Over the last year, I have interviewed over 100 salespeople on behalf of our clients.   I asked every one of them at the onset to describe their sales approach or methodology.   In over 85% of cases, the candidate replied with some form of “I am a consultative salesperson!”

In light of the 93,000 articles that have recently been written about the importance of consultative selling and the enormous impact it has in today’s selling environment, I would fully expect any sales candidate that hasn’t been living in isolation to say they sell consultatively.  Step One—Correct Answer!

Unfortunately, after 15 minutes of dialogue with each of these “consultative” salespeople, less than 15% of all candidates asked 3 or more questions!!!  In fact, the vast majority hung up the phone without learning a thing about what I was looking for, why I was talking with them, what success looked like, my role in the hiring decision, or any other vital information.   So much for being consultative…

A few quick facts…:

1.       Talking about consultative selling and actually selling consultatively are two completely different things.  It doesn’t matter if you can say it.   It only matters if you can do it.

2.       Consultative selling mandates that a salesperson ask critical, timely, tough questions.

3.       It also requires pushing back and challenging when 1+1 does not equal 2, in an assertive, yet respectful, manner. 

4.       The VAST majority of salespeople fail here, not because the questions are difficult, but because the questions cannot be scripted in advance.

A salesperson’s questions should almost always result directly from the prospect’s most recent response.  This is where the problem usually begins.   If you are one of those individuals who resembles my remarks and wishes to stop fooling yourself into believing you are selling consultatively, here are several critical personal attributes necessary to begin walking your talk and selling much more effectively.

Child-like Curiosity:  Consultative salespeople behave much more like children than like experts, continually challenging their own assumptions and asking their prospects to tell them more about what they are hearing.  Weak salespeople rarely ask prospects to explain anything.

Sincere Interest:   Don’t act sincerely interested, BE sincerely interested.

Listening:  Many salespeople lack even the most primary listening skills.  Listening skills can be developed, but the journey must begin by being honest with oneself.   Start by asking:  “Am I really listening, or simply waiting to talk?”

Unselfishness:    Many people, and most salespeople, find it very difficult to focus entirely on what someone else is saying without reacting emotionally about how the words affect themselves.  A ME-centered salesperson will never hear everything their prospects are really telling them.

Patience:  Salespeople cannot wait to talk about what they sell and how it helps.  Consequently, they avoid asking more questions for fear that doing so may delay their presentation, demo, or proposal.   These weak salespeople feel better talking about how great they are because they are more confident in their ability to talk, present, and pitch than in their ability to ask, listen, and learn.  This dysfunctional cycle actually moves them backwards instead of forward.  Effective salespeople slow down and go much deeper and wider with their discovery and investigations.   Believe it or not, this actually saves them time.

MORE Patience: - Part of the reason that most of the candidates told me they are selling consultatively is that they actually believe it!   They believe they are selling consultatively when they have asked a few questions.  Unfortunately for them, they aren’t even scratching the surface until they’ve asked 3 to 4 dozen of them.  And these are NOT scripted questions, rehearsed or recited from a list.  We are talking here about 40 or 50 spontaneous, inquisitive, thought-provoking follow-up questions to one, or perhaps two opening questions the salesperson asked during the first few minutes.

You’ll notice that each of the items I’ve listed here are foundational qualities of mindset, choice and attitude, versus manipulative tactics or techniques.  Each item can be developed and dramatically improved via an honest self-assessment, a commitment, and some recurrent practice.  You can quickly accelerate your development by associating with a coach and peer group.

Enjoy the Journey…

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2019.   All Rights Reserved.

In late 2018, Salesforce.com published its third annual State of Sales report.   Among other interesting facts, the research report concluded that 57% of salespeople expected to miss their annual quota.   Various other studies have reported success rates even worse.  In the past, Salesforce has reported that 77% expect to miss their goal.  Think about that—3 of every 4 reps will fail.   Independent of the data you choose to believe, the odds say that you are likely to fail as well.

