The Sales Process

The Funnel Principle BlogA Breakthrough Sales Performance Ebook

By Mark Sellers

....................................................................................Teach Your Salespeople Pricing Strategy 3

....................................................................................................................Sales Life In Europe 5

.....................Sales Process: I’ll Take The Barbacoa Please With Pinto Beans And Brown Rice 7

.................................................................................Sales Training: Why Role Playing Pays Off 9

......................................................................................................Global Sales Mumbai Magic 10

............................................................................................................Death Of New Products 12

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Teach Your Salespeople Pricing StrategyAugust 23, 2012

Recently I was making my way from the main terminal at Toronto’s Pearson International airport to the 90 series gates (I swear it’s a half mile walk). I stopped at a small sandwich and beverage kiosk and grabbed a bottle of Odwalla juice and a bag of Lays potato chips.

I don’t know if my version of a combo meal caught the clerk off guard or what but even after a long day I immediately caught her comment. “Your Odwalla is $4.19, is that ok?”

After I made it to the gate I played the game of “I wished I would have said…” and came up with a couple of possibilities:

“Actually, no, it’s not ok. I’ll give you three bucks and we’ll call it even, ok?”

“I’m thrilled at the price. Hey everybody – smoothies on me!”

“Really? If you throw in one of those little bottles of Smirnoff you’ve got yourself a deal.”

I’ve been trying to understand what she meant by her comment but since I’ll never know I decided to explore another path – how do companies prepare their salespeople to sell their companies’ pricing strategies.

I’m not sure the veeps of sales or sales managers of most companies give it enough thought. Sure it comes up when they get a request from the field to offer a lower price. “We can close this deal if we drop the price 5%.” But even though that is a too common request do managers take the time to coach or train their salespeople to deal with it?

One of my clients years ago introduced me to a room full of his salespeople as the guy who refused to budge on price when I was asked to offer a discount. Believe me I’ve had worse introductions.

I don’t mean to be hard on this clerk, nor would I do something to cause a diplomatic situation for Ms. Clinton but I would give the clerk a low grade for her salesmanship. She caused me to think about something that I couldn’t have cared less about just a few seconds earlier. I’m not sure I could have told you how much it cost before I bought it. I know Odwalla is not cheap but in my mind it’s good stuff that I’m willing to pay for. But now she’s got me thinking, wow that is kind of expensive. My only reference was a paying $2.50 for a bottle of Naked Juice at Whole Foods but I think it was on sale (who comes up with these names?)

Pricing strategy has a lot to do with the success of the most popular handgun in

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America, the Glock. Because it was manufactured with less than half the number of parts as the most popular police handgun, the Smith and Wesson, Glock could price it low and still earn a fat margin. Glock’s top salesman in the US, Karl Walter dissuaded owner Gaston Glock from going really low on the price, convincing him that the perception of cheap would hurt Glock’s high quality in the long run. No police commander is going to recommend to his or her force to put their lives on the line with a cheap handgun. The pricing strategy was one variable that helped Glock beat the pants off of the gold standard Smith & Wesson as the police weapon of choice.

On my trip to Toronto, where I spoke to the salesforce at the national sales meeting of the country’s largest home improvement chain, the new director of sales, Martin, told his salespeople that the

company will invest in a branding overhaul to sell more to the chain’s remodeling contractors. These contractors, hired by you and I to redo your kitchen or finish your basement are less concerned about price than they are about service, expertise and supply. Martin’s company is smart to carefully adopt a different pricing strategy than the strategies used to sell you and me a garden hose or light bulbs. Martin would be wise to train and coach his salespeople in how to position the prices and how to respond to requests for discounts.

Instead of simply expecting your salespeople to know when to discount or not, and to know how to professionally position the company’s pricing strategy, consider taking time to train, coach and role play to build the kinds of responses you want.

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Sales Life In EuropeAugust 23, 2012

Earlier this year I traveled for two weeks in Europe to train the entire EMEA salesforce of a large embedded electronics company.

Here are some observations regarding business, selling, food, exercise and more.

What recession? My client has nearly $1B in revenue and finished the year with record sales. The year before that they had record sales. How enjoyable it was to be consumed the entire day, every day, with positive thoughts about selling.

The secret to good health in Europe is that Europeans in major cities do a ton of walking. With train travel so common throughout the continent people are forced, ironically, to walk a lot. My feet thanked me for wearing a pair of 7 year old Allen Edmonds Seneca shoes that I’ve had resoled three times. I think I could run a 10K in those babies.

European sales managers are passionate about learning business processes for selling. In every office I visited, from Amsterdam to Milan to Munich to Dusseldorf and to Eindhoven the managers kicked off the training with a passionate speech. Better yet they stayed engaged throughout the two days. What a great example they set for their people.

