Selling Power Blog

Five Steps to Make Your Sales Team Data Driven

Today’s post is by Michael Muhlfelder, TARGIT vice president of sales, Americas.

Success in sales requires a fine balance of sharp people skills and good information. Sometimes, though, we find ourselves relying more on our gut instincts than informed data to make a business decision. For example, we might choose to work with a company because of a flashy brand name – not because we are sure that doing so will be a profitable choice. It might work out some of the time, but why stress about whether the right decision was made when you could use data to support your experience and increase your probability of making a sale?

Currently, leading sales teams are considering adopting a modern business intelligence (BI) solution to better enable salespeople to know where to focus their time. (For example, should they focus on relationships or new account penetration?) The entire company benefits from sales sorting out the facts about where and what to sell and ensuring the right data-backed decisions are being made.

Here are five steps to make your sales team data driven.

Step #1: Track every action

Data-driven sales departments share a drive and capacity to track every action of their daily operations. Every action a team member takes in the process of converting a lead – from a prospect triggering a response through their interaction with the company website to a conversation a customer has with the support team – needs to be recorded in order to be tracked and analyzed. There are patterns in the behavior of the sales team, the management team, and the customer base.

Patterns are the key to figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve. Fortunately, many of the industry-standard tools can track these actions automatically. Logging emails, notating phone calls, even dialing the phone – all of this can be done without any time spent on the part of the sales representative. This frees the team to focus exclusively on developing relationships and closing deals rather than logging actions.

Step #2: Define KPIs and provide the tools to learn more

Making something out of massive amounts of data is a different challenge than collecting it. If everything is being recorded, how do you know which actions are the ones worth paying attention to?

Every sales department is managed, in large part, by their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – the specific metrics managers use to determine if the sales team’s performance is on track. The most data-driven sales departments think long and hard about the KPIs they use to measure their sales team, and they make adjustments as needed to reflect the reality of the sales team’s circumstances.

It’s critical that a business’s chosen KPIs are visible, well known, and reviewed by everybody on the team. High-performing sales organizations don’t wait for automatically published reports to get insights. They have real-time access to analytical tools and they rely on notifications from these tools to alert them when something needs their attention – rather than sifting through a lengthy list of reports each morning.

Step #3: Stay current

Data-driven sales organizations commit themselves to staying current with their technological solutions. A functional team may be tempted to try to retain the status quo, but that mindset prevents businesses from taking advantage of the features and functionalities available in the updates to each platform they use on a regular basis.

Sometimes that means not being married to a platform the organization has been using for ages. Data-driven sales departments are inherently agile and flexible, and – if there’s an alternative solution out there that’s better suited to what the sales team needs to accomplish – managers can’t be afraid to pull the trigger.

Step #4: Keep it simple

The fourth habit of the data-driven sales department is to keep things simple. Specifically, don’t let dashboards and analyses spiral out of control. Collecting the necessary data is just the first step in becoming data driven. Delivering  that data in a way that makes sense to those who need to see it is also critical. 

It can be tempting to design complex visualizations and hyper-detailed analyses that try to explore every element of a particular question. Keep analyses limited to one question. Don’t overcomplicate them in an effort to answer everything – and don’t be drawn in by complex visualizations. The data-driven sales team can look at dashboards and analyses, quickly learn what they need to learn, overlay their experiential learning, and move on to putting a plan in action. Overcomplicated, poorly-designed analyses – not to mention page-long, static reports – stand in the way of that goal.

Step #5: Prime the pump

The best data-driven sales departments don’t just learn from and act on the data they generate; they use that information to inspire the team members to continue to succeed. It’s only a small jump to use analyses and reports as tools to foster a healthy competitive spirit among the sales team.

One way to do this is displaying key dashboards on storyboards throughout the organization. Storyboards are designed to display top dashboards and KPIs on monitors and television screens in the sales bullpen. This gives the entire team the opportunity to understand how each member has contributed to the overall results – or why the company’s performance may not have been as expected.

How to Choose the Best Sales Management Software

Today’s guest post is by Karen McCandless, editor of the GetApp blog and writer for the GetApp Lab. GetApp is a Gartner company, which is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company.

Do your salespeople feel more like data-entry clerks than sales professionals? Are they spending most of their time documenting their activities rather than focusing on selling? As a manager, are you spending hours managing your sales pipeline and forecast in Excel? Does communication with your customers feel like a mess – with key clients receiving pitches from different salespeople while other customers get no response at all?

