We have been speaking to a number of clients and progress that have a simple answer when we ask them: “Who is your ideal client?”. “Anyone that spends money with us” is the often serious and considered responses.

I attend several business groups where we train our fellow members on what to look for when seeking leads to pass to us. The mantra at all of them is “be specific”.

Time and time again you see a handful of attendees at these meetings complain that they don’t get any quality referrals. And they are consistently the same people who are never specific. When asked what business they want leads into, this group of underper-formers begins their pitch with “Anyone that…” or “You already know what we do..”. Conversely, those that seem to get the most business (not, I don’t say leads but actually refer to clients won) are those that seem almost super-specific.

I believe the reason that most of these under-achievers are not specific, is because they have never taken the time to analyse where their best business comes from. They are not ignorant people and they are not lazy. I think they have just never been convinced of the need to analyse and articulate their best customers.

Imagine your company was to conduct an advertising campaign. Would you not think firstly in which magazines you might book the ads? And then, would you not say things in that advert that appealed to its readers? But how do you get to this position first? You analyse what customers you want to attract, of course!

Have a look at the customers that:
- spend the most with you
- are the least trouble to manage
- tell you how much they appreciate your business
- refer you to other clients
- generate the best net margin

And you can start to narrow down your ideal clients. Flesh out this description, make it real. Then work out where they are all hiding and focus your selling attention on these prospects.

I have just had two young chaps knocking at my door, fairly late in the evening, pitching their solar panels to me. One was listening, the guy talking to me was truly awful. Plus I am no eco-warrior and I know that solar panels and wind turbines are best reserved for the wealthy, the naïve and the tofu-addicts. But I still took a leaflet and gave him my number? Why?

Persistence. In fact, the offer they have can be compelling if the salesman gets a chance to pitch. However, his attitude was truly awful: he was confrontational, seemed aggrieved that I wanted him to go away (it was 20.30 and I was cooking dinner) even though it was HE that disturbed ME, did not pitch the benefits but the features and he failed to engage me.

He did not even ask me any open questions. When I told him that I understood that the return on solar panels was 25 years, he bluntly countered with “no, it is actually 5 years”!

As a sales professional I marvelled at his lack of training and poor people skills. But, you know what? I took the leaflet and agreed to a call back. He was like a pit bull with a manual (and a minder in this instance). He knew what he had to do and stuck to the task in hand: get the prospect to agree to the follow-up.

Now you could argue that I would never have responded positively if I had not been in sales training, but I bet some others in our road were be won over by his persistence! I could not help but wonder how great the young man would be if he was more respectful, smiled more, asked open questions…oh, well I will make sure I call his supervisor and pitch our services.

What is the most common mistake I see in sales departments? The mistaking of activity for results.

What do I mean by that? Put simply, good sales people are adept at seeming busy. They can show all the calls they have made, how full their pipeline is and how many appointments they had booked. But they claim they just “need that lucky break” whenever you quiz them about the lack of new business.

The attitude of being “busy being busy” is highly corrosive. When it gets out of hand the management can accept the excuses, even feeling sorry for the luckless sales people. But you don’t get rewards in sales for making phone calls. You get the rewards for closing deals (this is certainly the way it works in successful sales departments!).

If you are an individual, managing and motivating yourself, take a moment to look at what you do each day, each week, each month. Be hard on yourself and be objective. Are you attending a lot of events, persistently following up the same prospects week after week, adding new products to the portfolio, blogging (!) and spending a day going to see a prospect at the other end of the country?

Be really critical and decide where you should actually spend your time most productively. Stop doing the enjoyable things that you can’t prove to yourself actually yield business. Stop living on hope and being exhausted each day with no closed sales at the end of each month to show for it.

Begin to work intelligently and stop worrying about looking busy. You get paid for the business you write not the hours you work. You will soon start working smarter not harder and the revenue will follow.

I have been in property investment for some years now as well as running the training company and have watched as the market lurched from boom to bust. And I have marvelled how this sector seems to foster the best and worst in sales techniques.

I was struck by the recent news that 40 of the biggest house building companies in the UK have been fined nearly £130m for rigging the market. In effect, whenever one of them bid on a contract, they discussed the price with the others in order to push up how much the buyer paid.

Anyone who has had to deal with local builders will know that familiar sound of air being sucked between teeth and the inevitable comments about a job costing more than they thought! So, frankly, Balfour Beatty and the others were simply doing this on a huge scale.

Now contrast that with the concept of buying houses using back-to-back (or sandwich) lease options. Now I don’t intend to turn this into a property seminar so it is enough to say that this is a new way of helping sellers to get the price they want for a house, letting a buyer get a house and to make money as an intermediary. Everybody wins. The exact opposite of the house builders’ game of ‘heads I win; tails you lose’ as described above.

We all know the market is tight for a lot of products and services. This can be the mother of invention for new ways for you to sell your company and its wares. Alongside improving your existing routes to market, why not explore other ways you can help buyers to buy?

If yours is a high value capital good, maybe buyers just can’t get the cash to buy it. But they desperately want it. So could you find some way of letting them borrow it and pay for it over time? Maybe let them share with you a proportion of the cost saving or revenue generated? Alternatively, can you bring two different customers together and your product or service sits in the middle?

Try a little lateral thinking, in the style of Edward de Bono. Remember the saying “If you do what everyone else does, you will get what everyone else gets”.

