Selling Trucks With Outdated Selling Techniques

To this business owner, the question that was troubling to him was:

Why is this seller not selling?
He was supposed to sell trucks for this company. But he was not getting results.

What was happening to him?
He was applying ready to hand, very basic and common selling techniques that were unfit to sell trucks. It was like trying to sell airplanes with cosmetics selling techniques.
Let me explain.

Background
This salesman was hired to sell trucks but in the last six months his production was zero. Indeed, he was trying but he wasn't producing any results. His manager, the owner of the business, asked me to see what was happening and to help, if it was possible, him to sell.

A visit to his territory
I asked the seller to schedule at least 5 meetings with his clients so we can visit together and have a look and a close comprehension about what he was doing so he was getting no results.
He picked me up at the airport and immediately started our sales visits.

What was happening?
Our first sales meeting was with the owner of a truck company. He received us in a very friendly mood. In the moment that my client was allowed to talk he started to sell talking only about all the features of his product. He talked and talked and talked. His client, of course, while he was talking (or selling, he called it) was thinking and not very positive things (his body language was speaking louder than his words) about the presentation. My client used a beautiful brochure in this presentation (to cover the inefficiency of his presentation and praying for the brochure do the selling). The buyer, almost at the end of the conversation asked my client about the price, he immediately said it and obviously the buyer told my client that he need time to think about it. It was then when my client, like begging, told the buyer:

• "Please, why don't we start with one (truck)? Only one, please."
  

The buyer told him that he was going to think the offer an he was going to call back in two weeks. (We all know what does that means.) Then we left the office of the buyer. While we were in the car heading to the next interview he, the seller, my client, asked a question I was afraid he was going to ask: "How it was?" I told him that I was going to answer that question after we finish all his scheduled meetings with his clients.

The Next Sales Meetings
The next sales meetings went almost the same. They change their own dynamics because the clients asked several things, but the kind of presentations that my client was doing was essentially the same. The pattern was the same. What were his problems selling? I'm going to list several, but all of them have their roots in the overall selling structure that this salesman had about selling, which I'm going to explain later.

His Mistakes
He:

• never asked any questions and was blind about the client's precise situation of its fleet
  
• relied always in the brochure
• thought that he could close a sale this big (the price of his product was $23,000 USD average) in one meeting
• in three meetings he was selling to the person that has no power to decide
• was almost always talking about features ("the Pearson suspension is the best of all", "the size of the box is better than the others")
• didn't know what to do when the client told him that "...it was too expensive..."

...among others

Causes?
But what was the cause, if any, of this type of selling? He sold, in the last 10 years, truck parts. You can sell a truck part in 2 minutes. Well of course, it depends on the price of the part, but it's closed sale. The salesman is inside the store, the buyer comes in and asks for a specific part, the seller gives him his part, he pays it, and that's it. On the contrary, if 's selling trucks, and visiting potential buyers for that, he needs another type of sales method. He was unable to sell a truck with his "selling truck part techniques".

The Automatic Selling
Other problem was that this "truck parts selling techniques" automatic "used him" in almost every presentation with a potential client AND he didn't noticed that. He wasn't unaware about this and he was visiting potential buyers doing exactly the same thing with each one of them: he was used by the same sales structure he used when he was a parts seller.

The Next Step: the Design of a New Selling Structure
The problem with this kind of situation, and it's very common, is that the seller is unaware that he is being used by a selling structure, with life of his own that doesn't matches the product/service nor with the potential buyer. So the first step is to provoke awareness in the salesman. For a moment, he was in shock with the revelation that he is selling trucks with techniques that are fit more in selling cheap products. Then, the second step is the designing of a new sales process that matches precisely with the product/service he is trying to sell with the potential buyer and/or potential buyers.

The Results?
After several weeks of designing, he started to use the new sales process and also started to close sales.

Selling More: A Shift in the Belief System

Some time ago, I was introduced to a new client by a mutual friend in a restaurant. Our friend told him that I was an executive sales coach. We (the new client and I) made an appointment to meet in his office to talk about how "I could help him with his new sales projects".

