In today’s market selling skills training does not equal product training or pressure tactics.  If product training or pressure selling (the hard sell) are on the top of your sales training agenda or the only training you offer your sales people then you may want to rethink your sales training strategy.

What is expected of sales people today by way of skillful thought and action goes way beyond the product or the hard sell.

Let’s first look at what clients want.  This will then help us determine what sales people need to be able to do.

Clients today have access to more information than ever before. Clients can make product versus product comparisons very easily.  And most clients know what they are after even if they don’t know how to articulate it. Clients don’t expect to be coerced, bullied, tricked or intimidated into buying either.  They don’t expect to be treated like an ‘idiot’ or a ‘sucker’ by sales people who just talk at them and flash brochures or product sheets, looking for someone to boost their commissions.  Nor on the other hand do they necessarily want to make ‘friends’ with sales people.
Clients expect to communicate and deal with a real professional who knows their own business and how they can best serve their clients’ needs with creative solutions and fresh ideas.

So, what do clients want from sales people?

• To deal with a real professional
• To be ‘helped’ and understood
• Business acumen and commercial awareness
• A definition of what ‘success’ will look like
• A planned approach for change
• Conceptual thinking and empathy

In effect, clients are now after ‘business people’ who can sell that think about possibility and take information to the imagination phase.  Clients tend to value subject matter and solution expertise which is not the same as product knowledge.  They are looking for partners to help them map a pathway forward into the future and integrate a myriad of components, one of which is product.

Skillful thought and action are among some of the most critical skills in selling; diagnosing and solving problems, opportunity questioning, active listening, paraphrasing and verifying; advising clients on the best use of a product or a solution in relation to their priorities; linking the ‘big picture’ to details and strategy; thinking about possibilities; effective alignment of client and company objectives; listening closely to the needs of clients and being able to feed them back to marketing and technical people for product improvement and market relevance; and understanding the financial importance of client retention.

Effective sales professionals truly add value to client relationships well beyond the product.  The product is now only part of the sale, not the sale itself.

This approach to selling is seen as a distinct competitive advantage to businesses and any sales person or sales team not putting these skills into practice is at risk of losing sales and clients.   Training sales people in these skills has a significant effect on the profitability of a business.

The stereotype of the ‘smooth talking’ sales person whose job is to convince and persuade people to buy a product is outdated and, most of all, ineffective.

The skills we highlighted above are often described by those less enlightened sales individuals as ‘fluffy’ or ‘niceties’ and seen as irrelevant.  These people were either unable to extract themselves from the product  or at worst only saw their clients as a means to an end, i.e. it was only about extracting as much commission out of the client to serve their own needs – not a real partnership for a mutually beneficial relationship.

It may be worth noting that, both locally and overseas, there is an emergence of a critical skill which is ethical decision making in sales.  While not included in most selling skills programs, we are seeing a growing interest in this aspect of selling being included in training.  You have probably gathered that this always been a common thread through my writing and our work at Barrett – now it seems for obvious reasons.

Ethical training for all employees is coming through loud and clear.  This is also closely linked to ethical corporate culture, code of conduct, brand, reputation, and customer loyalty. As sales people have direct contact with prospects and customers, it would be advisable to have ethical decision making on the selling skills agenda as well.  I will discuss this specific topic in more depth in the coming weeks.

It is worth making sure your sales people conduct themselves with skillful thought and action as it may well deliver handsome payoffs.

Author: Sue Barrett is Founder and Managing Director of BARRETT.

When I consider how I spend my time professionally, I find it is often devoted to demystifying two things:

1. What is ‘good’ selling?
2. The proper use of psychometric assessments, especially in sales recruitment

Having written on the former on many occasions, I would like to dedicate this space to the latter – the proper use of psychometric assessments in sales recruitment.

To put this into perspective, my business has psychometrically assessed 40,000+ people in sales, business development and leadership roles using a variety of purpose built assessments.  This has provided us with valuable insight into what assessments work best in sales recruitment.  Over the years we have been exposed to many test publishers promoting their various assessments, claiming this and claiming that. We are constantly scanning for new tools.

We have discovered that there is no one single assessment that can measure everything you want to know about a sales person. Some test publishers have made this claim, however upon investigation we have found that they have often compiled several different assessments (measuring different things) into one offering. In doing so, they reduce the number of items measuring each area; therefore limiting the laser effect you need in sales recruitment.

