There Is No Silver Bullet in Sales

I overheard someone telling a sales rep yesterday that the silver bullet to sales success was getting a good sales tech platform in place. He said that sales automation tools made the difference between making his quota and falling short. I love sales automation tools, but I had trouble reconciling his advice.

After about a hundred years in sales, I have noticed that while no silver bullet exists, there is in fact a shiny Copper bullet. It is commonly referred to as “hard work”. Hard work is the only magic elixir that will separate sales success from failure and it has little to do with sales automation tools. (But don’t leave just yet. I am a huge fan of Sales Tech. I believe it adds a ton of value and I know the whole product landscape quite well.)

I suspect that if you are reading this, you are in sales. And because you have chosen sales as a career, you love competition and want to be the best. In fact, you probably want to dominate. You’re one of those who believe that if you’re not first, you may as well be last.

You were probably a college or high school athlete (most sales people I know were), so you will know what I’m talking about. Steph Curry doesn’t make three pointers all night long because he didn’t spend hours in a gym shooting three pointers. Inbee Park, Lexi Thompson, Tiger, Jordan and Lydia Ko didn’t get to be world number ones by not practicing golf 18 hours a day. Ditto, Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Williams. Does anyone believe that Ronaldo and Messi didn’t spend thousands of hours bending a soccer ball? To be the best, you have to work the hardest. Period.

So, what exactly does a successful sales rep have to do to get to that first $100 million in sales?

One, find a couple of successful sales reps and model your behavior after theirs. Not the guys who were handed the most lucrative accounts or the best order takers. You want the guys who still cold call. The guys who have figured out how to create the lifetime customer value train. The guys who know how to build trust and lasting relationships. Not the guys who focus on their next commission check. And, did I mention cold-calling?

Two, stay as far away from the complainers and bitchers as you can. These are the lazy clowns who are not making their numbers and blame the product, markets, economy, leads, service, location, support, leadership or whatever it is that they want to hang their failure on. Hanging around this crowd is like mainlining poison. It will kill you.

Three, consume modern sales and marketing technology and study how today’s buyers leverage all of them in their customer journey. If you are too lazy to learn and use, I guarantee that you will fail. But that also doesn’t mean that you should hide behind the 460 products and 5,000 applications that as of January 2018 comprise the modern sales tech stack. Most of these products are here to help you gain a small advantage. Some can even make a huge impact. But none of them can substitute for talking with prospects and customers. If you think that AI sales bots will deliver sales for you, you will likely be in for a bad surprise.

Rocket science is for rockets. Selling is an art.

Four, understand why people buy and what it takes to help them believe what they need to believe to make a purchase decision. Learn all the functionality about your product or service so that you can recite it all in front of the best customer techs they can line up, but remember, there are a lot of failing sales reps who can recite with the best but have never figured out how to present a proposal to a customer.

And, sales isn’t just about asking for the order. We are now entering a world where there are two kinds of transactions, and highly successful sales professionals are only going to be relevant in one of them. In a low-friction transaction universe, buyers just want to click a button and buy something. That is not the universe in which your company probably operates. Yours is likely somewhere in the high-value interaction universe where you will need to add far more value than simply pitching a product or service. Your universe is about customized offerings, and you need to fully understand what makes one buyer different from another and how to own each relationship.

In this universe it’s about presenting the value proposition is a way that assures the customer will succeed. You’re not selling a bicycle. You’re selling the experience of owning a bike. Those are two different things. The only way you will assure lifetime value is to become your customer. Know what it is going to be like to own that bike and do everything your prospect needs to help them see the lifetime value.

When we helped Harley-Davidson build their first website (back in the Pleistocene era), we didn’t build a product feature website. We built a lifestyle website. We knew that their customers weren’t interested in horsepower and torque as much as they were interested in identifying with a lifestyle. You need to think the same way about your prospects. The question you need to answer is, “What benefit is the prospect actually seeking?” It is rarely tied to the product data sheet, or your service level agreements.

It is likely that your prospect will have to sell your solution internally as well, so you best understand everything about everybody and their decision drivers along that path before you start that sale. This isn’t about some magical ABM sales model. It is simply change management. Your job is to help your prospect manage through the internal obstacles that will be presented so you can both succeed.

That bicycle of yours will have to be fast and smooth. It will have to have lots of gears and be easy to ride. It will have to be safe and comfortable at the same time. It will have to support 300 lb. riders and 120 lb. riders. It better come in all the right colors as well and if it doesn’t do all of that, you better know how the trade-offs increase the customer value (it only comes in a powder-coated carbon black matte finish so that there will be no confusion about which prestigious machine you ride).

More importantly, you will have to figure out how each vote on the buying council perceives the introduction of that new bile into their ecosystem. There are probably people who hate bikes, and some who are afraid of bikes, who don’t see the value of a bicycle and don’t want to change their processes to accommodate a bicycle. You will need to prepare and deliver a separate case for each trial.

This all takes hard work, aka the Copper bullet.

On the other hand, research studies tell us that 90% of sales reps have never read a sales book, don’t understand the basic sales process and don’t understand sales fundamentals. Over 60% of sales reps know their product or service cold but have never successfully presented a value proposal to a customer. Over 80% give up after the 3rd contact with the prospect. Studies also tell us that he average sales rep only does 46 sales activities per day. These include outbound calls, emails, and social media touches. Which do you think the average rep gravitates toward? Another survey of over 1100 sales people indicates that handling objections and closing the deal are the biggest weaknesses of ALL sales people. And on and on.

Are you freaking kidding me?

This is great news for you! Because we now know that 8 out of 10 sales reps give up after the 3rd attempt, and that the average rep only gets it up for a handful of activities a day. We know that most sales reps have never read a book about selling and that 6 out of 10 have never made a successful value proposal. And, we know that 91% of customers say they’d give a referral but only 11% of salespeople ask for one. Maybe the most critical data point of all is that handling objections and the art of the close are fundamental weaknesses for 95% of all sales reps.

As a competitive sales professional, these statistics ought to be like liquid adrenaline. You can feed on these stats and immediately see how the playing field opens for your playbook. Suddenly the golf course fits your eye. Every putt drops. The 3 pointers all make that same lovely sound as the ball passes through the net. You hit every return with exactly the right amount of top-spin. And it all couldn’t be simpler. Or easier.

That is unless you are allergic to Copper … or hard work. And I’m guessing that because you chose sales, you live to succeed, and you know how to work. I’m also guessing that you don’t care much for participation trophies.

All you need to do now is to put in the reps. You just need to be better, faster and do it harder than those other guys. The good news is you have the only playbook you will ever need.

Here’s to your incredible sales success!