It makes me want to jump out of my seat and scream: “WTF, you never lose a deal over a single feature! You were simply outsold.” And IMHO, this is an epic sales leadership/sales coaching failure. Sales leadership is fundamentally responsible for training and coaching up their sales reps on competitive positioning. No software product will ever have all the features that a customer wants.

Your job as a sales rep is to help the customer understand the value of your overall solution. And that includes differentiating your solution from the competition. Most importantly, that involves seeding and influencing the customer’s decision criteria. This is basic sales…sales 101 if you will. And yet, I constantly hear sales leaders making the lame excuse that they are losing deals over a feature. Really?

I would submit the following challenge to all technology sales leaders out there…you should never accept losing over a feature. Not ever. And you need to take ownership as the sales leader of the failure on your part to train and coach up your sales reps so they don’t ever tell you the reason that they lost a deal is over a single competitive feature that your software does not have.
Let’s start with the basics. The first thing is you should be obsessed with knowing what your top competitors’ software can and can’t do. You need to know how they are going to position against you and respond to competitive land mines that your sales reps should seed with the customer. Your sales reps should be taught never to disparage the competition because that just makes you look defensive and inferior in the customer’s eyes.

In fact, great sales reps acknowledge areas where their competitors have an advantage over you. That establishes strong credibility with smart customers. Then the great sales reps build the business case with the customer that the advantages that your overall solution has over the competition dwarfs the single feature or integration that your software does not have. In fact, the best of the best sales reps proactively seeks out those latent customer objections over a competitive feature or integration that your software does not have. And they convince the customer by giving real world examples that a single feature should not be the most important factor in their final analysis.

Here is an example of how great sales reps would do this. It’s the classic sales pivot. Bring the customer back to things that they told you were far more important in their overall solution needs that you do better than anyone else. “You are correct Mr./Ms. customer in that we do not support an integration with Slack in our platform today. In fact, this is not the first time this has been brought up by our customers. But what we’ve found in practice through our customers experience is that your users prefer using Slack as a standalone application. Because that is how they are accustomed to using Slack. In fact, we’ve heard through other customers that had Slack integration in different platforms that the Slack integration was not being used due to the user’s customary workflow experience.”

The aforementioned was the debunking the significance/value component and then you pivot to reminding the customer what they told you was most important in their decision criteria. Here is an example of how to do that: “Allow me to go back to what you told me was the most important parts of your decision criteria. Ms./Mr. Customer, didn’t we discuss the user experience as being the most important overall requirement in your decision criteria? The customer will respond and then you ask: “Has that changed or is that still the case?” The customer responds and then you get concurrence on why the user experience is the most important element of their decision criteria by asking: “And my recollection is that you shared with me that the reason the user experience was the most important element in your decision criteria was because you are rolling this platform out to your entire enterprise and need rapid adoption to ensure success, is that still correct?”

The customer responds and then you do a trial competitive positioning close by saying: “Great, because throughout your evaluation we have heard you and your team repeatedly say that our platform/solution was by far the best use experience compared to the other solutions that you are considering. Is that an accurate statement?”. The customer responds in the affirmative and your great sales rep elegantly handled an objection and outsold your competition in one fell swoop.

Good selling to all!

The post Are You Losing Deals Due To A Feature? first appeared on True Sales Results.

My Grandfather had to drop out of school at a very young age to help earn money to support the family. He told me he would leave his house at sunrise and would look for any odd jobs to bring home 20 or 25 cents for working 10-12 hours. His Stepmother took from him any money that he earned. He really had a hard knock life growing up, so he lied about his age and enlisted in the Navy during World War I. The irony is that my Grandfather never learned how to swim and yet was in the Navy during WW I on boats and in the water that he was deathly afraid of for years. He sent home his meager Navy paycheck and asked his Stepmother to start a savings account for him so when he got out of the Navy he could have enough money saved to marry my Grandmother, who was his next door neighbor since they were both born. 

