All Problems Are People Problems is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

All problems are really people problems.

To make the case that all problems are people problems, let’s tackle the biggest people problem first. Let’s say a company’s overall strategy is broken. Well, that doesn’t sound like a people problem at all, does it? But it is a people problem.

If the overall strategy is broken, then some people are too rigid in their commitment to the old strategy. Or it might mean that the leadership of this company isn’t resourceful enough to come up with a new way to compete and move the company forward. So if the biggest strategy problem is really a people problem, then all other problems might be people problems too, right?

How about low sales numbers? Absolutely a people problem. Could be that you have the wrong people on your team (maybe they’re not really salespeople). It might also mean that the people you have don’t have the right belief system or mindset. Could be that the people on your team don’t have the skill sets to succeed in this disruptive age. Maybe they don’t have the tools or haven’t been properly trained. Regardless, the root of the problem is still people.

Cultural issues? Accountability issues? Marketing problems? People problems all.

But wait! There’s good news here, too! If people are the root of all your problems, then people are the solution to your problems. Unlocking the resourcefulness of a small group of people can provide solutions to the most complex and intractable problems.

All problems are people problems. Fortunately, people can also solve the problems that they create.

Questions

Make a list of your challenges. What’s the people problem at the root of your problem?

I would the people involved in your problem need to change in order to overcome that problem or challenge?

One of the fastest way to change people is to change yourself. If you change the way you interact with people you can get different results. If you change the outcomes you want and interactions with people you can get very different results. Okay, what do you have to change?

The Problem with Ultimatums is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

The first problem with giving an ultimatum is that it can be accepted. You may believe that you have the power in a negotiation. You might believe that that power can be exercised by giving the other party an ultimatum. But giving an ultimatum allows for the other party’s acceptance. And then, you’re done.

Maybe you really believe you should be done negotiating. But giving an ultimatum usually indicates a different, deeper set of problems.

Lack of Strong Relationships

All things being equal, relationships win. All things being unequal, relationships still probably win.

Giving ultimatums often means that you don’t have the relationship necessary to work through the issue and arrive a more positive solution. Strong relationships allow you to work through issues and give the other party the benefit of the doubt. But sometimes you don’t quite have the relationships you need. Before you give an ultimatum, you’re better off asking for an opportunity to work on the relationships, to build trust, and to build a better understanding of the other party’s view.

Ultimatums eliminate relationships … they’re a seriously transactional behavior. They aren’t what people with relationships offer each other.

Lack of Resourcefulness

You are a limitless reservoir of ideas.

Ultimatums are also a sign that you are in an unresourceful state. Your resourcefulness (your imagination and your creativity) allows you to continually identify new options, new ideas, and new solutions. There is no reason to get to an ultimatum when you can instead work on creating alternatives. You need the trust that relationships are built on to get the time and opportunity to work on these solutions. If you’ve got the relationship, use it to collaborate.

Ultimatums eliminate the possibility of identifying and pursuing alternatives. You are a limitless reservoir of ideas. So is the person with whom you are negotiating. The best relationships are built on collaborating to find a way or make a new one.

Instead of giving ultimatums, work on the underlying relationship and resourcefulness problems.

Every Interaction Matters is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Every interaction with your clients (and dream clients) counts. It all matters.

That first cold call matters. It matters that you sound like someone who creates value for their clients. Having ideas matters … a lot! It matters how you treat the gatekeepers. It matters how you persist after your request for time is rejected. Are you treating your prospecting interactions like they matters.

Your first sales call matters. That interaction is a what your will determine whether or not you are someone worth spending more time with or whether you should be precluded from an opportunity. Are you preparing for sales calls and planning for them like the interaction matters?

The way you develop your solutions matters (now more than ever). The way you develop solutions needs to be more collaborative. It needs to include more stakeholders from more diverse areas of the business. Less is probably just pitching. It’s probably features and benefits divorced from any real desired future state. Is the way that you work the middle of the sales process proof positive that you know it matters–and how much it matters when the votes are tallied?

