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I received an email from Courtney of Seattle, Washington asking the following questions, “Scott, can you share with everyone your feelings about using our faith in God to help us in our sales job? Is this a cop-out?”

Courtney,

Sales can be an extremely rewarding career for all kinds of reasons. At times it can also be incredibly stressful. I’ve directly managed literally hundreds of sales professionals over the years and I’ve found that many of them rely on their personal faith in their sales careers.

Some might think that relying on faith smacks of desperation instead of determination. Before we throw out faith as a possible legitimate aid to our sales career, let’s consider just some of the challenges that we have to contend with, many of which are out of our control.

1. Sales budgets to reach each month/quarter/year. Sales success is measured by one metric and one metric only, total sales. Nothing else matters to employers. Worse yet, at the end of each month/quarter/year we have to start all over again. A sales career is the poster child for, “What have you done for me lately?”
2. Rejection, rejection, rejection. I know we’re supposed to be thick-skinned sales professionals and all of that, but, at some level, we have to feel accepted by others. If we are in a heavy prospecting mode over an extended period, the avoidance behavior of prospects can take its toll.
3. Competition. Have you ever tried to explain to someone who works at the home office what it’s like to have people (i.e., competitors) trying to take your job on a daily basis? I don’t think I’ve ever found anyone outside of sales who understands the pressure this puts us under.
4. Work hours. We can’t even imagine a 40 hour workweek. A hard hitting sales professional knows that we must contact customers and prospects during the day and attack the colossus of administrative tasks at night or on the weekends.

We all like to come across as tough and capable people in our sales jobs, but most of us need help that extends beyond what our sales managers and employers can provide. Sales is a very demanding profession and, quite frankly, it scared me when I thought about the goals that were expected of me when I was a salesperson.

I have no problem in admitting to you that my faith has helped me to feel more complete and confident with many things in my life, including my sales career.

Courtney, use your faith; it’s a valuable tool. I think that if you shared these thoughts with your sales peers that you would find that you are far from being alone. Thanks for your question.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

It’s been 20 years since Neil Rackham published his 1988 book, SPIN Selling. For those of you who are too young to remember when this book was a business best seller, I can tell you that it turned a lot of traditional sales training concepts upside down. To a great extent it set in motion some major changes in how we currently view the customer/salesperson interaction.

1950’s style sales training wasn’t very pretty, nor was it very effective. Neil started a trend with his book that made us challenge those outdated views of the sales process. He also made us look more objectively at how sales professionals are trained and how we interact with prospects and customers.

Let’s review what made this book so noteworthy in relation to sales skills and concepts.

1. The author took time to research his material. Prior to the writing of this book (and even today) much of what passed for sales training was just the writer’s personal experiences and biases. Neil used a scientifically crafted approach to prove his points. This is a trend that fortunately is becoming more prominent in sales training today.
2. Neil broke the sales process down into four basic steps which you’ll find in most current sales training. Prior to his book these steps were not so clearly defined and understood.
3. He introduced ideas that were probably thought to be sinful to even consider in sales training circles 20 years ago. Things like: first impressions are greatly overrated, using scripts is a great way to destroy the sales process, questions are everything when it comes to selling, etc.

While I certainly don’t agree with all of the content in SPIN Selling, I have to applaud the author for researching his subject so well and not being afraid to be a contrarian. We need more Neil Rackhams in sales training.

While we don’t talk as much about this book today, many of its concepts have been integrated into current sales training. We shouldn’t forget the powerful contributions that were made by this book.

Should you read this book? It would be most helpful to those that are involved in consultative sales versus transactional sales, but I would encourage it as a classic sales training must-read, regardless of what type of sales environment you work in.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

We all know the Pareto Principle, which broadly states that 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes. Countless sales organizations have gotten themselves into deep trouble by mindlessly applying this principle to their sales organizations. I call it the Pareto Protocol.

Sales management thinks something like the following, “We’ve done an analysis and find that 80% of our sales comes from only 20% of our sales force. We need to fire 80% of our salesforce, which will lower our overhead and increase our profits!”

