Mar/102
Where is the spotlight? If it is on you, you are not selling!
I was sitting in the best burrito place in Budapest one afternoon. At a table near me, I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation in English, My Hungarian is still pretty weak, so the familiar language caught my attention.
In this conversation, an older guy in a business suit was sitting with a young, fresh faced 20-something guy in jeans and a t-shirt. The older guy was peppering with younger one with questions:
- So how long have you known her?
- Where did you guys meet?
- Do you speak any Slovakian?
- What is your current status?
- What does she do for a living?
- Etc.
The kid didn’t seem to mind, but it was eminently clear that the older guy was COMPLETELY controlling the conversation. I am not making any value judgement here, just an observation.
It reminded me of a talk show. Where Johnny or Jay or Connan or Larry fires off well informed questions, directing the celebrity of the moment through the interview until the key moment when the hot issue is approached, exposed and explored – with or without the consent and/or comfort of the interviewee .
What does this have to do with sales and selling? The key concept here is all about what we can call “the spotlight”.
Some non-salespeople (and some salespeople) have the misguided idea that salespeople love the spotlight. They believe that selling is an opportunity to get up on a kind of stage and present the wonders of a product or service in such a dazzling way that prospective customers can’t help but throw money at them, like bras at a Beatles concert in days of old.
These people have it all wrong. If these people are salespeople, then it is probably a hard job for them. The image of the snake oil salesman on his wagon in the old west town is an old story, and it no longer plays in Peoria or anywhere else.
If you aspire to be an effective professional salesperson, then you should remember the concept of “the spotlight”. To help you remember it, perhaps I should tell you what it is:
When you are in a sales conversation, imagine that you and your prospect are on a stage with two chairs. You sit in one, the prospect in the other. The stage is dark, except for a single spotlight. The spotlight shines not on the person talking, but on the person who is the subject of the conversation.
You are selling most effectively when the spotlight is on the other person – the prospect.
How can this be? Don’t you need to tell the prospect all about your great stuff so that they know that they need to buy it? Not necessarily.
In the sales process that I map out in blow-by-blow detail in my book Mastering Your Sales Process, the first four steps (leads, prospecting, qualifying and needs analysis) are designed to allow the salesperson to demonstrate professionalism which generates trust and to gather client information interactively, in such a way that what feels to the client like the gathering of information (spotlight on them) simultaneously and proactively addresses potential objections and informs parameters for the solution option.
In this way, the second half of the sales process (solution, objections and close) can be brief, spot-on, and totally effective without the need for presentations, lengthy proposals, extended negotiation sessions, or any of those other “spotlight on the salespeople” activities that usually do more damage to the opportunity to close than they do help it.
Proposals and presentations have their place, but if you want to be effective, the skills you need to focus on revolve around understanding the compelling reasons that the prospect has for wanting your product or service, and fleshing them out in a dialogue that highlights your understanding of the issue, your ability to fix it, and your character as the kind of person the prospect wants to partner with towards a solution.
Keeping the spotlight on the prospect with great questions, trial solutions, thorough needs analysis, properly timed and complete proposals will help. A lot. When you do it all right, your closing technique can be as simple as something like “well OK then”. It is true that to close, you do need to say or do something, By keeping the spotlight on the prospect the right way as you work towards the close, you can keep it short, and help make it more effective than your best uninformed, spotlight-on-you monologue or power point presentation ever will.
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Feb/103
The right sales mindset and success in social media – part 1 of a 3 part series
PART ONE
In my blog post on January 13, I asked the questions “Does Social Media Marketing Work”. My answer was that it works best when it is driven by great content.
But what is “great content” in the context of sales? In other words, if your goal is to use social media to sell more of your product or service, what kind of content qualifies as “great”, especially towards reaching that goal?
I’ll attempt to answer that questions over the next three blog posts – why three? Well, the answer breaks up neatly into three pieces, and the answer is too long for a single blog post – even by my “anything under 1000 character is OK” standards! So here is part one: Why demonstrating that you are an expert matters.
