SALES MANAGEMENT: It seems this is a continuing refrain heard ’round the world- “It’s so tough to find good sales people.” The first question is “Are you really looking?” After that is wrestled down, “How and Where?”

Today’s tightened economy has opened the ears of so many more capable sales people that have been previously closed to overtures about making a move. Some have been hurt due to their industry being severely impacted. Some are working at companies that are genuinely struggling and are open to discussing a move. Now is the time to turn a tightened economy into a time of opportunity. Put together your list of known top sales performers that could add quick and real impact to your team. Don’t forget to expand your search to folks outside your industry. Whenever Jack Daly asks his audiences if they would want a third/fourth quartile performer with industry experience or a first/second quartile performer with no industry experience, the choice is always the latter. Yet, it’s infrequent that we see Sales Leaders recruiting from outside their industry. There is real opportunity here and you can train them in your business. Top performers know one thing for certain- how to be top performers!  Identify a dozen or so key recruits and begin the courting process.

According to bestselling author Mike Brooks, the bottom line in sales is that asking questions — and then shutting up and listening — is still one of the most important things you can do either during the qualification stage or during the close.  Use the questions provided during your next presentation and watch your closes get stronger and your income get bigger!

Dave Brock has noticed over the years that many people are moved into their first sales management jobs because they were great individual contributors.  Their entire experience base and self perception is built around their ability to close deals.  In moving into sales management, they tend to think of it as doing more of the same thing, in a larger territory.  Their natural reaction is to dive into doing deals, pushing the responsible sales person aside or delegating the mundane follow-ups to the sales people.

Inevitably this management style leads to failure.  

The job of the manager is not to do more of what they were doing as individual contributors.  The job of the manager is getting things done through their people.

The new manager (and his manager) needs to recognize the only way to be successful is to focus on making his people more successful.  His role is no longer that of an individual contributor, but as a leader of a team, his focus must be on… 

One obvious purpose of selling is to persuade buyers to buy what you are selling. Most people have no trouble agreeing to that proposition. Yet the harder you try to get people to do what you want them to do, the more likely they are to push back, resist, and generally behave contrarily.

Put those two statements together, and we can easily see selling as an ongoing struggle to get people to do what we want without making them feel that we are trying to get them to do what we want. Selling has at its heart a struggle to reconcile these two truths. You want to sell. They don’t want to be sold.

When two truths collide, one tends to lose, or they both tend to get watered down. But the way out is not to give up one goal (to sell) or the other (to not cause the feeling of being sold); it is to fully recognize both and transcend the apparent paradox.

Charles Green shares that it can be done. Here’s how.

Selling is all about getting people to change and change always involves risk. Generally, when given a choice, most people will always choose to not change. People are creatures of habit and change requires them to break old habits and create new ones. What makes selling difficult is the fact that it requires you to work against human nature by getting people to change (and you thought this was going to be easy!).

John Hirth discusses how to lower risk, or at least lower the perception of risk, to get more people to take the risks they need in order for us to sell.

Without salespeople, you don’t have customers. If you have a reasonable compensation plan in place, for every dollar you pay your salesperson, you should be getting at least two dollars. So, in reality, the more money your salespeople are making, the more money your business is making.

Professional Coach Diane Helbig, shares three steps every business owner should implement with their sales force to ensure results are being realized.

A large percentage of top-producing salespeople are free spirits by nature.

They’re entrepreneurial with high drive, ambition and self-reliance. They work — often by choice — individually as they know they can produce results. They possess the most important skill any employee can have: the ability to produce results. They’re rainmakers and most companies need them.  By their very entrepreneurial nature, however, they often alienate themselves from the support staff in a company — sometimes by choice, other times by company structure.

Regardless, companies must realize the value, and necessity, of team communication throughout the entire organization. Roy E. Chitwood, President, Max Sacks International tells us why.

This week’s blog is by Sharon Drew Morgen, the visionary and thought leader behind Buying Facilitation®, the new sales paradigm that focuses on helping buyers manage their buying decision.

As I was doing the final rewrites on my book, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it, I realized how many times I mentioned my frustration with the failure of the sales model. It actually builds in a 90% failure rate – we’ve begun to expect it!

We hire 10 times more sales people than needed to get the results we seek. We get 50% longer sales cycles, face objections because people are responding to the sales model itself, and lose clients we shouldn’t lose.

What a waste – not only for sellers, but for buyers.

This doesn’t need to happen. The sales model is an incomplete one that we’ve accepted as a way to place our products. It works only at the product decision end of the equation (vs. Buying Facilitation, my model that manages the buying decision end of the equation), with no ability to guide buyers through the tangle of information that needs to be figured out before they can make a buying decision.

That tangle is where prospects go when they say, “I’ll call you back.” They have to make sure all of the people and policies that touch the Identified Problem are in agreement, that old vendor issues and relationships are handled, and that historic problems are managed.

Unfortunately for us, the sales model doesn’t help with this aspect of the seller-buyer equation. Buyers need to do this on their own.

Unfortunately for them, buyers don’t initially know the route through all of their decisions. We also meet them far too early in their decision process, leaving us waiting to close and not knowing what’s going on. After all, their need and our solution seem to be a match – but it takes so long for them to decide! What is the problem?

So we sit and wait. And 90% of the prospects don’t come back. Not because our product isn’t good or because our solution doesn’t match their need, but because their internal issues haven’t been resolved. Buyers won’t buy until they are. They can’t; they must maintain the integrity of their environment even if it means they don’t resolve their need.

The sales model doesn’t offer us the tools to help guide buyers through the route to all of those decisions. It’s difficult for sellers to understand the buyer’s buy-in issues, management decisions and technology factors.

But it’s quite possible to have an understanding of the decision making process – the route that buyers must make through their unique decision criteria – and then recalibrate our jobs to be not only solution providers, but neutral navigators or Buying Facilitators if you will. Much like a buddy to a sight-impaired friend, who knows where they want to go but doesn’t know the exact route to get there.

By focusing on the buying decision end of the equation, sales can be closed in months rather than years, and weeks rather than months. Sellers can stop wasting so much of their time and failing so often. Imagine if doctors or baseball players had the same failure rate!

Imagine if we could lead buyers through all of their unconscious decision criteria, help them discover who needs to buy-in to a new solution, and help them build our product into their solution design. Imagine!

Morgen’s book, “Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it,” goes on sale Oct. 15 and will be featured in the SalesJournal.com Store.

Entrepreneurial sales leader Jim Burns continues to hear from sales people who still try to use email as a prospecting tool. He contends that email is no longer a communication tool — especially when unsolicited — it’s primarily a delivery vehicle. In our business, we seldom send unsolicited emails unless we have the opportunity to make the call and leave the message. Email is the delivery system for our vignette and compelling message, not the primary prospecting tool.

Are your really different? Do you really look different when you show up in front of the prospect? Is your sales process so different that a prospect can pick you out of a group and say, “I want to do business with that company because of how they execute the sales cycle”? Probably not.

It’s been a tough year, but still there’s a lot of business out there. So Bill Caskey of Inside the Sales Mind, challenges you over the next 30 days to think…really think…about your business and how different you really are. You can’t say you’re different, you have to demonstrate it.