By Dan Hudson

A good friend called me a few weeks ago saying he had a client that he wanted me to meet for a potential business connection. My friend is in the diamond business so my first reaction was that he probably did not really understand the type of work we do at 3FORWARD, but he was insistent I speak with this person as soon as possible.  He introduced us via email then after a brief phone call we decided to meet face-to-face next time this person was in Dallas.  That meeting recently occurred and I am really glad I took the time to make this new connection!

We met for coffee and immediately hit it off.  It turns out that this individual is the CEO of a company that provides sales effectiveness software focused on helping complex solution selling teams grow sales revenues. Our discussion centered on the selling process, specifically on what portion of that process the sales rep controls versus what portion is controlled by the prospect.

He explained to me that data conclusively proves that by focusing on the things that are in your sales teams’ control your win probability increases dramatically.  The two primary areas that a sales rep has control over are frequency and selling skills, and by proactively managing sales frequency and sales behavior skills, real sustainable growth is possible for the entire sales organization.  His software helps sales reps and their managers achieve this.

The key to this process is to be able to capture and measure these behaviors quickly so that sales and pipeline reporting is accurate and as importantly, you have the ability to provide real time sales coaching to the sale person. The approach is simple and makes complete sense.

We plan on having additional discussions about how our firms might be able to work together.  The real point of the story is to never dismiss a referral without taking the time to have an initial discussion; it could be costly!

By Jill Harrington

 I was recently asked by a colleague to share my top three insights to help younger, less experienced sellers be successful in their careers. I love working with young new sales pros because they are eager to “get producing” as quickly as possible, they usually have few or no bad habits to “unlearn.” And while they may initially lack experience and business acumen, they make up for this in their willingness to put new ideas into action. And action ultimately drives results … I’ve seen newbie reps outsell their more seasoned counterparts who let their egos prevent them from trying something different.As for the ones who are “hitting the ball out of the park” early in their career, here’s what they have in common…

1. Their quest for knowledge. They understand that “how you sell” has far more impact on sales success that “what you sell.” They continuously invest in their own professional development and view training as an opportunity, not an annoyance keeping them from their customers. They proactively seek mentorship, and reflect on what works and what doesn’t in terms of their own sales approach.
2. Their intent. They are not just focused on closing the sale. Their intent is to contribute to their customer’s success. As a result of this mindset they proactively look for the customers who will benefit from their services. And they do their homework so they can speak intelligently about why this specific customer would benefit from having a sales conversation. The sale – and usually a bigger one – is the output.
3. Their curiosity. They are genuinely curious about the customer and his / her business which means they “know” who they are talking to, and they prepare questions that are valuable to both the customer and the sales pro. They take time to understand what’s important from the customer’s perspective and they listen – to the customer’s words and to the implication of these words. So when they respond, their recommendations are ruthlessly relevant. 

By Steve W. Martin

Here’s one of my favorite year end stories that you do not want to miss… READ BRIAN’S STORY BELOW!                      

Brian was presenting his forecast in front of his teammates and was explaining why a deal that he had originally forecasted to close in the fourth quarter came in three months later. Here’s his story.  

 Brian was excited that the account he had worked on for nine months had selected his software solution. After several weeks of ensuing price negotiations, a $300,000 purchase order was submitted into the customer’s capital expenditure software system (referred to by the customer internally as the “CESS system”). Since several weeks were left in the quarter, Brian expected that he would receive the purchase order well before the quarter’s cutoff.  In Brian’s mind the deal was done. The purchase order would be printed and signed and he forecasted the deal accordingly. However, Brian was quite surprised to learn that the rules-based CESS system required that a purchase of that magnitude be approved by twenty-one different people. The purchase order had entered the “CESSPOOL of Purchase Order Approval”.

