In the second episode of Hot Tip Thursday, Bryan Neale tells how to make your deals run smoother by using Calendar End Dates. Don’t miss this episode or the next, free of charge to all users.
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In this podcast, Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale give their advice on finding your OWN voice in a sales situation. This is a very important step in improving in many different areas of your life. Follow Bill and Bryan’s steps in finding yourself and tapping into your own heart.
I’ve loved checklists ever since I read Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto. I’ve become interested in how checklists can help us become much more effective in selling.
Below is a handout I gave to our High Performance Sales Academy students a few weeks ago.
It outlines the kinds of questions you should ask and tactics you should employ as you’re pursuing an account.
As a frequent reader of this blog or listening to the Advanced Selling Podcast, I provide you this free of charge and consideration. Send it onto others in your company – especially your sales team.
I got a lot of response from a prior post you can find here on the danger of hiring seasoned vets.
As you can imagine, most of that email was from seasoned vets.
So I’m going to stand by my initial post yet deliver some caveats to that:
1. If a sales veteran has a track record of learning and adapting their skill set to the current reality, that’s beautiful.
In other words, the 55-year-old person who comes to the VP of sales for a job and you look at his LinkedIn profile and it is fully filled out with a video and a well-written bio – and has meaningful endorsements and they have joined groups that will help them grow their skills, awesome! Give him a shot.
2. Secondly, if the seasoned vet has her own blog she contributes to on a frequent basis and has a portfolio of some of her work on it along with links to her Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, then you might have something. Sales vets who seize the power of the new technology are willing to adapt it for her use – get her on the phone. Give her a shot.
3. If you decide to interview a seasoned vet and they come to the interview having explored your website, full of questions about your market and model, and have a vibe that they take care of themselves both physically and emotionally, let ‘er rip!
On the other hand, if they use the standard wisecracks, are disheveled in their appearance and don’t bring paper with them to the interview, or ask no questions about your goals and your visions and your objectives and your problems, end the interview quickly. They’re not changing. They may tell you what you want to hear, but let your instincts guide you.
Once again, I am not against seasoned vets. I am against people who show up who haven’t learned a new thing in the last 10 years – and who expect to be successful in a job that requires all the skills they aren’t good at.
Politically incorrect? Of course it is. But it’s true.
Think of how many sales books, cassettes, and podcasts there are and yet the selling skills of American salespeople are still inadequate.
Is it possible that no one has really taught us how to learn these aforementioned selling skills? I think so.
There is one easy and profoundly effective way to learn any kind of skill and that is to break it into sub-skills.
For example, in sales you must learn the skill of prospecting for new business. You can’t just go learn that skill though in a two-hour seminar because it requires many, many subsets of other skills that you must learn.
For example, you must learn the skill of “Positioning.” You must learn the sub-skill of creating a safe environment so the prospect doesn’t lie to you. You must learn the skill of getting invited in (instead of begging to get in).
And you must be good at the sub-skill of delivering your message in a way that causes someone to want to hear more about it. That one right there is what trips most people up.
Do you want more sub-skills?
What about the inner game skill of detachment? If you get too needy and hungry and desperate for a sale when you’re calling a prospect, do you not think that comes through to them? If you’re detached and feeling abundant about the chances for your future, you take on a more relaxed tone which allows the prospect to relax.
My recommendation would be to take the 5-10 selling skills that you really need – – for example if you’re in account management then prospecting probably isn’t one – – and break those down into a series of 5 to 7 sub-skills.
After you do so it may seem like there’s a lot of work to do. And there might be. But until you can break skill sets down into bite-size chunks, you can’t work on, selling skills effectively.
Many times I have heard a sales manager say, “We don’t need training here because we hire seasoned vets.” I always am amused at that statement.
I’m working right now with an organization that has 25 people in their salesforce, all of whom are between 25 and 40.
They did not hire seasoned vets.
They hire young ambitious talent who are interested in learning how to be better at what they do. And they are crushing the competition.
Recently, I administered the Hogan personality inventory to their 25 people. And almost universally, their Ambition levels were very high.
In this case an Ambition score determines the fuel tank of energy that a person has to get their job done – and do it well. Even the VP of Sales was surprised at the pattern of highly ambitious people that he and his management team had selected.
It was probably instinct more than anything and probably some of the less ambitious people were spit out of the system quickly because they couldn’t make it.
So you sales managers who are hiring season vets in their 50s – I need to be careful with this because I’m in my late 50s – you’d better be careful because your lunch will be beaten by highly ambitious groups of young people who understand social media, how to use Google for research, how to learn new skills that they don’t presently have, and how to use all of the technologies that help serve customers better.
Seasoned vets? Not for me.
In our sales training programs, we are consistently teaching people to “drop back” – don’t be so eager. Relax into the circumstance.
Had a coaching call with Lisa yesterday. Usually, Lisa is quite adept at this skill – what we call “staying behind” the prospect. But that’s when she’s “in the process” – not when she’s in pursuit of a first meeting,
She complained of her lack of results in landing those first meetings. When I asked her what she was saying when she called, I was shocked! Was this the same Lisa that was so savvy at leading the prospect through the selling system? How could she sound no needy? 
When the circumstances change, we change. In this case, the circumstance was no longer her sitting in front of a prospect asking about their goals and objectives. It was her on the phone, “trying to get someone” to see her. And she changed her position. But she shouldn’t have.
Let’s face it. You are selling scarcity. Not because your product is scarce (although it could be). But because YOUR TIME is scarce. If everyone in your territory decided to see you, you wouldn’t have the time. And then, you would begin a selection process of who you want to see and who you didn’t.
So why don’t you do that in the first place?
When you call (if you must cold call), be skeptical. Hold back. Don’t be so eager. Say, “John, this is Lisa, and I have no idea of what I’m about to ask you would be acceptable.” Or some such phrasing that lets the prospect know that you are not going to pound them for an appointment. Sell scarcity because your worth it.
Recently, I’ve become interested in how elite performers become that way. There are the obvious things like studying the game they play or the craft they act in, there is the full practice and rehearsal, and there’s also the rituals they use to get ready for performances.
But often, it still gets down to skills. Do I have the skill set to compete and perform at an elite level?
I think the same thing is true of salespeople. Recently we launched a video series called the Sales How-To video series that you can find at sales-how-to-video-series.com. Also, one of the videos below is one we did on improving your skills. Hope you enjoy by all means sign up for the other 11.
If not for the Duchess’s pregnancy, this story would have been on the front page of USATODAY.com.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/07/21/sales-job-openings/2568003/ (It actually was on the front of the hard cover.)
And it’s a good start to a dialogue we’ve seen building for years: the difficulty in finding good sales people.
But we need more.
It seems that the profession suffers from villain-azation (my word.) There is a cloud over the profession caused by amateurs who give it a bad name. The fact is that there will ALWAYS be a place for good sales people in our economy.
And it’s most pathetic that more colleges and institutions fail to offer much in the way of a ‘field of study,’ let a lone a Major. My sense is that that change alone would begin to rebuild a profession that needs fresh faces.
Let’s keep the dialogue open. Of course, we’ll be talking about it on The Advanced Selling Podcast. And would love to hear your comments on what you would tell a 20 year old who might be cut out for sales. Tell him/her to go in? Or not?