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Mindset

Thinking vs Doing : Thoughts on Different Personality Types

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 14th, 2008.

In my experience, sales is mostly about doing – about taking action.

Thinking in advance is important, vital in fact, to focus action on the right things, and to make action “automatic” when it's time to act.

But at the end of the day, sales happen “in the moment” face to face with clients.

In line with this, most sales people tend to be action-oriented. So I find when I'm helping most sales people to improve their performance, my work often focuses around helping them with their thinking. Perhaps they need to better target and select their customers. Perhaps they need to identify better ways of generating leads. Or perhaps they need to rethink the way they hold sales meetings and interact with clients.

But when I work with the people who sell professional services – the lawyers, accountants, consultants and other professionals themselves – it's a different story.

Most professionals tend to love thinking. They'll analyse and debate a problem to death. So I find that my work with many professionals is to get them to be more action oriented.

The professional's seemingly inbuilt fear of rejection and losing face adds to this tendency to think rather than do. Doing involves risk – the possibility that you'll have an unpleasant interaction with a potential client. Thinking is safe – at least in the short term.

In sales, the second best plan implemented today is often much better than the best plan implemented tomorrow. But that really goes against the grain for professionals trained to search for the very best solution to any problem.

With professionals, the key to helping them improve performance is therefore often less about new ideas and insights – and more about coaching and coaxing to take action.

Ian

PS If you're wondering about the graphic – it's an Einstein Action Figure – the perfect combination of thought and action!

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Marketing

Forget Your Competition

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 26th, 2008.

Mr Forgetful It's really important to think about your competitors when developing strategy and trying to develop a unique differentiated position for your products and services.

But when you're selling – actually communicating with customers – thinking about your competitors, or even your differentiators, can be a huge mistake.

What customers are primarily interested in, of course, is what you can do for them: the end results or benefits they get.

But when you think about your competitors your focus turns instead to yourself and what you do – and how it's different from what they do. Your communication begins to move away from being customer-focused, to being seller or product-focused.

In fact, in the majority of cases, the best way to differentiate yourself is not to think about your competitors; but instead to focus purely on the value you bring to your customer.

If you can really understand that value – and communicate it clearly to your customer – then 9 times out of 10 you'll be the only one doing so. And that in itself will be a huge differentiator.

Ian

PS The picture is Mr Forgetful, of course.

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Selling

Avoiding the "Treacle Effect" when Selling to Big Companies

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 22nd, 2008.

Treacle Selling to large companies can often feel like you're “wading through treacle”. Progress is slow at best, and it often feels like you've taken one step forwards only to take two steps back.

Often the challenge is not the company itself, or even their slow decision-making processes – it's the salesperson's lack of knowledge of how decisions are really made in the company.

When you're selling products or services of any significant size to a large company you'll almost always have to deal with a complex decision-making process. And unless you're lucky enough to be selling directly to the CEO, there'll be multiple levels of decision-maker, multiple budgets to be allocated, and an approval process of seemingly Gordian complexity.

Veteran salespeople who have worked on key accounts over a long period of time gain one of their critical advantages over “outsiders” by knowing how the decision making process works. But smart newcomers can begin to cut through the complexity – provided they are prepared to address the issue of the decision-making process openly with their potential customer.

Sometimes this can feel embarrassing or risky. It can feel like you're trying to “play the politics” of the situation. But the reality is that effective selling relies just as much on the politics and emotion of client decision-making as it does on the rationality of product features and benefits. If you believe in your product and it's in the client's best interests to buy it – then it's your duty to make sure it happens. And frequently, your clients themselves are less than expert in steering through their own decision-making processes – the coaching you can provide to guide them through this will be much appreciated.

The key to working your way through the decision-making maze is – like many things in sales – down to good questioning.

Firstly, it's vital to identify the key players in the decision making process and to understand their motivation. Typical questions you might ask are:

Who else in the organization is touched by this issue?
What do they see as the root of the problem
What benefit would they see from getting these issues resolved?
How important is this issue for them and is now the right time to be addressing this issue?

