Preparation and Adaptability

The most fundamental belief I hold about being a successful salesperson is you have to be adaptable. That is, your sales approach and sales behaviors should be customized to fit the specific elements of the selling situation you find your self in.

And my biggest pet peeve about salespeople is that they "wing-it" all the time. Recently, someone said to me, "isn't encouraging an adaptive approach just encouraging people to wing-it?" It was a great question, but I have a very firm answer to it: not at all!

It is my opinion that to be adaptive you need to be prepared. And this is even more critical in selling where the adaptable actions you must take are often while you are face-to-face with a client. It will be your preparation that allows you to quickly and effectively switch gears. It will be the preparation that gives you any alternative gears to switch to. With preperation you are making purposeful and strategic adaptations based on your evaluation of the situation in comparison to the knowledge available to you in your brain. Without that knowledge, you are left with only adaptive intentions, not adaptive abailities. In other words, even if you know you should adapt, without a broad range of knowledge you options are limited to what you know, and that may or may not be what is required of the selling situation.

A simple example. My students in Germany have an assignment due Friday. they needed to research Lyman & Sheets Insurance in Lansing and their sales manager, Dave Drayton. We set up the scenario that they represent Crystal Mountain Resort and they are going to approach Dave about having his next training or business meeting at the resort. Their job is to produce a 1 page research review that is basically 60% the company and 40% the person. I am guessing it will take these students about 2 hours to do well, and that is with them having English as their second language.

So one may claim that no salesperson would bother with this in the "real world". And my reponse would be; that is the problem. Most salespeople would simply head to the sales call or make the phone call blindly and wing the interaction. This going in blind approach means they lack knowledge that could make them adaptable, thus they are going to have to HOPE what they do know is enough and what they don't know doesn't hurt them.

The salesperson who takes an hour and creates their cheat sheet for this customer is already winning. They can start to choose the best approach strategies (Dave, congrats on being named to the Red Cross board!), ask insightful and connected questions, (I saw Lyman & Sheets does alot of work with associations, how has that worked for you?), understand organizational structure (Does Andy Sheets need to get involved in this decision?), and basically create a starting point for themselves that is already adaptive in nature.

Also, such knowledge can make you a better collector of information. Lets say you are selling a CRM software and because you did your research you learned that the staff covers most of Michigan even though they are Lansing based. During the questioning phase you take extra time to collect information related to that travel so you can best recommend the appropriate version of your product (e.g. the most mobile version). Without that pre-knowledge you might have skipped such questions thinking they were just a Lansing business.

So, my guess is you can seek, organize and assimilate information faster then my German sales students, heck you get to do it in your native language. But even if it took you 2 hours, wouldn't it be worth having a more appropriately targeted and adapted sales interaction? Given the difficulty in getting time with people, and the potential long-term value of initiating a relationship with them, I would conclude it would still be worth it.

Be Smart with Your Money.

Your sales manager wants you to go out today and buy a house, a boat, a 65 inch 1020HD flat screen and 3 Movado watches. Why? Because you will then be very hungry to make money (because you NEED that money to pay off all those debts). But that seems like a very stupid way to launch your financial life.

As I have discussed in class - pay yourself first and learn to live within your means. In the long run the freedom that financial security provides will bring much greater happiness then that flat screen. And constantly chasing an inflated standard of living should not be confused with financial security. knowing you can buy things or experiences that are very important to you and knowing that your financial future is relatively bright is a better model of financial security. As a personal example, after years of building equity in our house and living within our means, Paula & I tapped some of our wealth to buy our place Up North. And even with the place Up North (a dream come true for us) we live within our means because we weren't putting a high priced mortgage on top of our already over-debted life (did I just make-up a word?). Instead we were cashing in our past discipline and benefitting from in it in a way that no better TV set or fancier car could have ever given us.

To that end, check out the recent NY Times article on this topic. it is great reading and great advice. Check out his links to past columns at the bottom - also good reading for your financial well being.

I hope you are hungry to sell because you enjoy the challenge and you enjoy the rewards, not because you are handcuffed by unneccessary debt and spending.

Eckert without anything to say....

Yes, I can't think of anything to say. I have class in Germany tomorrow at 9am (German time - EST +6hrs). It is 10pm German time. And I can't think of a good way to start my selling course. I am used to teaching advanced selling or training salespeople, and in both of those cases people have a foundation and it is easy to pick it up from there. but where do I start with these students? The possibilities...

The Concept / Theory: I could start by addressing my picture view of selling. Introduce both the concept of "modern selling" and Adaptive Selling. This would give them a big picture foundation and a framework by which to organize what else they learn. The cons to this approach include it isn't very interactive and sometimes people need to be familiar with a few trees before the forest really means anything to them.

Basic Selling Process Overview: In this case I could use a "middle picture" approach and not do the big picture of selling as a concept, but do an overview of the basic selling process. Basically I could teach the basics of all of the things we will be discussing the rest of the semester. I usually like this approach, but in this case I may not want to do much repeating with such a compressed time frame. And I have a hard time not going too in depth once I get going on a topic.

"Sell Me that Pen" Approach: I walk in and tell someone to be a volunteer and sell me a pen and we pick up the converstaion from there. It is cheesy, but it brings the selling task to front and center immediately. It is a "do it first" then break it down and talk about what we should really be doing.

So why do I bother my loyal blog readers (both of them: Maiki and Juli), with this information? Partly because it helps me think it through, but also becasue I think people have truly mastered a craft when they are small, middle and big picture masters of that craft. So as you develop your craft take the time to ask yourself if you have a good mastery of the ground level selling skills you need (e.g. do you really have a good questioning toolbox), do you have a good grasp of how the basics all work together (e.g. how questioning and presenting should be closely tied together as tasks), and do you have a big picture selling philosophy that guides your work? As you develop yourself take the time to isolate each of these and devout time to each.

I think I have just sold myself on doing all three tomorrow. I am going to start with the Pen, then bounce to the big picture and finish with the selling process overview. Now I can go have that weizen beir that has been chilling in my fridge!