These days great sales people, real ones, those that go and talk to customers and potential customers are expensive, and hard to find.
Most often in a B2B environment their role is not just closing a sale but developing a relationship that is deeper and longer term than the individual transaction. Success is measured not just by the transactions, but by the quality of the relationships they build, and the trust, that will take the pressure off price, delivery times, and the other quantitative measures used to judge performance from a distance.
It also true that the first time many sellers know a potential customer is in the market is after that customer has done a considerable amount of research, arrived at a short list, features required and price point, which gives them the power in the conversation, unless you are able to re-frame it somehow.
The word ‘Process‘ in the headline implies repeatable, subject to continuous improvement, and measureable. In order to achieve these outcomes there are a number of building blocks:
Plan
The old cliché “failing to plan, is planning to fail’ is unfortunately true, that is why it is a cliché. The caveat of course is that just planning will not generate an outcome, you actually have to implement. The gap between planning and implementation is deceptively wide and full of very hungry crocodiles that will consume your will, time, and financial resources given the chance.
Don’t spend time, Invest it.
We demand a return on our financial investments, why don’t we do the same for that most valuable of resources, our time? Most of us complete some sort of post capital expenditure review to check that the returns we expected and planned for prior to a capital investment actually materialised.
Why do we not do the same thing without most valuable resource, time?
This may be a challenging idea, but if you allocate your time to the ‘important but not urgent’ category rather than the seemingly urgent, but not important things that consume our lives, the returns will flow.
Learn continuously
Being able to learn is a gift, leverage it. Nobody becomes outstandingly good at something without learning from those who have gone before and mastered the skills. Beyond a base level of skill, you need coaching to learn, and it is the primary role of a sales manager to coach those in their team, so they learn, do better, effectively leveraging their time and expertise, learnt from those who went before, and their hard won experience. A core part of learning is being able to be reflective about what worked and what did not, then making those small adjustments, day after day, to test and improve.
Be proactive
An old football coach of mine used to bang it into our heads that while defence was a critically important component of any contest, you did not win by preventing the other bloke from scoring, at best, it was a draw.
Being proactive is about experimenting, taking considered risks, searching for opportunities, prospecting for ideas and applications that others have missed, being unafraid of the power of the status quo, and being prepared to ask for forgiveness rather than waiting for permission.
My standard mantra is ‘get out of the building’ meaning nothing different or innovative happens within the context of your normal, routine activities.
Follow up obsessively
Few sales are made at the first contact, or second. It takes time and polite persistence mixed with an understanding of why the ‘target’ will benefit from buying from you. Failing to articulate the value of your proposition results in the follow up being Spam, but if the value is genuinely there, follow up builds credibility, and in a small way, a sense of reciprocity or obligation to at least give you the opportunity to make your pitch.
Remove ‘busywork’
We all know that work fills the time available, but we also know that often the stuff being done is just ‘busywork’, stuff that rally makes little difference apart from reassuring yourself that you are needed, and others that you are indispensable. Remove it, ruthlessly, in favour of activity that customers would be prepared to pay for, because that is exactly what they are doing, indirectly.
Most of the real work is not digital
It has becomes to easy to rely in digital to do our jobs for us. It won’t, it can only do exactly as it is told. Besides, people buy from those they know like and trust, and I never met a computer I completely trusted, somehow they are not completely human.
As noted previously, the term ‘Sales’ is to my mind approaching redundant, as it conjured up in most people minds something less than what it is, or should be. The term I favour is Revenue Generation. This simple semantic change tends to shake perceptions and put the sales function into the spotlight as being vital, not just those people down the hall with company cars who go out to lunch a lot.
