I Like My Sales Training, Like I Like My Women

Smart and Engaging.

One of the most common questions we receive here at TSW and one you will also find repeatedly asked in the Sales and Marketing section of linkedin’s questions forum is :

“What book and/or training can give me the quickest and best impact in my sales team’s performance?”

On linkedin, you will notice the people who do not sell will post the longest answers with the biggest words embedded within.

We have talked in previous posts about books and sales techniques, however here is a quick, yet effective, technique you can use at your next sales meeting that will produce positive results………….unless you hire stupid people.

Step 1: Cut a hole in the box Pick one member of your team to do a role play of a typical customer interaction; cold call, qualification meeting, and/or presentation.

Step 2: Critique the role play and look for the following errors:

Opera Singer Syndrome  (Me!  Me!  Me!)

Talking about your company too much.

My presentations lasted 45 minutes, with 15 mins reserved for Q&A.

Don’s took three hours.

Don started his presentations talking our company history, all of our products, our position in the marketplace, our strategy moving forward,  what analyst were saying and finally a discussion of 4 to 5 of our clients whose logo’s where lost in a slide that had no less than 50.

The first five minutes of my presentations started by succinctly stating how we were going to solve key problems and allow the client to obtain the strategic goals to which the purchase of a solution was tied.

I started this practice after a presentation at which my laptop died and I lost my ppt and actually had to talk with my prospect. After ten minutes I realized I was having the most productive presentation of my career.

Plainly tell the prospect how you can help them and then use the rest of your time to solidify how.

Spaghetti Selling

Throwing Everything at the Prospect, Hoping Something Sticks

One of my former employers had multiple product divisions that included a market-leading Lotus Notes practice.

In every presentation, we told every prospect.

Even those who had no Lotus Notes.

Even those who hated Lotus Notes.

Even those who would rather work PR for Michael Jackson’s daycare than spell L o t u s N o t e s.

It was a part of who we were.

Besides us, who cared?

Nobody.

Recently, one of my friends, Susan, sent me her presentation about her company’s marketing services and it looked great until the last.

There on the final slide was a bulleted list that ran the entire length of the screen and listed everything not mentioned in the previous slides.  My ire rose as I noticed that the bullets listed the crap, commodity jobs that every vendor in her space offers.

I asked Susan, if she was expecting the prospect to jump up and have an eruption of joy as they proclaimed “HOLY SMOKES, YOU OFFER EXPRESS SHIPPING!!!!”?

So Susan and I are on the outs right now.

If you have any points that state the obvious, ex. “Micheal Phelps swims in water”.  Take them out.

If your company offers products/services that are not directly related to the reason the prospect is speaking with you, take them out of our presentation.  Send a brochure instead.

Teaching Latin to Paris Hilton

You are there to talk with your prospect, not to them

I consider myself to be bilingual in the fact that I speak English and Yankee-English.

For my Yankee brethren, if you feel the need to show off your vocabulary and the fact that you live within driving distance of Harvard? Go right ahead.

You want to tell me about how you can partner with my organization to adopt the best practices and blue sky strategy of Web 2.0 and use the semantic Web 3.0 to effectively execute a multi-channel, multi-platform, marketing strategy?  Go right ahead.

But as a Southerner, Im going to buy from the guy who can tell me how I can get the stuff on my website to a cell phone.

You can feed your ego, you can make the sale, rarely can you do both.

This point extends to techie talk and industry lingo as well.  If your pitch is heavy with acronyms or industry-centric lingo, remove those.  Having sold into banking, military, government, and life sciences, I kept my presentations lingo-free by practicing them with our receptionist.  If she didn’t get the main points, I changed the pitch.

Step 3 Reveiw the sins of the role players.  Repeat the role play, but this time make it more interactive and have the observers yell out whenever they see a fault, but they must also offer a constructive adjustment.  If they can not offer a suitable correction, they most swap with the role player who made the mistake.

Allowing for time, have as much of the team participate as possible.  The “winner” is the one who can make it through the excercise with no corrections.  They buy the drinks.

Good Luck.

Sasser

Great Sales Sins – Opera Singer Syndrome

When I go to my dentist, I wear an Ipod.

For the record, yes, I do consider myself clever for this innovative solution to the problem of having dental professionals practically “fisting” my mouth, while simultaneously being overwhelmed by the desire to be “chatty”.

This is the typical scenario that happens in the chair:
“So Sasser, hows that golf games of yours? Whoops, holy smokes, I cant believe my whole Rolex fits in there! Wow. Hang on….we need to give you another shot for no darn good reason…..so anyway, your short game?”

The real problem is the assistant. Nice as she can be, but her lord has put her on a mission to share her life story, especially the tragic parts, with anyone in pursuit of good oral hygiene.

During a two hour session in which an old crown was being removed and a temporary put in its place, I learned the unabridged version of how her son-in-law had a series of unfortunate career turns. For the sake of screen space, here’s an “abridged” version; he’s a under-achiever who flunked out of welding school, impregnated her daughter, dumber than a stool sample, and couldn’t find a job if it leaped up and bit him on the butt. But I’m paraphrasing.

A month later during the follow up visit to have the temporary removed and the replacement crown fitted, I wore an Ipod. An audio book loaded and I was set. The great thing about headphones, it tells the world to shut the heck up in a very direct, yet somehow polite, way.

While the plan was working flawlessly, there was one 15 second window of opportunity when one of the ear buds slipped out. As I reached up to replace it, the assistant seized the moment and screamed at me “I have three distant cousins with cancer!!!!”.

A lovely woman really. Here I am, nervous as everything having more drills in my mouth that you find at Home Depot, and she needs to share this nugget with me.

Me….Me….Me……information without context or empathy is simply noise – just like an opera singer or a poorly planned sales presentation.

In that light, your favorite competitors should be your biggest ones. Especially those with the long histories, the great brands, and the customer list a mile long.

Why?

The odds are higher that in smaller deals they will not bring their “A game” to the table. A 100k deal a sales presentation their sales teams will spend the majority of the time talking about the greatness of the company, their “platform”, their vision for the future, and then, in the twelfth hour, actually start talking about the reasons why the prospect met with them in the first place.

My team was competing against the big guys at a flooring manufacturer in North Georgia. We walked into a group of people who were very professional and friendly but whose body language cried “If I see one more mission statement I am going to take a swing at someone”. They were viewing all vendors back to back to back. Two days, four vendors, each with half a day. We were in on the second half of second day.

We started our presentation with one slide that listed the major objectives of the project – lower costs, increased productivity, expanded branding, etc., followed by one slide each with a succinct description of how we would achieve each of the goals. We followed that with a practical demonstration, showing them what we discussed in the slides, followed by a brief overview of 3 clients with similar projects in the same industry as them.

Done – Start to Finish – 1.5 hours.

Vendor 1 took 6 hours, Vendor 2 took 5 hours, Vendor 3 took 2.5 hours and got into a fight with their technical expert.

One of the most common flaws made in presentations today is focusing so much on who you are as a company, your vision, yada, yada, yada, and you wind up burning the attention span of your prospects.

As recommended in a previous post, go through your sales pitch with a non-company person. At the end of each slide, ask yourself “Why would the prospect care?” or the shorter “So what”? If you don’t have an answer remove it from your slides.

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