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Sales professionals often need the proper support and feedback of management to be successful. Sales managers want to support their team members; however, the methods used by the managers can at times be more harmful than helpful.

Why is that?

Often there is a lack of clarity and focus between the manager and the sales professional on the behavioural expectations

Coaches often don’t understand the behavioural change process and therefore cannot gain the commitment of their staff to want to take action

Managers don’t observe their performers ‘in the game’ enough to know how to identify and target key behavioural development opportunities

The typical approach to coaching someone is to “tell” the salesperson what to do vs. asking effective questions to help lead the salesperson to improved performance

What to do about it?

Managers need to be equipped with the right sales coaching skills by understanding how to be an effective coach. They need to  learn skills on how to conduct coaching sessions that develop the key skills and that help change the behaviour of others.

How is this accomplished?

Managers need to:

Build their attributes of an effective sales coach required to create a positive coaching experience

Recognise individual differences in approaches to learning and adapt the coaching discussion to suit the needs of the individual

Identify exactly what skills and behaviours managers expect from their sales professionals in order to achieve the desirable outcomes

Enhance observation skills for assessing and identifying key behaviours, client engagement skills and sales activity at critical stages of the sales process

To provide positive and corrective performance feedback that builds and maintains self esteem

Enhance coaching communication skills (asking and listening) in order to  increase personal commitment to individual development opportunities

Demonstrate competence in the delivery of a  coaching model

Be able to set and monitor personal development plans to reinforce behavioural change after the coaching session

For more information, see maximising sales performance and skills

Andrew Sidwell, Team Egyii, Singapore

Because salespeople are too “seller focused’ and not “client focused.”

When was the last time you spoke to someone in a social situation and all that person did was talk about himself? I,I, I…me,me, me..Etc. How boring- and self-centred was that encounter? Now transpose that situation into a business scenario- a conversation with a typical salesperson or business person. Features, features, features, our company can do this and that….so many “programmed” questions because the sales process requires it…Etc.

Salespeople (and business people) still tend to act very transactional, focusing on the task at hand, the numbers, the advance, Etc.  Business people tend not to listen or really care. This is  all about “me” and not about the client.

Focus on the client and not “me” or “us.” You will see a difference.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

The more your clients trust you, the more they will:

Reach for your advice

Be inclined to accept and act on your recommendations

Bring you in on more advanced, complex, strategic issues

Treat you as you wish to be treated

Respect you

Share more crucial information

Pay your bills more quickly

Refer you to friends and business acquaintances

Lower the level of stress in your interactions

Give you the benefit of the doubt

Forgive you when you make a mistake

Protect you when you need it

Warn you of dangers that you might avoid

Be comfortable and allow you to be comfortable

Involve you early on when their issues begin to form, rather than later in the process

Trust your instincts and judgement*

Does trust make your business relationships easier? You bet.

(*From an excerpt from The Trusted Advisor)

Team Egyii, Singapore

Some of Today’s Sales Challenges

Your company has researched, designed and built competitive, innovative and compelling products.

Money and effort has also been spent on marketing and communicating the product benefits…only to soon discover that it is difficult to sell because your competitor releases a similar product shortly thereafter.

The last thing you want to do is do anything out of complete desperation or that is overly drastic…such as dropping the price or losing the sale.

This is just an example but these and other similar challenges confront your front line sales organization daily.

What to do in these and other scenarios? How to differentiate and stay ahead of the pack?

Differentiation through Your People and  Communications Delivery Methods

Your biggest differentiator is your people and how they interact with their clients.

If your people are not prepared to face these tough scenarios and work through them with your clients, then you will have difficulty growing your business and holding onto your key sales drivers, the salespeople (who will end up quitting).

How to work through this? Some examples:

Front line telephone sales need specific skills that outsell  the competition

Salespeople need to create customer value by cross-selling and up-selling

Sales needs to have high impact sales conversations with the customers

They need to present the value proposition in the right manner

How do you ensure that the skills are applied and properly utilised?

The team needs to be motivated and management needs to be aligned. Reinforcement also needs to be applied.

