I have a theory, and it is that single-interest people rarely are the best at solving problems; to stay sane and be at your mental best, you need a distraction.  I had an example of this recently; oftentimes my car hobby provides a mental break from my sales coaching.  This time it worked in reverse.  I was fixing the power window mechanism on my ’96 Chevy Impala SS (this is a common problem on these cars), and I had an intractable problem.  To make a long story short, I needed to get a clamp aligned on the window track but the access panels didn’t allow me to align – so I was stumped and not a little frustrated.

I walked away to work on a work issue, not thinking about the problem.  I started working on a document for a customer – and 10 minutes later, I knew exactly how I needed to modify the clamp so that it would work properly.  The next night, a little welding, and I had exactly the right tool I needed, and the window was fixed.  I know that, had I just kept trying to power through the problem on the car, it would still be disassembled.  With that in mind, here’s Troy’s Process For Solving Tough Problems:

1. Have a distraction.  You can’t make a mental escape if you have nothing to escape TO.  Your distraction doesn’t need to be anything specific; it just needs to be yours.  It should be something that resonates with you and that you can mentally absorb yourself in.  Without that absorption, you won’t get the mental escape you need.
   
   
2. When the solution comes to you, let it come.  What I mean about that is this:  When your mind turns back to the problem that you were struggling with, there’s a temptation to completely flip back to that problem as soon as the germ of a solution appears.  Don’t do that.  The solution will come to you at its own pace; let it do so.  The unconscious is a wonderful thing.
   
   
3. Don’t feel you have to immediately jump back onto the problem, unless you are on a deadline.  It’s tempting, particularly with work problems, to immediately drop your distraction and go back to solving the problem.  This might be a mistake; your subconscious will continue to turn the problem over and over and refine the solution.  In the case I’m referring to, I was tempted to quit working on the document and immediately begin modifying the clamp, but I didn’t.  That was a good thing, because by the time I was done with the document, I had a refinement that made the job 100% easier than it would have been.

This approach works for me.  In fact, it’s worked for me for decades, and for many other people I have worked with.  The unusual part about this instance was that, normally, my cars solve work problems, and not the other way around.

The point is that, sometimes, trying to power through a solution to a tough problem only makes the problem worse.  This is true in sales, management, general business, and in life.

I like to listen to audio books when I take road trips.  Well, heck, let’s be honest – I usually START them on road trips and finish them while driving around town.  Recently, I’ve been listening to a good one:  “Catastrophe 1914:  Europe Goes to War,” by Max Hastings.  It’s about the First World War, and since we have the National World War I museum here in Kansas City, it piqued my interest.  A lot of what I thought I knew about WWI and its causes and start was wrong.

You wouldn’t think there would be a sales lesson in a war book, would you?  I wouldn’t – but I was wrong.  Due to advances in weaponry, WWI has been called “The First Modern War,” but early battles created huge casualties because some armies (notably, the French and Russian armies) were using 19^th century tactics against 20^th century weapons – with predictable results.  In fact, in one battle, the Russians marched in, shoulder to shoulder, wearing bright red tunics and hats with a drummer and a flag, directly toward German machine gun emplacements. The Germans were so shocked by the Russians that they actually held their fire, wondering if such obvious targets were a ruse.  When they opened fire, well, you can imagine what happened.  Believe it or not, this has a lot to do with sales.

The 20^th century could be seen as the birth of modern sales techniques, as authors from Ziglar to Hopkins to Gitomer endeavored to teach salespeople how to sell.  In addition, numerous sales training companies and franchises were birthed.  Some of the techniques taught were good, some were pretty bad, and many were a product of their time.

Times have changed.

What many of those techniques had in common is that they worked IF and ONLY IF your buyer didn’t understand what you were trying to do to them.  Looking back over old sales books, it amazes me how many of the techniques are based on the idea of maneuvering your customer into a corner with words (theirs and yours) so that they “had to buy.”  Those techniques worked when the customer was kept in the dark.  The trouble is, it’s not dark anymore.

