Proposing and closing is a high-stress moment in selling.  I’ve been there and I understand.  If you’re not just a little amped up when you put a proposal forth, you may need to check your commitment to selling.  I’ve been in selling for a long time, and I still get excited!

That means that when the customer says “no,” (and you will always have customers that say “no”), we have stress to manage.  One of the worst ways you can manage that stress is by insulting the customer’s intelligence.  A friend of mine described such a situation to me recently.  She turned down a salesperson, and the salesperson’s response was, “Well, obviously, you just don’t understand what I’m offering.  What questions can I answer?”  After a moment’s shocked silence, she said that the biggest question he could answer was how quickly the meeting could end.  NO SALE.

Look, it’s possible that the customer doesn’t understand your proposal.  Whose fault is that? YOURS, champ!  Not theirs.  A sale happens when need, solution, and timing are all present.

The customer has to have a definite need.

Your solution has to solve the problem – by the CUSTOMER’s agreement and standards, not yours.

And the timing has to be right.

Which means that if the customer said “no,” one of three things has happened:

1. The need wasn’t present, important, or you didn’t discover the right need. Most of the time, this is the case – too many salespeople do only rudimentary questioning.  Ask comprehensive questions to discover needs, and then confirm with the customer that you have assessed their needs correctly.
2. What you are selling didn’t solve the needs. Once you have discovered the needs, your presentation must be centered around their needs, not a one-size-fits-all “here’s how we are awesome” slide deck.  And once you have shown your solution, you must confirm that the customer agrees that this will solve the need.  A great question to ask:  “How do you see a win from making this purchase?
3. You are hitting them at the wrong time. A friend whom I greatly respect always says, “you have to be there when their window is open.”  He’s right.  Ask timing-based questions; for instance, “When would you like to implement this?”  Know you’re at the right time; that way, it won’t surprise you.

And if you do all of those things, customers will still say “no.”  Nothing is perfect in selling.  But when they do say so, instead of telling your customer that they just didn’t understand all the ways you will rock their world, instead you should simply ask your customer why they are saying “no.”  Don’t whine.  Just ask.  Then let the conversation go from there.

You might not win the sale.

But you also won’t get booted out of the office because you expected them to say something that no customer has ever said.

Don’t sell stupid.

Want to fix stupid?  Contact me and let’s talk.

There’s a youth movement afoot, and if you’re not on board with how to sell to younger buyers, you’re going to get run over by it. Purchasing power and corporate leadership is shifting.  Most of the time, I hear salespeople and sales managers bellyaching about how “different” the “new generation” is in terms of their purchasing habits, rather than trying to figure out what those habits are and how to adapt our selling methods to them.

Younger buyers may have different buying habits than you’re used to, but they ARE buying, and what you don’t understand about trends in purchasing is costing you money.  For the last couple of years, I’ve been talking to people at conferences who want nothing more to demystify the art and science of selling to younger buyers (for the purposes of this article, let’s just say that the dividing line between “younger” and “not younger” is 40).  Well, I’m here to help.  Let’s stop bellyaching and start learning.

The skill of selling to younger buyers can be summed up with 4 C’s: Concision, Connection, Collaboration, and Consideration.

