The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

3 Ways Salespeople Improve Their Leadership Skills

S. Anthony Iannarino — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:28:42 +0000

1. Read and Study Leadership

Leadership is a complex array of skills and attributes. There are as many definitions as there are leaders, and an equal number of ideas about the skills and attributes leadership requires. Because there are so many ideas, much has been written. This is a good place to start.

The role of sales now requires that the salesperson be a strategic orchestrator, leading cross-functional teams made up of members of their own company, as well as the client’s company. We recognize this fact, but there are few (read: none) sales organizations that focus even the smallest portion of the training and development resources towards leadership. This means you are all but certain to have to train and develop yourself.

Much of the skills required of the strategic orchestrator are found in storytelling, negotiation and change management. But even though they help with leadership, leadership is something more.

Go to your local bookstore and buy a couple of books on leadership. I make no recommendation as to what books you should read because you will very easily find something that appeals to you, and the more engaged you are with the reading, the more you will gain from it.

For my money, I like to read books by actual practitioners, leaders who were faced with challenges that seemed insurmountable, like Shackleton, Washington, and Patton. I find it easy to distill their stories into lists of ideas and attributes (but then, I am a list-maker). If you don’t like to read biographies, or if you don’t like distilling the lessons yourself, choose a book that has a number in the title. A book with a number in the title means someone else captured the stories and distilled the lessons into a list for you.

Take the time to write down your ideas as you read. Make notes about the skills and attributes of leadership and collect stories of where you have seen these come into play in your business. Especially write down the failures of leadership and what leadership skills and attributes might have prevented those failures. This exercise alone will ingrain these lessons into your DNA, and you will find yourself thinking of your own leadership problems in the framework you develop.

Like anything else, learning comes down to studying and practicing.

2. Learn to Own the Outcome

When you sell something, you are responsible for the outcome.

This has always been true, and it is truer now than ever. If your client does not achieve the outcome you sold, they are holding you accountable for their failure. Yes, even if it is a complex problem that caused the failure and, yes, even if it is their fault.

Leadership is, in large part, about responsibility for outcomes.

Learning to own the outcome means first accepting the responsibility for helping them to achieve the outcome. It also means understanding that you will have to lead others even when you have no authority, other than the authority that accompanies owning the responsibility for the outcome. But it is simply amazing how much authority comes along with owning the outcome. In most cases, you will find no one fighting to take your place as the person responsible for the outcome, and even fewer who volunteer to take on the biggest problems.

Leadership is, in part, taking responsibility and tackling the biggest problems.

You create followers, and you create the ability to generate outcomes through the effort of others by taking responsibility and owning the outcome.

Watch this video: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

3. Learn to Lead from the Front

This is really part of the above point. Leadership is found where the action is. Leaders have muddy boots because they are at the front with the people they lead. Leadership, especially as it pertains to sales, isn’t about authority. It is instead about finding the obstacles to achieving your goal or vision and then rallying the resources to overcome those obstacles.

You don’t lead from behind a desk. You rush to the sounds of the guns. You go to where the action is and you make your presence felt. There is very little that you can do to create lifelong relationships in sales that tops being by your client’s side when they are dealing with their most difficult challenge.

You helped create the vision. You sold the vision. Problems showed up. You answered the phone. You rushed to the scene to make a difference. This is what your client believed they bought, and making this true is the foundation of sales success (as well as referrals).

There is no reading to do and no list to make. To put this in to practice you have to step up, take ownership, and lead. Many (most) (all) great leaders were baptized in a similar fire.

Conclusion

Great salespeople have the ability to lead. They have the ability to generate results through the efforts of others on their teams, as well as their client’s teams. But leadership starts with owning the outcome and leading from the front. Apply these ideas to be a better leader.

3 Ways Salespeople Improve Their Leadership Skills is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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5 Ways Salespeople Can Improve Their Change Management Skills

S. Anthony Iannarino — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:18:11 +0000

1. Identify and Build the Team

In many cases, salespeople lose more deals to the prospect deciding to take no action than they lose to competitors. Selling is always about change, and change is scary. Making the case for change in any organization requires building the team that can help you sell the change and who can help you execute the change.

It is no longer enough to identify and sell to the economic decision-maker alone. And it isn’t enough to simply find a decision-influencer who may be dissatisfied enough to help you identify an area that needs improvement. Instead, you need to develop a coalition of decision-makers, decision-influencers, and stakeholders who will help you both sell the idea of change as well as execute the change. You need to build a team.

As you work through an organization, ask questions to determine who else is needed on your team. Who will most benefit from your solution? Who has the greatest political power in the organization? Who has the most influence over other decision-makers, decision-influencers and stakeholders? Who is passionate enough about your idea to sell your ideas when you aren’t there?

Build this team first!

This team will help you build and sell your case for change, after you . . .

2. Identify the Obstacles to Change

It isn’t enough to build a broad coalition of team members to help you with your change initiative. You also need to identify the obstacles to change. Many deals are lost because the salesperson or the sales organization underestimates the obstacles to change.

First you need to identify the decision-makers, decision-influencers, and stakeholders who oppose change. It is surprising how often you find that these people are very open to your solution, but completely closed to the idea of change. The status quo is safer; it is the devil we know, and we have learned to live with it.

