I decided to go back to what I was writing years ago and see if it all still made sense. And from nearly 6 years ago here is what I found…. I love that even then the thinking of CUSP was at the core.
CUSP
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly, with
PURPOSE.
OK. LET’s ROLL!
Mitch
------------------------------- from Nov 2015-------------------------------
Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
Theodore Roosevelt
As salespeople, our past success over several decades has been driven by data - data in the form of what we KNEW. Our success in “selling” was once based on the information that we had in our heads, the people that we knew, the contacts that we had, and the resources that we knew how to deploy.
Unfortunately, today significant portions of what once made us winners no longer matter, and many of us still can’t get over the ways of the past.
In a recent blog, a friend and fellow sales fanatic, Dave Brock wrote about how poorly many salespeople today prospect for clients. Check out his thoughts, they are great. I see the same thing today from EVERY single call and email that I get from salespeople who are wanting a piece of my time.
The message starts like this:
“Mitchell…”
(We can stop right here because clearly my name was picked out of some database somewhere. The only person ever to call me by my full name was my Mother, when I was in trouble.)
“Mitchell, my name is Bob Blah and I would really like to have just 10 minutes of your time to tell you all about my blah, blah, blah. We are number one in blah, blah, blah. And we today we serve 159 of the Fortune 500 companies. Our blah, blah, blah, will help you sell more and solve all of your problems.”
I actually do not pick up my office phone any longer because these calls come all day, every day. It’s sad. If just once, one of these hard-working folks would call up and demonstrate that they actually cared about what was important to me, I would be delighted to call them back. But in the last decade that has never happened. Not even once.
To connect with the people in our lives, while selling or not, we have to CARE, and we have to care about THEM.
Our understanding of what is important to THEM, what their challenges are, and how we can help, must come before we ever get into a discussion about our products or services or anything to do with us.
Our clients will care about what we have to say, ONLY when we clearly demonstrate that we care about them FIRST. And it must be in that order. And it must be genuine and sincere. No games, no pitches, no opening and closing strategies, no handling of objections, no manipulation, no SELLING!
Start with caring about them as people, not as a part of a company. Do your homework about their world. Understand what you can about their issues in their company, their challenges in their industry, the risks that they face daily in innovation… And keep seeking to understand, because you care. Turn the understanding and caring around to focus on the person that you are serving.
You will find that those people that you care enough to serve well from their perspective will in fact care a great deal about what YOU have to say, in time. And from there the caring and information sharing explodes.
Your clients care because you care. You first!
Once upon a time, our value as salespeople was information. It actually still is, but the new reality is that to get to the point in a client relationship where your information is again valuable, you must enter into that relationship from the perspective of listening and diagnosing first, extensively, before you prescribe.
Sounds easy, but most salespeople that I interact with today are still pushing their stuff on me before they have ever stopped to understand me. Too bad. Their loss, and our gain, since we know the secret… CARE about the people who you serve.
Are you curious?
If you are a curious sort, just that question alone should have got your attention. The reality is that curiosity did NOT kill the cat… IT MADE THE SALE!
We have all had great conversations with people that flowed well and seemed to go on and on. And we have had the opposite, major flops. In the case of the latter, and in the realm of selling, it is almost always due to our own self-interest and an overwhelming burning desire to TELL our story to the potential client.
Now on its own, without understanding the client and setting up all of the connections that tactic will simply cause endlessly glazed-over eyes outcomes. Your time will come to talk about your stuff…be patient.
And create curiosity!
The genesis to great early on conversations is the layering of little bits of credible client-focused information between layers of curiosity creating questions or thoughts. A bit of contextually specific information, the posing of a curiosity creating question… tee up the next bit of new information… add in another curiosity provoking thought…repeat till done.
This all must be planned out in advance of the conversation. You will be best served if you can simulate it with a friend and get comfortable with the iterating style.
If you are not curious about your client it will show to them in your conversations. Our sales world is way too full of people that simply want to “tell you all about MY stuff”. And our clients know that and until you prove that you are different and provide value that they acknowledge you will be stuck in the short loop chat routine, going nowhere.
So, here is an idea… be curious about what unique outcomes your “stuff” can create with your client. Put your “stuff” value into their terms. This too will take some specific client prep work. So just do it! Dig in, find out what business challenges your client is facing, build some solutions to that, create some conversation simulations around the curiosity of how to communicate the value… and get it done!
All of this is a continuation of the grand theme of making the world a better place by serving. And of course, it looks like this…
CUSP
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly, with
PURPOSE
And, have a little fun while you are creating massive amounts of curiosity.
OK, LET’s ROLL!
Mitch
The BIG 2 questions… they are not what you think they are!
My lovely wife and I raised 5 kids while we were both working. That was a long time ago. And ALL of them were quite inquisitive. The top question of every road trip was of course… “are we there yet?” But the dominant question, regardless of situation or timing was “WHY?”
So the road trip question, “are we there yet”, applies quite literally to the journey that we take when we seek to serve our clients. In the case of serving a client, it ends up that we oftentimes don’t really know the destination as the client does not know it either. So our inquiry must be continual and open and sincere. Sadly, most “sales” people already have a predefined destination in mind… having the client buy their “stuff”. If you will take the time to open the mind map with the client and explore where they “might” go, with your help, you will find the journey to be substantially rewarding for everyone. Start the trip, take out a map, look at possible destinations and sights to see along the way that may actually open up the alternative destinations. We can NEVER close our eyes to different paths than what we started down. If we are open and receptive the client will guide us. We need only to ask the question “are we there yet”? And keep looking for the next waypoint.