• Concision: Concision is the art of being concise in your communication. One complaint I hear all the time is, “Troy, younger buyers just don’t want to talk to people in person and they don’t want to see salespeople!”    Younger people are in face to face contact with other people all the time.  We are social creatures, and that trait is not generational.  However, younger buyers want you to get to the point – to be concise.  A younger buyer doesn’t want to sit and talk football for 30 minutes before they discuss business.  If you are in front of them, that means that you need to get to the point and give value for the time spent. Forget the old “fish on the wall” fake rapport tactics – you’ll get tossed out. Ask good questions and make to-the-point, targeted, individualized presentations that improves the buyer’s condition in the time you spend with them.  Hack:  Prepare five great questions about their business to open every new sales call.
• Connection: Younger people are the most connected generation(s) that the world has ever seen, and this is due of course to technology. It’s not unusual for younger people to have friends literally all over the world.  Have they met all of those people face to face? Probably not – but through technology, they have fostered connections.  That means that they have a larger business network than could have ever been dreamed of decades ago.  That also means that they want to be connected with YOU.  How much do you use LinkedIn?  Hint – just putting up a rudimentary profile is not “using” LinkedIn.  If you aren’t posting, commenting, and engaging with other people, they’ll see it.  When you approach a younger buyer, they are likely to check you out on LinkedIn within 24 hours.  If your presence is found wanting, you will be less likely to become a business connection to them.  Staying off of business social media is an outdated strategy.  Hack:  Set your browser’s home page to LinkedIn, so that every day when you fire up the computer, it’s staring you right in the face.  You’d be amazed at how much you can get done in 15 minutes a day.
• Collaboration: Studies show that the average buyer today has completed 57% of his or her buying process before ever seeing a sales rep.  Younger people are researchers, and when they bring knowledge to a sales call, they expect it to be part of the conversation.  More than that, they want to be active partners in the purchasing process – hence, collaboration.  A salesperson who doesn’t respect the buyer’s journey is going to lose out.  Worse, a salesperson to takes it upon themselves to explain to the buyer why everything they have learned is incorrect will mightily anger the buyer.  When the younger buyer comes to the table, expect that buyer to be current on the offerings of your competitors and how they compare.  Are YOU that current?  Hack:  One of the first questions you should ask a buyer is, “What have you done thus far in this purchasing process?”
• Current: There are still many salespeople out there who are technophobes.  If that’s you, you are setting your own expiration date.  Being “current” means being up to date on the technology that affects your customers’ buying process and communication needs.  In today’s world, if you don’t know how to use video conferencing platforms, social media, IM, and text, AT A MINIMUM, you’re limiting your potential for success.  Why do you need to be comfortable in all of these platforms?  Because you need to meet your customers where they are – and they might be in a number of different places, in terms of communication.  I have one client that is nearly impossible to reach by phone, but if I text him, I have a response within minutes.  If I refused to text (as a salesperson told me last week that he did), I’d never get ahold of him.  Hack:  Ask your customers (not just the younger ones) what they prefer for communication.  Then communicate the way they want to.

Are younger buyers different?  Somewhat, for reasons both cultural and technological.  But they are still people, and they are still individuals.  By now, you should have noticed that none of my four C’s put all younger people in one bucket.  The real art of selling to younger people is to recognize who they are as individuals, be adaptive to meet them where they are, and respect their skills, processes, and abilities.  We’ll delve into this topic a lot more as 2023 continues, but the four C’s should give you a good starting point.

No Customer Ever Video

Okay, who likes to be lied to?  Raise your hands.  You in the back – put your hand down.  You look stupid.

I see salespeople and marketers who lie every day to their customers and still expect to sell to them.  In fact, they begin their relationships with a lie and still expect to sell to them.

That’s stupid.

When you use a tactic like beginning a cold email with “Re:,” to attempt to fool your prospect into thinking you had a dialogue with them, not only will they delete the email – they’ll delete any chance of buying from you.

Why? Because you are a LIAR.  And – I know this is shocking – people don’t like to buy from liars.

So, what is a salesperson to do when it comes to cold email prospecting?  Well, there are a few pointers I can offer you.

First – understand that return rates for emails are low.  The rule of thumb for direct mail used to be a 1% to 2% response rate.  I think that would be a high rate for email prospecting; if you’re going to send out prospecting emails, be prepared to send a lot of them.

Second – rather than lying in your subject line for attention, think clickbait.  In a business sense, your prospecting should be problem solution oriented.  What problems can you solve for them, and how can you communicate that in as concise and impactful a way as possible?

Third – your email itself should also be concise and impactful.  Get your message across with as little fluff as possible.  You want to make good use of your client’s time, so give them the meat of the matter in something that only takes them a few seconds to read.

Fourth – no attachments.  Attachments are the kiss of death; they get your email sent to the spam folder.

Fifth – everything should be brand consistent.  I don’t just mean your company’s brand, but also your personal brand.  That’s why deception is bad; unless you are a liar by nature, lying in an email just to get attention is the wrong path.

There’s more to prospecting, of course, but those are topics for the future.

Don’t sell stupid.  If no customer has ever said they like it, don’t do it.

#saleshack:  Work with me.

Can we agree that making the customer negotiate with the boss is stupid?  No customer has ever said how much they loved negotiating with “the boss.”  As I promised in the video, let’s fix stupid.

“Boss Negotiation” happens because the boss doesn’t trust the salesperson to make an acceptable profit on the deal, so the boss must be “the bad guy” in order to help the salesperson hold price.  I have a sneaking suspicion that many sales managers do this because they like the control, as well.

The problem is that this disempowers the salesperson and makes the customer think, “Well, why don’t I just talk directly to the boss?”  In fact, many customers say this outright.

It’s wasteful for the salesperson and annoying to the customer.

Worse, in my experience, the achieved final price actually ends up LOWER than what it is when the salesperson handles their own negotiation – thus defeating the purpose (I think this is because the salesperson is so devalued in the customer’s eyes).  So, how about we stop doing it?  Here are a few keys to getting away from this:

If you are the sales manager:

1. Teach your salespeople how your company makes money. I don’t just mean that you sell goods and services at a price; teach your salespeople about all of the moving parts that go into generating an acceptable profit.  I find that most salespeople will be good agents of the company and protectors of the company’s profit if they know this information.  Keeping them dumb is dumb.
2. Establish pricing guidelines that salespeople can use in the field so that they don’t have to come back to the batcave to get pricing and proposals. When salespeople can quote price on the spot, they become more important in the customer’s eyes.  Part of this process is having a high/low set of guardrails around pricing – or even better, a pricing matrix like the rate cards used in advertising and media with brackets for pricing.
3. Teach your salespeople how to quote price in a definite fashion and how to negotiate on their own. Yes – this means you give up some control.  The time you save can be used to coach your salespeople and develop their skills; that’s a win/win.
4. Make it safe for salespeople to say ‘no’ to bad business, and stand up for them when they do. There’s nothing worse than being a salesperson who says ‘no’ to a deal that the boss won’t accept – and then finding out later that the boss would have accepted it (because there is information you haven’t been told by your boss).  Ask me how I know this.  If the salesperson turns down a deal that’s outside the guardrails you set for them, it’s your job to stand by them and praise them for making a good decision.
5. Finally, say ‘no’ as a last resort for when salespeople come in with a bad deal. If you’ve done steps 1-4, they already know that they are bringing you a bad deal, so the ‘no’ won’t be a surprise.  Even so, use it as a coaching moment to help them not bring you bad business in the future.

If you are the salesperson:

1. Be a businessperson that is a good steward of company profits, not just a salesperson who is trying to get any deal that you can. This means being assertive about learning how your company makes money and the role that you play in it.    Then live it.
2. Don’t make anyone else “the bad guy” in negotiation. “This is what my boss needs me to do” shouldn’t come out of your mouth.  “This is what I need” or “This is what my company needs” are acceptable – YOU are the representative of your company.
3. Hold price and don’t bring your boss junk deals. The principle here is that you, the salesperson, are trustworthy and able to be a good guardian of profit.  So be that.
4. Don’t ever sell JUST on price. You should be able to come up with at least two solid non-price reasons for the customer to switch their business to you.  If you can’t, don’t bother – if you win them on price, you’ll lose them on price.

Selling this way is empowering and professional for the salesperson and sales manager, it’s a lot more fun, and it produces a better buying experience for the customer.  And better buying experiences lead to stronger relationships and higher profits.

