A stirring salute was done on 60 Minutes last night, but here is my “two lesson” version.

My lessons were:

Lesson 1) Tell Stories

That was his motto–”Tell me a story.” That was all 60 Minutes was–stories. I love this because every sales professional should be good at that very skill–story telling. Make them short, concise, compelling and relevant. But tell them.

He said during an interview, “Why don’t others get this? The reason for my success was that all I did was tell stories every Sunday night. There is nothing magical about it.”

Lesson #2) Control The Details To Everything Important.

You should have seen Don work to make sure every detail came together perfectly–for every episode. Was he arrogant? Of course. Was he right? More often than not. Was he visionary? Yes, every week.

He knew exactly what he wanted each and every episode. He could see it. He visualized it.

Do you pay attention to the details? Are there misspellings in your blog? (I’ve been guilty of that before). Are there mistakes in your presentations? Is your grammar correct in your letters? All are details. But all worth getting right.

Seth Godin’s blog this weekend about Vague Claims was about the realtor who advertises “Top 10 Realtors In Nation.” He maintains, if you can’t be specific about something don’t claim it.

We say, “If you have to lie to get noticed, then don’t expect the rest of the sales relationship to be based on honesty.”

This is especially true of you sales people who come in to the prospect’s office making un-demonstratable claims. “We can save you money!” “We’ll enhance your business.” “We’ll get you on the first page of Google.”

Lies, all.

Then, we sales people flip out when we make yet another unsubstantiated claim–and the prospect doesn’t believe us.

Don’t you understand that you started all this lying by putting forth something without proof?

Solution: Make No Claims

Then, its easy. Besides, why are you so intent on making claims the prospect may care nothing about?

• The Realtor above says he’s Top 10 In Nation, but maybe I don’t want that. Maybe I want someone down the list that I feel can take care of me. Someone who has more time (and isn’t as arrogant).
• You say you want to cut costs for me. Maybe that’s not my #1 concern. (Be careful about that assumption.) Maybe it’s more important for me to know what those costs even are–before I can cut.
• You say you can “grow my business.” Maybe I don’t want that. Besides what “grow the business” means to you is totally different than what it means to me. (And you haven’t even taken the time to ask me about it)

Find out what the prospect wants–where their mind is–what’s on it–and why they invited you in. (Oh, you begged to get in? Trouble. We’ll have to deal with that one in the next post.)

So he’s been looking at other sales opportunities. One came a long–a  large company that does high-end Handyman work. They needed a sales person so he sent his resume. He thought he’d be good at this — knowing as much as he does about residential real estate. Nothing. Not even a form email that said, “We’re so sorry. That position is filled.” Nothing.

So, at my request, he called the outsource staffing company to follow up. He was told, rudely and indignantly, that he need not call back–the position had been filled already.

Companies Spend Millions to Build a Brand. And It’s Over In Seconds.

Think about the absurdity of this. This Handyman company is a consumer company. Virtually EVERY potential candidate for the job is ALSO a candidate for a $50,000 remodel. So, what do they do? They piss off the very person who’s a potential prospect.

PLUS, he’s a realtor. How many people do you suppose he meets each week who are prospects for the Handyman services? And how many realtors does he know that he could refer Handyman to?

The bottom line is that this little mistake they made won’t show up anywhere on their P&L. But it will be costly.

You never know who you’re talking to. And you never know when who you’re talking to will tell stories to your real prospects. It’s a shame to ruin your reputation for no reason at all. If you’re an owner and you’re outsourcing important components of your sales cycle, be VERY careful. Your brand hangs in the balance.

Think about all the ways you build your brand or destroy it.

FlickrPhoto by Evisibility.com

And lest you think all Gen-Y’ers are slackers, Joe will surprise you.

Here’s the story.

Joe is our media intern at Caskey. He started when he was 16 and takes care of all of our video shooting, editing and some podcast work. No one knows his way around the Mac like Joe. No one can edit video quicker than Joe.

