What is all of the doom and gloom all about?

For those of you that have attended my Professional Selling SkillsTM (PSS) classes this past year and beyond there is a message that I keep getting from you about the selling conditions today. Yes these are turbulent times! A down economy is just the time for us as sales professionals to differentiate ourselves. Now is the time that sales people are exposed as it relates to their weak or limited capabilities. Some of your very best will discover and be discovered for their failure to build and develop their skills.

Let me share the "Leaky Bucket" story with you in terms of you as the salesperson. For the sake of illustration, try to think of yourself as a leaky bucket (hopefully something you don’t do too often). The tiny holes in the bucket are flaws, mistakes, areas in need of format improvement in your PSS skills.

The water represents lost sales opportunities — whether those opportunities are new clients, expanded product sales, new tickets, new kit boxes, more units, more contracts, better networking relationships, more production opportunities, more affiliations with your business and so on. Close up more of those holes, and you retain more opportunities to move towards your goals.

You will never close them all, but you can work to close as many as possible. The process begins with pin-pointing where you need to improve.

Some of the more critical areas that need improvement are:

• Have a written call plan and call objective - New and old sales people have gotten sloppy in the stronger economy and have forgotten to have a plan. Sales just came to easy before. Frankly it is sad they may have actually been better with call plans and objectives. It is just that sales people became satisfied with less when things were good.


• Knowing how to deal with customer concerns COLD! So the customer is indifferent - what did you expect? Are you even calling on the right person? Do you settle to have a relationship with the purchaser only in good times? Are you known to the owner? When the economy shuts down the first thing an owner does is they tell the purchaser to stop purchasing! How will you differentiate yourself if you do not sell to the Very Important Top Executive? Let me give you a clue - you will not! You settled before so now you pay the price - SORRY.


• Ask for referrals - I am amazed at how shy salespeople are to ask for introductions to people in the respective industries they serve. It is silly. Your clients want you to be successful and they will help you. That is if you really offer something unique and special. Which may be the real message that you are afraid to learn that you are (yawn...) boringly average as a sales person.


• As sales executives we have to understand that this is the time to help our customers reduce costs or increase revenues. A proper balance with this is always required. The same holds true however for the organizations that we work for. In down turns it is important for us to look inside and ask ourselves if we can do the same for our employers. The choice of hotel we stay in, the airline we chose, the extra dinner we charge to the company all serve to increase our firms bid to our next client. Ask yourself if doing business with you and your firm really helps your client accomplish more sales or reduced costs. If so how?


• The most cited factors that I hear to mediocre sales performance are sales peoples customers more than the competitors that are selling the same client. This plays out in the form of customers spending less, demanding more or deferring buying decisions. Do you have options to deal with these stalls and customer concerns? Are you listening? Is your own companies management providing you with creative tools to work in the soft economy? Now would be the time to create a unique way to do business with your firm. Frankly you should have been doing it right along but we all get a bit focused on serving the numerous opportunities that we have until the bucket starts to leak and there are less opportunities.


• Leads which are difficult to assess and those that seem to "fall through the cracks" need to be handled with a strong discipline. Are we even interested in building our customer base?


• Sales people have a way of getting stuck in the past, they have poor metrics for sales performance, and they have incomplete or terrible customer records data. Some of this is in large part to giving the sales people the chore of updating data after a full day of sales calls! Why do we do this? Hire a team of transcription support people and put your sales people on a dictation recording line and let the sales people do what they seem to love to do - TALK! Your data will have so much information now that in a down turn such as we might be in now is harvest time.


• Focus your energy on high-value customers or at the very least on those with significant opportunities. This is accomplished in part by demanding that sales and marketing departments become better and integrating their respective functions. Cross train with each other. Marketing people get out in the field and sell! Sales people spend some time understanding the frustrations of those in marketing. You are both on the same team. I watch so much "us and them" in corporate selling!


• STOP SELLING and START HELPING! Allan Cimberger taught my sales team this over 15 years ago when he was in his late 80's and early 90's after an amazing selling career. I persuade you to understand that you do NOT SELL PRODUCTS - you sell SOLUTIONS. This makes this economy the very reason why your clients and prospects should be buying more from you now.


• Sharpen your saw! Steven Covey says it and we need to listen. Graduates of our class are free to attend public session without charge. Now is the time to join a class again if you are a graduate and bring your book to learn again. Even as in instructor that has taught PSS for over 25 years and in the last year taught the program over 45 times I learn in every class that I teach. It is amazing that we have been named for the second consecutive year the largest providing partner of AchieveNET in the world. A small company in Albany, NY that just believes we can even do better for ourselves and our customers. We want you to have exceptional sales in these challenging times.