4 Ways Salespeople Can Better Manage Outcomes and Achieve Results for Their Clients

by S. Anthony Iannarino

1. Move From Products and Solutions to Outcomes

The first way to improve your ability to achieve outcomes and real results for your clients is to abandon the old ways of thinking about sales. Sales has changed. It has shifted dramatically and in ways that make it unrecognizable to some, and impossible for others.

We no longer sell products. We no longer sell solutions. We now sell business results and performance acceleration. Understanding this shift isn’t difficult. Taking responsibility and acting according to this shift is as complicated and difficult as any modern business problem.

Instead of ensuring that your product was delivered on time, you now have to ensure that the client achieved the result that you promised when you sold the product. Instead of ensuring your solution worked as promised, you now have to ensure that the solution produced the result it was intended to, be it greater profitability, lower costs, greater competitiveness, or any number of business outcomes. This is not your father’s Chevy!

Think about the deals you are working on now. What are they really buying? What are you really selling? After you make the sale, in what way will their business be transformed? What is the business outcome that will transform it? How do you ensure that they achieve this outcome?

These questions aren’t easy to answer. Ensuring that the outcome is achieved is anything but easy. Doing so will require all of the preceding sales skills and attributes as well as the success attributes this series of posts has addressed.

2. Take Responsibility for the Outcome

Someone has to be responsible for the client achieving the outcome that you sold. That someone is you! Ultimately, regardless of the organizational chart and regardless of how the responsibilities are laid out on the project implementation plan, you are responsible for what you sold. Don’t believe me? Ask the client who they think is responsible. Ask them who they think is responsible when the train goes off the tracks.

By taking responsibility, you empower yourself to take action, instead of waiting to be acted upon. Empowering yourself gives you the permission to act. It makes you the de facto leader.  It says: “I care more about the client getting the outcome than anybody else!” To which everyone concerned will reply: “Okay.” They will act accordingly (and, if anybody is more concerned and more aggressively taking the steps to ensure your client gets the outcome you sold, well, that is the happiest of circumstances, now isn’t it?).

Take responsibility for the outcomes you sell as if your success depends on it. Make your personal brand stands for something more than making sure the delivery truck arrived on time.

3. Get Help! Rally the Troops!

Owning the outcomes is a form of leadership and empowerment, but it doesn’t mean you can, will, or should act alone. Getting results is messy, and sometimes the mess is more than you can take care of by yourself.

The key here is not only to get your team, their team, and outside help engaged in whatever needs done to get the outcome, but to get them in early and often. Problems don’t age well. The sooner you recognize that you need help, the more likely you can prevent a small challenge from growing up to be a result-killing monster of a problem. Kill the problems in the cradle.

Look at the deals you are implementing now. What are the problems, challenges, and obstacles that may prevent your client from achieving the outcome you sold? Who do you need to help you fix it? Who has the subject-matter expertise? Who has the political capital? Who has the budget? Who has the authority to make the changes? Who from the client organization can help?

Answer these questions and get moving on a solution, lest your little problem have the time to grow up to be something much worse.

4. Verify, Verify, Verify

Is the outcome being achieved? What are the results? You have to answer these questions by verifying that what you have sold is working. And then verify again, and verify again.

Too much can go wrong. Early results may be good and then disappear. You cannot disappear. Managing outcomes requires that you verify that the results are being achieved and to regularly ensure that they continue to do so. It is continuously verifying that the outcomes are being achieved or that changes needed to achieve the outcomes you sold are being implemented and executed upon.

Verify. Verify. And verify again.

Stop. Drop everything. Make the calls and make the visits to your clients to verify that they are getting the outcomes. If they aren’t, you know what to do!

Conclusion

Salespeople don’t sell product or services; they sell outcomes. Successful salespeople manage these outcomes for their clients and their companies, ensuring that they achieve the results and the outcome that they sold. Follow these steps to better manage your client’s outcomes.

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3 Ways Salespeople Improve Their Leadership Skills

by S. Anthony Iannarino

1. Read and Study Leadership

Leadership is a complex array of skills and attributes. There are as many definitions as there are leaders, and an equal number of ideas about the skills and attributes leadership requires. Because there are so many ideas, much has been written. This is a good place to start.

The role of sales now requires that the salesperson be a strategic orchestrator, leading cross-functional teams made up of members of their own company, as well as the client’s company. We recognize this fact, but there are few (read: none) sales organizations that focus even the smallest portion of the training and development resources towards leadership. This means you are all but certain to have to train and develop yourself.

Much of the skills required of the strategic orchestrator are found in storytelling, negotiation and change management. But even though they help with leadership, leadership is something more.

Go to your local bookstore and buy a couple of books on leadership. I make no recommendation as to what books you should read because you will very easily find something that appeals to you, and the more engaged you are with the reading, the more you will gain from it.

For my money, I like to read books by actual practitioners, leaders who were faced with challenges that seemed insurmountable, like Shackleton, Washington, and Patton. I find it easy to distill their stories into lists of ideas and attributes (but then, I am a list-maker). If you don’t like to read biographies, or if you don’t like distilling the lessons yourself, choose a book that has a number in the title. A book with a number in the title means someone else captured the stories and distilled the lessons into a list for you.

