In August, I wrote how a kitesurf accident that left me in a coma triggered a deep curiosity about resilience: the ability to brush yourself off after getting knocked down. I wanted to find out what we can learn from people who don’t just get back on their feet, but actually come out stronger – and how to apply their skills in the sales profession. Because the reality is that in sales, we’re exposed to a steady stream of setbacks, which could lead to disappointment, stress or demotivation. Yet, we don’t normally get trained on how to best handle these upsetting events. Some of us cope well, others don’t. Why is that? This is the first follow-up article to share what I’ve learned about resilience for the sales professional.
Let’s debunk the first myth straight away. Resilience is not a trait. It is not a characteristic that you’re either born with, or not. Resilient sales people are not ‘just tough and determined individuals’ that shrug their shoulders when difficulties arise. The behaviours that make people resilient are in fact based on skills and practices that are teachable. Things that you as an individual, and organisation, can put in place to be better prepared when hard times hit. Sheryl Sandberg, who unexpectedly lost her husband and wrote a book to share her lessons learned on the harrowing journey that followed, says that resilience can be built. It is not about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone, she writes. Although her experience is way more heart wrenching than mine, one commonality stood out for me. She needed to get her life back on track, just like me after my accident. We both had a ‘meaningful cause’, a higher purpose to reach for, that kept us focused during our recovery – a journey with its own number of setbacks along the way – and helped us pull through.
To appreciate how purpose builds resilience, Mandela’s plight is as impactful as it gets. The setbacks he experienced – including the 27 years he spent in jail – did not make him give up his fight against apartheid. Quite the opposite – he really came out stronger when he became the president of South Africa in 1994. Malala, the Pakistani schoolgirl who fought for gender equality in education and got shot in the face by the Taliban, showed a similar resilience. She not only survived her ordeal, but decided to bring her crusade to the global stage, becoming a UN Messenger of Peace, and the youngest ever Nobel Prize winner in 2014. She is also now doing speaking engagements across the world, and will be in Australia in December.
Us sales professionals tend to not have as idealistic a cause as Mandela or Malala, but if we want to be more resilient, we’d be wise to seek a higher cause than our quarterly commission cheque. The companies I worked for that had a clear and inspiring vision did much better in retaining talent when we hit some rough patches. Sales professionals who really bought into the positive change that the company was bringing to the world were the ones who were always more determined, while seemingly needing less energy! The reps who were there just for the money were the first ones to give up when times got tough. A vision creates meaning, which in turn, builds determination.
What if your company doesn’t have a meaningful purpose or vision? I suggest you don’t wait for HQ to inspire you – the strongest vision that made me power through hard times at work was the one where we as a local team agreed to build the best sales team in Australia (and I believe we did!). What if your team can’t agree on one? Create your own. Find a deeper meaning than your quarterly target. Asses the skills you’re building and determine how they support your overall career over the long run. Print them out, and hang them up to remind yourself of what you’re working towards when times get tough. In part 3, I’ll be sharing insights around how setting specific goals around my vision helped me built resilience during my recovery.
Even if you’ve only been in B2B sales for a short while, you already know this: Sales is exciting and fun, but also comes with disappointment. As sales professionals, we are exposed to many events that can cause stress, anger or frustration. We have prospects who don’t call us back, we miss out on RFPs, we don’t get shortlisted, we miss our target, we lose an existing customer, we get meetings cancelled on us without reason, and we are given territory restructures and targets we don’t always agree with. Most of all, we lose more deals than we win. I’m not asking for pity here, but a career in sales is also a career with enough, let’s say, opportunity for disappointment.
Good sales people brush themselves off after getting knocked down. Great sales people go further. They actually thrive in the face of stress, setbacks and adversity, and come out stronger. They are resilient sales professionals. After 20 years in sales, I like to think I am one of them. I’m still going strong, with the conviction that every year, I am getting better at it. But at a personal level, my resilience got the test of a life-time a couple of years ago. I am a very experienced kitesurfer, but got involved in a horrible accident; I somehow got entangled in another kitesurfer’s lines, got lifted up and fell 30 feet down onto the beach – face first. A trauma helicopter raced me to the hospital where X-rays revealed my face was shattered into 9 pieces, my pelvis broke off my spine, my wrist was beyond repair and vital organs had been damaged by bone splinters. I was in a coma for the first 10 days, and had dozens and dozens of hours of surgery in the weeks after. I left the hospital two months later, and although I lost 10 kilos in body weight, I gained a total of 47 screws, 11 titanium plates, and one brand spanking new titanium eye socket.
