Whether you are one of the faithful following the FIFA 2010 World Cup or one of the millions driven to distraction by the endless coverage in the media, the story of France’s rapid exit from the tournament is a sobering one for anyone in sales.

On June 22 the French national team lost to the hosts of the tournament South Africa. France are ranked 9th in the world and won the World Cup in 1998 and Euro in 2000. South Africa are 83rd and only rejoined world football in 1992.

Only a matter of days ago the petulant multi-millionaire France players refused to train because of a bust-up with their coach. Many of them are considered amongst the best players in the world and the weight of national expectation was on their shoulders. But still they did not make it past the first hurdle in the tournament.

Is your team full of winners but not a winning team? As Clive Woodward, the former coach of the rugby world cup winning England team said, the victory is in the inches not in the feet. It is the many small things that add up that create victory. And selling is ultimately about winning.

For every sporting disappointment there is a sporting inspiration. Greece in 2004 won the 2004 Euro football championship and the team had been written off even at the group stages. In their whole history they had only qualified for two major tournaments.

Salespeople need to learn to lock out distractions and each day recalibrate their attitude. We need to think about what is important today and what we can do to get the victories we want. To achieve those goals we have set ourselves. The big difference between the smaller and bigger football tournament teams is their motivation, hunger and focus.

In the case of France it is so easy to blame everything on the coach Raymond Domenech who has been in his position for 6 years. It is like blaming one’s personal failure on the sales manager when you have the autonomy to go out there and get the business. What a bunch of nonsense!

A former headmaster of mine used to say “excuses are lies”. And I never wanted to be a liar. What is more, we are all too often prone to blame our failures on others when hindsight shows we could have done things differently ourselves.

Examine all those small changes each day that could be regarded as Woodward’s ‘inches’. Do something a little bit better each day and you never need to wait for the big crunch moment. And don’t rely on others to give you motivation or direction. If they do – great. If they don’t, do something about it yourself. Let’s learn the lesson of France’s 2010 failure and emulate Greece’s 2004 triumph.

(this blog written immediately prior to England’s crunch match against Slovenia)

Moments of truth (MOT) in a sales context are those instants in a presentation, negotiation, telemarketing call, prospect meeting or needs analysis where you can see the deal swing to you or away from you. They are the moments when something is said or done that takes the prospect’s desire to buy a new level; up or down.

The best salespeople spot these moments and adapt. Poor salespeople blithely chunter on without realising that the right statement or question can move the whole process one step nearer to the close. We have all encountered the latter – most recently I had an domestic energy rep come to the door and I told them I was busy upstairs and thought they were someone I was expecting. Nonetheless they insisted “but this won’t take a moment and you could save…”. A better line might have been “when is a better time?” but that was not in the script.

Often these MOTs can be very subtle and it is inexperience that prevents you from noticing them. It could be something as small as a noticeable hesitation by the prospect, often when we mention the price! In a face-to-face meeting, it could be a frown when you talk about delivery times. Or it could be one raised eyebrow when you mention one of your existing large clients.

The thing with MOTs is that even the most experienced salesperson cannot be certain of its significance. And that is why they stop. They stop talking. They pause. They ask a question. They make an observation about the prospect’s reaction and they become the detective: “Mr Smith, I can’t help noticing your reaction to our lead times – how does that compare to your expectation?”.

Other MOTs are blindingly obvious. The prospect might ask; “So how much would 500 of those be if we wanted them next month?”. Alternatively; “How many times do I have to tell you people, we don’t need any widgets?”.

When we focus our attentions more on the prospects and less on our product or presentation, we allow ourselves to intuitively raise our awareness of these MOTs. Don’t be worried if you get it wrong: better that you misinterpret a comment or hesitation by the prospect than you miss a big clue that could help you win the business.

Trendwatching.com has spotted what it believes to be a new trend – that of ‘sellsumers’. In essence, consumers are increasingly starting to sell or rent various skills, services and assets. From making money in their spare time via Google adverts to renting out parking spaces, people are becoming every more enterprising.

In essence, most of these novel services have become possible as a result of the Internet. We can now reach out many more people, at negligible cost and do it instantaneously. Plus the new services allow us to be found via sophisticated search mechanisms.

Part of me was a little annoyed to see the term in the first paragraph include the word “sell”. Because the various services outlined are marketing, not selling.

To me the difference between selling is this: you put up a stall in the market, you put up great signs, you get the pricing right, you choose your pitch and decide what to sell: that is marketing. Spotting casual browsers, engaging people who squeeze your product, chatting with punters that were going to walk by and charming people into parting with their money: that is selling.

But I guess “marketsumers” does not work quite so well as a term.

And then I realised that the sellsumer term at least makes the concept of selling more palatable, at least in the UK.

I may have spotted another trend: a lot of marketing is increasingly being called selling. If that is the case, and the general population are getting less squeamish about the concept of selling, then I am all for it.

For more about sellsumers, have a look at http://bit.ly/a4VZkW

Ever come across a puppy-dog sale? You almost certainly have but possibly did not know that is what it is called. Look at it as a try-before-you-buy.

In principle these are fantastic ways to generate interest in your service. But you have to be willing to give away something of genuine value.

We offer 1.5-hour free taster sessions to prospective clients. This can actually end up being quite expensive because the organisation, travel cost and time involved is not hugely less than a paid day. But I call them our “shop window”. It gives potential buyers a chance to try before they buy.

In effect we are mitigating the risk that a buyer perceives in choosing the wrong product or service. This fear of making the wrong decision is one of the biggest “drags” to even beginning the discussions of changing supplier.

You may well be a brilliant company with a wonderful product but how can the buyer know that UNTIL they have already started using you? This especially so if your product or service is “disruptive”. Computer-related products are just such a product. Almost all the stakeholders in a company are affected by the installation of a new computer network or phone system. If the main buying unit gets it wrong, EVERYONE will give them grief!

However, you need to be careful about how you offer your “puppy dog”. It must be genuine and offer a real chance for the user to get a benefit. Nearly is not good enough.

As an example I recently downloaded some software that converts file formats for video. There is a free trial version. It differs from the full version only in that it applies a “watermark” to the video, so the marketing explains. In reality an ugly and obtrusive message sits over the image telling people that the video was created using an “unauthorised” version of the software. But you only realise this when you make your first converted video.

There is no way anyone could tolerate that “watermark”. “But they do this so you can just use it for free”, might be the response. But remember what I said before, the best puppy dog sale gives you a genuine chance to try before you buy. Software company Adobe are a classic example: they offer their PDF document reader for free. But you have to pay for the software that does the converting.

Rather than being impressed by how well the video conversion software works, I will be looking for another one. Even though this is actually irrational, I would rather spend more time finding another software that I will pay for and possibly not even use their free version at all before buying. So the first company has actually HELPED the competition.

So, think of how you offer puppy-dog sales to generate interest and ensure they are genuine useful offers: “sow, and you shall reap”!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.