Here’s the Disney movie twist, when my Grandfather got out of the Navy he found out that his Stepmother had spent all of the money that he was sending home to save and marry my Grandmother. So he was forced to sign back up again for another stint in the Navy to start all over again and save money to marry my Grandmother. This time he sent home his paychecks to my Grandmother to save in a bank account for him. This delayed their marriage by 4 years, so needless to say my Grandmother wasn’t terribly fond of my Grandfather’s Stepmother. My Grandparents lived through the Great Depression and worked incredibly hard to raise my Dad and Uncle. They saved their entire lives and bought a house. When my Uncle got married, as a wedding present my Grandparents gave him their house and they moved into an apartment. They never owned a home again for the rest of their lives. My Grandmother never had a driver’s license or drove a car in her life (she lived to be 93 years old) because they couldn’t afford two cars.

What did I learn from my Grandparents? That hard work, sacrifice, commitment and integrity are the keys to be successful in this world. My Grandfather always wanted to know what job I had and was I doing the absolute best that I could at that job. He helped to instill in me a competitive drive around always trying my hardest at any task or endeavor that I was undertaking. He modeled for me that your work ethic is what separates you from the rest and it can create great opportunities for you. 

Why do I have such a freakishly strong competitive drive? It’s probably attributable to several factors. Growing up, my older brother was always bigger and stronger than me, which he reminded me of on almost a daily basis by a friendly big brother pounding on little brother:-) He took his responsibility of toughening me up very seriously, I can assure you. Then my younger sister was a freakishly gifted athlete and faster than me. So I couldn’t catch her in a foot race. Being the middle child of us three kids was the root cause of my competitive spirit developing early in life.

So when you are slower than your younger sister and weaker than your older brother, how the hell do you compete? At first it was incredibly frustrating because I would pretty much lose at everything. And growing up, my family was all about the competition whether it was sports, cards, playing Yahtzee, Ping-Pong, eating food, anything and everything was a competition.  Since I hate losing and was always losing at everything, I needed to figure out a way to win. At least some of the time:-) I came to the realization that I needed to be more clever when competing and have a better strategy to win because I wasn’t going to win solely on my athletic abilities. 

I figured out that I could unnerve my sister during competition by trash talking her and getting under her skin. We would play tennis and while she was a better pure tennis player than me, she would lose every time because I’d get under her skin by trash talking and playing trick shots. With my brother, I’d only compete in games where strength wasn’t an advantage and that winning strategy determined the winner. We would play Ping-Pong endlessly and I would use spin shots to frustrate him while he would always try to slam the ball and hit it too hard. I was winning against him regularly and getting him to lose his temper was a factor. 

I’m probably one of the only people that knew I wanted to be a professional salesman while in High School. I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted to sell. I just knew that I wanted to sell. The irony is that there isn’t a College degree or program for selling. So I got a degree in Business with a concentration in Marketing. Why did I want to sell? Because sales represented the purest opportunity to compete every day in my professional life. I ended up getting into enterprise software sales 25+ years ago. I started off as an inside sales rep cold calling and sending letters (yes, I said sending letters, aka snailmail:-) to target accounts and prospects. Then I graduated to an outside sales role and became the #1 sales rep in the company. I got promoted to a sales director role, opened up our west coast office and grew it to be the biggest revenue producing region in the company.  I was blessed to be part of the team over 7.5 years that grew the company (I was employee#10) and that culminated in a successful IPO.

Then I went on to become a VP of Sales and transitioned more into a strategic role and leading sales teams. I started my own company 10 years ago that specializes in B2B sales enablement services and outsourced sales services. I’ve been quite fortunate in my career and as I move into the “back nine”, sunset years of my career, I like to give back by mentoring and coaching sales professionals. It brings back fond memories of growing up with my Grandfather and competing with my siblings. I believe that the competitive spirit is innate. You are either hard wired to be competitive and it’s in your DNA or you aren’t. Some people hate conflict or will do anything to avoid a confrontation. That doesn’t mean anything negative, it’s just how they are hard wired.

True competitors relish a challenge. We seek conflict when we can affect a more positive outcome than the status quo. We drive change because progress and improvement aren’t optional to competitors. We lead and blaze new trails with an insatiable thirst to discover new and better ways. We relentlessly analyze process and seek optimization. We aren’t afraid to experiment and fail. Just fail fast and learn from each failure so as to not repeat it ever again. Are you a true competitor?

