For some time now I have been testing the concept of ‘everybody lives by selling something’ with almost everyone I meet, including senior leadership teams (comprising of HR, Finance, IT, Operations, and Sales), primary school teachers and administration staff, senior banking risk professionals, and health professionals (including my podiatrist and GP).

I am curious to see how people respond and how they see themselves in relation to the concept of ‘everybody lives by selling something’.

Often when one mentions the words ‘selling’ or ‘sales’ you can see people visibly recoil in disgust, with many immediately saying something like “I don’t sell” or “It’s not my job”.  As discussed in previous posts, people often reference limited stereotypes about selling which are usually tainted with negative, manipulative, references that most people find offensive and unable to relate to.

However, since I have been asking people to consider the concept of ‘everybody lives by selling something’ I have been pleasantly surprised at the responses.  It appears that most agree with the statement, whether they are officially in a sales role or not.

While initially, some people viewed the statement as only applying to a commercial transaction where money was exchanged and did not see themselves related to sales at all, they soon opened up as we explored the concept further and applied the principle to any form of exchange between two or more people. When we discussed that most people essentially work in a ‘contact dependant’ career where some form of exchange is essential for them to succeed in their job we then agreed that, indeed, ‘everybody lives by selling something’.

Take for instance, a recent experience I had where I was interviewed (Michael Parkinson style), by the Head of Risk for a major Australian bank, in front of his senior leadership team all of whom are senior risk professionals.

Now in most organisations ‘risk’ is not usually associated positively with ‘sales’.  In fact, there is often a ‘standoff’ between risk and sales – the ‘us versus them’ approach.   I have seen both sides of the fence roll their eyes at the mention of the other.

For this interview I was asked to expand upon the concept of ‘everybody lives by selling something’ and the Principle of Exchange.  My client sponsor (and interviewer) has worked with me for some years and wanted to raise to a conscious level the importance of proactive, open, and transparent relationships.  He knew that the concept of ‘everybody lives by selling something’ may be a challenge for some, however he felt it was so important he was prepared to take the risk (pardon the pun).  The good news is that it was received in a favourable light, even for a tough audience like this.

Here is an excerpt from a communication piece that went out to the group post the session.  The PIE Model is especially well worth a read:

“…Essentially Sue believes that if we have an idea, product, service, skill, capability or talent by which we earn a living we need to be able to sell, in the general sense of the word. To put it another way, in order to maximise our impact and ongoing influence we need to ensure our talents and capabilities are visible to those who need to be influenced.

In a previous life I used a model called the “PIE Model”. This suggests that 70% of an individual’s impact or effectiveness is defined by their Performance (P), 20% by their Image (I) and 10% by their Exposure (E) to the right people within the business. Whether the percentages are correct or not is moot.

The point is that Performance alone will not maximise your impact. You also have to be seen as credible and have ready access to the decision makers. Imagine the world’s greatest Op Risk professional who portrays an image that alienates the business team they work with or equally a super star technocrat in Market Risk who sits in a corner all day never interacting with their business partners or leaders. Both will do a good job, but neither will create an impact to demand respect or influence their business leaders.

To be clear – I am very keen that we all perform to the highest possible standard. I also want us all to focus on becoming more effective by improving our interaction with our business and functional partners.

Consider your exposure to the broader business, think about how you communicate with and influence your risk and functional colleagues, reflect on how your persona and image impact on the messages that you are trying to convey. If you’ve never considered this before discuss it with your line manger and build it into your development plan.

One other aspect of Sue’s message that resonated with me was her assertion that a great salesperson will build trust, communicate in a transparent way and do what they say they will do. This creates their competitive advantage as sales people. Sounds like a good set of principles to me and I believe that these traits are also those of a successful Risk professional!”

I commend the leaders of this business for taking a stand and putting the concept out there to be discussed openly and candidly.

Why is this important to you and all the people in your business?

The message is clear that we all are, indeed, responsible for how we manage our careers, our perceptions, our image, and our roles within businesses and the broader community.

We all affect each other in terms of how we relate and how we communicate our intentions and actions.  Sure, it is the primary responsibility of the sales team to go out and proactively source new business. However, we are all representatives of our businesses – from the back room to the front counter, from the customer service call to an internal email, from the company website to the comments on your Facebook page or your Tweets.

How we all speak about and reference the organisation and the people within can influence and impact on sales results and ultimate success of the organisation.

Many people who know me have heard me say that I would love every role in every business to have a sales capability defined in it.  So far the signs are promising as it appears that nearly everyone I speak to is able to relate to ‘everybody lives by selling something’ at its broadest level.

So why not ask your people how they feel about the concept ‘everybody lives by selling something’ and let me know they have to say using the Request information form.

There are many things written and said about effective sales people, effective leaders, successful entrepreneurs, great teams and so on.

Many descriptions are in circulation.  There is an overabundance of experts recommending this approach one day and that approach the next.

Those of us who want to be effective and successful often follow the advice of those experts however we are at risk of turning ourselves inside out and losing sight of what we are really here to do if we keep trying to bend to the winds and whims of the latest management trends, fads, findings, research, etc.

