Ok professional network I would like your input on something. Here’s the back ground.
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As we often do in business, I recently asked a person in my network for an introduction to someone they knew as they used to work together and are connected on LinkedIn.
 
This is the response they received from requesting a warm introduction for me:
 
“Thanks. I don't know him. He's a sales person who has been trying to get business for years. I am not interested in pursuing that”
 
He is a sales person…
 
That felt like it was supposed to be derogatory and demeaning. Didn’t it?
 
I am not sure why but this really offended me. All morning I kept thinking about it. I have been ‘a sales person’ for over 30 years and am proud of this profession. As I have gained experience and gray hair, I now have an even better appreciation for the value of the ‘Noble Purpose’ (Lisa Earle McLeod) of putting the needs of the customers first. I am consistently looking for ways to help, not just sell something. Why can’t they figure it out?
 
I quickly checked my CRM and saw that I had reached out about 10 times over 30 months – several emails and a couple voice messages. Was that too much?
 
My first thought was that this was a poor reflection of the prospect I was trying to connect with and that they were being narrow minded.

• How does someone who shrugs off warm introductions even manage to do business?
• What is wrong with them?
• They are doing their organization a disservice.  And so on…

 
Then, as my fragile old ego started to heal, another thought occurred to me. Maybe, just maybe, this is my fault? I must have come across as ‘salesy’, whatever that is. Clearly I have not effectively communicated my intent of exploring ways to help their organization.

I thought about it further and decided that there were a few things I could have done differently. Better. Y'know like the things I train and coach on??
 
Since we should always learn from setbacks and failure, what have I (re)learned here?

More research - is required prior to reaching out. A generic message likely won’t resonate with anyone. Instead, what will be of specific interest to them? Everything else is just noise. In Hope is Not a Strategy, Rick Page talks of the Arsenal of Competitive Advantage and Linking only what’s relevant to the client. In hindsight I was throwing ‘stuff’ out hoping something would stick. That was dumb.
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​​Shorter emails - I am verbose at times and my subject lines more compelling. There is lots of research that shows short emails with specific messages and compelling subject lines are opened more, increasing the opportunity to connect.

Leverage your network - to learn more about the individual PROIR to reaching out. Spending time preparing better upfront is more effective than potentially wasting time later. Jill Konrath (More Sales Less Time) writes about the benefits of pushing the BETTER button in sales vs the MORE button. If your approach or process is sub optimal, why do even more of it? Figure out how to do it even better.

​Negative perception of sales people is still quite prevalent - What can I/we do to help people understand we want to help? Sales is by definition helping, however some people still view sales people as yucky. As per Daniel Pink’s word cloud in To Sell is Human:​




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​​As I have written about before, my purpose or mission is to help evolve sales people into even more effective sales professionals through sales training and coaching. This unflattering email response reminded me that we are all a work in progress. Yes, even me. Maybe especially me. It’s easy to get complacent and then reality reminds you there is always room to improve and get ‘more better’.
 
What recent experience have you had that was a reminder that sales is hard and we need to always be looking to grow and improve professionally?

I was looking for some funny sales cartoons last week and during my 'research' I was struck by a common theme – a negative perception of the profession of sales. Unfortunately, I get it and it’s our own fault.

Think about the old school way sales was taught (or not taught at all). Sure organizations often provide technical or product training, but what about actual sales skills? There was (is?) the common scenario of ever-increasing targets and misguided compensation plans that reward the wrong behavior. Given the lack of training and poor comp plans, is there any wonder why sales has a bad reputation? We were literally creating an environment where a collection of under skilled, unprepared sales people with intense pressure to ‘close’ were interacting YOUR clients. As a result, it’s not a surprise that we often see desperate or unethical behavior from sales people.

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​The often poor reputation of the role of sales, people in sales and the sales profession doesn’t sit well with me. Let’s change that.

Don’t believe me or think I may be exaggerating? Well, I will politely say you are wrong. As noted in my recent LinkedIn post, In his book "To sell is Human", Daniel Pink did a survey on the perception of sales people and 80% of the responses were NEGATIVE. 

