• Need you daily fix of self-help tapes/CDs or guru books to get you pepped up to sell.
• Have a fragile positivism about sales, which bursts at the slightest criticism.
• Can’t wait to get out of sales to get a “real” job.
• Secretly ashamed of being in a sales career – this isn’t what I should be doing, my mother wants me to be a dentist.
• Fear the loss of approval of your friends, family or peers because you think they will think less of you if you are in sales.
• Don’t like being called a sales person – prefer titles like marketing consultant or pre-need counsellor (yes, this one is for real).
• Other departments, friends or family deride your career choice in sales.

Sound familiar?

Over the years I have met many sales people who are really good at selling, have all the ingredients, write great sales results and are highly valued by their companies, yet they never feel satisfied in their sales career. The afflicted sales person just feels a sense of unease and guilt about being in sales, a disquiet that never seems to get resolved.

Imagine waking up everyday feeling ashamed about what you do and carrying that unresolved guilt with you wherever you go. It’s exhausting. Often times it sits beneath the level of conscious awareness, silently gnawing away at your confidence, your feeling of worthiness, until one day you can’t take it anymore.

Always looking for greener pastures as a way to resolve this feeling, sales people afflicted with this issue often quit highly successful sales careers to go into management roles or something else that doesn’t require selling. And no one even questions why.

Many settle for something beneath their abilities and some go into management or worse still – sales management or sales training. What hasn’t changed is that they still carry this unresolved issue with them.

Then they often unwittingly pass it on to their unsuspecting peers with comments and negative attitudes towards sales. If in sales management or sales training, their sales team cop comments like “Oh we don’t call ourselves sales people here”, or “We don’t have to sell – we consult”, as well as “The product sells itself”, “All sales people are pushy and rude and we aren’t like that here, are we?”, etc.

This then perpetuates the whole cycle again by instilling mistaken beliefs about selling and creating doubt and shame about sales in a whole new group of people. And still no-one questions why? Just go into some professional services firms or non-sales departments of business and listen to how they deride sales and sales people.

What are their criticisms based on? Why do many people still hold a negative view of selling? Do they know what good selling actually is? Are they basing their view of selling on bad business practices? How did people develop poor and misinformed views of selling?

Maybe one reason is that in the 1970s, 1980s and early to mid 1990s, many sales teams were trained to be either:

• Aggressive and adversarial in their negotiations with clients leaving people feeling battered and worn-out in the process to get product or service.
• Very product focused – “show up and throw up” sales approach.
• Soft and insipid, basing their sales efforts on mateship or special deals (often bribery) which usually resulted in a loss for the business they represented.

Or another reason may be the persistent myths about the tricks and secrets to sales success touted by so called “sales gurus” who teach people how to get sales at your client’s expense.

No wonder many people shy away from selling as a career. Whether they are conscious of it or not, they don’t like how selling has been “sold” to them. I don’t blame them.

I have spent much of my professional career helping people rearrange their thinking and understanding about what good selling actually is. Techniques of manipulation and intimidation, stimulus response selling and rapport alone do not work and never have for long-term sustainable client relationships.

Relationships do not work or last if they are forced or coerced.

I think “selling” needs a PR makeover. Old selling mythology needs to be superseded by a more accurate view of what good selling actually is. Check the view of selling as defined below and see how it sits with your belief system and values. How does it resonate with you?

View of selling

You have a view of selling that is positive because selling helps sales people and companies understand and identify what their customers’ needs are, then helps them fill their needs in an ethical and professional manner and allows for profitable ongoing business relationships.

Whether you have the skills or not to sell, you shouldn’t be afraid or ashamed of what good selling actually is. Remember: Everyone lives by selling something.

Done well, sales is an honourable career we can’t do without.

We all know people want to buy from people they trust! They always have and they always will, if they can. In fact, top performing sales people have always sold based on trust, transparency and doing what they said they would do. And their view of selling was always positive and honourable, despite the prevailing paradigms mentioned above.

If you’re still not sure, check the following implication – to make more money, you have to like sales people, and that sales people are morally and ethically inclined!

