Salespeople need them now more than ever.
Let me expand and explain.
As salespeople, we are told to “just go sell”. Get more face time (now video time) with our clients. Understand what they need and then deliver it. Simple, right? From that single perspective yes it is. And once upon a time that worked. In the world of the complex “solution” sell of today, it is no longer effective. AND it never was really what the best of the best did in any case. The very best “sellers” had a lot more internal knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and just plain cared more than the average bloke. And it showed. When the CEB produced their book on Challenger selling they did not invent a class of person that rose to the top. Their research simply pointed out a style that firmly and totally existed already, and that in fact was the best combination of attributes that made up the best producers. What the CEB team did was label things clearly and define them accurately so that we could finally figure out how to search for, find, hire, and enable more of what we wanted in our teams. We are finding that hiring for attitude as Mark Murphy (www.leadershipiq.com) has taught us is the most important shift in hiring that we have ever made. We now hire for traits, not skills. And it is making a HUGE difference. But… let’s go back to building blocks for the moment.
As we hire for attitude, train to teach, tailor, and take control, we also find that the new normal in the co-creation and delivery of insight with our clients requires that our team have a total and detailed understanding of all of the elements of business as the client sees it. Now to do the job we need to have all of the chapters of the book (Shiftability) engrained in our soul. The fundamental elements of the trade now consist of having a full grasp of :
The sales world that we thrive in today demands uniqueness, but only if you want differentiation from commoditization. And where once that was done by having the best products and/or services, it is now done by the sales professional and their approach to serving their clients. Now, more than ever our best sales pros have a complete grasp of all of the building blocks that are a part of the complex mosaic of today’s business. Building blocks are now for big kids if you want to make a difference!
OK, Let’s Roll!
Mitch
Continuing our exploration of Shiftability we step into the art and science of TRANSFORMATION. More than just change… this is where we change who we ARE at the core of our beliefs, not just changing our techniques. The journey continues with a bit of a story that we are all probably familiar with. While written before the “mandates’ of physical distancing you can envision this same situation playing out over ZOOM as our sales team all grab that “first cup” and cozy up to the big screen monitor on their desk at home...
Juggling her coffee and her laptop, Kristine pushed open the door to the conference room with her elbow, a few minutes late for the weekly division sales meeting. As she made her way to her seat she caught Dave’s eye. He made a small nod to the right. She followed his gaze. Three stacks of bright-colored hardcover books occupied center stage. Kristine’s stomach knotted and she looked back to Dave. He smirked and rolled his eyes.
Whatever it was, Kristine knew a couple of things for sure. There would be a few good ideas to get excited about but she would probably be told to abandon a few old ideas that had worked for her in order to get with the new program. And Dave would make some good beer money again, selling everyone’s new books on eBay.
Sound familiar? Perhaps your sales manager handed you this book to read over the weekend and told you to come back Monday ready to discuss it in your sales meeting. Please don’t sell it on eBay just yet.
Kristine’s sales manager, like so many others, is frantically trying to solve this problem: How does a sales professional stay relevant today? How do we equip ourselves to be successful in aggressive PICOS-style negotiations? How do we make sure we deliver value to our organization? To our clients? And ultimately, to ourselves?
So we are eagerly searching for the next best technique in selling, adopting and mandating new methods, changing focus, trying different incentives, and designing new programs. We get very busy doing new things, something, anything. But too often, even though we have changed everything, we get the same old results. We knock our heads up against the same problems and find ourselves right back where we started, still on the edge of irrelevance.
The whole effort becomes a change for change’s sake, without any real progress or improvement made. Several key misconceptions underpin this cycle of change that doesn’t change anything.
Out With the Old, In With the New
The first misconception is that a shift or change is always an either/or proposition. We will either adopt this new program wholeheartedly and abandon our previous methods OR we will reject this new idea and stubbornly stick to the old plan.
