And within the group intended to deliver usable information there is a further breakdown into those that are simply fluff and filler and those that really deliver on their promise to help sellers become better sellers.

If you have spent any time scanning the sales books in Amazon or Barnes and Noble you know there’s no dearth of “big picture” books (books that although fun to read leave one wondering why they wasted their time reading it because ultimately it really didn’t have anything applicable in it).  You also know there are thousands of the “this is your key to sales success” strategy books that for the most part simply lay out a couple of time worn strategies and use stories as filler to put some pages to the book.

Thankfully you will find that there are a few books that deliver real value; that aren’t stuffed with fluff just to make the book thicker; and that provide a broad range of effective strategies all designed and coordinated to accomplish a specific goal.

One of those few books of real value is Mark Hunter’s new book, High-Profit Selling: Win The Sale Without Compromising On Price (AMACOM:  2012).

Hunter comes from the trenches of sales—he spent almost two decades selling for Fortune 100 companies.  His experience is that of a seller, not a theorist or seller wanna be.

Those years of real world selling, combined with his years as a sales trainer are at the heart of High-Profit Selling, and all designed to do one thing—help you acquire more business without compromising on price.

In today’s tough economy it is common for sellers and sales leaders to think in terms of capturing business by cutting price.  Hunter argues—and presents the tools necessary to do so—that you don’t have to cut price and profit in order to win business even in today’s troubled economy.

Instead of cutting price, learn how to create the value that justifies your price.

High-Profit Selling presents a comprehensive approach to creating value to support your price.  Hunter’s concentration is on value building and he thus spends a good deal of time on how to dig down to uncover prospect needs and issues, the fine points of communication, and leveraging knowledge, but he doesn’t neglect the equally critical issues of how to prospect, how to deal with price objections, and how to deal effectively—and profitably—with RFP’s, RFQ’s and professional buyers.

In addition to the standard one-on-one selling situation, Hunter addresses the need for an on-line presence, how to become a thought leader in your industry, and how to get your information out onto the internet in a manner that will inform and attract prospects.

It is common for many readers of sales books to skip around and read the parts that sound interesting and to ignore the rest.  In some cases, the reader skips the greater part of the book.

First, I’d advise readers not to approach High-Profit Selling as a magazine with each chapter being an article that can be read or skipped—read the entire book and read it in order.

Second, if you simply cannot control yourself and you must read the book as you would Reader’s Digest; by all means do not skip the “One Percent Continuous Improvement Process” section in the last chapter.  I suspect that a great many readers will skip this section and they’ll suffer because of it.  In the space of just about three pages Mark presents a very simple concept that can literally change your career in a matter of months.  By concentrating on improving a single aspect of your selling each week by just one percent you will improve your sales performance by almost 70% over the course of a year.  What would your pipeline—and bank account—look like if your performance was improved  by 60 or 70% by the end of the year?

If you’re looking for a well written, high value book to help you increase your sales, High-Profit Selling has just hit the streets and is in stock at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books-a-Million.  I encourage you to pick up a copy and learn how to make your numbers without compromising on profit.

We’ve become a generation of “good enough” business leaders.

We’ve traded a relentless focus on being extraordinary for the justification that we are following the rules. That we are doing what we’ve been told we should be doing — college degree, MBA, and 5 year subscription to Smart Business magazine.

Nothing too risky.

Nothing unexplained.

In place of wonderment, we’ve adopted process, policy, and politics. There are rules for everything. And when that doesn’t work we can always blame the “nine-to-fivers” for not doing enough.

If something goes wrong then we unwire the entire business process and start strategizing around the uncertainty that we just experienced.

But maybe this whole drive for understanding the process is why we find it so tough to stay motivated. To stay focused on our mission. To take the road less traveled.

We’ve lost our sense of breathlessness. Our curiosity for achieving the impossible.

If we can’t predict it, project it, and plan for it, then we aren’t interested.

But the magic behind success is what happens in spite of our anticipations — what emerges from chaos and confusion.

Maya Angelou made the poetic observation that: “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”

Breathless business.

Leadership needs an overhaul — we need breathlessness.

• Our customers crave it.
• Our employees thrive in it.
• Our ambitions demand it.

It’s the missing ingredient in our struggle for finding success.

We’ve tried everything else. We’ve tried to manage chaos; attempted to manufacture passion from school plans. We even have a bevy of tools to help us automate empathy.

