Tom Bird, Jeremy Cassell: Brilliant selling

Brilliant selling

When we won the contract with Pearson to deliver the first edition of Brilliant Selling it was 2006, a lot has changed since 2015.

• The modern buyer is more sophisticated, intolerant and price sensitive.
• Procurement process and people are standard in big companies.
• Social brand of a seller is important.
• Adding value is a must.
• Cold calling is dying.
• Closing model is not applicable in majority of sales situations.
• Pandemic affected whole business community.

The process of selling

When you are managing a business, predictability is absolutely critical. You need to get planning and processes right.

The sales process

Process can be defined as ‘a series of actions or steps in making or achieving something’, and it implies progress towards a desired end result.

The seven steps of ‘generic’ sales process:

• Prospect
• Identify needs and implications
• Present solution
• Meet objections
• Negotiate
• Ask for the business
• Manage the account

Prospecting is the process of initiating and developing new business by searching for potential customers for your products or services. Leads become prospects once they are qualified.

Prospecting includes: identifying possible prospects, targeting possible prospects and developing prospects. Some common problems are: not being clear on the prospect profile, being clear about the prospect profile but not acting on it, not doing enough activity and not qualifying early enough.

Identifying needs and implications includes: discovery, building the motivation to make a buying decision. Some common problems are: we do not ask enough questions and we make assumptions. What are key priorities: fully understand their needs and help them to build a compelling reason to take action.

Presenting solutions includes: articulating benefits, gauging their reaction objectively, providing a written proposal and presenting. Some common problems are: we make assumptions, we communicate features, we do not present to the right person(s). Key priorities: talk about the benefits in the prospect’s language, uncover any additional steps or information needed, influence the decision maker(s).

Meet objection includes: surface and welcome objections, fully understand them, address them correctly and fully and check with the prospect. Common problems are: we avoid objections and we do not deal with them effectively. Key priorities: welcome objections, take the time to address them and don’t move on before you know they have been addressed.

Negotiate includes: reaching agreement on the terms and trading concessions. Some common problems: we assume we will need to negotiate, thinking it is all about price, not linking the product to the value it brings for the prospect, not linking the product to the value it brings for the prospect and giving rather than trading. Key priorities: reach an agreement that works well for both parties.

Ask for the business includes: check that you have met all of the objections, choose how best to ask for the sale, choose how best to ask for the sale and ask. Common problems: we might put off asking and we might ask too early. Key priorities: consider when to ask and how to ask and gain commitment.

Manage the account involves: focus on the relationship and look to add value and insight. Common problems: not making time for it and focusing on only one person. Key priorities: develop the relationship to greater level of trust.

Planning for success

Planning implies coming up with a method, procedure or approach in advance of taking action. In sales, a lot of ‘plans’ are actually targets.

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”[1]

You should plan activities, meetings and efficient use of time. You don’t need to plan everything; you just need to plan the right things.

Pre-suasion

Robert Cialdini shows that the most effective influencers also plan and craft what they are going to say immediately before giving the message itself.

As part of your planning, you should consider three things: how can I gain, hold and direct attention, how can I create a sense of unity between the prospect and myself and my product or service and how can I establish positive connections.

Per-suasion recognizes that what you say first determines how people respond to what you say next.

Effective time and self-management

Your time is finite. You cannot change it. The very best that you can do is to understand where you spend your time now and consider if it is on the right things.

Once you have made a commitment to focus only on things you can control, you can turn your attention to the choices you are making.

Things that move sales forward are important and not necessarily urgent.

“People can generally make time for what they choose to do, it is not really the time but the will that is lacking.”[2]

Managing sales information

Most salespeople did not get into selling to analyze data. Data can often be an objective window into why you are achieving a certain result and a clue as to what to do about it.

“The person who knows HOW will always have a job. The person who knows WHY will always be his boss.”[3]

Pay attention to data and information about: what market is doing, what specific prospects customers are doing, how other salespeople are doing within the company and how you are doing.

The best salespeople manage their sales cycles – their pipeline. A pipeline enables you to track:

• Individual prospects
• Sales forecast
• Each stage of the sales cycle
• A percentage probability of the sale happening

Understanding buyers and the buying environment

The new process of procurement

Brilliant salespeople have to put themselves in the shoes of their buyers. They have to be curious about a buyer’s challenges, needs, frustrations and about the buying process so that they can plan to navigate the sale effectively.

• Buyers are more sophisticated and knowledgeable.
• Buyers do more research themselves as part of the sales process.
• They have fewer face-to-face meetings with salespeople.
• Buyers want salespeople to be consultative.
• Customer expectations of a salesperson have increased substantially.
• Buyers expect you to add real value to them in the first meaningful interaction you have.
• Buyers are often not the user of the product or service they are buying; they want to be educated but they also have a formal process to buy.

