A while ago, I tuned into a conversation between two of our salespeople. One (a relative newcomer to sales) was commenting that given the experience of his first year in sales, “selling was easy.”

I sold for a long time, and I never thought it was easy.

I’ve talked about sales as a profession in earlier entries. As in any profession, it’s difficult to make a call on how easy it is until you have a lot of experience under your belt. Early success in sales can be the result of factors outside of your native selling skills.

I remember my first order for about $10,000. I was elated. The problem was that most people in the sales department are nice, and they pat you on the back for your first sale. But it wasn’t a sale; it was an order. I just took the customer’s call and wrote down the information. The guy whose territory I had just taken over did the spadework.

The better you get in sales, the higher you rise, and the more challenging it becomes. You are now up against competitors whose maturity evolved from the same torturous path that you followed to become successful.If selling is easy, you have no competition—and sometimes that is the case. Or, someone else is doing the work for you. But if your product is much the same as your competitors, and the salesperson you are working against has the same experience as you—selling will not be easy.

I’m writing this on the way to Hawaii, on a cruise ship—a planned attempt at avoiding part of the long Canadian winter (which has actually been very forgiving this year) Cruises are always a good opportunity to read books, something that I find tough to do in life back home.

I quickly read two excellent books, the kind that you can’t put down once you start. One of them was Bob Woodward’s account of “deep throat,” the contact who gave him and Carl Bernstein guidance while investigating the Watergate break-in. In a short postscript Bernstein said something that caught my attention: “Reporters may believe they control the story, but the story always controls the reporters.” This triggered something—I have often talked about the story that resides within our OPM sales method, which originated out of my first book and which has been expanded and augmented within the framework of OPM sales training. A sales method must have a story, because it has to follow real life experiences involved in the process of selling. A good many sales methods have been developed over the past decades and only a few of them have survived and are accepted. The test of a sales method is that it has to work, and it takes a lot of time to establish that. It’s extremely difficult to get salespeople to switch methods, even to a good one. They don’t have much patience, and if they try something new that detracts them from their normal routine, they had better see results quickly. If not, they revert to their previous way of doing things. The point is, that it is difficult to introduce new methods to salespeople if they have spent any significant time in the field and have confidence in what they believe is the right way to do it. Because of this, bad sales methods will never go mainstream—they are like bad news stories, unless they stand up to scrutiny, people won’t believe them.

Bernstein says the “story” controls the reporters. He’s right. Nothing can change the story, because it should be, by definition the truth. Reporters grapple with the task of finding the truth. It’s the same with sale methods. We try to discover a sales “method” Sometime, under scrutiny the method breaks down, because we haven’t got it right. The method only works if it truly reflects what goes on in the sales process—figuring that out is as difficult as a reporter trying to unearth the details that will piece together the “story”.

If I seem like I’m belaboring this point, it’s because I sometimes wonder how we got to where OPM is today. We started in the early nineties in assembling the components and here we are fifteen years later with a method, a book, a training course, and a patent. But the process was evolutionary, just like Woodward and Bernstein figuring out Watergate. There’s no doubt that the OPM method controlled us. Sometimes when we tried to add stuff the method fought back—with the new material the method broke down. We had to change it and test again, until it was right. As we added pieces to the puzzle, the basis for truth was tested. If we passed, we locked up that stage, and moved on.

The method controlled us, as the story controlled the reporters.

In my last post I referred to Michael Schrage’s comment that the 2×2 matrix rated along with PowerPoint as the two most popular business tools. I don’t rate them equal—PowerPoint does not have the same depth as the 2×2 in the power to unravel problems—it is more a set of tools to get a more effective portrayal of an idea or message. In an effort to learn more, I went over to Wikipedia to check on PowerPoint. This led to a digression that is worth blogging about.

Wikipedia says that PowerPoint is a ubiquitous presentation program. I guess we all knew that, and the reason it is ubiquitous is because of Microsoft’s marketing clout. It goes on to say that PowerPoint “is among the most prevalent forms of persuasion technology.” That last term caught my interest—I’ve heard of information technology, change technology, but this is the first I’ve heard of persuasion technology. I ploughed on:

“Persuasion technology is technology that can be used for presenting or promoting a point-of-view. Any technology designed and deployed for those purposes can be considered a persuasion technology. Such aids are regularly used in sales, diplomacy, politics, religion, military training, cult recruiting and management, and may potentially be used in any area of human interaction.”

