“Focusing on Problems - Not Symptoms”

As a sales manager, are you spending more times working to solve symptoms or problems from your sales team members? Sadly, most of the sales managers I see spend the majority of their time only working on symptoms and not problems. The majority of all the sales problems brought to me by sales people asking for help over my 30 years as a sales trainer and consultant have really only been symptoms.

Symptoms can be fixed and they will go away, but will keep coming back or reappearing as different symptoms as long as the underlying problem still exists. You go to the doctor with a cough you feel is a problem. However, the doctor cannot just give you cough medicine to suppress your cough; they need to look deeper to uncover what is really causing your cough in the first place. My Doctor loves to tell all of his patients “You bring me symptoms; I’ll give you problems, no extra charge!”

Do you remember the “Hellarewe” bird I am always mentioning; the three-foot bird living in four-foot grass? The vast majority of otherwise successful sales professionals tend only to see symptoms and not the real problems due to their lack of awareness and vision. When you are only three foot tall in four-foot grass anything in your way appears as if it is a problem to you, even when it is only a symptom and others can see the real underlying problems. The job of a sales manager is to lift your reps above the four-foot grass so they can see where they need to go and what they need to do. Helping translate symptoms into real problems that can be fixed is one of the ways you can successfully lift your reps above their four-foot grass.

So how much time are you spending with your sales team solving symptoms instead of problems?

The most common sales symptoms

Let us review the three most common symptoms sales people think are really problems, how many of these have you heard lately?

“Our prices are too high”

The most common symptom brought to me by sales people is “We lost because our prices are too high.” Most sales people see their pricing as a real problem. However, a customer’s primary evaluation of competitive proposals is not based on the differences in your price, but in the differences they perceive in your value. The greater the difference in value between competitors the greater difference in price a customer will be willing to pay.

The symptom is your prices are too high, but the real problem is your sales rep (and likely your entire company) has not done enough to position and communicate enough value differential to justify your higher price. But look how ineffective your sales coaching help would be if you only focused on trying to help your rep deal with your higher prices.

“Most of my prospects won’t agree to a second sales call”

The second most common symptom I hear from sales reps is “Most of my prospects won’t agree to a second sales call.” Notice how this symptom brought by a sales rep, along with the majority of all other sales symptoms, cannot be solved with a simple or direct solution. But if we reframe their problem into a real problem then both a solution and a set of action plans to correct it can now be identified. The symptom is the rep cannot seem to get a second appointment, but the real problem could be the prospect is not seeing enough competitive value and uniqueness to justify investing time meeting with another vendor. The real problem could also be that the prospect does not need or find value in what you offer and should not have been called on in the first place.

“We lost because of our customer’s screwed-up political environment”

The third most common symptom I am asked for advice centers around “We lost because of our customer’s screwed up political environment.” Your sales rep believes their customer’s political environment is the problem when the real problem is they did not do enough to get “higher, wider, and deeper” within their prospect’s political structure so they wound up being surprised by others having more influence or stronger interest in a competitor.

Notice how most symptoms are never caused or due to the fault of the sales rep. Screwed up political environments cannot be fixed, but me as the rep doing more to get “higher, wider and deeper” within my customer’s organization is something I can take responsibility for and actually fix or improve.

That is one of the reasons sales reps focus so much of their attention on symptoms and not problems. Notice how the majority of symptoms stated as problems by your reps can always be ended with “…so it’s not my fault.” “We lost the proposal because our prices were too high…so it’s not my fault that we lost.” Or “We lost because of our customer’s screwed up political environment…so it’s not my fault.”

How to turn sales symptoms into real problems

"Selling to Your Buyer’s Entire Political Culture”

The reality of today’s buyers is they rarely make decisions alone. A “final decision maker” will still seek opinions and insights from others, even when they alone are the final decision maker of their vendor selection. However, most sales professionals only focus their attention selling to their main buyer or decision maker and see little value talking with the rest of the buyer’s organization, after all, they say, “I’m already talking to the decision maker who signs the checks, what’s the value of talking with anyone else?”

