Stop Letting Your People Pitch
I learned something very interesting when I first started consulting in the ‘developing’ world, where social enterprises are addressing the problems caused by poverty. They are selling life-saving, life-changing products to poor people, instead of simply giving handouts.
I went into one of the rural areas of Cambodia, right next to Vietnam, to observe a team of salespeople. None of the team members had ever been in sales before.
Again and again, I saw them approach customers, start talking at them, and just not shut up. They explained, they demonstrated, they stretched the truth, they even threatened and intimidated!
They thought ‘selling’ meant ‘pitching’ and ‘convincing.’ There was zero conversation.
‘You could sell ice cubes to Eskimos’
‘She’s got the gift of gab’
‘Joe’s a natural-born salesman’
In every one of the 54 countries we’ve worked on six continents, in our own culture and every other culture we have served, there is a common belief about sales: selling means pitching.
Salespeople think that selling is pitching.
They craft their ‘elevator speech’ to get in the door so they can pitch some more.
They learn a spiel for every product and service they sell. They memorize sales talks, learn to prepare PowerPoint decks, gather case studies, and have stories at hand to illustrate every product and to answer every objection.
They go to a first meeting with a customer armed to the teeth with a value proposition, complete with compelling images of what they can do, the brands they’ve done it for, and how valuable it can be for the customer who is now listening at length to them.
They only listen long enough to hear the word, the phrase, the need for something they have in their portfolio, and they’re like a shark smelling blood in the water. They open their mouths, start talking, and just don’t stop.
Companies think that selling is pitching.
Marketing departments shower salespeople with images, slogans, videos, case studies, and scripts for ‘customer conversations’.
Product departments develop technical specs, long lists of features and benefits, confident that reciting this information will make the difference.
Finance departments not only provide the sales targets, they require forecasts of prospective deals and ROI calculations they want the sales staff to pitch to customers.
And customers think that selling is pitching.
They are convinced they know what they need, so their opening questions are: ‘How can you help me? How are you different than other suppliers?’
Larger companies have adopted RFP and RFQ processes which require solutions and quotes up front so they can be shortlisted.
They delegate purchasing to the procurement department and shield their executives and heads of departments from the silver-tongued pitching machines that suppliers send to knock on their doors.
Anyone who finds a salesperson standing on their doorstep simply ask, ‘What are you selling?’ and wait quietly while salespeople drone on.
Nobody seems to notice that this belief – selling is pitching – is a self-defeating approach for both seller and customer that perpetuates mistrust, ignorance, and blame for poor buying decisions that don’t deliver what was needed.
Pitching is all about a solution, not about the problem for which a solution is needed.
Customers buy because there's a problem to solve, and, unless that problem is fully understood before the conversation turns to potential solutions, customers are going to buy ignorantly and sellers are going to sell blindly.
How do you avoid this? First, stop pitching! Just give it a rest. There's a time and a place for it, but it's not at the beginning of the buying process. There are several steps customers need to take before they are ready to hear your pitch:
They need to be intrigued and impressed that you have researched the problems they face and that you’re taking the time to give them insight, ask them substantive questions, and require them to fully understand the issues they must address.
They need to go through the exercise of estimating how much it will cost them to leave these problems unsolved. Only then will they have enough financial motivation to find a solution for which they are willing to pay what it takes to solve the problem they now grapple with.
They need to get the right people in the room to explore, develop, and commit to the solution that you are going to develop with them.
Get this done, every bit of it, and then make your pitch. Do this well, and several interesting things happen:
You will differentiate yourself from all those suppliers who are still pitching.
Your customer will trust you because you’re not bombarding them with a pitch but guiding them to an understanding of the problems they are really trying to solve.
The time invested in the front end of the conversation will pay off: objections are fewer, buy-in is significant, and you have a customer not just for now, but for the future.
We call this approach DQ Sales®. You’ve heard of IQ (intellectual intelligence) and EQ (emotional intelligence). DQ refers to ‘decision intelligence,’ the customer's decision intelligence.
When your sales team dedicate themselves to it and learn how to lead their customers to develop it, their sales performance will change – significantly and for good.
If you want to introduce this approach to your team, try the following. This is one of those exercises that is highly effective to do together.
Draw four columns on a whiteboard or flip chart. Title the columns: ‘Product (or Service),’ ‘Feature,’ ‘Benefit,’ and ‘Problem.’
Use all that marketing and product information to complete the first three columns for the major offerings in your portfolio.
Then list specifically the customer problem(s) that each feature and benefit addresses.
Now ask each salesperson to identify the problems each of their customers currently have at some depth. If they can’t do this, require them to learn and help them find the resources to do so.
Then ensure that they lead their customers to a full understanding of their genuine needs before any pitching takes place.
