Is "social proof" screwing B2B sales?

This Week's Edition

• Introduction (and excuses)
• The Article - Is Social Proof Screwing B2B Sales (hint - the answer is "yes")
• Tactic of the Week - what NOT to say when you call someone for the first time

Introduction (and excuses)

I know, last week I promised I'd write more about preparing for your first "long" meeting with a senior executive in an important prospect. And I will. Soon.

But events intervened. Last week I saw a post by Nicholas Thickett about tracking reps activities. It started like this:

I can't shake this conversation with a VP of Sales.

Me: What would happen if you stopped tracking reps activities?

VP of Sales: We would miss targets

Me: You've had less than 60% quota attainment the last 3 years tracking activities according to your CRM. How did tracking activities get you closer to the target?

VP of Sales: Then WTF should I be doing Nick?

There's more - you can read the entire post here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6951588585397510145/

But it got me thinking, because I have a visceral hatred of the current obsession with tracking activities. It inspired me to write this week's article about my strong belief that many, if not most, sales leaders have an false world view about sales.

A world view that has been proven to lead to poor results, stressed, unhappy employees, high salesforce turnover, high sales leader turnover, poor company performance and unhappy customers.

This is in fact very relevant to the rest of my articles in this newsletter because this false world view leads to underperformance and makes it harder for salespeople and sales leaders to do the things I recommend and write about.

Normal service - my approach to preparing for longer meetings with executives - will be resumed next week.

As always I will respond to all comments and questions and I'd very much appreciate it if you'd "like" this article (assuming you do) so the LinkedIn house elves share it with more people. If you'd like to share it I'll be even more grateful.

The Article - Is "Social Proof" Screwing Sales?

Back in the 70s I was co-owner of a shop in Bristol with my four flatmates. It sold cards & posters & did block mounting.

We bought it from Rodney Matthews & his partner Terry Brace - Rodney was a well known graphic artist who designed fantasy album covers for Hawkwind & book covers for Michael Moorcock. Check him out, he's still good.

We also sold badges with trendy and sometimes risque slogans like "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", "Moby Dick is not contagious" and "Muffin the Mule is not illegal".

(Sadly two of my flatmates have left us but anotgher still runs the shop - Sky, Waterloo Street, Clifton - if you're near pop in & say "hi" to Mart, the owner, from Kogs - my nickname there).

What does this have to do with selling & social proof?

Well, one of the badges said "Eat shit - 80 billion flies can't be wrong". Which - many years before?Robert Cialdini?wrote his brilliant book Influence - used absurdum ad infinitum to lampoon social proof.

The point is, just because everyone does something doesn't mean it's right. As Jim Jones proved in Georgetown.

That, IMHO, is the biggest problem with B2B sales today. People do things, others copy them, "thought leaders" talk about them & soon it's a bandwaggon that everyone jumps on.

Even if it's careering downhill out of control in the wrong direction.

I believe the majority of B2B sales leaders (by no means all - certainly not YOU) have fallen into the trap of accepting an incorrect world view.

The wrong (but prevalent) world view of sales

This world view goes as follows.

Sales, especially prospecting, is a tough, unpleasant .job. Most salespeople are weak and lazy. They need to just grit their teeth, suck it up and get on with the unpleasant job. Sales is a numbers game and you need to get a lot of "Nos" for every "Yes".

Salespeople need to learn to live with rejection. But they don't like putting in the hard graft that's needed to sell a lot.

This world view leads to the question "How can we bribe/force/motivate them to do what we want them to do?"

The (wrong) answer

Or rather the right answer to the wrong question.

B.F. (Burrhus Frederic - weird names eh?)?Skinner, a leader in the behaviourist movement of psychology, developed the theory of operant conditioning in the seventies. This is the idea that behavior is determined by its consequences, be they reinforcements or punishments, which make it more or less likely that the behavior will occur again.

In plain English, the carrot and the stick.

In this theory behaviour is determined by external "motivation" - the desire to get pleasure and to avoid pain. There's certainly SOME truth in this but (in my opinion and in that of most modern psychologists) this is simplistic and doesn't take into account intrinsic (or internal) motivation.

And intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic motivation (that is, the carrot and the stick) is a much more powerful force. Here's an example from my life.

An example of internal motivation

In the winter of 1987 I got up at 4.00 am pretty much every day for three months to run anything from 10 km of intervals to 25 km long runs. It was a miserable winter and it pissed down almost every day. It was cold, it was dark, it was wet and it hurt. I averaged over 90km a week for 13 or 14 weeks.

Why did I put myself through all that at age 35? I did it because I'd set myself a goal to run a marathon in less than 2 hours 50 minutes (I failed by 13 seconds). No-one paid me. No-one promised to fire me or punish me for not doing it. I wasn't going to win a medal. No-one made me do it. No-one asked me to do it (my wife said I was a nutcase for doing it, although she did support me).

In fact if anyone had tried make me do something similar that I wasn't passionate about, using a carrot or stick, I'd have resisted fiercely (I don't like being told what to do).

Only internal motivation got me out of bed. (The picture is from my previous marathon in 1985). Oh, one other thing got me out of bed. I trained with a couple of friends who helped me. When my bed was warm and the wind was lashing the rain through the trees the knowledge one of my friends was waiting for me and I'd be letting them down if I stayed in bed - that got me up.

The desire to be part of a team and to support your fellow team members is a massive motivating force.

The result of asking (and answering) the wrong question

If the question is "how do we get salespeople to do a repetitive, unpleasant job" it's no surprise the prevailing view is usually based on Skinner's behaviourism.

This leads to the carrot of commission. Which in itself isn't totally an awful thing, although I much prefer paying salespeople a decent salary plus a team based bonus.

But when salespeople are kept "hungry" by paying them an inadequate base salary and making them dependent on commission to survive it leads to bad outcomes.

The salespeople become very stressed - making the supposed carrot more like a stick - and it encourages bad behavious - overpromising, discounting, overselling and worse. When a salesperson is stressed and desperate it's bad for them, for the customer and eventually for he company.

It also leads to multiple sticks. Such as

• The fear of redundancy
• The fear of missing ever more onerous targets
• Micromanagement
• Tighter and tighter control of activities - calls, meetings, leads, demonstrations, proposals, keeping Godzilla the CRM fed - and harsh consequences for failing to achieve what are often arbitrary (and sometimes damaging) targets.

Which leads to even more stress, even more fear - and the complete destruction of whatever internal motivation the salespople originally had. There's nothing better than fear and having someone on your back all the time to discourage you and demotivate you.

And do you know what's so stupid about this?

IT DOESN'T WORK!

We KNOW it doesn't work.

Fewer and fewer sales teams make their targets. The average tenure of a B2B salesperson is 15 months. It takes three to six months to come up to speed, giving salespeople less than a year to make it before they leave - taking knowledge, relationships and information with them.

The average tenure of a sales leader is even less - 14 months. Again, this approach is bad for sales, bad for salespeople, bad for sales leaders, bad for customers and bad for vendors. The only people it's good for are therapists and recruitment firms.

A better world view - and better questions

Here's my world view with respect to sales and salespeople.

No-one wants to fail. Every salesperson wants to succeed. Most salespeople are motivated to work hard in order to succeed. Most salespeople are driven at least in part by internal motivation - the much stronger motivation.

There are many reasons salespeople don't make their quotas, including:

• They don't have the skills or training
• They're knocking themselves out to reach daft targets that don't make sense
• They're expected to leap large quotas at a single bound with little or no help
• They spend too much time doing unproductive stuff (like putting heaps of info into CRMs that swallow it and never regurgitste it)
• They're running scared all the time
• They're expected to be the Lone Ranger - a gun salesperson that does everything themselves, without even a Tonto to help them
• Unrealistic short term goals (and quarterly targets)

But "They're lazy and don't want to put in the work, they just need a kick up the backside" isn't one of them.

So let's assume salespeople are ALREADY motivated. They WANT to succeed. They are prepared to work hard. That changes the question sales leaders ask themselves. Much better questions are:

1. How can we make sales easier and more fun?
2. How can we use human nature to make our sales team more effective?
3. How can we support our salespeople to help them succeed?
4. What are we doing that doesn't need to be done?
5. What are our salespeople doing that other people can do for them? (This does NOT mean getting inexperienced SDRs to do the prospecting - that just shifts the problem.)
6. How can we work as a team and use the human desire to help your teammates?

That's why I've written this particular article this particular week. Because it's easy for me to sit in my office (actually my bedroom) pontificating about taking a long term perspective and putting in the research and understanding what senior executives care about and preparing for meetings and so on.

But if the people who have to do this - the salespeople - are stressed, obsessed with short term targets and pointless activities, micromanaged to death and are having their internal motivation sucked out of them - then it won't happen.

My solution

"OK" say the sales leaders reading this, "that's easy for you to say. But what would you do in my place?"

Well, I realise you have constraints on what you're able to do. But putting those aside, here's what I'd do if I was running a B2B sales team (which I have done in the past).

1. I'd pay everyone involved in the sales process - SDRs (if you use them - not my favourite approach but that's another story), AEs, CX people, pre-sales support, etc. - a decent base salary so they can go to work free from fear.
2. I'd set team goals so everyone has shared targets and is motivated to help everyone else succeed. Who's in the team? It depends on what you sell but those mentioned above plus perhaps selected people in marketing.
3. I'd look at the activities I measure and I'd ask myself why we're measuring them, if we need to and what the end result of measuring them is. For example, if you measure marketing on leads they're motivated to generate lots of leads - not necessarily quality leads. If you measure SDRs on dials they'll dial the local pizza place if they have to in order to achieve their goals.
4. I'd get rid of all activities based on pure numbers (calls, dials, leads) and focus on more value adding activities (second meetings, sales, etc.). Obviously this takes analysis and thought.
5. I'd try, as much as possible, to move my focus from short term goals and quarterly quotas to longer term targets. IMHO quarterly targets just promote panic and dicsounting. Me, personally, I'd rather make a $100k sale the day after the quarter ends than a $90k sale with a 10% discount the day before.
6. As a manager I'd spend a LOT less time micromanaging - none in fact - and a LOT more time coaching and communicating. I'd set up regular SHORT team meetings where the team works together to achieve agreed, shared goals.
7. I'd be looking at what prevents us from making sales and how we can make it easier for customers to buy from us.
8. I'd be focusing on targeting and the other things i've discussed in this newsletter.

That's all a bit obvious and the actual approach would vary depending on many factors. But above all I'd be treating my salespeople as motivated, intelligent, eager people who want to succeed and asking myself what I could do as a sales leader to help them.

Oh - and I'd ask them that question. "What do you need from me and the company to help you succeed?"

Tactic of the Week - what NOT to say when you call someone for the first time

Sooner or later - probably sooner - you're going to make a sales call to someone you've never met. If you're an SDR or prospector you're going to do it a lot.

If you're trying to speak to a senior executive or an EA this is particularly important.

There are a couple of things you should never say. One is obvious and I've covered it before - "Hello, how are you?" or some variation thereof.

Why? Because that's what everyone (or almost everyone) says - and it's equivalent to saying "Hi, this is a cold call, I'm going to ask how you are but we both know I really don't give a damn". But let's put that aside because there's something else that you should never say.

It's "Hello, my name is Steve Hall". Why? Well for one thing, your name isn't Steve Hall. But more seriously it's because "my name is ....." also notifies the the person you're calling that they don't know you. And often - not always but often - barriers spring up and they stop listening.

Why tell them that?

They'll work it out anyway soon enough but if they spend the first few seconds wondering if they do know you, and where from, it causes a tiny bit of confusion - and curiousity. And people are more likely to keep listening to work out who you are if that aren't sure.

It's simple, it's subtle but it can make the difference between a hang up and a conversation.

What do you say instead? That depends on your natural style to some extent but here's what I say.

Either "Hi, this is Steve (Hall) " or "Hi, it's Steve" depending on who I'm calling and how I feel. It's simple, it's short and it's informal. If I'm calling an EA it positions me as an equal - to them AND potentially to the person they assist. Ditto if I'm calling an executive.

What you say is up to you. But don't say what everyone else does. Be yourself - and have fun.