The Internet has brought salespeople many gifts.  Customer information is far more accessible.  It’s easier to find and network with potential customers online.  It’s easier to disseminate your message online.  Those are all great things.

It’s also brought sunlight into the customer’s world.  It’s far easier for customers to compare and contrast products and services.  Customers no longer have to rely on salesperson-supplied references – review sites allow customers to share their experiences, both good and bad.  And – get this – there are websites that actually discuss sales techniques that salespeople use, and how buyers can defend themselves from those techniques and those salespeople.  If that’s frightening to you, you should probably reevaluate your sales approach.

I still sit in on live sales calls with my clients (both on the customer’s side of the desk and on the salesperson’s), and I’ve seen some amazing things in the last few years.

I’ve seen a customer stop a salesperson and say, “You’re trying to use an Up Front Contract on me, and I don’t do that.”  The salesperson’s jaw hit the floor, no doubt over his technique being spotted and named.

I’ve seen a salesperson attempt to misquote a product stat to position his as better than his competitor’s – only to have the customer turn his phone screen around and show the correct stat.

I’ve seen a sale lost when a customer found a salesperson whining about his customers on his Facebook page.

And of course, I’ve seen a lot more.  What all of these things have in common is this – salespeople were selling with a 20^th century mentality, and 20^th century sales techniques, in a 21^st century environment.  To their competitors, they were the equivalent of the 1914 Russians walking into battle against the Germans.

So, what is essential to 21^st century selling?  Glad you asked.

• Open and honest dialogue.
• Penetrating questions designed to elicit information, not manipulate and lead.
• Transparency; if you try to hide things from your customers, they’ll find out anyway.
• Respect for the buyer’s intelligence.
• Knowledge of, and respect for, the customer’s buying process.
• A desire to help the customer win rather than pushing product.
• An understanding of information and its value.

In today’s selling environment, the salespeople who focus on those essentials, rather than last century’s sales techniques (even if they have cute names) are going to be the ones who win.

We all have our passions, and as you probably know by now, one of mine is cars and motorcycles.  This weekend, I had a chance to indulge that passion by showing my ’96 Chevy Impala SS at the Kansas City World of Wheels.  I’ve been going to the WoW since I was 10, and this was the first year I’d shown a car (I showed my Harley the previous two years).  It was a great experience, and as it turned out, the judges liked my Impala – I got second in my class.

What I’ve discovered, though, is that even during a ‘hobby’ weekend, I’m still the Sales Navigator.  I had a moment where my instincts came out, and therein is a sales lesson.

These shows are three days long; counting setup, we occupy the better part of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It’s a long show and exhausting.  Judging takes place on Friday and class awards are presented on Saturday.  On Sunday, a lot of people look a little like zombies.  Well, on Sunday at about 1 PM, I noticed that the roof and hood of my Impala were dusty – and on a black car, that’s pretty noticeable.

So, I got out my Meguiar’s Quick Detailer and a towel and started cleaning the dust off.  As I did, a guy walked by, complimented me on the car, and said that he had a truck that was displayed a few spots away.  He asked, “I have to ask you something.  It’s Sunday.  Why are you still polishing your car?”

I said, “Well, the people who are here today paid just as much as the people who came yesterday, and they deserve our best effort.”  He got a funny look on his face and said, “You know, you’re right.”  A few minutes later, I looked over and saw him polishing his truck.  Obviously, he took my point to heart.

How often do we allow ourselves to experience a letdown in our careers?  Probably quite a bit.

At 4 P.M., do you stop making calls and head for Happy Hour, or do you power through and keep selling until 5?

Partway through the month, when your numbers are made, do you relax and go play golf – or do you work to get a head start on the next month?

When working a trade show, do you have the same intensity on the last day as you did on the first?

Do you keep asking your current customers good and new questions, or do you ease up and do the old “P.R. visits?”

Like the people who paid to attend the car show, the potential value of your time and your customers’ time doesn’t change.  What changes is your approach to maximizing that time.

So, yes.  Polish the car on Sunday.  It’s worth the effort, as my new friend decided.

