3 Sales Shifts to Outpace the Industry: Positioning
At the recent ROI Leader Forum, I talked about vital shifts in sales processes and sales people that CEOs, presidents and business leaders must ensure their sales teams have the speed, agility and resilience to outpace their industry. In addition, it’s important to examine how your sales team is positioning your company’s solution when talking with 
prospects and clients.
As autumn approaches, those of us the Midwest will witness great flocks of Canadian geese flying south for the winter in their infamous V formation. Every time I see them, it reminds me that this is what I want on a sales staff. I want everything that we do to be purposefully, intentional, moving us toward our ultimate goal.
Scientists know that geese flying in this classic V formation with achieve a greater distance of 770% when flying in groups than each flying in solo, using the same amount of energy.
So, how does this V Principle apply to how your sales people are positioning your company?
Often I find that salespeople are unclear about the unique value that your solutions can bring. The unclarity slows down the entire sales process, using up valuable time and energy. Since prospects aren’t clear, there’s little response to the salesperson’s new business development or hunting efforts.
This lack of clarity then translates into a non-descriptive discovery and qualification process, leaving prospects thinking that you offer a commodity. Because of this commoditization, there’s no sense of urgency…..the decision can be delayed until the prospect can do a competitive face-off. So, closing takes forever. What causes the delay in hunting, qualifying and closing? Lack of understanding and/or confusion about what solutions you really provide.
Recently, we helped a client survey their sales people to determine if the sales team was in sync with the leadership and marketing team on Brand Promise, Value Proposition and Elevator Pitch. There were four separate Brand Promises that emerged from the sales staff:
28% We fit the highest level of technology.
15% We provide the highest level of professionalism.
34% We have the highest quality product and service.
23% We stand behind our product 100%.
With a confused sales staff, the market and clients will be confused also.
So, ensure your team is targeted, flying in formation when it comes to your positioning and messaging.
Sales Growth Question: What steps are you taking to ensure there’s clarity of message with your sales staff?
Sales Growth Lesson: Clarity of message ensures a straight-forward approach to achieving objectives.
To learn more about this please download a copy of my sales hiring assessments ebook.
© Copyright 2011, Danita Bye Sales Growth Specialists, All Rights Reserved.
3 Sales Shifts to Outpace the Market: People
At the recent ROI Leader Forum, I talked about vital shifts that CEOs, presidents and business leaders must make to ensure their sales teams have the speed, agility and resilience to outpace the market.
A friend of mine recently traveled to Finland. Being a great granddaughter of Finnish homesteaders, I asked him what four words captured the essence of the Finnish people. He said, “Humility. Intelligence. Determination. Resilience.”
I immediately recognized these as the same characteristics of top sales performers who WILL succeed in today’s unpredictable economic conditions.
Humility:
Top performers have a quiet confidence that allows them to quickly build trust with clients. They have the prospects/clients best interests in mind at all times without being arrogant.
Intelligence:
Selling complex, business-to-business, technology solutions that positions client companies to better serve their customers is an intellectually challenging task. Top performers know that they need to constantly improve their business acumen.
Determination:
Top performers access all resources at their disposal to accomplish a task. Sometimes it means that they need to learn new skills to stay current with technology and global competition. Other times it means shifting their sales strategy in order to win the business. Whatever is needed, they do it. Finns call this intense determination to accomplish your goals, SISU. (Read more about SISU here.)
Resilience:
My Finnish great grandparents who homesteaded this desolate part of North Dakota knew all about resilience. No matter how often they failed, they got up again. Resilience is a key characteristic for your entire sales team.
With all the changes happening economically, it’s imperative for a team to embrace the challenges, looking for the unique opportunity to help clients succeed in these unpredictable times.
What does your sales team look like? Do you have a team of status-quo players? Or, do you have a team that’s committed to thrive in the uncertain world that we’re facing?
Sales Growth Question: Do you have a status quo recovery team that will deliver yo-yo results matching the market? Or, do you have an Acceleration Team that can outpace the market?
Sales Growth Lesson: Having growth-oriented people on your sales team is a must in today’s unpredictable climate.
