The truth about liars

Here's a riddle: What are the three times in life it is acceptable to lie? When you are an actor in a play, when you are bluffing in poker and when you are giving objections to a sales person.

Overcoming objections is especially difficult because prospects think it is perfectly okay to play it fast and loose with the truth. Let's look at the liars, half-truth-tellers, "concealers," and the delusional hopeful, whose greatest sin is that they lie to themselves first and then repeat it to us.
I don't have science behind me and I am not a poker expert that can read tells. I do, however, tend to think there are some indicators when the conversation is not completely truthful and those hints are worth watching for.

Over claims. Promises are too big for the person's position in the company or role in the project. Beware the overzealous prospect. They make claims that they can approve the deal because they are afraid you'll move past them and leave them out of the discussions.
Wait-and-see. When someone is delaying the timeline in a buying process he or she defined, it's not a great indicator of honesty. I have found that in these circumstances the person is often checking pricing with the incumbent vendor or negotiating with my biggest competitor while keeping me on the hook.
Too-good-to-be-true. "Price is not a major factor in this decision." "We're not considering any other providers." "We're going to bypass the normal testing phases and put this into full production." I've heard all of these and later in the process not one of them turned out to be true. Was the person lying? Let's say no. But I think she had convinced herself of something that in the end she should have known was not going to be true.
If, then. As in, "...if you just lower your price 11 percent, then we will make the decision right away..." only to find out this was a gambit in a list of demands. This liar is seductive because he preys upon our sense of urgency, and causes us to act as his agent in negotiations within our own firm. The "if, then" liars proceed to blame other forces within their firm, for further delays and heretofore unmentioned requirements, as a means to repeat the "if then" game to win even more concessions.

When I see these types of red-flags, I push. I think a mixture of self-confidence, raw curiosity, and authenticity can get you closer to truth, regardless if the person will tell you the truth or not. The biggest push is raw curiosity -- ask the questions that are uncomfortable. It always surprises me how often we don't ask the questions we know we should because we are afraid of the answer. As if by not asking the question, the answer doesn't exist.

Some of those tough questions can include:

• Why are you considering making a change at this time?
• What is the exact threshold of performance improvement that has to be achieved for us to win this business?
• Who has the greatest amount to lose in your company if you agree to do business with us?

Since you are delaying the decision for 30 days, what specifically will change during that period to enable you to make a better decision in 30 days?

If you made the decision today and went with our firm, what is the biggest thing that could go wrong? Who would be the first to point it out?

This is not the climatic scene of this week's episode of "Law and Order" ("ripped from today's headlines!"), but rather a hunt for information that will help you overcome the real objections. And that's the truth.

Gaining commitment

Tom Searcy July 5th, 2012 www.cbsnews.com

Prospects have a hard time with the C word: Commitment. Sure they have signed on the dotted line. But fear, uncertainty and doubt enter the picture. One of the biggest fears prospects usually have is a quite simple question: "How do we get started?"

They're now poised at the end of a cliff and a deep chasm. They can see the other side and implementation of your solution. But between now and then is a huge chasm they cannot cross in their imagination. This, of course, makes them very afraid.

Building a bridge for them will eliminate that gigantic fear and show them your competence, your ability to anticipate and strategize, and your willingness to share a little of the load of transition.

What the prospects want to know is, "What happens between now and then?" And you have to be prepared to answer completely and with confidence.

"Trust us. It'll be done," won't eliminate any fear.

Let's look at how we develop your transition map.

- Start with the question: What will we do today or tomorrow to move this forward? And you take it from there.

- Name and define clearly each step you will take between now and full implementation. Think of everything. Nothing is too trivial to be included: Actions to be taken, people to be involved from both companies, training that will be needed, person(s) from your company responsible for each step, timelines for each step, and individuals to contact in case the prospect has questions.

- Set a regular communication schedule with the prospects to keep them fully informed.

- Establish milestones with key performance indicators where you and the prospects can discuss how everything is going. Define your results threshold for rollout upfront. At each step, what results do you need and what results do your prospects need to make, so that you can move seamlessly through the steps?

- Establish the 30 percent completion point, the 50 percent completion point, and so on.

- Establish an ROI schedule.

This transition map is essential when you're hunting a big deal. Since this is such a large deal and since prospects are fearful, sometimes they will say, "Let's try a little and see how that works." Don't fall into that trap.

I was with a company recently in the far Northwest. They would sell an initial implementation -- fairly complex engineering sales -- and they'd sell almost any volume they could get.

The volume that would allow them to work out the kinks, really engineer the product, and work through the implementation was 10,000 units. But the salespeople were allowed to go out and sell 5,000 units.

Well, you want to know what the first 5,000 units look like? A mess.

During the first 5,000 they're just getting their supply chain management right. They're working through the orientation of parts in the inline manufacturing process. The first 5,000 units is where all the hard, bumpy work gets done. And if the prospects really wanted to know what the future would look like working with that company, the best vantage point would result from viewing it during the implementation of the second 5,000 units.

If you let yourself get caught in the "try it and see how it goes" trap, you won't have made the big sale you want to make, and your prospects will be disappointed with the results. Chances are you'll lose the deal entirely.

Selling 5,000 when you know the only way for prospects to really understand your value proposition is at 10,000 will not get you your big sale. If the prospect isn't interested in buying your entire deal, you need to find other prospects that will. Don't sell yourself short and settle for anything less than commitment.

A cure for toxic salesperson syndrome

 Tom Searcy July 18, 2012 www.cbsnews.com

Does your company have a salesperson that is too valuable to let go but too painful to keep?  Toxic sales people are easy to spot in the workplace. Co-workers call them tyrants, jerks, and worse. Most are emotional bullies who treat employees coldly, even cruelly. They are quick to assign blame and even quicker to hog credit for themselves.

But what is the impact of such bosses on company performance? Heavy, according to researchers who polled several thousand managers and employees from a diverse range of U.S. companies. Here's how employees respond to toxic co-workers:

• 80 percent lost work time worrying about the offending employees' rudeness
• 78 percent said their commitment to the organization declined
• 66 percent said their performance declined
• 63 percent lost time avoiding the offender
• 48 percent decreased their work effort

Add to that the legal penalties levied against companies in connection with workplace bullying or the hidden cost of long-term disability if a bully makes his or her targets psychologically incapable of working again. And if word gets around that a company tolerates this sort behavior, the employer may have trouble hiring or retaining good employees.

Despite their adverse impact, toxic managers can be rehabilitated, says workplace psychologist Dr. Bruce Heller, author of the book "The Prodigal Executive." That is good news for any company with the kind of salespeople you can't live with -- and without.

"Toxic sales people can be saved because these are individuals who are extremely successful," Heller says. "Many of these executives could be compared to an elite athlete. They are highly skilled, talented, and energetic. They have passion for what they do and love the companies they're working for. They feel a sense pride in their work, have an insatiable curiosity, and want to learn more."

Unfortunately, many of them have never had coaching or leadership development. They were put into a sales leadership role because they were good at selling and often are eager for a mentor. As a result, many are ripe to learn some of these skills.

Heller has repeatedly found that toxic salespeople can change their personality, even if they have been that way for a long time. "Personality is malleable if there is a reward for doing so," he says, citing the example of one president of a Fortune 500 subsidiary named Peter. "His level of intuition and ability to analyze problems were superb. He was also one of the best negotiators I have ever seen. Peter picked up subtle nuances and would instantaneously have the perfect retort ready."