But last week, a big thing happened to him. With his partner, Erin Meyer, he won the national DECA competition in Anaheim. DECA is a society of high school marketing students. (If you own a company, go right now to your phone and call your local high school and create an intern position as soon as you can for a DECA student. They rock.)

If you were to meet Joe, you’d say he’s a typical HS student—a little sloppy in dress—a little too laid back for some—and not a big “detail” person—grades OK, but not great.

But he makes up for all that in substance. He created a marketing plan for Thrifty Car Rental that blew people away.

Joe is testament to my belief that we all have enormous potential that sits inside us waiting for the right time to erupt. For most, it never comes. For others, it comes so rarely that we actually forget how it feels to be “at the top of our game.”

In our leadership practice, we call that Alignment—when the job at hand is totally aligned with your interests and skills. For Joe, it was when his interest in business aligned with a marketing contest.

High Powered But Seldom Taxed.

I conclude we’re all like a high-powered race horse that jogs around the track most of our life—never really taxing our system to bring out our best performance. Like a huge engine that merely idles all day—never really doing what it could do.

But sometimes, we are called upon to rev the engine—to get all horses moving—and that’s when we’re at our best. When the demand arises, we rise with it.

Bob Knight said [paraphrasing]: “Our competition is not the other team. It is ourselves. The other team is simply our partner in this effort to bring out our best. So play up.”

So the Joe lesson here is: Find something that jazzes you—that juices you—that you lost track of time doing—that you want to come back and tinker with—not because you want to be the best in the world at something—but because it nourishes your soul.

Find that thing and do it all the time.

Congratulations Joe. Good luck at Xavier next year!

[This is the second in a two-part series on selling to the military. Todd Rogers is our guest blogger today. Todd is a recruiter in a fascinating field—science and defense contracting. His thoughts and experience can be of great help to ALL B2B salespeople.]

In the last post,  I focused on how it works when the military buys a big defense contract. I spoke of the process specifically and how it differs from the sales process you might be accustomed to. In this post, we’ll get more into the sales cycle.

Pain or Opportunity

I learned the value of this type of conceptual selling and I apply it daily. I approach each prospect with a typical Caskey mindset. There is something taking place at a prospect’s work site, and someone there is willing to spend time with me to see if my services can address that thing.

Most Recruiters Miss the Sales Mark

Now, I know very few readers are “headhunters,” but I give you this post because this happens to many salespeople today.

The way I see it, businesses hire people for two broad reasons. They have a challenge or pain of some kind and someone else they hire will hopefully make that pain go away.

Or, businesses hire people to help them move closer to some opportunity they perceive within their respective market. If I don’t know the reason why a company would make a hire, then I haven’t done my job.

If the prospect I’m meeting with doesn’t know, or isn’t willing to tell me, why a job is open and also why they would be willing to pay me upwards of $25,000 in fees to fill it, then it’s pretty safe to assume either I really screwed up, or I’m not actually sitting with a prospect who will buy when he sees something he believes will help his business progress towards his goals.

Everyone Says They’re a Decision Maker…But Facts On The Ground Say Something Different

I have lots of prospect calls with lots of people who claim they’re decision makers. But if they can’t tell me, in no uncertain terms, what they hope to accomplish by filling the job we’re discussing, then I continue that meeting purely as a fact finding endeavor.

And I fight that tingle which emerges when a salesperson adds a new prospect to his funnel. If someone speaks in terms of a problem they face and my services might be a solution, I feel good. I know that most newly minted prospects probably don’t really care much about price. They don’t even care if it’s a new employee who will be the remedy or perhaps if it’s just a piece of software.

“Make My Pain Go Away”

Like a guy with a compound fracture, my prospect just wants something which will make that pain go away. The Pentagon wanted something which would ensure air superiority; not having it would be very painful. My clients must be able to articulate why this job is open and what they hope to gain by filling it. Otherwise, they’re probably not really a prospect—but rather someone who was nice enough to invite me in. But those people typically don’t sign invoices.

