144: Stop Slamming The Square Peg Into The Round Hole When Selling

07/30/19 • 12 min

Stop Slamming The Square Peg Into The Round Hole When Selling

One of the most dangerous people on the planet is the salesperson who doesn't listen well enough to the client’s needs. They miss the key cues, misunderstand the problem, can’t override their fixation on what they want and do most of the talking during the sales call. They wonder why getting an agreement to buy is so hard.

One of my sales coaching students was relating how he took the client meeting into negative territory from the very kick off of the sales conversation and then proceeded to dig the hole deeper and deeper for himself. Small talk at the start is needed to set the foundation for building the trust, as buyer and seller get to know each other. In this case, the small talk conversation went into a death spiral. This is when the redirect button is pushed to make it more meaningful for the buyer.

In this case, he just lent harder on the shovel and dug faster. If we find things are not going well, then stop talking and start asking questions. This allows the buyer to feel in more control to direct things the way they want them and for you to regroup and prepare to take back the reins of the conversation. Usually we have the selling plan, but the buyer doesn’t have the buying plan. They are wandering around with no direction in mind, because they expect to hear what they need from us. We need to keep that conversation on track.

When we hear what the client is trying to achieve, the solutions we suggest have to be in line with delivering that. You would think that is the most logical thing in the world, but salespeople do the most surprising things. They try to redirect the client’s needs, to match their own needs. If there is a higher commission being paid on one product, over the others, then they want to stress that product, regardless of whether that is the best one for the client or otherwise.

They may be under pressure from their boss to push a solution that benefits the company the most. This is where you start getting into hole digging territory. The client may be following our advice because we did such a very good job of establishing rapport and building trust at the outset. When we FOIST the wrong solution on the client, we are haemorrhaging that trust immediately. The ROI we should be focused on is the client’s ROI not ours.

Our intrepid hero was sadly successful in convincing the client to buy the thing which would have zero return. When we had our coaching session together, I was drilling down into what would the client get in return for their hard earned money, based on the conversation that had covered what the client was trying to achieve. It was obviously zero value for the client but good for the seller, who was having trouble moving this product. Great, but this destroys your reputation in the market. You do get the sale and usually the size of the sale is a peanut, as it is the first sale. You blow all your credibility at the start and then the client tells everyone in town you are radioactive and to be careful of dealing with you. The lifetime value of the client means that the loss is enormous, when measured that way. That peanut will also be expensive, given the way it will shred your reputation.

We worked on a more custom solution for the client and took the solution in a completely different direction. This customisation process is always the best idea. We tend to have ready to go, off the shelf solutions, which are cost and time effective, but these won’t always match the needs of the client. The more customised the solution, the better in terms of client satisfaction, ROI and perceived value. Make the solution fit the client’s needs, rather than make the client fit in with the seller’s needs. No more square peg solutions please.

Stop Slamming The Square Peg Into The Round Hole When Selling

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143: Really Understand Your Expectations Of Your Sale's Team

Really Understand Your Expectations Of Your Sales Team

We hire people and they don’t perform as we expected. The time passes and the numbers are not rolling in. We thought they would be more proactive and more skilled at getting new business. We fire them and start over again. Except that in Japan, you can fire them, but replacing them is a different and difficult matter these days. Recruiting salespeople is horrendous, so the retain component is the mirror piece we have to master as well. Turning the tap on in the sink, with the plug removed, isn’t getting us anywhere and this revolving salesperson door is just that issue. We are wasting a lot of resources.

We are often the problem though. I have a start-up founder client who is a nightmare. I have interviewed all of his direct reports and finally the big man himself. Actually, I don’t want to work with his company. They can keep the money. He is the issue as to why they are having such significant staff turnover. He has a “plug and play” mentality with people. When you find a problem, you just hire someone in to fix it and then go back to running around like a headless chicken as before. In this case, the leader is the problem.

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His expectations are unrealistic with the current state of the market. He thinks we are still back in the old days, when there wasn’t the same amount of job mobility and where people tended to stick around, because it was hard to get another job. He had key people jump and rather than try and fix the problem, starting with himself, he just wants to throw another body at it.

There are three areas where we need to audit ourselves and our expectations. Are we sure of what we are looking for in our salespeople when we hire them? If we hire a farmer and they don’t hunt, we fire them. Whose fault was that? Ours not theirs. We need to know at the very start are we bringing in another farmer here or a hunter? In Japan, farmers are much more numerous and so the chances of getting a farmer on board are statistically higher.

How can we tell which is which, in the interview process? Ask the candidate about their current client base. Where did those buyers come from? If they say through the marketing team’s efforts generating leads, the pool of “orphan clients”, their boss or from departed colleagues, then that tells you they are farmers. If they talk about how they recruited new clients, by beating the bushes and finding them then, you have a hunter there. This is not to say one is better than the other, but that in Japan you are more likely to wind up with a farmer than a hunter. Once you know that, you adjust your expectations and know you need to get busy feeding them.

