SalesSquawk

Solomon Says: Communication is Capital!

Right in the middle of the sales cycle, within the structure of sales lives this one little phase called "communicate." and while seemingly innocent sitting there is the kick in the pants that drives all things sales.  Done well, it drives joy and happiness throughout the customers world, and the sales persons company.  Done poorly, it creates anger, distrust and bad reviews for the "no longer a prospect," and causes the sales person to hang his head low in shame and guilt.

Communicate is the collection of meetings and presentations after discovering some value to the prospect that invites the sales interaction.  It is where we as sales professionals earn our keep as people who can help our prospects recognize our value to them or we recognize we cannot and disqualify them gracefully and move on.  It is where we spend the most effort managing their natural inclination to ensure they are getting the best value for their purpose and not being taken advantage of, AKA, their defenses.

The only mindset that matters here as a sales professional is one that believes, " I must help my customer discover they have more value than cost in going forward with me, or I must help them decide not to go there."  That mindset operates with dignity, integrity and value for the customer, and fosters long term relationships and a huge referral base. Failure to do so costs the salesperson and everyone else in the sales community.

So look around at the sales people in your office.  If there is a rep who is consistently on top of the leader board and has been for a long time, watch how he/she does it.  My bet is their customers love them.  This is why.

Next, the Holy Grail on how you do it.

Respectfully submitted,
Michael D Goodman

Solomon Says: "The Structure of Sales Matters"

Solomon Says: "Structure of Sales = Mental Preparation, Finding, Engaging, Advancing, Qualify, Communicate, Commit, Implement, Satisfy, & Repeat"

All sales efforts are not created equal.  

Neither are sales people, sales managers, sales organizations, products or buyers.  

Because of this, the sales effort that worked in one company will not necessarily work in another.  Unfortunately, the training a sales professional received in one organization will often not translate well either.  In fact, the best spend a company can make in training is one that is customized to their own product or service!  While more expensive to start, the long term reduction in "cost of sales", and "time to money" from a new sales person is far more impressive than a bank executives bonus!

Rather than purchase a one size fits all sales training program, either for the company or the sales professional, the most effective path is to understand the structure of sales, and then build your companies sales process, and sales education around the structure you actually operate in.

To create the greatest possible efficiency in sales, Solomon offers the following structure as the fastest path to money with the lowest effort and cost.  

    

Mental and Emotional Preparation
3 Major Sales Phases
Opportunity Discovery	Sales Prosecution	Post - Sale
Find	Qualify	Implement
Engage	Communicate	Satisfy
Advance	Commit	Repeat / Referral

If I can help you with this, give a shout.  Your career in sales matters!

Respectfully submitted,
Solomon

The Dog Days of Discipline II, The Meaning of Love

I am fully willing to accept your thinking I am nuts with this article.  I am betting though, that those with an interest in how people work, and an intellect to understand may just find it a bit interesting.  You see in the last article I tied discipline to love and advised I could not really tell you how that works, only that we can see it from the outside and do our best to guess how that works on the inside.   You want to tell me I am crazy, go right ahead, but watch this.

We have learned through brain function that the life cycle of a result looks something like this.  We observe an event, the event brings us a thought, the thought leads to a feeling, the feeling causes us to take action, and the action brings a result.  The result becomes another observable event and we spend our days travelling this cycle.  If this were a television court drama, this is where the judge would ask me if I were trying to make a point.  I in my best Boston Legal television way would tie the thought / feeling process to the whole cognitive behavioral psychology world and demonstrate dramatically how discipline equals love and produces results!

You see the thoughts we pull from when we observe an event are based on all we know and have experienced since birth.  If our experience includes discipline as an act of love to teach us right and wrong behavior then the thought/feeling connection we undergo at an event will tie to that previous experience.  The thought/feeling connection will cause us to take an action which is the "right" thing because we believe that is right.  More important, it feels like the "love" from our earlier history.  When we connect the feeling of discipline to love, we will always strive for that feeling.  It will be as much a part of us as our DNA.  

So if you don't feel like you have enough discipline to you go back and smack your parents?  Nope, jail is no fun and it wouldn't support your long term goals. (I don't think...)

There are mental and emotional exercises you can do to get back there but (and this is why this is often difficult) they do take discipline to achieve.  Kind of seems like the bank charging you more of what they know you don't have any of when thy penalize you for an overdraft, doesn't it?

