Up-selling, despite what some people believe, is not a sneaky or dishonest sales strategy.  In fact is is an essential strategy for start-ups.  I do, however, understand, how many people can see it this way.

At the bagel store near my house, a bagel costs $0.49.  Yet, order that bagel with $0.03 worth of butter, and the bagel is suddenly $1.69.  Why does the store do this?  Because its great to advertise bagels that cost only $0.49, but who comes into the store and only orders 1 bagel with nothing on it?  The upsell is the critical method of driving profit into the store.

It’s not a dishonest strategy, but if you sat there and really thought about what is going on, its kind of maddening.  And if you listen to the entire process of people walking in and out of the store (which as a person who looks for sales techniques in anything, I do), you will hear the constant upsell.  “Can I interest you in a coffee too?  Perhaps some cheese with that taylor ham sandwich?  Can I interest you in home fries?”  The entire sales process is hinged on the upsell.

Think about every infomercial you have ever seen.. “but wait… act now and get a second for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling”

So, I can see how people think of the upsell as a technique that lies on the border of sleazy in terms of sales tactics.

However, I think it is an honest and essential tool for start-ups that sell to enterprises.  As I wrote in my post on Easier to buy, easier to sell one of the major keys to seeing breakthrough sales processes in start-ups is to make the decision to buy an easier one.

For most start-ups, especially for those in technology, buying from you takes a major leap of faith.  They have to trust that:

• You will survive until next year
• That all of your claims of success to date are repeatable… after all, you are basing your past successes (assuming you have some so far) on a very small and stastically insignificant base
• Your product even does what you say
• That you have the ability to scale
• That you won’t embarrass them to their boss, their investors, wall street, their customers, etc.
• That you won’t disappear with their money
• That your visionary new way of doing something will even work
• and dozens of other dears around working with an unknown entity.

All of their fears will surround ideas like these.  Therefore, the larger the leap that they have to make, the harder it will be for you to get the deal done.

How do you solve this problem?  The intentional and explicit up-sell.  You need to create a snack-size version of your product, and get these people “half-pregnant.”  Once you get them hooked, if your product is as good as you say and provides them value, then they will happily upgrade to the larger package.  Buying anything from you is a massive leap, so you need to figure out the best ways to make the leap smaller.   You should avoid the free trial if at all possible – because you want to establish the relationship of customer-vendor as quickly as possible rather than customer-prospect.  Its too easy for a prospect to say yes to a free trial, when he/she really has no intention of buying.

Lots of companies have embraced the upsell with the freemium models that are so common now in SaaS products, and that’s a great thing!  In fact, its the entire beauty behind the SaaS model.   By allowing someone to buy in smaller chunks, and with an upgrade/upsell path to a larger commitment, you make getting on board significantly easier.

The tricky part here is to make sure that you provide enough value in the lowest version, and enough differentiation and value to get people to move up to the  more expensive options.  I can’t generically speak to what must be included in the minimal package since all products are different, but it should be enough to have the company understand the value that they will get and then also make them feel comfortable with your company enough to write a large check.  There are entire discussions about what and how you should position your packages, and in this post, I don’t intend to dive into that much detail about those issues – just how critical the upsell availability is, and how it affects the sales process for a start-up.

Assuming you’ve embraced my logic behind the up-sell, you need to really think about how it affects the sales process particularly in how your prospects buy.  Do you really understand how the buying happens in their company:  Do you know what the threshold is where the decision maker can buy without major approvals?  Do you know what the budget process is?  Do you know what the fiscal year is?  Do you know how add-ons (up-sells) are treated?  You may offer something at $2,000 / mo with an opportunity to cancel at any time, but the person buying your service may need to budget for the full $24,000 just in case they use it for the full year, so, once again, you need to realize the size of the leap that the prospect needs to make in order to buy.  Is your minimum level, when multiplied out for a year, still too much pain for the prospect? And, while you think you are only asking them for $2,000 – they are making a $24,000 decision – and that is a very different decision.  Can they make a $24,000 decision without needing to bring the decision to a C level person OR can they make a $10,000 decision on their own?  If so, perhaps your initial offering is $10,000 with an up-sell from there.

