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.