Amateur Salespeople Don’t Take Notes – That’s One Reason Why They’re Amateurs

I was on a sales call with one of my colleagues last June. As we drove away in the taxi, he ridiculed my note taking during the call (it was his customer) and bragged about his good memory. He said “Look, if I am taking notes, I am not focusing 100% on what the customer is saying.” This arrogance can cost you. Rule #1: Take good notes.

My colleague’s misguided confidence in his IQ and memory reminded me of Jeffery Fox’s book: Secrets Of Great Rainmakers. In the book, Fox tells a story about waiters who write down their customer’s orders vs. those who don’t and the differences in the gratuity each receives as a result. The waiter who writes down the order earns significantly more in tips. Why? The waiter, who thought he was impressing the customer with his great memory, was really making the customer anxious and uncomfortable. Deep down, the customer was worried that the waiter might not get it right and if he did blow the order, the customer was especially annoyed because the error was preventable. So it goes with a sales call.

When the customer is talking and you are taking notes, the customer is feeling more valued. The fact that you are writing it down, in detail, makes the customer feel that what he or she is telling you is important.

Taking notes signals to the customer that you are a professional and that you are organized. By the way, invest in a high quality portfolio and spend a few hundred dollars on a good pen. I use a Raika sewn bound leather portfolio with gold-edged ruled pages and a Montblanc rollerball pen. Make an impression.

Taking notes helps sharpen the customer’s mind. When the customer knows you are writing it down, she will subconsciously work harder on getting you more detail and greater accuracy in the information she is transmitting. I have seen customers pick up the phone and call other departments to get me more detail during a call. Wow! They WON’T do that if you are just sipping coffee, nodding attentively, and making eye contact.

Taking notes also gives you a great way to summarize as you close out the call. You really focus the customer when you say “let me review my notes with you and make sure I have this requirement clearly understood.” Then, take the customer through what you have written down ... point by point. Finish with “Did I miss anything? Was there anything else you wanted to cover with me?”

Here is a final excellent reason to take good notes. You can re-play the sales call later, in the solitude of your hotel room, and discover fresh insights that maybe you missed on the first pass. You can triangulate with notes you made from a previous call with another executive in the same company. You can share the notes with your team and see what new ideas the notes stir up in their minds. Here is another one. When I refill my Raika, I make a point of re-reading every page of the old diary. Without fail, I find something I missed, an action or request that I need to follow up on, or a note that at the time, seemed unimportant, but now, in light of new developments in the account, are key to achieving my objective and closing a big sale.

Look, if for no other reason, because a lot of amateur salespeople never take notes, you will immediately stand out from your competitors by doing it.

Good Selling!!

Salesman’s Checklist Can Lower Your Competitive Death Rate

Teams Using “Cheat Sheets” Always Produce Better Results

There was a recent story in the Washington Post by Ceci Connolly claiming that surgical teams following a basic cockpit-style checklist in the operating room, from confirming the patient's name to discussing expected blood loss, reduced the rate of deaths and complications by more than a third. I claim that your sales “death rate” can also drop dramatically if you take a lesson from pilots and now, surgeons, and use a checklist of your own during sales calls.
Connolly’s theory is that the human brain can't remember everything, so it's best to focus on the complicated challenges and leave the simple reminders to a cheat sheet. A salesman’s checklist is a cheat sheet...a basic form of pre-call planning. The sales call can get intense and dynamic. The professional salesperson must focus 100% on what the customer is saying. Listening skills are a salesperson’s most important attribute. You can’t listen effectively if your brain is working overtime to think of the next question you want to ask, or trying to figure out how to get the sales call back on the road and out of the ditch. Here are some ideas:
-Plan and write down your opening statement. Make it a “killer” question or phrase that grabs attention and focuses the client on the problem.
-Ask why it is important to solve this problem.
-Uncover the decision criteria. Rank them in order of importance.

-What is the decision process? Who is involved? (Get introduced to the people you don’t know that have a role in making it happen).
-Has the budget been approved?
-Which other solution providers are competing?
-Interest rate being used to arrive at NPV and IRR
-Carrying cost of inventory/Cost of capital
-Other financial ground rules?
I think you get the idea. Write them all down. If you are involved in complex sales for expensive things, it’s likely that you make sales calls with a team of subject matter experts. Involve them in the checklist planning and execution. That way the team stays more coordinated during the call.
You will get the most out of your sales call checklist if you build it around the potential problems that the customer may be having. Most problems tend to fall into what I call my “basic dozen categories”. Here they are:

1) Profitability
2) Cost
3) Productivity
4) Competition
5) Quality
6) Ease of Operation
7) Reliability
8) Credibility
9) Safety
10) Morale
11) Customer Satisfaction
12) Reputation/image

Think of the basic dozen as a “checklist for a checklist”. Build your checklist around these categories and your sales call death rate will decrease dramatically.

