Wednesday 24 March 2021

By: Adam Gray, co-founder and head of intellectual property (IP) for DLAignite - a global strategy and training business that helps organisations to see social media as the platform for closing the distance between clients, prospects, remote employees and potential recruits.

Back in the mists of time, before LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp and other social platforms, a salesperson who wanted to communicate with a potential customer started with a phone directory and a phone.

Now we have a world of possibilities.

Instead of a phone book, a seller has access to a vast digital directory. LinkedIn alone has 740 million members in more than 200 countries and territories - a phone book for the modern age - not just names, but job titles, responsibilities, companies, business contacts, employment and education history.

This is a goldmine, but it still takes serious prospecting, which starts with a structured plan to help narrow your focus on those who might be interested in what you have to sell.

On the whole, you can split your marketplace into three groups: the interested – your prospects; the not interested; and the others – your suspects.

In the old phone-directory days, you would cross out the names of people you had spoken to that weren’t interested; and you would add to your customer relationship manager (CRM) the details of those that were. (You would also cross out their names in the phone book.) Those you had not spoken to did not have a line through their names, so you were still free to call them. Simple, but despite the names being in alphabetical order, completely random.

Now, with social media, you have the perfect mechanism for turning a random approach into a targeted approach. Social selling lets you set out your stall, build recognition and trust, and narrow your focus. This is key because your digital shop window can be seen by an almost unlimited number of suspects.

Where the phone book gave you hundreds of possibilities, the internet provides a hitherto undreamt-of degree of scale to your messaging, but just like the old phone directory, a big list rarely moves you closer to actually selling something. For that there is the need for a process and procedure, in the same way as those needed for accurate forecasting, deal flow and revenue generation from the pipeline in your CRM.

Turning suspects into conversations, then prospects, then leads, pipeline and revenue takes time and energy. This does not happen by chance.

To target your search, set out your key performance indicators: connections, messages, views, posts, likes, comments, shares, and then note how these drive conversations, calls, forecasts and eventually revenue. The important thing is that there is a relationship between your social activity and revenue, if the right things are measured and promoted and the right lessons are learned.

To make sure your digital shop window is enticing, I would recommend focusing on the following:

• Profile - does your profile say what it needs to say about you and your business? (This isn’t necessarily what you want it to say or think it should say.)
• Network - is your network focused in the right area? If you have no connections, or very few within your nominated accounts, your social behaviour will have little benefit.
• Engaging - are you liking and commenting on the posts of people you want to be noticed by, and how would they regard your posts and profile?
• Publishing - when you have started to build a network, regularly publish interesting comments and posts, so i) they remember who you are, ii) you maximise the chance of being in the right place at the right time, iii) they continue to build trust in you.
• Skilled, ethical selling – promoting yourself as a member of your professional body – like the newly merged Association of Professional Sales (APS) and the Institute of Sales Management (ISM) gives you credibility and status. Read More..
• Knowledge – sharing and commenting on the latest thought leadership, like the latest parliamentary report called Supercharging Sales: Investing in B2B selling for jobs and growth will demonstrate that you are across industry trends. Read More..
• Spam – the more you publish, the more you’ll be noticed, but go for informed, interesting, targeted comments and posts. Think about your market audience and post for them.
• Personal - If you post about who you are rather than your products and services, you are more likely to start conversations. Remember when you meet a prospect face-to-face, or now by phone or video call, you don’t sell straight away, you talk about mutual interests, sport, children, pets, lockdown living whatever interests you have in common.

For complex business-to-business purchases a buyer needs more than a brochure. They need a connection. Social selling gives you the chance to project your image and role within your organisation to help you build a strong business relationship. In time, you customers will see you as a knowledgeable, trusted adviser because good communication builds business.

Thursday 25 June 2020

Alliances between companies can develop markets, build value and profits, and now more than ever, those partnerships can give new impetus in challenging times.

Alliances expert Mario Joao, with more than 20 years experience in international companies and different industries told today’s webinar audience of sales professionals that it wasn’t easy to develop relationships when you can’t travel and meet people face to face, but he said, it’s important to keep working together to create winning strategies.

Joao, Vice President of Global Alliance Partners at Aveva, the industrial software specialists, has an impressive record. He built his department from scratch but has returned remarkable revenue figures in a clear demonstration that his structured, methodical approach works. This begins with agreeing the shared mission, setting out the value and the engagement model, then step by step, the details of how the alliance will work through to how success is measured.

Each partnership is tailor made.

Underpinning all this is the development of trust between parties. Trust is key in all good business relationships, but especially those that depend on partnerships between companies.

Joao said that alliance partners “can’t build trust by throwing a PowerPoint presentation.” Aligning “mission, values and culture” is important because “trust is not an on-off switch it takes time,” but it will pay off, if built from a solid foundation.

Customers, he said, really appreciate it when their vendors and partners work together to offer unique value to them: “Our growth and the deals we are winning, it's all due to the fact that we are aligning, we are creating the strategy even in this challenging time.

“We started our Q1 in April, right in the middle of this lockdown and surprisingly, everybody within the organisation not just me, has been positively surprised with some of the results.

“A true partnership will be successful if it's a two way street. If it's just one-way, it's setting up a partnership for failure,” he continued.

“I talk a lot more with my alliance partners over this period than last year, it's important.”

And when it comes to making partnership profitable, there is a key guiding principle, he said. It’s all about “expanding the pie, not just dividing it.”

This webinar, in the APS series Lockdown to Looking Forward, was held on Thursday 25 June. For more online masterclasses, to help professional sellers through the coronavirus crisis, click here: the-aps.com/page/Events


Tuesday 23 June 2020

There have never been so many MBA-qualified leaders in the ranks of British business, yet somehow the key indicators that show a healthy business stubbornly refuse to rise.

What is going wrong? Why have productivity, staff retention and employee wellbeing been stagnant or declining for a decade?

Jeremy Moore, founder of Zoomcow consultancy, diagnoses a basic supply side error: leaders are falling back on theory and the way things have always been done, and are failing to provide the leadership that is really needed.