Not enough new business coming? Sales drying up? Not making a satisfactory impact when in front of prospective clients?

If this is happening to you, consider your sales effectiveness and your sales efforts from these two angles:

1. Missed sales opportunities.
2. Lost sales opportunities.

If market conditions are right, and you have good products or services, then you may want to take a look at your own efforts. Your poor sales efforts may be due to:

Missed sales opportunities: Put simply, missed sales opportunities are all about a lack of prospecting activity. If there is little or no prospecting for new business in new and/or existing accounts you will not get sales. You cannot lose sales if you’re not there to get them in the first place.

Remedy: Develop a prospecting plan and get out and see and/or speak to more people in your target market on a regular and consistent basis. Prospecting requires sales people to establish contact with people who might buy your products or services. Whether it’s phone prospecting, face-to-face prospecting or group prospecting, inbound or outbound, nothing gets sold until salespeople get in front of and/or talk to potential buyers. Prospecting is… The identification of new business opportunities in new or existing accounts!

Lost sales opportunities: You can only lose a sale when you are engaged in a sales conversation with a prospective viable client. (A viable client is someone who has the willingness and ability to buy from you, the authority to make a decision and a genuine need for your product or service offering).

If the client is viable and you lose a sale, it is most likely due to your lack of capacity to convert a sales opportunity into a sale – and sales revenue. This is usually due to poor selling skills and techniques such as having no logical sales process to follow, poor questioning skills, inability to relate to and empathise with your customer’s situation, making poor recommendations, etc.

Remedy: Get trained in a proper evidenced-based sales process that teaches you how to sell well. More than 90% of sales people follow no logical process when selling. They fly by the seat of their pants. Sales people need clear sales communication models, questioning skills, a process to match client needs with their products and make effective recommendations, and skills to secure client commitment and close a sale.

I hope this helps. Happy selling.

I don’t know about you, but when markets start to tighten or when things feel a bit uncertain, instead of cost cutting and bunkering down, I have found that you need to do precisely the opposite. You need to invest in your sales efforts with good strategy, sales training, good sales management and good sales coaching.

I have experienced selling in tight markets over the years and found these times to be some of my most successful sales years. Why? Because I took advantage of everyone else’s pessimistic approach as they sat around complaining, and I got out there and learned how to survive and thrive in tight markets. While you may hear others saying things are bad and they can’t make any sales, you know there are still potential clients out there who need your help/products/services.

Beware where your thoughts take you and whom you listen to. We have a saying at Barrett: “Watch who you let near your mind”.

In tight times it is too easy just to cut costs at any expense. Cutting costs on your sales efforts by not training and coaching your sales staff or investing in sales support resources just sends you further backwards.

Here is what some of my close business contacts, who hold senior sales management roles in large public companies, had to say about cost cutting at the expense of their sales teams and sales efforts.

They are lamenting the current fad of the career CEO and their gangs who come in for three or four years only and whose only strategy to drive up the share price is to cut costs. Their experience is that these CEOs show no signs of investing in the development of the businesses or their people.

These senior sales managers stated that they have repeatedly asked for and received no investment funding to develop their sales teams for over two years. One of these managers has moved from one public company to another only to find exactly the same issue, despite promises to the contrary when they were being interviewed for the job.

They have put their economic cases and research evidence to senior management about how important it is in this day and age to invest in developing sales teams so they can be competitive and fit in the market place. They have stated that their “competitive edge” is their sales team, not their products or pricing any more.

They stated that developing their teams helps them attract and retain more and better quality customers, make more sales and attract and retain good staff. Just like a sports team, these senior sales managers know that they and their teams need regular training and development to leverage their skills and talent in the market place.

But their requests continue to fall on deaf ears. In my contacts’ opinions, they see their respective CEOs and their gangs only thinking short term with no eye for the future and “cost cutting” as their only maxim.

