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

Sales Lessons for Today from the 1890's

They say: "The more things change, the more they stay the same."  I was reminded of this, when I uncovered some "pearls of  sales wisdom"  looking through the NCR Archives in Dayton last week.  I was researching John Patterson's very first sales school in Dayton, which began April 4th 1894 (120 years ago this coming April).  So I was reading "The NCR" an internal company newsletter where I came across the following  quote from Patterson himself in the May 15th issue of 1894; " Our people are teachers rather than salesmen.  It is the teaching of merchants how to do business and how to make money."  I went on reading in the biography of Patterson by Samuel Crowther, first published in 1923, where he points out that Patterson believed; "We are not selling cash registers but rather helping customers with their business."

Does any of this sound familiar?  I'm reminded of the "Challenger Sales" where salespeople are encouraged to be teachers, "commercial teaching" in their lingo and the key is to provide a unique insight to the customers business they had not thought of.  Don't get me wrong.  I believe the Challenger Sale is the next step in the evolving profession of sales but it is more a new technique.  The premise of the salesperson as teachers and discovering the business problems of their customer , however is as old as the profession of modern selling is itself.

 The reason I'm doing this research is that since retiring, after 15 years of sales training, most recently with IBM, I have made it my "mission", to do what I can to improve the sales profession, that I so love. To begin, I have chosen to work with colleges and universities to raise their awareness of sales as a profession and how they can modify their offerings and curriculum to better prepare young sales professionals.  Future entries in this blog will highlight what I have learned and experienced on my "mission."

Turning Buying Signals into Major Sales

Buying signals are typically defined as statements made by the customer that indicate a readiness to buy or to move forward.  In reviewing this topic I always come back to Neil Rackham, the author of SPIN Selling. He used his terminology of implied need and explicit needs when talking of buying signals in major sales.  Both are buying signals, but he points out that implicit needs such as: agreement by the customer  "that they problem" (capacity, speed etc.) or "are not happy" with the quality are buying signals for small sales.

Explicit needs such as: "we planning to buy a new system" are required for a major sale.  What this means to the salesperson in a major sales it is not enough just to identify a problem (implied need).  You need to receive a commitment to action such as: "we are planning to purchase a new system this year."  Then you must create the value in your product so that it is the chosen solution.

In summary: Get the customer to 1. Identify the problem  (implied need) 2. Commit to resolving it (explicit need) 3. Convince the customer that your product should be the chosen solution (create the specific value of your solution for this customer.)

Connecting with Value

Today when we talk about Social Media it is all about connections.  The number of connections you have on Linked In , the number of followers you have on Twitter and the number of friends you have on Facebook.  If you are using your connections for you professional development you need to ask yourself another question.  What is the value my connection brings to a connection, follower or friend?

As a sales trainer, I try to provide those connected to me value.  On Twitter, I follow best sales practices and key sales information related to the products we sell and the industries we sell into.  By following me, those I teach will get information about best sales practices and key product and industry information.

So if you are using social media to connect with your customers and prospects what is the value they receive from your connection, your tweets and re-tweets?