Are they helping your sales performance or holding it back?
By Phil Krone, President
This column is inspired by Joe Hoyle, the popular accounting professor at the University of Richmond. Joe has recently blogged on LinkedIn that students hold themselves back by telling themselves negative stories. He encourages all students, even those getting As, to improve by changing the story they are telling themselves. He cites a few stories as examples of excuses students might give for not doing well in his accounting course:
- “I am not a good test-taker.”
- “I’m not good at math.”
- “I’m just not smart enough to do well in this course.”
- “I’m not going to get an A, so why should I try?”
Reading his post made me think about the stories I hear from salespeople that I believe are holding them back: Here are the quotes I hear followed by how we helped them change the story and win more business.
“My prospects just don’t get it.”
I have heard this complaint from many salespeople over the years and still do. This story tells me that the salesperson has a seller-centric sales process that relies on telling the prospect about the solution and expecting them to “get it.” In other words, an “all about me and my product or service” approach to selling. We change this seller-centric process to be prospect-centric, which enables the prospect to better appreciate the cost of the status quo and understand the value in our solution.
One client provided IBM with a new-to-the-world service; and that innovation led them to believe it would be easy to sell to others. For a year they told people about the solution and how much IBM loved it. This seller-centric approach resulted in no sales, not one. After we worked with them to switch their sales process from seller-centric to prospect-centric, they made two Fortune 500 sales within 90 days.
Here is another example of a story holding back growth:
“They have their own in-house system for finding billing errors. They don’t believe any outsiders could find any more.”
This one involved a client’s Texas hospital prospect that used its own original software to find billing errors. They wouldn’t let outsiders in to look for errors because it would be a waste of everybody’s time. The were certain that no outside system would be as good as their in-house system. Keep in mind our client’s business model was earning a fee on a portion of the savings so it would not cost the prospect anything to let us process their data. Watching our client try to make the case that his software would find things the in-house software missed, it became clear that the buyer was not going to change their mind.
I rebooted the meeting to focus on a different problem and asked our client’s prospect: Do you ever worry that because no outsider has looked at your system that, even though you might be billing the correct amounts, you are failing to meet compliance requirements? The prospect looked at me and said, “I worry about that all the time.”
With our help, our client got the business and guess what: our client did find errors the in-house system missed. We changed two stories here: 1) the prospect’s story from being about whose software was more accurate to … having a no-cost consultant review your procedures to report on compliance levels; and 2) the salesperson’s story that the hospital would never engage an outsider to review his billing. Actually we changed a third story: after we came back with the order, the owner of the firm laughed: “I specified that hospital for your audit of our salesperson because I knew there was no hope of making a sale. I wanted you to critique the sales process in an environment where we had nothing to lose.”
In a third example, the story the prospect is telling itself needs to be changed if the seller is not to be held back.
Our client is a commercial/industrial real estate broker that targets private equity firms. In this case the story that had to be revised was in the mind of the prospect, not the seller. Our client discovered that private equity firms rarely include real estate projects in their investment thesis because they believe real estate projects take too long to implement. They couldn’t be completed within the investment thesis timeline.
His objective was to persuade private equity firms that he had the capability to build new buildings; identify suitable existing buildings and provide upgrades, such as automation, if needed; and to do it all within the timeframes they required. We helped create a sales process that not only educated the private equity firms but also persuaded them that by not including real estate in the value creation process they were leaving millions of dollars on the table. The story they were telling themselves prevented them from realizing the true economic value of their investments.
Professor Hoyle quotes the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed: “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story.”
Call us at 847-446-0008 Ext. 1 to discuss how to change the stories you need to change to release sales growth: yours or those of your salespeople, your business development professionals—even of your prospects and customers. Or, email me directly at pkrone@productivestrategies.com.