61 % of buyers said sales representatives were transaction-orientated only and did not understand customer needs.

The following are key questions that are on a buyer’s mind:

• What are you offering?
• Legitimacy of your business.
• Competition.
• Price vs. value.
• Timing.
• You.

What buyers fear:

• The fear of paying too much.
• The fear of change.
• The fear of being left behind.
• The fear of loss.
• The fear of not knowing enough about what they are buying.
• The fear of not hitting their procurement targets.
• Our job as a salesperson is to answer the buyers’ questions and address their fears.
• Four key qualities that buyers are seeking from a sales partner:
• Product/service advice
• Market knowledge and insight
• Trust
• Relationship building

Prospecting with purpose

Prospecting is about making proactive efforts through calls, social media and other direct contact with the intent of creating opportunities for you to progress.

To avoid ‘feast and famine’ cycle you must continue to prospect, even when sales are good.

Myths of sales prospecting:

• Prospecting is the same thing as sales. The key qualification questions are: will my product/service solve a problem for customers, can they afford it, are they willing to spend?
• Prospecting is a numbers game.
• Prospecting is time-intensive.
• Scripts simply do not work. Script or basic framework allows you to test which key benefits and qualifying questions work.
• You need to ‘close’ them on the appointment.

Always identify valid business reason (VBR).

The prospecting process:

• Identify prospects
• Plan and research your prospects
• Plan the initial telephone call
• Get into a resourceful state
• Make the initial call to the organization
• Make the initial call to the prospective buyer
• Follow up all calls

Asking the right questions to identify what the prospect wants and needs

Questions are the answer.

A need is something you have to have, something you cannot do without to survive. A want is something you would like to have. It has emotional pull. Wants relate to emotions, whereas needs relate to something definitive within the specific business.

Seven principles to guide you to ask the right questions:

• Start with an attitude of curiosity.
• Have a clear outcome for your questions.
• Let the conversation flow naturally.
• Use both open and closed question.
• Make your questions understandable.
• Ask questions that help your pinpoint the dominant buying motivations.
• Avoid offending your buyers!

“If you are not moving closer to what you want in sales (or in life), you probably aren’t doing enough asking.”[4]

Focus your questioning around these nine areas:

• Needs and wants
• Selection criteria
• Options
• Your service/product
• People
• Decision making
• Budget
• Momentum/qualifying
• Extending the relationship

So many salespeople ignore customer buying cycle and just enforce a rigid sales cycle and wonder why they fail.

Ask for referrals at the height of the gratitude curve.

Unprejudiced listening

Brilliant listeners put aside distractions and really listen in an unprejudiced way.

There are eight elements of unprejudiced listening:

• Value the other party.
• Listen to what is not said.
• Limit the time you speak.
• Avoid thinking about what you are about to say.
• Listen to other party’s point of view.
• Repeat and reflect the other party’s comments.
• Take notes.
• Maintain eye contact.

Your role as a salesperson

The evidence about top salespeople and personality types

Most people think that all great salespeople have a certain type of personality: big, bubbly, extrovert.

Everyone sells differently and you need to be yourself to sell authentically.

To create or change a habit we need three things: knowledge, desire and awareness.

Think about what are your preferences:

• Do you take action or do you reflect?
• Do you prefer detail or big picture?
• Are you motivated towards something you want or away from something you do not want?

If you are a detail-conscious person, make sure you pay attention to the right details.

By setting a “towards” goal you know specifically where you are headed, whereas with an “away from” goal all you know is what you will not have.

Mind-sets of Brilliant Salespeople

Our decisions and motivations in selling are based on our beliefs and values. To a large extent they will determine our success.

Beliefs are simply those things that we feel are true and they underpin our actions.

Positive beliefs about selling will allow you to communicate passionately and convincingly.

The start point for changing limiting beliefs is to understand that they are not objectively true and that they also ignore other relevant information.

In The Fifth Discipline Peter Senge summarizes William Isaacs’ Ladder of Inference mode to describe how beliefs are formed:

• Observable data and experiences.
• I select data.
• I add meaning.
• I make assumptions.
• I draw conclusions.
• I adopt beliefs.
• I act on my beliefs.

The chain is: belief, behaviors and result.

Social selling

It is still possible to ignore social selling. But only just. For most of us, it is now part of how we interact with the world.

For many salespeople, social selling has replaced the dreaded practice of cold calling.

Social selling is not just about gaining access to contracts but about building relationships and listening for the right moment to join the conversation so you can present yourself as a solution to a problem.

Bluebird is defined as ‘happiness’ by the Oxford English Dictionary and its origin dates to 1909. It has been increasingly used in corporate circles in the past few years, describing an unexpected sale.

