Most everyone has heard the expression that patience is a virtue. Through the years when someone asks me to describe the major difference between A Players (superior) and B/C Players (average) salespeople in one word, my response: Patience.

Mistakes sellers make stem from their impatience

Once goals or problems are shared, many sellers immediately try to rescue buyers by telling them the solution, a phenomenon I call “premature elaboration.” Sellers are well intentioned but there are two problems in jumping to the rescue:

• Sellers are shooting blind because they have no way of knowing if their generic “solution” will address a buyer’s needs.
• Buyers aren’t ready to be rescued until they and the seller calling on them understand the shortcomings of how things are done without the offering being discussed.

Taking a step back, if buyers knew why desired business outcomes couldn’t be achieved they would try to address them without help from salespeople. The “hurt” amounts to asking questions to help buyers understand what’s broken in the way they currently operate.

Still, B/C Players often get into premature product discussions. Once product is mentioned, many buyers will ask: “How much does it cost?” This often begins a death spiral because if no value has been identified, any cost will seem high.

I believe there are a several reasons sellers dive into product too soon:

• Their companies provide extensive product training.
• Many sellers and vendors believe part of a seller’s job is educating buyers (even though few executive buyers want to learn all about offerings).
• Talking about offerings is a comfort zone for salespeople.
• Asking relevant questions and responding to buyers’ answers is challenging.

Sellers should earn the right to talk about offerings by having buyers conclude early in sales calls that they are sincere and competent. In order to avoid boiling the ocean it would be helpful for sellers to go into calls with a menu of business outcomes that are relevant to the title they are calling on and can be achieved through the use of their offering. Sharing title-specific Success Stories and asking some probing questions are ways to have sellers share business goals.

Having buyers share a business goal is a watershed event. Both seller and buyer now understand a desired outcome. Once again, however, patience is necessary. Many B/C Players dive right into their offerings. The downside of doing that is that it will be a “spray and pray” exercise without knowing a buyer’s requirements. “A” Players begin asking diagnostic questions to understand why the buyer can’t achieve the desired outcome.

After doing so, they can present only the features/capabilities of their offerings that are likely to be relevant to the buyer.

One further caveat: Sellers should uncover areas that are broken that can be addressed by capabilities within their offerings.

Having the patience to ask relevant diagnostic questions allows sellers to:

• Understand the buyer’s situation before discussing their offerings.
• Share only those capabilities that address barriers to achieving the desired outcome so that they share specific rather than generic solutions.
• Help buyers quantify the potential value of achieving the goal being discussed by finding out how much problems cost buyers that are uncovered.

Being patient can be especially difficult for experienced sellers. They’ve had these conversations several times before and therefore see “solutions” long before buyers do. Understanding it’s the first time through for buyers can allow sellers to do thorough diagnoses (hurts) before earning the right to present solutions (rescues). Buyers want to know how things are broken, the specific capabilities they need to address them and the value of fixing them.

Ben Franklin said: People are best convinced by reasons they themselves discover. As it relates to selling, I would tack onto Franklin’s phrase: “and by answering relevant questions posed by patient salespeople.”

Patience in earning the right to discuss a seller’s offering should provide superior buying experiences for Key Players and result in more closes.

There has been so much published about “closing the sale.” Specifically, about WHEN to close the sale. I don’t even use that term anymore because its name alone gives the wrong impression about how it’s done! “Close” gives the impression that it’s conducted at the end of the sales process. When really, closing the sale starts at the very beginning and is conducted all the way through the sales process.

Periodically, through the sales process, the seller should be asking the prospect “commitment questions.” Questions that get the client to make agreements of sorts. Small agreements made throughout the sales process will inevitably give you a faster closing cycle.

Here are the different types of commitments or agreements you should be asking for:

1. The Needs Commitment. “Can we both agree that you need to solve “x” problem in the future?”
2. The Decision Commitment: “On what criteria will you be making your decision?”
3. The Company Commitment: “Do you agree that my company provides a superior product to others you’ve seen?”
4. The Product Commitment: “Do you feel that our product is the best in class and value?”

