There is no easy way!
I had a great conversation with a sales leader this week of a great corporation. He is working his way through reframing the reconstruction of his team. There is no easy way to do this. And he is doing ALL the right things. And he will forever transform his BIG company if his leadership can just “buy-in”. I believe they will in this case.
What does making that shift look like?
Start with understanding your WHY (see Simon Sinek – YouTube videos galore). Make sure that you have a clear picture of what your corporation is working to accomplish. Think big picture “humankind” type of objectives. Then make sure that what your own team does to fit into that bigger picture. Not a revenue contribution discussion. A true understanding of PURPOSE. AND to work, it all must be outward centric. About the world, the clients, the people outside of your own team. No silly euphemisms about “world-class”, “number one”, “biggest”….all “meisms”.
Now that you slog your way through that minefield you have to dig into WHAT it is that your team will DO to truly “make a difference” with your clients. You don’t get to simply deliver “different”, your focus must be on the co-creation of value that the client recognizes is UNIQUE. Not something that everyone else is ever going to attempt. That’s a deep well. Keep digging till you hit true paydirt on this one.
Ok, we’ve got it figured out and we need to dive into structural discussions about roles, responsibilities, and compensation. Here is where almost everyone struggles…. The compensation. Many times in conversations with sales leaders working to pull all this together their true struggle is with the variable compensation part of the rebuild. I won’t go into the discussion about Commission POISON here (see my prior blogs). EXCEPT there is an “out” that folks try to use. Instead of paying individual compensation based on performance to quota etc, the idea pops up that “hey, we will pay commission based on team/client results”. That sounds reasonable, and they head down that path all excited that they have neutralized the poison. Nope… just changed how the poison will get manipulated and injected. Let’s examine that a bit. The harsh reality is that leaving any sort of variable compensation that is this narrowly focused will still have all the same effects as a personal commission, it simply redirects the focus of how the outcome will be manipulated for the good of the compensation. Any remaining element of such a measure will still taint the service to the client and defocus the team from pure service. So how do we lead these strange folks called salespeople? If not by money…how? See my blogs on Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose by Dan Pink. In short, you must coach and lead them just like you should do with every other person in your corporation. And that’s where most often this move to rebuild a team and have them focus on the client and not their compensation dies…. When sales leadership suddenly realizes that they will lose their compensation “control” and manipulation of people and actually have to do the hard work of coaching and leading they freak out and proclaim that this can never work here…. NEVER.
As I said at the beginning… there is no easy way. We create greatness through a lot of hard work, not by manipulating people, but by helping them grow.
In Satya Nadella’s book (Hit Refresh) about the transformation of Microsoft, he talks about creating a company driven by a sense of empathy and a desire to empower others. He goes on to talk about his passion to put empathy at the center of everything he pursues. He writes about the culture that they are building that has a “growth mindset”. Critical to note here is that his reference it to “growth” of the individual, not the bottom line. Where in any of this brilliance is there room for the manipulation of people through their back pocket?
For a bit of a twist, however…
There IS room for a variable comp part of the plan. And it works GREAT. We have been doing this for more than 2 decades. Fundamentally, everyone, including sales, has a small percentage of their compensation tied to a handful of global corporate goals. These should be something that everyone can relate to and see that they can have contributed towards. A few examples would be corporate revenue growth quarter over quarter; corporate gross margin (you want to have salespeople stop lowering prices, teach them gross margin). You can include revenue growth of specific areas of focus for the corporation, cost controls in specific ways. Many different metrics can be deployed. I suggest that they be consistent across the entire corporation. It helps greatly if you truly want to get everyone rowing the boat in the same direction.
And to not leave you without answers to coaching and leading… Here are the 2 best in our space.
Hendre Coetzee is the world’s best coaching coach… www.hendrecoetzee.com
Dave Brock is the best sales leader that you will ever see… partnersinexcellenceblog.com
There is no easy way to create the BEST!
So let’s go do the work!