This brings me to the major issue at hand: sales recruitment is one of the most challenging jobs around.  It is fraught with ambiguities because of the very nature of trying to assess ‘soft skills’ such as attitudes and actual versus perceived capability. Given this complexity, as a sales recruiter it may be beneficial to partner with a qualified and experienced organisation to support you when using assessments.

There is not one-quick-fix to getting this right. To assist you in your sales recruitment, let’s look at three important questions when it comes to using psychometric assessments:

1. Why use assessments?
2. What assessments should you use?
3. When should you use assessments?

Why use assessments?

While you don’t have to use assessments when recruiting, when used in conjunction with a robust sales recruitment process they can add real value to your decision making. The problem arises when assessments are used in place of a multi-pronged recruitment approach.

Recruitment, especially sales recruitment, can be very time consuming, therefore there is a tendency for people to take short cuts and replace the other steps in the recruitment process with a ‘quick’ psychometric assessment to base their hiring decision on.

This ‘assessment only’ approach is not how psychometric assessments are designed to be applied (reputable test publishers will always tell you this). This approach is not best practice; it does not give you all the answers and could get you into trouble with recruitment and anti- discriminatory laws. In fact, best practice states that assessments should account for no more than 20% of your decision making process in recruitment, especially sales.

The other main issue that arises out of this ‘assessment only’ approach is that the ‘assessment’ can get blamed if the sales person doesn’t work out.  Assessing in isolation is the issue here, not the assessment itself.

Psychometric assessments are best used to back up and cross reference the current data you have gathered via other means.   Depending upon which assessments you use, they can corroborate what you have already gathered and give you additional information to further investigate areas of concerns.

Tip: Psychometric assessments should compliment a multi-pronged sales recruitment process rather than be the recruitment process in entirety.

What assessments should you use?

I have seen anything from the CLEO quiz, numerology, star signs, and simplistic 4 quadrant models through to purpose built psychometric assessments used in sales recruitment.

Essentially there are thousands of so called ‘psychometric assessments’ out there, many claiming to test for sales effectiveness and predict sales performance.

So what to use?

First of all, it depends on what you want to measure.  There are a variety of purpose built assessments which are designed to address the following important questions about a candidate:

•  Will they sell?
•  Why will they sell?
•  How do they sell?
•  How well can they sell?

In our work we use a range assessments which have been purpose built to measure different areas including:

•  Personality
•  Motives and Values
•  Prospecting fitness- sales hesitation and call reluctance
•  Leadership potential
•  Cognitive Abilities – i.e. abstract, numeracy, and verbal reasoning, etc.
•  Coping strategies under pressure
•  Emotional Resilience and Emotional Intelligence (EI)

Tip: Depending on the level and complexity of the sales roles you should match the psychometric assessments to the required competencies and areas of capability.

When should you use assessments?

As assessments should not be used as the sole determinant, it is often advised to use them after the first interview but prior to the second interview and reference checking. This is recommended so that the assessment results can be used to verify and check gathered candidate information and then incorporating the results into interview questions and reference checks.

While there are some assessments you can use prior to the first interview or even at the resume submission point, the decision to assess earlier is often based on costs to the business. Obviously, it would be great to test everyone who applies, however this would not be economically viable or recommended in most recruitment situations.

Tip: Use the insight gained through assessments for the second interview questions and reference checks.

Conclusion

Whether you currently use assessments or are considering (recommended) incorporating them, the important point is:

Providing structure and using a multi- pronged approach are the two techniques most likely to help improve the reliability of your sales recruitment process and placements.

Remembering that sales recruitment is one of the most challenging jobs around; the average increase in output resulting from improved selection is approximately 2.5 times greater in sales jobs than in low-complexity, non-sales jobs. This is why is can also be important to partner with an organisation who has a sound understanding and working knowledge of recruitment and assessments.

I wish you happy and successful selling and sales recruitment.

Sue Barrett is Managing Director of BARRETT Pty Ltd. For more information please go to www.barrett.com.au.

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Like many people in Australia, my family and employees have been captivated by MasterChef Australia.

What I love about MasterChef is that it can be seen as a metaphor for expressing our talents and being the best we can be.  Given my interest in everything to do with sales, personal mastery and performance, I particularly love the parallel I have been able to draw about what it takes to be an elite master chef and an elite sales person and elite sales leader by the observation I have made in MasterChef.

