 | Boomtown Radio 7/21/10 |  |
Mike Consol (MC)
Steve Richard (SR)
Andrew Crawford (AC)
MC: The topic of this week’s program is professional sales training. It is amazing the number of professions that are not considered sales but require the continuous use of sales skills. Professions such as stock brokering, financial planning, accounting, law, consulting of all types, retailing, manufacturing, the list goes on and on and on. Some say sales is used constantly in marriages and all kinds of personal relationships and uh that’s why it’s really little wonder that professional sales training is, has become, over the years a major industry and is in demand in good and bad economies.
To discuss this topic and the many skills and considerations involved in becoming a top-producing sales person, I’m joined in the studio by Andrew Crawford of Crawford Consulting International and joined via telephone from Arlington, Virginia by Steve Richard who is the Co-Founder and Head Sales Trainer at Vorsight.
Mr. Crawford’s pas and present clients include: AIG, Ernston Young, Marsh, Mercer, Swiss Reinsurance, Watson Wyatt, and Wells Fargo Bank. Mr. Richard’s past and present clients include: Verizon, Hewlett Packer, Adobe, Level 3, Bell Microproducts, NTT Communications, and Seagate.
Gentlemen welcome to Boomtown Business.
AC: Good to be here.
SR: Thanks Mike.
MC: Uh, Steve Richard, let’s start with you. I alluded to this idea that in good times and in bad times, companies spend, well they’ll cut other types of training, they’ll cut all kinds of budget items across the board. The one thing they seem to preserve is sales training, for an obvious reason, companies, the lifeblood of a company is revenue. Has that been your experience? Do you concur with this notion that even in bad times, like what we’re seeing right now, this great recession, or so called great recession, is business now as good as ever for you and Vorsight?
SR: It actually is. I kind of, I chuckle to myself when you said the great recession, I know it doesn’t mean anything for people who are out of work out there but you know we’ve seen our business has grown steadily and even during the darkest year of late 2008 early 2009, um we were growing then and even when people had budgets that were “frozen,” people always had discretionary money and it tends to go to the sales force first; if they can get a little bit of productivity improvement there, it makes a big difference.
MC: Andrew, has that been your experience as well? AC: Yes I think so. The first six months in particular had been probably the busiest period in the ten years almost I’ve been in business. I think Steve makes an interesting point; it very much depends in my view, on whether training is perceived as a cost or an investment. If it’s perceived as a cost, they’ll cut it really quickly when revenues and profits decline. On the other hand, if they see it as an investment, then they’ll continue to spend money. So as sales trainers, I think its up to us to ensure that when we talk about sales training, we’re showing our clients the potential return on their investment.
MC: So let’s, let’s continue with a very basic question and that is, “Why is sales training important?” and I’ll start with you Andrew. And the reason I ask this question is, ideally a good sales manager is going to hire good professional skilled sales people who already know the game and know how to sell and can just move forward, yet a lot of money is spent on sales training. Why is it necessary to continually train people who are already professional sales people?
AC: Yeah that’s an excellent question. I think, the key initiative in any organization, is to grow profitable revenue, and that’s going to involve not only the sales force, but those people who are involved with day-to-day clients, their back-up staff, indeed people throughout the organization. So I would say, sales training’s important because: one, we have to keep, organization’s have to keep their existing clients, that’s crucial, client retention; two, they have to deepen existing client sales by meeting new and new client needs basically; and then thirdly, they have to convert profitable, um I should say, targeted prospects into profitable new clients. If you get those three things right, then you are well on your way to profitable revenue growth and that requires training, skills development, new ideas, customer-centric behaviors, and that kind of thing.
05:03 MC: And Steve, in your case, you, if I understand your business correctly, you emphasize telephone sales and I would think that might be an area where somebody might be a very good salesperson but there seems to be kind of a durth of training on how to actually use the telephone to sell.
05:20 SR: Yeah that’s true. So what we’ve seen in the past three years or so, as the web-based tools have increased, people are able to accomplish a lot more selling over the telephone than they ever were before; able to get much better information, and sort of close the gap on, um, on what you have to do when you’re face-to-face, especially when it comes down to where we focus, it’s on the first half of the sales process, landing an initial appointment with the person. That appointment can be a face-to-face meeting, but more often we’re finding a lot of our clients say, I’d rather land a first web meeting where I do a demo, or land a first discovery phone conversation. Um, so, you know, because people are realizing, wait I can get almost the same productivity as a field, from a field person, as an inside person, an the inside person’s gonna cost me a lot less all-in with travel and everything else, I’d rather invest in this person inside.
