What makes a good salesperson? Are there best practices? Will there be a drop in sales jobs 10 years from now?
Was your first instinct to interject a laundry list of cookie-cutter responses before reading all of the questions? If so, your ambitions of becoming a sales rockstar will never come to fruition. Potential customers want listeners. Say too much or make one wrong move and you won't even get as far as a rejection. Instead, you'll be privy to the harmonious sound of a slamming telephone.
Seasoned sales professionals already know this, and the successful ones are masters at restraining the "Me, Me, Me" impulse. Nevertheless, they all got their start somewhere and generally are filled with interesting stories. So, listen up.
Linda Bishop began her sales career after leaving her job as an estimator. For 17 years, she sold printing for a company called IPD, which now is a part of the RR Donnelley organization. During her time there, Bishop's sales skyrocketed from $0 to more than $9 million annually. She wasn't born knowing how to cold call, but practiced until it became natural.
"Early on, I stumbled through a cold call with a prospect. She was the main buyer at a big bank. When I asked her if she ever heard of my company, she said, 'Yes. I heard you're expensive and slow.' I didn't have a clue how to reply to that, so I asked for a meeting, and was shocked when she said yes," Bishop recalled. "That moment taught me bad cold calls sometimes work out and bad cold calls are always better than no cold calls when it comes to getting appointments."
Approximately 10 years ago, Bishop took an early retirement to pursue writing and she eventually started Thought Transformation, a national sales and marketing consulting company. However, she couldn't stay out of the sales game for long after observing the business strategies of her client, Atlanta-based Standard Press.
Under the ownership of Andy Shulman, Standard Press represented everything Bishop thought a printer should be in order to survive in the 21st century. While her consulting ventures enabled Bishop to work with a lot of great people such as Shulman, they prevented her from directly driving any change. It simply wasn't enough for her to give advice; Bishop wanted to be "personally responsible for results." Today, she is the executive vice president/marketing strategist for Standard Press and is trying to morph Thought Transformation into an online sales training solution.
Bill Farquharson, president of Aspire For, had a slightly different journey. He received the best piece of sales advice ever from his big brother, Andy.
"I was right out of college and still in 'party mode,'" Farquharson said. "Andy advised me to set a goal of 18 months of hard work. He told me to study the craft of sales. He told me not to focus on the results, but the activities. He told me, and I quote, to 'Work your tail off for 18 months, little brother, and you'll set yourself up for five years of success.'"
Farquharson listened and it paid off. Looking back on his 30-year sales career, Farquharson considers himself a "classically trained" salesperson. In other words, the company he worked for right out of college was "steeped in the fundamentals." He's done it all from selling in the business forms industry to switching over to print sales and later digital print sales to coaching and training.
Bishop and Farquharson are equally qualified to impart sales knowledge to beginners or those simply looking to sharpen their skills. Still, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to selling—and they are not exempt from this understood rule. With that in mind, salespeople need to think critically about how they work.
Bishop believes in what she calls "intelligence persistence."
"To succeed, you need to get enough meetings to get enough opportunities to close enough deals. To do that, you need to combine the practice of fundamentals with a willingness to try new things (and be uncomfortable while you learn) and always, always look for smarter ways to use time," she stressed. "It can take just as long to sell a client who buys little as it does to sell a client who is an 'A-lister' buying a lot."
Farquharson follows the selling motto of his previous employer, UARCO Business Forms: "Solve the problem, Earn the order." This idea requires salespeople to look past the product and, instead, understand the needs of the customer.
"I am a pretty simple guy and that is a pretty simple way of looking at things. Dale Carnegie said it perfectly, 'You can get what you want when you figure out what the other guy wants and help him to get it,'" Farquharson commented.
He added, "Once you see yourself as a craftsman and recognize the fact that you have a toolbox, you come to realize that you must discover the need before you know which tool to use."
Farquharson stressed the importance of listening. Many salespeople need to stop "selling" and realize that the process does not revolve around them, their products or their services. They should really be concentrating on customer needs and solving problems.
"The customer will tell you everything you need to know if you learn to ask questions, to not interrupt and to do more listening than talking," he explained. "When I'm on the phone with the salesperson [who] is breaking these rules, the conversation is over. I find it very disrespectful to be interrupted, especially when it happens on multiple occasions."
Bishop sees too many salespeople failing to properly follow up with potential clients. She has learned that few clients buy after one call and her policy is to see people five times.
"If you haven't received a chance to bid on an opportunity by the fifth call, ask for what you want. If a lot of time stretches out between calls, send articles, send samples. Printed samples were effective 20 years ago when I was selling, and they still work today because they demonstrate quality and are a simple way to 'drop a name' into a sales cycle," Bishop noted.
Cold calling is another old school technique that can be effective with the right system in place. Salespeople have to make enough dials to connect with the busy marketer they're trying to reach. Although nothing is guaranteed, Bishop suggested calling prospects eight to 12 times. If you're just starting out, make a list of 100 prospects and make at least 100 calls per week.
"If you do nothing but dial the phone with the same basic message, you can call about 20 people in an hour. You can contact a prospect twice a week without being obtrusive, so you could call twice, or call and e-mail. When you e-mail twice, prospects can feel 'over-contacted' because they are already coping with so many e-mails," Bishop instructed.
Farquharson said a new sales rep should be approaching 10 new prospects (i.e., people, not companies) per week. "It's been my experience that if you prospect those 10 every week for a month, you will not make contact with 20 [percent] to 40 percent of them. Those names should be put on a separate list for monthly or bi-monthly contact as you have built up 'sales equity' with them," he remarked.
Bishop also said that if you are forced to leave a voicemail, make it count by leaving a compelling message no longer that 20 to 30 seconds. "A good message is clear, concise and gives someone a real benefit and reason to call you—or talk when you call back. A bad message is fuzzy, rambling, too long, too vague, too mushy."
Farquharson agreed that a voicemail should be valuable; otherwise, it "will and should be" deleted.
"The value of the call (that is, the quality of the message) will dictate whether this cold call is a waste of everyone's time," he said. "If you are calling me to sell print, you're just like everyone else. Go away. If, however, you are calling to help me grow my business, I'm in! When can we get together?"
He continued, "A print buyer e-mailed me once with an interesting comment: 'I get 60 voicemail messages a day. If I gave everyone five minutes of my time, that would be five hours a day spent just returning calls. So, I go through the voicemail messages one by one. If they talk about saving me money, I delete them immediately. The ones that get my attention are the ones that offer to save me time. Time is what I value the most.'"
Finally, there is still something to be said for plant visits. Bishop views them as a buying signal since they require a time investment on the prospect's part. Farquharson thinks a plant visit is a good idea if the plant is worth visiting. Is it clean and presentable? Will it make a good impression on the client?
With 2013 around the corner, new techniques will be introduced while older techniques will become irrelevant. Regardless, several traditional sales approaches have carved a permanent niche across all industries.
Perhaps Farquharson summed it up best. "The most important factor in gaining appointments, and therefore to growing your sales, is diligence. There is nothing more 'old school' or fundamental as that," he insisted. "The diligent succeed 100 percent of the time."