Survey: Take a quick, 7 minute survey to figure out what parts of your sales organization need to be honed in order to build that Acceleration Team: Sales Force Grader.
Comment from attendee at ROI Leader Forum: “I like how you broke down the sales process into small discrete steps and components. Too often it is viewed in a broad sweeping intuitive way, which is also helpful, but I like your more rigorous scientific approach. It helps me to understand the importance of process, people, and positioning.”
© Copyright 2011, Danita Bye Sales Growth Specialists, All Rights Reserved.
3 Sales Shifts to Outpace Your Competition: Sales Processes
What a great audience Friday morning at ROI Leadership Forum where we talked about Speed, Agility & Resilience: 3 Sales Shifts to Outpace, Outrun and Outmaneuver the Competition!
The topic is especially relevant in light of the renewed discussion about the next leg of the double dip. It’s difficult to predict the future; however, the discussion is a warning for us in business. We need to be asking ourselves whether we’re making the right investments, the right “sales shifts,” so that we can weather the economic uncertainties.
Here are 3 shifts that you can start making today:
Shift 1: Sales Processes
Ensure that you’re continuing to strengthen your sales processes. In our 2011 Strategic Sales Initiative Survey, we discovered the following:
- 73% of companies have no defined sales process
- 53% have no process to update strategic sales plans
- 77% have no defined sales coaching process
- 82% have no defined sales management process
It sounds dismal. However, there’s an important finding. Growth companies said that they did have these processes with 30% more frequency!
Here’s the point. Be intentional in shifting your sales processes into high gear. Here’s a sampling of processes to double check in your sales teams:
- Recruiting: Hiring Process, Termination, Expectations, Ramp Up, Onboarding
- Motivating: Compensation, Sales Meetings, Support Systems, Goal Alignment
- Coaching: Sales Performance, Training & Development, Pre-Call Coaching, Post-Call Debriefing, Pipeline Coaching
- Accountability: Tracking and Reports, Goal Setting, Meeting Rhythm, Execution of Automation
- Growth: Business Plan, Territory Management
Stay tuned for Shift 2 and 3.
What can you learn about growing a business or sales from riding motorcycle? Here are some of the ideas I got from friends, colleagues and clients in response to that question:
- Accelerate too fast and you quickly lose control. Mike Shannon, Axiom Experience
- Know when you should play it conservative and when you can open up full throttle. John Palen, Allied Executives
- Be acutely aware…all the time. Rocky LaGrone, My Professional Development
Sales Growth Question: What steps are you taking to shift your sales team into high gear?
Sales Growth Lesson: Successful selling starts with a strong sales process.
For more information on how you can measure if your current sales process are ready to weather the storm, take a quick 7 min. survey, the Sales Force Grader. The results will be emailed to you immediately.
© Copyright 2011, Danita Bye Sales Growth Specialists, All Rights Reserved.
Find and Leverage Sales and Leadership Talent
When the business landscape changes, many sales leaders try and carry on as business as usual. However, this is the wrong move; it leaves you vulnerable. Instead, this is the time to reassess your sales leadership and your sales team. In both cases, your goal is to reposition both skill sets and mindset for the emerging marketplace. That’s where assessments can be a tremendous value. They help you get a grip on the unique gifts and talents of your leadership and sales teams that you need to leverage moving forward. In addition, they can reveal weaknesses hidden that have potential to sabotage your effectiveness.
A proactive president of an engineering company that had been particularly hit hard by the recession assessed his leadership team using Key Management Dynamics. Through the leadership assessment process, he discovered a hidden asset; a person on his team assessed as an Innovator. However, this employee was rather shy and so didn’t often share his ideas with the group. Once the president knew of the hidden talent, he was able to intentionally access it. In their first meeting, they explored innovative options to regain market share.
As Kurlan reminds us: “Today more than ever, Executive Teams and Boards need to run on all cylinders, being more resourceful, creative, interactive, high powered, disciplined, compliant and effective than ever before.” To achieve this, sales teams must have both strength and the flexibility to adapt.
