Selling Doesn't Work.... Like it used to

Monday, November 1, 2010.

Selling Doesn't Work.... Like it used to.

 This is from a guy whose company has, since the 40's, been coaching and training salespeople as part of their offering.

The role of sales has changed.  You're thinking, 'no kidding'.  I remember when our world was stable and all a company had to do was add a better person to the team to make more calls and see more people.  The result was increased sales.  Nothing much is stable anymore and thinking from old sales assumptions just does not work like it did. 

Today, salespeople feel overworked, underpaid and under appreciated and their work environment can be more abusive and tense than it used to be.  In fact, over the last 5 - 7 years, the entire sales profession has gone through a transformation.  It used to be that the only way prospects learned about a company's products and services was to have a sales person call on them.  They were info rmation-providers for product specs and service offerings.  The focus of the salesperson was to close leads that marketing created.  They had to convince a prospect to buy by having a great sales presentation, interviewing skills, and communicating the features and benefits of their product or service.

Things have changed.

1. Customers/prospects can now perform extensive internet research on their own.  It used to be the salesperson's job to prove the product was good.  Now, blogs and consumer websites are abundant and the information they provide go beyond what most sales professionals can or, in some cases, want to provide.

2. Today's customers want simple solutions.  They do not like having products pushed on them.  They want quarterbacks who connect with everyone involved and pull the pieces together.  Sales professionals today need to be business advisers rather than information providers.  They need to uncover the client's real needs.  Business has become so complex due to the constant changing of markets needs, the global structure of business, and the incredible access to information that it can boggle the mind of any business person.  As a result, most prospects do not know their needs because they are too caught up in the details of the business to see what is really going on.  Many buyers have narrowed down their solutions in a simplistic way, rather than see how all the parts effect the whole.  If sales pros just let the buyer dominate the actions or sales process, both the buyer and the salesperson could lose.  You can no longer assume that prospects even know what their problems are.  They know their businesses should be better, but don't quite know how to change it.  The business adviser's wisdom becomes the springboard for a continual relationship.

The old paradigm of selling was biased toward your product's features and benefits.  The new model is about habitually using tools  that get at the real problems of your prospects and presenting offerings that solve these problems while matching the buyer's motives.

3. The sales reps need to be impactful in all their interactions because a prospect's  time is limited.  Sales professionals have less time to prove themselves.  New sales people have to perform quickly.  To succeed quickly salespeople need:

·  To be fearless

·  To be open to coaching and training.

·  To use analytical tools to uncover the customers real problems.

·  To be a sector expert by reading and studying daily.

·  To know their market, their customer and all aspects of a customers
   business.

·  To be clear as to what to say to C- level executives.  If they are not
   clear, they probably won't make the call.

·  To give a unique or at least adequate sales proposition quickly that
   closely matches a prospects motives and needs.

·  To profile what a good qualified prospect looks like so they can hunt
   down  opportunities and qualify more effectively.

4. Sales managers and business owners need to be serious about using business advisory sales training and coaching rather than trying to hire rainmakers who bring their client list with them.  Many companies still do this because they don't support their people enough. Sales managers need to go over their new hires time management to ensure they are in activities that uncover qualified prospect's needs.  Also, they need to spend time going over their salespeople's proposals and deals to ensure their potential client wins. They don't want to compete by just price cutting.  They should hire outside coaches and trainers to help people deal with reality and develop the habits and skills required. If coaches and trainers start with abstract concepts, dump them quickly. It's tough out there.  We need to be real and practical.  In the past, sales training was conceptual and it worked.  Today sales training companies are forced to teach how to uncover the genuine problems, finding opportunities and presenting offerings that match the markets and customers motives.

Management needs to play a bigger role in the sales process. Only management can create new offerings that match the market's motivation to buy by studying customer's buying motives. If the sales process is not based on this kind of sound strategic thinking, making more calls will make very little difference.

In summary, the sales force needs to be a strategic weapon in the company's arsenal.  Sales professionals need and deserve highly specialized training and sales management that teaches and coaches them to provide winning solutions to their prospects and customers that expose the competition's weaknesses and allow them to take sales away from them. Managers need to be market-centric and ensure that the organization's offering matches buyer's motives.

Actions:

Assess the following:

1) Do you have a unique, compelling sales proposition on your website or is it just a bunch of features and benefits of your company and/or products?