In my book, Mastering Your Sales Process, I spent a few pages talking about the “right sales mindset” and why it is important. That right mindset is as follows:
“I am an expert in my field. My job is to help qualified prospects make good decisions about solving problems using my product or service.”
Before we start to take this apart, let’s get back to the question at hand – why is this the right mindset for sales success in social media?
Anyone who is using social media that might wind up buying from you as a result of doing so, is probably collaborating with others and evaluating multiple sources of information before making a decision. As such, you COULD position yourself in a corporate communications style of one-way, marketing speak (look at our great products, they do these cool things, etc.). This is the mode of communications that you see in commercials, corporate web sites, etc. However, it is not the right approach for social media.
In social media, it is best to not sell, but rather to help customers buy (arguably true outside of social media as well!). Consumers have become accustomed to hearing companies talk about how great their products are, and in the right context, that is accepted (although it may or may not be believed at face value). Social media is a different kind of communications venue in that allows two-way communication, and fosters more of a “discussion” format as opposed to a “presentation”. In a presentation, saying that you are great is usually not contested, if it is even possible (yelling at a TV commercial doesn’t count). In the midst of a conversation, it is not considered polite (or effective) to talk about how terrific you and your stuff might be.
So what does happen in a conversation that helps engender trust? In a conversation, a person who is an expert on the topic at hand will demonstrate their expertise by the content of their part of the conversation. If the topic is cardiovascular surgery, and you are talking with a cardiovascular surgeon, it will become clear during the course of the conversation that the surgeon has some idea what they are talking about, even if (especially if?) they don’t tell you how great they are at it. Rather, they demonstrate their expertise by addressing the subject knowledgeably. They demonstrate this to you by the way they engage in the two-way dialogue you are having.
If you want to have credibility about a subject in a dialogue, you must demonstrate, not announce your expertise in a subject matter. Once you have done so, you have made an important step towards having the ability to influence your dialogue partner. If they believe that you know what you are talking about regarding a subject that matters to them, and they are inclined to take action, they just might listen to an expert like you.
Step one in generating great content in the context of sales via social media is to embody the first part of our sales mind set: to demonstrate that you are indeed a subject matter expert regarding the subject at hand.
Step two – the subject of next weeks blog – will focus on how to position your expertise to help the prospective customer decide to allow you to influence their buying decision.
Jan/100
How the talk inside of your head is hurting your sales
Do you remember what it was like when you first learned to drive a car? How about riding a bike? Using a computer for the first time?
If you remember your early experiences with these things, then you may remember what was going on inside of your head at that time, and how different that is from what goes on inside of your head now as you do these same (presumably now familiar) things.
When we first learn something that requires a lot of concentration and/or that has a lot of “moving parts”, we tend to talk to ourselves a lot. We feed ourselves reminders about what we need to remember as we go through the mechanics of executing the task at hand.
“OK, check the mirrors, put the gear shift into ‘drive’ – no wait, first push the break….”
“OK, single click the ‘start’ button; highlight ‘applications’; select ‘Word’; click the ‘file’ menu and click on ‘new’….”
After a short time, these things become routine. Part of the “background operating program” in your mind. Now you pull the car our while talking on the phone, sipping your coffee, or checking your makeup. You open a new word document as you multitask through 10 other things both on and off of your computer screen.
I am not a fan of multitasking, but I’ll save that rant for another post. My point now is that when you have achieved a certain level of comfort with the set of steps involved in accomplishing a task, then you are able to execute that task with a greater level of attention.
Wait a minute, what? Shouldn’t that be a smaller amount of attention? I just said that instead of concentrating on the steps, we can now concentrate on other things as the mechanical actions are run in the background?
That is not the right perspective – here is why. If your attention is focused on the minutia of your execution, then you are not fully present for the larger experience of getting your task done. For example, if you are backing out your car, and you are focussed on the minutia of the mechanics, it is easier to miss the fact that someone just walked behind your car.
