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Drive Sales Performance Metrics by Selling to a Gap

I recently started working out again, so I decided to seek out a gym. As I weighed Lifetime Fitness vs. the local rec center, the options were overwhelming. So, I sat down with the GM of Lifetime Fitness and he said, “Can I ask you a few questions before I give you the tour?”

His questions revolved around four things:

1. How often I work out.
2. If I had any workout equipment at home.
3. What I thought I should or could be doing more of. What’s the ideal situation? Meaning, how much I should be working out.
4. What I was looking for.

“So, what’s been holding you back? Why hasn’t that been happening?” he asked. I said, “Quite frankly, time.” He nodded. “What else?” “Probably know-how,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.” “If you did have that access, what would be the perceived benefit?” he asked. “I’d be healthier.” Essentially what he did, what all good salespeople do—sell to a gap. He sold to my desired situation, rather than to my current situation. Lifetime Fitness was a vehicle to get from where I was to where I wanted to be. It wasn’t necessarily going to solve the problem, but it was the vehicle to get me there. Incidentally, both my son and I now have memberships. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Yet you could put salt in the oats. That’s what great sales questions do….reveal a gap to make buyers thirsty.

The Mistake New Sales Reps Make When Opening a Sales Call

In our training sessions, our clients regularly ask about ways of opening a sales call. These questions typically take the form of, “I make 100 cold calls a day and nobody’s buying anything. What am I doing wrong?” or “I leave a voicemail message whenever I don’t reach someone. How come no one ever returns my calls?”

The answer to questions like these can be almost anything, from the type of phone they use to the time of day. However, here is how I usually respond to these questions to insure our discussion has the right focus:

Most sales reps run into this challenge when starting their career and they never overcome it. They make the mistake of confusing business communications with casual communications. If you don’t understand how to communicate on a business level, you will fall back on your casual communication techniques, the same kind of techniques you used with their college buddies.

If you find you are not effective when conducting a sales conversation on the phone, look at your communication techniques. You may be using outdated interruption tactics and focusing on what you want, not about what your prospect wants.

Here are 4 tactics to consider when opening a sales call:

Don’t Open Your Sales Call With ‘Let Me Tell You Why I Called’

I’ve heard many sales reps open their calls with tired phrases like “Let me tell you why I called” or “How are you today”. Fillers like these are a great way to gain think time. They may even work in a face-to-face encounter on occasion. But on the phone, they consume time you don’t have and add nothing meaningful to your conversation.

Conversation starters like “let me tell you why I called” center the conversation around the sales person, not on the prospect or their challenge. You called them at their place of business in the middle of the workday. The purpose of the call is business and you are the problem solver. Jump in and get to the point.

Use Their Name In Moderation During the Sales Call

If you want to get someone’s attention, use his or her name. That has been the business communication philosophy for the last century. We do it in our email campaigns, on the phone, and in face-to-face encounters. Not only does this get your prospect’s attention, it’s also a great way of acknowledging the other party’s importance.

However, if you use a person’s name too much, your conversation comes across as scripted and force. Ironically, in an attempt to achieve rapport, your efforts instead come across as contrived. You want to sound conversational, not like you are trying to hit a “name quota” established by a business communication guru. When using your prospect’s name, use it to get their attention, not their ire.

Talk Like Your Prospect During the Sales Call

Always consider the background of the people you are connecting with. You don’t want to talk over their head or sound condescending.

When opening a sales call, remember why your prospect agreed to listen to you. They aren’t listening to you because you needed an ego boost. They are listening to you because you promised an enticing solution to their problems. If you approach your prospects trying to impress them with fake inflections, forced enthusiasm, and $2 words, you will come across as insincere.

When talking to your prospect, use this piece of advice I heard Lance Tyson give a group of sales reps selling entertainment suites for one of the national sports franchises:

Sales people that can talk like regular folks and not like they just got out of an MBA program tend to do well.