Motivation and Management Alignment Programmes

Examples. To enhance the sales team climate you need:

Interpersonal and team communication

Management needs to motivate the sales team, lead change and build the right team

Management needs to run effective performance appraisals and provide motivational feedback

Leadership needs to be developed through sales performance coaching, coaching the disengaged sales staff, and leading the sales team to success.

Reinforcement Methodologies

Without reinforcement, you lose the skills you have learned quickly. You need to treat learning and development with a five stage process to ensure business results always follow initiatives. Result: each initiative translates to measurable execution by learners which produces concrete business results. As follows:

Align the learning  to desired business outcomes and target behaviours

Involve all in the design of a holistic learning experience

Deliver using the right tools and practicing 80% of the time using realistic scenarios

Embed through active support  and reinforcement through direct managers

Form learning groups to act on barriers that impede performance

Lead with your people and ensure the skills they learn are embedded and utilised.

Andrew Sidwell, Team Egyii, Singapore

Customer Experience and Loyalty

The main driver behind customer experience for companies is building and maintaining customer loyalty. Happy, loyal customers tend to buy more products at higher margins with less associated costs (vs the banks’ cost acquisition of new customers). Loyal customers are also great marketing channels for the banks- word of mouth marketing (and therefore referrals) are the best way to attain well-qualified prospects.  

Customer Experience and Loyalty in Banking- 5 Key Factors

“In banking, every 1% increase in loyalty is associated with a 17% higher likelihood of repurchasing. “ (Lariviere, 2008 banking study)

According to Market Force Information Inc, there are 5 contributing factors that enhance the customer experience and therefore loyalty in banking :

Efficiency

Problem Experience

Knowledge

Relevancy

Trust

(Efficiency and Problem Experience are “the critical and necessary factors,” and Knowledge, Relevancy and Trust are “the factors that drive truly loyalty”)

So what is it that bank clients want?

The Market Force studies showed that customers wanted a knowledgeable banker (“value”) who is engaging (“relationship”).  “Being enthusiastic, sincere, and having a good rapport with customers has the highest impact on customer satisfaction, reinforcing the need to build knowledge, relevancy, and trust.” (Why the Bank Customer Experience Matters. Market Force Information 2008) This will help drive loyalty.

Building Trust to Build Loyalty- One Piece to the Customer Experience Puzzle

There is a lot of talk around building trust, but there is very little action. How to build trust and trustworthiness? It is not simple and it takes time.

Trust in banking needs to be inherently absorbed both internally and externally. Internally is within the organization- front office, back office and management. Externally is between the customer facing individuals and the customers. Without both forces at work, trust does not work.

Trusted Advisor Associates uses the Trust Equation, which consists of building trustworthiness:

Credibility

Reliability

Intimacy

Self orientation

So building trust and trustworthiness is one of the key factors in customer experience and therefore customer loyalty. Live it and breathe it to increase your business.

For more information on trust, see: Egyii- trusted advisor edge and Egyii’s partner in crime-Trusted Advisor Associates

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Client Relationships 

Although the term “client relationship” can be nebulous and can carry broad meanings, client relationships can be defined as a connection, association or involvement with a prospect or ongoing client in a business relationship.

A “relationship” can be achieved through numerous means, for example:

Someone who “surfs” the internet to look for a product, some value or knowledge.

A customer service representative assisting a client with his needs.

Advertising, PR and word of mouth marketing that connects a product with a client (or a client with a product).

A customer service survey, requesting for feedback.

But, from Egyii’s perspective, the most powerful and meaningful client relationship (for both internal and external business) is a close, personalised, long term face to face relationship.

Challenges Today in Client Relationships

With today’s busy, interconnected and digital world, it is becoming more and more difficult to build and maintain close client relationships. Companies understand the importance of it and have gone to great efforts to enhance their relationships.

Why is it so difficult?

There are too many distractions and there is too much competition for both the companies and the clients.

People are not so loyal anymore as everything is a “click away.”

Many people are leery of the “gun slinging” salesperson looking for “the deal” to meet his numbers.

Companies are too focused internally and not focused on the client.

Companies are too short term focused and not medium to long term focused.

People have doubts and trust less due to the economic environment.

