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Riding the Shark: Vanquishing Fear in Selling, Part 4 of 4: Shark-proof Your Selling

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Shark ProofingThis is the final post in a four-part series on Fear in Selling.  In the first part, I talked about the importance of dealing with fear in sales. In the second part, I wrote about the four types of fear.  In the third part I talked about fending off the sharks of fear. In this last part I talk about Shark-proofing your market – how to banish fear permanently.

The Sharks of Fear: Beyond Shark Repellent

There are Four Sharks of Fear:

1. Execution Fear. “I might mess up in doing this sale; I might not do it right.”
2. Competence Fear. “I might not know how to do this sale right; I may not even know I don’t know.”
3. Outcome Fear. “I might not get the deal at all – everything I wanted to happen won’t happen.”
4. Shame-based Fear. “They’re not going to like me or respect me anymore; and they’re probably right.”

While each can be dealt with tactically (see part 3), fear is a classic case where an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.  So – how do you conduct your selling life in ways that keep the Sharks of Fear permanently at bay?

It can be done.

Five Keys to Vanquishing the Sharks of Fear in Selling

First, let’s be clear where the solution does not lie. It is not in your sales process. You won’t find the key in sales management, and you won’t get there by tweaking your value proposition.

Instead, it consists of constantly applying five principles, or values, to every aspect of your selling life.  And here they are.

1. Always Sit on the Same Side of the Table. You are on the same team as your customer. Your interests are allied. There is no such thing as win-lose or lose-win, there is only win-win or part on friendly terms. You are not playing a zero-sum game, you are looking for a mutually beneficial relationship.

Don’t speak, write or think anything that posits you vs. your customer – your proper seat is on the same side of the table as your customer.

2. The Customer Gets Theirs First. The way to a successful partnership is not by insisting on 50-50 from the outset and at every step of the way. It comes from being gracious, putting the customer’s needs first, offering up some value, taking some risks, and listening before talking. The single best behavioral tool you can employ for this principle is – listen empathetically, long, and well. The result is that, when it’s your turn, you will be listened to in the same way.

Yes, a trust-based partnership has to work for both of you; but you get there by being willing to first focus on the customer’s needs, not your own.

3. Play the Long Game. The most powerful force in selling is the natural human tendency to return good for good, and bad for bad. Again – the most powerful force. Time, though of this way, is your friend, because time lets you develop relationships, not transactions. The more you develop relationships, the more your transactions will have context; and it’s a context of mutual courtesy, obligation and goodwill.

Don’t think of the sales process as a transaction, to be repeated. Think of it as a relationship, with ongoing interactions, but with a permanence all its own. And remember – the way you behave is the way you will be treated in turn. You empower what you fear; and you get back what you put out.

4. Keep No Secrets.  Transparency is to fear as a cross is to vampires. If you have no secrets, then there can be no surprises. If you don’t know something, say so. If you have information, share it. If you’re the best for the job, say so and say why. And if you’re not, say so as well – and that will be a lot more believable. Be the same person at all times to all people.

There are three exceptions, of course. Don’t give away trade secrets; don’t do anything illegal; and don’t hurt someone. Other than that, deal strictly in the Truth in all your affairs, and no one can or will fault you.  (And if you think giving away all your information will empower your competitors, think again – they can never replicate your relationships).

5. Lead With Your Chin. The thing that triggers trust, allows you to play the long game, and encourages collaborative reciprocal behavior is to be the one to take the first risk. Never mind what Ronald Reagan said – there is no trust without risk. If you want to create trust, you must lead with risk-taking.

Talk price early, not late. Admit your shortcomings up front. Give away samples – especially if you’re in an intangible services business. Have a point of view. Go out on a limb. Invest a little time, rather than checking your sales efficiency watch every minute. Dare to empathize.

 

That’s it. If you conduct your sales life by those principles, about 90% of customers will return your behavior in kind. The other 10%? Leave them to your competitors. Life is too short. And be assured, they won’t do as well as you and the 90% anyway.

Why Your Sales Process Is Bad for Sales

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At a holiday party this weekend, I chatted with two friends about life at their companies.

Each has been around long enough to see several generations of approaches to selling. We seemed to notice a few things in common.

1. The term “sales approach” has increasingly come to mean a “sales management process;”

2. Which means selling has come to be seen as a business process, not as a human interaction;

3. The “management” of selling has come to mean box-checking and numbers-tweaking, much like an engineer might summarize the readings from a series of flow-meters;

4. A major objective of these processes seems to be forecasting. Yet forecasts themselves are often ignored on the upside because of the risks of hiring, and on the downside because of the cost to people of short-term firings.

Which begs the obvious question, why are we doing this?

Of course this is just anecdotal party chatter—but it rings true to me.

Sales is one business area (others include HR and purchasing) that has been hit by a case of physics-envy: the belief that quantitative analysis of physical behavior at a micro-scale holds the key to understanding business performance (and the meaning of life to boot).

Google “sales management” and look at all the process models—CRM systems, sales force automation, lead tracking, right-pointing chevron graphics—that pop up.

The message? Selling is nothing more than a simple business process. Identify leads, screen-call-screen-meet-screen them, question them, trial-close them, identify/answer objections, repeat trial-close, repeat as necessary, close. Return to start.

Identify the steps at a sufficiently detailed level, then just collect enough data, and you too can be selling, or better yet, managing the poor slobs who actually have to slap shoe leather. Just follow the steps in the order given. Paint by numbers. Connect the dots. Just do it.

Got a sales problem? It must be a process problem, which means—you must have the wrong sales process—time to switch processes! You need consultative selling, or power-based selling, or buyer decision analysis selling. You need data. Analysis. Tweak the process.

It’s easy to caricature this approach, harder to describe just what’s wrong with it. But here’s a shot.

Selling is not at root, despite what web-searches will tell you, about process. It is about people and relationships and trust. We are in most cases far, far past the point of significant value-add by linking systems. And in getting there, we have run roughshod over the value-add by human connections.

Companies are driven by vision of linking all that data so they know just what to pitch you and me—to decrease time-to-“you-want-fries-with-that?” Most customers would gladly trade some Big Brother capability for less time on-hold and more genuine concern about our wants.

Why this obsession with metrics, behaviors and processes? Like I said, physics-envy. For over a century, many academic disciplines—including business, more recently—have had a case of “physics-envy.”

They believe that only “real” data is meaningful, only particles and precision make for real “science.” Neuro-fill-in-the-blank is just the latest manifestation.  Sociologists have had physics-envy for years, as did MIT’s Business School.  Harvard used to be immune, but caught it as well a few decades back.

Hey—sales is still the fulcrum point of the commercial interaction between a buyer and a seller.  Somewhere in there humans still lurk.  Sales process descriptions leave something out. Sort of like writing about the physics of love.  Neither quite gets at the point.