Traditional US-based sales training is becoming a dying export for good reason. Companies want tailored programs that fit the European selling environment, cultures, and languages.

Europeans need long coffee breaks. In the States our breaks during training are usually 15 minutes. In Europe I gave 20 which pushed to 25 and that was needed to regain their complete attention when they returned from breaks.

The American way of business is admired by European business people. One sales manager told me that he was envious of how easy our governments make it to start new businesses. It’s mostly transparent too, void of multiple, mysterious intermediaries in the ‘supply chain’ of getting started. In Italy, the government leaders are fighting to overturn a 41 year old law that makes it virtually impossible to fire an employee. They recognize the need to give businesses flexibility to get rid of poor performers and hire new and motivated talent. Also in Italy, they are trying to increase the number of notaries in the country to inspire more competition. Same with increasing the number of taxis. It’s the right thing to do and many are against it. Though the American system also has flaws it’s easy

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to take for granted how pro-enterprise our society is.

Italian offices have the best coffee machines.

Europeans love to play US hits of the 80′s during breakfast. Instead of oatmeal there’s always scrambled eggs and beans and croissants.

Be sure you have coins when you want to buy train tickets because many of the machines do not take bills. Also, they won’t take US credit cards that do not have a European chip built into the card for greater security purposes. I found some merchants outside of the train stations also required this card. Have cash!

Have a backup plan to stay fit during long trips since many boutique hotels do not have an exercise room. I did circuit exercises in my room but was afraid the residents in the room below mine wouldn’t appreciate the skaters and squat jumps.

Many European salespeople love to work on their English language skills. As a result they might go on talking for longer than you’d expect, but this isn’t because they aren’t interested in listening to you. One of my clients based in Germany was always making sure she drove me from the hotel to the office so she could practice her English with me.

The 35 hour European work week doesn’t apply to sales forces. My clients selling and managing every day are working from 9 until 7 most days. I get more emails past eleven o’clock her time from my main contact in Paris than I do from any US based client.

The US English language is a gift to the business world. How else would Italians, French, Bavarians, Dutch, the three different regions of Belgium, Spaniards, Swiss, Danes, Swedes, Portuguese, and all of the unique dialects within these countries communicate were it not for the English language?

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Sales Process: I’ll Take The Barbacoa Please With Pinto Beans And Brown RiceOctober 20, 2012

I love Chipotle. They’ve got a great story. Their food is tasty. And most important they make it easy for me to buy from them.

Several years ago my wife and I alternated between taking our kids to Chipotle and another mexican fast casual place in our hometown. This other place was also ‘corporate’ – at the time, like Chipotle, it was either owned by a big parent company or had big parent investors (neither one is owned by a big parent company today).

However, more times than I care to describe the other joint failed to get our food right. I think the main reason had to do with simplicity of operations and the focus of the entire strategy – the place that kept getting my meal wrong wasn’t simple to order from and didn’t have simple operations. Chipotle has both. This sounds so easy and yet it’s so hard to do.

Simplicity is also the key to getting your sales teams to adopt a sales strategy and change how they sell. When your strategy or sales method is simple it’s easier to learn. When it’s easy to learn it’s easier to use. When it’s easy to use you’re more likely to use it. When you use the new sales method repeatedly you’re more

likely to get good at it.

A simple sales method is also easier to coach to. Think of it as having fewer moving parts and therefore fewer ways to screw it up. Sales managers can more easily stay on message and focus when it’s all simple.

So what does a simple sales method look like? A simple sales method could be as straightforward as BANT – budget, authority, need, timing. That’s brilliant isn’t it? My friend Brian Dietmeyer has a simple, powerful negotiation method. No one has a monopoly on simple but there are some methods that take the prize for being downright over engineered and overly complex. They claim that a complex sale needs a complex sales process. I disagree.

Customers tell us that our BuyCycle Funnel is simple. The Commit Funding stage is the pivotal stage where the PFA chooses to no longer live with the problem. Whether or not the PFA has committed to that is simple yet so powerful. If they’ve Committed Funding your strategy should focus on persuading the customer to buy your solution. If they haven’t Committed Funding your strategy

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should focus on finding a financially compelling case for the problem.

Another simple context is for running meetings. What’s the purpose of this meeting? What outcomes are we focused on getting? What’s the agenda? Who’s keeping us on task? Who’s keeping us on time? Ok, let’s go!

Chipotle has made it simple to eat well and get through lunch in a reasonable time. You pick the style (burrito? salad?

bowl?), then rice or not, then beans or not, then you pick the filling, then salsa, then toppings. AND, in case you’re delirious from the smells or distracted by that lousy meeting you escaped from before lunch they remind you what to do at each step.

