A Sales Guy Consulting Blog

Rejection is part of sales. It's unavoidable. Not everyone is going to buy what you are selling, therefore you will be rejected.  

In spite of this fact, many sales people struggle with rejection, hampering their ability to get deals closed and move with confidence. 

When we are afraid of failure we move tentatively, we are unsure and it shows in how we operate. 

Failure of rejection isn't just a "sales person" problem. Everyone lives with some level of fear or rejection. 

This guy Jia Jiag was rejected by a major VC for investment in his company. He was so dejected he didn't know how to deal with it. After doing the research and learning about how rejection works, he decided to get better at handling rejection. 

For the next 100 days, Jia is creating crazy, unrealistic request designed to have him be rejected. In this one, Jia asks to be a live Abercrombie model. 

Jia's video's are hilarious, entertaining and creative. He's asked to cut the Best Buy line on Thursday night of Black Friday. He's asked a car sales person to teach him to sell and he's asked an employee at Krispy Kreme to make a donut Olympic rings. 

Check out Jia's videos. They just might make it easier for you to accept rejection and that would make you a better sales person. 

Sales has changed. That's all there is to it.  This is a good video put out by Huthwaite, the company that brought you Spin Selling.  

Ignore the dry and almost deathly boring presence of the narrator, Huthwaite's President and CEO John Golden. It's painful, but if you can get past it, there are some good nuggets in it. 

My favorite part come at 3:56 to 4:44 when TAS CEO Donal Daly talks about the death of the relationship sales person. 

Another one of my favorite parts is when Dave Stein of ES Research talks about value propostions. 

Take the time to check out this video, it's worth it. It does a good job of explaining what has changed while you've been busy selling. 

I see this far too often.  Sales managers and sales leaders reactively manage their people. They reactively manage because they to manage to results.  Results are a trailing indicator in sales. If you manage to results your too late.

It’s a common approach in sales.  The sales rep misses quota. The manager says that’s not good, don’t miss quota again.  The rep misses quota again, the manager puts him on a PIP (performance improvement plan), which in essence lays out goals the rep must meet in the next 30 to 60 days or be fired.  In the less agressive scenerios like this, the manager works with the rep to figure out what is wrong but even then it’s still being reactive.

I have always felt this is a bad way to manage and lead sales teams, yet it has staying power and seems to be the course of action for most organziations.

Being reactive does little for anyone.  The key is to be proactive.  Like most things in life getting ahead of the problems or preventing them entirely is far better than trying to fix them. The key is find the leading indicators of failure.

To find the leading indicators I break down sales management into 4 integrated categories; planning, execution, results and talent.

Failure and poor performance can and will be seen early in any and all of these categories. They are a barometer for failure or success.

If a poor plan is put in place, failure is imminent even if it’s executed well by a talented sales person. – Manage the plan.

If a great plan is in place but is executed poorly by a talented person, failure is just around the corner. – Manage execution.

If the sales person lacks the skill or talent a good plan won’t make a difference. – Manage talent

If it’s a poor plan, executed poorly by someone with out the talent you’re screwed. – Manage all three.

If it’s a great plan, executed brilliantly, by a talented sales rep and the results aren’t there, you’ve messed up somewhere. – See 1, 2, or 3.  The problem is there.

Proactive management requires a process that embraces and monitors all the critical elements to sales delivery.

My management process to increase sales and get ahead of the problem works like this;

1) Everyone on my team builds a yearly plan.  They share it with the entire team, peers and all.  We cut it up, attack it, challenge it, and rework it until its a solid plan.  Plans go through a rigorous evaluation process to ensure they’re sound.

2) I focus on execution.  Plans are reviewed every quarter asking the following questions: what did you say you would do, what did you do, what did you learn, what are you going to do next quarter.  The process ensures proper execution by evaluating WHAT a rep is doing and HOW they are executing to the plan.  This allows problems to be identified early and changes made on the front end.

3) I hire for talent, and coach.  The most important aspect of proactive management is talent.  I hire for talent and I coach them.  I have standing one on one meetings every 6 weeks with all of my direct reports.  During these sessions we talk about what they do well, what they need to improve on and what they need to stop doing.  These are not performance reviews.  They are coaching sessions, designed to help them grow as a sales person and as a leader.

A process that embraces all of these elements is proactive.  Problems are seen early and symptoms are separated from root cause.

Getting poor results with proactive management is almost impossible.  You see it coming long before the boat sinks.  It gives you time to course correct, limit the damage or turn things around.

If your results aren’t there, if the numbers are off, if quota is in jeopardy it’s one of 3 things; a bad plan, poor execution or lack of talent or selling skills.  

Quick can you tell me which it is?

How do you know?

Sales leaders, pull out your 2012 sales strategy right now. Go through it and take note of how much of it is dedicated to sales support and enablement. How much of the budget is allocated to sales improvement or support tools?  How much of the plan focuses on training? How much of the strategy focuses on value proposition development? How much of the strategy focuses on marketing and collateral support? How much of the plan DOESN’T focus on direct go to market and numbers making? If  the plan as good coverage in all of these things, you have a good plan. But if your plan is like most, it’s lacking in almost all of these areas.

