Adams Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-925648-70-6
Verlag: Kona Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

How do the best salespeople connect, influence and persuade? With stories. Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell takes you on a high-stakes sales journey, using stories to establish rapport and trust, deliver insight, inspire action and close the deal, and in doing so win new friends and collaborators. When you share purposeful stories in your client conversations, you'll create more new business than you thought possible.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Adams, Mike

Leseproben

Foreword

by Mike Bosworth

Reading Mike Adams’ Seven Stories has caused me once again to reflect on how I think about sales effectiveness.

My sales journey began in 1972, working for Xerox Computer Services (XCS) which was founded in 1969 by the great James S. Campbell. Most people know Xerox invented more technology that they never made money on than any other tech organisation. Desktop icons, the mouse, Ethernet, the list goes on. Most people don’t know that Xerox Computer Services also invented cloud computing.

When I joined XCS in 1972 after serving in the military and graduating from Cal Poly, Pomona, we had 50 Los Angeles based customers communicating real-time transactions over dumb terminals in departments like cost accounting, fund accounting, payroll, production control and material control. In case you think Software as a Service is a new thing, our customers paid us for the usage of our applications, for storage on our disk drives, for reports by the print line and for transactions (every ‘enter’ was 2.2 cents). If the customers didn’t use our system, there was no revenue. Because of this revenue model, all XCS employees were focused on keeping those 50 customers online.

I went through the same six weeks of product demo school that our newly hired, experienced salespeople (mostly ex-IBM) went through. At the end of product school they went into sales. But I was hired to do the job nobody else wanted — help desk support. I was just 25.

It typically took those experienced former IBM salespeople between nine and fifteen months to make their first sale. My 20/20 hindsight tells me that it took them that long to figure out how the job titles we were calling on could use our product. Demo school did not teach product usage by job title.

Xerox was also ahead of its time in the way they on-boarded me. I was employee number 120, and within two months of joining, my wife and I were invited to dinner with senior managers and executives from sales, marketing, operations, finance and product development. During these dinners we shared stories about our individual paths to where we were now working. Through those interactions I formed an emotional connection with the heads of multiple departments. If I had an unhappy customer on the phone, I knew who to call.

After a year on the help desk, I got promoted to field application support specialist and got to ‘convert’ new manufacturing, distribution and city government customers onto our ‘cloud’ interactive accounting system. I helped them figure out the best ways to use our applications to do their jobs much better than they ever had before.

When I was 28, a sales manager asked me to try sales. I had two answers – no! And hell no! Reason one: I had a low opinion of many of our salespeople who sold their prospects features we didn’t have in order to make sales — that I had to rescue. Reason two: my violent alcoholic father was a salesman who could not keep a job longer than six months.

A week later, that same manager, along with our branch manager, succeeded in persuading me to ‘try’ sales for six months. I agreed on the condition of keeping my application support salary, and I had it in writing that if I did not like sales I could have my old job back.

My biggest worry was ‘I don’t know how to sell’, but I did know how dozens of job titles used our applications. And I knew how they had done their jobs before they had our system, how they did their jobs using our system, and the success metrics to prove the improvement. My real insecurity about selling was I didn’t know how find prospects. I didn’t know how to look for the people who should be looking for my product.

My sales manager knew he had to teach me how to prospect. That meant teaching me how to cold call. Back then, cold calling meant physically walking into the lobby of a manufacturing company and saying to the receptionist, ‘My name is Mike Bosworth. I work for Xerox Computer Services and I’d like to speak to your materials manager.’

Eighty percent of the time, the materials manager would come out to the lobby to meet me (yes, 80 percent!). Number one reason? Curiosity. Xerox had a huge halo as a great, innovative company. They were curious about why someone from Xerox would want to talk to a materials manager and curious about new technology for manufacturing, pre internet.

When the materials managers came to the lobby to meet me, many would glance at their watch. I was 28, they were 48. I knew they were kicking themselves for coming out to the lobby to meet with a ‘kid’.