“Disruptive” is a word that’s frequently used an infrequently understood.  To be “disruptive” is to blow up current expectations and patterns, and set new expectations and patterns.  Our profession of selling is one that could use some disruption.  According to a recent HubSpot survey, salespeople are one of the least trusted professions.  Only 3% of people say that they trust salespeople!  At least we beat out politicians, so there’s that. Still – it’s time to update and change.

Any profession with a 3% trust rating needs some work.  The problem is that our customers have been telling us for years how they want to be treated, and we ignore them.  We focus on “Sales Processes” instead of the Buyer’s Journey.  We ask limited questions.  We hold back critical information thinking that we’re giving out “free consulting.”  In short, when customers have the chance to kick salespeople out of the process, they usually take it.  The good news is that this leaves a lot of ways to be disruptive in sales.  Here are three:

1. Be transparent.  Today, the ultimate sales flex is transparency; customers don’t want to fight for critical information.  Those fine-print contract terms?  Put ‘em on your website so that customers can read them before you visit.  Publish pricing.  Be aware of, and reactive to, your online reviews.  You can either embrace transparency or have it forced upon you. And if you’re scared of putting your information out there, don’t be.  It’s out there anyway.  Technology has made it so that there aren’t any secrets – and if you don’t look like you’re trying to keep secrets, customers will trust you more.

   This also means that you should stay current on what information is out there about you and your company.  Did you get a bad Google review?  Chances are that your prospects will become aware of it.  Be ready to discuss it with them, openly and honestly.  Someone has ripped your company on Glassdoor?  Same thing – be informed, ready, and candid.

2. Ask your customer how they want to buy. Again – your sales process is “you” focused – be “them” focused. Being “them” focused is one of the easiest and best ways to be disruptive in sales.  I learned how to be disruptive in sales when I was 19; I just didn’t recognize that I was doing so.  I had a job selling mens’ suits at a large department store in Topeka, KS.  Topeka was not a big ‘suit wearing’ city, and most of my customers were coming in to buy a suit for an occasion – a graduation, a funeral, or a wedding.  We all know what retail salespeople do, right?  They say, “Can I help you?”  The customer, knowing their line in this play, quickly says, “Just looking.”  In other words, “leave me alone.”  I did that for a little while, and then one day this couple came in.  The man looked decidedly like he was there under protest.  So instead of the standard question, I asked him, “So, how do you like to shop?”

   He stared at me for a moment and then grumbled, “Well, I really don’t.”  I smiled and said, “Let me guess.  You’re here because someone is graduating, someone died, or someone is getting married, right?”  At that, he smiled and said, “Yeah, my daughter is getting married and I need a suit.”  I quickly sized him up and walked him to his size on the rack (48 regular, if I remember right).  He grabbed the most conservative blue suit on the rack and said, “That’ll do.”  I stopped him, agreeing that it would do the job for the wedding – but what if I hooked him up with a suit that was equally acceptable for the wedding, but had a little more flair?  That way he could wear it with a sport shirt to take his wife out for a nice dinner.  At this, his wife perked up and elbowed him.  He said that this might be possible – so I found a windowpane plaid suit, paired it up with a dress shirt and tie, and then found a couple of sport shirts to try on with it.  I’ll never forget the look on his wife’s face when he came out of the dressing room.  Suffice it to say that I bet that he had a very good evening.  I sold him two suits, two sport shirts, and a shirt and tie.  After that experience, that’s what I did – and the older guys never could figure out how a punk kid was outselling them.

   I was being disruptive by breaking the customer’s expected patterns, and instead working with them to help them buy in the way they wanted to.  I made the customer a genuine partner in the process – and it worked.  It will work for you, too.

