Is there a Generation Problem in Sales?

 

As a Sales Consultant I get to work with Salespeople of all ages.

 

And, I love the diversity.

Gen Y	Gen X	Baby Boomer
Diversity	Self-centred	Optimism
Social	Disloyal	Involved
Now!	Impatient	Go the extra Mile
Anti-Authority	Distrustful	Achieve
Community	Independent	Family
	Influencing Factors
I-Phones	MTV	KFC
Ninja Turtles	AIDS	Woodstock
‘Indignados’	NIKE	Equality
NYC twin towers	Kuwait/Falklands	Vietnam

 

 

This is my list, how I see ‘difference’.

Personally I love them all, but that’s because I’m a Baby Boomer. Two parents, male and female, two brothers and loads of girl cousins, stay at home Mom and working Dad. Encouraged, but not forced, to study. Stand for the national anthem and honour the flag. I have 5 kids from 42 thru 26, and an 18 year old grand-daughter so I have some insights.

The thing is; there is a clear difference between GenX and GenY which is causing them problems in Selling together. In fact, in my experience, it’s easier for GenY to sell WITH (not always to) a Baby-boomer. It’s got to do with their views about (or their attitude to) Independence-Interdependence.

Baby -Boomers and GenY are comfortable with ‘inter-dependence’ in one case its small community ‘Family’ in the other its bigger community ‘Friends’. And in both cases it extends to both Friends and Family.

If you don’t believe me compare 20 of each BB, GenY, GenX on Facebook for both ‘community’ type, size and activity. However, GenX limits themselves to close friends, few family and the acquaintances who may be ‘useful’ to them.

How does this effect Sales? Quite a lot!

As the Baby-boomers
are leaving Sales, GenX isn’t too happy with their new GenY colleagues and subordinates.

 

GenX find GenY “NEEDY!”

The GenY Subordinates and Colleagues find their GenX Bosses and Colleagues Distant and Cold.
GenY preferred the warmer and more involved Baby Boomers!

I am seeing ‘step-overs’ happening more and more. GenY’s are going directly to their Baby Boomer CEO or other ‘B-B’ C suite contact for support. ‘B-B’ CEO’s are more comfortable in the community of GenY Sales people than the individualist GenX Sales Manager!

How are we going to cope?

• VALUE Diversity! Strive for an inclusive mixture,
  be part of a broad Community

• DON’T rush the Baby-boomers out the door.

• STOP trying to make the GenY’s in your image.

Have a look in the mirror, YOU are not as young as you were,
and you will be the previous generation soon enough.
GenY isn’t going to put up with your demands,
they have their own way of doing things.

Looking at some Sales Centres of Excellence in Big IT,
I couldn’t help but notice how well GenY and the Baby Boomers ‘got on’,
and that the GenX’s were sometimes a resentful minority!

“Coaching and Counselling” is easier between Grandchildren and Grandparents than it ever was between Parents and Children.
Perhaps its natural, when you ‘rebel’ against a Parent, you become more like your Grandparent!

Baby-boomers have been slow to Sales Social Media because they didn’t know HOW,
but GenX are being slow because they don’t see WHY,
and GenY simply live there!

In Sales how can you ‘lose’ a sure thing or ‘win’ a no hoper?

 

Measuring and ‘predicting’ customer loyalty is a fascinating field.

This blog is inspired by the work and research of Burke Inc. www.burke.com

 

The usual triangle to calculate Customer Loyalty (repeat purchase) is:

1. Current Satisfaction

2. Willingness to buy again

3. Recommending the product to others

 

This Security Triangle is often thought of as 3 separate aspects;

Sales are often targeted on Customer Satisfaction,

but NOT Repeat purchase or Recommendations to third parties!

 

Sure Thing or “likelihood to buy” is the product of all three factors.