With all of the books, articles, podcasts, videos, and training programs available to salespeople today, how can the success rates be so pathetic?  Can you think of any other profession (or other departments in your company) where performance is so weak?

Having run a Sales Development company for over two decades, these results do not surprise me.  What does continue to surprise me is the willingness among some salespeople (and business owners) to continue to tolerate this pathetic level of performance.  Most continue to try the same approach and expect a different result.   Good luck to that.

If you have already cracked the code to consistent selling effectiveness, congratulations!   If not, please understand that sales success is not complicated.   It is extremely formulaic and relatively simple, but it isn’t easy.   However, for many people (aka:  the two thirds that are consistently failing) it does require a commitment to change.

Change takes courage.   If you have the courage to commit to changing, here are just a few things to consider to tip the odds of sales success in your favor and begin your transformation.  There is nothing magic here and I’ve written about this before.   You may have heard similar recommendations for improving sales effectiveness elsewhere, but knowing and not doing is not really knowing, right?

1.   If you don’t have a Sales Process, adopt an effective one:  A process is not a strategy, a model, an approach, or a philosophy.  It is a specific series of steps that leads to a result. 

a.     Hint #1:  less than 5% of private companies have any sales process.

b.     Hint #2:  If you can’t describe your sales process in detail, and if all of your salespeople wouldn’t describe it exactly like you do, you don’t have one.

2.   Adopt an effective Sales Management Process:   If you are serious about maximizing sales success and ROI, effective management is vital.   Selling is a performance/production activity, and all effective result-producers need a coach.   Even if you have only one salesperson in your company, effective sales management will pay huge dividends.   This doesn’t mean that you need to hire a full-time sales manager, but it does mean that a portion of someone’s time must be dedicated to helping your salesperson/salespeople optimize.   Sales management is NOT about rescuing, closing the big-deals, or doing ride-alongs.   It is about coaching, motivating, developing, keeping salespeople on task, and holding them accountable to their weekly activity and pipeline commitments.   The lack of effective sales management in private companies is staggering.   In fact, many private companies don’t even attempt to manage their salespeople.  They just equip their sales reps with some product training, then send them out to sink or swim.  Again, good luck to that.   Talk about a strategy of hope…   

3.   Adopt an effective Locate, Land, and Launch™ Process:  Effective salespeople are scarce, and the cost of hiring weak salespeople is outrageous.   Despite this fact, many business owners, unfortunately, would rather pay taxes or get their teeth pulled than go through the “painful” process of hiring, on-boarding, and developing effective salespeople.   Consequently, most owners don’t do it well.  Most simply don’t know how to do recruit, hire, and launch salespeople, others don’t devote sufficient resources to making it happen because of “other really important projects”.    If you are an owner that has more important projects to focus upon than those that will grow your revenues, market share, profitability, and enterprise value, feel free to join this group of non-performing sales organizations.

4.    It OK to say “I don’t know how…”:   If you are like many business owners, you may feel that selling directly, or building a consistent, predictable, scalable sales organization simply isn’t your strongest suit.   You are in business today because you do some things well, but none of us does everything well.   So if selling effectively, or hiring, on-boarding, developing, and growing a great sales team is not your best talent, there is a ton of help out there, ranging from training and coaching to interim sales management & leadership.

5.   The choice is yours:   Again, there is no magic here and the odds say you’ll fail if you behave like the majority.  Any business owner (whether they are proficient in building sales teams or not) can dramatically upgrade their sales organizations by virtue of single decision to commit and change.

So the “secret” of successful sales organizations is really not a secret.   Sales success may be determined solely by virtue of a choice.   You can do anything, but you can’t do everything, so I hope you’ll choose wisely.

Best wishes for the most successful 2019!

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2019.   All Rights Reserved.

Stop Lying to yourself in 2019.  PLEASE.

Most people have a good heart and want to do the right thing.   They do their best to be truthful in their dialogue and interactions with others.

Unfortunately, research shows we do not tend to be so honest with ourselves.   Our self-talk is loaded with piles of BS.

