CHAPTER 3

Small-Wins Selling

Have you ever had a goal so big you weren’t sure how to get started? Salespeople experience this challenge whenever they pursue a large, complex opportunity that could take years to realize. These large, complex opportunities feel like a never-ending scavenger hunt, where each clue leads to another clue, and another, and another. Salespeople meet a new contact, which leads to another meeting, which leads to gaining another level of approval, which leads to product testing, etc. When salespeople pursue large, complex opportunities, they feel like they are always chasing down the next clue. All the while, salespeople experience multiple setbacks, stalling their progress.

Some salespeople manage large, complex opportunities well, while other salespeople get lost in the weeds. Some salespeople push through setbacks, while other salespeople get discouraged and quit. Some salespeople eat an elephant one bite at a time, while others try to consume the whole thing in one sitting.

Successful salespeople break down large, complex opportunities into manageable small wins. They win big opportunities by designing and pursuing success in small steps. Along the path to success, there are a series of small wins that move the sale forward. These small wins keep salespeople focused, motivated, and engaged. Small wins give salespeople a sense of control.

Focus is one of the greatest challenges salespeople face. Today, salespeople are inundated with distractions. Distracted salespeople achieve focus by simplifying their sales approach. They focus on the immediate, next best outcome. They don’t distract or discourage themselves with everything they need to achieve.

Small wins keep people motivated. Sales is one of the few professions where succeeding only once in 10 tries is still considered successful. Most people cannot handle this level of failure and uncertainty. Salespeople face more setbacks than successes. These constant setbacks can lead to frustrations and self-doubt, and a frustrated salesperson rarely performs at his or her best. Salespeople need something to build their confidence and get back on track.

There is a better way for you to manage large, complex opportunities. Big opportunities excite, inspire, and eventually frustrate salespeople. Balance your excitement by focusing on small wins. Celebrate each small win to keep yourself inspired. Reduce frustration by properly setting your own expectations. Realize that it’s not one or two small wins that lead to success, it’s the aggregate. Behind every big victory, there is a series of small wins.

In this chapter, you will learn how to apply a small-wins approach to keep you focused, motivated, and engaged. At the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

•   Define small wins

•   Describe the benefits of a small-wins approach

•   List examples of small wins

•   Detail small wins from previous success

•   Apply the small-wins approach to account planning

•   List three ideas to manage salespeople using a small-wins approach

•   Describe what gets in the way of achieving small wins

WHAT IS A SMALL WIN

In the January 1984 American Psychologist (vol. 39), Karl Weick wrote about redefining the scale of social issues and how to create change. In his article “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” he argued that large-scale change doesn’t happen through large, significant events. Instead, big change happens through a series of small, moderately significant events. On the surface, social problems like equal rights, environmental regulation, and unemployment are too big to manage. Big problems must be broken down so problem solvers can focus on overcoming the smaller, more manageable challenges.

Weick defines a small win as a “concrete, completed outcome of moderate importance. By itself, one small win doesn’t mean all that much. But a combination of small wins can attract allies, deter adversaries, generate momentum, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals. A small win is a controllable opportunity that produces a visible result.”

Although Weick is defining small wins in the context of social change, the concept can be broadly applied to include most changes, including sales. The same methods used to redefine social change can help salespeople redefine their large, complex opportunities to more manageable outcomes.

By itself, one small win doesn’t mean much. One meeting, a product demonstration, or a single proposal does not guarantee long-term success in an account. Expecting one small win to deliver the desired results is the equivalent of expecting one workout to deliver your desired health. It’s the combination of several small wins that leads to big change.

Small wins attract allies. In Value-Added Selling, we call allies internal champions. Consider how a new product gains traction within an account. Initially, a salesperson will sell the idea to one decision maker to try the product. The first successful outcome provides proof for other decision makers. Other departments start using the new product and enjoy successful outcomes. Each decision maker that has a positive experience with the product promotes it to other decision makers. Now you have a group of allies selling the product for you. This group continues to promote your solutions, generating additional momentum while protecting you from adversaries.

A jigsaw puzzle is a perfect analogy for small wins. Imagine putting together a 1,000-piece puzzle. Puzzles can be frustrating and overwhelming. But each piece of the puzzle represents a small win. Each connection produces a visible outcome that demonstrates progress.

Weick mentions that one small win by itself may seem unimportant. By itself, connecting two puzzle pieces might seem unimportant. But when several pieces are connected, you generate momentum. In fact, Karl Weick mentions that a combination of small wins lowers the resistance to subsequent proposals. Once you achieve a small win, the next small win becomes easier. You generate momentum.

When putting together a puzzle, each subsequent puzzle piece becomes easier to place. Since puzzles are easier to complete as you place more pieces, the puzzle seems more difficult and time-consuming in the beginning. Likewise, in a large, complex sale, the initial small wins seem more difficult. Be aware of this, but don’t be frustrated by it. With a small-wins approach, it will naturally take more time and effort in the beginning, but once the earlier pieces are in place, the process will become easier.

Not all puzzle pieces are created equal, and neither are small wins. Some small wins generate more progress and momentum than other small wins, just like some puzzle pieces generate more progress. For example, finding the edge pieces will help you establish the border. Completing the border will give you a head start. Some puzzle pieces have special colors or symbols, making them easier to place in the puzzle. Once you build off these specialty pieces, it’s easier to generate momentum. These small wins create momentum and are considered leveraging points because of the increasing impact they have on your success.

Identify the leveraging points in the sales process by analyzing your previous successes. In each success ask yourself, “What small wins had the greatest impact or generated the most momentum?” Then ask, “What were the small wins that led to this leveraging point?”

Puzzles are not completed in a logical, linear format. You don’t start at the top and work your way down, from left to right. You’ll place several pieces together and then find another section to piece together. Likewise, small wins aren’t always linear. They are achieved in the real world, where there are many dynamics at play. Small wins do not always happen in a predictable order. Instead of obsessing over perfect order, ask yourself, “Are we moving in the right general direction? Are we moving closer toward our goal, or further away from it?”

Once you achieve a series of small wins, you’ve built a foundation. When you experience failures or setbacks, you don’t have to start over. Instead, you start at the previous small win. For example, when putting together a puzzle, you might leave the puzzle for a day or two, or get stuck, or you can’t find the missing piece. These temporary setbacks don’t cause you to start over. Instead, you start again where you left off. The same is true for setbacks in the complex sale. Each small win strengthens your foundation of success. A temporary setback or stall doesn’t mean you need to start over. You start at your previous small win. Consider the small wins listed below:

•   You completed an initial meeting with the operations manager.

•   The engineer and operations manager agreed to a trial.

•   The engineer included your solution in the specification.

•   You met with procurement and established the budget based on your solution.

These small wins build a foundation. If your procurement contact leaves the organization, you don’t have to start over. You have built a foundation of small wins, and you already have several puzzle pieces in place. There will be setbacks and stalls, but during these setbacks, remind the buyer (and yourself) of the momentum you have already generated.

In the previous example, the procurement contact leaves the organization. In your initial meeting, remind the new procurement contact of the momentum generated:

“Mr. Buyer, it’s great to meet you. Let’s spend a few minutes reviewing where we are on this project. We have met with the operations managers and engineer to conduct a trial. Our trial performance exceeded both the engineer’s and operations manager’s expectations. Our performance then prompted engineering to include our solution in the specification. Also, we have gained budgetary approval for the solution.” With small wins, you don’t need to start over, just review your momentum.

It’s important to define what a small win is not. A small win is not asking for an initial meeting, it’s having the actual meeting. A small win is not making a request for additional information, it’s receiving the customer information. A small win is a complete, implemented outcome. A small win is outcome-based, not effort-based. Effort is a critical component of any small-wins approach, but don’t confuse effort with outcome.

THE BENEFITS OF A SMALL-WINS APPROACH

Small wins keep salespeople focused. Salespeople are pulled in multiple directions. With mobile devices, social media, and 24/7 accessibility, salespeople are distracted from their intended course. In today’s selling environment, the need to stay focused has never been greater.

Clarity and simplicity lead to focus. With a small-wins approach, you identify the immediate, next best outcome. Then you only focus on achieving that outcome. Think about your biggest sales opportunity. How many outcomes must you achieve to get the desired result? It can be an overwhelming number. Now consider only the immediate, next best outcome. It’s manageable and attainable. Don’t worry about the tenth outcome. The tenth outcome doesn’t matter until you complete the first nine.

Small wins keep you motivated. In their groundbreaking book The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer identified what really keeps employees motivated and engaged.¹ They analyzed nearly 12,000 journal entries taken from 238 employees at seven different companies. Participants journaled about their day-to-day activities over several weeks (9 to 38 weeks). After reviewing the data, the authors found that employees were the most motivated and most engaged on the days that they made progress in meaningful work. Self-efficacy and accomplishment are critical in any profession, especially in sales.

Consider how a small-wins approach will impact a salesperson’s motivation. The salesperson begins pursuing a massive opportunity that will take several years to materialize. Over that three-year period, the salesperson faces several setbacks. If the salesperson views every setback as a failure, he or she gives up. Too often, salespeople associate a short-term setback as a long-term failure. By focusing on small wins, salespeople stay motivated. Again, the best way to manage a long-term, value-added sale is to break it down to manageable pieces, just like the jigsaw puzzle—one piece at a time.