Here is the other tie for Love and Discipline. Powerful achievement behavior.  You see anytime anybody sets off on a difficult goal, they must by definition face the obstacles that make it difficult in the first place.  Whether the difficulties attack the physical, emotional or mental self, that obstacle, without the power of discipline can easily lead to ones own "medicating" behavior or what ever the drug of choice is.  Now when I say drug here I mean anything any of us do to not feel bad about a let down or failure.  Sometimes it is shopping, sometimes talking, sometimes withdrawal, and sometimes drinking or actual drugging.  In the moments when the impulse to find a way not to feel bad about the loss is the strongest, it is the sense of self love that drives the next choice.  Do I give into the temptation to buy a new pair of shoes or do I get back on the phone and make the next prospecting call?

That choice will be made by the love of discipline within.

Respectfully submitted,
Michael D Goodman

Seems like it will make sense to write and article in the near future on building discipline when you don't really feel like it.  I am looking forward to that one myself...

The Dog Days of Discipline

"Character," quotes a truly respectable man, now deceased, "is the capacity to continue on in an intended path, long after the original motivation is gone."  I always loved that definition of character by Cavett Robert and I truly miss the Thursday morning meetings where he would quote that from time to time.  It is not surprising that the founder of the National Speakers Association would create memorable quotes with poignant meaning, but it is surprising that it took me so long to figure out he was really referring to discipline.

Another quote, far more mangled that relates to the fundamental drive of all people goes something like this, "Freedom comes from Margin, (resource excess in time, & money) Margin comes from Work, and Work comes from Discipline."  This one came from Cal Jernigan whom you have little reason to know unless you attend Central Christian Church in Mesa, AZ.  There, Cal is the Senior Pastor and speaks of stuff like this on a regular basis

I know we all know this is true in some recess of our mind and I am pretty certain we all want that discipline, especially when we don't have the freedom we might have thought we should by now.  What I am struggling to figure out is why it is so darn hard to stay engaged in the original effort deep into some new means of getting the freedom we want.  

I believe the answer lies in Love.  I can get there because I can see pieces of it from the outside.  In many ways this love/discipline connection is reminiscent of Einstein's explanation of quantum physics.  "like looking at a watch on the outside we can speculate how it works inside, but because we can't really see it, we don't really know."  

I think I'll explore this more tomorrow and how it applies to our world of sales but for today, I have to get out the door to a clients office.  It's 90 degrees out already, climbing to a hundred and infernal, I would rather be at the pool, the beach or the forest, middle of summer, icky and I don't wanna go.  Unfortunately, Cavett is whispering in my ear again, and off I go.

See you tomorrow.

Respectfully submitted,
Michael D Goodman

Toxic Marketing

Hey wait, marketing isn't toxic.  marketing drives revenue to companies.  Doesn't it?  Sure it does.  Just the way all selling drives revenue to companies.  In sales though, we learned a long time ago that selling is based on relationships and relationships are based on Trust, Credibility and Interest.  Trust is based on the buyers believing that their agenda is the most important in the transaction and the seller is there to serve them.  

In the exact instant that the buyer believes the seller only cares about the sellers agenda, trust, relationship and the sale all go out the window.

Toxic Marketing is the exact instant that the buyer believes the marketing effort is no longer there to serve them but instead support the marketers agenda.

Unfortunately, the company putting out the marketing rarely if ever knows it has happened.  Marketing, by its nature can only be measured by it's capacity to bring in more dollars than were received before the marketing intervention.  It cannot measure how many people were turned off and chose to not buy, nor return to that company

Even more unfortunately, many companies don't care.  Shame on them.  While it is possible to find out if marketing is toxic, to do so requires surveys and customer interaction requesting that information.  Of all the things you have purchased in the last three years, how many companies asked you about your experience?  Some do, most don't.

Now here is the real question, of all the companies you DID NOT buy from, how many asked you why not?  Right.  They generally don't even know they were shut out do they?

So instead the leaders of marketing departments happily prove their success by additional sales and no one in corporate leadership cares about how many people think poorly of the company and encourage purchasing elsewhere.

For some reason or another this is pretty annoying to me and I am looking forward to shooting video or recording examples of poor marketing to share with you.

If you have examples, will you let me know?  Even more importantly, if you hate the idea, will you let me know that sooner?

Very respectfully submitted,
Michael D Goodman

The Secular Value of Spirituality for Sales People

Well that title is a mouthful, isn't it?  Lots going on there and tons of room for conflict in all kinds of ways.  So if you could, for just a moment, suspend all your thinking on religion, judgement, and preconceived notions on what I am about to say.  Track with me if you would the opening construct and why it matters and know it is not my purpose to persuade you to my spiritual beliefs here.

