Something Old and Something New!, Prospecting with Insight!

I'm sure many of you have heard that: " prospecting is now old fashioned you and should instead be "connecting" through social media."  I don't know about you, but I have a blog, a Twitter account and a presence on LinkedIn and new business is not exactly breaking down my door.  The bottom line is prospecting or if you want "connecting" is still a basic fundamental discipline of effective selling.  I was reminded of this as I listened to the In The Arena podcast of  S.Anthony Iannarino where he interviewed Mike Weinberg  the author of New Sales. Simplified. which was published by AMACOM  in 2013.

Mr. Weinberg is known for being a hunter and he reminded me of some old  truths and simple practices to find new business.  Key among them is Prospecting.  He reminded me of the very simple discipline required of every successful seller.  I had recently fallen into the the trap of blaming a lack of marketing for my lack of new business.  What really was wrong was that I had not blocked time to work on getting the business from the prospects I had prioritized and researched.

So I recommend that you read Mr. Weinberg's book  But then there is the still "something new" that I think you should use to supplement Mr. Weinberg's sage advice.  In your prospecting I recommend you take full advantage of social media.  That you should research your prospects, their industry, their company and their role to discover what insight you can bring to their business, that they did not heretofore know,  and that can help their business.  To assist you I suggest you read Changing the Sales Conversation: Connect, Collaborate and Close 2015  published by McGraw Hill  and authored by Linda Richardson. She does a particularly good job of showing how to create "insight-led' questions that can help you in your discovery without subjecting your prospect to "questioning fatigue."

To whet your appetite, before committing to buy the books you may want to check out S. Anthony Iannarino's podcast In The Arena.  In separate episodes he speaks to both authors.
http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/anthony-iannarino/in-the-arena

Episode 25 Mike Weinberg, New Sales. Simplified.
Episode 39 Linda Richardson, Changing The Sales Conversation: Connect, Collaborate, Close

Beyond the Challenger Sale

Just when we thought "solution selling" and "relationship selling" were "dead" new research by the RAIN Group collected in the book Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What sales Winners Do Differently has proved differently: Since 2012 and the publishing of the Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation  and the subsequent article in the Harvard Business Review proclaiming the death of Solution Selling many companies have re-thought their sales development.  For years they practiced solution selling, consultative sales and relationship building and now all of a sudden these techniques and practices were in question?  Many companies, it turns out, rightfully so, did not throw the baby out with the bath water and abandon these practices.  What we did learn from the Challenger is that delivering "Insight" is key for the salesperson and relationships, not based upon value,  no longer worked. We also learned  customer needs identification based upon a dialogue of multiple questions was not working.  Customers were experiencing  "questioning fatigue."   The Challenger also taught us that the client relies upon the salesperson  teach (a special type of teaching the Challenger calls commercial teaching).

Now in 2014 we have learned more, the effective salesperson of the future has continued to evolve. Work by Linda Richardson (Changing The Sales Conversation: Connect, Collaborate,  Close) and Mike Schultz and John E. Doerr (Insight Selling: Surprising  Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently) have shown us how to "create" insight, reassured us of the value of relationships and given some techniques to conduct a needs dialogue without putting the client in "question fatigue" and suggestions for "teaching" or "convincing" the clients.

Both of these books are very practical and provide resources to help you engage in this new type of selling and you should read them!  However, below I have included a link to  Anthony Iannarino's  "In the Arena Podcast"  in Episode 40 he interviews Linda Richardson about her book, Changing The Sales Conversation and in Episode 35 he interviews Mike Schultz in regards to his book Insight Selling.  Both of these are about 30 minutes long and provide a great window into the books.

http://thesalesblog.com/blog/category/in_the_arena_podcast/ 

Is Your Sales Training Holding You Back?

In the last ten years the sales landscape has changed dramatically! Products and solutions have improved in quality and service so there is little competitive differentiation based on these factors alone. Information on the internet is ubiquitous. No longer is the sales person the key to product/solution information. Buyers are becoming risk adverse.  Decisions that were made by one person have now been elevated to the C level  within the corporation and are often made by committee.  All of this has combined to diminish the role of the traditional sales professional.  Sales professionals must now improve their game and rise to a new level.

The question for high tech, B2B companies becomes, will our current sales training take us to the next level?  Sales training is a huge business (2.4 billion dollars in annual revenue) dominated by some very large companies.  These companies have warehouses full of stock training materials and stables full of trainers schooled in their consultative/solution selling techniques.  All of them are very similar and if you take away their branding and their "secret sauce"  you can hardly tell them apart.  Are they using the "science of selling", the performance based research, to move beyond "Selling 101" to the next level where sales professionals will need to get to to survive in the new landscape?

I have some simple observations that you can make to determine if your sales training /sales training company is using the science of selling (the latest performance based research).

Is your training still talking about:
'prospecting" instead of "making connections"?
"needs assessment/collection" as opposed to "providing insight"?
"articulating value" instead of "creating value"?
"negotiating" rather than "collaborating"?
"handling" objections rather than "resolving" them?
"Closing rather than "securing a commitment".

If you are still doing the former as opposed to the later, of 1 or more of the above, maybe it is time to stop "training" your sales people and start "developing" your sales professionals.

The Science of Selling and Sales Training

The sales training industry, globally, for 2013 generated 2.24 billion dollars.  It is big business and is dominated by some large international companies.  Selling is now very much a science.  There is a large body of  established research that can tell us what is effective and what is not.  The question is: are the sales training companies using this research?  When you look at the what the major sales training companies are teaching they are all very similar.  They are all teaching consultative selling, solution selling and spin selling or some variety there of.  But what about the research?  In most cases I don't think they are using it.   Why?  I'm not sure, but I'm confident they have warehouses full of  ready made materials and an army of trainers that would all need to be refreshed, at a considerable cost in time and effort as well as dollars.

