I keep hearing and reading about this concept of putting the passion back into selling. Nonsense.

Passion is equated with romance, love, emotion. Is that what we want our salespeople to exhibit?

Alternatively, do we want them to do the basics well? Things like elevator pitches, value propositions, objection handling, closing and listening skills.

Sales is about making a human connection. But it is not about smooching with our prospects. That is account management – making the customer feel loved.

Prospects don’t care whether you love them. They care about return on investment. Once your foot is in the door, you need to be getting down to the nitty gritty. Sure, you need to build the relationship. But that is about empathy and rapport, not about passion.

Look at this way, to which would prospects respond better: the enthusiastic puppy dog with little product understanding or core sales skills or the cold, calculating sales machine that knows how to turn every objection into a benefit and closes even the most resistant of buyers?

Sales team motivation is not about encouraging sales people to appear passionate. Look at the sales figures. You will have all types of personalities achieving all levels of sales. The miserable beggar can be your top performer. Your energetic client-lover may be the busiest but could be failing to bring home the bacon.

Instead of passion, think motivation. Carrot and stick. And give your team the sales ‘tools’ they need to be better sales professionals.

The best way to avoid objections? Don’t ask the questions.

So, if you agree you have to start asking the question – will you buy? – now you accept you will have a lot of ‘no’s. So we can’t avoid it as salespeople, much as we would love every prospect to write us a cheque.

There is a paradox in selling – the more passionate you are about your product, the more likely you are to get the sale. Forget the facts, if the prospect gets the message that you believe in what you are selling, a part of them thinks “well if he thinks it is that great, maybe there is something in it”. And the paradoxical part? It is that very passion that can allow you to be upset when prospects fob you off sometimes.

Some prospects will give good, objective, rational reasons as to why they will not buy your product. The other 99% will just say they are not interested, or something similar. And a significant proportion of these will try to make you feel bad about contacting them (that helps them to deal with the difficult job of being nasty to you).

The ones that try to make you feel bad can be the most problematic for empathetic salespeople. You can start to believe them if you are not careful! If the prospect has an opinion about you or the product, then try to reason with them once, but give up quickly. Emotion will outweigh the facts and they will still want to make you feel bad, all too often. At this point, you respect their opinion – for it is no more than an opinion - and move on. Put the experience behind you, neither you nor the prospect have learnt anything, but it was a necessary bump in the road to the summit of sales success mountain.

Telemarketers in particular need to be thick-skinned. The prospects are not rejecting the telemarketer. They don’t know them from Adam. They are saying no possibly for a huge range of reasons, some of those reasons can be dealt with, others are best circumnavigated.

So embrace the ‘no’s. Sometimes you are the fly, sometimes you are the windscreen. It is an immutable fact that prospects will beat up on salespeople. But it is also immutable that the buyers are out there somewhere. The more people you talk to; the more people you will sell to.

No, this is not a sales training blog about A Levels or MBAs, it is about making sure we understand the quality of our prospects.

A recent project reminded me about this neat and simple way of starting to prioritise prospects. Many sales people focus their attention like magpies on the new shiny lead that has just come in rather than older better quality sales opportunities. As a result they can be very busy but are failing to get the sales results that they should

A system of lead qualification focuses your attention on when you are most likely to get the best reward. Don’t be fooled by suggestions that every prospect is a potential goldmine. It is an altogether different thing to make sure you capitalise on every opportunity and another to avoid wasting your precious selling time.

We use a sophisticated scoring system known as MANDACT with clients but the principle can be applied immediately by any sales person or sales manager reading this. In essence we look at 7 factors related to the opportunity. By scoring those individually, we sum the scores and arrive at a total. This number gives us an opportunity score. The higher the number; the higher the priority for us to pursue the opportunity.

Higher opportunity scores also indicate to us that we should focus more resources on these prospects. That means more time, manpower, mileage, financial cost and ‘opportunity cost’. We do that because the score suggests that we are likely to get a better return on this opportunity than those with lower scores.

We won’t discuss scoring criteria here, but they will vary between businesses. Sales people will generate higher scores for opportunities that win them more commission more quickly. The enterprise might score differently based on lifetime value of the client (if the two requirements are not aligned, it teaches us that the compensation and benefits system for the sales people are not correctly designed!).

Looking at the elements of MANDACT:

Money: here we consider whether there is budget allocated by the prospect, how large is that budget and does our opportunity sponsor have control over the finances?

Authority: this point encourages us to analyse how well we understand the decision making unit (DMU) and how much influence we might have over it.

Need: otherwise know as ‘pain’. How pressing is it for the prospect to acquire a product or service to cure their operational pain?