Selling means leading a change initiative and that means moving some of these obstacles to your side, and overcoming others. This is no mean feat. But too often, we sell to the group that is receptive to our offering and who wants change, and we avoid the obstacles, ignoring them at are peril.

Instead, we need to identify these obstacles and deal with them. Ignoring them is not a strategy, and it too often leads to “no action.”

But before we deal with these obstacles, we need to look at why some obstacles are so obstinate.

3. Deal with Conflicting Interests

Sometimes the obstacles to a deal and the change that it brings are opposed because they have conflicting interests. While change might help in one area, it might make things much more difficult for another area. Some of the obstacles aren’t human obstacles to be overcome; they are technical obstacles that need to be effectively dealt with before the human obstacles can agree to change.

These obstacles need to be identified and dealt with, and the sooner the better. Too often, we in sales present our solution before we have identified all of the technical obstacles and the conflicting interests and built the plan for effectively dispatching them. We leave the client and their team with a wonderful presentation, a wonderful solution, and a long list of unresolved concerns. Thinking on your feet and responding during the presentation may be exciting, and you may even be great at doing so, but it does little to resolve concerns.

Collect the obstacles long before you present. Make sure your presentations and your solutions effectively deal with obstacles to change, and that you have the agreement of those who would be affected by your change initiative before you present. (You make not get everyone’s agreement, but you better have more than you need to win a deal)

Deal with the conflicting interests!

4. Build the Case for Killing the Status Quo . . . And Sell It

You have assembled the team, you have identified the group opposed, and you have identified the obstacles. Now you have to build and sell your case for change. There is a reason that Change Management follows both Storytelling and Negotiation on my Foundational Sales Attributes hierarchy: you will need both of these skills to build your case for change.

No one will kill the status quo to replace it with something similar. It isn’t worth the work, it isn’t worth the disruption, and most of all, it isn’t worth stepping off the cliff and into the unknown. To kill the status quo, you have to build the case for how your solution will create a better future. You have to provide the vision of what the future looks like and how it is better.

If you are a great storyteller, you will have had some help with with your story including your team in the creation of that vision and how you get there. You will also have both identified the obstacles and will have built the plan for overcoming them together.

You also need to have built the ROI analysis in both financial terms and in human terms. Your case has to answer the question: “What’s in it for me?” And it has to provide that answer for as many parties as possible. This is how you sell the idea of killing the status quo to the obstacles. The less of an ROI, the greater likelihood the obstacle remains opposed. It isn’t enough to promise them blood, toil, sweat and tears.

And then. some obstacles simply must be overcome.

5. Play Politics

Politics exist in every organization, including your clients. To be effective requires that you understand and play politics. Is it messy? It sure as Hell is!

To sell and manage change requires that you understand who can bring obstacles onto the team and who can overcome them. Yes, try as you may, some obstacles will have to be overcome. It means trading deals to remove the conflicting interests. It means changing parts of your offerings to acquire some of the team members you need in order to win and execute the deal. It also means courting the obstacles and building the relationships that build trust, especially when what you sell comes with a healthy serving of blood, toil, sweat and tears—and sometimes that is exactly what is necessary to move towards a better future. And sometimes it means someone doesn’t get their way and that a higher authority decides against them.

And, as added bonus, all of these ideas must be applied to your own organization as well. Sometimes moving a client from “no action” to “action” requires that you first change something in your own organization.

You need to learn to play politics. You need to do more than learn: you need to be a master politician. This is where all of the real action in change management occurs. Want big deals with big change? Play big politics!

Conclusion

Sales people sell change. They sell a better future, a better outcome. Successful salespeople know that they sell more than a product or service; they sell change. Follow these ideas to improve your change management skills.

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4279.

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

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5 Ways Salespeople Can Improve Their Change Management Skills is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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2 Ways Salespeople Can Negotiate Better

S. Anthony Iannarino — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:56:09 +0000

This post isn’t about tactics. There are excellent books on negotiating tactics, including Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, and one of my favorites, The Street Smart Negotiator: How to Outwit, Outmaneuver and Outlast Your Opponents by Harry Mills. You should be more than familiar with common negotiation tactics so that you recognize the tactics some people employ in negotiations.

But in B2B sales, the person you are negotiating with is your client (or future client, anyway) not your opponent. If you have done a good job developing relationships throughout the sales process, reducing the deal to writing should be very natural and easy. If it is adversarial, then you are beginning the relationships on a weak foundation, and you will have to work very hard to create a win-win deal (let alone execute what is contained in the agreement).

1. Never Lose the Ability to Walk Away

I hate to put this first idea at the top of this post. This idea is really about negotiating final contracts, which is a really important negotiation. But there are dozens of negotiations that occur throughout the sales process, all of which are important. But this one has to come first because you cannot negotiate from a place of strength without it.

You must create win-win deals, or you must walk away.

You should walk away from Lose-Win deals. If the deal isn’t good for you and your company, you should not make the deal. These deals cost your company time, they cost your company resources that are better dedicated to other clients, and most of all, and they cost your company emotional energy invested in trying to make something out of a bad deal.

You should also walk away from Win-Lose deals. If the deal is good for your company but bad for your client, then in the long run, you will not only lose the client, you will lose something more. You will lose your reputation. You will lose the ability to be trusted, and you will have created a community of people who will be happy to share their negative experience of doing business with you with anyone who will listen.