The way you negotiate value matters, too. You owe it to your client, your company, and yourself to not allow your client to underinvest in the result they need. Discounting means allowing your client to underinvest. It means depriving your company of the profit necessary to produce the results your client needs. It also discounts the value that you create. This interaction matters a whole bunch, and not treating all the previous sales interactions like they matter often results in poor creating and capturing of value.

Every sales interaction matters. They all count. If you believe they count, then you have to prepare for each interaction in a way that ensures that you create value for your clients and that you obtain the sales interaction’s outcomes (usually an advance).

Treat every interaction as if the whole deal rests on that single interaction. It just may.

Questions

How do you prepare for sales interactions?

How do you prepare for your first sales call?

How do you ensure that your prep work helps you obtain the outcome you need?

You Are a Commission Only Salesperson is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

I just spoke to a group of people learning to master the digital channels. I opened by asking for a show of hands as to who in the room worked as a commission only salesperson? Not a single hand was raised. I’m certain they thought I was in the wrong room.

So I asked for a show of hands from people who believed that the results that they produce in business and life are the direct result of their ability to sell themselves and their ideas, their ability to influence and persuade others. Every person in the room raised a hand. I asked again how many believed they were commission only salespeople … again, every hand.

Now I want you to raise your hand.

People don’t want to believe that they’re salespeople. But they are. You are. If you don’t describe yourself as a salesperson, it’s even worse than that: you are a commission only sales person. Whether or not you know it, believe it, or accept it, it’s true.

All of the results that you produce in business (and life) are the result of your ability to sell yourself and your ideas. The only thing that you have any modicum of control over is yourself. The best you can hope for with other people is influence; you’ll never control them. The results that you produce are necessarily the result of your ability to influence other people.

So is the money you make. The amount of money you earn (your commission) is a direct reflection of the value you create. The more people you persuade to let you create value for—and with—them, the more money you make.

Do you believe this to be true? Then what do you need to change?

A Yes Is More Difficult Than a No is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Getting a “yes” is more difficult than getting a ‘no.” You have to work very hard for a “yes.”

You have to work very hard to understand your dream client’s needs. This is easier said than done, and it almost always requires that you start building that understanding in advance of an opportunity. Sometimes a “no” is easier than upsetting the status quo; it looks risky.

Are you collaborating with your dream client in a way that indicates to them that you are deeply connected to their needs?

You also have to work exceedingly hard to build consensus. Often you aren’t anywhere near your client’s location when the real sale is being made—or lost. Your client’s have their own caucuses. If you can’t influence those conversations—or participate in them—you can easily find your way to a “no.”

Are you working through your dream client’s company, building consensus horizontally and vertically through their organization?

There aren’t too many challenges more difficult than dealing with price. If your price is higher, it’s more difficult to get a “yes” than a “no.” You likely have to be in front of the opportunity. You have to be able to differentiate your offering. There is no way you can command a higher price without creating more value. And it’s guaranteed that you are going to have to help your dream client justify paying a higher price for a greater value (and a lower overall cost).

Are you worth paying more to obtain? Does the way you sell prove it?

It’s tough to get to “yes,” because it’s easier for your client to say “no.” It’s easy to choose the status quo. Your competitor, the one they’re working with now, is the devil they know and you’re the devil they don’t know.

Are you following this? It’s difficult to win and easy to lose.

This means you have to bring your A-game to every contest. It means that you have to approach every interaction as if it counts—because it does. You have to create value for your dream clients—and all of their stakeholders—during every sales interaction.

Questions

Are you preparing for sales interactions in a way that takes into account how difficult it is to win and how easy it is to lose?

Are you competing like it’s difficult to win? Or are you wading in, apathetic and complacent?

What are the things that you can do as a salesperson to make it easier to win?

How do you make it easy for your client to say “no?”

Making 179 Degree Changes is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Ever wonder what you get when you sign up for my Sunday newsletter? It’s rare that I ever use a newsletter for a blog post, but because 15 people emailed me to ask me for a link, I decided to post here. If you like it, sign up.

A young person I know was explaining to me the changes that he wanted to make in his life. At one point in the conversation he got excited and said, “I am going to make a 360 degree change in my life.” I appreciated the sentiment, and I struggled not to laugh. I didn’t want to interrupt his excitement to point out that turning 360 degrees would point him right back in the direction he was already heading.