Another case is how fast we expect people to get up to speed. When the months roll buy and the numbers don’t role in, we get frustrated. We need revenues and we need them now. The costs in salary, insurances and expenses flow out like a flood and the revenues from new salespeople comes in like a trickle. Where do we get our expectations from? Are they rooted in numbers, experience or hope. Often it is the hope component, followed by our personal experience and rarely are any comparative numbers involved. It is always dangerous to judge others through the lens of ourselves. “I did it, so they can do it too”, makes sense at one level, except when you uncover that very few other salespeople are like you. A better analytical tool is performance.

Take every salesperson who has worked for your organisation over the last five to ten years and trace them all back to Day One when they started. Track their revenue production monthly. In this way you can compare like for like. There will be some averages you can apply to give you a measuring stick, against which to gauge their output. If you have a sufficient number of people to look at, you can take out the worst and the best performer and form an average from those left. If you don’t have enough people, then a straight average is enough. This gives you quarter by quarter, what, on average, you should expect from your people after they join. This has nothing to do with what you did and so is a more objective means of defining performance and tempering your expectations.

The third thing to look at is your sales incentive scheme. American style 100% commission systems are not much in evidence in Japan, except in very dubious occupations, closely associated with skulduggery. Usually salespeople are on fixed salaries with bonuses. This is not a great system and so try to change it. A better case is where the base salary will be lower and a percentage of sales as commission is paid.

If your scheme is mainly to benefit your pocket, then don’t be surprised if people don’t get excited about it. I have a friend who is mean, when it comes to paying salespeople and has tremendous turnover, wondering why. I keep telling him why, but he is too greedy about getting t...

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145: Generating Your Own Leads In Sales

Generating Your Own Leads In Sales

Marketing plays a key role in generating leads. They are trying to maximise the accuracy of the segmentation of the data base, to make offers that resonate specifically with different segments. They are producing content marketing pieces that will spark leads through the SEO route. Buying ad words to get pay per click activation from buyers, searching for your specific good or service is another channel. Potential buyers raise their hand when they download a white paper or an eBook from the website or leave an inquiry. However this is never enough from a sales point of view.

Salespeople want to fill the top of their funnel of leads. They know they have certain ratios which will unveil the KAIs or Key Activity Indicators. If we try to email or phone a certain number of prospects, then we will get a certain amount of replies or contacts. By tracking how many we make contact with we can get a ratio of our activity relative to our success. The next stage is converting those contacts into face to face meetings. In Japan, for the vast majority of B2B sales, this is required, especially if you are a potential new supplier. There will be a ratio of success here counting appointments achieved against attempts to get a meeting. Then obviously we can count how many of those meeting led to a deal being done. That is another key ration.

We can calculate the value of all the deals we did against the number of deals and work out our average sale value. If our average deal size is 1 million yen and our annual sales target is 30 million yen then we can work backwards and nominate how many original contact we need to be making to generate our target number. The problem is very few sales people have any clue what their KAI is and they just ramble thorough the year.

When we know our KAI we know we need to put aside what marketing is doing because we can’t control that process. We can control though, how many networking events we go to, how many cold calls we make, how many reactivation calls to orphan clients we need to make. We have a clear idea of what an ideal client looks like.

We have clients in an industry who have rivals in the same business. The chances are high that the problems and issues facing one five star hotel in Tokyo will probably be shared with other similar hotels. Our insights derived from dealing with one can provide us with a battering ram to break into the other hotels.

Commonly, cold calls fall on stony ground in Japan unless you know the exact name of the person you need to talk to. The lowest placed young woman on the totem pole is always designated to pick up the phone. Despite her tender years she has become a hardened, ego demolishing, expert at keeping her bosses protected against pesky salespeople. “Who are you”, “Why are you calling, “We will call you back”, then crickets is usually how it goes.

Most salespeople just ask to speak with the sales manager, false promises are made to get rid of them and deafening silence on the return call front is all they ever experience. The Sales Manager never contacts you and you are never ever confident that young Ms. Call Killer even passed your message on to the boss in the first place.

Based on our insights gained from working with similar companies in the same industry, we can try a different angle. “Hello, this is Greg Story from Dale Carnegie Training Japan, we are global soft skills training experts. We have been working with your direct competitors here in Japan. What you will find interesting is we have been having great success helping their sales teams to win new business for their Hotels. These rival sales managers have loved seeing their teams going after new business, succeeding and so substantially expanding their sales. Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure. Please allow me to discuss this possibility with your sales manager, to see if we can help you achieve similar success. Would you please transfer me to the sales manager?”.

Invariably the Sales Manager “isn’t there”, even if they actually are there. At this point Ms. Call Killer often goes stone motherless silent. She will not offer to take a message, as she is hoping you will crack and say “I will call back later”. That makes her feel good about getting rid of you, because experience has taught her that most salespeople don’t try again. She will not tell you the name of the sales manager if you ask. If you don’t give up so easily and you ask to leave a message, she will take down your name and number - maybe. You have to rely on her tender mercies for your message to be passed across. Here is a key tactic. You should keep calling back every few hours, until you get to talk to the sales manager. You have to be that persistent to break through the wall.

Making these cold calls needs discipline, guts, a thick hide and time. Everyday you need to make a key appointment...