Tag Archives: Sales

The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

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TO SELL IS HUMAN

WHY THE OLD RULES OF SELLING DON’T APPLY

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, author Daniel Pink notes in his new book To Sell Is Human, 1 out of every 10 Americans works in sales. Is that less than before? Certainly. But have the Internet and online shopping brought the sales function to the precipice of extinction, as so many have predicted? Not quite, Pink writes. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data (replicated by corresponding statistics in other developed countries) vastly understates the amount of “selling” going on when we consider what selling, according to Pink, really entails: “persuading, influencing and convincing others.”

This is what he calls “non-sales selling.” Most people, Pink explains, are involved in non-sales selling, no matter what their profession. Examples cited by Pink include physicians who sell patients on a remedy, lawyers who sell juries on a verdict, teachers who sell students on the value of paying attention in class, entrepreneurs selling to funders, writers selling to producers and coaches cajoling players to play their best. In fact, it’s no longer completely accurate to see producing and consuming as the two most important economic activities, Pink writes. “Today, much of what we do also seems to involve moving,” he explains. “That is, we’re moving other people to part with resources — whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention — so that we both get what we want.”

Why Sales Is So Important

Why are so many people devoting their valuable time to selling when the practice is allegedly in decline? Pink offers three reasons:

  1. Entrepreneurship. The past few years (thanks in great part and a bit ironically to the Internet) have seen the rise of small entrepreneurship — small shops or one- or two-person enterprises selling, as Pink writes, “services, creativity and expertise.” For these small-business owners and micro-entrepreneurs, there is no dedicated sales force to bring in the customers; they are their own sales forces.
  2. Elasticity. Once upon a time, Pink writes, “if you were an accountant, you did accounting.” However, intense competition and economic conditions have forced organizations to go “flat” — or at least flatter. As a result, functions are no longer rigidly separated as in the past. Job descriptions are broader and usually involve some kind of selling.
  3. Ed-Med. Education and health are among the fastest-growing industries, and as the examples of the teachers and physicians above demonstrate, much of education- and health-related work involves non-sales selling. “Of course,” Pink notes with characteristic humor, “teaching and healing aren’t the same as selling electrostatic carpet sweepers. The outcomes are different. A healthy and educated population is a public good, something that is valuable in its own right and from which we all benefit. A new carpet sweeper or gleaming Winnebago, not so much.”

The New ABCs

When selling is mostly “moving” people, the old rules of selling no longer apply. After making his case for the predominance of non-sales selling in our lives, Pink outlines the different strategies for 21st-century selling. He begins, in the second section of his book, by showing how the traditional mantra of selling, “Always Be Closing,” has been replaced by a new set of ABCs: Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity. Attunement is to be in harmony with those around you — which is why, Pink writes, extraverts are not the best salespeople. They don’t take the time to become attuned. (Introverts aren’t necessarily the best, either, Pink notes.) Buoyancy is knowing how to always be “afloat” in a difficult world of constant rejection, thanks to one’s resilience and optimism. Clarity, in Pink’s approach, refers to the art of problem finding — different from the traditional emphasis on problem solving. Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity are the attributes of the new successful salesperson. In the final section of the book, Pink outlines the three core abilities — knowing how to pitch, how to improvise and how to serve — required to succeed.

Pink, a best-selling author whose books include Drive and A Whole New Mind, has once again expanded his readers’ perspectives on how the world really works, with insight and humor bolstered by solid research.

Lessons from the Pumpkin Patch

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Leave it to an entrepreneur to see business growth principles in a pumpkin patch! That’s what Mike Michalowicz has done in his book The Pumpkin Plan.

We’ve all seen pictures of the huge pumpkins, up to a half ton in weight, that are grown by farmers each season in a bid to win the county fair prize and garner some attention for their produce. Michalowicz saw an article in a local newspaper that provided one farmer’s secret to growing the biggest pumpkin and applied it to business. Here are his seven steps for growing a business:

Step One – Identify and leverage your biggest natural strength.

Step Two – Sell, sell, sell.

Step Three – As your business grows, fire all of your small-time, rotten clients.

Step Four – Never, ever let distractions – often labeled as new opportunities – take hold. Weed ‘em out fast.

Step Five – Identify your top clients and remove the rest of your less-promising clients.

Step Six – Focus all your attention on your top clients. Nurture and protect them; find out what they want more than anything, and if it’s in alignment with what you do best, give it to them. Then, replicate that same service or product for as many of the same types of top clients as possible.

Step Seven – Watch your company grow to a giant size.

While these principles seem simple enough, the follow-through is not always easy. What new business dares to drop clients on purpose? But this is the key to Michalowicz’s growth plan.

To help you grow your business, we’ve invited Mike to join us for our next Soundview Live webinar on April 2nd to that you can hear his full explanation of these principles, and ask your burning questions regarding how to apply them to you business. You can register for How to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field today.

Selling No Longer Works

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“Today, we live in a postselling and postpushing world. As people grow more aware of manipulative tactics, their guard goes up. The Internet, television advertising, and wall-to-wall marketing have made us cynical about deceptive tricks and hard-sell approaches.”

This is the contention of Mark Goulston and John Ullmen in their new book Real Influence. Goulston and Ullmen provide a different way – instead of trying to manipulate people to do what we want them to, we connect with them in a way that influences them to want to work with us.

