Exploring reasons for ‘sales sabotage,’ Jeff Thull observes that how salespeople talk with customers can easily undermine the ability to succeed and win business. If you don’t know how to effectively structure and conduct customer conversations, what you talk about doesn’t make much difference, he adds, in one of the essays included in ‘The Sales Gurus: Lessons from the best sales books of all time,’ put together by Andrew B. Clancy and the editors at Soundview (www.landmarkonthenet.com).
To salespeople who find it difficult to accept that they may be sabotaging their own career, Thull presents evidence such as that most people (including sales, service, and support professionals) are not naturally effective communicators; and that the techniques promoted in the majority of sales-training programmes exacerbate our innate communication shortcomings. Worse still, “When salespeople get emotionally involved in the outcome of a customer engagement and start to try to drag the customer into compliance using outdated techniques, they are confirming the customer’s negative assumptions and stereotypes about the sales profession.”
Underprepared ‘opinions’
A similarly worrying thought can be found in ‘Customer-centric selling,’ another chapter in the book, written by Michael T. Bosworth and John R. Holland, where the authors rue that companies rely unduly on the underprepared opinions of salespeople.
The authors note that, after a brief, often misdirected training effort, new salespeople are asked to immediately begin ‘volunteering opinions’ by first condensing their understanding of the company’s offerings into a coherent message for buyers. “They must provide their opinions of what accounts and titles to call once in a given territory; which accounts should be in their pipelines; what accounts will close, when, and why; what prospects will be lost and why; and what enhancements to offerings are needed to improve win rates.”
As if to compound the problem, those who manage sales forces are often ill suited for the job, the authors fret. Aghast that companies tend to promote their top-performing sellers into these positions, regardless of whether these people possess the skills required to teach customer-centricity to others, the authors remind that these managers “have often ‘winged it’ much of their careers and don’t know what has made them successful: It was intuitive. They’ve never broken down their success into teachable components.”
Watch out for the ‘time traps’
An instructive chapter in the book is ‘Time traps,’ by Todd Duncan, where the author cautions that as much as 75 per cent of the time you spend at work or in your sales career is probably a waste of time. So, what is the solution? Manage time better? No, the concept of time management is flawed, says Duncan. “As a worker, you cant’ manage or tame or control time any more than you can lasso the wind and tie it to a fence post. You can only manage your thoughts and actions,” he reasons.
Before you dismiss that as being philosophical, Duncan assures that we have the know-how and capacity to make time matter. The problem, according to him, is that there are obstacles – the time traps – which keep us from achieving our goal. The first of such traps is that of identity – where the only thing forming your identity is work. “You are known to yourself and to others solely by what you sell, how you sell, and how well you sell. You become lost in your job.”
Among the negative consequences of being thus ensnared by identity trap are guilt, restlessness, growing frustration, an urge to justify our schedules, and fear of regret, as the author lists. A few affirmations that can help you get out of the trap are that life will not settle down until you choose to settle it down; working is not living; time is life first, then money; and you can’t control time, but you can control how you use and respond to time.
Advising that who you are and who you are becoming is foundationally a function of how you are using your waking hours, the author laments that most salespeople overlook this in their pursuit of success and become something they never intended to be.
Valuable read, as a capsulated compilation of insights relevant to sales professionals.
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