Based on my ‘research’, I see many top sales writers and influencers speaking about the evolution of sales, especially with the recent pandemic causing even more need to adapt.

The Modern Definition of Sales-Generally speaking, sales is a process of creating value and helping prospective customers fix their problems. Sales is all about ABH or Always Be Helping rather than an old school ABC which was all about Always Be Closing

I like that. I also saw this comment that resonated with me:

“What makes someone effective at sales? A genuine desire to help others solve problems”

Lisa Earle McLoed describes a concept of Noble Purpose. Her research has revealed that salespeople who's focus or purpose is to improve their customers' lives—rather than a metric assigned to them (quotas), actually sell more and are happier in their roles.

So then how do we help sales people evolve into sales professionals and shift the perception of sales?

Well, what elite athletes have in common is an intentional plan and time commitment to work on specific skills. Why don’t we do the same with Leadership and Sales skills? (I don’t know either- that’s why I am asking you!).

Organizations rely on sales to grow revenue. Always have. As we recover from the pandemic, we need effective, motivated and well-trained sales professionals to grow our organizations and our economies. This underlines how important it is to focus the appropriate investment, time and attention on our sales processes and our sales teams skills to increase the opportunity for success.

Proper training and coaching is more important than ever to help sales reps evolve into effective and fulfilled sales professionals. All of us can benefit from enhancing and updating our skills.

I am fortunate to be a Senior Partner with the Envision Group and work with many exceptionally talented people across North America. I am also fortunate to be collaborating with several other seasoned professionals closer to home. This diverse teams of business all-stars have helped me create a number of sales programs designed to help salespeople grow closer to their potential. The focus is very much on ‘new school’ skills we all need to learn, practice and incrementally improve on over time. Topics include skills such as:

• Building Trust
• Managing Objections
• Sales Emotional Intelligence
• Effective Listening Skills
• Effective Sales Account and Call Planning
• Improving your Soft Sales Skills
• Better Qualifying opportunities and getting to Decision Makers

​These programs are available virtually and when appropriate, in-person.

Let's work together to professionalize sales by providing better training and coaching support for the people who chose to work in this incredibly important area of our organizations.

If you’re ready to grow your organization, or grow as a sales professional, let’s talk.

Work with me here:

Think of your favourite (yes Canadian spelling) hockey team (GO Jets Go). You watch all the games and are a huge fan. Let’s say their 5 on 5 game is good, Penalty Killing is near the top of the league, but the Power Play is ineffective and not only doesn’t score, it takes momentum away from your team. The Power Play has sucked for a while now and nothing seems to work. But they keep doing. The same. Dam. Thing. Man that's frustrating, right?
As a fan are you screaming at the TV for the coach to ‘do something’? (I don’t do that by the way). Maybe fire the GM? Or change it up and put so and so in front of the net. 

                                    "If it’s not working, why don’t they do SOMETHING? Anything?"

As the coach, if you knew the PP was hurting your success, wouldn’t you look to update and improve your power play?
Additionally, what if they didn’t track this part of their game (analytics/KPI’s) and don’t even realize the extent the Power Play  and is hurting the team’s success? That would be irresponsible to the players and the fans. Especially the fans.....

Wait a minute - does this maybe, possibly, even a little bit...sound like your sales game plan?

While I have your attention, ask yourself the following questions:

1.      What is your sales strategy?
2.      How do you measure your effectiveness?

• Do you understand what is working?
• What is not?

3.      How often do you review your KPI’s to assess and adapt if/when required?
4.      What does your sales funnel look like? (Does it look like a funnel?)

• Are there stagnant opportunities? (No come on, really?)
• Are there deals that have been ready to close for a while now that haven’t?
• Are there a bunch of accounts in early stages of the sales cycle and only a few that look favourable?

If these questions were difficult to answer, or you didn’t like the answers, should we fire the coach? Of course not. But it does drive home the fact that if we took a page from sports in terms of our approach to sales and sales leadership, we could probably be even more successful.

Here’s another example to hopefully drive this point home: Think about the amount of time sports teams invest preparing and planning for their games. Football for example takes an entire week to review game film, devise a game plan specific to the next opponent, run drills at practice, more drills, pre-game preparation etc.