“So stop reading theory books, and look at the real impact you’re having on the team you lead,” Moore advises clients.

Moore, who has coached hundreds of executives worldwide, along with the GB junior rowing squad, believes in the power of good leadership to transform the fortunes of a team.

Good leadership starts with a hard, unflinching look in the mirror. The corporate equivalent of staring in the mirror is to measure what is going on in your organisation. What is the state of employee morale? Is wellbeing improving or on the decline? How do staff feel about the way they are led? How do they rate your leadership on the key qualities of trust, empathy and respect? How does their rating compare with your own view of how well you lead?

This last comparison is an uncomfortable but necessary thing to do, Moore says. It is no good brushing resentment at the perceived arrogance, contempt or hypocrisy of leaders under the carpet, when you can hold it up to the light and learn from it.

He categorises poor leadership behaviour as “addictive” leadership, because it involves clinging on to unhelpful behaviours that deep down you know are bad but somehow can’t help repeating.

To illustrate the devastating effect of addictive leadership, Moore tells the story of how he left his private equity job in the City after a bruising experience with a new manager who failed to show the three key leadership qualities of trust, empathy and respect. A successful and high performing team was split apart and demoralised because the incoming boss made every single team member re-apply for their job with the threat of the sack hanging over them.

When it was Moore’s turn, the boss clapped him on the back and offered him his own job, saying he was “on my team”. Moore refused, and quit the business.

“The uncomfortable truth is that we know what we should deliver, but we don’t deliver it,” Moore told the audience of APS fellows during today’s inspiring webinar.

“How many of us work for an organisation that we would be happy for our children to work for?

“We need a far more sophisticated understanding of leadership and the effect we have on people. Listen to our own intuitions, and use an incredibly powerful thing called free will to turn away from addictive choices. We can all choose to have an impact on the people we lead.”

For more online masterclasses, to help professional sellers through the Covid crisis, click here: https://the-aps.com/page/Events

Executive summary

The Covid-19 crisis has forced the sales industry to make rapid adaptations. To become trusted partners in a time of change and upheaval, sellers must be inquisitive and demonstrate customer-centric behaviour, while companies need to show a sense of purpose that goes beyond revenue-making. This article explores how sales organisations need to adapt each stage of the process of co-creating a deal, and the likely shape of a new normal.

Introduction

The sales industry has been hit by a massive storm, and is unlikely to be the same again.

The Covid-19 crisis has forced organisations urgently to re-examine each aspect of their business processes, and to escalate the use of digital technology to connect with customers, business partners and their own colleagues.

In the first phase of the pandemic, as we weather the crisis, key priorities are to maintain trust and to build on human connections. Only if you have stood by your customer in difficult times are you likely to be trusted as a future partner.

In the second phase, priorities shift to researching customers (and prospects) as their aims, needs and processes change.

The third phase of adaptation is active collaboration with the customer towards a shared goal or purpose, bringing a co-created project to the point where a deal is possible.

Phase four is the new normal: ethical, purposeful sales that make greater use of technology while valuing and developing both customer and seller.

Corporate transformation only occurs if individuals transform themselves. To succeed in the new normal, organisations must support and encourage their employees in their personal transformations. We must acknowledge that the old normal will probably never reappear.

The pace of change, already brisk, has been intensified greatly by the pandemic, and is unlikely to slacken. Our hope, at the Association of Professional Sales (APS), is that organisations will see the turmoil as presenting an opportunity rather than a challenge – an opportunity to transform the future of sales.

The lockdown imposed in response to the pandemic has transformed every seller from an office worker to a home worker. Social distancing will ensure we are physically separated from our customers and our colleagues for many months to come. Most meetings will continue to be online. Any face-to-face encounters, when they do happen, will be at a distance, across offices that have been reconfigured as low-density workplaces.

Sellers have been presented with a stark choice: stay at home and do little, or adapt quickly to new ways of working. They have had to find coping mechanisms to deal with the anxiety of a pandemic, the distractions at home, and the challenge of maintaining working relationships using digital technology. The success of these individual transformations will determine how well the business adapts to its new circumstances.

The impact of Covid-19 has stretched every business model to the limit, and people within our customers’ organisations are experiencing previously unheard-of stresses and distractions. The fear, uncertainty and restrictions placed on us by the pandemic mean that one of the most significant effects is that people are connecting with a degree of sincerity not seen for many years.

Our customers are expecting to see the same humanity in the way we interact with them. As salespeople, we ignore this at our peril.

Trying to drive through sales by holding “deal now” discussions will only end in frustration, and certainly, not many deals. All the indicators suggest that now is the wrong time for such conversations.

Intelligent sellers will hold back, seeking to understand the needs of prospects and clients. The emphasis should be on standing by their customers, delivering for them as their needs change rapidly, and ensuring their success within current restrictions. Building strong, trusting relationships, and achieving a successful outcome for our customers has always been a top priority for good sellers. Now it’s vital. If we do not show concern for our customers, and if we fail to match our actions with our promises, people will remember for a long time.

Phase two: knowledge and planning

While you are developing a new sense of trust with your business connections and keeping open positive lines of communication during the Covid-19 crisis, use any opportunity you have to analyse, investigate and build up your knowledge.

Every organisation is pivoting rapidly and their needs are changing. It is essential to stay abreast of this so you can anticipate your customer’s possible future needs.

Key actions for sales teams should be to:

• Research each of your customers and prospects with an open mind: their industry, their market competitors and their revenue base.
• Avoid assumptions about the financial health of a customer’s business, or exposure to industry trends.
• Based on your research, use territory analysis to decide which customer or prospect to focus on first.
• Research key stakeholders and their roles. Map their appetite for external assistance against key indicators: for example, open or closed to influence, positive or negative to your company, how they view value in a transaction.
• Use empathic enquiry to check your research and understanding, so that you start to formulate co-created solutions with your customers.
• Understand that your customer is focused on the needs of their own customers, as maintaining revenue is vital to their own success.
• Explain how your solutions may help your customer to increase their cashflow.
• Draw up solutions that take account of the customer’s pain points. Share your thoughts with key stakeholders, and build their feedback into proposals.