06:07 MC: So the technology is really changed the game a lot in terms of telephone sales?
06:10 SR: It, massively, massively. Um, you know, you can be in many different places on the same day as I am right now, uh, I don’t get out of the office much except for when I, when I go and do trainings with people. We sell almost exclusively over the telephone, um, but even with organizations that are emphasizing face-to-face interactions, there’s no substitute for face-to-face, I think we all agree on that, but, um, companies are realizing they don’t have to have the first or second interaction be face-to-face, they can gather all the information, do everything ahead of time on a telephone, that’s why inside sales teams are growing, or lead generation teams are growing, and once that opportunity is right for the plucking, we’ll get someone out there face-to-face to finish it off.
06:45 MC: So when you guys are out there doing sales training on-site, Andrew, do you actually go out on sales calls with people on occasions? Is that part of the training? Do you do any individual type stuff where you’ll go with one of the people you’re training on a call?
06:58: AC: Absolutely, uh, that’s the best part of the whole business I think is we can have so much serious fun when we’re organizing workshops and doing roll-plays and all that kind of stuff, but there’s nothing to actually being face-to-face with a client, with their prospect or client and putting this thing into real life.
07:18 MC: Now I’ve seen this happen with, uh, a company I used to work for, the National Sales Director would go out on calls and the sales person would kind of sit back and like, turn things over to the National Sales Manager, that’s not what you want to happen, correct?
07:34 AC: Oh absolutely. So we have, we spend a little time before the actual meeting and we talk about what roles we’re gonna play, and uh, what we’re trying to achieve and how we might achieve it and normally the point is made that, don’t just wait for a difficult question and then pass it to me. I’m here to observe and contribute, let’s work on this as a team, so it’s all reasonably carefully thought out before the actual meeting.
08:02 MC: And Steve, in your case, you probably are, uh, really kind of lurking over the shoulder of the people making phone calls and making them incredibly nervous, is that what you do as part of your sales training?
08:11 SR: Yeah that’s it, you just hit it, um, no, so we, when we do our workshops on-site with people, we’re focusing again, on the first half of the sales process, how do you land an initial appointment. In some cases organizations we work with will have a list of leads that they’ll working off of that were generated off of marketing activities like downloading whitepapers or tradeshows or something, in some cases we’re doing it completely cold and they’ll say, hey we already do business with Cisco, for instance, we’d like to do business with other companies like Cisco, um, can we figure out who the correct executive is; it’s all centered around that live calling on speakerphone, um, we’re in a really fortunate position of focusing on getting in the door because as long as the phone lines are up and running, we can make calls to people as long as people are around, uh, you know, just don’t call on the weekends, but we’re practicing that in the classroom, we’re making the calls on behalf of the organization, uh, for instance, you know if it’s Adobe we’re saying, “Steve Richard from Adobe;” it sounds as if we’re calling from Adobe, they have no idea and then we’re getting their people to get on the telephone as well in front of their peers and it sounds like a very scary thing but it actually, Andrew used a great word for it earlier, it’s fun, it actually becomes a heck of a lot of fun if you have the right energy and enthusiasm in that moment while you’re making those live calls on speakerphone and people, I guess we’re unintentionally motivational in that we take the fear out of it, not because we try to, but because people realize that once you implement some techniques and tactics, you can get fast results pretty easy and once you start doing that a few times you get excited by it, like that kid that’s riding a bike with training wheels the first time and they figure it out and all of the sudden you can take the training wheels off and they’re going and they’re just so excited to be riding the bike that they’re not scared anymore.
09:43 MC: Business radio AM 1220 KDOW. We’re talking about professional sales training with Andrew Crawford of Crawford Consulting International and Steve Richard of Vorsight; we’ll be back after a break.
10:15 MC: Back to our discussion about professional sales training with Andrew Crawford and Steve Richard and gentlemen, today, consultative selling seems to be the sales training method of choice, that’s all I hear about these days when it comes to sales, uh, Andrew, is that the case and for our audience, why don’t you start off by giving us a coaching explanation of what consultative selling is.
10:36 AC: Yeah I think consultative selling, or what I refer to it as conversational selling, probably applies best in a more complex situation where there’s different buyers, there’s a reasonable amount of dollars involved in the transaction and the actual product or solution itself will make a big difference to the person’s bottom line, so that’s the first thing. Um, it is, in my view, the approach of choice in those complex sales situations and basically it means, that I want to always encourage my sales people to have conversations that matter with their clients. Now how do I know what those items are? Simply by asking. If I sit with you, I might say to a client for the next hour and we talk about what’s really important to you and if we come up with some ideas that might resolve those issues, would that be a good thing? Especially, especially if it has a positive impact on your bottom line, that’s the kind of strategic approach that consultative selling will imply.