The authors have developed a four-step method of connecting and influencing:

  1. Go for great outcomes – going beyond where people want to be to showing them where they could be.
  2. Listen past your blind spot – you need to have a willingness to learn, an open mind, and sometimes the insight to discover that you’re wrong.
  3. Engage them in their there – it’s about “getting” your audience, not using “gotcha” techniques to manipulate them into compliance.
  4. When you’ve done enough…do more – it’s about committing to make their great outcomes happen, both now and in the future.

Perhaps you’ve run into these postselling walls with those that you’re trying to influence. If so, then why not join us on January 10th to hear a presentation of this new influence model with Goulston and Ullmen. They will explain the model in more detail, and give real life examples of those who have made it work. You can also ask your questions during this live webinar.

Master the Revenue Cycle

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Once upon a time, writes consultant Phil Fernandez in his book Revenue Disruption, companies were in control of the buying process. Customers needed the company marketers to grab their interest and the company salespeople to give them the information they needed to make their final decisions. Many companies still operate under that old-fashioned paradigm, Fernandez writes. Marketers try through their webpages, Google AdWords and other marketing tools to “hook” a prospect; as soon as the prospect is hooked — because he or she has sent an email asking for information, for example, thus becoming a live lead — the prospect is immediately handed to sales, which is supposed to close the deal. Often, Fernandez notes, the prospect will simply say, “I’m not really interested,” and sales will angrily denounce “another poor lead from marketing.” Eventually, the sales function will ignore the marketing leads, which angers the marketers, and the two functions are quickly engaged in pitched battle.

The Buyer in Control

What both marketing and sales fail to appreciate is that today, buyers are prospects long before the company even knows they exist, Fernandez writes. They wander anonymously throughout the website, they ask friends through LinkedIn for their opinions on the company, they read articles and reviews online — all before showing up on the company’s radar. According to Fernandez, traditional sales strategies and methodologies are based on the salesperson’s timeline: develop leads, make contact and so forth. Fernandez has developed a radical new approach to sales and marketing, called Revenue Performance Management (RPM), that is built around the buyer’s cycle, which he captures in a Revenue Cycle Model.

The Revenue Cycle Model

The first step of the cycle is simply “Aware,” and refers to the entire pool of people who are aware of the existence of your company or its products — nothing more. A buyer moves to the next step, “Friend,” when he or she starts to have positive associations and preferences for the company’s brands or products. If still interested, the buyer becomes a “Name” by giving contact information to the company. The buyer is then qualified by marketing, becoming a “Prospect” and eventually a “Lead” when he or she is ready to engage with the company’s sales organization. In the last two stages of the Revenue Cycle Model, the buyer is an “Opportunity” for as long as he or she is actively engaged with a customer service representative, and a “Customer” when the deal is closed.

The steps of the cycle can be grouped in three stages: Seed Nurturing (Aware, Friend); Lead Nurturing (Name, Prospect, Lead); and Qualification to Close (Opportunity, Customer).

Why Marketing Counts

This Revenue Cycle Model is a more accurate depiction of the prospect’s journey than traditional sales cycle models. In traditional sales cycles, the sale begins with the prospect’s first contact with a sales representative. In reality, this step is in the middle of the buyer’s journey, Fernandez writes. The Revenue Cycle begins at the start of the journey, when the buyer is first encountering information produced by marketing.

Thus, according to Fernandez, marketing is considered part-and-parcel of the sales process. This is a departure from the traditional approach of most companies, which consider the sales function as a profit center and the marketing function as a cost center. Marketing itself might be to blame somewhat since it is reluctant to use the revenue language of salespeople. It is clear that marketing, according to Fernandez, is a growth investment.

Fernandez compares RPM to Six Sigma — a series of new business processes that leads to continuous improvement of revenue performance. Lead scoring, for example, is a process that identifies promising leads versus leads that are premature. RPM also includes careful tracking of Key Performance Indicators, the metrics that monitor the effectiveness of the company’s revenue functions.

Calling for new business processes, new metrics, new relationships between the formerly antagonistic functions of sales and marketing, and even new executive positions (Chief Revenue Officer), Revenue Disruption is a detailed and insightful blueprint for revolution.

Speeding Up the Sales Process

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When you have a question, where is the first place you go to find the answer? The Internet. Search has become our new yellow pages, dictionary, encyclopedia, catalog, thesaurus, do-it-yourself guide and research department all wrapped into one. This is true in business as well as personally.

This new reality has affected the sales process. It used to be that when someone was looking for a new product or service for their company, they would contact vendors and set up meetings and demos to see what was available.

But now, when you’re contacted by a potential client, they have most likely done 70% of the research already and are much further along in the decision process. When they call or email, they need answers to specific questions quickly, and if you can’t respond in a timely manner you lose the sale.

This is where Andy Paul and Zero-Time Selling come in. Paul shows how to transform sales by integrating higher levels of responsiveness, information content and speed into every step of the sales process.  Here are some of the key principles behind Zero-Time Selling:

  1. How you sell is as important as what you sell.
  2. If you are talking to a customer, it is urgent.
  3. Everything happens now (unless is has already happened).
  4. Measure. Fine-tune. Measure.
  5. Every customer is the center of your universe.

If you’d like to hear more about these principles and learn about Andy’s 10 simple sales practices, please join us on September 25th, when Andy Paul will be our guest at our Soundview Live webinar, Sales: The 10 Essential Steps to Yes. You might want to fill the conference room with your sales team and bring along your questions for Andy.