And none of it has worked.  None of it is working.

Customer loyalty is at an all time low.  Employee retention continues to exasperate progress.  Selfish sales and marketing processes dampen client engagement.

We’re missing guts.

We’re missing the guts to be amazing — choosing survival over the extraordinary.

It’s time to start being amazing.  Being predictable and eliminating uncertainty is what is holding you back.

Be breathless.

Speaker, writer, strategist, Dan Waldschmidt is at war with conventional business strategy.  His Edgy Conversations© have turned hundreds of companies into rock-star businesses and the Wall Street Journal calls his blog one of the” Top 7 sales blogs” anywhere in the world.  He’s on a mission to empower millions of high-performers all over the globe.  For more information about Waldschmidt Partners Intl, go to www.EdgyConversations.com or call at 202-630-6730.

Yes, there are a host of proven lead generation, prospecting and follow-up techniques that can make a real difference in your organization—and I talk about these often in my sales training sessions and webinars.

That’s only part of your solution though. In fact, that’s the second part. The first part of the equation involves personalizing your message, thinking smart and going beyond trust—creating winning conditions that you can later capitalize on.

Thinking personal.
You can’t sell very well to people who either don’t remember you, or can’t remember why they bought from you. Today, all selling is personal. Even in enterprise situations.

To be effective at being personal, however, you have to have to be ready to scale some walls. It’s a busy, noisy world out there, and odds are good that your customers filter out as much of it as they can. Who can blame them, given all the impersonal messages and wooden pitches that inundate inboxes everywhere?

Being personal sells because it transcends the act of selling. It requires a regular, thoughtful investment of your time to do this properly. It also happens to be what will set you and your team apart from those who still treat selling purely in transactional terms.

Thinking smart.
To be effective at being personal, think smart. You have to provide something that people want and can find useful in their own work. It can be a highlighted extract from a brand-new report, new research on market behavior, fresh data on a subject that matters to your audience. It can be a link posted on Google+ to a brand-new blog post, or a tweet. Or it can be a free webinar or podcast on a subject that provides a solution to a problem they are struggling with.

Just make sure that there’s substance to it. You are the subject authority.

No audience has to look hard to find run-of-the-mill tips or fact-free opinions. What they value is unique insight, validated by other subject matter authorities. Andrew Rashbass, Chief Executive of The Economist magazine (which has nearly doubled its profits since 2007) recently observed a growing phenomenon in the marketplace, which he calls “the mega-trend of mass intelligence.” People, he says, are “smarting up” rather than “dumbing down.”

That trend should be on your mind and that of every member of your sales team as you brainstorm for ways that you can provide better, more personalized value to your customers and prospects. Companies want to do business with thought leaders and industry experts—not sales people. Now is the time to start creating high-value content that sets you apart from all the other vendors.

Marketing consultant Simon Sinek argues in his book, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, that “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” When[A1]  you take the time to be an authority on something and share it with others, you’re making a powerful statement about why you are in business. Work hard to show that what matters to you is also what matters to your audience.

Beyond trust.
For the last several years, there has been much talk about the need to forge trust with your customers as part of winning more sales.

Trust isn’t enough.

In fact, trust is an outcome. You can’t buy it. You can’t demand it. You only can earn it. Therefore, look carefully at the ways in which you go about earning that trust. That’s where people are paying attention and forming opinions.

What I see in the marketplace today—backed by the winning habits of the top salespeople across the full range of industries—is that people have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. They are looking to work with those who are experts in their subject area and who are prepared to share what they know. What you have to sell to them—while important—is secondary.

An opportunity of a lifetime.
Being in sales today is an opportunity of a lifetime. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise with their gloomy forecasts on what they call a bad economy, which is just a form of shorthand for making excuses for failure. There is a $61 trillion dollar global economy out there, populated with more people than ever who are in a position to buy your products, services and ideas.

Many old barriers to entering the marketplace don’t matter anymore (e.g., distance to market). New barriers, such as attracting and sustaining your audience’s attention, are entirely solveable.

The question you and your sales team need to ask yourself is why are you in business? Where does your passion live? How can you showcase that passion and the knowledge that comes with it and share it with your audience? Answer these questions, coupled with the time-honored, field-tested methods that we talk about so often at Engage to immediately improve your sales results, and your team will be hitting and surpassing sales targets like never before.

