CHAPTER 7
PRACTICE 5: BUILD A LEGACY
OF SALES LEADERSHIP
WE’VE SAID THAT EFFECTIVE LEADERS are trustworthy people with high purpose, who in turn inspire a level of trust that creates deep loyalty among employees, customers, and extended communities of all kinds. Perhaps nowhere does purposeful, inspiring leadership have the ability to bring about more radical transformation today than in the realm of the sales organization. The assumption throughout the past century was that if you wanted greater sales, all you needed was great salespeople, but that’s no longer true. Customers’ demands are too high, and the selling environment is too complex. Leaders who are in tune with the current reality recognize that building an enduring legacy of success doesn’t come from creating great salespeople, it comes from creating a superior sales culture—in other words, what your salespeople do every day.
It’s more than a shift of focus within the organization. It’s part of a fundamental paradigm shift that corresponds with a host of changes in the buyer-seller relationship. In the past decade, selling has changed more rapidly than in all five decades before. Buyers now know more than ever about their needs and choices, and your competition. They engage sellers later in the buying cycle, after needs, budgets, and options have been identified. Buyers will meet with sellers, but only when the seller has a high-value perspective, point of view, service, or product. And they will no longer tolerate the Twenty Questions game.
On the other side of the table, sellers have tremendous access to data about customers and potential customers, and can easily identify their targets. But sellers are behind the curve, reacting to change with buyers rather than leading that change. Companies are in the position of having way too many demands on their budgets for all the tools, systems, approaches, and training in which they could invest for their sales force. Our research shows that somewhere north of 50 percent of customer loyalty is established before customers experience a service or take delivery of a product. This means that how you sell matters way more than what you sell. It means that the buying and selling experience is a big part of your brand. The leader who creates a sales culture that reflects this understanding can lead an organization to victory.
What kind of buying experience is your sales team creating? Is it the tired solution-seller/problem-solving model, where they ask question after question with nothing to add? Or how about the pesky pushers, chasing quotas and prodding or even insulting customers? Or just another seller, who could work for you or any of your competitors, and no one would know the difference? How about the fulfiller? All they want to know is, “How can I help you today?” They aren’t able to add real value beyond simply filling orders.
Instead, what if your sellers were well-informed, insightful, trustworthy businesspeople, who were looking to create value with and for clients? A sales force like this runs on a combination of critical communication skills coupled with disciplined business thinking and focused execution. This enables your salespeople to talk honestly and put insightful thinking on the table, explore important issues, and collaborate to craft solutions that exactly meet clients’ needs. The goal is to help clients succeed.
This model of selling engages and motivates your entire sales culture, empowering the sales force to do something for clients rather than to them, and unleashes extraordinarily productive behaviors that can lead to unprecedented success. When your organization is equipped with a strong and authentic sales culture, it can move the world. You not only can create better business and better relationships, but also compete more effectively.
CREATING A GREAT SALES CULTURE
The difference between creating great salespeople and creating a great sales culture is well illustrated in the remarkable story of nine young athletes from the state of Washington who rowed their way to victory in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Germany. The young men of the University of Washington crew team had rowed together for less than five months before the start of that year’s games in Berlin, and unlike their competitors—many of whom came from elite and privileged backgrounds—the Washington crew was composed of kids from middle- and working-class families, the sons of shipyard workers, lumberjacks, and farmers.
But they didn’t need wealth or privilege to win the race. They needed synergy. By literally pulling together and operating in nearperfect synchronization under the effective direction of their coach, the crewmates of the Husky Clipper challenged and beat the greatest teams in the world. One of rowing’s finest achievements wasn’t the work of a dream team of superstars, but “an improbable assemblage”1 of earnest, committed, and hard-working team members. Individually, they were talented, but together they were unbeatable.
The truth is, you don’t need sales superstars. You need a super sales culture, where ordinary people do extraordinary things. Unfortunately, our hands-on research has shown that business leaders tend to think about maintaining the culture of their sales organization in the same way that the Mississippi River floods the delta. Every seven years, this force comes along and destroys everything in its wake. It replenishes the soil, and then the nourishment is depleted over time until the flood returns. This approach is never going to create a sustainable, best-in-class sales culture and organizational sales capability.