Our internal conversations have enormous ramifications on the level of our performance.   Simply, your self-talk ultimately determines your actions, achievement, and growth.   It controls your personal and business success.

We all have many motivations to lie to ourselves.   We lie to satisfy our psychological needs, avoid pain, stay in our comfort zone, and remain confident in our personal abilities.   We lie to feel better.   

Unfortunately, these lies drive us to consistently make unskillful decisions.  

By lying, we sacrifice our long-term needs in order to fulfill our short-term desires. 

The psychological motivations here are deep-rooted and strong, so overcoming the desire to maintain false beliefs and deny reality requires courage and commitment.

Our self-talk controls our choices and behavior.  So if we don’t make ourselves acutely aware of our lies and commit to an intentional process to prevent them from dictating our actions, we will continue to BS our way into poor decision-making, missing our goals and aspirations and falling far short of our potential.    We become ineffective robots.

In other words, productivity and effectiveness are a 100% function of our self-talk.   If you have the courage to totally transform your personal and business performance, you can do so by adopting a process to improve your truthfulness.    The resulting actions will elevate you to much higher levels of personal freedom and happiness.  

Executives share their internal lies with me all the time.  I’m sure you hear them as well.   Here are just a few examples of some destructive self-talk I continually hear from well-intentioned business owners:

·         “I would do that, but I can’t because…”

·         “If I could only ________, then my life would be fantastic.”

·         “If I do __________, people might think I’m nuts (or dumb, or arrogant,…).”

·         “I would change, but I can’t do it because of ________ .”

·         “I know what I’m doing.”

and I’m sure you’ve heard this popular diddy…

·         “I’m really busy right now, but I’ll get to it next quarter when I’ll have more time…”

This last lie is one of the most destructive because it continues to feed upon itself, taking the liar deeper and deeper into the un-productive abyss.  

You might notice that people who tell you how busy they are tend to always be busy.  Most are never able to escape their shackles.

A person’s self-talk creates their busy-ness.   So without changing their BS, they will continue to make choices that create busy activities instead of productive ones.

Most honest people would agree that Busy-ness is not success or freedom, but simply a lack of priority.  As with all self-lying, the Busy Lie mortgages long-term happiness for near-term emotional gain.  And the mortgage interest rate is astronomical…

A business owner can do anything, but cannot do everything.  One can choose to be busy, or choose to be effective.   But not both…

Being truthful with oneself is a life-long journey.   The process is not easy (especially if you try to go it alone).   But the process is fairly simple.   Here are the steps…:

1.      Muster up the courage, then COMMIT to a process of BS elimination.

2.      If you don’t have a coach, find an accountability partner – someone who will agree to talk with you frequently to call you on your BS and resulting choices and actions.  

3.      Find yourself a peer group.  Remember, this process will take courage.  Peers will keep you on course, drive your accountability up a notch, unearth hidden self-lies, help you generate new effectiveness insights, make better decisions, and much more.

4.      Tell EVERYONE you know that you have committed to this new process.  The more people that know, the less likely you are to bail out.

5.      Decide what you REALLY want (since you won’t be lying to yourself anymore, you’ll be much more likely to earn it!)

6.      Set specific goals and make a plan to achieve them.   Share your new plan with your partner and peer group for advice, council, and insight.

7.      Be humble.   Ask yourself what lies you are telling yourself today (use the examples above as a starting point).

8.      Stay the course and continue the process.  Doing so will make BS-elimination a productivity habit.    

When I founded Z3 Performance Development 21 years ago, I did so to help private business owners find Freedom through Results, Results through Responsibility…™

During that time, I have observed honest self-conversation transform the lives of hundreds of owners.  It lies at the core of performance transformation.

I sincerely hope you will adopt this process, leading to a much more effective and prosperous 2019 and beyond.

If you have any questions or want to share anything about your journey or success, please email me.   I would love to hear from you.

Cheers and Best Wishes for a Prosperous and Happiest New Year!

