18 05, 2015

Why Your Sales Methodology Is Stifling Success

2017-02-25T12:39:29+11:00

US Comedian, Jerry Seinfeld suggested that the tuxedo must have been invented by women on the premise that ‘Men are all the same, might as well dress them the same’.

Unfortunately too many sales methodologies are based on similar thinking and if the tuxedo comment is sexist, I’m going to coin the phrase ‘Sales-ist.’

Like ice cream flavours, depending on your preference, you can choose a methodology that’s designed to build consensus or challenge decision makers or be customer-centric, be solution-centric, seller led, buyer led, forecast led, focused on large accounts, mid-tier accounts or even baby bear accounts.

You choose, Goldilocks!

More from Sales Training Courses Melbourne

 

Now many of you will have your favourites and swear by them as is often the case when people feel it’s the methodology that has made them successful.

Whilst there are a lot of good principles in different methodologies, I think it’s more about you.

This week is my 12th birthday consulting and coaching leaders, sales people, pre-sales experts to win significantly more business. (Not counting the 15+ years before that actually doing it)

During this time I’ve coached thousands of people including the philosopher, the ego-head, the dyslexic, the self assured, the intellectual, the Year 10 dropout, the OCD, the introvert, the impostor, the sycophant, the drug addict, the 4 times divorced, the driven, the lazy, the unflinchingly decent and the self-esteem bandits.

They’re called human beings.

Each one has their own personal and professional background that they bring to the sales process and client engagement.

This is where there is still too much sheep dipping no matter how many times you see ‘tailored’ in the workbooks.

My mobile phone plan is tailored just for me too….just as I also believe Megan Gale will be interested in me some day.

So, unless you have 5000 reps selling soft drink, where a standardised methodology is a good thing, what are the options for you to develop consistent sales success in B2B Sales?

People learn from doing, not watching so here are three things you can do.

1.Only learn on live deals. Frameworks that use historical data are less relevant tofuture success.

Discuss, coach, guide on real opportunities where the sales person has a real voice on what’s going on and there’s a chance to do something about it.

Focus on the steps that are most relevant to that client at this particular moment in time.

So what if they skipped step 3 in the process, if it wasn’t the key issue?

2. There is more than one way to win a deal. Look around the office.

Jacinta sells very differently to Nathan, right? Learn from both. Leverage all the internal skills and opinions to see how real business is won.

Some sales managers say Jacinta is too reliant on relationships and Nathan is too technical – we need to change this and stick to a formula’.

Do we? Or do we just add new creative approaches, skills and ideas into the mix and coach them to try them rather than change who they are?

My Year 10 dropout for example, still said ‘Youse’ and hated filling in sales process sheets…not overly professional, but her success was borne out of courage in going deep across all decision makers and her understanding of her client’s real needs was outstanding.

My intellectual philosopher was considered a ‘wanker’ by some colleagues and he would reference Nietzche in his sales frameworks.

Yet he had a laser-like ability to dissect the commerciality of the deal so that clients clearly understood the whole story.

3 Too much process stifles creativity. The left field ideas, the courageous ideas, the game changers, the work to massively differentiate as opposed to producing flaccid sales messages is limited in rigid (tailored) methodology.

Finally, a voice from the customer.

After interviewing and befriending many Chief Procurement Officers and senior decision makers I discovered a little known game they play.

It’s called ‘Guess the methodology’.

Yes, these people who get pitched to every week have to do something to overcome the tedium of self indulgent meetings and poor presentations, so they grab a coffee and try to guess what the sales person has been trained in and then predict what’s going to happen next.

Hours of fun!

It doesn’t help you differentiate, though.

Amidst the noise of competition and sales messages out there, authentic, creative, human conversations focused on the client are the differentiator.

Combined with creative, fresh ideas and coaching, your human-ness is your differentiator.

As Oscar Wilde said “Be yourself, everybody else is already taken’

Sales Training Courses 

Elliot Epstein is a leading Pitch Consultant, Keynote Speaker, Corporate trainer who gets sales results rapidly. He has coached and trained high profile corporates globally in presenting, selling, negotiating and pitching. He has spoken at over 1500 conferences and workshops for leading companies such as HP, SEEK, Avaya, Hitachi , Computershare and CUB.

 

He is internationally renowned for ensuring sessions are creative, engaging, interactive and relevant to winning business in competitive markets.

 

Elliot is based in Melbourne where he lives with his wife and two expensive children.

www.salientcommunication.com.au

Published in   Executive Level Selling

Why Shark Tank Decisions Are Flakey

Saturday, 18 April 2015 14:40
18 04, 2015

Why Shark Tank Decisions Are Flakey

2017-02-25T12:39:29+11:00

I love our Australian Sharks in Network Ten’s Shark Tank and you can learn a lot from their decision making.

Andrew Banks’s urbane style appears a second away from saying ‘Come, come, Mr Bond, you get as much pleasure out of making a killing as I do’

Queensland’s Steve Baxter’s warmth belies that he looks like the kindly, younger brother of Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor.

Janine Allis’s smiling pitch assassinations are masterful and John McGrath quashes the idea that Real Estate people don’t have a heart.

Naomi Simson is the voice of Aussie common sense, even if it channels Julia Gillard when it’s time to say ‘Oim out’.

However, these seasoned, successful, single wardrobe wearing multi-millionaires would have you believe that their decisions come down to getting a serious return on their investment based  a lot on numbers together with the perceived passion of the business owner.

Perhaps not.

Here’s why and the significance for you in your pitches.

Numbers aren’t the magic solution.

 Putting aside the funsters who couldn’t count to 21 unless they were naked, there have been plenty of pitches for reasonable businesses where the requested investment wasn’t too high, the presentation was professional and the valuation modest enough to comfort the most anxiety ridden bean counter.

Yet they didn’t get a single Shark’s money.

Why?

The Sharks couldn’t be stuffed working with something not sexy enough.

Most people (except for Naomi) thought a business selling Pegs with a hook was about as exciting as visiting your ex-partner’s Nanna.

The Sharks have limited time and the cost of mentoring was greater than the raw numbers in the business.

Let’s face it, some people could suck the energy out of a room as soon as they walk in.

There have been nine times already when a Shark has said something like ‘It would help if you listened’

(Do your clients think you are coachable or a pain and difficult to deal with?)

The Sharks liked the presenter, but didn’t ‘loooove them’.

Not fickle. Practical, given the amount of time they’ll spend together.

So it isn’t just about the numbers.

 

It is or isn’t ‘Them’.

 Janine is drawn to food and beverage businesses like a half price Jimmy Choo sale.

Apart from a weird bottletop thingy, Andrew seems more interested in eating the food than investing in it.

Everyone blinked at a baby showering chair except John McGrath, the Real Estate guy who knows what really happens in rental and new properties.

Even the emotionally charged Disabilities Based Child Care Centre only received two offers out of five because certain Sharks felt they weren’t best fit.

If it’s not ‘them’ they won’t do it, no matter what the spreadsheet looks like.

So, what does all this mean for your pitches?

Your pitches can learn more from Shark Tank than passionate presentation skills and getting the numbers right.

Your clients are like Sharks.

Base camp is getting the numbers of the deal right, the ROI, the cost/benefit story.

Presenting persuasively and engagingly is important but only the next rung up.

The really great pitches tap deep in to the history, patterns, egos, personalities and emotional peccadillos of their clients.

Great pitches are steeped in emotionally connected strategies for individuals, not business to business strategy.

Great strategists know that if the client has never bought high end consulting services before, they need to come up with a tonne of proof and comfort to assuage ‘we don’t normally do this’

Great Pitch Leaders have learned how to sell Transition from their experience watching deals sour despite making ‘business sense’ because the client couldn’t be stuffed transitioning from one supplier to the other.

Next time you watch Shark Tank, note what you think really drove one person’s decision over another.

Then look at your own upcoming deals and ask yourself about your strategies.

After all, you don’t want your new, high potential client saying ‘I’m Out’

Elliot Epstein is a leading Pitch Consultant, Keynote Speaker, Corporate Trainer who gets sales results rapidly.

He has coached and trained high profile corporates globally in presenting, selling, negotiating and pitching.

He has spoken at over 1500 conferences and workshops for leading companies such as HP, SEEK, Avaya, Hitachi , Computershare and CUB.

 

If you would like to improve your win rate (our clients’ rate is 79% over 10 years) on highly contested, competitive bids,

Email directly elliote@salientcommunication.com.au

Please feel free to share/re-post/comment/tweet or print and use for your budgie cage as you see fit.

Published in   Presentations

Why Your Pitch Needs A Colonoscopy

Tuesday, 10 March 2015 00:40
10 03, 2015

Why Your Pitch Needs A Colonoscopy

2017-02-25T12:39:29+11:00

Bend down before you get bent over.

The two most common forms of assessing sales performance are before and after the deal.

Before the deal, there are forecasting meetings, commit meetings and hasty appraisals of a deal’s winnability because every one is flat chat and a number needs to go in by midnight to keep someone happy somewhere in the world of sales operations.

After the deal, if it’s a win – great.

If it’s a loss there’s public lynching, more finger pointing than an AFL goal umpire, followed often by the same lame attempts at retrieval as those of a 3 legged cocker spaniel with a bent stick.

Confronting the effectiveness of the deal strategy is often not done well and pitch/presentations/client meetings go ahead with half baked and often untested value propositions.

It’s time to get comfortable with the rubber glove.

This month alone I’m conducting three major pitch colonoscopies for clients that want their deals probed, picked apart, differentiated and made compelling BEFORE they hit the client’s eyes and ears.

People still believe in hope, the tooth fairy and their existing so-called fabulous relationships to win.

Key questions that should be asked are:

‘Why should this client at this particular time see this as important?’

‘Why are you not just capable, but absolutely differentiated as best fit?’

‘What do your client’s most senior executives know or think about you?’

‘What are you presenting that is going to WOW them?’

‘What have you done to accommodate the egos, politics and personalities of each decision maker?’

There are at least twenty others that discover polyps, cysts and other brown sticky stuff that prevent pitches from telling a genuinely persuasive story.

One of the best organisations I’ve seen is a top tier professional services firm that spent 3 days including senior partner time at gazillions of dollars an hour testing a colleagues pitch.

The ramifications were significant in that 110 jobs were at risk if they didn’t hold that account.

During one of my sessions with them I asked the managing partner ‘ How did you develop such a professional, robust culture of critique, confrontation and analysis to win major accounts?’

He said ‘Do you know how much it costs to recruit and train 110 people – we’re not losing this on my watch’

In a time of political correctness (the definition of which is that it presupposes you can pick up a turd from the clean end), sensitivity and ego management, too many problems with deals are not picked up and confronted early enough.

Issues are glossed over or forgotten, not enough time is dedicated to strategy and too much undifferentiated drivel is pitched to clients affecting win rates.

It can be uncomfortable bending down and having your deal exposed.

It’s more devastating to waste months on a lost deal that could have been won.

Next time, get a team comprised of your CFO, CTO, Director or head of a different product division to listen to your deal, watch your pitch and pick it to pieces.

It may be the best use of internal resources you make all year.

Alternatively, call me. I have warm hands.

CEO of Salient Communication, Elliot is a sought after keynote speaker, pitch consultant and corporate trainer who gets sales results rapidly. He has coached and trained high profile corporates globally in presenting, selling, negotiating and pitching. He has spoken at over 1500 conferences and workshops for leading companies such as HP, SEEK, Avaya, Hitachi , Computershare and CUB.

 

He is internationally renowned for ensuring sessions are engaging, interactive and relevant to winning business in competitive markets.

 

Elliot is based in Melbourne where he lives with his wife and two expensive children.