Colleen Francis, Sales Expert, is Founder and President of Engage Selling Solutions (www.EngageSelling.com). Armed with skills developed from years of experience, Colleen helps clients realize immediate results, achieve lasting success and permanently raise their bottom line.  Start improving your results today with Engage’s online Newsletter Sales Flash and a FREE 7 day intensive sales eCourse: www.EngagingIdeasOnline.com 

The typical response goes like this:

You devise several homemade remedies to ensure you do better next year. You develop a plan to do one or more of the following:

• Develop a new selling skills program
• Hire only top sales reps
•  Focus on growing key customers
•  Create a better incentive plan

However, these “quick fixes” only scratch the surface. The deeper response is to ask yourself some difficult questions. You need to understand why your team is not delivering. Here are a couple of questions I would ask:

• Are your sales reps making a difference?
• Do your sales reps make impact on each call?
•  Do they actually make a difference in the sales in their territory?
•  How often do your sales managers go out in the field?
• Do your sales managers actually make an impact on each sales reps performance?

If you have answered “no” to more than one of the questions, your team may be suffering from “failure to impact syndrome”. It is contagious and can spread throughout a sales force. I have seen it in many sales forces.  I call it the daily sales charade:  Sales reps make their calls and sales managers do their field visits. That works as long as the business grows. Everyone gets high fives and there is no need to dig any deeper. But when sales are off, senior management starts asking questions. Sales managers struggle to come up with the answers and reps get nervous.

If your sales force suffers from “failure to impact syndrome”, homemade remedies are not going to work. Unless….

Unless, you have strong front line sales managers, you stand little chance of making impact even with all the tactics outlined above. The front line sales manager is the unsung hero, a person with tremendous responsibility, but little support or development.

In today’s corporate environment, responsibilities are outpacing the time needed to perform the activities that drive revenue. The key to reversing “failure to impact syndrome” is to have your front line sales mangers physical presence in the field coaching/developing and inspiring reps. The question remains, why is this not a standard operation?

The problem is two- fold, firstly the activity that managers are least adept at is coaching/developing their reps. Secondly they spend less time in the field because of reason one and are too busy completing non revenue generating activities.

What you need to do as the head of sales is relentlessly develop a team of great front line sales managers. This is the building block to cure “failure to impact syndrome”. Top sales managers will develop their teams to their fullest potential. They reinforce sales training and help companies maximise their teaching efforts and deliver more sales.

Conclusion:
The key to building a sales force that can dramatically impact and increase sales is directly related to the strength of the sales management team. Hire great sales managers and they will hire and develop sales superstars.

Steven Rosen, MBA is Canada’s Sales Leadership Coach and the founder of STAR Results. Steven helps companies transform sales managers into great sales coaches. He works with sales executives to develop high performance sales organizations. For more information on how you can improve your personal and professional success, contact Steven @ steven@staresults.com, call 905-737-4548 or visit http://www.starresults.com

I suspect you are like me, getting dozens of emails, phone calls, snail mail letters, and even face-to-face meetings with sellers who seem to have only one goal—waste as much of my time as possible.  They email and call wanting to know if I’m doing OK, or if I need anything, or if they can show me a new product or service without having the slightest idea if I could actually use it.  Some call to simply let me know they’re still around and want my business.

Many of these intrepid sellers have bombarded me with so much time wasting junk communication that they’ve taught me to completely ignore them.  When I see an email or letter from them or if I get a voice mail message from them I know that I need pay absolutely no attention to them.  Their time wasting communications have completely killed me off as a prospect—and, worse, I’ve even had some sellers kill me off as a client because of their insistence on trying to waste my time.

Sellers work hard to find and connect with quality prospects and then to win them as clients.  Why in the world would they want to then commit prospect and client genocide?

Obviously, their intent isn’t to become mass murderers, but that is the final result of many sellers’ communications.  Their killer communication strategy is to unintentionally kill off massive numbers of their prospects and clients by teaching them to ignore any of their communications. 

So many sellers think of communication as nothing that important.  Their object is to keep their name in front of the prospect or client and to that end they feel a need to contact the prospect or client even when they have nothing of import to communicate.  Actually and more correctly, they feel the need to draw attention to themselves even when they have nothing of value to communicate.  And even more correctly, they are just too damn lazy to find something of value to deliver to the prospect or client. 