Because of this elaborate sign off procedure, it would take another three months before all twenty-one signatures were gathered. In the meantime, Brian embarrassingly had to explain to his manager why a deal he had absolutely, positively, guaranteed would close wouldn’t. His assumption about the purchase order turnaround time was dead wrong. If only he’d had the foresight to ask about the details of the procurement process with the same diligence that he spent qualifying their decision making process before he committed the deal on his forecast. During tough economic times like today, you should expect every purchase approval to take two to four times longer than normal.

Because, every organization exercises another excruciating level of diligence to ascertain whether or not the purchase is absolutely necessary.  

by Jacques Werth
©All Rights Reserved

Is it a good idea to leave sales-oriented Voice Mail Messages (VMM)? At High Probability Selling, we advise againt it, since your potential customers will react in one of the following ways, none of them positive!

1.  The prospect will hear your name and company, and, not recognizing either, will delete your VMM without listening to the rest of your message. Only that negative impression of your name, your voice and your company will remain in his/her memory.
2.  The prospect will hear your pitch and delete it, because s/he is too busy to think about your offer now. Only that negative impression of your name, your voice and your company will remain in his/her memory.
3.  The prospect will hear your one-way communication and be frustrated, because there is no opportunity to ask any questions. Then, s/he will hit “delete,” and click to the next message without trying to call you back. Only that negative impression of your name, your voice and your company will remain in his/her memory.
4. The prospect may not like the sound of your voice or your pitch, and immediately delete your VMM. Only that negative impression of your name, your voice and your company will remain in his/her memory.
5. The prospect may listen to your VMM and be interested, but too busy to call you back. Eventually, s/he will be frustrated and/or annoyed that you did not call again, or be faced with a potential phone tag scenario. Only that negative impression of your name, your voice and your company will remain in his/her memory.
6. The prospect will listen to your VMM, stop what s/he is doing, and call you immediately. Approximately 1 out of 120 VMMs will result in a call back, and an average of 1/3 of them will result in a new customer. Therefore, without actually talking with them, salespeople that leave VMMs alienate the other 119 prospects.Is it a good idea to leave sales-oriented Voice Mail Messages (VMM)? Our research indicates that salespeople who leave voice mail messages produce an average annual sales volume that is twenty-nine percent (29%) lower than the average sales volume of all salespeople in their companies.In High Probability Prospecting (HPP), we do not leave Voice Mail Messages.HPP is about a series of extremely brief human-to-human interactions characterized by mutual trust and respect.

The process gets better sales results during the first round of calls, and increasingly better sales results with each subsequent round of calls.The primary strategy of the HPP process is to contact a highly targeted list of prospects every four weeks, to determine whether the prospect wants what we have to offer now, or not. If not, we quickly accept any negative response and leave a positive impression that builds with time.

By Mike Brooks

If you are a sales manager or business owner, then you probably know and understand that fine line between being a leader and exercising authority, and trying to fit in as part of the team and wanting people to like you. Managers struggle with this all the time, and many would be leaders lose their ability to successfully direct their teams because they are afraid of exercising this authority for fear of alienating other team members.

The problem is that most managers and other figures of authority – Directors, V.P.’s, and Business Owners – have never been taught how to properly exercise authority and command respect as leaders.

If you find yourself in this position, follow this proven, 5-step method for exercising authority. It will not only get results, but it will establish, or re-establish, your role as leader of your sales team or department.

1) Make sure your instructions are clear. Having ambiguous goals, or methods of achieving them, automatically undermines your authority and dooms many projects from the beginning. Rule #1 — be clear on the goal and the instructions on how to accomplish it. After you have delivered them, ask your team if they have any questions about what is required, so problems can be cleared up from the beginning.

2) Encourage people to approach you if they run into problems. Establishing open communication and feedback early on is crucial to avoid big disappointments later. Helping team members resolve problems as they arise ensures quick resolution, continued progress, and good morale.

3) Take action quickly when you learn of any real problems. Failing to act quickly once you learn of a problem, or putting it off for days or weeks, not only undermines your authority, but also kills morale and confidence. Problems tend to get bigger the longer they go unresolved, and your job as a leader is to solve problems not avoid them.