Neil Rackham, the author of SPIN Selling, calls this the “Armageddon selling formula” and describes it like this. “Everything you’ve ever learned about sales is wrong and, unless you stop doing it instantly, your sales efforts will shortly die in agony. There is, however, one simple cure that I have discovered. It is...” and here the author puts in a pitch for the appropriate magic bullet, such as “my prospecting method,” “my selection system,” “our funnel management process,” or “our trademarked social media analytics”—take your pick ...
This is probably the biggest failing of many sales formulas and usually what inspires controversy. The champions enthusiastically adopt the new program and throw out everything they have been doing up to this point. The detractors disdainfully reject the new ideas completely because they are unwilling to part with their old ways. In both cases, change is understood to be a net-zero exchange, instead of a process of building, growth, and evolution.
In this book, we would like to suggest that shifting is not binary, but instead mostly a both/and proposition. You will need to learn new skills, apply new ideas in selling, AND still maintain the old ideas that work well but perhaps understand and apply them in new ways. We don’t want you to abandon methods and skills that are successful for you. We also don’t want you to reject new ideas just because they are new and perhaps not yet proven in your own experience.
The challenge becomes choosing which changes to adopt, and which shifts to make.
We aim to show you a framework for putting the best of today’s thinking of selling into practice. We are going to help you navigate your way through the noise to six essential shifts we believe you need to make to stay relevant and be effective. But first, we need to help you answer this pressing question: How do I make changes that stick?
To Do, Or Not to Do?
The second misconception about change is that it is all about doing. When we are faced with a problem, usually our first thought is, what should I do to solve this problem? Then we get very busy doing things to solve our problem. We think that if we could just change our behavior, develop a new skill, apply a new technique, or start a new program, then surely we will be more successful. Hence the flood of books on selling that promise new ways to do sales.
We are going to show you why doing isn’t the right place to start for sustainable change. Rather, we need to start with changing who we are at the core of our beliefs, not just changing our techniques.
Before we get to showing you the things you can do that will help put you on the road to success as a sales professional today, we need to talk to you about your being. In order to do something different, you have to believe something different.
This is the heart of transformation. And, transformation is exactly what is required.
I was reading a blog, this morning, from a consultant firm that I consider to be very sound, until this moment, on this subject. The subject was the area of compensation for sales teams. They wrote all about making sure that the sales compensation drove the strategic objectives of the corporation. While that sounds reasonable, the baseline assumption is not valid. Because inherent in that belief is the fact that the only tool most management will use to keep folks in sync happens to be their personal income. Pure manipulation, not motivation!
But what really floored me was that within their assumption set was a metric about a world-class compensation system and the artificial barrier to success called a “quota”. This is not new, and we have all seen it for years. Their metric said that a great system has 45%-55% of the people NOT achieving quota. Again, that is not far from the reality of that statistics of what truly takes place…and that was stated to be OK.
Really? How can it possibly be OK that 45%-55% of your team FAILS? In those arcane individual commission-based systems the first hurdle to “success” is achieving an outcome where failure more than half the time is acceptable.
Would you really accept 50% failure of ANY other part of your team? 50% failure of shipping product on time… 50% failure of new products… 50% failure on a quality front… 50% failure of accounts receivable. NO, none of that would be OK. Yet we set up the “coin-operated” sales team with a hurdle to success that it is OK to miss… half the time. In no way does this even make a little bit of sense. That’s not even remotely close to being motivating. That’s just insulting! And sadly, it’s quite common in the world of compensation of sales teams.
Please go back to my earlier blogs on the Poison Known as Commission and check out the DATA that says this compensation methodology is highly flawed.
In this changing world, we truly need to shift our thinking into what we can do that will change the game for the better, and it is through true COACHING and LEADING that we can make a difference in the world around us.
Kill the commission systems… GROW the COACHING and LEAD the world to a better place.
OK, LET’s ROLL!
Mitch
In the beginning…
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I want to dig into our book Shiftability and extract some key points for your consideration over the next few weeks. Let’s start at the beginning of this whole journey for many of us…. The story below is a direct extract from the manuscript of Shiftability so you will see the third-person perspective in the writing….
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In the beginning, there were people who made stuff and people who needed stuff. Then there were the peddlers of stuff who helped the makers and the buyers find each other.
The peddlers of stuff were very successful for hundreds of years because the makers and buyers needed them. Stuff was bought and sold and everyone was okay.
Then things changed.
That Was Then …
It was a typically warm and sunny Arizona day. The cloudless blue skies seemed to go on forever as Mitch drove across the desert out of Phoenix on one of his monthly sales trips to Las Vegas. This time was a bit different. Mitch’s usual mode of transportation was his bright silver Audi 5000T. This day he was behind the wheel of a bright orange and white rental truck from U-Haul.
The two-ton box on wheels was loaded front to back and fully to the ceiling with high tech data. But this was not data as we think of it today. This was technical product information contained in hundreds of copies of technical documents, printed and bound in books from various manufacturers. These were called data books. In the technical sales trade, they were almost as good as gold. Electrical engineers would go to almost any means needed to get their hands on their favorite manufacturers’ data books.
And Mitch had an entire truckload of them.
He was on his way to a government contractor in Nevada. This was a tough account to get into to talk with even just a few of their thousands of engineers. But Mitch had found that if he set up shop in the parking lot with a truckload of data books, over a couple of days nearly every engineer in the company would come out to visit him. They could pick and choose from any of the dozens of manufacturers that he represented and take any data books they needed. All he asked was that they grant him access at a later date. Through Mitch’s semi-annual book drive he built one heck of a contact Rolodex.
This was 1977 and the electronics industry was in its infancy. Apple Computer had just incorporated, Star Wars had just opened and set new records, and Elvis had just left the building. At the time Mitch was a Field Sales Engineer working for Wyle Electronics, one of the largest distributors of electronic components in the industry. They represented and sold semiconductors for Motorola, Intel, Fairchild, and many others. They also sold a variety of electromechanical products like connectors and switches and passive products such as capacitors. Wyle represented the best of the best.
In these early days of the electronics industry, a salesperson working in the distribution world was viewed as a great source of information. Customers eagerly welcomed sales reps whether they were bringing in data books or doughnuts. At that time the only real source of technical product information was the printed material that the various manufacturers created. There was no Internet. This was a time known as BCP (Before Cell Phones). Electronic messages between companies were sent through a system called a TWX or a Telex. Fax machines were just becoming real. The human was the primary means of conveying the realities of the fast-moving electronics industry.
Every Monday night after work Mitch’s sales team would meet with various manufacturers over pizza and beer and hear all about what wonderful new technologies and products they were about to bring to market. They would check out the new technical literature and sometimes they would even score the ever-elusive “sample” that they could deliver to a really important client.
Life was grand and the role of sales professionals had maximum meaning and purpose. They were the kings and queens of data. Not just data, but data everything. They had data sheets, data books, data libraries, and data brochures. They had copies of advertising, which was just more data. They had product data, solution data, reliability data, and eventually, data CDs.
Not only did sales reps have all of the data known to the technical world, but they also had free products they called samples. They had samples to hand out for specific client projects, they had sample kits, they had product sample packs and solution sample packs. They even had product demo boards, product evaluation kits, and full demo system solutions. They had development systems and emulation tools. And even more importantly the sales rep had CONTROL of it. It was theirs to gift to their favorite clients, theirs to spread out, move around, and use to build relationships.
Sales reps also had control of the feedback on the use of the products and samples. They controlled the communication to the client and the communication back to the manufacturer of the products. The sales rep had it all – all the data, all the products, and all of the control.
That was then …
This Is Now …
Flash forward to today.
The electronics industry is thriving, the Star Wars franchise is still going strong, Apple is one of the premier companies in the world, and today the sales professional is on the verge of leaving the building.
We are no longer the kings and queens of data. Our customers do not need us to bring them information. They have the Internet for that. A revolution of massive disruption and disintermediation is underway.
And this changes everything.
And since its creation just 4 short years ago, and considering the Covid world changes we are making, Shiftability has become more critical and timely than ever! The premise of the work is that the world has changed greatly….have you. It's time to shift into a new reality that challenges our limiting beliefs.
There is a new urgency to figuring out how to stay relevant, how to stand up and push back to return the sales conversation to value with the right people, and to discover how to operate in today’s economy.
The landscape of selling has changed dramatically and it continues to change rapidly. How do you navigate this uncharted territory? How do you chart a course through this changing landscape? You have to learn how to shift …Shift into different abilities.
Shift onto a new plane of performance.
Shift into a deeper understanding of the value and your role in creating it.
Shift into a new mindset.
Shift into a new skillset.
Most of all, you have to be willing to shift and choose to move forward, even though the way is not clear. You have to cultivate shiftability.
We will dig into the specifics of how…. As we take this journey.
If you want to get the answers sooner, feel free to buy a copy of Shiftability from Amazon, knowing that ALL of the profits of the sale of the book go to a great charity… Charitywater.org. We are helping to provide water sources to those places in the world that do not have good ones.
Ok. So, let’s ROLL!
Mitch
BE-DO-HAVE
Are you playing to win, or are you playing to not lose?
Are you playing along, or are you looking to disrupt?
Are you playing it safe, or are you pushing boundaries?
Today we see more people being careful to not rock the boat than ever. Let’s not push the envelope, seems to be the COVID method. We are ALL looking for safety, sanity, and an assurance that “it will be alright”.
Well….. STOP IT! We cannot make what we have gone through disappear. We cannot make the hurt go away. It will not just magically become “alright”.
We can however choose to take action into creating a new future for each and every one of us, and all of those that we serve.
We MUST choose the mindset of playing to WIN… for ALL involved.
We MUST choose to DISRUPT the current thinking that has us stuck in the mud.
We MUST destroy the boundaries we perceive that have us frozen in our tracks.
Actually, human beings are wired to do what we believe. We act out of our sense of purpose and what we do is a result of what we believe. If I believe that I can make a sale, I will do all the work that is necessary to make that sale. If I believe that things are going to get difficult, then things are most likely going to get difficult. We become our own self-fulfilling prophecy. We create our way of operating from our way of believing.
Mahatma Gandhi described the thinking challenge like this…
Your beliefs become your thoughts,
your thoughts become your words,
your words become your actions,
your actions become your habits,
your habits become your values,
your values become your destiny.
If you are afraid, then you are going to act and do things that a fearful person does. If you are hopeful, then you are going to act and do things that a hopeful person does.
So we need to shift our order of operations from believing that if we do certain things, we will then be able to have the things we want or need, and then we will be successful (DO-HAVE-BE). If I only work harder, then I will have more stuff and I will be happy. Instead, we need to adopt the order of Be, Do, Have. What we believe about our world and ourselves in the core of our being, determines what we will do, and ultimately the results we will have (BE-DO-HAVE).
So it starts with believing in the value that you co-create with others, including our clients, who have the ability to make a difference for them. It starts with believing that to create that outcome we must understand “others’ deeply, and we do that because we care about them and their world. We believe in serving others WITHOUT reserve, and that creates a better world for all. And all of that drives toward achieving our stated purpose (more on purpose another time).
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly, with
PURPOSE
Reverse the normal old, pre-COVID, thought pattern and build this thinking into your day…BE-DO-HAVE.
Have a conversation with a client this week that you have never had with anyone before. Ask them if they are playing to win, or playing to not lose. And if it is the latter, what would it look like if they were playing to win. Let’s see who has the courage to care enough to ask that question.
OK, Let’s ROLL!
Mitch