Remember the old TV game shows, where at the end they’d have a “Lightning Round?”  In the “Lightning Round,” they’d put two contestants in an isolation booth, pepper them with questions, and whoever got the most questions right won the big money.  The winners were almost always the person who remained calm, instead of the person who acted like a nervous wreck in the booth.  There’s a lesson there.

One of the most common topics I’m asked about when it comes to training is that nebulous subject called “time management.”  “There just aren’t enough hours in the day!” yell salespeople and sales managers.  The truth is that there are usually enough hours in the day to get done what needs to get done, and successful people tend to use those hours to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. Here’s how.

Successful people have what I call “Schedule discipline.”  Schedule discipline is that ability to make plans, appointments, and commitments, and keep them in all but the most dire of circumstances.  Think back to that lightning round.  The winner was nearly always the person who stayed calm, on task, and focused.  If that person didn’t know the answer to a question, they passed in order to get more time with questions they might know.  That’s a microcosm of schedule discipline.

I’ve found that most people are pretty good at knowing and understanding what is important in their lives and careers, and most people are pretty good at building a schedule, in advance, to address those important tasks.  Not EVERYONE, of course, but most people.  If I were to ask you right now what would be your priorities to accomplish next week, or the week after, you’d probably have a pretty good idea.

What separates the successful from the unsuccessful is their ability to ACCOMPLISH those priorities and KEEP those commitments.  Take that hypothetical set of priorities two weeks down the road.  If we were to review that set of priorities at 5 PM Friday, how many of them would you have gotten accomplished?  That’s the difference.

So, what happens to interfere?  Distractions.  A customer calls.  You see a post on Facebook.  Someone walks into your office.  Any number of myriad events occurs that can disrupt a plan; some are avoidable and some are not.  This is where schedule discipline comes in. 

“Schedule discipline” is the skill that allows someone to immediately assess a distraction from the plan and decide if it really must be handled immediately, or if it can wait.  One of the biggest fables that has been taught is that we are capable of “multitasking.”  We are not – study after study shows that our brains are only capable of processing one input in any particular moment, no matter what the stimuli.  And when a new input is accepted, our brain must first detach from the previous task, then accept and process the new input, and then re-engage in the previous task.  All of that is lost time.

Ironically, as I was typing that paragraph, an email alert came up on my screen.  I didn’t read it because I’m working on this article; to read and process it would have taken time and attention away from the task at hand.  I’ll get to it as soon as I’m done writing and posting this.

So, how can you implement schedule discipline in your career?  It’s more than just “Plan your work, and work your plan.”  The real key to working the plan is personal and team discipline.

1. First of all, when you have a key task to accomplish –whether it’s prospecting, or a coaching session, or a meeting – schedule it as an appointment, even if it’s only an appointment with yourself.  And then keep it.  And have some mechanism to inform your other team members that you’re working on something important.  As a salesperson, I used a version of the old college “sock on the doorknob” technique; I had a yellow sign that said “Prospecting,” and I used to hang it up to let people know not to interrupt me unless it was really important.  Which leads us to….
   
   
2. Manage interruptions wisely.  Interruptions of any kind are killers to your work.  The key is to manage and prioritize interruptions wisely.  Everything isn’t “hair on fire, have to deal with it RIGHT NOW” level, but if you allow it to become that, it will.  Not only do YOU have to discern what’s important enough to break your workflow, you have to help your TEAM discern as well.  If it isn’t an issue that would jeopardize a key customer relationship, or a key employee, or represent an opportunity that would not be open if it weren’t handled RIGHT NOW, then don’t let it interrupt your work.  Again, schedule that which is important.
   
   
3. Schedule tasks in no more than two hour blocks, if at all possible.  There are a few reasons for this.  First of all, if you’re prospecting, I find that you get stale if you do more than a two-hour prospecting block at a time.  Secondly, in my experience, there are few issues that can’t wait a maximum of two hours, whether it’s email, a customer call, or an upset employee.  Keeping your task-time to two hour blocks means that nothing has to wait for an unacceptable period.  Again, there are exceptions, but they are rare.
   