Thanks to the Internet, the whole world is a small town now, and everyone knows your business.

Retaining the ability to walk away from bad deals gives you a powerful platform from which to negotiate. You don’t have to accept a bad deal, and you never have to try to give a bad deal. But to be in this position, you have to make sure that meeting your quota is never dependent upon any single deal. This is why prospecting is so very high on this list. A strong and healthy pipeline is what allows you to be able to afford to lose.

2. Be Prepared to Talk Honestly and Creatively About the Sticking Points

You have to be able to think on your feet to be great in sales, and this skill is surely required of great negotiating. But that is no excuse for not being prepared. To negotiate well, you need to prepare. This starts by making a simple list of the critical deal points that your client will need to create a win, as well as a list of the critical deal points that you will need to create a win.

Highlight the critical points that are difficult for you and the ones that are difficult for your client. Then, remember that the best negotiations are really conversations about how to get through the difficult points together. Prepare for an open, honest, and creative dialogue about the sticking points.

Great negotiation isn’t about winning. It is about creating something that is difficult to create because of conflicting needs. This requires a willingness to focus on the outcome of a win-win deal, and being resourceful enough to create and discuss new possibilities. Some of that will occur at the bargaining table, but there is no reason not to prepare alternative solutions and ideas.

Before going in to a negotiation, get with a group of thoughtful and creative people within your team and your company to brainstorm other possibilities, other potential deal structures, and alternative proposals. Prepare a presentation as to how your ideas may allow you and your client to create a win-win agreement. Think about how you make the pie bigger for both of you before you start claiming your share.

Know that great negotiations are built on creating ideas that overcome conflicting needs and desires with better ideas and solutions, not just trade offs. Also know that the simple value claiming that often leads to entrenched positions is really a lack of resourcefulness or an unwillingness to be creative.

Conclusion

To be effective in sales requires the ability to negotiate. But negotiation with organizations that we intend work with for years, and with whom tremendous competitive value is created, isn’t about value claiming. Instead, it is about being creative enough to create win-win deals that overcome the sticking points. Use these ideas to improve your ability to negotiate.

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

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2 Ways Salespeople Can Negotiate Better is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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6 Ways You Can Be A Better Storyteller in Sales

S. Anthony Iannarino — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:23:03 +0000

1. Collect Great Stories

One of the first ways to become a better storyteller is to collect great stories. Your life, including your sales life, is full of stories. Many of these stories contain the lessons that you have learned and the ideas that have proven the most useful to helping your clients succeed. Sometimes we overlook the value of these stories.

All of your experiences and stories are your own private selection of case studies. Even though they may not printed, bound, and collected in the PowerPoint presentation, they may all be useful in sharing with your prospects and clients what is possible.

Reflect on your experiences in sales and in serving your customers. What are the stories that are most compelling? What stories illustrate the lessons that you have learned? What stories help create a vision for what is possible?

2. Find the Arc

Every great story has an arc. The protagonist starts in one place and ends up someplace else. But there is never a straight line from A to B, from beginning to end. That would eliminate the drama, and drama is what makes a story compelling. Great stories don’t go boy meets girl, boy marries girl. They go boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy marries girl.

To be a great storyteller you need to find the arc of the story. You need identify the elements that give the story drama. The elements here are the problems, the challenges, and the obstacles that must be overcome. Your story might be client needed results, client tried this and failed, client worked with us in a way neither of us ever imagined, client got results (or something to that effect).

As you work on you stories, work on identifying the arc. What were the challenges you and your client faced together? What were the unexpected obstacles? What unexpected ideas caused you to succeed? What lessons did you learn?

3. Add Details: Details Bring Stories to Life

Details are what bring a story to life. Back to the old standard, no one cares about client needs results, client tries and fails, client gets results. There aren’t enough details there to bring the story to life.

What was the client trying to do? Who were the characters involved? What did they look like? Why were they trying to do it? What did it mean to them? How many times did they try and fail? What happened each time they failed? What kind of equipment were they using? Why were they failing? How did they feel? What was the cost of their failure?

How did they find you? Were they skeptical? Were they defeated? Were they hopeful? What did you learn together? How did you learn it?

Use some of these questions to give life to your stories.

4. Be Entertaining

Great stories are entertaining. The entertainment is, in part, provided by the arc, which provides the story with an element of drama. But great stories, even dramas, often contain an element of pure entertainment in the form of humor. If you have been in sales for any time at all, you have some funny anecdotal stories.

I remember being at a convention in Washington D.C. and a very well known and powerful Senator was the keynote speaker. I expected a political speech, and instead was treated to 20 minutes of stand up comedy. The Senator had, apparently, spent his time in the nation’s capital honing his storytelling craft and building a collection of stories and anecdotes that would disarm and entertain anyone.

The funny anecdotes and stories that you collect and learn to tell add an element of entertainment to your stories. They help to keep your prospects and clients engaged in the story.

Write down your collection of anecdotes and funny stories. Practice them and make sure that they are funny. Weave these anecdotes into the stories that you tell.

