Before we get started, no – it’s not Always Be Closing. This isn’t Glengarry Glen Ross, and if your sales director or CEO thinks it is and seems to enjoy beating you up over last month’s figures, it’s time for you to find a new job. Or better still, them.
Years ago, I once sat in a sales kick-off meeting for a very large multinational, in which the recently hired VP Global Sales proclaimed that, from now on, the sales organisation would operate in a state of ‘productive paranoia’. In other words, keep looking over your shoulder, because you are only as good as your last month or quarter. This is one of the most dehumanising and short-term approaches to managing salespeople. That this person, in a position of power over several hundred people, felt it was appropriate to say it out loud to those people, and display it in massive neon green letters on a giant screen, made it much worse. I started polishing my CV straight after that presentation, and I wasn’t alone. Now, that may well have been this person’s intention, to clear out any malcontents as part of implementing the new regime. I made my excuses and left a few months later, so no doubt both of us were happy.
Of course, having a structured, measurable process in sales and holding people to account for performance is important, especially in large multinational teams. Benchmarks and KPIs are useful, as indicators of a direction of travel and in identifying any areas for support or coaching. And as a sales professional, you should always be planning your next step in the process and getting buy-in from your prospect into that next step. Or ideally several next steps, moving towards that all-important decision and close.
This piece is about the other side of sales, something just as important as process – in fact, I believe it’s even more important. The psychology of sales. More specifically, the psychology and behaviour of salespeople and the people tasked with leading them.
Having the right mindset and showing this in how you go about your work are crucial facets of having a long and – hopefully – largely successful career in business development or sales leadership. My focus here is on solutions selling, typically enterprise-level agreements for software of some description, which can often involve lengthy sales cycles (6, 12, even 24 months) determined by complex decision-making processes by the prospect, the involvement of multiple stakeholders, and contractual commitments with their existing vendors. Success requires diligence and patience.
This piece is a personal viewpoint on sales behaviours. If you find these thoughts useful, that’s terrific. Maybe your team would like some sales coaching? If you disagree vehemently with my take on this, no problem. I’ll take that as a ‘no’ to the sales coaching!
An obvious but important disclaimer: the subtitle to this piece is ‘Psychology before Process’ but I am not a trained psychologist. It’s just intended to reflect the focus of my comments, plus who doesn’t like a bit of alliteration?
We could work our way through the whole alphabet, but in the interests of brevity and a catchy title, this piece covers A, B and C. So, no ‘D for Data-driven’ or ‘E for Empathy’, at least not in this piece.
A is for Aptitude
How many times have you heard someone describe someone else as a ‘natural salesperson’? Or demur about their own abilities to sell, and say they don’t have the right personality or the ‘gift of the gab’? Successful sales isn’t about talking. As the old cliché goes, we have two ears and one mouth in that proportion for a reason. Sales is about listening, understanding what you are being told, applying that understanding to your ongoing conversation with the prospect, and reflecting it in the proposal you eventually give them.
Another cliché is that everyone in your company is in sales, whether their designated role is in sales, customer support, marketing, operations, production, finance or C-level leadership. To a point, this is true – both in terms of every member of the business needing to have an awareness of the commercial imperatives at play and contributing to the ongoing success of the company; and, also, in our everyday engagement with colleagues, which typically revolves around listening, collaborating and – sometimes – persuading. We are often selling without realising it.
Being a salesperson can be a lonely profession. It can also feel very exposed. Most functions in a large company or SME have KPIs, but salespeople thrive or fail based on the most fundamental of metrics – usually revenue, often growth, sometimes the number of booked deals. There is nowhere to hide. And even if you are doing everything right, doing everything that is being asked of you, following the process – if the numbers don’t reflect that, you are going to be in trouble.
These brutal measures of success or failure often encourage poor behaviour, both by salespeople under pressure and by those leading them, who are most likely also under similar pressure. Common sense and agreed medium or long-term plans are sacrificed for quick fixes. Discounting your pricing to try and win the business. Over-selling your solution and then watching as your internal colleagues under-deliver on execution, because they are on a hiding to nothing. Making your monthly or quarterly commission and then hopping to the next sales role elsewhere to do the same thing, before the proverbial hits the fan.
None of this is healthy. Not for the salesperson. Not for the person leading and supporting them. Not for your company. And certainly not for the customer.
Having the right aptitude for a career in sales – and arguably life in general – isn’t about bullshitting, walking over others or letting others in the organisation take the fall. Not the prevailing wisdom in some quarters these days, admittedly.
It’s about having integrity, being able to listen and act on what you are being told by the prospect (directly or indirectly), being organised, being diligent and being respectful. The best salespeople and sales leaders are decent people. Sure, the numbers will fluctuate up and down. There will be good years and some less good years. There will be triumphs and maybe the odd disaster. But, overall, they will make a net positive contribution to your company, your reputation and your brand.
B is for Bravery
Obviously, we aren’t talking emergency services or armed forces level of bravery here. This is specifically about how a salesperson goes about starting the sales process, in the right way and with the right tone.
Time for another cliché – the elevator pitch. How many times has someone said, ‘give me your 30 second elevator pitch to see if I’m interested’? Now, in fairness, you should be able to confidently and concisely describe your solution and your value proposition, so having an elevator pitch in your back pocket isn’t a bad skill. If you can’t describe your product to an eight-year-old, or draw it, do you really understand it, etc etc?
My view is that you don’t open the sales process with an elevator pitch. You don’t open it with a show-and-tell presentation, either. Rushing to present is one of the most common approaches to opening the sales process, usually in an initial call or meeting with someone who has asked for a demo (or a price) or responded to your outreach asking for a conversation.
