The phone rang, and the person on the other end had obviously researched me. “Hello, Mr. Harrison,” she said. “I’m the Human Resources director for ABC corporation (name eliminated to protect the innocent), and we’re interested in having you do some sales training for our sales force.” She went on to explain the size of the sales force, the general layout of the company, and how many days’ training she was seeking.

“Great,” I said. “Who is driving the project?” She explained that she was researching trainers, and I said, “No, by that I mean, who is the ultimate decision maker, whose budget this is coming out of?” She said, “That would be our Vice President of Sales, Chris XXXXX (again, not the real name).” “Terrific,” I replied. “When can I talk to Chris?” “You can’t,” she explained. “I just need you to send me a proposal, and I’ll send it on to Chris.” I then said one of the most important words in selling – a word that every salesperson should know and be comfortable with.

“No,” I said.

“Excuse me?” she asked. I clarified my answer.

“No, I won’t send a proposal without speaking to Chris. I won’t, because from past experience I know that if I don’t speak to the person driving the project, I’m only guessing at what to propose – and hence my proposal wouldn’t be for the right program aimed at the right needs. Which means that I won’t get the business anyway.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said. “We would have liked to have you involved in this project.”

“If I can speak to Chris, I’m happy to change my stance,” I said. She replied, “That won’t be possible.” We wished each other well, and that was that. Except that it wasn’t that. Three days later, my phone rang again.

“Troy, this is Chris XXXXX,” the caller said. “I understand that you refused to offer sales training to my company?” I explained that, in my experience, unless I had the opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with the decision maker, I didn’t get the business anyway, and I simply don’t have the time these days to issue non-viable proposals. “Well, we’re talking now,” he said, and we ended up having a conversation about his needs. Three days later, I received a FedEx package with a signed contract and a check.

What made the deal happen? Well, it seems counterintuitive, but refusing to propose was the difference. Had I simply spent time creating a proposal and sent it (as four other sales trainers did), I’d have been at the buyer’s mercy, and I wouldn’t have gotten the engagement.

Customers give us orders and strong requests all the time, and sometimes it’s not in our best interests to follow them. Yet salespeople are petrified by the idea of saying “no” to a customer, even when they know they should. It’s okay to say “no,” particularly when doing so means that you are guarding the value of your own time and resources. Here are some examples of times when saying “no” is the best option:

1. When you get a blind Request For Proposal: We get RFP’s all the time. Too often, we simply follow directions, fill in numbers, send them back, and hope. That’s a monstrous waste of time. Here’s a good rule of thumb: For every RFP you receive, someone is driving it and has written it. A salesperson has been able to talk to that person. If that salesperson isn’t you, you’re probably not going to get the business. When you get an RFP, you should endeavor to meet with the decision maker, and if you can’t, you should ask yourself why you’re taking the time to respond. “But Troy,” you’re saying, “If I don’t respond they’ll take me off the bid list.” So what? Every time you get the RFP and don’t get to talk to the decision maker, your results will be the same.
2. When your customer makes an unreasonable request: The old saying is, “The customer is always right.” Nonsense. Customers are wrong every day. Not to mention unfair, unreasonable, and downright unpleasant. Note that I don’t mean ALL customers – most are terrific. But sometimes even the best, most well-meaning customers can be unreasonable without knowing it. Your instinct, as a customer-friendly salesperson, is to accede to any and all requests – but sometimes that’s the worst thing you can do. When you accept an unreasonable request from a customer, you train the customer to be unreasonable. Sometimes, to protect yourself, you have to say “no.”
3. When your customer asks for something that’s not in their best interests: As a consultative salesperson, your job is to help your customers make buying decisions that are in their own best interests. Sometimes, your customer will ask for things that are not in their best interests, and when they do, you have to be brave enough to say “no,” and explain why.

These, of course, are only a few of the times that “no” can be your best friend – but it takes courage to say “no” to a customer. I do it, and every time I do, I’m aware that I’m jeopardizing a relationship. But, to be effective, sometimes that’s what I have to do. It works the same for you. Don’t be afraid to say “no;” sometimes it can result in your best relationships.

The conversation I detailed at the beginning of this article was over two years ago. That client has engaged me on numerous occasions since then, and continues to do so. Had I just said, “Yes,” it wouldn’t have happened.

In my years of experience in working with (and for) companies large and small, I have discovered that there is a common element to the most successful businesses. The most successful companies have a sales culture. A “sales culture” is a philosophy that permeates the company, from the corner office to the loading dock, that says, essentially, “We are a sales organization, and everything else we are able to do is a product of our ability to sell our products or services to our customers.”

This isn’t a philosophical statement; it’s reality. The only difference is whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. It’s reality because no matter how good your products or services, if you can’t persuade someone to exchange money for those products or services, there’s no reason for production or service to exist, and hence your business will cease to exist. An acquaintance of mine attempted to make a go of it as a financial consultant, and to be frank, he was the most brilliant financial guy I’ve ever met. He’s now working for someone else as a CFO – because despite his brilliance, he was unable to make a single sale.

