Barry W Thornton Blog

I received a note from James on my blog about fighting the price battle in a salesman’s mind, he notes:

“What if the problem is the inability to listen and the urge to react without thinking it through? Sometimes I think that’s why we are going downhill.”

Thank you James, good insights and I agree with you.  I don’t think I can find many who will argue that the school system stopped teaching critical and analytical thinking as well as listening a long time ago so the problem is not recent.

But the sales process is designed to handle this.  Given that the basic sales dance consists of:

1 - Introduction - establish credibly and trust

2 - Define the problem you are addressing to get everyone clear on the terms and on the same page

3 - Present a solution that has value to the customer, explain that value proposition, answer clarifying questions

4 - Do a ground clearing Close (push the customer to a start making choices).

5 - Objections - Listen to the objections from the customer, go back to #2 with a modified presentation. Loop through #2 through #5 until until there is either a close, you progress to the next Gate Keeper, you agree to meet again with more data, or they carry your broken body out the door.

Built into this process is the ability to handle James’ issues if you instead have ‘the ability to listen and the personal power to think it through” (thanks James).

This means you must be clever and devious in many ways.  It all falls on the salesman’s brain, dummies don’t sell well.  In fact sales is one of the highest mental arts there is.  All that stuff about rocket scientists, mathematician, etc. is a load of snow (I know, I am one).  They don’t require 1/10 the mental effort as does a good salesman.  In science you have years to figure out the truth of a matter - in sales you have only minutes, maybe only seconds to figure it out, make a plan, and act on that plan.  I find sales infinitely more fun and exhilarating than sitting my office working on epiphanies, which goes to the heart of the matter - nothing ever happens until a  sale is made!

Great ideas happen all the time (and most have little or no value), great closes are as rare as flowers in a snowstorm and even more valuable because they make the world work.

Just about every Sunday I race my sailboat in a fleet out on the lake I live by. We try to go for just over 2 hours, depending on the wind and that means a course of 5 to 15 miles. I have a big boat and race other folks with big boats, we all depend on our crews to make the boat work right, to squeeze the best possible speed at all times on all tacks. We have a strategist, a tactician, guys who make the motor perform (in this case the motor is the sails), and some who drives the boat. We have a management team. For those of you who care, the driver is not in charge (more about that in a later blog).

After 2 and half hours and miles of water on a nice sunny day you can win or lose by an inch, which in that sense is no different that a foot, a yard, a furlong, or a league; you lose and that’s it. It means that every second of the race is critical and any mistakes can be fatal in terms of getting to the finish line first. Because we all make mistakes the general rule is that the guy who makes the fewest mistakes that day wins. Sure you can be second, or third, and still get iron (a trophy at the end of the event), but, well, you understand. Oh yea, there’s nothing for fourth place.

I depend on a team, skill and communication are critical, mistakes happen and they suck, there is no time off, once you cross the start line you are in the on mode for every second until you cross the finish. Let your attention drift on for a minute and you pay the bill.

Martin Luther King used to talk about keeping your eye on the prize, don’t get distracted or diverted, always focus on why you are there.

Does that sound anything like business?

Welcome to shared realities.

Over the last couple of years the mantra FREE has become a big deal in software and web stuff, the idea has attracted my attention but couldn’t see an application. I always looked at it as attracting bottom feeders. How do you build revenues when you give it away? (I know, you get them later or with more features or threaten to cut them off when they get used to it or some other scheme, but it was always about incremental cheap stuff.)

What do you do when your product cost $40k+, can you make that free too?

In some cases, yes. I made us one of those cases so we did it.  We give the hardware free at our dealers. Oh, and by the way, I make more income this way than I ever could selling it. In fact I raised the price to make sure no one buys it so they have to go the free route.

Confused, OK, mine is a special case. I have a product that renders a billable service.  Too expensive to sell easily and without a major marketing effort.

It dawned on me that since the word DISCOUNT sucks when you are on the selling side of the equation that the opposite of MSRP had to be FREE.   I simply said, let me put  it into your place for nothing and let’s split the revenues it generates.  You never buy it, I always own it, you sell the service, and collect the money which we split. Simple, not necessarily a new idea, but one I had never tried. All my life I have sold products as in it becomes yours and you do with it what you want, with it.  I go on to fine a new customer,

Anyway, some folks call it the ATM or Vending machine model.

