PART I: The #Truth About the “Experts”
CHAPTER 1 Truth, What Is Truth?
- Many of today’s nouveau “experts“ love to tell us that everything has changed. What’s so amusing and so irritating to me is that I see the exact opposite. The most effective executives, sales managers, and salespeople I observe are masters at the basics.
CHAPTER 2 Be Very Wary of the Nouveau Experts and False Teachers
- The professional seller, the one who delivers value, who proactively works into accounts before they are shopping, who seeks to truly understand a customer’s needs, who does effective discovery work, who’s motivated to solve a customer’s problems, who tells a compelling story, who’s committed to delivering valuable outcomes — that salesperson is not going anywhere anytime soon.
- Unless you can find sellers in similar roles having tremendous success from creating and publishing their own content, I would be highly skeptical you’d be well served following that route.
- I implore salespeople to use every appropriate, effective, and ethical means available.
CHAPTER 3 Just Because It’s Published Doesn’t Mean It’s True
- [Beware] the danger of relying on averages
- [Contrary to CEB’s 57% fiding,] buyers interact with sales representatives during every stage of the decision-making process, and in more than half the cases, salespeople are involved at the very beginning of the buyer’s journey.
- RAIN Group’s research across twenty-five industries demonstrated that 82 percent of buyers accepted meetings with sellers who proactively pursued them.
CHAPTER 4 Seven Powerful Sales Lessons from the 2016 US Presidential Election
- People (Buyers) Act in Their Own Self Interest, and Your Messaging Matters
- Ignore your long-term customers at your own peril.
- Prospects and Customers Do Not Always Tell the Truth
- We must learn to be leery of surface answers.
- Strive to build relationships with a wider array of people within the customer organization,
- We must better understand their internal buying culture and the landscape of competitors we are up against.
- The best time to uncover the customer’s objections is always right now.
- Presenting is not a synonym for selling. In many cases, the presentation is only a small piece of the overall sales process, and its importance is typically overrated.
- [Deals] are won by professional sellers who work their ass off prior to the presentation and frequently after presentation day too.
- Particularly in larger, more complex, and longer sales-cycle deals, the advantage goes to the salesperson who does the best discovery work, meets with the most stakeholders and influencers, who best understands the various constituencies ’ needs and desires, and who builds both the best relationships and most consensus — all before presenting.
- Don’t promise stuff you cannot deliver to your customers
- Trashing Your Competitor’s Supporters Will Come Back to Haunt You. Instead of this being a business decision, it has become personal to those he has offended.
PART II: The #Truth About Winning More New Sales
CHAPTER 5 To Win More New Sales Requires Focus on Winning New Sales
CHAPTER 6 The Most Valuable Salespeople Don’t Chase Opportunities, They Create Them
- Warm Leads and Set Appointments Should Be Viewed as the Icing, Not the Cake
- There is nothing more powerful you can do to increase your effectiveness and your earnings as a professional salesperson than to become highly proficient at the three critical phases of any sales process: creating, advancing, and closing opportunities.
- Keys to create new opportunities that fill the
top of our sales funnel.
- The Right Attitude
- Intentional Calendar Management
- Strategic Targeting
- Compelling Messaging
- Commitment to Prospecting
CHAPTER 7 The Right Attitude Toward Developing New Business Changes Everything
- “Your number one goal in sales is to make your customer as successful as possible.”
- You (and/or your company) are experts, problem-solvers, solution-providers, and value-creators for the customers/markets you serve.
CHAPTER 8 Take Back Your Calendar to Become More Selfishly Productive
- Time blocking, the discipline of making appointments with yourself, ensures that you have sufficient time carved out to invest your highest-value, highest-payoff activities.
- The consequence of the hottest-first approach is that proactively working target accounts to create new opportunities gets shortchanged, or more likely, ignored.
- Top producers prioritize the top of the sales funnel because they know that doing so ensures a healthy, balanced pipeline.