There is no generic correct answer because every product / offering / value prop / prospect mix is different – but I strongly believe that the start-ups that spend the time to figure out the correct up-sell strategy will have better results with selling to larger enterprises.

Its worth repeating my post from last December about the December Sales Problem.

December is a hard sales month for companies for several reasons:  The month is really only 2.5 weeks long before your prospects shut down.  Budgets are often used up.  Vacations make it hard to get deals done.  Prospects are more focused on their Holiday party then they are on your solution, etc.  The list is long, and very intuitive why its hard to get sales done.  However, as I’ve posted before, December can actually be an amazing month for sales.

But very often the biggest December sales problem is inside your own company…  Its the sandbagging sales team.  Get into the mind of a salesperson for a minute…  Sales plans typically reset in January, and each salesperson is in one of two camps.

The first camp has already made quota, and wants to make quota next year – and even though they are probably in accelerated commissions right now – want to make sure they hit quota two years in a row – and set themselves up for accelerated commissions next year as well as any challenges and bonuses that may come along.  In other words, they’ve already impressed you this year and in the “what have you done for me lately” mentality – they are already thinking about next year.

The second camp hasn’t made quota, and probably doesn’t see a way TO make quota in this hard month.  So, they sandbag the deals until next year.  These sales will be recorded and then their quota will re-set in January.  Since they were below quota this year, they know that they have to crush next year or risk their jobs – so they too, will be thinking about next year.

What this means is that NOBODY is thinking about December.  None of your sales team really cares about December.  They have moved on to the next year.

So… what are you to do?  Take this thought process into consideration and be creative about how to solve it.  In last year’s post I offered some suggestions that I’m going to repeat:

• Sales challenge for December.  Put a big carrot out there for achieving a particular goal in December. Cash is best since you are combating the thought of cash for next year but a trip or other prize can work as well.
• Increased commission rate.  This is a simple but effective one.  Bump all commission rates up in December in order to negate the sandbagging.
• Quota Relief for the following year.  Another idea which can be successful is to offer quota relief for the following year based on sales in December.   So, perhaps you drop a person’s next year quota by $0.25 for every dollar they sell in December.  This makes it easier for them to hit their accelerators in the next year.
• Immediate payment.  Typically salespeople have to wait to get commissions.  I’ve heard of some companies offering to pay immediately on December sales as an incentive because in January they will wait on the payment scale.  (This can create issues for customers that don’t eventually pay – which is why I’ve never done it – but I figured it was worth a mention because it was mentioned to me)

The challenge of avoiding sandbagging salespeople in December is a very tough one.  As business leaders and entrepreneurs, we want the best numbers we can get in December, and for the year.  As salespeople, we want to bring in sales in a way that can maximize our personal income.  Marrying these two ideas is always the compensation challenge and in December this is a bigger problem.  I’m certainly curious to hear about how other people have solved the problem.

Recently, I replied to a HARO request for the top 5 lessons for a new sales rep.  Happily, one of my items was selected for the article.  (Yes, the article is referring to an idea from me despite the fact that my name is massacred <grin> ).    The resulting list that author, Brandon Mendelson, compiled is actually quite good and I’m honored to be one of the items in his list.   I decided to post my entire top 5 here and provide links to my old articles that explain them in more detail:

1)      Nobody cares about your product:   Prospects care about their own problems – not your product.  The faster you find their problem (“their pain”) that you solve through your product, then the faster you will get to the sale.

2)      Embrace the word “NO”.  Don’t be afraid to ask for the deal.  Typical new salespeople let deals fester because they are afraid of hearing the word no.  I say, get to the no.  Then you find out the real reason for the objection – and eventually turn it into a yes by negotiating.