It is great new world for me.  Now your customer is my customer too because we both get money from them. Turns out there are other benefits too. I now get to see inside a bunch of different ‘retailers” and since it’s in my best interest for the retailer to be very very good at selling and delivering our now shared service, and because of this relationship I have a say in how they do it (if they don’t do well I can take my unit back and get someone else to make money with it), I can make them better even against their will, or perhaps awareness. I learn best practices by watching the good ones and make the poor one learn how to do it right, they have no choice, they make great money with me and that is the glue. If ego gets in the way, if they are dorks, if they are screwing up the market, whatever it is that makes them a poor performer or a pain, I can now fix or flee but I don’t have to suffer. And the revenue flows literally forever.

So I say “Thank You to FREE”, it works in ways I had never imagined.

That’s why we must always learn and adapt.

I have found that most really good closers while highly applauded also frequently scare the you know what out of sales management. They are not dependent thus essentially uncontrollable, mess with them and they go on to greener pastures.

There is an old tome that goes ‘feed the winners, starve the losers (the idea behind commission sales). If you can figure out a way to scale the salesman’s volume then there is no problem then you get the best of all worlds. But typically scaling sales requires time and time is a fixed resource. 60 to 80 hours a week means that the salesman has no life left, eventually this will cause them to move on and you will have a giant hole to try to fill.

Raise the reward for what you get to get more (efficiency)? The fact is that there is only so much margin in a product. Add to this the problem is that management’s ego can only handle so much difference in pay, when the managed guy makes a lot more than the manager a whole new set of problems occur.

So how to you as a manager scale sales people?

Offer enough reward and they will put up with you?

Do that silly team training and motivation thing? Makes you as a manager feel good, but wastes their time, after all salesmen are hunters of other men’s souls in a way, they do it alone, you bring them together for your benefit, not theirs.

So how do you scale?

Brutal answer is you fire people to do it, you filter, get rid of the losers, try and try again to find winners. I call it voluntary turnover, you volunteer to turn over the poor ones to get good ones. What is makes it all harder is rarely can you tell what a salesman can do from his past record. He may have been good at the last place he worked but that says little about your place, it only suggests, it doesn’t guarantee. You have to be ready to turn them as fast as you get them until you hit gold. Hard but real.

I have commented in the past on the fact that most sales people are clerks, they take orders, kiss the appropriate places on the customer’s body, and really don’t bring home the bacon. In many ways this is good from some business’s viewpoint, it assures that the sales folks essentially MRs (thanks to the Firesign Theater*, MRs are Multiple-Revendables as in disposables). Replace them frequently.

Can you scale sales this way? Two answers, only without competition is one, the other is that Marketing does the closing so Marketing becomes the salesman. Remember, clerks don’t take business away from others, salesmen do.

So in the competitive environment of the 21^st Century how do you scale? Differentiation in the offering, Value Proposition, pricing, messaging or the like? Some or all of that works for a while but unless the completion is brain-dead it is only a short-term solution. The fact is that you need two things, differentiation to kick start and closers to take business away from someone else and finish. Both say that you will always moving, changing what you have to offer and taking someone else’s customer to offer it to. In essence, doing and seeking.

That’s why I call it foraging. How long do think mankind has been foraging for the next meal?  Have we figured it out yet?

*If you have never listened to the FireSign Theater of 40 years ago you are spending time learning what the past could have thought you about today, Their deadly accurate prediction of the then future culture that we live in today has saved me a lot of time. It’s that old ‘I’ve seen this movie before’ forward looking hindsight that is one of the visions that let’s me cut to the chase and reality check with such ease.

I have a friend who used to be a great salesman and is now a virtual failure. He has confidence, will charge in, will persist, has energy, can say the right things, and still fails. I used to think the problem was an issue of fear, now closer observation and consideration makes me think the problem is more one of the misplaced need for acceptance. Needs and wants are very different drives. Emotions can drive needs, wants are intellect driven. The passion of need leads to comprise, the passion of want leads to structure. Needs limit perception, wants expand them.

Assuming that what I offer you has value to you, if I need to sell it to you and you won’t buy it, the need emotion overwhelms and generates desperation that stinks, you will smell it and dominate the situation thus control me.

If I want to sell you something and you won’t buy then I will likely go away, you will have to call me back thus we have parity, neither of us will dominate the situation and there is no control, just a transaction.

My friend’s need for acceptance has swamped out his wants, try as he might, he is a victim when he should be a participant. No sale is made.

Needs are irrational, wants aren’t.

One character issue we assume in good sales people is confidence, there is a whole industry of consultants that claim to be masters of this. Let me offer another view that is what we think of as confidence can in fact be indifference, indifference to rejection, fear, opinion, and the word no. Confidence is a state-of-mind wrapped in emotion, indifference is a state-of-mind wrapped in logic. Emotions are ephemeral, logic is eternal.

Indifference is cold, thoughtful, analytic, and liberating. Without the personal emotional attributes of confidence one appears to be confident in action yet free to be highly perceptive of the reality of a situation and thus its master. Confidence is a projection, frequently competitive in nature. Indifference to confidence is the root of power over a situation. Ever watch to confident sales people with opposing views clash, one must win by overpowering the other. Confidence and indifference is like a jujitsu match, the indifferent party takes the confident one’s energy and uses it to convert thoughts. Let me remind you that the assumption here is that both parties want to win and that is defined as one changing the other mind. Both are equally driven, both have the same goal.

Let me remind you that the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Love and hate are both passions, both emotions which blind the user. If you are indifferent to the passions they are easy to manipulate and dominate. If you are indifferent to the passions then they are easy to embrace with control and become part of the tool box that makes you flexible to the situation. This kind of truth lets you use passions as needed without your own passions getting in the way. This kind of knowledge mixed with action is real power, which is what is really about to make a sale.

Does this sound strange; I hope you think so, because the point of this wordjive was to make you think about it.

Welcome to Hard Times, not a town in a Henry Fonda Western but your front door. Everyone wants a discount, times are tough, they are special, everyone knows that you make too much anyway.

Your salesman are weakening, they don’t have a clue about selling the value of the product or service even though they read all the books, watch the CDs and you bring in ‘Experts” to prop them up.

I always felt that in general there are three weak spots in sales people that no one wants to deal with:

First, your salesmen are nice people. To be blunt you don’t necessarily want nice people, you want people who can be nice. You want people who have an almost vicious determination to get the sale at the terms they want; nice is one of the many tools they use to do. A good high-value closer is, just below the surface, well, not a nice person. That is cool, most of us deep inside know we may not be the nicest folks in that what we will do to someone else’s head to achieve our goal has limited bounds.

Was that a distasteful thought we just went through, feel that I am being insensitive and maybe even hurtful in what I advocate. If so you really don’t want to go any further with me in the realities I will be exploring in this series, go find a more sunshiny blog to read, one about kittens and puppies perhaps.

Second, your salesmen don’t have the faith. They don’t have the faith that they can close the deal the way you want them to. The suffer from the ‘Stockholm Syndrome”, they sympathize with the customer and surrendered their own will. Lacking willpower means no Force-Of-Will. It is Force-Of-Will that keeps the good salesman working on the customers head until the customer believes the value proposition that justifies the cost of the product. The good salesman instills faith about him, the company, and the products in the customer’s mind. Only then is the value of the product or service well enough established that the discount is not the winning issue, faith drives the discount aside. It’s called a Value Proposition for a darn good reason.

Third, is Cohunes – Brass Balls. Some look at this as a lack of pride, the willingness to interact with people to n-th degree with a sole purpose. Don’t confuse this with Force-Of-Will, there is a fine and important difference. Force-Of-Will is about drive, Cohunes is about welding that Willpower without being bothered what people think of you. It is about using that drive, which is beyond having it.

Point of it all is that good sales people are animals inside, mental animals with few external signs of what is really going on inside themselves. True stealth creatures, how cool!

Let’s talk about salesmen for a bit.

First thought. It is said with confidence that 45% of salesmen don’t close. Personally I think this number is low, but I will run with the convention for this Blog.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t bring home the order, it simply means that in most cases they take the order, not develop it, THEY DON’T CLOSE! They function as clerks, not sales people, but of course they claim all the credit. In fact they will claim more credit for the sale because they know their weakness and will lie to cover it.