The post Are You a True Competitor? first appeared on True Sales Results.

By way of context, they all work for a hot start-up that recently closed a substantial funding round.  They need to figure out how to scale the business rapidly over the next few years.  I know that sounds cliche, but this is Silicon Valley.  My old colleague heads up the sales team and most of his key lieutenants joined us for the dinner conversation.  We were discussing how to onboard and ramp up new sales team members most effectively.

Ironically, all of them had worked with another old sales rep of mine that was not at the dinner or part of their company… not yet anyway:-).  They had actually worked with my old sales rep at several different companies and so I shared his onboarding story with them.  Please note that all names (company and individual) have been sanitized in order to protect the innocent in this real world sales story…

It was his second week on board with my company at the time, so as his VP of Sales; I scheduled 3-4 days of sales calls and customer meetings in his territory. The plan was that I would introduce him to several of the key existing customers in his patch, lead the sales calls and generally show him the ropes related to our software product pitch, positioning, etc.

Our first meeting was with a long time client in the Midwest (that was his sales territory), who happened to be a blue chip F1000 Company.  So I flew into town from Boston the night before our first customer meeting and we went out for our obligatory sales road dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant complete with some great red wine to prepare us for battle.  I walked him through the customers and prospects that we were meeting that week and provided some context as to the sales opportunities related to each of them, where we were in the sales cycle, what the competitive landscape was, who the key stakeholders that we’d be meeting with were and what their respective hot buttons were, etc.

We leave the Marriott hotel bright and early the next morning to meet with our first customer and introduce him to the account.  Again, this company is a well-known Fortune 1000 company and we were going to their corporate HQ in the Midwest. We rolled our matching TUMI road warrior bags up to the HQ lobby receptionist and signed in.  Our customer host for the meeting promptly showed up and led us into a standard issue corporate conference room.  So far, this is about as typical of a field sales call day as it gets.

The first sign that something was off was the number of people in the conference room.  We were expecting 2-3 people from their end to attend the meeting and there were 15 people in the room.  Then as we’re going around the conference room table making introductions, it also struck me that there were several high-ranking execs in this meeting that weren’t supposed to be there.  “What the hell is going on here?”, I asked myself, as this meeting was set up with the intent to introduce my new sales rep to his account and discuss a moderately priced upgrade proposal with their Director and his lead IT guy.

Then as if rehearsed for weeks, all the heads around table turned almost in perfect unison to the ranking exec (the EVP who reported directly to the CEO) at the end of the table directly next to me.  He proceeded to chew us out in the most profane language for 40 straight minutes.   I was fascinated by the veins in his forehead bulging as he regaled his team with a steady stream of derisive comments about how our product sucked, how we were the worst customer service organization that he had ever worked with in his life.  I must admit that it was a command, Oscar winning worthy performance.  I recall thinking to myself “wow, he really hates us”.

And for dramatic flair, he picks up a stack of papers and shakes it directly in my face and says we have a proposal from your top competitor and we’re ready to throw your ass out and tell the world about it.  It occurred to me that he was deadly serious about this and what the hell were we going to do about this.  At the conclusion of his diatribe, which effectively eviscerated us, there was complete silence in the room.  After a prolonged pause, he asked me what our response to this was going to be.

Being the Midwest, I asked the EVP when was the last time he bought a new car. Everyone around the table laughed at my non sequitur but it accomplished my goal, which was to start to defuse the tension in the room. He graciously replied by laughing and saying “just last month, why do you ask?”. I replied by asking him “which car models did you consider as part of your evaluation and decision process”. Being the Midwest, his response was not surprising in that he considered a Ford, a GM vehicle and a Chrysler. I then asked which car he ended up buying. He said the Ford. I then asked if he test drove the 1956 Ford as part of his evaluation and decision process.

He was now growing frustrated with me and the conference room full of all his key lieutenants were wondering what the hell was I doing with this line of questioning. He said “Of course not, why would I test drive the 1956 Ford when I’m buying a car in 1996?”. I replied that was exactly my point….they were running a really old version of our software that we didn’t support anymore. In fact, we had been trying to get them to upgrade for several years now and they stubbornly had refused. The current version of our software was vastly superior in capabilities and the value it provided then the version they were running on.

