Episode #323: Selling Is All About The Basics

We are starting the New Year and have we decided how we will start it? Are we going to just slide back into our old habits and pick up the threads of the deals we were working on before the break? Or are we going to do some fresh thinking about what we are doing and how we are doing it? As salespeople, we are all massively time poor. That sets off a series of decisions where we are constantly cutting corners to shave off some time. Unfortunately we also shave off some activities we shouldn’t be minimising. Deciding how we are going to work as a professional this year is a good discipline.

Selling has some very consistent requirements. There are the basics and they must be perfected. When we sit back and look at our activities and behavior, we are bound to find areas where we have deleted necessary activities or truncated them. As we get back to work we need to make a commitment to ourselves to become more professional this year, than the level we achieved last year.

That means studying the art of sales. We need to break it all down and minutely examine what we are doing at each stage of the sales cycle. We are reading what other sales leaders are doing, searching for ideas and new information. Business is in a constant flux and technology is a tremendous enabler of business. What have been the latest advances and how can we adopt these into the sale’s process?

Habits are both great and dangerous. Poor habits need to be eliminated and replaced with better habits. Changing a habit however needs a tremendous amount of lifting to get it done. The rationale has to be very strong, otherwise we won’t sustain the effort needed. Exactly what better or new habits do we want to introduce and what is our strategy to make them stick. Just wishing that habits improve is delusional, because nothing will change without some application of dynamite to blow up the bad habits. We need a plan that works.

Are we tracking our activities? Probably we did this when we started in sales, but as we become more comfortable with the sales process we stop bothering. This is a good time to do an audit of how we spend our time and where we are prioritizing our activities Some activities are nice to haves but are starving the must haves for our attention. We need to strip everything back to the basics and look at what we are actually doing as opposed to what we think we are doing.

We have a scary matrix we employ which is always shocking when we investigate the results. We all know it is better to expand the sales with an existing client because it so much cheaper and faster than finding a brand new client. However, do we actually do that or are we stuck in first gear with just the one solution being applied to this client? The matrix is a simple one. Along the top we write in the solution lineup we have. In our case it would be all of the key courses we can offer clients. Down the left side we write in the names of the different clients we serve. The cells are then marked to show the match of what we are selling to the client today. What we quickly realise is we have a lot more solutions this client needs, but we haven’t been promoting them enough.

We get into a habit with this client and they also pigeon hole us into the one slot as well and don’t see us as agile and able to serve them in more that just the current manner. Maybe when we raised the possibility of doing more for them, there wasn’t that need, but business constantly moves and things change. There is nothing more frustrating than discovering the client has gone elsewhere to seek a solution you could have provided them.

We can’t blame the client, because our job is sales and we weren’t able to escape the gravitational pull of our old habits and change the conversation to include more solutions from us for them.

Are we tracking the breakdown of where things went well or went badly? The sales cycle has a cadence and there are bottlenecks we must clear to advance the sale. Do we have a big enough pipeline? If we don't, how have our cold calling efforts fared? How well have we been able to network during Covid? How well have we designed our first interaction with buyer? How many of these initial touches with the client resulted in a sales conversation? Was it online or in person and what was the difference in terms of results? How good a job did we do on uncovering their needs and understanding their motivations and desires for the firm? Did we match up our solution with their need correctly.

What objections or hesitations did we get and why? Was it a mismatch because we didn’t fully understand their needs? Could we flush out the real objection or we were we stuck with the top of the iceberg and missing the real problem under the waterline? Could we close the sale and get the deal done? What were the ratios at each stage of the sales conversation? Could we then flag an area of particular weakness, so that we could work on that area more?

Basics are the foundation of success in sales but so often we forget this and carry on regardless. There is a cost to that philosophy and we will do much better if we focus on making sure the basics are sound and then build on to top of that solid platform.