'Craft' - Old school sales rules we forgot along the way..

In an interview some years ago, when he was asked the ‘what makes your day ?’ question, Shah Rukh Khan, the richest actor in the world & someone who has probably scaled every height that a middle class guy from nowhere can manage in a lifetime, smiled shyly & admitted – “After giving a shot with all I have, when the director comes up & says it came out well, it really makes my day”. Not more money. Not more stardom. Just an acknowledgment of his craft.

You & I probably won’t achieve his kind of success. But each of us, in our own way, will arrive at our craft some day & settle down in it. Yes, other hats may get added. But there will be that one unique thing in your professional identity that becomes your adrenaline fix. For me, it’s the thrill of wrapping up a good quarter. I am your quintessential salesperson, regardless of what my biz card calls me.

This September I concluded 15 quarters in my present role. And thanks to my team, we hit the ball out of the park in each of those 15 quarters. Now, that’s something that makes me beam with joy. Especially as these quarters also include the dreaded Covid years inside them.

In the past fifteen years, I have (cumulatively speaking) led a few billion dollars’ worth of products & services businesses (of varying ticket sizes) across six major industries, having worked in & also led multi-cultural teams in more than a dozen countries, working with multi-cultural clients across the world’s most diverse region. I have also, over the past 24 years, worked with, for, against & also sometimes led superstars who have been a delight to observe & to learn from. I have seen companies’ tank & I have seen companies soar, depending on their commercial leadership.

This post is about fundamentals of commercial leadership that we’re forgetting or choosing to ignore. Partly because nouveau pundits fed us that the ‘rules of business have changed’. Also, because the digital supernova that hit us in the last 20 years, fooled us with false positives, having us confuse visibility for presence. Meanwhile, fake gurus & French-beard consultants with Twitter handles (who have never done any real business in their lives) showed up at our doorsteps to advise our sales leaders how to conduct their businesses. The management started micromanaging the commercial teams, and the commercial leadership, instead of gunning for growth, fell for wimpish ways of juggling portfolios, doing ‘creative accounting’ & playing clueless restructuring games to safeguard their shrinking shelf lives.

This post is an attempt to jog our memory to times when business was not a game, but a sport. And when business leaders balanced offence with defense, instead of ducking into inorganic hiding places at the slightest provocation. Let’s get into it.