Let’s look at some scores

 

For example:

An account has a 7/10 score for all three areas

Current Satisfaction = 7/10

Willingness to buy again = 7/10

Recommend the product to others = 7/10

7/10 x 7/10 x 7/10 =343 /1000 or 34.3% or a poor score,

I wouldn’t bet my House or my Pension on you winning the business!

What happens if its 8/10’s?

8 x8 x8 = 512/1000 or 51% better that 50/50; a good bet but YOU NEED 8/10 in all three boxes!

What happens if its 9/10’s?

9 x9 x9 = 729/1000 or 72.9% you may well win 3 out of 4 times!

NOW you know why Account Management
(not Relationship Management)
is so important.

 

The sure thing is 10/10 in all three areas and nobody gets that!

 

So, there is no such thing in selling as a “sure thing” or a “lost cause!”

This rule applies to our competitors too.

 

You need 8/10 in all three boxes for a fighting chance

 

You have to SELL to Customer Satisfaction

You have to SELL to Customer Willingness to buy

You have to SELL to Customer Recommendations

 

There is no such thing in Selling
as: a Sure Thing or a Lost Cause!

Run a Customer Engagement Workshop and hear what your Customers really think!

The Secrets of a Sales Expert

 

Familiarity does not mean understanding.

 

Making “familiar” things intelligible to others is very difficult.

 

Understanding the things that you are very familiar with is also very difficult.

We are all familiar with learning to talk; almost all of us did it! Both as Parents and family members we have seen infants develop from smiling mutes into talking machines.

We expect it to happen;
we worry when it doesn’t happen.
We become anxious when,
in our opinion, it happens too slowly.

We feel inordinate pride when it happens quickly;
we associate the speed of learning to talk with “clever”.

“Isn’t she clever, only 18 months
and just listen to her talk and talk and talk!”

 

 

 

Yet, with all of the “familiarity” we have with learning to talk,

the process by which it occurs is unintelligible to most of us.

 

WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT.

 

A few, a very few, researchers have some understanding but far less than complete.

How many of us would claim to be Speech ‘experts’?

How many of us would ask for the title
“Trainer” in helping infants to learn to speak?

 

Yet, in Selling, any ‘familiarity’ with Sales is a claimed qualification to be a “Sales Trainer”. We even have the ludicrous situation where self-appointed bodies, who at best have “familiarity” with selling claim a right (By Charter, God given or simply self proclaimed) to accredit Salespeople and Sales Trainers. In medicine such people would be dismissed as QUACKS, yet in Selling they abound.

LinkedIn, has given us all a tool to look at people differently. We only see what the person uploads but it is more the absence than the presence that impresses me. “SALES EXPERT” have a look at their history, where was the point where they earned this title?   Nowhere?

“Many years in selling”, often not there. And we know from research that “Tenure in Sales” doesn’t equal
‘understanding Selling’ nor does it ‘predict’ sales success.

 

 

There are a growing number of “Sales Gurus”,
who have never been in Sales,
who have little or have no understanding of Sales and
instead substitute pseudo-sales knowledge of “Marketing”,
“Software” or “Social Media” as their qualification and justification.

But, how if you have no intelligible grasp of a familiar process,

can you claim ‘expertise’ in it through
a familiarity with an ancillary process?

Speech Therapists, work with the ancillary processes of:

phonation, producing sounds;

resonance, use of vocal chords;

intonation, pitch changes; and

voice, the use of diaphragm Breathing for the ‘mechanics’ of speech

Yet, the actual Brain Process of Speech remains unintelligible.

 

BMAC Consultants focus on understanding the actual Process of Selling.

You can benefit from our 20 years of research into the Selling Process
as well as 20 years worth of knowledge and practice
helping Adults learn how to sell.

We scan Evidence Based Sales Research
looking for new insights to bring to light for you.

You can avoid dysfunctional Sales Behaviours

(the curse of current Sales Training)
from our Training and Coaching because we make every effort to exclude them.