Now, the second question is a classic one. When the kids were young it was “why Daddy”. It morphed in the teen years to a bit more belligerent “WHY!!!”, often stated as a demand for justice. In our B2B world, “why” is magical, but only if used not as a tool, but as a legitimate desire to understand and explore deeper. Here again, sadly, what I see often is highly experienced sales souls seeking to get their message across so they spend an amazing amount of time pitching the client on “why” their solutions are superior and on “why” they should choose them vs the competition. These are folks that are stuck in a choice between the status quo and the dreaded big “C” word…change. Not knowing how to facilitate change within their own world they are desperately in need of someone that can help them tackle the ”change” question. They don’t need product features and benefits knowledge. They need help, real help, in understanding WHY they should change. And beyond that…. how to make it happen.
So, serve your clients by helping them understand WHY they need to change, WHY now, and WHY to your solution. Solutions come last. We all need a primer on this one… I suggest a book titled “Leading Change” by John P. Kotter.
So, get your WHY on, and truly look to serve your clients, to their benefit!
CUSP
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly, with
PURPOSE
OK, LET’S ROLL!
Mitch
…in the words of one of the top organizational psychologists around today… Adam Grant.
Adam is a brilliant guy and a wonderful author. His book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, is a great piece about understanding. Give it a read.
In an opinion article that Adam just published in the NY Times titled “The Science of Reasoning With Unreasonable People,” he offers a great introduction to the thinking about helping others change. His final quote is “I no longer believe it’s my place to change anyone’s mind. All I can do is try to understand their thinking and ask if they’re open to some rethinking. The rest is up to them.”
And that is the cornerstone of what we have been exploring for the better part of the last 10 years. It has come to be known as I chat about it as the AND/ALSO pivot.
It starts with the clear understanding that YOU cannot change someone else’s mind. It is not possible. Only THEY can change their mind. That is the simple science of how it all works. While from time to time, with much verbal flogging, and verbose assaults you might get them to agree just to get you to shut up and go away, in fact, you cannot change what they think, even if they are wrong. Only the owner of the brain can control its workings.
So what does that mean to the salespeople in our space?
Quit trying to make your clients wrong about the decisions that they have made in the past and that control their actions today. STOP, it’s not working and you are only creating barriers that are really tough to break down.
INSTEAD… take time to understand how the client reached the decisions that they made. And under the circumstances, how much good sense that made. AND MEAN IT! No games here. You must really understand and empathize with reality.
Only when you clearly understand and say so honestly, do you open up doors for new additional thinking. It is at this time that you acknowledge their reality AND asks permission to ALSO put another thought on the table for them to consider. By openly acknowledging their reality as understandable you prevent the barrier to listening to another idea from being built. You have received a mini invitation to offer up a little bit of incremental wisdom that does not threaten their past thinking but openly ADDS to it.
Just like breaking a habit. You can’t kill a bad habit, you CAN add a new one that will be more powerful than the old one.
From there it is our place to serve the client in whatever choice they make and execute to excellence!
CUSP
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly with,
PURPOSE
OK, LET’s ROLL!
Mitch
EVERY DAY!
It’s crystal clear…. Or is it?
It is crystal clear to me….so why can’t everyone else see it?
That was the thought that kept coming to mind the other day as I spoke with some really bright leaders in sales and business.
The thinking that got us here REALLY might not be the thinking that builds the future that we desire. That is a really tough realization. And as it will take some significant shifting to affect the right change, it makes it an easy thought to dismiss and simply revert to what we have always done.
The phrase the hit me hardest was from a really great company that had in fact been very successful globally in a really tough business, and was facing the need to possibly change. We were talking about sales organizations and their focus. The quote from this leader was “our objective is to extract the maximum amount of value that we can from the customer”. I’m listening… thinking… extract, like yanking teeth out of a patient’s jaw…. And “from”…oh yea… TAKING… not giving. Ripping value right out of their hands. Sounds more like a torture technique than any sort of “sales process”. But then again, most of the sales process offerings in the world can be a lot like torture, to everyone involved. Extracting, taking, getting, all to our benefit. Where was the customer in this? Oh yea, they were the subject of the extraction and the taking.
OK, I got it… this is the history of where we, as a “sales” person have come from. All about what WE want and what our company wants FROM us. The rest of the conversation was about the typical subject of compensation (meaning commission). The fundamental belief from most every sales leader(actually manager is a better term) is that their team IS coin-operated, and they CAN manipulate their team into doing what they want them to do by commission systems. The fundamental belief of this group, and most sales managers, is that the only thing that matters to a salesperson is greed and the possibility of a BIG upside to their commission.
And that is absolutely NOT TRUE. But they have been brought up under that belief system, so it MUST be true. Truly sad. Management (not leaders) that believe this are actually lying to themselves and those that they “manage” and those that they report to. That’s tough to face.
One of the other leaders that we were talking with was faced with a great challenge… having to hire a BUNCH of salespeople… NOW. And while training was of concern, the biggest challenge in mind at that time was how to structure the commission system so that everyone would sell more of all of the products that they had to offer. Not leading and coaching, but rather manipulation of the individual back pockets of the PEOPLE that they were working so hard to find and hire (hence the reason also for a retention problem).
Oh well. The journey to enlightenment can often be a long one…and it takes just one step to start it. So let me step down from the “commission is evil” soapbox for a moment and ask all of the salespeople out there to consider the concept that the most powerful way that you can achieve the success that you desire is to let go of the focus on hitting your “numbers” and focus on the process of serving. Commission or not, the way to create a brighter future for you and your world is by a simple focus on the PROCESS of SERVING. No complex equation needed here. Every day, look to make a difference of some kind for someone new. Every day, take time to dig in deeper to understand that client that you just “don’t get”. Every day, show the world you care more than ever.
Every day, come back to the basics of the “human process”….
CUSP
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly with,
PURPOSE
OK, LET’s ROLL!
Mitch