2) How well do your sales people understand their prospects, clients, and competition?  Do they have the skills to uncover the real problems and needs of their prospects?  Can they package their offering to match the customer's motive to buy?

3) Are you investing money to train and coach your strategic sales team?  What training can you give them that will bring out their potential?

As always, if you want more help with any of the above, give me a call or email me your questions.

Have a great week.

What destroys possibilities

Monday, October 25, 2010.

Why possibilities aren't possible

As business coaches we begin our work with organizations and individuals by helping them create a vision.  For a team, it is a picture of the desired state of the business.  For an individual it is a picture of how a person will be, what they will be doing, and what they will have within a practical period of time.  It is an expression of results achieved; behaviors routinely demonstrated; relationships in place; and a life lived around what they truly aspire in relationship to their values.

Why is having a vision critical to growth and achievement and to living the life we want?  Does it work?  Here is what I have learned.

1)    You can be good at fixing problems as you go through life and still never get to where you want to be especially if where you want to go is unclear.  The context is missing for your actions.  Only a vision around what you want can give you the proper direction.

2)    Operating from long- held assessments, memories, and psychological stumbling blocks creates habits that keep you feeling a sense of hopelessness.  Operating from a vision can give you a sense of what is possible.  We need to grant ourselves that what we want is possible.  How we measured up to others or our own expectations in the past doesn't matter much.  These self- imposed or outside assessments were made in a different context at a different time.  Some were made by us as a child and they still hold us back.  What is a possibility is still a possibility.

3)    A well thought through, specific vision of that possibility creates clarity.  People can't do vague, fuzzy things. Whatever you see, believe, and act on, you can achieve.  I remember reading this quote in "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill when I was 21 years old.  Every 21 year old should read it.  Heck, all of us should read it again.  Once the vision is clear, we can look at our current reality and actions/initiatives should become obvious.

Who knows how all this vision stuff works.  I know for sure in my life that when I had a clear vision of what I wanted for my life (family, spiritual, financial, physical, social, recreational, travel, business) and I set up a plan and acted on goals, my life took on a structure.  How I saw my life was framed in a story in my head and I acted it out with passion.  As I look back, most of what I envisioned happened.  Sometimes it took longer than I thought, but I eventually realized the possibility.  In the desk in my home office, I still have seven files.  One big vision and six connecting files with plans, goals and measurements.  But these measurements are not some psychological limitations set on me from the past.  They are about what is happening now and what's next.  Every year, on the beach in Mexico, I update those plans by updating the current reality and set new goals and actions I will take.  So, vision works.

One of the readings in "Think and Grow Rich" was a poem titled "I bargained with life for a Penny".  As I look back, I should have asked for more because the possibilities were invented and limited by me.  So, vision is the place to begin and is the place to act from in the present.  It is always amazing to me how easy it is for people to tell you their problems, their story from the past, yet stumble and mumble when trying to articulate where they are going in their business or life.  How come?  Don't they see what is possible?  Is it that they just don't think about it?  

A vision is a powerful framework to take the operations of any size from a lack luster or downward spiral into the arena of possibility.  If done right, a vision releases us from the weight and confusion of local problems and concerns and allows us to see the long clear line.  A vision answers to the market and it's people... what about me?  It doesn't fix anything.  It is just desired.  Speaking it, planning from it, begins the transformation of people.  Every time you do, the world becomes a universe of possibility and the barriers to the realization of the vision disappear.  Playing the business game from a vision is relevant to the manifestation of the possibility.  How else does someone play so well, so freely, so passionately?  So successfully?

ACTIONS

1.   I suggest there is nothing more important than getting a piece of paper and writing down (you can still do this without a computer, right?) what is the desired state of your business or department and/or your desired state of your life.  (family, business, spiritual, physical, recreational,  hobbies, social, financial).  Begin the transition by writing out the factual, (not your past opinionated story) about your current reality in relationship to what you want.  Then put in place goals, plans, initiatives, actions to get you there.  Now get six or so files going around connected mini visions/current realities that will guide your goals and actions.  I wouldn't let the weekend pass without doing this.   This is your ticket to a better business and better life.

2.While doing this, grant yourself this possible future.  Write, speak, plan as if you actually deserve it.

3.  Grant that you are a contribution to others.  Grant everyone else around you to be one as well.  We are not a hopeless cog in the wheel of business.

