What does it take to become a top performer in today's competitive sales field? In Sales as a Science, author Allan Lobeck focuses on helping salespeople understand the sales process from both the customer and sales perspective. Based on twenty-five years of experience in worldwide sales, Lobeck communicates that selling commercially is a science, not an art; it is a long-term activity that requires both a plan and a pre-defined process. He presents a logical, documented, process-based approach for activities and sub-activities in a sales cycle. He also provides flow diagrams for each phase of the sales cycle giving professional sales staff the best potential roadmap for success. Sales as a Science defines the many steps and roles in the sales process, from planning, to account research, customer contacts, presentation and follow-up, negotiation, and customer evaluation. It outlines the commitment necessary to begin transforming your sales techniques in order to transition to financial independence and become a consistent top performer.
Sales is a Science
How the Top 2 % SucceedBy Allan LobeckiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Allan Lobeck
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-8393-9 Contents
Acknowledgments.........................................................................xiiiIntroduction............................................................................xvChapter 1: Beginning the Transition to Your Financial Independence......................1Chapter 2: Elements in an Effective Sales Process.......................................19Chapter 3: Creating My Sales Plan—Step 1 of My Transformation.....................39Chapter 4: Account Research Prior to Contact............................................67Chapter 5: Initial Customer Contact.....................................................81Chapter 6: Developing Customer Contacts.................................................103Chapter 7: Begin Your Transition to Selling.............................................125Chapter 8: Presentation and Follow-Up...................................................141Chapter 9: The Customer's Evaluation of Your Offering...................................155Chapter 10: The Negotiation Process.....................................................177Chapter 11: Increasing Your Revenue by 20 Percent.......................................193Chapter 12: The Successful Sales Process................................................199Bibliography/Recommended Reading........................................................203Index...................................................................................205
Chapter One
Beginning the Transition to Your Financial Independence
Why should you read this book about sales productivity? To discover what the top 2 percent do differently to help them overachieve and consistently be the number-one sales people in their company. How do they do it? They use a repeatable, definable, and measurable process that allows them to use their full team so they can make adjustments to their process to eliminate future challenges.
Then why don't the other 98 percent create a process and use it? Because the other 98 percent feel they fully understand their sales process and follow it 100 percent of the time. Furthermore, they believe selling is an art form; they believe every account is different; they believe that since they have done it before they can do it again; and they believe an individual salesperson's creativity is what is important and makes the sales. This 98 percent believes a measurable process would slow them down and stifle their individual creativity. They do not use measurements to adjust their sales process, and therefore their performance will always suffer from predictable highs and lows. They feel they can walk in and make a deal happen all by themselves, as planned, but there is no actual plan, although they will never admit it.
Selling is not entirely a process, but all the related activities in your process are repeatable and measurable. This shows selling is not an art but rather a science. Since it is a science, you can document and track all input, processes, and results, adjusting them until the process output exceeds your quota. Programmers used to believe that programming was an art. It has been shown that practicing defined measurable processes, such as RAD for IT programmers, increases the quality and quantity of output. The top 2 percent have realized that using a process with measurements is the only true path to success.
Many of you have heard about how after World War II, Deming turned Japan from a low-quality, low-quantity production culture to the world's standard for quality and quantity production. Deming's results were so good that many companies sent teams to Japan to study and use Deming's processes. Almost every company that succeeded in implementing processes has stated that it was their ability to engage and accept change that allowed them to improve the quality and quantity of output.
Deming's quality processes transformed many low-quality companies into world leaders in quality that people recognize and prefer to purchase from. Using some of Deming's ideas and other well-accepted practices, it is possible for you and your company to build the best performing sales team, doubling and even tripling your revenue.
In order to make a transformation, it is necessary to change some of your current processes. The challenge is embracing change. The history of change shows this is the biggest challenge to growth. If you want to be a top sales performer, you do need to change. To begin your change process, open your mind and heart. Intellectual and emotional change is required. Remember when you went to college? You opened your mind and heart to subject matter. You accepted what was taught. Why? Because you wanted to learn and become better than you were. This transformation is similar: change requires commitment to measurable results and adjusting your process to improve your results.