When I arrived at his office he told me "I want to increase my sales by 50% in the next two years. So tell me, how am I going to get new clients in order to achieve this goal?"
"Who told you that you'll need new clients in order to achieve a 50% sales increase over the next two years?" I asked him.
He gave me an amused look and replied, "Are you telling me that I'm not going to need more clients in order to achieve my goals?”
"No,” I told him. “You can achieve that goal without new clients."

I'm going to describe briefly, in two parts, some of the steps he took to achieve his goal without searching for new clients. This coaching process was entirely aimed at creating new strategies in order to achieve increasingly balanced results for my client. In other words, to sell a lot without having to go client hunting.


Step One: Stop selling to clients who don't produce profits for the company

The first thing he did was to analyze whether every single one of his clients was profitable. The fact that they're clients doesn't mean that he was making money from them. The result of this analysis was that five of his clients were unprofitable. We searched for opportunities to turn around that situation but there weren’t any. So we arrived at the conclusion that he must stop selling to these clients. This was a radical action for him, and he reacted emotionally because he’d never realized that he could lose money with a client and secondly, and more painfully, that he had to cut his relationships with these five clients.

Step Two: Relate to your clients as if they were 'assets' instead of merely clients.

Then I suggested to him to start relating to his own clients as if they were assets instead of clients. This was a new perspective for him. He took better care of his car than he did of his clients so I suggested that he should take more care of them. This new perspective allowed him to see what was missing in his relationship so that he could take new sales actions.

Step Three: Make a shift in the commercial relationships you have with your clients.

The interactions that he and people from his company had with their clients consisted in:

• the driver who delivered the order with the warehouse keeper who opened the door of the client’s warehouse
• his receipts payable department with the client's finance department
• occasional meetings with the purchase manager

And that was all. This kind of relationship made him a traditional 'order taker'.
He didn't know anything about his clients’ situation, so he wasn't able to create strategies in order to increase his sales to them, or to adjust his own product to help them to sell more. He had no information about them.

So to make this shift, we created some easy, totally new but very powerful strategies:

1. He selected his top five clients. These were those clients who provided him with 80% of his highly profitable total sales.
2. He would start calling/meeting the sales and/or marketing division managers instead of the purchase division manager. The former are his final customers because they use his product to sell their own product (solid alcohol, coffee and flour, among other products, were packed into the cans he made for them.) He did this because the purchase manager only handed the order to him after the sales department had handed the order to purchasing, so he was the last in the chain and most of his negotiations were about price. He was blind to his clients’ marketing/sales strategies. However, talking to sales/marketing INSTEAD of purchasing enabled him to:

• first, stop waiting for the next order by talking to his real clients: sales and marketing divisions; the purchase division was not his main client (or main user)
• second, participate in the client's new product designing process; as a result, he shifted from being an 'order taker' to being a 'sales consultant' so the new orders for these products went directly to him; also, he helped his clients to create strategies to sell more of the product that he was providing, so his sales immediately increased
• third, avoid competition and price negotiations because he is at the very beginning of the product creation process not at the end AND because he's talking to marketing and sales divisions he has the advantage of knowing more about their requirements, which meant more sales for him
• fourth, have immediate feedback about the performance of his own product and his clients’ sales strategies so that he could give advice and not just act as an 'order taker'
• fifth, the beauty of this was that his competitors were still trying to sell more to the purchase manager; nobody was trying to reach marketing and sales

Final Comments and Results

It was difficult for my client to make changes to his belief system regarding how to sell.

He made several 'belief transitions', for example:

• to stop selling to the purchase divisions of his clients and to start selling to marketing; selling was a big jump for him because 'this wasn't in the tradition' that his father had established for the company

• because he always thought that he ‘just sold cans’, it was very difficult for him to start seeing his cans as a 'marketing tool', that he was actually facilitating sales for his own clients. This identity change positioned him in a very different way, because if he participated in the product design with marketing and sales, he could come up with the 'order', and as he was very, very close to these divisions, new orders for the same products went to him

The most difficult changes, as I mentioned, were those regarding a shift in his belief system. He realized that he had to change how he was selling.

For this coaching process, which lasted two years, I followed the Miller and Heiman "Large Account Management Process". (And I'm not selling it!) And it worked very well.

RESULTS

Of course there were good results:

He raised his sales by 60%.

He stopped losing money with former clients and he made partnerships with two of his five most important clients. Another two referred three other very profitable clients to him.