We believe that the Research into the Buying and Selling process over the last 10 years has negated much of the myth and nonsense trained to unsuspecting sales people for the last 40 years.
However even a casual look at current Sales Training Content and Sales Trainers shows a woeful amount of Myth, Magic and Folklore still being sold
as “Magic Bullets”.

 

Pity!

If you wish to discuss evidence Based Sales development contact brian.maciver@gmail.com

Does Sales Training increase Top Line Revenue?

 

a) What is the effect of Sales Training on Revenue?

b) Is there any evidence that Sales Training impacts on Revenue?

 

 

Evidence Based Sales Training, when completed by Sales Coaching, can change the Sales Behaviours of the Salesperson. There is ample evidence based information (e.g. SPIN(r) and The Challenger Sale) to show that SOME Sales Behaviours are more effective than others.

Also, we can show from an evidence basis that some Sales Behaviours are Ineffective (waste of time) and finally that some Sales Behaviours are counterproductive (Dysfunctional).

 

 

 

 

By reducing or eliminating ‘Dysfunctional’ and ‘ineffective’ Sales behaviours
and by increasing the use of Effective Sales Behaviours
the following “effects” can be measured.

 

 

 

a) Increased Pipeline (more opportunities)

b) Better Qualification (eliminating no hope-opportunities)

c) Improved win rate

d) Shorter Sales Cycle (from Lead to Close)

e) Increased Revenue

f) Improved Margins

In 2013, all of this and much more “real time” data can be pulled off of your CRM or SFA, quite easily.

When writing my MBA Dissertation “Performance Measurement and Management of a Sales force” (1999)
I found that there is always difficulty of proving ‘cause and effect’,
especially when using ‘Proxy Measures’ and ‘Success Indicators’.

Instead, we often have to use factors “associated with success”
to plough our narrow furrow!

Evidence Based Sales Training has the following Flow:

a) Identify Behaviours associated with Sales Success and Failure

b) Measure the presence or absence of these Behaviours in the Sales force

c) Complete a Training Needs Analysis (PDP at the individual level)

d) Design the Behaviour Based Sales Training Program

e) Run the Training and the associated Coaching to modify their Sales Behaviour

f) Internal Validation – Did the Salespeople LEARN the new Behaviour?

g) External Validation – Are the Salespeople USING the New Sales Behaviour?

h) Evaluation – is the new behaviour producing the expected results?

You could read more about this in Leslie Rae’s Book
http://www.amazon.com/Assessing-Value-Your-Training-Evaluation/dp/0566085356/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

Or by using the Kirkpatrick Model

http://www.kirkpatrickpartners.com/

All of BMAC Consultants’ research, and the measured outcomes,
is bound by non-disclosure agreements with Clients.

But, from experience and exchanged anecdotes from other Evidence Based Sales Trainers
the expected Group or Line of Business Revenue result during the year of Sales Training
is between +15% to +30% improvement to Top Line Revenue.

At the individual salesperson level, a fully trained and competent (Evidence Based) Salesperson
after 3 years of planned curriculum (at an 80% Competence) can be expected
to perform at +200% to +300% more Revenue Performance
above the “average untrained” Salesperson.

 

How can we “prove” that
Evidence Based Sales Training
delivers Revenue Improvement?

Personally, when asked to do so,
I ask for 6 “stuck” deals from the current pipeline and
then I DEMONSTRATE the capability of the Sales Skills
to UN-stick or Close the Deals.

If you will settle for two anecdotes [not sourced] :

a) A deal worth £17M in Revenue and £4M in Margin had been “stuck”
or more accurately “lost” for
370 days at ‘Proposal made – Decision pending’. 
I reframed, we constructed and wrote a new Value Proposition
(reducing it from 103 pages to 4 pages),
presented the new Value Proposition and Closed the deal all in 10 days.

b) A €4M Revenue Renewal Negotiation “stuck” by the Customer’s demand
“for a 30% discount to match a Competitor’s offer”,
it was rated as a “Lost” deal in the pipeline!
I met with the Decision Maker, we reframed the deal increasing its Value to €7M,
and then we discounted by 12% against a Delegation of Discount Authority maximum of 15%.
From meeting the Account Manager, Planning the Call and Agreeing the Deal - 180 minutes!