But the executive never listened to staffers. He felt that because he was the smartest person in the room, listening to others was a waste of time because he already knew what was best. Not surprisingly, there was a mass exodus of top talent from the company.

"I coached Peter to listen using small steps," Heller says. "First, I just had him practice not talking for awhile while his subordinates spoke. Next we had him practice nodding while others spoke. Then, while going through the motions, something amazing happened. He actually heard what they were saying. 'I sure learned a lot more listening than when I was talking.' "
Remember the old joke about how many psychologists it takes to change a light bulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.

Stop Guesstimating Your Sales Forecasts

Matthew Bellows  May 17, 2012 www.blogs.hbr.org

For anyone running a sales organization, the 48 hours before a pipeline presentation are the worst days of the month. The pipeline meeting is where you tell management your team's sales forecast for the next month, and no matter how good your numbers were last month, your work life is a mess.

In the days and weeks leading up to this point, you've had everyone send you their individual and team projections. You've told them, "Update me on the deals you've been working on, tell me about the new ones, estimate when they are going to close, and give me a percentage chance for each one."

You have been diligent in managing your people and in creating compensation plans that reward consistency and predictability. You have stayed on top of the major deals. You have put in place sales training and a market-leading, cloud-based CRM system. Everyone on your teams spends hours each week typing updates, but for those 48 hours, none of it seems to help much.

Basically, you're going into the pipeline meeting and giving your bosses your best guess, because you lack the tools to offer something more precise.

But how can forecasting sales data be such of a problem? The performance of the sales team has always been the most measurable in a company. At the end of every week, month, quarter and year, the result of sales activity is shown on the top line for all to see.

There are two reasons. First, the obvious: the higher you go in the organization, the less connected you are to the deals happening beneath you — and the more vulnerable you are to individual reps or teams, either purposely or subconsciously, altering their pipeline projections to suit their needs. This is no different from how people in non-sales functions push to create budgets and targets they know they can beat.

The second reason for the sales manager's pain is that when it comes to gathering data about upcoming sales possibilities, companies and CRM systems rarely measure anything real. For most kinds of business-to-business selling, your CRM database is an outdated collection of anecdotes and guesses. The fewer the deals, and the longer the sales cycle, the less your "data" matches reality. The stuff that does get accumulated in spreadsheets and CRM systems looks like data — there are dollar signs and probabilities next to prospect names — but it's not. It's really just the opinions, guesses, estimates and suppositions of your sales team.

Thus, the terrible two days. The number you present to your bosses will look definitive, and your reputation will be staked to it. You will have padded it, of course, and your boss will push back and demand that you raise it. You'll settle on a compromise, but you'll leave the room anxious, because you know that there's nothing firm and reliable to back it up.

Why is this the best we, as sales leaders, can do? Because for the most part we are collecting and summing opinions instead of data.

Some innovative sales organizations are starting to move away from the old ways. The growth of inside sales teams and the increasing emphasis on more-measurable sales channels like phone calls and emails is a start. And while CRM systems have their shortcomings, the central repository of information and leads at least gives the harried manager a single pile through which to dig.

But there will be no end to the stress, the chaos and the cognitive dissonance of the 48 hours before the pipeline meeting unless we change. We have to start caring more about sales activities, the specific actions that salespeople and sales teams perform to close more business. We need to know how many phone calls, emails, demos and visits it takes for our teams to close a deal. Then we need to measure the underlying data for each team member without requiring them to report on themselves.

(Full disclosure: Although my company does make an email product to support the sales function, it doesn't help with the problem of tracking sales activities.)

So this is a call to innovative sales leaders, sales operations people, technology and service providers, and the top companies of the CRM industry. Let's build the processes, the services and the tools we need to collect data instead of opinions. Let's learn to build forecasts based on what we do instead of what we say. And most importantly, let's help our salespeople succeed instead of weighing them down with processes that waste valuable time and money.

It's the only way to improve those awful 48 hours. And along the way, we'll find ways to make a whole lot more money.

Matthew Bellows is founder and CEO of Yesware.

Key Account Selling: The Unwritten Rules

Tom Searcy May 16, 2012 www.cbsnews.com

Selling key accounts is like baseball: Both have their codes of unwritten rules.
Baseball fans and players know the game has an informal code of conduct worthy of a samurai. One former player said it is a game played by human beings and governed by unwritten laws of survival and self-preservation.
These rules are largely unofficial and aren't written down on clubhouse walls. But they are well-known. For instance:

• Don't slide into second with your spikes high and try to injure the infielder (that went out with Ty Cobb)
• With runners in scoring position and first base open, walk the number eight hitter to get to the pitcher (don't get me started on the designated hitter rule)
• Don't bunt with a home run hitter at the plate
• If there is a fight, everyone must leave the bench, and the bullpen has to join in (but no bats -- just fists)
• In cities that have two baseball teams, any given fan can only root for one of them (President Obama roots for the Chicago White Sox, for instance, not the Cubs)

Selling key accounts is similar to baseball. There are unwritten rules you are expected to learn if you want to pursue these major pieces of business, which have the highest profit potential. The competition to land these large corporate accounts is fierce. These unwritten sales laws are also a matter of survival and self-preservation.
One such rule is that when you're trying to land a key account, your prospects are listening for certain things. They want to know if you respect their money, if you respect their time, and if you understand the risks they face. For them, it doesn't matter what you are selling; they will judge your selling tools to see if you respect and understand the unwritten rules about money, time, and risk.

Salespeople have a bad habit of ignoring these unwritten rules and selling what they think prospects want to hear: quality, service, capacity, innovation, on-time delivery, guarantees, and all the other usual buzzwords. But the fact is, these are not the reasons why big companies buy. When you speak an entirely different language it shows, at best, ignorance of the rules, and at worst a lack of respect.

When you use those typical words, you are asking the big company to translate what you believe is valuable to what they believe is valuable. For example, to a big company the meaning is different.

Quality means time -- production lines not going down because of faulty parts, customer service calls not received because products work, and so on.

Quality Also Means Money -- repeat purchases, reduced waste in production, etc.
Quality Means Less Risk -- fewer product returns, investment confidence, etc.
The more complex your offering, the more difficult it is for a big organization to hear the three things it needs to hear make a decision to buy. To play the game right, we need to talk to a big company in its own language. We have to translate value based on the result of what we deliver.

Remember rule No 1: What matters most to a larger organization is time, money, and risk. For salespeople, that means following the unwritten rules of doing the translation in real-time, when you are presenting the benefits of what you sell. Every benefit needs to be accompanied with an impact statement that translates to time/money/risk in the big organization's business. To be successful, those are the (unwritten) rules.