5. Provide a Vision of the Future

The reason stories are powerful in sales is that they provide a vision of the future. You can tell a story of something that has already occurred as an analogy, which allows your prospect or client to see themselves in the role of the protagonist. You can tell a story of what the future will look like and how you will get there. Or you can combine these devices, telling a story of how you will get to a better future, including some trips to the past to give life to the obstacles and problems you will have to overcome together.

Personally, I have heard too many stories that include the Deus Ex Machina, the God in the Machine. This is a writing device in which someone or something enters the story that allows the protagonist to succeed, even though it defies all logic and plausibility. This story goes like this: Client needs results, client tries and fails, client hires us and succeeds. It is missing the arc; it is missing the part where they encounter obstacles, challenges, and problems. There is no dragon to slay. The problem here is that it sets an expectation that is unlikely to be realized.

Make sure your vision of the future is an accurate representation. If there are dragons, there are dragons. Give them a name, and make sure your story includes the part about where you do what is necessary to kill the dragon (there is almost always something sacrificed).

Do your stories provide a picture of a better future?

6. Share the Writing Credit

Your prospects and clients have their own stories. In fact, they write the entire story up to the point where you enter the story. Then, you write the story together from that point forward. Make sure to share the writing credit by including your prospect or clients vision of the future.

What are the elements of the story that are important to them? How do they believe you get from point A to point B? What characters do you need to be part of your story? Where do they believe the obstacles lie? How do they think the story ends?

Your prospects and your clients are active participants in the story and in the vision of the better you future you envision together. Making sure you include them means ensuring that they get to write part of the story.

How can you engage your customers in writing this story with you? What questions do you need to ask them to capture their vision?

Conclusion

Storytelling is the ability to create a compelling vision of the future. Great salespeople include in their stories the challenges and the obstacles that will need to be overcome in order to create that future. They write the future positive outcomes with their clients as both characters and as coauthors. Use these tips to be a better storyteller!

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

6 Ways You Can Be A Better Storyteller in Sales is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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3 Ways to Differentiate Yourself and Your Offering in Sales

S. Anthony Iannarino — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:54:52 +0000

1. Possess the Foundational Attributes

The first and most important thing to be able to differentiate is you. It answers the question: “What makes you different, and why should spend time with or buy from you?”

There were two comments on this week’s post 2 Ways to Create Influence and Persuade Others that speak to this point. The first comment was from Sales Training Tom at Huthwaite, who said there is “a joke among sales guys: Companies with great products have great salespeople. Companies with low quality products have low quality salespeople.” This comment was followed by a comment from Jonathon at Arctickiwi who asks: “Does this mean sales people determine the quality of the products, or the quality of the products determines the sales people?”

I have to admit that I am unfamiliar with the joke, but I take the point to mean that great salespeople are part of what makes their product great, and that lower caliber salespeople are part of what make their offering not-so-great, regardless of the product.

Most of us no longer sell simple products; we have evolved and are now selling something more complex like solutions or, something beyond that, measurable business results and acceleration. This means that you are a bigger part of the sale than at any time before; your clients are, more than ever, buying you.

The first way to differentiate yourself in sales it to focus on improving all of the foundational attributes that make up success and professionalism in business and in sales. These attributes are what make valuable to your company and your clients. They are the foundation upon which you build your capacity to create massive value for others.

Make a list are the attributes that you possess that differentiate you from other salespeople in your field? Make another list of the attributes that you could develop that would improve your ability to differentiate yourself? Build the action plan to develop those attributes and skills.

We’ll have more on differentiating you below.

2. Look Past Product and Service to Meaning and Values

Even in an age of commoditization and incredible access to information, too many sales organizations still believe that they need to differentiate their product or service on features and benefits. The challenge with defining the differences on features and benefits is that they are so easily (and quickly) copied, eliminating differentiation.

What is harder to replicate is meaning and values. This is the difference between selling the “what and how” and selling the “why.”

Why does your company do what it does to serve it customers? What does your company mean to the marketplace? What is your company’s worldview? Why are your values and meaning better than those of your competitors?

Meaning and values are much harder to copy, and they usually come with a compelling story that serves to illustrate how those values came into being and how they create value for your clients. The stories, the meaning, and the values are unique to you and your company.

Your company’s meaning, your company’s values, and your company’s stories and experiences are something that is unique. They separate you from all others with whom you compete. They allow you to stand out in a crowded marketplace, and to be different in a way that separates you from everyone else. Ultimately, these are the differences that make the difference.

Watch this video:

Steve Jobs on Marketing

Make a list of these values and meanings. Write down how these values and meanings give life to your product or services? What are the stories that prove how these values and meanings make the difference in choosing your company and in choosing someone else.

3. Tying it All Together

Extend the meaning and values exercise above to who you are as a salesperson. What are your values? What do you stand for? What is your brand? What are your stories and what experiences have provided you with your unique worldview? How does that differentiate you from your many competitors? How does it create value for your customers? How does it answer the question: “Why should I buy from you?”

Differentiation is your foundational attributes + your personal values, meaning and stories + the ability to add meaning and values to what you sell.

Conclusion

Success in sales is dependent upon your ability to differentiate your product or service in a crowded field. More important still is your ability to differentiate yourself as a salesperson. Work on these three ideas to improve your ability to differentiate!