If these statements sound familiar, it’s time to invest in sales management software. Fortunately, you have many options. Here are four questions to better understand how to choose the best sales management software for your organization.

“What should I look for in a sales management app?”

Sales management apps have come a long way since the days of being slightly more complex versions of spreadsheets. Key functionalities to look for include the following.

• Sales analytics
• Lead/contact management
• Email integration
• Sales forecasting
• Pricing optimization
• Predictive analytics
• Collaboration
• Reporting

There are many other features that can help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales processes, but the most important task is to identify what is must-have, what is optional, or what is unnecessary for your team. While you could choose software from a market leader with all the bells and whistles, if you’re not going to use half of the features, you’re wasting your time and money.

“Which benefits will persuade my finance team to sign off on purchasing sales-management software?”

It’s not always easy to convince your finance department to fork out for a new piece of software. Aside from the obvious benefits software can offer – making it easier for your sales staff to do their job and for your customers to do business with you – there are at least three points that can help you make your case to the finance team.

1. Sales management software can automate a whole host of time-consuming manual tasks; this will free you up to concentrate on the more important jobs at hand.
2. By getting better visibility into all activities through reporting functionality, you can better identify what is going wrong (and right) and act accordingly, with the added bonus of better forecasting.
3. You will also be able to better manage your pricing strategy through pricing optimization functionalities; and pulling in information from your email system will ensure smooth and transparent communication with your clients.

“Should I build or buy software?”

Once you’ve got an idea of what you’re looking for and how it will help your business, it’s important to consider whether you should purchase software from an external company or have it custom made.

These days, the benefits of choosing a cloud-based sales management solution tend to outweigh the advantages of custom-built software. This is because SaaS deployments:

• Cut down on implementation and training time
• Reduce the burden on IT support
• Enable more predictable pricing
• Provide better scalability, allowing you to add or remove licenses on demand.

“What other factors should I consider?”

1. Look into rankings. You can see GetApp’s quarterly ranking of the top 25 sales management apps to get an objective snapshot of your software options.
2. Consider integrations. No app will work in isolation, so investigating whether your sales management solution integrates well with other software you already use – such as HR or accounting – is also crucial.
3. Keep mobility in mind. Having a sales management mobile app is key to enable anytime, anywhere working and staying in touch with clients on the go.
4. Read reviews. Find out what other users think of the app you’re considering. This will help you form a more rounded opinion. Maybe an app is better for enterprises, more suited to technical users, or is a good fit for a particular industry.

If you’ve already been through this process – and now have great sales management software in your business – let us know how you chose it in the comments below.

How to Get Better Sales Results Consistently

Today's blog post is by Bob Sanders. He currently serves as President and CEO of AXIOM Sales Force Development. He has more than twenty five-years experience in sales, sales management, and marketing. He is dedicated to elevating the sales profession and delivering exceptional results for sales people, their customers and their companies. 

If you want a sustainable competitive advantage, it may be time to radically rethink the traditional approach to sales training. We are finding an increasing number of companies living on the front lines of a sales learning revolution and achieving lower turnover, faster ramp times, higher participation rates, and better overall performance. These spectacular results are being achieved by making learning a continuous part of the sales cadence and integrating learning, coaching, and selling tools into their CRM.

We all know the challenges with traditional sales training programs. Most can provide a small, short-lived spike in sales performance, but the overall impact and ROI of the investment is often suspect. However, the transformation of CRM systems, especially Salesforce.com – from contact, account, and opportunity management solutions to full sales effectiveness platforms – presents an opportunity for a radically new paradigm: the learning sales organization.

From our perspective, the learning sales organization differs from a traditional sales organization in the following ways:

• Classroom training is replaced largely by online learning that is available anywhere – any time salespeople want or need to learn.
• Sales managers play a significantly greater role in the development of their sellers. They leverage technology to help them better diagnose improvement opportunities and leverage the online learning to improve the skill and knowledge of their teams.
• Applications for opportunity management, account planning and management, and sales coaching are often embedded in Salesforce.com and drive learning application, methodology execution, and Salesforce.com adoption.
• Senior leaders set objectives for learning and coaching and integrate these performance metrics into their score cards.

A recent special report by Aberdeen helps highlight the impact this shift is having for best-in-class sales organizations.