Use the Trial Close As A Tool, Not A Trap

Most beginning sales reps are looking for a success formula that is easy to implement, universal across all prospects, and achieves a desired outcome. No wonder sales reps envision the trial close as a way of getting their prospects to make small commitments, paving the way to the close.

You don’t need an excess of imagination to ask a prospect a series of questions where you know the answer will be “yes”. For example:

“You want to make more money, don’t you?”

“Don’t we all want to be successful?”

“You want your people to be more effective, don’t you?”

Questions like these are targeted at making the prospect’s head bob up and down in a “yes” motion. As a sales rep, you need to be careful of this line of questioning. Your prospects will be on the lookout for it, and you will lose credibility attempting this kind of manipulation.

Instead, think of the trial close as a way of taking the prospect’s temperature. By using the appropriate questions, you can determine if the prospect is ready to move forward in the sales process or if there are objections that you need to address. When opening a sales call, Use a trial close to get the prospect’s permission to move the conversation to the next stage in the sales process. If they aren’t ready to move forward, then you need to go back and gain credibility and trust before forging ahead.

Use Permission Based Selling Techniques When Opening Your Sale Call

The big paradigm today is how to avoid interruption marketing and use permission based marketing instead. Yet, most of the communication tactics used in opening a sales call are interruption based. We typically get in our prospect’s face, wave our hands up and down and say, “Pay attention to me!”

If you want to get your prospect’s attention or more time with your current clients, avoid trying to interrupt their mindset.

Instead, use methods to gently become a part of their mental landscape. Take a strategic approach to your communication efforts. Use tact and diplomacy to talk about the events, challenges, and outcomes that are of interest to them. Then, when you have their attention, gently move the sale forward, lead them to the appropriate solution, and bring them to the eventual commitment.

Remember, the sales takes place in the mind of your prospect. Selling is an away game.

Encourage Sales Talent to Think Through The Prospect’s Mind

When you are doing a little do-it-yourself project on the weekend and you find you need to make a quarter-inch hole in the wall, you go to the hardware store. Why? Are you buying a quarter-inch drill bit, or are you really buying a quarter-inch hole? What the hell do you need a quarter-inch drill bit for unless you need the quarter-inch hole?

What most salespeople fail to realize is that they are not truly selling their product or service. They are selling the product of their product, the service of their service. For instance, when somebody wants to refinance their house, they actually don’t want to refinance their house. They want to be able to pay their bills, build a porch on the back of the house, take a vacation, or pay for their kid’s tuition.

High performing sales teams always work to connect to the prospect’s interests—whether it is through social media, direct interaction face-to-face, on the phone, or any other means. The first seven seconds are the most critical to get their attention. If you survive, you have the next sixty seconds to win their interest. And the first thing you’re selling them isn’t your product or service, but time on their calendar.

Last year, over a million quarter-inch drill bits were sold, not because people wanted quarter-inch drill bits, but because they wanted quarter-inch holes.

Get their interest. Talk holes!

For more ideas on how to sell the results of your product or service, get your copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon.

Observations on Sales Leadership Essentials for the Year

Being a top-producing sales rep doesn’t automatically make you a candidate for sales leadership. I’ve seen many cases where a sales rep was hitting their numbers and killing it in the field. But when they were promoted to sales management, they failed because they couldn’t use the skills they came to rely on in the field.

The roles of sales management and sales leadership are vital to the performance of the overall sales team. But leadership is never about who has the best sales skills or who is the best producer. Sales leadership requires a new and different set of skills and abilities. It requires a different way of looking at the organization. It requires a different way of thinking.

If you are looking to grow your sales organization and put a few people in leadership positions, or you are looking to sharpen your own abilities and lead your sales team to the next level, here are 5 sales leadership essentials you’ll need to review for the year:

• Distinguish between the ship and the crew
• Get comfortable with motivation and manipulation
• Know when to coach and when to take corrective action
• Know the difference between gaining knowledge and getting training
• Strategically use your sales meetings to sharpen your team

Let’s do a quick run down on each one of these essentials.