1. It’s about the team – Lone wolves look good only in Rambo movies. Quality business means team work. A good team, whether it’s your own, your client’s or your competitor’s, has a ripple effect on the entire eco-system. Quick reminders – When you’re a sales leader, your team doesn’t just mean people under you, but also the people above you ( your boss, her boss’s boss & so on) & around you ( the support functions). To make a mark in sales, learn to make your entire team look good. Reminds me, when you start leading people, having a drink with the boys ( or girls) every evening after work, is a bad idea. That’s why they’re the girls (or boys) & you’re the boss ( A ‘drink’, of course, is metaphoric & could as well mean a cafeteria gossip session). Good sales leadership is being with the team and also subtly above the team. And yes, make sure you define?your team colors early on, the hard-to-miss attributes that it stands for. It starts with values, but is more than linear values. It is strength of character, generosity & goodness, a common philosophy & some agreed virtues. It is a sense of belonging that leads to internalized humility & a quiet confidence to keep going when storms hit, as they often will. Your team colors will stay with your people even after life blows away the externals. Because, amidst the scores of things that they will fall for as they go about their lives , your team colors will be something they’ll stand for. Lastly, fight for your team inside the organization & fight by your team in the marketplace.
2. You gotta have growth – As in, O-R-G-A-N-I-C growth! Of course, as businesses evolve, there will be consolidations, mergers & acquisitions that will drive inorganic growth as well. However, inorganic growth should be the one-off event instead of becoming the core survival formula as we often see these days. No matter how much you puff your?organization’s numbers by juggling portfolios, unless you are also aligning it with strengthening & growing from your core, such growth is not sustainable. Inorganic growth, when used as a career ladder for ineffective leaders, quickly leads to political toxicity & crony-culture that corrodes the DNA of the healthiest of outfits. Look up the leaders who deliver consistently & grow faster than competition with no freebie BD revenues, and parade them like heroes across the organization.
3. Fine-tune your BS filter – You’re going to encounter a quintal of BS as you go through a sales career. From outright liars in your own community who feed you imaginary opportunity funnels, to clueless cogs in a client organization who pile you with homework, from long meetings on irrelevant topics, to boring townhalls chaired by ‘leaders’ battling an identity crisis, you can quickly get sucked into a lot of activity that seems like work, but that doesn’t add up into your numbers & bonuses. If, as a salesperson, you cannot detect BS from a mile away & avoid it, you need to quickly hone this skill. Keep asking yourself these questions - Does a strategy meeting for you mean a group of suits huddled in extremely cold & dark meeting rooms, flashing thousands of slides that discuss bygones? Who’re your most valuable commercial talent – territory servicers or true-blue hunters? Is Finance demystified into a few simple metrics that’s understood by the last employee in your value chain or is it tightly held by jargon-spewing CFOs crunching oceans of data that’s neither relevant nor actionable? How simplified is your variance analysis conducted, and what’s the benchmark that it follows – internal or external? Do your leaders fall for ‘This-won’t-work-here’ lines from your gatekeepers in new markets who feed you crap in the form of having to agree to free pilots, extra warranties, extended credit terms, deep discounts, urgent technology transfers, compromised channels and the endless wining & dining bills to help your employees conduct a mysterious activity called ‘business development’ ? You get the drift of what I mean, right?
4. Don’t believe those myths – When you’re new & green, you tend to believe in the H/Bollywood version of a successful sales personality & try to mold yourself accordingly. Mark my words, all those stereotypes are nonsense. I wrote about some of these myths in my previous article. You might consider checking those out.
5. ‘You were wild once’ - In ‘Rocky V’, when George Washington Duke ( Richard Gant) tries to cash in on the flare-up between Balboa and Tommy Gun, insisting – ‘In the ring! In the ring! Tommy Gun only fights in the ring!’ ;?Rocky replies, ‘My ring’s outside’. Every once in a while it makes sense to step outside your ring & test yourself in a street fight. And then you can always get back into the ring & finish well . Much better than what you would have, had it been your only ring. As often as you can, step out & do a tough sale yourself. ?To quote Isadora Duncan – ‘You were wild once. Don’t let them tame you’. Controlled conditions & known adversaries soften us. Life has a habit of domesticating us salespeople as we sleepwalk through the decades. Nothing beats the thrill being in a state of feral – free from captivity of the familiar & slugging it out in the wild. Keeps us agile. Also relevant - in our own eyes. Remember Casey Ryback ( Steven Seagal), who, after wrapping up his adventure in ‘Under Siege’, when asked about his day job,?quips – ‘Well, I also cook..’? Selling skills are like muscles. When not exercised, atrophy sets in. Don’t miss your street-fights.
6. Basics. Basics. Basics– Regardless of all tools & tackles that made their way into your sales kit, keep in mind that the basics are timeless. Ignore them at your own risk. Some examples ? Data is science, but it’s filtered data that’s art and convertible into sales ; Never trying to sell on phone ( or email) ; Eating before going for a dinner meeting with a client ; Avoiding fishing in ponds where everyone else is fishing ; Having an updated ‘Players’ Map’ at all times ( not just a lazy Org chart) ; Never sending an important attention-seeking email on a Monday ( sending it on a Sunday afternoon instead) ; Keeping an eye on competition ( including Tier 2 & Tier 3 competition) ; Dressing up / Showing up ; Making sure your net ( not gross) margins are at least 5 times that of your selling expenses & so on. Of course we all followed these at the starting line. And then one day we grew up & became stupid.
7. Pitch it easy – Do not go overboard with your pitch. Your client’s natural sales-resistance kicks into top gear when they see you opening your 73-page deck. Keep it simple. 5-6 pages at the most, and each page containing not more than a few bullets ( with a key takeaway below them). Most importantly, send the slides in advance to the client to assimilate & keep questions ready. Use meeting time for human interaction and answering questions, rather than doing a PPT festival where your tortured clients stifle yawns.
8. Bounce back – I saved this for the end. If you are young & starting out in sales, drop all your romanticized notions about this profession. This is a game that has a 10:3: 1 conversion ratio. For every 10 prospects, only 3 might show interest and only one of them might get converted into a sale. This means a rejection rate of 10 to 1. Not for the fainthearted. Early on, work out a bounce-back toolkit for yourself. You need to have an Unwind button by you every night & a Refresh button every morning. The former will silence the chatter in your head and the latter will keep your engine going through bad cycles when they come, as they often will. My buttons are writing & working out. I am sure you have your buttons figured out too.

This is a profession that is stigmatized, feared, chronicled, caricatured, scorned & misunderstood. And this stereotyping keeps many an able sales talent from venturing into it, thinking it to be a game of manipulation. Nothing can be farther from the truth. I can vouch for it. I have clocked 24 years here, without falling for the trappings of the trade. We keep the wheels of commerce going. We don’t participate in recessions. We sell dreams. And occasionally, we buy dreams too.

------------------------------------------------

( This was the second in the 3-part post on selling. Coming up in the next article – ‘Ten rules for accidental salespeople to survive & thrive in sales’)

------------------------------------------------

(Did this post connect with you ? Do hit ‘Like’ & leave your comments. If you like standalone articles sitting on overlapping boundaries of work & life, do check out my books, ‘As you Life It’ & ‘Life-ing it’ on Amazon’. If you like short stories, you may look up ‘Once upon a someone’, my 2022 collection of 55 short stories cutting through genres)