In fact I continued, it was the same software that was running successfully at many other large enterprises just like theirs and delivering great experiences and value to those customers. The current version of our software was competing against the very competitor that he had threatened to replace us with and we were winning the lion’s share of those head to head battles. I had recently read an article about how the major release cycles in the software industry had compressed to 6 months or once a year at the time and how that compared to other industries like the automotive industry, which at the time would introduce a completely new model once every 5-7 years in some instances.

I had extrapolated that the version of our software that they were running on was the equivalent of a 40 year old version of a car in the automotive industry. Hence the reference to the 1956 Ford. I told him that if he could commit to granting us a level playing field and objective evaluation of our 1996 software/car, then we would gladly commit to competing to keep their business. He needed to recognize that it wasn’t fair for him to expect our support team to support the 1956 version of our software anymore. We had communicated that to them over the past few years and they had chosen to ignore it.  Yes, we (sales) actually backed up our customer support team in the field with a negative customer.

Finally, their evaluation team would need to consider the functionality of our 1996 software/car, not the old 1956 clunker version that they were using. It worked. He agreed and we ended up going through a lengthy enterprise software evaluation and ultimately closed a $1M+ deal with them beating our hated competitor. I’ll never forget the look on my new sales rep’s face when we got back to the Hertz rental car in their HQ parking lot (ironically it was a Ford as you can’t make this shit up:-) and I asked how he thought our first customer meeting went.  He was white as a ghost and we both started to crack up laughing hysterically.  All I could think of was the old quip: “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”.

From a new sales rep onboarding perspective, it was truly baptism under fire! This was a real world sales story with no embellishment required. This was real Challenger Selling before the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) validated it through their wonderful research, book and subsequent cottage industry. Many of us veteran enterprise software sales reps have similar stories. My response to the SVP was risky, but calculated. I really didn’t have much to lose at that point by challenging him in front of his team. I decided that we weren’t going down without a fight, so I started swinging hard and furiously as if my sales life depended on it.

This post was inspired by real events and crazy enterprise software sales war stories shared in restaurants all over the world…

The post Enterprise Sales War Stories… first appeared on True Sales Results.

What qualifies someone as a thought leader? They are frequently sought out by their industry peers for strategy, coaching, advice, mentoring and innovation. Other leading indicators are that they are often keynote speakers at big industry conferences or events. Thought leaders tend to publish white papers, presentations or research that are virally downloaded, consumed and digested. In short, they are “go to” sources for best practices in their respective industry or area of expertise.

Beware the Charlatan! There are too many self-proclaimed thought leaders out there today. If you have to anoint yourself as a thought leader, chances are that you are not a true thought leader.  True thought leaders are afforded the moniker by earning it. They don’t necessarily seek attention from their peers, rather they attract it by bringing innovative ideas and best practices to the table.

They may not be on social media… Paradoxically, some of the best thought leaders in the world actually shun social media. That’s right, I said they shun social media. They don’t have LinkedIn or Facebook profiles. They don’t Tweet. They don’t measure themselves on the number of fans, comments, likes or retweets they have on social media. That doesn’t make them introverts, it simply means that they consider the social media masses to be superficial in nature, and quite frankly, a tad boring.

How do they think of themselves? If you ask most true thought leaders to describe themselves, interestingly enough you’ll hear that they often describe themselves as perpetual students with a particular passion. What’s curious is that those who are most qualified to teach and admired will tell you that they are in fact lifelong students and obsess over learning more and deeper every day in their field or area of expertise. They tend to be much more humble than the aforementioned “Charlatans” and love to share their experiences and lesson learned. They almost consider the sharing of knowledge and experiences to be an obligation and a way of giving back to the community that they are part of and love.

Who teaches the thought leaders? Here’s the gotcha…thought leaders learn from you and me. You probably had visions of some soft-spoken monk in flowing robes on a remote mountaintop dispensing the meaning of life advice to a young protégé in a seminal moment with classical music playing in the background. And that would be wrong:-) Thought leaders learn from their peers, competitors, families, children, friends, pets and everyday experiences. The distinction is that they see things in their everyday experiences that others don’t.