The Hidden Wealth Beyond Net Promoter

Bill Lee May 10, 2012 www.blogs.hbr.org 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is perhaps the best known customer loyalty tool around today, based on the entirely sound principle that the more customer promoters you have (i.e., customers who say on surveys that they're highly likely to refer you to a colleague or friend), the more likely you'll be to grow your business and outpace the competition. That makes powerful sense, and the continued growth and success of Net Promoter is a testament to the idea's relevance and value.
But I have found in my years of experience working across industries and sectors, that firms who embrace NPS are often leaving tremendous sources of wealth creation on the table. That's because the focus of NPS is on creating promoters, but stops short of engaging them to actually promote the business through activities like referrals, references, blogging or tweeting, speaking at industry events, or any of the myriad ways that passionate customers can help build businesses these days. The implicit assumption seems to be that NPS is only about getting customers to buy, to keep buying and to buy more. But there are many other — often far more lucrative — ways that customer promoters can create value for your firm and help grow your business.

Here are some ways to tap this unrealized source of growth:

Be intentional about customer promotion. Many firms assume that because a customer says on a survey that he'd be highly likely to refer you, that he will in fact do so. That may not be the case at all: they need to be asked. Two studies of firms in the telecommunications and financial services industries showed that only about 10% of declared promoters actually do refer profitable new customers. That's not bad, of course, but what about the other 90%? Why not intentionally provide opportunities to such promoters and invite them to, you know, promote you?

By the way, not all referral customers are the same. Businesses that take the time to understand which customers are more likely to respond to a marketing campaign by buying, and which are more likely to respond by referring a colleague or friend — doubled the return on their campaigns, as opposed to those that treated everyone as a potential buyer.

Look for customer value beyond promoting. Loyal customers who are disposed to refer business to you probably like you a lot. Why limit the ways in which they can help you grow your business to referrals? They might enjoy helping with your sales and marketing efforts by providing references or testimonials. Or they might speak on your behalf at industry events. Or participate in your user groups or other customer communities. Or ... you get the idea.

Remarkably, even highly sophisticated firms miss these opportunities. When Coleen Kaiser took over SAP's global customer reference program, she thought it would be a good idea to have the firm's promoters — in addition to providing referrals — to provide sales and marketing references as well. (A referral occurs where a customer suggests your solution to her friend or colleague. A reference is where a customer affirms the value of your product to your prospect). As it turned out, only 20% of promoters were customer references. Indeed, very few references were identifying themselves as promoters on NPS surveys!

Kaiser took the obvious step of reconciling that anomaly — making sure that her team invited promoters into its reference program, which more than tripled their participation to 70%. It wasn't a hard sell. After all, these are customers who've said they'd be highly likely to recommend SAP. As a result, in post-sale surveys, sales people went from identifying customer references as a "neutral influence" on sales to identifying them as one of their highest rated competitive advantages.

Move beyond promoters to defenders. With the rise of social media and the ability of buyers to check out a business long before they engage with its marketing communications or sales people, the very idea of a "promoter" is looking dated. It's too passive. The concept that emerged at the 2012 Summit on Customer Engagement was "defender." That's a customer advocate who doesn't passively wait for you to invite her to promote your firm, but who is already active on the social media sites that are talking about your firm and vigilant about addressing and correcting negative comments as well as amplifying positive ones.

Salesforce.com (SFDC) and a growing number of other firms are cultivating such customers, who are often called "MVPs" (most valuable professionals). At the 2012 Summit, a panel of three such MVPs talked about their activities and wowed the audience of marketing professionals with their dedication to keeping the Salesforce.com brand strong. They blog, they attend live events, they present and sit on panels. In return, they're given front row seating and other benefits and platforms at SFDC events. And they do all this for free — any other arrangement would destroy their hard-won reputation for objectivity.

Defenders go way beyond simply being loyal customers. They identify their success with SFDC's success and both promote — and defend — the firm vigorously. In today's world, such passionate 3d party defenders can be among a firm's most powerful sources of wealth and sustained growth.

Bill Lee is president of the Lee Consulting Group, Executive Director of the Summit on Customer Engagement, and author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset (HBR Press, June 2012).

Biggest Time Wasters for Sales People

by David Kale Copyright MMXII  Thinking About Sales Ezine

Good time management for sales people has been an obsession of mine for more than 30 years. In the last decade, I've been involved in helping tens of thousands of sales people improve their results through more effective use of their time. Over the years, I've seen some regularly occurring patterns develop - tendencies on the part of sales people to do things that detract from their effective use of time.

Here are the four most common time-wasters I've observed. See if any apply to you or your sales people.

Allure of the urgent/trivial.

Sales people love to be busy and active. We have visions of ourselves as people who can get things done. No idle dreamers, we're out there making things happen!

A big portion of our sense of worth and our personal identity is dependent on being busy. At some level in our self image, being busy means that we really are important. One of the worst things that can happen to us is to have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nothing going on. So, we latch onto every task that comes our way, regardless of the importance.

For example, one of our customers calls with a back order problem. "Oh good!" we think, "Something to do! We are needed! We can fix it!" So, we drop everything and spend two hours expediting the backorder.

In retrospect, couldn't someone in purchasing or customer service have done that? And couldn't they have done it better than you? And didn't you just allow something that was a little urgent but trivial prevent you from making some sales calls? And wouldn't those potential sales calls be a whole lot better use of your time?

Or, one of our customers hands us a very involved "Request for Quote." "Better schedule a half-day at the office," we think. "Need to look up specifications, calculate prices, compile literature, etc." We become immediately involved with this task, working on this project for our customer. In retrospect, couldn't we have given the project to an inside sales person or customer service rep to do the leg work? Couldn't we have just communicated the guidelines to someone and then reviewed the finished proposal?

Once again, we succumbed to the lure of the present task. That prevented us from making sales calls and siphoned our energy away from the important to the seemingly urgent.

I could go on for pages with examples, but you have the idea. We are so enamored with being busy and feeling needed that we often grab at any task that comes our way, regardless of how unimportant. And each time we do that, we compromise our ability to invest our sales times more effectively.

• The comfort of the status quo.
  
  A lot of sales people have evolved to the point where they have a comfortable routine. They make enough money and they have established routines and habits that are comfortable. They really don't want to expend the energy it takes to do things in a better way, or to become more successful or effective.
  
  This can be good. Some of the habits and routines that we follow work well for us. However, our rapidly changing world constantly demands new methods, techniques, habits and routines. Just because something has been effective for a few years doesn't mean that it continues to be so. This problem develops when sales people are so content with the way things are, they have not changed anything in years.
  
  If you haven't changed or challenged some habit or routine in the last few years, chances are you are not as effective as you could be.
  
  For example, you could still be writing phone messages down on little slips of paper, when entering them into your contact manager would be more effective. This is a simple example of a principle that can extend towards the most important things that we do. Are we using the same routines for organizing our work week, for determining who to call on, for understanding our customers, for collecting information, etc.? There is no practical end to the list.
  
  Contentment with the status quo almost always means sales people who are not as effective as they could be.
  
  My book, 10 Secrets of Time Management for Salespeople, discusses the use of the "more" mindset as an alternative to the status quo.

Lack of trust in other people in the organization.

Sales people have a natural tendency to work alone. After all, we spend most of the day by ourselves. We decide where to go by ourselves, we decide what to do by ourselves, and we are pretty much on our own all day long. It's no wonder then, that we just naturally want to do everything by ourselves.

That's generally a positive personality trait for a sales person. Unfortunately, when it extends to those tasks that could be done better by other people in our organization it turns into a real negative.