In other words, their killer communication strategy is tell their prospects and clients in no uncertain terms that they just aren’t important enough for the seller to invest the time and energy necessary to add value for them.

Now that’s a killer communication strategy.

There is a very simple communication rule that I teach my clients:  every communication you have with a prospect or client is teaching them to either pay attention to you because you bring value to them or to ignore you because all you do is waste their time.  In other words, every communication you have with a prospect or client is teaching them that it’s worth taking your phone calls and reading your emails because they know you’re not going to waste their time–or you’re teaching them to avoid you because you have nothing of value for them. 

The next time you pick up the phone or write an email or want to schedule an appointment, ask yourself one simple question: “am I adding value to them or to just me?”  If your honest answer is that you’re only adding value for yourself, don’t make the call, don’t send the letter, don’t send the email until you have taken the time to make sure you’re adding as much or more value to them as you are for yourself.

But there’s a dark side to that theme. The reason to be so client-focused is almost always phrased in terms of the benefits to the seller. And that changes everything.

Client focus, as it is too often practiced in business today, is the focus of a vulture. It is all about the benefit to the firm—not to the client. When client benefits are discussed, they are as discussed as a means to the seller’s ends. Yes, we want to serve clients better—but for our sake, not theirs.

Should we be surprised, then, when clients become cynical, send out RFPs, and refer us to third-party buying agents? In our rush to dissect the client brain, we have forgotten that motives matter.

I’m not talking about ethics—I’m talking about the simple facts of trust. We trust those we believe to have our interests at heart, and we distrust those we believe to have their interests at heart. But we particularly distrust those who pretend to be the former, while behaving like the latter.

Sometimes it’s hard to see trust faults in our own business. By way of metaphor, consider an industry recently hard-hit by trust issues—pharmaceuticals. One of the drug manufacturers’ wounds is self-inflicted—the failed relationship between physicians and reps.

Doctors long relied on reps to keep them up to date on new drugs—an important and valuable advisory role. In recent years, the drug companies tried to increase reps’ sales effectiveness. They increased the number of reps per doctor, focusing on hiring young and attractive people. They introduced complex measurement systems to evaluate rep performance, and purchased sophisticated statistical data to calibrate the impact of rep visits on physician prescriptive behavior.

Sensible steps all, it would seem: but they’ve produced negative results.

• Less than one rep visit in 10 now results in a conversation with a physician, and lasts on average only 90 seconds;
• Personal relationships have been reduced and curtailed; reps are valued only for the samples they leave, turning them into pill-pushers;
• The doctors have little respect for the reps, which in turn is debilitating for the reps.

How did this happen? Each change in the system was motivated largely, if not entirely, by a desire to increase physician prescription-writing of drugs produced by the pharmaceutical company. That motivation was very clear to the doctors—and they saw no benefit evident to them. Like most clients, the doctors reacted negatively. A past trusted relationship was degraded because the seller was motivated only by the seller’s needs.

Relationships and Fake Trust

When client focus becomes a tool for seller profit improvement, clients notice and become cynical. Lately, the language of client focus is adopting the language of relationships, fostering yet another layer of cynicism.

Think of “relationship,” “loyalty,” and “trust.” All once had significant emotional connotations—for “loyalty,” think “semper fi” or “’til death do us part.” For “trust,” think the bonds of a handshake, or of fiduciary responsibilities.

Today, loyalty gets defined behaviorally as repeat purchasing behavior. “Client relationship management” software is sold on the basis of its ability to create client profitability analyses (to the software owner, that is, not to the client).

In the dating world, it’s considered forward to say you want a relationship on the first date—but in business, some firms have gone one better and built “relationship” into a marketing slogan before even meeting the client.

Relationship concepts have been hijacked in service to selfish motives. When a company’s ad copy says, “you care about your children; that’s why we here at XYZ corporation are doing blah blah blah” the company is not only lying, but lying baldly and shamelessly about their motives.
What is at stake here is no less than the meaning of words, and therefore the credibility and trust of the company saying them.

Being Truly Client-Focused

The most difficult act for us as sellers of professional services is to stop viewing everything from our own perspective. And it has to be a personal act—a self-willed, psychological belief or attitude.
The economics of trust-based selling™ rest on a paradox: if we do what is good for the consumer, we will eventually gain more than our proportionate share of business. It may not come from this transaction, in this quarter—or even from this client—but it will come. Nothing motivates repeat business or referrals better than a trust-based relationship with the provider.
If our motives for being trusted are not truly client-focused—then it all falls apart. This is the paradox. Great results come from client focus—but only if you stop doing client focus in order to achieve results for yourself.

In today’s business climate, “best practices” and financial analyses are defined in ever-smaller, ever-shorter, ever-narrower slices. They are often not “best,” but among the most insidious.
These practices are harmful because they blind us to opportunities to serve our clients.

In the perennial Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street, Macy’s Santa Claus is nearly fired for recommending that a client go to competitor Gimbel’s for a particular product. That is, until Macy’s Chairman realizes the profound increase in client trust produced by Santa’s approach—having faith that doing right by the customer will end up helping Macy’s anyway.
Being truly client-focused means believing in the superiority of client relationship strategies over competitor-focused strategies; the medium- and long-term over successive short-terms; and truth-telling over spinning.

The good news is the field is wide open for firms willing to practice what everyone else only preaches—serving the client, believing that to do so will ultimately return more than the self-serving narrowly calculating strategies of the vulture can ever hope to do.

A truly client-focused relationship strategy built on trust is the best deal going. It is rare; most competitors are afraid to try it. It is powerful; ask any successful salesperson about the power of trust. And it is proven—just look at your own behavior as a buyer in relation to a seller you trust.

Trusting relationships have to start with the selling firm, not the client. Go ahead, take a risk. The ultimate paradox is, taking a risk ends up being the lowest risk. Being trusted is a very low-risk, high-return strategy.

Charles H. Green is a speaker and executive educator on trust-based relationships and Trust-based Selling in complex businesses. He is author of Trust-based Selling (McGraw-Hill, 2005), and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with David Maister and Rob Galford, Free Press, October 2000).  Visit his website

We’re told that the old normal was the government strove to keep unemployment below 5% and that the “new normal” is going to be to try to keep unemployment below 7%.

We’re told that the old normal in the auto industry was to try to increase the miles per gallon on a manufacturer’s fleet by selling enough high mileage units to raise the fleet average, and the “new normal” is no longer trying to sell large numbers of high mileage internal combustion engines but to sell hybrids and alternative energy vehicles.

In sales we’re told that the old normal was cold calling, face-to-face meetings with prospects and clients, and using salespeople to find, connect with, and sell prospects, and the “new normal” is that salespeople are an outdated and costly luxury and are, at best, nothing more than an archaic relic of the past that companies just haven’t come to the realization are no longer needed.

Many, including myself, find it amusing to read the “new normal” predictions knowing that for the most part they are nothing more than someone’s attempt to be relevant and gain some attention.

We’ll ignore addressing the issue of the “new normal” unemployment rate and the “new normal” in the auto industry and spend a minute or two discussing the “new normal” silliness in sales.

The “new normal” argument is based on several supposed changes in how buyers buy products and services.

• One argument is that the Internet has fundamentally changed the way people shop and buy.  Proponents of this position argue that the Internet provides buyers all the information about potential products and services that they used to have to rely on salespeople for, making the salesperson obsolete.  Further, most companies now offer their products and services online, so not only can the buyer get all the information and comparisons they need online, they can complete the purchase online, making a salesperson completely irrelevant.
• Others argue that in today’s highly competitive market where any company that creates a competitive advantage through product improvement or a more efficient process that reduces price can count on that advantage lasting only a very short time before their competitors catch up and return the market to equilibrium, there’s really no such thing as a competitive advantage.  In such a market all products and services are reduced to commodity status where price is the only differentiator and once price is the one and only deciding factor, salespeople are an unjustified expense whose only significant contribution is to increase the product or service’s cost.
• And others argue that with the increasing popularity of social media and technology the sellers that are left will never have to leave their homes as they will be able to connect with, develop relationships with, and sell via a combination of social media and tale-meeting technology such as Go to Meeting.  For these commentators the new normal is a world where technology replaces face-to-face meetings and even the telephone.  Sellers who use their car, their phone, or even text are not only behind the times, they’re signing their own death warrant by not learning to adapt to the new reality of business.

