13

Getting Help and Helping Others

Once I was staying with friends in Bombay who took me to a village wedding. Among the musicians was a teenager with a violin. I was struck by two things about him. First, he played the complex raga scales with a fluid elegance that was awesome. The second striking thing was that he didn’t put the violin under his chin as Western musicians are taught to do. He held it upright, like a small cello resting on his knee. I asked if this was the local style of playing and learned that it wasn’t. This young man had inherited the violin from an uncle and, by trial and error, learned how to play it. He never had a single music lesson and, until very recently, had never seen or heard any other violin player, which was why he held the instrument in such a peculiar way. It was a tribute to his determination and ingenuity that he played so well. I couldn’t help thinking, if only he’d had some help from a good teacher, he could easily have been a world-class virtuoso.

Since that day, I’ve come to realize just how unusual that young man was. Very few people are able to develop complex skills alone and unaided. Whether we’re talking about music, art, sports, or selling, most of us need some outside assistance if we hope to improve. We need a teacher, a guide, or a coach. A fieldbook like this can certainly be a help. It can, for example, show you the selling equivalent of how to hold the violin under your chin. But it’s no substitute for another person who can coach you—who can show you the finer points of violin playing. There are a few natural geniuses in this world like the young violinist who can find their own way unassisted. However, most of us need support from another person if we intend to polish and perfect our skills.

Where can you get help? Large organizations usually have some organized way to help their people develop and refine selling skills. They offer training programs or they have experienced sales managers whose job is to coach and guide salespeople. But if you work for a smaller company, you are rarely so lucky. Small organizations usually lack the resources to offer top class training. Their managers are often snowed under with a dozen priorities that leave them with little or no time for helping people develop selling skills. Even worse, if you are selling alone, if you are your company’s only salesperson or you are a one-person organization, then there’s no source of help inside your organization. Over the years, I’ve received many hundreds of calls from people looking for help. They want to go beyond the things that a book can teach, but they haven’t an experienced sales manager or access to a good company training program. What can they do?

Here’s the answer I give. First, be sure you’ve learned all you can reasonably get from teaching yourself. If you’re using a book like this one, set about the kind of systematic planning, practice, and self-analysis that we described in the last chapter. Even without additional help, it’s possible to go a long way if you are prepared to put effort into the exercise material. Next, think about three sources of help. These are:

Coaching from a mentor.

Two-way coaching.

Help from outside organizations.

Let’s examine each option more closely.

Coaching from a Mentor

Your manager, or a more experienced salesperson, may be willing to give you some time to help you develop skills. If you’re lucky enough to have this source of help available to you, use it well. Here are three ways in which an experienced mentor can be invaluable for developing skills.

Call Planning

Every minute spent in planning to make a call go right is worth ten spent in reviewing a lost sale or a call that went wrong. Use your mentor to help coach you in planning. And do plan a specific call. That’s a much better use of time than planning overall strategy. Too often we see salespeople go for help to experienced managers or colleagues, then spend their mentor’s scarce time on discussing only the big picture or the overall strategy. But the sad fact is this: No strategy is better than your capacity to execute it. The lowly sales call is a far better place to start improving your skill than flying at 30,000 feet over an account. Use your mentor to help you think about a specific call, about what needs to uncover and what questions to ask.

Role Playing

If you have access to a skilled mentor, then there are few better ways to learn than through role playing. After you’ve planned together, role play the call asking your mentor to play the buyer role. If possible, tape record the role play. Then replay the tape asking your mentor to comment. If you get to a section of the tape that you think you handled badly, or where you were unsure what to do, then ask your mentor to role play a suggested alternative way to handle the problem.

Real Calls

Best of all, if your mentor has time available, go on a call together. Choose a call that’s not too difficult, such as one involving an existing buyer where the discussion will be relatively easy and routine. Remember that your mentor is there as a coach. That means that you must do the selling. You’ll learn a lot less if your mentor sells for you. The role of the coach is to observe your selling and to give you feedback afterwards.

Two-Way Coaching

Many people don’t have access to an experienced coach or manager. So they feel doomed to learn alone. However, one of the most exciting and interesting ways to improve skills doesn’t need a mentor who has more experience than you possess. It’s called two-way coaching and it’s a method that allows you to learn from others who are also working to improve their selling. The basic idea is simple. Team up with another person who also wants to improve their skills. It doesn’t even have to be someone in your own company, as this example illustrates.

