Knowing where to find potential clients is one of the core skills of salespeople. Yes, marketing drives activity and we have our networks, but we need to keep that sales funnel full. That means we need a healthy flow of new prospects to talk to. Where will these new buyers come from? Often we have to create them out of thin air. Cold calling has become so much more difficult with remote work, as our buyers are hiding out at home. They are protected by a steel wall of blockers making it impossible to get to them. In this case, we need to re-group and re-think how we need to go about connecting with potential clients.
Identifying the perfect client is a good way to start because this will mean we are only focused on buyers with the highest potential, rather than spraying our efforts everywhere without any great focus. Let’s look at some markers we can use to locate these ideal clients.
Company size
This could be the number of people or the size of the revenue. Some operations may be too small to worry about and others may to big. A very large client can often be a problem, because they have so many resources they may not need our help, particularly with regard to our provision of services.
Age bracket
The staff of the company may be a target for us and this may vary depending on the age range. Are they newbies who have just started and are in their twenties? Or are they seasoned staff on their thirties and forties.
Gender
Are we focused on a particular gender for our product or service? Some industries are very heavily weighted toward one gender over the other. What is your situation?
Years in business
The maturity of the business can make a difference. Are they a start up, thrusting and growing or a mature company heading toward a gradual decline? Are they in peak condition and thriving with substantial volumes of business and substantial war chests available to be spent growing the business even further?
Our Champion’s profile
We need a champion inside the company to push for us, but who would they be? Are we after a C-suite executive, a middle manager or maybe a very specialized technician?
How we found them
Nikkei (Japanese domestic companies) and Gaishikei (foreign multi-nationals) are quite distinct categories, requiring separate approaches. Does your offer work better with one, more than the other. Do you need rapid decision-making, in which case Gaishikei companies will be a better focus.
Profitability
Being profitable is a great indicator of the capacity to invest in your solution. Companies losing money or just breaking even, may love to buy what you sell, but they honestly cannot do it.
Recession proof
We are about to leap out of the frypan of Covid into the fire of a global recession, so which industries and sectors look like they can withstand that likelihood?
Product or service fan
We will manufacture fans of our solution and they are great supporters inside the buying organisation. They may not even be our direct contact or in a related section, but behind the scenes they are supportive.
Going through organisational change
Change forces new options and new perspectives. When everything is smooth sailing, it may be hard to get buyers to make a change of supply arrangements. There is nothing like a good crisis to spark an interest in improving the current situation and being open to new possibilities.
So when you are thinking about where to find good clients cast your eye over this list and remind yourself where they are hidden away.
The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離. Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals. Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing. Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us. We have this same notion in the West, but I don’t think we have come up with three words to describe it as the Japanese have done.
In sales we can see the process at work. When we get sales training, there are so many moving parts, so much sophistication and subtlety, it can be a bit overwhelming at first. We have to make sure we know our USPs, our unique selling propositions to differentiate ourselves from the great unwashed who represent our competitors. We need to know how to build the trust needed with the buyer. How do we open the conversation, how to bridge from one conversation to the next? How do we set the agenda for the meeting? How do we handle the questioning discovery component, deal with the pushback and ask for the order. There are a lot of elements in a sales process.
Clients are not helpful in this process. They will try and drag the conversation all over the place, away from our well plotted little sales track. In the process, at the end of the sale’s call, we realise we didn’t get certain key information and we have to go back and get it which is both a waste for everyone’s time and rather embarrassing. We also realise that our questions were too perfunctory and too superficial and didn't yield any of the gold we needed to convince this client that urgent action is needed on their part to buy our offering.
In the Shu stage, we have to memorise the steps we need in the sales process and keep moving along the continuum to make sure we get to a deal at the other end. As we get more sales calls done, our sales talk improves and we also begin to realise we can handle sales talks for a variety of buyers with their different personality styes and their different needs.
At a certain point, we are comfortable with the process and we enter the Ha stage where we are looking for improvements and innovations, because the sales world is super competitive. We may start experimenting with new approaches to clients, to see if we can increase our success ratio or if we can speed up the deal flow process. We might start adding in techniques we have studied from sales gurus which are for more advanced salespeople. There are so many variables in the sales process, it means the opportunity for innovation is almost unlimited. This whole frame only works for those salespeople who are trained.