3)      Don’t worry about money:  The salesperson who is constantly thinking about money will lose more deals than he/she wins.  Worry about finding the right solution for your prospects, and the money will follow.

4)      Listen:  God gave you two ears and one mouth.  Listen twice as much as you speak and your prospect will tell you how to close the deal.

5)      There are no lost deals… only deals that didn’t close now.  If you take a deal that you lose, and ruin it, you will never get that deal.  Remember that your prospects may buy in the future – or move to different companies – and eventually buy.  Treat the people at lost deals with the same respect that you treat closed deals – even if they pick your competitor.  You never know when you may run into them again.

You can draw sales lessons from everywhere in life.  The reason for this is that most of sales is about the interaction of human beings with each other – about the acts of persuasion and communication.  I write constantly about how everyday life teaches me valuable lessons about how to become a better salesperson and sales manager.  First, I wrote about Sales Lessons in a chick flick.  Then I wrote about Sales Lessons from my 7 year old.  Then, sales lessons from my 2 year old.  I also wrote recently about sales lessons from my colorblind brother.

My latest sales lesson came from my 6 year  old son (which fantastically has provided me at least one post-worthy sales lesson from each of my children).  My son is playing flag football this year, and while he told me all spring and summer that he was really looking forward to playing flag football again this year, once it came time to play, he was less than interested.  He whined and complained for the first two weeks of practice, and not surprisingly gave a less than stellar performance on the field during the first game.  After the first game, I tried to remind him how great he did last year.  I made sure he got the proper rest, and the right breakfast before his second game.  Yet, he was a goofball on the field, and in many ways really provided an embarrassing display of antics on the field.  The fact that many of the moms were telling me how cute and funny he was did matter.  It was getting me very angry that he wasn’t trying his best and doing what I knew he could do well.

My reaction was to get angry at him and to punish him for his display on the field.  The next week?  He provided a similar display of antics.  I was infuriated.  But… by this point, I realized that there was a lesson here.  (Indeed – its coming back to a sales lesson).  I realized that I wasn’t providing the correct motivation to get the behavior that I wanted.

After his third game, I sat him down and explained to him about what would make me proud.  I explained to him that I always expected him to try his best at everything he did, and that I expected the same of myself.  If I wasn’t trying my best at QuotaCrush, then the company would not survive, and that would have repercussions on all of us in the family.  In the same way, he needed to always try his best.  I told him that I didn’t care if he got a flag or a touchdown, but that I wanted to see him do his best.  Then after the pep talk, I modified his “comp plan” and told him that he would receive $1 for each flag that he got, and $5 for every touchdown that he made.

The next football game cost me $20.

I’m not sure which part motivated him more, the pep talk or the comp plan, but it worked.  (Ok, he is my son.  I know it was all about the cash.)

So what’s the sales lesson here?  Proper motivation and the deploying the right compensation plan is the best way to get the results that you want from your sales team.

Just like my son, salespeople are wired to perform.  They want to succeed and close more deals:  just as much as management does and sometimes more.  However, since start-up sales is one of those jobs where the daily tasks are squishy, the proper compensation plan makes sure that the salesperson stays focused on what is important.  The salesperson’s drive for closing as many deals as possible in the shortest timespan, is directly related to the compensation that she/he expects to receive.  If your expectations are unrealistic – or comp plan too hard to calculate, you won’t get the results that you want.

When people ask me about building compensation plans, I typically recommend starting with a very simple plan so that it is easy for a salesperson to figure out what they will make with each sale.  I’ve got several half written posts on start-up compensation packages which I plan to finish, but the concept I’m talking about here is not about the mechanics of any particular compensation package, but about the fact that business owners need to understand what moves the salespeople in your organization.