Because we managers are only interested in results we generally don’t seek to understand the difference. The problem is that this means we are out of control, our salesman’s performance is capricious, based on luck and Marketing in many ways. Is this bad? After all, we got the sale.

It is terrible for several reasons:

1 – We don’t know which of our efforts (marketing or sales) made the event happen, so where do we pour our limited resources, more marketing or more commissions?

2 – We loose predictability, the data about our sales pipeline is false or weak at best. If the salesman is really clerking then he in fact is doing three things.

A – Operating in the blind, most likely deceiving himself in the process.

B – Deceiving us, in essence selling us, most likely lying to us.

C – Not developing the customer meaning that customer retention is going to be harder and we are not getting maximum yield for that customer.

This lack of clear vision means that the actual effectiveness of our Marketing is not really understood, without this feedback Marketing cannot better tune itself, understand the success of that they are doing, get better at it.

Most important, we have a B or C player working for us in a time when A-players are on the market. If we understood the truth we could replace him with an A-player thus future-proof our company by increasing our overall quality of the process, moral, and power of our selling force.

I hope you like your clerks.

Hi there, I have been off-line for about two months doing the 10 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week thing bringing life to a bootstrap start-up I started, fitting the family in has left no time to think or write about anything not related to product development and then sales of my stuff. But this is not about me; it’s about customers and sales.

My product caters to the contemporary Carriage Trade. What’s that you say (I heard that you know, these blogs are two-way . . . sometimes, depends on if I a listening, and I have selective hearing)? Carriage Trade refers to the retailers of old who had no front door; you could only get in by having your carriage enter through a portal to a vestibule. That’s class-

Prices are very high, margins are, well, GREAT. But it is an emotional sale that deals with vanity. The point is that after all this work anyone in my company that even mentions the word ‘discount’ is looking for a pink slip. A killer value prop, and oh yea, we don’t even advertise and sales are, well, justifying it all.

High price, niche market with almost universal appeal, lots of pull. How do you do it?

First of all most other entrepreneurs I run across are thinking in old (10 years ago, how long is that . . . let me tell you, a long f**king time ago!) models, too much internet, failure to really understand the tribal approach, lousy sensitivity to customers, too much sensitivity to people like themselves thinking they are the customer, incremental product, and most fundamentally little or no transformational qualities (see Pine and Gillmore, it’s all about the leading edge of the new-old economy).

Thus you now have all the clues to figure it out. Am I going to tell you how to think to find your own version of my path.

Hell No!

I can’t. Like the old crazy Werner Erhard dude said, even if I tell you, you won’t get IT. It’s not intellectual, it’s emotional, you have to feel it, and there is no way that I tell you how to feel something, you learn to feel it by picking up the bread crumbs such as those I have dropped above, fill in the blank spaces, “feel the Force Luke”, your intuition will tell you. Then you do something entirely crazy, you take the leap, ignore all those SOBs that try to tell you what is right, commit, go crazy, and win the day.

Welcome to the new-old world. Go kick your bankers butt.

Adaos Amigos.

Barry the Curmudgeon

The other day I was involved in an email thread about bulk mailing. While we on the thread generally agreed that bulk mailing was a bulk waste of time I had brought up a process I had used with some degree of success.  This process involved sending out post-cards with only one word on them.  My theory for doing this was that a post card with one word on it can not be denied, that someone can’t pick the card up and not read the one word as they throw it into the trash.  With this action I have gained brain-space, even if only for a fraction of a second, I got in through the noise, my “word” was in their brain.

“So what?” you might ask.  What does this do for you?

Well consider that you do it a couple of times. That word becomes an accepted data-point.   One way to look at it is brand recognition, you know that brand word.  Maybe you don’t know anything about it but you know the word, it is familiar and in that familiarity it becomes comfortable and perhaps non-threatening.  But it comes with a question.   What is it?

Remember the book/movie “The Manchurian Candidate”? A post hypnotic set of commands is activated with a single word.  Perhaps this is the reverse, a post-hypnotic curiosity is activated by the word.

