As 2012 comes to an end, I’ve found our business shifting to accommodate the changes in the business and economic landscapes. I’m doing a lot more coaching and advising at an executive level. This combined with my own experience of running a business has brought to light some of the fundamental changes that I’m seeing in selling these days. Namely, decisions are being made differently. Decisions are made more slowly, they are made with far more scrutiny, and they require an almost absolute guarantee of a successful outcome (typically short term ROI) before being signed off. It is harder to sell big complex products and services right now than it has been over the past 15 years. Here are three “selling” imperatives I’ve found to be important for the companies with whom I’m working:
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Willpower & Personal Performance
“There are 3 types of strength” I tell my kids. “Physical strength, intellectual strength, and the strength of your willpower.” I’ve been telling them this because I see them stuck in a lot of the frustrating patterns of behavior that I also see in myself… and that I’ve been working on continuously for years. So much of our performance in our jobs and in our roles in life will ultimately be tied to our strength of will. For a lot of my customers and coaching clients, their will is tested most when they move from an operations or technical role (engineering, consulting, etc.) into a role with sales responsibilities. It is very often willpower, not knowledge, that limits our performance.
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How Attitude Influences Communication
“Attitude” is a funny thing. We often talk about attitude, refer to it, judge it as “good” or “bad”, and yet it is very difficult for us to really get our arms around what it really is. In situations involving persuasion, tact, diplomacy, etc. we are all aware there is a right attitude for the situation and a wrong one. Continue reading
Don’t wish it were easier… Wish that you were better.
I heard a quote years ago that shifted the way I look at challenging situations. It was such a formative idea in my personal development that I thought it might be a good blog entry. The quote was on a CD by a speaker named Jim Rohn called “The Art of Exceptional Living”. I can still hear Jim’s unique voice ringing in my head when he said “don’t wish it were easier… wish that you were better!”
Becoming a Trusted Advisor… Relative Seniority
There’s a lot of rhetoric available about how to become someone’s trusted advisor. It is a coveted position to be in – both in terms of how it strokes our ego as well as being a prime position from which we can grow our relationship (and our role/business) with that person. From my experience in coaching some very smart people, I’ve noticed that being smarter doesn’t particularly create the trust, credibility, or relationship you might seek with your counterpart.
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Conversation vs. Information Exchange
One of the fundamental fallacies that I’ve observed in selling is the idea that information is the key reason people buy from us. I have watched the sales people, sales engineers, techies, and executives I coach share with their prospects how great their technology/process/approach is, how superior their features and benefits are, how the speeds and feeds are this and that, and continue with a litany of details about the product or service in question. It is as if they believe the information has some magic ability to cause the prospect to buy. It isn’t so!!!
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Can you be too smart?
Sometimes a company’s smartest people are rather handicapped when it comes to situations requiring tact, persuasion, influence, leadership, conversational elegance, emotion, etc. This white paper looks at the numerous roles and situations in which this behavior arises, the problems it causes, the workarounds that get implemented to mitigate the issue, and the actual solutions available to generate long term behavioral change in the personalities and interpersonal skills of, well, anybody who shows that narcissistic, know it all, fear of rejection, talks too much, talks too little, talks about the wrong thing, dysfunctional behavior in the workplace. Continue reading
What you DO vs. What you CREATE
I had an interesting conversation yesterday that really illuminated the distinction between the work that we do versus the value of that work to our customers. I was discussing a potential new project with a large customer – a global consulting and outsourcing firm. We got to talking about a competitive vendor who may also be considered for doing the project – a much larger and more established firm with deeper reach into my client (and with cheaper prices).
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The “Truth” is Irrelevant in Sales
The truth is irrelevant in sales. So are the facts. For the most part, all of the “information” we’d be inclined to focus upon conveying is pretty much irrelevant. Why? Because from the perspective of the buyer, all of our (the vendors’) so called truths, facts and info sound fundamentally the same. Even when we DO achieve some strategic or tactical advantage over our competitors, it only lasts a short time before their marketing department and their smart sales people figure out how to counter our claims. And the buyer is left wondering “Who’s really telling the truth?”
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Happy Holidays!
Click image for PDFAs 2009 draws to a close and we anticipate a new year and a new decade, we are filled with gratitude for those who have made our success possible. So in this spirit we wish to tell you all, simply and sincerely, Thank you! And as is the tradition during this time of year, we stumbled upon …