Beyond improving sales performance, the continuously learning approach can help your company dramatically reduce their training expenses. One company we know well recently merged with another organization of nearly the same size – onboarding nearly 500 sellers and managers to their existing sales and coaching methodology without conducting any traditional training events! This saved the company an estimated $1,000,000 in travel and training expenses and dramatically reduced integration time.

Beyond the traditional metrics and improved CRM adoption, becoming a learning sales organization can transform your customer relationships. When learning is a matter of course rather than a sporadic event, sellers and managers develop the habit of continuous learning.  This habit will allow them to absorb and apply new information about your solutions and competitive intelligence more quickly and completely – making the entire organization more flexible and improving the sales ramp-up for new products. More importantly, however, by building their learning muscles, salespeople are able to engage with customers in a dramatically more effective way. Salespeople who have “learned to learn” build more authentic relationships with their customers, investing in understanding customers rather than constantly pitching the next product. Customers are better served, salespeople deliver better results, and relationships are stronger and more sustainable.

So where should you begin your journey to becoming a learning sales organization? As Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Here are a couple of suggestions on how you can begin the transformation in small but meaningful ways:

1. Establish a common methodology for key selling activities, including opportunity management, account planning and management, and sales coaching. This should include an ideal model for engaging customers supported by well-defined skills.
2. Insist upon a plan for any training initiative that includes follow-up activities that will help cement the learning. See this blog post for more information on the learning cycle that necessitates the need for small, bite-sized learning activities followed by practice and application.
3. Implement a coaching solution. Sales leaders will have greater impact on the development of their teams than anything done by the training and development team.  Make sure your managers become great coaches by:
1. Setting meaningful goals and creating individualized sales success plans
2. Uncovering performance gaps before they impact sales results
3. Identifying the root cause of performance gaps
4. Defining corrective action in the form of learning, practice, and application activities that will shrink gaps
5. Measuring and evaluating coaching effectiveness across the organization
4. Integrate measures for sales coaching and learning into your senior leadership scorecard. Even if you are not fully equipped as a learning sales organization, adding measures for this will help ensure you continue to make incremental progress along your journey.
5. Celebrate learning and coaching. Once you start measuring this, be certain to celebrate it. Too often, leaders give far greater attention to what is wrong than what is right. As Frank Blake, former Home Depot CEO, has said, what you celebrate tells the organization what is important.

Should you need help with your initiative, or if you’re just looking to share ideas, don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at AXIOM. We’d be happy to assist you in any way we can.

 

Four Steps for Hiring the Right Sales Reps

Today’s post is by Brandon Redlinger, who runs growth at PersistIQ. PersistIQ helps sales reps become more effective – with smarter outbound campaigns, better lead management, and more personalized communication. You can read more of his work on the PersistIQ blog or follow him on twitter @brandon_lee_09.

Hiring the right people can be the difference between building a good company and building a great company. Mark Roberge, CRO of HubSpot – who was the first sales hire and responsible for building the entire sales team to what it is today – says, “I felt that, if I could get the right people into the system – even if I did a mediocre job at training and management – they would find a way to win. But, if I got mediocre people in – even if I did a world-class job at training and leading – it wouldn’t matter.” Hiring must be one of your top priorities.

The demand for high performing sales reps is plenty, but the available talent is few and far between. If you don’t make it a priority, you can quickly find yourself behind the 8 ball with a lackluster sales team and significantly limited revenue coming in.

We’ve talked to multiple recruiters, interviewed countless candidates, and built a stellar team, so we’ve built a proven process to help you find the next superstars for your sales teams.

1) Clearly Identify Your Needs for the Role

Assess your team’s abilities and identify what’s missing. What role, if filled, will have the largest impact on your team’s overall performance? If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, how will you know when you’ve found it?

You’re hiring for an immediate need, so screen for and hire the skills that are going to be the most useful over the next 3-6 months. Don’t get hung up on whether a candidate has what it takes to transition into a hypothetical role that might materialize in another year or two. Face those decisions if and when they come. For now, optimize for the KPIs this hire will be responsible for delivering on day one. The market changes incredibly quickly – what you think you’ll need two years from now could be extremely different from what you actually end up needing. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself.

