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Understanding the source

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Selling is not hard when you know what you are doing. Sales is a skill and you really need to know how to do it because it’s a skill that will be with you throughout your life. I recently worked with a sales team on 3 key areas:

  1. Attitude - How do you maintain a positive, possible attitude? Taking full responsibility for what you are doing, keeping an expectant attitude in place. How do you manage your attitude when things take a dip and go wrong?

  2. Competence – This is all about selling and understanding the methodology. How do you get buyers to really listen and learn about what the problem really is so you can go about a decision evidence model?

  3. Execution - Doing the things at the right time with the right people.

 

These things in combination are what drives the results you are going to get. The “old school” pitch, persuade and close the deal is the wrong starting point for the modern salespersons. Commit to helping the buyer make the best possible decision that benefits them, and tell yourself, “I’m at my best when I sell in this way.” I think you should always give buyers the room they need in order for them to really understand what they need, want and why from you.

Strengthening your muscles

What motivates you?
What fires you up?
What gets you going when the going gets tough?

The answer to these questions is different for everyone, just because it works for one person it doesn’t mean it will work for another. Humans are emotional creatures, and we seek patterns, and we are adept at finding them whether they exist or not. Nowadays, we are always hearing about passion, purpose and finding your “why”, and the brain needs that, as we need something to fall back on. Today, our number one problem is “Why now?” as it is far safer to wait, but as sales professionals we must learn how to sell around that.


So much of sales is not about what you know, it’s about how well you do it - in other words, it’s all about the performance. You must be able to get yourself to do things when you don’t feel like it. The people who only follow their feelings are misunderstanding what’s going on in our brains, as our subconscious doesn’t really care about tomorrow. It cares about right here, right now - it wants food, it wants rest, it wants to have fun – and it will take over and hijack our prefrontal cortex. Good salespersons have learned how to get motivated without getting upset, they have learned how to take feedback without taking it personally or as an attack on their identity. Would you like to learn how to regulate their emotions? Contact me via e-mail and let’s schedule an online meeting.

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Each buyer is unique

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Success in sales depends largely on the salesperson’s ability to adapt his or her skills and pitch when selling to different personality types. With just a little bit of communication, observation, and research, you can use your knowledge of these decision-making styles to build better and longer lasting customer relationships and increase your close rate.

 

What are those personality types? 

The four types of buyers whom I have met the most during my sales career are as follows: management, user, technical and economic buyers. I use the acronym M.U.T.E
- The management buyer is all about seeing the actual solution being implemented and how your solutions can be used.
- The user buyer is the person who is concerned with the overall customer experience and the impact of the buying experience and ease of purchase.
- The technical buyer relies heavily on measurable and quantifiable data before engaging in a purchase and wants proof that your product or service performs as stated.
- The economic buyer is focused on the ROI and stay within or under budget, this type of buyer takes into consideration examples of work done for past and current clients and seeks case studies that prove the ROI of a solution. 

 

By identifying your buyer’s personality type and what motivates them, you can tailor your sales presentation to meets their needs. I can teach you how to put all of these four types of buyers on a grid and figure why they would buy, and more importantly document the reasons why they are holding back from buying. Contact me via e-mail and I’ll guide you through the process of addressing those reasons for not buying and fine tuning your sales presentation.

Be of service

It’s only through understanding people’s holistic experiences that we can ever hope to design something that works within the parameters of what matters to them and the best way to understand what really matters to people is to speak to them. Speaking with your clients is the principal way to understand the rich, messy nuances of their multi-layered experiences. It is through a deep engagement with customers’ experiences that we can begin the process of designing meaningful solutions, for example, a digital e-commerce platform. With this in mind, anthropological expertise becomes especially helpful, because it brings together academic rigour and cultural understanding in order to build a detailed picture of customers’ experiences. This is achieved through discussions with customers that strike a balance between natural and honest, while still remaining focused and insightful. In practice, this usually means asking people about their lives, listening carefully to how they make sense of the situations they experience, and then seamlessly steering conversation topics toward your key areas of focus. 

 

This idea may initially feel obscure and vague, and it may seem more foundational than actionable. I am just trying to serve with what I have been given and I am coming from the place of good intentions. I think it’s essential to build a coherent understanding around the different ways customers experience your organisation. Interested? Contact me via e-mail and let’s schedule a meeting about your customer experience.

