Biz fundamentals (4of 5) Sales Development

The three themes we have explored in this series have been several profound concepts that work to guarantee a healthy organization. A start up business relies on the business fundamentals to acquire customers; this is a wonderful beginning toward positive cash flow.

The Summary:

1. Your Offering

This is where business begins. The principle describes concepts intended to assist the professional in creating what an organization will take to market.

2. Your Marketing Message

The value proposition describes the relevance of the offering. In the blog entry I provide a list of questions that work to assist an entrepreneur in creating and refining a marketing message.

3. Lead Generation

Demand generation is the entry point into your market. In this third step I provide concepts that range from considering your value add to organizing an effective lead generation campaign.

The Doctrine:

The sales development ideas that will be presented have assisted millions of professionals in developing effective sales funnels and in turn have contributed to the world’s largest organizations. There are four sales mythologies I draw my ideals from: strategic selling, conceptual selling, spin selling, and solution selling.

Intro To Sales Development:

Sales development is the understanding and application of effective organizational behavioral principles. In order to be an effective sales person we need to question our habitual behavior and question its effectiveness against an effective mental model. This entry is by no means a holistic view of sales. It does provide insight that will assist executives in being more productive sales professionals. The executives who must move their products or services have an opportunity to transform their businesses; as long as enough funding is present for the next three to five years.

In this discussion I will provide you with principles and guidelines regarding sales development. I want to ask in return for you to read over these principles more than once and decide on the implications they can have on your business and document your thoughts. This call to action will cause you to think of how you should position yourself.

Posturing:

I recommend planning for long-term sales success. Your mind set should embrace a long-term perspective and focus; this means that you must consistently learn and apply proven principles that will increase your chances for the sales.

The First Rule of Business:

If You’re Competent At Sales, You Will Never Have To Sell Again.

One of the first obstacles you have in business is to generate enough sales to create positive cash flow and to invest in human capital. Business professionals need to create an infrastructure that will be self sustaining. As a business owner you must, you must, you must be able to replace yourself as the sales person and to promote yourself to a strategic marketing role.

The Four Golden Rules for Learning Skills:
(Neil Rackham)

Why do people find it so difficult to learn skills? It’s not just because of the hard work, for we’re accustomed to putting work into learning new knowledge. You’ve demonstrated the ability to work hard already through the time and energy you’ve invested in acquiring knowledge about how to sell. Yet I wonder how many readers will invest an equivalent amount of short in turning their knowledge into practice. The sad fact is that we generally work harder and more effectively to learn knowledge than to translate our knowledge into skills. Perhaps entelechy [en-tel-uh-kee] is such a rare word because it refers to something we so rarely do.

It’s my personal belief that the main reason why people have such trouble improving their skills is that they’ve never thought about the basic techniques of skill learning. At school our success depended on the development techniques for learning knowledge and most of us got quite good at it. But what did school do to help us learn skills systematically? With the exception for sports the answer for most people is little or nothing. So before I talk about what skill you should practice it will be useful to begin with how. How can you learn any skill efficiently with minimum pain?

Rule 1: Practice Only One Behavior at a Time

Most people when they work on improving their skills try to do too much at once. I can imagine people going through sales training and saying, “I’m going to cut out closing techniques, and in the future I’ll ask more problem questions. Then, instead of jumping in with solutions which is what I usually do I’ll hold back and ask implication questions…Oh, and need-payoff questions too, of course. And I’ll also work on avoiding features and advantages’ instead; I’ll make more benefits and STOP! If that‘s how you’re thinking, than in terms of learning you’re dead. People who are successful in learning complex skills do so by practicing one behavior at a time-not by half practicing two and certainly not by trying to handle 10 at once.

Rule 2: Try the new behavior

The first time you try anything new, it’s bound to feel uncomfortable. It’s not only new shoes that hurt at first. Suppose, for example you decide to practice implication questions. You’re e keeping rule 1 in mind, so you’re going to concentrate on only one which is implication questions and not on any other behaviors we’ve covered. Off you go into a call. Do the new implications questions roll off your tongue in a smooth, convincing sequence? Not on your life! When you ask them you sound self conscious, artificial, and awkward and because of this, you don’t make a particularly positive impression on the customer. After the call if you’re like most people we’ve trained, you’re tempted to conclude that implications questions didn’t help you sell so you’d better drop them and try something different next call.

Rule3: Quantity before Quality

Remember the old fashioned way to learn a foreign language? You try to say a few words. “no,” says your teacher, ‘that’s the incorrect tense you should be using pluperfect’. You try again “wrong,” the teacher warns you “you’ve go the tense right, but this is an irregular verb.” With some nervousness you make a third attempt. ‘No’ you teacher tells you “this time the tense is right and verb is right, but your pronunciation is terrible’ Notice that every one of the teachers comments is about the quality of your skill. Many of us struggle for years to learn a language this way. At the end of it we were able hesitantly but correctly, to pronounce a few sentences with the right verbs, tenses and word orders. Most of us never reached the point, despite several years of emphasis on quality where we could speak the language confidently and comfortably.

In contrast, let’s look at modern language training. Students are told “never mind” about pronunciation and don’t worry about tense. For now word order doesn’t matter and we don’t care if you forget the differences between regular and irregular verbs. The only thing we want you to do is peak it, speak it, and speak it. ‘The emphasis in other words is on quantity rather than quality taking a lot of more important than talking well. Many convincing experiments have shown that this approach which puts emphasis on quantity of speech can greatly speed the earning of language skills. At the end of a single year, student are talking the new language more confidently than those who have spent 5 times as long learning in the old quality first manner. What’s more surprising is that by talking the language a lot the quality has improved too. In fact the correctness of language measured pronunciation and grammar test, is high in those taught by quality approach than in those taught by the older quality methods so in languages as training at least speaking it a lot. The same goes for learning sales skills.

Rule 4: Practice in Safe Situations

I once ran a negotiating skills program for company presidents. On the last day one of the participants asked me an innocent sounding question. “Tomorrow” he explained, “I’ll be going into the biggest negotiation of my career- I’m selling my company. What lesson from this program should I concentrate on during the negotiation?” I think my answer shocked him. “Forget every single thing you’ve heard on this program”, I advised him; “otherwise you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting you came here.”

Let me give you some similar advice. If you’ve heard application principles and are about to go visit your most important account than forget everything I’ve told you. It’s a strange quirk of human nature that we usually try to practice new skills in key situations, those important enough to justify the effort of trying something new. This is a terrible mistake. As we’ve seen, new skills are uncomfortable and awkward. They may even have a negative effect on the customers if you try them out in crucial situations, than you’re likely to be unsuccessful. Suppose you’ve decided to ask more need-payoff questions. Don’t practice on your biggest account. Instead begin with small accounts, or with customers you know well, or in areas where you’ve nothing to lose if you fail.

So expect a dip in your productivity as you try to use these however, what will soon happen is that your productivity and results will sky rocket higher than they have previously.

To be continued….