Sales Coaching Conversations

How to kill a sales process with your body language.

2011-06-22T15:43:00.004-04:00

As a coach, I have witnessed hundreds of sales meetings in order to provide feedback to my clients.
They are not able to see or listen themselves.
The purpose is seeing and listening their selling performance and later, as part of the coaching process, provide feedback. Sometimes I bring a recorder with me and after the sales meeting, we listen to the tape together.
At some of these meetings, I have witnessed how some of my clients have ruined their sales meetings with their 'automatic' body language. As a coach, I can listen to what they say AND simultaneously, see how they use their non verbal communication in the interview.

They can use it in three levels:

Random - This is the category in which almost all of the sales reps fall. Their body is completely disconnected from the sales interview purpose and this is the main reason why people don't accept easily sales reps.
Connected - Mind, body and emotions, are connected with the main purpose.
Aligned - Sales reps build a strategy around how they are going to use their body and other non verbals as tools to mobilize his client through the sales process towards a positive closing. This is a very rare art but powerful and very effective.

I'm surprise that most of the B2B sales reps are not trained on how to use these 'outside of the sales presentation' mechanisms to align themselves with the client and close the deal.

I will share with you 3 examples on what NOT to do with your non verbal expressions during a sales meeting. Two the sales reps of these three examples, work for global companies that have said their sales rep are trained in everything: from how to use the fork to how to do networking. From these experiences, it seems that the very essentials, on how to use their non verbal communications, is missing in their curriculum.

Here they are:
1. A life insurance sales woman:

While doing her presentation, she was rubbing her hands. This movement was distracting the prospect, who was trying to listen to her and at the same time was looking her hands. At some point, the prospect finally surrendered in trying to understand what she was saying, he was too distracted. He disengaged from the conversation, relaxing himself in the chair and crossing his arms. Astonishingly, my client, didn't noticed that the prospect wasn't listening anymore, that he was gone and she continued talking. The meeting ended when the prospect said: "Let me study your information and I will call you if I make a decision. I have to show this to my wife." No follow up was enough to bring him back to her pipeline.

2. An IT sales rep.

He works for a small company that sold more than 5 million CAD the last year in IT solutions. He prepared his presentation thoroughly using the most advanced consultative selling techniques. When we arrived we were leaded to the prospect's office. He showed us were to seat and gave my client the signal to start which made a good opening. The sales rep had a very well designed sequence, good questions, nice answers from the prospect and as we were moving to an agreement to explore further, my client started to feel positive, so positive that he started to move forward to the prospect's desk. The client started to feel OK with the interview, my client felt it and started to move towards the desk. Feeling that he had good rapport, he started to take out some printed materials and moved things on top of his prospect desk . Wrong move. The problem was that he didn't ask the client for permission to do it and that he was careless in the way that moved the things over the prospect's desk. As soon as he started to do this, the prospect was surprised, and with a look of shock in his face, said everything. With these movements my client lost the rapport that he had and the client ended the meeting. My client felt disappointed and frustrated and when I asked to him what he thought what happened he replied: 'I don't know.'

3. A Manufacturing Products Sales Rep

My client was starting a sales process with this company that she wanted for long time to have in her pipeline and this was the 1st interview. My client was carrying a briefcase. She started this meeting with the final user of her product. Since the very beginning she hold her hand bag in front of her. She never put it aside. Given my position at the table, watching the interview, I noticed how the prospect saw the hand bag several times. My client, left the hand bag open and struggled to make her presentation because she never got rid of it. In fact, she never took her left hand out of it. The prospect perceived that the hand bag was between he and the seller. How did I notice this? Because he looked at it several times. The meeting ended with a very cold: 'I'll call you." The prospect perceived a barrier, he felt that something was between him and the sales rep.

Comments
You can do a great sales presentation but your nonverbal communication might have other plans. These were just three examples of how good opportunities were lost just because the sales rep wasn't completely in charge of his/her body language. It is not just a matter of having some knowledge about what happens with your non-verbal communication, what matters is if you can use your knowledge about non-verbal communication to help you close the deal.

