Some well-meaning sales consultants, unfortunately, are offering inane advice to sales professionals about dealing with what appears to be a world-wide, long-term economic malaise that is changing the game of sales.  I recently read an article by a consultant who advised four steps for increasing sales in the current economic meltdown.

He admonished sales professionals to “stop procrastinating,” which begs the question Yoda might ask: “Get anything done when you procrastinate, do you?”  The consultant then advises sales professionals to “get organized.” Again, I can hear Yoda asking “How many sales can you make when disorganized, you are?”

His third piece of timely advice: “energize your attitude.”  How many sales are made by salespeople with obvious poor attitudes? Finally, the consultant advises sales professionals to “start prospecting.” This is usually sound advice that helps prevent an empty sales funnel; but under current economic conditions, be careful about prospecting for new customers who have difficulty paying their bills or are headed to bankruptcy court.

My three-word response to this consultant’s advice:  Feel-good-flapdoodle. If ever there was a time to face the facts of the new reality for sellers - Just the facts, Ma’am - it’s now.

CEOs who are counseled by astute CFOs have three priorities in this climate of unprecedented volatility: Preserve Cash – Protect Revenue – Manage Risk. Find me a CFO in America who disagrees with this and you should scan the horizon for a village that lost its idiot.

To borrow a legal concept, even a moron in a hurry has noticed that more than a few companies have fired thousands of employees, allow only expenditures approved by senior vice presidents, eliminated their employee training budgets for 2009 and cancelled their annual sales meetings and holiday parties.

If a salesperson’s product, service or solution doesn’t help customers preserve cash or increase cash flow, protect or increase sales revenue or mitigate perceived risk, the chances of closing many sales in this economic climate registers somewhere between zero and a very large negative number.

Ending procrastination, getting better organized, energizing an attitude or ramping up prospecting activities isn’t sufficient to help sales professionals survive or prosper in the new economic reality facing most sellers today.  It’s time to acknowledge that the old rules of sales no longer apply. 
 
Real help for sales professionals must come from sales leaders and senior executives who acknowledge that they have never slogged through an economic quagmire quite like this one, and who are willing to think creatively about strategy and tactics that sales professionals can use to survive, maybe even prosper in this new economic milieu.

Today’s unforgiving economy requires a bold, creative approach to managing sales, rather than simply making sales. Whatever the approach, it seems evident that effective solutions won’t be obvious, easy or simplistic. Consultants who offer pabulum advice to salespeople ignore the demands of an economy that no longer tolerates old ways of doing business.


Listen! - Back To Basics

If you accept, as we said last month, that “listening is not doing anything that interferes with seeing,” you must take a critical look at everything you normally do when you think you are listening. Much of what we’ve been taught about good listening habits just isn’t true.

Most of us are aware that if our minds are wandering when someone is speaking, we aren’t really listening. If we are thinking ahead, reacting to something the speaker has said, we can’t possibly listen to what the speaker is currently saying. If we are busy formulating questions to ask while the speaker is talking, we are thinking about our questions, and we aren’t really listening. This seems obvious; But what about taking notes and some other activities we’ve been told helps us to listen?

When you take notes during a sales call or during a business meeting, I guarantee that you are missing out on a significant part of the human listening and communication process. First, you cannot write fast enough or accurately enough to capture all the speaker’s words or reflect exactly what the speaker says. Second, taking notes requires effort and activities that detract from pure listening. Finally, to miss a speaker’s candid facial expressions, the signposts of emotions, robs you of a crucial part of the communication process. Although well intentioned teachers taught us that taking notes ensures that we will capture what is said during meetings, note taking actually inhibits effective listening.

Many of us may also have been taught that to be perceived as good listeners we must make a sincere effort to appear attentive when someone is speaking. We might have been advised, for example, to lean forward, and to stare intently into the eyes of a speaker, or to defy gravity by twisting ourselves up into contorted positions – all intended to scream that we are listening! But in the making of the effort to do all this we divert attention from the speaker and instead devote some concentration to our efforts. Again, we aren’t truly listening.

So, if you find yourself interrupting a speaker, recognize that you had already started the thinking process that resulted in the interruption. When you observe yourself taking notes, realize that while you are writing, you may be missing some of the most important components of the communication process, the visual cues telegraphed by the speaker that may reveal underlying emotions. And if you become conscious that you are making some effort to impress a speaker with your listening skills, recognize that those efforts interfere with complete listening.

If you are convinced that multi-tasking – doing any two or more things at the same time – divides your attention and prevents effective listening, you will want to get back to the basics of listening immediately. Before you can get back to basics, however, you might want to go beyond the superficial to understand what, more than anything, prevents real listening.  Next month we will explore “listening through a screen, darkly.”


Strategic Sales Roadmap™
Our answer to the current economic quagmire is Strategic Sales Roadmap™, a bold plan for generating profitable sales and protecting key customers.

In just two days, senior sales leaders and senior executives, who don't have the time or resources to wait for the economy to improve, build a strong, yet flexible sales strategy and tactics for closing profitable sales and protecting key customers in this time of unprecedented volatility.