Instead of soliciting aid from others in the organization, and thereby making much better use of our time, many sales people insist on doing it themselves, no matter how redundant and time-consuming is the task. The world is full of sales people who don't trust their own colleagues to write an order, to source a product, to enter an order in the system, to follow up on a back order, to deliver some sample or literature, to research a quote, to deliver a proposal, etc. Again, the list could go on and on.

The point is that many of these tasks can be done better or cheaper by someone else in the organization. The sales people don't release the tasks to them because they, the sales people, don't trust them to do it. Too bad. It's a tremendous waste of good selling time and talent. Chapter 10 of my book "10 Secrets" describes a system to nurture helpful relationships.

• Lack of tough-minded thoughtfulness.
  
  Ultimately, time management begins with thoughtfulness. That means a sufficient quantity of good quality thought-energy invested in the process. I like to say that good time management is a result of "thinking about it before you do it."
  
  Good time managers invest sufficiently in this process. They set aside time each year to create annual goals, they invest planning time every quarter and every month to create plans for those times, they plan every week and every sales call. Poor sales time managers don't dedicate sufficient time to the "thinking about it" phase of their job.
  
  Not only do good sales time managers invest a sufficient quantity of time, but they also are disciplined and tough-minded about how they think. They ask themselves good questions, and answer them with as much objectivity as they can muster.
  
  "What do I really want to accomplish in this account?"
  
  "Why aren't they buying from me?"
  
  "Who is the key decision maker in this account?"
  
  "Am I spending too much time in this account, or not enough in that one?"
  
  "How can I change what I am doing in order to become more effective?"
  
  These are just a few of the tough questions that good sales time managers consider on a regular basis. They don't let allow their emotions or personal comfort zones to dictate the plans. They go where it is smart to go, do what it is smart to do. They do these things because they have spent the quantity and quality of thought-time necessary.

These are just a few of the tough questions that good sales time managers consider on a regular basis. They don't allow their emotions or personal comfort zones to dictate the plans. They go where it is smart to go, do what it is smart to do. They do these things because they have spent the quantity and quality of thought-time necessary.

Of course, there are hundreds of other time-wasting habits. These four, however, are the most common. Correct them, and you'll be well on your way to dramatically improved results.

Great customer service starts with 7 letters

Michael Hess www.cbsnews.com March 28, 2012

There is no shortage of advice, opinion, theory and technology around the practice of customer service. Some of it good, much of it not. But none of it -- none of it -- will result in a truly exceptional customer service environment if it isn't built around one simple word: Empathy.


No matter what procedures, processes, people or tools you put in place, empathy -- the ability to identify with and understand somebody else's feelings or difficulties -- is a quality without which superior customer service simply can't exist.

If you Google "customer service best practices," it returns about 13 million results. Tack the word "empathy" onto the same search and the results drop by 95%, to 700,000. By no means a scientific study or conclusion, but I think telling.

Customer service empathy can be boiled down to five simple questions:

• How does the person I'm trying to help feel?
• How would I feel if I were that person?
• No matter the request or the "rules," is there something I can/should do to help?
• What would I expect to be done for me if the roles were reversed?
• In the end, what would make this customer satisfied or (better yet) happy, and is there any reason I can't do it or find someone who can?

With these five questions and the right attitude, you need little else to be a customer service superstar. They cannot be replaced with a 700-page handbook or multi-million dollar CRM system.

Empathy is often ignored or lost when companies start to get excessively clever and complex. Things like NIA (Next Issue Avoidance), ASA (Average Speed of Answer), KPI (Key Performance Indicators), and any number of other acronyms and metrics dehumanize a very human interaction. Articles, white papers and corporate guidelines often read like satire to anyone who is truly passionate about customers. They are full of buzz terms and grandiose technical language, focused very much on operational performance and "ROI," and very rarely focused on the person around whom all of this complexity revolves. It's akin to having a conversation about someone who's standing in the room but ignoring the fact that she's there.

Companies get so caught up in their systems and investments that they lose sight of the fact that genuine empathy can obviate the need for much of it, or at a minimum certainly simplify it. "Eyes on the prize," as it were.

I expect to get the usual flack from the people who work hard in these highly structured, analytical environments and think that my approach to service is quaint and unrealistic. That's OK. Their jobs -- and entire departments, businesses and industries -- revolve around systematizing service, I understand that. And of course I realize that in all areas of business there need to be steps, measurements, and controls in place (and the bigger the organization the more may be needed). But today's customer service standard-bearers have proven that process should only be built on a basic, human-focused foundation, and when it comes to serving humans, empathy is the best place to start.

Michael Hess is founder and CEO of Skooba Design, and also serves as an advisor to other entrepreneurs. He is "obsessed to the point of insanity" with customer service. Read the philosophies that make Michael and Skooba Design tick here.

Selling Commodities

By Dave Kahle  Copyright MMXII

"How do you create a perceived value to differentiate yourself from the competition when you are both selling a commodity?"

That's a question I'm often asked in my seminars. It uncovers a problem that is spreading to almost every industry. The rapid pace of technological development and our ultra-competitive global economy means that no one can keep a competitive edge in their product for very long. Develop a hot new product or service and before you can take your first check to the bank, a competitor has a hotter or cheaper version. As a result, customers are more and more inclined to view your product or service as a commodity - no real difference between you and the next guy.

This complicates life for the sales person. In some cases, you are selling exactly the same thing as your competitor. In other cases, your product may not be exactly the same, but the customer views your product as a commodity with no real differences between what you sell and what your competitor offers. How much real difference is there between Coke and Pepsi after all?

Regardless of the situation in which you find yourself, the problem for the sales person is the same - getting the business in the face of the customer's perception of your "me too" product or service.

So, what do you do?

To put it simply, you must detail and communicate the important ways your offering differs from your competitor's offering.

That's easier said than done. To do so effectively, you need to spend some time thinking and preparing. And that means that you must carefully consider the two most important elements of the sale - your offering, and your customer. In this column, we're going to focus on one part of that equation - your offering.

Granted, your product may be exactly the same as the competition, but the totality of your offering may be dramatically different. I use the word "offering" to indicate every aspect of the purchasing decision - not just the product. For example, the customer buys the product from a company - yours or the other guys. The customer buys it from a sales person - you or the competitor. Your company and you are part of the "offering." In addition, there may be differences in your terms, delivery, your customer-service capabilities, your follow-up, your return policy, your value-added services, etc. All of these are part of your "offering."

The product may be identical, but everything else about your offering may be different. For example, let's say you are contemplating purchasing a new Taurus. You have identical price quotes from two dealers. The product is the same, and the price is the same. However, one dealer is close by, the other across town. One dealer has a reputation for great customer service; the other has no such reputation. The sales person for the first dealer is the brother of an old high school friend, while the sales person for the second dealer is a bit cocky and pushy. The first dealer has a clean, comfortable establishment, while the second one is cramped, cluttered and dirty.

From whom do you buy your Taurus? Of course you buy it from the first dealer. Not because of any differences in the product or the price, but because of differences in the offering. Got the idea? There is a whole lot more to a decision to buy than just the product or the price.

Your first job is to identify those differences. Here are some very specific steps you can take today.

1. Think about everything that is associated with the product when a customer purchases it. Create several categories, and label columns on a piece of paper with the names of those categories. For example, the first column could be headed with the word "company," the second with the word "sales person," the third with "terms." Continue in this way, identifying every aspect of the offering and placing each of those components at the top of a column.