The best thing sales leadership can do is support the sales team. In order to do this, you have to build team support and enablement into your overall sales strategy. Like a go to market strategy, critical analysis is paramount.

Take a look at your plan then ask a very simple question. What does my team need today, that they don’t have to make the number? Ask the question over and over. Each answer should then become an initiative. If the answer is nothing, unless you’ve already asked the question, your not being honest with yourself.

Sales teams are not ready made, out of the box organizations. They require care and feeding. The best organizations understand this.

Ask the team what they feel is missing. Ask them what they think would make it easier to make their number. Ask them what you could provide to accelerate sales. Get familiar with the team’s weaknesses and strengths. Identify initiatives that will offset the weaknesses and leverage the strengths. Getting to your number, growing sales, and moving product is more than setting revenue targets and creating motivational rewards and recognition. Getting to your number means getting the most out of your team and that requires support.

Know what your team is lacking, know where it is weak, know where it is strong. Know what could make it stronger and then give it what it needs.

What is your sales support and enablement strategy? Do you have one? You should!

“You are the CEO of your own business.”  I said this all the time during my years leading sales teams. I would say it to every sales person and sales team that worked for me. I believe it.  Great sales people are like CEO’s.

More than any other position, sales has a tremendous amount of autonomy.  Like a CEO, this freedom gives sales people an infinite amount of lattitude in how they are going to attain quota.  Sales is a performance based role, like that of a CEO. Therefore, the best sales people approach sales like a CEO.

Great sales people, like CEO’s

• Leverage others to help them accomplish their goals – they don’t try to do it all themselves.  Great sales people know how to leverage the entire organization. Good and average sales people try to do it all themselves.

If you sell, getting people to change their minds or switch is part of the job. Sometimes people already have what you’re selling and you need to get them to try something else. You need to get them to switch. Getting people to switch is like selling to the monkeys; hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. No one is paying attention.

We don’t like to switch. We are normally very happy with our choices and unless there is a compelling reason, we will defend our choices to the end. We don’t want to listen to anything new, because we’ve heard it already. We don’t want to see an alternative, because we’ve seen it all before and we don’t want to talk about anything new, because there is nothing new to talk about. Considering a change without a compelling reason calls into questions our original decision and we don’t like to think we originally made a mistake

Getting people to try something new is hard. It’s even harder if you don’t have a compelling reason.

People don’t switch just to switch. This is especially true in b2b sales. To get your customers to switch, create a compelling reason. Make it difficult NOT to change. It can’t be because your new. New isn’t compelling. Save your customers 2X more money. Grow revenue by 25%. Increase productivity 2 fold. Shorten production by 15%. Reduce operating costs 30%. Shorten the sales cycle by 30 days. Make a real impact.

Selling to the monkey’s isn’t easy, they aren’t going to pay attention for a different banana. You need to bring ice-cream covered in chocolate. They’ll pay attention then.

Today's post is a killer break down on why you're not making your number and it's June. Matt Heinz is the president of Heinz Marketing. Matt is a marketing wiz and great writer. His blog is a daily must read. 

In this guest post, Matt eloquently serves up the 10 main reasons you aren't making your 2012 goals. He's nailed it with this post.  Enjoy

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You know what they say about the best-laid plans. Even if you had a great strategy, clear objectives and commonly-accepted sales goals on January 1, a thousand things can go wrong to push you off track.

Here are 10 specific reasons I find most often as culprits of sales goals that are behind schedule.

1. You didn’t have a plan to begin with
Setting a sales goal is not a plan. Telling your sales team and/or your leadership team (or board) what sales number you’re going to hit this year (and in each month/quarter) isn’t a plan either. Do you know how you’re going to get there? Have you quantified and planned the leading indicators to closed business? Does your sales management team, your front-line reps, your marketing team and other supporting groups know exactly what their role is to drive achievement of your number?

It’s never too late to create that plan, but without it you’re just a rudderless ship hoping to eventually find the horizon.

2. You didn’t commit the resources required to sell
Can your existing sales team hit the goals you’ve set out to achieve? Is the marketing team committed to deliver the leads, sales support tools and other prospect acceleration requirements you’ll need to increase interest and sales pipeline throughput?

Key to effective planning and execution is not only creating the plan, but ensuring the resources you need are in place and committed to execute moving forward. That goes for the size, quality and make-up of your sales team, the tools they use to manage their day and pipeline, budget for the right compensation and incentive plans, marketing and sales operations, and so forth.

3. You’re not doing the daily work to actively manage your pipeline
Talk to the best salespeople in the world and they’ll tell you the same thing. Achieving spectacular sales results means getting up early, putting your hard hat on, and doing the hard work all day, every single day. It means spending the majority of your day working with prospects – new prospects, nurtured prospects, qualified leads, channel partners, friends of prospects, whatever it takes.

