If you tied me up, put a knife to my throat, and demanded that I pick one and only one key to sales success, I would probably blurt, “Empathy!”
And, if you put the knife down and casually began to untie me, asking, “What’s empathy?” I would say it’s your ability to identify with the perspectives and feelings of another person. It’s not just about understanding the person, or being able to describe what’s on their mind; it’s about allowing yourself, in some sense, to BECOME the person—to take on, at least for a few moments, their orientation, values, stance, concerns, emotions, desires, worldview.
Some salespeople find the task particularly difficult because they get so obsessed with the goal of selling that they forget to listen. Paradoxically, the intensity of the obsession is inversely proportional to the ease of satisfying it. It’s not like running where the harder you try the faster you go. The paradox explains why salespeople are perceived to talk too much, be too pushy, not listen, and even sell features rather than benefits. They know better, of course—we all know it’s important to listen, but pressure from things like the economy, the boss, the competition, and the need for success get in the way.
Empathy doesn’t just inform a salesperson about what the customer seeks and avoids, it also helps the customer to FEEL a connection. That’s actually the biggie here. Think about it. Think of a salesperson you really trusted and from whom you enjoyed buying—one you would gladly buy from again. I bet that person made you feel heard. You sensed that he or she fully understood your stance on the product or service you were considering. You shared something, yes?
Can empathy be learned? Many people say no. You’ve either got it, or not. But I disagree most wholeheartedly. Except for certain psychotic people, we are all born with circuitry for compassion built right into our wiring. The challenge is to learn to switch that circuit on, to keep it on, and to integrate its contribution into the moments of a dialogue.
Now let’s you and I put away the tools of aggression and be friends.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Sales Success Key # 3 -- Creating Great First Impressions
Today my daughter is being interviewed for a short-term role at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
No fooling here: I am proud. Whether she wins the opportunity or not, she got exactly this far—and that’s proof enough for me of her star quality.
We were in Philadelphia so I took her to the train station and she would make her own way from there. That seems to be the formula.
When we unloaded her bag from the back of the car there would only be time for a few words and a hug. We’re not really a long-goodbye kind of family. I dug as deep as I could for my best fatherly advice.
One thing that came to mind is a blog post from a couple of weeks ago—Sales Success Key #1—about mustering the right attitude. “As you’re walking into the office or boardroom, wherever the interview is going to take place, give yourself a shot of positive attitude! Let there be an energy about you!"
The other little offering might be seen as two things because there are two traits involved. But they need to be in balance, and that’s the key.
Here it is: don’t forget that first impressions are made out of quick assessments of your warmth and your credibility. If you have warmth and not enough credibility, you’re undoubtedly lovely, but not quite good enough. If you have credibility but lack the warmth, you may not play well with others.
Indeed, I think this advice is good for salespeople too.
It sounds easy, I suppose. But I don’t think it is. I think the warmth and credibility one projects tend to derive from years of complex personal programming. The good news is that they are also self-programmable. We all have the circuitry for compassion and we all have whatever our left-brained cognitive functioning can offer; it’s a question of whether we can flick the right switches at will. Managing to be genuine while keeping those traits front-of-mind is an art.
Which is why my own daughter will wear the badge of modern art, if I say so myself.
No fooling here: I am proud. Whether she wins the opportunity or not, she got exactly this far—and that’s proof enough for me of her star quality.
We were in Philadelphia so I took her to the train station and she would make her own way from there. That seems to be the formula.
When we unloaded her bag from the back of the car there would only be time for a few words and a hug. We’re not really a long-goodbye kind of family. I dug as deep as I could for my best fatherly advice.
One thing that came to mind is a blog post from a couple of weeks ago—Sales Success Key #1—about mustering the right attitude. “As you’re walking into the office or boardroom, wherever the interview is going to take place, give yourself a shot of positive attitude! Let there be an energy about you!"
The other little offering might be seen as two things because there are two traits involved. But they need to be in balance, and that’s the key.
Here it is: don’t forget that first impressions are made out of quick assessments of your warmth and your credibility. If you have warmth and not enough credibility, you’re undoubtedly lovely, but not quite good enough. If you have credibility but lack the warmth, you may not play well with others.