So you cold-call the individual you sent the cards to and say the “word” in the introduction, the first words you get out before they hang the phone up.   Could this stop them from closing their mind?   Could this keep the door open long enough to get a second or third word in?  Could they be curious enough to ask what it all means?   Could you have a dialog as a result?  Could it lead to a sale?

One word.  What word would you choose?

The other night I went to a meeting to listen to a guy who wrote a book about marketing. I took my 19year old son; I try to expose him to everything even though his current ambition is to be a code monkey. I was smart enough to sit us in the back so we could sneak out early; the guy talking was a putz. A college professor who saw some simple things and churned a book out on it. He did studies, set up and ran three years of tests, in essence he re-invented the wheel. He was so full of himself for his discovery, and most of the audience was mesmerized. Why do people think they can find IT in a book? And what had he discovered and proven in such a complex way?

COMMON SENSE

When I was 18 through 21 I worked in a carriage-trade hi-fi salon run by an old merchant named Paul Holtz. He had sold cloths, jewelry, and at that point hi-fi. [Carriage-trade refers to retail stores a couple of generations ago. Hi-end shops did not have street access, you had to have your carriage driven through a port into a courtyard where you alighted onto a portico, customers stepped out the carriage right into the salon. If wanted to walk in you used the trade entrance and you were not a customer. Thus you started your buying experience for that store with a grand entrance.].

I didn’t want to be a salesman but I needed the money so I did what Paul said, constantly think about your experience as a customer and it’s easy. High-end sales were and still are an experience event. Always KISS to the ‘n’th degree, way beyond just the words Keep It Simple Stupid, and always remember that value was in the eye of the beholder, which is driven by his dreams. It is your job is to manipulate, fulfill, and harvest those dreams. Always offer three choices (avoiding the ‘tyranny of choice‘, good stuff for my next blog) and keep the best one locked to create a final theatrical stage to work on. Most of all always remember that from the first awareness of the product (or service) to the final delivery it is dance and both partners know it. Dance well!

Well this professor had discovered some of what this old merchant naturally did based simply on watching people, no collage education needed. And guess what? Every bit of it is common sense. There is no magic, only an honest understanding of how you buy, and how others buy. No special words to write down in a lecture, no special SEO stuff, no book long explanations, only simple thoughts you already know. We are all trained consumers, your mom pushed you around in a shopping cart when you were a year old and your education began. - -So what is my point? KISS! You don’t need gurus, mentors, professors or the like. You do need to look inside yourself because you already have experienced all you need to market and sell successfully; only your personal fear (my definition of ‘the box’) blocks you from seeing it and executing it fearlessly and flawlessly.

And remember, everything starts with a sale. Sell first, then analyze

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

The Entrepreneur has access to many methodologies to affect the growth of his venture. All are efforts to reach the ‘critical mass’ needed to become a perpetuating and sustainable enterprise. Once this state is achieved there is a further cost and burden in defending the growth position against both the passions and apathy if the competition and the customer alike.

Evangelism is one of the most effective tools to deal with both stages and is not just limited to the technology world. Its effects cover all ranges of human endeavors. This tool is so much more than just arm waving and an enthusiastic presentation. It is in fact a venture-wide state-of-mind that is totally manageable and results in the most profound form of the network-effect based growth. It can be implemented in a ‘fuel-efficient’ and long lasting way that result in a market-dominating wins for its users.

So what are these techniques? Over the next few blog entries I would like to explore this further. Lets start with the basics. First in the Evangelist’s toolbox is simple propaganda. This word had gotten a bum wrap over the last century because the guys who did it really well were what we consider very bad guys. We use the same techniques but don’t like to call it propaganda; in its lighter form we call it ‘messaging’. But when done with vigor is it plain old propaganda.

I just finished a book called ‘True Enough – Learning to live in a Post-Fact Society’. One of the fundamental tenants of the author is that new technologies are prompting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact. What he has missed is that this is history, this transition occurred a long time ago and is one of the fundamental rules that the evangelist works under. Facts are without passion (I call them ‘isms’) and humans are passionate emotional characters, although today we can employ both therapeutic and recreational drugs to change that.

Evangelism works on modifying ones beliefs and looks for factual structures to support those beliefs. Sounds terrible eh? Well maybe that’s just another belief. And beliefs are malleable; facts are only deniable.

More in round 2, see ya

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved