As the saying goes, “If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen”.  Once again MasterChef has served up some great life lessons.  Last year I wrote about the great leadership, coaching and mentoring we can learn from MasterChef.  Again Garry, George, Matt and the other guest chefs showed us how to excel in this area of leadership.

On this occasion, I want to comment on ‘Resilience’ and dealing with setbacks and challenges, and how MasterChef gave us a window into how people handle stress and demanding situations.  The time pressures and increasingly difficult tasks set for the contestants showed us how well they were able to manage themselves under pressure and produce the goods.  You could often see the demands of a given situation getting to a number of the contestants.  It was unrelenting at times.  Those who were able to hold it together and ‘manage’ themselves on every level when under added strain performed better.  The constant practice enhanced their skills for sure, but it also taught them how to deal with pressure which is just as important.  Prior to the final episode, we saw Adam, Claire and Callum put under pressure and it was Adam and Callum who held it together better than Claire.  Claire is an extremely talented cook but got rattled more than the others thus affecting her performance.  Unlike Jonathon who survived eight out of nine elimination challenges, Claire had only been in one before and you could tell.  She wasn’t ready for it.

Luckily for the MasterChef contestants they were only subjected to this for about three and a half months.  Working chefs are required to take the ‘heat’ everyday albeit in environments they can control.  This got me thinking about those professions where every action and the outcomes of those actions are scrutinised every day, placing pressure on those to perform at their best.  Professional Chefs and Sports People, Air Traffic Controllers and Surgeons come to mind and I am sure there are several others.  With the exception of weather for both the Air Traffic Controllers and some Professional Sports People, for the best part, all of these professions allow their people to work in environments they can directly control and influence.

Sales people also have the scrutiny of performance in common with these professions however, they are often working in environments that are not of their own making or design.  They need to be able to deal with, and adapt to things outside of their control, i.e variable conditions and new environments, meeting new people, going to new places, uncovering new issues; variables of many kinds.  And unlike recipes, which if executed correctly should turn out like they were intended, sales people are often presented with the ‘Mystery Box’ (same ingredients different outcomes) on a daily basis several times a day.  They have to be able to think on their feet, and create outcomes their clients need and want.  They need to know how this goes with this to that.

How do they handle the stress?  How do they develop their resilience to perform at higher and higher standards every day without cracking?  How do they pay attention and make sure every client feels like they are special and important when you have listened to 5-25 people already that day?

As sales people, our actions are assessed by ourselves, our managers and our clients.  We deal with acceptance and rejection of our offering every day.  Our activities are tracked and mapped.  There are league tables, etc.

Any self respecting, self managed, self aware sales person would be able to tell you where they are at each day.  They will also tell you that they have learned not to take ‘No’ as personal rejection – that’s a fatal mistake made by many a new sales person.  Selling is the ultimate ‘thinking on your feet’ and ‘doing’ job.  Like athletes, we need to be continually exercising and getting fitter, developing our skills, knowledge and mindset all at the same time.

Why don’t we teach ‘How to Build Resilience and a Healthy Mindset’?

A healthy mindset is just as, if not more, important as product knowledge and selling skills.  However, most businesses usually only train their people in business skills, product knowledge and processes.  What we need to do is help people become more emotionally aware, intelligent and resilient in a number of ways.  We need to work with the whole person and provide people with access to a range of tools, processes and techniques which give them insight and teach them how to manage their emotions. We need to teach people how to develop healthy and resilient attitudes so they can take the heat and really excel.

We can’t all go on MasterChef to have our resilience and cooking skills tested, nor do all of us have the opportunity to be elite athletes and learn what it is like to work under obvious performance pressure however, we can learn how to develop resilience every day in small ways.

Higher performers, unlike many other people, have searched for and found tools, processes and techniques that help them develop strategies to enhance their self awareness and emotional resilience, and allow them to make the most of their capabilities and the situations they find themselves in on a daily basis.

Developing a Healthy and Resilient Attitude

The first step to becoming more emotionally aware, healthy and resilient is the acknowledgment that there is room for improvement and taking the time to learn more about yourself.  It’s about honest, constructive feedback and learning not to take things personally.  That is what MasterChef is all about – continuous self improvement and self awareness.  That’s what MasterSelling is about!

Next week we will look at some of the tools, behaviours and attitudes that help build self awareness, health and emotional resilience.  If you want further information about this, please contact us directly.

Thanks to MasterChef for another excellent season – truly inspiring stuff!

Finally, Mary Anne Radmacher’s words sum up for me and probably many sales people and entrepreneurs our lot: “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says ‘I’ll try again tomorrow’.”

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

What’s in a name?  Well, there seems to be some confusion in the market place around the terminology used to describe those people who pay us money for goods, services, experiences, donations, etc.

Different industries can have different terms for the consumers of their products and/or services.  We see terms such as customer, client, patient, guest, patron, member, subscriber, donor, etc. used to describe a person who buys our products or services and intends to use them directly.  In short, these terms are referring to the same person – the ‘end user’.  However, not everyone ‘consumes’ our products or services or is the intended ‘end user’.  Some people or businesses buy our products or services to ‘on sell’ them to another party, often the final end user, but not always.

Many industries might a have a chain of buyers and only one will be the end user.  For instance, if we follow the chain from the manufacturer who sells via a wholesaler (partner or client) who then sells to a retailer (client or customer) who then sells to the end user (customer or consumer), we can have several terms to distinguish who’s who.

If this is your situation, it does help to define who is who by having specific terms such as ‘client’, ‘member’, ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ so we can keep track of our actions and key messages as each of them may want something different from you, and as sales people we need to know who we are working with.  For instance, you may use ‘client’ for the retailer and ‘consumer’ for the end user to keep roles and communication clear.  Marketing and advertising agencies use the term  ’client’ for their direct customers since marketers also have to refer to the consumers of the client’s products.

So where does ‘member’ feature?

Some businesses, often retailers, use ‘member’ to distinguish between those who buy regularly from them compared to those who do not.  They want to set up memberships so as to attract and retain regular users of their products/services and reward them with greater benefits or discounts so they keep coming back.  It’s a way of building up your database to build a tribe of followers or a community of users or supporters which, if done correctly, can make future sales that much easier to attain.  Retailers often have membership cards and reward programs for regular purchasers of their products or services.  There are usually benefits and special privileges to being a ‘member’ but essentially a member is a ‘customer’, ‘end user’ or ‘consumer’ of your business.  This means you can have customers and members in the same business.

When having ‘members’ can be a problem for sales growth

To avoid any challenges, you need to make sure that before you embark on a ‘membership’ program there are very clear definitions and actions in place that distinguish membership from customers.  However, do not make the mistake of thinking once a person is a ‘member’ that you do not have to sell.

We are seeing a trend in some businesses who claim to be there for their ‘members’ or ‘member associations’ dissociating themselves from the function of ‘selling’ when their members are customers.

Because these people choose to be ‘members’ of these businesses there is an expectation of being kept informed of the latest trends, best buys or ‘right’ options for them, or why would you bother being a member.  You expect the membership team to keep in touch with you and to help you make good ‘buying’ choices and decisions.  You trust them to offer products and services that meet your needs.  After all, they should know your current preferences and buying patterns.  Members expect to deal with people who are skilful in client centric consultative sales practices even if they do not know to call it that.

However, when speaking to some of these membership businesses we find a deep reluctance to acknowledge and admit that the skills they want their membership teams to be competent in, such as prospecting and client centric consultative sales communication practices, are indeed selling skills.

By denying this practical reality, member organisations can end up developing teams who are reactive, passive and reluctant to engage in proactive, problem solving, solution based interactions with members.  The number of membership based businesses that swear that being a member and a customer are mutually exclusive, are fooling themselves and are doing a disservice to themselves and their members.  By telling their people “we are not sales people, we do not use the word selling, we have members” creates cultural and competency issues.

I am happy for people to call their ‘end users’ members, patients, guests, donors, patrons, subscribers, customers or clients as long as they recognise that serving the end user of buyers of your products and services properly means employing ethical, consultative selling skills and processes if you mean to exchange something of value i.e. money for your products or services.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of sales people around the world use sales scripts.  Used properly, sales scripts act as scaffolding or bridgework to earn us the right to have a meaningful discussion with our prospecting customers, members, donors or subscribers.  The sales script is a well constructed set of guidelines that support us when we prospect.

Good sales scripts:

• are purposeful – have a clear reason why you are calling someone;
• use language the customer understands;
• are designed for the benefit of the listener with it always being “the prospects choice” to accept or reject what they hear;
• are brief and allow for questions and conversations;
• aim to achieve a result – an appointment, donation, purchase, feedback, etc;
• are planned not canned –they are flexible, allowing the sales person to adapt to the different needs or queries of the prospect whilst maintaining the integrity of the call’s purpose;
• leave the prospect feeling valued and informed, even if they choose not to proceed with you in this instance; and,
• are pleasant, respectful and engaging.