11:49 MC: And when you talk about complex sales, you’re talking about things such as maybe a benefits package for a company, enterprise software systems, big ticket items that are pretty complex and maybe the barriers are high just because change can be painful in a case like that?
12:06 AC: Yes. Yes it can be. And so if I’m going to, if I’m going to buy something that might cost a fair amount of money, it’s not like buying a candy bar, it’s like buying a benefits package, or a new communications strategy, or something like that. I want to have this conversation with the client so that when I’ve, when we’ve finished, when we’ve actually finished having the conversation, the client will say, “Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It’s solving issues and its delivering financial impact on my bottom line.”
12:38 MC: So Steve what do you think? Consultative selling is the flavor of the decade?
12:41 SR: I love consultative selling. It’s not right for all environments. So if you’re selling something that’s very transactional, it might not necessarily be right because, and I think that Andrew and I agree on this, um, because you’re not going to invest the sort of time in having that level of depth. I think we all agree that having a conversation always makes sense and it’s better than just trying to push product, but there’s definitely kind of a step below that, which is solution selling where you have a specific problem and you’re selling a solution to that problem. You’re asking questions to uncover that person’s problem that you already know is there and then you solve it. And there is one more beyond that too and I think that especially for the Bay area where you have a lot of software and service companies, there is an article in Harvard Business Review, on provocation base selling, where you are essentially provoking a person in an instance where they don’t necessarily even know they have a problem. And you are provoking a person by maybe not necessarily agreeing with them on everything, but actually disagreeing with them in a professional way and getting them to realize that they have some problem there that they didn’t know they had before. So just two different ones that are on either side of consultative selling.
13:43 MC: I read that article, interesting article, sounds a little risky, but Andrew you wanted to comment on that?
13:50 AC: Yes, one of my abiding principles in any situation with a client or prospect, is to think of a very basic equation and its P+S=R, problem plus solution equals result. So, for me to come up with a solution, that exactly meets my client’s needs, whether its complex or not, I want to know what problems, as Steve mentioned, I want to know what problems that solution will address and the results it will deliver, what it will give the client that they don’t have now. So in consultative selling, you are focusing on discussing the P’s and the R’s and by doing that and finding the value you like, to the P and the R, the S defines itself. That, in my view, is the essence of consultative selling.
14:43 MC: What is the best piece of advice, Steve, that you would give a company that is trying to build a stellar sales force.
14:49 SR: Make sure you invest in the recruiting process and the people. So one of the things that actually a lot of our clients have been asking us these days is we will come and do work with them, some training work, and they love it, they think it’s fantastic, but they still want to get that DNA and they don’t really know necessarily what to look for when they are hiring people who are going to be more hunter, cold call oriented and focused. So lately we have actually been embarking on projects on helping to either tweak or rebuild inside sales organizations as well and making sure you have the right, I think it is clay, and I don’t want to depersonalize but having the right skill sets, right off the bat, having good clay, you can mold it the way you want.
15:28 AC: I would agree with Steve there, I would add a couple of things, maybe three things real quick. One, in the work that I have done with sales teams, in this area, building a stellar sales force, is to collaborate on the vision, what is it that we are trying to achieve? Collaborate, partner, get ideas from everyone. So what is our sales vision? And when we get there, what are the outcomes? What will we get that we don’t have now? And then thirdly, how are we going to get there? Working as a team, that’s the first thing. The second thing, that Steve mentioned, is get the right people, with the right skills, and the right attitude. The right attitude, I basically mean, is not what the company can do for me, but what I can do for the company. And then the third thing is sales management. And of course, woven into all of that stuff, is appropriate rewards and recognition.
16:20 MC: Yes, we have to have our compensation, our benefits package, our bonus package, a nice 25% commission rate.
16:32 SR: Good sales people aren’t cheap.
16:34 MC: Exactly. So in sales there is a lot of talk, of course about deliverables. If someone hires Andrew Crawford or Steve Richard, as a trainer for their sales team, what are the deliverables that you promise? Steve, why don’t you lead off with that one?
