Michael: Good morning Paul. Firstly thank you very much for agreeing to this podcast for out listeners, on selling and selling in this new decade of 2010. Would you kick off by introducing yourself?
Paul: I'd be delighted to. And thank you Michael for the opportunity to do this podcast with you. My name is Paul Jarvis and I'm an independent specialist in the area of sales for ICT companies. And as I say, I work independently, but I work very closely with some very special training companies - in particular with a training company called Intuition based out of Singapore.
Michael : OK. And what is your own key selling experience?
Paul : I've been in the sales and selling arena for IT companies. IT and communication companies, for the last twenty five or thirty years and I've worked up through the ranks from the original sales rep and his car through to being European sales and marketing director for a division of a London BLC.
Michael : Excellent. Very simple question - Where and when is the best time for selling?
Paul : Well I guess that depends on what that is that you're selling. But in my area of ICT I would say that selling actually begins at the very first point of understanding your potential customer. I would say that most of the selling is done in a fairly invisible way, in getting to know who your customer is and what you can sell to him even before you have contact with him.
Michael : OK. So in a way what you're saying - to clarify - is that a lot of selling is done when you're not actually with the customer?
Paul : In way I am saying that, and also that the initial stages of understanding your customer prepares you for being like the customer. So as you build a rapport with your new potential customer you're already going in with some knowledge and some vocabulary and some way of being, that allows you to be like him. Does that make sense?
Michael : OK. Let's build on that a little bit. Within your industry what are some of the key behaviours exhibited by key sales people?
Paul : Key behaviours. Well I would break down the most successful sales people into having three areas of capability really. One is an extensive knowledge about what they sell and about their customers - a knowledge base, of course, is important.
They also tend to develop a very efficient working habits, and they will normally achieve those by setting themselves smart goals and giving themselves feedback as to how well they're achieving those goals and therefore creating a working habit that allows them to achieve those goals consistently.
So habits becomes a part of a successful sales persons kit bag.
Michael : OK - before we get onto soft skills, can you expand a little more on habits. Give us a good example of a goal and a good example of a habit.
Paul :OK. A good example of a goal would be to identifying a prospect, and having a sales value that you intend to sell to that prospect before a certain point in time. So that goal would then create a whole series of actions that needed to take place - such as, for example - taking time to understand how that prospect makes money, how he could save money - areas where what you're selling could fit to what they are likely to respond to.
And then creating the habit that you are always well prepared for a meeting in order to put over what your value proposition is in the words and environment that your client is going to completely understand.
Michael : OK - So.
Paul : Sorry to interrupt Michael, but it goes through to a numbers game. In a numbers game you may decide 'Oh, I'll just make this many contacts, and some of them will go my way.'
Michael : And you talked about soft-skills. What are the sorts of things involved with soft skills?
Paul : Right. I think in terms of soft skills we're talking predominantly about the ability to create rapport with customers - and rapport, basically, as we have in NLP is made up of many different areas, you influence your attraction to the customer by a lot more than just your words.
As a matter of fact, as we know, only 7% of the impact of a message comes from the words - and it's everything else, before during and after the words have been delivered - that really builds rapport with the customer.
Therefore I would say that rapport, both with corporate culture and with individuals, is key to success
Michael : Let's move on from that. If we were to look at a sales sequence in a linear fashion, what are some of the key elements in that sequence? And where does that sale start? What's the first thing that actually happens?
And similarly where does the sale actually end?
Paul : Right. For the sorts of products and services which my customers tend to be involved in selling - the first stage of selling is no more than identifying who that who that prospect is going to be, because having identified that prospect, the process then begins of understanding that prospect in order to then outline areas of the prospects business and to identify individuals who will be receptive to the value proposition being taken to them.
So it begins at a research stage.
Michael : OK. So I've identified the individuals. I've identified the sorts of areas that they might be interested in - what comes next?
Paul : What comes next is a series of preparations which allow you to go into the prospect's company in order to engage in conversations that will make sense to him. So that involves understanding what it is that you're going to take to that prospect that's going to make sense to him in his language.
Very often that's an analysis of his business, and what you're offering to him that will help him run it better.
Michael : Could you give an example of that?
Paul : Yes indeed. We could look at for example a company that's doing very well, is making lots of money, and yet has got an opportunity to do better by introducing - let's say - unified communications, which would allow it's workforce to be centred on spending time in the office.
A customer won't often think of that as being a move, or a change of his business model that he would naturally investigate. Many of my sales customers would therefore take that in as a fresh idea. So they would take it in, rather than on a level of sales person to buyer, they'll take it in more as a consultancy suggestion.
Michael : OK. And what's the next stage. I've sat back in the office and I've come up with the people, and I've come up with what might work for them - What do I do next?