Goals, targets and the focus on performance

Goal setting is critical in sales. We are often given sales goals in the form of targets, but Brilliant Salespeople set goals for themselves.

Tim Gallwey in his Inner Game sets a formula:

Performance = Potential – Interferences

Make sure that any goal is set around something of which you are in control.

Recent research cited by Cialdini identifies that adherence to goal-oriented behaviors can be increased by at least 24 % by creating ‘If/when … then’ plans because they put our consciousness on high alert for specific situations.

Continuous self-improvement

“Five frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left? Answer: five. Why? Because there’s a difference between deciding and doing.”[5]

There are two things that you must have to bring about any change in behavior (or belief): awareness and responsibility.

Great feedback is both objective and specific.

“You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.”[6]

Your power to influence

Emotional intelligence

We can define emotional intelligence (EI) as the ability to:

• Recognize, understand and manage our own emotions.
• Recognize, understand and influence the emotions of others.

The term EI was invented by Peter Salovey and John Mayer in the article published in journal Imagination, Cognition and Personality (1990).

In our modern sales world, one undeniable fact is the power and importance of the buyer’s emotional experience when dealing with salespeople as they go through the buying process.

EQ competences can be broken down into three specific components: self-awareness, self-management and social awareness.

One of our most pressing needs as humans is the need to feel significant. Salespeople with high levels of EQ are able to make the buyer feel important as they focus on them and their needs.

As well as developing and utilizing your EQ, you need, of course, to leverage your expertise, experience and knowledge in sales, what we call credibility.

The C³ Model of Influencing

Influencing is about producing an effect on an individual or group by imperceptible or intangible means.

The C³ Model of Influencing™ includes: confidence, credibility and connection. In most sales situations it is unlikely that anyone will buy anything from a salesperson unless they have demonstrated confidence, established credibility and built a connection with you.

Confidence

The state you are in will affect everything else going on in you and around you. A state is the way you are felling at a given moment – a combination of thought, emotion and physiology. It combines our mental pictures, sounds, feelings, physical energy and breathing. State management is the ability to choose the most appropriate state at any given moment.

Confidence comes in two forms: surface and deep confidence.

Credibility

Credibility derives from the Latin credo, which means ‘I believe’. You need to be believable to sell. Credibility includes the components of trustworthiness and expertise.

Ten top tips to establish credibility when selling:

• Make your buyer feel special.
• Take responsibility.
• Acquire as much knowledge as possible.
• Establish multiple links into the organization.
• Add value – all the time.
• Prepare effectively.
• Avoid ‘selling’ too early.
• Present with enthusiasm.
• Execute efficiently.
• Have the courage to say no.

Connection

Credibility comes first in selling, followed closely by connection/rapport. Rapport is a harmonious connection with another person, which often takes place outside conscious awareness.

Ten top tips to establish and build connection:

• Lobby in advance.
• Do the chit-chat.
• Share personal information.
• Be like them.
• Listen, listen, listen.
• Ask questions.
• Look as though you are interested.
• Be friendly.
• Lighten up and laugh.
• Finally – get to the point.

Presenting solutions

Appealing to the customer

• A feature is any characteristic of a product or service that remains the same whether the prospect buys or not.
• An advantage is the performance characteristic of a service that describes how it can be used or how it will help the customer.
• Benefits are the favorable results that the buyer receives from the service/product that satisfy a customer’s needs/wants.
• A USP – unique selling proposition – is something you or your company has that no other company has.
• A key differentiator is a feature that is better than the main competitor’s feature in some way(s).

Whether you are in B2B sales, B2C sales, internet sales, retail sales or you are selling professional services, benefits and differentiators are what really sell your product or service.

Great salespeople are able to differentiate in four distinct areas: themselves and their approach to buyers; their specific products and services; the company they represent; and the actual benefits that buyer can achieve by buying from them.

If your really think about it, you can link most benefits and differentiators at the highest level to:

• Money
• Time
• Perceived improved performance
• Ego

Writing great sales proposals

Your proposal is a sales, not a technical, document.

What can you do to produce a high-quality sales document that gets results?

• Elicit criteria for proposal.
• Under-promise and over-deliver (time frame for proposal).
• Make sure proposals are customer-focused.
• Brainstorm.
• Use a template.
• Write well.
• Substantiate all claims you make in your proposal.
• Offer alternatives.
• Write a strong executive summary.
• Follow up and present if you can.

Find out what the decision maker would like to see in the proposal. Once you do, summarize it and then confirm this by email. Use customer language in the proposal, identify their concerns and their challenges.