16:50 SR: So the deliverables are really a change in the culture mindset and attitude of the people who are generating the initial appointments, and those could be field reps, more often than not they are going to be inside reps or lead generators, where we take them through an interactive training workshop. It revolves around a workbook, we look at prospecting, how do you find the right people, talking points, when you get someone on the phone what you say to them, overcoming objections to the initial appointment, that’s very different from objections to the buying, just objections to time, qualifying questions; how do you start and have a good conversation with people, asking the right questions; and then planning process, time management, email and voicemail. So they get the workbook and they get on the phones and they get people skills by being on the phones, and frequently we make recordings of the training workshop programs that we bring back to them after the session.
17:36 MC: So Andrew, when you show up on site, with other than a bottle of scotch, what do you deliver?
17:41 AC: Well I always end up having the conversation, “Is economic value important to you?” So, if I come in and the intervention, if I can call it an intervention, is entirely successful from your point of view, “what will we have achieved working together?” And it always seems to me, Mike, to come down to, I will help the client, with their retention, which is a huge revenue protector. Secondly, and I mentioned this earlier, we will deepen client sales, by discovering new client needs and delivering solutions to meet them. Thirdly, the new sales process, targeting prospects into profitable new clients. Those are the three things that we will deliver on, IF, they follow my recommendations.
18:34 MC: Exactly, but you know, you just hit on something, I think is just a huge issue for sales forces and that is retention because a good sales person, I mean, headhunters are always going to go after really good sales people and they are always going to be looking for, I mean let’s face it, people go into sales largely because they are very well compensated for what they do, if they are really good at it. And they are dealing with high ticket items. So, you’ve got a lot of people gunning for them, looking to add them to their sales force. What is the key to retaining good sales people, Andrew?
19:04 AC: I think by involving them from the very outset, in sales strategy, and sales execution. Making them feel what they are doing is important. And that what they achieve will help the company grow forward. Sales people can expect to be well rewarded, and that becomes a requirement after a short period of time. So if you can say as a sales person, I am making a difference, and I feel good about it, and I like my environment, and the resource, by and large the resources that they are giving me to make, to achieve these successes, then I think that’s a key element in sales management retention.
19:51 MC: Steve, what do you think?
19:53 SR: Praise and recognition is absolutely huge, and giving the people the tools that they need to do their job and letting them have fun in their job, and not feeling like their wings are clipped, as long as they feel like they are soaring, they will soar.
20:06 MC: Just 10 seconds a piece and then we will go to a break, Andrew what do you specialize in?
20:12 AC: Well my elevator speech is, I turn good sales people into outstanding sales people by teaching them skills, trusted advisor skills that will delight their clients, and result in higher retention, deepening client sales and converting more targeting prospects into profitable new clients.
20:33 MC: And then the elevator door is open. And standing there is Steve Richard, Steve, what’s your elevator pitch?
20:38 SR: Tactics and techniques, for the first half of the sales process, we are just about the only company we have seen out there that actually gets on speakerphone and makes live calls with your team, it makes all the difference in the world.
23:00 MC: Steve, you are a proponent of cold calling, a lot of people just cringe at the notion of cold calling, they just find it too remote, too impersonal, and the people on the other end of the line, I think, sometimes there is a tendency when they are getting cold called to rush off that phone in a big hurry, tell me why you are a proponent of cold calling and what is maybe a key or two to making cold calls work?
23:28 SR: Cold calling is no longer sitting and dialing through the yellow pages, and that’s what gave cold calling a bad name in the first place, sort of like the other T word there, telemarketing. Especially with all the technology at our fingertips, LinkedIn, being the foremost, we have the opportunity to really make intelligent calls in to people and have a smart message and something good to say and these are extremely targeted calls. The reason that we believe, and I believe to the tune, that our business continues to grow year in and year out that cold calling is alive and well is because fundamentally, you are not going to be able to know everybody, you are not going to be able to network with everybody. I am a big advocate of doing that while you can, but in cases where you don’t know somebody, you can’t get a marketing generated lead because let’s face it, CFOs of Fortune 500 companies are not downloading whitepapers, right? And you need to make a targeted, smart call in and there really is no other way to do it. There is some recent research from OneSource, it is a provider of information, sort of like a Hoovers type of thing, and the OneSource research indicates that sales people, when they were polled still overwhelmingly rate outbound prospecting as their number one source of qualified opportunities followed by a distant second, the website downloaded forms. So it just goes to show that people, who are out there actually generating the revenue, realize that outbound prospecting is alive and well.