   
4. Allow time between blocks for the unexpected.  If you’re isolating yourself for two-hour blocks, you’ll need time in between those blocks as a catch-all for whatever issues might come up.  This is also time to answer emails, return calls, and other random acts of being busy.  For every two hours “in session,” allow a half hour to an hour “off session.”
   
   
5. Keep your commitments.  To yourself, to internal personnel, and to external personnel.  Schedule discipline is all about respecting the value of your own time, and getting others to respect the value of both your time and theirs.  If you commit to a task or a meeting, keep it.  You’re not only making yourself more productive, you’re also modeling behavior for the rest of your team.  If you’re a manager and they see you doing this to manage your own time, they’ll use this system to manage theirs as well.  On the other hand, if they see you coming in to work in the morning and waiting to run from putting out fire to putting out fire, they’ll do that too.  Oddly enough, those who work under schedule discipline seem to have fewer fires to put out in the first place.

There’s more to say on this subject, of course, but you can drill down to the details as much as you want.  What I’ve discovered about so many “time management” approaches is that they focus so much on the details that the big issues get lost in the shuffle.  Think of each work day as your own personal “Lightning Round,” and you’ll have the schedule discipline that separates the successful from the unsuccessful.

OK, call me a Luddite if you will, but I’ve never been a fan of auto-attendant answering systems.  Currently I’m on hold to cancel a hotel reservation (they give me no way to do it online), and I’ve heard the phrase, “Your Call is Very Important to Us” for the fourteenth time.  I’m beginning to think that my call isn’t important to them at all.

Who is my call important to?  Well, let’s see.  I’ve never called Southwest Airlines without getting a live person to answer.  Of course everyone knows about my loyalty to, and evangelizing for, Southwest.  There are other companies, too – all of whom care enough to have a live person to answer my call (or at least keep me on hold for less than the seven minutes that this hotel has).

I seldom go to a conference where I don’t hear complaints about “The Amazon Effect;” i.e. customers who seek out the absolute lowest price online without regard to service….and yet, when I call many of those same companies, I get….an autoattendant who reassures me every 30 seconds or so how important my call is.  BS.  If my call – or anyone’s call – was important, you’d have a person answering it.

Bottom line – if you do in fact have an autoattendant, please respect your customers’ intelligence enough to NOT have the ‘your call is important to us’ message.  Say something else – because by the 15th repetition or so, it’s just irritating and a reminder of how UNimportant the phone calls are.

On the other hand, if you want to fight the Amazon Effect, then dazzle people with service from the beginning (meaning the very first encounter they have with your company).  Have a live, competent, courteous, and friendly person answering the telephone.  Online, have a chatbot manned (or womanned) by a live person ready to help.  Respond to emails and texts quickly.  That’s how you let customers know that they really are important to you.

I just finished a welding project in my garage. A charity needed nine rolling stands for displays, and they were fairly easy to design, build and assemble. I still like doing things like this – working with my hands, building, creating something – whether it’s a project like this or something on one of my cars or motorcycles.

As is my habit, I built one all the way through, noting out the steps. Cutting the metal, drilling for casters, squaring it, welding it together, prepping it, painting the stand, then attaching wooden tack strips, casters, and finishing the tubing ends with snap-in plastic caps. Simple. But – when I’m building something in series like this, I find that the first one is to learn on, and then I get a process going and the rest are pretty easy from there.

The first one isn’t always perfect – in this one I tried to use a cheap set of casters, and they didn’t even survive being pushed across my garage floor! In fact, the first one is the hardest.

While I was working, I thought about parallels to selling. Many is the time I’ve coached a salesperson or business owner on prospecting, and the project goes sideways when it’s time for them to pick up the phone and actually do it. Even with those salespeople with strong call reluctance, if I can get them past the first one – and then the first three or four – things smooth out and they have success.

It’s the first one that is the problem.