2. Now, consider each column one at a time, and list all the ways that your offering differs from your competitor's in that column. For example, your company may be locally owned as opposed to your competitor's branch of a national company. Or you may be physically closer to the customer, or larger, smaller, newer, older, etc. After you've exhausted one column, move on to the others, filling in the details as you go.

3. This exercise will typically reveal dozens (and in some cases hundreds) of specific, detailed differences. Far too many than you can easily communicate to the customer. So, your next step is to pick out those differences that are most important to your customer. Keep in mind that often what you see as important may not be viewed that way by your customers.

At one point in my career, I worked for a company that celebrated its 100th year anniversary. That was unusual. No other competitors had been in business nearly that long. The company decided to make a big deal about it. A history of the company was written, brochures printed, even murals depicting significant moments in the company's history were painted on the walls of the corporate office. We all thought it was important.

Our customers, however, didn't care. After respectfully listening to our boasting, their response was some form of "So what?" In other words, our 100 years didn't mean anything to them. In no way did it make their jobs easier, simplify their lives, or make them more important to their companies. What we thought was important turned out to be irrelevant from our customers' perspective.

Don't make the mistake we made. Instead, take the time to critically analyze your list, and eliminate those items that are not important to your customer, that don't impact their jobs or make a difference to them. You should be left with a handful of items.

4. One more step to the preparation. Translate each of those items into statements of benefit to the customer. For example, your company may be local, while your competitor ships from 50 miles away. So what? What does that mean to your customer? You could translate that item of difference into a benefit by saying something like this: "As opposed to some other suppliers, we're just 15 minutes from your plant. This means that you can get quick delivery of emergency shipments, as well as rapid response to any problem that might develop. So, you'll have potentially less downtime in the plant, and of course, less stress and pressure on you."

Now that you've professionally prepared, you are ready to communicate those differences to your customer. You need to point them out in an organized and persuasive presentation.

Prepare a sell sheet with each of the differences noted as a bullet. Next to each bullet, have a few comments that capsulize the benefit statements you prepared. Then, meet with your customer, lay the sheet down in front of him/her, and talk down through it, explaining each point as you go.

Treat it like you would any other well-done presentation. Be sensitive to your customer's reaction, and ask for feedback as you work down through the list. Say, "How does that sound?" or "Does that make sense to you?" and emphasize those things that seem to be more important to your customer. Then, leave that sheet with your customer.

I'm always amazed at the number of sales people who are confounded over the customer's perception that their product is just like the other guys, when those sales people have done nothing to show the customer how it is different.

As always, if you have done a good job of analyzing, preparing, and communicating, your customer's perception should be altered, and you gain the business.

If you haven't done well at this, then your customer will continue to see no difference between buying it from you and buying from the next guy. And, if you haven't shown him/her sufficient reason to buy it from you, then he shouldn't.

From the customer's point of view, if your offering is just like the competitor's, then the customer is absolutely correct in buying from the cheaper source. However, if there is any difference between your offering and your competitors', then the responsibility is totally yours to show the customer that difference. Follow the process described here, and you'll have far fewer customers treating you like a commodity.

You can reach David at www.davikahle.com

11 Reasons You May Want to Raise Prices in 2012:

From my good friend Joe Ellers, March 5, 2012

Hi!  So, I've been getting some questions in from your fellow sales pros out in the field, about my recent emails concerning raising prices in a "down economy"

Here's some helpful ideas incase you're struggling with this: 

If You're on the fence about raising prices or don't think you need to, Consider these:

10 Reasons You May Want to Raise Prices:

1. You need a nice way to Fire lower tier or problem-customers you would rather not even sell to.

2. You're 'busting at the seems' but don't want to expand your company.

3. Your raw material prices are going up and you need to pass along the increase.

4. You're already selling at lower prices than your competitors are when you know that 'price' is not the deciding factor for your customer base.

5. Everyone else is raising prices so you want to jump on the bandwagon.

6. You know your customers will pay 'anything'and you want the opportunity to cash-in by raising prices a bit.

7. You want to add more value to your customers but need to bump up your prices a little to cover the costs.

8. You want to raise prices on NEW customers so you attract a more desirable type of customer base.

9. You want higher quantity orders, so you're raising prices on smaller orders to encourage orders of larger quantities.

10. You're an opportunist and just want more money! 

11. You've just now figured out that the reason your company is going under is because you're not charging enough, so you need to raise prices just to stay in business.

Ok, Having said all this, raising prices is NOT for everyone. Some companies simply can't justify raising prices.

Hope this helps...

Visit Joe at www.JoeEllers.com 

Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers: The Idea in Practice

Matthew Dixon Lara Ponomareff, and Anastasia Milgramm   January 23, 2012 www.blogs.hbr.org

The notion of going above and beyond customer needs is so entrenched in organizations that managers rarely question it.
But delighting your customers may be a waste of time and energy.

In fact, most customers just want a simple, quick solution to their problem. Exceeding customer expectations has a negligible impact on customer loyalty. Instead of providing a series of bells and whistles in customer interactions, companies need to reduce the amount of effort customers make.
This is the conclusion we found in our five-year study, in which we analyzed customer data from 75,000+ respondents and conducted interviews with hundreds of companies around the world. We presented the findings in the 2010 HBR article "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers". In it, we explained that what matters most to customer is the amount of effort they put in to interactions: 96% of customers who report putting in high effort in their service interactions are more disloyal, while only 9% of customers who expend low effort are more disloyal.

Because these findings contrast the conventional belief that companies must provide over-the-top service for customers, we've found that companies are often relieved to have hard proof that exceeding expectations — an often expensive and unsuccessful mission — shouldn't be their focus. Then they want to know what steps they should take to reduce the amount of effort their customers expend. In our work with companies to answer this question, we've seen where most organizations struggle: getting buy in from the rest of the organization and figuring out what to tackle first.

To provide practical advice for companies to address these challenges, we created an Idea in Practice that shares the experiences of two companies — American Express Consumer Travel Network and Texas-based energy company Reliant — as they implemented plans to reduce their customers' effort in service interactions.
Here is a preview of two of the crucial lessons:

1. Reducing customer effort doesn't require a 180-degree turn, but a shift in focus. Many of the companies we work with wonder if they have to start from scratch to achieve effort reduction. We've found most companies already have some of the right elements in place, just as Reliant did. Instead of starting fresh, they can reframe initiatives with the goal of effort reduction in mind, tweaking existing processes rather than overhauling them.
2. Focus on the front line. Frontline employees are crucial for good customer interactions. The most successful companies, such as American Express, focus on ensuring that frontline workers have the skills, permission, and the desire to reduce customer effort.

7 Tips on How to Apologize in the Business World

This one should be posted over every employee's Desk!!!

Tom Searcy January 13, 2012 www.cbsnews.com

I believe that apologies are woefully underused in professional communication.
Hyper-sensitivity to liability, finger-pointing, entitlement, and a lack of accountability drive good people to avoid acknowledging mistakes, let alone apologizing for them. This resistance to apologizing does all sorts of bad things professionally. The longer issues are left unaddressed, the deeper the resentment and the harder it is to move forward.