What exactly do you do when you get your best selling results? 1st principle of self-coaching: 'Know yourself'.

2011-05-31T15:11:00.001-04:00

One of the most interesting 'homeworks' that my clients have done is to answer this question (and its variances):

'What do I do when I get my best selling results?'

I (and them) am amazed on the impact that the answer(s) to this question produce in their performance and results.

You see, sometimes happens that they start to forget who they were when they executed almost perfectly and/or how they closed this and/or that account. And when they forget, they start to panic and thinking that they need another training, that something is wrong with them or that they are not sales reps anymore. Far from that, when they answer this question, they are surprised with the amount of information that is revealed: the moods that they have, the techniques that they used, the courage that they showed up, the strategies that they designed. The best part is that now that this information has been revealed, they have more resources for a 'come back'. You see, sometimes the problem is one of memory.

It is better when they answer the question while in the 'coaching' session, with a coach.
Why? Because I ask questions that can bring more from the experience. Almost the complete experience and from there, we apply to present situations to better the future.

Ramon Ruiz

"Mental Pictures Can Help You Sell More Goods"

2011-05-12T08:44:00.000-04:00

This mental technique looks interesting.
I found it in: 'Psycho-Cybernetics', by Maxwell Maltz, 1960, Pocket Books.
Hope is useful!

I'll allow the author to explain it with his voice:

"-In his book, How to Make $25,000 a Year Selling*, Charles B. Roth tells how a group of salesmen in Detroit who tried a new idea increased their sales 100 per cent. Another group in New York increased their sales by 150%. And individual sales men, using the same idea, have increased their sales up to 400%. (Charles B. Roth, 'How to Make $25,000 a Year Selling', Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall, Inc.)

"And what is this magic that accomplishes so much for sales men?
It is something called role-playing, ans you should know about it, because if you will let it, it may help you to double your sales.
What is role-playing?
Well, it is simply imagining** yourself in various sales situations, then solving them in your mind, until you know what to say and what to do whenever the situation comes up in real life.
It is what is called on the football field 'skull practice'.
The reason why it accomplishes so much is that selling is a matter fo situations. One is created every time you talk to a customer. He says something or raises an objection. If you always know how to counter what he says or answer his qquestion or hanle the objection, you make sales...
A role playing sales man, at night when he is alone, will create these situations. He will imagin the prospect throuwing the wildest kind of courves athim. Then ne will work out the best answer for them...
No matter what the situation is, you can prepare for it beforehand by means of imagining yourself and your prospect face to face while he is raising objections and creating problems and you are hablding them properly."

*I know, but the book was written around the 1960s.
**May I expand on this: imagining can be potentialized when you are able not just seeing images or better, watching movies but, listening to the conversation. The more rich the situation is, the more it has not just images, but sounds and feelings, the more useful will be.

Coaching as a Key element of Leadership and Building Trust in Sales Organizations

2011-02-12T14:47:00.000-05:00

Coaching is KEY to build leadership and trust in a sales team.
'Coaching is doing the enough number of interventions to get results through others.' -Ferdinand Fournies

It is an excellent tool to change the mood of the coachee.

If you want to influence and/or persuade your sales team, you better be coaching them or at least, some of them.

Coaching, as a tool of leadership, provides POWER to the sales representative AND to the sales manager. You could be a very powerful sales manager.

Example of my experience

A sales manager of a life insurance organization asked me to coach him. He wanted to meet his sales goals and he wanted to understand how 'this coaching thing' could help him and
his team.

In our first conversation, I asked him to choose several people from his team as he was going to coach them. He told me that he didn't know how to coach. I replied that that was precisely the reason why I was there: to mentor him on how to coach his sales reps.
(This is an interesting aspect: I coached lots of sales managers in Mexico and now that some of them are certifying themselves as coaches, they are finding that they already knew how to do it!)

The first stage of the process lasted 6 months.

First Challenges

During the first three months, he faced some minor challenges coaching his sales reps: they didn't arrive on time, sometimes they canceled the session or they just didn't show up at the time of the session, during the session, they were resistant or they agreed almost with everything but they didn't do anything.