Clearly you can’t and shouldn’t wait until the end to start having these conversations. NOT getting an agreement on any one of those questions alerts you to where you have to focus your efforts.

As a sales leader, you live and die by your results. No doubt, you experience intense frustration when members of your team don’t seem to get it. Equally frustrating are the salespeople that are so focused on their numbers they turn customers and prospects off. What is the key to building a team that is focused on results in a way that customers and prospects appreciate and you are able to consistently meet your sales objectives?

#1: Focus on the customer’s results

This is really why we are in business. The purpose of business is to create value for customers first, and shareholders second (as a consequence of consistently creating customer value).

As you track opportunities in your pipeline, be sure that everyone on the team understands the outcome that the customer wants. While this sounds obvious, in the heat of battle, it is often lost. Salespeople often look at their pipeline as an indication of how much money they will make, rather than a reflection of the obligations to achieve customer outcomes. And it’s not just salespeople; sales managers can be just as bad. I can remember, early in my career, working for one sales manager that loved the fact that I consistently exceeded my numbers. What he couldn’t stand was my focus on ensuring our implementation projects were successful. When I communicated customer problems to him, his response was, “Adrian, it’s not your problem. You need to stay focused on selling.” Actually, it was my problem. First, win-win means we win “after” our customers win, not before. That means our customers problems are our problems. Second, it was my reputation. Salespeople live by making promises. If our word cannot be trusted, our promises are not worth anything and it won’t matter how flashy what we sell is, no one will buy.

#2: Real results are delivered over time

This is the fundamental difference between selling a transaction and selling a solution. Transactions happen at a moment in time. Solutions happen over time. By focusing on customer outcomes, your sales team is positioned to better understand where your customer needs to be in the long term. By understanding long-term goals, your team will better identify opportunities to partner with your customers over time. With a longer-term focus, both supplier and customer can work together more cooperatively in order to achieve the customer’s expected outcomes. Salespeople who focus on short-term, transactional selling may initially appear successful, but, in today’s demanding environment, their success will be short-lived.

This is a matter of delayed gratification. Anyone can spot the short-term transaction. It’s the mature sales professional, that can dig deeper and probe further in order to understand the bigger picture and the higher, more strategic priorities.

#3: Use metrics

Metrics enable you to clearly demonstrate to your customer that you are making a difference. Metrics should show your ability to increase sales, profit or productivity, or decrease cost and/or waste. By taking baseline metrics at the beginning of the project and then holding quarterly business reviews, you will be able to maintain customer excitement in your work together and demonstrate that you really mean business. You’re not just there to make money. You’re there to make a difference!

It is the passionate commitment and unrelenting focus on achieving customer results that is the key to every successful business today. As the world gets more complex, as competition increases and as customers become more demanding, those sales teams that have made it part of their DNA to focus on customer results and measure their success by their customers’ success will consistently rise to the top.

Evaluate your team’s focus on customer results by taking this quick assessment: Let’s talk about strategic account management.

Sales Managers must not only focus on recruiting, training, coaching and exceeding sales quota but stimulating their sales teams as well. I have written often on the mental side of sales management and need for the leader to emotionally motivate their teams to believe in themselves, their product/service and organization. Using sales contests or what I like to call sales games is one method a manager can use to create excitement. Normally sales contests are used to stimulate sales and while that is a good idea they must also be used to create a high-performance sales environment.

Organizations need to focus certainly on the short term-30 days sales cycle and end of the year, but they also need to have a longer-term perspective. As an executive, you must also focus on creating an atmosphere of fun, high performance, and teamwork.

In this blog I wanted to share a few ideas from my books on sales management: Leading High-Performance Sales Teams and Creating Sales Compensation Plans for High Performance. In both books, I share ideas for sales contests/games as well as how to properly roll them out and manage them. In many cases I have seen great sales contests ideas poorly executed, it is critical you think through what your objectives are and what you want the results to be and then CLEARLY write down the objectives, rules, and incentives. The first rule, remember cash is not what you want to use during sales games-that is what your commission plan is designed to achieve. The second rule is that creating fun in your sales culture is the main outcome-surely you may wish to add “net new client’s” or sell certain products/services and increase sales-but it is sales leadership objective to make the sales contest is a fun experience. “If it isn’t fun, it isn’t selling”.