How do they learn? They learn from their observation and personal experiences.  They tend to think about things much deeper and longer than anyone else. Thought leaders have well developed discernment capabilities and the ability to glean insight through their observations and experiences that others can’t.  They constantly obsess and challenge themselves to think of better ways to do things. They look for new ideas and innovation. They are not afraid to admit what they don’t know and seek others that do know. They learn by asking really smart questions. They learn by listening, observing and discerning at a level of depth that most of us mere mortals simply are not capable of. They test their theories and assertions and admit when they are wrong. They learn by constantly challenging themselves to be better and seeking those that have discovered better ways.

How do you determine whether they are a true thought leader or charlatan? By asking smart questions, listening/discerning carefully and conducting due diligence on them. Here are some smart questions to get you started:

• How would you describe yourself?
• What is your experience in your particular field or area of expertise?
• What qualifies you as an expert in your field?
• What is your biggest professional failure? What did you learn from that?
• How do you learn?
• Who do you consider as your professional mentors?
• What don’t you know about in your field that you’d really like to know?
• Who do you consider to be true innovators in your field? Why?
• What would your advice be for someone brand new to your professional field or are of expertise?
• If you could start your career all over again in the same field, what would you do differently?

Leading “Charlatan” indicators:

• People who speak at every major industry conference for years running with repurposed content but nothing fresh or innovative
• People who prodigiously publish research, white papers or books and lose touch with real world practitioners and what’s currently happening in their field
• Poor listeners
• Talk over people constantly
• Don’t ask smart or any questions
• Always act as if they are smarter than everyone else in the room
• Constantly use cliché buzzwords, acronyms and expressions
• Tell old war stories that are dated and not relevant anymore
• Never help or give back to their community
• Everything is viewed through their profit lens

Open disclaimer, I’m not a big proponent of the term thought leader. Please share your thoughts on thought leaders and your experiences with them!

The post Who Teaches Our Thought Leaders? first appeared on True Sales Results.

I was talking with an esteemed sales colleague and friend of mine last week and we touched upon this very subject.  We’ve both been in B2B enterprise technology sales for 20+ years, in other words we’re old salty sales dogs:-) The gist of our conversation was why so many sales people and sales organizations have lost the simple notion of why “why” is so important in sales. When was the last time you read a sentence with the word “why” in it three times?

But I digress in my attempts to amuse myself… I recall back when I was a VP of Sales with a very senior team of outside sales reps and sales engineers. Our focus was working the enterprise deals, forecasting accurately, growing the deal size and the frenetically exhausting quarter and fiscal year end close cadence. Lather, rinse, repeat and “what have you done for me lately” every new quarter or fiscal year start.

Last year’s top sales performer always starts at exactly the same place as everyone else on the sales team. This holds true regardless of the size of your sales organization from 2 to 20,000 sales reps, at the start of the new fiscal sales year…because the great sales equalizer affectionately referred to as zero dollars in closed revenue/bookings is the starting line for everyone.

Back to the why… After many years of exclusively managing the aforementioned senior outside sales teams, I was given the added responsibility of managing an orphan team of sales development reps (SDRs) and inside sales reps. In many ways it was refreshing and daunting all at the same time. I felt like a college professor who had been teaching graduate and post graduate level classes all my life that was just handed a class of elementary school aged students. What was I supposed to do differently?

It was refreshing due to the fact that many of these SDRs and inside sales reps were either brand new to sales or just had 1-2 years of sales experience. Expressed differently, they didn’t have bad sales habits that needed to be broken. They represented a blank canvas brimming with optimism and open to learning. They were veritable sponges which was a blast for my sales coaching efforts!  As opposed to the experienced and cynical sales team members that I managed, many of whom thought they were incapable of learning anything new that could help them sell better.

My new team of SDRs and inside sales reps had gone through some basic sales methodology training and had many different forms of cheat sheets and check lists posted in their cubicles. All useful stuff, but also a lot to absorb for someone who is brand new to enterprise sales. Not surprisingly they were all over the map and performing inconsistently. So I called an all hands sales team meeting in our main conference room.