You may want to read more about DQ Sales® in one of our books, Decision Intelligence Selling or Sell Well, Do Good. But don’t hesitate to take your team through this exercise. You’ll figure out what to do next.
Stop Being Negative
For more than two and a half years, we had been coaching Michael about how he worked with his staff, both in person and on the phone. It took a while before he began to understand the relationship between employees having an above-the-line attitude and producing results.
But the light bulb moment came when Michael’s daughter, who had been moping about a school project and procrastinating from starting it, finally shifted her attitude and completed the project in about a half-hour.
When he told us about this, he said, “Now I understand what you’ve been saying about the relationship between attitude and producing results!”
The monthly sales results have come in and they’re far short of where you needed them to be. In fact, you’ve missed your targets for three of the last four months. You’re starting to worry.
You’ve kept a brave face, trying to rally the troops to take the next hill, but it’s just not panning out. Your top gun is threatening to go to the competition. Three of your salespeople have raised moping and moaning to an art form. HR can’t find anyone else for your team who actually knows how to sell. Your product line is woefully lagging behind the competition. The “sure deals” you were counting on to pull you out of the fire have all fallen through. To top it off, the biggest sale of the month just crashed.
Sound familiar? Selling is tough. Managing salespeople is even tougher, because you must work through others to get your number, and most of your team are nowhere near as experienced as you are. Let’s face it, you would probably be reaching – even exceeding – your targets if you were the one selling.
When you’re not succeeding, it’s easy to get down on yourself, your team, and your company. You try to keep an “up” attitude, but after a while you can’t help it. Your negativity starts leaking out. It starts with a light, well-placed jab, a complaint disguised as humor, an under-the-breath sarcastic remark. Soon, your frustration boils to the surface. You’re angry at what’s happening and you want things to change.
You’re smart enough to know that expressing your negativity makes it a problem for everyone else. Either you’ve learned the hard way that indulging your frustration and blowing up generates more heat than light, or you’ve watched other sales managers do this and you’ve seen the mess that needs to be cleaned up afterward.
There’s only one transformative solution: get off it! Get over your negativity, let it go, quit indulging yourself and get on with finding solutions to the problems you see.
Why do this? There are three very good reasons:
Your sales team won’t sell well as long as you are unsettled and upset. Please believe us when we tell you that nobody is fooled - they all know when you’re upset.
You won’t be able to think clearly and act wisely. Your unresolved negativity will prevent you from being at your best.
The extent to which you cannot get over your own negativity matches your inability to help your team get over theirs.
So, how do you do this? How do you free yourself from the grip of exasperation, frustration, and cynicism before things change? Now that’s a question in search of an answer! If you could master that, wouldn’t it have a huge impact? It would indeed.
Here are some steps to take if you want to develop the mental strength to let go of negativity and start fixing things.
Choose something with which you are frustrated: something someone has done, something they’ve said, a policy that doesn’t work, a communication that has created problems, etc.
Put pen to paper and write the conclusions you have drawn about this situation: why they did it, what it means, what caused it, how it was heard by others.
Keep writing. Write the predictions your mind is making about what this situation will bring: now what will happen? What will others feel and do? What problems will you now have to deal with?
Stop and accept the possibility that your negativity is being fueled and maintained by these conclusions and predictions. Keep thinking them and you’ll keep being upset.
Now write something different: what you want and why you want it. What do you want instead? Why does it matter to you? Add the words: “Because I want…” and keep writing more sentences that deepen your “why”.
Once you feel yourself lightening up, choose one thing to do that will help you get what you want, then go do it.
Your ability to lead and develop a crack team of sales professionals will rely greatly on your ability to manage your own negativity, disappointment, and frustration.
Stop Letting Your People Whine
When we met with Nick, he was whining…a lot. And, he had some pretty good reasons. He said that his company’s delivery personnel were so ineffective, he would make his customer happier if he simply loaded the products on a truck and delivered them himself!
As we coached him through one upset after another, he made the connection between being pissed off and wasting time.
One day he simply put his complaints aside. He just decided that whining was getting in the way of his success. He could quit or he could stay, but he was determined not to waste another minute complaining, because it limited his ability to succeed.
Anyone who has worked in sales knows that there’s a lot to complain about.
There are customers who:
Have a dysfunctional buying process (e.g. an RFP process) that actually prevents them from making the most intelligent buying decision for their company.
Hold salespeople hostage over things they can’t control such as delivery, service, and billing disputes.
Won’t be honest about the real problems they are trying to solve.
Fail to disclose the difficulties they are having with internal stakeholders.
Withhold difficult truths so they can avoid being the bearer of bad news.
Behave like jerks to drive the price as low as possible.
There are colleagues and other managers who:
Don’t do their job very well, and expect salespeople to handle the mess they leave behind.
Maintain unrealistic expectations of your salespeople.
Increase targets midway through the year when salespeople are smashing them.