Mitch Little
And in the beginning, there was “stuff”. Folks made “stuff”. Other folks used that “stuff”. And it was pretty direct. Then the world evolved and the people that made “stuff” wanted more income so they hired a new breed of a person called a “salesperson” whose job was to go out and find additional people to buy the “stuff” they were selling. For the most part, it appears that this all started with the barter system as early as 6000 BC. Trading goods for goods or service worked pretty directly but did not scale well. Somewhere around 3000 BC, basic product selling started to take a foothold. That seems to have stayed pretty stable for a LONG time…
In the mid-1800’s we morphed into an influential way of talking folks into what we wanted them to believe, and buy…. Some have called this the “snake oil” era. In the 1900’s we worked our way through fundamentals driven by brilliance by Dale Carnegie and onto offerings like PSS, Solution selling, LAMP, Value selling, etc, etc, etc, and on to Challenger. And every one of those had value and taught us a great deal. Social media now seems to drive the world for good and bad and now we need to figure out what that looks like in the brand new B2B world. Considering the events of 2020 I can say that we do not really have an idea of how this will all unfold, AND it will be different than what we view today in many respects.
I do also believe that the guiding client elements that we need to stay focused on, going forward, are the same BIG3 client elements that have always been key.
We define the BIG3 as helping the client…
We know from serving 120,000 clients around the world that regardless of role, country, or business model, the BIG3 is critical to every person we serve.
If you can put what you DO into one of those 3 elements you can have great 2-way conversations with people that make a difference to them and that matters to us both. Products, technologies, hardware, and software, are all vital, and if you don’t have world-class in those, you should consider your options. However, all of them are now table stakes, the price of entry into the game, the starting point for the race. They are absolutely critical and we had all better know our “stuff” very well.
And yet that is not enough. Not really. The real battle is in the mind of the client and what we each DO to help them make a difference in their world and with their clients. Stuff is great. Stuff is needed. Stuff is not enough. YOU are the differentiator!
There are a great number of new things that dealing with COVID-19 has taught us, or more accurately, reminded us of the importance of. To me, the ONE thing that will stick out and that I will work to make sure we all keep is the value of PLANNING. Preparation before every call, planning before every conversation, every email, every video. The time that we have with people is precious. We have been way too casual about wasting other's time and that has been reflected to us over the years as we study what clients value, or don’t when we work with them. Making sure that we value other's time and ensure that every interaction we have makes a difference is what we owe those that we serve. It takes serious planning to accomplish that. Where I work we use the thinking of….
PLAN/DO/REVIEW
Prepare well for everything. Execute according to plan, which seldom gets to happen. Review and learn from every action. The after-action review is not a new concept. We just need to live it!
Be well, stay safe, make a difference!
- Mitch
It seems that the wave of the sales revolution is picking up steam. Just now we are seeing many “sales experts” announce that the role of the salesperson is gone. The internet has won and people in selling can be replaced by specialized recognition systems driven by big data manipulation running on machines.
First of all, where the heck have they been? The commoditization of information via the internet is not new - it is just moving at a non linear rate that is staggering and catching everyone’s attention. As of April of 2015 (ancient times in the data world) the stats are crazy. Ninety percent of the world’s existing data has been created in the last 2 years. Every day we create enough NEW data to fill 10,000,000 blu-ray discs (remember those?), which when stacked would measure the height of 4 Eiffel Towers on top of one another. EVERY DAY… a year ago. (No newer validated data that I can find.)
Secondly, those same pundits who forecast the demise of the salesperson are both right and wrong. They are right - if the sales professional questioning their existence does not make a huge mind set shift and follow that up with an equally huge methodology shift. So that opens up the door to the fact that they can be wrong, and the outcome is actually in the hands of the individual sales professional themselves.
My premise, along with a good friend and colleague, Hendre Coetzee, is that this massive amount of information that overloads people is actually a catalyst for the need for even better professionals in selling, helping clients understand good from bad data, make better decisions, and make them faster than ever before. Today’s very best sales pro is the master of understanding and simplification. Understanding how to help their clients make the world a better place, and simplifying the client decision-making process. While these both seem very holistic, they are actually very practical motivations and outcomes.
Preparation is the key to it all. No longer can the sales pro strap on their product selector guide and hit the street and do any real work. Now we must start with a serious focus on understanding each client, and the role of specific people in that client, and figuring out how to help them better view the myriad of product and solution options that are in front of them.
We need to understand, at a high level, the industry that they are in and many of the fundamental challenges that exist in that industry. It takes more preparation time than ever before to be able to help our clients make a real difference, because we must first determine what that will look like. When we get into this level of conversation the first push back we hear is that “we can’t be expected to know our client’s business better than they do”. While even that is arguable, the primary response to that is that we CAN be expected to know what impact our products and solutions will have on their business better than they can.
And to do this well we have to make a shift away from OUR view of the world and shift it into a view of THEIR world…then merge the two.
