The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Majer

Today I am honored to have a guest blogger on my blog, his name is Dave Kahle and he is one of the top sales trainers in the world. Here is his article.

Sales Master Best Practices:

Has a systematic set of criteria for classifying customers and prospects into ABC categories

“You’ve got to show it in order to sell it.”

Today’s selling environment is jammed with an unbelievable array of “things to do.” Left without any mechanism to take control, salespeople can easily default to a way of going about their jobs that is characterized by being extremely busy at all the wrong things. We spend all day reacting to the pressures and demands on us. At the end of the day, we have been busy, but we’ve accomplished little of value.

The best salespeople understand that daily temptation to give into the urgent in place of the important. They understand the need to prioritize. And, when it comes to sales, the most important aspect of your job to prioritize is your list of customers and prospects.

The best salespeople spend the most time with the highest potential customers and prospects. In order to consistently do so, they need a system for classifying customers and prospects into categories based on potential – ABC. The “A” customers are the highest potential 20 percent of their account base. The “C” customers are the lowest potential 30 – 50 percent, and the “Bs” are everyone who is left in the middle.

Note that the discriminating characteristic is “potential.” So many salespeople categorize their accounts based on the quantity of their purchases. Thus, the A accounts are those who bought the most last year. But that view is historic – who bought the most last year. In our rapidly changing economy, that historic basis for investing your sales time is misleading. The issue is not who bought the most last year. It is far more effective to determine who could buy the most this year.
The best salespeople understand this, and develop a systematic way of determining the potential in each account. Having a defendable basis for their decisions, they are then free to invest their time where it will get the best results – one of the hallmarks of the high–achieving salesperson.

About the author:
Dave Kahle is one of the world’s premier sales training educators.  Since 1988, Dave has worked with over 400 companies, helping them to increase their sales and develop their sales people. Learn more at his website at http://www.davekahle.com

Today I would like to present to my readers an amazing and inspirational book written by my dear colleague Sharon Drew Morgen: “Dirty Little Secrets - why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.”

What’s stopping us from closing the sales we should be closing? What’s causing us to lose prospects that need our solution? Why is the sales cycle so long? Why do we close less than 10% of our prospects?

Morgen contends it’s the sales model itself. In this disturbing, insightful book, Morgen introduces us to the behind-the-scenes world of the buyer: the culture, the system, the decisions, and the change management issues that need to be addressed before buyers can buy. The sales model has never taught us how to manage these off-line issues, and so we sit and wait until buyers do this on their own.

Now, in Dirty Little Secrets, we discover what’s going on and how we can help. Caution: if you are not ready to add some new skills or new thinking to what you’re already doing, this book is not for you. But if you are a serious student of sales, and want to find more prospects and close faster, this book is a wonderful guide through change management and decision making. After you’ve read the book, you’ll know exactly what is going on in your buyer’s environment and how to help them.

More about the book here: Dirty Little Secrets

Limited Time Bonuses

When you purchase the book between Oct. 15 - Oct. 29, you will be able to download free additional materials. Click here for the full list.

Today I have a special guest on my blog, her name is Sharon Drew Morgen and she is the author of the NY Times Business Bestseller “Selling with Integrity” as well as 5 other books and hundreds of articles that explain different aspects of the decision facilitation model that teaches buyers how to buy. If you didn’t know, she is the visionary and thought leader behind Buying Facilitation® the new sales paradigm that focuses on helping buyers manage their buying decision.

Here is her article:

Why is a 90% failure rate ok?

As I’m doing the final rewrites on my new book out Oct 15, 2009, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy andsellers can’t sell and what you can do about it, I realized how many times I’ve mentioned my frustration with the failure of the sales model: it actually builds in a 90% failure rate and we expect that! We hire 10x more sales people to get the results we seek, we get 50% longer sales cycles than we could be having, we face objections because people are responding to the sales model itself, we lose clients we shouldn’t lose.

What a waste – not only for sellers, but for buyers.

This doesn’t need to happen. Sales is just an incomplete model that we’ve accepted as the way to place our products. It works only at the product decision end of the equation (vs. Buying Facilitation, my model that manages the buying decision end of the equation), with no ability to guide buyers through their tangle of stuff’ that needs to get figured out before they can make a buying decision. It’s where prospects go when they say, “I’ll call you back.” They have to make sure all of the people and policies that touch the Identified Problem are in agreement, that old vendor issues and relationships are handled, that historic problems are managed. Unfortunately for us, sales doesn’t help with this aspect of the seller-buyer equation and buyers need to do this on their own.

Unfortunately for them, buyers don’t initially know the route through all of their decisions either. And we meet them far too early in their decision process, leaving us waiting to close and not knowing what’s going on. After all, their need and our solution seem to be a match – but it takes so long for them to decide! What is the problem!