This summer, my family trekked to visit the Coastal Redwoods in Northern California. It was an awe-inspiring experience. Like a high-performance sales and leadership team, the Coastal Redwoods draw on different strengths under different conditions. For example, Redwoods are hollow underneath and they have no taproot. Their largest roots, only one inch in diameter, grow horizontally as opposed to vertically yet the tree stands strong. The interlocking of roots from multiple trees forms a web-like support system – like a strong team that succeeds by creating the right synergy. This support system prevents the trees from toppling over!
As sales leaders, we need to ensure that, like the Coastal Redwoods, we gather all the strengths and talents from our team members.
The Sales Growth Question: What sales and leadership talents are hidden, that if found and leveraged, could provide a needed competitive edge?
The Sales Growth Lesson: Tap the talents of your team.
If you’d like to find out more about our suite of sales assessments and leadership assessments, go to here.
Build Sales Team on Strengths
The numbers are surprising. Only 12% of workers are drawing on their strengths, according to strengths expert and leadership guru Marcus Buckingham. Put another way, 88% of your sales force’s sales potential is untapped. In today’s do-more-with-less marketplace, it is even more puzzling. Truth is, if you ask a sales leader to draw up a list of the sales team’s resources, the word ‘strengths’ will not appear. Sales organizations are very good at measuring revenue and sales ROI but not so good at defining strengths.
We take strengths for granted, says Buckingham, who emphasizes that individuals and teams who play to their strengths outperform the rest, the weaklings. How do you tap the other 88% of your sales force’s strength. If you can answer this question through sales evaluations, the high potential return on strengths-based sales assessments is evident.
I recently visited the Coastal Redwoods and learned a valuable lesson from the the long-living Sequoias in the importance of strengths identification. These majestic trees live for hundreds of years because they are built on rock, not sand. Their longevity is due to their strengths – heat shielding bark to stave off fire, poisonous chemicals to fend off termites and other tree pests and a networked root system that draws on the strength of other Redwoods.
Sales assessments are an important tool to identify the strengths of your sales team. It is important to assess and the strengths across the sales organization. In so doing, you’ll find your Achilles Heels-vital information to know when you’re in a growth track and taking market share.
Lesson: To ensure the longevity of your business, build your sales organization on rocks – the strengths of your sales force – not sand.
Question: How do you measure the strengths of your sales force? sales team? How do you find the Achilles Heels?
To learn more about how Sequoias inspire high performance sales and leadership, see the article Transformational Leadership: In Praise of Hardship and my eBook, Leadership Shift, Paradoxical Wisdom for Transformational Leaders during These Times of Change.
Sales Assessments should Measure Sales Attitude and Emotional IQ
As your hiring sales process gets wheedled down to five or ten candidates, a laser focus should be placed on organizational fit, cultural alignment, selling skills and attitude, or Emotional Intelligence.
Sales Attitude & Sales Emotional Intelligence
Emotional IQ, in particular, may not be getting the attention it deserves given its crucial role in today’s selling environment.
Review your sales management hiring processes and determine whether the attitudes, or Emotional IQ, of your sales force fit their roles.
A new study from the Center for Strategic Marketing and Sales at the Cranfield School of Management has revealed a misalignment in many sales forces. As B2B key account management evolves into sophisticated relationship management for both defensive and offensive purposes, it is more important to place more weight on sales attitude and sales emotional intelligence in your sales assessment process, concluded the study.
Sales attitude or Emotional Intelligence tells us a lot about how one processes information and behaves in the sales process. Take, for example, an unsubstantiated judgment on a delay in a sales close. The enthusiastic client is on vacation. The negative sales person, who misreads the situation, assumes the client is waffling. To save the sale, he sends some reinforcing literature, which instead raises doubts about product quality due to the over persistence.
The candidate you want is the one that has a strong Emotional Quotient and can clearly and accurately perceive and communicate with your most valuable prospects and clients, consistently delivering the sales performance you want.
I introduce a number of tools that can be used to assess the attitude or Emotional IQ of your sales hire in my new eBook, Measuring Sales DNA. Or, you can read “Hiring Sales People, A Grounded Approach to Hiring Sales People,” in the recently published Business Expert Guide to Small Business Success.