I had made copies of all the various cheat sheets, checklists, sales tools, etc. and taped them up on the whiteboard in the main conference room prior to the meeting starting. When we commenced the meeting, I asked them a series of questions:

• What are these things taped on the whiteboard?
• How do use them?
• How do they help you?
• Do you understand them well?
• What confuses you about how to use them?
• What is your role/job?
• What is your goal for every touch/interaction with a prospect?
• How do you accomplish that?
• What is the purpose of sales?

As you might expect, the answers to all of my questions were all over the map. Everyone in the room had to respond to the questions, first by writing down their answers and then by reading them back in front of everyone. I acted as a scribe up at the whiteboard by grouping their answers to find out where, if anywhere, there was critical mass and alignment in any of their answers. It was really a fun exercise designed to strip away all the fluffy bullshit that we feed ourselves as sales people and allow us to laugh at ourselves and see how comical the whole thing can become at times.

Then with dramatic flair, I ripped down from the whiteboard all the cheat sheets, sales process flow charts, checklists, BANT qualification criteria, etc. that I had taped up there and erased all of their answers to my aforementioned questions that I had written down. I simply said very quietly to my team that we tend to make sales too complicated and can over think it at times.  And that it comes down to one simple word that we all know quite well because we have been using that word since we all first started talking.

Yup, you guessed it as I wrote the word “WHY” in big bold letters on the whiteboard. I explained to my team that “WHY” is the very meaning, purpose and pure essence of sales.   Our job is to answer that question (aka- Why?) for all of our prospects and customers. In our preparation for every call or email or interaction that we have with the prospect, think about why they should listen to us and not hang up on us. Think about why we can uniquely help them address big, hairy, painful business problems that they have better than any other alternative solution. Here is a subset of the “why” focused sales questions we learned together:

• Why am I calling/emailing you?
• Why should this matter to you Mr./Ms. Prospect?
• Why should you take the time to learn more about how we can help you?
• Why did we build this software/technology in the first place?
• Why do our existing customers buy more from us and renew their subscriptions with us?
• Why are we considered thought leaders and innovators in our industry?
• Why should you invest in this solution?
• Why are you going to learn things in working with us that you won’t learn from anyone else in the world?
• Why are we qualified to make these statements/assertions?

I’m pleased to report that after adopting the “why” sales focus on our SDR and inside sales team, performance and consistency improved dramatically. In fact, we became the SDR and inside sales team model for other sales teams within the company as I started seeing various other VPs of Sales crashing my quarterly sales team learning workshops to learn what we were doing, and yes, to see “why” it was working so well.

So for those of you that bothered reading this entire blog post, here is a test…a shout out to Sol Cates (CSO from Vormetric), who was the esteemed colleague and friend that I mentioned at the start of this post that inspired this article through our conversation. Please reply with a comment telling me “why” you liked or hated this article and hash tag Sol Cates in your comments/reply so I’ll know that you read the entire 1216 words in this post:-)

The post The Tao of “Why” in Sales first appeared on True Sales Results.

What do I mean by this? Quite simply that most sales teams are going through robotic, tactical sales motions and hoping for a positive outcome.  Worse, they are forecasting deals that never should be forecasted in the first place.  Often they are “blindsided” at the end of the quarter and either the deal never materializes on time or it goes away to a competitor or the dreaded “do nothing” alternative.

This is a sales leaders worst nightmare.  How did we get to this point?  Well, like any industry or field where there is massive growth over time, there is a dilution in talent.  If you examine the math behind this, it becomes very intuitive.  For example, my supposition is that if there were 50,000 people that sold software to the enterprise 20 years ago and now there are 300,000 people selling software to the enterprise.

And you apply the 80/20 rule (which means 80% of your revenues are generated through 20% of your sales reps), that means 20 years ago there were 40,000 average to poor performers out there selling to the enterprise.  Following that math logic through to today’s 300,000 sales reps…that means there are 240,000 average to poor performers out there selling software to the enterprise.  Yikes, that’s scary!

The problem is only exacerbated by the fact that the customer has a lower tolerance for average to poor performing sales teams.  In fact, they expect a lot more than they did 20 years ago from the sales rep.  And they have far more control over the enterprise sales process as evidenced by the fact that they don’t engage a sales rep for 60-70% of their evaluation process today (according to research by SiriusDecisions and CEB).