1. Should Sales Leadership Focus on the Ship or the Crew?

Here’s a question I’ve posed in some of my leadership sessions: If leading a team is like being the captain of a ship, then which is more important – the ship or the crew?

In some form, this question has been the source of arguments for some thought leaders. Some lean towards the ship while others argue in favor of the crew.

So why do I bring this up in my sessions? Because this is not a theoretical exercise. We do ask a similar question in business, and a good sales coach will highlight this with their clients. That is, which is more important: managing the business or leading the team?

In the leadership sessions I facilitate with my clients, I hear a lot of people say, “Geez, I think I’m more of a leader than a manager.” That’s because leadership is perceived as fashionable and exciting.

But when we break it down in the session’s review, participants see that leadership comes down to getting results from the people in their team.

If you look at some of the important elements of leadership, you find things like vision, communication, people skills, and understanding what motivation is. Now, when we break down sales management, we start talking about activities like planning, organizing, directing, and coordinating.

In the coming year, there should be a healthy dose of both leading and managing your team in your daily and weekly activities. Remember, we manage resources and processes for maximum results, and we lead people for maximum impact.

2. Sales Leaders Will Need to Understand How to Use Motivation and Manipulation

Now, many new sales leaders think their job is to motivate their people. But your job, as a sales leader, is to understand the concept of motivation and know what drives your people.

This comes down to acknowledging that as a sales leader, sometimes you must manipulate circumstances or the environment to get people to do something. Naturally, this turns manipulation into a dirty word. But if you go to Merriam Webster’s dictionary online and look up the word manipulation, you’d find that one of the definitions is: to act in a skillful manner.

In order to thrive this year, sales leaders must break that stigma and get comfortable with the idea of manipulation. Something as simple as a contest can be viewed by some as a motivating action while others see it as a manipulation tactic.

What We Can Learn From Nick Fury About Motivating a High-Performance Team Like The Avengers. Remember the first Avengers movie? That’s the one where an alien army from outer space attacked New York City.

In one scene, Captain America and Tony Stark were sitting at a conference table on the helicarrier bridge just after losing Agent Phil Coulson. Then, Nick Fury enters the room and throws down a handful of bloodstained Captain America Trading Cards on the table and says, “These were in Phil Coulson’s jacket. I guess he never did get you to sign them.”

Nick Fury went on, “There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people to see if they could become something more, to see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could. Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea. In heroes.” And as Tony Stark leaves the room out of shame, Fury said, “Well, it’s a good old-fashioned notion.”

Later, as Fury was standing on the bridge of his helicarrier, his right-hand woman, Agent Maria Hill, approached him. She said, “Sir, those cards were in Phil Coulson’s locker, not his pocket.”Fury replied, “They needed a push in the right direction.” And as he notices the Avengers take off in their jet for the next battle, he says, “They got it!”

Most of us look at Fury’s actions and say he motivated his team. However, looking closely at what he did, we see that he understood the strengths of his team. He then skillfully manipulated the environment where the members of his team could motivate themselves to act. That is exactly what we want to do as sales leaders.

Become skillful at manipulating the conditions where your sales team can succeed and they’ll motivate themselves.

3. Know When to Coach and When to Take Corrective Action

Here’s another question for you: Are you coaching or are you performing corrective action? In addition to being an instructor or trainer, Merriam Webster defines a coach as a horse drawn-carriage, a railroad car, or a well-equipped bus. In other words, a coach is a vehicle that helps you get from point A to point B. Or in our case, a coach helps you get from one performance level to a higher performance level.

Here’s the challenge. Many sales leaders will see somebody do something that violates a set standard and they’ll perform what they think is coaching. For example, they will see someone come in late or engage in behavior that is not becoming of the company. They’ll pull the person aside and perform what they call coaching. However, what they’ve actually done is pulled the team member out of the ditch and put them back on the road. That’s not coaching, that’s corrective action.

You coach to impact a person’s behavior or attitude to reach a new, agreed-upon performance standard. You use corrective action when a person is continuously underperforming, is outside the lines, or is always in the ditch. At this point, you aren’t helping them hit a new performance standard. You are helping them back on the normal path.