He was disappointed (now I understand why sales managers don't want to coach their sales reps) and he wanted to quit the process. I laughed and told him that it was part of the process and that it was very important for him to keep the process alive.

At the same time, he was building his coaching techniques repertoire (we covered from Grinder, to Fournies, to Leonard, to Flores, to O´Hanlon) and his 'how to influence' them repertoire. One of the main purposes on his coaching process was to analyze and solve: his sales reps' problems, his problems with the coaching process, his communication skills, his selling communication repertoire and everything related to his sales goals.

On the third month of our process, he started to notice that most of his sales rep in the coaching process, weren't canceling the sessions, they were arriving on time and that they were asking for help, real help to solve real problems/situations with their sales process execution.

Things started to flow and the resistance was almost gone. They were starting to trust him. This brought a very interesting issue for him: they were working with him, in his sales team before this coaching process started so he started to ask himself: 'what was the exact nature of my relationship with them?' Because the difference is huge. The quality of the relationship now is greater that the one we had before. And the rest of the team? The quality of the relationship with the rest of the team is so poor...' A shocking moment.

I affirm that with this coaching process he made a shift in the quality of the relationship that he had with them. Before, they where related but at a level that wasn't directly related with the committed results selling life insurance. The only thing that is required to transform a group into a team is a shift in the quality of the relationship. But I'm sure that you already know that.

Impact in the Sales Organization

Now, between the 4th-6th month of the coaching process, he started to notice something more. The coachees, his sales representatives, were getting better results. He was already delighted with the trust that he was building so with the results, he became a fan of coaching. They started to sell, to have their pipeline full, their income started to get better, they started to have a relevant activity and to get noticed by the rest of the group.
His team has 20 sales representatives. He was coaching only 5. The other 15 were asking what was happening in the coaching sessions, they wanted to have coaching and they were asking for it.

One day, in one of our sessions, he told me that he was noticing something more. That the mood of his entire sales organization was shifting, was more positive, more ambitious. In the general Monday morning meetings, the team was not only more relaxed but, they were more cooperative instead of more defiant and willing to do more to get better results, to sell more. They were complaining less. We must remember that he was only coaching 5 of the 20 sales reps that were in his team. Could be possible that these five were influencing the other 15?

What happened

I was coaching him on how to coach them. We had four sessions per month. At the very beginning he was having the usual problems that every sales manager has when he hasn't installed the practice of coaching in his sales organization. He was having resistance and they weren't doing what they agreed on doing. He was frustrated BUT suddenly this changed. Now, the change could just have stayed withing these 5 sales reps but it was quite different: his entire organization started to change, particularly the mood, just by coaching these 5 sales reps. Why?

It's easy. During the sales coaching process, these sales reps were experiencing changes in their performance and results as an effect of going to their sessions with their manager. These sessions were the first opportunity in their careers to analize their sales situation, performance, moods, expectations, professional and personal goals.

The sales manager told me once that at the beginning, most of them arrived to their session unmotivated, but, after the coaching conversation, they left it with a completely different mood: ambition. And from there, they were talking to the other members of the team. It was like, as one of them described, as if 'I arrived feeling like a candle with the light off and after the conversation with R., I felt like a candle, but with the light on'. They were acting as 'change agents'. 'Moods are contagious', says Jim Selman. They got out of the coaching sessions in a different mood and then, other sales reps asked them what was happening, what exactly they were talking about and they shared the content to others. After some weeks, the sales reps that weren't receiving coaching, started to ask to the ones that were in the process about what to do in this or that situation. The coach was coaching some sales reps that were doing some unofficial coaching to the rest of the team.

Please, we weren't creating, for the sake of results, a coaching team. But, the leader, the sales manager was able to make a difference in the moods AND results of his team coaching only 5 people. He was delighted. The group dynamics changed and his team started getting great results.