You might be laughing to yourself, believing that what this young person meant to say was, “I am going make a 180 degree change in my life.” But that’s not correct either. Turning 180 degrees means that you completely change directions. If you were heading north, changing 180 degrees means you are heading south. That kind of serious correction may be necessary from time to time. But most of the time the corrections you need to make are something less than that.

Let’s use the metaphor “179-degrees” to describe these changes. It’s less than 180 degrees. Reaching your goals in business, in sales, and life requires that you trim you sails and make adjustments. But it’s likely you are not off course by so much that you have to change directions completely. Changing that much is what causes people to go from failed effort to failed effort, always seeking the magic bullet answer.

Here’s a personal example. Last year I lost 25 pounds. For years I had a healthy smoothie for breakfast (one cup of frozen mixed berries, one cup of frozen spinach, two scoops of carb-free Iso-Pure protein powder, aloe vera, ground flax seed, and water in a blender). I almost always had a salad with chicken for lunch. But it was dinners and snacking with my three kids on the weekends that kept the weight on. To lose the weight, I stopped eating bad carbs and snacking with the kids and the pounds fell off. I didn’t exercise once during the time I lost the weight. I wasn’t that far off, and I changed something far less than 180 degrees.

Whether your goals are around your physical health, your financial health, your results in business, or your results in sales, reaching those goals requires that you make changes. You arrived at your present state by holding certain beliefs and taking certain actions as a result of those beliefs. To reach your desired future state you need new beliefs and new actions. But everything you believe and everything you’re doing isn’t wrong. You might not be that far off.

Have you ever tried to make 180 degree turn only to find out that it was too much change and that it was impossibly difficult to sustain? It might not have even been necessary.

Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef has made his career by studying how get massive changes with a little effort as possible. He searches for the “minimum effective dosage,” the least amount of work that you can do to produce outstanding results. He looks for “effectiveness” instead of changes that require massive effort.

Think of some area of your life where you want better results. What are the 179-degree (less than 180) changes that you can make to produce those results?

When something isn’t working, we often want to scrap the whole idea, believing that the idea was bad or that we failed. But that isn’t always true. Sometimes you’re mostly right, but you need to trim the sails to produce the results you’re after. Think of some project that you’ve abandoned (or that you are about to abandon). What are the 179-degree changes you might make to produce better results instead of abandoning your project?

What are the one or two little actions you can take (or stop taking) that would change your results and correct your course?

Three Imperatives for Revenue Growth is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

You want revenue growth? You want to make your goals? Here are your three imperatives.

Create Enough Opportunities

To improve your revenue numbers and reach your goals, you need to generate opportunities. You might be able to acquire enough opportunities within your existing client accounts, but it isn’t likely. Opportunity acquisition is your very first problem and it should be your first priority each week.

You create new opportunities by prospecting.

If you want growth, you have to dedicate time to the activities that generate opportunities. If you put some other activity in front of opportunity acquisition, those activities will like crowd out the time you need to prospect and nurture your dream clients. If your honest with yourself, you know this is true.

Put opportunity creation first and dedicate the necessary time to prospecting.

Improving Your Win Rate

Every sales interaction counts. It’s imperative that you execute your sales process and that this process helps your buyer navigate their buying process. You can generate all the opportunities that you want, but if you’re not effective enough at the moment of truth you don’t advance opportunities—and you don’t win them.

You improve your win rate by following your sales process. You also improve your win rate by planning the outcomes of your sales interactions. Deep down, you know that opportunities are too rare to squander. Winging it isn’t a plan for value creation. Your effectiveness during sales interactions is the key to winning.

Focus on executing and improving your win rate.

Capture More Value

The final imperative is to capture more value from each and every opportunity. You need to create the most value possible for your clients so that you can capture the most value for you and your sales organization. It’s easier to win small deals and it’s often faster. But you need an average deal size that allows you to reach your goals.

Capturing more value requires that you build bigger deals. It might also mean you increase the size of target accounts. It almost always means improving your ability to create enough value to capture more of it yourself (i.e. selling well enough that you don’t have to discount).

Focus on creating the maximum value for your clients and capturing some of the value that you create.