Only if you have stood by your customer to the very best of your ability in these difficult times, will you be in a position to build together, strong, fact-based business proposals.

Doing the right thing by the customer has to come first. Once you achieve that, you can start a conversation about your own company’s targets, revenues and budgets.

Phase three: collaboration with purpose

We have yet to see what the business landscape will look like once the Chancellor’s support programmes wind down. A recession of some duration is factored in; the best outcome will be if it is short, and V-shaped. Situations will be fluid for some time and cash flow will continue to be a challenge.

In this part of the recovery cycle, the seller’s task is to build propositions with those people with whom they have established trust. Everyone is in unknown territory. Customer-centric behaviour and careful engagement with stakeholders will be absolutely essential.

• Start to formulate financial returns and timescales, in order to co-create investment proposals for board submission.
• Use virtual workshops to gain broader perspectives from your stakeholders. Align your team internally to individual stakeholders to create a customer-centric focus and a breadth of engagement.
• Continue to assess and explain the impact of your proposition on your customer’s business.
• Fine-tune specifics and timescales so that you and your customer are actively collaborating.

Be patient and remain realistic about where your solutions rank in your customer’s priorities, and how they see your offering compared with other draws on their limited capital resources. Retain your focus on helping your customer’s recovery go more quickly towards a new normal, as you co-create the path to approval, commitment and contracts between both parties.

By projecting this sense of purpose, over and above your own company’s needs for revenue-making, you will convince the customer that you have their best interests at heart. Then, all being well, the opportunity should open up to progress through the pipeline stages to success.

Phase four: the new normal

In the 2020 APS survey of sellers, carried out before the crisis, the number one concern was work-life balance. The lockdown has transformed that in a heartbeat. The pendulum has swung from one extreme, being at work wanting to have more time at home, to now being at home wanting more time at work. The question is, how far the pendulum will swing back?

It seems inevitable that greater use of digital behaviour in sales will be here to stay. Our phones and laptops will be ever more important as the tools by which we forge relationships and do business. Insights delivered by artificial intelligence to our screens, will inspire how and to whom we sell more and more.

At the same time, the human values of care and responsibility that we have each embraced will not fade away entirely either. They will change the quality of our selling, through more ethical sales behaviour.

Changing personal values will also put pressure on sales organisations to act with greater responsibility, towards their employees, their customers, their society and the environment. To be effective, to hone a reputation as a desirable business partner, companies will need to acquire a sense of purpose which goes beyond revenue-making. Buyers and procurement will not wish to engage with companies which lack this sense of purpose.

Greater purpose and direction will also be vital for sales organisations in attracting and retaining talent. Hitting a number used to be enough but as 62% of sales people do not hit goal, there is a need for more. Generation Z will not be attracted to organisations without greater purpose.

Developing talent for more than the purpose of hitting a number will be central to a new people-strategy. Coaching will be a vital tool. This will be of particular importance to millennials, who now represent more than 50% of the workforce. More than 48% of millennials leave organisations because they feel their capabilities and careers are not being developed, according to the APS Sellers’ Survey which flagged this as an area of particular concern for sellers in 2020.

The 2020 APS survey continues to show that the fourth highest concern for sellers is being recognised as a respected professional. At the heart of professionalism are ethical behaviour and true understanding of the customer.

This is the key, not just for salespeople, but for the organisations they serve and the customers they work with. This crisis throws up many challenges but it also presents an outstanding opportunity to transform the future of sales for good.

Sales in the new normal

• Increased use of digital technology
• Purpose and direction beyond revenue-making
• Customer-centric and ethical selling
• Co-creating long-term customer value
• Coaching for resilience and purpose

Wednesday 29 April 2020

How do you grab the attention of a customer when they are not in the same room and your sales presentation has to take place remotely?

Covid-19 has thrown up new challenges for sellers; but in a webinar hosted by the Association of Professional Sales, neuroscientist Dr Carmen Simon from Corporate Visions was able to provide some answers.

At the best of times, after two days people remember only 10% of what they have been told - so be clear about the 10% you want them to remember, then make sure it comes to the top of their brain.

To do that, Dr Simon advised:

Dr Simon's presentation was part of the APS series of webinars to keep sellers safe and selling through the Covid-19 crisis.

Our next presentation, “To sell is still human – and so is leadership” is tomorrow, Thursday, 30 April, at 9am.

Click here to see our full programme of events, and book your place. https://lnkd.in/dqHuZ5z

“If you’re wondering what day it is, it’s Blursday the Fortyteenth of Marprilay,” read a popular meme in week two of the Covid-19 lockdown.

 As the weeks have rolled on, some people have found their rhythm and been able to work productively at home. The majority of us, however, are still often challenged by remote working.

An instant poll of hundreds of participants in a recent webinar showed 63% of attendees found managing distractions difficult, while 62% said it was hard to stay focused.

The reason is no surprise. Familiar office cues to put your head down and get on with things - things like schedules, team meetings and check-ins with the boss - are just not the same. Many of the rewarding points of our day, such as socialising with colleagues over coffee and lunch, and going-home time, are missing altogether.

In their place have come the distractions and deadlines of being at home. While it’s not too difficult to ignore the laundry, having the kids in the house demanding lunch and help with home schooling while you’re trying to work is a major distraction.

So how do you stay productive at home? How do you keep up your focus and energy levels and prevent work tasks bleeding into family time, and vice versa?

In the webinar run by the Association of Professional Sales on March 31, Angie Vaux of OutsideIN Performance had many excellent suggestions (which APS members can check by watching the webinar recording on the APS site). My main takeaways were to take control of your day by making a good start, and to use productivity models to focus the mind.

A good start

Key here is getting up at your usual time. As the rest of the house sleeps in, you will have peace to crack the jobs that need concentration. I have been doing this since the webinar, and Angie was dead on about it. She suggests you use some of the extra time you’ve won, by not having to commute, to do something healthy: meditation, yoga, exercise, learning; and that you plan your day, including breaks. When I manage to do this, I feel calmer and the day goes better.