When I needed my son to perform, I gave him two small goals:  Get flags and get touchdowns.  He went onto the field with those objectives in the forefront of his brain and his every move kept him on those two goals.  In your business, you should find those small goals that your salespeople can achieve and have them attack it, and they should feel the immediate results.  (cash in the bank).

As the weeks progress, I may add incentives for other goals like proper blocking, passing, fair play, etc. and likewise, you can start to add other incentives around the goals that you need to achieve, but make sure that the goals you seek aren’t too far out, and that they are achievable.  Recently, I spoke with a very early stage start-up that has an enterprise sale that will probably take several months before any sales are made, and the CEO was frustrated because he just couldn’t feel like he had anything big to motivate his salespeople.  It was clear that the salespeople would probably not make commission for 4-6 months because of the sales cycle plus when it would take to get paid.  I gave him the idea to start by setting aside $5,000 in commissions.  I told him to tell his two salespeople to go and get secured meetings with confirmed decision makers and have him pay $500 for each meeting to the salepeople and tell them that once the $5,000 was used up, it was used up.  The result was that he spent the $5,000 in a little over a month and successfully kick-started his sales effort.  And.. it only cost him $5,000.  He got motivated salespeople, and delivered a win-win.  The lesson here is that rather than just telling salespeople that they would make the money when they made the sale, he got into their head, and gave them an incentive that matched the incentive of the company.  Would the company have paid $5,000+ to get good leads elsewhere?  probably – so why not use it for sales motivation.

If it seems simple… it really is.  Salespeople want to make money – and they will deliver in the easiest and fastest way for them to make money.   So.. make sure your compensation plan allows salespeople to make money in the ways that grow your business in the way you want it to grow.

I gave my “Sales 101 for entrepreneurs” lecture to the entrepreneurs at DreamIT Ventures in Philadelphia last week.  If you aren’t familiar with them, its a TechStars / Y-Combinator style incubator that helps launch great companies on a shoe-string.  It does so by providing a great environment and access to top notch mentors and experienced VC’s and entrepreneurs.  I was honored to be one of their speakers this year.

During my presentation, one of the entreprenuers asked me a great question:  What should I look for when I’m hiring a sales candidate?

My immediate response was, “The first and most important quality that I look for in a salesperson is that they have expensive hobbies.”  Of course, this evoked quite a bit of laughter, but then I started to explain my rationale.

Most people will tell you that when you hire a salesperson, you should look for confidence, persuasiveness, an extensive rolodex, the persistence of a 2 year old , and intelligence.  I say, yes all of those things are great (although I am not a believer in the rolodex-theory), but you are talking to salespeople.  We are not normal.  By nature, we are trained at the core to manipulate conversations, control the direction of conversations, get you to feel good about what we are saying, and convince you that the things you are looking for are not what you are looking for – but you are instead looking for the things that are good in us.  Our job is to close you – to get the deal done.

OK – so how do you find a good person, knowing that every person you talk to is trained to make you think they are a good salesperson even if they really aren’t.

I look for two basic qualifiers if I’m going to be thinking about this person further:

First, I look for expensive LEGAL hobbies.  (Obviously, I do not mean an expensive cocaine or heronie habit.)   I mean skiing, scuba, spa, golf, biking, expensive watch collections, expensive purse collections, etc.  These are things you can usually find out in the banter that happens even before the interview starts.  Expensive hobbies speak to two things:

1. They have had some success before that allowed them to even partake in these hobbies
2. They have motivation to repeat that success in order to continue with those hobbies.

You need to sense a passion for that hobby.  I don’t mean just skiing, but someone that has decided that they need to ski every mountain around Lake Tahoe more than once, and at least once on every continent that has skiing.  I don’t mean someone that enjoys biking, I mean someone that describes the bike they own (or REALLY want to own)  as having automatic transmission, disc brakes and made of titanium.  Its that type of passion for the hobby, that typically tells me that this someone who is driven, focused, and squarely thinking about cash in their pocket at nearly every turn.  The more this salesperson wants to do that hobby, the more she/he going to be thinking about closing.  This is of course, good for you.  The more your sales person makes… the more your company makes... the higher your valuation is… the closer you are to a great exit or break-even.