These are the three imperatives for revenue growth: creating opportunities, improving your win rate, and capturing more value.

Questions

Are you creating enough opportunities? Are you dedicating enough time to opportunity acquisition?

Is your win rate improving? Declining? Are you executing your sales process and preparing for each sales interaction as if it matters?

Are you selling your clients what’s easy or what they really need? Are you selling small prospects instead of the dream clients you really need to build your business?

Episode 16 – Reaching Decision Makers with Marhnelle and David Hibbard is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Show Notes

On Upselling is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

You must upsell your clients.

Upselling your clients isn’t about producing more revenue for you and your company, although it will certainly produce that outcome.

Upselling your clients isn’t about improving your profit margins, even though it will absolutely make you and your company more profitable.

Upselling isn’t about moving your clients upstream into a high priced solution as part of your sales strategy, even though it’s sometimes the right strategy and it often works.

It isn’t about your commission check.

Upselling is about creating the maximum amount of value for your clients.

Let’s say you walk into your dream client’s office for a meeting. They know what they need and share those needs with you. You have just the solution. It’s what they need and will get them the right outcome. All you have to do is help them buy it. It’s an easy sale. But that doesn’t make it the right sale.

What if there is something more your client needs? What if there is a larger, more strategic outcome you could deliver? Selling your client what they need isn’t the same as creating the maximum value that you can create. Stopping short of maximum value creation makes you transactional.

So why don’t you upsell your clients? First, it’s easier just take the deal in front of you. Some salespeople just take the easy sale and move on. But the second reason some salespeople don’t upsell their dream clients is because they’re afraid that by increasing the size and scope of the deal they lower their chances of winning it. They also believe that increasing the value created also means lengthening the sales cycle (and it might).

Not upselling means not creating the maximum value for your client. It means choosing to be transactional instead of strategic. Not upselling also means increasing the likelihood that one of your competitors (one who isn’t afraid of losing and isn’t afraid of a little longer sales cycle) will win their business—and their mindshare, their wallet share, and their loyalty.

Your job is to create the maximum value for your client in every deal. That doesn’t mean selling them more than they need (that’s about you). But it also doesn’t mean selling them less than they need (that’s about you, too).

Preparing to Sell in the Next Economic Downturn is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

It is easy to sell when the economy is booming. When things are going well for everyone, you are selling into a target rich environment. People have needs and money. In really good times salespeople with great selling skills do well—but so do salespeople with poor selling skills. This is true for companies with a hit, companies that happen upon some offering that causes people to beat a path to their door; selling is easy.

When the economy is booming, opportunity acquisition isn’t a problem. When you have a runaway hit product opportunity acquisition is easy, too. But when the economy goes south, opportunity acquisition is difficult—and opportunity acquisition is where sales organizations win and lose.

The Great Recession exposed a lot of sales organizations (and a lot of salespeople). They believed that what they were doing was working, that their overall strategy was sound, and that executing their strategy was working. They believed their sales force was solid. And then the results they were producing disappeared.

This isn’t a booming economy (although it does seem to be opportunity rich for good salespeople). This is not the kind of economy that produces the kind of high water that covers a lot of stumps (or “lifts all boats,” if you like that kinder metaphor better). This is the Disruptive Age. This may be as good an economy as you see for a while. And I’m not trying to scare you, but you can be certain that another recession looms in your future. (Okay, maybe I am trying to scare you.)

Now Is the Time

Now is the time to build the sales skills and habits that allow you to succeed in economies good and bad.

• Now is the time to focus on developing your skills at prospecting, especially cold calling. Ignore anyone who tells you different. It’s irresponsible and it’s criminal negligence.
• Now is the time to nurture the relationships you need with your dream clients, the clients for whom the value you create can help them do better in good times and bad. You need to be known before your dream clients decide to change. You can’t sell from behind the buying cycle.
• Now is the time to focus your learning, your training, and your development on building the front of your pipeline. Focus as much on the front of the pipeline as you do the back of the pipeline.

Now is the time to build the sales skills (and sales force) you need for the next economic downturn.

Questions

Are you sure the results you are producing what they should be?

How will the actions today hold up during an economic downturn?

What are the skills that allow you to sell in an economic downturn?

What do you need to change?