Unless you’ve spent your career selling a must-have, killer software application, you’ve probably figured out by now that all prospects are not qualified to buy what you have to sell. You probably weren’t feeling that way by the time the deal finally blew up. Many salespeople believe that every prospect is automatically a qualified buyer, and so they end up clinging to each prospect hoping that someday, eventually, they will be able to close the deal. They blame the sales failure on messing up somewhere in the selling process: saying the wrong thing, picking a bad day for the presentation, or just wearing the wrong suit!  Each could be true, could be… but what’s more likely is the prospect simply didn’t qualify for the solution (in all of its dimensions) that was being offered. The outcome the prospect was looking to achieve simply wasn’t aligned with the solution, and there’s nothing that could have been said or done to change that reality — no matter how much time was invested in the process.

Most veteran salespeople understand that relatively few prospects dropped into the sales funnel of a high-cost, B2B vertical will end up signing the deal in the end. Early in the process it is not easy to distinguish who will and who won’t ultimately pan out. Further complicating matters is that the bigger the ticket, the smaller the pool of likely buyers (read: “the more precious the prospect”) and generally the longer the sales cycle. The buyer’s risk of making an expensive mistake stretches out the time needed to deliberate over decisions until it becomes difficult for the seller to know when, or if, to finally terminate the opportunity as dead and move on.

Fortunately there’s a natural pattern to the sales cycle for every business, beyond which the law of diminishing returns begins exacting a toll in dollar cost, sales momentum and even the self-esteem of the sales professional. If we can understand the natural pacing of our typical sale, it will be easier to judge when the deal has gone “off the tracks.” Just as our sales process has sequential required steps, our timing should have flexible decision points beyond which we require ourselves to make an intelligent choice on changing the status of an opportunity from active to inactive.  Once we begin narrowing our sales judgment down to the razor-thin edge formed by time and decision, we become highly empowered because we are in control, not the prospect. It is crucial as a successful Guess Free Selling™sales professional that we only choose to engage in opportunities under the condition that we are controlling the decision process and timeline.

If our product sells in the $25-50k price range or more, the person who is the “money authority” will likely have some elements of the “D” DISC profile and therefore be more willing to give us early, easy up-or-down choices that signal whether or not the company qualifies for us. When you know that about the prospect’s decision-making style, it becomes easier to set fears aside, pump courage up, and ask for the truth about “where we stand.” With D’s especially, keep out of the way of the decision. Don’t complicate the opportunity with assumptions and irrelevant assertions. Prevent our eagerness to “always be closing” from getting in the way of the prospect taking us straight to an expedient “Yes” or “No” answer.  Understanding this and acting on it, you hazard neither the emotional investment nor the diminishing return of a long, indecisive sales process.  You will develop an intuitive “SW³N” advantage: “Some Will, Some Won’t, So What – Next!”

Anything we do that consciously or unconsciously protracts the sales cycle is “shame on us” and may even be a disservice to the prospect, who is trying to remain productive and innovative in the market, and is vitally dependent on people like us to get them there. To the extent that you fail to move the prospect forward to decisions with intention, you are actually driving them away and into the arms of your competition. Even if the prospect does eventually buy from you (see below), they will remember the process as so laborious  that when the next opportunity comes along they will run (not walk) the other way to seek an alternative supplier.

“You can’t blow up a good deal by constantly pressing it forward against your own predetermined expectation for progress. The problem comes up when you don’t have a clock ticking. Nobody ever got fired for being too conscientious about getting deals done on time.”

Here’s an example of when winning is losing because of time. One of our clients had a prospect that they’d worked on for 14 months for a discounted (time destroys margins too) $60,000 piece of business with a 35% margin. There were three meetings (two sales people each), approximately 70 emails exchanged and 22 phone conversations. Conservatively, this cost 45 minutes in call and call prep time; 30 minutes in email time, plus 20 hours in miscellaneous office time. The result is a company gross profit before sales costs (if all goes well, receivables are paid on time, etc.) of $21,000 with a total cost of sales time invested of $17,500 (not including the opportunity cost of milling the account). That leaves a net of $3,500 or 6% before T&I on a transaction that was in the pipeline for nearly a year and a half. It took way too much organizational and psychic energy– on both sides of the desk. P.S. The salesperson no longer works there.