Paul : Very much the next stage is to create the right relationship with the customer - And really, these are the NLP skills that very often determine whether you can progress forward or not. The quality of the relationship that is created by the buyer and the seller needs to be aimed at a point where the buyer and seller don't look at each other as being - let's say - adversaries in a process. They look at each other as both being equals, where they're both going to investigate, together, how they can both benefit from that relationship.
The supplier has got the product or service, but the buyer has got the money. But at the end of the day, they have both got to benefit from the exchange of the product or service and the money.
Michael : Very simple question about the process - How and when does the sales guy actually pick up that phone and actually make that appointment? And what sort of approach would you suggest? You might not even suggest that he picks up the phone.
How would you suggest he make first contact to the people that he wants to relate to?
Paul : That's very interesting. These days I think one can make a judgement about somebody and their way of being by looking at their online networks, such as LinkedIn or Zing, or some of the others - and you can quite often look at somebody's profile and identify the particulars that they've used in their descriptions of themselves.
You can get an idea of what's important to them, and their values. And by doing that prior to making that contact, and of course having all of that corporate information available to - you're stepping in the right direction and making a good first impression.
And obviously, as we all know - you don't get another chance to make a good first impression.
Michael : OK. So you've started that relationship off. What happens next in this imaginary sales process?
Paul : Well, in the ideal situation, your potential buyer also becomes your sponsor and you work together in order to sell into the organisation what it is that they propose. Very often there is a great deal of work to be done in financial justification, because that first relationship may not be adequate to take the sale all of the way through.
And other relationships will be less close as you move into the opportunity to talk with a CFO for example, where you'd get just one chance to talk and to produce your financial case and then walk away. You're not, with him, able to create the same relationship that you would be with the first people that you get involved with.
Michael : So are you saying - and please correct me - That you've got your first contact, and with him you then refine the proposal, and then with him, or you yourself decide who it is that you actually need to promote this to.
Paul : That's often the way that the best, optimal sell will go. Remembering that buyers are there often to beat suppliers over the head in terms of price - and this approach tries to take away that, so that you both look at value rather than cost.
Now that's quite difficult, because a lot of sales people are not used to that - and for the last ten or twenty years in IT sales people could be very successful without creating relationships. And what they tended to do was to go out into the marketplace and look for buyers - Look for a company that was already looking to buy something and sell it to them.
These days it's much more difficult because it's harder to differentiate at a level of product or service, between the offerings of different suppliers. So very often it's the quality of the sales person's activity that becomes the differentiator of who wins the business.
Michael : Moving on from that. You're now in the company, you've talked to everybody - in terms of the process, what happens next? What are the next few stages before you can actually say that the sell is finished?
Paul : The next few stages are really to maximise the value of the sale for both parties, because one might have gone in with an original proposal - and if you don't look at that proposal from a cost point of view, you'll only look at it from a point of view of what it will deliver in value - there are very often opportunities to extend the value by looking at what is around the edges.
So by extending the values both parties may end up doing a bigger deal - buy both benefiting by a proportionate amount in addition.
Michael : OK. I understand that. Take us from now until you consider that the sale has finished. What are the main things between where you've got to and where you can actually say that the sale has finished.
Paul : OK. Well, for my world of larger sales in IT environments, the sale is never actually finished. The original sale may capture a new customer, but it's an ongoing relationship. So the sale changes from an initial one of making the sale and creating the relationship to then defending it against attack from other suppliers, effectively.
And again, one of the key criteria is to determine whether a competitor is going to take a customer away from you or not is the perception and the trust that the buyer has in you as a supplier. And the number of areas involved in creating that perception or that trust is nothing to do with what you're selling - it's to do with your personal behaviours and your personal capabilities of relating to the customers.
Michael : Let's move on from the process. In NLP we talk a lot about states. What do you think are some of the useful states for top sales people to have?
Paul : People that enter into sales as a profession tend to be very optimistic, and tend to be very active, and those are very good attributes. However it tends to create a repetition of activity rather than necessarily learning from what happened. So learning everything from what happens, in NLP terms 'there's no failure, there's only feedback.' is a very important behaviour for sales people to take on board.
We have the capability to learn more from our failures than we do from our successes, and the best sales people actually mature, change, and develop different behaviours rather than just repeat the same behaviours with more customers.
And very often you'll get a sales account manager whose manager, whose boss, doesn't know anything about NLP and will beat the poor guy around the head for failing on a sale instead of sitting down and trying to understand what was the useful feedback that we got from this and how could we change our behaviours to do better next time.
Michael : OK - and how we could make something from it.
Paul : Yes, exactly so. I think that the best sales people create, effectively, a personal information management system. They do a personal audit on themselves, and have the capability to know that by changing behaviour they will do better next time.