After you identify missing links in your team, examine what characteristics and personal attributes are important for your team. In our experience, the best sales reps exhibit:

• Drive and ambition: They’re internally driven to success, are usually competitive in nature, and do whatever it takes to get the job done (within moral and ethical guidelines, of course).
• Coachability: They’re willing to (and can) listen, learn, and quickly adapt.
• Positivity and optimism: They are resilient and persevere when faced with fear, challenges, and/or rejection.
• Empathy: They understand others’ thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, then act accordingly.
• Curiosity: They’re lifelong learners who constantly need to try new things. They’re always asking questions; after all, that’s largely what they’ll be doing for you as a sales rep.

2) Create a Compelling Job Description

Sell candidates on the position. How can you make your job listing stand out from all the other listings for sales roles? How can you attract the best talent to come work for you? Most job postings are simply a laundry list of duties. What matters most is why they should work for you. Inspire people! If you haven’t seen Simon Sinek’s TED talk titled, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” or read his book Start with Why, invest the time to understand this concept, then apply it to your job posting.

Another mistake is making the job about how much money you can offer. That should be an afterthought. If you’ve determined this candidate is a good fit for you and you’re truly a good fit for this candidate, than compensation shouldn’t be the thing getting in the way of a signed contract. You’ll be able to work it out.

In your job listing, paint a picture of your company culture. Make it about being part of something bigger. Tell them the impact they’ll have on the company and, more importantly, the society. Sell them on working for your company.

3) Act Quickly and Decisively

The first step in the interview process is the phone screening. Limit these to 15 minutes. Make your decision to cut them or move to an in-person interview quickly. Sales professionals need to be able to present themselves extremely well over the phone, so, if they’re not able to sell themselves in this short amount of time, don’t expect them to be able to sell your product or service. On the other hand, if you’ve identified someone who can help your company, move quickly toward an in-person interview, a culture interview, then an offer, or you risk losing that person to a competitor.

Candidates should be doing research on your company, your market position, and any shared connections. After all, you’ll be expecting them to do exactly the same thing – many times over every day on the job. Don’t hire candidates who ask basic questions that could be easily answered by Siri or a two-minute Google search. On the other hand, some salespeople can convince you (and themselves) that they’re the right fit for a role when, in fact, they’re not. Look out for feigned enthusiasm.

4) Keep the Top of the Funnel Full

Just like in prospecting, it’s vital to keep job candidates flowing through your pipeline. Don’t wait to start the hiring process until you need someone – or it will be too late. It always takes more time than you anticipate to find, hire, and ramp employees. And, just because you have a handful of candidates going through your funnel doesn’t mean you should stop putting more in the top, either. Traditionally, sales has had a high turnover rate compared to other professions. Just because a rep was a top performer at another company doesn’t mean he or she will be at yours. There are too many factors that come into play. Secondly, many students fresh out of college will take sales roles but quickly discover it’s not for them.

Always be looking out for top talent. There are many ways to keep candidates in the pipeline, so don’t limit it to any single channel. Manually prospect on LinkedIn for top talent. Utilize a staffing firm like Hired or CloserIQ. Ask your network to make introductions to candidates. Motivate your current employees to refer their friends and colleagues.

Conclusion

Treat hiring like a sales process. To source job candidates, you can even use a lot of the same advanced tools and technologies that reps use for prospecting and selling. We built PersistIQ to help sales reps become more effective at outbound sales, but it’s become own secret weapon for hiring too.

As Jim Collins says, “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” There’s only so much you can do on your own, but, with the right people around you, you can do anything.

Sales Management Process: The Key to Effective Execution

Today’s post is by Michelle Vazzana, a founding partner at Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm. Vazzana is also coauthor of Cracking the Sales Management Code. She is a sought-after speaker on the topic of sales management and leadership and has more than 28 years of successful sales and management experience.

Sales leaders across the globe are worried about sales execution. They are so worried that they are spending billions of dollars and countless hours formalizing the processes they want sellers to follow in order to take the guesswork out of field-level execution.

It’s a smart investment: year after year, CSO Insights’ Sales Optimization Study finds that companies with more formal sales processes outperform companies with ad-hoc processes. This is not surprising given that an effective, widely executed process creates consistency and predictability in performance and results.

What’s Your Sales Management Process?

But, in all the attention sales leaders are giving to their sales processes, they are overlooking what could arguably be a far more critical process: sales management process. The reality is that, no matter how excellent your sales process is, it is the sales manager who ensures adoption of that process. Frontline managers directly impact what salespeople do on a daily basis and can make or break the performance of a team. Therefore, it is just as important – if not more so – to take the guesswork and ad-hoc approach out of a sales manager’s job as it is to remove it from the seller’s job. Yet we find very few companies are doing this.