4.  Grant that you are a genuine player.  Someone who is not judging, watching or measuring how things are from the stands but someone on the court focusing on hitting the ball as it comes to you, in the moment, doing whatever it takes with whatever is being served to you.  (you can tell I am an old tennis player)  You can be a player or an observer.  It's your choice.

Incidentally I am leading a small group "Wake Up Your Business" coffee strategy huddle at my office on October 28^th from 8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. at 2121 Argentia Road. It is filling so enroll now. It will be done in a workshop fashion, but we will have some dialogue. We will review the most important actions to take to prepare us for the rebound and to boost performance - now.  No cost.

To Enroll: Click Here

What Destroys a Business?

A message from Kevin D. Crone, CEO, Dale Carnegie Business Group, Canada. Please Note: We now have a Monday Morning Mentor Blog.

Monday, October 18, 2010. What destroys a business? Last Wednesday I said hello to a vendor who was in our boardroom meeting with some of our keen, young leaders on system changes for our business.  He said "Kevin, the recession is over."  I responded with "It sounds like you found some customers?"  He replied, "Correct, it's that simple". When companies are in survival mode, finding some good customers is a great, simple answer and gives focus.  What isn't simple is determining what would cause an organization to do the simple things in the face of seemingly tougher, world wide conditions. You can improve the offering; align all your operations systems to support it; create a better story to the market using all the modern marketing tools that keep customers warm until they buy; create incentives and reward performance at all levels; attract, coach, educate and train your people; all this and your business could still be destroyed if you don't recognize and respond to building that extra ingredient of success that has been profoundly true for centuries. That ingredient is ATTITUDE. I know, I know... you don't want to hear it.  In today's world you may think knowledge is all-important.  Well yes it is.  Skills are important too.  They get you in the game.  They tell you it can be done, but doing it and/or doing it well is determined by attitude.  It has always been this way and always will be. If you don't have the factors outlined in the previous paragraph in place, you probably never will without a change in attitude.  What's the make-up of your culture?  It's made from the conversations going around the office.  Are these conversations about how you please and take care of your customers?  Peter Drucker said, that should be the main topic "for there is no other reason to be in business." Or, are they about how management is messing with employee's security and sense of importance?  How the business sucks and the business model doesn't work anymore?  Are people complaining that customers are too demanding and fickle and you can't access them anymore?  Your conversations and what has happened to the entire structure of business worldwide can affect attitudes. About six months ago a CEO of an international company said to me "I don't know where our passion has gone."  I had some thoughts but didn't think he would welcome hearing them. Maybe the reality is that management and the business model do need improving.  You can either be positive, negative or indifferent about it... your choice.  No one person or circumstance can affect your attitude without your permission.  It's your choice.   Indifference and negativity can chip away at our hope, vision, passion, enthusiasm, focus, clarity of action, confidence and of course, all of the above will show up in the actions we take or don't take and the subsequent results.  We'll expect less, complain more and achieve little and it is because of what is unknown to us.... Our ATTITUDE. Now I am not talking about some Polyanna, rose colored glasses, blind to reality, attitude.  I am talking about having an attitude that allows for new thinking, planning, actions and simple focus.  I have been in the human behavior and business improvement field for 45 years watching, listening, and studying.  One thing I've come to realize is that our minds are designed to string events into story lines whether or not there is any connection between the parts in reality.   In other words, it is all invented in our minds and we might as well invent a story and framework that shifts our attitudes and creates the conditions that support the business or personal vision for you and those around you. For example:  Our people are important to us.  What can we do to recognize, coach, train and reward them?  Our customers make us.  What can we do to offer them what they need to make their world better? My work is important.  I choose to do this work because of the impact I can have which is _____________________.  Don't assume your story.  It's all attitude.  You can't change, improve or deliver on any simple, new answer without inventing a new one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What if survival attitudes are only a product of our fears and our need to add everything up in a tight, measured package so we can pretend to have everything figured out?  What if we had the attitude that there are always new customers out there wanting to sign up, rather than the concept that money, customers, and ideas are in short supply.  When you are oriented to abundance you are more engaging, care less about having all the answers first and you will take more risks and just go for it.  You are probably missing little, are very capable and an attitude tune up will make the difference to you, your team and the business. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Actions:  We all need to think about and answer the following. How is your attitude?   What characterizes your business culture?  What are the conversations about?  What is important to you and your team?  What story have you been creating in your mind that gives you what you see?  What can you now invent that gives you other choices regarding customers and fellow associates?  Now, go have better conversations. Incidentally I am leading a small group "Wake Up Your Business" coffee strategy huddle at my office on October 28th from 8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. at 2121 Argentia Road. It is filling so enroll now. It will be done in a workshop fashion, but we will have some dialogue. We will review the most important actions to take to prepare us for the rebound and to boost performance - now.  No cost. To Enroll: Click Here Have a great week. Kevin D. Crone CEO Dale Carnegie Business Group BusinessNext Inc. Offering Dale Carnegie Throughout Canada kevin@businessnext.ca (905) 826-7300 / 1-800-361-2032 ext. 223 www.dalecarnegie.ca www.businessnext.ca

