There are tons of examples, computers, email, the lightbulb, The Clapper (OK, so maybe you didn’t “have to have” that).  But imagine yourself doing without the first three.

The issue is that if you don’t think a problem is solvable, do you really spend a lot of time searching for a solution? No.

In sales training, we hear all the complaints that sales people have about the way they’re treated, but seldom do we hear the questions we should be hearing.

• “Bill, is there  a way to keep the prospect from lying to me?”
• “Bill, what can I do to keep the sales process from stalling?”
• “Bill, how can I create a stream of prospects lining up outside my door to buy?”
• “Bill, is there a way to communicate my message so it is more compelling?”
• “Bill, is there a way to differentiate myself from everyone else that calls on that prospect?”
• “Bill, is there a new method of selling that would help me avoid the frustrations I’m feeling in this economy?”

We Should Be Getting These Questions

But we don’t. We wonder why. Is it because we don’t think there are solutions for these–so better to save our selves the frustration of looking for something that isn’t available?

Or, have we relegated ourselves to a sales life of mediocrity and sameness?

We hope it’s the former–that until someone gives us a tool–we don’t even think about a solution.

There Are Tools Available

There are ways around these issues. In fact, over the next several days, I’m going to be addressing each of these six questions in six different posts.

Hope you can join me–and see that there are solutions to problems you didn’t know you had--but that might be costing you money.

Flickr photo by Faith Goble

Why? You ask.

Simple. In today’s confusing, overwhelming economy, you might be the only one that comes along today to teach your prospect something. And learning is power.

What exactly, can you teach them?

• How to use your product/service better (how to make more money, save more time, conserve more energy). Isn’t it amazing how most vendors disappear the minute you buy something? Think of how many referrals they’d get if they just showed up occasionally to teach you something.
• How to get more value out of the relationship they have with you.We sellers are naive. We just expect that a client of ours knows exactly how to best “use” the relationship to their advantage.
• How to understand their business better (That’s right, you should know their business so well you can teach them a thing or two about it–that is, if you’ve done a good job in the sales process.
• How to recognize if they have pain that you can fix. (What??!! You aren’t doing that right now? Shame on you. Your competitor probably is or will).
• How to understand the high cost of doing nothing. It’s what we call the “phantom cost.” Yes, inaction has a price. If it doesn’t, then they weren’t a prospect in the first place.

Don’t think about lecturing them, though. That won’t do. You must help them consume this knowledge the way they want to consume such knowledge.

Some of them will use the web. Some will use DVD’s. Some will need you to show up physically. Some will consume through audio. Some are visual. Just because you learn a certain way doesn’t mean your prospect will, doo.

And just because you can’t show up in their office doesn’t mean you can’t teach. For God’s sake use the tool you’re reading this on. It’s the best learning tool invented and it just happened to be invented in your lifetime. What a windfall.

Biggest problem is when you have invested hours/weeks/ years in a laboriously long selling cycle and nothing is happening. But rather than pull out, you persevere—thinking that maybe, just maybe, you’ll get lucky.

Pull Out and Move On

I tell clients all the time–you know by the middle of the cycle whether a prospect will turn into a client. Your gut screams this at you. But why don’t you listen? Well, Seth hit it. We get emotional.

We get so ‘bound up’ in what we’ve put into the sales process, we neglect to consider that every extra hour we put in on a losing deal, is an hour we DON’T put into a new one.

Look At Your Funnel

So, as you spend this Friday night reviewing your sales funnel, ask yourself the question, “How many losers am I working on?” You won’t like the answer—but it WILL make you money.

[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.]

Which reminds me of “how to sell a concept.”

When you a sell an idea or a concept (bail out package), you actually don’t need a lot of details. What you need are two things: PAIN and VISION.

Pain is easy in this case. Everyone’s feeling it. Vision is something else.

How to Sell The Vision

First, don’t confuse this with the network marketer’s mantra, “Sell the dream.” The vision is the picture of how things will work once the work has been done.

Most people are NOT visionary, so you have to spell it out (or draw it) for them.