Indeed, I think this advice is good for salespeople too.
It sounds easy, I suppose. But I don’t think it is. I think the warmth and credibility one projects tend to derive from years of complex personal programming. The good news is that they are also self-programmable. We all have the circuitry for compassion and we all have whatever our left-brained cognitive functioning can offer; it’s a question of whether we can flick the right switches at will. Managing to be genuine while keeping those traits front-of-mind is an art.
Which is why my own daughter will wear the badge of modern art, if I say so myself.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Sales Success Key #2 -- Numbers Orientation
Sure, “sales is a numbers game”—but that usually refers to the idea of throwing spaghetti against the wall with the knowledge that inevitably some of it will stick. That’s the simple part of the numbers aspect of selling. There’s a much more rigorous part too.
In my opinion the most successful salespeople think in terms of volume and rates. I don’t just mean they sit with a spreadsheet and crunch and study those numbers—though they might. I’m suggesting that their brains have been trained to actually work that way. Or, they were born that way; the style of thinking is, after all, basically rational. In the same way that you seek to invest your money in accounts with the biggest return, or pay off credit cards that charge the highest interest rate first, salespeople too must invest their primary asset—the minutes of their day—into the activities that yield the best return. In a capitalistic environment, a salesperson ought to sell as much as possible (the volume part), with as much profit per sale (the rate part) as possible. And to do all this in the finite amount of time available.
We don’t want volume alone; we want profitable volume. We don’t want as many appointments as we can get, or to give as many presentations as possible; we want them to be qualified appointments and presentations to audiences who are most likely to proceed with a commitment. It’s a balancing act; we seek to optimize both.
If I have a geographical sales territory, I want to be efficient in my travels. If I manage big accounts, I want to apportion my time based on where I’ll get the biggest bang for my minutes. If I generate leads, I want to know the rate at which they convert and make a science of measuring cost per lead and cost per sale by lead source. If I focus too much on volume, then I might blow it on efficiency. If I focus too much on efficiency, or profitability, or productivity, then I might not get the volume I need.
Every business has its mathematics. The best salespeople think mathematics. In retail, for example, the game is to get as many customers into the door as possible, maximize the rate at which they walk out with a shopping bag in their hand, maximize the average cash register transaction value, and optimize the average profit percentage per transaction. Volume and rates. Volume and rates.
It takes a person with honed left brained intuition to succeed at this game. Or natural skills in differential calculus such that you dream of minimums and maximums. Or a boss who harps.
The problem with all this, of course, is that integrity and compliance with laws and policies need to be woven into the picture. All this striving must be done within certain parameters. Therein is the clash between capitalist values and, well, other stuff.
We’ll save that for another day.
In my opinion the most successful salespeople think in terms of volume and rates. I don’t just mean they sit with a spreadsheet and crunch and study those numbers—though they might. I’m suggesting that their brains have been trained to actually work that way. Or, they were born that way; the style of thinking is, after all, basically rational. In the same way that you seek to invest your money in accounts with the biggest return, or pay off credit cards that charge the highest interest rate first, salespeople too must invest their primary asset—the minutes of their day—into the activities that yield the best return. In a capitalistic environment, a salesperson ought to sell as much as possible (the volume part), with as much profit per sale (the rate part) as possible. And to do all this in the finite amount of time available.
We don’t want volume alone; we want profitable volume. We don’t want as many appointments as we can get, or to give as many presentations as possible; we want them to be qualified appointments and presentations to audiences who are most likely to proceed with a commitment. It’s a balancing act; we seek to optimize both.
If I have a geographical sales territory, I want to be efficient in my travels. If I manage big accounts, I want to apportion my time based on where I’ll get the biggest bang for my minutes. If I generate leads, I want to know the rate at which they convert and make a science of measuring cost per lead and cost per sale by lead source. If I focus too much on volume, then I might blow it on efficiency. If I focus too much on efficiency, or profitability, or productivity, then I might not get the volume I need.
Every business has its mathematics. The best salespeople think mathematics. In retail, for example, the game is to get as many customers into the door as possible, maximize the rate at which they walk out with a shopping bag in their hand, maximize the average cash register transaction value, and optimize the average profit percentage per transaction. Volume and rates. Volume and rates.