 

E: elliote@salientcommunication.com.au

Published in   Executive Level Selling

Agenda Bender

Thursday, 22 January 2015 05:13
22 01, 2015

Agenda Bender

2017-02-25T12:39:30+11:00

Gee, there are a lot of articles around on selling at the moment. I wonder if people who bake, design buildings or make porn are as inundated as sales people with 1001 ideas that will guarantee them success.

 According to the sage advice we should challenge but be empathic, smile a lot, use the CRM, target whales, strategise, post stuff online, tweet, fill the account plan and present like a TED Talker all before lunch time on Wednesday and then if that doesn’t work, cut the arse out of the price at quarter’s end,  go home and do a combined yoga/pilates/mindfulness course whilst listening to Sia.

 Really?

 How about we just have a conversation with clients without an agenda? …they will love you for it.

 Many people talk about being consultative but it’s simply not true. The truth is they want the agenda to be consultative about their special yellow handled widgets.

 Others talk of solution selling or challenging the status quo to ‘shake the tree’ and fifteen other vomitous, meaningless cliches that the Sales Jargonator created.

 Psychologists don’t have an agenda. The good ones that is, as opposed to the ones in the paper caught on camera horizontal folk dancing with patients.

 Psychologists simply want to understand what’s going on at a deep level and they are not looking to steer you into signing up to a three year contract. 

They have five times the questioning skills of most sales people. That’s why we coach people with these naturally emotive ways of connecting rather than prescribed agenda based questioning.

Agendas are like the Titanic at the top of the page. They are inflexible, often run by control freaks and are not very good at sidestepping icebergs.

 People who go in with an agenda are already leading the client and the client is wary because they’ve seen it all before and they’ll only reveal what they want to reveal and absolutely nothing more.

 You can have general topics the client is interested in such as supply chain certainty, cost reduction or revenue growth but that’s it.

 Leave the agenda, pitch, slide pack, leading questions and other old school sales habits in the car….in the sun….and let them rot.

 A conversation implies that the discussion could go anywhere and you should revel in being the water skier behind the boat going with them, 

 ‘Tell me more, Why , Pausing’ are just three legitimate conversation behaviors among the 15 we coach to establish whether there is a professional gain for both parties.

 Notice they are 1-3 words, not convoluted, rambling sales questions.

 It won’t be long before the client is asking you lots of questions and you’re on your way.

 The nervous bed-wetters out there will no doubt be quite uncomfortable with meetings without agendas because of the control issue (see Low Self Esteem).

 They worry that sales people will have a lot of coffee chats with no professional purpose. It must be remembered that most clients today are time poor and they didn’t agree to the meeting because they want to waste time. They want the conversation, just without the self indulgent bits.

 You don’t need a 3 hour brainstorm and agenda to ask for a meeting. Just ask or tell them you’ve done some cool stuff in their industry.

 When you get there, forget you even mentioned it – they probably have. Then start the psychologist session getting to the stories of your successes only if and when it comes up.

 Finally, Face Time is not an App.

 Face to Face time with clients is sadly reducing. Partly because of the demands of internal CRM, forecasting and account management but often because it’s easier to email, text, Google and get stuck in front of a screen getting distracted by Kim Kardashian”s oiled butt than focus on meeting live people.

 A psychologist doesn’t diagnose or counsel over email.

 The top sales performers today are out there, differentiating themselves face to face every day, without self serving agendas communicating, conversing and connecting with clients when others are still trying to come up with a detailed agenda to drive a meeting.

 Just like Kim’s baby oil company. They’ve got this covered.

 CEO of Salient Communication, Elliot is a sought after keynote speaker and corporate trainer who gets sales results rapidly. He has coached and trained high profile corporates globally in presenting, selling, negotiating and pitching. He has spoken at over 1500 conferences and workshops for leading companies such as HP, SEEK, Avaya, Hitachi , Computershare and CUB.

 He is internationally renowned for ensuring sessions are engaging, interactive and relevant to winning business in competitive markets.

 Elliot is based in Melbourne where he lives with his wife and two expensive children.

 

E: elliote@salientcommunication.com.au

Published in   Executive Level Selling

The Serial Sales Killer

Friday, 21 November 2014 00:18
21 11, 2014

The Serial Sales Killer

2017-02-25T12:39:30+11:00

Are you strong enough to look deep into your own sales attitudes and behaviours?

