Solution Selling

Solution Selling is the ideal title for describing what all sales people should be doing at all times. They should be asking questions with prospects or existing clients (which I see as prospects as well) that identify their most immediate problems and then the sales person presents a solution to their problem(s). In this environment you are not selling the lowest price. You are offering value to your prospect that they can see benefit from that actually impacts their bottom line. The impact can be either in savings or in additional revenue to their company.

A sales person should be proactive and constantly researching their prospects industry and business. Let's say for example your client's business is in merger consideration and if taken over by another company could cause you to lose the client to your competition because the other company has a larger say in the supplier decision making process. The proactive sales person would be working hard to do business with the businesses entertaining the merger. Perhaps you can even solve problems for these new clients that have nothing to do with what you are selling. If and when a merger does happen your name (and the company you represent) has a better chance of not only maintaining your existing client but also growing the business with this merger.

In addition, too often sales people bid on a "solution" and when the decision is delayed they get nervous and start offering a reduced price. Here is an excerpt from Sales Performance Blog post; "If The Economy Slows, How Should We Sell?" that states my point clearly:

"...what most salespeople do: they simply react by cutting price or offering other kinds of substantive concessions. Ironically, aggressive discounting at the end of the cycle can actually increase the perception of risk by customers. They may wonder, “Why did you quote me a higher price before? Is this now the best price? What kind of price could I get if I delay further?” This begins a death spiral of further delays, followed by additional discounts, until all profit margins are completely squeezed out — which is bad business for both the seller and the buyer."

In summary, Solutions Selling is presented on value not price. And is proactive not reactive.

Top 10 Sales Manager Mistakes

I find it interesting that when I search the internet for articles on sales the focus is generally on the sales person and not the manager. I do appreciate the importance for sales people to improve their sales skills but who is improving the manager? Let's look at what I believe are the top 10 sales manager mistakes:

1. The Sales Manager/Account Rep who has to wear two hats. To be a successful sales manager you must be a manager of your people and focused on their success. If they succeed, you succeed. Give up the account rep role even if it is a plum account. You can still be involved with the account but you should be there to support or help close for your rep.

2. The Let Me Sell Sales Manager; a great Sales Person does not always mean a great Sales Manager. Some of the most successful sales people I have met over the years were the best closers. Aggressive, talkative and very social. However, many of these people when moved to a managers role began to fail. Why? Because they spent their career focused on their success. It is very difficult to turn that switch off. It requires EI, Emotional Intelligence. I believe a measure of a persons EI is nurtured over the years and also has to do with how they are wired. In other words, they are naturally empathetic and care about the success of others.

3. The I Can Do But Can't Teach Sales manager; a great sales manager must be a great sales trainer. Too often I see sales managers who are great communicators but don't know how to reverse engineer what they do to teach others. Send them off to a seminar or get additional training outside the company is their mantra. My suggestion is for this sales manager to get some training on how to train.

4. The Ivory Tower Sales Manager is the manger who is not accessible. They have the "I've made it" attitude and hide away in their big office sending emails and planning golf games and taking trips. Sure the sales manager needs to do this but not if their objective is get as many perks out of the job as possible. In other words, their rep or the reps client could care less if they were there or not and in fact, would prefer if they were not there because it is effecting the nurturing of the relationship started by the rep.

5. The Harping Sales Manager is the person who never upgrades their experience and knowledge of sales and is stuck in an old school mentality. They believe if they answer any question with a standard response or sales management spin or use a strong arm bully approach this will work on their reps. All this does is churn out sales reps causing a low retention rate and from the outside looking in, your clients and prospects don't want to work with a company that can't even keep employees or keep them happy.

6. The Sales Manager With "I" Problems is the person who takes credit for all the teams successes and passes mistakes and failures onto their team or an individual. If you want to be a leader, a sales manager, then you must take responsibility publicly for all failures and pass the accolades onto your team. The respect you will garner from your team will be inspirational and they will climb the highest mountains for you to make you proud of them. In some respects you are assuming the role of a parent and they are the child. Your vocabulary should then change from "I" to "We" or "Them". Try it and see how good it feels.

7. The Grunter Sales Manager is the person who never listens to his reps and shows their lack of interest in many ways. For example; they keep working on their computer with their head down responding with a grunt on occasion. When a rep has a problem, stop what you are doing and listen. Now I know we need to manage by effort but if they are in your office then we must assume you gave them permission to enter and therefore speak to you, so listen to them.

8. The Talker Sales Manager is the person who loves to hear his own voice and never truly listens to his reps. "Seek first to understand before being understood" is Stephen Covey's 5th principle from his book the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This essentially means we need to listen with our ears and our heart. We need to connect by understanding the other persons view point before having them understand our view point. Listen, but NOT with the intent to respond. Which means don't be deaf because you are thinking only about what you are going to say next.

9. The MBA Sales Manager is the person with very little real life experience but has a wealth of education that abounds with theory. I pity the reps with this person. This sales manager answers every problem with a book answer. Throw the book away and get some real sales experience under your belt.

10. The Numbers Guy Sales Manager is the person who tries to manage the rep by the Statistics but has no clue on how to interpret the numbers. In the old days maybe a poor rep could be motivated to work harder by the numbers but reps are smarter and more educated today. One thing we all know about stats is they can be interpreted to mean what ever we want to say. As sales managers we do need to be on top of the numbers but don't use them as a big stick to get your reps to work harder. The numbers should be used to isolate problem areas in your sales process unique to the individual and the team. Then once isolated you work together to fix the weakness.

WebEx Video Conferencing

I don't normally write about one of my advertisers but this one is special. I use this product and between the combination of ease of use and the interconnectivity of users, it is great. For example, every two weeks I set up a live web conference between Toronto and Japan. Not only can we see the presentation with PowerPoint and access live into a CRM (Client Resource Management) system which we are implementing we can communicate by voice, and video if we chose to do so. That is all great but to consider the distance between Toronto and Japan and even though we expect a lag of seconds we don't see it or experience any time lag. This is an absolutely brilliant technology.