Productivity models

The simplest form of productivity model is a list. Angie suggests that you make a list in the morning that contains just six things to do. Write them down and then do them in order, ticking them off and not starting the second until you have finished the first.

Make sure you’re doing the jobs that need doing most by using an Eisenhower matrix to prioritise: divide a sheet of paper into four and put urgent tasks on the left and non-urgent on the right, important tasks at the top and unimportant at the bottom. Anything that is unimportant and non-urgent you can delete. Check in with your manager and team to make sure your priorities are still in sync with theirs; and use your experience of how lockdown days normally go, to plan the best times to get work done. The Association of Professional Sales is running a series of online masterclasses to keep sellers safe and selling during the Coronavirus crisis.

Click here to see our full programme of events, and book your place. https://the-aps.com/page/Events

If you are member of the Association of Professional Sales, you can log on to your membership area to listen back to Angie Vaux's webinar.

The Association of Professional Sales is supporting salespeople across all sectors to help them adapt quickly to the disruption and uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 crisis.

We are hosting a series of webinars, normally only available to members, to help with the immediate challenges of keeping sellers safe and selling.

Our advice covers a host of topics, including: focus and wellbeing while working from home, remote learning and coaching, closing business over the phone and managing stakeholders using technology.

 See details below.

Life and work have been turned upside down in the last few weeks, leaving us trying to find the best way to support vulnerable family and friends, cope with children who are off school, buy food and essentials, and all while trying to work from home.

To help you focus, despite the pressures and the distractions, we are pleased to invite you to a series of short webinars. The next is on 31 March, details below.

In the meantime, here are some useful tips from Mike Hurley MSc (Sales), a Fellow of the APS and head of our advisory and academic liaison service.

1 Organisation

• Find a workspace, ideally somewhere where you can shut the door and concentrate.
• Because of other pressures at home, like children being off school, planning your day will prove to be more important than it might have been in the office.
• A routine that works for you and, if applicable, the family, will help to instill some normality.
• Where possible, keep to the same timetable. Ideally be at your desk at the same time you would arrive at your desk at work, and finish at the normal time.

2 Technology

• It’s time to make sure your broadband is up to the job for sharing attachments and conference calls.
• Make sure your conference calling software is working and up to date and your computer is configured correctly. Or download some of the free apps if you don’t have any.

3 Tasks

• Prepare and plan conference calls. A 30-minute-discipline on calls is good.
• Bring your LinkedIn and other social media profiles up to date.
• Are you following key contacts and thought-leaders whose advice could be invaluable when you are stuck for inspiration? Think of it as buyer-centric to grow your network.
• Connect to everybody in your team, your company, your prospects and your customers.
• Write a short word blog on an idea and share it with your colleagues, prospects and customers. (Always follow your company's approval guidelines.)

4 Customers

• Consider the impact of Covid-19 on your current pipeline.
• Consider what will happen if the crisis continues for another six months.
• Plan accordingly.
• Research to understand your customer needs and objectives. This will allow insight on how you will fare against the competition.
• Research and develop customer-centric propositions. This will enable you to increase value to existing customers.
• Think outside the box. What is it that we can do to help people? People are fearful, their business will be suffering, and they may not be as proactive as we are. What can we do as a business to help our prospects and customers?
• Provide 'value'. People will only buy if there is a business case. You must also be able to deliver, based on the current paradigm; things must be delivered virtually.
• Create solutions with innovation aligned to your customers’ business objectives that will defend against competitive attack.

5 Competitors

• Things will hot up. Think of the competition and how they will attack your customer base.
• In defence you must migrate quickly from one competitive position to another, creating new ones, depreciating old ones, and overtaking or matching rivals.
• Research competitors' strengths weaknesses. Threats and opportunities will inform you better of your proposition different and valuable.

6 Wellbeing

• Evenly-spaced breaks will clear your head and help you focus.
• If you can go for a short walk, perfect, but if that is not possible because you would be too close to others, get fresh air in the garden, or even through an open window.
• Make a cup of tea.
• Take a lunch break. If you have done all the above, you will have earned it.

Join our next webinar about home-working on 31 March

• Mindfulness techniques to keep you focused and engaged
• Simple rituals you can use throughout the day
• Techniques to appreciate the moment

About the presenter:

Angie Vaux is CEO and Founder of OutsideIN Performance

Angie has more than 15 years' experience leading global sales and marketing organisations around the world, including SAP, TripAdvisor and Mimecast

Click here for more details, and to book your place.

See the full list of events you can join from home.

About the APS:

The Association of Professional Sales is the leading authority for salespeople, a not-for-profit organisation reinvesting in the sales profession to build standards, trust and education. The APS is engaged with MPs to promote ethical, professional selling across UK businesses and has worked with the government, business leaders and academics to establish sales apprenticeships up to degree and master’s level. We are also campaigning for chartered status to give skilled, ethical salespeople the same recognition as other professions like accountants, architects, and engineers.

Click here to learn more about joining our sales revolution.

Whilst we are conscious that the Coronavirus outbreak is a public health issue with serious consequences for many in high risk groups, we cannot ignore the fact that the immediate and medium-term impact on business will be significant.

Discussion.

Following the prime minister’s announcement that people should avoid public gatherings and work from home, everybody is having to reconsider how and where they do business.

This puts salespeople, from leaders to front line sales teams, under pressure as they suddenly need to navigate new ways of connecting and working with prospects and clients. Some sectors (such as the leisure industry) will see a pause in normal trading altogether.

The economic impact and social disruption we are experiencing across the world is unprecedented, although it is worth considering that the same was said of the financial crisis of 2008/9.  That event along with the Coronavirus (Covid-19) emergency underline that we are living in an ever-more connected world and the impacts of globalisation and urbanisation have never been more stark.

What do we think will happen?

There are some critical lessons to learn from recent financial events, along with some important differences.

The difference, economically, is that the current situation is an acute economic shock, rather than a systemic, financial crisis. Given the information currently available, the Association of Professional Sales predicts that unlike recent downturns there will likely be a severe dip followed by a sharp recovery. 

Some industries will need to adjust to new customers' behaviours which may become permanent. If companies take the opportunity to flex and adapt, they will no doubt see advantages in lowered travel costs, time efficiencies and quicker ways of meeting environmental goals. 

So after the critical time has passed we think we will see markets getting used to doing business using more technology in place of some traditional routes to market.

 Where workers are on flexible contracts are shown to be vulnerable there may be demand for more safeguards, but even without that there will no doubt be many comparisons made regarding employers and how well they have looked after their people.

We know there may be a pause in the growth of the economy, but it is unlikely that there will be a pause in sales targets and quotas.

How Do Companies Continue to Deliver In a Downturn?

Time and again it has been proven that it is organisations who adapt, get proactive and genuinely who connect with their market who come out best. Sometimes better than they started. 

In terms of sales functions, they have built a culture based on professionalism, commercial acumen, a growth mindset and ethical behaviour. They are therefore able to react and adapt creatively to customer needs and they can challenge thinking and become true business assets to customers because they have built credibility and trust.

If their experience of their employer is that they are quickly supported, up-skilled and given the encouragement and expectation that they are problem solvers, they will respond in kind.

The APS global survey for sellers in 2020 shows some interesting insight that can help organisations in their decision-making as we consider their top four concerns and priorities.

The ‘Ability to hit targets’ is the number-two priority for salespeople because it impacts their main concern which is the ‘ability to maintain a work life balance’.

The number-three priority was ‘Earning Potential during 2020/21’.  This includes the way their organisation has gone to market, alongside how realistic their on-target earnings and future commissions are.

Then, as if to re-emphasise, the number-four priority for sellers in 2020 is ‘Professional and Personal Development’.

Now consider that training and development and a coaching culture is often the first to suffer in a downturn. Removing those opportunities could undermine your sellers' engagement and experience in your organisation and become the catalyst for them to seek alternative sales roles when the economy flows once more.

It may be inevitable that earnings will be effected. This may well be out of your control, but if your sellers see that you are still investing in them as individuals, they will be motivated to repay your support when the economy starts to pick up. Your investment in their future career, and rewarding them for their skill and effort in a crisis will all help to focus their activity and effective customer engagement.

Stalling such development initiatives could consequently underline any disenchantment between you and your salespeople. It may be the most significant advancement they make during 2020.

Our studies show that time and again salespeople return the loyalty and investment shown to them.

Think About The Targets You Are Setting

Companies will still have growth expectations to deliver to their shareholders, which means it will be difficult to reduce targets, particularly with the potential of a quick rebound and hence a possibility to achieve near goal.

This is exacerbated when companies use the practice of 'over-goaling', so the summation of their sellers' individual goals exceed the company's.

This practice currently results in what we saw in 2019 which was only 60% of sellers not hitting their particular quotas and the resulting impact on sales teams (especially when we consider their priorities from the survey) will be counter-productive. This will not create the kind of behaviours that drive business out of a downturn.

 We believe this this practice may rise in 2020, due to the Coronavirus affect and we urge business to avoid this where possible.

Can we train our way out?

Some reactions to a situation like this include rolling out a programme of blanket, online training. This may give some short-term ‘tips’ but like much of sales training it won’t create the behaviour you need or increase your team's ability to adapt to the new landscape and the changing behaviour of your buyers.

Even in ‘business as usual’ we believe the training of this sort only has limited impact.

Conclusion

Whilst the situation is severe we must have a clear head, stay positive and make sure we do all we can to stay balanced.

The fundamentals of the global economy are still relatively sound but there will be a reluctance to spend as people look to balance a possible delay in revenues versus expenses, and the uncertainty of how long this may continue.

That is where sellers who can be professional, proactive and customer-centric are critical.

They can create long term credibility and good will with your customer base.

If they are ethical and socially responsible they will protect your brand and help your business perform better now, and as we recover.  

Focusing on professional skills and behaviour means that sellers will have a far better chance to help customers understand why buying "now", as opposed to deferring, helps them achieve their best interests and will contribute to the speed of the recovery of the economy.  

Call To Action

In the previous downturns many chose to remove salespeople from the sales ecosystem, but in hindsight this ended up damaging customer relationships.

If you adopt this strategy, you would likely need to be hiring again very quickly. This is a costly process that will undermine your ability to engage with customers as they drive to make up for lost time in their businesses.

Retain the productive sellers you have.

You could double down on developing your sellers, using this time to provide them with learning pathways that develop their commercial acumen, quality of sales skills and customer-centric behaviour.  They in turn will feel valued as the key team that drives your business out the other side.

Find new ways to upskill and enhance seller capability.

We know all changes bring challenges, so you also need to motivate your salespeople to go above and beyond.

We are seeing long-term improvements in sales abilities and results when salespeople are given the opportunity to strive for professional status by acquiring leading-edge skills and professional qualifications.

Give your sellers positive experiences and they will flow through to a great customer experience.

These articles offer guidance on solving the SME dilemma: do you risk hiring the wrong person, or risk your business if you don’t hire at all. The second article focuses on the critical issue of taking on good salespeople.

1. Do start-up failures stem from hiring errors?

2. Driving SME growth with good salespeople

For a salesperson there is no other comment more likely to provoke a desire to attack the speaker with a proverbial slap. It’s not just insulting, after all the hard work and learning we put into our careers, it can be downright frustrating, writes sales and marketing specialist, RJ Cerasoli.

Since I was 18 (I’m now the wrong side of 40) I’ve been involved in sales in most of its forms. I’d learned about sales campaign management, account management, the hierarchy of needs, rapport-based sales, NLP in sales, features and benefits 101, territory planning, behavioural change, mind-set management, and sales-data analysis, long before any of my peers had finished their first year at uni.

Sadly, it highlights a commonly held belief about what a sales person is. To many people it’s an unskilled non-career that chancers do, using slick words and underhanded tactics, to earn a quick buck. There are even some employers who don’t fully appreciate the value our profession brings to their organisations. Ever been asked “sell me this pen” in an interview, when they can see from your CV and references that you have a proven track record in sales, and personal development?

