed. It makes it much less likely that the situational knowledge is lost. It also makes it less likely that a new employee will make mistakes.

Instead of requiring your client to retrain you and your team by providing information and preferences over and over again, you are better off to capture the information once, and in a format that allows you to quickly bring a new employee up to speed. This is impressive to your clients, and it’s worth a little extra effort.

There isn’t a good argument against capturing all of the information about your relationships with your clients in an electronic format that makes it easy to retrieve and share with your team. It takes time to capture the information, but that investment of time helps to prevent mistakes later, when the information would help someone else serve your client. It’s also an investment that prevents your client from having to invest the time to retrain the new person serving them and their account.

Questions

Why are your clients frustrated when they lose a member of their service team?

In what format do you handoff information to your team?

How do you ensure your handoff builds your team’s ability to execute for your client over the long term?

What format allows you to quickly bring a new team member up to speed quickly?

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Most of the time that we spend looking for opportunities is spent in two segments of our competitor’s loyalty continuum. We seek opportunities within their at-risk clients, where we know dissatisfaction lives, and we compete for their inevitable-loss clients.

If you hope to win your dream clients, it’s likely they exist in one of the other two segments, the loyal and secure segment or the loyal and unsecure segments. Here are some things to consider.

Selling to the Secure

Your competitor’s most loyal and most secure clients are your dream clients. They spend a lot in your segment, and they have the types of needs and challenges that allow you to create massive value. But you don’t spend time selling into this segment. Why not?

You don’t spend time selling in the loyal and secure because it’s difficult to penetrate. Your competitor has earned their client’s loyalty, and your dream client isn’t going to easily let them go just because you called claiming you can create more value. It’s easier to give up and call on more easily won prospects.

It’s also problematic to call on your competitor’s loyal and secure clients when you have a quarterly number to make. It’s not easy to win these clients, and it isn’t likely that an opportunity can be created or won quickly. Sales management frowns upon missed numbers, and all the happy talk about long-term thinking is for naught when people don’t make their numbers.

So instead, we avoid our best prospective clients and move downstream.

You have to both create and win opportunities with your dream clients, especially the ones loyal to your competitors.

You win these clients over time by nurturing the relationships within your dream client’s account. You make frequent, meaningful deposits in those relationships by providing them with ideas and insights that create value for them—even though it is counterintuitive to share your ideas with your competitor’s dream clients. You make yourself known as a value creator so that when your dream client experiences some change, when there is some opening, you have paid in advance for the opportunity to work with your dream client.

There is no alternative to working on your dream clients. If you are not known when they experience a change, you will not get an opportunity to serve them, nor will you deserve one.

Selling to the Unsecure

Your competitor’s loyal clients may be less secure than you might believe. These clients may not be in the at-risk column, but they may have stakeholders that are unhappy with their present results and they believe that they someone in your space to do something to help you.

It isn’t difficult to believe that because you have some key stakeholders that are loyal and secure that your client isn’t going to look at other potential offerings. This is a dangerous belief—and it’s a little naïve. A little dissatisfaction can create an opening for someone else long before the account is at-risk, especially someone who is willing to find their way in at a level low enough not to raise eyebrows or sound the alarms.

To sell to your competitor’s unsecure clients, you work on finding the pockets of dissatisfaction that do exist. You build and nurture those relationships. You build consensus around you and your ability to create the value that they really need. You have a presence deep in the bowels of the organization, your create relationships, and you make sure that you are known. You learn the ground truth and make yourself valuable while you build towards an opportunity.

You can do all of this while you are nurturing relationships with the contacts that are still loyal. You may not be able to directly approach and sell to the loyal very easily (they are loyal, after all), but you can build consensus all around them.

Regardless of your strategy and your tactics, you have to sell within these two most difficult segments. This is where your dream clients live.

Questions

How do you sell to accounts that are loyal to your competitors?

How do you nurture relationships within these accounts while your competitors are doing good work and while they have secure relationships?

How do you find pockets of dissatisfaction within your dream client accounts?

What do you do to develop consensus around you and your ideas while your account is still loyal to your competitor?

Why isn’t it enough to call on your competitor’s at risk and lost clients?