It took nearly two years to fully recover, with lots of setbacks along the way. Once I got my life back, I felt the way a race horse must feel after her blinkers are removed at the finish line of the Melbourne Cup Race. Exhausted, satisfied but not exactly sure what happened. From doctors, surgeons and physiotherapist, I kept hearing how lucky I had been and how my determination made it a very unusual recovery (did I mention I am kitesurfing again?). They told me that other people wouldn’t have made it to such a great outcome. To start with, a third of Intensive Care Unit survivors falls into depression. What Nietzsche said is wrong. What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t make you stronger. Not necessarily. Many people come out weaker, or barely get their old life back; physically or mentally.
In the corporate environment, people who experience serious setbacks don’t always come out stronger either. Instead, the continuous flow of setbacks slowly demoralises or burns them out. Which explains why we are all familiar with terms like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Anxiety, Stress at Work, Burnout, Depression and so on. Sure, there are inspirational stories of people who somehow scramble back up, but in popular media, not much attention is devoted to how these people exactly manage to come out stronger.
I became curious about that very topic. What is it they do, and what can we learn from them so we are better equipped when we face a great deal of adversity in sales? Because the reality is that in my career, I’ve had many, many sales trainings, but not one of them on resilience. Not even a few pointers. We’re just supposed to dust ourselves off and get back in the saddle. Clearly, more resilient sales people would bring higher productivity, create a more fun work environment, more stability and consistency, more happiness, and lead to more deals won.So I started reading. About resilience. About positive psychology. About the plasticity of the brain, and the working of hormones like cortisol, dopamine, and adrenaline. I read autobiographies from Mandela and Malala, to understand their incredible journeys of resilience. I read books from CEOs about how they guided their companies through turbulence and setback after setback. And I found a few common themes, or skills which resilient people apply. All of them are applicable in corporate sales. I am super excited to present these in a first workshop this week, and will be sharing my findings on my website and linkedin in the coming period. Stay tuned!
I often come across two key challenges, when consulting enterprise b2b sales teams:
Several deals in the pipeline keep on getting pushed out, after which they finally get closed to the dreadful “No Decision” stage. Then, everyone seems to agree these deals should not have been qualified-in in the first place. But, the next quarter, the same things happens again.
After closing a deal to the even more dreadful “Lost to Competition”, post-loss analysis reveals that prospects believe the product differentiators are not that aligned with their needs or budget. Yet, no one picked up on that before the decision.
Such problems are nearly always the result of weak execution of the early stages of the sales process. And typically, this weak execution is a result of a poor design of the sales process. The Sales Process simply does not align with the Buying Process.
The Sales Process
For most B2B sales teams, the Sales Process invariably looks like this. The first stage is “Prospecting” – finding a prospect that potentially has a need for your product or service. “Qualification” then follows, with validation steps around BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs, Timing). When that gets cleared (or, more likely, when the rep thinks it does), the whole sales train comes in motion with numerous activities focused at linking your solution to the prospect’s needs: “Discovery”, “Demonstration”, “Proposal”, “Negotiation”, etc.
The Buying Process
In reality, the Buying Process (all that happens at the prospect’s side) begins much earlier than the Sales Process (that what happens at your side). At the prospect’s side, a company typically goes through three phases, before they start looking for a solution. These phases roughly go like this: 1) Something Changes, which then 2) causes or aggravates Pain or friction, which then 3) gives rise to Needs. Which triggers the search for a Solution. For instance, that Change that gets the whole Buying Process in motion, could be the prospect’s competitor creating price pressure, or new government regulation, or margin erosion, or a current vendor not performing. Or – the Big Change – the prospect’s customer (often the Consumer) is changing. They want things faster, easier, in a self-serve fashion, or cheaper (because that’s the expectation set by companies like Netflix, Amazon, Uber, or other companies that don’t even play in the prospect’s industry). This Change creates Pain because the prospect’s current processes and infrastructure were created before this Change occurred. People at the prospect then realise something needs to be done (or not), they define their needs, and then look for a solution to meet those needs.