Imagine if a software developer said, “Once our people learn a certain way to code, we’re never going to give them any more education or information.” How long would it be until they were irrelevant in the computing space and their people unemployable? A year? Maybe three? They’d be out of business. And yet companies routinely treat their sales teams this way.
If what you’re trying to build is a sales legacy, then that goal requires ongoing care and feeding. Unfortunately, there’s a common belief that building a high-performance sales culture and capability is both difficult and expensive. But it doesn’t have to be hard, and it only costs too much if you try to do too much. The truth is that instead of spending like the seven-year flood, the whole process can be better served by smoothing out the economic curve. Rather than investing enormous amounts of money in sales performance improvement one year, followed by a multiyear drought, your organization can commit a smaller amount every year to engage in a powerful, renewable cycle in which you define and focus on a target, measure results so that you can fine-tune, and continuously improve. By doing this, you can actually avoid going through a hard and expensive process.
There are leaders in industries who see the value of this approach and have the courage to stand up for it, saying, “This is how we’re going to run. This is what it means to be part of this community.” Our Sales Performance Practice Leader, Randy Illig, speaks with admiration about one client of ours, a chief sales officer, who was recruited to join an ailing company that, despite twenty years in business and multibillion-dollar sales, had lost its way. Among other troubles, the organization was experiencing extensive turnover in the executive ranks, and the sales force was fractured, with one sales force for each of the five operating units. “There was nothing consistent in how they worked with customers or how they thought about selling,” Randy says. “The sales organization was a group of individuals who sold. It wasn’t an organization with its own heartbeat or positive sales culture.”
The new sales leader decided that what the company actually needed wasn’t new or more salespeople; in fact, he eliminated a large number of the team. Rather, they needed to figure out how to become a great selling organization, and how to create a culture of high performance around selling. Over the course of three years, working with FranklinCovey’s Sales Performance Practice, this sales leader took a company where revenue was shrinking, performance was low and getting worse—and where there was tremendous turnover and a lack of consistency in the sales force and sales management ranks—and created a unified sales culture for the first time in the company’s twenty-year history.
To do it, he consolidated the group into one selling organization and gave the individuals an identity, both in name and purpose. He instituted all the things that you’d see in any great culture. He made performance expectations and processes clear. He invested in education and tools. He aligned salespeople’s compensation more clearly to their objectives. He outlined how each member of the team would contribute and trained them to execute well. From the front-line salespeople to the CEO, all levels of the team knew what to do and how to do it. He got the sales organization to work as a system.
One year into the transition, a leading industry analyst had the opportunity to interview several of the company’s clients. The analyst reported back to Randy that the customers he’d spoken with had made a point of discussing how much they appreciated the new way that the company had been selling. The analyst said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. Because your customers notice and value the difference.” This unsolicited praise reinforced the fact that it wasn’t just what the team was selling but how they were selling that was registering as a competitive advantage.
The outcomes were dramatic. By the end of the sales leader’s first year, the company’s total sales went from declining to increasing by 35 percent. Sales to new accounts went up 154 percent. Add-on sales increased 133 percent. The total number of sales rose 14.7 percent. Average deal size increased by 18 percent. And for the first time, people who were part of the sales organization were proud to be affiliated with that part of the business. They were engaged, they had an identity, and they had the performance to go along with it.
How does your sales force feel about representing your organization? Are they proud to be affiliated with your brand? Are they clear about your expectations? Are the processes for developing business clear? Have you invested in both the education and tools to help them succeed?
SOLUTIONS HAVE NO INHERENT VALUE
Building a culture that has a focused intent on helping your customers succeed fundamentally changes the way you do business—and requires a different mindset and skillset than has typically been engrained in organizations for the past century. One of the major shifts in mindset that needs to take place is the idea that you should meet the client with the solution in hand. Sales professionals tend to think everyone needs what they have, that their solution is universally applicable. However, solutions only derive value from the problems they solve that people care about, and from producing results that people highly value. Solutions must solve something. If there is nothing the client wants to solve, there is no value to the proposed solution. Understanding this axiom should guide everything you do with clients.
Salespeople are often eager to tell their clients, “The solution to your problem is …” Let’s take a moment and examine that short phrase. Before reading further, take a couple of minutes and write down the assumptions contained in the phrase:
“The solution to the problem is …”
Did you come up with some of these assumptions?