                                            

Getting “Higher, wider and deeper” within your prospects and customers

However, increasing your relationships, connections, and customer information can significantly increase your competitive advantage. Just calling on the final or top decision maker is not enough in today’s buying culture, you need to get higher, wider, and deeper within your buyer’s organization if you want to increase your competitive advantage, and ultimately win their business.

Every organization has three levels of political awareness and power

The most powerful group is the “Inner Circle.” These are the decision makers who can easily decide what to buy and who to buy from. However, the “Inner Circle” decision makers are influenced by the second group, the “Outer Circle.” The “Outer Circle” influencers provide feedback, council and share opinions with decision makers. The third and final political group within your buyer’s organization is the group titled “What’s a circle?” This third group neither recognizes nor understands their organization’s political structure thinking there are no political levels within their company, and decisions to buy are only made on the merit of who is the best vendor who can provide the most value to their company.

The reality of buying in today’s hyper-competitive world is the more politically aware, or closer you get to the “Inner Circle” political level, the less likely these people will want to tell you the truth about what is really going on in their company.

Buyers don’t benefit telling you the truth…

The reality of buying is that there is little value in a decision maker telling you the complete truth. As an example, let’s say I’m the buyer who is buying from your competitors and you’re the sales person calling on my company. As you walk into my office I say “Thank goodness you’re here! My current supplier has been ignoring me, I can’t get any support from them, and they keep missing their promised delivery dates. Their billing system is all screwed up and no one there seems to even care about my business.” What would you be thinking as your prospect told you that? How many of you are thinking “Cha-ching!?”

Buyers have learned they have to have two levels of openness to all but their closest vendors. The first level of openness is when a buyer isn’t in “buying mode.”

This is the time where they’re not evaluating or shopping for new vendors. During this open mode buyers at all three political levels will be happy to answer any of your questions and to tell you exactly how things are going, both the good and bad, with their current suppliers. They are so open now since they don’t feel anything they say can be used against them since they’re not ready to buy again, or to renew an existing agreement at this time.

But when they’re getting ready to buy again and start shopping multiple vendors they move to the second and most restrictive level of openness. When a buyer is shopping and talking with vendors they know they’ll lose the ability to effectively negotiate with any vendor who knows about any significant gaps in current service or any displeasure with their current supplier. It’s kind of hard to be a tough negotiator and to demand a lower price from you, the vendor, if you know I’m unhappy and not likely to continue with my current supplier.

This is why it is so critical you get “higher, wider, and deeper” within a prospect’s or existing customer’s organization. You want to get higher, getting to all the decision makers in their “Inner circle” the people who sign the contracts and checks. You want to get wider, getting to anyone who will be able to influence their Inner Circle, such as other department heads or other areas of responsibility within your buyer’s organization. In addition, you want to get deeper, getting to the non-politically aware “What’s a circle” group such as their front line users and operators.

When a buyer is in their shut down “shopping mode,” the “Inner Circle” decision makers will only tell you what they think will help them negotiate more value or a lower price. Therefore, any problems with their current vendor will be hidden or dismissed, since any sign of problems with their current supplier will just help you justify why they have to pay your higher prices.

These politically aware buyers know that if you get to their less politically aware “Outer Circle Influencers” or politically clueless users and operators you could learn what is really happening, and how much their company really needs to buy from you even when you have a higher price. This is why these decision makers will work to restrict your access to anyone else within their organization during their vendor evaluations even demanding you only talk to them.

“You Can Always Sell More…By Positioning Buyers to Use Your Low Risk Customer Buying Process”

What is your selling approach and competitive uniqueness? Is your selling strategy to win the business based on having the lowest prices or are you selling on your greater value and lower total cost?

Less skilled sales people tend to gravitate to selling on price. They lack the skills of probing to understand better, their prospects real needs. They tend to sell products that are cheaper in their construction, have fewer performance functions, come with less support, and are less durable.

One of the key ways these “selling cheap” sales people increase their competitive advantage and selling success is by accelerating or shortening their customer’s evaluation and buying process. After all, if I have a cheaper, less supported and lower functioning product compared to my competitors, then I can increase my odds of winning by accelerating how you, the buyer, make your buying decision. In addition, the faster and sooner I can get you to make a buying decision then the less likely you will be as a buyer to uncover my product’s competitive gaps or functional exposures that exist in my cheaper product offering.