Decision: what things is the prospect going to consider when making the decision? In other words, what boxes do you need to tick to get the sale, how well do you know these boxes and how well would your product or service fulfil these criteria?

Ability: what is the ability of the prospect to implement your product or service? Are all the logistical, technical and practical steps in place to immediately take on board the solution you might propose?

Competition: how devoted to your company is the prospect? Have they gone out to 10 companies and they want the cheapest solution, at one extreme? Are they a loyal client that is willing to pay more for your solution because they understand the quality that you offer, at the other end of the scale.

Timing: put simply how soon do might they buy?

Once all these considerations have been weighed and compared via a MANDACT analysis, any salesperson can start prioritising opportunities and making the best use of their time to win more sales, more quickly.

Men: have you ever been asked to go and buy detergent by your loved one, entered the supermarket aisle, been confronted by a bewildering array of boxes and simply bought the first one that came to hand? Obviously your loved one berated you for making the wrong choice of size, fragrance, bio/non-bio variant, etc

OK, so this is a stereotype and I will probably get flamed for giving it as an example. But the point is that often we make irrational decisions when we buy. This is especially true when we have a large range of choices and it is an unfamiliar purchase.

If you sell to businesses, think for a moment how many options you present to them. Many salespeople are scared of losing a sale by not offering the exact option that the prospect was seeking. Surely the safest thing to do is to present all the possible solutions and let them choose?

Maybe sometimes your buyer is a very scientific, rational, intelligent person with lots of time on their hands. Other times they will be a busy executive with many things on their mind other than the new stationery supplier and they may be rather harassed by having to file the monthly budget that week.

We often assume that the prospect cares enough to make a careful reasoned decision. But we regularly make snap decisions ourselves so why should prospects be so different.

I have lost count of the number of times that friends tell me about their new car and immediately follow this by a description of “how nice the salesperson was”. Who cares if they were nice? Surely you want the best combination of value, economy, mileage, seat configuration, prestige, service cost?

You may win the business next time because you made it easy for the prospect to choose you. Even though your product was more expensive that the competition’s, had a longer lead time or was less flexible.

Let’s set aside the fact that people buy people and bear in mind that buyers don’t always want bewildering choice and comprehensive features. They want to believe that you are advising them well. So make the choice easy: keep the options limited, be seen to care and tailor the offering closely to the requirement. Don’t worry about whether you truly have offered the absolute best option. Good enough is good enough and the buyer will rationalise the rest after they have handed over the money…

Have you ever heard a salesperson complain that they are having trouble selling because their product is too expensive? As a sales trainer, you better believe I have! If only I got a penny of every time I heard a delegate moan about this.

In many cases, you can’t change the price. For one reason or another you have a price scale, you are already at rock bottom or you know that your proposition will be undermined if you discount. And then the conversation comes to the price.

The main thing to understand is that buyers don’t want the cheapest, they want the best value. Sure, they regularly ask for our best price, tell us we must be making healthy margins at that price or they could get it cheaper elsewhere. But deep down, they are not asking you to discount. They are asking you to justify.

It is the second-rate salespeople that begin the negotiation here. When issues about price come up, this is not the beginning of the negotiation. Certainly, it is a buying cue and is an encouraging indicator (they would not raise the issue of price generally if they had no intention to buy). In fact it is an opportunity to prove you are right-priced.

So do you know your price justifications? They should be reflex responses (of course delivered in a style that makes them sound considered and the prospect is the first to hear them). They should be in your sales toolbox. Write them down now, if you don’t know them already.

When salespeople focus on price objections and blame this on their difficulty in converting prospects, it is rarely because the product or service has been wrongly priced by accounts or marketing. It is usually because the salesperson is finding excuses. That is a motivational and cultural issue and is soon cured. And sometimes it becomes a recruitment and performance management one if it is not solved!

Even if you have the best product or service in the world, if you can’t communicate it, you may as well not turn up to the sales appointment.

In our personality profiling projects, it really hammers home to me how one of the defining characteristics of an excellent customer service or sales representative is their ability to communicate.

A good friend of mine Richard Murphy very kindly gave me a book recently called the “Jelly Effect” by Andy Bounds. Now let’s set aside the subtext that I could read into his giving ME the book since I have broad shoulders. He promises me the choice of gift was not determined by my communication skills deficit but I am humble enough to always want to improve!

In that book, there are numerous sensible and practical tips on improving one’s communication. And frequently this is subtly tied in to the process of winning new business. And this is spot-on in my opinion.

I recently held a meeting with a sales director of a merchandising and promotions company and explained I had no need for his services since I had a loyal and long-standing supplier. But the director was a powerful communicator and really sought to understand what I wanted out of a supplier. He soon spotted the Achilles heal of that supplier and I have left the opportunity open to him, despite thinking I could not possibly need his services.