It takes a person with honed left brained intuition to succeed at this game. Or natural skills in differential calculus such that you dream of minimums and maximums. Or a boss who harps.
The problem with all this, of course, is that integrity and compliance with laws and policies need to be woven into the picture. All this striving must be done within certain parameters. Therein is the clash between capitalist values and, well, other stuff.
We’ll save that for another day.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Sales Success Key # 1 -- Resilience
In my promised list of 10 keys to sales success there is only one item that’s comes from the realm of personal psychology. It’s pretty straight forward: resilience. Do you find you give up too easily? How low do you go when you are rejected? How quickly do you recover?
Disappointment, frustration, and hurt are built right into the job description. After all, the role of a salesperson is to influence. People often don't want to be influenced, so hearing the word ‘no’ is inevitable. As Sartre put it, “Hell is other people.” Interestingly, statistically speaking, the more you ask, the more often you get told no. Almost paradoxically, the more you get told no, the more successful you are (assuming at least a steady rate of yeses).
Resilience is critical in order to contend with the day-to-day struggles. You can have problems finding a customer, keeping a customer, and getting a customer to like you. You can be beaten by a competitor, miss sales targets, and be told your ideas or products or services simply aren't good enough. You can easily be perceived by colleagues and customers as over-promising, unrealistic, too hard, too soft. But you have to keep going or things get worse. Resilience is a necessary ingredient.
Just how resilient you are depends on a lot of factors -- things like: whom you hang around with, the frequency of letdowns, other life pressures, how you were raised, how you are compensated, your physical condition, the strength of your hopes and dreams, the negative consequences of failure, your level of pigheadness, your habits around self-soothing (e.g., babbling, bathing, buying). All these things impact your response, the duration of your recovery period, and your ability to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.
But if you want more resilience and “sticktuitiveness”, where can you get it? Juicy question. Many people have spent a lot of time trying to figure that out.
Self esteem is considered a biggie. That pertains to the extent to which you believe that you are generally able to do what you set out to do, and that you are valuable or worthy, in and of yourself. People with high self esteem tend to be able to override their impulses. Accordingly, the impulse to shy away from rejection, for example, can be overcome if self esteem is high enough.
Managing your own inner monologue or self talk is another means of getting past the impulse to “go to sleep” after a letdown. Actually, what you mumble to yourself can be the cause of a negative attitude as well as a cure. For example, have you heard yourself say, “Yup, that proves it, nobody wants this stuff”? Or, “Our prices are too high,” or, “The competition is much tougher than it used to be,” or, “I’m not very good at this,” or, “I blew it,” or, “We don’t do enough marketing,” or, “There is a lack of internal support,” or, “That customer was a doinker.” Indeed, a negative inner monologue can actually create a negative emotional reaction in your own head. And slow down recovery.
But quick recovery can come from how you reframe your circumstance. Self awareness is the key to this. Recognize yourself responding to rejection. Get really familiar with how you process it. Know what you are saying to yourself, where it comes from in your past and present, exactly what triggers it. Put your finger on how your response might not be rational or might be doing you a disservice. Work hard at overriding that habitual response and replacing it with something like a clenched fist, flexed arm muscles and, in your own private, whacky way, declaring to the universe, “Whoooaa.”
To some extent we’re talking about getting oneself reoriented. For example, when you overcome an impulse (and, in so doing, either manifest or elevate your self esteem), you are essentially reorienting. When you manage your self-talk, you are reorienting. When you talk to your boss after some misfortune, hopefully her leadership reorients you in some way.
Or even change the whole darned paradigm. That’s reorienting at its best. One of the biggest things I’ve learned about mental health or emotional savvy is that one can’t free oneself from negative feelings; but one can either manage one’s life such that hurt is less likely to be the result, or one can try to see things differently.
One of my favorite examples of reorienting is a trick I learned from a group of life insurance sales reps I trained 20 years ago. It was about handling the slings and arrows of cold calling and was called the paperclip technique. It’s pretty much an industrial age kind of thing, but that’s how darned old I am.