The Sales Lesson: The Emotional Intelligence of your sales hire has a critical impact on your sales team, selling process and sales performance.
The Sales Question: How do you measure Emotional IQ in your hiring sales process?
Plus, join me at the upcoming BEW Webinar entitled: Sales Hiring Strategies that Return High Sales ROI
Emotional or Rational Intelligence for Sales Leadership?
While I’m in Tanzania working with www.CheetahDevelopment.org, I’m asking trusted colleagues, clients and friends to share insights of building strong sales performance. Hope you enjoy!
In his ground-breaking 1996 book, “Emotional Intelligence”, the American psychologist Daniel Goleman explored the issue of personal and professional effectiveness. He argued that in a business world too often obsessed by cold analysis, the emotional climate is more important to the success of a leader than previously recognized.
At senior levels, ‘emotional intelligence’ rather than ‘rational intelligence’ marks out the true leader: “The qualities of leadership and the quality of the heart are largely the same”. This may explain why someone like Branson, who twice failed his elementary mathematics exam, can make a better leader than someone with a degree from Harvard Business School. Branson’s ‘emotional intelligence’ – his ‘people radar’ – is more keenly developed.
According to Goleman, studies of outstanding performers in organizations show that about two thirds of the abilities that set star performers apart in the leadership stakes are based on emotional intelligence. Only a third of the skills that matter relate to raw intelligence (as measured by IQ) and technical expertise.
“Our emotions are hardwired into our being,” Goleman explained. “The very architecture of the brain gives feelings priority over thought.” There is a sign in Harvard’s rat lab that says: “Rats under carefully controlled conditions will do any damned thing they please.” The same is true of human beings. Leaders ignore emotions at their perils.
Most important of all, the role of leaders in developing the next generation has too often been neglected. If we are to grow as a society, this must be the priority for the future. As Sir Adrian Cadbury, the former Head of Cadbury Schweppes, has observed: “Good leaders grow people, bad leaders stunt them; good leaders serve their followers, bad leaders enslave them”
Jonathan Farrington is a globally recognized business coach, mentor, author, consultant, and sales strategist, who has guided hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals around the world towards optimum performance levels. He is the CEO of Top Sales Associates, Chairman of The jf Corporation and Senior Partner at the JF Consultancy, based in London and Paris.
He also posts his highly popular daily blog for dedicated business professionals HERE.
To learn more about the importance of EQ in building high performance sales teams, you’re invited to get Leadership Shift, Paradoxical Wisdom for Transformational Leaders in These Times of Change.
Model Sales Talent DNA: Can You Buy or Build It?
In my new eBook, Measuring Sales DNA, I focus on the natural sales talents, those sales talents who have the traits of a high performance sales person in their DNA. Many highly successful people claim to have been born to be great at their respective talent — Babe Ruth and baseball, Luciano Pavarotti and opera.
When you pair this natural sales talent with the right sales job fit, sales can go out of the park. In the Measuring Sales DNA, we focus on how to develop a recruiting process with sales assessments that can identify the right Sales DNA for your sales culture. Additionally, the perfect Sales Gene should easily mutate to adapt to changing selling environments (see previous blog).
Given the high selling potential of the right Sales DNA, companies naturally want to know if they can develop and cultivate it. Can the right sales DNA be developed through sales training and coaching, or is it inborn? Should you only hire salespeople who were running profitable lemonade stands by the age of five? Or are late bloomers okay, too?
Karen Klein’s Bloombereg BusinessWeek column this week explores this very topic. She concludes that the traits of a “born entrepreneur” can be developed but those who lack the natural gift may have to work harder to develop them. Karen backs up her
position with a recently published Case Western study on twins and a related book, Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders. According to the research, 48 percent of entrepreneurship is “influenced by genetic factors.” Presumably, the other 52 percent can be trained.
According to management psychologist David Weiman, optimism and persistence — core Sales DNA material — can be learned. In the BusinessWeek column, he recommends several books for the task, including Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism.