Do You Know Your Prospect’s Intentions?

Let me give you an example of why it’s so critical to know exactly how your prospect plans to use your solution. How many times have you had a sales process stay nice and warm right up until the time that you delivered your proposal?

Then, when you send over your multi-page PDF, PowerPoint, or Word proposal, your prospect mysteriously vanishes into the ether—POOF!

Now, if you were selling morphine and there were a bunch of people laying around in agony, trust me, they wouldn’t send you directly to voicemail when you call. In this example, you know what your prospect’s pain is and you also know precisely what they plan on doing with your product the moment it arrives.

You also know if they don’t get your product that nothing else will get done that is work-related. Thus my point is this, if your solution is born directly out of whatever pain (or opportunity pursuit) your prospect is currently experiencing, you won’t go directly to voice mail, ever.

So, don’t go into that meeting trying to qualify a prospect in terms of whether or not he has a need for your product or service. Qualify him in terms of what obstacles stand between him and how he defines success. Or, qualify him in terms of pain and what exactly it is that will make that pain go away AND what will happen once that pain is remedied. THEN—and only then—see if your solution addresses that obstacle. If not, it’s time to get back to the phones.

[Todd Rogers will be a regular contributor to Inside The Sales Mind blog. He can be reached on LinkedIn.]

[As part of our Guest Blogger series, Todd Rogers—not the volleyball player—has agreed to contribute. Todd is a recruiter in a fascinating field—science and defense contractors. He shares his observations of how we can all learn from the BIG defense contracts and how they’re sold.]

Bill Caskey has found my comments on his blog to be useful enough that he invited me in to do some guest blogging. I hope I get it right and don’t drive away the loyal web surfers.

I’m a professional recruiter—what many call a headhunter.  Presently I recruit business development managers, directors, and VPs for a small cadre of defense and science contractor firms. You’d recognize most of their names. These are companies that make fighter jets, tanks, ships, and provide myriad different types of services to governments including our own.

A Unique Sales Cycle

The sales cycle that takes place when the Department of Defense buys an air defense program is unique. In some ways it’s like selling any other widget, but in most ways it presents a radical departure from the current paradigm which typifies how most B2B sales processes take place.

That’s what I wanted to share with you: How a company such as Lockheed Martin sold the government almost $20,000,000,000 (that’s billion) in fighter jets, repair parts, and the labor to make it happen.  

It’s called the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program and when it’s all finished, Maverick and Goose (RIP) will be left in the dust like two kids who strapped wings to a lawn mower.

The highly sophisticated “opportunity pursuit” process of winning such a contract is a finely tuned work of art—a super-high-stakes game. And there is one part of the process I want to discuss which clearly separates the government purchasing cycle from what regularly happens out in the private sector.

This Sales Process is Not Typical (Although Maybe It Should Be)

Average sales professionals often have a line of goods or services that they attempt to cleverly assemble into what they will then market as “solutions.”

The typical “rep” follows a straight forward process which follows the steps:
He will get a meeting with a prospect;
The two will have a discussion;
The rep will provide a demo or some samples,
And if all goes well, the prospect will become a customer,
(and everyone will play a round of golf.)

Well, maybe it doesn’t always go that way even though we’d like it to. For my purposes, we’ll call this the typical sales process.

A guy with a product finds another guy who needs this product and the two work things out so the other guy gets the product and the sales guy gets some money.

That’s Not The Way It Works Selling Fighter Jets

This may surprise some people, but the designers and prototype-engineers involved in the sale of a fighter program didn’t do a bunch of work-up fighter jet models and then send out some salespeople to find a buyer.

There was no discussion which involved the salesperson asking the prospect to “tell me a little bit about your company.”