You might enjoy this video on Building a High-Performance Culture:

Different types of contests will help you achieve different goals. Some should be held annually to address sales objectives, (I am a big believer in the annual sales trip!) company business strategies and potential seasonal fluctuations. Others can be scheduled as needed to help launch new products or services, promote new releases or upgrades or tie into your customers’ larger campaigns. Still, others can consist of short-term incentive games designed to motivate sales personnel to accomplish specific objectives by a specific deadline.

A Contest Sampler

Following are a few typical goals, along with ideas for contests that may help achieve them:

• Increasing sales volume. Consider adding a cash bounty for each additional new seat, new customer, or revenue sold beyond a certain target value. Set a quarter-to-date objective above your sales goal; that way, everyone on the team can win.
• Improving customer service. Periodically survey your entire customer base. If satisfaction reaches a certain goal—for instance, when 95 percent of your clients say they’re “highly satisfied”—and if your company is profitable, everyone gets a cash bonus. Keep a visible scorecard of your goals and results so that everyone maintains a constant awareness of your objectives.
• Acquiring new clients. To boost the number of new clients you add each quarter, consider creating a “bounty bonus” plan. For example, salespeople could earn a bounty bonus—either in cash or in points that can be redeemed for rewards—for each new client or each competitive replacement of a specific vendor’s customer. In addition, you could offer bounty bonuses for salespeople who exceed their quarterly or annual quotas for new accounts or net new revenues. You might even create and post “Blank Wanted Poster” posters with the bounties prominently displayed to help keep salespeople focused on contest objectives.
• Overcoming seasonal slumps. If your sales typically slow down over the summer, try launching a prospecting activity contest in March, April and May. For instance, award sales team members points for each new face-to-face call or sales demonstrations that they make during those months, with accumulated points eventually eligible for prizes. Such an effort can go a long way toward increasing the number of opportunities in the pipeline from June through August.

Competition Considerations

Following are some issues to consider and questions to answer as you plan sales contests:

• Determine what you want the contest to accomplish
• Set the ground rules. Are all sales executives on an equal basis for the contest? Be sure to put the rules in writing, making provisions for those and other situations that could arise
• Make the contest length the same as the sales cycle
• Set specific goals that can be measured weekly or monthly
• Incorporate an exciting theme
• Consider making rewards gifts, rather than cash
• Boost team members’ motivation by getting their families involved
• Never run contests to the last day of the month or sales period

What specific sales contests have you used that worked? What was the best theme?

This is certainly the era of Big Data — so much so that storage device capacities constantly expand. We’re now up to multiple terabytes with no end in sight.

But just because all of that data is available, and we now have ways to store it, does that mean we should access and try to process all of it?

As you might guess, that’s a mathematical impossibility, if only because the amount of data grows exponentially all the time. So what is the key to confronting this enormous mass of data, and how do successful reps do it?

The Keyword is Relevance

When a computer program is sorting through a huge amount of data, part of its code will be to look for relevance. It will only pick out pieces of data that are relevant to its search parameters. The more relevant the information, the higher it will be rated in importance.

Salespeople should be trained to sort out data in the same way. If a salesperson downloads and tries to store every bit of information on a particular prospect or customer, pretty soon the salesperson will run out of storage space. But more importantly, the ability for the salesperson to actually view and process all of that data will be rapidly exceeded. The result will be nothing but an overwhelmed sales rep.

Just as with a computer program, the salesperson should decide up front what is truly relevant. For example:

• What issues is the prospect or customer encountering that can be solved with our products or services?
• What issues are taking place within the prospect or customer’s marketplace that might negatively or positively affect opportunities?
• Who are the decision-makers in the company that I need to deal with?
• What issues are important to each of those decision-makers?