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

3 Ways to Differentiate Yourself and Your Offering in Sales is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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3 Ways to Improve Your Ability to Diagnose for Salespeople

S. Anthony Iannarino — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:04:45 +0000

To diagnose in sales is to be able to discover the root cause of your client’s business problem or challenge. It is the ability to recognize what is undesirable by the signs and the symptoms. But to diagnose is not to prescribe the cure—that is a very different outcome!

1. Suspend Your Judgment and Be Open To Exploring

The first way to improve your ability to diagnose is to learn to suspend your judgment. Just because you have seen the signs before, and just because you have been able to make an improvement for a client who shared these signs and symptoms, does not in any way suggest that what you have done before will work in this case. It might work, and it might not. It might need minor changes and modifications, and it might need to be scrapped for a whole new solution. You must be open to exploring.

To really perform a great diagnosis, you need to be able to stop yourself from the tendency to draw analogies from one set of circumstances to another long enough to make sure you really understand the root cause. The symptoms and the signs, the causes of the dissatisfaction, may be the same while having very different root causes.

In fact, you may have the right solution in mind. Your first assumption may be correct. But doing a great diagnosis requires you to develop the ability to suspend judgment until you fully understand what it is you are seeing and what it means. It means taking time to notice the distinctions and the nuances that differentiate two root causes that coincidentally share symptoms, and only determining the best way forward after having done so.

2. Remember That You Are Not Treating an Individual

In sales, we tend to talk about our clients by using their company name. It is almost like that company is an individual entity. And in some ways, it is. But a company is really a staggeringly complex number of parts and systems that are all interrelated. Problems in one area have way of spilling over into other areas.

That is why an excellent diagnosis considers the effect of the solution on the whole.

The dissatisfaction in an organization can be found, the symptoms identified, and the root causes discovered. But this doesn’t mean that the diagnosis is over and that it is time to present solutions. To be really great at diagnosis, you have to understand how your solution will impact the rest of the organization. When you make a change here, what happens over there? You need to be aware that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Like gravity, the law of unintended consequences is a hard law to break.

A doctor who did a poor diagnosis once prescribed me anti-convulsant drug. One of the primary side effects of the drug was that it caused kidney stones, and it was recommended that the drug not be given to patients who had a history of kidney stones. A familiarity with the side effects and a single question would have discovered that I had had a kidney stone removed in the past. Fortunately, I read the accompanying documentation.

Make sure your diagnosis extends to all parts of the organization before prescribing your solutions. Make sure you understand how what you will provide will impact other areas of the organization and that you make the adjustments necessary to ensure that you don’t improve something here by making something worse somewhere else.

This means taking time to understand. It means postponing your desire to sell your solution. It means being professional.

Remember that you are not treating a single entity. You are treating a complex array of interconnected systems.

3. Build a Diagnostic Tool

You can build a diagnostic tool of your own.

Make a list of the questions that you need to ask to not only identify the symptoms, but to get to the cause. Your questions need to confirm not only what you can visibly see and measure as the symptoms, but also what is the root cause of the symptoms.

Profit margins are down.
Customer service scores are too low.
Client churn is too high.
Shipping times are too long.

All of these are simply symptoms. To discover the root causes you have to continually track down the “Why?” And you have to keeping asking why, following the path wherever it leads you. Why are profit margins down? When did profit margins drop? What is causing them to be lower than you need them to be? What caused that change?

To do this work, you have to be a good detective, following the trail of evidence, asking the question “Why?”

If you have been in sales for any time at all, you have surely followed this path to discover that the root cause was something other than what you had originally believed. If you have been at this game a long time and you are completely honest, you can recall times when you discovered that you didn’t really know what the root cause was until after you installed your solution.

Make sure your questions don’t simply confirm that your solutions will work. Ask questions that confirm all of the areas where and why your solution may be wrong! This may help you prevent unintended consequences.

Make a list of the questions you need to ask to discover the root causes. Include questions that confirm that by providing a solution that improves the root cause that you improve the root cause and the symptoms. Questions like: “So if we were able to improve this, would it automatically improve profit margins?

Conclusion

Selling requires a strong ability to diagnose the client’s problems and challenges. By diagnosing their problems and challenges, and by developing a full understanding of their root causes, the professional salesperson can build a solution that perfectly matches the client’s needs, improving their performance and providing them with the outcome they desire. Follow these steps to improve your ability to diagnose!

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

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3 Ways to Improve Your Ability to Diagnose for Salespeople is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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7 Ways to Improve Your Business Acumen for Sales

S. Anthony Iannarino — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:54:55 +0000

As we have moved from product sales, to solutions sales, to business improvement and acceleration sales, the skill sets for success in sales have changed. To be effective now, salespeople need to be great businesspeople; they need to understand how to create business results for their clients.

Business acumen is too rare in sales. We spend far too much of our time worrying about product knowledge, technical knowledge, and sales acumen when we should be focusing more attention on business acumen.

Business acumen takes time and effort to acquire. But it doesn’t take money, and it surely doesn’t require an Ivy League MBA. Here are seven ways that you can improve your business acumen, six of which cost almost nothing but conscious and consistent effort.

Self-Educate 1: Read Business Books and Magazines

The start of any education is gaining an understanding of the fundamental concepts and vocabulary. It is discovering what is already known. Fortunately, the fundamentals have all been researched, studied, written, edited, published, formatted, bound, delivered and made available at a shocking low price.