Small wins beget more small wins. Achieving small wins generates momentum, which increases motivation. Most salespeople know what it’s like to “be on a roll.” That feeling of success makes sales a rewarding profession.

Jim Collins wrote about this in his timeless book Good to Great. Collins analyzed what caused good companies to transform into great companies. One contributing factor was generating self-sustaining momentum. He referred to this momentum as the flywheel effect. Collins describes a flywheel as a 30-foot-diameter wheel weighing 5,000 pounds. To initially move the wheel requires a lot of effort (like an initial small win), but eventually the momentum becomes self-reinforcing. When referring to those companies that went from good to great, Collins mentions that big results and groundbreaking transitions do not happen all at once. They are a culmination of all the previous events that led to the transition. In the same way, as a salesperson, your transition from where you are to ultimate success is due to a culmination of small wins.

IMPLEMENT A SMALL-WINS APPROACH

For a small-wins approach to succeed, salespeople and management must buy in to the concept. If management buys in but salespeople refuse to focus on small wins, the process fails. If salespeople buy inbut management doesn’t have the patience to see it through, the process fails. A small-wins approach requires commitment throughout the entire organization.

Identifying Small Wins

You cannot achieve a small win until you identify the ultimate goal. At first glance, the big win can be exciting, motivating, and for some, overwhelming. The first step is to identify your big goal and then shrink it. Identify the series of small wins that will lead to your ultimate success.

Identify the small wins based on your dynamic selling environment. Ask yourself, “From initial contact to contract, what is the series of immediate, next best outcomes that I need to achieve?” Make a list of all the small wins.

Once you identify the series of small wins, create a plan to achieve them. Plan your week using this small-wins approach. Begin every week by asking yourself, “What action do I need to take this week to achieve my small win?”

You can also identify small wins by analyzing previous successes. Review your organization’s greatest sales successes. Your greatest success usually means biggest net profit or revenue. Break down the success by detailing the small wins. It’s critical to analyze the initial small wins that generated momentum. These first few small wins are often overlooked or forgotten.

The goal during this exercise is quantity. The more small wins you uncover, the better. After reviewing several successes, ask yourself, “What are the common small wins?” Although each opportunity requires unique small wins, you will notice overlap. These overlapping small wins help guide your effort.

Small wins are not always achieved in an orderly, linear fashion. Don’t obsess over the perfect order. When gauging your success of a small-wins approach, ask yourself, “Are we getting closer to our ultimate goal, or are we moving further from it?” This is the acid test to gauge the effectiveness of your approach.

Avoiding Small Losses

Identify small losses you want to avoid. In every sale, there are small wins that generate momentum toward your desired outcome, and there are also small losses that impede your progress. In The Progress Principle, the authors found that small losses and setbacks had a more powerful impact than small wins. In other words, negative events impeded progress more than positive events contributed to progress. This is the frustration of a missing puzzle piece.

You can only avoid small losses you are aware of. Take a minute to analyze your failures. Think of lost opportunities and identify the small losses and setbacks that impeded progress. For example, you couldn’t secure a meeting with a key decision maker, the engineer would not endorse your solution, or you only met with a procurement buyer. Identify small losses that led to the failure or impeded your progress. Then develop a plan to avoid or overcome these small losses. Value-added salespeople know what they want to achieve, and more important, what to avoid.

Coaching Salespeople Using a Small-Wins Approach

If salespeople report to you, coaching them is your number one priority. Coaching your sales team using a small-wins approach is conceptually simple. You teach salespeople to focus their time, energy, and effort on achieving the immediate, next best outcome. You also coach them on how they must achieve that outcome. For salespeople, this approach requires steady commitment. As a sales leader, this approach requires patience and restraint.

A small-wins approach requires both a long-range vision and short-term focus. For managers, this delicate balance can be frustrating. On the surface, a salesperson might not display his normal sense of urgency. He appears to be spending an inordinate amount of time getting started. A small-wins approach requires more time and effort in the beginning. Remember, small wins will, as Weick said, “attract allies, deter threats, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals.” Getting started is more difficult and time-consuming; finishing happens faster—just like the puzzle. Managers must be patient in the beginning and encourage the salesperson. The salesperson needs reassurance that he is on the right path, in spite of the difficulty.

Let’s take a closer look at the puzzle analogy and how it relates to a sales manager’s role. Imagine a group of students having to put together a puzzle. The students are given four hours to complete the puzzle, and the teacher is evaluated on the student’s ability to achieve this goal.

Each puzzle piece represents a small win. The students first organize the puzzle by laying out the pieces. Then they start organizing and connecting various puzzle pieces. All the while, the time keeps ticking by. An hour passes, and the puzzle is only 10 percent completed. Two hours pass, and it’s only 30 percent completed. Three hours pass, and the puzzle is only 50 percent completed.