You’ll notice that the answers to these questions will probably comprise smaller pieces of data–but they’ll be far more relevant and helpful to the salesperson.

Applying to Pipeline Management

This adage of “Less is really more” also applies to pipeline management. How?

There are some salespeople that are driven by “big.” They only sniff out and voraciously go after the biggest opportunities, ignoring the smaller ones. In an effort to make or beat a sales period quota, they’ll frantically go after such big deals, even when they appear within virtual seconds of the close of the sales period.

There is certainly nothing wrong going after big deals–if reps didn’t do that, they would never be closed. But is that all a salesperson should be doing?

In this series on salesperson clarity, we’ve been examining the actions of truly successful salespeople–and here is yet another one. While successful reps certainly don’t pass up big opportunities, they are always carefully and diligently replenishing their pipeline with new opportunities of all sizes. Ideally, they’ve always got as much or more needed to make their quota, given their own closing ratio.

This is an application of “Less is more” to the pipeline itself–many of these deals may seem like “less,” but added up they mean the making or even exceeding a quota.

Successful salespeople know that to do otherwise would be to succumb to the feast-or-famine rollercoaster ride that many other salespeople fall victim to when they allow all their focus to fall upon only “big deals“–especially only in the later stages of the pipeline.

So to the list of successful methods of the best salespeople, we can add this adage and always use it to evaluate information: “Less is more.”

People buy for all sorts of reasons. They either need something or want something. When you’re the buyer, you typically have some idea based on your needs, wants, past experiences, budget, etc. But do you really know why people buy from you? And do you truly understand the buyer and their specific journey throughout the decision making process?

Because so much information is available at our fingertips, we know that most people are well into their buying cycle before interacting with a sales person. They do their own research and take their time deciding what’s most important to them early on. They’re approaching the buying process with an open mind, hoping for greater discovery and perspective as they move toward a decision.

What salespeople must realize is that this is a huge opportunity for them to align themselves with the buyer’s journey. Salespeople can make the most of this process by focusing on the buyer and assisting them with their discovery process.

It’s still kind of funny that many salespeople still believe that people buy from them because they like them. Well, ok, sometimes maybe they do. But maybe – just maybe — the reason why people buy from you is because:

• You have shown the buyer that you have done your research, assuring them that you are not there to waste their time
• You have proposed other alternatives or asked questions the buyer had not thought of, allowing them to broaden their perspective
• You have listened to their needs and timeline and worked to make it easy for them to buy, reducing or eliminating their key objections and minimizing any risk of buying from you

To build a relationship, any relationship, you need to focus on the buyer – not yourself – because:

• You cannot sell what you think is important
• You cannot sell the products or services that put more money in your pocket
• You cannot sell what the buyer does not need

However, you can do your research about the client, understand their past experiences, and get to know why they would want to invest the time, money and resources to disrupt their lives and that of their staff to make a change.

Every interaction with the buyer should be about them. Look for those who can truly benefit from your products and services. Help the buyer truly learn by understanding their goals, priorities and concerns. Ask insightful questions so the buyer can expand their perspective. And prepare to discuss objections in a way that gets the buyer really thinking. That’s how you build relationships. They trust that you understand them and have their best interests at heart – not your own.

Earlier in this series, we talked about the way a salesperson is often perceived: They’re juggling opportunities at different stages of the sales lifecycle while torrents of emails flood their inbox, and calls and text messages melt their smartphones. They always appear to be playing “catch-up” while never quite catching up. This is such a common view that we seem to have normalized this condition. We expect salespeople to be in perpetual motion—and many are measured on activity levels, especially when revenue performance is falling short.

But are these madly dashing salespeople the truly successful ones? If you take a good step back, you’ll discover that they’re not. They can’t be—because they don’t have enough of a solid organizational foundation to proceed steadily forward, successfully navigate through complexity, and consistently make targets. Whereas successful salespeople do.

And interestingly, the successful salespeople aren’t the ones that are immediately visible, because they’re not in hectic motion and making all that noise. No, they’re just calmly proceeding forward—and for that reason it is their names you’ll see on the leaderboards.