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Facts on Friday

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The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mysterious glue that enables millions of humans to cooperate effectively. This mysterious glue is made of stories, not genes. We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money, and human rights. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, and no human rights – except in the common imagination of human beings. You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will get limitless bananas in chimpanzee heaven. Only Sapiens can believe such stories. This is why we rule the world, and chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

From “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari

Awareness can travel

c/o Getty Images

In psychology, a heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to make decisions quickly and efficiently. It is the way you feel (your affect) toward a particular stimulus that influences the decisions you make. No one likes to be outwitted or to be tricked, I wrote a little about “affect heuristics” on Tuesday because advertisers are perpetually after our attention and politicians after our votes, both of them employing as much inducement and enticement as they can muster. With heuristics, the brain can make faster and more efficient decisions, albeit at the cost of accuracy. Do people in your organisation exhibit curious, predictable biases?

In 1974, behavioural economics researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman identified a specific mental process used to simplify decision-making. They showed that humans rely on a limited set of heuristics when making decisions with information about which they are uncertain. The three key heuristics are as follows: 

1. Representativeness - allows people to judge the likelihood that an object belongs in a general category or class based on how similar the object is to members of that category.

2. Anchoring - allows people to estimate a number by starting at an initial value (the “anchor”) and adjusting that value up or down. 

3. Adjustment and availability - allows people to assess how often an event occurs or how likely it will occur, based on how easily that event can be brought to mind.

Understanding your biases

A cognitive bias is a subconscious error in thinking that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you, and affects the rationality and accuracy of decisions and judgments. Biases are unconscious, they are automatic processes designed to make decision-making quicker and more efficient. Cognitive biases can be caused by a number of different things, for example, heuristics (mental shortcuts), individual motivations and social pressures. Everyone exhibits cognitive bias, and it might be easier to spot in others, but it is important to know that it is something that also affects your thinking.

Here are some typical signs that you are influenced by some type of cognitive biases:
- Only paying attention to news stories that confirm your opinions.
- Blaming outside factors when things don't go your way.
- Attributing other people's success to luck but taking personal credit for your own accomplishments.
- Assuming that everyone else shares your opinions or beliefs.
- Learning a little about a topic and then assuming you know all there is to know about it.


When you are making judgments and decisions about the world around you, you like to think that you are objective, logical, and capable of taking in and evaluating all the information that is available to you. Unfortunately, these biases sometimes trip us up, leading to poor decisions and bad judgments.

You decide for yourself

c/o Harvard Business Review

How do we balance the need to be rational, cautious, and sceptical with the benefits of being curious and open minded to new ideas?
I think our emotions influence all types of decisions, both big and small. By nature, we are wired to pay attention to our emotions whereas we only listen to our thoughts, so when we feel something, it engages so much of our body. We are emotional creatures by nature, we are not the rational thinking animals we like to think we are. Marketing gurus know how to communicate and appeal to the animal in us, as people buy things based on emotions and not based on rational decisions. Consider how advertising can sometimes make unhealthy activities such as smoking or eating unhealthy foods seem both positive and appealing. These ads can sometimes influence the emotions of consumers, which can lead to poor health decisions and risky behaviours that can have serious, long-term consequences.


What can you do to prevent emotions from contributing to poor decision making?
Heuristics are efficient mental processes that help humans solve problems and learn new concepts and these processes make problems less complex by ignoring some of the information that’s coming into the brain, either consciously or unconsciously. The affect heuristic is a type of mental shortcut in which people make decisions that are heavily influenced by their current emotions, in other words, your emotional response plays a critical role in the choices and decisions you make. I think the next time you need to decide during an emotional moment, take a moment to talk silently to yourself using the third person. It might help you stay calm, collected, and level-headed, a strategy that may prevent bad decisions made in the heat of the moment.

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Unlocking growth

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The job of a salesperson is straightforward, their job is to listen to understand what’s the most important thing for their buyer and then help them get that. Unfortunately, most technology today is not built to provide your buyers with the experience they want and need, just image if your sales team could unlock their performance and become top sales professionals and deliver essential insights to their buyers in those critical moments. This may be the difference between winning and losing because if you don’t partner with buyers and guide them through their journey, you will lose deals to competitors. 