After the Coaching Process

We did this for one year. During the first six months he coached, with a lot of discipline, a few of the members of his team. With this, he was able, through others, to change the group dynamics, performance, results and the particular and general moods.
He learned how to intervene in both: if a person was having problems in his production or in the team. He was aware where his power as a leader resided: in making enough number and timed interventions... he suddenly discovered that he was able to change positively his entire organization, instead of leaving it to training courses, tactical strategies or motivational meetings. He discovered that he could do something. It was very important for him to learn how to own, to take charge, to appropriate. And money, money started to flow.
During the next 6 months, we designed the leadership dynamics that he required in order to achieve his desired results. He was able to exercise more power to transform and mobilize his sales force.

Are you ready to sell? Ableness, Closing and Action

2010-06-11T14:48:00.000-04:00

This means being ready to ask:

for the business-attempt at least once, to close the deal
the required questions to define the client’s situation so they will be able to prescribe
the next required action/movement defined by your sales process
what your sales process require to be alive

And believe me, there are a lot of sales representatives that are not ready to sell.
This means that they are not ready to ask:

for the deal, they just tell (they are in the telling business, as this case, not in the selling business)
questions in order to have all the info required to craft a solution
to the client to take the next action defined by your sales process

Let me illustrate with a case:

Recently, a client from Toronto asked for my help to design his selling strategies so he could sell the products that he was importing from his country. These were small, cheap and beautiful. They can be used as ornament in almost every part at home. We met in several opportunities to design precisely what he was going to say/do to sell them. He was planning to talk/visit the Buying Manager and send/leave to him a catalog containing photographs and descriptions of the products. This catalog was very well designed and printed. After having analyzed in detail his selling strategy, we arrived to the conclusion that sending/talking to the buying manager was useless. This was based in my experience.

Analyzing closely what he was trying to sell, we designed the following selling strategy:

he was going to approach the sales representatives at the stores where he thought he could sell his products and engage with them in a soft inquiry conversation about the products in the catalog, how well did they know their clients, who, among their clients might buy these products and "more than guess", if they were able to sell these products to their clients.

The thought that was behind this strategy was:

"The store sales representative have a lot of info related to the store's clients. They know the buying patterns of their clients, type of home that each one of them has and, most importantly, which of them where more suitable to buy, soon, the products that my client was selling. The buying manager wasn't an important person now, BUT indeed, he was an important person in the power chain, so we decide to leave him near the end of the sales process. The sales representatives were the ones that were going to sell these products. We were sure that if the store's sales representative thought that these products were 'sellable' to some of their clients, then, it was time to go to the sales manager. He will buy them."

After talking to several sales representatives, some of them suggested to start talking to the sales manager, what my client did immediately." Some of these visits went so well that they scheduled immediately a 2nd meeting to close the deal and make the first order.

A subtle but key distinction in closing.

After several 1st interviews with some sales representatives and sales managers, some 2nd interviews were scheduled with some sales managers. In our selling strategy design, these interviews were designed to close the sale. But before we created it, I asked him what exactly he was planning to do. He explained briefly that he was going to bring with him the catalog, he was going to review it with the sales manager and if he, the sales manager, asked for it, the catalog, he was going to leave it there, for further review. In fact, he thought in bringing some samples with him and show them to the buyer. In short, he was preparing himself to do more of the same: telling.

Then I asked:

“What would happen if the client, in that moment, decides to place an order, how are you going to take it? What’s the purpose of you going to these 2nd interviews? Furthermore, what would happen if he, the client, doesn't decide to place an order, how are you going to help him to decide to buy from you?”

I want to make clear that, yes, we were designing an entire sales process AND some selling strategies for his particular clients BUT, my purpose in asking him these questions was to find if he was thinking in closing the sale, in making a deal. And as you have read, I found out that that he didn't have that concept:

how to make the client do something, in this case, accept the offer.

I know that for some of you, this could sound strange: not being aware of the ‘closing act’ of a sale, and please don’t take me wrong but, in my experience, lots of sales representatives, in order to avoid the uncomfortable moment that it represents, asking for something to the prospect/client, they just keep telling, hoping that the client will do the job for them. But if that doesn't happen, and normally it won't, they leave the sales conversation, not only without having asked for the order but for anything in particular that could have helped him to move through his sales process. They go, as in this case, ‘just to tell’, not to sell.