Underneath the BMW/Audi, the tailored suit and the $200 haircut lies the dormant sales serial killer, potent enough to kill deals without leaving a trace of DNA.

No CSI team, deal post mortem or client de-brief could uncover the real murderer of highly profitable, high value wins.

The killer is called Attribution Bias…let’s call him/her AB…..it’s kind of catchy.

AB loves to take credit for a win and believes wholeheartedly that if it wasn’t for him/her this bloody company would have ended up in the toilet a long time ago.

In fact, why there isn’t a statue of them at reception is a complete mystery.

Equally AB loves to blame everybody else when a deal goes sour and again, if it wasn’t for them they wouldn’t have been that close in the first place.

You could at least say thank you for all your efforts – it’s not their fault the deal was lost.

AB essentially is biased in that too much credit is claimed for success and not enough responsibility is taken for failure.

Here are some examples of AB behaviour:

‘ The client’s a dickhead – he doesn’t even understand the technology’

‘ I’m on my own here – the pre-sales resources are never there when you need them’

‘ Why can’t the global office understand that we can’t charge that rate here’

‘ It’s only my relationship with this client that keeps this account alive’

‘ It’s unbelievable how long it takes to get a proposal done around here’

‘ My boss is a dickhead’

‘ The CRM is stuffed’

‘ Nobody could sell that bundle of solutions into government/corporate/SMB without discounting’

‘ My channel partner is a dickhead’

‘ I always sell this way – if the client doesn’t get it, I move on’

‘ I need to take the client through my presentation/methodology, because I’ve seen it work before’

‘ I was the Global Top Sales Achiever in 2009’ This place doesn’t get it.

‘ My clients love me…that’s why we win’

‘ The marketing guy is a dickhead’

These biases often prevent people from seeing things at their purest.

The reality is often different to your perception.

Some clients will buy from you and your company and some won’t for all sorts of weird and wonderful reasons we’ve covered in the Salient Blog before, but needing approval and validation from clients or shifting blame are not the best building blocks to long term success.

AB loses deals because opportunities are killed off as soon as the bias kicks in.

If you stop judging clients and the people around you and simply listen with empathy, observing the situation at hand from all angles, you are much better placed to uncover new opportunities, remove blocks, dissolve frustration and find new strategies to win business.

As paradoxical as it may seem , putting yourself at the centre of the deal is attributing far too much bias to the reality that is taking place around you.

Step back, see things for what they are, not what AB is telling you they are. Make choices.

That is ultimate empowerment.

When you lock AB away in the cell and throw away the key, then you can be released to be even more successful.

CEO of Salient Communication, Elliot is a sought after keynote speaker and corporate trainer who has coached and trained over 4000 people including CEOs, senior management and successful sales teams throughout Australasia and Asia including Hong Kong and Singapore.

 

Elliot is a specialist sales speaker/trainer for high profile corporates having spoken at over 1500 conferences, workshops and break-out sessions on presenting, selling, negotiating and pitching for leading companies such as HP, SEEK, Avaya, Hitachi , Computershare and CUB.

 

He is renowned for ensuring sessions are engaging, interactive and relevant to winning business in competitive markets.

 

Elliot is based in Melbourne where he lives with his wife and two expensive children.

E: elliote@salientcommunication.com.au

Published in   Executive Level Selling

21 10, 2014

Why You Need To Know What’s Changed in Selling To Procurement

2017-02-25T12:39:30+11:00

One wag suggested Procurement is the art of pretending not to be the slightest bit interested in buying anything on offer whilst simultaneously being desperate to supply products and services urgently to their own company.

I think it was me.

But Procurement has changed or at least is well on the way to changing and you should be prepared for it.

Together with Paul Rogers, an acclaimed international procurement guru, we have produced over 3 hours of podcast content to help you navigate the world of selling to procurement in 2014.