24:46 MC: How do you keep somebody on the phone? There is a tendency, I mean, I used to do some cold calling myself, years and years ago when I was getting people to come to timeshare presentations and believe me, I had been hung up on many a times during that. How do you approach that kind of conversation? How do you open that conversation to keep a person interested and willing to listen long enough to find out what it is that you have to say?
25:12 SR: So two specific tactics, I’ll give you one for an opener and one to sort of keep the conversation going. As an opener, try using that person’s title or responsibilities when you lead off the call, it’s a great way to start off the conversation, even before that I’ll say, “Hey, do you have a sec?” You know there is that debate, do you want to ask them if they have a moment? What if they say they are busy, they will hang up, you will never get them back on. You know I don’t believe that. Let’s ask them, “Do you have a quick sec?” “Sure.” “I understand that you are the CFO for blank, is that right?” “Yes it is.” It’s showing the person that I’ve done my homework. So leading in like that you can establish rapport quickly and then on the flip side, how do you keep that call going because if someone gives you a little initial knee jerk reaction, objection, everyone is initially going to say no. They are initially going to object to the experience of being cold called, we know that. So how do you overcome that? We want to act like a peer. We want to look like a peer, we want to sound like a peer, we want to feel like a peer. I am talking to other CFO’s like you, I understand how busy you are, I understand the budget constraints you are under right now. And you can relate to them like that and then get them, persuade them and turn them around to what your way of thinking. And “I understand that you are probably dealing with these types of issues.” Now all the sudden that person is going, you know what, this isn’t a cold call, this is someone who gets my world and it’s worth having a conversation.
26:21 MC: Go ahead Andrew.
26:22 AC: Yeah, that’s very interesting stuff. I tend to emphasize the referral selling as opposed to cold calling. I am not saying that cold calling is wrong; it’s just that my emphasis with my clients tends to be referrals. Two kinds of referrals, one is passive and the other is active. Passive is when the phone rings, and our client says, I have been talking about you ect. ect.; I am talking more about the active referrals, where I actually feed my sales funnel, which is the lifeblood of any sales person, I feed the sales funnel with a kind of ideal sales prospects that I work very well with. And I’ve found in my experience the best way to do that, is to ask one of my very satisfied clients to refer me to someone just like them. The law of attraction says that if I get along very well with you Mike, which I do, I hope, if I get along with you and I ask you to refer me to somebody just like you, the chances are very high that the fit between me and the person to whom you have referred me to will be good. That’s the emphasis I have with my clients.
27:38 MC: And you would actually be very good at cold calling, Andrew because you come at it with that Scottish accent. Somebody might think Sean Connery is on the other end of the line. So it may give you a little extra time. You’ve got the shaved head like Sean’s got, and you’ve got it all going on there. So Andrew, your website Crawford Consulting International uses a slogan and I am quoting, “Building your ability to profit, by focusing you, on your client’s success.” Unpack that statement for us, what’s the import of this slogan, what is it really saying?
28:10 AC: I think what it is really saying is that when asked the question, “What are you in business to do?” Most traditional sales people will say to make money and I am saying it shouldn’t be that. When asked that question, I personally will answer and I hope that the people I work with will answer, I am in business to help my clients succeed. So that beggars me if you will, to find out what’s important to my client, and always applies solutions and thinking to delivering successful results. Now, how well I do that will impact how much money I make. So I come at it slightly differently, I am always going to get my client to focus on the success of their clients, I find that’s the most efficient way to profitability in the shortest possible time.
29:05 MC: Steve, what is the key to keeping a sales staff motivated?
29:13 SR: Boy, I wish I had the Oracle of Omaha, if I had the answer for that one I’d be a multi-millionaire. It’s difficult, its work, and it’s the key to a marriage, right? You have to put into it all the time, you have to put into it every day. But what I find is that people tend to respond to leaders that can give them something big picture to think about on one end of the spectrum and on the other end of the spectrum, they can get in the trenches with them and pick up the phone and make the dials. If you can do that, and you can continually excite them and especially the inside role it tends to not be a career choice for people, it tends to be a first sales position to launch to the next thing, if you can give them a career path and help them develop professionally. Then another thing that doesn’t hurt is an acronym called SPIFF, short term performance incentives for fun. Give them an IPOD or something, for short term performance, all those things add up and help keep people motivated, but I’ll tell you what, it’s not one thing and its work.
30:05 MC: Steve, I am going to stick with you for a moment. Complete the sentence, selling is the art of…
30:12 SR: Selling is the art of listening and persuading.
30:16 MC: Andrew, complete that sentence, selling is the art of…
30:20 AC: Understanding what clients need and want and delivering it to them profitably.