This is one of the reasons companies selling on low price tend to go in early in the selling process offering special prices only available for a short period of time. If they can make their special discounts or pricing look attractive enough, they might get a buyer to accelerate their buying decision and miss what they are really giving, compared to buying from a stronger competitor.

The key to selling higher priced products or services against low price competitors.

The key to selling higher priced products or services against low price competitors is to increase your customer’s competitive evaluation and decision process. It makes sense doesn’t it? You can increase your competitive advantage selling higher priced, greater value and lower risk products when you can get your customer or prospect to conduct a complete and extensive evaluation of all their competitive alternatives. The greater your value and uniqueness then the more likely you are to win when your customer or prospect gains a complete and detailed understanding of everything they are going to get from all of the vendors going after their business. A more complete competitive evaluation will also prevent your buyer from being surprised by selecting a cheaper product they later discover was under-configured and ignoring what they really wanted and needed.

Presenting your customers with the “low risk customer buying” process.

One of the best ways to persuade your buyer to complete a more through competitive evaluation is by showing them a more customer focused process or structure that can help them through their evaluation. The goal is to help your customer understand how to evaluate all of the aspects, both product functionality and performance, as well as the service and support capabilities of all proposals, both yours and your competitors.

Proposing your suggested buying process has to be handled properly. You will position yourself and your company as more professional, ethical and customer focused if you are able to offer your customer buying suggestions that come across as more balanced and fair than anything being suggested by your competitors.

The first step in any selling process is to lower your customer’s resistance and to increase their trust in your offers of help. The more you lower their resistance and increase their trust in you and your company then the more likely they will be to consider and follow your advice. You can best accomplish this resistance lowering trust building process by conducting more research, asking more questions and spending more time understanding their total business than what your competitors are attempting to do.

Fairly early in your selling process, but after you feel you’ve stabilized your relationship and built up their trust, you want to start asking how they plan to evaluate all of their competitive choices. The less structured or complete their evaluation plans then the more you are going to be competitively exposed as the higher priced, but greater value vendor.

You will come across as more customer focused and professional if you help your buyers evaluate and protect their best interests. The goal here is to have them see how concerned you are for them making the best decision for their business, and your confidence that the more complete their evaluation, then the more likely and confident you are that you’ll win their business.

The best way to position your suggested customer buying process is by positioning the questions you have found have been of most value to your other customers in the past. You will be most effective if you present these buying suggestions as something you encourage your buyers to ask of all vendors going after their business, including you. 

You want to present these suggested questions verbally to your buyer but also have a letter prepared to hand them at the conclusion of your suggestions. You want to present your suggested low risk customer buying process as a business letter instead of as a printed brochure. A letter on your company stationary and addressed to them looks more intimate and special to each customer where a brochure looks like it’s been printed and is being presented to all customers.

It’s also a good idea to carry unaddressed copies of this letter with you at all times just in case you have the opportunity to share this information with a new prospect or contact. Even though the letter is not addressed directly to them, it can still impress them with your personal focus to their buying issues and challenges.

Suggested low risk customer buying process letter.

This letter and suggested buying process will work equally well selling intangible services, equipment, or consumable supplies. Though these same four suggested buying questions will work for any product or service selling environment, you’ll want to customize the detailed evaluation questions contained under each of these four questions to better focus on your proposed business application. A suggested letter format for selling your equipment to your customer can read like this…

Dear << Customer’s name >>

Thank you for your interest in << Your company name and product brands being proposed. >> Our past customers have shared the following four questions as a way to help you lower your risk and ultimately achieve the lowest total cost equipment selection if you ask all vendors (including us) being considered to quantify and prove to you:

1) “What’s my total cost?”

            - Are all the required accessories and tools included in your quoted price?

2) “How will you support me?”

            - How will you prove your “24/7” support?

            - Equipment performance record

            - Service technicians and support availability

            - Parts inventory/availability

3) “How much risk am I taking doing business with you?”

4) “How will you help me improve my business?”

We look forward to working with you to fully explain and outline exactly how we can successfully answer these and all of your other questions.

