“Most Salespeople try to take the horse to water and make him drink.  It’s your job to make the horse thirsty.”  ~ Gabriel Siegel

1.    Define success according to you!

Five years from now, what does success look like for you?  What are you doing in your free time?  How are you living?  Where have you taken your organization?  Where are you working and what is your position?  What value are you providing at work that causes you to smile when you think about it?

Your answers to these and similar questions will be your personal vision for success.  Envision your success daily to drive your sales goals and behaviors.  Working off of someone else’s vision of success will not maximize your potential.  Success is personal!

2.    Set transcendent goals!

Consider the following sales goals:  “We will increase sales by 20% this year”… “I will be the top sales rep on my team and in my region in Q4”…

How do those sound to you?  I’ve come across many goals like this as a sales manager.  In fact, I’ve set a few similar-sounding goals myself as a sales professional.  This is how I know they don’t help aspire to transcendent greatness and success.  They can motivate us in the moment but they lack in longevity and passion.

Go big! Transcend yourself beyond simple motivation into the realm of lasting inspiration: “Our company will expand on our core innovations to exceed revenue by 50% in the next six months”… “I will be promoted to sales manager this year due to consistent sales effectiveness quarter over quarter”…

Don’t be afraid to exceed your own expectations!

3.    Educate your market with empowering information.

Customer demands aren’t the only driver for sales and business growth.  More important is your ability to effectively sell your solutions where there is a need.  Often our target market is naive to the cause of their problem for which they have a need for our solution.  It is our job to help educate them on four key things: their industry, their problems, the implications of their problems, all available solutions, and the best solutions (aka our products/services as applicable).

You will often hear me say that educating is the new marketing.  There is nothing salesy about education.  Dive deep into your market’s problems and help them regardless of directly providing a related product or service.  When your prospects and customers can apply the knowledge you’ve empowered them with via a white paper, case study, etc., you will earn their trust and they will follow your lead in the marketplace.  Thought leadership is an invaluable sales tool!

4.    Educate yourself on the selling skills of today.

Old school selling involves brochures, internet brochures (aka your ‘traditional’ website), cold calls, hard closes, staged conversations, bill-board advertising, radio advertising, face-to-face meetings, driving around town all day long, dry sales letters, and press releases.

Contemporary school selling involves communicating on the customer’s terms, with information products, long sales copy, webinar meetings, white papers, case studies, blogging, podcasting, video, as well as  attracting and converting prospects online via various social media outlets.

Old school strategies are best implemented with a new media twist, and new school strategies can be severely screwed up if not taken seriously and carried out with integrity and a plan.  It is a whole new era in which sales and marketing have become a hybrid strategy.  Invest in self-educating yourself so you do not get left behind!  The selling skills of today are always changing!

5.    Sell on emotion always!

Day-to-day business is riddled with emotion.  There are many problems to solve and risky decisions to make!  Never forget, we all buy out of happiness or fear. It’s that simple!  Don’t shy away from communicating the value of your solution based on your prospect’s fears out of concern for appearing negative.  Many of their fears are very real AND justified – your prospect wants them alleviated!  Can you help them?  Tapping into happiness and fear will earn your prospects attention for communicating your value.

6.    Roll with the punches as you strive towards life-long excellence.

When we make mistakes during selling situations, we can beat ourselves up pretty badly.  We didn’t advance the sale to the next step like we visualized, for instance, or we couldn’t recall a pertinent piece of data to help us close the sale.  What’s worse, perhaps we define ourselves through the recent month’s sales numbers and worry ourselves sick about our value to the organization (I’ve seen this a lot in my big pharma days).

Excellent sales people excel because they forgive themselves for inevitable selling mistakes and they commit to life-long excellence. They know that spending their time in anxiety will blunt their performance and make things worse.  As long as you come from a place of integrity and value, not only will you be able to forgive yourself, but your prospects/customers will too.  With trying new and amazing things come mistakes!

7.    Think!

Selling today is hard work!  You can’t just roll into a meeting or give an unemotional presentation and walk away with a sale.  You need to prove yourself first, and then sell your product/service.  You need to understand your prospect simply to show them you understand.  You need to communicate according to their communication style.

In addition to skills, what about your products and services?  What opportunities are you missing?  Does all your revenue come from one product?  How can you better use the internet to acquire business nationally?  What info products can you sell on-line in addition to your services?  Are you connecting with your prospects before you try to convert them?  Are you pushing your research, product, or services on the market, or are you attracting the market with your education-based marketing practices and establishing thought leadership?  Can you trace the sales flow from attraction to conversion in your organization?  What is your strategy?

Like a solid business plan, a sales plan needs to be created, implemented and measured.

I chose these 7 keys as a result of comments I often hear myself saying when I coach my clients about sales and selling skills.  Be they business owners or sales professionals, I believe these “keys” serve as excellent reminders for what success in sales is all about.  

Based on your sales experiences and wisdom, what would you add?

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1. Everybody possesses the ability to lead.  This means that every member of your workforce can develop his/her unique leadership skills and abilities to achieve improved results. It’s a common myth that a select number of us are “born” leaders.
2. Leadership is a journey.  Leadership characteristics are developed and improved over time. Consciously and consistently developing our leadership skills will accelerate our results.  Compare the skill sets you possess now to those of five years ago.  How are you doing?
3. Leadership is a personal choice.  If we don’t take the initiative to grow our leadership potential, we will achieve limited success.  We create our future, our companies and the world when we take responsibility for developing our leadership potential and the potential of our workforce.  On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your initiative for developing your leadership potential?  How about that of your workforce?
4. People get results, not titles. We must first be effective leaders personally, before we can be effective leaders formally. Both formal and personal leadership require personal power – we get results from people because our behaviors are those that earn people’s trust and respect, thus people are eager to follow our lead.
5. Leaders face failure head-on.  When mistakes happen leaders act on courage and adhere to their values to keep leading.  Remember, it’s who we are in times of intense challenge that define our character. Which of your leadership characteristics are shining through at work and at home during this challenging time in our economy?  Are you a lighthouse or a weather-vane?
6. Leaders set goals.  Goals act as a compass for success.  If we don’t set written goals we are at high risk for losing sight of where we are going personally and professionally.  Leadership requires pointing everyone in the same direction.  Are you setting written goals?

What might you add to this list?

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Over the course of my career in biopharmaceutical sales, I’ve learned much about people, leadership, success, failure, sales, management, problem solving, teams, and growth!

To kick off my first post on the Roxx Consulting blog, I’d like to share a few of the many lessons I’ve learned about my passion, organizational effectiveness, during my tenure in the biotechnology industry. 

Business lessons I will not forget:

1.  Customer Loyalty: Customer loyalty is to your business what vitamin D is to your body: you have to go out of your way to get it, and without it you cannot survive.

The pivotal words here are “go out of your way”.  Maybe it’s just me, but I’m easily dazzled when a business goes out of their way for my convenience.  I tell everyone in my circle about the fantastic experience I had as I complement the management there. 

Many business owners will nod their heads in agreement regarding “focusing on the customer” and, “improving the customer experience”; yet, they take minimal to no action! This is a far cry from going out of their way. Think of the missed opportunity for free advertising and gaining an edge on your competition!

Sadly, I know too many companies right now that are slowly dying because of their inability to implement effective customer management
systems. They are aware of the problem (poor customer service), they say they must do something (how about a new marketing campaign?), and then they do nothing to address the real issue. Big mistake. Eventually, their organizational ineffectiveness will consume them from the inside out (although it appears to be from the outside in).

2.  Time Strategies: Time strategies are the ultimate litmus test for top talent.

Time management is always a hot topic for discussion, as well as popular measure for performance. For as much attention as it gets, why is it not the star interview question or the first category on a performance appraisal?  It really should be. 

Effective time management reflects one’s ability for hardcore problem solving.  Because, as enjoyable as life is, each day presents it’s fair share of creative problem solving for our enhanced enjoyment. By now, we’ve all had the opportunity to “show our stuff” in this key area.           

So take a close look (and I mean a really close look; spend some time on this one) at that interviewee’s time strategies, or your
employees’ level of performance as it relates to navigating through daily problems.  I bet you’ll find that your top talent (you know, those who always seem to get results come hell or high-water) is a master time strategist aka problem solver.

If a position requires lifting heavy problems, hire a master time strategist!

3.  Sales and Marketing: It’s an entirely new ecosystem.  Adapt!

I come from the land of Sales Force Oz where big marketing budgets reign supreme and the sales force is treated like bronze (platinum in the earlier days) and handed expensive, yet typically ineffective, tools for sales conversion (although every now and then we would get a “winner” tool my teammates and I would jokingly ask, “Where’s the magic wand?  Can we expect that in our next quarterly shipment?)

It’s very different now. An expansive (and expensive!) sales force with elaborate brochures and a fancy pitch is no longer as effective as it once was more than a decade ago. Marketing and sales have officially converged online where information marketing – on the customer’s terms – is a basic requirement.

Here’s the good news: you can save sales and marketing dollars AND successfully grow your business!

4.  Team Leadership: Create many specialized “organelles” within your organization.

I think of teams much like the specialized organelles within a cell. Their job is to carry out advanced functions for the optimized performance of the whole (the organization and the cell, respectively).

What’s important to your organization?  Innovation?  Customer management? Fresh marketing content?  Put together a specialized team for each goal category verses suffering through organization-wide communication problems due to a lack of accountability. 

Create each team to function as an independent whole with a qualified leader, manager, and roles and responsibilities for each member as it pertains to that unit.  Measure performance and reap targeted results!

5.  Management:  Practice superior quality control by obliterating ineffective management early!

I’ve witnessed in awe how bad management slows results.  Awe because little-to-nothing is often done about it – bad managers are allowed to run rampant!  This is way too costly for an organization to tolerate.  Only the best people shouldbe managers.  “Best” meaning healthy-minded individuals with superior leadership ability.

If you know someone has an obnoxious ego or presents with a personality disorder, don’t promote him/her into management!  It will only get worse. You’ll reduce organizational effectiveness for achieving goals. 

Bad management is an insidious disease.  Cynicism is the side effect to look for in your people.  Identify and obliterate. The growth of your company depends on it!

6.  Leadership:  If leadership is results, then by all means…culture it!

Highly effective organizations ooze leadership.  It is developed from the top-down on an ongoing basis so that no matter what a person’s position or function, they can be depended upon as a leader in their unique role for producing results.

Some organizations take leadership development lightly or not at all.  Another mistake.  The truth is, leadership begins with the founding culture of the organization. That culture needs to be infused throughout the company through strategic development and used as a filter for hiring and retaining the right talent.

Continuously develop your people’s potential for leadership and you will optimize results and organizational growth!

7.  Executive Leadership: The marketplace has an affinity for effective organizations.

The more effective your company is at all the various business management functions, the more attractive you will be to the market. 

A top scientist seeking employment will experience an aversion to organizations known for high employee turnover.  Investors will be leery to invest in an organization with no real vision and true purpose to guide its people toward achieving critical milestones.  And no one will want to partner with a company that has bad managers chronically debilitating performance and results.

A word to the wise: your best marketing will not attract the market if your management is less than stellar.  Bad management will show up in you measure of customer loyalty and your slow demise will begin.

Improve effectiveness; increase attractiveness!

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