- There is only one problem. There are not multiple problems or several different problems intertwined.
- Likewise, there is only one solution.
- We can measure the extent of the problem.
- The solution would solve the entire problem.
- The cost of the solution is meaningfully less than the cost of the problem.
- Someone is willing and able to allocate sufficient resources to address the problem.
There are a dozen other assumptions you might name. And you could do the same exercise, with similar conclusions, if you substitute the word “opportunity” for the word “problem”: “The solution to the opportunity is …”
How can you talk intelligently about a solution to a problem without exploring the assumptions involved?
A MUTUAL CONSPIRACY
Nobody likes problems, so there is a mutual conspiracy between buyer and seller to talk about the solution. Sales people love talking about the solution. It is their comfort zone. The solution is what they’re selling. They understand it, they know it, it’s about them, it’s their solution, and it’s really great. What about the client? They like to believe there is a magic formula—that they can throw some money at the situation and everything will be okay.
It is easier to talk about a solution than to do the critical spadework to uncover the issues the solution is supposed to resolve, to find evidence that proves the client has a problem, to develop metrics for success, to explore systemic implications, and to identify and overcome constraints. Additionally, as long as the solution is the topic of discussion, clients can put all the pressure on the salesperson; they sit back and watch you sing and dance. But since the job to be done now is to bring value to your clients—to help them truly succeed, not just sell your ready-made solution—you must inspire your sales force to go deeper, to look at the issues surrounding the problem.
MOVE OFF THE SOLUTION
Highly effective professionals “move off the solution.” While they often begin the conversation with an insightful perspective to interest their client, they withhold offering a final solution until they have intelligently explored the problems to be solved and/or the results to be achieved. They organize their questioning to get meaningful answers to critical assumptions. They do so in a way that is comfortable, conversational, and time-efficient. When done well, clients gain insight and understanding of their situation.
But moving off the solution requires discipline and communication skills. One of the hardest behaviors to overcome is the tendency to go for the first solution right off the bat. Sales professionals who can resist the immediate solution are more successful. So move off the solution!
INTENT COUNTS MORE THAN TECHNIQUE
If how you sell matters more than what you sell, then the collective intent of your team members becomes the cornerstone of your sales culture. Technique is still important, but concentrating on the success of others, rather than on your own, is the path to sustainable success. And if you’re going to help your clients succeed, you need good information to do it. That means asking questions. Your clients will decide how much information to disclose based largely on their perception of the intent behind your questions. Are you asking questions to help them get what they want in a way they feel good about, or to help you get what you want in a way you feel good about? If they give you information, can they trust that you will use it for their interests and not against them? Many clients make these judgments instinctively, at a subconscious level. Nonetheless, you can influence those judgments.
Trust, as we discussed in Chapter 6, plays a big factor in this. In The Speed of Trust, Stephen M. R. Covey makes two key points about the power of intent:
- The degree of trust has hard economic consequences. As trust goes up, speed goes up and costs go down. As trust decreases, everything slows and costs rise. Most of us understand this intuitively; Stephen backs it up with evidence.
- Trust can be built on purpose. Earning trust is a skill that can be learned and improved. It doesn’t need to be left to good luck, circumstance, or hope.
In their book Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play, Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig describe trust as follows: Trust = Intent + Expertise. Clients must trust that your intent is compatible with their best interests, and that you have the expertise to design and deliver a solution that meets their needs. For most of us, how we can increase our expertise is far clearer than how we can improve clients’ perception of our intent. Yet if clients do not feel comfortable with your intent, they may discount your expertise.
A client will assign an intent to you whether you want them to or not. The intent they assign to you will have a large impact on the quality of your dialogue. If your intent is not crystal clear to you, it may not be clear to the client.
MOVING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION
When people feel they are being manipulated or led to your conclusion rather than their own, they will often move aggressively in the opposite direction. This behavior is called “reactance” or “polarity response.” The irony of reactance is that the harder you try to “sell” people, the less likely it is to happen. People feel their choice is being restricted and they become highly motivated to subvert the limitation. It’s an emotional response. When trust is compromised, information flow is severely curtailed, and you are far less likely to craft a solution they feel meets their needs.
Conversely, when a client perceives that your intent is to help them succeed, they are more likely to share their beliefs about what that success is. The better you understand what the client wants and needs, the better the choices you can bring to the table. It is in your own best interest to focus on the interests of the client first.