Business books take years to write and contain thousands of hours of research. They contain the valuable experiences of practitioners, including the stories of their successes as well as the mistakes that they made. The cost of a business book is about $25.00. If the author spent a normal work year writing it (2,080 hours), you are in effect paying a little over $.01 per hour for their work.

Business books are usually about 250 pages long. Reading at about 30 pages per hour, you can read a book in about a week by dedicating only one hour a day to reading. If this is too much, read a book every two weeks. I would tell you that doing so will mean you are reading far more than your peer group, but reading 26 books a year will mean that you have no peer group.

Reading business books alone will provide you with a basic understanding of business concepts and the accompanying vocabulary.

You can also pick up Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, or Inc. magazine. Find something interesting and make note of how it might be useful.

Write your reading plan.

Self-Educate 2: Read Nonfiction Books That Have Nothing to Do With Business

Business books and magazines are great, but there is as much or more to be gained from reading nonfiction. There is a certain education and situational knowledge that comes along with being widely read. You run into a lot of ideas, a lot of concepts, and you find a lot of connections.

You would do well to pick up things like Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto or Better, neither book is about business, and yet, both books are absolutely about business.

You will do well to pick up my friend Bloom’s The Genius of the Beat: A Radical Revision of Capitalism, or his magnum opus The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. Both books will teach you more about sales and marketing than many other books you might read, even though neither book is about sales or marketing.

Pick something that interests you, and I promise you will find something that applies to your job in sales and some concept that helps you to better understand business.

Free Education 1: Get Company Tutors

There are free training and development resources within your company. They are waiting for you to take advantage of all they have to offer. These resources are your co-workers in other departments throughout your company. They are the subject matter experts who would love to help you better understand their subject by showing off all they know.

Need a better understanding of financial reports? Easy. Go to your finance and accounting department and find a tutor. Ask them to walk you through a prospect’s P&L and tell you what they see.

Need help understanding how people in operations think about something? How about procurement, marketing, or executive management? Ask them to teach you about what they do and how they think about it. Ask them to give you something to read that will give you a very high level understanding. Ask them to join you for lunch to discuss your takeaways.

Find and develop tutors. There relationships are invaluable for greasing the skids when you really need something done for your clients, too.

Free Education 2: Get Mentors

There are mentors available to you as well. There are family members, community members, church members, neighbors, friends, and acquaintances all of which have subject matter expertise in some area of business. These people will willingly share their knowledge and their understanding of their business with you.

Ask them to mentor you and guide your education in their area. They will be flattered. They will be excited. And they will help you. Find two or three people who know about some area of business and rotate your Friday lunch hour with your new mentors.

Take notes on their experiences, their ideas, and their advice for learning about their area of expertise. Ask them to help you understand how the subject they know about might be thought about in your prospect’s companies and how you might address it when discussing your company, your product, or your service.

Free Education 3: Let Your Client’s Teach You Their Business

Your clients know their business cold. And even though you may believe you are supposed to know everything, they will be more than happy to teach you about their business.

They will share with you about all aspects of their operations, how they hire employees (human resources), how they compete in their markets (strategy, marketing), the challenges with serving their customers (operations, customer service), their financial results and concerns (accounting, finance, strategy), and how they lead and manager their employees (management and leadership).

More still, they will be grateful that you seek to improve your business acumen and that you are trying to understand their business (in part, because they are trying to better understand their business, too) because they know that your understanding will improve your ability to help them produce better results and faster. This is what they want and expect from their business partners and the salespeople who serve them.

Make a list of questions and ask a client to help you answer them. Take them to lunch, too.

Self-Educate 3: Write Down What You Have Learned

One great way to educate yourself is to write down what you have learned. As you obtain the business acumen lessons, the concepts, the ideas, and stories, write them down. Make notes on the important ideas, where you learned it, when you learned it, and how it might be useful to you and your clients.

The act of writing both helps you to remember what you have learned and it deepens your understanding.

Paid Education 1: Get a Formal Education

Guess what they give you before you even show up for you first MBA class? That’s right, it’s a reading list. See, you are going to have to give yourself your education, even if you pay others to guide you on your path.

There is nothing better than reading something, studying it, and then banging ideas around with a bunch of thoughtful people in a big room with whiteboards, projectors, and computers. That is the university experience, and it is a fun, exciting, and extremely rewarding experience if you are passionately engaged in it.

Mr. Peters’ strong admonition against an MBA be damned. An MBA is a great exercise in learning, and I promise you that you will see a whole lot more of them in sales in the future, as sales more and more requires extremely high business acumen.

Conclusion

In the past, success in sales depended very heavily on the salesperson’s sales acumen. While sales acumen is still necessary, business acumen is now equally as important as sales acumen (and in many cases, more!). The business of sales is now the business of business. Use this list to build a plan to improve your business acumen.

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

7 Ways to Improve Your Business Acumen for Sales is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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7 Ways To Be Better at Prospecting

S. Anthony Iannarino — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:08:28 +0000

1. Consistency Counts: Prospect Daily!

Salespeople acquire new clients, and to do so, they necessarily open relationships. Prospecting is the art of opening new relationships. The new business opportunities that later turn into sales are initially identified through prospecting, making prospecting the lifeblood of sales.

