Breaking the Mould

MARK ERSKINE considers a new set of salesperson competencies for today’s changing sales landscape

There have been many changes to different results”, but it’s certainly aligned with the sales landscape over the past Henry Ford’s famous observation,“If you always do few years and it is easy to get left what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what behind in the race for success. you’ve always got.” Differentiation can seem elusive Let’s start with the most commonly held belief and innovation hard to find, and in recruiting for sales. There has always been a the competition moves fast and inexorably to widespread assumption that extroverts are the most replicate new products and services in a heartbeat. productive and successful salespeople. Yet in 2013

As highlighted in my last article “Who holds the Adam Grant, an American author and a professor cards?”, published in the last edition of Winning Edge at the Wharton School of the University of (2017, No 2) the rise of professional procurement Pennsylvania, studied salespeople and found that has created a new buying process, meaning new success belonged to “ambiverts” – people in the salesperson skills and middle of the continuum competencies are needed to “The rise of professional from quite introvert to come out on top. Purely identifying customer needs and matching your product or service to meet that need procurement has created a new buying process, meaning new salesperson skills are needed” clearly extrovert. He found that this group naturally engages in a flexible pattern of talking and in the form of “solution listening. selling” is no longer enough. Salespeople relying on When recruiting, the industry body for human personality, drive and influencing won’t succeed, as resources professionals, the CIPD, recommends in the buyer now holds the cards. its best practice guide that, alongside competency-

All these changes have crept up on the sales based interviews and assessment centres, community, yet many sales organisations have organisations should use a form of psychometric or seemingly chosen to ignore them and still behavioural profile. If we take the life orientations sell in the same way, despite dwindling circumplex diagram (see page 42) as an example, success. Furthermore, these same old you will find that traditional sales leaders have habits become epidemic across the recruited for sales hunters by choosing a business – recruiting for the same combination of “controlling” and “adapting specifications, job descriptions, behaviour – with one eye on driving to get competencies and behaviours. results and closing deals with high Maybe it’s not quite insanity, persuasive skills, and the other eye on defined by Einstein as “doing building strong relationships (the the same thing over and right hand side of the over again and expecting diagram).

RESTRICTIVE

DETAILED

Introvert PEOPLE

Trust Fairness Teamwork Responsiveness

Quality

Principles

Safety

Planned

Rational Facts

SUPPORTING CONSERVING

Analytical Structured Flexible

Inspiring Resourceful FlexibilityEnthusiasticSocial intelligenceAgreeable ADAPTING Focus PowerCompetencyQuick to actSeeks change Confident CONTROLLING

Focused Extrovert

EXPANSIVE

BIG PICTURE

TASK

Adam Grant’s research puts a real question mark over this tenet and finds there has been growing resistance to stereotypical salespeople characterised by the “adapting” orientation, who often lack the detailed subject matter expertise and gravitas. Procurement professionals, on the other hand, are primarily from the “conserving” orientation and naturally run a structured, logical and reason-driven process, where emotion and subjectivity are, as far as possible, eliminated. So, if we took our rising procurement professional, who looks for far more “What we do still find is that it regulation and compliance comes down to trust between the buyer and seller – trust, pure and simple” during the buying process, would they be so easily manipulated by our pure adapting seller? What we do still find is that it comes down to trust between the buyer and seller – trust, pure and simple. The financial services industry has been blighted by trust issues with its public for a number of years, principally because of widespread mis-selling, and it has resulted in clients becoming highly risk averse. That old maxim that “people buy from people they like” is still true – every buying decision is made up of a combination of reason, logic and emotion, with emotion dominant. As Matthew Lieberman of the Social Cognitive Laboratory in Los Angeles puts it, “We are hard wired to be social – our brains are wired to connect.”

So, rather than the people orientation of “adapting” they are more aligned with that of the “supporting” orientation, where relationships are key, but so is fairness, trust and reliability. A piece of research undertaken with 500 global buyers in 2016 on selling featured words such as “shifty”, “dishonest”, “pushy”, “annoying”, “untrustworthy”, and “self-interested” as the primary terms in a word cloud. This stereotype needs to be eliminated in all forms of selling. But let’s get more granular by looking at some detailed competency requirements that can help us adapt to this new sales landscape.

A NEW SET OF SALES COMPETENCIES

Identifying needs Challenging and problem solving

Traditional solution selling, by identifying needs through effective questioning and listening skills, is no longer enough. Buyers are now looking for problem solvers where, as the “challenger” sales methodology model proposes, salespeople educate their clients with insights about their business and challenge the status quo. This approach needs investigative and evaluative skills with a deeper thinking style than ever before.