They admit they are in despair. Here is what they shared with me about their sales teams:

• “Management refuses to invest in people. My sales people are demotivated and many are wanting to leave except they won’t because they know the company is paying (bribing) them more than they are worth in the market, so they’re all waiting for the ‘package’ – how can I run a sales team like that? Sales are stagnating. Staff engagement is really low across the whole business. It’s depressing.”
• “As much as I am out in the field with them and coaching for better performance (which they really appreciate), they know that senior management have no interest in their future well-being or development. My team wants to be better and would love more training on current sales practices but they know they won’t get it here. I am at great risk of losing my team.”

Whether you are large or small, do not fall into this trap. The short, medium and long term consequences are lethal. Be prudent with your dollar, for sure, but don’t kill off the source of your revenue stream.

Regularly invest in your sales team’s development. It doesn’t have to be full blown training programs (although these are helpful on at least a yearly basis). It can be as simple as getting in an expert guest speaker at your sales meetings or giving special executive coaching sessions to your top sales performers to make them even better. It’s what keeps us healthy, fit and motivated.

If you are thinking of using external sales consultants, coaches or trainers to help you improve your sales efforts, I recommend you assess them using the following criteria:

• Do they have experience and a proven track record working with companies to create high performing sales teams?
• Do they know what makes great sales people great?
• Is their sales training content relevant and up-to-date for today’s competitive market place? That is, are they incorporating sales process, sales planning, influencing, developing meaningful business relationships, emotional self management etcetera into their training?
• Is their training methodology designed to develop sales teams to deliver your sales plans consistently?
• Can they show specific evidence of improving sales results in businesses?
• Does their methodology ensure that you can build a sustainable sales culture over time?
• Are they able to translate complex initiatives into practical, tactical road maps you and your people can use immediately?
• Do they ensure that you can measure the right sales metrics so that you can then manage by them?
• Do they have proven competency based approach which leads to observable behaviour change at all levels?
• Do their consultants, coaches and trainers all have industry-based commercial and sales experience?
• Do their coaches and trainers have relevant industry-recognised qualifications in coaching, facilitation and assessment?
• Do they have experience in sales culture and process transformation across industries?
• Do they help you make more money than the cost of having them in your business?

It has often been said that very strong negotiation skills are critical to being a high performing sales person. However, findings from our “sales force fitness” profiling work, where we profile critical qualities for successful sales performance in many businesses, large and small, is telling a very different story.

Before you invest your training dollars into negotiating skills training for your sales team, you might like to think about investing it into influencing skills training instead.

Why? The ability to positively influence prospects or clients towards your brand and product offering – more so than negotiation – is what is needed in today’s market.

Products/solutions are often quite clearly defined and a salesperson’s ability to negotiate price and value-added services is limited in today’s market.

We are now finding some companies are setting prices for their sales teams with no room for negotiation, thus eliminating price negotiations altogether.

(Not always a bad thing if you ask me, given all the pricing discounts I have seen sales people giving away unnecessarily over the years.)

So what is a sales person to do now?

We are consistently hearing in interviews with high performing sales managers and sales people that the ability to positively influence the client is a more critical competency than the skill of negotiating. This has direct relevance to the emotional intelligence (EI) area of managing others emotions.

The emotional management of others is the skill of influencing the moods and emotions of others. A sales person’s ability to:

• Influence a prospective customer to say ‘yes’.
• Overcome a customer’s reservation towards a new product.
• Help a client feel enthusiastic about a product they recently purchased.
• Plan with a client how to best engage their ‘economic buyer’.

These are critical to success in business today.

In addition, we are finding that:

• Accurately reading the client, gauging their reactions and then adjusting your own style is also being highlighted as a key competency of high performing sales people. This is relevant to the EI competency of recognising emotions of others, emotional reasoning and managing others emotions.
• Building relationships and trust is also critical. For the past three of our major corporate projects in assessing “sales force fitness”, it has been cited as a key point of competitive difference. The ability to build trust-based relationships is influenced by a number of EI competencies – emotional self awareness, emotional awareness of others, ability to influence others’ emotions and emotional control.

Ask yourself: “How effectively are my sales people perceiving, understanding, reasoning with and manage their own and others’ feelings.” These skills are cornerstones to successful selling, as emotions are an inherent part of why people buy and why they do not.