As lessons for people wanting to master the sales profession,MasterChef works on many levels:

• It’s about acquiring and honing a range of skills, often difficult to master skills individually and even more so in concert with each other
• It’s about receiving and dealing with real feedback about real results
• It’s about learning from your mistakes – practice, practice, practice
• It’s about resilience – being able to get back up when you are down and face a new day whatever it may bring
• It’s about personal insight and self-awareness
• It’s about humility – letting go of the old to embrace the new
• It’s about listening to and understanding what needs to be achieved
• It’s about operating under pressure, sometimes extreme pressure (internal and external)
• It’s about finding your own character and what you stand for; your values, your purpose
• It’s about friendship and community even in a competitive environment
• It’s about skillful learning – including learning how to be coached and mentored
• It’s about personal responsibility
• It’s about respect – for self, for peers, your leaders, and your profession
• It’s about process – following the recipe, the fundamental rules of chemistry that work
• It’s about personal leadership and being true to yourself
• It’s about potential, opportunity, creativity, innovation and achievement

In my opinion, the real heroes of this program are the judges and guest chefs who have shown leadership and clarity of purpose in their mentoring and managing of the various contestants.

As leaders they display and model:

• Their skillful leadership as masters in their own profession – they know what it takes to be a master craftsman in their profession.  There is something magical in watching a skillful person create something wonderful.
• Their respect for the discipline of training, learning, constant practice and continuous improvement
• Their respect for process and quality – the foundations, the recipes, the ingredients. As leaders they leave nothing is half baked (pardon the pun).
• Their love of and passion for what they do and the expectation they have for each contestant to reach and push beyond their own potential and what they thought they were capable of.  Their encouragement and desire for excellence in each person is outstanding.
• Their coaching skills – from running the master classes to their observations and feedback at the contestants work bench as they work through real life challenging situations is nothing short of text book.
• Their constructive and honest feedback at judgment time as well as their ability to drill down to the fine detail to show where contestants did well and where they could improve makes for fine example of performance management conversations at their best.
• Their care, respect and concern for each person and each person’s special gifts and talents.
• Their regular referencing to and questioning of the real intentions of each person to make sure each contestant was in it for real.
• Their knowledge about how to run a viable business – from cost of ingredients to the true value of a dish.
• The standards they set.  There is nothing mediocre aboutMasterChef.

My hope is that we as Sales Leaders can aspire to be role models in the same way these leaders are for their people.

We each could learn lessons from how all the people on this show have managed their part in it – the good and the bad.

MasterChef inspires me to continue to live by our motto at BARRETT, ‘excellence through purposeful action’.

Excellence means giving our best to whatever we do and giving our best to relationships. Setting noble and realistic goals and remembering to plan and practice. We don’t try to do everything; instead we focus on developing our special gifts.

Purposeful Action means having a clear vision of what we want to accomplish. Knowing why we are doing what we are doing. Having a clear goal and getting back on track if we get scattered or distracted. Finishing what we start and persevering until we get results.

As author William Arthur Ward quotes  “The price of excellence is discipline. The cost of mediocrity is disappointment.”

I commend MasterChef for its devotion to excellence through purposeful action. Thank you.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

I find it somewhat frustrating when people make simplistic claims and statements about salespeople like: ‘super sales performers are all risk takers and oblivious to rejection and failure’.

Statements like this are simply not true and trivialise the complex world of selling by trying to box people without proper analysis and insight.

There is a large body of research that shows there are many types of sales people for different types of clients, products, and markets.  Just because a sales person may be excellent in one market may not mean they are well suited for another.

Take call centres for instance.  If the type of sale is simple and transactional, putting in people who like complex problem solving and variety would be a very bad decision.  Boredom and repetition, amongst other things, could see people like this leave sooner than intended or create havoc while there.

The reason I am speaking up about this is I find many people do not understand the intricacies of selling and tend to take a one-type-of-salesperson-does-it-all approach when selecting and developing sales people often leaving them frustrated and angry and not getting the sales performance they want.

In the last 15 years my team and I have analysed and profiled over 100 different types of sales roles as diverse as:

-    Business Banking Sales,
-    Media Sales (TV & Radio)
-    Online Advertising Sales
-    Publishing Sales
-    IT Sales
-    Hi-tech Medical Equipment Sales
-    Pharmaceutical Sales
-    Funeral Sales
-    Wholesale Sales
-    Print and Distribution Sales
-    Telephone Sales (inbound and outbound)
-    Direct Sales (party plan, etc.)
-    Money Market Sales
-    Mortgage Sales
-    Investment Sales
-    Recruitment Sales
-    Industrial Sales
-    Engineering Sales
-    Key Account Management Sales
-    Sales Management
-    Sales Directors
-    Music Licensing Sales
-    Account Co-ordinators
-    Sales Support

I am here to tell you that there were many variations in these sales roles and variation in the styles and types of people needed to perform these roles effectively.  For instance, some need to be very prospecting fit, while others needs to be detailed, patient and very thorough.