So how does this all tie back to sales and selling? As you undoubtedly know by now, I attribute a lot of the elements of sales success back to the development of and the proper execution of a well-developed sales process.
With respect to this concept then, the salesperson who operates with confidence within the framework of a well-developed process is able to concentrate on “other things” as the mechanical elements of selling operate quietly and predictably in the background. If properly applied, these “other things” should include actively listening to the prospect; taking copious notes about the conditions and concerns of the prospect; floating trial solutions and noting the degree to which they resonate with the prospect – and why or why not – according to the prospect, etc.
In contrast, a salesperson who does not have a clear path, who does not have a visceral feel for the next steps and interconnected nature of the full sales process at a near unconscious level will spend his or her mental energy worrying about the right way to respond to the remarks of the client, as opposed to “effortlessly” arriving at their next strategic move by better understanding the needs of their conversational counterpart.
Samurai warriors aspired towards a mental state of what is called Mu Shin – or no mind. This served them well when they fought another Samurai. These fights usually played out as both Samurai standing in a fighting position, with swords drawn and ready, and within striking distance of each other for perhaps hours. The first Samurai that moved (due to less mental strength and stamina) often revealed an opening which the other exploited, usually with deadly consequences.
These Samurai would not have been well served to stand in their fighting position thinking about all of the possibilities that might confront them. They were successful if they “owned” that information, and were able to tune out that internal noise in exchange for a keen awareness of the present moment.
You as a salesperson need to own your sales process, and the steps and elements that comprise it. In this way, you will be able to stick to your path, and remain engaged with your opponent (prospect) in a way that leads you to the best result. An informed position, free from internal noise, that allows you to direct the course of action forward as is most applicable based on your observations and your internal knowledge.
The alternative, all too common, is a course of client engagement clouded by internal noise, which is a function of a lack of discipline about how to properly do the job of professional sales, and how to manage the sales process that you move through with each and every client.
Oct/090
The Meal Meeting
Over a 20+ year business career, I have a few small tricks that just seem to work every time. Here is one of my favorites.
When you have a business meeting that takes place during the course of a meal in a restaurant, when is the right time to start talking business? If you get it right, the meeting goes smoothly, and the business discussion is seen as a natural part of the flow of conversation. In this case, if you are the salesperson, or the one with something to ask for, the meeting is perceived as professional, and so are you. Before I tell you the right time, let’s look at some wrong times.
If you start talking business as soon as you see your colleague, you run the risk of interruptions. First the waiter comes over to offer menus. If you are in the middle of talking business, then you will need to decide when to stop and look at the menu. If it is right away, the conversation has an interruption. If the menus are set aside, a lot of time can go by before you look, which can become uncomfortable. It will take time for the food to be prepared, served, and eaten. If the process of getting this started is delayed, the meeting can wind up taking longer than expected. This does not strike anyone as professional.
Then there is the waiter. Until you place your order, the waiter will come by every few minutes to see if you are ready. More interruptions, more discomfort. So this is not OK.
On the other hand, if you wait too long, it can be hard to bridge the conversation over to business. If you have ordered and continue talking small talk, how and when do you get to business? Now the transition to business may seem awkward. Once the food comes, you have mouth-related interruptions that make getting started difficult to do.
After dessert just doesn’t leave enough time.
So when? The right answer is just after the waiter takes your order. This is a natural break that you can move on from in any direction. Say something like “Well, now that the hard work of choosing lunch is over, let’s talk about XYZ”. This allows you to control the meeting flow, get started on business early but not too early, and to have a few minutes while the food is prepared to get business started, so that when the meal does come, you are well enough into the business conversation that the serving of the meal is not an interruption.
This is a long blog post on what may seem a pretty subtle point, but if you have ever done this wrong, you know that it is important. Always target the exit of the waiter with your order as the right time, and you will almost always have a smooth transition.
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