Your Pipeline Could Be Fuller

by Mark Hunter, The Sales Hunter

Keeping your pipeline of prospects full is no easy task.  I’m not going to suggest it is.  I talk to salespeople all the time and most say that prospecting is their number one source of new business.  So if you are like most salespeople, one of your hardest tasks is simultaneously one of your most necessary – keeping your pipeline full.  There’s no way to slide into loads of profit without some effort – serious effort – on the front end.
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Are Great Salespeople Born?

I just attended Jeffrey Gitomer’s seminar for sales managers and leaders.

Before Jeffrey started his presentation, I was chatting with the gentleman next to me who is a VP of Sales. I asked him what kind of sales training he uses.  He said, “Oh, we train our salespeople ourselves.

Salespeople are born, anyway. They either have it or they don’t.”

I couldn’t resist pulling out my copy of Forceful Selling and saying, “That’s interesting you say that. This book says that is one of the myths of sales.”  And I showed him the list of sales myths, including the illustration of the bulldog salesperson who is born with a purchase order in his mouth.

He said, “Well, just because some guy wrote it in a book doesn’t mean it’s right.”

Later, Jeffrey was an hour into his talk and he said, “Anybody who thinks salespeople are just born is an [insert expletive]. You can teach sales skills. In fact, you must teach sales skills. What you cannot teach is smarts and happiness. If you hire smart, happy people, they can learn to sell.”

What are your thoughts? Do you believe selling is a mystical art that a few lucky people are gifted with?

For millennia humans have invented myths to explain behavior they didn’t understand. So are people who say great salespeople are born simply saying they don’t know what they don’t know about the science and art of selling?

Challenge your team. Challenge yourself — to develop a new skill everyday. After doing that for, say, 1,095 days (3 years) people will start to say, “Wow, you’re amazing. You were just born to sell!”

How do you know if your sales methodology needs a tune up?

How can you tell if your sales process is in need of improvement, or if stalled growth is simply a result of the challenging economy?

The sales function and methodologies tend to be poorly understood across most companies. Therefore, companies often focus on measuring easily understood items such as activity and transactions, rather than measuring strategy and methodology, which require expertise and training to be well understood.

However, in most cases a methodology tune-up will result in far bigger performance improvements than pushing the activity throttle. Remember the old saying, “What gets optimized is what gets measured”? Do you want to optimize activity and short-term results? Or, do you want to optimize your competitive strength and sustainable results?

Focusing on activity and short-term results is like driving a race car on worn-out tires. The car uses just as much gas, but doesn’t yield very good results. In fact, it could blow a tire and lose the whole race. Conversely, making regular pit-stops to tune-up the performance keeps the car in the race and operating at peak performance.

Similarly, making some simple changes to a company’s sales methodology can have profound impact on a company’s ability to generate consistent revenue and profit growth.

Is your sales methodology a finely tune race car engine? Or, is it a relic of the past?

Here are some signs that it needs a tune-up.

1) Shared Process.

Is there a common sales process that is shared across the sales, marketing, and delivery organizations? Or, are the sales processes, ad hoc, not widely understood, or inconsistently followed?

2) Transaction Value.

Are salespeople focused on transaction value, rather than the company’s strategic position in their accounts?  If salespeople are operating tactically to close orders, rather than strategically to find and deliver high value, they will not be maximizing the revenue opportunity for your company.

3) Discounting.

Are sales people more comfortable discounting than establishing high value? Do your salespeople complain about prices being too high? Or, too low?  Salespeople who see the opportunities for change leadership see that the value to the customer is far greater than the one-size-fits-all price list and often feel that money is being left on the table.

4) Competition.

Does your business have many competitors that are constantly putting pressure on pricing? Studies have shown that pricing most often ranks very low on the buyer’s priority list. Change-centric salespeople focus on the higher priorities that drive value and they are not subject to the same pricing pressures.

5) Executive Access.

Do your salespeople have difficulty getting access to key executives and expanding your business into more strategic projects? Key executives delegate the solving of problems to their teams, so approaching them with solutions to problems will only result in being referred to a member of their staff. To establish relationships with high-level executives, salespeople must add high value; by addressing the strategic challenges facing the executive.

6) Implementation.

Are your sales and delivery organizations typically engaged at the solution implementation stage, rather than problem definition stage? By the time the customer has defined the problem and is requesting solution proposals, s/he has already formed a vision for the ideal solution and is now looking for the best fit at the lowest price. Change leaders foresee the challenges facing the customer and help the customer drive the changes needed to address them, thereby setting themselves far ahead of the competition.

7) Catch-up.

Are your salespeople constantly scrambling at the end of the quarter to find revenue and pull their pipelines from future quarters? This is the classic sign of an organization operating in a short-term, transactional mode. Operating in this manner, constantly playing catch-up, prevents salespeople from pro actively engaging customers to deliver higher value – and higher revenues.

What is wrong with the way you’ve been taught to sell?

We’ve all taken many sales courses over the years. They all taught us to find the customer’s need, pain or problem and then demonstrate that our product or service is the best solution. They also taught us to find the real decision makers, the people with the power to make the purchase, and essentially make them like us—you know the cliches, “people buy from people they like”. Those approaches worked very well over the last 20 to 30 years and we all made a lot of money using them. But something happened a while ago that has made those techniques as obsolete as a car phone antenna on the rear window of your Bimmer—the Internet.

The Internet, along with today’s blazingly fast fiber optic networks, has put an astounding amount of power in buyers’ hands. Buyers no longer rely on professional salespeople to help them define a solution or determine which is best. In fact, it is not uncommon for buyers to know more about your product and your competitors’ products than you do.

What does that mean for you?No matter how much they like you, buyers simply don’t need you very much, anymore. In their mind your value is helping them convince your management to lower your prices.  And you know how well your management likes that.

What can you do to increase your value and boost your sales?

What can you do if your solutions, even custom solutions requiring talented professional services, get turned into commodities, such as dollars-per-hour? Clearly, if the old approaches aren’t working, it’s time for a new approach. It’s time to climb to the next rung on the value ladder; to go beyond providing solutions to problems. What is beyond solving a problem?

Achieving a goal.

Solutions are like bandages. They heal a pain. But, are people satisfied simply by not being in pain? Or, do they actually want to feel good, to go somewhere, to get something accomplished? You will be far more valuable to your customers if you help them achieve their goals, rather than just relieve their pain. But, goals can be achieved only by making changes that enable them. Now, more than ever, people and companies must continually change in order to remain competitive and to achieve their goals—whether business or personal.

Five Disciplines That Make You Invaluable to Your Customers

Does it seem harder and harder to get customers’ attention these days? Does your product or service always seem to fall short of being a priority for the customer? What if there were a way to have customers begging to be higher on your priority list, instead of you begging to be on theirs? How would it feel to be with a customer closing a sale and be interrupted by another customer calling you pleading to take their order instead? What would that mean for your business? You can become invaluable to customers and dramatically grow your business, if you change your selling paradigm.

What is the new approach and how do you use it?
The new approach is a change-centric approach. It is the philosophy that the motivation behind every purchase is the desire to make a change—a change that enables the purchaser to achieve a goal. The way you can become a change-centric salesperson is by practicing the five disciplines of change leadership. Read more