This seems to work the same way when it comes to learning, and then applying, new techniques. The technique that worked great in role-play and classroom setting somehow seems daunting to implement in front of the customers – but when that bridge is crossed, the next implementations are easier and successful.

My display stand project, essentially, is like being pushed out of your comfort zone. The first application is by far the hardest – and from there, everything else is easier.

Prospecting.  Nearly all salespeople have to do it.  Few are good at it.  Fewer still like it.  It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?  In training salespeople from all around the world, I’ve found that prospecting – in any country or any language – is a universal challenge.  It’s even more challenging now because of the rise of social media.  Right now, it seems, salespeople are living on the extremes – either eschewing conventional prospecting for social media, or focusing entirely on cold calling to the exclusion of social media.  As in many situations in life, the solution lies in the middle.

Constructing an effective unified (including conventional prospecting and social media) prospecting effort can be greatly simplified by asking three key questions:

Who are you going to approach?

What are you going to say to get his/her attention and create buyer motivation?

Why do you want to say it?

Too many salespeople start a prospecting effort without answering these questions, and that leads to unsuccessful prospecting as well as unsuccessful selling.  Let’s define “successful prospecting:”

Successful prospecting yields a consistent flow of appointments with contacts who can independently make a buying decision for our products and/or services.  In other words, successful prospecting leads to a consistent flow of sales.  I talk to salespeople all the time who tell me that they are able to ‘successfully prospect,’ but then their sales are stalled later because they aren’t in front of the actual decision maker.  What they really mean is that they aren’t really successful prospectors.

Now that we have that definition, let’s look back at our “who, what, and why” in various potential prospecting venues.

One statement that I said in 2004 when I started my business, and that remains true today, is that a quality data-driven teleprospecting program is the cornerstone of any successful prospecting effort.  Data-driven teleprospecting means that we can target and segment our market by using comprehensive databases such as InfoUSA, Dun and Bradstreet, Hoover’s, or others.  If you’re trying to prospect without one of these tools, you’re working with one hand tied behind your back.  In this day and age, there’s simply no excuse for not using databases.  Not even cost; ReferenceUSA (an offshoot of InfoUSA) is available free through most public libraries.

So, with respect to data-driven prospecting:

Who:  You need to be approaching the person who can make a decision to purchase.  With modern databases, it’s easy to find that person.  Here’s where it starts.  In any organization, the power to buy independently begins in the corner office (President/CEO/Owner/etc.) and emanates out only as far as the person in the corner office wants it to.  Hence, you’d better be at the C-level, or the V-level (Vice President), at the least, for most B2B service companies.

What:  What you say to this person needs to be something that grabs their attention quickly.  Most people have “walls” already built – defenses against salespeople.  What you say to this person on the phone will either grab their attention and get them to pull the walls down, or get them to quickly begin adding height to the wall.

Why:  Here’s your guideline:  People buy solutions to problems.  Hence, focus on the problems that your contact is likely to face, and then demonstrate how you can help solve them.  “I want to talk to you about….” Is an old approach and unlikely to succeed in today’s world.  The first 15-20 seconds after the phone is answered is critical to your success – think through your words and make them the most effective words you say.

Now that you’ve answered those three questions, let’s look at social media with the same three questions in mind.

Who:  This is much tougher with social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook.  I liken social media to a message in a bottle; much of the time, you’re putting out a message and hoping that it finds the right person and resonates with that person.  Most of the time, it does not.  Twitter and Facebook have frameworks that make it difficult, at best, to target the right contacts; LinkedIn is much better for this.  In fact, in business-to-business sales, I recommend that LinkedIn be the main platform used for this reason.  The truth is that your defined decision makers haven’t changed from above – it’s just that the method has.  Stay focused on this, and your social media efforts will more likely be effective.

What:  The “what” can take many forms in social media.  I always recommend confining your posts – no matter what the platform – to professional postings in nature.  Seek out articles, give tips, etc., that will benefit your readers (preferably your customers and prospects).  On LinkedIn, you can send messages to targeted contacts that mirror your “what” from your teleprospecting efforts.  You can also use LinkedIn for introductions.  This can be very effective; in fact, I have a technique for generating appointments on LinkedIn that is included in my “Ultimate Guide to Prospecting” training course (available on the “Buy sales tools” page on my website).