30:29 MC: So many sales people are very good at the whole lead up to a sale, closing is the big issue. A lot of time is spent on how do you close a deal? Because the courtship can come pretty easily, a lot of people like being courted, they like being paid attention to, but closing the sale can be the big one. Andrew, we have 30 seconds until the break, and on the other side of the break, Steve I will ask you to answer this one, what is the key to being a good closer?
30:58 AC: I think it is to think differently. Closing the sale to me is 60’s 70’s 80’s type vernacular if you will. The key for me is to enable the client to make a decision. That’s the big one. How would you do that? Perhaps by asking questions. You know, “Mr./Mrs. client, when you consider the ideas I have been pushing forward, these past 15-20 minutes, what makes sense to you? What is missing? What needs to be present? What else do you need to see to be entirely comfortable to go to the next step?”
31:32 MC: So you lead the witness a little bit, you draw them out, you find out what their priorities are.
31:37 AC: Yeah I don’t lead them, I ask the question, “What are you sensing right now that does make sense and what has to be present, what extra has to be there for you to be totally comfortable with what I am suggesting?”
33:26 MC: Steve, what is the key to being a good closer?
33:28 SR: I am going to take you to two completely different ends of the spectrum, one is counter-intuitive and actually being a good closer is all about being a good opener, and we heard Andrew talk about asking the right questions many, many times, but unless you really dig in there and ask the right questions and the onion questions and the next layer of questions, you are not going to understand how to even close. And then on the other side, on the exact opposite end is what you actually do at the very end, when you know you’re in the position to move forward, and that’s ask for the business, and it’s really incredible how few people out there will do a trial close question like do you feel comfortable with this, is there anything else that you need to see to feel comfortable with it? But beyond that, how many people will say, look we’ve put forth a good business case here, we would be honored to have you work with us. Being the owner of a 25 person company, I have a lot of sales people selling me, and no salespeople do that. And they are really leaving a lot of money on the table because they have done a lot of good work and they are not asking for that business, the final mile.
34:27 MC: Well in fact, back when I was hiring sales people, one of the things I always looked for was somebody who would ask for the job. We would get to the end of the interview and it would just be like geez, nice to meet you, shake hands and they leave. And its like, I wonder why they didn’t ask for the job, maybe they won’t ask for the contract or the deal either. So yeah, interesting. Andrew, what are the habits of highly successful salespeople?
34:50 AC: Again, another great question, Mike. I have actually asked my client’s client that question on a number of occasions, and it’s amazing the common themes that come back and I’ll share that with you. The first thing I hear is one very important habit, is that a successful salesperson will always focus on his/her client’s success. Not their success, but their client’s success. That’s very important. The second one is they say, “My salesperson always gives me value for money that when I buy something from them, at least in the marketplace I operate in, there is a return on my investment” and we talk about that. And it’s clear to both parties. The third one is you treat the client as if that client were their only client. So the hour that the salesperson spends with that client, the client feels special. They feel that you know, you probably have only got one client, and that’s me. The fourth one, quickly, is they don’t push product prematurely. They are not into being product peddlers. They hold back until they fully understand what the client is looking for. And then one that comes up all the time is highly effective salespeople know their clients and prospects and they know the organization. They actually spend ten or fifteen minutes maybe, before the call, on the internet to find out what’s going on in the organization and often they will open up with that, they will break the ice with that. “I see you have just celebrated 30 years of business, I was checking your website. Wow, what an accomplishment. How did you celebrate it?” And that tells the client that the salesperson is interested.
36:42 MC: Mhmm. Yeah, we used to have our salespeople looking at our own archives at the newspaper, and you might find out that the company’s in the middle of a merger, and if you didn’t know that going in, well you’re at a disadvantage. So Steve, you see top-rate salespeople. What are the habits you see them practicing that make them as good as they are.
37:04 SR: I’ll cite two specific pieces of research that are consistent with what I see. One of them was, I believe it was a gallop poll, but I’m not sure, that was done with thousands of salespeople of what the number one attribute was. Not what you’d expect, people think it’s being outgoing or something. No, no, no, actually there are a lot of introverts that are good salespeople. It’s actually time management, and if you think about that, it makes sense because time is the enemy of the salesperson. Theoretically, if you had limitless time, you could generate limitless prospects until you were at the size of the marketplace, right, until you had a hundred percent market share? Another one is from a company called RingToday.com. They did a research study on, um, asking, again it was people that buy solutions, usually software products, what was important to them in the sales process, or why the salesperson didn’t win the business. And two of the four reasons: number one, listening. Thirty-eight percent of buyers reported that the service provider did not listen, and fifty-five percent said they would have been much more likely to buy if they did. And then number two, don’t be late. Thirty percent of buyers said service providers did not respond to requests in a timely fashion, and fifty-seven percent of people said they would be much more likely to buy if they had done that. So if you promise that you’re going to do something, do it. And it’s funny, it goes back to the old wisdom of sales. It’s just show up on time and listen to what the person has to say, and that’s literally half the battle.