A good sales management process – just like a good sales process – creates consistency and predictability for ongoing sales execution. Specifically, an effective sales management process accomplishes three things:

1. It helps managers prioritize seller activities to ensure the highest likelihood of quota attainment.
2. It helps managers determine the right type and frequency of coaching conversations to enable sellers to execute effectively and consistently.
3. It enables managers to assess what is and isn’t working in the sales process.

Prioritizing Seller Activities

Let’s begin with prioritization of seller activities. Most organizations leave it up to the frontline manager to manage the activities needed to get their sellers to quota. This creates a burden on the sales manager to create paths to results for each seller. An established management process eliminates that burden by codifying which specific sales activities, by role, are most closely aligned with quota attainment – and linking those activities to specific sales objectives. This is the key to effective execution.

For example, a blanket requirement to make 20 calls per week is not specific enough to drive desired results. A major account rep may need fewer calls on fewer accounts, whereas a territory rep might need closer to 30 calls a week. Once the right quantity of sales activities is established, those activities must be linked to desired sales objectives, such as increasing margin with existing accounts or improving customer retention. A good sales management process lays all this out, taking the guesswork out of helping reps make quota by detailing which high-impact activities link to relevant sales objectives in order to achieve results.

Coaching Reps More Effectively

The second benefit of a good sales management process is that it helps managers determine which type and frequency of sales coaching will best enable their reps to execute effectively – and it ensures managers provide that coaching. As with quota attainment, most organizations leave it up to individual sales managers to determine the cadence and type of interactions they should have with their reps. This leads to inconsistent and often poor-quality coaching.

Left to their own devices, sales managers tend to default in the direction of field ride-alongs as the best venue for coaching – an unrealistic approach in today’s tightly scheduled, geographically dispersed sales environment. A good sales management process prevents a manager from automatically reaching for this familiar approach by laying out the types of coaching interactions that are most impactful, the frequency with which they should be scheduled, and the right way to structure agendas based on planned topics for discussion. From there, the manager needs simply to follow the prescribed process to improve the quality of coaching conversations – a critical ingredient for sales success.

Establishing Checkpoints to Evaluate Progress

Finally, it is vitally important that a sales management process includes checkpoints to evaluate progress against desired outcomes. Many organizations use yearly performance appraisals, but that frequency puts managers far behind the curve when corrective action is needed. Quarterly checks – while an increased time burden – will enable managers to identify problem spots and take action much more quickly.

During these checks, managers must take a hard look at what is being evaluated. The most common evaluation for a salesperson is achievement against quota, but this is a rather blunt instrument because quota is usually measured in revenue. Better questions for the manager to ask are: What makes up that quota? Should reps be selling certain types of products at certain margin levels? Should they be targeting certain types of customers? Should they be looking to shorten sales cycles or improve close rates? These types of questions are the best leading indicators of seller progress. By evaluating them quarterly, managers will have a better understanding of individual strengths and weaknesses and, in turn, where a course correction is needed.

All this is not to diminish the importance of a solid sales process. A good sales process, executed consistently, is critical to achieving sales excellence. However – alongside effort to get the sales process established – we would urge companies to take a hard look at their sales management process; because effective sales management, driven by a repeatable process, is the backbone of a high-performing team.

Four Facts about the Reps Currently Winning the Selling Power President's Club

Today’s guest post is by Adam Honig, cofounder and CEO of Spiro Technologies.

Back when we launched the President’s Club, we knew it would be a great opportunity to gain some intriguing insights about the top salespeople in the country.

We are very pleased that, to date, more than 1,500 salespeople (who are all using our personal sales assistant, Spiro, to help them close more deals) have joined the contest. These individuals are competing for $10,000 in prizes in three categories: gross bookings, deals won, and Spiro usage. The President’s Club is limited to the first 2,000 people who sign up, and we expect to hit that number in the next few weeks.

What do we know so far about the sales professionals who are currently in first place? Here are four facts based on emerging data.

1. The Top Salespeople Tend to Be R-Rated

One of the fun features of working with Spiro is that you can choose the “personality” of your assistant. There are seven choices, like Surfer Dude, Jewish Mother, Coach and…R-Rated. Think of Andrew Dice Clay giving you advice on who to call.