- Block early morning time for new business development.
- Highly productive salespeople and managers decide when to check email.
- Stop telling your accounts that you are “their guy“ or “their gal“ and that no matter what their need they should contact you.
CHAPTER 9 Naming Strategic Target Accounts Is the First Step of a Successful Sales Attack
- Top-producing sales hunters can point to their target account list in a nanosecond.
- Even the most supremely talented salespeople will not produce optimal results if they are pursuing the wrong accounts
- Growable Existing Accounts: Take a step back to evaluate whether you have been underinvesting in your most growable customers
- Over-servicing existing customers is not a recipe for winning new business.
- Name the Names of Your Ideal Profile Prospects and Dream Accounts
- Salespeople should intentionally target prospective accounts that look, smell, and feel like their company’s best existing customers.
- I’m a fan of salespeople reserving a small subset of their target prospect list for gigantic, monster accounts.
- Seek Input and Commit to Your Finite List for a Season. Be slow to cross names off the list. In my own selling career, some of my best, largest, and most profitable clients took a very long time to acquire.
CHAPTER 10 A Compelling Message Increases Your Confidence and Effectiveness
- Customers do NOT care what you do, how much you love your company or your product, or how long you’ve been in business. What they really want to know is what you can do for them!
- Three essential ingredients for drafting a
compelling, customer-issue-focused, and differentiating story:
- 1. The Issues You Address for Customers (outcomes you achieve)
- 2. Your Offerings
- 3. Differentiators (that set apart you, your company, and your offering)
- Use the “Bridge Line” to shift your focus from your products & services to customer issues & outcomes: [Customer Type] turns/look to [Your Company Name] when/to… Ex: “Senior executives look to me when…”
- Salespeople must be armed with a a handful of one-page case studies that cover the gamut of their company’s offerings and the types of situations where those offerings apply.
- A solid, usable case study has three very simple
components:
- The customer’s situation when we found them or became engaged
- What we did
- The outcome
- It’s not enough for a salesperson to have case studies in writing. They must be committed to memory.
CHAPTER 11 Prospecting Is Not Optional
- The telephone remains an incredibly effective vehicle to deliver your message and to secure a meeting with a prospective customer.
- In just about every sales situation I’ve encountered is that there are not enough leads and referrals to sufficiently fill the top of the sales funnel regardless of how strong the inbound marketing effort or well-crafted and disciplined the referral requests.
- Sell the Meeting Not Your Solution: When you face resistance, don’t start selling your solution. Sell the value the prospect will receive from spending just a little bit of time with you. Let the prospect know that along with learning more about their situation, you’ll share how you are helping other people like them or organizations like theirs. Make it abundantly clear that whether or not there ends up being a fit, your prospect will leave that discovery meeting challenged by what you share and with fresh perspective, ideas, and insights.
- Use “The Money Line” to burst objections:
- Ex: “Joe, I understand you are under contract through next June. That’s great. Let me ask you to visit with me anyway.”
- Ex: “Mary, it makes complete sense to me that you are swamped. I work with production managers (or whatever her position is) every day and totally get it. I am going to ask you to visit with me anyway. You are going get value and ideas from the meeting, even if there is not a next step for me.”
- Lose the Sales Voice and Hackneyed Phrases.
- It’s the volume of quality messages received in a relatively short time-frame that catalyzes the return call. I like to leave messages about every four business days until I’ve left five or six messages. Then I take a break.
- Befriend the Gatekeeper and Ask for Help
- Use your relational ability, your EQ, and your sales skills to create a dialogue with the gatekeeper.
- Be kind. Be respectful. Be prepared. Be concise. Demonstrate that you understand their role and that you respect their position and their time.
- While you are scoring relational points by showing deference to the gatekeeper, take it a step further and ask for guidance and help. Ex: “May I ask you to help me, please. What would you suggest is the best way to earn thirty minutes on Charles’ schedule?”