To read secrets 4 & 5, click here.

By Tibor Shanto

Whether we like it or not, sales is a game of semantics.  The words you choose make a difference.   You want to make sure that you facilitate communication, and fully drive the Discovery process.  It also has a strong impact as to the level of engagement by your buyer, the more engaged and the more they communicate the entire picture, the greater the likelihood that you will uncover crucial information you need to convey and deliver value; as importantly, the more difference they will perceive in you vs. other sellers they are speaking with.  So when I was asked what is the number one word in sales, I knew that it was…..

Watch the video here…

By Tibor Shanto

This is not about bashing demos, but more about how many sales reps use, or misuse them, and the lost opportunities that result from the misuse. The fact is that many in sales love demos because they feel that it creates the sale for them; and while it would be easy to blame the rep, it is often part of the corporate approach. Many sales processes are built around the demo rather than discovering, deriving, driving and delivering value. Nothing is more of a throwback to feature based selling than selling by demo.

What differentiates a good demo from a bad one is the demo’s timing and sequence in the sale. In most instances, a seller meets a prospect, they have the right title, a pulse, and agree that they have the time for a demo; once completed, they spend time and effort retrofitting the “needs” of the buyer to things that seemed to appeal to them in the demo. The net result is a longer sale, with more work, and generally reduced value for both the buyer and the seller.

The typical scenario is you get the opportunity to meet with a potential buyer, after a few obligatory questions, what most will consider and tell you are qualifying questions; three check marks, and a demo is offered up. All this before you have learned anything specific about the buyers requirements, objective, and here we are not talking about product objectives. We’ve all seen the example where the seller does not probe or explore beyond the obvious, beyond the range of their own product, after all, they took an appointment with a copier rep, so they must want a copier. Yet the buyer’s objective could extend far beyond the obvious, and beyond the one demoed product, and to other potential services.

Rather than selling, this resembles more the routine of throwing enough demos against the buyers in the hope that some stick. This is especially worse when the demo consists of giving the buyer a free XX day trial. Same process as above, the variation is instead of just sitting through a 20-30 minute live demo, the buyer gets to test drive it for 14 days, then the rep comes back, sees if the buyer is ready to buy, if not, then they probe a bit more, hoping to uncover further information. It really needs to be the other way around.

I remember working with reps who would do the above, and when asked what they were hoping to get out of the exercise, the response was always a sales. But rarely did they have the results to validate the process. To be fair, the reps not only get pressure from their managers to provide demo accounts, but since the market has conditioned the buyers, they too want a demo before agreeing to exchange valuable insight.

A much better approach is to think of the demo as a closing tool, not a selling tool; a proof of concept that is the bow on the sales, rather than the heart of it. I remember selling information services, the market had been conditioned to expect a trial, and “then we can talk”. The reps would return after the agreed on period (the better ones would actually call the buyer once, even twice during the period) to hear the buyer’s verdict. I use the word verdict, because the decisions, and reasoning behind it was very much done behind closed doors, without the knowledge or input of the rep.

The preferred approach for me was to actually keep the product/service under wraps as long as possible, right to the end. The strategy was to spend time with the buyer, understand their objectives, buying criteria, buying process, qualify financially and agree on a solution. Once that was successfully completed, you could offer a demo under two specific conditions, first was that other than the demo, there were no barriers to the sale. That is if the demo did in fact demonstrate and address their criteria and delivered against expectations that were set, there was in fact a deal in place. The second was that if the demo validated 80% of the key criteria uncovered and agreed to, and there was a specific means of addressing the fifth, again the deal will happen. As stated above, the demo needs to be a proving point that seals the deal, not something that happens before any discovery or qualification takes place.