The first way to improve you’re your prospecting results is to acknowledge its importance to your sales results and treat it accordingly.

Improving your prospecting results begins with setting aside the time and the energy to prospect each and every day. And, yes, I do mean each and every day. You would never suggest that you could only close on Thursday afternoons, and it is ridiculous to suggest that there is only a single time at which you can be effective prospecting. It is equally ridiculous to suggest that your prospects are only open to taking your calls on Mondays and Fridays. Those are generalizations and all generalizations are lies.

Write a weekly plan making time to prospect every day. It is best to set aside the time first thing in the morning to ensure it gets done before the world makes other demands of you.

2. Turn Off the Distractions

Turn off the Internet. Turn off your email. Turn off your Smart Phone. Focus.

Tell your friends you have a new found discipline and that you need their support; promise to catch up with them later.

Hang a sign on your door saying “Do Not Disturb! Prospecting!” If you don’t have a door, use string and hang the sign over your desk.

3. Use Every Method Available

Prospecting is the activity of opening new relationships, but it isn’t really what we are focused on here. We are focused on the outcome that is better described as opening new business relationships to identify potential new business opportunities. There are many ways to do this, and all of them are effective sometimes.

To prospect well, you need to focus your time and energy on what works best for you, but not exclusively. If you are great at cold calling, you should absolutely focus on cold calling. But that doesn’t mean that you should never use email marketing, inbound marketing, networking, trade shows and conferences, direct mail, social networking, or referrals. You should include all of these tools in your arsenal.

Make a list of all of the methods that you can and will use to prospect. Plan the time that you will set aside for each method and how many prospects you will gain from your effort. For example, you might commit to attending one networking event per month with the result that you acquire two new prospects from each networking event. Measure these results and focus on what generates the greatest return on your investment of time, but remember that your prospects may have their own opinion on how they best like to be approached, and you shouldn’t exclude any method.

4. Write Scripts

Two things cause poor prospecting results. The first is not spending enough time prospecting. The other is ineffective prospecting. This mostly comes down to language choices. It comes down to what you are saying when you prospect.

There is no substitute for scripts.

“But wait!” you say. “I am a professional salesperson and I can’t sound like I am using a script!” I hear you loud and clear. And you can’t sound like someone that your prospect isn’t interested in meeting either.

First you have to recognize that you are already using a script. The words that you use when prospecting (and on sales calls, by the way), are choices that are comfortable to you because you have rehearsed them. They are comfortable to you because you have them memorized, not because you are reading them. But this doesn’t necessarily mean they are the best language choices.

Your effectiveness is improved by choosing carefully the word that use, making observations about what is working and what isn’t working. This takes an awareness, focus, and discipline. It also allows you to experiment with language choices to see what is most effective.

Write scripts for each of the prospecting methods you use. Write responses to the common objections you hear. Rehearse them. If you are part of a great sales team, do this together and rehearse them together. Commit the best language to memory and replace the unwritten and ineffective scripts you are already using.

5. Focus on the Outcome

The outcome of prospecting is to open the relationship. This almost always involves obtaining the commitment for an appointment.

Effectiveness in prospecting is improved by simply focusing on the outcome. This means that you don’t allow your prospecting to turn into a needs analysis, a presentation, or a discussion about the merits of your product or service. It means you apply a laser-like focus on scheduling the appointment.

The reason some salespeople struggle focusing on the outcome of an appointment and the reason often they slip into the sales mode is because they feel that they have to prove that they can create value for the prospect during their prospecting activity. But prospecting has a very different goal, namely, the opening of the exploration of the possibility that you might be able to create value and do something together. Selling, at this point, is premature.

There is no list to make, no plan to write here. Just know that a successful outcome here is almost always an appointment. It doesn’t matter how much you liked them or how much they liked you if you didn’t schedule an appointment.

6. Get Good at Cold Calling

There is too much to write here about how to get good at cold calling. But it is important that you have it in your repertoire, and that you build your competency picking up the phone and scheduling an appointment.

Cold calling is still one of the fastest ways to schedule appointments and to open relationships, and the very best salespeople are the very best at cold calling. They are also the very best at all other forms of prospecting, and the only salespeople I have found that are willing to consistently ask for referrals, something else salespeople avoid.

Start cold calling.

7. Nurture Relationships Over Time

Even when you use all of the ideas above, you are still going to hear “no.” You are going to hear it a lot. But relationships, including business relationships, are built over time. Your consistent and unrelenting pursuit of your dream clients is part of a longer-term plan for success and not a quick fix.

Consistency here means that these prospects hear from you more than sporadically. It means they hear from you frequently and with all the predictability of the Sun rising each morning.

Your calls, your thank you cards, your letters, your white papers, your surveys, your studies, your newspaper and web clippings, your constant attempts to find a way to create some value before claiming any all add up over time.

Some of the best relationships and the biggest deals will take the longest time to win, and your consistent nurturing of these relationships will open opportunities for you over time. This approach proves that you are not going to disappear like so many of your peers, that you are truly interested in working with them, that you are a professional who executes well, and that you are determined. These are some of the attributes that people look for in salespeople and partners.