Consistent Pipeline Review

A successful salesperson always knows where opportunities stand—in which sales process stages, and in relation to the tasks and activities that need to be done to get them through each of those individual stages.

This could be referred to as a consistent, ongoing pipeline review. The successful rep is always looking through their pipeline, seeing which opportunities are in which stages, and evaluating the tasks that must be undertaken to get them through the next stages and to a close.

This can and often is done manually—although with the right technology, such as Pipeliner CRM, a constant manual review isn’t necessary at all. The CRM solution is in itself a real-time pipeline review for the rep that the rep can simply refer to as needed.

Underneath all of this is a knowledge and understanding of what must be done to bring each of these opportunities to a close. This has been worked out in the past—the rep now follows the successful routes laid down. Of course these routes must be tweaked from time to time, because nothing stays the same and markets, product lines, competitors and even economies undergo regular change.

Prioritizing

But such a review—performed with automation or manually—forms the basis for the rest of a successful sales rep’s actions. Vitally, it provides the data with which to prioritize: Which deals should be worked on first? Which actions should be taken up first, within each of those deals?
With successful prioritizing going on, a regular workday can be planned with relative ease. Since opportunities and activities are already prioritized, the tasks that need to be undertaken—taken from those opportunities—can be confidently laid out.

Of course this, too, can be done manually, and has been for ages by successful salespeople. But Pipeliner CRM’s new Navigator feature actually automates this process, too; a salesperson need only open up CRM first thing in the morning and go.

So what does a successful salesperson focus on that others don’t? He or she calmly proceeds forward, knowing where to go, knowing the priorities and what actions to take next, and always making sure there is an organized supporting structure helping guide them through.

Stay tuned for more in our series on Focus and Clarity.
What kind of CRM solution does it take to remain focused and forging ahead at optimum speed? Download it here:

Many salespeople fail not because of the lack of sales skills training but because their organizations are not spending enough time/money training them on the emotional power they need for success.

I am convinced that salespeople must be trained on the emotional elements of success at the same level that they are trained in pure sales skills training. The reason most salespeople fail to achieve quota is not product or the market it is because they lack the self-confidence or emotional commitment to success.

Last week after speaking at a conference a person mentioned to me she really enjoyed the topic; Why Winners Win. It is one of my favorite parts of the keynote and the four points I make wrap up many of the beliefs I hold, so I thought I would share them with you today.

The first element is: Winners Create Optimism. One reason is they dare to dream what others can’t imagine. In the past sociologists told us that you needed talent or hunger to succeed and win. There was a study done of highly talented individuals and those people who worked extremely hard (hunger) that never became successful. The result was the groups that were successful had an additional ingredient: optimism, not a simple happy go lucky feeling, but a real attitude that good things will happen. The secret to this ingredient is you can develop it. Work on the positives of life.

The second element is: they recognize fear as opportunity. Winners aren’t immune to fear, but instead of stopping them, the go with it. They treat fear as a signal and push through to experience new heights of living. Feel the fear-do it anyway!

The third is: they build dreams. Winners can visualize, they create of the image of their dream into reality. Our dreams shape us and we can’t do what we can’t imagine, people who get what they want often figure out what that is by letting their ambitions soar instead of censoring them before they emerge. Winners hang on to dreams…they are self fulfilling prophecy; positive illusions promote the capacity to productive work and a successful life.

The fourth action is: Winners reduce frustrations. Winners focus on what will go right, not what will go wrong, losers see the sand traps around every green, winners see only the greens—go for the pin! Remember that past frustrations build anxiety, while we must recognize frustration, it is a healthy by product of working towards your goals/dreams. Frustrations are simply steps to achievement.

Keep reading: Two great books to keep your mind on track.

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz

My blog on Creating Intensity is also focused on the emotional aspects of sales leadership and sales team performance.

I hope these ideas will begin to make your week, month and year terrific! Remember to build a Gourmet Life! Put the right ingredients in place and your Menu for Life will guide you to a highly successful and happy life.