Wow, look at what heads up the list—sales! Click on sales and you get this:

“Sales, or the activity of selling, forms an integral part of commercial activity. It could be argued that it is the cornerstone of business as it is the meeting of buyers and sellers and all other areas of business has the goal of making that meeting successful. Mastering sales is considered by many as some sort of persuading ‘art.’ On the contrary, the methodological approach of selling refers to it as a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesperson relates his offering, enabling the buyer to visualize how to achieve his goal in an economic way.”

I need to say “wow” a second time. That definition of sales is right on. I try to emphasize the true meaning of sales in our OPM course. I use a slide that says “sales is the business of doing business.” One of our trainers asked to take it out. I let him do it—but on sober second thought, I won’t do that again.

There is so much to talk about just in this simple wander through Wikipedia (sales is a persuading “art”, wow number 3!!)

Must do this again.

For the previous entry, I had to dig around in some dusty areas of my sales library. The oldest sales book was part of a series of twenty volumes called “Modern Business” dating from 1958. I bought them for $5 from our next door neighbor’s garage sale. His wife had made him toss them out, and my wife was mad at me for buying them (they require three feet of shelf space). Although I consider 1958 as almost yesterday, these books are nearly fifty years old. Most of the people I work with in SalesWays were not yet born then.

In 1958, I was living in the UK. Buddy Holly had recorded “That’ll Be The Day” in 1957. The Beatles were listening and they would do their own great thing five years later. I was not thinking at all about sales. But somebody was, because the volume called “Salesmanship” has a lot of good stuff in it. When I wrote Sales Automation Done Right, I had not read these books—they had been gathering dust, waiting for my wife’s next garage sale. There are some gems here, and now, there is no way that I will ever let them go.

Here are just a few of the ideas that will be just as appropriate in 2008, sixty years on from when they were written:

1958: “When one accepts the idea that selling is a process, he has started on the right path.”
1958: “While selling seems to be primarily an art, it still has certain aspects of a science. . . as a science, it requires the mastery of certain fundamentals which have evolved from success by others.”
1958: “In selling your product, a prospect needs conviction if you would close him.”
1958: “Analyzing a sales opportunity. If a sales opportunity arises, it is important that you carefully study it before reaching a conclusion as to whether you should make an effort to take an advantage of it.”
1958: “Value of planning. In the process of selling, planning plays a major role . . .”

Of course, the most influential factor in the progress of sales is not mentioned in “Salesmanship.” It would be another 35 years before personal computers would develop as the technology tool of choice for salespeople everywhere.

I have bought four books on sales…in the past week. They are all quite new and very different. If I have a glance around my bookshelves, I have anywhere between fifty and a hundred books devoted to sales, salespeople and sales management.

The reason I am reviewing them now is that I am writing my second book, which is devoted to sales methodology (my first book mixed in a bit of technology). It’s good to see what has already been done before you embark on a project you feel has something new to say about a subject. When I review books on the sales process, it strikes me that the human interplay between customer and salesperson must be complex; if that wasn’t the case, how could so much be written about it?

The first thing that comes to mind is that almost all of these books targeting salespeople are tactical. I use the word tactical to describe the actions of the salesperson as they are in front of the customer, whether it is what questions to ask, what to listen for, what information to retrieve, and the like. The emphasis is on the interaction with the customer as it happens in these few minutes or hours, on this day in time. The results of the tactic will hopefully contribute to the overall strategy in place to win that particular sale.

I don’t have any problem with learning the tactics of winning, but I do feel that most salespeople are faced with consuming these ideas before they know the intrinsic dynamic of the sale cycle itself. A thorough understanding of the progression of the sales cycle as it reacts to ebb and flow of the customer’s natural buying process makes tactical selling much easier.

I took a random sample of six sales books from the shelf and looked to see how many of them had “Sales Cycle” in the index. Guess what? One out of six.

This posting is from John Darrin, an old friend who has been involved with sales and marketing for most of his career, with a few interludes - starting and running his own businesses. John worked with me during much of the time that the ideas in Sales Automation Done Right came to being, and was a valuable observer and commentator in those discussions. I hope John will be a frequent contributor to the SalesWays site.

- Keith Thompson

First, the disclaimer. I have been selling for over thirty years. Selling a broad variety of products and services from multi-million dollar projects to $200 electronics to the luncheon special. I have read the Sales Automation Done Right book, and I use similar processes and methodologies and techniques.

In the book, sales automation is defined (Page 7), and I paraphrase that definition to read “efficient and effective, technology-assisted selling.” The precision of that definition, the importance of both effectiveness and efficiency, and the ability of modern technology to support them, is critical to success in selling today.