And finally…

We went to meet one of the marketing and sales v.p.’s of one of his five top clients.

When we arrived, they were in a meeting. One of them said:
"-You arrived just in time. We are going to launch a new product and we're trying to find the perfect package for it. Can you help us?"
We spent two hours with them. My client helped his clients with the design and we came up with the order.

My Coaching Style: Too Directive?

Some of my friends and colleagues have offered comments regarding the last post in which I wrote about one of my coaching conversations with Alejandro.

The issue that they have raised is that they believe that my coaching style is too directive.

One colleague asked me:

• "Do you tell them what to do?"

I replied that yes, a lot of my coaching has that nature. But then I started to worry because in some parts of the world, as a coach, you don't tell people what to do. You work with your client the whole coaching session and if he "doesn't get it" or come up with his own responses or answers or solutions, he can go home or hang up the telephone until the next session, still waiting, passively, for his own solutions, answers or whatever, to occur to him.
Thinking about this little controversy, I searched through my coaching notes (and found) a training course written by Thomas Leonard some years ago. Thomas Leonard was one of the greatest promoters of the coaching practice. He founded the International Coaching Federation in order to regulate this practice. He wrote several books on coaching and created, among other organizations and structures for coaching, CoachU.com, one of the first coaching schools.

Below I quote TL about a coach telling the client what to do:

"Some coaches feel that giving a client direction robs the client of the joy of discovery.
Other coaches are drill sergeants. Who's the better coach?
They both are...
Different clients need different approaches, depending on their personality/style, the situation/need and the timing/urgency.
Think Baskin Robbins 31 flavors of ice cream. The most successful coaches know all 31 flavors and can adapt to the changing needs of the clients and the marketplace.
(Note: Some coaching schools tsk tsk the idea of a coach being directive. Those schools are not training their coaches for the real world, in my opinion. One trick ponies are rarely successful.)
There are some situations in which you'll be very directive because of your level of experience/expertise, and because the client wants you to be.
One reason that most clients hire a coach is to help them get somewhere faster. Speedier. Easier. Fewer bumps. Fewer delays. Flatter learning curve. You get the picture. True, sometimes, it's more beneficial for the client to "find their own answers," but I've found that most clients want you to bring them up to speed with the dynamic of the situation/opportunity they are in, and help them devise strategies and solutions that work well. Adjust to meet the present client need.
Clients ARE hiring you for your opinions as well as your support and great questions.
Some coaches ask a lot of questions. And that's all they do. Which can get annoying. And lead to "Where's the beef?" complaints. Most clients WANT to know your views, observations, opinions, related experiences, solutions and inklings about what they are working on or how they are coming across. When a client hires a coach, they want all of the coach; not just your great personality and a question bank."

So this was Thomas Leonard's response to the question, in "How to coach anyone."

Alejandro, 2nd part

This intervention was made not inside the context of sales but inside the context of how he was "perceiving" and "relating" to a particular situation and the openings for action that that perception were opening and closing for him.
He was 'suffering' a "fear attack" and his selling activities were almost stopped. He wasn't making phone calls or visiting his clients or even trying to make a list of prospects. He was very fearful because, as I wrote in part one of this case, he was in the middle of a fraud lawsuit. The company he worked with was sued because his boss stole thousands of dollars from its clients and Alejandro was working there. His boss left the country but some of his employees stayed without knowing what was happening and some were sued.

In the coaching session he came very fearful. He told me the following:

Alejandro: I'm going to jail! When I see a police patrol immediately I think that the are coming after me. When my home or my cell phone rang I think that it's the police or my lawyer calling to tell me bad news. I'm scared.
Coach: Yes, for me that's clear. Can you do anything right know? Or everything is in the hands of your lawyers?
Alejandro: Everything is in the hands of my lawyers.
Coach: And tell me, how's your sales activity the last week?
Alejandro: Nothing because I was afraid as I told you. Sometimes I used half of the day thinking what would happen if I go to jail and that scare me the most. And then...
Coach: Yes, you are paralyzed thinking about with the fear of going to jail and also with the fear you provoke to yourself thinking about it, but I want to ask you something: lets say that effectively, you will and surely be send to jail. The judge declares that you and your friends are guilty of fraud. You lose and you go to jail.
What do yo prefer, to go to jail WITH MONEY or WITHOUT MONEY?
Alejandro: It's obvious! With money!
Coach: So?
Alejandro: ...
Coach: You need activity...and fast. And probably you're not going to believe me but if you start your selling activities as we have talked you're going to reduce a lot the possibilities to be found guilty or to go to jail. If you do your selling activities you're going to put far that possibility. On the other hand, if you use all your day thinking in going to jail, you probably are going to end there. But in the event that you go to jail, if you sell, you will go with money and feeling better.