In those three phases where Change leads to Pain, and then to Needs, some crucial decisions get made on the prospect’s side. And not all of them are made explicitly, some just ‘happen’. The internal owner of the problem is assigned or arises, the priority over other business problems is determined, an initial business case gets established to determine whether to indeed move forward, needs get defined, a rough view of the solution gets formed, expectations around timelines are set, and resources and budget get earmarked. Once that’s established, the search for a solution starts. The main stage in the Sales Process that covers those first three important phases of the Buying Process, is that “Prospecting” stage. Sure, it’s not always all that linear, but key factors that determine the potential fit of your solution really get shaped in these very early stages.
What’s Wrong
In other words, fundamental decisions that impact your ability to win the deal are made in the “Prospecting” stage – before the evaluation really starts. The reality is that once an opportunity clears that BANT qualification hurdle, your ability to influence is greatly reduced. The train has left the station, and if you weren’t steering it, there’s no point jumping on board.
And that’s where the Sales Process design often is wrong. Sales emphasis actually increases as the ability to influence reduces. Sales management tends to only get involved once opportunities are well progressed – post Qualification. Solution Consulting and Processional Services assign domain experts once it gets to “Discovery” or “Proposal” stage. Management start scrutinising things once an opportunity is in “Decision” stage. In other words – when the reps or sales manager’s ability to influence the outcome is minimal. CEOs get introduced at the tail end, when the processes set in motion typically don’t allow prospects to change tack, even if they’d wanted to. Yet, that super important “Prospecting” stage – where the ability to influence is at its highest – hardly gets any scrutiny.
How to fix it
Determine your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and ensure you Get in Early. Focus; selling change in enterprise is about quality, not quantity. Agree on the importance of the “Prospecting” stage, and rearrange your weekly sales meeting to ensure the agenda also addresses the top of the funnel. Have Marketing and Sales Development present, to share their Lead Generation activities to start conversations early. In your CRM, consider breaking up “Prospecting” into “Reaching out”, “Initial Meetings”, “Selling Vision”, and “Vision Match”, before moving on to “Qualification”. In the 1:1s with the sales reps, scrutinise opportunities in qualification stages and don’t be afraid to slow things down. If you don’t already have one, create a process around qualification; have multiple people constructively review such opportunities to avoid eagerly qualified opportunities lead to “No Decision”. Review those “No Decision” opportunities in more detail to find the cause. I often come across reps that qualify too eagerly simply because they want Solution Consultants involved, and the Sales Process dictates that SCs only get assigned to opportunities past Qualification stage! If that’s the case, train reps to have better business conversations to avoid they rush into showing what your solution looks like. Consider changing your Sales Process to involve SCs before “Qualification” with key accounts. Whatever you do, develop an understanding how your prospects buy, and what you really can still influence at what stage. A simple first step is to stop calling it a Sales Process; it’s a Buying Process.
Being able to articulate differentiators is the single most important skill for any B2B sales professional. It’s often also the most difficult; that’s why a large part of your sales training is devoted to it. As you make that skill your own, you have to be critical and be aware that your competitors will be just as confident as you when they come out of their sales training. They will develop their pitch around different differentiators and try to convince your prospect those are more important than yours. Of course, selling then is about the right questioning to understand the client’s needs, and to get them to buy into your point of view rather than the competitor’s. I am sure your sales training addresses that, too. But so does your competitor’s training.
There is a powerful question that most sales trainings don’t teach you to ask. It’s a bit of a no-brainer, which is probably the reason why it gets overlooked not just by your sales team, but by your competitors, too. It’s single best question I’ve learned to ask, and has often lead to game-changing insights. It’s pretty straight forward: “Dear customer, thank you very much for deciding to go with us after such a thorough evaluation. What made you decide that way?”. I ask this question after every single win, and always learn something new – which I then take into my next pitch. For instance, when I worked at Responsys a couple of years ago, one new client told me she back-channeled with customers of the shortlisted vendors, and heard our SaaS solution never had unexpected outages. Also, our local support team was really helpful. The sales training I’d had didn’t mention these as differentiators, but once I learned these were differentiators, I made a point of telling prospects to focus on that during the reference calls they requested. Other customers would give me reasons that did align with our differentiators, but used their words, and provided a context that helped me understand the customers’ business even better (yep, even after the deal was won! Clients sometimes open up more to sales people after the decision is made). And it wasn’t just about the customer agreeing our offering was better – sometimes, this simple question would lead to insights around competitors’ strengths or sales tactics that nearly got them to sway the deal their way!