Using some imagination costs nothing. Taking a risk might, but then again you might unearth another way to sell that will tide you through the recession and beyond. Build on what you have got and you might find the foundation of more stable sales.

This is a question that is often asked when I speak to managers looking to recruit. It is often uttered by operational staff and managing directors who resent paying salespeople their relatively high market rates. Sales directors sometimes even say it!

But firstly, ARE salespeople paid highly? Well a recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and publishing group Croner, entitled Sales Rewards, suggested that the average basic salary for a middle manager in sales is just over £38,000 – 5.6% higher than the national average for this level. Not a massive difference, but significant.

Interestingly, there are regional variations with sales reps in the North East and North West receiving 10% LESS than people at the equivalent level in other roles.

As a salesperson you are in the almost unique position in the business that you are constantly under the return-on-investment spotlight. Would an HR manager be constantly monitored to see that he was worth each year? Or the health and safety manager? Highly unlikely, even in these recessionary times.

However, the value of a salesperson appears to be easy to measure: if you don’t bring enough new sales to cover a certain multiple of your salary, you are toast!

On a strategic level, this way of thinking is incredibly inefficient and unfair. We are a sales training company after all so I not only have an axe to grind but can show it is not the most profitable rout. But let us put this to one side and deal with the issue head on.

Put simply, you need to show your managers the value you bring to the business. If you are regularly exceeding target all the time, then there is no issue. But, if you are like most salespeople, you have good months and bad months.

So be your own harshest critic: think carefully why you may have come up short. Don’t think of excuses; work out the reasons why. And take corrective action, before your manager needs to.

Sometimes the reasons for missing targets are genuine ones and unavoidable. If it is out of your control, see the storm brewing. Understand that the business demands (fairly or unfairly) that you return adequate return on investment. Start the dialogue with our manager early. Don’t let the threat of the axe come as a surprise.

Like it or loathe it, we need to constantly justify our value to our employers unlike other departments. But we do get better rewarded according to the research!

So often sales people focus too much of their attention on sales skills and believe that their mental state is not so important to their success. When we are training people in making cold calls, the frequent request is for “powerful phrases”, “clever responses” and “sentences that convince”. These are important but only secondary to the mental approach.

I was reminded a few days ago how important the state of mind is to success, more than actual skills. Usain Bolt on Top Gear in fact. For a little background, Usain Bolt is a runner who holds the world records for 100m sprint, 200m and 4×100m relay. Top Gear is a television programme about cars.

Usain recently wrote-off of a very expensive BMW in car crash from which he was luck to escape unscathed. This might call into question his ability to drive. His world records suggest he is not too shoddy at running.

When he recently appeared on Top Gear he was asked to drive a lap around a race track in an ordinary family car. Many famous people had previously performed the task and some impressive times had been set by these stars. Usain approached the driving task in the same way he did his running: he had a tangible and enormous will to win. He said as much to interviewer Jeremy Clarkson.

It was no surprise then that his time was nearly the fastest ever. He would have possibly set the record if he had not been a heavy muscly 6ft 4ins, the weight slowing the card down considerably.

Even if we factor in the possibility that he is a fast learner, there were few actual skills he could have transferred from running to driving at high speed. The main constant was his state of mind: the determination to win.

When making sales calls we need to be like highly trained athletes. We need to focus our subconscious minds on the result and allow our natural skills to align. Get the mind right, and the body will follow.

Have you ever had a prospect seem really keen to buy and then they disappear off the face of the earth? The were a “sure thing” when you put the phone down or left their office. Then you can’t get hold of them even though all you need now is the signature?

Possibly this is a version of “post-purchase remorse” that I call “pre-purchase remorse”. This first is a recognised psychological response to buying. Sometimes buyers start to rationalise their purchase and panic over a number of factors such as having spent a budget on the wrong thing, that they are no longer able to choose an alternative, what will the boss say, etc Other buyers almost predict this effect before they have even made the commitment to give you any money and behave as if they have “pre-purchase remorse”, in other words they regret that they are about to no longer have all the options open to them – including not buying.

The good news is that you must have done a good job as a salesperson because they must have been convinced by your arguments at the time. After all, they did not kick you out of the office or ring off. However, once they began to think about taking their interest to the next stage – in other words paying – they have become rabbits in the headlights. Almost paralysed. And that is why they don’t take your call.

Firstly we need to accept that some prospects have been in buying mode for a long time. Maybe they have seen and spoken to many representatives over a particular purchase they are considering. On some occasions we see “analysis paralysis”: they have so many options that they cannot now mentally process all the information. And this can lead to an irrational decision, rather than a well-researched one.

It is possible they have been doing this research for so long that they have almost become addicted to the process. In fact, making the purchase will end this process, which they have become very comfortable with. And making the purchase might put them in an uncomfortable place.

We can’t know for sure if a client has simply made a firm decision not to use our product or service, or if they are in “pre-purchase remorse”. If the latter, then they need a little more support and they will complete the purchase with us.

So, if you suspect pre-purchase remorse; confront it. Explain in an email or voicemail message that you know this is a big decision and that it should not be taken lightly. Then offer to provide some sort of reassurance. Cases studies or ”customers like you” (note the presumptive language) are one way to help reassure them. Let them know you are there to answer their questions. And be patient and persistent. You need to believe that they will see the light eventually, and you WILL get your sale.

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.