In the government’s case, much work should be spent on “envisioning” what life will look like after the bailout program works (if it does work). But in fact, very little time is spent on communicating that vision.

So what you have is unrest, disbelief that it will work, and dashed hopes for certainty. What Obama (and Treasure Secy, Tim Geithner) should have said when talking to Wall Street is this:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve created this plan and I have a vision for it. (Sometimes you just have to tell people you have a vision.) I see a day in the not too distant future when credit markets will be freed up. Credit will be eased. People will be able to invest again. Small businesses will be able to expand. And the economy will be humming along like it was 10 years ago. This will take a lot of work on all of our parts. But we WILL make it happen. That’s what I see.”

But No, we didn’t get any of that. We always get from our bureaucrats the same old bureaucratese we’ve always gotten.

So this should be a lesson to sales people far and wide. Find the pain. And sell the vision. It makes life so much easier.

His words: “You might not have any pain right now, but if you do nothing, someday, your spine will degenerate and when you feel the pain then, it’ll be too late.”

As i thought about that statement, I thought of how that relates to you and I in our pursuit of business growth.

The Doctor Has X-Rays. We Have Only Instinct.

It’s easy when you hav an X-ray to show the patient’s spine. But when we work with sales teams, we have no such luxury. So, when we ask a sales team to reveal their pain to us, they’ve become so accustomed to doing things the old way, they don’t feel it. There are symptoms, but no pain. And until there’s a little “pain” there won’t be much change.

But they will feel it someday.

So, in my quest to help you and our clients, I’ve devised a list of 5 questions that you can ask yourself to “bring awareness” to any problems you have which don’t have symptoms—-yet.

By asking these questions, it might cause you to notice more clues.

1. Do you ever feel that something isn’t right in your sales process–but you quickly chalk it up to lying customers or ‘the way it’s always been’?
2. Do you ask yourself why the prospect is always trying to discount you?
3. Do you look at your numbers–and for a fleeting moment–wonder why they aren’t better?
4. Do you get that little anxiety in your gut when you have to prospect?
5. Are you self conscious when you meet with a new prospect–and you feel your behavior becoming over-determined (talk too loud, too much, make false claims, don’t think before you speak)?

These questions, if answered with rigorous honesty, might give you clues into some of the symptoms of your thinking — that haven’t made it to “pain” yet.

And while you may think some of these questions are ridiculous (”Of course, Bill, I feel that way. Doesn’t everyone?”) they aren’t normal. What we’ve come to accept as normal is really a result of thinking small.

So, like Kara’s doctor says, fix the root cause of the problems now. Because once there is pain, it might be too late.

Not to the point of trashing it. But to the point of modernizing it.

What Makes Us Think That?

Simple. People are buying differently now. Think about your current sales approach–and your results with that approach. The million dollar question: Are you getting the results you’ve dreamed of with your current sales strategy? Are your tactics cutting edge? Does your approach leave the prospect ‘demanding more?’ (Or, are my questions now starting to insult you?)

It’s amazing how we dilute a sales strategy to the point where it’s so uncompelling it’s boring.  And then we wonder why people don’t buy from us.

Are You Demonstrating Value?

The question in the post title is still valid. How do you demonstrate value? Or do you? Is it easier for your prospect to say “no” or “yes”? Show me your pitch and I’ll give you the answer.

We hire sales people who are outgoing–translated: They talk a lot. But is that truly the skill you want them so have? When they’re talking, are they saying anything, or just talking?

When you’re talking, you’re not demonstrating value. Your talking about your value. A huge difference.

2009. A Year To Get Serious About How You Communicate Your Value

Your goal for 2009- a year which is the most uncertain I’ve seen in 30 years–should be to improve your skills (dramatically) in demonstrating your value–not just talking about it.

TIP: You can do it through stories–through case studies–through giving your wisdom away (at least a little of it)–through the diagnostic you take the prospect through to see if there’s pain (it has to be more than merely a list of questions)–through a podcast where you talk about challenges and how you’ve fixed them with clients–through a live talk/seminar where you educate your prospect to the challenges they face–on and on the list goes.