What’s the take home lesson? Shorter is better — much, much better. Keep brevity as your guiding principle. Decisions are always better than indecision. Setting a pattern of rapid incremental decision making early on in the sales process saves both you and the company plenty, whether it’s a win or a loss. Change behavior by creating a flexible timeline of your own before embarking on a conversation with a prospect. Get in the habit of gently pressing forward to decisions on your timeline and questioning the reality of “where we stand” when you fail to obtain the decision you are seeking. Place choice as the underlying theme of your conversations and make the choices as simple and “binary” as possible right from the beginning. Start out by giving the prospect a choice based on real result from non-action. For example: “Companies who fail to incorporate our new ‘ultra-widget’  in their processing system will be unable to compete effectively within 24 months. Does this sound like a product that could be valuable to someone like you sitting at the CWO (Chief Widget Officer) desk?”

Hobart, a manufacturer of large-scale food processing equipment, would regularly challenge customers to sign up in advance for a new, innovative piece of equipment or Hobart would offer it to a regional competitor in an exclusive agreement. Admittedly we can’t all be in such a dominant market position, but to the extent that you can begin each sales conversation with a simple binary choice that requires a commitment in or out, you will supercharge your sales process, close more business and most importantly close deals faster.  Remember the sound bite: “Time kills deals.”

by Scott Messer and Dave Light of Sales Evolution

You’ve heard that “the market loathes uncertainty.”

Whether the issue is sovereign debt crisis, energy volatility or legislative zaniness over a financial regulations bill, security markets perceive business uncertainties as increased monetary risk, commercial disruption and a general reduction in the orderly flow of capital. When investors lack some idea about what’s going to happen next — politically, economically, etc. — investment slows or stops. And as the insurance companies have taught us all, risk and therefore, all uncertainty, has a cost.

The “risk cost” in sales is “No deal!” because the prospects’ buying process also loathes uncertainty. Customers may want to buy, but if they can’t see a clear path to a decision — either to a yes or a no — they stop buying until they can find a salesperson who has a process for guiding them with certainty to an outcome. For a sales organization to be truly great — regardless of the economic environment — it needs a strong culture of following a process that is precise and decisive. In challenging times, this discipline is the best measure of the organization’s “sales evolution.” The sales force that is most highly evolved develops the “sales courage” to have reality-testing conversations while diligently guiding the prospect ever forward to the best and most practicable decision for their own desired outcome — not the salesperson’s outcome.

This is the new sales paradigm in the world of the savvy, online buyer. The buyer as user is likely to be more knowledgeable about the practical elements (what matters to him) of the product or service you are selling then you are. They’ve come to the point of talking to you to learn just one thing: Are you the best person with the best organization to enable them to get it done? They don’t need product information or the company history — because they already have it via the Internet. They know what competitive options are available. They want you to show what blanks to fill in and what buttons to press so that when they put their money into your business solution, the outcome they’ve been dreaming of will pop out the other end. What the prospect needs is to replace the uncertainties of getting there with knowledge — we’re talking about their uncertainties, not yours. So stop selling and start talking about what they perceive as standing in the way.

When all you talk about is how big, problem-free, efficient, well-financed, etc., your product/company is, it’s actually a sign that you are not confident (or certain) about your company or yourself. Instead, begin by focusing on questions that reveal how big, problematic, inefficient and costly (especially costly) their problem is. When you ask about the nitty-gritty details that stand in the way of getting it fixed, you’ve framed your sales process with a frankness and openness that eliminates uncertainty. Change the game from “buyers school” to “sellers school” — the customers will love you for it. Get to the truth and get the uncertainties out on the table. Challenge your prospect to get them resolved one way or another in a timely fashion. “If not now, when?” “What should I do if I don’t hear from you then?” Always eliminate the uncertainty.

Recently, we received a coaching call from a salesperson seeking advice about how to gain a useful referral into a prospect company through a third party at the company.

Jack the Sales Rep wanted to obtain a meaningful referral from a management-level acquaintance, Jane, who was roughly on par in the organizational chart to the Very Important Top Officer (VITO) whom Jack was seeking contact.

Jack tried a conventional approach. He sent a message via email to Jane and called her to follow up. Jack and Jane’s relationship is slight  — he’d met her in passing when introduced by a common friend at an event a few months earlier. In the email and subsequent call, Jack attempted to explain how his company’s product/solution could be beneficial to Jane’s company, if only Jane would be good enough to provide him with an introduction to the appropriate authority at her organization.