Of the 15 current leaders in the President’s Club, eight are working with the R-Rated personality.

2. Successful Salespeople Don’t Always Come from Big Cities

In each of our contest categories, the current leaders don’t come from any of the top five metropolitan areas. Our bookings leader, Kevin Barberio of Zimmer Biomet, comes from Birmingham, Alabama. That’s the 49th largest metropolitan area in the country.

You know the idea that the top salespeople get the best territories? Well, maybe the best salespeople make the best territories.

3. Women Are Closing More Deals than Men

Currently, four of the five salespeople who closed the most deals are women. Looking at the top five, you can see that three of these amazing sales professionals work for American Furniture Rentals.

4. The Heaviest Users of Spiro Are in Software

Users of Spiro fall into all industries: consulting, medical devices, industrial products, financial services – even oil drilling! Yet our heaviest users come from the software sector.

Perhaps because the software industry tends to be fast moving and somewhat cut-throat, salespeople are looking for any advantage they can get. When they find something that works, they double down on it.

The Leaders Thus Far

Bookings Leaders (in alphabetical order):

• Adam Roberts of Yodlee, based in Redwood City, CA
• Andy Alvarez of Kelly Services, based in Miami, FL
• Kevin Barberio of Zimmer Biomet, based in Birmingham, AL
• Taylor Nelson, of SolarCity, based in Dallas, TX
• Wade Pitts of Fort Point Capital Partners, based in San Francisco, CA

Won Deals Leaders (in alphabetical order):

• Ellen O’Halloran of Citrix Online, based in Fort Lauderdale, FL
• Heidi Brown of American Furniture Rentals, based in Washington, D.C.
• Kristen Lewis of American Furniture Rentals, based in San Francisco, CA
• Kurtis Myers of Caster Concepts Inc., based in Jackson, MI
• Sarah Bradley of American Furniture Rentals, based in West Palm Beach, FL

Spiro Usage Leaders (in alphabetical order):

• Andrew Mytinger of Degreed, based in Hilton Head Island, SC
• Collin Miller of Showpad, based in Portland, OR
• Ellie Tamari of Clicktale, based in Boston, MA
• Kurtis Myers of Caster Concepts Inc., based in Jackson, MI
• Shawnee Canjura of Showpad, based in San Francisco, CA

Special mention goes out to Jason MacLellan of Fimex. Jason would be on the leaderboard, except for the fact that he’s from Toronto, Canada. (The contest is only for U.S. residents.)

How Salespeople Can Succeed in Any Circumstances

Today’s post is by Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder of Selling Power and host of the Sales 2.0 Conference.

 

 

Yesterday, I had a long conversation with a sales professional I haven’t spoken with in a few months. The last time we talked, he was at the top of his game. He was crushing his monthly numbers and had just received a glowing review from his sales manager. His outlook for the coming months was bright as can be.

As I discovered during our chat yesterday, though, his fortunes have changed dramatically. His company has been sold, his manager has accepted another job offer, and one of his major customers is jumping to a competitor. On top of all of that, his home needs some major and costly plumbing repairs.

Clearly, this sales professional is facing a lot of pressures and challenges. Yet I heard very little fear or dejection coming from him. Instead, his outlook was optimistic, and his goal for our conversation was to talk through some of his options. Instead of seeing problems, he saw opportunities. “Every day is a new day to reinvent yourself,” he told me.

Our conversation reminded me that fortunes in sales can change at any time. Therefore, it never pays to measure your happiness based on your circumstances. Even if you are up today, you could be down tomorrow. The most important element that will dictate your success will not come from outside sources. It will come from your own internal mindset.

This salesperson inspired me to put together a list of the following things you can do to keep your selling game strong no matter what.

1. See each day as a new slate. Yesterday is done and gone, and you cannot change it. So don’t focus on what happened in the past. Instead, choose to embrace the present moment. That’s the only moment you have any real power over.

2. Don’t take bad days personally. Everyone has bad days. Whether you accidentally locked your keys in your car or discovered that you just lost a valuable customer, keep it in perspective. Don’t beat yourself up about it and don’t choose to take this as evidence that the world is somehow against you. Instead, take action to correct the situation where you can – and move on. The less energy you spend lamenting your problems, the more quickly you’ll move on to a solution.