Establish compensation systems that cap the amount of money your superstars can earn and therefore reward mediocre performance.
Require endless work-around reports.
Fill their calendar with meetings that cut down selling time.
Salespeople allow these challenges to affect their attitude. The more their attitude drops, the less clearly they think, and the more they complain. They give up internally, and lose the will to find a way around the situation.
You, in turn, wind up giving the same advice which didn’t work before and which won’t work now.
Let’s face it, things would have improved ages ago if people would invest just half the energy they spend on complaining into coming up with a solution.
People whine, complain, and moan when (a) something is in their way of succeeding and (b) they believe they’re powerless and can’t do anything about it. It’s a victim’s perspective. Moaning about something is what we do instead of taking action to fix it or accept it and let it go.
In truth, we always have the power to act and the responsibility for doing so no matter what’s happening. We have three types of power available to us.
Things we can control:
What we do - including the option of quitting our job and finding one we like
What we say - for example, to stop moaning
The attitude we maintain – to see what can be done instead of what can’t
Things we can influence.
We know the people who can change things.
We know the people who know the people who can change things.
Things we cannot control or influence. What we can do is hope they change instead of falling into cynicism and despair about them.
Next time you’re interacting with someone whining about something, let them do so for no more than five minutes and then try this:
Take their upset seriously - find out what it’s about and why it matters to them.
Ask them three questions:
What can you control?
What can you influence?
What’s completely beyond your control and influence?
Then ask ‘Are you ready to do something about it?’
Help them identify what they will do and when they will do it.
Follow up with them to see what happened.
As you get more comfortable with this conversation, you will see things start changing for the better.
Stop Setting Targets for Your Team
In his autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut, former GE chairman Jack Welch talked about how he learned to set targets that his people wanted to hit.
He said that every year his CFO would tell him what the sales numbers needed to be to satisfy Wall Street. Welch would write these numbers on a sheet of paper and put it in his back pocket.
Then, he would go to his department heads and ask them what products, patents and sales they could launch or complete that year. For 25 out of 26 years, the dollar amounts provided by the employees were higher than the numbers Welch had gotten from finance.
One of our clients, Lawrence – divisional director of sales - used the same tactic. He asked his salespeople to spell out target numbers for the year and their numbers were also higher than those set by senior management. He actually had to convince the CFO to not present the company numbers, which were lower!
Many businesses fear doing what Jack Welch did: committing to a strategy of ‘bottom up’ target setting. They don’t trust that the numbers will add up to what the company needs to succeed. Ironically, they unwittingly miss the opportunity to achieve outstanding sales performance.
We don’t have a problem with companies having sales targets. We do have a problem with any targeting process that interferes with salespeople performing at their best.
For example, let’s examine the typical annual target-setting ritual. It starts with a sales manager being told by his boss to estimate how much his team can sell in the coming year. He sits down with his reps and asks them to review their accounts, determine how much can be sold in the next year and how many new accounts they think they can win.
But the sales manager also knows that his team is setting him up: lowballing their figures, telling him how tough it is out there, how products are lagging behind the competition, how prices are too high, etc.
The sales manager goes away, ups the numbers to what he thinks is possible, and then meets with his boss or the finance department. He is given figures that make his eyes water. The gap is as wide as the Grand Canyon.
And so the negotiation gets underway. He might get some concessions, but the result is a mammoth target that he has no idea how to hit. Now he’s faced with the Herculean task of selling the target to his team.
Their reaction to the target is much the same as his. Anxiety gives way to stunned silence. The air in the room is thick with impossibility.
Why do companies do this over and over again, when the result is a demotivated salesforce that starts the year believing they can’t win?
Companies set sales targets because they’re nervous that their salespeople are going to take advantage of them. After all, the general belief about salespeople is that, when it comes to target-setting, they are ‘sandbaggers:’ they estimate low and they sell high, doing as little as possible for the most money they can make.
Furthermore, setting targets for people is a risky business because it’s very difficult to give someone a target that they are delighted with and excited to receive. If the target is too high, it instills anxiety and fear; too low and it puts in place an artificial ceiling on performance.
Either way you lose.
Furthermore, companies that set targets may send the wrong messages to the very people who are keeping them in business:
‘You can’t motivate yourself - we have to do it for you.’
‘You won’t be honest with us about what you can achieve.’
‘You won’t perform at your best if we don’t give you something to shoot for.’
‘If we don’t set targets, you won’t sell enough to keep us going.’
By guarding against the downside, companies set themselves up to miss the upside. They don’t engage the natural enthusiasm, the drive, and the self-motivation that salespeople naturally bring to a challenge of their own making.
When target-setting time rolls around again, you might start something radical: do a variation on what Jack did. Before the ‘official’ process starts, say to your team: ‘I don’t know what’s going to come down from up top, but let’s do something that could make us all a lot of money.’