The trouble is, every stereotype is based in some truth – at least at some point in history.

Noahm Shpancer Ph.D wrote in Psychology Today: “Stereotypes are not bugs in our cultural software but features of our biological hardware. This is because the ability to stereotype is often essential for efficient decision-making.” He goes on to quote Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, when he wrote: “You don’t ask a toddler for directions; you don’t ask a very old person to help you move a sofa, and that’s because you stereotype.”

Let’s face it. There are hordes of salespeople for whom professionalism, excellence and ethics, are way down on their list of priorities. Customers remember their encounters with these people because their experience was so bad.

So, how do we set ourselves apart as sales professionals on a par with lawyers, chartered accountants and marketing executives? What do all of these professions have in common? They all have an organisation that supports their profession in maintaining standards of excellence, ethics, and professionalism. Lawyers have The Bar Council; marketeers have The Chartered Institute of Marketing. Just by having the credentials awarded by these organisations, the status of members is immediately elevated in the minds of their clients, employers, and the general public. They can command the best salaries, are head hunted for new roles, are confident they are being supported in all aspects of their personal development and know that their skills are respected by other companies in their field.

What about sales?

The Association of Professional Sales (APS) is the professional body for the sales industry. We work with government, education and leading sales organisations to bring professional chartered status to our industry. We raise standards of professionalism and ethics by educating, supporting, engaging and constantly challenging our members to raise theirs.

We want our members to be proud of their career in sales and this is why we are sending an open invitation to all salespeople, of all levels of experience, to become members of the APS. If you want to be at the top of your game, get in touch. We will walk with you through each step of your personal development, making sure that you continually grow as confident sales professional.

RJ Cerasoli is a sales and marketing specialist with the Association of Professional Sales. He has been involved in the sales industry since he was 18 and started working for a sales training company then moved to the leisure industry, strategic communications, and field sales. Most recently he has been working for CPM UK on their Diageo account. RJ joined the APS to develop our community with frontline sales executives. He is also building a second career as a voiceover actor.

The Association of Professional Sales is the leading authority for salespeople. We are a not-for-profit organisation, reinvesting in our profession to build standards, trust and education.

Click here to join us.

Click here to see what our members say about us.

If you sell for a living, you’ll want to read this.

James Wakeford has spent 20 years in the buying business, in both direct and indirect goods and services across a broad range of sectors, from automotive, business support services, and fashion, through to his current role as vice president of group procurement at Electrocomponents, an organisation with more than a million customers in 80 countries and an annual revenue of £1.7bn.

Electrocomponents sells a huge range of half a million products, and does business with more than 2,500 suppliers, trading around the world under the brands: RS Components, Allied Electronics & Automation, and Iesa.

“Everybody in my world has been a buyer at some stage,” says James. “We all have experiences, good and bad, of sellers and selling techniques. The key is personality so we need people we’re talking to who are personable. Those are the sellers who understand and appreciate your time, and show that we are in this together. “As buyers, we can easily smell out somebody who’s looking for a quick sale and won’t actually be there with their heart and soul trying to make it work.”

Price and value

Rightly or wrongly many sales people feel that those in procurement only care about one thing: price. Not true, says James: “A good buyer won’t be looking to nail a supplier on price alone, but looking at the total value. Obviously, price is going to be an important part, but we need the sales industry to understand that it’s about combined goals.

Don’t oversell
“What we definitely don’t need is oversell, and the pushy sell, because we want to make sure we are delivering on a business need. Sometimes you’ll see through the sales pitch which will be based purely on what the sales person wants to achieve, rather than what our business would need, so the key point is don’t oversell.”

Know your stuff
“You need someone who is knowledgeable, but being ‘knowledgeable’ isn’t just somebody who knows about their business, it’s being knowledgeable about our business too. It’s about understanding how the business you are selling to operates, not necessarily understanding the revenue to the nth degree, but understanding what the business proposition is.”

Don’t name drop
“We don’t need somebody who is going to come in and quote names at you, because that can be quite grating. They might come in and say, ‘Oh, I met your CEO at this trade fair, or I know such-and-such who you used to work to.’ Sometimes it can be relevant and interesting, but it can also be perceived as trying to divide and conquer which a buyer at any level won’t warm to. Buyers like to feel they are able to make an impartial decision without the additional pressures, and quite frankly the credibility of the sales individual would be in question if namedropping is the key.”

Differentiation
“We know people buy people,” says James, “but where is the glue? What’s different about your business and you as an individual? Be the same person when you communicate by phone, and face to face. If there is a gap, you’re going to struggle. There isn’t a silver bullet here. Credibility is the key and you don’t get that from a LinkedIn profile, CV or a sales pitch. Authenticity will come through. The how, rather than the what; it is behavioural.”

The Association of Professional Sales
“If I saw ‘APS’ on a seller’s email now, now I know about you, I would say there is a certain amount of credence there. A lot of people have different acronyms next to their names, so it is more about promoting the APS to make the buying community aware of the benefits of individual sellers. So personally, today, the APS would be a tick in the right box.”

Talk straight
”Obviously people have different psychological make-ups. Not everyone from one buyer to the next, or one seller to the next, is the same person but we don’t want to feel there is any ambiguity. So let’s cut through it. If you can’t do something, I’d rather you told me. Sometimes you do have to review a potential deal to drive it through, but getting peoples’ hopes up to deliver on a request when it’s not achievable is not in anyone’s interest.”

Be wary of stereotypes
The perception of the typical buyer is about price, about detail, about spreadsheets, but James notes that buyers and sellers are more alike than they might acknowledge: “There are synergies between sellers and buyers. We are cut from the same cloth; we might not think it and you might not want to admit it on either side of the fence, but the amount we drive-through, we should look at how we learn together. As buyers, we buy externally and we sell internally. Sellers sell externally and buy internally. We do both. It feels up till now, never the twain shall meet, but there is so much synergy there. Why would we not leverage that mutual learning?”