The other factor influencing this is that both companies and sales reps are not investing in their professional development and sales training like they used to. This is based on my anecdotal experience and observations over the last 25 years of selling technology solutions to the enterprise.  There was a day when most B2B technology sales reps could recite chapter and verse the great business books that shed insight on how to influence business more effectively like “In Search of Excellence” (I know that I’m dating myself with this reference), “Crossing the Chasm” or “Inside the Tornado”.

The supply and demand factor reinforces my point…how many of the best business books were written in the year 2000 or prior?  How many since then? Here’s a link to Huffington’s Post best business books of all time and if you throw out “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu written in 6th century BC as an outlier (which is a favorite of mine since College:-), it still is heavily weighted towards books written 40-70 years ago (http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-selling-in-b2b-sales-3/).

As a young sales professional, I used to invest in my own development and training.  I bought books, videos, subscribed to business magazines (remember business magazines like Business Week, Forbes and Fortune?) and constantly pursued mentors to learn from.  Today, most young sales reps are immersed in Facebook, Twitter, and other Social Media to keep themselves entertained.

What is a sales sage?  My definition of a sales sage is a sales rep that brings genuine insight and value add to their prospect or client.  They challenge the prospect or customer to think of important things that should be thinking about but aren’t.  They bring innovative solutions to the table.  They focus on multiple dimensions such as can we help you help your customers, not just internal facing perspectives.

A sales sage doesn’t simply parrot back to the prospect or customer what they heard them say as if there were some hidden insight that the prospect or customer wasn’t aware of.  The “parrot” sales approach is a prime example of the stooge, zero value add.  Think about what is going through a Customer Execs mind at a prospect site when they are hearing what they told you and nothing additional… “Of course I know all of that you moron, remember that I’m the one who told you that in the first place in response to your discovery questions!”

There was a study conducted at a recent Forrester Sales Enablement forum, and they concluded that there will be approx. 1 million less B2B sales reps in the year 2020.  They further concluded that there will 500,000 additional “Consultant Type” B2B sales reps in 2020 based on the buyer’s preferences and perceived value of who they want to engage and work with.  In this study, Forrester defined four archetypes of sales reps. Here is the paraphrased version of the only B2B sales rep archteytpe projected to grow over the next 5 years:

Consultants – who focus on buyer outcomes and value, are the only archetype expected to grow, adding ½ million to their ranks, as their insights and advice remain relevant and vital to their customers.

I close with following question: How do you pare your sales ranks of the sales stooges and build more sales sages?

The post Is Your Sales Team a Stooge or a Sage? first appeared on True Sales Results.

More here: Sales Effectiveness Breakfast Event Series | dta Worldwide

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View post: Kiss the TOAD for Sales Effectiveness

The post Kiss the TOAD for Sales Effectiveness first appeared on True Sales Results.

Excerpt from:
Increasing Sales Effectiveness: The Art and Science of Win/Loss Analysis – MarketingProfs.com (subscription)

The post Increasing Sales Effectiveness: The Art and Science of Win/Loss Analysis – MarketingProfs.com (subscription) first appeared on True Sales Results.

This is not someone who is relatively new to sales that simply doesn’t know any better. Rather, this is a really bad sales rep who keeps blindly attempting the same approach and getting the same results. Is anyone thinking about the definition of “insanity” at this point? He’s not crazy, he’s just insanely bad at sales!

Sales can be a numbers game, but the best sales people make it a “smart” numbers game. It’s not just about activity such as cold calling or emailing, it’s emailing and calling with a well thought out purpose. Do some research on the industry, company and person that you are calling or emailing prior to reaching out to them. What challenges are they facing? What are their strategic priorities? If you can’t logically build a bridge from your solution to their needs, you shouldn’t waste your time or theirs.

I’ve always coached my sales teams over the years that they should be weighing where they invest their time and resources to maximize their return in the form of sales success and commissions. If you don’t value your own time, why should any prospect?

Bad sales is offensive and rampant. Particularly during touch economic times, it pays to do your homework and separate yourself from the desperate sales masses.

The post Bad Sales first appeared on True Sales Results.