Have you heard these proclamations of the”new normal” before?  You probably heard them last year—and the year before that—and the year before that.  This new normal is taking forever to get here but I guess if someone keeps claiming this is the year, sooner or later maybe someone will be right.

But I sincerely doubt it—at least any time soon.

First, let’s look at a couple of statistics that might shed some light on what salespeople are doing.

According to travel statistics, business travel has increased by almost 4% each of the last two years.  I find it somewhat surprising that there’s a significant increase in business travel when supposedly salespeople aren’t traveling.

In addition, every single recruiter I’ve spoken to indicate a significant increase in open sales positions, especially for experienced outside salespeople.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that the sales profession isn’t changing nor am I arguing that social media and technology are not impacting how sellers sell.

My argument is simply that in 2012—and probably for the foreseeable future—there will not be a “new normal.”

• Almost all sellers will find their offline activities will still be more vital to their success than their social media interaction.
• Getting out of the office and in front of prospects and clients will still be the primary relationship building and selling format
• More than likely business travel will increase again this year—and for the foreseeable years to come—including travel by sellers
• Sales jobs will continue to be created with the corresponding opportunities for both experienced and inexperienced men and women
• Social media will continue to be an area that sellers need to learn how to effectively engage—but the reality is it isn’t going to take the place of a seller’s offline activities such as cold calling, networking, and seeking high quality referrals and when a connection is made through social media, for it to be effective it will have to be taken offline.

In other words, for now and at least the next few years, the “new normal” will be the old normal.

Do those activities this year that have been successful for you in the past and you’ll be successful again this year.

It’s fun and exciting to talk about the “new normal,” but the fact is not much has really changed.

Human nature hasn’t changed since last year.

The phone still works and people still answer it.

Referrals will still get you more and better business than any other prospecting format.

You will still have to work to develop relationships.

You’ll still have to educate, be a real problem solver for your clients, and bring more value to the table than your competitors.

The world hasn’t shifted on its axis—yet anyway.

So take all the talk of the new normal with a grain of salt.  Don’t ignore social media and by all means use technology to the fullest, but if you want to be successful in 2012, pick up the phone, fill up the car, and hit the streets just like you did last year and the years before that.

Follow Paul on Twitter: @paul_mccord

Many salespeople make the assumption that activity leads to results. “As long as I’m doing something,” they argue, “results will come.”

This is a mistake. It’s the best way to get stuck in the activity trap. The activity trap occurs when you begin working too hard to make the sale. Sales is much more simple than a lot of salespeople make it out to be.

Above all, your interactions must be meaningful. If all you’re doing on a call with a prospect is saying ‘hello,’ all you’ll hear is ‘hell no.’ Instead, your activities need to fall into one of these four productive buckets:

1. They educate your prospects.
2. They uncover essential information about your prospect.
3. They reveal pivotal information about your solution to your prospect.
4. They close opportunities (for the good or bad).

First, Educational activities provide information to your prospects that make them more receptive to your messaging. These kinds of activities help them understand the business impact you can have on their operation. They help them understand that you have something meaningful to say to them. Examples include:

• Sending useful content (e.g., articles, whitepapers, etc.) to them
• Sponsoring roundtable discussions for your prospects to meet your happy customers
• Publishing pamphlets about your solution
• Providing well-documented case studies to your prospects

Activities that allow you to uncover essential information about your prospects are some of the most important. The most common is the face-to-face (or phone-to-phone) meeting. These probing meetings allow you to ask meaningful questions that help (1) demonstrate your expertise in their field and (2) gather information you need to make a meaningful recommendation to them. They include:

• Surveys
• Interviews
• Focus Groups
• Sales Interviews

Revealing your recommended solution to your prospect is — obviously — essential. Doing it, though, requires more than just activity. Instead, meaningful sales presentations are carefully targeted to your prospects particular situation. This can be done in any number of ways, but is dependent on effectively uncovering practical information in your probing meeting.

• Webinars
• Formal Presentations
• Demonstrations
• Tours

Finally, the most directly meaningful of all sales activities are those that close business. This is typically in some kind of interaction between a salesperson and a prospect-turned-customer. Alternatively, you might discover that a particular prospect isn’t a good fit for your solution. This, too, can be good because it allows you to move on.

If your “activity” doesn’t fall into one of those four buckets, it’s probably wasteful. Many outside reps believe that activity begets results. With one slight change, the statement becomes true:

The Right Activity Begets Meaningful Results.