Good selling!!

How to Run a Constructive and Helpful Sales Account Plan Review – Part 2

In the last post, I promised to cover the broad Account Planning categories one might cover and the type of questions one might ask. A sales coach, like a good salesman, learns more and teaches better by asking well planned, insightful questions and letting the team do most of the talking.

ACCOUNT OVERVIEW
Start here - even if YOU know the state of the account. You want the team to be able to articulate it and challenge their thinking.

• Where are we with this account and where should this planning session focus?
• Describe the customer's business model. What are the customer’s longer term goals (24 to 36 months)? Growth strategies? Productivity Initiatives? New product launches?
• How is their financial health? Drill into the balance sheet and income statement. Spending patterns/trends? Financial Ratios? Cash position?
• Where is the customer’s “pain”? How bad is it? Do we understand it? Can we solve it?
• What does their vendor/service provider portfolio look like? Who are the outside “trusted advisers”?
• What would this customer say about us?

INDUSTRY OVERVIEW
• Describe the macro sector trends and economic factors most impacting the customer.
• What significant events have taken place on the customer's competitive landscape (recent loss of market share to a new competitor or disruptive emergent technology)?
• How is the customer doing in the eyes of its end customers and its suppliers?

RELATIONSHIP OVERVIEW
• Who are the key contacts in the relationship?
• Who are our main executive sponsors? What are our goals with each?
• What key relationships have not yet been established? What actions are being taken to close those gaps?
• How are you leveraging alliances/partners to introduce us to new decision makers and influencers in the account?
• Who are the competition’s champions in the account and how do we convert or neutralize them?
• Are we considered a trusted advisor/partner? If yes, how are we leveraging this? What must be done?

COMPETITIVE STRATEGY
• Who are our chief competitors?
• What are the competitor’s goals in the account? What are their key messages?
• What is our competitive strategy? What are our key competitive messages? How are you going to fight them off?

OPPORTUNITY ANALYSIS
• (For the top three opportunities) who is the customer executive sponsor? Rate your relationship with him/her. What should it be?
• What other long term opportunities may exist that have not been identified?
• Is this customer aware of our complete portfolio of products and services?
• Describe your strategy to create new opportunities.

PAST PERFORMANCE
• For each key current project, how would the customer assess our performance? What actions are needed?
• Describe what value we have created for the customer in the last 6 months. Can we “dollarize” it? Is the customer aware of it?

TEAM ALIGNMENT
• How often does the sales team get together and work the account issues? Is our whole company supporting you (shipping, pricing, customer support, call center, billing, etc)? What alignment issues need to be resolved with other parts of our company?
• What can I do (as a sales leader) to support you?
• What investments and resources are required for the priority opportunities? Any special needs? Exceptions? How can I help?

FINANCIAL/REVENUE PLAN
• What are the expected revenues for the next month 12 months?
• What has changed with respect to the Financial Plan since our last review?
• What is the financial risk and exposure in this account?

NEXT STEPS
• What are the team’s top actions resulting from this review (let them tell you and write them down)?

To be effective, these reviews should take place every six to nine months for a top account. Getting Account Planning to stick as a sales discipline is hard work but the pay-offs are potentially huge.

Good Selling!

The “No-Quick-Fix” Approach to Delivering Results in Sales - Account Planning

Most companies can’t get Account Planning to stick as a sales discipline. They try. They hire consultants. They have big kick-off meetings and for a few weeks, everyone is excited. Soon, the excitment gives way to the daily pressures of phone calls, meetings, e-mails, travel (make your own list) and the enthusiasm fades like a cheap shoeshine. Worse, everyone gets cynical and realizes it was another management flavor-of-the-month initiative (cynicism is a huge culture-killer). Salesmen watch the leaders and the leaders are usually the first to drop the ball.

