Change isn’t throwing away all the things that didn’t work. It’s accepting the fact that the way you did things yesterday might not have been the best, and for certain the way you do things today is not how they will be done in the future. Yes, the basics stay the same but customers and products change.
When I graduated school back in the 70’s, I knew I wanted to move out on my own, I wanted to buy a car, I wanted to take exotic trips to exotic places I’d never been, I wanted it all. I knew nothing about sales, except that salespeople made a lot of money. My uncle was a sales guy who played golf every week, lived in a great house, always drove a new car, had the best of everything. I was blessed by simply being able to walk, talk and chew gum at the same time. Plus, I was 18 then, and of course, I knew it all. So…armed with that, I just figured I’d be a success. The day after graduation I got my first job, in a bank, as a bank teller….I told myself that the experience would be great but this was no career for someone like me. I got my experience, and I moved on. The experience proved to me that working with Customers was just plain fun, and I could get paid to do it! How bad could that be? My next job was at a Japanese company where I met my first sales challenge. I was talking on the phone with a customer of all people, who said “Hey, you really should think about being in sales”. That’s all I EVER thought about, but I realized in that one sentence, he was offering me a job, which I jumped at. He said he’d teach me whatever I needed to know….and he did. He was going to change my life. And he did. He taught me about Personal Computers and how to sell them and how to talk to people about them. I had to learn from the mother board up….Next thing I knew, I was on my way to Hawaii, as an award for being a top producer for the products we sold. Then the PC market changed, and the challenge began. I had to reinvent myself, my sales presentation, my whole behavior to move into the glorious world of food sales. I realized that if I could be a chameleon, and be just what the customer needed at that moment, I could win against my competition. I learned that the customer I was speaking to was the most important person in my life. At that moment. Till the next customer came along. And THAT customer was the most important person in my life. At that moment. Till the next one came along. Ten years later, I wanted to go back into technology sales, and I realized that a whole lot had changed in the time I sold food. I earned the reputation as the “Duchess of Dead Birdies” because of my poultry sales, and I decided I could earn a reputation in technical sales too. I presented myself to my potential sales manager as “The salesperson you’re looking for to take your company into the next millennium” and, when he was through laughing at me, he agreed to talk to me. With nothing more than determination and a desire to succeed, I set out to learn everything I could about the industry that I was going into….and I’ve learned something every day about the industry that I’m still in.
So where does this leave you, whether you’re standing at the beginning of your first sales job or taking the last contract of your career or some where in the middle the only thing in this line of work you can count on is change. The same basic skills apply; it is a focus on the fundamentals that allows you to change products, companies or even industries. Sure maybe you started out selling replacement windows and now you sell million dollar software packages, but in fact you still need to do the same basic things. Find a customer, fill the need and deliver the product in the manner that your customer expects. It’s sales that sets the expectation and as a professional sales person you are the face of your company day in and day out. It’s like peer pressure in school, because you get to be the cool kid every one is looking to for direction. Sales people in general have a bad reputation, one for manipulating people into buying things they don’t want. Some people make money that way, but they don’t stay in a business too long. This is the image that people have when you say you’re in sales. It’s the greatest profession in the world but it gets a bad rap because of a few rotten apples. What the average consumer doesn’t see or think about is that there are millions of skilled professionals that are impeccably honest that solve problems for their customer each and every day. Sure, at the end of the process a sale is made, but many of those same sales people are the ones that executives turn to when they have a business need to solve. Whether it is the small start up company in your town, the local gas station or the largest corporation in the world. They all rely on sales people to impart expertise, to help them grow their businesses, care for their employees, or make them more profitable. “Trust is earned”. We’ve all heard it somewhere along the line, so how do you earn someone’s trust. It’s simple. Be honest, if you don’t know the answers go find them, do what you say you will and always call people back when you say you will. If there’s secret to this business that’s it. Short and sweet, everything else around it simply is to make the journey a little better, more tolerable and of course more profitable.
Not everyone is cut out for every sales job. It’s a simple but crucial concept, some people excel at selling the intangible… insurance, financial services are often the first to come to mind but there are so many others. Maintenance contracts, scheduled service agreements, consulting services and Software (though I’ll argue if you can sell a product you’ve already sold something intangible, your own value). Why software? You can’t touch it and feel it. Sure you can show samples, you can install demonstration versions or run simulations and projections but until it’s there and in place the customer only thinks they know what it will do for them. A bull dozer…you can see its size and if you really want to, go out in the lot and move a little bit of earth around. The intangible requires a different approach. You need to be an artist who can not only understand the product being positioned but paint the picture of the benefit it will deliver through a solid understanding of the need.
Other people sell products like there is no tomorrow, the tangible has a certain benefit but there is always an intangible to every sale even if it’s selling a t shirt to bubba through a retailer. Doubt it? Here’s an example:
You’re competing for a large customer’s account because their distributor just shut down. You know they were distributing the same things, or similar products that you distribute. You know that by landing this account, you can increase your monthly sales and most definitely achieve your quota. You set up a meeting, where you present all of the things that you can do for this customer. So does your competition. The difference is, you showed the potential customer how working with your company could help his company grow his business, get trained, be a more complete organization by delivering a more complete solution to his customer and thus, you could help him develop, and retain his own customer base and make him more successful. You learned what he needed because you asked questions and earned his trust. Your competitor came in and offered him a lower price and made a lot of commitments that he was challenged to keep… but nothing else. At first, the other guy was chosen as the supplier….but before too long, Mr. Customer came back to you and wanted to work with you. Why? Because you showed him value. You demonstrated ways to help him be more complete. You showed him the intangible. You showed him VALUE. Learn to under commit and over deliver. The key to any successful career….under commit and over deliver. Your Customers will be lifers if you can commit to making their lives simpler, and then proceed to make them easy.