So we sit and wait. And 90% of the prospects don’t come back. Not because our product isn’t good, or because our solution doesn’t match their need. It’s because their internal issues haven’t been resolved, and buyers won’t buy until they are. They can’t: they must maintain the integrity of their environment even if it means they don’t resolve their need.

Sales doesn’t offer us the tools to help guide them through the route to all of those decisions: it’s certainly difficult for sellers to understand the buyer’s buy-in issues, management decisions, technology factors. But it’s quite possible to have an understanding of the decision making process – the route that buyers must make through their unique decision criteria – and recalibrate our jobs to be not only solution providers, but neutral navigators – Buying Facilitators if you will – much like a buddy to a sight-impaired friend who knows where they want to go but doesn’t know the exact route to get there.

By focusing on the buying decision end of the equation, sales can be closed in months rather than years, weeks rather than months, and sellers can stop wasting so much of their time. And failing so often. Imagine if doctors or baseball players had the same failure rate!

Imagine if we could lead buyers through all of their unconscious decision criteria, help them discover who needs to buy-in to a new solution, and help them build our product into their solution design. Imagine.

To learn more about Buying Facilitation® or Sharon Drew feel free to visit her blog: www.SharonDrewMorgen.com

Read the first chapter of The Dirty Little Secret: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it.

Today I have a guest on my blog, his name is Marshall W. Northcott and he is a master in the field of sales training, coaching and consulting, with over 20 successful years of practical work experience and a solid track record in the sales industry. He partners with progressive, growth oriented organizations in challenging and rewarding roles that allow him to leverage his skills and assets in corporate sales, sales management and/or customer service. Here is his article:

The Sales Process

In the early years of my sales career, what I discovered was missing most was what I affectionately call the finesse skills.  Closely related to those finesse skills is what is commonly referred to as The Sales Process.

If you study most activities that occur in business after a while, you will notice that a pattern emerges.  Every successful outcome is preceded by a series of steps that make it possible for you to arrive at that outcome.  Simply put it’s like preparing a recipe.  If you use and properly prepare the ingredients as instructed, cook them in the manner suggested, for the length of time outlined, you will likely enjoy the desired outcome expected.  These success steps are known as The Sales Process.  Anyone who is willing to learn and master these steps will enjoy the greatest of rewards during their career in professional selling.  However if you don’t know and/or recognize the steps and in addition you have a haphazard, random approach although you may get results, those results will likely be limited, inconsistent, unpredictable and less than what you are truly capable of.

At the core of The Sales Cycle is the thought process that will make a significant difference in your success.  Establishing winning thought patterns is essential to achieving sustainable, long term results.  This training includes psychology, personality styles, people skills, communication skills, business and time management skills.  On the outer portion of The Sales Cycle you will note the various steps of the selling process from new business generation (or prospecting) to qualifying, to pre-call planning, to telephone skills, to appointment scheduling, rapport building, needs assessment, proposal preparation, presentation skills, objection handling, closing techniques, negotiation skills, on-going customer service and asking for referrals.

Work ethic is extremely important, however, hard work alone will only get you so far.  I’ve always worked hard without being told to do so.  Unfortunately, I discovered that left me short of hitting my objectives and reaching my sales goals.  There are a number of essential skills and beyond those are many other pieces of the puzzle that can have a huge impact on results.  Our primary goal through a structured, formal training program is to discuss these pieces of the puzzle, explain what they are individually and then cover how they fit together.

In The Bourne Supremacy, the second in the trilogy, there is a line in the movie that is directed towards Matt Damon’s character and those other individuals who were trained to be operatives like him.  Bourne gets caught crossing a European border and one of government agents states that he must have made his first mistake, a random error and got caught.  The woman who had once been his handler states, “It’s not a mistake they don’t make mistakes, they don’t do random, there’s always an objective, always a target.”  The point is that they were trained, programmed and conditioned to know what they were doing at all times and be 100% conscious of it at all times.  You will find that those sales professionals who end up at the top of the ranks in their chosen field are the same!  There is a reason for everything that they say and do their timing is well thought out and positioned, they are perfectly deliberate in their actions.

It isn’t practical to think that anyone, who doesn’t commit themselves to their profession, can fully reach their potential.  It is also rare for the majority of people to step up and take on this responsibility on their own.  If you are one of those rare individuals who has acted on your own in the past, congratulations!  It is likely that you are well on your way to achieving exceptional results in your sales or business endeavors.  You may already be in a management position or one of the principles of your organization.  This is all best summed up by the quote, “Those who don’t need a boss are usually asked to be one.”  Either way, in order for people to be fully productive contributors to the corporate effort, knowing and putting the steps of The Sales Process into action each and every time is not optional, it must be mandatory.

Visit Marshall’s website at www.marshallnorthcott.com.