Two-Way Coaching in Action

Here are the steps to go through if you want to try two-way coaching.

1. Choose a partner.

As we’ve seen, it doesn’t have to be someone more experienced than you are, or even someone from the same company or the same type of business. The crucial thing is that you both would like to improve your selling and you are both prepared to put effort into helping each other.

2. Agree on a learning contract.

Set out clear principles for how you and your partner will two-way coach. Our suggested rules would be these:

Tell it straight. We’ll learn best from straight feedback. So we won’t pretend things were effective if they weren’t. We’ll tell it as it is, not say things to boost each other’s egos. Mutual admiration societies don’t build skills.

Place facts before interpretations. When we listen together to a tape of a call, or a tape we’ve made of ourselves role playing, we’ll always begin by discussing the objective facts, such as, “You asked three Problem Questions in that section” before we go on to interpretations such as, “I didn’t think that was a very good question to ask.”

Keep it confidential. We’re going to learn things about each other and our skills. We’ll keep this between us and not discuss the content of our two-way coaching discussions with others.

3. Plan together.

When you get together, plan two calls, one call each that you’ll be making before your next meeting. Plan the Advance and the questions you intend to ask. Use the Call Plan from this Fieldbook as your basic planning guide and discussion document. Explain to each other why a particular question would help uncover or develop needs and give each other suggestions for additional questions.

4. Record the call.

Most buyers are very receptive to having the call recorded, especially if you explain that you planned it with a colleague who can’t be at the meeting but who was interested in hearing what happened.

5. Review it together.

Use the SPIN® Form from the last chapter to analyze and discuss the call. Remember that it’s facts first and interpretations second.

6. Keep it up.

You won’t learn much from doing it just once. The plan–do–review cycle must be repeated several times before it starts to work. Most people who have tried two-way coaching say that you should give it four or five meetings before you see real results.

Two-way coaching [or Peer Coaching as it’s sometimes called] holds great potential. We think that it’s an exciting way to set about improving skills. If you decide to look for coaching help, either from a mentor or from two-way coaching, you might find it useful to read the chapter on sales coaching in our book Managing Major Sales (Rackham and Ruff, Harper Collins, 1991).

Help from Outside Organizations

A final option is to look for help from consultants or training organizations who run sales training programs. I say “final option” because I’ve generally thought of this as a last resort. Many of the programs offered to the public at large by the thousands of sales training vendors are low-level and ineffective. It’s hard to sort out which ones offer real value and which are a waste of time and money. How can you make sure that training or seminars offered by outside organizations will really help your selling? Here are a few hints to help you.

Beware of extravagant claims.

Any program that suggests it can “double your sales,” let you “close every deal,” or “have buyers eating out of your hand” is likely to be pure snake oil. The responsible vendors are the ones who make modest claims.

Beware of “new and dramatic breakthrough” programs.

Every few months we come across claims that someone has found a dramatic new approach to selling. Invariably, when we look closely, we have been disappointed. The only dramatic thing about most of these programs is their marketing hype.

Beware of “as used by IBM and other (rich and famous) companies” claims.

While I was working for Xerox, we trained more than three thousand of their salespeople and, in the process, got to know their training very well. So we were surprised to see, in a sales magazine, a program we’d never even heard of advertising itself as “the sales training that Xerox uses.” Xerox trainers were also puzzled. So they checked it out. They found that the “as used by” claim was based on the fact that two people from a branch of Xerox had been on the program. Like most large companies Xerox sent a participant to every new seminar just to check out whether there was anything interesting. I wonder how many people responded to the advertisement thinking that they were getting something widely used and endorsed by Xerox.

Caveat emptor. There are excellent training vendors out there who can really help you. But don’t be taken in by the claims of those who are more interested in your money than your needs. Check references carefully. Look at track records. Ask to talk with satisfied users, and, if possible, to a company that has put more than 100 people through the program. In that way you can tell that someone thought the program worthwhile enough to put several groups through it.

Of course, we too are in the training business and would love to help you. (After all, who knows the SPIN® model better than we do?) But, whether you get help from this Fieldbook alone, from coaching with other people, or from outside sources like ourselves, the important thing is that you work to improve your selling. Effective selling is the proverbial long journey that starts with a single step. It’s our hope that our research and this book have helped you a mile or two along the road to success.