Unlike other new sales hires though, I didn’t ask if they’d like to see a demo. Instead, I would shake hands, confirm he was the materials manager, and ask, ‘Can I share a short story about a materials manager who works less than a mile from here and who I’ve been working with for the past 18 months?’ They all said ‘yes’ to the offer of a peer story (what’s called a success story in Seven Stories). I would then tell them the 90-second story of Ed Blackman.

Ed is the materials manager at Elpac Electronics. Elpac manufactures power supplies. I met Ed two years ago at an Orange County, California, industry meeting.

Ed had a very difficult job. He was experiencing massive shortages, which was impacting their production schedule. There were partially completed kits stacked all over his factory floor, and he had to deal with two bills of material for every power supply they made. Ed’s boss, the VP Manufacturing, was not meeting the shipment schedule and their backlog was out of control. To top it off, their CFO was unhappy with the cost of carrying too much inventory. To say Ed was feeling pressured is an understatement.

It was obvious to Ed that he needed a better way to respond to major vendor delivery changes. When he discovered 18 months ago that our technology would let him pre-plan his production schedule overnight, he decided to take the risk of being the first Southern California company to implement our new materials requirements planning (MRP) system.

We are now 18 months into the MRP implementation with Ed. His inventory turns have gone from 1.9 to almost 5. His backlog has been eliminated. They are operating off one bill-of-material, and 95 percent of shipments to customers are on time. Ed is beyond pleased.

And then I would transition to: ‘Enough about Ed. What’s going on around here?’

The vast majority of times, the materials manager that I had known for less than three minutes would begin talking freely about his own struggles. (Back then, I never met a female materials manager.) Usually, I would get invited in to take a look at their operation.

Then I could begin tending their stories.

In my first five months on quota I sold more than anyone in the history of the company had sold in a full year. Management were scratching their heads. How can this kid, two years out of college, outsell every other salesperson?

When I was 29 years old, after just one year on quota, I was ‘promoted’ to sales manager. I had to move from LA to New Jersey and inherited four older salespeople. I went from hero to zero. Number one salesperson in the company to number last sales manager.

Luckily, when they put me on that plane to New Jersey, they told me they wanted me to fly back to HQ four to six times each year to do sales training and teach others the things I had been doing intuitively. I told them I didn’t know how to do sales training so they sent me to learn our corporate sales methodology, PSS (Professional Selling Skills), inside and out. One thing that stuck from that program was, you can’t teach rapport. Rapport is ‘chemistry’ and the chemistry between any two humans is unique.

Since then, through my Solution Selling and Customer Centric Selling days, the one area I avoided as a sales trainer was teaching sellers how to ‘establish rapport’. I would spend literally thirty minutes out of a four-day workshop on the basics of not blowing your first impression — eye contact, avoiding stereo typical sales language, avoiding the trophies and props in the buyer’s office, silence up front so the buyer can decide whether we get right down to business or have some ‘small talk’. That was it. I stayed away from rapport because I had it in my head that it was not teachable. I taught people a system for managing their complex sales conversations and their complex sale cycles.

I founded Solution Selling in 1983 with the mission of helping my clients ‘lift’ the bottom 80 percent of their sales forces. Their top 20 percent sellers were doing fine, bringing in 80 percent of the sales revenue. Over the years, I know that the selling systems I created have dramatically improved the effectiveness of thousands of salespeople. My clients told me so. They also told me something twenty times over twenty years that my intellectual arrogance kept me from diagnosing and understanding: ‘Mike, our top 20 percent salespeople love Solution Selling, but within two weeks of the workshop our bottom 80 percent quit using it.’

What they quit using were the discovery question templates that were the bedrock of both methodologies: intelligent questions written by the smartest people in their company so their sales-people could ask specific buyer-types about specific problems that our solutions can help them solve. Why on earth would a bottom 80...