However, too many organisations push sales scripting too far creating word-for-word scripts that end up being stilted and clumsy at best and one-sided and ineffectual at worst.  We had an experience recently with a telecommunications firm whose telephone sales and service people seemed unable to deviate from a scripted response as the responses they gave us had nothing to do with our issue.  The impression this gave us was that our issue wasn’t even heard let alone acted upon – it didn’t fit their script.  The number of times we had to request information to check that our matter would be dealt with made the whole experience cumbersome, time consuming and very frustrating.  We ended up doing all the work, while the telephone sales and service person simply read from a script, which, as it turns out, could not account for our matter in its design.

Sales scripts are not meant to be regurgitated word for word with no deviation, nor are they meant to be a one-sided affair.  This type of approach is called ‘canned’ scripting.   You would think that in this day and age we would have ditched these ‘canned scripts’ but they still happen.

The Cluetrain Manifesto (a resulting force that rose out of the discontentment people experience with businesses and how they fail to communicate with people) really nails it when it says:

“Learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about ‘listening to customers’.  They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.  While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happy talk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.”

Building on this and taking the canned script one step further, some companies and political parties have even ditched the live person on the other end of the phone and opted for a recording instead.  And this is supposed to engage us?  This is free-to-air television advertising or junk mail in disguise.  At least with television we can choose what we watch and we can put a ‘no junk mail’ sign on our letter box but getting ‘canned’ advertising over the phone takes the biscuit in my opinion.  Yes there is the ‘do not call’ register which you can sign up to, however resorting to ‘recorded messages’ is lazy and only serves to create more angst in the already heated area of telemarketing.

If done properly, telephone sales is a very effective way of getting in contact with legitimate prospects.  But when scripting removes the ability to genuinely listen and respond to a customer, we all suffer.

If you want to create positive and memorable experiences for your customers, members, donors or subscribers then seek to engage with them in a meaningful way.  Don’t force your sales people to be rooted to the spot and limited by a one-size-fits all script.  Trust your team to engage with people in meaningful ways by giving them the guidelines and tools they need to communicate effectively with the wide variety of people they encounter on a daily basis.  The autonomy this gives your people puts back interest and challenge in the task of making effective prospecting calls and in the process might make the customers, members, donors or subscribers’ experience that much better.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

The New Competition was voted by you as the number 7  Sales Trend for 2010.  Over the coming years, we will see collaboration become the new competition.  Markets around the world are crying out for collaboration as innovation and differentiation become scarce in a sea of commoditised products and services.

Sales people who see themselves as collaborators, both internally (colleagues, departments) and externally (customers, competitors), will prosper more than ever during 2010 and beyond.

A large 5 year long research study conducted by B. Rosenbaum, Business Horizons, entitled Seven Emerging Sales Competencies and published in Jan/Feb 2001 revealed what makes highly successful sales people.  His research, among other key findings, showed that the most highly successful sales people are indeed collaborators.  In his research of over 1,000 B2B sales people across 5 years he found that top performers:

• collaborated with colleagues and did not allow competitiveness to get in the way of good business, and often assisted their colleagues in achieving their best by sharing ideas, information and resources;
• orchestrated internal resources so as to benefit the company, its people, and the customers and their people;
• invested time building collaborative, customer focused relationships inside their organisation;
• created an alignment between the customers’ and suppliers’ strategic objectives;
• looked to further the interests of their customers’ firms as well as their own;
• expanded the customer’s understanding of what a business relationship can be;
• built a flexible relationship that is responsive to marketplace changes;
• creatively drew on the full resources of the firm or business;
• introduced customers to other suppliers and potentially valuable support resources; and,
• invested time building collaborative, customer focused relationships inside their organisation.

These findings are not new as you can see.  However these qualities are still seen, if they are seen at all, as a novelty by most senior managers which is a major risk moving forward in such changing times.  Rosenbaum’s research revealed that, sadly, the vast majority of sales managers were completely unaware that these and other distinguishing qualities were what made their high performing sales people highly effective and successful.  What he observed is that these sales superstars where acting and performing this way despite management.  They knew what they needed to do to get the results.  It’s such a pity that their managers did not.

As I wrote recently, many sales teams are still held hostage by old school sales management practices and outdated mindsets that encourage internal competition, league tables and the like.   Too many sales leaders are still stuck in the 1980’s with ‘greed is good’ and ‘carrot and stick’ philosophies which do not work in the long term and only serve to hold us back in a 21st century world.  Most sales rewards are still self serving, endorsing selfishness which is completely at odds with the new world of collaboration and our natural state of being.

Daniel Pink’s new book Drive focuses a big spotlight on this very issue – what motivates us.  He reports that what business thinks works by way of motivation is not what the science shows or the vast majority of people want.

Besides the commoditisation of products and services, Rosenbaum’s research, Daniel Pink’s findings, and other corroborating research, the advent of social media and the multiple levels of engagement we can now have with our clients, suppliers and key stakeholders means that we need to work collaboratively with each other.  And this collaboration needs to take place across marketing, sales, service, supply, production and finance if we are going to create the ideas and solutions needed for our success in the 21st century.

Those 21st century enlightened salespeople will be the conductors or connectors of viable and valuable relationships across many levels.  They will be open-minded, humble and astute, and they will see patterns of connection and synergy in many places.  They will recognise that we are all interconnected and without kindness and cooperation we cannot exist.  They will identify competency and harness talent to achieve effective solutions. They will know that they are working towards something larger than themselves.  And they will know that their success is a shared success they will celebrate collectively.

So we need to get with the program and rethink our approach to sales motivation, sales mindset, sales skills, sales rewards and teamwork if we are to remain viable in this world.  Collaboration calls for a team effort.  Sales teams where everyone is pitted against each other to achieve ‘top dog’ status will be replaced by a ‘lead team’ approach.  Companies that want to bring in new business and grow and develop existing customers will rely on the united hands of many – rather than just one.  Successful sales people of 2010 and beyond will leverage the power of collaboration over competition because they understand that relationships never work if they are forced and manipulated, and that the sum is greater than its individual parts.  Synergy and collaboration will prevail.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

Many sales cultures are traditionally based on respect for authority, status and success, and encouraging competitive, challenging and achievement-oriented atmospheres. Although this is not true for all businesses, especially in the 21st Century! There are a growing number of businesses adopting more collegiate, lead team approaches. However, despite different types of cultures, sales performance and results are usually derived from the efforts of individuals. Harnessing those individual efforts to achieve synergy (the sum is greater than its individual parts) is a key task of management, yet so many get it wrong. Let’s take a look at one case study and see why.

What is wrong with the following scenario?

• Sales team has great products and service proposition and is part of an international business
• Sales team is made up of individuals who are measured on achievement of individual sales targets
• Each sales person is given a base retainer but earns the vast majority of their income on commissions made from sales converted
• There are a couple of high achieving sales performers, some average performers and some new sales people yet to prove themselves
• Annual staff turnover of sales staff has been about 30-40%
• Average tenure is 18 months
• The sales team is a state team all working in the same city
• Sales performance is purely measured on sales revenue results
• Sales League Tables are on public display showing who is ‘top sales dog’ each week
• The sales culture is based on respect for authority, status, success and competition
• The workplace atmosphere is competitive, challenging and achievement-oriented
• The sales people do NOT work to specific territories/markets or customer segments to manage and grow, instead it is ‘first in best dressed’
• The competitive environment encourages sales people to fight over leads that come into the business leading to ‘bullying’ tactics, attempts to ‘outdo’ each other, squabbling and fighting over who got to that client first
• Sales people ‘sand bag’ lists of clients just to make sure that the other sales people do not get them even if they themselves are not working on those leads at present
• Management provide no selling skills training, no sales coaching, no sales support, no CRM, no documented sales strategy nor a ‘go-to-market’ plan
• There are no formal sales management practices in place except for the weekly sales meeting which deteriorates into an ‘I’m better than you are’ bun fight

This is an example of lazy and ineffectual management. Only focused on outcomes with no regard for strategy, team structure, performance quality, clear leadership, staff retention, values or culture, this sales team is not geared for high performance and continues to lag behind its true potential.

Why create competition where it doesn’t need to be?

Why make selling harder than it needs to be?

‘Old school’ sales management said that you had to have sales people competing with each other or they wouldn’t sell. You weren’t a legitimate sales team if you didn’t have league tables. They said that internal competition would motivate people to sell more. Well they are wrong. The scenario above is not uncommon. It reflects an actual real life situation – happening right now.

This archaic approach doesn’t work. It’s outdated and old fashioned. If you want to generate real sales growth, try harnessing the energy, talent and ambitions of your sales people in a constructive way where they can all achieve their individual goals along with those of the company without trying to ‘kill’ each other in the process. Remember the old saying ‘a team of champions will not beat a champion team’?

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au