Plan and build future relationships
“Everything over £100K is really where my team operates, but if a supplier contacted me to say ‘look we don’t work at that level yet, but we will in future and you may want to keep us on your radar’ I would say that’s useful and it’s only a two-minute email.”

What’s in a wardrobe?
This might not seem to be a make-or-break issue but James advises you to research your clients. If you are wearing a shirt, tie and suit, you stand out and it’s very difficult to mirror the right behaviour if you’ve walked into an office where everyone is casually dressed. “It’s similar to an interview,” explains James. “If you turn up for an interview and you are underdressed you won’t perform as well, but if you are overdressed, you won’t either, so it’s a small thing, that does help develop relationships.” And James says, don’t be afraid to ask before you turn up in person.

James Wakeford is vice president of group procurement at Electrocomponents plc.

But Andrew Hough, the CEO of the Association of Professional Sales (APS), offers a solution to give customers the confidence that you are a trustworthy, professional salesperson, from your very first approach. 

As buyers travel along the highway of sales and commerce, they may spare a thought: “What a smooth transaction that was! That salesperson was really professional and helped me out. The solution we came up with is really going to add value to my business.” And then they drive on, and the glimpse is lost.

But being a positive image in one customer’s rear view mirror is not going to be much use to a salesperson when it comes to attracting future business.

Ideally, as the seller, you need to reassure future prospects that you are someone who is skilled and qualified, and committed to giving them a great buying experience.

Just as your customer would always make sure that their car was roadworthy, taxed, MOT’d and fully insured before they took it for a drive, they need a way to have confidence in advance that you, as a salesperson, have all the professional sales credentials they would hope for.

When it comes to the vital first meeting, when customers’ suspicions are high and they are debating whether you are someone they can do business with, they should be able to inspect your documents, reassuring themselves that you will work to the highest standards.

Now it is possible to show customers – and future employers – your professional sales credentials.

With the Association of Professional Sales, the world’s most recognised sales body with more than 50 global brands as members, you can be instantly recognised by displaying the APS logo on your business cards and letterheads. And you can show your MOT sales equivalent:

1 Your ethical selling knowledge: shown by having passed the exam to be entered on the APS professional register
2 Your customer certification: shown by being APS customer-certified
3 Your professional development: shown by being an APS certified professional
4 Your other qualifications: the APS has developed a growing number of government-recognised professional qualifications in sales, up to and including degree level.

The APS makes sure that its sales qualifications are not easy to get. Fail rates are built in to keep standards high. But just like drivers, many sellers who fail their test first time go on to become flawless practitioners.

Increasingly, customers are recognising that the APS logo is an assurance that they are dealing with a salesperson of the highest quality.

For instance, Craig Spencer the head of sales enablement at Neopost – the business communications specialists – has told us: “The support we get from the APS is second to none. We advertise our partnership with the APS as an integral part of the ethics we stand for. The impact has been huge. It’s part and parcel of what we do. It’s become the way of life for us.”

In a business environment obsessed with competing on price, the differentiating factor is very often you, the salesperson. As sales expert Paul Johnston writes in Valueology, his best-selling and meticulously researched book: “I have found through my research that people really do buy people.”

With the APS you can be recognised as one of the best. Please click here to apply to Jennie Harnaman, our head of membership services.

We look forward to being an integral part of your sales and commerce journey.

Andrew Hough
CEO,
Association of Professional Sales

In the five years that Phil has been MD, only two salespeople have made it into his office. He told a captivated audience at a seminar run by the Association of Professional Sales: “Those two were good. If you want to sell to a CEO you’ve got to think like a CEO.”

And here’s how..

“To stand out, you’ve got to be outstanding”
It will come as no surprise, that preparation is fundamental to success.  Phil jokes that he gets bombarded by emails with people”we-ing all over the place”.  We do this; we do that. We are great. “I get so many inbound communications like this, but it’s blanket bombing. Just pinging yourself at me isn’t working.”  Instead, sellers need to “raise their game” and be highly skilled. Your approach has to be targeted and relevant. “Review everything you send out. What does it say? Convince people you’re talking their language.”

Coffee
Phil showed his audience the kind of pro-forma email that he receives all too frequently. He sends these straight to his junk folder.  A typical email might start with the lazy phrase: Dear Phil, I’m reaching out to you..   “Oh, please,” said the Brother boss.  The email concludes with a paragraph inviting him for a coffee, but Phil said there was nothing in the email to give him any incentive to meet. “I’d live in Costa if I had a coffee with everyone who offered.”

Be Fab
Phil loves a three-letter acronym, and being “Fab” is one of them. If you are Fab seller you make sure you “know the pain points of the business you’re selling to” and you focus on the features, advantages and benefits of what you’re selling.

The three Ps
Preparation
Who is the person you are selling to? What are their interests and passions? Identify something that you both care about – “something uncommonly in common”.  Use social media to research, speak the same language – the “industry vernacular”, study the industry and the stakeholders

Personalisation
Craft your approach, make it relevant, have one big dazzling fact.  Personalisation is brilliant. It’s the difference between the spear and the net.  The spear is targeted. The net is a random, blanket approach that hopes to make a catch.

Platform
Brother UK are working on bespoke video calling cards, where Phil, as the MD introduces a colleague to the customer.

ABC
Talk with accuracy, brevity and clarity.  As a former salesman, Phil Jones admits he had the gift of the gab but with maturity and promotion comes the realisation that an executive needs to speak succinctly. When you’re selling to the CEO, the same applies.

The CEO’s personal assistant
There were no second chances here. “If you’re rude to my PA, you’re on my blacklist, straightaway,” says Phil.

Phil Jones, MBE, was speaking at an APS seminar, hosted by EY on Monday, June 25, 2018 at EY, 
1 More London Place, London SE1 2AF.

We will email APS members with a link to Phil’s presentation which will be published on our Client Share platform.

It sounds obvious, but too few sales leaders make the time to reflect, research and plan. In sales, it’s not enough to say work smart, not hard; you need to do both, but slogging away without a focused, rational approach won’t get the results you’re striving for. You need to work in an intelligent methodical way, and work hard, comments Mike Hurley a former sales executive with a master’s degree in business from Middlesex University.