Sincerely,

As a higher priced, but lower total cost vendor you will increase your chances of winning when your customer conducts a through and complete evaluation of all competitive alternatives being considered. Presenting this letter and these suggested buying questions, and being able to provide strong answers to each of these questions is one of the best ways to prove you are the lower risk, lower total cost and most effective solution for your customers, even when you have a higher price.

We know you’re good…now the question is….are you good enough…and customer focused enough to offer these four questions to help communicate and prove your added value and lower risk so you can increase your competitive advantage and selling success?

Jim Pancero

“You Can Always Sell More, By Making Sure It’s ‘No Problem!’”

There‘s a new term that’s crept into today’s selling and service language that’s having a severe and negative impact on our customers and how they view our efforts to help them, and I bet it’s a term you’ve used yourself in the last 24 hours when talking with your customer.

And the term is…“No problem!”

I have an unusual food allergy, I’m allergic to garlic and garlic has become a pervasive spice used today in almost all sauces, anything deep fried as well as most foods served at meetings. When I go to any restaurant or meeting I have to specifically ask for help to identify what I can eat that doesn’t contain garlic.

But when I ask the wait staff for help with my garlic problem the most common response I hear back is…”No problem!” Well to me it’s a big problem, and not a response that makes me feel comfortable or trust them taking serious enough my questions about what I can or can’t eat at their buffet.

Recently I asked a sales person trying to sell me a new camera if they offer support in case I have a problem or failure with any of the equipment I’m thinking of buying and instead of telling me how great their service and support are, they tell me “No problem!”

How many times have you or your support team used this phrase with your most important customers? One of my friends who runs a farm shared how they recently had their tractor break down in the middle of planting and they needed urgent service from their local equipment dealer. The service tech quickly arrived and got my friend’s tractor back up and running much faster than my friend expected. Impressed with the service he was receiving he thanked the service tech for getting him back up and running so fast, and the service tech responded by saying “No problem!”

Well, to my friend, his tractor being down at such a prime usage time was a major problem and getting up and running so fast was a real added value of doing business with that equipment dealer. But even when my friend identified this added value and thanked the service tech the service tech’s response of “No problem!” only neutralized any of the value and good will that dealer was receiving from such a successful repair.

How often are you and your support team neutralizing any value differential or customer satisfaction with your responses? Look how much damage responses like “No problem” generates within a buyer.

What did it cost that equipment dealer to get my friend’s tractor up and running faster than he expected?
I bet it was because that dealer invested in a fleet of in-field service trucks and trained technicians. They also carried more spare parts inventory and did more training of their service team than their competitors. And I bet the reason they invested in all this extra service and support was so they could increase their competitive advantage within their markets allowing them to charge a higher price and still win the majority of the business.

But after this dealer made all of these investments to increase their value and uniqueness…it all got discarded by the service tech responding to a thank you for a great job with “No problem!”

And this is not just a local problem with us here in the United States, or even North America. I recently had the opportunity to visit Helsinki Finland, Paris France and London England, and heard the response several times of “No problem” in all three cities.

So…is this “No problem!” problem a problem with your sales and support teams?

Some suggestions…

The first idea or suggestion is to make your entire team aware of how damaging responding with “No problem!” is to your business, your brand, and your value and uniqueness in your markets. Every time someone now tells me “No problem!” I immediately respond with, “You mean there’s no value.”

The second suggestion is to get your management team to commit to stopping this negative selling language within your company. Just making your people aware of the damage this type of “No problem” response generates is not enough. Stopping this language within your company team will require you to break people’s habits, and that takes both time and the attention of all your managers to listen for and coach your people into giving more positive selling responses instead.

So what’s a good response to give a customer instead of saying “No problem?” Well, just about anything said will likely be more positive. But if a customer thanks you for your fast service times, like my farmer friend told his tractor service tech, the simplest response could have just been saying “Thank you!” A more persuasive and proactive response might be to say “Thanks for noticing how fast we work, we think it’s one of the reasons our customer’s keep using our service and buying from us.”