3. Seek motivational material. You can do this in whatever way makes most sense to you. From podcasts, to newsletters, to inspirational screensavers, to positive posters in your workspace, you have lots of options for filling your head with good messages instead of negative ones.

4. Seek motivational people. There are certain types of people who drain us of our positive energy. These people tend to see problems everywhere and they constantly complain about their circumstances and fortunes. Choose to limit your interactions with such people. They will only try to find ways to get you to see the world as they do.

5. Establish motivational goals. Our goals give us something to strive for and can help keep us on track – even when our energy dips or we get blindsided by unexpected events. This is one reason we established the Selling Power President’s Club, powered by Spiro. The contest runs until May and offers salespeople a chance to win a $5,000 cash prize – among other prizes. I encourage you to sign up for it and give yourself a positive goal to work toward for the next few months.

The rewards of a sales career can be great, but the profession is not for the fainthearted. It takes a resilient ego to handle all the rejection and problems that make up a salesperson’s day and still stay pumped up. Remember – external circumstances don’t dictate your success. Rather, it’s how you choose to respond to events that will determine how far you go in sales and in life.

Painful Selling Lessons from a Botched Sales Presentation

Today’s post is by J. Steven Osborne, CEO, Top Gun Sales Performance. Hear him speak live at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston on May 2nd, where he will present "The Lies We Tell Ourselves about Sales Performance -- and Why We Believe Us!" 

 

As a sales professional, I meet with clients and prospects every week. However, as a CEO of a company, I occasionally get to be the client or prospect. It’s amazing how changing your seat at the boardroom table can change your perspective.

The other day I agreed to hear a presentation from two selling professionals. They represent a bank we’ve done business with for years (we work with four banks so, no, it’s not the one you’re thinking about); we’ll call them the Acme Bank of St. Louis.

The account executive asked if he and an associate could come out and tell me why I should consider moving my 401(k) investments from their current location with a competitive bank to them. I like these guys, and they do a great job for us in the other areas of our business relationship. So, of course I agreed.

The meeting begins. They present their investment funds, their employee-accessible website, graphs with growth and progress, and statistical tables that are almost impossible to read. Within the first 15 minutes, I have lost interest. Within the first 25 minutes, I have clearly mentally checked out of the meeting. The meeting lasts an hour and fifteen minutes. By the end, I’m annoyed.

However, I really like this bank and our relationship is important to me. What I did next may sound unkind, but I did it because I care very much about this bank.

I began with, “Gentlemen, how do you feel your presentation went?”

“Pretty good,” said the senior rep, “How did we do?”

“Well, gentlemen, you are not going to get my business today. How we continue from here is up to you. You can leave, regroup, and try again a few months from now or you can stay and I will take you through my thoughts of your presentation. But I have to warn you, it will not be pleasant.” I said this because I was going to take them step by step through assumptions and mistakes they had made – not to scold them, but, hopefully, to make them better. They looked at each other and decided to stay no matter their fate.

“What do you know about my company?” I asked.

“We saw the awards on your wall, so you must be doing well.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And what do you know about my people to date?”

Their faces assumed somewhat blank and apologetic expressions. Finally, they surrendered. “Not much.”

“What is important to me in our 401(k) offering?” I asked. They responded with items about financial security, employee retention, and the like.

“No, that’s not what is important to me. That is what your marketing department thinks should interest me. Are any of the items you just presented in the last hour of importance to me?”

“We thought they would be. How would we know?”

Aha! There is the real question, isn’t it? How could they possibly know what was important to me? Here was the lesson I wanted them to learn: “This appointment was booked over 10 days ago. At any time, did either of you attempt to contact me to ask me about my areas of interest or what needed to happen in order for this hour to be valuable for me?”

They responded with two silent, slight turns of their heads.

Now I drove home my point. “You see, the most important thing to me is not your website; it’s not the investment funds, as I can get them from your competitor. It’s the person who manages my investments. You see, the person who manages our 401(k) will also manage my personal assets. They come as a package deal. Faith and confidence in that person are paramount to me – and a 10-minute phone call last week would have revealed that to you. Instead, you just wasted an hour of my time.”

Bottom line: The ultimate decision maker has specific needs and drivers. They are busy people and – more times than not – will tell you what to focus on if you ask. But do so in advance – NOT at the beginning of the meeting, but days prior. It makes a huge difference. Sounds simple, right? But do you do it consistently?