As I mentioned, they are all teaching a variety of the same thing.  To differentiate they are not using the research but rather what I refer to as their"secret sauce."  How did this industry get so big? The sales training industry grew to its huge presence in a vacuum.    Sales is a profession that except for recent years was  abandoned by the universities.  So companies started to train their own sales forces.  This training is focused on product/solution and industry.   The methodology and process of selling has fallen, by default,. to the large sales training companies.

Things need to change!  I, for one, would like to see these training companies stop "training" salespeople and start "developing sales professionals".   I would like them to stop selling their "secret sauce" and incorporate the latest research.

How can you tell if the sales training your company is using is incorporating the research? Check back here in the coming weeks and I will give you some hints!

Steve Jobs on Salespeople

Late last year I read Walter Issacson's biography, Steve Jobs.  I loved every page of it!  In fact, I enjoyed it more than any other book I read that year!  I highly recommend it for all salespeople. To me Steve Jobs was a great salesperson and in many ways the preeminent salesperson.  From his "reality distortion field" to his effective product introductions and demos a salesperson can learn a lot from Jobs.  Therefore you can only imagine my incredulity when I reached the end of the book and read this quote from Jobs " I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM and Microsoft.  The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.  The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers or designer. So the salespeople end up running the company, John Akers at IBM was a smart eloquent, fantastic salesperson but he didn't know anything about the product.  The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off.  It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.  Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don't think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.."

Wow!  I was shocked. To me salespeople, in general, are real product people.  The better the product the easier it is to sell.  The salespeople I know are real concerned about the product, they fill the front row seats at product road map meetings.  They are staunch supporters of product development and innovation.  To me, it appears that the" bad guys" are the finance guys.  Salespeople want to sell and nothing sells better than a great product.

I still think this book is a must read for salespeople.  Jobs was many things, an inventor/innovator, an engineer, a designer, a marketer and salesperson.  He exemplifies the quality that Daniel Pink identifies in his great book To Sell Is Human: The Art of Moving Others, that he calls "elasticity." The ability to perform many functions.  Today the salesperson must be a "jack of all trades" if he is to create value for the customer.  To me no one mastered the skill of elasticity more than Steve Jobs.  He was the best at so many things!

The Salesperson as a Free Agent

I have always believed salespeople are entrepreneurs.  In name they for  work companies but actually they work for themselves.  Now go one step further and imagine them as true free agents hired on an opportunity by opportunity basis. I just finished reading The Rise of The Naked Economy: How to Benefit fromThe Changing Workplace by Ryan Coonerty and Jeremy Neuner.  It looks at the future workplace and makes some interesting observations. It depicts a world where the trend to outsource has continued and 1/2 of the entire workforce works for themselves (self employed)  Gone is the paternalistic company which provides the employed with a retirement or even healthcare. Workers collaborate to create products and services on a project by project basis.  Once the project is completed they move on finding new projects/opportunities and collaborators.

According to the authors these self employed fall into two categories "generalists and specialists" who come together on a project basis, dissolving when the project is complete and then forming new collaborations as opportunities arise.  In my recollection, they never specifically talk of salespeople as one of these types of specialists but to me it makes great sense.

In the15 years that I have worked with salespeople all over the world,  I have noticed that many times the salespeople who leave the company are the very best ones.  They chafe at the many levels of management with which that have to share their commissions and are unhappy with having to get permission to sell from client executives and software client leads that constrain their access and relationship with key executives and decision makers.  Free agency, to me, sounds like a great alternative.

Large opportunities can have sales cycles six months or longer.  This presents the perfect environment to introduce the sales free agent, who has the industry, solution and competitive expertise to make the sale happen and can do it for a fraction of what it would cost to introduce a big consulting agency to do the same.  Just a thought....

Anyway, this book is a great read and provides many provocative thoughts for the entrepreneur in all of us!

New Years Resolution: Sales Personal Professional Development

Have you chosen professional development as your New Years resolution?  If so, we have some reading suggestions for you.

In Sales:

1. Daniel Pink's, "To Sell Is Human, The Surprising Truth About Moving Others."  This book provides a fresh look at the sales profession, some interesting new research regarding sales and who sells and finally some great insight on how to sell.
2. "The Challenger Sale, Taking Control Of The Customer Conversation," by  Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. Here you will find some interesting insights into the evolution of sales and where we are today. This book is provocative and controversial and most of all will provide some new and interesting techniques, of which every salesperson should be aware.

In Marketing, something old and something new:

1. "Influence: Science and Practice," now in it's fifth edition, by eminent social psychologist, Robert Cialdini provides a classic of  research and insight of getting to YES
2. " Contagious, Why Things Catch On,  by Wharton Marketing Professor, Jonah Berger, who through engaging examples offers research and insight as to why things catch on and even go viral.

In Retail:

1. "The Everything Store," by Brad Stone is a must read for anyone interested in the future of retail.  Stone documents the extraordinary efforts of founder Jeff Bezos and the incredible rise of Amazon.

In Analytics:

1. Nate Silver's,  "The Signal and The Noise," is a great primer, in easy to understand narrative form for those seeking to understand issues in analytics, "Big Data" and statistics.

In General Business:

1. Malcolm Gladwell continues to provide refreshing ,surprising and useful insight into the world around us with his latest book, "David & Goliath, Underdogs, Misfits and The Art of Battling Giants."

For Your Career:

1. "The Start-up Of You: Adapt to The Future, Invest In Yourself And Transform Your Career," by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman with Ben Casnocha provides great advice for all not just entrepreneurs.h