They think that if they can increase the sales of the 20%-super-producers by just 25% they won’t see any decline in revenues, while simultaneously realizing an 80% reduction in their base sales payroll. It sounds too good to be true, because it is.

I’ve seen the results when the Pareto Protocol is applied to sales organizations and it is consistently a disaster. I am fully aware that every sales organization has salespersons that need to find another career, or at the least be encouraged to work for a competitor.

I am also fully aware that every sales organization has its high producing heavy lifters, but to think that they can and will do even more lifting, all the time, is an ill-advised sales strategy.

Before your sales organization is tempted to partially or fully implement the Pareto Protocol, please consider the following:

1. Your top producers are in that position because they are already working at high capacity. Do they really have an additional 25%+ of bandwidth to give you?
2. You have salespeople at differing levels of development. Firing 80% of the sales force will undoubtedly nip many future super stars in the bud.
3. After applying the Pareto Protocol your sales force is now theoretically comprised exclusively of superstars; you’ve unintentionally created headhunter heaven. Be prepared for your superstars to be rapidly and easily gobbled up by your competitors.
4. Sometimes sales management tends to put their heads in the sand and pretend that everyone on the sales force has exactly the same opportunities. Not true. Accounts, products, geography, experience, sales management, etc. are variables that have to be accounted for and leveraged for each salesperson.

There is a normal distribution of sales capabilities within all sales organizations. Please see Sales Managers, Invest in Your Average Performers.

Sales management needs to focus on improving/removing the bottom 15%, improving the middle 70% and rewarding the top 15%. Sales management also has to look at its own skill levels at managing the sales force most effectively, but that’s for another post.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

We can get in all kinds of trouble talking about politics with customers during this presidential election year. We can also get into all kinds of trouble when we talk with our customers about their relative value to us.

Letting a customer know what their relative worth is to our company, and us, is not a good move.

Scenario 1, Question from one of our small to medium customers: “Gee Scott, are we your biggest, or one of your biggest, customers?” If we tell them they are one of our most valued customers (in order to make them feel more important) we have just given away all kinds of future negotiating power. If we are truthful and tell them that they are mid-pack (or lower) then they could be offended. Remember that many, if not most, of our customers think they are near the top of our customer hill.

The best way to handle this scenario is to answer with something like, “My business is split up by product, industry and geography. For the products you buy in your industry and in this part of my territory you are very important to my company and to me.” There are a million variations on this kind of answer.

Scenario 2, Same question from one of your biggest and most strategic accounts: “Gee Scott, are we your biggest, or one of your biggest, customers?” What we want to do here is to let them know they are very important to us without letting them think we are overly dependent on them, which robs us of negotiating power.

Remember, we are always in a state of negotiation with customers. An answer that could work in this situation might sound something like, “My company and I have a policy that all customers are very important; I hope you know that our unique partnership definitely makes you one of our most important customers.”

It’s surprising, but most of our customers don’t really know where they fit regarding their size and importance to us. Never bring this issue up on your own because it’s almost always a losing proposition for us. If you have a customer who asks this question, be sure to make the customer feel important without showing too many of your cards.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

“It’s not about you.” That’s the first sentence in Rick Warren’s 2002 book, The Purpose Driven Life.

While that comment has profound implications for our lives in general, it is also a necessary frame of mind for a successful sales career. We can get so obsessed with earnings, sales budgets, reports, internal meetings, schedules, etc. that we sometimes take our eyes off the elements that are most important, our customers and support team members.

The need to be respected and elevated by others is a primary human need. If we focus on ourselves we can’t effectively meet this need and it will penalize us in the long run.

All of us have unfortunately seen salespeople that treat home office support employees like trash. These salespeople believe that they are the axis of their company. Without them, everyone starves.

When salespeople have an “it’s all about me” attitude with fellow team members they are guaranteeing themselves future problems. For starters, the home office people who support them will consciously or unconsciously put the needs of these prima donnas on the back burner.