No doubt it takes work to do it the right way, but that is what selling is about. Furthermore, your close ratio on sales where the demo is the closer is always higher than when the demo is the “light show” before the sale begins. This is usually because the demo in the latter scenario often kills the opportunity, because it is not tied to any specifics driving the buyer; be that financial, productivity gains, efficiencies vis-a-vis time, individual interests or risk avoidance. It is a light show looking for an audience. If the demo is not directly tethered to the above factors and objectives, it is just a light show that requires you to work much harder as you now have to breakdown misconceptions, and still build the case for value.

There are a number of ways to uncover objectives and drive the value factors; we obviously like our GAP Selling approach. But real success lies in the sequence and execution, done in the right order the right way it adds value to all involved; wrong sequence just creates grind, risk, and lost sales.

By: Jeff Beals

“Great moments are born from great opportunities,” said the late Herb Brooks, one of the world’s most famous hockey coaches.

Brooks certainly seized opportunity during his career. He agreed to coach the 1980 U.S. Olympic team that beat the “unbeatable” Soviet Union in Lake Placid, New York during the famous “Miracle on Ice” game on the way to winning the gold medal. It was a modern-day “David vs. Goliath” matchup. Many coaches would refuse such an overwhelmingly difficult job. In fact, several did.

But Brooks saw opportunity in the monumental challenge of leading a bunch of young, amateur, college all-stars against the essentially professional players of the Soviet Union and other European hockey powers.

That opportunity paid off, to say the least.

Whether you’re talking about sports, business or any other subject matter, seeking, finding and capitalizing on opportunity are among the most important things a professional must do.

There’s one big problem with opportunity, however. It is often hard to find and even harder to harness.

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations,” said Charles Swindoll, an American religious author.

I agree wholeheartedly with Swindoll’s characterization. The best opportunities are often hidden. They are often located in places we least expect to find them and are presented by people we least expect to provide them.

That reminds me of the old story that sales managers like to share with their young trainees: “On his way back from a three-day fishing trip, a multi-millionaire visits the showroom of an upscale, luxury car dealer. The salespersons, seeing an unshaven, disheveled, poorly dressed man, essentially ignore him. Offended, the multi-millionaire buys a top-of-the-line model the next day from a direct competitor.” There are a lot of ways to tell that classic missed-sales-opportunity story, but they all sound something like that.

If opportunity is so important to our success, and so difficult to find and recognize, we need to focus more of our energy on it. Unless you’re naturally good at it, finding and capitalizing on opportunity needs to be a deliberate focus: 

Open your eyes and ears - we can no longer afford to be indifferent, or even worse, oblivious to the world around us. Be on the lookout for ideas that could lead to new opportunities. Even more important than eyes and ears, keep your mind open too. Many of us miss opportunities, because they don’t fit into our pre-existing paradigms.

Remember that all people count – sometimes we get so obsessed with the “right” people, we miss out on valuable opportunities from people, who on the surface, can do seemingly nothing for us.

Fight through the fear - one of the biggest reasons we miss out on extraordinary opportunities is because we are too afraid to leap. Herb Brooks wasn’t too afraid to leap; we shouldn’t be either.

Let your creative juices flow - the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Albert Szent-Gyorgi once said, “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” The more creative you are, the more opportunity you will discover. See the world in a different way, and doing things like nobody else, and just watch the opportunities that manifest.

Take risks - As the old saying goes, “nothing risked, nothing gained.” Unless you take a chance and do something new, you’ll keep running into the same old opportunities.

Work really hard – “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work,” said the great inventor Thomas Edison.

Set meaningful goals - make those goals specific too. The more you clarify what you really want, the quicker you will recognize it when it shows up.

Find quiet time - many people have found great opportunities, because they prayed for them or spent time meditating about them. Such activity creates focus in your mind, and a focused mind is a powerful mind.

Believe - visualize success and tell yourself that good things will come. A positive mind is more receptive to hidden opportunity.