You can check it out here https://www.salientcommunication.com.au/index.php/new-podcasts

Here are a few insights into the new world of selling to procurement:

Harry Halitosis is dying out

Harry grew up in purchasing and gravitated to procurement in a fluke restructure where he learned to grow his own dandruff and bark rudely at suppliers who didn’t give him what he wanted.

Harry has no vision and his company wouldn’t dare give him visibility on their real needs so he can’t make any decisions of note. Handling Harry is simple – go around him and stop being such a Wuss about probity and the document that says you can’t.

Harry won’t buy from you anyway unless you’re cheaper than a Cambodian Call Centre Worker.

However, you won’t need to stock up on breath mints for Harry for much longer.

He is being replaced by a new breed of Procurement professional, increasingly female, well educated and with a broader view of value.

She is also very well educated in the art of negotiation, so you’d better be too.

Did I mention the podcasts yet?

New Procurement Now Has Real Power

Newer procurement professionals often come with strong lines of business background including Operations, Finance, HR, IT and would you believe, Sales.

They not only know their supply chain and how it works, they are well networked in their industry and can Google faster than your 12 year old when a new app comes out.

To top it off they are given real authority by their senior stakeholders.

If you sell products and services that are classified as Indirect Spend (not material to their core function) like IT, Print, Travel, Labour Hire, Equipment, Professional Services etc, chances are they have the imprimatur to guide and drive a lot of decisions.

I know of at least two clients that have the Chief Procurement Officer reporting directly to the CEO and are afforded the autonomy accordingly.

Sales 101 cheese, crappy rapport building and talking brochure sales behaviour will fail miserably.

The way you craft your offer and negotiate from there will be critical.

Real cases studies as opposed to the new testimonials you have in Alabama or Kazakhstan will be vital.

These procurement people are like a squad of Liam Neesons.

They have a very special set of skills, they will hunt you down, they will find you and they will kill you…… You will be ‘Taken’ in the negotiation if not careful and that means serious margin is at stake, not to mention onerous deliverables.

You Are Always Negotiating

When we run negotiation skills training for sales people it’s typically a couple of days a year.

Your new procurement friends will spend up to 8 days a year in formal and informal training and certifications.

By the time you’ve picked up your first double strength ristretto/skinny latte/macchiato, Procurement will have negotiated their first 100k in savings for the day.

You should always have multiple options, tender compliant or outside the scope of the tender – good procurement people will look at it, even if only to pick your brains and leverage the incumbent, if it’s not you.

You should implicitly know where you can move and where you can’t and you need a shield as big as the ozone layer to handle all myriad of tactics.

it’s a new world – Jarryd Hayne is off to play NFL, Rap is still considered music and Procurement is armed, educated and licensed to buy.

This message will self destruct in 5 seconds.

if you want to avoid self destruction go to the Sales V Procurement Podcasts HERE:

As CEO of Salient Communication, Elliot is a sought after keynote speaker and corporate trainer who has coached and trained over 4000 people including CEOs, senior management and successful sales teams throughout Australasia and Asia including Hong Kong and Singapore.

 

Elliot is a specialist sales speaker for high profile corporates having spoken at over 1500 conferences, workshops and break-out sessions on presenting, selling, negotiating and pitching for leading companies such as HP, SEEK, Avaya, Hitachi , Computershare and CUB.

 

He is renowned for ensuring sessions are engaging, interactive and relevant to winning business in competitive markets.

 

Elliot is based in Melbourne where he lives with his wife and two expensive children

 

E: elliote@salientcommunication.com.au

Published in   Negotiation

Why You Don’t Need Motivation to Win Business

Saturday, 23 August 2014 15:08
23 08, 2014

Why You Don’t Need Motivation to Win Business

2017-02-25T12:39:30+11:00

Recently I was privileged to attend a complete coaching philosophy session led by the Head Coach of A-League team, Melbourne Victory and his three key assistants.

 There were less than a hundred of us eagerly eating cold party pies, waiting for pearls of wisdom on how their magic structures or formations could help our junior footballers suddenly become heroes and in turn claim bragging rights at the pub.