When I explained to the vendor of a voting handset technology that I was not in the market to buy but was simply investigating options, he listened. He then outlined options and benefits related to my long-term needs and I have now several times found opportunities that may require his product.

Two very different suppliers but both united by their high quality communication skills. They let me GUIDE them to understand how to sell to me. They let me talk and pulled out the important elements that allowed them to effectively pitch their product and direct the negotiation.

As Andy Bounds’ moving story about his mother’s blindness and his visual impairment illustrate, we need to let our prospects tell US what we need to tell THEM to fully describe their needs. Listen to what they say (and what they don’t say) and – like a detective – you can pick out the evidence to build your case.

The temptation is to treat all prospects and customers the same. But each has different needs and they convey them in a different way. Equally they will respond to different messages and different styles so our effective communication must begin with seeking to understand them as individuals.

To quote motivational writer and speaker Anthony Robbins: “To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.”

As a UK-based sales trainer but one who observes what happens in US sales I am frequently struck by the differential attitudes towards selling between the two sides of the pond.

Within sales, professionals are proud and competitive. Two sales people will soon adopt the language of conversion, prospects and pipeline and recognise a fellow professional. But outside this rarefied atmosphere there is a palpable animosity to anyone calling themselves a sales professional.

For 9 years I have been on what appears to be a one-man crusade to encourage ‘normal’ people to see sales in a more positive light. I am willing now to admit defeat.

Sales people need to recognise how the world sees them. A word association exercise will frequently throw up “pushy”, “unethical”, “slimey”, “liar”, “slick” when asked to associate words with salespeople. And those are genuinely from a flipchart conducted with a customer service team last year.

If we can’t change the world, how should we react? Of course it depends who we are talking to. And it is this consideration that highlights a trait of the most successful salesperson – the ability to be a social chameleon.

Sales directors love to watch me ‘perform’. By that I mean in a pitch. I am a sales trainer primarily but the commissioning buyer is often the sales director and they expect to see the skills exhibited by the trainer/training company as well as being imparted to their staff. So at this end of the sales – normal person spectrum, we need to show off our knowledge of techniques, skills, language and thinking.

At the other end of the spectrum we have, for example, a teacher that we might meet at a party. I am sufficiently self aware to recognise my own paranoias and I can sincerely say that I have at least twice watched objectively education professional perceptibly wince when I say that I am in sales.

In these circumstances we need to initially adapt. We need to find the euphemism for what we do (account management, product marketing, account development, describe our industry sector, etc). In my case in this instance, I am just at trainer. When pressed by normal people I might say I train in customer service….and sales. The conversation then has a chance to go swimmingly.

And our prospects can react in much the same way. Plenty of your potential buyers will enjoy the cut and thrust of a negotiation or a pitch. Indulge them. Others will be possibly insecure, less commercially aware and frankly prejudiced. Here you must move much more into the consultant or doctor mode. You will find it best to more than normal focus on how YOU can HELP them. Mirror and reflect their posture and attitudes until you have built credibility according to their value framework.

It is this adaptability that is the hallmark of the best sales people and a bit like a hypnotist, no-one knows that have been under the spell of a professional salesperson.

I was recently doing some research on a personality profiling tool and came across some fascinating research:

“At L’Oreal, sales agents selected on the basis of certain emotional competencies
significantly outsold salespeople selected using the company’s old selection
procedure. On an annual basis, salespeople selected on the basis of emotional
competence sold $91,370 more than other salespeople did, for a net revenue increase
of $2,558,360. Salespeople selected on the basis of emotional competence also had
63% less turnover during the first year than those selected in the typical way (Spencer
& Spencer, 1993; Spencer, McClelland, & Kelner, 1997)”

The sniffing around was related to the excellent Tracom Social Styles Psychometric tool and it really reminded me how so much of what sales people do is in their state of mind than in their knowledge. Emotional intelligence is a termed made popular by Daniel Goleman and looks at personality traits such as influence, team leadership, organizational awareness, self-confidence, achievement drive and leadership.

The L’Oreal research really resonated because I was recently with a prospect and I was given the opportunity to listen in to a telesales call. They client was relatively pleased with the performance of the team but was mindful that they could do better. In listening to the call, I could easily agree with them.

The telemarketer had a lovely clear, cheery voice. All good there. When the prospect spoke, she responded accurately. All good there. But the over-riding impression was that she sounded like a poor actress with a script that she had been force-fed. The attitude was utterly un-engaging and the prospect soon found a way to get rid of her.

Much better a genuine, enquiring, empathetic approach. One that started a conversation, that exhibited flexibility of thought and showed a spirit of discovery.

