The Power Of Marginal Gains To Win Sales – Part 2: Building A Customer Buyer Persona / Creating Resilience In Salespeople

Sub title: Creating Customer Buyer Personas & Building Resilience

In my previous article, The Power Of Marginal Gains To Win Sales – Part 1, I explained the principle of marginal gains, which has been so successfully applied in the world of competitive sports by Sir Dave Brailsford and British Cycling and is again evident in the 2018 Tour de France by Team Sky.

If I asked you to improve each aspect of your sales process and then add together all those individual improvements, is it possible that you might experience an overall gain of more than 10%? However, what if I'd first asked you to improve your overall selling ability by 10% or 15%, would you know how to go about achieving this?

Improvement One Step At A Time

By breaking down each element of your sales activity into its individual component part and then making small adjustments to each one, you will significantly increase the chances of achieving a larger overall improvement in your ability to get your customers to buy from you.

How many steps does a typical sales process have? I’m sure you can immediately come up with 5 or 6 including: prospecting, qualifying the customer, presentation skills, closing techniques, follow up etc. Now add to these; proposal writing, negotiation, resilience, objection handling, developing a personal brand, planning and scheduling sales activity, using assertive communication skills, understanding body language.

Ultimately, you could end up with a list of 20 or more areas where a 1% improvement could be applied.

The power of marginal gains is about breaking down everything that goes into the sales process and then improving it by 1%. By aggregating each of these marginal gains you should expect to experience a significant overall improvement in your sales results. 

In this article, the 2nd in the series, I want to examine 2 further aspects of the sales process, included in my training programme, which are; Creating A Customer Buyer Persona and Building Resilience.

Let’s start by examining what is a customer buyer persona?

Who Is Your Ideal Customer And Who Is Not?

Customers fall roughly into 3 categories: Good, bad and the downright ugly. No surprises which type of customer you would prefer to deal with, right? Hopefully you said ‘Good’?

But what makes up a ‘Good’ customer? This is where your customer buyer persona comes into play. A buyer persona is a record of relevant qualifying information, combined with a benchmark of what a good customer should look like – it is also an assessment of what a bad customer might look like too.

A buyer persona is a model to help you identify the type of customer you’d like to do business with, whilst eliminating any negative traits you’d absolutely want to avoid.

Creating Your Ideal Buyer Persona

In the image below, the green column reflects the positive points you’re looking for in an ideal customer, based on your experience of other ideal customers from the past. Let’s look at the first of the green points, ‘His/Her Why’.

I’d like you to think about the very best customers you’ve ever had, what was their ‘Why?', their key driver, why do they do what they do, what are their values? How did these ideal customers demonstrate their values?

Now consider your very worst customer. They may well have had some well-meaning mission statement hanging on the wall in the boss’s office but when it came to demonstrating those values, how did they measure up?

Once you identify that value driven customers are better customers, then you make sure this becomes one of the key check-off points contained in your customer buyer persona checklist.

As well as using this approach to identify potential ideal customers, a well-constructed buyer persona will also help you avoid doing business with your less than ideal customer. Take one of the points shown in red below, ‘Requires too much hand holding’ This point could refer to those customers, who despite your best efforts, fail to reply to your follow up calls or continually promise to discuss your proposal with other key stakeholders in their business and then don't. They're often friendly, well-meaning people but in the end they fail to deliver. You may get there in the end but this type of customer drains you of your time and energy and significantly increases your cost per sale. 

By including a reference, on your buyer persona checklist, to ‘Requires too much hand holding’, you are primed to identify, through a combination of effective qualification and past experience, whether this potential customer has the necessary influence, authority and capability to champion your proposal with other key influencers in your prospect's business. In some cases, you may come to the conclusion that this sale may actually be more trouble than it’s worth – yes, this does mean that there will be some sales you may actually have to walk away from. 