38:26 MC: Boy, isn’t that the truth? I have a motto: “If you’re not early, you’re late.”
38:31 AC: Yeah, I think Mike. Steve good point on the really good salespeople being somewhat introverted, and that’s fairly true. If you’re highly extrovert, there’s a chance that you won’t ask enough questions, you’ll do all the talking. And a great habit, I think, a fundamental habit of great salespeople is that they are excellent at discovery. “Before I talk about me, shall we talk about you, and what you would like to achieve today?” And I think that the more of the introvert that’s in you, the more you’re likely to ask those kinds of questions.
39:08 MC: So you’ve got the good and great salespeople, then you have the mediocre and bad salespeople. What are the most common mistakes that salespeople make? Steve, you want to lead off?
39:19 SR: Yeah, if you’re talking about the latter parts of the sales process, and Andrew’s already said this, it’s presenting a solution too soon. And the unfortunate reality is that we work a lot with high tech companies, telecom software, services companies, business services companies. They usually have some sort of a really cool mousetrap, and they train their people really well on all the features and benefits of the mousetrap. So, what happens when they get out there in the marketplace and start selling or when they get on the phone and start selling? They want to show up and throw up all of the features and benefits of the mousetrap that they’ve learned because they’re so excited about it, and that goes exactly in the face of listening.
39:56 MC: Interesting. You know it’s become axiomatic that people buy based more on emotion than they do on logic. So how would you, Andrew, bring emotion into the sales process? Most people think of the sales process as being very methodical and very logical. How do you bring emotion into play as well, so you can be more persuasive?
40:19 AC: Yeah, I always say to my clients that there are two kinds of value that the marketplace is looking for. One is economic value, which I have referred to on a number of occasions. The other one is emotional value. Emotional value tells the client that he or she wants to work with me, and there was a very famous piece of research, you may have come across this too Steve, I think it was David Maister who’s a guru in the professional services/consulting industry. He said that people buy, people hire professional service firms, for three main reasons. In order of importance, there is a compatibility with the salesperson. They want to work with the salesperson, in other words, chemistry, rapport. Two is they have confidence in that salesperson. They trust them, in other words. And the third, and the least important, is that that salesperson, or her organization, has capability, they have the right kind of solution. So what that basically is telling me is compatibility and confidence are the two big ones, and that defines the emotional value. Here’s a person, the client would say or the prospect would say, that I like, I trust them, they’re interested in me, they’re asking great questions, and they’re not trying to sell me. And I think that’s the emotional value that salespeople in this day and age have to really focus on.
41:56 SR: I chuckle a little bit, Andrew, because if you think about a lot of professional services firms, they send out their sort of A-players to go out and bid to win jobs. And they’re doing exactly that, they’re driving compatibility, and they’re really inspiring confidence and letting the prospect feel trust. But then when it comes to delivering the job, they back sell it with a bunch of recent college graduates, and people feel like they had the old bait-and-switch pulled on them in a lot of cases.
42:22 MC: Oh, isn’t that the truth? Yeah, I think that’s why a lot of people use, just in terms of consulting firms, they’ll go to the boutiques because they want to work with a partner, not just in the beginning. It’s like, you work with a partner, sign a contract, okay, now here’s all the RMBA graduates that’ll flood your place, and we’ll charge you a lot of money, and they’ll learn the business on your dime. So, yeah, interesting.
42:46 SR: Nothing against recent college grads, they have to work too, but…
42:49 MC: Oh yeah, but it would be nice if there was a little apprenticeship going on there. How does one master the sales process? We have thirty seconds to the break Andrew. How does a person master that sales process once they’re taught it?
43:04 AC: Well, that’s the important thing, once they’re taught it. If I ask a lot of salespeople, “What is your sales process?” they might look at me blankly and say, “I don’t know.” So the first thing, in my view, is to have a sales process, and the sales process basically says, this is how we sell in this organization, and it gets back to the sales funnel, how I manage that sales funnel, the skills I need to track the right person into it and move them down or out, as the case might be. To me, that’s the most important thing of the sales process is to communicate it and build some skills in how to manage it effectively.