3. Give free advice. Salespeople are petrified of giving “free consulting,” meaning that they want to hold back their prescriptions for solving the customer’s need until they feel that they have a deal.  The fear is that the customer will take their advice to another vendor, get a cheaper price, and buy elsewhere.  This fear ignores two essential facts.  First – customers eventually buy from the vendor they want to.  If you aren’t that vendor, you’ve done a lousy job of showing the customer your value.  Second – the knowledge that the customer wants and needs is out there.  Remember that whole “technology” thing we were talking about.  Giving the customer essential knowledge is one way to build a relationship that is based on openness and trust.  “Don’t be a free consultant” is one of those old philosophies that has been made obsolete.  Remember – there are no trade secrets today.

Most of the time, when “disruptive” is used in a business context, the writer or speaker is referring to technology.  In our profession, tech is vital – but technique can be even more disruptive.  Going against the grain in a way that your customers want is the best, and most profitable, way you can be disruptive every day.

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I’ll be honest – I thought this technique was dead.  I like to think that my finger is on the pulse of my profession nonstop, 24/7/365.  Surely THIS old, hackneyed technique would be dead as a doornail, right?  You would think.  As educated and savvy as buyers have become, and as much information is available to them, there’s really no excuse for salespeople to continue to think that this old saw would still cut.

Then it happened.  I was buying a piece of equipment for my garage (as I am wont to do), and the salesman said, “And if you’ll buy now, I’ll knock $50 off!”  I was actually ready to buy the thing, and I didn’t even need the discount.  But as much as I’m a car guy, I’m always The Sales Navigator.  And I couldn’t help myself.  This was on a Friday.  I replied, “So, if I come back Monday and I’m ready to buy, cash in hand, you won’t give me the $50 off?”

The salesman’s jaw dropped and he said, “uhhhh…..uhhhh.”  As salespeople are wont to do when a customer hoists them by their own petard.  Like it says in the video, I was there, but only once.  I had the feeling this wasn’t this guy’s first time, which made it worse.  I smiled, gently explained to him what I do, and told him that he might try a different technique.  And then, since I wanted the equipment, I went ahead and bought.

How could he avoided this?  There are a few ways:

1. Understand the customer’s priorities. A sale happens when there is a need, a solution, and the timing is right.  Any one of those three components can derail your sale.  Even if your solution truly does address the customer’s need, if that need isn’t the highest priority for the customer, the timing won’t be right.  Asking good questions to understand the priorities is the best way to understand timing.
2. Ask time-frame questions early. You should ask your time-frame questions well before you attempt to close the sale.  Your questions should be centered around the desired time of delivery or use, not around the timing of the decision itself.  When customers make a buying decision, they want immediate gratification; if that isn’t possible, it’s on you to let them know.
3. Ask checking questions. Never assume things. Don’t assume that the need you are trying to solve is an important need to the buyer.  Don’t assume that they agree that your solution works.
4. Ask the customer how they see a gain in buying. This is a great pre-proposal question; if the customer has a good answer, they are basically selling your product or service back to you.  If they don’t have an answer?  You’ve missed something.
5. Listen. This should be obvious, but listen to the answers you’re given, and act on them.  Respect your customers and their intelligence.

“Buy now or the deal can’t happen” is stupid selling. We can fix stupid. Don’t be that guy.  Come up with other ways to get the sale moving that don’t require dishonesty, and you will be more successful

This is an excellent article from the Harvard Business Review on the power of questions. I’ve said for many years that, in selling, 80% of your chance to win or lose the sale is in the questions you ask, and questioning is a key piece of my sales training programs. Still, most salespeople don’t ask enough questions. I ran a poll on the “Sales Best Practices” group and asked how many questions salespeople were asking on the discovery appointment, and the results shocked me. 37% said that they asked five or fewer questions; another 41% said they asked 10 or fewer questions. Only 22% of salespeople ask more questions (wanna bet which group has the better results?). Overlay this with the result from the article that said that there is a significant difference in likeability and rapport building between asking five questions and asking nine – and now extrapolate that to a sales call where you are trying to define customer needs. If you’re not making enough sales, you’re probably not asking enough questions.