Jeb Brooks is Executive Vice President of The Brooks Group, one of the world’s Top Ten Sales Training Firms as ranked by Selling Power Magazine. He’s a sought-after commentator on sales and sales management issues, having appeared in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal. Jeb authored the second edition of the book “Perfect Phrases for the Sales Call.” He regularly writes for The Brooks Group’s popular Sales Blog <http://www.brooksgroup.com/blog>. Follow him on Twitter: @JebBrooks

Whether we tend to be politically active or not, we will all have opinions about the candidates and issues involved in political combat this year.

We’ll also have some—hopefully just a very few–prospects and clients make comments about these people and issues or, worse, ask us directly about our opinions regarding them.

When these uncomfortable topics come up what should our response be?

As salespeople we spend a great deal of time trying to develop relationships built upon trust, honesty, and openness with our prospects and clients. We claim that we want to build relationships with our clients; we want to get to know them as people and not just as potential purchasers, and that we want to create friends, not just accounts.

Many of us go to great lengths to learn how to read body language, to communicate in a manner that caters to the prospect’s personality type, to read the unspoken signals the client sends through how they dress, how they decorate their office, what they drive, and what they do for recreation and relaxation. Our goal we say is to treat the prospect as a whole person.

Nevertheless, our holistic approach to sales is one sided. Most of us have been taught to avoid the social and political issues that could offend a prospect or client.  Let the conversation get close to the area of political or social opinion and all the sudden we’re no longer too anxious to build the relationship on honesty and openness. Rather than being open and honest when these subjects come up we try mightily to obfuscate or avoid.  The last thing we want is for our prospect or client to know where we actually stand on a candidate or issue.

Consequently we’ll spend the next few months doing a delicate dance of avoidance, trying to offend no one while insisting that we are open, honest, trustworthy individuals, intent only on meeting the prospect’s needs and becoming trusted advisors. We’ll try to build relationships based on getting to know our client while allowing them to get to know only what we have determined is safe for public consumption and that will allow them to get to know us only superficially. We’ll try to balance on the head of a pin, afraid that if we reveal ourselves as a politically or socially aware person we’ll offend, we’ll step on toes, we’ll lose a sale.

In my opinion–and experience–not only is this behavior disingenuous, but it is itself destructive. Prospects and clients expect each of us to have opinions and they are quite aware that those opinions may be counter to their own.

What are we communicating to prospects and clients when we try to sidestep discussion of the issues or candidates? Some will immediately assume we’re avoiding the issue because we hold opinions we believe are counter to theirs—so whether their assumption is correct or not, by avoiding the discussion we risk offending the prospect by unintentionally communicating a contrary opinion to theirs. A few may assume that we’re not informed well enough or care enough to have an opinion. Most will assume that we’re simply trying to play the game, trying to be ‘real’ as long as that reality doesn’t involve anything of substance in our personal lives.

Conventional wisdom has been to avoid political discussion at all costs. Conventional wisdom comes from a time when the emphasis wasn’t on building long-term, trust based relationships with prospects and clients.

I’m not advocating you initiate political and social discussion, but avoiding it isn’t going to advance the relationship either.

Seldom have I found discussing these issues to be, well, an issue. I have lost a few sales that I can trace to these types of discussions, but I can identify many more sales I’ve made where the sale had its roots in a willingness to answer questions—especially uncomfortable questions–honestly. 

As long as you are respectful of the prospects point of view, have reasoned arguments for your stance, and don’t engage in inflammatory or degrading language, there is no reason to fear alienating a prospect or client. In fact, if you can intelligently discuss the issues in light of how they may impact your prospect’s business, you may find that your discussion instead of being a potential minefield may be one of the most compelling reasons to do business with you.

Prospects and clients not only respect honesty, they also respect salespeople who understand their business and the future prospects for their business. By demonstrating an understanding of how political, economic and social issues may affect your prospect’s future, you demonstrate an intimate knowledge of their business—and prospects love to do business with people they trust and who really understand their problems, issues, and opportunities.

Follow Paul on Twitter: @paul_mccord

No matter how good the relationship is, people are going to run into problems.  Consequently there should be a system in place to make it easy for customers to tell you when they have a problem as early as possible.  The earlier you find out about a Moment of Misery (when you fall short of the customer’s expectations), the easier, faster, and less expensive it is to solve.  Once you are aware of the problem, you should have techniques, systems, and procedures in place to resolve it. 