VPs of Sales or CEOs, Presidents, or others considering how to get your sales organization to adopt change and improve sales performance: Keep it simple. Stay on message. Don’t let up.

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Sales Training: Why Role Playing Pays OffOctober 25, 2012

Inspired by a recent deal strategy session with a client of mine and his sales director I wanted to give you three reasons to role play before your next sales call.

Reason #1 – Mulligans are usually better.

If you’re a golfer you can relate to this. After you miss a surely makeable putt (and after you curse a few times) you throw another ball down and strike it right in the heart of the cup! Or after you block slice one out of bounds you re tee another ball and split the fairway. When you make a sales call the second time, or third time - by role playing – for sure you will do something better on each subsequent ‘call’ because you’ll learn from the previous one. By the time you make the actual sales call you’re ready to nail it. If you doubt this think of the last sales call you made where you got to the car and said “I wish I would have…” There’s always something else, something more we wish we would have said or asked or done. So role play and get your second chance the first time.

Reason #2 – You build confidence and confidence helps your customer believe you.

By role playing you gain confidence in what you want to say and ask and how to do that. Then when you’re ‘live’ on the call you’re saying it exactly as you have rehearsed it and your confidence will come through.

Reason #3 – Doing doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes perfect. Role playing is practice. Doing is not.

When you sell, you do. Doing is not practicing. So don’t mislead yourself into thinking that all the doing you do every day when you’re doing what you do when you’re selling is automatically making you a better seller. Do you know which group of motorcycle riders has the highest rate of accidents? The ones that have had their licenses for a long time and have not committed to annual training courses. They get lazy, they take risks, they stop anticipating, they crash their motorcycles.

Don’t crash your motorcycle. Role play.

Good selling,

Mark

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Global Sales Mumbai MagicDecember 4, 2012

Recently I was invited by a client based in Singapore to on-board new sales teams in Mumbai, India, Shanghai and Singapore in my company’s Funnel Principle selling process.

The highlight of the trip was something I wasn’t expecting.

The first stop was Mumbai, India. It was tempting for me to treat the Mumbai segment as a warm up to the excitement and intrigue of Shanghai and the exoticness of Singapore. It was the beginning of the monsoon season and western India summer heat can easily top 100 degrees.

I got a lot of advice before leaving. “It’s not safe to walk around the city”, one person told me. Mumbai was the site of the 2008 terrorist attack that killed nearly 200 people so I took this advice seriously. “Don’t drink any water from any source”, another person said. A client from another company told me to pack a suitcase of Power Bars. “Get vaccines for hepatitis A (liver inflammation caused by ingesting bad food or drink) and B (same caused by the transfer of bodily fluids)”, someone else told me. Whatever I do, said one more, take plenty of Immodium for diarrhea.

The interesting thing that I didn’t realize until after my visit was that no one said to be sure to take notice of the spirit of the Indian people.

Mumbai didn’t start well. I arrived in Newark to find an email saying my direct flight was cancelled. I would have to taxi to La Guardia (90 minutes in traffic, $130) to catch a new flight. Instead of direct to Mumbai we first flew to Paris (8 hours), then to New Delhi (9 hours). It was now midnight the next day for me. We left Delhi but stopped 45 minutes later in Indore for no reason. I was told this by the guy next to me in business class, an Air India pilot who said the pilot’s strike now in its second month was causing much havoc. We left Indore at 1:15 AM and landed in Mumbai at 2am. I had been traveling for 31 hours. My meeting would begin at 800 sharp.

Mumbai is a city of contrasts. My 5 star Hyatt had exceptional service and amenities but the scene outside my conference room window was different. Security guards at the hotel entrance were busy checking the underside of all cars for bombs; my hotel was all glass and steel and marble, yet across the street was a row of old shack type structures, maybe businesses, with dirt sidewalks; I saw a cow feasting on a pile of roadside garbage

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the size of half a basketball court, yet inside I feasted on a phenomenal buffet of fish and vegetables and spices and herbs that made my taste buds do the tango; I saw feral dogs wandering the streets desperately in search of a meal. I started every day by piling on my plate large slices of deeply orange alphonso mangos that were perfectly in season.

The pleasant young man serving breakfast was deeply interested in where I was from. He stayed around my table for at least five minutes. He could picture New York and California but Ohio and the Great Lakes were unclear.

At lunch a woman escorted me from the conference room to the dining area, something completely unnecessary but refreshingly memorable. I said I needed to use the toilet (it’s not a bathroom) and as she walked me to the hallway she slipped and went crashing down, but somehow I grabbed her and prevented her fall. She was embarrassed, but each day her good morning smile had a touch of personal meaning.