These same salespeople who don’t have a clue how to work as a team are on a short leash with sales management too (and usually don’t know it). I’ve seen it a million times. When a sales manager has a problem child like this, he or she thinks, “Mark is really not able to work with the people here at headquarters and quite frankly he’s been a pain in the neck for me too. As long as he keeps his numbers at 100% or better we’ll put up with him, but the second he starts to falter we’ll get rid of him.”

The “it’s all about me” mindset doesn’t work too well with our customers either.

Customers are offended when their salesperson thinks that customers are not the most important person in the customer-salesperson relationship. Customers are never stupid; they pick up on “it’s all about me” cues such as being chronically late to appointments and a general lack of respect.

We honestly have to feel in our heart of hearts that we are subordinate to our fellow team members and our customers. Taking ourselves off the pedestal frees us to meet the needs of our customers and team members, who will then be more open to helping us further our own careers.

A classic win-win.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

“Life is difficult. This is a great truth; it is also an ironic truth. Because once we truly understand and accept it, we no longer view life as difficult.”

These paraphrased words were written by M. Scott Peck, M.D. in his 1978 book, The Road Less Traveled, one of the greatest books ever written about leading a full and complete life.

His words apply to all of us in professional sales careers. Sales is a challenging, frustrating and intense career to pursue. Those outside of sales think all we do is play golf and cash big paychecks. We know differently.

Just as Dr. Peck suggests, once we accept the fact that everything isn’t going to be easy in our sales career, we are then free to stop expecting things to be perfect. Our careers will never be ideal; we should never be surprised, or even annoyed, by problems.

The definition of frustration is a blocked goal. If we give up our goal of a problem-free sales career we automatically reduce our frustration level. We are then free to use our emotions and energy on more productive things like customer relationships and relationships within our company.

What aspects of our careers do we unrealistically think should be perfect? The short answer is people (i.e., sales managers, customers, prospects, department heads and corporate executives).

Just like us, everyone struggles with the desire for their life to be flawless too. The reality is that we all waste a lot of time and energy waiting for paradise on earth. It is not to be found…here.

Rx: Know that we are going to face problems every day and that virtually 100% of them will be generated by people. Since we know this, we can choose not to waste any of our personal resources on frustration. We can instead choose to channel our energy, intellect and emotions toward improving ourselves, our company and our service to our customers.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Allow me to introduce you to a tried and true warehouse operations technique that can also work beautifully in sales.

Have you ever heard the term Cycle Inventory or Perpetual Inventory? It’s a concept used by companies that have a large warehouse of goods that require a high degree of inventory accuracy.

Let’s say a company has 25,000 items that they stock in inventory. Instead of doing the inventory all at once they break it up into pieces and do a little each day.

If they wanted to inventory their entire warehouse every six months they would only need to inventory 192 items per day using this technique. They make it a manageable task.

Prospecting is no different. If we Cycle Prospect or Perpetual Prospect we can take a time consuming and challenging chore and break it into much smaller pieces. At the end of a month, quarter or year we can achieve some remarkable numbers without ever having to binge prospect.

Here are the steps to make this happen:

1. Calculate how many new customers we want to add in a month.
2. Calculate what our personal closing average is (i.e., for every 100 prospects we contact how many turn into customers?).
3. Divide the number of new customers desired by our closing average.
4. Take this number and divide by 22 (the average number of work days in a month).
5. This number represents how many prospects we need to contact each work day in order to achieve our new customer goals for the month.

Example:

Jill wants to add five new customers each month and her closing average is 10%. She takes the number of desired new customers (five) and divides by her closing average (.10) and the result is 50. Next she’ll divide 50 by 22 to see how many prospects she’ll need to contact each work day, and the result is 2.3. By contacting just 2.3 prospects each day Jill can realistically expect to add five new customers a month.

With discipline and time this technique can break down a sales chore into reasonable chunks and yield nice long term returns.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

When we are prospecting by phone, one of the most common dismissals we hear is for the prospect to say, “I’m familiar with what you do and we don’t need any of that product/service now.”