Why?

To maximize the opportunity for a successful outcome.

​In our case that may be a sale, but it may also be another meeting. It may be an opportunity to get in front of more decision makers to even better understand how you can help them. It may be the opportunity to submit a proposal for the first time with this account. Those are all 'wins' that lead up to the 'championship' – a new client.

How many of us show up to our calls and meetings prepared with a well-defined sales game plan?

No? Ok that’s it! FIRE THE COACH!!!

Kidding again of course.

But, maybe you could hire a Sales Coach to work with your team. One that has the experience to help guide team players and management on developing a sales game plan that will lead to increased success. Someone who could put processes and structure into place that will lead to building that capacity internally so that you can eventually run your own game plan. Someone that could help with practice plans and provide a safe and fun environment to practice your various skills so that when you get into the game - sorry met with a customer - you are prepared to be at your best, help the customer and invariably, make the sale. 

Somebody who is funny, witty and with boyish good looks and charm for days. I know a guy…
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I have always felt that the notion of ABC was rubbish.

Remember when we were young(er)…..and we were taught to Always Be Closing (ABC)? It didn’t feel right.

I didn’t feel natural. That’s not how we have real conversations with actual people. Imagine the following scenarios:

“Hey, I know we just met but if I could show you that I am a good person, would be good with kids and make a good living, would you consider getting married?”

Or how about this one:

“This should be fun year of beer league. So I was thinking….if I prove to be a good teammate, a good guy to hang out with for a beer and helped you move heavy furniture when required, can I borrow your new truck to go on holidays this summer?”

Who talks like that? Nobody talks like that.

Rubbish (I like that word and plan to use it more). Those tactics don’t work anymore and never really did

Lastly, how many of you have had an experience like this at some point in your sales career: “Here's all of our product specs, features and benefits sheet and crappy outdated prospect data base, now go sell. Oh and your quota just went up”

When we think about the old school way sales was taught (or not taught at all) and the all too common scenario of aggressive, ever-increasing targets and misguided comp plans, is there any wonder why sales has a bad reputation? We were literally creating an environment where a collection of under skilled, unprepared sales people with intense pressure to ‘close’ were interacting with clients - so it’s not a surprise that we often saw desperate or unethical behavior from sales people.

"Let's work together to professionalize sales by providing better training and coaching support for the people who chose to work in this incredibly important area of our organizations."
​
If you go onto LinkedIn Learning, read books and articles and watch sales vlogs (that the right word?) you can see lots of examples of just how much sales has evolved in recent years. In one of the articles I read recently there was a definition of sales I really liked:

The Modern Definition of Sales-Generally speaking, sales is a process of creating value and helping prospective customers fix their problems. Sales is all about ABH or Always Be Helping rather than an old school ABC which was all about Always Be Closing

I like that. I also saw this comment that resonated with me:

“What makes someone effective at sales? A genuine desire to help others solve problems”

Further to this, I have read a couple articles and completed the LinkedIn Learning module by Lisa Earle McLoed on what she describes as Noble Purpose. Her research has revealed that salespeople who focus on their purpose—to improve their customers' lives—rather than a metric assigned to them (quotas) actually sell more and are happier in their roles.

How do we help sales people evolve into sales professionals?

Well, elite athletes tend to have a plan and are intentional about working on specific skills. They make time to practice and work on getting better - all the time. They have a coach, or many coaches, to guide them on the journey and help them to adapt and evolve in ways that allows them realize new levels of potential. Why don’t we do the same with Leadership and Sales skills? (I don’t know either- that’s why I am asking you!).

Organizations have always relied on sales people to drive revenue. They are the front lines in our relationships with customers. Today, more than ever, sales professionals are vitally important in growing revenues and will be called upon in reviving our organizations revenues as well as the overall economy.

Let’s invest in their abilities and skills and by doing so, arm them with the right tools, skills and confidence they need to help them be even more successful.

SBD Growth Strategies is working with several partners to help sales people grow into sales professionals.

​More to follow on this…..