One evening we taxied into the city to the Gateway of India, an 85 foot high arch built as a welcoming place for dignitaries traveling by sea. Then we went to the famous Café Leopold, a chic place that was the first target of the terrorist attack in

2008. The streets were overcrowded with taxis, tuk-tuks (3-wheeled taxis), motorbikes, trucks, trash, debris, people, all converging like traffic leaving a state fair parking lot after a Jason Aldean concert. At the restaurant, we immediately were handled by several staff getting us to our tables, getting our beers and bringing appetizers. We seldom waited longer than you’d expect for anything.

After dinner, around 11 o’clock, we took another adventuresome ride in tuk-tuks to the famous Juhu beach where many Bollywood celebrities live. There was a warm breeze coming in off of the Arabian Sea and there were people everywhere. My hosts were thrilled when I asked if Anil Kapoor had a place here.

Unlike in too many parts of Europe, in Mumbai this American felt welcomed everywhere I went.

My flight to Shanghai was scheduled for 1:30AM so we returned to the hotel. By the end of the Mumbai leg I was exhausted in a completely satisfying way. The Indian sales team was by far the most pleasant, upbeat and easy going group I worked with. They were rightfully proud of their city and country took nothing for granted. I can’t wait to go back.

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Death Of New ProductsDecember 17, 2012

Is your selling approach killing sales of your company’s new products?

Years ago, Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling and Rethinking the Sales Force published a paper that showed how the sales forces of three well known companies were failing to meet sales expectations of each company’s newly launched products.

These products were not just new. They were ground breaking technologies that the market would have been excited to have.

Rackham’s consulting and training company was involved in training each of the salesforces. When sales did not meet early expectations his clients asked him to figure out what was going wrong.

Rackham is known best for his research based book SPIN Selling. He researched 35,000 sales calls and used that to create the sales method SPIN. In that research he and his team found a positive correlation between the number of questions asked and the success of the sales call. The more questions asked the more likely the call succeeded.

They also found that product features were negatively correlated with call success. In calls that failed salespeople

described more than twice as many features of products and services they were selling as they did during the calls that succeeded.

For his three clients that were experiencing troubling results with their new products he and his team went on sales calls and observed the sellers in action. Since the products were complex and required more questions to understand the complexity of the customer’s needs, they all expected to hear more questions being asked.

They discovered something entirely different.

Sellers were asking 40% fewer questions in selling these new products. The average length of the sales calls were even longer than the length of sales calls for other products. What were sellers doing on these calls? Spending a lot more time describing features. Oops.

In a non research world we’d call that data dumping, showing up and throwing up, or throw it on the wall to see what sticks. Not exactly model behavior for fundamentally good selling.

This paper was published in the early 1990s. Mistakes like this still happen today. For example, while many of the

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exciting new technologies under the sales 2.0 era are shaking up sales effectiveness many of the products are sold by way of doing a ‘demo’. A demo is often done over the web without either party traveling. Demos focus on showing how products work.

One company with a pretty cool technology did a demo to me after I stopped by its booth at the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco. The sales rep didn’t know what I did for a living. She hadn’t prepared any questions for the call. I gave her a bit of a hard time. The ultimate insult would be for me to buy the technology and reinforce her weak selling behavior.

In another demo example a client of mine was paying a hefty finders type fee to its channel partners in Asia to set up demos of its software product. Unfortunately my client’s sales and technical staff often showed up ready to do the demo and discovered that key people weren’t invited, or just as bad no clear reason for doing the demo was defined. In these situations the demo is a wasted, expensive selling resource. On the other hand, when the right people attend the demo and a call to action is identified and agreed to upfront demos can be a key catalyst in moving sales forward.

There are a number of reasons why this stuff still happens. Companies are excited about their new products and they forget that the customer still has to express a need for them. Let’s hope that the new products have been through a research process that showed there really is a need for them.

When salespeople are trained in a new product they are mostly trained in features and functions. They learn how it’s different from what it’s replacing. They learn how to price it. Usually the section on learning how to uncover customers’ needs get footnote attention. I don’t know if the Veeps of Sales are assuming “Of course we’ve still got to ask questions and do discovery duh!” Their assumption is a sign of poor leadership.

On your next sales call leave the product in the car, or do the equivalent online – leave the demo in the demo file. Ask some Stage 1 questions. Find out who the PFA could be. Seek an Advocate who has tremendous energy for change and is willing to take responsibility for it. Ask some Stage 2 questions to see if the customer has explored the financial impact of the problem or situation. And by all means do at least a little research to know business the customer is in.

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