Drawing out a decision or stakeholder map with the client at this point can be hugely beneficial – as long as they don't begin to feel you're being too manipulative or self-serving.

In addition to the key influencers of the decision, it's vital to understand the decision-process itself. For example:

What level of approval is needed for different levels and types of expenditure
What is the timing of key events – tor example it's quite normal for project or financial approval boards to meet only quarterly and require all documentation weeks in advance – you need to know this timetable and the requirements – and know how to get on the approval schedule

Armed with this information you'll be in vastly better position to know who to meet up with, what to discuss – and ultimately, how to get your product or service sold.

Ian

PS – Many thanks to my good friend Rick McCann for providing the inspiration for this post. It was a discussion over a coffee with Rick a few years ago which provided the raw material and questions which I've used in this area ever since.

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More Clients Memorandum

Can it really be this simple?

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 14th, 2008.

I had a discussion with a client recently where we were getting into some quite complex and frankly convoluted ideas for setting up sales meetings with potential clients.

At one point we both paused for a bit, recognising we were overcomplicating things. And then my client reminded me of something the great Ford Harding had taught him.

(I'm paraphrasing here, but I'm sure Ford will forgive me for mangling the words as long as I get the essence right).

Ford taught him that at the end of the day, all we're really trying to do is create ways of getting together with potential clients to listen to them and allow them to tell us what they need.

If we know that potential client reasonably well and we've been a valuable resource to them before, then often we don't need to engineer a clever excuse for meeting with them.

We can just ask them for a coffee and a chat.

And in that chat we can ask them “what's new?”. or “Anything interesting you're working on?”. Or any one of a myriad of little opening questions that allow them to tell you what they're focused on and what help they might need.

Of course, you could get more out of those meetings by using some smart questioning techniques and following a decent process.

But sometimes by trying to learn the perfect way of doing these meetings we paralyse ourselves and never have them for fear of not getting it right.

Often it's enough to sit down and have a chat with a friendly person we've built a good relationship with. We don't need the fancy sales techniques.

The key is to just get more of those meetings (or calls or whatever it is you do to bring clients on board).

Is it really that simple?

Well, for most potential clients, no.

But for some…yes.

I bet if you thought about it you'd be able to find at least one or two potential clients you've built a good relationship with who would be happy to catch up and find out how things are going on both sides.

And if you ask them what they're focused on right now, sometimes it'll be something you could help with.

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Selling

A Sales Conundrum: Do We Need a Sales Meeting to Sell Nowadays?

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 22nd, 2008.

If there's one thing I know about selling professional services – it's that my chances of making a sale go up exponentially if I can meet my prospect face to face. In fact in my 20+ years in business and over £20m of consulting projects sold – I've only ever sold one engagement (and a very small one at that) without at least one face to face client meeting.

Yet in my life as a buyer of services, I'm becoming increasingly reluctant to meet salespeople face to face. Perhaps it's my age, or perhaps it's that I'm increasingly used to being “in control” in other aspects of business life – especially on the internet. For whatever reason, I basically don't want to be sold to. And I am confident enough in my knowledge of most service areas that I don't need the “help” a salesperson to guide me.

In fact, when I recently bought some marketing information services, I selected a supplier I'd never met – but one that was prepared to provide me with all the information I requested over email. The other potential supplier insisted on trying to set up a meeting. Despite my requests for them just to tell me what I needed to know, they insisted they would need to meet me face to face to properly explain what they had to offer. As a result, I simply put off the meeting to a much later date (that will never happen) and went with the first supplier.

So should a salesperson push for a meeting with a potential client or not? There's no easy answer to this conundrum. Obviously, the simpler, easier to specify the service is, the more possible it is to buy without a face-to-face meeting.

But the key determinant of whether a meeting will progress a sales is the attitude of the buyer. Is the buyer the sort of person who will resent a push for a meeting – or will (perhaps despite some initial resistance) it work in your favour? An experienced expert buyer is more likely to be able to buy without a meeting – but might not necessarily want to do so.