Here's what I like about professional apologies:

-- Apologies take the energy out of conflicts
-- Apologies allow for recognition of shared accountability

Believe it or not, there are lots of bad ways to apologize. A few examples of what not to say:

-- "I'm sorry you feel that way."
-- "You have to admit, a big part of this is your fault too."
-- "There's lots of blame to be spread around here."

Here are guidelines on how to make a professional apology:

1. Separate the apology and the explanation -- The apology has to stand on its own. I know you want the other person to understand your intentions, the circumstances under which things happened and, most important, that it is not all your fault. However, he or she cannot hear this at the same time as the apology. They will hear the explanation (read: "excuses and accusations"), rather than the apology. Instead, just apologize. Get clarity that you have apologized, and make no explanations or excuses until the apology has been accepted.

2. Ask for the discussion, but don't insist upon it -- "If you would like to discuss the circumstances around this so we can work on avoiding issues in the future, I'm open to it, but it's not necessary. I want to move forward." This invitation puts the ball into the other person's court and allows for the discussion to be invited rather than forced. If they don't want to discuss, don't push it.

3. One-up the connection -- If you can, you want to move the connection method for the apology to its highest level. Face-to-face is best, but GoToMeeting or Skype is second, then phone, then letter and finally email. The point is that professional apologies are still personal.

4. Don't assume you know what will make it right, but be prepared with options -- If the issue that requires the apology also requires some resolution, ask what the other person believes will "make this right." Have options ready, but don't offer them first. Instead, ask and consider what they have suggested.

5. Own more than your portion -- When mistakes are made or offenses given, there is a tendency to get to a 50/50 assignment of responsibility. You have to own your entire portion without seeking them to own theirs. This usually means owning the entire problem in your apology. Remember, one of the things you are trying to do is get past this point in the business relationship. You won't accomplish that doing "guilt fractions."

6. Focus on what happens next -- Close out the issue with the person and then move to immediate next steps. Time may heal, but action accelerates it.

7. Move on -- There is no sense in hanging onto this issue or walking on eggshells. If you have given the apology and it has been accepted, then you need to keep moving. If the other person chooses to bring the issue up again, simply state, "When I apologized and you accepted it, I considered the matter closed."

Professional apologies allow companies and people to resolve issues, change the direction of a relationship and move forward. If you are looking for "justice" in your professional relationships, I think you are destined for disappointment. I encourage you to be satisfied with resolution and move on.

How Many Customers Did You Lose Today?

Rita McGrath  blogs.hbr.org Dec. 7, 2011

My theme this month appears to be tone deafness among business designers. Cue Bank of America!
But genuinely, one of the most vexing dilemmas for senior executives is being plugged in to what is actually going on in the front lines of their business. It's all too easy to miss critically important customer experience information when one is engaging in the day-to-day grind that constitutes an executive's job. All the same, not being attuned to the way your business is perceived by customers can lead to a lot of damage.
Here's a recent example. My husband and I were traveling from Edinburgh to London, where we were to attend the Thinkers50 gala dinner, on a Monday in November. Our train was due to depart in 15 minutes, and my husband was anxious for a coffee. Aha! Conveniently located next to Track 2 was a Café Nero, one of the more ubiquitous brands of coffee shop that grew up in the wake of Starbucks' enviable success. I was given the task of watching the luggage; he went to get coffee.
Here's where it gets interesting. From my vantage point just opposite the entrance, I was able to observe customers coming and going. I was fascinated to see how many of them came and went — without buying anything — because they took one look at how long the line was and abandoned their coffee mission then and there. Intrigued, I started to count. Fully 3 people looked at the line and bailed on the thought of purchasing for every 1 person who actually made a purchase. Imagine — the café would have increased its business by 300% if everybody who thought they might like a coffee had been converted into a coffee buyer. And this is at a train station, where people risk missing a train if they stand around!
My guess is that these lost sales won't even be picked up in a corporate database. After all, how do you identify the dissatisfaction of people who were potential customers but ended up not being customers at all? How do you measure a non-event that should have been a sale?
I'm not picking on Café Nero, particularly, or the friendly people behind the counter. The business issue, however, is that their potential business was more than cut in half — in fact, cut by 75% — because they missed the obvious about buying coffee at a high-end café in a train station. This sort of thing happens over and over again because business designers miss one or more of customers' critical decision triggers. The companies that can fix this have the potential to create real profits by designing better, more complete customer experiences.
So, here's the challenge — how do you get the people who make strategy and resource allocation decisions to deeply understand what is actually happening on the front lines of their business?

Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath studies innovation, corporate venturing, and entrepreneurship. Her latest book is Discovery-Driven Growth (2009).

Top 3 Ways to Get Your Phone Calls Returned

Tom Searcy November 2, 2011 9:40 AM cbsnews.com

Chasing sucks. Prospects, clients, people who owe you information, drawings, money. I hate having to chase. Most of us have to do it--A LOT. Most of the time we go into the bottomless pit of voice mail hell to be tortured by the digital demons therein. Here is how to get your phone call returned more often. There are no perfect strategies that guarantee 100% response; even the IRS auditors don't get 100% return calls. But you can do much better if you follow this approach.

Quick note: This skill focuses on getting a returned call from someone you have already met. Prospecting is a different skill.

Step 1: Tell the person what you want. Calls that say "Call me when you get a chance" are relegated to someone's "B" or "C" priority list. (When was the last time you were working your "B" priority list?). If your voice mail says "Give me a call back, I have a couple of things I want to review with you," then you are never going on that person's radar of must-do priorities.

Tell the person you are calling what you want right at the beginning of the call. Make certain your voice mail is not longer than 40 seconds- they won't listen to it. What do you tell them you want? A document, a phone call, an email, a piece of information- whatever it is that you want, ask for it and ask for it fast. I'll give examples below.

Step 2: Speak in terms of time. Tell them:

• How long the returned call will take. (3 minutes, 11 minutes, "less than a cup of coffee" are all good increments)
• Must-talk-by date and time. Your message needs to say, "This call has to happen by...." And then give the date and time. End of day tomorrow, Friday by noon, this afternoon before 3:45pm. Success goes up if the window is later than 4 hours from now and no later than 24 hours from the point of your voice mail message you are leaving. If, by some miracle, you are actually talking to an administrative support person, the time issue is the same, just ask to book the appointment.

Step 3: Declare consequences.
To create urgency you need to declare consequences. Notice I used the word "consequences" not "threats." Consequences are the natural and understandable outcomes of an action or inaction. You are telling the person you are reaching out too that if he does not call back to you this will happen. Factual and without emotion. Here are some approaches:

• Negative Option - If you do not hear back, you will assume the answer is "no" and you will act accordingly.
• Time expiration - If you do not hear back, time will expire on the offer and what has been offered will be rescinded.
• Delay of Progress - If you do not hear back, then the proposed date for start or end will not be attainable and will be delayed.
• Positive Option - If you do not hear back you will take that as tacit approval and will move forward with the previously agreed upon actions.

Examples:
* "Bill, this is Tom from XYZ. I need the final drawings we discussed by noon tomorrow in my email or I will not be able to honor the delivery date of next Friday. Please give me a 30 second call when you have sent them to confirm. Thanks."

* "Sue, this is Joe from PDQ. I need confirmation of the wire transfer by end of business today or we will not ship. Please give me a call back by 4:00pm to ensure shipment. Thanks."