Matching solutions Developing and tailoring solutions

In days gone by, the salesperson identified the need and simply matched their product service or solution to that need. Anyone who messed with the standard offer would be quickly reprimanded. Now buyers no longer want “out of the box” solutions, but expect their service providers to tailor the solution to their business. Flexible and resourceful skills are now vital.

Relationship building Adaptive selling

Now for those of you who have read my previous article called “Challenging challenger” (Winning Edge, September/October 2015) will know, I am not by any stretch a fan of the challenger ethos, which says, “If you are like most business leaders, you’d say sales success is fundamentally about relationships – and you’d be wrong.” Relationship building is a non-negotiable competency, but given the advances made in the study of neuroscience, salespeople need to learn adaptive selling skills, matching and mirroring and becoming the archetypal sales chameleon. Learning the science of relationship building is key, as they now need to relate to multi-functional, complex buying relationships. Understanding what clients of differing profiles want to know, how they want to be seen, what makes them comfortable and uncomfortable, and how to identify their profile in the first place, is now a learnable process.

Being positive Motivating and inspiring

It has always been important to be self-motivated as a salesperson. Most of the time sellers were out there on their own driving to close deals, relying on their own skill set. Now, prospects expect to see a team approach, where subject matter experts and specialists form a central part of the selling process. The salesperson has become the conductor or facilitator of the sale, and now it is important to be able to inspire and motivate other team members.

Being disciplined Project management

Let’s face it, salespeople were never renowned for being the most structured and organised workers, often ignoring the admin tasks, preferring to be out there “doing the do”. But with the rise of the collaborative team sales approach, and the management information needs of businesses with CRM systems and forecasting models, they need to multi-task and project-manage the sale, getting the right resources in the right place at the right time.

Closing the deal

Consulting collaboratively

Back in the day, strong presentation skills and assertive, often manipulative, closing skills were essential ingredients. Now “selling with” rather than “selling to” is the order of the day – with trust, honesty and collaboration all critical. Closing has become a natural outcome, rather than a technique.

Subject matter expertise Business acumen

Knowing your product was always a sales maxim. Now buyers hold all the cards, knowing more about your product and service offer than ever before, as they undertake thorough and expert research and preparation. Not even subject-matter expertise is enough; now genuine business acumen is required – being able to show a return on investment model and forecast business results that impact the balance sheet as well as the profit and loss line.

Results driven Sustaining growth

Everyone wants salespeople to be focused on results, but given the rising cost of winning a piece of business, the salesperson must look for sustained growth from an account by selling win-win solutions that create a platform for ongoing development and growth – demonstrating real return on investment.

SELECTING SALESPEOPLE So where do we find salespeople with this complex range of competencies and skills? There is no doubt they will be harder to find, so it is first vital to run a proper and effective recruitment and selection

THE CHANGING SHAPE OF SALES FUNNELS

process that tests applicants against a rigorous competency assessment, combined with psychometric or behavioural profiling.

In addition, organisations need to look hard at their selling model. The cost of large sales opportunities in areas such as consulting, capital goods, construction and technology regularly cost £250,000 or more whether they win or lose. The big consulting firms can easily spend £1m-plus to win a corporate audit.

Sales cycles are more complex, involving increased numbers of buying influences, more and more hurdles to jump, multiple buying stages (RFIs, RFPs and the like) and customised solutions.

The most successful complex B2B sales organisations are changing the shape of their sales funnel (from blue to green, above). They are using sophisticated scoring techniques to choose which prospective clients to pursue and then overresourcing those fewer opportunities to improve their conversion ratios. A narrower sales funnel means you can employ fewer, better remunerated salespeople with improved competency sets.

So how do we begin to break the mould as an industry and adapt to today’s changing buying and selling environment? Like a game of chess, we need to think constantly of new and innovative ways to outwit our opponent and achieve checkmate. Using the same old game plan just won’t cut it.

If you have a team full of trustworthy, reliable salespeople, how adaptable are they if the buyer suddenly changes direction? Are you confident that you could re-train them with a new range of sales competencies? Or are you daring enough to invest in a new slimmed down team, but with more potent characteristics. These are all questions sales leaders need to ask themselves if they are to meet next year’s challenging quotas.

Whatever step you do decide to take next, standing still just isn’t an option. As an industry, if we in sales want to start winning back control, we need to start embracing, among other things, the power of neuroscience, in order to build better relationships and a set of sales competencies fit for today’s changing world.

Now is the time to break the mould and seize back the initiative from the buyer.

MARK ERSKINE is a member of the ISM with over 35 years’ experience in the sales industry. He is owner and director of Seller Performance, which, through its Capitalise programme, helps organisations harness the power of neuroscience in selling. Its preferred behavioural profiling tool is Life Orientations, used by over 21,000 organisations around the world. Email mark@ sellerperformance.co.uk or visit www.sellerperformance.co.uk