It takes skillful reading of the buyer – knowing when to push and when to back off – to navigate through this. One thing I can tell you though – don't try to push me for a meeting.

Ian

Postscript It's now May 2011, nearly three years after I wrote this post, and this trend has continued. In fact, it's accelerated.

Back then, I'd only ever sold one project without meeting the client face to face. Today, almost all my coaching clients sign up after talking to me on the phone rather than meeting face to face.

Part of the change is that people are increasingly used to buying without meeting people. And part of the change, I think, is that because people do so much research on the web in advance of calling a business. In may case, theyll see my blog posts, videos, podcasts and a host of other material I've produced. They'll get to see if I know my stuff – and they'll get a feel for who I am and if they can work with me. If they can't – they don't call and they don't waste their time or mine.

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Selling

Sales: It's the Small Steps that Count

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 14th, 2008.

The element of sales most visible to outsiders is the “big win”. The “rainmaker” seemingly works some magic in a presentation, or big meeting and returns home with the sale in the bag.

This often leads to a belief that the crucial element of the sale was that final event. When people look at what the professional or salesperson did, and what skills they have; they focus on the final event. When they then try to reproduce that performance themselves or train and foster it in others they focus again on that final event – on big presentations and “closing”.

Of course, what they miss is all the small things that person did over time to make the sale happen.

Their initial persistence in sending useful material to the potential client to eventually gain a meeting. The ongoing networking at client associations that meant they were well known and trusted by the key decision-makers. The connections they made to third parties who were able to help and advise the client in related areas. The careful listening to differing client perspectives – and the meeting they organised to help them reach consensus on their needs.

None of these steps individually was enough to guarantee the sale – but added together theya situation where the final presentation was simply to confirm what had already been decided.

Effective “salespeople” (and by that I mean anyone responsible for bringing in new clients whether sales is in their job title or not) seem to instinctively know that they need to repeatedly go the extra mile and plug away at these small steps. Day after day, week after week, month after month. It's not glamorous – but over time it's effective.

If you want to reproduce effective sales behaviour it's these seemingly little things you need your team to be able to do. And it's often these things which are the hardest. Presentation and closing skills are so much sexier – and often easier for trainers to focus on than the real sales drivers – the persistent plugging away at all the small steps.

Ian

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Selling

Sales Tips from Angelina Jolie

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 6th, 2008.

Angelina Jolie One of my favourite resources for professional services marketing is David Maister's series of podcasts. In his Business Masterclass episode “Cultivate the Habits of Friendship” he shares a lovely anecdote about building relationships that bears repeating:

The actress Angelina Jolie was interviewed on television and asked if she had to like the characters she was portraying in order to act them well. Her answer was brilliant. She said something like: “You can’t love everything about everyone. But there must be something there. The key is to find that one small slice of overlap between you and them, and focus intensely on that overlap, ignoring everything else.” I don’t know about acting, but that sounds like a perfect recipe for human relationships to me.

The reality of relationships is that everyone is different, and everyone is flawed. There will be things we like, and things we dislike (in differing proportions) about everyone.

Although it's often said that you get 30 seconds to make a good impression – and that's great advice for how we should present ourselves – we absolutely must not treat others in this way. Yes, our time is precious. Yes, we cannot have deep relationships with everyone and we must be selective. But we must not make that selection based on the first 30 seconds.

We've got to take time and make an effort to establish a relationship with people before making that selection. In my life, the scouser who looked so much like a “scally” at our first meeting I feared for my hub-caps is my oldest friend; and the irascible Scot who everyone else steered clear of was the guy who gave me some of the most insightful advice on sales I've ever had.

Angelina's method of focusing on the areas of overlap and ignoring the rest is a great way of starting relationship and of beginning to find out enough about people to know whether to continue the relationship rather than making a snap decision.

Ian

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Image via ThisParticularGreg

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Strategy

Topgrading for Sales: A Review

Posted by

Ian Brodie on July 18th, 2008.