* "John, this is Deirdre from Pinnacle. I only need 3 minutes to get the details from you I need to give you the proposal you requested. If we connect by noon today, you'll have my proposal before you pack up to go home. Thanks.

* "Frank, this is Alex from Acme. A call no longer than a cup of coffee will sort out the issues you raised about the proposal. We have been out of touch for over a week- that usually means bad things. If I don't hear back from you by end of day tomorrow, I'll take that as a definite "no" and assume you are not interested in the proposal. Thanks."

What you should notice is that
1) This approach takes a forceful and direct tone, rather than a subservient and weak tone.

2) The messages are short. People rarely listen to long, detailed voice mails. They scan, much like we scan our emails. They store the things they intend to listen to later and delete everything else. They rarely get to what they say and eventually it solves itself or they delete it.

3) Action requests, time frames and consequences are clear.

Tom Searcy is a nationally recognized author, speaker, and the foremost expert in large account sales.

The 3 Most Dangerous Sales Clichés

By Tom Searcy November 3, 2011 7:34 PM cbsnews.com

Clichés can wreak havoc. In sales, especially, many clichés can cause damage in the hiring processes, the buying experience and the sales conversation. Here are three common ones that are dangerously wrong and drive me crazy:
"Sales is all about relationships."
Maybe that was true when Larry Tate and Darren Stevens were drinking triples on the 1970's show "Bewitched," but not so much anymore. I watch salespeople lose deals all day long and the bad news is delivered by that sales rep's "best friend ever" at the prospect company. Selling is about a lot of things, and relationships are only one sliver of it, and that sliver is shrinking.

If you want to improve your sales performance, don't assess the strength of your contacts by your "emotional connection." Rather, you will know you have leverage based upon your ability to influence the behaviors of your key contacts. For example:

• When you ask for unique information about the prospect company, the decision-making process, the people at the table and how your company is doing, can you get it?
• When you ask for unique access- a meeting, a phone call, an introduction, a tour or to review a document, can you get it?
• When you ask for "most favored nation status" in the consideration process, (last look on pricing, final presentation position or a more executive audience for your proposal), can you get it?

If these requests are not possible, then the relationships you have are irrelevant, at least in terms of closing the deal. Relationships definitely will make the selling process more pleasant, but without leverage, they mean nothing when it comes to making the sale.

"Salespeople are born."
This is partly true--people, after all, are born, not hatched. But there are many traits that make salespeople effective, including being curious, good communicators, great listeners, leadership abilities, accessibility, integrity, and intelligence. But none of these qualities are specific just to "born salespeople." These are the qualities of effective executives of all disciplines. So you need to look for effective leaders and effective executives if you want explosive sales, not the cliché of a glad-handing, joke-telling, hyper-extrovert.

"Sales is a numbers game."
Maybe in the world of the previous century, activity was equivalent to productivity. More calls, letters, emails, appointments all translated into more sales. However, this is no longer a causal link. If you want to become intimately acquainted with this fact, answer every RFP that crosses your desk and you will see that success is not guaranteed because of activity. Sales effectiveness is about efficiency and yield, rather than the mind-numbing belief that more in the top of the funnel equals more out the bottom.

Sales truly is a numbers game when the numbers you are watching are the right ones. If you are watching the inputs only - prospecting activities for instance, you are missing it. If you are watching the closes only- signed contracts and orders, you are missing it. In the large, complex sales you need to be watching the "WIP," (work in process). The key to this idea is knowing the distinct stages of your sales process and then setting performance expectations for each of the movements from one stage to the next in the process. By having an objective evaluation of the movements in the process, you are watching the full story - inputs, sales stage movements and outcomes.

Clichés hide the important truths, regardless of the topic. Don't be sucked into the sales clichés because they will lead to the wrong conclusions.
Tom Searcy is a nationally recognized author, speaker, and the foremost expert in large account sales.

How the Rift Between Sales and Marketing Undermines Reps

Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson Nov. 7, 2011 blogs.hbr.org

This post, the last in a four-part series, is also part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line.

It's no secret that sales and marketing executives don't always see eye to eye.

In a recent Corporate Executive Board survey, sales executives' top terms for their marketing colleagues included "paper pushers," "academic," and perhaps worst of all, "irrelevant." On the other hand, marketing executives called out their sales counterparts as "simple minded," "cowboys," and flat out "incompetent." Strikingly, across several hundred sales and marketing responses, a full 87% were negative.
Management has long called for sales and marketing to bury the hatchet, but the requests often lack urgency and are generally met with indifference. That must change. In today's historically difficult selling environment, the rift between sales and marketing seriously undermines even the best-performing reps. In previous posts (here, here, and here), we've described a gifted kind of sales rep we call Challengers. Challengers excel by creating constructive tension with customers through unique and surprising competitive insights. However, all but the very best Challengers will struggle to source and package those insights unless they have organizational support — especially from marketing.
Yet much of the sales support marketing provides falls short because it's focused on teaching customers about the supplier's business, not the customer's. Worse, the function responsible more than any other for differentiating your solution in the marketplace often churns out collateral and sales tools that look and sound exactly like everyone else's. Where's the teaching in that?
Don't take our word for it. In a recent study, public relations expert Adam Sherk analyzed the most frequent terms in company communications, and the results were eye opening. Here are the top ten: Leader, leading, best, top, unique, solution, largest, innovative, and innovator.
Sound familiar? Most companies' marketing materials make generic claims like "an industry leader with decades of experience helping global customers achieve business objectives through unique solutions and uncompromised value." Blah, blah, blah. When customers hear such commoditized messages often enough, they stop hearing them altogether. So, you say to your customers, "Our solution is unique," and your customers don't believe you. Why should they? Your message sure isn't. Their reply? "That's fantastic. Can I get a discount?" After all, why should your customer pay more for your solution when it sounds exactly like everyone else's?
So what's the alternative? In our book, we share case studies of companies whose marketing organizations have gotten it right.
Here are four rules Challenger marketing organizations live by:
1. Identify your unique capabilities, not all your capabilities
In their excitement to tell the world about their broader "solution," most marketing organizations fail to identify the handful of capabilities that truly set them apart. Sure, your products are "faster," "newer," "smaller," "bigger," or "greener," but why does it matter? If customers see no difference between you and the competition, anything you teach them will simply wind up in an RFP headed for a price-driven bake-off. Bottom line, if you can't identify the unique capabilities customers should be willing to pay you for, they're sure not going to do it for you.
Answer the question, "Why should our customers buy from us over anyone else?" It's a simple question, but often proves surprisingly hard to answer. It's shocking how many companies are unable to identify what truly sets their solution apart.
2. Focus on the unique capabilities your customers currently undervalue
Most marketing organizations naturally focus on capabilities customers disproportionately value. The thinking goes: customers want it, we're best at it, so that's the core of our value proposition. The best marketing organizations, however, are far more interested in promoting capabilities customers under value. Why? Because their primary goal is to teach customers new perspectives, not reinforce existing ones. The best teaching opportunities often spring from the question, "What is it that customers fail to appreciate about their business that leads them to undervalue our capability?" The answer provides a strong foundation for insights that challenge customers' thinking.
3. Design messages that lead to those capabilities, not with them
Virtually all marketing collateral suffers from the same flaw. If the first five pages — and the first ten slides — of your collateral or sales pitch deck are about you (and they almost invariably are), you've got it wrong. Build messages that lead to your unique capabilities. In a teaching conversation, the supplier enters the conversation at the end, not the beginning.
4. Calculate the ROI of changing behavior, not of buying a solution
Finally, equip reps with an ROI calculator that shows customers the value of behavior change. Surprisingly, the best ROI calculators are supplier agnostic. They're built to convince customers to do something, not to buy something — to take action on whatever new perspective you've just taught them. Of course, when customers ask, "Wow, who can help us do this?" the rep must be able to legitimately say, "Let me show you how we're uniquely able to help make this happen."
Successfully challenging customers' thinking is a team sport. Does your company set up Challengers to succeed? Pull out the latest piece of collateral produced by your marketing organization. Does it equip your salespeople to teach customers about their company or about yours?