Take the time to write down your ideas as you read. Make notes about the skills and attributes of leadership and collect stories of where you have seen these come into play in your business. Especially write down the failures of leadership and what leadership skills and attributes might have prevented those failures. This exercise alone will ingrain these lessons into your DNA, and you will find yourself thinking of your own leadership problems in the framework you develop.

Like anything else, learning comes down to studying and practicing.

2. Learn to Own the Outcome

When you sell something, you are responsible for the outcome.

This has always been true, and it is truer now than ever. If your client does not achieve the outcome you sold, they are holding you accountable for their failure. Yes, even if it is a complex problem that caused the failure and, yes, even if it is their fault.

Leadership is, in large part, about responsibility for outcomes.

Learning to own the outcome means first accepting the responsibility for helping them to achieve the outcome. It also means understanding that you will have to lead others even when you have no authority, other than the authority that accompanies owning the responsibility for the outcome. But it is simply amazing how much authority comes along with owning the outcome. In most cases, you will find no one fighting to take your place as the person responsible for the outcome, and even fewer who volunteer to take on the biggest problems.

Leadership is, in part, taking responsibility and tackling the biggest problems.

You create followers, and you create the ability to generate outcomes through the effort of others by taking responsibility and owning the outcome.

Watch this video: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

3. Learn to Lead from the Front

This is really part of the above point. Leadership is found where the action is. Leaders have muddy boots because they are at the front with the people they lead. Leadership, especially as it pertains to sales, isn’t about authority. It is instead about finding the obstacles to achieving your goal or vision and then rallying the resources to overcome those obstacles.

You don’t lead from behind a desk. You rush to the sounds of the guns. You go to where the action is and you make your presence felt. There is very little that you can do to create lifelong relationships in sales that tops being by your client’s side when they are dealing with their most difficult challenge.

You helped create the vision. You sold the vision. Problems showed up. You answered the phone. You rushed to the scene to make a difference.  This is what your client believed they bought, and making this true is the foundation of sales success (as well as referrals).

There is no reading to do and no list to make. To put this in to practice you have to step up, take ownership, and lead. Many (most) (all) great leaders were baptized in a similar fire.

Conclusion

Great salespeople have the ability to lead. They have the ability to generate results through the efforts of others on their teams, as well as their client’s teams. But leadership starts with owning the outcome and leading from the front. Apply these ideas to be a better leader.

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5 Ways Salespeople Can Improve Their Change Management Skills

by S. Anthony Iannarino

1. Identify and Build the Team

In many cases, salespeople lose more deals to the prospect deciding to take no action than they lose to competitors. Selling is always about change, and change is scary. Making the case for change in any organization requires building the team that can help you sell the change and who can help you execute the change.

It is no longer enough to identify and sell to the economic decision-maker alone. And it isn’t enough to simply find a decision-influencer who may be dissatisfied enough to help you identify an area that needs improvement. Instead, you need to develop a coalition of decision-makers, decision-influencers, and stakeholders who will help you both sell the idea of change as well as execute the change. You need to build a team.

As you work through an organization, ask questions to determine who else is needed on your team. Who will most benefit from your solution? Who has the greatest political power in the organization? Who has the most influence over other decision-makers, decision-influencers and stakeholders? Who is passionate enough about your idea to sell your ideas when you aren’t there?

Build this team first!

This team will help you build and sell your case for change, after you . . .

2. Identify the Obstacles to Change

It isn’t enough to build a broad coalition of team members to help you with your change initiative. You also need to identify the obstacles to change. Many deals are lost because the salesperson or the sales organization underestimates the obstacles to change.

First you need to identify the decision-makers, decision-influencers, and stakeholders who oppose change. It is surprising how often you find that these people are very open to your solution, but completely closed to the idea of change. The status quo is safer; it is the devil we know, and we have learned to live with it.

Selling means leading a change initiative and that means moving some of these obstacles to your side, and overcoming others. This is no mean feat. But too often, we sell to the group that is receptive to our offering and who wants change, and we avoid the obstacles, ignoring them at are peril.

Instead, we need to identify these obstacles and deal with them. Ignoring them is not a strategy, and it too often leads to “no action.”

But before we deal with these obstacles, we need to look at why some obstacles are so obstinate.

3. Deal with Conflicting Interests

Sometimes the obstacles to a deal and the change that it brings are opposed because they have conflicting interests. While change might help in one area, it might make things much more difficult for another area. Some of the obstacles aren’t human obstacles to be overcome; they are technical obstacles that need to be effectively dealt with before the human obstacles can agree to change.

These obstacles need to be identified and dealt with, and the sooner the better. Too often, we in sales present our solution before we have identified all of the technical obstacles and the conflicting interests and built the plan for effectively dispatching them. We leave the client and their team with a wonderful presentation, a wonderful solution, and a long list of unresolved concerns. Thinking on your feet and responding during the presentation may be exciting, and you may even be great at doing so, but it does little to resolve concerns.