The untrained don’t have a solid base off which to work and to elevate through innovation. They are doing idiosyncratic sales which they have cobbled together through a process of trial and error. Of course we can all do it this way, except that it is very wasteful of good opportunities and it takes a lot longer to become excellent in sales. Trained salespeople benefit from a broader perspective available to them to start innovating and trialling new approaches off an established base of techniques which already work.
In the Ri stage we don’t even feel there are stages anymore. The whole sales process becomes a smooth and seamless flow from one aspect to another, as we move clients along the railway track to an agreement to buy. When we get pushback such as “your price is too high” we don’t even blink. We are not having any mental conversation with ourselves about how should deal with this objection, because we are already dealing with it, without any conscious thought. It is as if our sales reflexes just kick in automatically and all the while we are relaxed and confident and these feelings are being flooded to the buyer.
When 100 people have told you your price is too high, you are not fazed at all. When you are trained you have a process for handing these types of objections and you just unleash the system on the buyer and it does all the work. This doesn't mean we become too relaxed and arrogant about our own skills. Naturally, every buyer and every situation is different and we need to taper our remarks accordingly.
So where would you locate yourself on this Shu-Ha-Ri journey in sales? One thing we cannot do is let the grass grow under our feet and believe we have plenty of time to move through the these three stages. Sales is unforgiving and It is in a constant make over. We need to always be out in front or we will be left behind. Business moves at the pace of sales being made, so the pressure to speed up that process up is immense.
Many salespeople contemplating this title would be flummoxed. They don’t have really good questions for the client because they don’t ask any questions whatsoever. They are losers who go straight into the detail, the nitty gritty of their solution. How do they know this is the right solution? They don’t worry about that, because they are delving into the product catalogue or the flyers for the micro detail of the solution. I can call them losers because they irritate me. They pollute our profession because they never study about how to become better in sales. Also, I will never hurt their feelings because they will never access my content.
We know there is a sales cycle which is neither mysterious nor complicated. We establish some rapport, move into questioning the buyer, suggest our solution, deal with any objections and ask for the order. Simple right? Maybe not. The questioning part is absolutely key. If we get this wrong then our solution will be rejected. There are a couple of things we need to be doing to make this work. I was reminded of one of them the other day when I failed to get the deal.
Like many salespeople, I get into a rhythm with my sales calls and ask the questions needed. I hear the key points and my mind races toward the best solution for the buyer. I am confident, sure this is what they need but I have cut a corner. I have shaved off a piece of the process, because I am arrogant about my own abilities and are forgetting some of the basics. I thought I clearly understood what this client wanted and duly put together a proposal, but she rejected it. I was shocked because I thought I had correctly parsed what she needed for this training for her team. When I reviewed my activity, I realised that while had her on the Zoom call, I neglected one step which proved to be a deal breaker. I was too sure of myself, which is why I didn’t run the solution by her right then and there to check what I was proposing was the right thing for her team. I assumed too much.
There are some key things in the questioning process which we should all remember to ask especially the 5 whys. What I mean is we keep drilling down by asking why of the answer. For example, in my case, the client says we want leadership training, but that is a pretty broad church with many alcoves and vaults. I need to ask why (1)? They reply that there is a communication problem between the middle managers and their teams. Why is there a communication problem (2)? Because the leaders are not properly skilled at leading. Why aren’t they properly skilled (3)? Because we have never trained them. Why haven’t they been trained (4)? Because we never understood it was needed. Why? (5). We didn’t see the need, we thought they were capable enough. Do you see how this works?
Another brilliant question is “why now”? Whenever a client tells us they have a problem, we should always ask this timing question, because it will help us to understand what is driving the organisation to take action. They might say Covid revealed the leadership ability gap of their leaders, in the example I used. They might say there is a new President or HQ has issued a mandate about this and they are rolling out the solution country by country or the competitors are taking our market share , or we have surplus funds at the end of the year we don’t want to hand back, etc. Knowing this helps us to establish their sense of urgency and commitment to take some action to fix the problem. Having a problem and actually doing anything about it are worlds apart.
Another object on the sale call is to ask a question which they have not considered. We want to get them thinking one of two things: “we haven’t thought about that” or “we haven’t prepared for that”. This is not easy, but is the mark of the professional in sales. Anyone can ask about simple questions about their current situation and where they want to be and try and build a solution around that. Getting the client to project into the future and see trouble aplenty, is the ideal outcome. We now move from being the salesperson to becoming their trusted advisor, flagging key issues they haven’t considered.