Why:  This is where most social media efforts fail.  Few salespeople think through their postings all the way and end up with a high frequency of posting that is nearly meaningless in terms of business development.  Remember, whatever you post or message should be geared toward creating motivation in targeted buyers – anything else is a waste of your time and efforts.

An effective prospecting effort integrates teleprospecting and social media in such a way as to be highly time-efficient with both.  If yours isn’t, consider getting help or good prospecting training to improve.

This is a question I ask a lot at different seminars and programs.  Usually, we end up defining what a “good networker” really means.  After having this experience at one of my programs last week, it occurs to me that very few salespeople – even those heavily engaged in networking – really understand what makes a “good networker.”

Perhaps driven by the Internet age, I find that more and more people think that someone who is “well networked” is someone who KNOWS, or has MET, a lot of people.  Think of this as sort of the business-card version of the “Facebook hero” who has 1,547 “friends,” and who has actually met about 10 of them in real life.  People who collect business cards, or who collect arm’s length “acquaintanceships,” are not necessarily good networkers.

In last week’s seminar, one person used the word “connector” as a definition for a good networker, and I think that works pretty well.  Good networkers are able to “connect” people with other people that they can benefit from knowing; not-so-good networkers can name-drop with the best of them, but can’t actually arrange, or get, a meeting with very many of the names they drop.

Taking it one step deeper, I think that good networkers are “hubs of value.”  In other words, they are capable of GETTING value from the relationships they have with others (think referrals, business, favors, etc.), and are able to GIVE or CONDUCT value to others they know (similar to the above).  Here are some other measuring sticks to determine whether you are a good networker or not a good networker:

Good networkers are successful.  First and foremost, good networkers are able to produce success for THEMSELVES, on their own.  They are producers.  I’ve never met someone who was incapable of producing success on their own terms for themselves, but was able to produce it for others.  I should point out here that “success” has its own definitions, and those definitions are not necessarily financial.  For instance, the high school football coach who is capable of generating a winning team and who is able to help his kids get scholarships might not necessarily be wealthy in financial terms, but has certainly achieved success in his/her own measurement.

Good networkers have stability.  Here we are, back to that “job stability” thing again.  The truth is that those who are constantly expending their own energies finding new jobs for themselves have precious little left over to conduct value to others; and of course, they also have issues with generating the needed respect from others to conduct value.

Good networkers are selective.  It’s impossible to generate value from or for everyone that you meet, particularly if you’re an active networker and are constantly meeting new people.  Hence, good networkers are selective with the relationships they want to pursue, and once they select someone, they work very hard to generate value for them.

Good networkers are willing to be the first giver.  There’s an old law which I believe is still on the books in Kansas that says, “When two cars meet at an intersection, neither shall move until the other has passed.”  Think about that brilliance of lawmaking for a second; somewhere at a seldom used intersection in western Kansas, the skeletons of two old farmers sit in their Model T’s, still exhorting the other to move first.  That’s a good analogy for how many potentially good networking relationships die.  If you are always waiting for the other to give first, you run the danger of never getting any value.  Along these lines, good networkers seek out MUTUAL relationships and not just coattails.

Good networkers never stop.  I have encountered a number of people in my travels who came to me with the reputation of being “great networkers,” or even “networking gurus.”  I’ve always been amazed at how many of these people seem to have retired, or withdrawn, from networking efforts.  They’re not encouraging new contacts or new relationships, and seem content to rest upon whatever laurels have bestowed on them.  The problem with this is both simple and obvious – people retire, they change jobs, they move.  The network that you have today might not be the network you have tomorrow.  For that reason, a good networker always remains open to new relationships.

There are, of course, many other attributes to good networking, and many books have been written on the subject.  Look at the criteria above – are you getting the networking results you want?  If not, maybe you should look at the above criteria and make a change in 2017.