Does the teacher have the patience and restraint to give the students time to finish, or will the teacher jump in and redirect their efforts? How often do sales managers jump in and redirect their salespeople?

Anyone who has ever put together a puzzle knows that the first half takes more time and energy than the second half. Every manager should realize that front-end small wins take longer and seem disorderly. The manager’s role is to keep salespeople focused and motivated, not to immediately jump in and redirect their efforts.

Motivating employees is a challenge. Motivation is more than a rah-rah speech at your monthly sales meeting. True motivation is internal. The key to motivating salespeople is getting salespeople to motivate themselves.

Ask your salespeople to detail a list of small wins they plan to achieve. Discuss how they will achieve these small wins. Conduct a barrier analysis to reveal potential roadblocks and to create a backup plan.

Meaningful work is highly motivating. Managers should focus on helping salespeople achieve small, meaningful wins. Celebrate successes, coach them through small losses, and find a way for them to progress.

Help Your Customers Achieve Small Wins

Your customers are like you in so many ways. They are also trying to achieve a goal. Their goal might be different, but it’s a goal nonetheless. They also have a 1,000-piece puzzle they are trying to complete. Helping your customers achieve progress leads to greater loyalty and a better overall customer experience.

To help your customers achieve small wins, ask yourself the following questions:

•   What are this organization’s goals?

•   What are the departmental objectives associated with these organizational goals?

•   What are the small wins that will lead to these departmental goals?

•   How can I help this department achieve these small wins?

Organizations will partner with salespeople who help them achieve their organizational goals. Customers measure the impact of salespeople by the value they create, not the price they charge. The more small wins you help your customer achieve, the less important price becomes.

WHAT PREVENTS SALESPEOPLE FROM FOCUSING ON SMALL WINS

In seminars, we ask salespeople the following questions:

•   What gets in the way of you calling on high-level decision makers?

•   What gets in the way of you holding the line on pricing?

•   What gets in the way of you asking for a customer’s commitment?

The response is nearly always the same for all three questions—fear. Salespeople fear upsetting their lower-level contacts, losing the business, or destroying relationships. The salespeople’s fear motivates them to focus on safe, lower-risk activities. For example, salespeople know they should hold the line on pricing and talk to other decision makers, but they don’t. Why? Fear. They fear losing the order.

When listing small wins, identify the perceived risk of each small win. Once you do this, discuss ways to mitigate risk. In risk-filled situations, it’s natural to dwell more on what you stand to lose versus what you stand to gain. Acknowledge this tendency and focus more on the gain. Remind yourself of the greater risk, doing nothing and getting nothing.

Salespeople operate in a high-energy field; consequently, they are impatient. A strong sense of urgency coupled with their competitiveness doesn’t always help with a small-wins approach. In an effort to close a sale or reach a goal, the salesperson might skip a few steps or try to jump ahead.

For example, the salesperson knows she should demonstrate a new product to gain buy-in before quoting the solution. However, she is close to hitting her monthly number, so she skips this step and works directly with procurement to get a purchase order. The salesperson’s urgency to close was more compelling than her commitment to the small-wins approach.

Managers also push salespeople and challenge them to produce results. Although managers are trying to drive business results, it can drive the wrong behaviors. Managers are driven (and evaluated) by results. Therefore, they drive their teams to produce accordingly. Managers need to demonstrate their commitment to small-win behavior instead of big-win results. Initially moving a heavy flywheel is difficult, and then it becomes easier. Initial small wins are just like the initial turns of a flywheel. In the early stages, commitment and patience are going to be critical. It’s tempting to skip steps early in the process, trying to show greater progress and gain results. However, skipping steps at the beginning of a small-wins approach can lead to a more difficult road toward the finish. Both managers and salespeople need to temper their urgency with patience. The commitment to a small-wins approach has to be greater than the temptation to skip ahead.

VALUE-ADDED SELLING REVIEW AND ACTION ITEMS

1.   A small win keeps salespeople focused and motivated. A small win is a concrete, implemented outcome of moderate importance. A small win is outcome-based, not effort-based. One small win doesn’t generate much progress, but a series of small wins will generate momentum.

2.   Implement a small-wins approach through a small-wins audit. The first step is to identify a long-term, account-specific goal. Dream big. Then ask yourself, “From initial contact to contract, what is the series of immediate, next best outcomes that I need to achieve?” Make a list of these outcomes, and then focus your time on achieving the next best outcome.

3.   Identify the small losses that impede your progress. Small losses can have greater impact than small wins. Know which small wins to focus on and which losses to avoid.

4.   If you are a manager, use the small-wins approach to coach your sales team. Focus their time and energy on small wins. Give them time to achieve small wins (be patient), coach them when they are off track, and celebrate small successes to build confidence and keep your team motivated.