The rest of this book will define the approach and the overall process for sales transformation. This book will help its readers understand, develop, and use the sales process to become a consistent top performer. This chapter will define basic terminology needed for developing your own successful sales process.
What Is a Process?
A business sales process is a collection of related activities that, when executed in a systematic and logical progression, produce value for your customers and sales for you. Since a process is a logical flow, this logic and any related activities can be visualized using diagrams to represent the sequence of activities. This visualization allows all participants to understand how and when their activities need to be executed to help sales communicate with the prospect and secure the transaction successfully.
There are three basic types of sales processes:
1. Sales management processes: processes that govern the operation of a sales system. Typical management processes include forecasting and territory management. These processes should be supported by computerized tools available in your CRM/SALES reporting, such as ACT, SalesForce.com, and many others.
2. Operational sales processes: processes that constitute the core business and create the primary value stream. Some are: defining target customers, forecasting standard definitions, and reporting pre- and post-sales activity.
3. Supporting processes: processes that support the core sales processes. Examples include marketing events, inside sales activities, and technical support.
For a business process to be successful, it must begin with an understanding of a customer's needs and end with fulfilling those needs. Your process must be customer focused. Check your current process. If your process focuses on your quota needs, it misses the true goal of providing value for your customer. Your process must focus on improving your customer's business value proposition and not on your quota.
Small and large companies all have departments with functional roles that support sales in their revenue-producing activities. These departmental boundaries create corporate control points, which create barriers in the sales process.
Process-oriented organizations eliminate such barriers. In order to make this happen, the business culture of the company must change to be focused on the customer and openly supportive of sales processes. This change must include visible and audible support from upper management, or the sales processes will encounter seemingly unmovable barriers to success. If this condition exists in your company, sales must lead the charge and build the understandable value proposition for change that aligns upper management and all supporting teams. Eliminating roadblocks improves sales performance.
A business process can be divided into subcomponents, each with its own attributes, which all support the sales process. The analysis of sales activities must include the mapping of processes and supporting subcomponents, down to the individual contributor for each activity. When every contributor learns how he or she supports sales by understanding his or her role in the process, the contributor sees how each activity impacts the sales process for a customer. Every activity and all participants must be fully documented to calculate success. You are responsible for your quota, and the most important vehicle for your success is your process.
Business processes are designed to add value for the customer and should not include unnecessary activities. The outcome of a well-designed business process is increased effectiveness (value for the customer), increased efficiency (less costs for the company), and increased effectiveness (more sales for you). Any activity that does not contribute to one of these values should be eliminated or rewritten to provide value.
Is Sales an Art OR a Science?
There is a basic difference between art and science. In art, we honor the uniqueness of the creation. In science, we value processes that can be repeated and verified. Most sales teams today perform as though the selling process were both an art and a science. It is possible for a salesperson to over-quota for a period without using a measurable sales process; however, luck does not last for those who gamble. Look at blackjack. Counting cards is a science, and the people who do this win consistently. They have a process that puts them into the top 2 percent of their skill set. Selling is a process that is composed of processes and sub-processes. Once you learn that selling is a process, and you learn how to measure your activity steps, you can join the top 2 percent.
So why don't more sales professionals make the transition? The single largest challenge to increasing sales results is resistance to change. It is natural to resist change. Again, let's use going to college as an example. The main reason people attend college is they want to learn new skills to improve their lifestyle. Since they are motivated by their desire for change, they accept what is being taught and start using it as soon as possible.
So, why don't sales professionals change today? There are two reasons. First, it is the responsibility of the executive sales team to find the correct approach for changing to a measurable process; otherwise, the sales staff may rebel. The sales staff is just like your buyers—they need to see how the change will help them become more successful. Often the first hurdle is created when sales management announces this change without first soliciting input and then communicating to the team how they can improve their results by using the new process. Without this pre-announcement effort, the initial reaction of most of the sales staff is "why?" The sales staff is not prepared emotionally or intellectually for the change.
The second reason sales professionals don't like change is that they don't understand why the manager wants them to change, because they don't understand what the sales process is. The sales manager needs to explain the value of using a measurable process and reflect how each team member's results can improve. The manager must approach this just as he would a sales prospect. If you try to sell something without first fully understanding your customer's pain, you will fail. When sales management start by gathering information from the sales staff about potential improvements to the current process, they meet with less resistance. Sales staff sees that the company is trying to help and that they are part of the change process, and they become more enthusiastic.