In my example, I could ask, “if this communication problem between your staff and their managers continues, there is a strong chance the engagement levels of the staff will go down and they will be open to recruiters encouraging them to leave and go work for your competitors. Given the declining population and no major immigration on the horizon, there is going to be a continuing huge problem regarding recruiting new staff. There is also a major disruption to the business whenever people leave and new people have to be trained. Have you factored these occurrences into your calculations about achieving this year’s targets?
The client is thinking about a simple leadership problem but we are talking about a business disruption problem through lack of retention of key people. They haven’t considered this possibility and it ramps up the urgency of fixing this issue right now, before they start losing people. It make us look like a genius to be pointing out this brewing issue for them, so that they can take actions to prevent it occurring.
Questioning buyers is basic yet critical, but beyond that being able to ask brilliant questions which drive action and underline urgency are operating at a higher level of sales professionalism. Is that the level you are operating at right now?
Buyers can smell fear and desperation on salespeople. When the sales funnel is sad and prospects are few, we panic. The client picks up on this and unconsciously they hesitate to work with us, because for them something doesn't feel right. We are suffering. We are reminded of the Sales Manager’s mantra, “don’t tell me about what you have sold in the past, tell me what deals you are doing today”. Sales is a moving feast where we have to constantly recreate our results every week and the boss pressure to perform is unrelenting. In these circumstances our confidence can take a battering and we are pushed over the edge into a savage downward spiral, rocketing toward sales oblivion. Here are four strategies to boost our self-confidence to get back on the bucking bronco that is the sales life.
We need to stop beating ourselves up when sales are not going well – that is the Sale’s Manager’s joy. We have to realise we cannot control currency rates, market movements, interest rates, wars, supply chain fiascos, pandemics, etc. We need to look at what we can control. In fact, we have perfect control over the most powerful weapon in sales – our time and how we use it. Once we make that decision to exercise control over what we do every minute of the day, we can start moving our mindset from one of deal poverty, to one of deal abundance.
We know what we need to be doing, but are we actually spending our days doing that? If we don’t have clients we need to get busy contacting previous clients where the trail has gone cold and find new clients. Remote working styes has created new barriers to contacting buyers and so we need to adjust what we were doing, to what we need to be doing now. We need to be searching for potential contacts through data banks, LinkedIn, our contacts in the market, the media - anywhere we can locate a name and then we need to call that person. Yes, we will run into blockers who answer the phone, but we need to leave messages, send items using mail which don’t look like spam and even turn up there to meet the buyer. We know our buyer avatar, their profile and so we can target new buyers who are similar and then make a concerted effort to meet them.
We have had deal successes, we have served clients extremely well and so we know we can do this. Our confidence takes a hammering though when things are not moving forward and in the process, we can forget our track record and all of the things we have learnt along the way. We need to dig into our past successes for reminders of what we did to be successful. The sales process is made of microscopic elements and it is a game of millimetres in terms of driving sales forward.
By focusing on those building blocks, we can make sure we are not cutting corners and are completing the right steps to get to a sales. Did we actually follow-up with that client? Was the follow-up fast enough, comprehensive enough, exciting enough, attractive enough? Let’s break down the steps and remind ourselves of what we were doing when we were harvesting deals and being successful, making good commissions and gaining confidence in ourselves. Go back and analyse what made you a deal maker. You have done it before and you can do it again.
Certainly push the envelope, but not with your reputation. Taking risks with your reputation is a one way ticket out of the sales profession. I am not talking about that. I am thinking about challenging new ways of doing things and tackling new ways of analysing where the business might be had. We tend to get into ruts and we get stuck in our thinking. We need to do a reboot of our perspectives about where the business might be gained.
We might need to re-allocate our time and try something new. Maybe we haven’t been doing enough research on the industry or the market and so our sales call conversation is not getting us anywhere. Time management is full of risks, if you get it wrong and aren’t working on the right things. I mentioned before about dusting off some tobikomi eigyo (door to door) sales techniques, which because of the time involved could be considered a risky use of our time, but maybe it is worth giving it a crack and just see what happens. Your competitors certainly won’t be rolling up unannounced to the client’s office looking for the buyer.