I think another reason this question hardly gets asked, is that sales people think it could reflect a lack of confidence. They believe clients decided to go their way because they were so good at convincing them about their differentiators. The win simply is a confirmation of the sales team’s awesomeness and since the client already signed, why take the risk of coming across so timidly? To not let overconfidence or ego get in the way of gaining such powerful insights, develop a good talk track and processes around that question. Maybe an Account Manager, or senior leader could own that conversation. Maybe even an outside party. Whatever you do, make it part of the sales process! You’ll see that new customers will appreciate the humble ask, and always are willing to help you do even better.
“Please skip the slides, we’ve already been to your website. Just show us your demo, and we’ll let you know”
“No, don’t send a sales guy, just send us the guy who can answer our technical questions”
“We’ve done our research already, just give us your price”
You probably have had a prospect tell you something like that. You’ve also seen these (for us B2B sales professionals) unsettling statistics saying 70% of a business buyer’s journey is completed before the sales rep comes into the picture. Or that 90% of a buyer’s research happens online. All of this proves what we all already know: B2B buyers are much more independent as they contemplate options during their evaluation process. However nice your smile, they won’t call you in until the Buying Cycle is well on track.
Inbound and content marketing, with a big focus on educating prospects during those early stages, is typically seen as the solution to this challenge. And often, it works well. But there are scenario’s where relying on inbound marketing is not only an ineffective approach, it can actually create noise and distractions that will seriously hamper your sales success. Scenarios where a prospect needs to look at their problem from a different angle. Scenarios where you need to Get in Early to have a chance to show them that. Scenarios where the prospect can’t explore options fully without involvement from an expert – you. In SaaS, two pipeline characteristics are typically evidence of these scenarios. First, there is a lot of activity at the top of the sales funnel, with very low conversions. Prospects are interested, but unconvinced. Secondly, annual renewal levels (for those that did convert) are well below 90%. Customers didn’t really understand what they bought, didn’t integrate it properly, bought it for the wrong reasons, didn’t manage internal expectations around ROI, misjudged the impact of self-service, or a combination of all that. Oh, and that same buyer who told you he wasn’t interested in meeting a sales guy, probably blames you for not making him aware of what they really were buying.
I often come across SaaS companies that struggle with these challenges. Particularly US-headquartered companies that assume our market is as mature as theirs, and implement the same sales strategy here. Frustrated with the lack of success, they ramp up marketing to get more leads. Or tell marketing to just get better leads. Or they end up questioning the skills of the sales reps. Or, the worst of all, they start discounting to get the deal or renewal. All in all, a slippery slope.
So, what to do?
Assess the level of change your solution will have on the people, processes and technology side at your customers. With change, I mean how much the buying organisation needs to adjust before they get value from your solution. Do they need to change processes? Do they need to restructure responsibilities or even departments? Are end-users skilled to perform all tasks that come with self-service, and do their job descriptions and KPIs support that? Have they ever bought something like this before, and do they know what questions to ask? Most of all, do they even know what success looks like? With all focus on your exciting SaaS offering, it’s so easy to forget (on both sides) that a successful implementation and renewal need more than your technology alone.
If the Change Impact is low, inbound is probably the best approach. The introduction of your solution represents an incremental improvement of how they currently work – not a Big Change. Just ensure your content and processes make it really easy to buy from you. The Change Impact will be high on the other hand, if your offering involves automation of manual activities, or new self-service tasks that traditionally sat with IT or other non-functional users. Or if you rely on buzzwords like Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence – anything that has represents a Big Change to people, process and technology. In that case, a pure inbound driven approach is likely to create too much noise with the wrong prospects kicking the wrong tires. Instead, develop an old-school outbound strategy with a focus on those prospects that are most likely to buy. Don’t drop inbound all together, as long as you focus – it’s about quality, not quantity. Fight like hell to Get in Early into the Buying Cycle. Embrace Challenger Sale or Insight Selling, slow down your prospects, and position yourself as a Trusted Advisor for Change.