Collect the obstacles long before you present. Make sure your presentations and your solutions effectively deal with obstacles to change, and that you have the agreement of those who would be affected by your change initiative before you present. (You make not get everyone’s agreement, but you better have more than you need to win a deal)

Deal with the conflicting interests!

4. Build the Case for Killing the Status Quo . . . And Sell It

You have assembled the team, you have identified the group opposed, and you have identified the obstacles.  Now you have to build and sell your case for change. There is a reason that Change Management follows both Storytelling and Negotiation on my Foundational Sales Attributes hierarchy: you will need both of these skills to build your case for change.

No one will kill the status quo to replace it with something similar. It isn’t worth the work, it isn’t worth the disruption, and most of all, it isn’t worth stepping off the cliff and into the unknown. To kill the status quo, you have to build the case for how your solution will create a better future. You have to provide the vision of what the future looks like and how it is better.

If you are a great storyteller, you will have had some help with with your story including your team in the creation of that vision and how you get there. You will also have both identified the obstacles and will have built the plan for overcoming them together.

You also need to have built the ROI analysis in both financial terms and in human terms. Your case has to answer the question: “What’s in it for me?” And it has to provide that answer for as many parties as possible. This is how you sell the idea of killing the status quo to the obstacles. The less of an ROI, the greater likelihood the obstacle remains opposed. It isn’t enough to promise them blood, toil, sweat and tears.

And then. some obstacles simply must be overcome.

5. Play Politics

Politics exist in every organization, including your clients. To be effective requires that you understand and play politics. Is it messy? It sure as Hell is!

To sell and manage change requires that you understand who can bring obstacles onto the team and who can overcome them. Yes, try as you may, some obstacles will have to be overcome. It means trading deals to remove the conflicting interests. It means changing parts of your offerings to acquire some of the team members you need in order to win and execute the deal. It also means courting the obstacles and building the relationships that build trust, especially when what you sell comes with a healthy serving of blood, toil, sweat and tears—and sometimes that is exactly what is necessary to move towards a better future. And sometimes it means someone doesn’t get their way and that a higher authority decides against them.

And, as added bonus, all of these ideas must be applied to your own organization as well. Sometimes moving a client from “no action” to “action” requires that you first change something in your own organization.

You need to learn to play politics. You need to do more than learn: you need to be a master politician. This is where all of the real action in change management occurs. Want big deals with big change? Play big politics!

Conclusion

Sales people sell change. They sell a better future, a better outcome. Successful salespeople know that they sell more than a product or service; they sell change. Follow these ideas to improve your change management skills.

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4279.

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2 Ways Salespeople Can Negotiate Better

March 9, 2010 Sales 3.0

This post isn’t about tactics. There are excellent books on negotiating tactics, including Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, and one of my favorites, The Street Smart Negotiator: How to Outwit, Outmaneuver and Outlast Your Opponents by Harry Mills. You should be more than familiar with common negotiation tactics so that you [...]

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6 Ways You Can Be A Better Storyteller in Sales

March 8, 2010 Sales 3.0

1. Collect Great Stories
One of the first ways to become a better storyteller is to collect great stories. Your life, including your sales life, is full of stories. Many of these stories contain the lessons that you have learned and the ideas that have proven the most useful to helping your clients succeed. Sometimes we [...]

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3 Ways to Differentiate Yourself and Your Offering in Sales

March 7, 2010 Sales 3.0

1. Possess the Foundational Attributes
The first and most important thing to be able to differentiate is you. It answers the question: “What makes you different, and why should spend time with or buy from you?”
There were two comments on this week’s post 2 Ways to Create Influence and Persuade Others that speak to this point. [...]

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3 Ways to Improve Your Ability to Diagnose for Salespeople

March 6, 2010 Sales 3.0

To diagnose in sales is to be able to discover the root cause of your client’s business problem or challenge. It is the ability to recognize what is undesirable by the signs and the symptoms. But to diagnose is not to prescribe the cure—that is a very different outcome!
1. Suspend Your Judgment and Be Open [...]

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7 Ways to Improve Your Business Acumen for Sales

March 5, 2010 Sales 3.0

As we have moved from product sales, to solutions sales, to business improvement and acceleration sales, the skill sets for success in sales have changed. To be effective now, salespeople need to be great businesspeople; they need to understand how to create business results for their clients.
Business acumen is too rare in sales. We spend [...]

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7 Ways To Be Better at Prospecting

March 4, 2010 Sales 3.0

1. Consistency Counts: Prospect Daily!
Salespeople acquire new clients, and to do so, they necessarily open relationships. Prospecting is the art of opening new relationships. The new business opportunities that later turn into sales are initially identified through prospecting, making prospecting the lifeblood of sales.
The first way to improve you’re your prospecting results is to acknowledge [...]

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My Kill Your Inner Critic Guest Post on The Naked Redhead

March 3, 2010 Found Elsewhere

I wrote a post for my friend, The Naked Redhead (that’s the name of her blog. really). It is called Why You Must Kill Your Inner Critic. She posted it on Monday. If you ever doubt yourself, you may want to give it a read.

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