The most successful companies both acknowledge and embrace the idea that they are first and foremost a sales organization, and that culture flows from the top. It flows from the top because it must. Despite the protestations of those who advocate bottom-up leadership, the reality is that any corporate culture is set not by the employees at ground and field level, but by the overriding philosophy of management. That’s you, by the way. So, let’s assume for the moment that you have decided that your company needs to accept and embrace a sales culture. How do we go about that?

Set the mission: First of all, whatever your mission statement, throw it away. I know, it’s something that you’ve put a lot of thought into and probably has some great phrasing. It’s probably also something that your employees couldn’t remember if a gun were put to their heads. Let’s replace it with something simple like this: “We are a sales organization, and we grow profitably by Acquiring new customers, Developing current customers to greater profitability, and Retaining profitable business.” Use this as the mantra that guides your company’s decision making.

Communicate: All good things in sales (and business) come from good communication, and most bad things happen because of insufficient communication. Knowing this, the next step is to communicate the message to your people, and to do so consistently. This is where a lot of companies fail, because the communication happens like this: The Big Guy at the Top will have a staff meeting where he/she communicates the ‘new mission’ forcefully to his key managers, and then expects the managers to communicate it downstream. They do, but with varying degrees of emphasis and enthusiasm. The Sales Manager obviously embraces the mission, while the Production Manager may be less enthusiastic, and so forth. If you really want to effect change, it has to be up to you.

In creating a sales culture, there is no employee whose job is so small or insignificant that he/she shouldn’t hear this message from YOU. Have all-company meetings, or all-department meetings, or all-branch meetings; however you need to do it in order to have the opportunity to have every employee hear the message directly from your lips. I once struggled with the support personnel in a 50-person department; no matter what I told the supervisors, nothing seemed to change at ground level. So, over the objections of several supervisors and even a couple of managers from other departments, I held a full-department meeting and laid out my goals for the next quarter, how we would achieve them, and what everyone’s duty was as part of the goal achievement. The employees asked great questions, and within days were taking the actions that I needed them to take in order to achieve the goals. Result – we didn’t just make the goals, we blew them away. And you can bet that we repeated the quarterly meetings consistently. The take-away is that, for the most part, if your people know the goals, they will act in accordance with them – if they believe that the goal is real and permanent.

Align Goals: To accomplish your goal of profitable growth through acquiring, developing, and retaining customers, you must align all your departments and goals. I once worked for a company that would set each department’s goals in a vacuum; for instance, sales would be tasked to grow the company 15% while the production department would be tasked to cut labor costs by 10%. Assuming there are no major technical innovations (there weren’t), you had departments with goals that could not all be reached collectively. This produced management and interdepartmental conflict on a constant basis.

Instead of this, set department goals in such a way that they can all be achieved together. For instance, instead of budgeting in dollar terms, budget in percentages from the top line. This way, when departments need more resources for equipment and personnel, they know how to get it – help grow the company. Even with the best goal setting, however, you’re going to see some internal conflict.

Remove Internal Conflict: Good sales forces, by their nature, create internal conflict. This isn’t because salespeople are bad people, obnoxious, or difficult to work with (although that is a separate issue), but because good salespeople push the frontiers. Because sales is all about growth, good sales forces are always creating extra work and pressure for the other departments which must then function at a higher level to support the sales growth created. This creates conflict and push-back.

As a business owner, it’s your job to mediate and handle these conflicts and push-backs. It’s a delicate issue because no department, or department manager, wants to feel subordinate or less important than sales. The reality is that, if you’re truly embracing a sales culture, the other departments are exactly that – subordinate to sales. When conflicts arise, you should go back to your mission statement; what helps your company grow profitably through acquiring, developing, and retaining customers?

Few things can be as demotivating to a sales force, or as detrimental to sales productivity, as the daily interdepartmental battles that can result when other departments feel that they must act as a brake pedal on progress. Good sales cultures overcome this problem by empowering managers who are sales advocates and by removing internal obstacles.

Have a High Performance Sales Force: So far, we’ve talked about aligning a company’s objective, people, and goals around the sales force, which creates a very sales-friendly environment. Now it’s time to turn up the heat on the people who are doing the selling. You have the right, and the responsibility, to demand excellence from your salespeople once you have molded the culture of the company around them.

First, you need a strong sales manager. A “strong sales manager” is one who actively works, on a day to day basis, to strengthen and enhance the abilities of his/her salespeople. Your sales manager should be not only a good administrator, reporter, and forecaster; the sales manager must be a good coach and developer of people. He should be willing to advocate for the needs of the sales force while simultaneously demanding the highest effort and achievement from them. He must be capable of surrounding himself with top talent and then making that talent even better.

The sales manager must understand the basic equation of sales achievement: Quantity of activity x Quality of activity = Results. To this end, the sales manager should have performance metrics in place to assess both quantity and quality of sales activity, and be equipped to hold salespeople accountable for those metrics and for the results. Struggling personnel must be either coached or changed; top performers should be rewarded and coached to even higher levels.

Your salespeople should be excellent “fits” for your company and environment, and should be capable of winning new business, developing current business, and retaining customers (remember the mission statement?). They should have the appropriate mix of traits necessary for success, while being highly skilled and trained (which means that your investment in training should be ongoing). The salespeople in a high performance sales force are not salespeople that must be babysit or constantly watched to achieve results.