Now I want to get something relevant to this definition off my chest. Something that continues to nag at me whenever my sales staff, or peers, or even bosses or clients, postulate one particularly absurd assumption. Here is my rant:

IT ISN’T ALL UP THERE.

One of the silliest things I ever heard came from a young, very aggressive, very ambitious, and otherwise very intelligent salesman, while he tapped his head with his index finger. “It’s all up here,” he said.

He meant that he didn’t need technology to record and save and use his sales opportunity information to help him sell, because he kept it all in his head. Technology was good for keeping his contact information and his calendar, but that’s all. Presumably, recording these bits of information on his computer left room for everything else to fit in his head.

Sales people are often smug, pretty confident, sure of themselves. We have to be able to get up every day and go out there and try to convince people to do something. Usually something they should do anyway but are dragging their feet for some reason, and usually with someone else trying to convince them otherwise. Often, we succeed, and this success can blind us to some realities. And when we fail, many times we don’t know why.

I don’t care who you are, or what you sell, it is critical to understand that it isn’t all up there. Some of it is. Maybe even enough to enjoy some success. But never all. If it was all up there, then you would be solving the big bang theory, or playing with super strings, or something equally esoteric. Or, you would be closing 100% of your opportunities.

But you’re not.

Look at it this way – if you had just one opportunity to work, and you could devote 100% of your time, your resources, and your talent to it, and as long as it wasn’t selling a fleet of 747’s or something equally complex, you would have virtually a 100% closing rate. It’s as simple as that.

As more opportunities are added, or as opportunities become more complex and require more activity, focus gets blurred, information remains undiscovered, chances are missed. And sales are lost.

So, whatever you can do as a salesman to focus all of your might on one opportunity before you move on to the next, do it. Even if you have a hundred open opportunities and you have to switch gears fifty times a day, technology can make the transition smooth.

When you do switch those gears, focus on the one opportunity. Treat it like it was your only one. And let technology keep track of the other ninety-nine until it’s their turn.

Do that, and it never will be the only one.

Newton’s third law says that “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Even though I did physics for over nine years of my life, I’m very rusty on that stuff. But when I started putting together the material for sales automation done right I realized that even though he didn’t know it at the time, Newton was onto something important concerning the sales cycle.

Over ten years ago I was trying to answer the question “what are the dynamics of the sales cycle—what variables change as the sales opportunity progresses through the period of time we call the sales cycle.” This was important to get to grips with because we were trying to find a way for a computer to understand those dynamics with some helpful information from the salesperson. To cut a long story short, and not to take away the punch from future postings, we developed a model that said that the sales cycle can be divided into three phases, and each phase was distinctly different, requiring special skills from the salesperson.

After we came up with this idea, I revisited Neil Rackham’s books on selling and his research on how people buy stuff, from jet planes, to computers, to houses – in fact, to anything. He found that the buying process almost always followed a three stage (phase) model. We had concluded that selling followed a three phase approach too. That’s where Newton comes in – selling is a reaction to the action of buying.
Now, I figure that if I had started off with Rackham’s ideas, coupled with a knowledge of the Third Law, I could have written SADR in half the time.

Welcome to SalesWays, an informative blog-centric portal dedicated to innovations in sales and technology. Sales and technology are the core themes that run through my book sales automation done right, which encapsulates ideas and methods that have taken me half a lifetime to see come to fruition.

Challenges facing salespeople today are greater than they have ever been. Competition is as strong as ever, and even though salespeople have numerous technologies at their disposal, there has been no evident push to ensure that the synergy between sales and technology truly works to their full advantage. That’s where we come in. SalesWays is devoted to the ways that technology can make the whole process of selling come alive.

We will keep these pages filled with content that is relevant to the theme of bringing technology to sales. Topics will span from probing to PDAs, CRM to connectivity, sales cycles to speech recognition and everything you can imagine in between. We’ll show you how easy it is for the paths of sales and technology to intersect, bringing harmony to the way you sell.

Our panel of contributors will provide you with insightful tidbits that you can apply, from your daily sales activities all the way down to the core of your sales processes. And if you’re a bit intimidated and don’t know how to go about doing this, you’ve come to the right place; we’re here to get you started. Technology is the single largest innovator, the force behind the biggest changes that the sales community has ever seen, and we’re here to create a sense of renewed excitement in the ways people sell. This is our philosophy behind SalesWays; we hope you’re just as excited about the possibilities of employing technology in sales as we are.