Sales, as a career, is harder because of what we face in relationships than because of the mechanics of sales.  

The effort of sales activity regularly places us in a perception of conflict with our buyers in both their minds and our own.  It happens in our actions, our presentations, our words, our products and in everyones expectations.  

You see, the nature of our world is that we are effectively asking someone to, "change" which by itself is often an uncomfortable proposition, and to do so, the buyer has to recognize that need.  The range of "fight or flight" responses they throw back at us if we don't recommend change at the right time (when they are ready) is simply amazing.  

Unfortunately, what often happens is that one of their strategies for resisting change runs headlong into one of our personal triggers for being "good enough" or valuable as a human being.  Many times, this head-on collision of wills and feelings happens so fast we are never aware they have occurred.  The Cognitive Behavioral Psychology folks call this an, "automatic thought" because it has long since been relegated to a habit in our mind.

When we enter the field of sales, if we are going to be effective we must turn our attention to what is important to our buyers.  Unfortunately, we don't give up our automatic thoughts automatically!  Consequently we WILL have these moments, when their responses to us will cause us to have thoughts and feelings which don't really promote great salesmanship. When we act on 'em, we injure the relationship and the sale.

If you are with me so far, congratulations, it's kind of dry, I know.

Here is the payoff.  

By having a spiritual faith that goes beyond ourselves, our belief in our value is determined by that faith.  While this is always a growth process for us mere humans, being on that path allows us to recognize and give up our own automatic thoughts that feel bad during a sales effort much quicker and refocus on our customer and their needs for the betterment of the sale.

The greater overall impact here, a spiritual faith, helps release the emotional beliefs of all value judgments we carry that tell us we are not good enough.  More than just in our sales career, this freedom is powerful for all of our relationships and all of our efforts.

Feel free to comment, either for or against if you like.  I know this is only the first post on this topic I expect to share as we go forward and I would love to have your thoughts for some of the rest of them.

Respectfully Submitted
Michael D Goodman

Firestorms, Tornado's and Hot Sales

The road between Sioux Falls and Omaha meanders across cornfields, rivers and farmhouses.  A perfect place to think through the previous weeks successes while driving to make a plane back home.  15 years ago I had begun thinking about what I wanted to do in my life that mattered and I realized that if I took my skills at selling and managing sales people, adjusted it a little bit, I could fundamentally change the way sales is done globally.

The proof of that concept showed up last week and I think Mother Nature wanted to let me know she was paying attention.  I work with a company that has 2 major divisions of sales people and their summer sales conferences were both this week.  I was the leader of both, one in Flagstaff, Arizona, one in North Western Iowa.  

The day before going up to Flagstaff to organize the conference, I received a call letting me know that there was a fire outside the hotel, Little America, and it had been evacuated.  The conference was on hold pending arrangements.  Fortunately the fire turned away from the hotel and we were allowed in on Sunday though all the way up the hill during the drive, clouds of smoke billowed over the city from now two fires in town.  The 30 some attendee's at the conference demonstrated an amazing shift also.  

For over a year, we have made a huge effort to get this team to move from presenting the solution to diagnosing the problem first.  At this conference they presented again.  This time though, they presented their capacity to change.  Like a battleship turning slowly, we could see the team shifting into a diagnostic mode and learning the skills to do so.  They left reporting the single best conference the company had invited them to attend.  I think they left with the comfort and confidence to try new skills out in the field.  Turns out we just had to light a little fire under them...

Off to Iowa, to repeat the process with the second division.  Flying in at midnight to the center of the College World Series required finding lodging a little ways up the road from Omaha.  Missouri Valley is really only about 15 minutes up the road and I had reservations there.  Tornadoes got there first.

GPS told me I was in the right place.  Utter darkness told me I was no place.  Apparently a tornado took out all the electricity for miles around and I couldn't see it cuz it was you know, dark.  Found a place another 40 miles up the road and made it to the conference in time.  

This team, a staid, conservative, and older team of sales people got it too.  Some of them with as much time in selling as I have in living.  This team went through the same program after a year of working with them and demonstrated an excellent capacity to twist their thinking to a much stronger skill set of questioning and listening.  Their funnels are improving and there are less clouds on their horizon.  As a sales team of Christian Curriculum, what was fantastic about this is, this team recognized a powerful way of selling with dignity and integrity, how to build bonds simply by listening and asking good questions.

