Seeing past sales 101

To be capable of selling virtually anything, salespeople must be equipped with a basic armoury of skills that includes all the fundamentals – cold-calling, managing a territory, delivering presentations, negotiating, closing and so on. But while these skills are certainly valuable, they have limited potential and won’t provide too much of a competitive edge. In order for salespeople to consistently outsell their competitors – particularly in more complex environments – they will require advanced selling capabilities. 

One of the key problems we face in sales, however, is the fact that many salespeople and sales leaders, once they’ve accomplished the basics, believe they have essentially mastered all the skills they need to be successful. And it’s a problem that extends to a lot of sales training companies: many offer various flavours and versions of sales 101, and not much more besides. The reality is that these are all just basic skills and if every salesperson in a particular territory or market has those fundamentals and nothing else, no one has any real competitive advantage.

Truly savvy sales leaders will ensure that their salespeople are well versed and very capable in sales 101 skills and capabilities before going on to invest the time, money and effort in taking them to the next level. And that next level is where the competitive difference really is. Our research (at ES Research Group) – carried out both formally and from working with clients – indicates that companies that adopt and become proficient in advanced selling techniques are able to win more than their normal share of business.

Strategic approach

There’s a significant leap from sales 101 to more advanced skills, and the latter is infinitely more strategic. One example of an advanced selling skill is the ability to determine the competition’s selling strategies and devise effective counter-strategies to deal with these. For instance, if you know that your competitor is always trying to negative sell against you, you can reduce any potentially damaging impact by developing your own counter-strategy and pre-empting their tactics. This is obviously far more effective than waiting until the damage is already done.

Another example of an advanced selling skill is the ability to link the strategic value of a product or service to your customer’s long-term business objectives. If, for example, you’re selling laptops and you tell potential customers that these are the best available, then highlight the laptop’s key features and point them towards favourable reviews, that’s essentially a sales 101 kind of approach.

However, if you know your client is trying to break into a new market or provide existing customers with greater value, you can communicate information about your laptops that directly relates to your client’s ability to achieve their strategic objectives and therefore position your offering as a tool rather than a commodity product. That’s advanced selling.

Another very important skill that very few companies really understand is the ability to identify, recruit and leverage politically powerful people to influence buying decisions. In many companies, most decisions are informed by the personal and business agendas of a few powerful and influential people, rather than a system whereby everybody involved gets an equal vote. The salespeople who learn how to find the really powerful people within organisations, who really understand what those people are looking to gain out of an initiative, a project, or some type of a new business direction, and who can then appeal to their personal and business goals, are usually the ones who can turn buying decisions in their favour.

And that is a pretty advanced selling capability. To consistently pull it off requires a lot of experience and plenty of insight into how organisations really work and how people think. The salespeople who have figured out how to do that generally tend to win more business.

The challenge

But it is still a significant challenge to get sales leaders and managing directors to understand that it’s just not realistic to hire an average salesperson, to put them through basic sales training and to then expect them to win more than their fair share of business.

If they’re to win new business, more business and higher-value contracts, salespeople must be given as much competitive advantage as possible and there are several ways of doing that. As far as training is concerned, it involves providing them with the learning they need to develop the advanced selling skills that will enable them to overcome competitors who have nothing more than plain old sales 101. 

Of course, mastering advanced selling skills takes a real analytical capability, as well as discipline, intelligence and resilience, and not every salesperson has these qualities. There are plenty of salespeople who are very effective in certain kinds of sales jobs, but who just don’t have the capabilities or personal traits required for advanced selling.

So, when sales leaders come around to the idea that they need to bring their salespeople to the next level to help them win business, they need to start out by determining whether those people will be capable of taking on a whole new layer of skills. If a salesperson doesn’t have it in their DNA to be able to get to the next level, trying to force them to go there will only result in them being distracted and discouraged, which is the last thing you want. Plus, you’ll miss your company sales targets too.

And there is still a place for salespeople who don’t have the potential to take on these skills. Plenty of organisations will benefit from having two types of salespeople: one type to go after the very complex, competitive deals, and the other to do the more transactional, competitive-type deals, requiring two different skillsets and two different sets of DNA, depending on those responsibilities.

And the need for advanced selling skills also depends largely on what you’re actually selling. If it’s big ticket items and the sales process generally involves large, diverse buying committees and a need for real relationship building, then these advanced skills are certainly required. But, if your focus is food products, drinks, office equipment, networking, wiring, construction materials and so on, you probably need fewer of those very advanced selling skills.

The current climate

That said, the way the economy is right now, I personally believe that advanced selling skills are even more critical than ever. Right now, CEOs need to get their salespeople to think about what their customers have to accomplish, rather than what they themselves want to or need to achieve. If your salespeople are totally focused on ensuring your customers accomplish what they have to, whether it’s making their numbers, retaining more of their own customers, beating their competitors, preventing their prices from having to go up – whatever it happens to be, then you, in turn, are going to achieve what you need to.

But it takes mature thinking for a salesperson to be able to understand that it’s not about you surviving and putting money in your pocket; it’s really about your customers surviving, because if they do, you do. That takes advanced thinking, planning, research, analysis and understanding, and your average salesperson on the street is not going to think that way. They’re going to think, ‘Let me look at my customer list. Who can I sell something to today?’ But that very short-term, tactical, ‘me’ view is not what’s needed today.

A very small percentage of salespeople currently have advanced selling skills and are applying them to the extent that they are winning business on a consistent basis because of them. I’d be surprised if 10pc of salespeople are using such skills effectively. I think a lot of other people are just out there with their fingers crossed, slugging it out, hoping upon hope that they’re going to win.

That said, a lot of them are doing many of the right things: there’s nothing wrong with sales 101 – without that you’re not going to really win anything. They’re doing many of the right things; they’re just not doing enough of the right things to be able to count on them to consistently be successful.

Dave Stein is founder and CEO of ES Research.

This article first appeared in Marketing Age magazine.