Salespeople are often terrible self-talkers. We get down on ourselves when things are not going well and our self-talk turns toxic. This confidence death spiral must be avoided at all costs. Once your self-talk talks you out of your ability to succeed in sales, you are done. Sales is hard enough when things are going okay, let alone when times are rough and tough.
We need to change our diet of what we put into our minds. We need to ramp up the motivational material, the self-belief gurus, the whole gamut of positive mind control. We must switch the words which come into our minds for the negative to the positive. When we notice a nasty negative descriptor suddenly appearing, we have to smash it to pieces and replace it with a positive word. We need to do that immediately and every time.
These four tools can help us reconstruct our self-confidence and change our fortunes. The best time to start was yesterday and the second best time is right now.
The client is always right. No they aren’t. We usually have more information about our offering than the buyer and are across the breadth of our range of solution in a way they can never be. We are interacting with a variety of buyers in the industry and the sector and are constantly picking up intelligence on what is working and what isn’t. We are not being driven by internal politicking, as ambitious rivals jockey for position. We have the client’s best interests at the forefront and firmly in our mind, because we have one goal for our business and that is getting the re-order. Clients however will have partial information, wrong information and will lack information, none of which disqualifies them from telling us their view of the world as they see it.
This can become very frustrating for salespeople. We are often setting ourselves up for frustration because we forget that the buyer isn't the same as us in terms of scope. We are expecting too much of them and when we don’t get it we are upset. We know the buyer but they forget and ask another company to supply them. They met us a while ago and that memory has disappeared. They just went to our competitor because it suited them to, but we absolutely don’t like that. We feel betrayed. Add these frustrations to the pressure cooker that is sales and tempers can be short or fraying.
I divide clients into two bundles – those I like and would want to make a friend and those I just do business with. The chemistry won’t be there with every client and we still need to get business done, so if the stars don’t align, so what, make the sales anyway. If we can turn the client into a friend, then that is better because we all spend so much time at work it makes sense to find people you like in that environment. If you are in sales then you had better be spending your days with buyers, if you want to get anywhere. It stands to reason some number of the buyers will become friends.
For the others, it will be a strictly professional relationship of supply and demand. Inside this group will be people you just don’t like as human beings. There will clients who are arrogant, rude, have short tempers, are unrealistically demanding and are a hand full. There are variations of this idea – some more colourful than others - but there is the “no idiots” rule in sales, which says who not to do business with. We effectively “fire the client” because we don’t want to deal with them.
On the path to firing them we will be doing our best to squeeze a deal out of the process. When trying to serve them we may be biting our tongues, holding our breath, counting to 30 in order not to explode, but the tension is palpable. Our degree of perseverance will depend a great deal on the health of our sales funnel. If we have numerous buyers in the funnel and the new buyers are constantly being refreshed, then we can be relaxed about firing a nasty client.
The problems arise when we are desperate and are not seeing much revenue coming down the pike. We tend to have to suck it up a lot more and somehow these nasty clients sense that and can become even more demanding and unreasonable, simply because they can. Power doesn't always sit well in the hands of certain individuals and the buyers always feel they have power in the relationship.
Where is the line between making the point to the client that what they want or what they are saying is not going to fly with our values and our situation and the start of an argument? This is often a hard one, because few of us are trained for this type of conflict. We are usually working off a trial and error formula, which can be the hard way to do it. Proper training would give us the needed edge to work out how to help the client understand this arrangement is not attractive to our company and we don’t want to do it, without getting into a massive bun fight with the buyer.
Arguing with the buyer isn’t effective. We should be looking for points of agreement rather than zooming into the pain points. We should be carefully educating the buyer on what they don’t know about the current state of the market or about the intricacies of our solution. We also want to keep in mind that idea of “coming back to fight again another day”. We don’t want to destroy the relationship just because we might not be able to find a middle ground today to do business together. Things change inside companies and markets and a “no” today can become a “yes” tomorrow, if things change sufficiently.
Sometimes the client’s ideas are not very good and what they want us to do won’t fix their problem. We might be tempted by getting a deal, any deal, but the relief is short and the pain is long in these cases. Naturally, when it doesn’t work we get the blame and the brand collateral damage. I believe it is always better to walk away for those types of deals which have potential brand damage written all over them.