From Egyii’s research and experience, we see, through service driven economies and the need to introduce complex solutions to be competitive, that the most difficult relationships for businesses to attain are the relationships that drive intangible and complex sales and overall business.

So what is missing?

Solutions

In more complex or less tangible business scenarios, what do most people want? People want to be understood and treated like an individual- not as a number. They want that connection, association and involvement. They want help.

They want some sort of relationship.

To build your relationship you first need the tools to manage yourself – your own situation. We call this self management.

Once you can manage yourself, you can start to manage the relationship. We call this relationship management.

The combination of self management and relationship management tools, along your company’s tools (your sales process, marketing and unique product offerings) make for a powerful client relationship programme.

The Benefits of Well Executed, Long Term Client Relationships

The benefits are clear. With long term, solid client relationships you and the client benefit.  

For example:

You attain a more loyal client base. It is proven that loyal clients typically buy more products at higher margin, and they are easier to cross sell and up sell to.

Your operations costs are cut. As the client becomes more familiar with you and your business, less support is required.

It is easier for the client: peace of mind.

Your product and company look different- people become the differentiator.

You become more competitive through your biggest asset- your people.

The benefits of well executed, long term client relationships benefit all parties. It is a win-win scenario.

Understanding one’s self is the key to true knowledge. Aristotle

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Let’s simplify an overused, sometimes “overcomplicated” term: customer experience.

There are three important drivers of customer experience:

Technology: Technology is the IT systems in place to track and gather the data that is necessary to understand who the client is, the client satisfaction points, their history, Etc. This would be CRM systems, call centre operations and unified communications as examples. Often companies rely too much on this driver- it cannot stand alone.

Design: Design gives us the “look, smell & feel” of customer experience. We leave this to the web designers, interior and industrial designers who enhance the “click,” the bank lobbies and the Apple iPhones.

Connect: This is the interface to the customer and the most difficult of all three, as it involves direct contact with “fickle” humans and requires a behavioural change in the company delivering the experience, to be effective.

Both Technology and Design play an important role in Connect and without Connect, you lose  the overall customer experience.

Customer service, ease of use on the company’s website and face to face interactions are the heart and soul of Connect and customer experience. It is where most companies fail and where they should be focusing,

Overall, if you use Technology, Design and Connect you will deliver great customer experience, which  drives…

word of mouth marketing

loyalty

higher profits

…and more business.

Do or die.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Trust.

It remains a hot issue and will for a while.

With that, we at Egyii will be doing a series of interviews and Podcasts with the leaders in Trust, in anticipation of our August announcement on our new programme on Trust.

The second of the series is Charles H. Green, one of the founding fathers of the “trust movement ” and founder/CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. He is the author of Trust Based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor. His expertise is in trusted relationships in business. For more on Charlie, click here.

Here is Part 2 (a continuation of Part 1).

The following is transcribed from a recorded session.

Trip Allen: Moving on to 2006, the theme of your second book called “Trust Based Selling,” encompasses two words: sales and trust.

These terms together have a bad reputation and don’t mix well with the business world, a little like oil and water.  Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Charlie Green:  Well, you are exactly right and I was completely conscious of that when I wrote it that way. In fact one major firm told me if you write a book with “sales” in the title we are not buying it.  The phenomena you just mentioned is that strong, and I wrote that way any way because I wanted to play off the tension.

I think the word sales or selling is a four letter word.  We all have these negative feelings about it, and the whole sales function in many ways has gotten a bad name, too.

What fascinated me about is that sales is where the person and the business come together. When a company buys from one and sells to another, with the exception of reverse online auctions, there are people doing “the deal,” and that is where institutions come together, where they connect. That is what fascinated me – how do people behave when there is serious money at stake and they are doing business? That is the essence of commercial relationship; commerce, in the old sense of the word.

I am happy with the choice I made, because I think it intrigues people. They say “how can you put those two together?” Well, you examine why they don’t fit, and it turns out to be a very interesting way of looking at it.

In a nutshell, there is nothing that sells better than being trusted – period. That’s the power of trust in the commercial relationship. I just find it fascinating.