Second, a great salesperson will start building his/her pitch in the interview.   They may not get your product or the product direction correctly, but as they hear you talk about the product, they should come back at you with suggestions on how to pitch the product, or “have you tried this approach” questions.  These suggestions may be WAY off your corporate mission but that’s OK.  What you should take from this is that you have someone that knows how to listen, and is willing to take what he/she hears and be creative to find a solution.  The salesperson that is building his/her pitch the minute he starts hearing about the product is already thinking about how he/she can close deals.  This is the key to the entire thought process.  A salesperson that is thinking about a solution that leads to a close is the salesperson you want on your sales force.

As simplistic and as unconventional as these suggestions are, they are typically methods that have worked for me in finding great salespeople.  Of course, you should continue to look deeper into their background, sales tactic, etc. to see if its a match for your company culture, etc. but I follow these two simple rules to at least do a first pass at them.

Now to go plan that Tahoe trip….

Recently, I spoke to someone who had followed my advice about being completely truthful in the sales process, and was finding that he wasn’t getting as many sales from it as he thought.  I started digging into his process, and instantly realized the problem.

Truthfulness does not mean “reveal everything at once” – nor does it mean that you don’t control what information you give at any time. You need truth in every step of the process, but that doesn’t mean that you have to show your entire hand from the get-go.  You should be offering up information in snack-sizes and when it is required to move the process along.  You should always be managing the process towards the end goal that you want – a close.

Think of it this way…  Go back to your single days (or if you are single.. go back to last weekend), and imagine yourself in a bar and seeing an attractive person.  You certainly don’t walk up to them and say, “I just saw you, had a mental fantasy about us together, and thought I would come over here and talk to you.  I think we are likely quite compatible and would make very attractive children.”

While this may be a very truthful comment about your intentions, it sort of reveals WAY too much information at once and perhaps reveals your ultimate goal without really getting any feedback, or easing into the “sale”

What should you say?  Probably something closer to, “Hi, can I buy you a drink?”

When you ask that, the person most likely KNOWS that you find them attractive.  They probably KNOW you are trying to get closer to them to potentially find out if there are any “next steps” to the relationship, but its WAY less threatening than the first approach.

As your relationship develops, IF it develops, you can reveal the other information at appropriate points so that you ultimately both wind up in the same place and live happily ever after with your attractive children.

Sales is exactly the same.  First, you need to understand your end goal, and then you need to map out your process to get there.  You need to then think about how your prospect sees the world and what things are important to them.

In the example that prompted this article, the salesperson was cold calling and then traversing the organization to get to the right person and was striking out most of the time.  The problem was, he was revealing everything he planned on pushing to the people for whom he needed an introduction.  So the call went something like this, “Hi, Fred.  Can you introduce me to Mary, your CFO?   I’m going to try to sell her our product.  You guys are a great organization and a great candidate for our enterprise package.”   Well… that indeed was truthful… but scary!  He essentially asked for an introduction and revealed that he was going to be a pushy salesperson.  Who wants to pass on that referral!?  Too truthful.

What should his call have been?  “Hi Fred.  I was hoping you could help me get an introduction to Mary, your CFO.  My company sells a very interesting solution that may have applicability for her, and I’d like to set up an exploratory call with her to discuss.”  Fred should know from this conversation that Mary is going to get a sales pitch.  That was obvious, but nothing was revealed about the fact that the enterprise product would be pushed.

Changing to this strategy is yielding much better results.

There is actually much more to be written about pushiness and sales, but I’m listing this example here because this particular salesperson was taking “be truthful” to heart and using it in every message that they conveyed – thinking they were doing a good thing – and not realizing that they were likely being perceived as pushy.