 

We will be selling in digital, virtual, and online spaces more often in the future, and these spaces are noisier and more polluted than ever. This digital pollution costs both you and your sales team time, attention, and productivity, also it affects your ability to reach and engage with the decision makers who matter most to your sales success. How do you fight through it and reach the right people? How can you grow relationships, reputations and revenues? For answers contact me via e-mail and let’s have a meeting.

“The architect of the universe did not build a staircase leading to nowhere!”
— Burrellism

Asking for help

When people choose between talking about the past and talking about the future, the pragmatic person will always opt for the future and forget the past. It is always best to speak pragmatically to a pragmatic person, and at the end of the day, most people are pragmatic and will rarely act against their own self-interests.

 

You will always find yourself in the position of asking for help from those who are more powerful than you. There is an art to asking for help and all depends on your ability to understand the person you are dealing with, and not to confuse your interests with theirs. Most people never succeed at this because they are completely trapped in their own wants and desires. They start from the assumption that the people they are appealing to have a selfless interest in helping them, they talk as though their needs matter to those people – who, couldn’t care less. 

 

Even the most powerful person is locked in the needs of their own. Self-interest is the lever that will move people, once you make them see how you can in some way meet their needs or advance their cause, their resistance to your requests for help will magically disappear. To see the other persons needs and interests, to get rid of the screen of your own feelings that obscure the truth.

We ask to get to know

The quality of your life is directly influenced by your ability to communicate with confidence and clarity. Part of being a good communicator requires that you become an active listener, and active listening requires you ask questions. Questions have benefits for both the questioner and the people responding. I think one of those benefits is proving the other person the opportunity to show more of their authentic selves. I have found that good questions really help in the discovery phase and when you ask better questions your clients will open.

 

Asking questions is only half the process, the other half of it is being mindful about how you respond to people. Questioning helps us do more than gathering information, like data, facts, and details. It can also help us to learn about what people are thinking, feeling and in some cases what they want. I define a better question as one that demonstrates genuine curiosity but without being too intrusive, and when we can strike that balance that’s when we can shatter the perceptions that we have of other people and what people have of us.

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Opportunity identification

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Customer experience (CX) is the overarching feeling or opinion that customers have about your business based on their history of interactions with your company throughout their customer journey. Customer experience is not made up of a single interaction, but rather a series of interactions that include researching your business, buying and using your products or services, getting support, and providing feedback. CX design is the process design teams follow to optimise customer experiences at all touchpoints before, during and after conversion. They leverage customer-centred strategies to delight customers at each step of the conversion journey and nurture strong customer-brand relationships.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around”
— Steve Jobs

One customer’s CX can be influenced by multiple communication channels, several different departments and agents, separate brick-and-mortar locations, and their experience with multiple products or services your business offers. Every interaction is an opportunity to delight your customer and grow your business, together with you, I’ll design, build and deliver valuable and meaningful end-to-end experiences for your organisation.

Focal point

I am focused on working with entrepreneurs, leaders, and team's - helping them to focus on their company’s performance and culture by integrating commercial excellence into the heart of their business. So that they can become more strategic, productive, agile, and commercially successful. In most areas of life, I think it’s more hard work and dedication than natural ability and talent that leads to excellence and great success. You begin your journey to excellence by asking the question: “What additional skills, knowledge and information will I need to lead my field in the months and years ahead?”

 

What one skill if you developed and did it in an excellent fashion would have the greatest positive impact on your career? The answer to this question is essential if you are to achieve excellence in your field. When you find out the answer, then focus all of your energy on improving performance in this one particular area. In my experience, if your principles are right and aligned with your purpose, and your leadership has a clear vision, focus and authenticity then your business will be in profit in so many ways.

“Everybody has talent, but ability takes hard work.”
— Michael Jordan

Going against the grain

The idea that we are trying to optimise something is fundamentally mistaken, we are using the wrong maths and the wrong mindset in making marketing decisions if we assume only that our job is to be the best at something. If we define ourselves by our competitors, we’ll be even worse because we are trying to be better at something that a lot of people are already very good at. What’s the point of doing that?

 

My purpose is not to be a great competitor, my purpose is to create a mental monopoly in the space. Essentially, so that I have a monopoly (price and power) and can operate like a business - innovate and take long term decisions. The second I try to be competitive; the future health of my business is already in doubt because I’ll be driven by short-term thinking and the whims of the market. What about your organisation?