The folks at the Topgrading team (http://www.topgradingforsales.com/) kindly sent me a review copy of their latest book: Topgrading for Sales – so here’s the review.

A quick caveat: Topgrading focuses primarily on recruitment – and I’m far from an expert in that area. In fact, in my 15+ years working in consulting organisations I managed to studiously avoid the corporate recruitment process whenever possible, And when I was hired by others, it was always as a “done deal” result of headhunting rather than happening through a structured recruitment process. So this review is from the perspective of someone who is coming at it with a fresh pair of eyes.

Philosophy
The first interesting thing about Topgrading for Sales is its simple philosophy. The core concept of Topgrading is that you can and should hire only “A Players” – the top 25% of the population. Topgrading is very stark here; there’s no hiring of nearly-A’s or B+’s and hoping they will make the grade. Yes – try to coach your existing team if they’re not A Players yet, But when it comes to hiring – aim for the top.
There’s an unwritten assumption behind this, of course. It assumes it’s possible to do this. Theoretically, if everyone was Topgrading, there wouldn’t be enough A Players to go around. But my experience is that very few firms are really thorough in how they go about hiring – and certainly not as thorough as the Topgrading process. So in practice you don’t have to worry about a shortage of A Players – especially if you follow the first key piece of advice they give.

Maintaining an A Player “bench”
The first piece of advice in Topgrading which I’d not come across before is to maintain an A Player “bench”. Rather than do what most companies do – ignore the job candidate marketplace until you really need someone – their recommendation is to maintain regular contacts with a “bench” of high performers you would like to hire, and referrers who are able to put you in contact with high performers. This approach makes a lot of sense to me – rather than starting from scratch each time you want to hire you have an active pipeline of high quality candidates already at your fingertips. And if you’ve been keeping in contact with them regularly it will help you sell your organisation to them.

Rigorous Selection Process
The next differentiator of the Topgrading approach is the rigour with which the hiring process is carried out. For example, rather than relying on the candidate's CV/resume (which is likely nowadays to have been significantly massaged by one of the many career coaches and CV advisors available), the Topgrading approach is to ask candidates to fill in a detailed Career History form – including compensation details, exact dates for each job, the name of previous bosses (hinting that they will be contacted) etc.

The process also includes a detailed “Topgrading Interview” in addition to the normal competency-based interviews (which most people now know about and how to prepare for). This interview is a rigorous career history review – talking about specific accountabilities, achievements and learnings.

The next key step is to get the candidate to set up a call for the interviewer with each of their previous bosses for the last few years. Now, of course, you can’t force the candidate to get you these calls. But the authors' experience is that the A Players will be happy to set them up – knowing they will get good feedback.

At each stage of the process, of course, there is a filtering and narrowing down of candidates with the final decision being made after the calls with previous managers,

Overall
As you’ll have guessed from the review so far, I rate the book pretty highly. There were a number of new ideas for me – and they reflected my own personal experience of what seems to work and what doesn’t. And I really buy-in to the philosophy of taking recruitment seriously enough and rigorously enough to ensure you are only hiring A Players.

The book is pretty slim – 113 pages – which is both a good and a bad thing. It’s a quick and easy read – but in areas I felt I would need more in order to actually implement the ideas. Over half the pages in the book are forms and checklists which is really helpful. But there’s little information on building the skills needed for successful hiring. For example, there isn’t really anything about interviewing skills, and the coaching chapter really only focuses on the timetable for coaching rather than on how to actually do it well. I think that anyone who buys-in to the Topgrading philosophy should take recruitment seriously enough to invest in books and other resources to make sure they are an A Player at all the skills needed to recruit A Players. In this respect Topgrading for Sales is an excellent overarching philosophy and framework for the way you should recrti sales people – and a starting point for further building your skills at doing so.

Ian

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Marketing

Social Media and Professional Services Business Development

Posted by

Ian Brodie on July 14th, 2008.

An excellent post by Matt Brazil caught my eye recently. It's provocatively entitled Are Social Networks the Last Nail in the Coffin for Cold Calling?