Yesterday, I met my brother at the gym early in the morning.  After our workout, my brother asked me in helping him pick out the right tie for him to wear to work. (he had brought 4 to the gym with him).  Why?  My brother is colorblind.  Not black and white only, but enough that getting himself dressed can present challenges.

I had forgotten this about my brother.   I shared a VERY small bedroom with my brother for about 14 years before I left for college, and helping my brother with his clothing choices used to be a regular occurrence, but having not lived with him for so long, I forgot about it – and having him ask me about it reminded me of life in his eyes.

As I left the gym, I related the story in my mind to sales.   (My wife will tell you that I relate EVERYTHING in my life to sales).  The question I asked myself was… am I too wrapped up in the way that I see life and the deals that I’m working on that perhaps I’m not looking at the deals in the way that my prospects see them.  Do I really understand and know the way that they see the world – so that I can better create a win-win scenario that will lead to a close?  (It is interesting that this is the second time that a tie has caused me to blog about the prospect’s point of view.)

The good news was that for most deals, I believe that I have taken the customer’s point of view into consideration and framed them correctly.  A few other deals, I rethought them and am trying some new strategies to awaken them.   But, the simple tie question really points out that every prospect and every person within that prospect will see the world in a different way – and the way that they see the world will color (pun intended) their view of the world.  Unless you, as a salesperson, understand that and build your deal around that, it will be difficult to get your deals done.

Imagine someone trying to sell my brother another tie.  They could show him a green tie and a blue tie, and those ties might look identical to my brother.  OR, one with a beautiful hue may actually look hideous to my brother.  And… I guarantee that he won’t know if it matches anything else he owns so he may not make the purchase regardless.  This is a man that thinks demin blue jeans look purple, and thinks Christmas trees have a reddish hue.  A salesperson who understood that my brother was colorblind might do a better job about describing the color, or matching it to his current suit – or other tools in selling items that are color dependent to color-blind people.  Whatever the tactic, if the salesperson never takes the time to understand my brother’s colorblindness, he will never make the sale.

Ask yourself… do you REALLY know your clients challenges?  The way they see the world?  Do you understand how the economy has affected their business?  Is buying your product something that is a great risk for them personally?  Do they even think about how to solve problems in the same way that you do?  If you are a technology guru, using technology to solve problems is a natural.  Perhaps your prospect doesn’t immediately run to technology to solve a problem.  If you are under 30, you may immediately understand the value of social networking, but your 60+ prospect thinks that social networking is a big time-waster.

Whatever the challenge, you need to understand how they see the world, so that you can frame your sale properly.  Going back to the social networking sale: Perhaps you need to spend more time on the basis of why social networking has transformed business and get them on board with that before you start touting your product where for another prospect you can launch right into the benefits of your specific solution.

There are no hard rules here – but just the simple idea that you should always be looking for ways to see the world thru your prospects eyes.  And if they are colorblind, simply ignore the fact that they may be wearing a mismatched tie.

People that read QuotaCrush know that I am always talking about the need for transparency and honesty in the sales process.  As I’ve said, when you do the right thing and when you are honest, sales happen for you.  And the more honest you are, the more good karma comes back and leads to more sales.

A few weeks ago, I took a customer out to lunch since I was in town.  This customer has been up on one of the software services for one my clients for about a month, and this was a great opportunity to get some feedback on the product, and talk about the implementation thus far.

At one point in the conversation, I paused and said to the customer, “So.  how truthful was I in the sales process about what your post sales experience with our software would be?”  He immediately replied, “Actually… very!  You made some pretty bold statements in your sales process about what you guys could accomplish and I admit that I discounted some of what you said, but I’m certainly very pleased that you have come through on everything that you have promised.”

Bold statements – but honest ones.  If you put a value statement out there, and you back it up later on, it works wonders for you in the sales process.