Prepare - as the old Boy Scout motto says, “be prepared.” You never know when the perfect opportunity will open up. If you’re not prepared, you might not act on it quickly enough. In his autobiography, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he believes in “relentless preparation.” He constantly prepares for crisis, so he will perform properly. Same thing applies to opportunity.

Jeff Beals is an award-winning author, who helps professionals do more business and have a greater impact on the world through effective sales, marketing and personal branding techniques. As a professional speaker, he delivers energetic and humorous keynote speeches and workshops to audiences worldwide. You can learn more and follow his “Business Motivation Blog” at http://www.JeffBeals.com.

Paul Cherry, Pbresults

Her name was Cindy, but around the office, she was better known as “Solitaire Cindy.” Whenever I walked by her desk, the Solitaire screen on her PC was running. Frankly, it bugged me. Why should Solitaire Cindy game her day away while I busted my hump in my job, along with my fellow employees? I asked her manager how she felt about that. She sighed, “For what we pay Cindy, she does a decent job, so she’s earned the right to futz around.”

I even talked with Cindy myself, hoping to encourage her. But, she shrugged as she flipped a card with a click of her mouse.

Cindy wasn’t motivated. But I blame management. They neither confronted her nor gave her any motivation. Like so many managers, they took the path of least resistance. People would prefer to put up with mediocrity than make waves with employees.

You Have Choices on How to Address Mediocrity in Your Sales and Marketing Organization.

For instance, would you:

• Disconnect Cindy’s Solitaire software to force her to step up to the plate?

• Confront her, running the risk of annoying her and losing her (and finding her replacement)?

• Ignore Cindy’s overall mediocre performance because of the things she does do well, risking a ripple effect on the other employees who work hard while Cindy follows her own path of least resistance?

• Initiate a meaningful dialogue with her to find out why she’d rather play computer Solitaire than be a proactive worker in your sales organization?

If you were like some of my large business-to-business sales organization clients, you probably think installing programs to monitor and restrict employees’ Internet access is the answer. But that only treats the symptom, not the disease.

If you were like most misguided managers then you feel it’s not your job to inspire excellence. You would choose to ignore Cindy’s overall mediocre performance. I’m sorry but chances are your sales team will not magically motivate themselves. You must address mediocrity issues ASAP so they don’t snowballs into a major problem.

An effective sales team leader would:

• Initiate a meaningful dialogue with their sales team

• Remember all members of their sale team are individuals with motivations as different as their work styles

• Respect and respond to those differences so their sales team performs above and beyond expectations

• Understand their employees like they understand their customers

• Find out what their sales team truly values

You risk losing your best workers if you don’t discover ways for them to feel successful and accomplished in their positions. And, the only way to understand what people value is to engage. That’s why I strongly suggest that you talk with your sales team. Really listen to what success means to them!

8 Questions You Must Ask Your Sales Team So You Can Take Them to the Next Level

Armed with the answers to these 8 questions, you can implement meaningful reward systems, programs, and promotions that’ll turn mediocre employees into happy and productive sales performers.

1. What do you feel is going well for you at our company?

2. What have you accomplished so far that you’re really proud of?

3. What else besides a bigger paycheck would make you feel more successful at work? In life?

4. What would you have to accomplish in order to feel successful five years from now in your sales career?

5. What do you enjoy most about your sales job?

6. What two things would you most like to achieve in the next six months?

7. In order to make your sales career more interesting, what would you like to do more of? Less of?”

8. How do you define success?

Get Your Sales Team Motivated

If you want your sales team to feel successful and triumphant in their jobs, you must make them feel valued. I can’t even begin to count the number of times clients have called asking to help them motivate their employees. Over and over, they tell me their business would improve if only Joe or Jenny Worker would “step up to the plate” or “put in that extra effort.” But all they have to do is ask their employees what motivates them, and how they want to be motivated!

Remember, motivated employees have the drive to succeed. So start asking questions and motivate your sales team today, so you can grow your business tomorrow!