On this week’s audio post, I want you to evaluate who you spend most of your time with. Are you surrounding yourself with people that you admire and look up to? The people you choose to be around are a direct reflection of who you will become. The rule is, you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
Apologies to the person who created the “flower and the bee” concept but I think that epitomizes perfectly the problem with most sales processes today.
And do we ever have a problem.
The ‘flower and the bee’ phenomena goes like this: in nature the flower must pollinate itself. It sits there waiting for the bee (one of the many ways pollination happens) to pollinate it. The flower does not labor, nor does it stress about bees showing up. Bees, on the other hand, are scurrying about trying to find food, and pollinating the flower.
In business, sales people are typically the bees and the customer is the flower. Sales people scurry around the country looking for food.
Why does it have to be that way? Why shouldn’t the sales professional be sitting – allowing the prospect to show up for them? Why?
It’s because we don’t plan it out that way. (We actually might, secretly, like the scurrying about looking for plants -err prospects.)
We have bought into the flower/bee process so heavily in sales that we refuse to even admit that it’s all wrong. (We also do this when job searching…wrong again.) Read more
Since I coach people, I’m privy to their psychology. Often, my coaching clients come to me in a bad state of mind. They’re in what I call, “a dip.”
Let’s get this straight, the dip is a signal that your state of mind is off. You are out of sync. There is nothing wrong with you. There IS something wrong with the conditions you’ve created. Oh, and something else – I am not a psychiatrist. If your dip lasts longer than a few weeks, probably should get professional help.
But for most of us these few ideas can get us started.
Here are seven ideas I gave to a client who came to me about a month ago. He was a super high achiever, but he wasn’t in the right mental framework, and he felt it.
1. On Outcomes. Stop trying. Stop trying to make friends. Stop trying to get deals. Stop trying to get the outcomes that you believe you deserve. We call this “detachment.” The more emphasis you put on your outcomes, the less likely you are to run the process well. Let outcomes come to you. Go out and be interested in others. Be a good listener. Be curious (which I know you are), but let it happen if it’s supposed to happen. Read more
The Universe has a funny way of working. It seems to have the attitude of, “I’ll allow it to happen when it’s ready to happen.” We see this in all phases in our life. We really want something—really bad. But we don’t get it. Then later, we realize we really didn’t want it. What if we were to get everything we think we want? Not so good. The Universe usually knows best.
It’s that way in business too. Everyone’s talking about how they have to call higher or get wider in organizations (call on the President.) But yet, when I ask what they’re going to talk about when they get there, I get mush.
Recently I did an exercise with a client called “Value Mapping.” We looked at the kinds of problems they could solve for their clients, what kind of value those solutions would bring to their clients, and at what level that value was felt.
We quickly arrived at the conclusion that much of the value was felt at the CEO level. Yet, when I asked the account development people what kinds of conversations they had when they got in front of CEO’s, the answer was “We never talk to CEO’s.”
Again, could it be that they aren’t getting in front of CEO’s because they never thought about it? Probably not. I used to think our reluctance to call on CEO’s was caused only by our own self-image. However, I’m beginning to see that there is another issue. Our reluctance stems more from our ignorance of how they think and what they want to talk about than it does our self-image of deserving to be at that level.
Therein lies a nagging and continuous problem in the communication of your value to your client companies. That is – the person who gets the most benefit from your product seldom knows or is involved in the sales process upfront. That would be the CEO.
The first critical point in understanding the discussion you should have with a CEO is to understand how your value or your solutions impact the following areas. These areas I list are the five most relevant topics a CEO deals with daily. So as you go through this list of five topics, scribble some notes at the end of each paragraph if you bring any value in helping them deal with these issues.
Profitability
Most CEO’s I know have a financial mind. They care about the net income of the company, either on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. They also care about the trends and the indicators that lead to the final numbers. Does your solution have any impact on profitability? If so, your conversation with this CEO is quite relevant. If not, maybe you haven’t looked deep enough. The prospect is not going to connect these dots for you. You’ll have to do it yourself.
Employee Retention
With a tight labor market (unemployment less than 5%), especially in key positions, the CEO knows that she has to hang on to her best people. If you provide a solution that helps make employee retention more successful, you will have her ear.
Revenue Growth
Every CEO cares about new business capture, client expansion, new markets and general sales numbers. They may not care about the process their managers go through to get those numbers, but they do care about the end results. Do your solutions touch that at all? Before you say no, check it out. Do a mind map, where you start at the left of the page with the problem your company solves—then move to the right with the total impact of that solution. I’ll bet you’ll find some connection between what you do and their revenue.