The reality of customers is they tend to evaluate all vendors based on the mistakes or weakest things we have (or haven’t) done for them lately, not based on the strongest or best things we’ve done. An important part of success in selling today is to minimize, repair or improve the weaknesses that exist within your company and customer support efforts so your true value and competitive strengths can be seen and understood.

The reality of driving any change within an organization is that it takes time, attention, and repetitive feedback and coaching in a positive environment to actually make long-term changes to the selling habits of your team.

The goal is to coach all members of your team; your managers, drivers, administrative people, ordering or parts counter staff, service techs and all sales people, to respond to any opportunity by saying something positive that’ll affirm and reinforce your uniqueness and brand. Remember that branding is predictability. The more consistent your responses to a customer then the more consistency and predictability they’ll hopefully see in your products or services and buying from you.

After all, we know you’re good…now the question is….are you and all the members of your sales and support teams good enough, and persuasive enough to not respond to a customer by saying “No problem!”? Instead use that opportunity to increase your value, your uniqueness, and your brand in the eyes of your customers and prospects.

Jim Pancero

“You Can Always Sell More by Becoming More of A ‘Managing Manager”

Are your salespeople maximizing all of the selling opportunities available in your markets? How are you, as their sales manager, contributing to their selling success and profitability? What “management style” do you utilize to lead your sales team?

There are two basic managerial styles or philosophies of leading a sales team. You can manage and lead as a “Doing” Manager or as a “Managing Manager.”

Are You A “Doing” Manager?

The majority of sales managers only function as “Doing” managers. A “Doing” sales manager is a manager who has multiple responsibilities other than managing and leading a sales team. There are three major categories of “Doing” sales managers:

- A Selling Sales Manager - This is someone who splits their time between functioning as a salesperson and acting as a sales manager to other salespeople. A “Selling Sales Manager” spends part of their time selling their own customers and the rest supporting the salespeople reporting to them. A “Selling Sales Manager” normally handles the largest (or most important) accounts and is the busiest member of the sales team. This is the most common type of “Doing” Manager within most “business to business” distribution companies.

- A Full Time “Take Over” Sales Manager - This sales manager sees themselves as a full time manager and leader but in reality is only functioning as the “Lead Doer.” Instead of coaching others on how to do things they would rather just do it themselves because they then know it will be done right. A “Take Over” Sales Manager on a sales call will take a sales call away from their sales rep and will do all the selling “because this account is just too important.” When coaching a salesperson, a “Take Over” Manager will just tell the rep exactly what to do instead of coaching the rep so they discover the best answer on their own.

- A Working Sales Manager - This position is normally only present in small companies where everyone handles a variety of jobs and responsibilities. These are the sales managers who split their time between managing their salespeople and working at some other task such as running a piece of equipment or running the entire company.

Do any of these “Doing” Manager profiles describe you and your management style? Though each management approach has a different set of problems, they all share the significant challenge of shifting their focus between successfully coaching and leading a sales team and handling another radically different responsibility of just feeling they should do everything themselves.

It’s hard to work for a “Doing” Manager. They tend to offer very little coaching or discussions of how to handle situations but instead jump in and take over what the salesperson is doing. If you ask a “Doing” Manager how to un-jam the office copier they’ll most likely just do it for you.

Have You Ever Been Trained As A Sales Manager?

The main reason most sales managers act as “Doing Managers” is they’ve never been formally trained in how to lead salespeople. Over 90% of all the sales managers I see in my programs have never attended even a full day of sales management training.

How did you become a sales manager? Most started off as salespeople and either out-sold or out-lasted the others to finally get promoted to sales manager. And why were you so successful as a salesperson? Most likely it was because you were a “Super-Doer.” A “Super-Doer” is a sales rep who has learned it’s easier to just do everything themselves than it is to go through all the time and hassle to ask others for help. They survived under the maxim “If you want it done right, you might as well do it yourself.”

So now we take these successful “Super-Doers” and promote them to sales management but give them no training and very little coaching. So the first time one of your new reports brings you a problem how do you solve it? Well as a “Super-Doer” or “Take Over” Sales Manager of course and you just do it yourself.

It takes training to understand how to coach others on how to do something instead of just doing it for them. How much sales management training have you had on how to coach and lead others?