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There are countless ways that you can classify your clients and prospects. While you should never pretend that any client is yours forever, lest you become complacent, there is a loyalty continuum that helps you determine what actions you need to take to create value for—and retain—your clients.

Loyal and Secure

You can classify your client as loyal and secure if you can objectively prove that this client uses no other services in your space. If asked, these clients wouldn’t even entertain the possibility of using one of your competitors. Many of us in business-to-business sales have these anchor clients who, at least for the period we are reviewing, are loyal and secure.

It’s not that there is no conceivable event that could cause the client to be lost. There are countless events that could cause this to be so, including mergers, acquisitions, severe economic downturns, etc. But for purposes of managing clients, the clients in this category should be managed as if they are loyal and secure.

You create value for these clients by continually executing, by moving to strategic, and by continually bringing them new ideas. You cannot rest on your laurels if you hope to keep these clients in this category, and you cannot afford to be complacent.

The following questions are used to verify that a client belongs in the “loyal and secure” category:

1. Do I have all of this client’s decision-makers, decision-influencers, and end-user’s commitment to our relationship?

2. Are their dissenters or opponents within this organization that at some time in the future could damage the commitment from this client? Are there some who are presently dissatisfied?

3. What do the client satisfaction surveys (formal and informal) indicate?

4. Do I have client satisfaction surveys from all decision-makers, decision-influencers, and all other affected parties?

5. Are the contacts within this client promoters of my product or service?

6. Are there members of my own organization that at some time in the future could damage or destroy our commitment from this client?

7. Does this client ever meet with, take calls from, have lunch with, or entertain offers from my competitors?

8. Is any portion of this client’s business given to one of my competitors?

9. Do I have a contractual commitment from this client that obligates them to use my products or services for some period?

If the answer to any of these questions gives you pause, then it is likely that the client doesn’t belong in this segment. Your value creation might need to be different if the client belongs in another category.

Loyal and Not Secure

Some clients will have demonstrated loyalty over prior periods, but may be experiencing any number of changes that require them to be classified as “not secure.” The client may be experiencing changes in their business.

There may be changes in their personnel (particularly your contacts and sponsors), they be merging with another company or being acquired by one, they could make changes to their product or service that change their need for you product or service, or they may just no longer have a need for your service or product.

Or, there may be issues that are not as predictable but every bit as dangerous. Dissatisfied decision-makers or decision-influencers may be a future threat to your commitment. Even more damaging are true dissenters that have a strong negative opinion about your company, your services, or your product offerings. A vigilant salesperson will most likely be aware of these issues.

These clients are loyal because you have deep enough relationships to be able to predict that you will retain the account. But as long as there is dissatisfaction at some level, they cannot be considered secure.

You create value for clients in this segment by executing, by resolving outstanding issues, and by working to improve the experience of those that may not be satisfied with you or your service.

The following questions can be used to assess whether a client belongs in this category:

1. Do we have a history of unresolved problems, issues, or complaints that have been left unaddressed?

2. Is there a seriously dissatisfied or dissenting decision-maker or decision-influence within my client’s company?

3. Does this decision-maker, decision-influencer or dissenter have a known preference for another firm?

4. Does this decision-maker, decision-influencer or dissenter have a prior relationship with another firm? Do they have a strong preference for someone else in my space?

5. Are there any known factors (like annual RFP or RFI) that would indicate an overall continuing commitment to shop the market regardless of your present relationship?

Anyone in business-to-business sales for a significant period of time understands inherently that some clients, as a much as we would like to believe otherwise, fall outside of the above two categories. An honest assessment will require that some clients fall into the following two categories.

At Risk

Clients that are very likely to entertain offers from your competitors, that regularly meet with your competitors, that have a price orientation, or that may have serious service or product issues with your firm should be classified as “at risk.”

In some cases, it would be easy to classify these clients as loyal and not secure. You may simply think of this as a client who may just as easily be lost as will be retained.

You create value for these clients by making major adjustments to what you do. This means you most likely to develop far deeper—and far more strategic—relationships. It probably requires that you correct the issues that prevent your client from capturing the value you create (likely execution issues).

Most sales organizations don’t have any trouble figuring out who goes in the at-risk column.