Sales Leadership Support:  5 Essential Techniques to Enhance Your Coaching Process

If a sales rep needs to get back on track, help them by providing corrective action. Then, coach them to reach higher performance levels.

4. Sales Leaders Will Distinguish Between Gaining Knowledge and Getting Training

Today, people have access to plenty of information. It’s easily accessible in large volumes, and in some cases, it’s not always factual. Now, when you have a large body of factual knowledge disseminated in a formal learning environment, we call that education. In fact, some of what passes for training is actually education about a product or a process.

But there’s a difference between the two. And you can determine the difference by asking the same question we ask our clients. When your people go through a training program, do you want them to know something new, or do you want them to do something new.

With education, your sales team will have new knowledge about a product, a process, or they’ll know how to do something differently. But having that knowledge doesn’t guarantee that they’ll act differently. With applicable training, your sales team will not only know something new, but will be able to change their behavior based on that new information.

A Four-Step Process Sales Leadership Can Use to Change Behaviors and Create High Performing Sales Teams.

• Consider this four-step model we share in our leadership sessions as it relates to the training process.
• Raise the salesperson’s awareness of a needed skill by assessing their current abilities and identifying the desired outcome.
• Provide knowledge and educate the salesperson on elements of the skill.
• Train the salesperson on how to apply the knowledge in real world situations by allowing them to practice using a variety of training techniques.
• Allow the salesperson to practice the new skill in active situations with reviews and coaching.

Using this model, we have seen sales reps develop solid skills which they use to grow their book of business and their careers.

Bottom line here is that new knowledge doesn’t always translate into new action. Knowing the difference between education, training, and coaching will help you develop your high-performance sales team.

5. High Performance Sales Leaders Will Strategically Use Their Meetings to Sharpen Their Sales Teams

The last sales leadership essential involves leveraging the power of your sales meetings.

When we are trying to hold people accountable for a sales call, pipeline numbers, or certain activities, we often let people off the hook by reverting to a one-on-one session. But there’s power in the group. Celebrating people or holding people accountable in a group of salespeople can be a more powerful and effective motivating factor than you can in a one-on-one session.

In a typical sales meeting, sales leaders are making announcements, talking about product knowledge, and trying to motivate the team. Most sales leaders try to do too many things in the short timeframe of that meeting. So, they revert to the one-on-one sessions to motivate, coach, or take corrective action on an individual level.

What I’m suggesting here is to be strategic when determining the purpose, outcomes, and execution of your meetings. If you’re trying to drive a pipeline to goals and activities, and you want to use the power of the group, have a meeting that focuses on the pipeline and acknowledges the accomplishments of those high achievers. Let people know the results of the team. But, if you want to do a training session to apply product knowledge, put it in a different meeting. Don’t pack too many activities into one meeting by making it a training session and a pipeline development meeting.

Keep your meeting focused tightly on one or two outcomes. And leverage the power of the group in a group sales meeting.

To discover more ways to improve your powers of influence and persuasion,  order Lance Tyson’s bestselling book, The Human Sales Factor: The H2H Equation for Connecting, Persuading, and Closing the Deal on Amazon today.

Have Them at HelloEncourage Sales Starters to Build a Strong Sales Team

Getting a two-way conversation going is crucial to increase sales effectiveness, and questions are a great way to do it. Let’s talk about Sales Starters. One time I was with one of my new hires, Ellen Valudes, at a meeting with a VP at Comcast. Sometimes pleasantries can take over a meeting, but Ellen is very gregarious and powerful communicator and I had coached her on that earlier.

As she was looking for her opportunity to bridge out of the pleasantries she said, “Did you know your salespeople are stealing from you?”

I looked over at her, jaw wide open, not knowing what to say.

With a pregnant pause, she continued. “Every time they go into a sales call without a plan and a process, they steal time from the prospect, and from Comcast.”

Ellen had both me and the VP at hello.

She went on: “Our meeting today is going to focus on ideas of how Comcast sales employees can leverage a predictable process to grow sales.”

The Sales Starter or Attention Getter is an opener. It hinges on the ability to gain favorable attention. To do this, you may compliment a prospect, ask questions, refer, educate, share information, or startle.

Having the right Sales Starter can create a great opening. And contrary to popular belief, there is no skill in closing; it’s all about a great opening.

For additional ideas on powering the sales process and building a high performance sales team, get your copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon.

We have reviewed how to identify sales objections and separate out true concerns from the smoke screens used by disinterested buyers. We reviewed the types of sales objections we encounter in the sales process. And we reviewed the best time to overcome common sales objections. So now it’s time to look at overcoming objections in sales through our responses.

Coach Your People to Separate Put-offs from Genuine Buyer’s Objections

Let’s start by reviewing an example of what doesn’t work. In an in-house consultation session, one of the sales reps asked me the following question:

“My prospects keep blowing me off before I can present my services. If I can get in front of them, I know I can sell them. How do I get them to stop blowing me off?”

Many sales reps often mistakenly identify put-offs for true buyer’s objections. In a put-off, recognize that the prospect is voicing opposition to your sales reps before they can perform a diagnostic session. The prospects are either indifferent to what your salespeople have to offer, or their prospects are preoccupied with something else. When your salespeople encounter situations like this, they need to loop back in the sales process, get their buyer’s attention, and then get their interest in solving an issue before moving forward in the sales process. Overcoming this challenge requires a different process. A process we covered in the Seven Steps to Resolving Objections.

Need more instruction on navigating these hurdles? Download your copy of Seven Steps to Resolving Objections here.

Now, there comes a point in the sales process where your sales reps have their prospects’ attention. Their buyers view your people as a trusted resource. And your people have determined that their prospects have a need and the ability to buy. So when the sales process stalls, your people need to have enough credibility to help their prospects identify the real concern. And they need to be able to respond to those concerns effectively.

How to Overcome Objections in Sales Using These Four Tactical Responses

Here are four basic yet powerful ways to respond when overcoming objections in sales:

1. Refuting their Legitimacy
2. Acknowledging the Challenge
3. Reversing the Objection
4. Explaining the Solution

When you are coaching your salespeople, remember that these response methods are tactical processes. They won’t give you specifics on addressing the common sales objections your salespeople will encounter. But they will give your people processes on how to handle sales objections within the framework of the sales methodology, the business situation, and their buyers. For example, it may make sense for your salesperson to refute a common financial or price objection with one of their buyers while reversing the same, or a similar objection with a different prospect. These four methods of responding give your salespeople flexibility on how to best present solutions when they handle sales objections within the context of the business situation.

With that, let’s look at each one and give you a better idea on how to coach your team.

1. Overcoming Objections in Sales by Refuting Their Legitimacy

If the buyer has misinformation or is operating from fear, uncertainty, and doubt, then it’s best to overcome the sales objection by setting the record straight. However, flat out denial or stating that the buyer is wrong is a quick way to validate the falsehood in the buyer’s mind. Your buyers will quickly become more entrenched in their thinking. So, you will need to cushion a response before invalidating the falsehood. Often, you can weaken this type of objection simply by asking more probing questions. “When you say our delivery times are terrible, how do you mean specifically?” Or, “How did you hear that we have terrible delivery times?” Asking probing, open ended questions will give you more information before you lay out your supporting facts to rebuff the objection.

When addressing their claim, avoid confrontational statements like, “That’s not true.” Instead, cushion with a neutral statement, like “I can appreciate your concern…” Then, follow up with an example of how your delivery times have helped another client meet their goals. Or quote statistics comparing your delivery times against the industry. The point here is to recognize that everyone has their own beliefs and opinions. Stating “you’re wrong” in any way quickly builds walls, and you need to build bridges.

2. Overcoming Objections in Sales by Acknowledging the Issue and Highlighting the Resulting Improvements

Let’s say your buyer is putting up an objection that is based on some factual knowledge of your company. Your best course of action is to admit it quickly and emphatically. Then show how you have resolved, or plan to resolve the issue. Again, use a cushion to acknowledge that you heard them. Then, use evidence to show you have addressed the challenge, or how the issue won’t impact their application.

