An open letter to the Kenyan sales manager; teach your sales team to sell, not beg!

Link to the full article https://marketingnewsroom.africa/2021/09/29/an-open-letter-to-the-kenyan-sales-manager-teach-your-sales-team-to-sell-not-beg/

Sales; a word which scares off most people both in sales related and unrelated professions. Most people think of sales as an act of disposing of what you have to acquire people’s money, which is a very wrong definition. You sell a solution to a problem. By selling, you are telling us that you are the solution to our problem and that you expect us to pay you for solving our problem which costs more than our problem. You get the gist of it? You are a national sales manager. You drive a company car and live in a two bedroom in the high end areas of Kenya’s capital. When you go home for Christmas, your family is excited. If you work in FMCG, they know you will bring them product samples from your company; but that is besides the point. Congrats! You are good at what you do! I respect you for that. You are a closer. At the workplace, your subordinates respect you and some even envy you. They say imitation is the highest form of flattery and surely your subordinates do try to be like you. They try to speak like you, dress like you and act like you to the customer. You know how you say with calmness and confidence, “Here is what we are going to do…,”then continue to provide guidance when everyone else is in panic mode. Your subordinates do that when you are not around. They try to be like you. Your boss is pushing you for sales; asking why your region’s sales are not at the level they want it to be; but you do not panic. You stay rational and sane. You ask yourself the same question, “Why are we not selling as much as we want to?”

What if I told you, your subordinates understand your mannerisms except one key thing which they often all miss; you sell solutions, you control the frame in every sales situation. In the marketplace, customers can be ruthless about having their problems solved in the best possible way, but so can you be ruthless in presenting that best solution.? Do your subordinates realize that? That they too can walk away if a client does not believe they have a problem at all? Your work is not to convince people to buy from you, your work is to convince people that you have a solution and they have a problem; and that you can give them the solution to their problem for a lesser cost than the cost of their problem. You get it??

Example: In our marketing agency, we had a salesperson who was new in the job. He reported directly to me. we kept on pressuring him to “close new accounts”. He tried to copy my walking style to even our talking style when in front of a customer. He did it all well until we noticed one thing; he was getting the presentation bit wrong.?

He went to prospects with an attitude of, “I need your money or else our boss is going to get mad at us for not closing you.”?

Let us dissect the above thought process. The last part is true. I respect closers and get mad at people who always say “the prospect is in the pipeline” for up to 6 years! We all respect closers. The first part however is not true. He did not need that account. We did not need that account. What we need is to solve problems for qualified prospects. Qualified because these are prospects with whom we are aligned; budget wise, mindset wise and behavior wise. I talked to the salesperson and invited him to a prospect meeting. Here is how I started the meeting, “Prospect X, we agreed to be here at 9:00 A.M, here we are, let us get right into the agenda of the day. Here is what we will do: We will present our solution to you within the first five minutes after which we will allow you to ask us questions. After the question session, you will give an answer to the question whether you are willing to commit to our solution. To that question, you will answer either “yes” or “no” . We will leave at 9:45 for another meeting. Within the first twenty minutes, the prospect said, “We have a deal!” Our sales person was shocked. After the meeting, he told me,”I thought we would start by talking about how hard it was to find parking space, then ask about the kids and all that to build rapport.” I told him, “No, you do not have that time. The client only respects you when you look like you know what you are doing.” Needless to say, through practise, the sales person grew to become the best sales person our marketing agency has ever had. Teach your sales team to sell actual solutions like you do. Teach them to behave like they have options. It sounds like common sense but wait till we see how it is applied in the actual world. If you are selling us cleaning services for our office for? example, just dive right in, tell us where we are getting it wrong with our current suppliers (the problem) and how you can help us improve (the solution). We do not care about how crazy the last week has been for you for crying out loud. Let us do some math for it to make sense to you:

Let us say our marketing agency has an office in Kilimani, Nairobi. Our current cleaning supplier (a company) costs us Ksh. 165,000 per month. The cleaning company does not deliver; they leave most places dirty and we have had that conversation with them many times but they do not improve. You (as a sales manager of a cleaning company) get wind of our problem and you send your salesperson who then comes to us with a solution. You want to charge us Ksh. 185,000 with a promise that things will get done on time. Plus you will also clean our company cars as part of that package. If we break it down, we are spending Ksh. 165,000 per month to get the office cleaned. We are also spending Ksh. 30,000 on hiring someone internally to help with the cleaning of the company cars per month. our office admin who we pay Ksh. 75,000 per month spends at least one hour daily inspecting the poorly done work and asking for reworking of specific areas. One hour of their time equals Ksh. 360. One hour daily for twenty six days equals Ksh. 9360. In total therefore, we are spending ksh. 204,360. Remember, when the office admin has not inspected the place, we face the risk of a prospect walking in and us losing a contract because we look clumsy. Let us say the contract we lose per month is worth Ksh. 3,000,000 (the average marketing budget for a MSME). By cleaning on time, your company reduces the risk of us losing the Ksh. 3,000,000 contract, plus, you also charge Ksh. 185,000 versus the 204,360 we are spending now. Don’t we need you? So why come with unrelated issues like how our family is doing and how hard it was to find parking? Won’t we take you more seriously if you dive right in and break it down for us than if you come to us with an attitude of “I really need this deal?” You don’t need the deal. We need our office to be clean and we will pay you if it is done correctly. That is all! Whoever comes with that attitude closes the sale. I hope that this is your sales person because you will teach them this.

Train your sales team to be short and concise. No parking stories, no unrelated stories, no dilly dallying, just the solution. If you are forthcoming with me and you have checked that I have the budget, authority, need and you come at the correct time, my answer is either, “Yes” or “No.”?

If I say “No”, you move on. No sticking around, no “please allow us to tell you blah blah blah.” You just move on. Show us you have got options and that without us, you will not be crying outside sleeping hungry for days if not weeks. On the other hand, however, show us that without you, we will be sleeping hungry because our pain point will cost us a lot of money. Show us we may even develop stress related diseases because we will be in stress constantly. Make the solution the prize, not the money! That is all, dear sales manager. Break a leg!

You can find the full article here www.marketingnewsroom.africa?

Further reading if you want to be a sales and marketing expert:

1. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition
2. Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal?
3. Principles of Marketing (17th Edition)