As it happens, this particular customer will be giving a keynote at a prominent trade show in about a month, and I’m fairly certain that he will be giving a raving endorsement for our product and service – and as a reference, he will certainly let people know that we are honest and fair in the sales process.  I believe that by being honest with this customer, we now have a champion – and that means the world in the sales process.

It does happen sometimes, however, that a customers experience is not exactly what they expected, and they may feel that you were not 100% true to your word.  At these times, what you need to make sure is that the customer understands where your process may have failed, or fallen down.  Perhaps you got new information after the sale that you didn’t take into account before the sale, or perhaps external factors affected your ability to deliver.  What must happen at this point, is for you to explain in very truthful statements about what happened, and map it back to those bold statements made in the sales process.  Presuming that the sales process had honest statements, you should be able to easily explain why the experience wasn’t exactly what they thought it might be, and how you plan to get them back on track.   Your open and honest communications here should be the way to maintain the relationship – and eventually get a champion again.

I’ve often found that customers for which you’ve had a failure, been honest about it, and then turn around, become even bigger champions.  These customers know that they can trust your word completely.  Problems happen to everyone and every account.  Its how you deal with them that makes the difference.  At a company I was selling for, we had a MASSIVE mistake for one customer.  It was an IT failure on our part, and a very massive mistake.  I found out about it, and immediately went to the CFO’s office in person, sat down and told him of the problem and what we were going to do about it.  After the smoke stopped pouring out of his ears and his face resumed a normal color, he looked at me and said, “Well.  You could have easily hidden this problem from me, so I have to respect you for being honest and for coming and telling me in person.  That’s probably the only reason I’ll give you a chance to fix this.”  We did fix it, and the trust I gained from that customer was immense.  From that point on, he knew there was no reason for him to doubt my word or think that I wouldn’t be honest with him.  I did quite a bit of additional business with that customer (including selling to him on my next sales gig).

When dealing with a person who makes money from commissions, the natural instinct of most people is to think that the salesperson is saying and doing anything to get the sale.  Therefore, distrust is the natural emotion of the buyer.  When you turn that on its head, you will be amazed at how much it will help in the sales process.

When I was in my first job out of college, I worked for a containerized shipping company and wrote code for automating the shipping port.  On the successful launch of our software, the CEO of the company came to the port to see the operation. While reviewing the smooth motion of the trucks thru the port, he saw a trucker changing a tire and he was struggling with a lug nut.  He made an off-hand comment, “you know… someone should fix that… there should be an easier way,” and then he continued on his tour.

Some managers heard this comment, and proceeded on a six month engineering study of lug nuts, and eventually came back to the CEO with an entire plan on new and improved lug nuts, and what the implementation plan and costs would be to equip the entire fleet of chassis with new lug nuts.  These new lug nuts would reduce the amount of stress on drivers needing to change tires.  Needless to say, these managers were quite proud of the work they had done.

After the presentation of the lug nut plan, the CEO sat for a while before responding in anger, “What the heck is this?”  When these managers explained that he had made a comment about the lug nuts and that someone should fix it, not only did the CEO not remember making the comment, he certainly did not appreciate the hundreds of thousands of dollars that were spent in a research study about how to make them better.

This story is always in the back of my mind.  Why?  As a salesperson, I’m always trying to make sure that I choose my words wisely – and I attempt to be mindful of everything I say.  You can never be sure of what small off-hand comment will be taken as gospel, or what small comment might offend or kill a deal.  I’ve already blogged about how you need to keep your on-line presence clean in Swingers Make Bad Salespeople, but what I’m talking about here is something even deeper.  Its about making sure that you are careful in even the smallest things you say – not only because you might offend someone – but because you might take the prospect in a direction you don’t want them to go – or thinking about issues that will cloud the deal and take longer for it to get done.