Knowledge Is Power

The more you recognise what makes up an ideal customer and the more information you possess about them; their priority initiatives, pain points, trigger events etc, the more effectively you’ll be able to communicate with prospective clients and understand if you are both a good fit for one another and in turn, how you can best help them buy your product or service.

Building Resilience Or What It Takes To Keep Going When You Don’t Feel Like It

Have you ever taken your motivational temperature ahead of a sales meeting – are you up for the challenge right now?

Next time you are about to head into a client meeting, perform this motivational temperature check and ask yourself these 3 questions:

1. On a scale from 1-5, how motivated do I feel right now?

2. If I’m not registering a 5, what thoughts am I having that are impacting on me?

3. What cognitive actions can I undertake before I go into the meeting which will move my motivation score to reach 5?

By cognitively recognising how motivated you feel prior to a meeting and then making a 1% adjustment to how you feel, this could make all the difference between you making the sale or being sent home without an order.

It may be that you’ll have to take your motivational temperature several times a day to ensure that you’re constantly at level 5.

To Stress Or Not To Stress

Resilience requires you to manage a number of traits and attitudes, which may impact positively or negatively on your ability to make a sale, for example, how you manage stress.

Experts would suggest that under certain levels of stress, human beings excel and rise to most challenges. On other occasions however, stress can be so debilitating that you are unable to get out of bed in a morning, let alone make a sale.

The diagram above demonstrates what is known as The General Adaptation Syndrome created by Hans Selye. It demonstrates how stress is an adaptive response to stressors. In sales, stressors might include a prospect no-show, a lost deal, a difficult or challenging customer or heavy traffic delaying your arrival at your next sales meeting.

Following the initial stress alarm, our automatic response is to try and manage the stress (resistance). Over time however, managing stressful situations can become wearing and lead to exhaustion and possible stress related illnesses.

Sales can be a highly stressful environment and how you deal with daily stressors will make the difference between a successful or unsuccessful sales week.  

Applying Marginal Gains To Manage Stress

In much the same way as we explored introducing the motivational temperature check, when it comes to managing stress, a Cognitive Checklist will help you cope with challenging situations which may, even temporarily, knock you back and impact negatively on your ability to make a sale.

The Cognitive Checklist includes 8 key steps.

If you’re not familiar with Point 1, the ‘Stop’ technique, it’s an approach widely used by cognitive behavioural therapists. As the name suggests, whenever you experience negative or stressful thoughts that are beginning to bring your levels of motivation down, you yell ‘STOP’ at the top of your voice.

This approach may seem somewhat extreme but therapists have discovered that by shouting the word ‘Stop’ this often distracts the person from thinking about the negative thoughts occupying their mind. Try it, see if this pattern interrupt works for you. After one or two times of shouting ‘STOP out loud, you’ll find that doing this in your head will be just as effective and slightly less embarrassing when you’re in public!

As you can see from the other 7 points shown in the Cognitive Checklist above, the goal is to pick apart each aspect of your thought process, as you experience stress taking hold and then at Point 7, reassessing these thoughts to find a more fair and balanced set of beliefs that you can then act on and move forward in a more motivated state.

You may argue that such attention to detail is time consuming and would it really make a difference? I’d ask you to consider, as I suggested earlier, that by making incremental and marginal improvements to each part of the sales process, you stand a greater chance of winning more business in the long-term. Also, this approach is far easier to achieve than being told to improve your overall performance in one go.

Resilience is a wide topic and during my training, we explore other areas related to resilience, such as applying positive filters, building positivity, developing confidence, amongst other topics. By breaking down each element, related to building resilience in sales, your goal is to make a 1% improvement to each – it’s about examining each aspect of your sales activity and making a simple adjustment to each one. The result is a much larger, aggregated improvement in your sales performance.

If this topic of marginal gains to help you improve your sales performance has captured your imagination and you’re interested in learning more, don’t forget to read my previous article and look out for the next in the series, where I’ll explore 2 more aspects of applying marginal gains to win more sales – these will be: Planning & Scheduling Sales Activity and How To Become a More Effective Communicator.

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