Sales is one of the few things in business you can measure accurately and immediately. Are you getting greater efficiencies from your internal systems? Is the marketing working? Are our team becoming more skillful? Are our leaders effective? These are topics which are super important but also devilish to measure. Sales however is straightforward – how much did you sell? Therefore, there is no wiggle room and the pressure on salespeople is enormous. There are deadlines for sales and there are accurate measures in place tracking everything. What was the revenue return relative to the ratio of the salesperson’s total costs. For every yen the salesperson costs, how much do they generate in net revenue return. Are they yielding a 3:1 return or is the ratio at 7:1 or better?
Because of all of this pressure, salespeople have become absolute masters of excuse making. Having to justify your existence every month creates a tremendous amount of creativity in the excuse field. When you ask salespeople what is holding them back from achieving higher levels of performance, a surprising number of the reasons given are not related to sales activities. External factors are listed up very readily. The organisation needs to be better staffed, the product needs improvement, after sales service is holding us back, the strategy needs more work, the market is shifting, my sales manager is clueless, etc.
Many of the problems are located outside the sphere of influence of the salesperson, yet they continue to dwell on these factors as holding them back from achieving their targets. This is a substantial lack of self-awareness. If a salesperson is really doing their job, they ignore all of the external factors they cannot control and instead focus on developing the skills they need to succeed.
What would those skills be? Knowing your product and the value it generates inside out is a given. Yet this is where a lot of salespeople check out. They know the details of the features of what they are selling, but they don’t plumb the depths of the benefits of those features. Now the benefits have to be in context. Where does this benefit help the client in the competitive marketplace in which they are operating? How will this give the buyer a differentiable advantage vis-a-vis rivals? Where will it save money, raise productivity, speed up processes, eliminate waste, etc.
Where is the market moving toward and what does the client need to be doing today, to anticipate and properly prepare for the changes which are coming. This requires study of the client’s situation and industry. Not knowing the client’s world relegates salespeople to proposing transactional sales solutions rather than achieving partnership status.
The salesperson who can provide insights such that the client thinks to themselves, “we hadn’t thought about that” or “we haven’t properly prepared for that” is doing a fantastic job of providing value to the buyer.
Asking well designed questions is an absolute must, but so many salespeople troop into the sales call woefully underprepared. They wing it from start to finish and wonder why they are not seeing any business. The preparation for the sales call is so much easier today because of our access to instant information. Yet, salespeople are not applying themselves to learn about the buyer and their industry before the call. You can’t be the font of insight, if you don’t study beforehand. This is a lack of awareness about what the real role of the salesperson is. Blarney, smooth talk, verbal gymnastics, bamboozling clients are all pointless froth. The real core ability is to understand where you can be helpful to solve the client’s problem. You can’t change the external factors at play, but you can control the internal factors like your own abilities in the sales process. The famous gridiron coach Vince Lombardy talked about the key in football was mastery of the basics, which he summarised as “blocking and tackling”. Asking brilliant questions and presenting the value of our solution are the equivalent skills in selling.
Like Lombardi’s training philosophy, the basics are always current and mastery of the basics is mandatory. Yet, so many salespeople don’t even know what the basics are or if they do, they don’t invest the time to master them. Self-awareness of your skill deficiencies is the first step to fixing them and dwelling on external elements you cannot control is self-delusion. Self-delusion doesn’t pay particularly well, so let’s give that a miss and instead work on grasping the reality for the client. If we understand that then we will be able to correctly match our solution with the buyer’s need. Lot’s of good things happen when we can do that.