Now, of course, the increased prevalance of social media (and Matt includes blogs, articles, podcasts, etc. in that group) aren't going to completely kill off cold calling. But Matt's point – based on a lead generation experiment he ran – is that for many businesses they may now present a better return on investment than cold calling.

In the case of professional services: article writing, seminars and speeches have always been a fantastic business development device for the larger “names” in the business. They provide advanced clues for potential buyers to the credibility and knowledge of the consultant, lawyer, accountant, engineer or architect who wrote the article or delivered the speech. Given the intangible nature of professional services; those clues are often an immensely powerful lever to at least get the professional engaged in a dialogue with the potential client.

Historically, speech-making and article writing has often been the preserve of the well-known individual or the major firm. Most people read a small number of quality journals so competition for placement was high and the chances of a small firm or unknown individual getting a high degree of visibility was slim.

But like many things in life, the internet has changed all that. Not only is it much easier for good quality content to get published on a plethora of sites and blogs; but potential clients have changed the way they find material. Nowadays they don't subscribe to a small number of quality journals in the hope that something of relevance will appear every few months – they search for what they want, when they want it.

So equipped with some half-decent SEO and an interesting niche to write about; smaller firms and less well-known professionals can replicate the marketing tactics of the industry giants.

Of course, actually being able to produce quality material that really is going to raise your credibility is a whole different story. But at least today the barriers to publishing and being found have all but fallen.

Ian

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Strategy

The Myth of Goal Setting

Posted by

Ian Brodie on June 26th, 2008.

One of the most often repeated stories to back up the importance of setting clear goals and targets is the “Yale 1953 Goals Study”.

The story takes many forms – but essentially says that in 1953, researchers surveyed Yale's graduating seniors to determine how many of them had specific, written goals for their future. Twenty years later, the researchers checked with the surviving class members and found that the 3% who had written goals had accumulated more personal financial wealth than the other 97% combined.

It's a powerful story with a seductive message often told by consultants, coaches and self-help gurus. Unfortunately, it's just not true. No such study exists.

I seem to be spending much of my time debunking management myths nowadays (see Debunking the myths of non-verbal communication and Challenging the 80:20 rule).

This one has been brought back to my attention by a seminar I recently attended run by some business coaches from one of the world's largest coaching organisations.

In this case, the presenters even got the myth wrong – they said it was based on research at Harvard (a mistaken-retelling first done by Bill Phillips in his Body for Life book). They even went into great detail drawing pyramids and talking about how the researchers had gone back 10 years later again to confirm their findings.

Now I don't know if they were just making all this extra stuff up themselves, or if they themselves had been misled by their organisation – but either way, I was flabbergasted at how they were prepared to “educate” their seminar attendees so strongly on something which they hadn't bothered to check out.

Fast Company magazine, however, did check out the story.

They spoke to self-help guru after self-help guru – each passing them on to another guru as the source of their information – yet each happy to write and speak about the study as fact without checking it out. The original source was eventually tracked as far back as Zig Ziglar whose assistant told the magazine that Ziglar's source was hard to track down as he “reads a lot”.

Thankfully, the researchers were rather more conscientious. They followed up with the secretary of the class of 1953 and a research associate at Yale who told them that from personal experience and an exhaustive search of the archives: there was no such study.

Now this doesn't mean that written goals aren't important. Logic and much anecdotal evidence tells us that writing down your (or your company's) goals can be very helpful in “keeping you honest” and focusing on them. But they probably aren't as important as the story implies.

Worse: the story also implies that all that was needed to achieve great wealth was to write down goals. Nothing about the persistence and pain needed to stick to them – or the thought and creativity needed to make the goals happen.

For me it also acts as a huge Caveat Emptor for buyers of consulting, training and coaching services. If the people you are considering to be your advisors can't even take the time to check out whether one of their core assertions is actually true or not – how much can you trust their other advice?

And a message for fellow consultants and trainers: check your facts. You do our profession a great disservice by mindlessly repeating “facts” and advice that may not be true at all.

Ian

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