Hendre and I are writing a book in which we guide the mindset shift as well as explore some of the methodology and skillset shift that is required to remain relevant and successful in selling in today’s business climate. We are excited to show you how you can become a depended-upon resource for client specific solutions of any kind. Despite what many say, the sales professional indeed has an important and necessary role to play today. But it requires core shifts in mindset and skillset – stay tuned!
In the meantime, my good friend and colleague Dave Brock has just released the Sales Manager Survival Guide. The book has already reached number one in Amazon Kindle hot new books in sales and marketing.
The Sales Manager Survival Guide is packed with everything a front line sales leader needs to succeed. Purchase Dave’s book on Amazon to both Get Smarter and to Do Good. Congratulations Dave!
I remember clearly one of the early conversations I had with Jim Camp, author of Start With No. Jim and I had become good friends very quickly. We shared a true passion about the power of NO. America’s number one negotiating coach, Jim passed away in November of 2014 and the world misses his practical wisdom every day. This day Jim and I were talking about the power of process versus outcome and what NO might mean along the way. One of Jim’s statements sounds in my head on a daily basis: “Stop trying to control the outcome, focus on your behavior and actions instead.”
What I have learned along the way is that NO is just a word, but one to which we give way too much implied power. It is a word that requires context to give it any substance. It can be a perceived wall maker, a conversation branch creator, or an absolute command. In the business of selling and or negotiating you have to get over the fear of hearing or saying NO.
Hearing NO in the selling process most typically means that in the conversations leading up to receiving the NO, you did a rather poor job of using great questioning to lead to understanding. Jim said something else to me that day: “Control what you can control, and forget the rest.”
In this case that means we can only control ourselves and our process and questions - we cannot control the outcome. At every NO, we have a chance to branch and continue. We have to become masters at understanding and using great questions that are led by an interrogative. The good questions start with who, what, when, where, why, how, and which. All of them are intended to create dialog, extend the conversation, and figure out more about the client than ever before.
NO is just not all that complex. We make way too much out of it in the selling process. It is our job to understand the points that create NO, and that is ok to get to NO, on both parties behalf. When one path ends in a NO, then create another path based on a different who, what, where, when, etc. question; each time gathering more understanding and information along the way. And each of those conversations create more curiosity that enables further conversations. This all comes back to the basics of Question Based Selling with Tom Freese and conversational layering principles - deliver a bit of credibility that creates some curiosity and gets you the next mini-invitation to continue the conversation. And it can all START with NO.
Building blocks are not just for kids! Sales people need them now more than ever.
Let me expand and explain.
As sales people we are told to “just go sell”. Get more face time with our clients. Understand what they need and then deliver it. Simple, right? From that single perspective yes it is. And once upon a time that worked.
In the world of the complex “solution” sell of today it is no longer effective, and it never really was what the best of the best did in any case. The very best “sellers” have always had a lot more internal knowledge and intellectual curiosity, and just plain cared more than the average bloke. And it showed.
When the CEB published The Challenger Sale they did not invent a class of person that rose to the top. Their research simply identified a selling style that firmly and totally existed already. This selling style was the best combination of attributes that marked the best producers. What the CEB team did was label things clearly and define them accurately so that we could finally figure out how to search for, find, hire, and enable more of what we wanted in our teams.
(We are finding that hiring for attitude as Mark Murphy has taught us is the most important shift in hiring that we have ever made. We now hire for traits not skills. And it is making a HUGE difference. But, let’s go back to building blocks for the moment.)
As we hire for attitude and train to teach, tailor, and take control, we also find that the new normal in the co-creation and delivery of insight with our clients requires that our team have a total and detailed understanding of all of the elements of business as the client sees it.
Now to do the job we need to have all of the chapters of the book engrained in our soul. The fundamental elements of the trade now consist of having a full grasp of:
As any good builder knows the strength and stability of every tall building is its foundation that it is formed on, its baseline building blocks. They must be solid and well-defined. So must our knowledge of our own building blocks… ALL of them. To make a real difference with our clients we have to be experts at the client engagement process.
The sales world that we thrive in today demands uniqueness, but only if we want differentiation from commoditization. And where once that was achieved by having the best products and/or services, it is now achieved by the sales professional and their approach to serving their clients. Now, more than ever our best sales pros have a complete grasp of all of the building blocks that are a part of the complex mosaic of today’s business. Building blocks are now for big kids… like me!