We’re left with the feeling that they actually probably don’t have the slightest idea what we’re selling. Frequently we’ll respond to this dismissal by forcefully trying to tell them about all the added value our company brings to the table.

The prospect becomes even more disinterested at this point, but there is a very effective and simple way to handle this situation by using the following question:

“Just so I can be sure we’re talking about the same thing, would you tell me your understanding of what my company does?”

Not only does this question pour water on the dismissal, but it gets the prospect talking. Note that this question is an open ended question which is effective at getting information from prospects and building relationships with them (our two main goals when prospecting).

Yes, I know, this question could potentially be viewed as a little offensive by the prospect. Your tone of voice and demeanor can soften how it comes across over the phone.

We all know that it’s easier for prospects to blow us off on the phone versus when we’re face to face with them. The prospect has already dismissed us when they tell us they know everything about us and don’t want any of what we sell. We really have little to lose by trying this effective response.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

We’ve all done it. We throw a wrench in things with our prospects and customers by not getting them information on time, ordering and shipping the wrong parts, offending one of the decision makers, making promises that we aren’t able to keep, misquoting prices, etc.

There are a million things we can do to damage customer relationships.

When we find ourselves in situations like this we know to initiate all the standard recovery techniques such as bringing in our sales manager for help, readily admitting our errors, etc.

But what if those things don’t work? What if things are stalled and the customer doesn’t appear to budge or, even worse, appears indifferent?

When we find ourselves in this predicament we have a back door. I call it the Control-Alt-Delete Recovery. We’re all familiar with control-alt-delete; it’s the key sequence we hit when we want to reboot and start from scratch with our Windows computer when all else has failed.

When we initiate a Control-Alt-Delete Recovery with prospects and customers we attempt to initiate a second chance with them. By starting all over they see us differently and many times will be open to reconnecting.

There are three primary components of this strategy:

1. New sales team. We need to bring in a new sales team, both salesperson and sales manager. The prospect or customer needs to see all new faces. Once things start to recover there is a possibility that the original team could be slowly re-introduced.
2. Additional decision makers. Obviously we want to continue the relationship with existing decision makers, but we need to add additional decision makers into the mix to help create a new chemistry.
3. New products and services. Not only do we want to bring in new sales faces and add decision makers but we want to introduce some new products and services as well.

The objective is to create a whole new look for our sales approach so that the customer sees us in a different and favorable light. This strategy will take a degree of boldness and humility but it can help us regain momentum.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

A successful sales career is built on three principles.

The most helpful insights we receive in our lives and careers are always the most simple. The following three principles are no exception. These principles apply whether we want to dramatically improve our sales skills, significantly enhance our industry knowledge, move into sales management or even change employers.

If we’re not happy with our sales careers we have to decide whether we are going to put the effort into improvement or continue with the status quo. Continuing with the status quo is always the easy decision. It’s also a decision that provides no benefit.

Principle #1: “A decision must be made.” Tony Robbins says that the decision to change is the most important and difficult part of self guidance. It takes a lot of guts to genuinely commit ourselves to make a major change in our careers.

When we decide to make a significant change we often find lots of reasons to abandon ship and never get to the planning stage. “This is going to be too hard. This will take too long. Am I really going to be able to make this happen? Who am I kidding?” Being able to ignore those thoughts is an essential element of success. Everyone doubts their abilities initially.

Principle #2. “A plan must be laid.” Once we decide to make a change, then we have to put together a plan to make that change happen. To skip this step puts us into a very large crowd of people known as “those with good intentions.”

We’ve decided to change and now we have to pay our dues. Success in our careers is never easy. We’re never handed success.

Principle #3. “A price must be paid.” There aren’t any shortcuts to hard work over time. I’ve never seen a mega-successful sales professional who didn’t pay his or her dues to get where they are.

I told you it was simple, but it’s also profound.

A decision must be made.
A plan must be laid.
A price must be paid.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer