A good friend of mine described a concept that is not readily translated from the Sanskrit into English. The word “dhairya” is generally translated as patience. However, it is a lot more than that. It is not a passive thing: in other words you sit back and wait. It is more a constancy of purpose and effort. Or to have the will to maintain effort through hard times when results might not be immediate.

I see the confusion of dhairya with patience frequently when it comes to sales. Maybe you recognise it in yourself.

That process whereby you wait for the prospect to come around; you don’t want to bother them too often in case you scare them off. That is patience.

The dhairya version is to keep believing the prospect will be ready to buy. But you need to DO something to keep that vision alive. You need to have a reason to contact them: useful information, chat about a latest industry development, refer a potentially useful partner to them, invite them to an event – social or business – that they might find interesting.

It is this ability to build long-term relationships that distinguishes the best consultative salespeople. It applies more to higher value goods and services where the margin justifies the ongoing effort. But even lower value goods can integrate the long-term marketing with the occasional sales call.

I was reminded at a recent meeting that good selling is not so much a case of a portfolio of specific skills but simply good communication.

We have a number of ways to measure how good a person is likely to be at selling using a number of specific tools such as Fit4 and elements of Thomas International, Belbin and others. But one trait seems to shine through amongst the best salespeople - they are great communicators.

But what do we mean by this? What we don’t mean is they are great talkers - hence the title of this blog entry. “Selling ain’t telling” is one of our A&P mantras. In other words, talking AT the prospect rarely gets them to commit to buy. Conversing WITH them is way more powerful.

The old adage about having two ears and one mouth and us using them in that proportion (paraphrasing the Greek philosopher Zeno I believe) still applies. Getting a message across is not a function of the number of words we use, or how long a meeting lasts. The best newspaper headlines are often very short, but they still get the message across with impact, sometimes with wit, but always with brevity.

All the great wits and thinkers in the world were always able to cut down critics with a few short words. As Winston Churchill once responded to the accusation that he was inebriated (again): “I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly”. I am not saying we need to insult our prospects, but we can do so much more by choosing our words carefully.

And communication is not just about the economic choice of words. It is the stuff in between…….silence. One of the most powerful closes is “first to speak, loses”. And so it is with handling objections or analysing the prospects needs.

So let’s pay more attention to how we gather information and less to how we broadcast it. Put away the megaphone and pick up the microphone, you could say.

One of my favourite idioms is “a rising tide raises all ships”. Together we can achieve so much more than alone. However, a lot of sales people tend to be less instinctively collaborative and are more likely to be self-motivated and self-absorbed.

When times get tough, the salesman will tend to be even more inward-looking. But this is the very time to summon the reserve troops, to look to additional ways of finding leads and to building partnerships. After all, a lot of sales people have fewer leads to chase and more time to develop the pipeline.

The wise sales organisation is building partnerships now that will gradually yield business during the quiet times and be a springboard when the recover comes.

Strategic
You need to start working with what is left of your marketing department and be thinking of ways to attract the right types of prospects.

Maybe you could even be collaborating with companies that in the past used to be competitors. Recent episode of Nature’s Great Events showed dolphins and sharks working together to round up a school of tasty fish. Normally the sharks would be eating the dolphins not working with them. But tough times demand different solutions.

Tactical
Almost all my contacts are reporting that prospects are becoming increasingly difficult to contact. They are less likely to take your call and more likely to be rude if they do. So we need to sprinkle crumbs on the lake to attract the ducks, not throw great loaves.

If you contact lapsed or past customers then make sure you have a clear reason to do so. A reason that benefits them. This may be looking for articles in your contacts’ trade magazines and forwarding these to them. Or maybe you have learnt some useful technical tips that can enhance their business. Don’t worry about whether you can sell to them just yet.

Possibly you can go to your marketing specialists and come up with ideas and offer your time to them. You could organise a seminar on a hot topic, a roadshow or find an exhibition you can attend. There is a host of creative ways you can generate leads, rather than just doing more regular prospecting and trying to close harder.

Commission means that salespeople sell more doesn’t it. And more commission means they will sell even more. Right? Wrong.

Apparently commission and all incentives kill the personal motivation to get things done. More than that, the quality of work falls and it is actually a relatively poor way to motivate people, according to the research cited by Alfie Kohn in the book Punished by Rewards.

It is an astonishing conclusion for anyone that has been involved in sales for a long time. However, the more one thinks about it, the more it could be true. I know plenty of people that work incredibly hard for less than the market wage and others that do as little as they can get away with despite the chance to make a lot of money. The recent series Make Me Millionaire Trader showed several talented prospective traders abandon the project due moral objections. Despite the fact they could have made a lot of money.

The suggestion that commission does not work then begs the question, “how do we motivate sales people then”? Indeed! I have to say, the evidence is very persuasive suggesting that commission is a very poor way to encourage salespeople to sell more.

At the very least, commission in the long run appears no better a motivator to working hard than helping staff to get job satisfaction. The problem is two-fold in my view: how do you replace the deeply ingrained tradition of commission being used to motivate salespeople? And the other problem is, how do you train sales managers to adopt the better way?

STRATEGIC
It would be a brave sales organisation that ditched commissions for improved management. It would certainly be difficult to attract some of the best salespeople.

However, my experience suggests that really good sales people will do their best work where they like the company and believe in the product. It is another matter whether they would set aside their “greed” to work for such a company without commission instead of an alternative company with a great compensation scheme.

TACTICAL
If you are a salaried salesperson with an element of commission, then, frankly, there is little you can do about the commission you get. Time and again I hear salespeople moaning about the fairness or amount of compensation schemes. Sometimes they might have a point. But the inescapable fact is that they probably can’t change it.

So the decision has to be, how do you motivate yourself? My suggestion would be to say the commission is simply a way of keeping score against your fellow salespeople. The main thing is to do the best YOU can do.

Judge yourself against your own benchmarks and learn to me “intrinsically motivated”. In other words, find your reasons. And set your own goals. These should be independent of those imposed upon you by managers or your employer.

You will find this discipline will see you right wherever you choose to work and however fair the commission package.

A recent report by consultancy DDI interviewed 2700 corporate buyers and employees and came up with one statistic that jumped out for me: 72 percent of buyers rated the internet as their first source of information. However, the conclusion of the report was as controversial as the statistic is unsurprising – that the internet allows buyers to “cut out the middleman”.

The presumption is that the salesperson is the middleman. Simply dead weight, a third wheel, a chocolate teapot. Frankly, if that is all the salesperson is being regarded as, then they SHOULD be cut out.

The salesperson’s role is often seen as redundant and unnecessary by so many buyers. And sometimes they are right – bad salespeople should be eliminated from the marketing process and order-taking should be left to someone else.

STRATEGIC
What value are your sales team adding to the transaction? Are they order takers with additional responsibilities, but they are not fulfilling that extra obligation? Or are they “trusted third parties” to prospects and buyers: valued consultants that make sure buyers get the right product each time.

Sales people who believe their role is simply to “close” the deal are order takers. Great salespeople welcome the internet as a tool to educate and empower prospects.

It means that thesedays buyers have a lot of information at their finger tips. But few consumers are able to make the comparisons and come up with the right decision with all this ammunition. The great salesperson can guide them to the right purchase and hopefully this is to buy THEIR product. Or not to buy the product this time if it is not right for prospect.

TACTICAL
One of the most powerful ways a salesperson can build trust is correctly and honestly to tell the prospect that the salesperson’s product is not the right one. At this time. But it may be in the future.

Right now I am looking to upgrade my mobile phone. John represents the 3 network asked the right questions, displayed his knowledge and understanding and concluded that the current handset range did not provide what my company wanted. In so doing, he recommended Jane from a totally different company that COULD provide an appropriate Windows Mobile handset. And Jane is being equally as helpful as John.

We may never know what John’s sales manager thinks of this but one thing is for sure: I have kept John’s details and know I will recommend him as a scrupulous and professional mobile phone contact. He did not make the sale this time but spread £1000s of goodwill. And who knows how much money he might make in the future because he DIDN’T force the sale this time.

Are you building up a bank account of goodwill by being a dependable and honest consultant? Avoid the pressure for the quick sell and you will build up a loyal customer base PLUS you will go a little way to helping lend the lie to the DDI consultancy report conclusions and salespeople being just middlemen.

A friend of mine who is heavily involved in property development remarked that in the last few years, “even a dog with a bank account could have made money from property”. With property prices falling now, it would be a mistake to think that all investors are such dogs and thus are now all losing money.

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that shrewd investors are snapping up repossessed properties at auctions at half their previous values. With smaller mortgages but rents pretty much at 2007 levels, it means that these are profitable investments with yields around 10%. So their capital value is less of relevance.

But why am I talking about property investment in a sales training blog?

When times are good, it is not so difficult to be among those making a profit from a particularly buoyant sector. The best operators are lumped in with the “lucky” and those jumping on the bandwagon.

Now, the good salesmen and good sales managers will shine. I worked in telecoms in the late 1990s and I saw all manner of charlatans make huge commissions selling mobile phones. Where they good salespeople? I think not in many cases, because most of these are out of the market scraping a living in a different sector.

STRATEGIC
The pie is smaller and we are all fighting over smaller slices. One of the biggest issues is how to reward the good sales people. These are the individuals that you want to hang on to when the upturn comes.

The consistently best salespeople have been shown to be the ones that don’t do the job just for the money but for the satisfaction. Big commissions and fancy holiday rewards are affordable when the business is flowing in and the more mercenary staff are bringing home the bacon. When the new business acquisition tap turns to a drip, we need to get smarter about motivation.

Why not try reducing the differential between the rewards for the best sales people and the poorer performers? The good guys should understand it is a team game and be willing to take a cut in commission and the poorer performers will be brought back into the game.

TACTICAL
There is an odd paradox that occurs in sales when times are tough. The buyers are more reluctant to commit AND are more demanding. In contrast, salespeople feel the need to close harder and generate more commitment, sometimes due to pressure from management.

This smacks of unstoppable force meeting immovable object! It is my view that buyers buy when they are ready and there is little (notice I don’t say “nothing”) we can do pin them down against their wills.
Look at it from your point of view; when you are buying, is there nothing more irritating than the salesman that wants to lead you to the checkout when you want to just have a look at the other colours available? I have certainly left shops where I might have otherwise made a purchase, but was hassled by a pushy salesperson.

Indeed, this recession is the time to REALLY build on the relationships. Spend more time researching your prospects and building the bond. Send them useful press cuttings, come up with free seminars that are useful to a client group, telephone for a chat or to pass industry intelligence. There are dozens of ways to put yourself more front of mind with the client than your competitors.

When the purse strings loosen, who will the prospects come to for a quote or to make a purchase? The pushy salesmen that just wanted the order or the “advisor” that wanted to help the prospect to make the buying decision?

We have had some great feedback about our blog and I have been surprised how many people dip into it. As a result of some of the comments, I realised that we are trying to be all things to all people. That we have as many senior sales managers and directors/business owners that read it as executive sales people. And your needs are different. So, from now on, we will have each blog in two sections Strategic (for those managing people) and Tactical (for those selling). Please let me know what you think about the change! And now to the subject of today’s article…

I recent spent 3 days with a client on an exhibition stand up at the NEC in Birmingham and was struck by the differences in the way we were using the space and the way that our neighbours were spending their investment.

STRATEGIC
If I had £1 for every time a contact told me that selling at exhibitions was a waste of time I would be a millionaire…I often think. Time and again, this belief stems from a simple deficiency – lack of preparation.

I will assume, albeit dangerously, that you have researched the market and decided on the “right” event. You know the right prospects will be there and you have decided that, instead of attending in order to build brand awareness, you are there to get customers.

Everyone on the stand needs to be focussed on one thing: finding prospects. Note that I do not say “selling”. Visitors to business exhibitions are rarely ready to be sold to. They are just “tyre kicking”; researching.

For this reason, you need to first engage as many people as possible to sift out the serious contacts. It is a numbers game. So the stand needs to have a competition, pretty people, images and logos that grab attention and is manned by tenacious energetic staff that will engage passers by.

And then you need to make sure you have the forms and questions that lead the attendee to either reveal their need, or reveal to you whether they are a prospect.

After that, it is all about your follow up. You have captured their details, your team has set aside time in your diaries for when you get back. You will then devote a couple of days to decide who you want to contact and then you contact them. Sounds simple. But why were so many of our neighbours at the recent event NOT doing it?

TACTICAL
Spending time at exhibitions is a great way to fill your pipeline. Or it can be a fantastic and exhausting waste of time. You can choose.

The temptation is to have nice chats with visitors, relax with a cup of coffee, get very drunk in the evenings and chat/flirt with other exhibitors. This attitude can seriously damage your wealth.