So why the change topic? In sales, things change every day. Products change, models get old or replaced by the inevitable new and better model. Customers change, not only what they buy but who they buy from and how the buying decision is made. Territories change. It’s a reality that today you might be covering these three states and tomorrow you’re now responsible for two different ones, maybe even in a different part of the country. If you have chosen sales as a career…change happens. With each change though there is the potential that change brings.
Once upon a time there was a company who was being ravaged by changes, they were losing the war, the tech bubble had burst, and they were in the tech industry. Customers were leaving in droves, and many of the ones who weren’t changing their suppliers were declining in sales or worse yet going out of business. The reality was that the industry wasn’t going to be replaced; they were selling wagon wheels when rubber car tires were in vogue. But they did change. They changed their product mix, to include new types of products. Ones that hadn’t been sold before and in some cases the products didn’t even exist just a year or two earlier. At the time, in a meeting with some panicked staff, the CEO just sat calmly, assessed all the planning and options and stated “we haven’t even met our best customers yet.” Turns out he was right. He knew change was inevitable and sure they had lost some business but he had enough confidence in where they were headed and all the talented people he had on staff that they would weather the storm and come out of it positioned for growth and be an even stronger organization.
The next reality of sales is that some people fail at it. I know a lot of great sales people who got fired for one reason or another, admittedly many of the times it was as they put it “not my fault”. As the old saying goes “I was looking for a job when I found this one.” Failing at sales is part of the job, that doesn’t mean you always need to be looking for a new one. Not everyone buys, that’s the reality. Just like baseball. Even the greatest batters of all time make an out 7 out of 10 times they walk up to bat. Sometimes you fail because you didn’t know what to do when an unusual situation came up or simply, you didn’t put enough into it. The more times you get to bat, the better you’ll become. In sales, the more calls you make, the better you’ll become at your craft.
Things to do:
Stop now and make an honest self assessment of your strengths and weaknesses. It is important to understand not only what challenges you, or where you have fallen short, but also what your strengths are. Then after you have listed 5-10 strengths and 5-10 weaknesses commit to a goal. I will improve my (insert your skill here) write it down and come back to it at least once a week looking at your activities that past week and reassess your progress. Also look at how you can leverage your strengths to your favor in the selling process, use your advantages to the greatest ability possible.
For example, you commit to getting more prospects on the phone each week. Set an appointment with yourself in your calendar for an hour each and every day to make outbound calls to potential customers and then create a follow up schedule for yourself so that you meet your commitment of calling the prospect back when you said you would.
TIP: Have a list of prospects ready to call during this hour! Make sure you’ve done your research, you have the phone number, a contact name if possible, a little of information about the company that you’re calling so that during your scheduled hour you can run down your list and make as many calls as possible. In reality, you may need two hours! One to prepare your list of calls and the other to actually call.
If you didn’t win the Big One….be bold enough to ask why. Learn from your mistakes, refine your approach and move onto the next one. Ask yourself those tough questions…what did I do wrong? What could I have done better? Hone your craft and make it better the next time around. Look at where you missed and determine what the thing or things were that could have made a difference. Did you missing something crucial in your discovery by not asking the right questions, did you correctly interpret their buying motivations?
TIP: always ask yourself or the Customer – you can’t always get an answer but if you’ve built a decent rapport and don’t treat it like your selling them something else more often than not you can get a glimpse into what the prospect or customer really liked and what just didn’t ring quite true.
Learn this today and you’ll be better off tomorrow. In sales, your world will constantly be changing. You’ll be constantly learning something new. You’ll be learning new “sales speak” – methods of presentation – on a regular basis. You’ll discover a new tool to make you more successful on a regular basis and you’ll be adding to your sales bucket (funnel…pipeline, whatever word you’re comfortable with) on a regular basis. We hope.
Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg but also don’t become someone who only knows the way it was back when. Imagine if you will going to a doctor that only knows medical techniques from 30 years ago, in this day and age even 2-5 years ago isn’t quite what it needs to be you need to change to stay current and viable, you don’t have to follow the down side of a market but you do need to figure out how to constantly improve and challenge yourself each and everyday to be just a little bit better than the day before. Think of your self as a weightlifter, no one can walk into a health club and pick up something that weighs 400 pounds the first time if they have never lifted anything heavy in their life. But with constant training, proper form, hard work and education you’d be amazed how many people can pick that weight up over and over again. That is about change, changing what you’re doing to achieve what you need want to. Changing how you go about doing the little things and the big things and changing how you plan to pick up the weight of the selling profession. The days are gone where you have job for life, the only way to have a job for life is to accept that you need to change and then and only then can you achieve results that every company looks for in one way or another.