Set up individual conversations:
Talk about how much money they want to make and what they could earn if they really blew the lid off.
Next, ask why it matters to them and keep asking them ‘why’ until they hit their core motivation. This part of the conversation often ends up with a purpose much bigger than the practical need for making more money just to buy more stuff.
Help them work out a plan that gets them to where they want to go.
Ask them what they want you to do – or use your influence to get others to do – to help them achieve their plan.
Then, add up all the sales targets that people have set for themselves. Keep that number in your back pocket.
When finance or your boss provide the new annual targets, do one of two things:
If the company targets are lower than your people are planning to do, smile sweetly and say, ‘We’ll commit to those targets.’
If the company targets are higher, pull out your team’s plans and argue strongly for an adjustment to the targets.
Competitive people love to set targets for themselves a lot more than they enjoy someone telling them what to do. Tie into this energy, work hard to make your compensation plans reward this energy, and remove the obstacle that ‘target-setting’ can place in your team’s path.
Stop Wasting Time Forecasting
We worked with the training division of a large Scottish bank. The reps spent an enormous amount of time forecasting and measuring different parts of the business instead of selling.
One day, the head of their Sales Academy, for whom we were designing their training, exploded with frustration.
‘It’s like we’re trying to fatten a pig for market. You want the pig to get bigger and bigger, but we keep weighing the pig instead of feeding it!’
You’re on the hook for accurately forecasting sales, and you should be. After all, it’s an integral part of any sales manager’s job.
However, you’re not on the hook for wasting your time putting the forecast together before it can be done accurately and then defending it when it doesn’t work out.
The first activity helps the business but the second hurts it. It hurts because it eats away at the time you could be spending developing, training, and coaching your people - activities which will generate a lot more sales than repeated forecasting.
So, how do you end up wasting so much time forecasting? What’s the series of events that leads to your wasting time? Usually, it’s something like this:
Near the beginning of the year or the quarter, your manager requests that you (a) hit certain sales targets and (b) develop a forecast that shows how you will reach these targets.
You work with your team to examine the deals currently in the pipeline and evaluate where new opportunities exist. You identify the size of each deal and estimate when it will close. So far so good.
You start the quarter. After a few weeks, you notice that some deal values are decreasing and close dates are slipping. You increase the amount of conversation with your sales team about deal amounts and close dates. You want accuracy in their prediction, but now you’re falling short in your Q1 numbers, and you let them know that you’ve got to close certain deals this quarter.
The quarter ends, and senior management isn’t happy. Your short fall for Q1 is added to your Q2 target, and you are told to come up with a forecast that will hit this target. You let your team know this is expected, and emphasize they enter the close dates you need into the CRM
Halfway through Q2, reality is falling way short of your unrealistic forecast. Senior management now mandates new ‘slippage’ metrics with a fancy dashboard and a new governance process of required review meetings for you and your team to attend.
Q2 results actually match the original Q2 target, but, of course, they fall short of the adjusted Q2 amount, which included the Q1 shortfall. The CRM is no longer regarded as reliable and a new set of spreadsheets and reports are now required each week.
You do a quick calculation of the time now being invested in additional measurements to get the forecast right, and you realize that, as a team, you are now investing one person-week of time more each month than you were at the start of the quarter. That’s five extra days of reviewing sales and five fewer days of doing sales.
How crazy is this? More measurement does not equate to more sales results!
You’ve got your own version of this scenario, don’t you?
The only way out of this insanity is to stop finding more ways to “weigh the pig” and start forecasting more accurately. There’s no simple prescription for doing this, no simple tip or trick.
However, you can try the following approach, taking your time, and letting your native intelligence come up with solutions that fit your situation.
Talk with your team about this crazy dance and get everyone to see that all of you are wasting time you need for selling.
Accept the need for accurate forecasting. Your company needs it to plan product release, marketing, and all sorts of things, including paying your salaries and commissions.
But - and this is where you’ve got to exert your authority - your team and senior management must also accept that, in the early stages of a deal, forecasting deal amounts and close date is mostly guesswork and not a commitment that you’ll close the deal!
This is a vital distinction. Accept it and act accordingly: with your team and with your own manager. Stop stacking the pipeline with unrealistic close dates and deal amounts, admit you don’t yet have a plan to meet the targets, and set your salespeople free to work on selling while you come up with a plan.
Yes, this will be really challenging for you. Fine. Step up and handle it.
There is another way to get more accurate forecasting by weighting the pipeline according to the stage at which the customer is in his buying process, not where you are in your selling process. But more about that later.
For now, stop suffering for the wrong reasons (giving crap forecasts you know you can’t hit and accepting more time-wasting measurements of it) and start suffering for the right reasons (you can’t see a way - yet - to meet the targets they’ve set for you).
At least you’ll be working on the real problem. That gives you a fighting chance to win.