CHAPTER 6

Our Sales Weapons: What’s in the Arsenal?

The expression “never bring a water pistol to a gunfight” reminds me of what the car dealer told me while delivering my first little Audi. After a comprehensive twenty-minute orientation covering the details of my finely tuned German machine, I asked if there was anything else I should know about driving the car. Excited to glean that last bit of wisdom from my personal Audi guru, and hoping to learn something I could brag about with my buddies, I listened with rapt attention as the salesman just smiled and said, “Don’t race a Corvette; you’ll lose.”

While it wasn’t the send-off message I was hoping for, it was a great piece of advice. Weapons matter. The better our weaponry, the more confidently we head into battle. My oldest son is a pro at the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare video game series. His mother doesn’t like that he is in the basement shooting bad guys on the big screen. My take is a little different. I love when he shoots the bad guys; it’s when he gets shot that I cringe. It is interesting to hear him talk about his favorite weapons and how he has become more proficient over time. My son’s current weapon of choice is the Intervention sniper rifle. His sniping has significantly improved with practice and, because of his mastery of the Intervention, my son is confident of his chances of winning every battle.

The same truths apply to a new business development sales attack. Every salesperson must be armed with the necessary weapons and then become proficient at firing those weapons at target accounts. That is how we win the sales battle.

Salespeople not properly equipped for battle are less likely to engage with prospects. And those who are armed but ineffective at launching these weapons will either miss their targets completely or not get noticed when they do pull the trigger. You probably know several ill-equipped sales reps who are reluctant to engage prospects because they don’t know what to do. And then there are the ineffective reps who are willing to pull the trigger but consistently take terrible shot after terrible shot; their feeble attempts fail to score a direct hit or move the sales process forward. Reluctant and ineffective are not words we want describing our sales effort.

Marshaling the Weapons in Your Arsenal

Visualize the salesperson as an elite fighter pilot. The mission: Acquire enough new pieces of business or new accounts to exceed sales goal. Once our pilot is locked into a strategic, finite, focused, workable list of targets (see Chapter 5), it’s time to load the fighter jet with weapons required to execute the attack and carry out the mission. Here’s a sampling of the weapons cache available for the sales battle:

  Our Sales Story. The story is foundational to everything we do in sales, and we use bits and pieces of it in all of our weapons. By “story” I’m referring to the language or talking points we use when asked what we do or when we tell someone about our business. It’s so critical to our success that the next two chapters are dedicated to helping you create and implement a succinct, powerful, differentiating, customer-focused story.

  Networking. This is the age-old practice of building relationships and connecting with people who can help us. Networking is an art form for many veteran sales reps, whose packed Rolodexes are the equivalent to having a proverbial key to the city (for readers born after 1980, just substitute “electronic address book” for Rolodex).

  Social Media. The opportunity to research and connect with potential customers has exponentially increased with the social media revolution. While certain aspects of the Internet have made selling more challenging, tools like LinkedIn and Twitter are versatile weapons, providing information and opportunity to engage with prospects in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

  E-Mail. E-mail has become the primary weapon of choice for many sales hunters when making an initial contact with prospects. It is less disruptive to the potential customer, and less reliant on the salesperson’s ability to execute a proactive telephone call. Because it is less intimidating overall, e-mail can be a creative and effective entrée to an account.

  The Proactive Telephone Call. Much to the dismay of many Sales 2.0 pontificators and scared sales reps, I remain a huge fan of our old friend, the telephone. Bar none, the phone is still the most deadly and accurate weapon to score a face-to-face meeting with a target prospect. I attribute much of my own success as a new business salesperson to the quantity and quality of proactive phone calls (some ice-cold) made over the years. The concepts shared in Chapter 9 will provide everything necessary to help make you great on the phone.

  Voice Mail. Voice mail is reality, and anyone in sales needs to deal with it. I’m tired of all the whining about reaching a prospect’s voice mail. If we’re going to get voice mail more than half of the time, let’s change our attitude about it. What a wonderful opportunity to drop a tidbit of our sales story, position ourselves as a value creator, and begin building a relationship. Yes, you can build a relationship with someone through voice mail messages.

  Traditional Printed Marketing Materials. Sell sheets, brochures, catalogs, and introductory letters to prospects sent via snail mail. These weapons have been around for ages and, when used properly, are still beneficial today.

  Digital Marketing Tools: Blogs, Podcasts, Online Videos (YouTube), and Webinars. These powerful and interactive tools put a modern twist on traditional sales materials. This relatively new genre of weapons is attractive for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the incredibly low cost of production combined with the ease of updating content. Today’s effective salesperson creatively deploys these tools to deliver ideas and value as appetizers that entice prospects to want to know more.

  White Papers and Industry Experts. Third-party, unbiased, or academic information can be launched before, during, and after the initial sales call to help pique a prospect’s interest. Often, buyers are more receptive to information highlighting industry issues and marketplace realities from outside sources and respected gurus. It follows that a potential customer receiving this third-party information assumes that the salesperson providing the material has a meaningful solution to the issues presented.

  The Initial Face-to-Face Sales Call. The first face-to-face meeting with a prospect is the pinnacle of what we do in sales. The simple goal of all weapons launched beforehand is to set up the sales call. That’s not true for the inside sales rep who conducts full sales calls over the phone. But for the outside rep, that initial meeting is the big enchilada—it’s what we work so hard to achieve. Chapter 10 will help us prepare for the call, and Chapter 11 provides a fail-safe structure for conducting winning sales calls.

  Probing Questions. I’m convinced that more and better selling is accomplished by asking great questions than by making great presentations. Professional reps can significantly move the sales ball forward when they become proficient at asking pain-seeking, opportunity-uncovering, probing questions. And salespeople who are incompetent at asking questions will embarrass themselves and lose ground faster than one can imagine.

  Case Studies. The proof is in the pudding. I don’t know where that expression originated, but it sure applies here. Case studies of how we’ve helped other clients are powerful evidence that what we sell is real and works. It’s a thing of beauty when a salesperson weaves relevant case studies and client successes into the dialogue with a prospect.

  Samples and Demos. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Most salespeople are armed with samples and demos because these weapons are important to the marketing folks. While these materials are very effective when used well, I’ve seen too many examples of boring, self-focused demos blowing up in the salespersons hands.

  Trade Shows. While a costly and seemingly outdated platform, trade shows remain a viable and efficient way to connect live with large numbers of customers and prospects. All it takes is one meaningful lead becoming a major account and you become a fan of trade shows for life.

  Facility Tours. For many companies, their place of business is a memorable and differentiating sales weapon. The salesperson can provide the prospect with a great feel for his company’s people, culture, and processes. One of my best friends and sales mentors sold 401(k) plans for a giant financial company. He had a reputation for turning the prospect site tour into a well-orchestrated selling science. Every step of the tour was planned, and he insisted that key players rehearse their roles.

  Team Selling. Top-performing hunters must become masters at using all available resources to win business. Team selling can take various forms. Personally, I love to drag the CEO or other senior executives along for high-level sales calls. The very presence of senior executives demonstrates commitment to earning the prospect’s business and also helps keep the conversation focused on the buyer’s business issues as opposed to the finer details of the deal. Another bonus of involving senior managers is that they become personally invested in the opportunity and usually make every effort to help you close the deal. It’s also advantageous to use other subject matter experts (SMEs) from your company. In certain businesses, sales engineers, program coordinators, implementation specialists, or even account managers play essential roles in the sales process. This is particularly true in technical sales, where the sales rep is often seen only as the “relationship” person and the buyer prefers talking to technical experts.

  Entertainment. This is a main reason that a good number of people outside of sales resent those of us in sales. They hear about expensive dinners or seeming perks such as taking customers to ball games and they’re jealous. Of course, they’re not jealous of our having to call strangers on the phone, or getting stood up for meetings, or being stranded in airports because of flight cancellations. The truth remains that a ton of business is conducted away from the office and entertainment is a wonderfully effective weapon when used appropriately.

  Presentations. While I’ve come to hate the word presentation for good reason (see Chapter 13), presentations are expected or obligatory pieces of the selling process in many situations. When planned and executed properly, a killer presentation can be the difference maker that truly sets you apart from the competition. To be successful, we must perfect the art of drafting and delivering effective presentations.

  Proposals. Proposals come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes we’re forced to respond to a formal request for proposal (RFP), but in most cases we have the freedom to craft a highly customized document for our potential customer. Since the proposal is one of the final weapons we would fire at a target account, and since it’s the one they can say “yes” to, it is certainly worth the effort to hone our proposal-writing skills.

  References. Right along with case studies, references serve as validation that we’re as good as we say we are. Testimonials and third-party endorsements are more credible than anything we can say about ourselves, which makes cultivating usable references a worthwhile endeavor. It’s ideal to have a variety of references so that you’re in the advantageous position of being able to pick and choose the most relevant references for specific new business opportunities. And it’s also perfectly acceptable to coach your references (assuming your relationship is solid enough) on what they should say or how they might be able to assist in winning over your prospect. The best sales reps maintain fantastic reference relationships and use them as deal-closing weapons whenever possible.

We have quite a stockpile of available weapons to launch a new business sales attack. Yet, of all the weapons I’ve listed, only a handful of them are truly “owned” by sales. Other weapons are developed and maintained by different parts of the organization and our role is simply to fire them, when appropriate, to help advance the sales effort.

In the next several chapters, we’ll focus attention on the three mission-critical weapons that we fully control and which have the most dramatic impact on sales performance: the sales story, the proactive telephone call, and the face-to-face sales call.