The key very often is in being able to manage state because sales people do have to suffer a lot of pressure in the work that they do - and the ability to manage state and to call upon a positive state when it's needed is another very key requirement.
Michael : Excellent. Different sort of question - What do you think are some of the backgrounds that the best salespeople have? And does it matter?
Paul : Very interesting question. I don't think that the background is that important, but I do think that the core values of somebody is important because selling has to be valued by them as something that is significantly important. If they haven't got as a core value that what it is that they're selling is important for both them, their life, and for the customer, then they tend to get distracted by other things and not to stay in the profession.
Michael : Now either from your own point of view - because you might not want to anticipate this for other people - but what are some useful beliefs that salespeople can have about their customers?
Paul : Wow, that's a big question. I think that successful sales people believe that the customer is acting out of best intention regardless of what that customer does and that is one of the fundamental NLP presuppositions that allows that salesperson to continue acting with this potential customer, even if he may feel that he's being treated badly, being rejected, or being treated as an inferior being.
Michael : OK. And what are some of the beliefs that good sales people may have about themselves?
Paul : Beliefs that they're capable of achieving their goals. Beliefs that support them in achieving the goals that they want and modifying the way that they do what they do in order to achieve them.
If you have sales people, and very often the very mature sales people, those who have been in sales maybe thirty years are the most difficult to see succeeding in the current marketplaces, because they have the belief that what they do, they are doing correctly and I'm being very general here in that observation.
But the most successful younger generation of sales people are the ones that are eager to make changes in themselves in order to achieve their goals.
Michael : OK. And again - either talk about successful sales people that you know or talk about yourself - What sort of mission do you have? When you're out there selling, who are you? What is you is your own personal mission, if you have one?
Paul : Personal mission - I'm not sure how to answer the question really. Personal mission I think really for both me and highly successful sales people has to be about excellence. It has to be about doing what you're doing in the best possible way for all parties.
Michael : I like that. That sits well. And in a way this allows you to build on what you said before - How do you think that selling is changing?
Paul : Yes, it does seem to build on what I've already said. In the past, especially in the ICT arena, one could achieve very good results by being very average in your abilities. It was a numbers game because the market was absorbing, effectively, all of the products and services that were being offered to it.
That's no longer happening, and the differentiation between products and services is getting smaller. The great differentiation now comes from the support, the knowledge, the professionalism that's taken to the buyer by the sales person. Therefore I'm seeing two areas of change that are very important.
One is the ability to form a longer-term relationship where both willing to win a bit and lose a bit in order to work together towards mutual success, and secondly where the salesperson is able to qualify what he is selling on a financial lever.
And that's a big change. In the past a lot of IT was sold to IT managers, now IT is being sold into the financial side of the business. So the sales person not only has to create a relationship and have rapport with his clients on the two sides of the business - both IT and on finance - but at the same time has to put over a sales message in a way that is framed in financial terms, not in new features and benefits.
Michael : A curious question. If you had to describe the relationship between a salesperson and his or her customers and clients - and you had to describe it in a metaphor - how would you describe it?
Paul : There are probably all sorts of relationships, but if we're talking about the one that a person would want to achieve - the perfect relationship - then I would see the buyer and the seller as being members of the same family.
They would know each other very well, and assuming it's a close family they would also trust each other. So I would put them as a family unit.
Michael : Now is there anything that you would - for our listeners - like emphasise or add, just to round it off, is there anything that you would like to emphasise?
Paul : Not specifically Michael. Just to say that from the point of view of sales, I think that everything that I've said today indicates the use of NLP is increasingly - in my opinion - becoming a differentiator between the winners and the losers, in the sales process.
The only thing that I would add as we close this is that those soft skills is for many sales people an area that they may have avoided in the past because it's easier to study what it is that you're selling rather than study yourself.
But I would say that as we move forwards into the new markets that are ahead of us in the next few years - those personal skills are going to be very strong differentiators in deciding who succeeds in hitting their quotas for the year, and those that don't.
Michael : Excellent. Because you've talked to us about your experience for almost half an hour, is there anything that you would like to plug that you're doing? And would you like to give your contact details?
Paul : Well, there's nothing really that I would like to plug. Certainly from a business point of view we're going to be launching some public sales master courses into the UK and into Spain in the near future, which would contain some NLP content and would hopefully some of the people that have been listening to this will contact me on a personal level and come to those courses - hopefully someone will come along and join us on one of those.
And in terms of contact details the best way to contact me is through
mail@pauljarvis.com
Michael : Excellent. Thank you very much for your time.
Paul : Thank you very much Michael, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Paul Jarvis on Selling
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