Some part of you understands this dynamic, yet you often feel pressured to meet your personal and organizational revenue goals. Your intent becomes, “Meet the goals! Make the sale!” Perversely, the harder you try, the worse you do. The more important it is to meet your numbers, the more important it is to stop concentrating on your numbers and start concentrating on the clients’ numbers.
This is something that we and our colleagues know from experience. At times, we have sold to survive (“I’ve got to get some sales”), we have sold out of ego (“I can get them to do this”), and we have helped clients succeed. We know the difference among these goals in our hearts, minds, and guts. Helping clients succeed not only feels better, it is tremendously more effective. Helping clients succeed is not an attempt to be nice; it is not philanthropic or selfless; it is a powerful, if paradoxical, means of getting what we want.
A note about technique: Clearly, technique is also important. You could be the most well-intentioned person in the world, a fine human being, yet if you have no communication skills or no critical-thinking tools, you will not be successful. If your technique does not serve your intent, and if that intent does not serve the people you are working with, everything else will be jeopardized.
WORLD-CLASS SALES CULTURES BALANCE ADVOCACY AND INQUIRY
To be in step with what’s going on in the selling world today, you can’t simply assault a prospect with questions. They’re not going to play the game. You can only ask questions after you’ve earned the right to. Successful business development is a balance between advocacy and inquiry.
In the past, solution sellers would begin with a potential client by asking a lot of generic questions, and clients were willing to answer the questions. Today, no matter how the process begins—with clients contacting you or you contacting them—you need to be prepared with insightful thinking. Clients will answer your questions, but only after they conclude that doing so would be valuable. Clients are looking for salespeople who can help them, who know their business, and who have intelligent thinking to offer. When you can share your good thinking and ask questions that balance advocacy and inquiry, you gain mutual understanding. You have a better understanding of what the client truly values; the client gains better clarity on their own situation and possibilities, and feels understood. The better the job you do of eliciting the client’s story, the more able you will be to match your story to theirs.
Most people know how to ask questions and hear what others are saying, yet few are consciously competent at developing a high degree of mutual understanding. They lack either a powerful methodology of questioning, the ability to truly listen with all their senses, or both. Lacking superb inquiry skills (often while thinking that is surely not the case), sales professionals commonly resort to three traditional approaches to interacting with clients:
1. You tell.
When advocacy and inquiry are out of balance, the tilt is almost always toward advocacy. “Telling” is not always bad. Sometimes trusted business advisors help their clients cut through fear, uncertainty, and doubt by strongly advocating what the client must do. You always have telling as a choice. Telling, however, has a low probability of producing a solution that clients feel exactly meets their needs. The downsides of telling include:
- What you choose to tell is not interesting or relevant to the client. You waste their time and your own, and reduce the desire for more interactions.
- What you tell them to do might be wrong (it is at least a statistical possibility).
- There may be no buy-in or ownership from the client, which could cause either the sale or the initiative to fail.
- They see you as arrogant, ignorant, or both.
- You potentially leave huge amounts of money on the table by telling clients about one opportunity, when asking them about others could have produced many more.
- You lose the ability to match your story to the client’s story, to speak their language, to address their priorities, to foresee and counteract pitfalls early, and to build trust through understanding.
2. You accept.
The client tells you what they want, and you propose to give it to them. Easy, isn’t it? Obviously, accepting what the client wants is not always bad, particularly if you agree with them. Yet how often do you propose a solution based on what the client said they wanted, and the client either feels it misses the mark, chooses to do nothing, or picks a solution from a competitor that is different from what they requested? How many times have you won the engagement, given the client what they said they wanted, and still ended up with an unhappy client? The downsides of passively accepting include:
- The client could be wrong—and they will still blame you, sometimes with severe consequences.
- You have not demonstrated any thought leadership.
- You may not understand exactly what you are solving or how to measure success.
- You could leave many opportunities uncovered.
3. You guess.
You may not call it guessing—you may call it diagnosis, assessment, or analysis. Yet if one didn’t know better, it would look a lot like guessing. One or two sales professionals talk to one or two client counterparts for an hour or two. Based on that, they start guessing: “What do we think they really need? What do we think the actual problems are? Why haven’t they fixed this before now? What should we propose? Do you think we were talking to the right people? Do you think they have any money to pay for this? How much should we charge? Who do you think the competition is?” And so on.
