I love this business!!! Where else can you invite total strangers into your office and have an intelligent, inspiring conversation about sales problems and how to fix them? And have everyone leave with hope that one can change outcomes–by changing their thinking.

Well, we just did that in a recent series of seminars. We had more than 100 people take part in the program over four days. Although this is a marketing tool for us, we used it more as a training forum for best practices.

Consequently, I thought our blog readers would like to know what the biggest challenges were (according to the input of the group). And then a few thoughts on what we recommended.

1. How do I position our company (and it’s value) when my customer continues to see us as how we were, not how we are?

2. How do we differentiate our solution and stop being a commmodity?

3. How do we keep the sales process moving–avoid it getting stuck in corporate games?

4. How do I train my people–who sometimes don’t think about selling in the right way?

5. My buyers are more sophisticated, having access to information, prior to our sales team showing up.

Without getting into detail on each one, here is the bottom line (as I see it):

1. You can’t communicate value if you don’t know it and believe it. Most of the time sales people want to “jump to the words.” What do I say to help customers get our value? Perhaps that’s not the first question.

Instead the first question should be: “what is our value”? Or, “how does our solution solve a problem the customer has?” Or, “What are some trends that are causing my customer problems in my area of expertise?” Ask the right questions.

2. Bryan Neale brought up this–if you are constantly talking in sales meetings about “how we get the prospect to say yes,” then your intent is out of whack. Stop doing that. Exchange that worn out intent, with the intent of helping your customer solve a problem. Then, and only then, will you take control of the process.

One of our attendees said it best when he said, “It sounds like the only way to control the sales process is to give up control.” There’s a good student. Simple to talk about. Tough to do. But if you want to accomplish obscenely wonderful things in your business life, you have to change your perspective around intent.

3.  Our capacity to innovate has exceeded our ability to communicate. This kind of goes back to #1. How do we communicate the REAL value of what we do? We do it quite simply–by stating it in a way that allows the prospect to say (or feel), “that’s me.” If you communicate your value by pleading and convincing and persuading, is it surprising that no one’s saying “that’s me”?

A Brief Audio of The Program (20 minutes)
Here is a brief audio of the upfront portion of one of the workshops. It’s only 15 minutes (out of 2 hours) but wanted to at least give you a taste.

Download ExecSemBNBCAbridged.mp3