Joe

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2018.   All Rights Reserved.

People often ask me if selling has changed.

The answer is YES and NO.  

In order to sell effectively, it is vital to understand both halves of this equation.  

Effectiveness begins with an understanding of the selling landscape.   You wouldn’t attempt to cross an ocean on a bicycle, and wouldn’t choose a boat to traverse a mountain.  In other words, it is important to understand what you are selling INTO, before selecting tools and processes to get the job done.

Here are just a few things that have changed (dramatically) about the landscape over the last ten years…:

·      Buyers have much greater access to information.  Consequently, there is a good chance that they know quite a bit about your company and your product or service (as well as those of your competitors) before they speak with you.

·      Your competition also has greater access to information.  So they know more about you, too.

·      Unprecedented access to quick information has made it MUCH more difficult for any company to differentiate themselves from their competitors.   Differentiation is especially difficult for a smaller private company that doesn’t have a multi-million dollar marketing budget.

·      Buyers have much shorter attention spans.  They are short and getting shorter.   Studies show that the average person can only pay attention for 8 seconds.   Goldfish beat humans with an average span of 9 seconds.

·      The combination of information access and shrinking attention spans means transactional selling is finished.   Most other antiquated approaches like feature-benefit, AIDA, presenting & proposing, solution selling, needs-based selling, strategic selling, and relationship selling are all on life-support or dying a quick death.

Here are few things about selling that have NOT changed…:

·      As a group, buyers do not trust salespeople.  Never did, never will.

·      The fundamental psychology of buyers remains unchanged.

·      So do the principles of effective communication.

·      Despite tremendous access to information, most buyers will not make a purchase of any type of semi-sophisticated product or service without first speaking with a sales representative.

·      Research still shows that a buyer’s interaction with the sales representative is the #1 factor in determining which company they buy from.   This human interaction has a greater effect on a prospect’s purchase decision than their perception of quality, reputation, service, and price combined!

·      The vast majority of salespeople are totally ineffective.  

Most salespeople have not changed with the changing landscape.

The good news is that addressing today’s evolved selling landscape does not require more work or harder work.  It simply requires a different approach and primarily lies in the development of one skill.

The single factor that addresses the changing landscape, differentiates a salesperson, and contributes to effectiveness is the ability to sell consultatively.   You’ve probably heard this term tossed around, but most people who use it don’t really know what it means.   In fact, most salespeople that have told me they are consultative sellers do NOT sell consultatively.  Not even close…

Consultative sellers…:

Develop trust by slowing down the sales process and asking dozens of high-value, attention-keeping, tough, assertive questions.

Abandon Convinc-aholic™ preferences.

Facilitate discovery to help prospects create a totally new buying vision.

Never waste time (the buyer’s or their own)

Continuously explore the “Don’t Know What You Don’t Know” domain.

Differentiate themselves via a unique mindset, belief system, & conversation.

Deeply explore the decision maker’s TRUE reasons and motives for…:

§  Solving a problem

§  Capturing an opportunity

§  Saving money

§  Changing the status quo

§  Switching suppliers or partners

§  Initiating a new project or process

§  Selecting one vendor over another.

§  And much more…

Directly and honestly address the potential consequences of change.

            Discuss who might be affected by change, and how.

            Develop relationships based on caring, sharing, mutual discovery, and trust.

Less than 15% of sales professionals even attempt to approach selling consultatively.   If your salespeople haven’t changed with the times, they are only generating a tiny percentage of the available potential business, sacrificing an enormous volume of profit.                   

Learning a consultative process, then developing and mastering the skill to execute it, will drive sales far beyond expectations.

Joe

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2018.   All Rights Reserved.

People often ask me “Are there a set of critical factors that distinguish the Top Performers from those that just can’t seem to get there?”