Now I am riding in the car with my buddy Arturo Fuente and he is glowing, along with me about the joys of lighting up sales people to red hot effectiveness.  Looks like we are going to have a hot sales year.

Respectfully submitted,
Michael D Goodman

PS, Thanks for allowing me to wander around in my own happiness for a day.  Thanks for joining in the celebration of success this week represents of the last 15 years worth of work to fundamentally change the way sales is done.  MDG

Tomorrow - The Secular Value of Spirituality for Sales People.

Fishing? Really?

I know.  I never watch fishing shows on TV either but someone must because there it was.  Oddly enough before I flipped the channels, I got fascinated.  There is no need to panic, I am not a fishing show addict but I am fascinated by the work it takes to find a good fishing hole.  The announcer and color commentator were discussing the difference between the timing of the year, and the relevance of the location to the amount and types of fish they were catching.  You see because this particular location was in Canada, in late November before the lake froze over, the types of fish they were catching were all found at a particular depth.  Earlier or later in the year and they would be scattered all over the lake, but at that precise time, there were few places in the lake that supported that depth so the fish were concentrated, making for a target rich fishing location. 

For years, we have spoken of the value of Trust, Credibility and Interest in developing the relationship necessary for effective selling.  We should add Timing and Relevance to the "fishing" side of the equation as well.  A great prospecting or fishing trip for our customers will be made up of Trust, Credibility, Interest, Timing and Relevance.  I am guessing when you find a fishing hole with those things, you will be amazed at how effective your fishing will get.  Maybe even get your own TV show.  Let me know if you do.  I could probably watch it.

Respectfully submitted,
Michael D Goodman

The Longest Day

So I thought I would commemorate the upcoming summer solstice by writing something on it that tied together with sales pretty well.  The only thing I could tie it to however was that feeling you get, deep into a negotiation where you just want it to be over.  The pressure is high, the battle has been intense to move forward and you already know you are going to close the deal.  but in the late stages before the commitment is made, the buyer just wants to wring a few more drops of sweat out of you.

If you haven't been through it before, it is very easy just to give up, give in and close the deal the way they are working you to do.  You can.  But if you do you lose.  

Oh you got the deal, that end game only cost you a little and you have earned yourself a nice little commission to go celebrate with.  But if you want to be the professional, if you want to play in the big leagues, than think about us poor Arizonans who face summer heat like you can't imagine, and the longest day of the year seems to last forever.  In the late stages of the 21st day of June, the rest of the ride is downhill and if we forget that, it is easy to quit late in the game.

The trick to winning the day in either case is to stay focused on what got you to this point of this deal, or this point of this day.  Don't let the enthusiasm of the end creep up and take over your soul until the deal/day is done.

Keep your head in the game all day, and I guarantee, tomorrow will be cooler.  Either way.

Happy summer,
Michael D Goodman

Confusion Selling

With millions of books and billions of opinions on how to sell best produced over the last thousand years it is absolutely no wonder why people get confused on the best way to sell.  Added to the fray are the various types of selling environments, like differing sales cycles, multiple levels of authority, percentage of the total budget required and other factors and some poor sales guy with little or no understanding of how to sell in that particular market is going to learn a sales model called confusion selling.  And if it seems only natural for the sales person to be confused, imagine what that is going to do to the customer.  Looking deeply into that crevasse of overwhelming odds, it almost seems amazing that we get much sold at all.  But we do.  How?

At the end of the day, buyers buy and sellers sell.  It isn't whether goods and services are sell- able, it is whether we can sell enough of our goods and services to keep our selves and our companies earnings at their desired level.  

So how do you beat the odds?  How do you wake up in the morning KNOWING that you know what to do that day?  Confident that the effort you put in will indeed earn you income even though it is for some point in the future?

Understand the, "Structure of Sales."  The skeleton framework on which all sales reside.  Then when you read a good, "How to" book, you have some concept of where to hang that information to improve your own efforts.  When you achieve success with this new knowledge your confidence will soar and your comfort level for generating revenue in the future will skyrocket.  Just like a farmer is fairly certain his efforts will produce crops though a few months away, you will know you can produce sales at will because you understand what goes where, and why.

Respectfully submitted,
Michael D. Goodman

PS, want a quick diagram of the structure of all sales?  Drop me a note.  I just created one for a couple of sales conferences I am running and I am happy to share it with you.