I am not against reading widely, continuous learning, adopting new ways and adapting to change as you have probably realised by now.

However, in recent times I have been feeling overwhelmed by too much information and instead found myself opting for a ‘less is more’ approach to life.

As I always do, I have been sifting through a lot of information and finding that I am beginning to distill some fundamental truths that hold true whatever the fad or trend of the day.

On my most  recent distillation process I have found that I was able to identify four valuable life skills that work very well for me in every situation I have found myself in.  You will recognise that these skills are essential to effective selling, and I am sure you won’t miss their relevance to all other roles we play, personally and professionally.

So in the spirit of ‘less is more’ here are my 4 valuable life skills which continue to serve me very well:

1. The ability to ask good questions
2. The ability to actively listen
3. The ability to receive and give honest feedback
4. The ability to reflect on my actions

I hope they serve you well too. Enjoy your sales week.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

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.

How to incentivise and reward sales people has long been a contentious topic.  Too many times I have seen businesses set up incentive programs that reward the wrong behaviours which can affect team morale, client relationships, sales, staff retention, and so on.

For instance, I recently met the managing director of a medium sized software business who asked me why would his sales people keep selling one version of their product when they had been instructed to also sell in a newer more comprehensive version of the product.

I asked him two questions:
1.    “How do your sales people get incentivised for each product sale?”
2.    “Do they earn most of their income from their commissions or from their base salary?”

It turned out that his sales people earned more commission by selling in the older version than the newer version of his product.  And the sales people made the bulk of their income from their commissions rather than from their salaries.

There you have it.  What makes perfect sense to the sales person – “If I make more money by selling in one type of product and the majority of my income comes from my commissions I would be stupid selling anything else.” does not always work for the organisation or the customer.

Lesson: If you want a different outcome (as did the aforementioned MD), you need to think about what behaviours you want to drive and reward in your people that don’t create competing motivations.

And here in lies the issue with certain aspects of the Financial Planning industry.

Much of what is being written about the Financial Planning industry in current and recent times is centering around the issue about competing motivations.

As I see it there are two different models in operation in the Financial Planning industry:

Fee for service model

• Is where you engage an independent Financial adviser to guide you and instruct you in your financial planning and wealth management strategies.  These people are in the business of selling their consulting services and their advice. They earn their  income purely off their hourly consulting time.  Service fees are applicable to the level of service provided.  Their focus is on advising on the three keys are of wealth management:  Creation, Consolidation and Distribution with no products commission attached to their advice.

Product sales model

• Is where you buy a specific product or suite of products to incorporate into your financial planning and wealth management strategies.  In this instance you know you are buying a product via a transactional product sale.  You can do this at a bank branch for instance.  Some people who run their own self-managed super funds work this way by purchasing only product.   Others may use a broker who sells a range of these products and can provide easy access to the right product you need.  Brokers usually make their money by getting a commission on the sale of these products.  Some brokers also make trail commissions for the life time of the sale which is where you are seeing an increase in complaints.  This model is basically the old Insurance Sales model.

There is nothing wrong with these models so long as they are open and transparent and do what they say they do.

Basically, people should know what they are getting i.e. independent advice for a specified fee or product for a specified fee/commission.  For instance there are customers who do not want to ‘pay fee for service’ and prefer the commission model so these two models offer choice which is only fair in an open market.

However the problems arising for the Financial Planning industry is when people using the ‘product sales model’ try to pass it off as the ‘independent financial adviser’ model.  All this does is create competing motivations like:

“Do I give my client what is best for them or best for me?”
“I need to sell more product to supplement my retirement pool not necessarily my clients.”

The issue as I see with this approach it is that we are more likely to get products that make the most money for the broker or planner not the best product or solution for us.  We are at risk of becoming a vehicle for them to make as much money as possible at our expense as is evidenced by some of the more spectacular business failures in recent times.

Financial Planners who are really only selling product with a commission structure attached as their main source of income cannot truly act in an independent  advisory or consulting role.

The competing motivation that can arise is that they can become more concerned with how they could get paid rather than how they can provide better advice for their clients.

This poses some important questions for the industry:

• Why have these competing motivations been allowed to manifest?
• In the industry trying to squeeze a product sales model into a consulting sales model?
• What is the industry doing about creating a client centric model where it’s all about the client and the client’s outcome?
• What relationships have been created with the product suppliers that may be leading to these competing motivations?

In my opinion the terms Financial Adviser or Financial Planner have been poorly defined and often misused by the industry potentially leading to misunderstandings, confusion, and in some cases distress and financial loss for some customers because they did not get what they paid for.

In my opinion, those who sell product should be called a Financial Product Specialist or Financial Products Broker.

And those who truly practice legitimate Fee for Service models can rightly call themselves a Financial Adviser or Financial Planner.

Clearly this issue will not go away until the industry finds the best way to legitimately define Financial Advising or Financial Planning and stop creating opportunities for competing motivations which only serve to devalue their industry and its potential for a truly professional model that works for all.  More work to be done here .

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