43:47 MC: This is radio AM 1220 KDOW. You’re listening to sales training experts, Andrew Crawford and Steve Richard. Time for a break.
45:16 MC: Thank you for staying with us. I’m here with Steve Richard and Andrew Crawford. We’re talking about professional sales training, and Steve Richard, I’ll start with you. Give us an example of a success story that you’ve pulled off during you’re career.
45:33 SR: Sure, happy to. So I’ll give you two specific examples. One of them is a software company, a large enterprise software company. I’m going to let them remain nameless at this point, but they increased the number of meetings that they were driving, or sales leads that they were driving to the field sales team, by twenty-five percent in the quarter following our training. They have about eight thousand employees, and the second one is a telecom company that was able to attribute twelve-and-a-half percent increase in revenue amongst the sales people that we worked with and trained. Again, if you think about what we’re doing, we’re focusing exclusively on the first half of the sales process and tactics and techniques for landing more appointments. So more often than not, people in measuring that, at least up front, in the number of net new appointments that they get, either within existing accounts or new accounts that they’d like to do business with, and because most of our customers are selling a solution with a long sales process, usually about six months, you see that number comes through in the revenue downstream. But typically, people can see, can expect to see, between a ten percent all the way up to about a twenty percent increase in revenue and usually between twenty-five percent all the way up to a doubling in the number of new doors they are able to get into.
46:48 MC: I’d say most people would kill for an increase like that right about now. What do you say Andrew?
46:54 AC: Yeah, going back to the three key deliverables that I talk to my clients about. Client retention: we very often see ten percent increases in client retention. Deepening client sales: it may well be the average number of lines of business for existing clients is one point five. If we can get that up to two point five, that makes a huge difference in the bottom line. And then the big one too, another big one, is the third initiative, which is targeted prospects into brand new clients. Typically in the business I’m in, that can be twenty, twenty-five percent. We can get that up to forty or fifty percent. Now how we do that, I don’t think we have time to talk about right now. It’s not just workshops. It’s the actual reinforcement and the follow-up sessions we have with real life clients and prospects that enables that success to happen.
47:53 SR: And Mike, it’s actually worth nothing those, just a couple of clients or so, there are some names associated there, Level 3 Communications as well as Merrill Corporation out of Minnesota. So mostly software, telecom, business services firms.
48:09 MC: Okay, so there are thousands and thousands, maybe millions, of salespeople out there in the world. People generally, I mean you don’t really go to college for sales, Steve. In fact, you have a degree in finance. How did you end up in sales?
48:26 SR: I graduated in 2002, and there were no finance or consulting jobs out there. There were, but they were few and far between. I think I went 0 for thirty-five on interviews, and then someone, a friend of a friend, said, “Have you ever thought about sales?” and I said, “Well you know, of course, when you think about sales, you think about the used car salesman, and you think about selling photocopiers, and it’s not the most appealing thing when you’re in college.” Then I said, “Well I guess it depends on what you do.” He said, “I think it’s mostly you do presentations. You do presentations well, why don’t you go try to do that?” And little did I know, I was getting into my future career. I think what happens, especially for the college grads, is that you don’t find sales, sales finds you. I interview lots of people that are graduating school looking for sales jobs and that tends to be a theme, that people stumble into or maybe it was a friend or a relative or they know some rich uncle that happens to be in sales, something like that. But it definitely is not typically taught in schools, except we’re seeing a little bit of an increase in that. For instance, I know a woman named Lynn Schleeter at St. Catherine’s University in Minnesota, and they have one of the first sales innovation curriculums out there in the country, and we’re starting to see pockets of schools and MBA programs picking up a little bit of sales. But you still, at this point, really can’t get a sales major.
49:31 MC: Got it, got it. You know our time is up for this edition of Boomtown Business. Thank you to our guests, Andrew Crawford, of Crawford Consulting International based in San Francisco, and Steve Richard, of Vorsight in Arlington, Virginia. Listeners, thank you for joining us. Please join us again next week when the topic turns to the self-publishing industry. I’ll be interviewing Eileen Gittins, the founder and CEO of the self-publishing house, Blurb, and Carla King, the founder of Misadventures Media and a producer of self-publishing boot camp seminars. Again, Boomtown Business is sponsored by Mechanics Bank, where customer service and financial responsibility have lasted for generations. For Boomtown Business, I’m Mike Consol.