Monday Morning Mentor - October 11, 2010

A message from Kevin D. Crone, CEO, Dale Carnegie Business Group, Canada.

Monday, October 11, 2010. Marketing Doesn't work (Like it used to) The old interruptive model doesn't work.  Customers are tuning out.  They no longer listen to 'in-your-face' messages.  What does work, more often than not?? 1)  Obviously if you go into a store you are more prone to buy brand.  Brand still matters in all markets, so building your brand still works.  It can lead to more leads and customers. 2)  In Canada, going to a website to check a company's offering is the number one way people buy.  People spend more time on the internet than watching TV, so make sure your website works.  Too many of our businesses have outdated websites that have in your face, push messages.  Instead, we must tell the prospective customer how we can change their lives.  The website alone should give prospects some value whether or not anyone buys from you.  Pretend you are talking to your best customer and you understand their needs and wants, and are always rewarding them for their loyalty.  What do they need to know to be better? What answers do you have for their real-world problems? Give them value and provide calls to action that could be of real value if they act on them. Provide call to action deals accordingly. 3) Put a face to the brand. Forge a genuine connection with your market/customers, you have to be one of your biggest fans, and it helps to be vocal about it.  Contrary to what we hear from today's gurus, marketers are not staying behind the scene.  Customers respond positively to a human to human outreach which adds a face to the brand.  By building connections between people and brands, marketing can make a product more interesting and more valuable and be the seed to long term loyalty.  Get out there.  Write blogs, give speeches, do workshops, write articles. 4)  Support a good cause, especially if it fits your brand.  Let your market know about it.  For years we have supported Athletes Canada.  We have trained and coached many of Canada's Olympic athletes.  And every year our team coaches and trains young, native Canadian entrepreneurs at Project Bayshick.  Give back in a very meaningful way.  For us, we love working with these groups. 5)  According to a Nielsen report, two thirds of the world's internet population visit social networking or blogging sites. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are used for business and personal use. Happy consumers can create a ground swell of support and free marketing. (think online Zappos - up to one billion in annual sales in just a few years), or how a few mistreated consumers can cause tremendous damage to brands. (think Dell Hell)  What consumers think is that companies should ramp up social media usage to identify service/support issues not to promote their products.  Consumers want and like to know you are listening, so listen and mean it.  Customers can tell if you don't.   However you do it, listening is more than a strategy.  If you aren't listening and responding to what you hear, you could be in trouble and missing opportunities. Google is now considered the most valuable brand in the world today, even though it spends almost nothing on advertising.  They provide great value and stand for something.  Employees want their companies to stand for something and they will give their best effort when they are working toward a cause they believe in.  No baloney!  When your marketing provides value and allows your people to accomplish their dreams, they will tolerate quite a bit.  By creating marketing that people choose to engage with and that improves people's lives, we are reaching the highest level of personal success. Actions:  Questions to answer... What is your brand about?  Does it represent changing customers lives?   How? What can you do to build a brand dialogue in-house? How does your website give your prospects value other than an 'in-your-face' description of what you do?  How could it? What can you do to build a face to face connection between you and the brand?  (speeches, blogs, etc) How is your social media strategy working for you?  Is it about listening and responding to customers? What good cause are your supporting that fits your brand and could add meaning to your brand? What is your social media marketing strategy?  Are you in the market's face as an unwelcome guest or do you use it to support, listen and respond to your customers?  If it isn't the latter, what will you do? Incidentally I am leading a small group "Wake Up Your Business" coffee strategy huddle at my office on October 28th from 8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. at 2121 Argentia Road. It is filling so enroll now. It will be done in a workshop fashion, but we will have some dialogue so we will review the most important actions to sell for the rebound and to boost performance...now.  No cost. To Enroll: Click Here Have a great week.