In fact, Learned Optimism along with Feeling Good by Dr. Burns are some of my most highly recommended books.
Leadership Shift & Coffee
It must be the coffee.
Two years ago, I’m savoring my custom-designed blend of coffee at the Caribou on Bren Road in Hopkins while reflecting on the characteristics that I see in vibrant companies. I compare these observations with what I’m learning in my master’s program on transformational leadership. On a clean Caribou napkin, I thoughtfully sketch the core paradox of Sales Growth 
Specialists:
Discipline-Creativity
I observed this paradox while selling at Xerox, managing and leading at Micro-Tech and consulting with clients at Sales Growth Specialists. It seems that vibrant leaders are able to artfully hold these tensions in balance. I often find highly creative teams, flush with fresh ideas, unable to execute due to lack of discipline. Vice versa, I also find highly disciplined sales organizations that lack creativity, unable to maximize their talents. My conclusion is that resilient companies have strong leaders who balance the paradox, managing these polarities.
Maybe it’s the extra shot of caffeine that day, because it’s then that my brain goes into overdrive. I begin envisioning a host of other paradoxes. I race to write them on the Caribou napkin, filling up both sides with ink.
These five leadership paradoxes, that started out as scribble, now form the foundation of Leadership Shift:
1. Instill Hopeful Realism
2. Manage in Synergy with Leadership
3. Cultivate Disciplined Creativity
4. Foster Collective Independence
5. Inspire Servant Leadership
During the uncertainty of 2010, I observe two other paradoxes that Make-It-Happen leaders balance and manage:
6. Nurture a Focus-Forward Culture
7. Capitalize on the Energy of Adversity
I invite you into dialogue over the next couple of weeks as we wrestle with these leadership ideas. I trust that this dialogue will inspire all of us to sharpen our leadership acumen so that we can continue to lead in uncertain times. I invite you to download and read Leadership Shift at your favorite Caribou.
How to grow your Sales with “SISU”
Got “Sisu?” What the Finnish teach us about Achieving Sales Results
I spent the weekend at the Hostfest in Minot, N.D., the largest Scandinavian festival in the United States. It was an incredible time watching the rosemaling (Norwegian rose painting), wood carving, silver crafting artisans; listening to the folk singers; dining in Oslo Hall; listening to some great musicians, country, bluegrass, The Oak Ridge Boys and Ray Stevens; and understanding my Finnish/Danish heritage.
However, the highlight of Hostfest was learning about the word,“sisu.”
Let me explain. I grew up in a Finnish community in North Dakota. And, yes, true to our heritage, we took saunas, not the wimpy saunas that you often find in North American hotels, but real saunas where we stoked the wood stove in order to get over 176 °F. Invigorating! Since we didn’t have the modern convenience of running water when I was a child, the every-Saturday-evening sauna was a “must” event, not a luxury. Little did I know that this half-a-football-field trek that we often took in the middle of snowstorms when it was 20 below zero and the wind was howling through the Knife River Valley was “sisu” training.
What’s sisu? It means unreasonable, uncompromising will, determination, perseverance, courage, tenacity, and persistence. You’ll want to read what Wikipedia has to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisu
As I reflected on sisu, I realized that this is the character trait that we want in our CEOs, presidents and sales management leaders, isn’t it? It’s also what we want in our salespeople: Unreasonable, uncompromising will, determination, perseverance, courage, tenacity, and persistence to accomplish the task, isn’t it?
The sales process tool that I’ve found comes closest to helping CEO, presidents and owners determine who on their sales teams have sisu and who can be counted on to grow sales even against difficult economic, market, or competitive pressure are the Sales Assessments done by the Objective Management Group. They have a Sales Evaluation by Objective Management Group and also a Sales Express Screen that helps identify sales candidates who can — and WILL — grow sales even during difficult times. Sales people who have sisu.
The Sales Lesson: To grow sales even during difficult times require salespeople with SISU. Sales Assessments will help you identify these people.
The Sales Question: Do you have sisu? Who on your leader team has sisu? What about your sales team?
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