In one of my small group sessions, I had a salesperson who succeeded in landing a large account, something his predecessors had failed to do. What was the difference that allowed him to succeed? All his predecessors refused to acknowledge a problem that the buyer kept bringing up. However, he met with the client, acknowledged that the buyer’s concern was legitimate, and outlined his plan to address the concern. He was the one who walked away with a $50K equipment order.

3. Overcome Sales Objections by Reversing Them

Sometimes, the objection can be the very reason to move forward with the sale. You simply have to know how to re-frame the objection from a different perspective. This is often the case when clients bring up price objections. If price is a concern, help your buyer compare the one-time cost of your solution with the lifetime cost of not implementing it. Doing that will help them gain a better picture of the value you bring to the table and the true price of not moving forward.

Alternatively, you can show the revenue-generating potential of your solution. Then, compare that against the lost income potential for delaying implementation of your solution. The stark comparison will help motivate them to take swift action.

As shown above, to reverse an objection, review the big picture and understand the long-term or global impact your solution will have on their organization. Typically, your buyer is looking at your products or services through a limited and narrow lens. By expanding their perspective and showing the long term impact of your solution, you can help them see the reason they’re holding back is exactly the reason they should move forward.

4. Overcome Sales Objections by Explaining The Solution

If you’ve determined that your buyer’s objection is a legitimate concern, use the information gathered to directly address the issue. You’ve already performed an in-depth analysis of their application. and you have created a solution that everyone agrees would be a good fit for the buyer’s environment. So, if the buyer raises an objection indicating they don’t understand your solution, or they can’t see how your products or services will solve a particular challenge, rearrange the information into a more suitable form. Naturally, you will want to use all the evidence you have amassed to highlight how your solution is a good fit. In most cases, using an analogy will help your buyers better understand how your products or services can address their situation.

Here’s an example to give you some idea of what this looks like. My director of technology tells of several sales situations back when he was a systems engineer for a storage company. He said anytime he and his salespeople went on a sales call and presented their products and services to a group of decision-makers, the decision-makers had some sort of technical background. So, when his team would present their tape backup solution, the decision-makers understood terms like data capacity, throughput, and bandwidth. But on a few occasions, they presented to an audience that included a couple of financial people. It was important to get these financial people on board, but they were always skeptical and raised money concerns such as “your solution is too pricey” or “do we really need this.”

Making the Explanation Easy to Mentally Digest

However, he said that when their team started comparing the backup process to draining a cup using a straw and their solution was the equivalent of lashing a bunch of straws together to drain the cup faster and save time, the financial people got it. They didn’t object because they had misinformation or even legitimate concerns about the solution. They objected because they didn’t understand what my tech director and his salespeople were presenting. But once his salespeople explained the solution to the financial people in everyday terms that were easy to mentally digest, their solution made sense and the price objections vanished.

As a matter of fact, your salespeople will most likely need to explain their solution, products or services even if they start with refuting, acknowledging, or reversing the objection. At some point, they will have to obtain clarity when overcoming the sales objection. I often tell participants in my training sessions that as salespeople, our job is to act like a big bottle of Windex. We have to make everything clear to our buyers during the sales conversation so they can see a path forward in the sales process.

An Objection is a Sign of Interest

Overcoming objections in sales is a natural part of the negotiation process. For the truly engaged buyer, the common sales objections your people encounter are actually signs of interest. Their  prospects are trying to apply the solutions your people are offering to their business environment.

But remember that all obstacles your people encounter won’t be real buyer objections. Also, out of all of the objections they do encounter, some won’t be the real reason the buyer is holding back. Coach your salespeople to use the steps outlined in the sales brief below to identify the real objections. Then, coach them to handle the objections using their communication skills and one of the four methods listed above.  This will allow your salespeople to effectively address the real issues and move the sale process to completion.

Good Selling!