“You Can Always Sell More By Strengthening Your Listening Skills”

How good a listener are you? When I ask this question of experienced sales pro’s the overwhelming majority immediately identify they’re great listeners and identify their listening skills as one of the reasons for their long-term selling success. But the reality is significantly different for most salespeople, even the most experienced and successful ones.

The reality of selling is that most salespeople sell by talking. They do ask questions of their customers but usually only with the goals of first qualifying them to make sure they’re a viable prospect and then second, by asking them enough questions to learn and identify issues or customer “hot buttons” they can then sell to.

How interactive are your sales calls?

With over 28 years as a sales and sales management consultant I’ve had the opportunity to ride with a wide variety of salespeople to watch them sell. I’ve ridden with salespeople selling in distribution, manufacturing, capital equipment, agricultural, services and financial industries and the vast majority spent considerably more time talking than they did asking questions and listening.

There are two tests you can take to identify how much you actually talk with a prospect or client compared to listening to what they say.

The first test you can do alone. Next time you’re spending the day on the telephone talking with either new prospects or existing clients consider recording some of your phone calls. The goal of this recording is for you to go back later and listen to your call with a stop watch so you can time out exactly how many total minutes you talked during your call. You don’t need any fancy equipment to do this, any type of tape player or dictation recording device will work. You don’t even need to record both sides of your conversation, if you just record your side you can still time it out by assuming any silence was when the customer was talking.

Another way to discover how much you talk vs. listen during a sales call is to ask your manager or another sales rep to ride with you for the day. You can introduce them as an observer or down play their role so they’re not actively participating in the call. Ask them to bring along a stop watch and, while keeping the watch in their pocket and without the customer’s knowledge, they can now turn the watch on and off whenever your customer starts talking so you can get an accurate total of the minutes your customer actually talked. By the way, if you do this exercise make sure your stop watch makes no noise when you turn it on or off!

I’ve taken a stop watch on hundreds of sales calls I’ve ridden on. I never tell the rep until the end of the day I was even timing their calls. After the day of selling I’ll ask the rep how much of their calls they think they talked, most reps answer somewhere between 40 to 60%. But the stop watch identifies numbers that usually range in the 80 to 90 percentages. The majority of salespeople do all the talking on a sales call!

“You Can Always Sell More…By Helping Your Reps Shift From Being Intuitive To Being More Structured And Consistent In Their Selling Efforts”

Do you have professional salespeople on your team? Of course almost all sales managers would answer yes, even when it’s not really the correct answer.

What’s your definition of a professional? The best definition I’ve heard of a professional is based on their consistency of performance. Describing someone as a professional is also saying there’s an expectation that they, as a professional, will have a consistency in their ability to perform and produce. Do you want to increase your customer’s perceptions that your team members are professionals? Then we need to increase your sales team’s ability to consistently act and respond, following some type of pre-defined and tested structure or process. Without consistency there is no professionalism!

Selling Best Practices

Today’s quality programs call these pre-defined and tested structures or processes “best practices.” The goal of any “best practice” is to have a researched and proven system, process or structure that’ll help your people, when they follow your “best practice” to increase the consistency and ultimately the professionalism of their selling efforts.

Sadly though, most sales organizations have few “best practices” defined and in place for their sales team.

Defined “Best Practices” include identifying the steps of a sales call you and your team have found work best for your selling environment and customers. They also include defining the prospecting steps or “best practices” you follow, from the time you identify a new prospect until the time you close your first significant sale. What about the “best practices” you’ve defined to help maintain and grow your best accounts over a year?

An organized and focused sales team will function more like a police ‘SWAT’ team than as a bunch of independent gun fighters. ‘SWAT’ teams practice and rehearse to insure all understand and can immediately implement the “best practices” for any team action, and all members of a ‘SWAT’ team learn and benefit from any single individual’s mistakes or experiences.

But independent gun fighters, the philosophy of most sales team’s today, believe that each territory; each customer; and each sales rep’s style; are all so unique that it would be impossible to identify, much less follow, any consistent process or stepped structure.

How many “best practices” have you and your team defined, and an even more important question is, how many of your defined “best practices” are your sales team members tracking and following on any type of consistent basis?