If you have to call 100 people today, then make a pile of 100 paperclips right in front of your phone. The goal? Move the pile 12 inches over to the right -- one paperclip at a time. One for each dial. “Hello, Mr. Smith, got a minute? No? No problem. Have a good day”. Click. Move a clip. Next call. Next clip. Watch your pile move. Stop when you’ve reached your goal. It’s about moving the paperclips, not about getting rejected.
Get it? It’s not about you.
Disappointment, frustration, and hurt are built right into the job description. After all, the role of a salesperson is to influence. People often don't want to be influenced, so hearing the word ‘no’ is inevitable. As Sartre put it, “Hell is other people.” Interestingly, statistically speaking, the more you ask, the more often you get told no. Almost paradoxically, the more you get told no, the more successful you are (assuming at least a steady rate of yeses).
Resilience is critical in order to contend with the day-to-day struggles. You can have problems finding a customer, keeping a customer, and getting a customer to like you. You can be beaten by a competitor, miss sales targets, and be told your ideas or products or services simply aren't good enough. You can easily be perceived by colleagues and customers as over-promising, unrealistic, too hard, too soft. But you have to keep going or things get worse. Resilience is a necessary ingredient.
Just how resilient you are depends on a lot of factors -- things like: whom you hang around with, the frequency of letdowns, other life pressures, how you were raised, how you are compensated, your physical condition, the strength of your hopes and dreams, the negative consequences of failure, your level of pigheadness, your habits around self-soothing (e.g., babbling, bathing, buying). All these things impact your response, the duration of your recovery period, and your ability to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.
But if you want more resilience and “sticktuitiveness”, where can you get it? Juicy question. Many people have spent a lot of time trying to figure that out.
Self esteem is considered a biggie. That pertains to the extent to which you believe that you are generally able to do what you set out to do, and that you are valuable or worthy, in and of yourself. People with high self esteem tend to be able to override their impulses. Accordingly, the impulse to shy away from rejection, for example, can be overcome if self esteem is high enough.
Managing your own inner monologue or self talk is another means of getting past the impulse to “go to sleep” after a letdown. Actually, what you mumble to yourself can be the cause of a negative attitude as well as a cure. For example, have you heard yourself say, “Yup, that proves it, nobody wants this stuff”? Or, “Our prices are too high,” or, “The competition is much tougher than it used to be,” or, “I’m not very good at this,” or, “I blew it,” or, “We don’t do enough marketing,” or, “There is a lack of internal support,” or, “That customer was a doinker.” Indeed, a negative inner monologue can actually create a negative emotional reaction in your own head. And slow down recovery.
But quick recovery can come from how you reframe your circumstance. Self awareness is the key to this. Recognize yourself responding to rejection. Get really familiar with how you process it. Know what you are saying to yourself, where it comes from in your past and present, exactly what triggers it. Put your finger on how your response might not be rational or might be doing you a disservice. Work hard at overriding that habitual response and replacing it with something like a clenched fist, flexed arm muscles and, in your own private, whacky way, declaring to the universe, “Whoooaa.”
To some extent we’re talking about getting oneself reoriented. For example, when you overcome an impulse (and, in so doing, either manifest or elevate your self esteem), you are essentially reorienting. When you manage your self-talk, you are reorienting. When you talk to your boss after some misfortune, hopefully her leadership reorients you in some way.
Or even change the whole darned paradigm. That’s reorienting at its best. One of the biggest things I’ve learned about mental health or emotional savvy is that one can’t free oneself from negative feelings; but one can either manage one’s life such that hurt is less likely to be the result, or one can try to see things differently.
One of my favorite examples of reorienting is a trick I learned from a group of life insurance sales reps I trained 20 years ago. It was about handling the slings and arrows of cold calling and was called the paperclip technique. It’s pretty much an industrial age kind of thing, but that’s how darned old I am.
If you have to call 100 people today, then make a pile of 100 paperclips right in front of your phone. The goal? Move the pile 12 inches over to the right -- one paperclip at a time. One for each dial. “Hello, Mr. Smith, got a minute? No? No problem. Have a good day”. Click. Move a clip. Next call. Next clip. Watch your pile move. Stop when you’ve reached your goal. It’s about moving the paperclips, not about getting rejected.
Get it? It’s not about you.
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