Accessible and pleasant

It’s a no-brainer, all organisations would like to increase revenues, reduce costs and improve culture. Customer Experience (CX) is an investment, an ongoing improvement project as organisations have a moral obligation to create value. The pandemic has hopefully taught us that we don’t need more stuff and what we want are meaningful experiences with our colleagues, friends, and family.

 

First, you must get customers to trust you. Once they trust you, then you need to communicate that you care about them and value them. Then, after all of this, when you make them happy, it is the kind of happiness that drives customer loyalty and, perhaps more importantly, customer-driven growth. Take 60 seconds and watch Steve Jobs explain why Apple always put the CX first.

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Strategic insights into audiences

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Many organisations are awash with data but do not know what to do with it. I hear from many business leaders that leading consultancies are guilty of not giving clear, concise advice for some reason. The business leaders bring in consultants and they will give a really good blueprint, but what they need is clear actionable advice that they can use immediately.

 

I take a more holistic view of research, after studying the Law of Large Numbers, I know the algorithms work. The ability to take huge amounts of data from people who think that they are acting independently but actually you can start to predict what they want by using the Law of Large Numbers, for example, Spotify predicts quite accurately your music and Amazon are excellent at predicting products that you also need. The more information you give to AI the better it will get.

A good example of a company who looks outside of the data for their competitive advantage is Patagonia. Patagonia have a genuine interest in their customers and what their customers want, what inspires them and what's affecting their lives. These things are becoming more and more of a competitive advantage, and I love Patagonia’s value-based business model and the fact they say “No!” to Black Friday. 

Driving transformation

One of the first steps in business transformation is communicating purpose, everyone should very clearly understand that “Why?” In uncertain economic times, having a clear north-star objective is what can keep organisations on the right path. It’s what guides leadership decisions, from cost-cutting to entering new markets and creating new products. The North Star in this case means every single person in an organisation should have a very clear sense of understanding the reasons why the organisation does what it does and why the organisation exists.

Nowadays, you've got to listen to the employees you have today, because they are more qualified than anyone else to know what your clients want.
- How are the consumer needs changing? 
- What are the consumers demanding?
This kind of insight into how consumer behaviour is changing will allow organisations to remain relevant and retain their competitive edge in a post-pandemic reality. 

Awareness and trust

I recently spoke to an audience of designers and brand owners about the fact that when the world is not happening the way you want it to happen then you have a problem not your customers. I started with a bold statement: “I know that you already make stuff that people want to engage with but are you clear about the fact that consumers will only buy from you for two reasons; they know you exist, and they trust you.”


Here are some examples of the questions I posed and answered:  

  • What change are you trying to make?

  • How are you going to spend your time and resources?

  • Would you like to learn how speak up and tell a story that spreads?

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Nurture and give

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Why are brands with clear and consistent messages far more likely to close the sale than the ones who pursue a matrixed approach?
Brands with one major promise are far more likely to be successful because they focus their efforts on discovering the most important thing that the buyer is concerned about. And I think the odds of winning the sale are far higher if you focus on that one thing. Framing your message takes discipline and it’s important to take a courageous strategy. You don’t necessarily have to give people more information, just help them to solve their emotional needs.


What is the right approach to account-based marketing?
The job of a salesperson is straightforward. The job is to listen to understand what is the most important thing that the buyer wants and then help them achieve it. Values will get you through the door; risk mitigation will get you the deal.

Never give up

Most salespersons are looking for the success strategy, but because of their psychology, for example, fears, worries, views about the economic situation, etc., are keeping them from maximising their capabilities. Usually when you think that you’re not good enough, in reality what’s holding you back is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics. Top salespersons think mostly about their goals and their priorities and how to achieve them. Top salespersons think about their actions and activities each day, they think about the number people they need to call, the number people they need to send proposals to each day, the number things they need to read and study, etc., etc. Always thinking about what they want!

When you think about what you want it makes you happy and positive, it makes you think that you are in control of your whole life. I think success comes from planning! If you truly want success, then do what top salespersons do – engage with an executive coach and develop a plan. Contact me via e-mail for 1-on-1 executive coaching.