Rather, it went a little like this:

• Some analysts at the Pentagon noticed some trends about fighter aircraft. These analysts told their bosses that it might be time to rethink how our armed forces leveraged aeronautical capabilities.
• Their bosses gave it some thought and at some point, through our friends in Congress, asked tax payers for a bunch of money to help keep us safe. (I’m skipping a lot in this story.)
• But while all this analysis and appropriating was taking place on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon, the people at Boeing, Lockheed, and a handful of other firms knew such discussions were in the works, and they got busy “chumming the water” in preparation for what would go on to become the largest defense contract ever awarded.

Now, there was a “meeting” (several actually) where the buyer told the sellers what he wanted.

But he didn’t say he wanted to buy some jets. Instead, he told them about how important it is for our troops on the ground to have the capability to function underneath what is referred to as “air superiority.”

Air superiority, after all, was the thing that the tax payers were actually buying, not a bunch of really sweet fighter jets. Air superiority, by the way, is the notion that in any given scenario, if so ordered, the armed forces can fully control the airspace above a specific part of the planet—think Iraq; if you’re in the air over Iraq, we know about you, and if necessary we can remove you from the air with very little effort.

After a whole bunch of meetings over several weeks, designers, retired generals, smart people who know a lot about physics and also weapons came up with a short list of ideas on how best we could continue to ensure air superiority.

Some of the ideas could have looked nothing like a jet at all. The concept of “jet-ness” or “jet-like” wasn’t the deliverable—at least not exactly. But, given the available technology, it was very likely going to resemble a jet…surprise!

This is the meat of my story. The business development professionals who won this deal went into it looking to provide a solution which solved a problem. Very likely, many people who worked on winning the award had been successful at selling jets in the past.

Now, as luck would also have it, a lot of our fighter jets are getting old. Additionally, battlefields are changing.  So, we needed a solution which ensured that for the next few decades we’d have little resistance when it came to taking control of the air.

We also wanted these “vehicles” to be ubiquitous among the other branches of the military. The Marines would get a version which suited their needs. The Air Force had their own needs as did the Navy. Each branch would launch, use, and recover their vehicles in a different way.

But we wanted one jet…er…”solution” which could be modified to meet the different demands of the different branches. Enter the F-35 (A, B, and C).

(Next time, I’ll get into how the sales process works and some tips I can give our readers on how to look at the sales process differently.)

[Todd can be reached on LinkedIn.]

“Lack of clarity leads to confusion. Confusion leads to fear. And fear leads to inaction.”

Now, of course, he was talking about the economy in general and the ineffectiveness of the President’s communication to the people on this front.

But he could just as well be talking to you.

As a sales trainer, I’m always observing how sales people approach me. The world is one big laboratory for us.

I had a sales person call on me from a referral last week. It should have been a ‘laydown’ for him (or ‘layup’ coz of March Madness). I really wanted what he had.

But by the end of the phone call, he had me so confused with so many options that I decided to “do nothing.” Afterall, I didn’t HAVE TO HAVE what he was selling. it was a “nice to have.”

Too many options. Too confusing. Too much Fear. Too little action.

Do you do that to your prospects? Do you get ahead of yourself? Do you fail to realize that they aren’t in your business? You’re in college–they’re just in grade school, comparatively. Do you overplay your hand to the point you scare them?

I hope not. But if you’re experiencing  a slow market, don’t be too quick to blame that market. Look in the mirror and see if you’re easy to buy from.

Slow down. Be patient. Ask better questions. Tell stories. Be more clear about your value. And watch your results change. Don’t confuse your prospect.

It all started when I took the giant leap to follow my passion and come to work with Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale as a consultant and trainer. I had enjoyed a successful career in logistics with a company and people that I loved. But, as sometimes happens, you get pulled by an undeniable force to do something new.

It took me a year to make the decision, but I finally did it. You have to understand that with that decision came a clean slate—no clients, no income. My family and I were okay with that because we had planned accordingly. What is it they say ”the best laid plans”? Yeah, one week into my “dream” my husband was laid off. So, welcome to my personal recession.