Are you or your team sounding like you are going through the motions? Or do you sound like the person you are speaking to is the most important call of the day?

An increased awareness of emotional intelligence issues will make us more money, as the L’Oreal example shows in spades. Some people have EI automatically, some lower. But all of us can consciously foster it so that prospects are willing and keen to spend more time with us.

Do you get prospects regularly asking for reference customers or testimonial sites? If you do, do you have a co-ordinated and reasoned strategy for dealing with them?

Most salespeople do not. Or, if they do, their system is TTWWADI (That’s The Way We Always Did It). It is inherited and may included a list of clients that has not been updated in years.

Let’s firstly deal with the WHY: the reasons that prospects ask for reference customers:

RUBBISH REASONS (ones that are red flags to you and a sign that you need to calculate careful the value of investing too much time with the prospect)
• To catch you out: they may be speaking to lots of prospective suppliers and it is a quick way to eliminate the weak
• They feel they should: a quick cross-examination reveals that they are not the true decision maker and this is part of their vetting process.
• They don’t really want to use you and hope that you don’t jump this hurdle: try to find out if all the prospects are required to comply

GREAT REASONS (it might seem like aggravation to comply with the request to provide a reference but they are showing you that they want to use you)
• To give them confidence in choosing you: you are near the top of their list and they want to prove to themselves they are making the right decision.
• They genuinely want to hear from a true testimonial site in order they can rubber stamp their decision to use you.

If you look at these explanations and consider any others that come to mind, there is an inescapable conclusion: What is the point? In other words, will it truly help the prospect to choose your company.

More evidence that the process is counterproductive is the consideration that you are not likely to give them references to a company that was displeased with your service!

So, what do you do?

1. Make sure you can deal with such queries with as little hassle to you as possible: spend time all the time to get good quality testimonials from your clients. And ask clients whether they are willing to be reference sites.

Happy clients will not only be delighted to comply, you can then ask them to do a testimonial. Start with a request for a video testimonial, then an audio, then a spontaneous written on, and then – and only then – write it for them, based on what they said they liked about you. (The next stage is then to get referrals to their contacts but that is for another article!)

2. Check with the prospect the exact nature of their query - do they REALLY want to speak to a reference client? If so, what type, what sort of issues do they want to broach, etc. If they are clearly going through the motions, do the minimum to comply. If the request is a deal-maker – bust a gut to line up a superb former client.

Prospects set bear traps for suppliers they don’t want to use. This is why you should be very careful about having prepared solutions to overcome the bear traps. Why? Because sometimes they DO want to use you and you want to leave the door open to establish this. Equally you want to spend more time on the more serious prospects.

Prospects also ask you to jump through hoops if they are not the Decision Maker. Maybe such requests for references are a red flag that you need to find someone else in the Decision Making Unit to pitch to.

The bottom line is that you need to have done some preparation and strategising. You need to have lined up reference customers and gathered testimonials well in advance. It must be part of your personal and corporate after-sales. Sometimes just having a sheet of testimonials in your pitch or proposal short-cuts the request. Either way, reference customers should become assets to your overall sales process so that a request for them is never an unpleasant distraction to your sale.

The thorny issue of voicemails came up in a recent online forum in which I participated and it was fascinating to see the range of responses from the professionals. Ultimately, as with all things in sales, I think it comes down to ethics and common sense.

A lot of the discussion was around what clever wording could be left on the answerphone. Much of it was not quite dishonest but misleading. But I think all this missed the point about how prospects will listen to the voicemail.

I can categorically say that I have never called back anyone who made a cold call to me after they left a message. It does not matter how clever their pitch. If it is a sales call, I probably won’t be interested and I sure as hell ain’t spending my phone bill to find out!

The reality may be that the caller has done their research and I am missing out on a great opportunity. But I am willing to take the risk and I believe so will most prospects.

So my mantra for voicemails is think why anyone why might call back someone that has not given them sufficient reason to call back? I think two approaches are head and shoulders above the rest. Either the curiosity approach or the confusion approach. Either way, the prospect chooses to call back because they want to know more. What better position to be in as a salesperson?

I know there will be some people who think this is misleading but it is not. We are simply playing on people’s psychology and the fear of missing out.

So, two examples: “Hi, Andy from A&P, can Gemma call back. Oh, the number in case you don’t have it is…..”. The point is it does not sound like a sales call. It sounds like a friend or contact. How you deal with the incoming call is the subject for another article!

And the other example: “Bob, can you call me back about the widgets please? In case you don’t have it, the number is….”. And that is it. No embellishments, no pitch.

Don’t expect a deluge of calls. Maybe one in 100 might call back. But that is one more than if you don’t leave a message and probably a higher response than leaving a detailed benefits statement. Try it and let me know!