Why Your Salespeople Are Pushovers

Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson October 14, 2011 http://blogs.hbr.org

One of the age-old stereotypes in business is the pushy salesperson. But what if we told you that the real issue in sales today isn't that salespeople tend to be too pushy, but that they're not pushy enough?
In our first post in this series, we introduced you to a special type of high-performing sales rep called the Challenger. One of the defining attributes of Challengers is that they take control of the sale by being assertive.
What does this look like in practice? Challengers take control in three important ways.

• First, as we discussed in last week's post, Challengers use proprietary insights to change the way customers think about their business and that highlight the suppliers' unique ability to create value. If customers respond, as they invariably do, that the insights don't apply in their situation, Challengers don't back down. They know that if they want customers to buy differently, they're first going to have to get them to think differently — and that they may have to get a little scuffed up in the process.
• Second, knowing that today's complex deals are often just as difficult to buy as they are to sell, Challengers actively guide customers through the purchase process. They maintain the momentum of the sale by pushing customers to engage the right internal stakeholders at the right time with the right message. Challengers don't ask customers how the deal is going to get done, waiting for the customer to "coach" them. They teach customers how to drive consensus for the purchase — as more often than not, customers themselves don't really know how to do it.
• Finally, Challengers take control in negotiating commercial details — especially at that crucial moment when the customer looks them in the eye and says, "If we could just get a 5% discount, I think we could get this done by the end of the week." Unlike most reps whose response to a discount request is either to "consult with a manager" or to "meet the customer half way," Challengers table the discount request altogether and instead push the conversation back to the value they're providing to the customer. They acknowledge the request for a price concession, but defer a decision and, if pressed, offer other less costly concessions.

Now, of course, in all of these situations Challengers push back respectfully, professionally, empathetically and in a manner consistent with local culture (the way you challenge in Japan is different than the way you challenge in the U.S., for example). But, make no mistake, Challengers do push back.
When we present this research to sales leaders, we hear a common refrain: "If we tell our reps to sell like Challengers and be more assertive, they'll go too far. They'll take it as a license to become aggressive." But more often than not, this concern is unwarranted. In reality, most reps are far more likely to be passive than aggressive with customers. Guided by years of training and a deeply seated but mistaken belief that they should always do what the customer wants, reps seek to resolve tension with customers quickly, rather than prolong it. But maintaining a certain amount of constructive tension is exactly what Challengers do.
Why do most reps fear tension? We see two reasons. First, they feel they have no choice — it's either acquiesce or lose the deal. Yet, in a recent survey of sales reps and procurement officers, BayGroup International determined that while 75 percent of reps believe that procurement has the upper hand in the rep-customer relationship, 75 percent of procurement officers believe that reps have more power. What does that tell us? At the very least, if reps give in simply because of a perceived power imbalance, they're conceding way too easily.
Second, most reps adopt a passive posture because senior management has told them to. How so? In ongoing efforts to differentiate their companies, virtually every leadership team has exhorted their team to "put the customer first," or "place the customer at the center of everything we do." It's not a bad strategy, mind you, but it backfires when leadership is vague about how this translates to specific behavior. Without clear guidance, most reps simply slip into "order taker" mode, closing small, disaggregated, price-driven deals at a discount all in the name of "giving customers what they want."
How would you describe the best reps in your organization? Do they acquiesce to customer demands and passively take business that's given to them or do they push their customers and use tension to their advantage?
Matthew Dixon is Managing Director of the Corporate Executive Board's Sales and Service Practice. Brent Adamson is Senior Director of the Sales Executive Council, a division of the Sales and Service Practice. Their new book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, is forthcoming November 10, 2011 from Portfolio/Penguin.

7 Ways to Up Your Sales Game

By Steve Strauss | October 11, 2011 bnet.com

Not a natural born salesperson? Fortunately, sales is one of those things that can be learned, and improved upon over time. All you need do is copy what great salespeople do, learn their strategies, and practice.

According to a 2002 Harvard study, great salespeople have the following in common: They do not take “no” personally, they take responsibility for their results, they are empathetic, they are ambitious, they are very goal-oriented, and they find it easy to approach strangers.
Here are seven more ways to emulate the best salespeople:
1. Think of sales like golf: If you have ever golfed at all, you know the golf paradox: The harder you try, the worse you do. The same is true in sales. Try hard and prospects sniff desperation. But back off a bit and they are more intrigued.
2. Build rapport: Building rapport with prospects makes your job infinitely easier. Once they trust and/or like you, it’s all downhill. How do you build rapport? Use humor. Find common interests. Be honest. Ask questions. Most of all, listen. Master salesman Tom Hopkins puts it this way: “Listen twice as much as you talk and you’ll succeed in persuading others nearly every time.”
3. Remember, it’s helping, not selling: Looking at flat-screen TVs recently, I ended up with a salesman who loved to hear himself talk and sell. Had he listened, he would have discovered that I wanted to understand why I should pay more for plasma. Had he helped me understand that, instead of trying to sell me, he would have gotten my business.
Your job is to help the customer get what he or she wants, not sell them what you want.
4. Listen for clues: People interpret information in different ways. Some people are visual, others are auditory, and yet others are primarily kinesthetic (feelings). You can tell pretty quickly which method someone uses to process information by the words they choose:

• Kinesthetic people say things like that doesn’t feel right to me.”
• Auditory people might say “I don’t like the sound of that.”
• Visual people might say “I see what you are saying.”

These clues can help you tailor your pitch appropriately. Using a lot of words with a visual person doesn’t make a lot of sense — showing them would work better.
5. No does not always mean no: This gem comes from Hopkins. According to him, ‘no’ can mean many things, aside from simply no. For instance, it may mean

• “I am methodical and need to hear more” or
• “You skipped over something that was important to me,” or
• “I’m not ready to make a decision yet.”

You get the idea. According to Hopkins, try not to hear ‘no’ when people say ‘no.’ Instead, “you should respond with courage and conviction, press on, and try another tack.”
6. Testimonials work wonders: When other people say that your business is exceptional or your products are superior, it carries much more weight than when you say it. Testimonials written by other customers are the key. Use them in sales letters, presentations, on your website, tweet them, and put them in proposals.
7. Go for the big fish: I have a pal who used to sell duplexes but who now sells big apartment houses. Why? “Because although it is about the same amount of work, I make four times as much money.” Prospecting for bigger clients can mean bigger paydays for the same amount of work.