Jack’s strategy did result in a referral, but not the one he was expecting.  Instead of referring Jack to the targeted VITO, Jane referred him to Leah the Marketing Coordinator, whom we would classify in Guess Free Selling terms as an “un-authority.”  An un-authority is any individual who is presented or presents him/herself as a port into an organization’s decision-making when he or she is really not an authority at all. An un-authority is not one of the Guess Free Selling true authority figures (the trifecta of Executive, Specification and End-user buyers). We often are misled, typically by our own false hopes, into believing that if we trust an un-authority while engaged in an often one-sided conversation about how great our stuff is, it will eventually lead us to a win.

Leah the Marketing Coordinator had neither the power nor the inclination to take action on the information Jack provided. She also failed to let Jack know this and went dark on him instead. Even if Jack’s service was a “killer app” or game changer, Leah was incapable of sponsoring him in the firm, much less championing him up to the appropriate authorities in the organization.

There are several lessons to gleaned from Jack’s situation.

1. Political Capital: No one will expend political capital on your behalf unless you’ve established a perception of a benefit that makes them want to spend it. The benefit need not be direct or explicit. In fact, it is better if it is not. People make decisions to act based on their own best interests or in avoidance of something detrimental to them. Jack needed to establish a perception of a benefit at the start, or no one would risk sponsoring him into the organization.
2. WIIFM: When we say WIIFM (What’s in It for Me) in Guess Free Selling, we mean it differently than in the conventional sense. Learning what’s in it for our counterpart means Guess Free Listening — true listening that suspends all assumptions. It means listening with a mind that is empty of preconceived ideas and subjective intentions. Jack needed to do this in a sincere and meaningful way to create a perception of benefit in the mind of the other person and build relational equity.
3. Perceived Benefit: In the absence of a perceived benefit, the prospect will pass on making an introduction. In this case, Jane took the cordial and safe path of handing our client off to Leah. Was Jane being unkind? The answer is no. Jane was just making the polite — but conservative — choice in the absence of a reason to act otherwise. To avoid this, Jack needed to have established a perception of benefit in the mind of his acquaintance, when they first met or soon after.
4. Risk: The reason that neither Jane nor Leah referred Jack vertically to the appropriate authority was because of the risk they perceived to themselves personally. Risk and uncertainty are business destroyers. People will always choose inaction over decisiveness when the perceived inflated risk cost exceeds the discounted chance of benefit. The only way to offset perceived risk is to create perceived benefit though communication — in this case, sincere, outwardly directed reality testing questions and active listening.
5. Sidebar on Procurement: Procurement is a special case of un-authority. In larger organizations, salespeople are often directed to the procurement department as the path to becoming an approved vendor and winning the business. However, procurement rarely initiates changes in vendors or creates a new vendor relationship unless it fits a mandate to reduce cost — the chief driver in procurement. So, if your solution is mainly a cost-cutting story, then procurement is your way into the company … at least until someone cheaper comes along. Otherwise, procurement as your entry point into an organization is a slow and painful death.

The Guess Free Selling remedy: Every business acquaintance is a potential relationship. Don’t approach a player in any role with any interest other than gaining an understanding of what the business world looks like from their side of the desk, and take the conversation from there.  People buy or recommend for their reasons, not yours. It’s your task to learn what they are for every person with whom you speak.

In Guess Free Selling, we teach participants to only sell to people who have the power to say “Yes.” Even with an organizational plan, it can be tough to figure out exactly who the person is who has “Money Authority” because many of those you approach will be quick to suggest it’s them.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: Start at the top. Don’t approach a new prospect at mid-level or procurement-level management because if you do, you are stuck there. This person will seldom, if ever, deliver you a “yes” (or even a “no” for that matter), and worse, they have no emotional motivation to change the status quo. The sales professional who consistently delivers number-crushing results only goes to the top in the C Suite.

In Guess Free Selling, we spend important time working on “Relationship Management,” part of which is DISC Analysis (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance). DISC profiling provides a basis for judging the pacing, tone and content of business conversations based on the natural communication style of your counterpart. The intent of the training is to help sales professionals adapt their own style to that of the person they are speaking with.  Particularly in first meetings, effective communications and establishing credibility are based on the way we speak to someone as much as what we say to them. This is especially critical when you are talking with the top management in the C Suite or the D Suite.

We call it the D-Suite, because top management tends to be populated with “D” or Dominant-type DISC personalities. When it comes to business discussions, Ds live by the credo: “Be brief, be bright, be gone.” So how do we adapt our natural personalities, our natural communication style to assure successful conversations in the D Suite?