What goes wrong here? Leaders failed to lead. Leaders failed to make Account Planning important. Leaders, seeking a quick-fix, hired consultants to do what they themselves should be doing. As a result, they failed to connect the team to the rewards and benefits of a measure-twice-cut-once sales culture.

Salesmen are by nature, hard working and always on the run. A commonly heard objection to account planning is “I am too busy to bother with making charts for other people to inspect”.

Too busy?

Habit #7 in Steve Covey’s The 7 Habits is called “Sharpen the Saw.” Covey uses the analogy of a woodcutter who is sawing for several days straight without getting the tree down.
A passerby says, “What are you doing?”
The woodcutter snorts, “Don’t bother me, can’t you see I am busy cutting this tree down”.
The passerby shrugs, “Why don’t you try sharpening the saw?”
The woodcutter screams “I’m too damn busy to sharpen the saw!”

Rule #1: Don’t confuse being busy with being effective in the marketplace. What you are after is effectiveness.

Effectiveness. That’s a good word. Let’s look at it-

ef·fec tive·ness, n. The ability of a program, project or task to produce a specific desired effect or result that can be qualitatively measured.


Making it Stick - Three Simple Disciplines: Learn it. Teach it. Coach it.

If you want Account Planning to stick and you want to reap the reward of lower selling cost, higher revenue, better margins, stronger customer loyalty, and a more motivated and energized sales force, you must deeply embed Account Planning into your company culture.

Learn it: The sales leaders need to become students of the Account Planning discipline. They must agree on a vision for Account Planning and be aligned on its purpose and benefits. Then, and this is really important, they have to teach it.

Teach it: That’s right. The sales leaders, NOT THE CONSULTANTS, must teach. Why? Think of the message this sends to the organization about sincerity and commitment. “The boss is taking this seriously. I better pay attention.” Also, no one learns more than the teacher so it this is a powerful way to embed the discipline. Finally, and this is the hard one...coach it.

Coach it: Spending major time here pays off 10x the effort invested. Regular coaching around the account plan with the team and with the salesman is the best way a sales leader can help move the needle, not only on sales results, but on customer loyalty and employee engagement.

A good Account Planning process focuses on helping the team deliver results and to continually elevate their game. In my next post, I will lay out the steps and the methods for running an effective account plan review.

Good selling!

Consultative Selling-What Is It All About?

When a customer buys a product, especially a major capital expense B2B product or service, that customer is really buying a 10 to 20 year relationship with you and your company. Product support, service, and life cycle cost management insight become really valuable to the customer. It’s important to dramatically increase your focus here to better serve the customers and differentiate your offering.
To do this, you must understand your customer's business environment better than ever before. The low hanging fruit of operational cost saving and efficiency has already been picked. You need to engage your customers on a level that is much deeper than that required to simply sell a product. You have to climb inside the heads of the customer’s key executives/managers/users in multiple departments and even up and down their supply chain. It’s hard work!
The consultative salesperson resists the temptation to "pitch" a product or solution until he has laid a solid foundation for selling. This means you have had sufficient dialogue with the customer, and even the customer's customer, to understand their operating environment, critical business drivers, and existing high priority business initiatives. You have to really validate that your solution is sustainable in the customer’s unique business environment.
Consultative selling is way beyond the “thing” you are offering. Consultative selling creates preference for you and your insight… and that creates preference for your product/service and your company.
Consultative selling, from a sales leader's perspective, is the outright transformation of your customer facing teams (sales teams) into service oriented teams that provide operational and business insight to the customers. That becomes your unique identifying characteristic when products alone get harder to differentiate due to price cutting and misinformation.
Ask yourself, are we creating value on every sales call? Ask this question...did we bring so much value/insight to that company’s CEO in today's 1 hour engagement that she would be willing to write us a check for the time we spent together? A consultative sales call provides value to the customer far beyond the features, advantages and benefits of a product:
· Provide access to deep subject matter expertise that doesn’t exist within the customer’s organization.
· Surface tough issues or business realities that would be difficult or dangerous for the customer’s CEO to surface on her own.
· Provide access to an independent outside perspective and the chance to look at a business problem in a different way.
· Shine a light on unrecognized problems.
· Provide knowledge of unanticipated solutions.
· Clear away the fog of competition and markets to revel previously unseen business opportunity.

And if you and your company can't solve the customer’s problem, then you can still add value by becoming a knowledge broker and finding someone that can provide the solution. Don’t worry; they will love you for that too.

Good selling!