Sales Success for the Individual Contributor
Let’s start with two of my favorite personal quotes:
“Luck is what happens when Preparation meets Opportunity.” – Seneca, Roman Philosopher.
“Become the person who would attract the results you seek.” – Jim Cathcart, Author of “Relationship Selling”
Why are those quotes important? Because they point out that you are responsible for your own success.
Great companies with great products or services and great management teams make it much easier to be successful, but anyone who is prepared, curious, focused, motivated, and has a system they follow can succeed anywhere.
My experience has shown the following to be true:
- You are unlikely to succeed without preparation and understanding of your prospects, their customers, and their competition. This understanding provides the foundation for asking relevant questions to understand the real need and effectively qualify a deal in or out.
- Most sales occur because a Product or Service solves real and immediate business problems or ties into strategic business initiatives.
- Your early goals should be around getting the meeting, having real discussions, understanding problems from your prospect’s perspective (including the terminology they use to describe those problems), and helping them describe what success “looks like to them” and why that is important (logically and emotionally). At this stage, you are learning and positioning, not selling.
- Deal qualification is an essential skill that enables you to focus your time and efforts where you are most likely to succeed. The faster you can “qualify out” a prospect that is not a good fit, the better it is for you and that prospect. Eternal optimism is not a plan for filling your pipeline.
- If you have a supporting team, ensure that everyone understands the situation, their role and contribution to success, and what you want them to focus on. Never assume that things will just fall into place on their own.
- Have a repeatable process to track activities, measure progress, and identify the best next steps. Remember, “To measure is to know.” (Lord Kelvin)
- The sale is not over until your new Customer is happy. Become their internal advocate within your organization, and you will be rewarded with the customer’s trust, loyalty, and repeat business.
Ideally, your Sales Leadership Team has defined a Sales Strategy and created a couple of repeatable Sales Plays and compelling supporting materials such as Success Stories; Case Studies; ROI and TCO charts; brief but targeted Demos; and realistic Product Comparison information for internal use. These become the foundation for repeatable and scalable success.
But, if that is missing, collaborate with your peers, seek guidance from your leadership, and get creative. Remember, you are ultimately responsible for your success, so don’t allow things to become excuses or a crutch. In the words of the Buddha, “There are three solutions to every problem: Accept it, Change it, or Leave it.”
To help ensure success, you will need to follow a Sales Methodology. Here is a link to a good high-level overview from Spotio.com. I’ve used several and there are pros and cons to each. None of them effectively addresses the successful progression from:
- Initiation, Understanding, and Qualification.
- Defining a compelling Solution and successfully positioning it against the competition.
- Closing the Sale is an area in which many salespeople fall short.
The sales methodology that I personally believe is one of the easiest to use and most effective is MEDDIC. It is a Deal Qualification process, which is more encompassing than a simple Lead Qualification approach. The biggest blind spot is that it fails to address these four key areas:
- Influencers within a buyer’s organization. Knowing who these people are and their biases will allow you to direct various resources towards each and ideally provide a multi-threaded approach for each deal.
- Incumbents and the sentiment towards those vendors and their products. This is key to not wasting time on an opportunity you would unlikely win.
- Related/Adjacent needs. Being able to tie success to multiple areas provides leverage and increases the value of your solution.
- Timeline/Urgency. This allows you to work backward from milestone dates for efforts like typical lead times for Legal and Purchasing, Integration Testing, QA/QC, Training and Documentation, etc.
Being prepared, creating a common vision of success based on the outcome rather than the approach, being responsive, and developing relationships and trust based on knowledge and a desire to help are easy ways to differentiate yourself from many lesser salespeople. Invest in your skills, set aggressive goals, and always hold yourself accountable for success.
Do this and you will become part of the 20% of any sales team that ‘moves the dial.’
Where Ideas, Experiences, and Lessons Learned Intersect 