I don’t believe that dials and talk time are adequate metrics to measure inside sales success, but make no mistake – inside sales reps will increase their chances of success and higher commissions by picking up the phone more often, taking far more at bats every day, and playing whatever numbers and conversion game exists in their business to their advantage.

This also includes incorporating CRM best practices so that you’re actively managing and tracking your entire pipeline, and spending as little time as possible every day doing it.

4. You’re letting under-performing reps drag you down
Start the year with a proactive sales rep management program in place. Know the early indicators of success or failure well before the month or quarter closes. How healthy is the sales rep’s pipeline? Are they doing the daily activities required to be successful? Do they have enough qualified opportunities, early in the month or quarter, to close a percentage of them and exceed their quota?

The easy answer here is to move out of the organization reps who don’t hit their number. But at the point they fail to meet quota, they’re already dragging you down. Identify problem areas early, coach your reps to be better, and be more proactive at correcting or eliminating that behavior early on.

5. You’re only focusing on today’s deals without managing and nurturing long-term opportunities
In most B2B sales environments, only 10-15 percent of inbound leads will be both qualified and ready to buy. Of the remaining leads, 60-65 percent will be qualified and not ready to buy. That’s business for a future month or quarter that most sales organizations either disqualify or ignore.

In terms of current month or quarter sales, that’s a good thing. But if you fail to triage and manage long-term opportunities, you’re not only decreasing your chances of ever doing business with that prospect. You’re already increasing the cost and difficulty of hitting your number in future sales periods.

Those not-ready-to-buy prospects will eventually transact. Have the strategy and systems in place to manage them without disrupting your sales team’s ability to focus on current-period pipelines.

6. Your conversion expectations are overly optimistic
The vast majority of your leads aren’t going to buy. Even the majority of qualified opportunities probably won’t close. If you expect this up front, and build those expectations into your sales model and plans, you’re more likely to have the resources and execution required to accept those conversion realities and still hit your number.

In many B2B selling environments, for example, if I don’t have access to historical pipeline conversion data, I’ll start with an assumption that 5 percent of leads will turn into a near-term qualified opportunity, and 25 percent of opportunities will close into a sale. That’s a 1.5 percent conversion rate from lead to close in a given month or quarter. Tiny, but reality. If you assume higher without historical back-up, you’re putting your results at risk by expecting too much of what you have.

7. Your leads suck (and you either don’t know it or aren’t doing anything about it)
Working with your marketing team, you should have a pre-existing definition for a good lead and qualified lead (they might be different). Based on that, you need to have an expectation for overall lead-to-opportunity conversion as well as more detailed conversion expectations by marketing channel. And as time goes on, you should be able to measure lead-to-close conversion to ensure that your marketing cost per sale is at or below expectations.

In too many organizations, the focus isn’t on lead quality but lead volume. Marketing dumps a ton of “leads” on the sales team, and either is satisfied with an up-and-to-the-right delivery number month after month, or fails to subsequently measure whether those leads are converting into closed business.

Start with a common definition of a good lead, between sales and marketing. Then track lead performance through the pipeline to ensure your overall modeling on lead-opportunity-close is correct, but also to adjust resources and lead channel investments based on where the best conversions and lowest marketing cost per sale exists.

8. You’re selling the same way to everybody
This is worse than assuming a health care company needs your product or service in the same way as an engineering company or government organization. Worse than assuming that the CTO prospect needs to hear the same message as the CFO. If you’re selling the same way to everybody, you’re also not listening and responding to unique customer needs and priorities.

What you deliver to new customers, the product or service itself, may be largely the same for everybody. But every prospect approaches their unique problem or opportunity differently. The way they use your product or service, and/or the benefits and outcomes they need from it, will differ as well. Take advantage of and embrace those differences in the way you sell. You’ll find far more prospects interested and engaged at the top of the sales process.

9. Google has nothing good to say about you
Your collateral isn’t that important anymore. Your case studies are great, but new prospects will assume they’re heavily biased. What prospects do trust up front, right or wrong, is Google. What does the rest of the Web say about you? What are other customers, press, analysts and industry influencers saying about you?

A top priority of marketing teams working with sales organizations should be proactively managing the Google experience for early prospects. This is much harder said than done, as most of what happens on that first page of Google when someone searches your name is beyond your direct control. It’s not a quick fix either. But it’s worth it not only to increase current lead conversion and interest, but to accelerate new inbound lead volume as well.

10. You’re losing deals to apathy (because you’ve failed to build enough value)
Most sales get lose not to a competitor, but to nothing. Most prospects simply fail to make a decision and drop the opportunity altogether. If they indeed had a problem to solve, this means you as the seller have failed to adequately qualify your ability to solve the problem.

Worse, it could be an indication that you’ve failed to help the prospect with the value translation of a problem they may or may not know they have, and differentiate between the negative future they’re headed towards and the positive future you can help enable for them. You will still lose deals to apathy (you can lead a prospect to water, but you can’t make them all drink), but losing deals because the prospect is confused or uneducated is completely fixable.

Would love to hear other symptoms of under-performing sales you’ve seen or are experiencing in organizations you work in or manage. What else is this list missing?