Write a nurturing plan. What will you do to create value for your dream clients even before they decide to set an appointment with you? How often will you call? How often will they receive something from you? What will they receive? What will it say about you? How will it create trust?

Conclusion

Salespeople open relationships. Opening relationships is built upon the ability to prospect. Follow these steps to improve your prospecting results.

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

7 Ways To Be Better at Prospecting is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Prospecting: The Ability to Open Relationships For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to...
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My Kill Your Inner Critic Guest Post on The Naked Redhead

S. Anthony Iannarino — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:23:52 +0000

I wrote a post for my friend, The Naked Redhead (that’s the name of her blog. really). It is called Why You Must Kill Your Inner Critic. She posted it on Monday. If you ever doubt yourself, you may want to give it a read.

My Kill Your Inner Critic Guest Post on The Naked Redhead is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

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4 Ways to Be a Better Closer

S. Anthony Iannarino — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:03:19 +0000

Closing is the art of gaining of commitment. Some commitment gaining occurs at the end of the sales cycle. But more often there are many smaller commitments that allow the sale to move forward. The industry has historically placed far too much emphasis on the closing event at the end of the sales cycle and far too little on the commitment gaining that occurs at and between all of the stages of the sales process (this is one of the reasons that it may sometimes feel like your sales process is broken).

1. Know Your Outcome

The first way to improve your closing is to know what outcome you are seeking. People often mistake activity for outcomes. They are not the same. Making a sales call is not an outcome. The outcome is gaining agreement to move forward towards a deal.

Before any and every sales encounter, you have to decide what you want the outcome of that sales call to be. This is the most important and most overlooked piece of effective sales call planning.

Make a list of the all of the stages of your sales cycle. Now make a list of all of the agreements that you have to obtain in order to effectively move a deal from the beginning of that process to the final closing event. Make a list of the commitments that you have had to obtain that aren’t part of your sales process, like agreements for access to stakeholders that aren’t traditionally needed and access to information that normally isn’t required.

Refer to this list before every sales call and decide what commitment you are trying to obtain.

2. Close For What You Have Earned

It isn’t enough to know what outcome you are trying to obtain. To obtain commitments from clients, you have to have earned the right to ask in the first place.

Closing is very natural and very easy if you have earned the right to do so. We earn the right to ask for commitments to move forward together by creating value during each and every sales encounter. “But wait,” you say, “how do I create value during a needs analysis? I am not even presenting my ideas.” Exactly!

The way to create value on each and every sales call is to leave the prospect or client in a better position that they would have been otherwise. Sticking with the Needs Analysis example, you leave the client with a deeper understanding of their situation, a greater understanding of the implications, and perhaps a clearer vision of how their future might be made better. Without presenting, you may create value by exploring the needs for change and how that change might be made. But you have to be really good to make this happen.

Make a list of the sales calls you make in the regular course of your sales process. Answer these questions. How does the client benefit from this interaction? How could they benefit even more? What do I do on a sales call that earns me the right to ask to advance towards a deal? What could I do? What would create value for me if I were sitting on the client’s side of the table?

3. Close For Something That Creates Future Value for Your Client

In order to obtain commitments, you have to be able to explain the value of moving forward. This is easy at the end of the sales cycle. When you have an ROI analysis in hand, it is easy to explain the value of moving forward. But what about the beginning of the sales cycle and all the little steps between opening and closing?

Let’s stick with the needs analysis example. Maybe you need to acquire additional information from other stakeholders and decision-influencers within the client’s company. How does the client benefit from granting you access to the additional stakeholders? You, of course, get the access you need to move the deal forward. What is their ROI? How do they benefit?

By now you have a list of commitments that you need at each stage of the sale and a list of all the little commitments that may not be part of your formal sales process. You also have a list of how you create enough value on each sales call to have earned the commitment.

Now you need to make a list of the benefits the client will receive by agreeing to move forward in the sale. Answer these questions: How does the client benefit from agreeing to move forward to the next stage of the sales cycle with me? Even if they go no further in the process, will it be worth their time? What can I do to make sure it is worth their time?

4. Kill the Yellow Book

Closing isn’t about tactics or techniques. If what you say to obtain commitments is found in the middle of a yellow book, you shouldn’t be using it. We could stop right here with the simple instruction to remove these books from your bookshelves and remove anything you have taken from them from your repertoire. Sales isn’t for dummies.

Closing and obtaining the commitment should feel natural to you and to your client. If you have pull out the yellow legal pad and draw a line down the middle, it will not feel natural to your client. It will feel creepy. If it feels natural to you, you were born sometime before 1935.

Simply asking for the commitment you need to move forward, explaining how the client will benefit from taking that next action, and asking for their agreement is all an effective close need contain.

Write down the language you use to ask for commitments. How does the language meet the criteria listed above? How could you make the language both more natural and more effective?

Conclusion

Closing is the first skill or attribute a salesperson must possess. Not because they need to be able to close a deal, but because they need to obtain the commitment to open the possibility of working together, which is the first and most critical commitment the salesperson must obtain. Salespeople obtain commitments only after they have created value for the prospect of client, and they close for the commitment to create future value together.

Use this list to improve your closing.

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

4 Ways to Be a Better Closer is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Closing: The Ability to Ask For and Obtain Commitments For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to...
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