When one assumes that an organisation can have one sales force with no differentiation, there are often negative consequences.

These include:

• Individuals don’t work together well.
• Sales opportunities seem to ‘slip away’.
• Individuals can’t seem to get the job done.

The assumption that every salesperson can be all things to every customer does not work.

This assumption regards all customers and salespeople as a commodity, or an interchangeable part. For example, if a salesperson is unable to secure a sale with a customer, the organisation may not make a conclusion that the salesperson does not meet the needs of the customer.

Instead the organisation might view the customer as a commodity or an opportunity that has been lost, and will hope that the salesperson is able to secure another sale with a different customer.

A ‘one-salesperson-does-it-all approach’ does not work when you have a diverse product range or a varied pool of customers.  Each customer has unique needs, operates within a unique organisation, and needs to know different information from the salesperson. Therefore it is necessary to link the salesperson’s style of working to the needs of the customer, your market and your products.

Too little work is done in this area and yet it is one of the most critical areas you need to consider for business success.

The book The Quadrant Solution by Stevens, H & Cox, J, describes a sales model based upon a quadrant that is used to evaluate the organisation and its products on its complexity and the expected customer experience.

Complexity:
When a customer is making a complex purchase, with a lot of customised offerings, the seller needs to do a lot of hand-holding during the purchase and delivery. That would be a high touch sale (hand-holding, longer more secure relationship with seller). If it is a simple purchase and the customer can handle the purchase on their own, this would be a low touch sale (customer is confident in handling purchase, doesn’t need hand-holding, short/temporary relationship).

Customer experience:
When a customer needs a high degree of technical support during and after the purchase, it is a high tech sale. If the customer has the experience and knowledge to handle the technical components of the sale, it is a low tech sale.

In the book he describes four sales styles that link into the quadrant model. These are consultative selling, relationship selling, display selling, and super closer selling.

I have provided examples of each style as a way of demonstrating my point about the variety that exists in sales, however from our research there are even more selling styles or subsets of selling styles.  Not all selling roles will fit these categories however I feel it is a good place to simulate our thinking on this topic and help you make more sense of what you may need by way of sales talent.

Consultative selling style:
Salespeople who adopt a consultative selling style enjoy being the trusted consultant to their customers. They like a degree of complexity in their work, and are comfortable interacting with high-level managers. They are analytical, ambitious, educated, professional, self-confident and well-organised. They are able to work with customers who need technical support and a long-standing relationship (high tech, high touch).

Relationship selling style:
Salespeople who adopt a relationship selling style enjoy building and fostering relationships with customers. They have a strong work ethic and enjoy a hands-on approach when interacting with others. They are warm and personable and are sensitive to problems that the customer may be having. Relationship salespeople are not technically oriented, and focus on the relationship aspect of a sale (low tech, high touch).

Display selling style:
Salespeople who adopt a display selling style are comfortable promoting or displaying a product to the customer in the most effective way. They ensure that their approach is easy, convenient and simple for everyone to understand. They prefer to work with customers on a transactional basis, and are not inclined to provide the technical or long-term relationship support (low tech, low touch).

Super closer selling style:
Salespeople who adopt a super closer selling style are progressive and determined in their approach. They are extroverted, energetic and competitive in their style. They are visionary, entrepreneurial and are often viewed as experts in their field. They tend to get customers excited about the possibilities of a product/service, and their primary focus is on closing the sale. The super closer salesperson is generally moving too fast onto the next prospect to maintain a long-term relationship with the client, but will provide them with the technical support to secure the sale (high tech, low touch).

In conclusion, excellent salespeople can generally sell many things but not usually everything and even if they could, some selling environments would not suit them in the long term and therefore they would not be classified as good sales person for your business if this happened.

Our salesforces should be organised so that the natural selling style of the salesperson compliments the kind of product or service that they are selling, and fits in with the customer’s market.

My point is that we all need to know what type of sales role and sales person our businesses need to prosper. By determining a salesperson’s natural tendency or selling style, we can ensure that this is linked to the customer and products unique needs.

In today’s world we are well equipped to define the type of sales role our business needs and define the salesperson’s selling style to match that role.  So let move away from limiting sales stereotypes and open ourselves to diversity.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Happy selling