After the announcement meeting, sales management should individually review each sales staff member's sales forecast. The purpose of this review is to suggest how the new process can improve their success. These two steps are the minimum requirements to initiate a change. Remember, plan the announcement meeting agenda and prepare just as if you were preparing for your first face-to-face meeting with your largest opportunity.
Why Only 2 Percent Succeed
Change is the hardest test humans must face. In today's world of high-speed communications, some business experts state that we need to change our process every three to four years to be successful. If this is true, we will need to change at least twice every ten years and maybe even more often in the future. If we review the recent history of sales, we find that although relationships are still important, relationships alone will not make the deal anymore. Today's buyers have access to much more information and so many different organizations selling to them that they need help sorting out who provides what business value to their company. The sales process can help by translating all the available data into business improvements for the company. That is a sales professional's responsibility.
Since relationships alone will not succeed, sales professionals need a process that allows them to support their customers though a logical progression of all the activities. As mentioned earlier, sales professionals that use a logical set of activities (i.e., those that can be measured) to help their customers through the buying process are consistently in the top 2 percent of the sales professionals in their company.
Business Process Values
Business processes create tangible and intangible value by creating differentiation for your customers. For example, let us look at the way Ford Motor Company uses the principles of Deming's business process. Ford was manufacturing a car whose transmissions were simultaneously made in the United States and Japan. Soon after the car entered the market, customers began requesting the model with the Japanese-manufactured transmission. After noticing the buying trend, Ford checked and found both transmissions were made to meet specifications. To determine what the difference was Ford disassembled both transmissions.
Ford discovered that the transmissions made in Japan not only met specifications but were manufactured to a better tolerance than that of the US-manufactured transmissions. This differentiation led to longer-running transmissions with fewer problems and greater cost savings for the buyers. Once consumers learned of the difference, cars with Japanese transmissions always outsold cars with American transmissions. The Japanese created this differentiation was created when they began using process measurements to refine the production process. They created a buying preference that customers demonstrated with their purchases—exactly what you can achieve if you define your process and measure its steps.
You must also take steps to improve your process. To begin that journey, you must understand the types of values you can achieve internally by using a process. These include the following:
• Understandable sales process steps
• Ownership of sales process steps
• Thorough process reviews and refinements
• Process relationship to your sales funnel
• Commitment to resources
• Repeatable predictable sales funnel results
• Higher levels of commitment by supporting teams
• Elimination of time-wasting activities
• Management support of your success
UNDERSTAND THE STEPS OF THE SALES PROCESS
Dictionaries give us generally accepted definitions of words—they offer a consensus. By writing out our corporation's agreed-upon business processes, we achieve this same understanding when it comes to sales. Without written communication it is nearly impossible to achieve a common definition that includes departmental and individual accountability. Deming's model requires each process to be documented and training to be conducted for all supporting departments and each contributor's activities. Deming required all contributors to receive official communication explaining the process. That way the process can be embraced across the entire organization and all its supporting teams. Everyone wants to contribute; they just need to understand the process and how they add value for sales.
Today's quality management approach using documented processes started in the 1950s and has become more accepted in the production side of companies. Now companies are realizing business processes apply to all activities, including sales. Everyone understands and can fully support the process to demonstrate how their offerings will improve the customer's business.
Any process requires three items: input, processing, and output.
The symbols used in this diagram represent the basic steps in any process. The parallelograms represent both input and output (data). The rectangle represents a predefined process. A predefined process is one in which input data is transformed into output, either to be used later by it or to be input into another process. The reason these symbols are used is that they are easy to understand and are generally accepted.
There was a similar set of diagrams called HIPO (hierarchical input process output). This method was used prior to relational DBMSs and graphical user interfaces, when there was only one activity taking place at one time. HIPO was developed to support hierarchical database processing and had a built-in flow (from the top down and left to right). HIPO does not work well in today's business environment, where many things can be happening at the same time.
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Excerpted from Sales is a Scienceby Allan Lobeck Copyright © 2011 by Allan Lobeck. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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