Successful Selling in Tough Times

How To Manage in Uncertain Times is my new CD series designed for leaders and for those who coach them. It is based on a growing collection of my interviews with people who are experts in a specific area of business which is critical to our survival under these uncertain economic and market conditions. With insights you won’t hear anywhere else, I’ll bring you an excerpt from each interview in coming issues of this ezine.

In this issue we hear from Phil Lee – Australian Head of Sandler Sales, a leading global Sales and Management Training organisation. You might have caught his last seminar on How to Increase your Sales Revenues and Margins. In this brief excerpt, Phil continues this theme and shares his expertise on Successful Selling in Tough Times.

Di: "Phil, you have a unique insight into what makes for effective selling and what doesn’t with that background. Now when I’ve attended your seminars you warn your students that most selling is ineffective because of the historic mismatch between the system the buyer is using and the more traditional system the selling is using to close the deal. Can you share what you actually mean by this mismatch and why it’s not working?"

Phil: "Yeah, it will work some of the time but it doesn’t work a lot of the time and it creates a lot of frustration for sellers but quite simply Di, in any buying and selling situation there are two systems at work. There is a buyers system and a sellers system and most people have never heard that or are not aware of it. As buyers we are all wary of sales people and we’ve developed an unconscious process to keep them at bay and to keep us the buyer in control of the process and part of this process we’ve developed, I won’t go into in detail because we don’t have enough time, but part of the process that buyers have developed and I watch my children and they use the process and nobody has ever taught them that, they don’t teach it at schools and we’ve just sort of developed it based on our mistrust of sales people. Part of our process is to mislead or in fact even lie to the sales person to keep them at bay. We only tell them what we really want to tell them, we don’t give them the full story, we give them part of the story, we expose what we are comfortable exposing but part of it is to mislead or lie to the sales person and part of it is to just gather a lot of information. It is all designed to allow us as buyers to get what we want from the sales person which is a lot of information, price, all that sort of stuff without us having to make any commitment."

Di: "Okay, so we as the buyer feel compelled to lie so we feel also like we are in a power position."

Phil: "Exactly right because we know traditionally most sales people come from a push strategy and a seller focussed strategy. In other words most sellers are trying to convince us to buy their product or their service and that’s what they are good at. We are just so onto that and nobody likes it. If I say to people I say ‘who likes to buy things? Show of hands’ and about 80% of the group will always put up their hand and then I say ‘who likes to be sold to or closed, keep your hand up if you like to be closed or sold to?’ and immediately most of the hands go down."

Di: "Now if we’re all trying to sell and I’m assuming a lot of people on the call today are doing that very thing, they are actually wanting to get more customers, more buyers and yet we’re almost giving off a subliminal message that we don’t like to sell."

Phil: "Well, what actually happens is is most sellers come from a seller focussed perspective and you said earlier Di we want the sale. They want the sale and as buyers we smell that they want the sale and we know that people make commissions when they make sales and they want the sale and they will do, and not everybody is like this, everyone has an experience with a sales person that’s pushy, not too ethical, will do just about anything, make any sort of promise to get your business. This has been happening for a long time and we’re just so onto it. Bottom line is we’ve learnt as buyers to keep sales people at bay, we need to give them only the information we want to give them, we want to get everything they’ve got, so in other words we want to know everything they know and sales people are really happy to do that because they know a lot about their product and service and most of the training they do is around product and service. So we use that information in fact you shop it around to other vendors to get the best deal and often we don’t even make a purchase."

Di: "Well if you’ve got this mismatch going on, this battle of wills going on then what is the alternative?"

Phil: "Well, that’s a good question. The alternative is to as a seller is to use more of a buyer focussed process or system than a seller focussed system. The important thing here is trust, is for sellers to use a process and change what they are currently doing so that there is a lot more trust in the relationship."

Di: "Right, so to use a buyers system effectively is the alternative to this historic mismatch and the essence of that is to establish trust. "

Phil: "Well, that’s right, see the buyers are using this process to, which is based on misleading, which is based on telling some mistruths to the seller, and basically the buyer wants a lot of information. The sellers traditional process is to give a lot of information ‘hey guys, let me tell you why you want to deal with us, why we’re great, all the features and benefits of our products or service, I think you are really going to like it’. So we’ve been trained, partly by sales training companies for the last 50 years and partly by the buyers to believe that in giving a lot of information that’s going to help make you want to deal with me. In fact, it plays right into the buyers hands because what the buyer does with that information is shop it around. They beat everybody up for price, they are looking for the best deal and more often than not they don’t even make a decision. Sellers have also been taught that as well as giving a good presentation you’ve got to be really persistent and follow up. So they spend a lot of their time, energy, effort and money following up people that they should never really be following up."