People rush to present for four reasons: (1) they are nervous; (2) they don’t fully understand their solution and so fall back on their rehearsed pitch; (3) they are scared that they won’t understand any technical questions asked by the prospect and the sales process will be over before it has started; or (4) they just don’t have the right aptitude for sales and think they can persuade the prospect with their devasting charm or unimpeachable logic (see above).
The best way to start the sales process is with a discovery call or meeting. An opportunity for you to discover more about each other, not just them finding out about you. Tell your prospect that this is how you want to get things started. Find out why the prospect has agreed to have this conversation, why they are interested in your specific solution, what their pain points might be, and what you – and your solution – need to do for this prospect for you to win their trust and their business.
This means asking questions. Before you start walking through your beautifully designed, officially branded, marketing-approved slide deck. By all means have the deck (and your demo, if you are going to give one) teed up and ready to go when the time is right. But earn the right to take your prospect through this presentation by confirming that you understand what is important – and not important – to them and their business.
Asking questions and being able to answer them requires two things – preparation and bravery. Preparation should be a given. One of my former and best bosses once told me, ‘never ask a question unless you know the answer.’ (This same boss also taught me the trick of never being the first one to break the silence in a face-to-face negotiation, however awkward it might get or however much you want to try and get your point across!)
In this context, knowing the answers means doing as much research as you can before the discovery call to find out about the company, the person you are meeting, their offerings and their competitors. Check websites, annual reports and LinkedIn. Don’t waste your opening questions in the discovery call on finding out basic factual details you should already know from your desk research. By all means, check for accuracy on some of your research during the conversation, but not as your opening gambit. It looks (and is) lazy, and your prospect will know it.
Being brave means keeping things simple. As my friend and terrific former boss Jake Kelleher likes to say, ‘don’t overcomplicate a peanut butter sandwich!’ The more you overcomplicate things, the more nervous you will be, and the more likely things will go wrong. My advice is to ask two simple questions to get the meeting started, and then walk your prospect through your slide deck framing this as an aid to your conversation, not just a ‘show-and-tell’.
Why are you interested in [our company / our solution]?
How are you doing things at the moment?
There are other questions to ask during the discovery meeting, and we will come on to these shortly, but this opening gambit should get the conversation going, show you are genuinely interested in the prospect’s situation, not test their patience too much if they are anxious to see what you have (and how much it will cost them), and help frame your eventual proposal. And smart salespeople circle back to the answers given during their presentation, to help show they have been listening!
C is for Curiosity
Which brings us on to C. The best salespeople I have met are curious (and some of us are also admittedly a bit odd). They want to know about the person with whom they are talking. They want to understand how best to help them. They also want to know as much as they can about their own product, their competitors, the market and future trends.
Which means that good salespeople are always asking questions. And the best ones do this without the prospect feeling like they are in a pub quiz or an interrogation. Hopefully, most salespeople know the basics of effective questioning before they are let out into the wild. Open questions to find out how they can help the prospect and win their business. Closed questions to confirm your research, to find out information and – much later in the process – to ask for the business.
The most powerful question any salesperson can ask isn’t how, what, who or – although it’s important for your sales projections – when. It’s why.
At the back of your mind, you should be asking yourself: Why is the prospect talking to you? Why are they talking to you now? Why would they buy our solution? Why would they buy our competitors’? Why aren’t I talking to this person’s boss? Why hasn’t this person brought in their colleagues?
Of course, opening every question with ‘why’ takes you straight into interrogation territory. So, by all means, frame these questions as ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘when’ to uncover the information that you – and your company – needs to try and win the trust and business of this prospect.
Some addition questions to add to the mix during your discovery meeting and slide deck could be:
What are your specific problems (or pain points) at the moment?
What works well at the moment?
What doesn’t?
What does ‘good’ look like?
What does ‘perfect’ look like?
Who needs to be involved in evaluating any solution we propose?
How would you evaluate our solution? What specific criteria will you use?
How long do you think you would need to evaluate our solution?
Who needs to be involved in making the decision on accepting our solution?
When should we involve that person / these people in this conversation?
When do you need a better / workable solution in place?
How will you determine whether your new solution is successful?
(And if you are worried about whether this is a realistic sales opportunity and want to quickly qualify them in or out… What is your planned / available budget for implementing a new solution?)
Try to weave some of these questions into your presentation (not the slide deck, makes you look formulaic). If you don’t think you can get through all of these in the first call, plan and agree a follow-up call with the prospect in which you will get into more specific details. Prioritise what you need to know now to make an informed decision about this sales opportunity, in terms of its viability and your next steps.
Final thoughts
There is no magic formula to sales, although plenty of people have got rich telling you that there is. My hoary ‘ABC of Sales’ joins trusty old methods such as SPIN, AIDA and JAWS1 (my personal favourite, stands for Just Another Way of Selling and it’s pretty good too). But these methods are typically process-driven. They often treat sales as a science, not an art. Being a good and successful salesperson, with a sustainable career, is as much about who you are and how you behave, as it is about following process and hitting KPIs.
But, with all this being said, sales is still ultimately a numbers game, I’m afraid. Just don’t let those numbers drive how you behave towards your customers and colleagues. We should all be working to live… not the other way around. Glengarry Glen Ross is now a forty-two-year-old stage play. Enjoy it, but leave it in the past.
1 In fairness to the fine people at JAWS, find out more at https://www.jaws.works/
Coaching and consultancy
Interested in discussing this piece or having a chat about sales coaching? Feel free to get in touch at jason@deboerconsultancy.com