Mike has spent his career in the sales industry working with, amongst others, tech giants IBM, HP, and Unisys, and management consultants RIiSE. Now he is sales ambassador for the Association of Professional Sales.

“I like to have the word ‘sales’ on my business card,” he says. “We should be proud of what we do.”

Mike has been evaluating what keeps sales leaders busy and what they get in return. He is clear that time is the “enemy of the salesperson” so treat it as a precious resource.

Unfortunately for a lot of sales executives that doesn’t happen. Instead when they are appointed to a business they follow an existing pattern of working which means they can get sucked into a vortex of numbers, spending all their time on the minutiae so they can report up the line to their bosses, who are eager for figures to show success or failure.

“It doesn’t work, or add value,” says Mike.

Instead, the key to good selling is planning and keeping the whole process clear and simple.

Business is about making money, making money is about selling and selling is about the customer. It’s not a difficult equation but it’s easy to get lost in the mix. The key is the customer. They should be your focus.

“A smart salesperson will create the agenda with his customers and be in front all the time.

“Customers see that as adding tremendous value to them, rather than just a transactional relationship. If you can understand your customer’s business and be proactive in the way you help them move forward, they’ll stop thinking of you like a salesman and they’ll start to see you as part of their team that problem solves,” says Mike.

So how do you get to this ‘flow’ state, where everything runs like, well, clockwork?

“It’s not clever to have a packed diary, every minute of the day taken. At least one third of your time needs to be spent on reflecting, thinking and researching. If you’re a sales leader or executive, another third of your week needs to be spent with your people, coaching them, listening to them, helping them find the right answers to win the deals. And then the final third needs to be on the traditional things that some are probably spending 100 percent of their time on, and that’s the detail, like cadence, pipeline reviews and deal reviews.”

At every stage your customer is your focus. Your research and reflection is about the customer. Sometimes you will do this on your own, at other times you will do this with the customer. The customer is at the centre of what you do.

And if you’re a sales rep rather than running a sales team, Mike says the division of labour might look this: “A third reflecting, thinking and planning, a third researching your customers so you become relevant to them, and a third selling and having meetings, talking to your customer and helping your customer directly. Preparing quotes, that kind of thing.”

“Generally, sales people react to what their customers are asking them for: ‘Can I have a quote for this. Can you do that. Can you come in and see me, I’ve got a problem. That delivery didn’t go too well. I want a refund for this. I want extra discount.’”

When it comes to working with your customer, so you become a trusted partner, you need discipline and a plan that will create value for both of you.

In business, the rear-view mirror might be clearer than the windscreen but, as Mike has learnt, you need to focus on what’s coming up, and plan, so you look ahead with confidence, knowing you are prepared for the challenges that any deal might throw at you.

To echo Churchill’s words, planning is essential so when things change you are ready. You are not tied to a written plan because you can adapt quickly, and win.

Mike’s key takeaways:
:: A third of your time should be spent reflecting, thinking and researching
:: Your customer is always your focus.
:: Understand your customer’s business, be proactive and they will see you as a trusted part of their team.
:: Working smart is thinking about things, not just doing things.
:: A clever salesperson creates the agenda, and stays in front, rather than just reacting to problems.
:: Time is the enemy of the salesperson. You cannot afford to work on things you do not believe you can win.

I have just been talking to a sales leader who is becoming more involved with the Association of Professional Sales (APS). He was observing that sales seems to keep cheapening itself.

There is nothing wrong with good advice and handy tips to do a better job, but beware of the ‘arms race’ of free content on the web right now: Five tips for success; Four behaviours of a winner; Three top attributes of the world’s best negotiators; Two strategies for hitting your number… And a partridge in a pear tree.

It doesn’t take a forensic search of the web before you find bitesize tips for most professions: to be better accountants or more successful HR managers or even, the top ten characteristics of a good fighter pilot. Yes, this one does exist, but no one seriously thinks I’ll be given the keys to an F-22  stealth, fighter aircraft just because I’ve read a couple of self-help books.

My APS colleague, sales leader Mike Hurley, and I started our discussion partly because he was the first person to do a masters in sales. In fact, he was so keen to study something that would help professionals like him stand out from the crowd that he built a masters course with Middlesex University, as one didn’t exist. Middlesex are specialists in workplace learning which allows post graduates to integrate their working life into their academic studies.

Against this background of learning and continuous professional development, Mike has encouraged his son, who works for a large IT company, to go into sales. This has given both father and son an opportunity to share their perspectives about the fast-changing nature of selling in a new digital age. Today, thanks to the power of internet search engines, customers have done their research and, on the whole, know what they are buying. As a result, sellers need different skills because the web has changed the market dynamic.

Sales people are no longer walking, talking brochures. Now the sales person who calls in for a chat and a coffee needs more than an engaging personality. Business insight, understanding the challenges your customer faces and the ability to help them deal with the situation are essential – and only the start.

At the APS, we make it our business to understand how the world of sales is changing and to offer advice and support through our events, thought-leadership and network of senior, sales leaders. However, the ability to survive and prosper because you can adapt to change isn’t always helped by the quality of some of the debate on social media. Very few of the many bloggers and authors who talk about sales want to discuss the true concept of professionalism and show comparisons. It’s tempting to think I can make the jump from sales novice to sales superstar by reading a couple of self-help columns, but who are we kidding?

There is no magic formula for sustained success. It takes study, hard work, practice, research, constant evaluation of skill and personal redevelopment. There are no quick fixes because five words – immersion in your chosen profession – can take years to master.

To do that, you have to build on a good foundation. You need to understand the basics, consume best practice – not lists, look at examples, read reports, observe trends and then, work at it. Get feedback and coaching and improve by making the best habits your habits. This is a cycle. Keep going around it and each lap will take you higher.

That is, of course, if you want a career in sales. You may just want to be ‘good against the number’ but it is the self-developers, the ones that strive for excellence, those with coaches and qualifications, and those learning the hard way, that rise to the top.

A gold medallist cannot win in three easy steps, so let’s stop feeding the perception that sales is easy.