One time, an account manager and I were at a meeting, and before the presentation, all the people in the room were having a friendly chat about their iPhones, Blackberry’s, etc. and the account manager made a comment about how the service on his phone was so bad he had been late to answer quite a few emails over the past few weeks because of the bad phone service.  Harmless comment?  Perhaps in some meetings, but this prospect focused on this comment throughout the sales presentation – worried about not being able to get the service he might require for his account – because he had a bad experience with this before.  Instead of listening to the presentation as deeply as he should have – he was thinking about his bad customer service experience, and was thinking that he would have that with us.

Simple comment about phones – it was not.  It was a manefestation of his basic fear about using our software.

While I can think of hundreds of examples to this, I’d love to hear stories where off-hand comments affected a deal – or perhaps won a deal.

Managers and entrepreneurs can take lessons from this as well.  As a person in authority, you need to make sure that you are careful about how you phrase things and be clear in what you need your people to do.  I’ve seen sales managers complain about sales metrics on call numbers, and cost per meeting – and have that result in salespeople taking their eye off the ball of closing deals in the pipeline.  In the constant desire to look good in the eyes of the boss, people will do what they think their boss wants them to do – as was in the lug nut example above – but in fact, that may often NOT be what they ultimately want them to do.   This is NOT a cheer for micro-management (I’m vehemently opposed to that), but it is a cheer for making sure you are careful in what you ask of your people, and that you continually check-in to make sure your employees are on-track.

I’m not sure what ever happened to those lug-nut designs and if they were ever acted upon, but I know the story has had a tremendous impact on my career and in the ways that I treat conversations.

One of the most important, yet difficult, lessons that a salesperson needs to learn is that nobody really cares about the product you sell.

Prospects care about their own problems, their own issues, their own pain.  They don’t care about your product.

The only reason they are interested in your product at all is because it solves a particular problem of theirs, or makes their job easier, or saves them money, keeps their boss off their back, or some other selfish reason.  You can think your product is as cool as hell, but people don’t buy something cool as hell, unless they understand how it helps them.  Yes… your prospect will be thinking about his/her own issues while you talk about your product.  If they can’t make a match… they will not buy no matter how cool your product is.

Think about your own purchases.   Especially when you are spending large sums of money, you will always think about how if affect you, whether it be status, comfort, simplification of your life, etc.  Your prospects will be thinking this way too.

Once a salesperson understand this fact, the sales process changes to what it needs to be – about your prospects problems / about their issues and pain.  The faster the salesperson gets to relating the product, and more importantly the features of the product, to the particular pain of the prospect, the faster he/she will get to a sale.

Time and time again in demos, and presentations, I see a salesperson super intent on getting all of their points out.  They are so intent that they do anything and everything to make sure that they cover all the slides they prepared and that they demo every aspect of their product – even when the prospect has told them what they need and what they care about.  What makes me cringe is when I see a salesperson get to a section of their presentation and the prospect says, “That’s interesting, but I here is my problem… and I want to hear about this…” and then the salesperson continues on their defined tour of all of the product features.    As a salesperson, you should focus on the features FIRST that will help solve the prospects greatest pain.  If you can’t define that, then you haven’t done your homework – or there is no match for your product – and you will never get the sale.  And, if you only need a single feature to sell the product, why not focus heavily on that feature until is exhausted and the prospect fully understands it.

Once you get your prospect over the hurdle of understanding how you solve his her problem, then you can start to talk about all the other features and things that will make it even better – and perhaps take his/her business in a new direction.

Salespeople should be the greatest evangelists for their products and they should know and love the product.  But, by knowing the product that well, the salesperson should be able to talk to anyone and quickly ascertain what part of the product, if any, can solve this prospects pain, and get the prospect to understand that too.  If you, as a salesperson, feel the need to just vomit all of the possible features onto the prospect hoping something sticks, well then you are expecting your prospects to do your job and I certainly would not expect you to crush your quota.

Bottom line:  They will never care about your product until you MAKE them care about it.  How?  By showing them how it makes their lives better/easier/simpler/richer.