Moreover, the people in your sales force should be excellent relationship builders, both inside the company and outside. That means that the sales force shouldn’t have any “cowboys” who are negative or abusive to other employees; for a sales culture to work, the other employees have to want to get behind the sales team. Salespeople who can’t play nicely with others will work against your goals, no matter how good they are with customers.

Reinforce the culture: As you’ve probably guessed, it’s not enough to have some meetings, say “we are a sales organization,” and call it good. Cultures happen because they are reinforced, directly or indirectly. For this to work, key decisions must be made based on the new mission statement: “Does this decision help us to acquire, develop, or retain customers?” That doesn’t mean that non-sales departments starve; that new machine for the plant may be completely justified by its benefits in product quality. The raises for the production staff may be appropriate to reward them for their part in acquiring, developing, and retaining customers. It does mean that your company has one universal criteria for spending, personnel allocations, and any other key decision making.

The Benefits: There are numerous benefits to aligning your company around a sales culture. The biggest is this: Sales focused companies tend to produce excellence in every department. The reason is simple: Companies with a strong sales department cannot stay bad or mediocre in other areas; if they do, those sales gains will quickly be lost through customer dissatisfaction and attrition. As noted earlier, good sales departments tend to lift other departments through necessity. This is not true of other departmental objectives; an excellent production department seldom creates pressure on other departments to up their games.

On the whole, organizations that center their culture around the process of profitable growth tend to achieve that growth, year after year. It’s not easy, but the results are worth it.

I love stand-up comedy. When I travel, one of the entertainment venues I always seek out is a comedy club. Some are good, some are mediocre, and every now and then, one is truly awful – but I almost always seem to have a good time. One of my favorite comedians (well, me and millions of others) is Jerry Seinfeld. He has a routine that tells us a lot about selling services.

In the routine, he talks about dry cleaners. He doesn’t trust them, he says, “Because I don’t think they’re really doing it. What is dry cleaning? They take my clothes back into a room that I can’t see, and then charge them to give them back to me.” He then brushes some lint off his jacket and says, “Here. That’s dry cleaning.” It’s hilarious (much more in the viewing than in my retelling), but there’s a lesson here if you sell services. In fact, if you sell a pure service – perhaps one that is invisible most of the time – you can probably relate to what Jerry’s saying. Worse, your customers can relate.

When you sell products, it’s easy to remind your customers of the relationship, your value, and your quality. They see the tangible result all the time. Service sales are much tougher. To keep a service relationship alive, salespeople (and customer service people) must be much more proactive. Here are five keys to preserving the service relationship:

1. Always be diligent. One downfall of the ‘invisible service relationship’ is that sometimes, the people delivering that service can get a little lax. If your service is that way – for instance, your service is some sort of a recurring activity that doesn’t require the service people to check in with the customer on a regular basis – you MUST constantly check and verify that the service is being done. The worst thing is to get “caught” by the customer. Many times, if this happens, you simply won’t be able to recover.
2. Remind them. When your service isn’t the reminder of the great value to bring to them, YOU must be the reminder. Schedule ongoing business reviews. If you know the results of your work (ROI, cost savings, time savings, etc.), bring those numbers and show them. If you don’t know (and sometimes you might not), bring the data on the service activities you’ve performed, and don’t be afraid to ASK for the results.
3. Don’t be the Invisible Salesman. Just as with service personnel, it’s very tempting in these situations to sit back and wait for the call from the customer on the ‘no news is good news’ paradigm. Don’t. One of the great weaknesses of the insurance industry is the salesperson who only calls the customer at renewal time. Many times, that salesperson calls at renewal time only to discover that another salesperson has come in and picked his/her pocket by forming a relationship while salesperson #1 was sitting back and doing nothing.
4. Ask the tough questions. The toughest question for any salesperson to ask is, “Have I/we delivered on the promises we made?” The most fearless salesperson will choke a bit trying to get this question out – but get it out you must. Believe it or not, every sales question you ask will boil down to this one. And if you don’t ask it yourself, your customer will ask it of themselves – and answer it themselves, without your involvement. Do you want to be part of that discussion?
5. Keep renewing contacts. One potential pitfall in service relationships – particularly those that are contract-based – is that the salesperson can be lulled into falling out of touch between contract periods. Don’t do this. The problem is that, no matter how good your relationship is with the contact that signed your agreement, people move, they change jobs, they get promoted, they get fired. Then when it comes time to renew, you walk in fat, dumb, and happy, only to find out that nobody knows you and you’re basically on a cold call, having lost the advantage of incumbency. Don’t do that. Constantly work to get multiple contacts (remember High, Wide, and Deep), and keep relationships alive.

The reason that many customers are suspicious of service delivery are that, often times, services aren’t delivered as promised. If that’s your company, there’s very little you can do from a sales perspective to regain lost trust. The best thing you can do is actively monitor and check to make sure services are delivered, and to stay in contact with your customer. Do these things, and your customers won’t compare you to Seinfeld’s dry cleaner!