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.

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!

I once had a project manager working for me (actually he was in Marketing but I had special pull as the Fonder). Once we had a very cool idea for a whole new product line and he went out to test customers on it. From my talks with customers I had envisioned just two items in the line, when he came back and talked to the engineers they presented us with 15 products to build. At the product meeting I was amazed at my ability to not lift a 20 foot long conference table up and roll it through a big set of beautiful plate glass windows (I m getting better in my age, the adrenalin was there, but wisdom prevailed) with the ear-defining scream of “what the fXXX are you clowns thinking !!”. Which of course they weren’t, thinking that is, they were reacting.

I repeated the story of Steve Jobs coming back to Apple and reducing the product line from 20 some-odd major products to 4 and turning the business around. I then described to them what is called the “Tyranny of Choice”

Psychologist have long recognized that too many choices cause considerable stress in individuals. We know a family, good friends of my wife and son (they tolerate me, my son is falling into the same class as I because he too sees the reality of the situation and has started to asking the common sense questions) who, when searching for a new car, almost had to go to a therapist. The stress of deciding made her physically sick, him neurotic (I know, I am not a clinical professional so this is an opinion based on his conduct and not a legitimate analysis) and the kids (two) distanced and abstracted themselves as a shield.

Why so much detail? Simple, it is an exaggerated but real example of what you do to your customers when you don’t apply common sense to what they want.

Margaret Mead, the famous ethnologist, demonstrated to the world (much to her humiliation and discredit) that people will tell you want you want to hear because of the context and content of the questions you ask combined with their desire to please and be of value.

I always tell you to go first to the customer to get the truth about what you should do. The real truth is that you have listen with the ear of common sense. In between the dreamy maximum and the abbreviated minimum is reality, the reality of what they will buy because it does just enough to solve the problem, not too much to create more problems, and represents both safety and value. Delight to the upside is based on the old tome, just solve one real problem and you have a good product. You can always (and should) come back with more solutions, but don’t overwhelm the customer, do one thing excellently as Bill and Ted would say, make it easy to see the value, KISS, and build the relationship and reputation for doing something excellently, then look for another good problem.

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved.