I was bidding on a piece of business that was referred to me by one of the phone vendors I work with. I consider business referred by a vendor to have a high probability of closing. Smaller businesses can’t afford to have full time I.T. or telecom personnel, so they lean on their vendors and typically go with their recommendations.
The phone vendor and I met with a woman given the responsibility of gathering pricing and product information. She had experience working with my vendor contact and was pleased with his work. Since I was an independent agent, I could offer her any option available in the market place. After meeting with this woman, I was 90% sure we would win the business. So, I was a bit taken back when I followed up with her a week later and was informed that they decided to go in a different direction.
What happened?
We never met with the decision maker, that was a problem, but we did meet with the influencer. The main reason was that the decision maker had a personal relationship with the sales rep that won the deal.
In this deal, there was a third party who had no personal connection; they just happened to show up at the right place at the right time. But where did that get them besides wasting their time and effort? If the sales person that sold the deal was the back door, I represented the side door and the third rep was the front door.
If you’re dependant on earning a living by approaching every prospect cold, with no personal connection - coming through the front door - get ready to apply for food stamps and always have your resume ready.
Here’s another example:
I was assigned Yuma, Arizona for a territory when I was with Qwest. 99% of the Qwest reps that were assigned Yuma never set foot in the place. When I went prospecting in Yuma, I was warmly received and many decision makers dropped what they were doing and met with me on the spot. After 20 or so cold calls, I felt like I owned the town. Right away, I made a list of the top companies headquartered in Yuma. I figured, over time, I would own all these accounts. One of the biggest companies was a seed company. They had the competitor’s service and my prices were lower. What I didn’t know was that the phone vendor, who sold them their service, was the boss’s wife.
Yuma, Arizona seemed like front door heaven, but there’s no such thing. The only way to have long term, sustainable success in sales is to establish a dependable source of referral agents. That’s the closest thing to owning a key to the back door of selling. Keep that in mind and spend the majority of your efforts towards making that a reality. You still need to cold call, but instead of trying to determine who’s in charge and if the company is shopping for your service, focus on determining who the company’s vendors are and how to make contact with them. Have a way to incent them to work with you. If you’re professional and have something to offer, you still might need to find them some business before they agree to work with you.
I made contact with a commercial leasing agent. Commercial leasing agents are sort of the holy grail of referral agents in my business, because they could get you in on the ground floor of a lot of different opportunities. I called this guy because he advertised in a magazine we were considering advertising in and I wanted to know if he was receiving value for his investment. I thought that was a clever approach because it got him to drop his guard and allowed me time to talk to him. Turns out, he was opening a new office and happened to be shopping for the services that I sell. We met and hit it off because he had run in college, like I did, and had similar personalities. I thought I had hit the jack pot; I thought I had finally found a real estate professional that was going to send me a stream of new business.
I bid on his services but lost out because Cox was available where he was and that was the one provider I couldn’t sell and their rates were dirt cheap. I didn’t think that was too big of a deal. Then one of the phone vendors I work with missed our appointment. Then he wasn’t impressed by the other phone vendor I brought in. Then I missed the rescheduled appointment for the first guy because my car wouldn’t start. Then he went with his own phone guy. I went from the reaching the holy grail to making some guy wonder why I drove a crappy car.
Sure enough, he stopped taking all my calls and when he did get on the phone, he was short with me. It got so bad that when he wanted to return a book I lent him about running, he tried to leave it outside his office for me; he didn’t want me to come in to retrieve it from him in person. I had to find another way. I didn’t panic. I waited until I found an opportunity for him. I did that but didn’t call him about it. I waited and found a second opportunity. Then I called and I could tell his attitude had changed. He realized that it was going to be a mutually beneficial business relationship.
And where am I headed with this? If making a sale is equivalent to receiving a meal, establishing a relationship with a referral agent is the equivalent of learning how to farm. And farming is the back door of selling.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
Resting On Your Laurels
What have you done for me lately? That seems to be the sales battle cry. A sales career can be one without progress. In every other profession, you start out near the bottom and work your way up. Not so much in sales. You may gain experience and product knowledge and be assigned larger accounts…and still be competing with kids right out of college. In other careers, experience leads to promotions, prestige and more money. In sales, you’re only as important as your last month of production.
In sales, your base salary will stay pretty much the same from the start of your career until the day you retire. The only increases you’ll see will be due to inflation. And, if you get a boost, you’ll be expected to sell more.
So, let’s say you have a run of success and you end up being top salesperson for eight straight months. You start feeling pretty darn good about yourself. You got a strut to your step, managers repeatedly use you as an example to your underperforming cohorts and gradually you start forming the opinion that odor and you are mutually exclusive. If you’re a man, every woman in the office smiles at you, if you’re a woman, you make all the male reps’ privates shrink.
Then a few things transpire, in descending order:
1. You lose some of your fire.
2. You start feeling pressure to stay on top.
3. You start looking for management to rescue you with a promotion.
You’re making money and you need time to spend it. You start shopping during work hours, eating lunch at nice restaurants and leaving work early on Fridays. You take more vacations. You start relying too heavily on your sales funnel and stop prospecting. All of a sudden sales aren’t pouring in as they used to. Some other sales rep’s totals start approaching your own. Pretty soon your manager starts asking you what’s going on, what you’ve been up to and how you’re going to fix things. You start feeling disrespected. You vow to work harder but you’ve developed bad habits that are difficult to correct. Your sales figures continue to dip and you start to lose confidence. As your confidence drops, you get nervous when you prospect; you put off callbacks and hesitate to close. You start to wonder if you lost confidence because you stopped selling or if you stopped selling because you lost confidence. Next thing you know, your manager starts talking about an action plan. Action plan? You were top rep, eight months in a row! You can’t believe you’re being treated with such contempt. You start looking for a new job but no one seems interested because they sense your desperation.
What happened?
You rested on your laurels. You started to believe that sales was something it isn’t and that your sales totals from one month would mean something months later. Instead of building on your efforts, you’re going to have to start all over again, with another organization. Hopefully you’ll be able to get the hunger to sell once again.
What to do?
Stay humble and hungry. Don’t look at sales reports or listen to managers. Don’t think you have some kind of special gift or that you were born to sell. Don’t get too high or too low, stay even keeled.
In sales, your base salary will stay pretty much the same from the start of your career until the day you retire. The only increases you’ll see will be due to inflation. And, if you get a boost, you’ll be expected to sell more.
So, let’s say you have a run of success and you end up being top salesperson for eight straight months. You start feeling pretty darn good about yourself. You got a strut to your step, managers repeatedly use you as an example to your underperforming cohorts and gradually you start forming the opinion that odor and you are mutually exclusive. If you’re a man, every woman in the office smiles at you, if you’re a woman, you make all the male reps’ privates shrink.
Then a few things transpire, in descending order:
1. You lose some of your fire.
2. You start feeling pressure to stay on top.
3. You start looking for management to rescue you with a promotion.
You’re making money and you need time to spend it. You start shopping during work hours, eating lunch at nice restaurants and leaving work early on Fridays. You take more vacations. You start relying too heavily on your sales funnel and stop prospecting. All of a sudden sales aren’t pouring in as they used to. Some other sales rep’s totals start approaching your own. Pretty soon your manager starts asking you what’s going on, what you’ve been up to and how you’re going to fix things. You start feeling disrespected. You vow to work harder but you’ve developed bad habits that are difficult to correct. Your sales figures continue to dip and you start to lose confidence. As your confidence drops, you get nervous when you prospect; you put off callbacks and hesitate to close. You start to wonder if you lost confidence because you stopped selling or if you stopped selling because you lost confidence. Next thing you know, your manager starts talking about an action plan. Action plan? You were top rep, eight months in a row! You can’t believe you’re being treated with such contempt. You start looking for a new job but no one seems interested because they sense your desperation.
What happened?
You rested on your laurels. You started to believe that sales was something it isn’t and that your sales totals from one month would mean something months later. Instead of building on your efforts, you’re going to have to start all over again, with another organization. Hopefully you’ll be able to get the hunger to sell once again.
What to do?
Stay humble and hungry. Don’t look at sales reports or listen to managers. Don’t think you have some kind of special gift or that you were born to sell. Don’t get too high or too low, stay even keeled.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Be Like Lenny
Baseball is a sport that requires mental toughness. You can have all the talent in the world but if you can’t control your mind, you won’t be successful. The best baseball players fail 70% of the time. An At Bat can range from swinging and missing to fouling off a pitch, to stroking a single up the middle. You can hit a sharp line drive that‘s snagged by a baseman, or a weak floater that somehow drops in. Slumps can hit you like a disease; they’re consuming and the harder you try to overcome them, the more you’ll struggle.
To be a good hitter, you need to forget striking out the moment you start your walk back to the dugout. Players that don’t possess this ability are bound to fail. As a fan, you want to see your favorites fired up and competitive, but the best players stay cool and collected.
In Michael Lewis’ book, Money Ball, he describes two players, Billy Beane and Lenny Dykstra. Billy Beane was a five-tool player; he could run, throw, hit for power and average and field his position. But failures ate at Beane and baseball is a game of failure. Dykstra didn’t know any better. He was talented, but not like Beane. Self doubt wasn’t part of Dykstra’s make up and if he got one hit and struck out three times in a game, the only thing he remembered was the hit.(1)
In his book, Lewis described how a few Mets’ players were watching in awe as Hall of Fame pitcher, Steve Carlton warmed up. Carlton won over 300 games in his career and had one of the nastiest sliders in baseball history. Dykstra didn’t know who he was, and after being informed, he proclaimed, “Shit. I’ll stick him.”
What does this have to do with sales? Sales is like baseball. When you’re making calls and someone is rude to you, it’s like striking out in baseball. If the best baseball players fail 70% of the time, the best salespeople fail 75% of the time. And just as the best baseball players shrug off strike outs and errors, the best salespeople shrug off rejection.
If it’s Monday morning and you find out you lost a big sale, you got to forget about it and move forward, the same way a hitter needs to forget a 0 for. If you check out or take the rest of the day off, how many others sales are you affecting?
In baseball, if you start thinking of all the stuff stacked against you - fast balls, change ups, curve balls and sliders, all the fielders – you’re going to fail. The same thing is true in sales. If you start thinking about your competition, your pricing, whether or not people want to talk to you, no solicitation signs…you might as well stay home. Heck, if you were thinking of all those things, you already called in sick.
In sales, ignorance is bliss and introspective salespeople fall like flies. Enter a business or a call like you have the greatest news or the most valuable information to share. If you’re hung up on or asked to leave, don’t give it a second thought. If a potential customer calls to inform you that they decided to go another way, thank them for the opportunity and start looking for your next opportunity. Focus on success, strengths and acceptance, not failure, weaknesses and rejection.
Be like Lenny.
(1) Dykstra had the same mentality in the financial world and although it started out well, he lost everything, including his wife, and made a lot of enemies along the way.
To be a good hitter, you need to forget striking out the moment you start your walk back to the dugout. Players that don’t possess this ability are bound to fail. As a fan, you want to see your favorites fired up and competitive, but the best players stay cool and collected.
In Michael Lewis’ book, Money Ball, he describes two players, Billy Beane and Lenny Dykstra. Billy Beane was a five-tool player; he could run, throw, hit for power and average and field his position. But failures ate at Beane and baseball is a game of failure. Dykstra didn’t know any better. He was talented, but not like Beane. Self doubt wasn’t part of Dykstra’s make up and if he got one hit and struck out three times in a game, the only thing he remembered was the hit.(1)
In his book, Lewis described how a few Mets’ players were watching in awe as Hall of Fame pitcher, Steve Carlton warmed up. Carlton won over 300 games in his career and had one of the nastiest sliders in baseball history. Dykstra didn’t know who he was, and after being informed, he proclaimed, “Shit. I’ll stick him.”
What does this have to do with sales? Sales is like baseball. When you’re making calls and someone is rude to you, it’s like striking out in baseball. If the best baseball players fail 70% of the time, the best salespeople fail 75% of the time. And just as the best baseball players shrug off strike outs and errors, the best salespeople shrug off rejection.
If it’s Monday morning and you find out you lost a big sale, you got to forget about it and move forward, the same way a hitter needs to forget a 0 for. If you check out or take the rest of the day off, how many others sales are you affecting?
In baseball, if you start thinking of all the stuff stacked against you - fast balls, change ups, curve balls and sliders, all the fielders – you’re going to fail. The same thing is true in sales. If you start thinking about your competition, your pricing, whether or not people want to talk to you, no solicitation signs…you might as well stay home. Heck, if you were thinking of all those things, you already called in sick.
In sales, ignorance is bliss and introspective salespeople fall like flies. Enter a business or a call like you have the greatest news or the most valuable information to share. If you’re hung up on or asked to leave, don’t give it a second thought. If a potential customer calls to inform you that they decided to go another way, thank them for the opportunity and start looking for your next opportunity. Focus on success, strengths and acceptance, not failure, weaknesses and rejection.
Be like Lenny.
(1) Dykstra had the same mentality in the financial world and although it started out well, he lost everything, including his wife, and made a lot of enemies along the way.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