Your communication skills definitely come into play as you resolve the problem through an effective conflict resolution system. Resolving problems and conflict, believe it or not, is not as difficult as you may think.  Gregg Baron of Success Sciences and Robert Coates of CaDoCommunications, both of Tampa, FL., suggest several steps:

1.      Handle the person first, then the problem.
Let angry people vent their frustrations.  This alone will go a long way toward resolving the problem.

2.      Apologize.
This is often left out, but it is a crucial gesture.  Offer a sincere, personal apology, not one on behalf of the company.  Show that you are committed to the relationship.

3.      Find a solution.
Resolve the problem with your customer, not for the customer.  Ask questions that will get the customer involved in the process.  Some possible questions might be:

a.   “How would you like to see this problem resolved?”

b.   “What would be an acceptable resolution to this problem?”

c.   “If you were in my position, how might you resolve this kind of problem for your customer?”

d.   “Would a refund be acceptable to you?”

4.      Take individual responsibility.
Immediately take over and make the recovery process easy for your customer.  If there are phone calls to make or forms to fill out, you assume responsibility and do the work.  If the resolution of the problem is going to be complicated, explain the system to your customer.  People feel much better when they are informed rather than kept in the dark.

5.      Make Amends, if appropriate.
If the Moment of Misery was severe enough, you need to say, “I’m sorry,” with a concrete gesture.  Compensation should be:

a.   Immediate
Giving a gift long after the fact renders it meaningless and appears insincere.  Give it immediately.  For this reason, it must be clear to you what the parameters are for compensating customers as you see fit.

b.   Meaningful
A meaningful gift is something that has high-perceived value to your customer.  It should also differentiate you from your competition.  Be creative—customize the gift to your customer’s personality.  Don’t send flowers or a box of candy—everyone does that.  Know your customer well enough to determine if a pair of tickets to a baseball game or a hot air balloon ride would be appropriate.

c.   Consumable
If you send a calendar or a clock to say, “I’m sorry,” your customer will be reminded of the incident every time she looks at it.  Save those gifts for positive occasions.  Your customer should be able to eat or use your recovery gift relatively soon.  That way, the gift is appreciated and then out of sight and out of mind.

It should not be expensive.  The combination of high-perceived value and low cost to the company is ideal, especially if you are compensating customers regularly.  Giving away more of your company’s products or services may be appropriate (and inexpensive), but only if they won’t cause more problems.  The worst thing you can do is offer customers more of something that has already caused them grief.

6.      Follow up.
After resolving the problem, with or without a gift, you must follow up.  As with any follow up, you will not only make sure things are satisfactory, but you will also look for additional needs that represent selling opportunities.  Follow up is essential because there is nothing worse than a fouled-up recovery.  A recovery snafu is a guaranteed way to lose a customer forever.

Moments of Misery will happen—hopefully not often, but they will happen.  But when they do occur, it is a sound strategy to view those problems as the opportunities that they are—they give you the opportunity to show your customers just how much you care about them.  Having an effective conflict resolution system in place and being prepared to use it will help you turn those occasional Moments of Misery into Moments of Magic (when you exceed a customer’s expectations).

Meeting standards of excellence in business has always been important, but in today’s marketplace, it is absolutely essential for your company’s success and survival.  To meet those standards of excellence, you and your company must have a customer-driven orientation and provide customer-driven service—each and every time with each and every customer.

Dr. Tony Alessandra has a street-wise, college-smart perspective on business, having been raised in the housing projects of NYC to eventually realizing success as a graduate professor of marketing, entrepreneur, business author, and hall-of-fame keynote speaker. He earned a BBA from the Univ. of Notre Dame, an MBA from the Univ. of Connecticut and his PhD in marketing from Georgia State University.  Dr. Alessandra is a prolific author with 27 books translated into over 50 foreign language editions, including the newly revised, best selling The NEW Art of Managing People (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008);; The Platinum Rule (Warner Books, 1996); Collaborative Selling (John Wiley & Sons, 1993); and Communicating at Work (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1993.  Dr. Alessandra was inducted into the Speakers Hall of Fame in 1985.  Visit his website at http://www.alessandra.com