No income. No benefits.

Oh, and did I mention it was one week before Thanksgiving!

Don’t get me wrong, the “fond” feelings were not immediate. There were feelings of panic and fear. We let ourselves live that for about two days, but then it was time to get on with it. I’m happy to say that my husband found a job within three weeks, and I landed my first client within three months. So what does this have to do with our country’s current situation and our place in it? The value is in the lessons that I learned and how I experienced my life during this tough time.

1. We were PRESENT. When you don’t know what the future holds, you tend to live in the present—appreciating, hearing, feeling everything that is now. Sometimes we get so busy we go on autopilot. We don’t remember half of what we feel, think or experience during our day. I was a nicer person.
2. We appreciated EVERYTHING. We made our choices about how to spend our money very carefully. If we went to a movie with our son, we really made a big deal about it. It was an event. Something so simple is so special if you are present. Starbucks becomes a treat and not a medication. Long walks became a time to explore, talk.
3. Speaking of money. It was the first time, in a long time, that we paid attention—what was going out, what was coming in, what we owed, what we bought. This period of time made us financially healthy. We actually paid off more debt and saved more money. We realized how spoiled we are and how little we really need to live a great life.
4. We needed each other. I felt like my husband, son and I were a pack that couldn’t be infiltrated. No worry, no bad feelings—we were going to get through this. They were my rock, my place of shelter.

My hope during this time is that we can get back to the simple things—respecting, caring and helping our neighbors. Mostly, when we come out of this, which we will, I hope we remember the good things.

Yes.

Not sure how more direct to be. The reason I know your sales strategy is off-track is your closing percentage. It’s rare for a closing / conversion percentage (deals proposed to deals closed) to be higher than 20%.

Doesn’t that seem absurd to you? That 80% of people who care enough about your product to entertain a proposal–don’t see anything of value–and either don’t buy at all, or buy from another vendor?

That should tell you you’ve got a problem with your sales strategy.

So What Should Sales Strategy Be?

Simple. Rather than tell you what it should be, let me do you a favor and give you a bigger lesson–what should it revolve around?

Your sales strategy should revolve around client pain and possibility. That is, your features and benefits shouldn’t enter into the strategy until you first hear the prospect MUST change how they’re doing things to survive. And your sales training should as well.

If they don’t tell you that, then you don’t have a prospect.

So, the next time you lose a piece of business, ask yourself if your strategy really revolved around your prospect. Or, if you wimped out on them and focused too much on yourself. The answer’s real easy if you have the courage to look.

I am working with a CEO during a time of transition in his company. He is the new leader. Recently, he had a presentation in front of his entire team (the first time he addressed them in his new position), and we talked about the value of stories. Prior to our meeting he was intending to go through the PowerPoint — tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em and then tell ‘em what you told ‘em — you know that whole boring, tedious PowerPoint strategy.

But as I started asking him about his life story, one thing became very apparent: he had a story that was so powerful, so relevant and so compelling that he would be doing his employees a disservice by not telling it.

His story was about the power of a dream. And it was his personal path of how he arrived at this country from India at age 27 — not knowing the language, not knowing how to drive, not knowing American ways — and navigated his way up to where he’s a senior manager now of a very nice profitable small business in a growing market space.

I suggested he tell the story to his employees — many of whom had not heard him tell this before — so that they could see also the power of a dream.

Tom Peters talks about this in one of his blogs — “‘the dream economy” — which simply says that the dreams you have, long term vision, goals are the most powerful things you possess. And if vendors/partners can help you accomplish those dreams, they will be extremely valuable to you.

Same goes for employees.  If an employee sees the company dream and feels a part of it/connected to it, don’t you think they’ll bring their best game, fully engaged, everyday? I think they will. But not if there’s no story about the dream.