CHAPTER 12 Stop Rushing to Present and Demo
- “Discovery precedes presentation. “Always!
- What kind of doctor writes a prescription prior to examining and diagnosing the patient?
- Understand the customer’s situation
- Current state
- Needs, threats, initiatives, challenges, objectives,
- Desired future state
- Presentations, particularly online meetings and demos, generally move too slowly. The audience gets bored.
CHAPTER 13 Own Your Sales Process to Stay Out of the Procurement Pit
- Too many salespeople wimp out on their own sales process and continue defaulting to the buyer’s process even when it makes no sense.
- Bring so much value to the customer, and work so hard to establish relationships with the right key businesspeople within that customer that they have absolutely no trouble telling their contacts that they will not follow the procurement process because it benefits neither party.
- A premium price requires a premium sales process and offering up pricing and dates via email would not qualify as a premium process!
- I would inform the senior businessperson during our first discovery conversation that I don’t do procurement, I don’t do legal or master service agreements, and I don’t bank my clients.
- Adopt a policy that they would no longer submit RFP responses without first being granted access to key stakeholders for discovery meetings.
CHAPTER 14 You Most Certainly Can Win with an Older Product or a Higher Price
- Things tend to go poorly for sellers who make their product the star of the show or the focus of a sales call.
- There were four common themes I heard from those
who, against the odds, went out with their ten-year-old [product] and [nonetheless]
took business from the competition:
- 1. Fearless.
- 2. Focused
- 3. Fit [=account targeting]
- 4. Familiarity: Able to craft a very different narrative that played off customers ’ challenges, frustrations, and fears with the newer models in the marketplace.
- A best practice of top salespeople: Getting in to see your competitor’s customers instead of just over-servicing your own favorite accounts
- If You Need the Lowest Price to Sell, Then You Aren’t Needed as a Salesperson
CHAPTER 15 Two Extraordinary Sales Professionals ’ Not-So-Extraordinary Keys to Success
- There is nothing magical about what the top
salespeople in the world do:
- They work really hard. Really, really hard.
- They are really competitive.
- They go the extra mile whether they’re prospecting, prepping, probing, presenting, proposing or following-up.
- They know their business and their competitors.
- They understand that winning the sale requires connecting with the customer on a personal level.
- So many people in sales are looking for the shortcut to success, but there are no shortcuts.
- [Be] fanatical about these particular aspects of
selling:
- 1. Preparation
- 2. Practice: Not only does he insist that the entire team presenting to the prospect must meet to rehearse the day prior to the big meeting, they practice everything, even how they will introduce themselves
- 3. Personal:
- Take sales personally
- Connection trumps Content.
- People make buying decisions for personal reasons.
- 4. Follow-Up.: Follow up without coming across like an impatient, immature salesperson, and you must offer value to the prospect while doing it.
- [If you don’t know you are winning,] call your contact; you know she likes you. Tell her that you have the sense that they don’t have all the critical information necessary to make the best decision. Then ask her what she sees as the Achilles’ heel in your proposal.
CHAPTER 16 Beyond All Else, Great Sales Leadership Is Still the Key to Winning More New Sales
- Accountability, particularly when executed well, trumps coaching and enabling every day of the month and twice on the day that the sales report gets published!
- Best practice conducting effective monthly, one-to-one accountability meetings: Review a salesperson’s results, pipeline, and activity against named target accounts (in that specific order).
- I believe that the only way to get this kind of lift (and respect) when looking to stand up a sales operations team is to put a top producer in the leadership role.
- Most hunters don’t excel at managing the day-to-day needs of existing customers.
- Write the job description to repel the wrong candidates and attract the right ones!
- Two Iron Laws of Recruiting
- 1. Recruit ahead of the need.
- 2. Never hire a candidate who is not better than the average person on your team.
CHAPTER 17 Stop Searching for the Secret Sales Sauce, Ignore the Trendy Voices, and Get to Work Mastering the Fundamentals