Trip Allen:  Charlie, what’s the biggest thing you see wrong with selling today? You just mentioned that the reputation of a salesperson is bad, but what else do you see out there? What’s happening?

Charlie Green:  Well, it’s a great question because 10 to 15 years ago the biggest problem was salespeople selling and really not understanding the customer very well.  I think we have come to have a different problem and that is, let me call it the “mechanisation” of selling or the overdoing of “process reengineering” and the overuse of sales management systems.

Because of that we have broken the personal relationship and we have taken that “commercial” personal relationship (that I mentioned) and broken into a thousand mechanistic, metrics based, measurable behaviour based process. We have taken something that is, ought to be and can be very personal and have essentially depersonalised it. We have gotten to a level of detail where too often metrics have taken over from what the metrics were supposed to be measuring. People have therefore long ago “lost the forest for the trees” and have gotten deep in sequentially linked behaviours, so there is no relationship left.

I would actually say that is the biggest problem in selling today. We have lost the long term interpersonal relationship component of it. Every business I can think of out there still has an enormous amount of room for an increase in the level of relationships, and again, nothing is still better than that.

Trip Allen:  Great Charlie. One thing I am going to pull specifically from the book and one of the many activities I use – and I believe is very powerful,  is called “selling by doing and not telling.”

Traditionally salespeople told clients about the products, the features, the benefits etc. Salespeople have pretty much controlled the conversation. Can you elaborate a little bit on “selling by doing not telling?”

Charlie Green: Yes, and thank you for raising that. I agree with you, that is one of the powerful ideas in the book. If you think of it this way, with “selling by doing and not telling,” the more complicated the product, the more intangible the service, the longer relationship,  the more difficult  the whole sales process is, the less it is likely to be about snap decision and product qualities and so forth.

It’s complicated.

What you don’t want if you are buying a jet engine or if you are buying an audit or buying a brand advertising campaign, is to “out the expert the expert.”  That is an endless game that you will never win as a client or a customer.

What you really want to do is to be able to sleep at the night knowing you made the right decision about the person you deal with. And that is not going to come through PowerPoint presentations, Etc.; people are human beings and not persuaded of the trustworthiness of another human being by overused tools such as PowerPoint decks.  We’d like to think they are, and they will tell us they are, but they are not.

We are all human beings and profoundly make trust judgments based on much more of a “gut feel,” emotional feelings through connectivity and emotional feelings of safety. And that’s simply the way it is. I think we sort of rationalize it with all the logic and the data because, after all, we are supposed to be able to justify things.

That’s all true. But “selling by doing” basically says, instead of telling somebody about all the other past clients and all the wonderful things you have done, leave that behind and “just do it.” Deal with the person in front of you and deal with their issues, with their concerns and bring to them all the wonderful things and experiences you can deliver for them.

Just to simplify, I like to say it is like going out on a blind date with somebody. If they were to talk about the last seventeen people they went out with, you would be bored and offended.

But if on the other hand, what if your date is interesting, innovative and engaging and instead they ask you questions about you, we love that. We love it when people make the topic and conversation about us.

We need to take our expertise and apply it in real time to the problem at hand as it affects the person sitting in front of us. They don’t want to hear our resume or our history. They want to hear what our resume means for them.  That’s what “selling by doing and not telling” is all about.

Trip Allen: Great. Thank you for that. The next question has to do a bit with “selling by doing a not selling,” but it is all about collaboration. That is another key point you have in your book “Trust Based Selling.” How does collaboration improves trust and thereby improve the relationship?

Charlie Green: Well collaboration is one of the important elements I outlined in the book and it goes well beyond selling actually, although we will focus on the selling aspect only.

The other three key elements on the list are transparency, focus on the well being of the client (for sake of client and not just for us) and the tendency to look at the medium to long term (rather than just the short term).

Collaboration may be just the most important of the four elements. In any case, what collaboration means is a fundamental mindset. It says “I am not in this for me and dealing with you as an object. We are in this together. We are in for the sake of however long this relationship is going to be, working together for the greater outcome for both of us, but mainly for you, the client.”