 But there were no great insights into the game plans or strategies, rather we got something far more powerful that applies just as strongly to you in winning new business.

 Here are the 3 key insights from an elite coaching group and why this will lead to consistent wins in sales.

 

 Motivation Is A Waste Of Time
Head Coach, Kevin Muscat was characteristically blunt when he said there was too much work to do to waste time trying to motivate professionals. If they weren’t self motivated then they wouldn’t be at the club for very long.

 When questioned if he would spend time motivating a player who was having a bad run, he said ‘Zero…we would simply get to work on coaching skill or technique’.

 Many sales managers have asked me how to motivate a sales person with ‘He’s a good guy – I just can’t get him motivated to do X’. My standard reply is ‘I’m not that good’

 If s/he wants to succeed I’ll give them a range of skills, technique and ideas to win business but given s/he gets a six figure salary to turn up, the minimum requirement is desire, adaptability and attitude.

 Oh, and don’t waste your budget on listening to speakers who have climbed Mt Everest on one leg after contracting the Ebola virus at base camp. You’ll be filled with admiration but it will last as long as fairy floss and your sales figures next year won’t have increased.

 

 Every Training Session Is At Full Intensity

 A source of pride are my LinkedIn recommendations that talk about how challenging the sales/presentation/negotiation training was, yet how excited they are about the results they achieved afterwards.

 Melbourne Victory train at full intensity week after week, drill after drill. Everyone is committed to match day intensity because they are consummate professionals who want to win.

 When I mention the words ‘Role Play’ or ‘Presentation Rehearsal’ some people look at me as if I’ve just announced that I’ll be attaching electrodes to their testicles and delighting in ramping up the voltage. 

 That only happens when there’s access to off peak electricity rates and is highly conditional on whether or not I had an argument with my wife that morning.

 The real professionals ask for more air time, more critique, more feedback. Instead of saying ‘I’m much better than this in front of a client’,  they say ‘Make me better so I can win more business at C Level, win more deals and make more money.

 Can you imagine a footballer saying ‘I pass much better in a match than I do at training, so I’ll grab a coffee and sit this one out if you don’t mind , coach’

 

 The Strategy Doesn’t Change Much

 Whilst the team structure is tweaked slightly week to week, depending on the opposition they’re playing, the core strategy, positional play and tactics don’t change much.

 The reason for this is that the game strategy is set by the coaches in the pre-season, well before a match is played.

 Everyone understands the ‘way we go about about winning’ so if a player is injured or gets sold for megabucks mid season. someone else can simply slot in, adhere to the well drilled strategy and play their role.

 There are a lot of sales people and managers who change their strategy more often than they dry clean their favourite suit.

 End of quarter pressures, product mix issues, bonus incentives and perceptions of different markets often lead people to change tactics dramatically half way through a ‘sales season’.

 Existing sales people get thrown out of whack, clients get confused, new sales people are uncertain and inconsistency in wins creeps in because the whole team ( including pre-sales, marketing, service and support)  is playing differently every week.

 Some people like to call this flexibility.

 I call it ‘ad-hoc adventures into the unknown’.

 Elite sport is a multi-million dollar operation run by elite coaching methods.

 Elite Selling should be no different.

 If you’d like to learn more about how you can win business selling to C Level join me in the Salient Executive Level Selling Program in October 2014 click HERE

 As CEO of Salient Communication, Elliot is a sought after keynote speaker and corporate trainer who has coached and trained over 4000 people including CEOs, senior management and successful sales teams throughout Australasia and Asia including Hong Kong and Singapore.

 Elliot is a specialist sales speaker for high profile corporates having spoken at over 1500 conferences, workshops and break-out sessions on presenting, selling, negotiating and pitching for leading companies such as HP, SEEK, Avaya, Hitachi , Computershare and CUB.

 He is renowned for ensuring sessions are engaging, interactive and relevant to winning business in competitive markets.

 Elliot is based in Melbourne where he lives with his wife and two expensive children

 

E: elliote@salientcommunication.com.au

Published in   Executive Level Selling