Firstly, it is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to look after your body. Don’t drink coffee or tea at all, because it dehydrates you. Do have a bottle of water handy (kept out of view) and sip regularly. This stops your breath smelling (don’t be surprised if you can’t retain visitors on your stand as a result!) and keeps your energy up. Have a light breakfast and lunch and graze throughout the day on non-sugary foods.

And resist the urge to have more than a couple of evening alcoholic drinks if you are on the stand the next day. Difficult as such temperance might be, you will look better for it and your stamina for standing for six hours will be massively increased. Any time you are off the stand recovering, or on the stand looking like a dogs breakfast you won’t be generating leads for yourself!

Whether you are the business owner or salesperson, it is easy to get bogged down in the detail of what we do. Whether we are fire-fighting, calling back prospects, rearranging diaries or dealing with client queries, there seldom seems to be time to look at the big picture.

The most successful sales people regularly take stock. They have a plan and regularly compare their performance to the plan. The drifters often look up and wonder how they got where they are. And eventually their destination is mediocrity.

I am not so much talking about goals, targets and dreams. Those are issues of motivation as much as anything else. I am talking about the tactics of your sales process.

In other words, which of your activities are getting the best results? We are not talking about marketing, we are talking about your activities as a salesperson. These activities are your tactics and these tactics come together to form your individual strategy.

Maybe you need to think about how you conduct telephone calls on the road. Is it better to have a good signal for important calls and pull over? Or can you speak to more prospects whilst on the move, although you lose the signal occasionally? Is your strategy to spend more time thinking in the car and call prospects in longer chunks when you have a break? It is this level of detail that will define your success.

Think about what works. And do more of it. All our routines are different but create a defined strategy out of your tactics. You will find that working smarter as the economy gets tighter will leave you in a stronger position in a few months. And your good habits now will leave with long-term strategies that will lead you to the success you have dreamed.

With the financial turmoil around us being blamed for greed I was reminded about how a good sales pitch can be scuppered by the same thing.

Imagine the scenario: you, as the sales person, are getting on fabulously with the prospect. They have agreed in principle to buy the widget maintenance package. As you have talked they have become increasingly excited by the widget brokering offering and the widget intelligence service. You have seen the extra commission that can be earned from easily bolting on the extra products.

Then it comes to getting the sales order. Surely just a formality with the prospect biting your hand off? The prospect “just” has to get approval from the marketing director now that the intelligence service is being bundled in. So you wait patiently for a week, planning the romantic weekend away with your loved one with the extra commission you will earn.

Then, OH NO! The marketing director mentions he has a golfing buddy that runs a widget maintenance business. Within weeks, miraculously the marketing director’s choice offers exactly what you had on the table but for a 3% lower price.

This is “scope creep” in action and its potential downside. We have let the prospect lead the process too much. When we have an agreement on a specific service, it is often most prudent to pin that down, gain formal commitment and then work on the value-adds separately.

We can easily promise retrospective discounts and even come clean that we don’t want to muddy the waters by bringing other departments into the deal. But let’s first ring-fence what is on the table.

As a salesman, it is both your job to gain business for your company AND to help the prospect to make the right decision. Don’t be creepy: remember the adage “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”!

Sometimes I despair at the reputation that selling has in the UK. Financial services seem to have the worst reputation. The concept of mis-selling seems to be synonymous with that sector. (What about mis-buying and whatever happened to “caveat emptor”?)

You would expected educated and respectable individuals to be above perpetuating the misunderstandings about sales. But just recently I was looking at an excellent web site created by the UK’s financial services authority (FSA - Fsa.gov.uk). The micro site is designed for consumers looking to compare financial products and it does a superb job of doing that, apparently objectively.

However, my heart sank when I saw the strap line writ large on the page:
“No selling. No jargon. Just the facts.”

Time and again we teach delegates that two things to avoid are jargon and vagueness. So, yes, FSA, good on you for dropping the jargon and sticking to the facts. But, surely presenting this information in a comparative table IS a form of selling?

The sobering fact for salespeople is that the FSA has to reassure visitors to its web site that they won’t be sold to. This almost seems like our number one fear as consumers.

It is a tragedy that selling is now seen as such an evil. It will take time, but we as professional salespeople need to work hard to restore the image. Avoiding jargon and sticking to the facts will certainly help.