This fits because People just want the success secret;
they just want the recipe to imitate success.

.

Coaching Challenger Sales Performance

The TCS authors wrote an article on ‘WHO to Coach’ Published in the Harvard Business Review:
Http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/01/the_dirty_secret_of_effective.html

I want to express my complete agreement with THE key point:

Don’t waste time Coaching Sales Poor Performers!

“You would think that coaching the lowest performers would pay off
  because they have nowhere to go but up. 
  Actually, that's often not true, particularly for the bottom 10%.”

This time of the Sales year, most of the team are just getting started,
no or low scores above the doors,
so it’s hard to identify performers.

Look at last year!

Just before you waste loads of time on poor performers, DON’T, it doesn’t work! You can’t coach a Sales Poor Performer to Perform.

You can “Direct” them
and they can “Learn” but “Coaching” is the WRONG Sales Leadership
or Management style for poor performers!

Read more on:

http://brianmaciver.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-long-do-we-as-sales-managers-accept.html

“Likewise, star-performing reps show virtually
  no performance improvement due to coaching.”

 

I want to take issue with this point.

Hunter Mahan and his Golf Coach Sean Foley

If you can’t improve a Sales Star Performer by Coaching
then you are just NOT doing the ‘Coaching’ properly!

Recognise that Coaching Sales Top Performers IS DIFFERENT.

When you are Coaching “Average” salespeople or TCS Core Performers
you are moving between
‘Directing’ them “This is what I want you to do!” and
‘Coaching’ them “Let’s see how you are doing it?”

However, Sales Top Performers
need a different “style” of Coaching.

You will be moving from “Supporting” them with Recognition, Praise and Feed back
to “Coaching” in areas where you BOTH think there MAY be a problem.

Luke Donald  hits a putt as his coach Pat Goss looks on.

http://brianmaciver.blogspot.com/2010/09/coaching-top-performers-in-sales.html

http://brianmaciver.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-do-you-make-great-sales-people.html

Coaching is the best investment in Improving Sales Performance.

Coaching gives the highest ROI for Sales Manager’s Time and Money.

Do it right and do it with the right people

And, 2013 can be your best Sales year ever.

How to Change the way your Company Sells

 

The way Buyers “Buy” Products and the Markets that they buy from,
as we know changes, thus the WAY We Sell MUST also change!

The way a Company actually sells,
and they way individual Salespeople are selling,
is a function of the presence, or absence, of these Four Forces and their relative strengths.

Pragmatic Change is, without any doubt the most successful Sales Change,

but it needs the Conservative ‘restraint’ to prevent it running off-the-rails.

In my MBA Dissertation (1999) I identified FOUR Forces which cause Selling to “Change”,
i.e. from the Orthodox Approach or "Traditional" to the "New" or Unorthodox Approach. 

Four forces which cause the Sales Approach to Change:

primarily a “fall” in Sales Performance,
changes in the “Product/Market”,
changes by the “Competition” and “Economic” Change.

But, what was even more interesting was not the CAUSE of change,
but HOW Companies went about “changing” the way they Sell.

BMAC Consultants identified Four Ways that people CHANGE their Sales Approach

 

  

1. Pragmatic Change, based on evidence, what works?
This is akin to Mintzberg’s view of “Emergent” Strategy. 

Different Salespeople try different things with different Customers and
a "New Way of Selling" emerges, based on evidence.  It has basic Validation.

2. Conservative Change attempts to stop Pragmatic Change,

fearing that it won’t work, or is changing Selling too fast.

“Let us just keep going” the Market will shift in our favour.

The old way is best and we have “evidence” that it USED to work,
even if it no longer works!

 

These first two were “evidence” based, the next two are NOT!