Market Capitalization
If you are calling on publicly held companies, market cap is a big issue. If you’re calling on privately held companies, “creating stakeholder wealth” might replace “market cap” as the relevant topic. Peter Drucker says, “Businesses are in existence not to create profit but to serve customers.” While I agree, “creating profit” is a first cousin to customer acquisition and wealth for the stakeholders (not just the owners, but the employees, clients, vendors and the entire array of support people).
Vision and Strategy
Most CEO’s, if they are not visionary, should be. Most CEO’s, if they don’t have a strategy, should have one. Sometimes the very simple notion of you asking the questions about vision and strategy will cause the CEO to think about it at a different level. Just because the CEO talks about his vision and strategy doesn’t mean the other people in the organization understand what it is. j
john Kotter in Leading Change says, “Less than .05% of the time in a leader’s day is spent dealing with company vision.” So one must never assume that the CEO has done a good job of communicating that vision down the chain.
So as you go through these five relevant CEO topics, do you see any that you could help her with? If there is no link, then say that. But if there is a link, then you can look that CEO square in the eye and say “Ms. CEO, we help organizations who are looking to increase market capitalization and who are looking to expand their customer base. We’ve got solutions to those problems. You have to tell me whether these topics are relevant to you.”
(As sent out in our October New Rules Newsletter)
Your Value Is All You Have–How Competent Are You At Expressing It?
I was looking through some old training handouts … and came across one called “How To Express Your Value.”
Although I don’t have space here to review the entire module, there was one part that I thought you’d like to hear about. It had to do with how you get hold of your true value to your clients. It seems that every sales organization has a tough time communicating their value. One exercise we do when we begin working with a company is to have each person “write out” their expression of the value they bring to clients.
We usually have as many different expressions as we have ‘people in the room.’ That’s no good. So, this exercise is designed to help you know ‘where to go to get clear about your value.’
PROSPECT TRENDS. What are the trends that your prospect faces in the running of their business (department)? Trends cause pain. And you fix pain. So it pays to know trends. These trends could be macro/industry trends or trends within their company.
PROSPECT PAINS. What kinds of pains/problems do you help people solve? Do you have a list of those? No? Shame on you. How can you be a problem solver if you don’t even have a menu of the kind of problems you fix? Start that list today.
PROSPECT POSSIBILITIES. Selling is emotional. What’s more emotional than dreams? How can you help–through your service/product–create future possibilities for your prospect? Don’t laugh so quickly. If you sell a solution, then you solve problems. And if you solve problems, you advance your client to a new future. Shouldn’t you know what that might be?
STORIES. Most sales teams overlook case studies and stories. You have a wealth of those stories inside your company. But they don’t get accessed. Make a point in the next week to talk to 10 people in your company about a project that went well, or a customer that became overjoyed at your solution. That becomes a story you can tell as you talk about your value.
PICTOGRAPHS. Those who are in our training get tired of this story, but I’ll tell it anyway (in case you forgot). I read a book once called The McKinsey Way (about McKinsey Consulting). In it, they revealed that when you first get to McKinsey, you are responsible for creating a graph/ picture/ drawing every day on something you worked on. You might say that’s absurd, but they understood something you should understand. That we are all VISUAL people. And pictures do represent thousands of words. So if you can reduce your stories, examples and value to pictures, you’ll be helping your prospect “GET” your value at a deeper level.
Hope that’s not too much for today.
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Other Resources:
Advanced Selling Podcast: Thanks to your referrals, we’re up to over 7800 world-wide podcast subscribers.
Caskey Blog: We post when we see fit (and have time). Usually the topics come from training we have just done.
Same Game New Rules–E-Video Course (Free). Sign up for our 5 part course on the book, Same Game New Rules.
Regards
Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale
Forget whether or not you know your product–or know your customer. The question is “do you know your value?” And most, I find, do not.
The other day, I was training a group of stockbrokers who call on high end investors (+$1,000,000 in assets). Even though they all were earning high sums of money, none of them could accurately express the value they brought to their clients.
Here is the board picture I drew that illustrates the point.
The UV stands for do you “understand” your value? The CV means, how competent are you at “communicating value?” The PV means, if you do those things well, you’ll get paid for it.
When I say “understand” I mean do you know what problems your value solves? Or what opportunity your value helps the customer exploit. Thought you’d like to see the picture.