1. Are the factors that put this client at risk within my company’s control?

2. What changes and what effort would be required to move this client out of this category?

3. Is the effort to move the client out of this category feasible? Reasonable? At what cost?

4. Would the retention of this client take away from our effort to serve and obtain other clients?

5. Does my company have a strategic interest in keeping this client?

6. Is this client a low revenue or low margin client?

Inevitable Loss

These clients have notified you that you that they are leaving, or they have given you some indication that their loss is inevitable. There are many reasons we lose clients, some of which are unavoidable, including price, changes in their business, their loss of clients, and personnel changes, among others.

You have to decide whether it is worth the effort to pursue lost clients or move on to greener pastures.

The following questions will help you decide whether or not a client belongs in the category.

1. Has this client notified you that they will no longer be using your products or service?

2. Are their known changes at this client that indicate its loss in inevitable?

3. Does this client have needs that you can no longer serve (or that might be too expensive to provide)?

4. Are there changes in your business that will cause you to be unable to serve or provide this client?

5. Is it worth the effort to try to retain this client?

6. Do I have some way to create more value for this client than I have been able to in the past?

7. Are they willing to pay for that value creation?

8. What would it take to regain an opportunity to serve this client?

In order to use the above analysis, take a printed list of your clients and assess each for the above listed criteria. Place each client in the appropriate category. If you make an honest assessment, you will end up with clients in each category. If you do not have clients in each category, ask yourself if you are being realistic and honest about these clients. There is nothing to be gained by avoiding a truthful assessment of your present client category classifications, and there is everything to be gained by managing these clients accordingly.

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Have you ever had a prospective client who convinced you through their words and their actions that they were ready to move forward with you and your solution, only to later disengage completely from the you and the opportunity?

Have you ever struggled to understand why your dream client agrees that they need to make changes, and the closer they get to the end of the sales cycles, the further away they are from agreeing to move forward?

There is a reason that this occurs.

Your dream client is pulled in two directions by two deep fundamental human needs. You have to help balance these needs.

Growth

To make the improvements that your dream clients need to make, they have to change. They have to make improvements, and they have to grow. The status quo may be as warm and comfortable as an old coat, but the status quo isn’t a path to growth and improvement.

Your dream clients and clients know that they need to grow. They know that they need to change. And they know that they will need to forego the status quo. When you show them what is possible, it’s easy for them to be excited by a vision of the future. Because they find the future compelling, they agree to commitments that move both of you down that path together, you moving through your sales process, your client moving through their buying process.

Growth is a human need. It’s also one of business’s fundamental needs.

But then, as you move closer, another deep human need surfaces. This human need slows things down and puts the brakes on the commitments.

Certainty and Risk Avoidance

As you move closer to a commitment that would mean the client is required to act, the human needs for certainty and risk avoidance start to take precedence over other needs. You might be surprised when certainty and risk avoidance appear late in the game because they weren’t visible earlier in the process, but you would be wrong. These needs were there the whole time, but they were latent, hidden behind the excitement and enthusiasm of the better future results.

The need for certainty and risk avoidance are no less important than the need for growth. The stakeholders within your dream client’s company need growth, and they need certainty and risk avoidance. It’s your job to give them both.

A Balancing Act

In my experience, it’s the mark of a professional to bring risk into the discussion early in the process. The sooner it is brought up, the sooner you can effectively deal with it together with your dream client.

When you wait to address the uncertainty and risk, your dream client gets there themselves—and alone. Avoiding the issues of certainty and risk can cause a serious problem.

It can lead your clients to believe that you are unaware of the risks or that you are aware and don’t want to address them. This exacerbates the uncertainty and the perception of risk. Instead of a reasoned discussion of the risks kept in context and a discussion of how the risks might be mitigated, your avoidance makes it worse.

It’s easy to believe that if you bring up anything negative that you will you ruin your opportunity. But because both of these needs are important, you put your deal at greater risk by not addressing the uncertainty and risk that accompany significant change.

Professional salespeople don’t avoid the tough discussions. Instead, they have discussions about risk and they take the actions to mitigate those risks. This is what prevents your dream client from getting cold feet down the stretch.

Questions

Why does your dream client need growth?

Why do they also need certainty and risk avoidance?

What are the risks of addressing only growth and avoiding dealing with risk?

How do sales professionals help their clients address the risk and uncertainty in a healthy way that allows them to move forward with growth?

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