Most of us approach senior-level Ds the way the Cowardly Lion approached “Oz the Great and Powerful” in the Wizard of Oz, trembling and on our knees. In fact, this is the precise opposite of what a D is looking for in communications. In a nutshell, Ds want the “unvarnished truth with all the bark on it.” They want reality, not romance; funds not friends. You have a D’s undivided attention when you speak in irrefutable truths and scrap the indefensible assertions. The key to the D manager is one word — REAL: Revenue, Earnings, Assets and Love. Everything you address with a D better speak to improving sales, bottom line and asset value, or address the core passion about why they are doing what they are doing. You need to focus on the D’s personal emotional motivation for why she wants her business to go higher and further; her vision of tomorrow.

But for most of us, this is much easier said than done. Somehow, in the “lights, camera, action” moment, when it’s sink or swim time, we seem to lose our ability to think on our feet and respond intelligently to the most mundane questions. Our knees get weak and we collapse to the floor, a reflex response to the D’s natural instinct to attack as a way of establishing preeminence, “I guess if they ran or folded it couldn’t have been very important!”

Key to overcoming this requires us to create five reflexive behavior patterns for dealing with the D-Suite:

1) Talk REAL (Revenue, Earnings, Assets and Love) and in the context of the D’s personal investment in REAL outcomes. If it’s phony, you’re finished — but Ds can’t resist attention and interest in their priorities, as long as it is genuine. After all, what other priorities are there?

2) Assert nothing you can’t back up or that you aren’t prepared to defend to the death. And when you finally make an assertion, couch it in a nest of other statements that are irrefutably true.

3) Kill small talk (unless they insist). Even if they drift into small talk, they will love you for being the one to pull the conversation back to business.

4) Free yourself from emotion. Be like a doctor when it comes to dealing with Ds; you are there to create certainty about the D getting the outcome they seek — that’s it. In the end, it’s yes or no; you just want the decision.

5) Resist and go negative: Ds love pressure; without it they are like a fish out of water. Load your talk with reality testing questions that strike at the heart of “Why are we here and why are we having this conversation?”

The good news is that in senior management, even if people aren’t Ds, they have adapted D attributes that will be in alignment with this approach. Once you learn to deal with their D side, you are on your way to becoming a Guess Free Selling expert — one who crushes the numbers and gets results every time by dedicating time to those with the authority to say “yes.”

It is common in a sales process to be asked for a trial run.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

Before agreeing to the trial, follow the Guess Free Selling process and manage expectations. Here is a quick checklist of things that need to happen before beginning a trial period:

1. Ensure that trial users have seen a demo or at least know who you are and what the end goal is supposed to be.

Sometimes, you meet with a decision-maker, show them the product, and then he or she wants to follow up with a big trial involving a large group of users who did not participate in the demo. A trial may not be effective if the group doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be looking for or experiencing. Schedule a  demo to get in front of those who did not participate before.

2. Make sure the financial deal is clear.

Agree on a price. Say, “Based on a successful trial, here is how much it costs; presuming the trial is successful, will you buy it for that price — yes or no?”

3. Ask the client what constitutes a successful trial. You cannot run a trial for any product or service before defining success!

If it is a software trial, for example, and a large group of users is supposed to participate, set the expectation that not all of them will log on, so defining a trial as successful if the majority of the users gave good feedback is setting you and the client up for failure.

Find the key people that will affect the decision making and ask the client to get their commitment to participate.

Find out what specific areas the customer is interested in so you can monitor these areas during the trial. What are the “must have” and “should have” things they need to see to be sure?

Limit the duration and scope of the trial. This is an appetizer not a banquet. Keeping it short and simple limits the possibility of “if it can go wrong, it will go wrong.” Trials often go poorly because they are subject to two internal dynamics:

a. The “Immune Response” or “It’s a different color than the old one therefore it isn’t as good.”

b. The “Law of Initial Conditions.” Though your product does get more user-friendly over time, in the beginning it’s like changing your golf grip. Even if it eventually makes clients’ lives better, it is uncomfortable in the beginning and it doesn’t work at first.

The solution is to create a “special team” to implement the trial. Spend face time orienting them; make the trial (part one) “dumb,” easy and a victory.

4. Ask the client: “Assuming the trial went well, what would be the next step? What happens next and by when?”

If the prospect doesn’t say “we will buy the service,” you may be in trouble. Do NOT proceed with a trial.

If the prospect says “Then we need to go to get the boss’s approval,” do NOT proceed. He or she has to get the boss’s approval before the trial.

If the prospect says “We will sign the purchase order / agreement and get started,” you may proceed.

5. Schedule a call for mid-trial to measure progress and schedule a post-trial meeting (date and time) to learn the result and collect the final decision.

These appointments must be scheduled BEFORE the start of the trial.