So any decision we make has to be good one for both of us. We both have to be involved in it. We can’t keep too many secrets from each other. And if you begin thinking that way, you will begin behaving that way. You’ll start sharing more information with your customer, you’ll start feeling more free to ask them questions. After all, you have to know their answers in order to be collaborative, and frankly it even begins in the selling process. 

In those businesses that have process of using proposals, my “radical” suggestion is to write the next proposal, sitting next to the client in their offices. Instead of saying “great discussion” or “I’ll get back to you with the proposal later this week,” say “let’s book the conference room again and let’s work on this together. I know it is a proposal and, we may not get the job, I understand that. But if we may do this, you will have, at the end of the day, the best proposal possible from the combination of the two of us. By the way I suggest doing that with other potential vendors also. You will learn so much more about working with people if you begin working with them.’

That is an example of the power of collaboration.

End of Part 2. To be continued…

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Trust. It is a hot issue and there is a good reason for that.

With that, we at Egyii will be doing a series of interviews and Podcasts with the leaders in Trust, in anticipation of our August announcement on our new programme on Trust.

The first of the series is Charles H. Green, one of the founding fathers of the “trust movement ” and founder/CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. He is the author of Trust Based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor. His expertise is in trusted relationships in business. For more on Charlie, click here.

Here is Part 1.

The following is transcribed from a recorded session.

Trip Allen:  On this session of the Egyii edge, we have Charles H. Green of Trust Advisor Associates. Today the topic is ‘Trust’.

Tell us about your background and why you became so passionate about trust?

Charlie Green:  The main driver was that I spent 20 years working in the management consulting business, 10 as a management consultant and 10 helping to run the firm.

What I learned about that business was that you are selling “air,” in a way. It’s a very intangible, non unphysical kind of a service. You are selling it through people who are very bright and driven, and also little neurotic, who can’t quite get enough feedback.

You are selling this intangible “stuff” from smart people to people who manage the whole enterprise, are a little suspicious and often equally as bright. From that, I found that trust had an awful lot to do with it.

What I also found was that the clients could not compete with the consultants in terms of expertise, so the situation is a bit like a doctor- clients find it somewhat intimidating. Ultimately, the clients themselves didn’t like to be controlled either. So, the whole thing is very much run on the principles of trust, from selling in the firms to leadership of the firms.

So, as I got older and looked at more clients and businesses, I began to see general patterns of trust emerging in how businesses get run. So it’s from my personal experiences -that’s where it came from.

Trip Allen: About 9 years ago you really hit the streets with a book called “The Trusted Advisor,” which you co-authored in 2000. Today, it is a very well known, well respected book and programme. So tell us about what impact the book had on the business world at that time?

Charlie Green:  Well, it wasn’t one of the “big splash” books, but at the same time it was an idea where we hit the timing just right. The phrase “trusted advisor” had some resonance with people already in a lot of different professions like accounting, law, consulting, public relations, advertising, etc and it turns out it’s rather an annuity and it sells about  5 or 7 thousand copies a year.

I think the reason is you get to a certain point in your career in public accounting or consulting  or any of these consultative related business, or any business at all,  and you then feel you have a need to go buy “The Trusted Adviser.” So it’s turned out be like a little bit of an annuity. We don’t make a lot of money on it but it is always out there.

Trip Allen: Let me ask another question, since the “Trusted Advisor” book, what changes have you seen in the area of trust?  Over the past 9 years certainly a lot has happened.

 Charlie Green:  Well, yes. The most obvious thing is that in the past couple of years and months, the term “trust” has taken another whole new level of awareness in terms of visibility.

People suddenly raised it to a whole new level of business awareness and it’s obviously because of the recession and the great dramatic events that happened in the financial sector over the past several years.

And lot of that has to do with systemic failures of trust; trust at the individual level, trust at the organisational level and in some ways particularly at the institutional and social level.

It’s become relatively obvious when you get people like Bernie Madoff, that everybody can look at and say “wow, what a failure of trust, look what happened to the people who trusted him, we thought he was trustworthy, he wasn’t.”

I think the past 4 or 5 years in the financial sector have been the single biggest reason for the growth of trust and, depending upon what measure you look at, the decline of trusting and trustworthiness among people and businesses.

End of Part 1. To be continued…

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore