James Hickman | Head | Sales | Altron Karabina | mail me |
Recently, I wrote about what I would tell my 26-year-old self. This piece was well-received because it resonated with many people. You see, hindsight is 20/20, and so the ability to have access to some wisdom that comes with age is priceless.
In the piece I alluded to how I started out in business and some of the lessons I learned as a young salesperson, or seller, as I like to call it. The next logical step is to unpack what a young person needs to become a good seller. But before I do this, let’s start at the beginning.
The fundamentals
There are only two ways to grow business revenue. Either you need more customers or you must sell more to your current customers. It’s that simple and there’s no need to complicate matters.
Now, you get people that are made to be salespeople and those that aren’t. If you’d like to test this, ask someone if they’d like to double their salary by earning commission. Most would say yes. Then ask them if they’d still take up the offer if they were guaranteed to get their commission extra if they hit their targets, but would be at risk if they didn’t. Suddenly you separate sellers from those who don’t have the risk appetite that salespeople find natural.
Selling has been around for time immemorial but even though how we sell has changed, there are some things that are just not negotiable, and it is vital that young salespeople understand and practise these things. They fall under three broad umbrellas: the fundamentals, sales tactics and soft skills which are compulsory, not optional.
Understand the numbers
Any young seller reading this would think I am referring to targets – I am not. I am talking about metrics.
At the end of the day, nothing happens until sales happen, and ultimately selling depends on – and can be measured by – the numbers: number of calls you make, number of leads you get, how many leads are converted into opportunities and how many opportunities become closed deals.
We are all accustomed to the word sales funnel. Now try this: imagine a funnel. It is big and wide at the top and then tapers down until the narrow opening at the other end. You need to keep pouring a liquid into the wide end of the funnel to ensure something comes out the other end. You need to make sure you are putting in a high volume of calls, continually, in order to keep the sales funnel moving because if you stop for any amount of time, it will eventually result in a dry patch with no closed deals.
When I was young, we used to work on a 1% success rate for outbound cold calls. We used to physically go out and scope buildings and choose the ones we thought would house the most staff.
When we returned to the office, we would look up the business in the Yellow Pages. We’d call the reception and ask for the name of the IT Director – because asking to speak to this person without them knowing who you are or where you are from, would result in a resounding ‘No!’. We would then write a handwritten note and place it in an A4 envelope, with a big gold “hand-delivered” sticker on it, and deliver it to the office. A week later we would call and ask to speak to the IT Director and then it was game on!
The point is that I learned very early on that there was a direct link between how many buildings I went and scoped, how many times I did this whole process, and how many opportunities I got to work on. This is a vital understanding that remains crucial today: It does not matter whether you are using performance marketing funnels, social media campaigns, inbound or outbound, it remains a numbers game: how many leads, how many opportunities, how many deals? Understanding your numbers is crucial.
Understand your customer base
Your accounts are going to be broken down into three sets of customers.
Retained customers
First, you have customers that you cannot afford to lose. These will be your retained customers. There are a set of activities you need to do in order to retain them. You must understand at all times how you are performing against these activities.
You must ask tough questions. This is all about customer service and there’s some scope to grow these customers.
Develop customers
Your “develop customers” are customers where you are doing smaller, or little, business but with huge potential to grow.
If you give them a great service, focus on what value means to them and invest time in proposing innovative solutions that help them realise that value, you will inevitably start to beat your competition and take a larger piece of the pie.
It is interesting that in many cases while doing this you are attacking a competitors ‘Retained Customer’ segment and hence the need for absolute customer excellence regardless of which customer segment you are dealing with.
Attract customers
This group is as the name implies: You have to go out and find new customers, hopefully, land them and move them into the development phase. As with the develop customers you are more often than not either taking a customer from a competitor or creating a new market or spend stream within the customer.
In the sales world, we used to talk about two types of sellers – hunters or farmers. The names are obvious. The first type goes out and proactively finds customers, the second is someone who has a customer base and works on nurturing and growing customers. A young salesperson today needs to think differently and combine these skills, they need to become game farmers.
Game farmers can find and farm customers but more importantly they will go hunting within their current customers. They are not happy to accept what they are currently getting from a customer and proactively go and hunt in new categories or new solutions that can assist their customer in achieving their goals. As a leader, I demand that my team hunt and farm, whether the customer is brand new or has been on the books for 20 years.
Deal velocity
I have an obsession not only with understanding numbers and metrics but also with understanding deal velocity.
Deal velocity is how fast a deal is moving through the pipeline from the time a seller gets a lead to the deal being closed. How fast is this happening? What is the opportunity to grow or shrink that deal along the way?
Sales velocity is driven by keeping an eye on and optimising each of the following variables: the number of deals you have, the value of the deals you have, your close rate, and the average time it takes to close a deal. If you focus on these things, you will significantly improve your deal velocity. If your deal velocity is continually improving you will be making more sales, more often at a greater average deal size.
Seller tactics
Now that we have covered the fundamentals, we move on to some seller tactics. Ask the questions you might be uncomfortable to ask.
Many young sellers are afraid or uncomfortable asking a customer what their budget is. Rather than cringe, they should consider the following scenario: If they walk into a car dealership the salesperson will ask what their budget is. Now, whether that salesperson wastes everyone’s time showing them a car R100,000 outside their budget, or takes them to the best value possible within their budget, is up to the salesperson in the dealership.
But the point is simple – just like the customer at the car dealership, the customer in our world also has a budget and it would be a big mistake not to ask the question as it could quite literally waste everyone’s time.
Often a young seller asks a customer whether they’d like a proof of concept (PoC). They pull out the bells and whistles – of course, the customer will say yes. But when you want to close the deal, it becomes a different story. To understand why, consider this: there is only one reason I don’t drive a Ferrari, I cannot afford one. However, if a sales person at the Ferrari dealership offered me a test drive (a PoC in the motor sales world) I would jump at the opportunity, regardless of the fact that I don’t have the budget. Hence Ferrari sales people don’t offer test drives without ensuring the person has the budget to buy the car should they love the drive. At the end of the day, it is either within or outside my budget.
In my position, alarm bells ring when a young seller tells me they are afraid to ask important questions such as these for fear that they would undermine the deal. This is a case of a salesperson not asking a question because they don’t want to hear the answer, they are afraid of, for example, I am not going to buy.
The crazy thing is that the sooner you hear this the better. This gives you the opportunity to make a critical decision, is there something I can change in my proposal or quote to change the customers mind, do I need to totally relook the solution I am trying to sell and come at things from a different angle or do I move on to the next opportunity.
As a leader, I track loss rate. And not to ensure it is low enough for my standards, but to ensure it is high enough! My rationale is simple: If it is too low, we are not trying hard enough to get potential deals into the pipeline. You will always lose deals and you want to ask the right questions upfront, so you lose them quickly and free your valuable time to work on leads and opportunities that actually stand a chance of being closed.
We only have 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 160 hours a month – numbers, numbers, numbers – we better use them wisely.
Build a business rhythm
This is often driven by the sales manager but good sellers do this for themselves. They will put a structure in place to manage how they are going to work. As we have already discussed, building a pipeline is critical to success.
Very few enjoy that process, but if you are not dedicating time to that every week as part of a rhythm you will hit a patch where no pipeline leads are coming through – guaranteed. There are so many things that sellers need to do in a given week that if they just do what is needed to tick boxes, they will deteriorate to becoming reactive sellers versus proactive sellers.
A proactive seller goes out to customers and proactively works with the customer to uncover opportunity and proactively propose solutions that can assist the customer in achieving their goals. A proactive seller also identifies trends and needs in the market and works with their marketing and business teams to validate the need and drive new solutions, or new messaging in an existing category or creates new categories to which to sell into. A reactive seller waits for a customer to ask for something and then checks to see if they have a solution. Inevitably the customer has already done the research to understand what they need and it becomes very difficult for the seller to influence the outcome.
Proactivity can and often is the difference between an average seller and a great seller. Proactivity in driving leads, following up on leads, partnering with customers to solve their problems, researching the market and industry to understand what the latest trends are etc.
Once we understand the fundamentals and tactics that every young seller should know and practise, we get to the so-called soft skills. Soft skills in this day and age, are non-negotiable and you won’t be a great salesperson without them.
Relationships are important but not be-all and end-all of sales
Back in the day, when the world was different, relationships were everything. It involved spending an inordinate amount of time building personal relationships, doing lunches, playing golf, meeting for drinks and so on.
Many, if not most, customers in today’s high-paced digital world don’t need a deep personal relationship like before, they need a trust relationship. One where you as a seller have proved to be reliable, dependable, getting things done when you say you will and always over exceeding expectations on delivering value.
I often get asked, “when will I know my customer trusts me” my answer is always “would your customer field a call on their cell phone on a Saturday morning?” The only way a customer will answer you on a Saturday morning is if they trust that you would only call them during their personal time if it was absolutely necessary and probably important to them. Sellers need to focus on building trust, not relationships.
The relationship will follow but only if founded on trust and if it is truly valuable to you and your customer.
Be professional
Just being professional can go a long way towards a successful sales career. Following up a meeting with email and outlining what was discussed with next steps, getting back to someone when you say you will, delivering on promises – these are basic elements of professionalism but absolutely key to your success.
Some time ago a published survey asked customers what they wanted from their account manager. The answer may have been surprising for many. It was: they want you to be excellent at managing your organisation. What does this mean? It means they need you to be their go-to person, so that they can get what they need, when they need it, without needing to go through hoops and 20 different people. In other words: they want a great, professional customer experience, led by the account manager.
Professionalism is a choice; it determines how you are viewed as a seller and ultimately forms the foundation of your relationship with you customer. It contributes significantly to building trust and the lack of professionalism quickly destroys what may have already been built. Be professional, always!
A young person entering the world of sales today has more tools at their disposal than at any time before. Despite this, technology won’t replace the fundamentals. They must put in the hard yards building the funnel, they must understand their customer and they must chase an attractive sales velocity. They simply must ask difficult questions and build a structure to get through everything they must do weekly.
Lastly, professionalism, and how they treat customers, will determine whether they get by, or become rising stars.