Proposal template:

• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Identification of issues and challenges
• Alternatives
• Recommendation
• Process – show the steps to provide whatever it is your potential client needs
• Investment required
• Summary

Use section heading. Keep sentences short and coherent. Avoid using words, expressions or three-latter acronyms that will no be readily understood by the reader. 10 to 12-point font size. Restrict your paragraphs to 10 lines. Break up the text with some visuals and graphics. Use a spell checker.

Position your proposal as discussion documents.

Customers should never have to search for your key responses.

Preparing winning pitches

A six-step process to effective preparation for a sales presentation:

• Identify your outcome. A reason why you are speaking and what you hope to achieve. What do you want them to take away from your presentation? If there is one core message, what is it?
• Research your audience. If I were in their shoes, what would I want to hear?
• Brainstorm.
• Select and structure your material. A mistake in a pitch is to think, you have to tell them everything about you and your organization.
• Focus on the start and the finish. A spike is a sentence or series of sentences that gets to the heart of what you want to say. For the conclusion summarize the main points and suggest the next action.
• Practice.

Pitch structure formula created by Bernice McCarthy in the 1970s called 4MAT:

• Why. Why is this important to the audience?
• What. The audience needs information. Restrict it to three areas if you can.
• How. How is it going to work?
• What if. For those who wish to explore the future consequences of buying your product/services.

Persuasive delivery

The key to a formal sales presentation or pitch is to really engage the audience – bored buyers don’t buy.

Good visual aids can:

• Show the relationship or comparison between data.
• Build up a picture.
• Illustrate a picture.
• Summarize key points.

Making the most of objections

In traditional sales training, salespeople are often taught to ‘overcome’ an objection. If you were buying, would you really like your objection ‘overcome’.

An objection is a reservation, or concern, about some aspect of a service/product that may prevent a sale taking place.

Objections are opportunities to learn more about the client’s needs.

“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.”[7]

A four-step process for handling objections successfully called 4A model:

• Acknowledge
• Audience
• Answer
• Ask

The only person who can really ‘deal’ with an objection is the buyer/prospect. At the end ask a person who raised an objection if it has now been answered satisfactory.

If you are presenting as a team, decide who is going to handle which objections.

Negotiating collaboratively

Negotiation is not selling. Equally, you do not necessarily have to negotiate when you sell. Selling is about persuading and convincing. Negotiation is about tying up the loose ends, once an ‘in principle’ decision has been made.

Five core principles in negotiation that will improve your results:

• Work to win-win.
• Decide optimum and fallback positions.
• Trade concessions.
• Work on all the variables.
• Avoid assumptions.

 A lot of salespeople make the mistake of giving away concessions without asking for anything in return.

Cost and values are not always in straightforward financial terms. Setting up an exchange process is key to effective negotiation.

Negotiation tactics:

• Build debt.
• Consistency.
• Use standards and objective criteria.
• Summarize.
• Defer.
• Adjourn.
• The flinch.

Securing commitment

Throughout the sales process, you need to ensure there is momentum and commitment to the next stage.

The reality is that so often in business, the final decision happens without you in the room. That is fine. You should do your work before that final decision.

Developing and managing customer

The value of a customer

Work out the cost of acquiring the business in the first place. As discretionary time is limited, think about developing great ongoing relationship with a small number of high-valued customers.

Managing the relationship and the road to trusted advisor

• Prospect – someone who has not yet bought from me but is a qualified potential customer.
• Customer – someone who has bought from me once.
• Client – someone who has bought from me more than once.
• Supporter – someone who acts as a reference for me.
• Advocate – I have close relationship at senior management and middle management levels.

What to do when things go wrong in a commercial relationship

The Pinch model. If you ignore the small incidents called ‘pinches’ the next small thing can escalate enormously. You need to manage difficulties proactively and in a timely way.

Management of a sales team

Your management of a sales team

Sales management is primarily about getting the best from salespeople to achieve sales targets consistently.

Don’t assume others would like to be managed or developed in the same way you would like to be developed or managed.

With the rise of the sophisticated, impatient digital buyer, fast and complete communication is key.

Onboarding must be updated and continuously improved. It should be easy to access, linked to best practices and not fixed and too structured.

Maximizing performance through coaching

Sales coaching is what brilliant sales manager do to develop individuals and teams to improve performance and achieve goals.

Think also about performance not only results.

Effective meeting management

One of the benefits of working for yourself is that you do not attend unnecessary meetings. Keep meetings short. 30 minutes is enough for any meeting.

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[1] Alan Lakein in the book on page 22

[2] Sir John Lubbock in the book on page 36

[3] Diane Ravitch in the book on page 41

[4] Jack Canfield in the book on page 75

[5] Mark L. Feldman and Michael F. Spratt in the book on page 136

[6] Galileo in the book on page 141

[7] Samuel Johnson in the book on page 220