But all of these demonstrate you know how to a) recognize/identify the customer’s problem and b) how to bring your solutions to bear to fix it.

Much better than just talk.

He maintains that the prime learning tool to be used by Leaders or Learners of any kind is Scenario Learning.

His philosophy is simple and elegant: Case studies don’t work because the outcome is already presented. It’s much more taxing, motivating and valuable to take scenarios that “could happen” and strategize around them rather than things that have happened (case studies).

Be Preemptive In Your Process

Now to some, that sounds absurd. “Why would you want to waste any time working on things that will likely never happen?”

To which I would say, hold on a minute. Who’s to say the value is in predicting the future. To me it’s in preventing the future—at least that future that’s full of stress and anxiety because something happened you weren’t ready for.

Rather than waiting until something happens, why can’t you take precaution so it NEVER happens. Can’t you be proactive? Or preemptive? That’s exactly what scenario learning will teach you.

A Sales Example

In our sales training practice, there are a handful of customer encounters that happen all the time that drive you crazy. For example, here’s a common one:

You’re all the way through the sales process and your buyer tells you it’s not going to happen because there’s no money in their budget.

Now that is a scenario you’ve heard before, but are you ready to deal with it? Better yet, did you do anything in the sales process to prevent it? Probably not.

In fact, most sales orgs spend most of their training time talking about how to handle it when it happens—rather than the right thing to do—work on how to prevent it.

By examining “why” that scenario happens, you can aptly take preemptive action so it never happens to you.

Tip: Take the top 20 scenarios that happen to you and have discussion around how to prevent them. If your time has high value (>$500/hour), then you should consider The Sales Playbook, a product I’ve created that has the top 100 scenarios that salespeople face—and how to handle/prevent them. Or you can do it yourself and save the $100.

Last week, I had the honor to speak at the National Medical Alliance sales conference in Dallas. My client, Jeff Worrell of Advantage Medical, is one of the founders of the alliance and asked me to talk to their network about some modern selling strategies.

I always start speeches by asking, “What’s the biggest problem facing you in sales today?” And as usual, the number one answer was—STALLED DEALS.

This post is for the world to see as well as for the NMA member, because we didn’t quite get to all the reasons deals stall and what to do about them.

There are five reasons your sales processes stall out.

1. You haven’t found the true compelling reason the buyer has for buying.
2. You haven’t made it easier to buy than not to buy.
3. You haven’t laid out a process that he/she can follow.
4. You’re not talking to the right people.
5. You’re too desperate for the sale.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll cover the remaining four parts, but let’s start with number one—you haven’t found a compelling reason for them to change.

In the last week, I’ve run across several of my clients who are struggling with deals they thought were moving along toward the close but all of a sudden hit a road block. In this economy, the problem is even more common. It probably happens as a result of you pitching your solution before the true diagnosis has happened.

At the NMA meeting, where this problem was discussed, they call on therapists who would not dream of doing a recommended therapy program until first the problem is diagnosed and assessed. Yet, we as salespeople go in and launch directly in to the product or service, before we do an adequate diagnostic. Stop that. Right Now!

Inventory of Questions

You need an inventory of pertinent questions to ask your prospect so you can diagnose the issues. Take a lesson from your Dr. He has that clipboard with all of the same questions on it. Why? Because he wants to do a thorough diagnosis of the issues before he prescribes. He doesn’t want to forget one.

You need your own version of the Clipboard.  If you’re calling on someone who is slightly different than the rest of your clients–or you’ve had a brief conversation with him/her, then write down the still-unanswered questions from that talk. But at the least, you should have an inventory of 5-10 questions that are thoughtful and meaningful so you can determine if you can help solve a problem.

Tip: Stop prescribing until the diagnosis is done. Stop pitching until you know what the pain is that the product you are pitching will solve—then you’ll find deals continue to move and not stall out. And you’ll stop wasting your time.