After this part of the session, we reviewed the activities he could do through the next week in order to increase his selling activities and earn money and he found a lot. He closed a sale and started several sales processes with some clients that he closed several weeks later. He won the lawsuit and he is now very successful as a salesman. He was my client for more than two years.

Comments about my coaching style

Yes, probably some of my readers, in particular those who are coaches and are trained using questions as a method of coaching (John Whitmore or Timothy Gallwey or Onthology among others) are going to say that I´m too directive and my answer is yes. But also, I can say that I craft my coaching style according with my client's and my client's situation. Sometimes, when it is required I coach a client just asking questions and he arrives freely to his own actions to follow. But, sometimes I'm directive, yes, I tell my clients what to do.

Alejandro, 1st part

This is the case of one of my first clients: Alejandro.

He is a life insurance salesman or Financial Advisor.
He approached to me in 1997. Just a few months after I decided to be a sales coach.
I met him giving a conference at his sales management. At those time, when I started my practice I talked to a lot of sales managers to offer them conferences in order to get clients: the sales people that were in their management.
Of course some accepted and some not.
Alejandro's manager accepted and I went to his office and spoke for about an hour to his sales force for approximately 1 hour. His manager, Gustavo said that he will pay half the fee I charge for those who hired me as a coach. Two days later Alejandro talked to me by phone and asked me if I was available for a meeting. I told him yes, we set the date and we started our coaching process.
He came. He had two main problems:

• he was in problems with justice, his previous boss stole money from his clients, fled to Miami and these clients sued the company, his previous job, and he was in trial so he was very very nervous about the possibility to go to jail

• the second problem was that he was in his second year as a sales man and he wasn't getting the results that he expected in his new job; this nervousness added to the anguish produced by the fact that he was sued almost paralyzed him, that was the momento where we started working

One of our first interviews went like this:

Alejandro: -"Where am I'm going to obtain my clients? I don't have anybody to call."
Coach: -"How many clients do you have right now? How many people have bought from you?"
Alejandro: -"I have 10 clients."
Coach: -"Well, call them and ask for references."
Alejandro: -"I have done that."
Coach: -"And what happened?"
Alejandro: -"Not everybody gave me references. Only two or three. I don't remember."
Coach: -"When did you call them?"
Alejandro: -"2 or 3 months ago."
Coach: -"Call them again."
Alejandro: -"What...?! They are going to think... (interrupted)"
Coach: -"And what do you prefer? Them to think that you X or to have clients?"
(Here is evident his own resistance to do what it takes in order to have results. Between calling his clients in order to get references was nothing except his own fear and shyness.)
Alejandro: -"Much much better too have clients. But... (interrupted... again)"
Coach: -"So? Call the ten in your list and ask each one for three references with the intention to obtain them. OK? How much does it's going to take for you to call them all? 1 hour? 2? Call them and tell me how it goes. If they don't give you any reference start again and again and again until you get what you need in order to keep your career alive. OK?"
Alejandro: (shocked) -"OK"

The next coaching session he arrived with some results. He called only 5 of his clients and they gave him only 4 references. He doesn't call the rest because he thought...again, that was the problem. He thought. Well, he arrived at the conclusion that he has to call again. He called the 10 several times, against his feelings and his thoughts, but they gave him more and more references until it wasn't necessary to keep talking to them.

First post: an introduction of what is going to be here

coached sales professionals for the last 11 years.I've coached, in México, the U.S.A and in Canada:

• sales people
• sales managers
• sales v.p.
• small and medium business owners
• CEOs

These people sell:

• insurance
• cosmetics
• telecommunications
• homes and buildings
  
• cars
• trucks
• finance products and services
• IT
• manufactured products
• travel services

...among other products and services.

My global clients have been:

• Ford Motor Company
• Yves Rocher
• General Motors Company
• Avantel (Banamex and MCI partnership)
• Pepsico
• Coca-Cola
• New York Life
• ING
• Via Net Works

My Canadian Clients:

• Sun Life
• The Toronto Business Development Center
• YMCA
• Easy - Phone
• DAPA

They sell for persons and for business.
The amount of their selling ranks from a $4 dollars product to a $150 million dollars service.
Their sales processes last from one hour to a minimum of six months.
Some sell to ladies, some sell to global corporations.
Some sell for global corporations some for a small business.

Purpose
And the purpose of this blog is to publish some of the most extraordinary (my evaluation) sales conversations I had with them. My coaching is focused basically on how they sell (sellers) and how they move their sellers (sales managers).
My experience have proved to me that sometimes the help that the sales person needs is not only in the domain of sales or in the domain of how to close a deal or what strategy or tactic or technique he must follow in order to provoke action in one of the sales team member.
Sometimes, the sales person or the sales manager needs help at the personal domain. Sometimes a provocative question or a provocative statement can provoke more that a sales strategy.
That doesn't mean that I'm not an expert designing sales processes, models, strategies, techniques, tactics or arguments. I am. And I can customize them precisely in perfect correspondence to the situation my client is immersed in. It's lovely to work with a case.

The best phrases a client can tell me are:

1. "I have a client that..." This means that we, the sales person and I, are going to design the precise strategy to close that sale.
2. "I have a sales person that..." This means that we, the sales manager and I, are going to design the precise strategy to provoke movement
   

I have been a 'sales manager' for hundreds of sellers. And a sales VP for a lot of 'sales managers'. These clients hired me to act like those because their own sales managers or sales VP don´t coach them. That's a theme that I will aboard in another post.

What prepared and authorize me to offer sales coaching since 1996?
Well, direct action. A lot of reading. And some training.

Let me be precise:

Direct action:

• coaching individually more than 500 clients in the last 11 years in my offices at Mexico City
• coaching sales managers groups in the last 5 years
  

A lot, lot of reading:

• sales: more than 100 books, from Joe Girard's "How to close every sale" to "The New Strategic Selling" by Stephen Heiman
• psychology: more than 50 books. From Karl Jung to William O'Hanlon to Fritz Perls, Karl Whitaker, Joseph Campbell and Frank Farrelly
  
• coaching (obviously): Ferdinand Fournies, Thomas Leonard, John Grinder, John Whitmore, Fernando Flores, Rafael Echeverria, among others
• other themes/authors: Transformation: Ron Smothermon, Hypnosis: Jeffrey Zeig, Language: John Searle, Fernando Flores, John Grinder, Leadership: Margaret Wheatley

...among a lot lot others themes and authors

Some training:

• Doing Business in Ontario, Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, Toronto, ON. 2007.
  
• Transforming Belief Systems, Robert Dilts, London, England (2004).
• Provocative Therapy, Frank Farrelly, Bournemouth, England (2004).
• Hypnosis Seminar, Richard Bandler, London, England(2003).
• European Coaching Conference, International Coaching Federation, Milan, Italy (2003).
• The Landmark Forum, Chicago, Illinois, US, (2002).
• Solution Selling, Solution Selling Partners, Cuernavaca, Morelos (2000)
• Management Development Program, Southwestern Bell, Dallas, Texas, US (1995).
• NLP Trainers Training, Richard Bandler, San Francisco, California, US (1992).
• NLP Master Practitioner , Delozier Assocs, San Francisco, California, US (1990-1991)
• Communication Course 1 and 2. Werner Erhard and Associates (Mexico, D.F. 1987-1988)

Publications:

• more than 50 articles about sales coaching published in business specialized magazines in México and at some sites at the internet
  
• the book "Psicodinamica en las Ventas: Coaching para Vendedores Profesionales." (Sales Psicodynamics: Coaching for Sales Professionals", 2002. To be published in english soon.)
  

Oohh! And of course, received personal coaching.
I have had three personal coaches in the last 14 years and the 3 made a real difference in my life. And I am very, very grateful with the three of them. Thank you!

(to be continued with one of my first cases)