Salespeople, being intelligent, have formalized the guessing process—it’s called a proposal. And you can always tell how much salespeople are guessing: the more they guess, the longer the proposal. As the cost of face-to-face business development keeps climbing, the cost of guessing becomes enormous.
A Fourth Approach: Mutual Exploration
There is a fourth option: You explore with the client a solution that truly meets their needs—whether they eventually get that solution with you or with someone else. Of course, this is not easy. Clients have come to expect that you will tell, accept, and guess. Even worse, they may try to force you to tell (“You’re the expert”), accept (“Just give us what we want”), or guess (“It’s all in the RFP”).
Mutual exploration has two imagined downsides. First, it’s believed that it takes more time. However, we assert that mutual exploration does not take more time; it uses time differently and more effectively. If you do not have a solution that meets the client’s needs, it is more time effective (and cost effective) to find that out early rather than late. This leads to the second imagined downside: You may find you do not have a solution that truly meets the clients’ needs, and thus “lose” a sale. However, consider that you cannot lose something you never had. The probability of selling them something that does not meet their needs is low. Even if they do buy it and only afterward are displeased, you still “lose.” Thus, we contend that you can get the upsides of mutual exploration while turning the perceived downsides into advantages.
CREATE A TRUE WIN-WIN SOLUTION
In the new paradigm, sales isn’t about selling. It’s about helping your clients succeed. This means that your role is to create the conditions for clients to make good decisions—decisions that serve the clients’ best interests and help them achieve their highest priorities. It’s a paradigm that fully embodies the principle of win-win: The more passionately and skillfully you focus on creating success for your clients, the more successful you will be. This isn’t wishful thinking, but a powerful principle that we and our colleagues have seen in action again and again in twenty-five years of research and experience.
As Stephen R. Covey wrote, “Character is the foundation of win-win, and everything else builds on that foundation.”2 In the end, character comes down to one thing: caring as much about others as you do about yourself. If you take the win-win approach, the way you do business becomes your most important distinction in the marketplace. Success is rooted in anticipating and understanding your clients’ needs and beliefs, which requires, among other things, empathic listening—a different kind of listening than many of us are used to doing.
Covey also wrote, “There are people who protest that empathic listening takes too much time. It may take a little more time initially but it saves so much time downstream. The most efficient thing you can do if you’re a doctor and want to prescribe a wise treatment is to make an accurate diagnosis. You can’t say, ‘I’m in too much of a hurry. I don’t have time to make a diagnosis. Just take this treatment.’ But when you really listen with a pure desire to understand, you’ll be amazed how fast they will open up. They want to open up.”3
Our friend and colleague Craig Christensen says, “A lot of salespeople hate their jobs because they’re being forced to do unnatural things—manipulating, ‘hyping,’ faking sincerity—it’s against their character. We invite them into a place where they can be an advisor to their customers, someone they trust. You don’t have to be a jerk, to be tricky and manipulative and pushy. You can invite your customers to take a different journey, and you become a valued business partner.”
When the members of a sales organization are operating together in such a culture, they gain synergy and become something exponentially greater than the sum of their parts. Like the everyday students from the University of Washington who together became a team of Olympians, each individual supports and enriches the larger group. The rowers each had very different contributions to make. They had very different sizes, strengths, and capabilities. But by being one in purpose, they rowed their way to a gold medal.
The new paradigm is about creating a culture of mutual exploration, and offering the solution that truly meets the client’s needs is its goal. It may not happen every time, but it definitely can happen far more often than it does now. There’s a change underway, and the leaders who embrace it and create a culture in which win-win selling is a company capability are the leaders who will grant their organization a legacy that is capable of extending today’s wins well into the future.
HELPING CLIENTS SUCCEED:
INSTRUCTIONS FOR DOWNLOADING
Here are two sets of exercises to use in building a culture that wins by helping clients succeed. The first lists some key steps that your sales professionals can take with clients—whether external or internal. If you are a sales leader, review these steps with the team until they can understand and commit to them.
The second exercise lists the key steps that sales leaders need to take—in order—to institute a superior sales culture. Assess yourself as you review the steps. Do you see your organization doing these things? In this order?