 

3. Utopian Change to a ‘new, ideal and perfect’ Sales world,
without evidence of its likely effectiveness.
Based on a New Book, a Charismatic Sales Trainer, a ‘Cult’ like approach
where blind faith, hope and trust in a Method, Process, Software, ‘Guru’ or ‘Expert’.
When initial performance reports say it’s NOT working this is explained by
the Change not being fully “accepted”, it then forms into “Disciples” and “Rebels”.



   
4. Restorative Change is going back to the “Golden Age of Selling”.
This is again NOT evidence based.
It simply requires that the Sales “Techniques” believed to work in the past,
e.g. as used previously in IBM, XEROX, APPLE
or one of the ‘Door to Door’ Sales Companies be re-adopted.
It usually has several Senior Executives sponsoring it
and the introduction of the Sales Trainer who trained them.

Often, you will find both ‘Utopian’ and ‘Restorative’ Change at work
in the same Company, at the same time, as neither is "Evidence" based.

I collected substantial evidence that Evidence Based Selling works.

 

So, By Accident or by Design?

How are you Changing?

 

But, sometimes LUCK works too!

There is such a thing as the right product,

in the right place, at the right time;

it just doesn’t last!

This blog was originally entitled “Modern Selling”

Modern Selling will always be of its own age, and it will always be ‘unorthodox’.

‘Orthodox’ Selling will always be the one just before it.

 

The Key Constructs in this Blog are Copyright ©BMAC Consultants 1999,
and if used should be acknowledged.

Don’t Trust the Trusted Advisor.

 

I have just read TAS Group’s white paper “Moving from Vendor to Trusted Advisor.”

http://www.thetasgroup.com/whitepaperdownloads/new/The_TAS_Group_White_Paper_Moving_from_Vendor_to_Trusted_Advisor.pdf

It’s well written. It is a typical piece of Marketing ‘Content’ designed to excite and to promote their “Product” TAS Deal Maker. However, it falls between two stools.
It neither excites, nor was I left gagging for a demo of the Product!

What struck me was The Story of “Salesman Matt”, published by the CEO of The TAS Group
Donal Daly’s “Select Selling Sales Field book” - about a man called Matt.

 

Daly describes Matt as: “the ‘personification’ of the Trusted Advisor.”
And, it is Daly’s detail of
what a Trusted Advisor actually DOES that disturbs me!

A lot!

“Over the 15 or so years we’ve known Matt,
he has had three different employers,
but he has always retained the same four major customers.”

They don’t say that Matt left Employers to join Competitors taking the “HIS” customer with him or not.
But, it is clear that Matt as a “Trusted Advisor” to ‘his’ Customer
should not be treated as a “Trusted Employee”.

 

 

The flaw in this ‘Trusted Advisor’ thinking is that Matt “OWNS” his Customers.

 

HE DOES NOT!

“HIS” personal ‘relationship’ is bought, and paid for, by his Employer.

Those ‘Customers’ are Customers of Matt’s Employer;
Matt simply has stewardship of the Account.

I have had the pain of Managing Salespeople like Matt;
they withhold Key Data about “their” Customers,
while spending Company money on developing “their” relationship “Trusted Advisor”.

Trusted Advisors accept both a Salary and a Bonus,
but reserve ‘their rights’ to act in their own “best interest”.

They are really ‘self-employed’ Agents,
earning their living from exploiting an Employer to fund ‘their’ Business and
their Employer’s Customer to pay a second time for ‘their’ results.

Trusted Advisors should not be trusted.

Not trusted by their Customers as their income depends upon their “Sales”, not their advice.
Not trusted by their Employers in whose interest they are paid to act, to sell,
not to give ‘Trusted Advice’ to a Customer.

Thankfully, we have some Evidence to base our Sales Decision on.
The evidence based models of The Challenger Sale,
would show that the “Trusted Advisor” is in fact part ‘lone wolf’ in ‘relationship’ clothing.