Over the past several decades, I’ve had the opportunity to visit with many thousands of entrepreneurs and salespeople.   The performance of these individuals can be separated into three primary groups.   A very small percentage consistently over-achieve.   Let’s call them The Masters or Five Percenters.   Opposite The Masters are a fairly large percentage (over 50%) of business owners and salespeople that consistently fail.   Unfortunate, but true.   Most entrepreneurs struggle for survival or fail.   Most salespeople rarely make quota.   Yikes.   They simply do not get it.

Most of the remaining owners and salespeople try continually to break out of the pack.  Few succeed.  Many of these execs work extremely hard.  A significant percentage of them believe themselves to always be “really busy”.  Unfortunately, their busy-ness never seems to produce the results they seek.  If they could only find “more time”, they feel like they could right the ship, but they somehow never get around to effectively prioritizing their time.

Many well-intentioned execs struggle to break through.  They try many different approaches, reacting to urgency after urgency and often looking for a quick fix, magic pill, or silver bullet.  Quite a few of them of them are prone to chasing shiny objects, the next big thing that will propel them out of mediocrity and transform their performance.   As society continues to move in the direction of rapid-response and instant gratification, I’ve noticed this group has been growing.

If you happen to be a CEO, owner, or executive seeking superior performance, I have bad news and good news.  The bad news is that there are NO quick fixes.  The good news is that ANYONE can achieve mastery and become a Five Percenter.

Master business performers possess a very distinct, limited (and amazingly simple) set of attributes that separate them from the masses, independent of whether their goal is to become an elite salesperson or an elite CEO.    Although Masters come in all shapes and sizes, they all possess the following common attributes..:

1.    They are UnConditionally Committed to Personal Development.  They never rest on their laurels and always strive to be the best person possible.  They are committed to mastery.  No matter how “busy” they might feel, they ALWAYS allocate time and energy to improving their skills, knowledge, and ability to become a better person and leader.

2.    They constantly Seek to Learn.  5 Percenters possess the humility to understand that there is always much more that they do not know than that they do know.  Masters understand that they often don’t have the best answer, and very often don’t even have the right question.

3.    They take advantage of Universal Truths.   I’m often amazed at how many executives struggle because that they choose to ignore many universal truths and laws.   What goes up, must come down.  Gravity exists.  So do Key Human Attributes and Key Relationship Attributes.   These are Universal.  We all have only 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week.  Even the most disruptive, innovative companies in the world succeed by virtue of exploiting Universal Truths.  Ignore these truths at your peril.

4.    They insist upon giving more than they gain.   Masters clearly understand the Law of Reciprocity and the fact that they will never get there alone.  Masters are both Generous and Grateful.

5.    They understand the Path to Mastery.   Whether you wish to improve your performance as a CEO, salesperson, athlete, musician, or parent, the Path to Mastery will always include these three basic components:

a.     Skills Development:  To learn HOW to become a top performer in the pursuit of your choice.

b.     Peer Learning:   To develop new insights & possibilities, to recognize personal and organizational blindspots, to avoid potential risks and potholes, to help you develop the right questions, to keep you motivated, to help you effectively prioritize, to help you know what you don’t know, to learn to use your time wisely, to make better decisions, and much more…

c.     Coaching:   To help keep you on track in making skillful choices (e.g.:  how to invest your time wisely) and taking skillful actions in accordance with your vision and intentions.

Attempting to achieve peak performance without taking advantage of all three legs of the Path is like running a marathon in wet sand.  You might get there (one day), but it will take much longer, you’ll have to work much harder, and your journey is going to hurt a lot more than necessary.

It is rare for any performer to fail because of the hard stuff.   They sometimes fail because they do not choose to do the right stuff, but they mostly fail simply due to a lack of Discipline.

While the attributes above are important, one will never achieve Mastery in the absence of Self-Discipline (aka:  doing the EASY things on a consistent basis).   A good coach can help enormously here.  

If you’d like to share other Critical Attributes of Mastery, or would like to discuss any I’ve listed here, I’d love to hear from you.

Enjoy the Journey!

Joe

Copyright ©   Joe Zente  2018.   All Rights Reserved.