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.