The closing the sale mechanics and vehicles

He was in shock to discover that he didn't have the distinction: close a sale.. This concept of closing was missing from his selling repertoire so, after it was clear that we he needed to do something out of his normal and without risk presentation, we designed the closing mechanics. The other thing that I noticed while we were designing these closing mechanics was that he started to feel fear, some kind of uneasiness that he hasn't experienced before and then I knew it, he wasn't prepared to close the sale because he felt some type of nervousness and this is common in a lot of sales reps: they don't try enough to close the sale because they are protecting their EGO from rejection but that's another matter that I with deal with in future writings.

He discovered two things:

that he needed a closing vehicle: a document or documents where to take the order and a receipt to register an advance or a deposit from the client
that he needed a closing mechanics that allowed him to create the moment to ASK for and close the deal

How he did it? With the type of products that he was selling and the amount the clients were going to pay, we assumed, and later proved correctly, that it was going to be easy for him to say:

The dialog:

-“Now that we both know that your clients would want to have this in their backyards or in their living rooms or in their kitchens, and that we have arrived to some numbers them, then it is OK with you to start with 23 of this, 30 of this, and 15 of this?

(SILENCE... UNTIL THE CLIENT CONFIRMS AND/OR CHANGE THE NUMBERS AND TALKS VERBALLY.)

-"Perfect, let me take the order here." (He writes and makes calculations to arrive to the final figure.)

-"The total is X.00CAD. I need a deposit now and the rest at delivery."

(SILENCE... UNTIL THE CLIENT CONFIRMS AND/OR WANTS TO NEGOTIATE . THEN NEGOTIATE AND SILENCE AGAIN.)

(Then, the client signs the order. My client asks and wait for the advance or makes a agreement to pick it up sometime in the future, agree on the delivery dates, says 'thank you' and leave.)

Some of you can imagine the amount of problems and anxiety that these mechanics produce in sales reps. Some are too shy just to follow this small but effective sequence. They don't execute it: they just tell, hope... and leave.

Results

When he 'got' the "I have to close/produce action in my clients" concept, he left the ‘telling’ mode and got into the ‘selling’ part which for him meant, start asking not only for the order but, as I have already mentioned, asking questions to better understand the client's situation, dare to ask for a the next appointment in order to keep alive his sales cycle, and, above all, being able to learn to ask. In that moment, ambition was installed.
He said: "A lot of things could happen if I just ask for them."

So... Are you ready to sell?

To close a sale, is required to ask for it. It's necessary to be able to produce action in the client. The client will be ready to take action just if he sees possibilities for himself in what he's being offered. I know that some prospects ask for the product/service by themselves but the majority of the sales reps still have to ask for the business/deal, particularly if they are selling B2C products. There are thousands of books dedicated to the subject of closing a sale BUT, as I have explained to several clients, there is one critical distinction in the act of closing and this is the ability to produce action in other people. That is what closing is all about, to produce action, desired action in the client and the client is going to take action only if he sees possibilities for himself in the offer that the sales rep is doing.

Now, there is a huge difference about what a sales rep considers selling and what really is selling. There is a huge difference between selling and telling. Telling is a common presentation. They think that telling is selling and after some telling the client is going to 'jump' and say: "I want what you have, where do I sign?" But no, it doesn't work that way. If you want to break the inertia in which the client lives and want to move him in the right direction, you need to learn to ask.

Are you there?

2010-05-06T17:31:00.000-04:00

Introduction
When I'm in a conversation with a client, together designing her selling strategies, I know that I can approach her situation from several perspectives:

how her selling repertoire is enabling her to produce the results that she wants/needs/is committed to and what is missing
how her moods prevent/allow her to do what she wants/needs to do to meet her sales goals
if she is able or not to produce action in herself and in others (clients, company)
her verbal and non verbal communication.

In this particular case, her situation was addressed from all of these perspectives during the process BUT, in this particular conversation, we only covered two points:

'listening' and BEING FULLY PRESENT at the sales call.

Listening or not listening?
The expression "you are not listening" is not correct. The problem with some sales representatives is not if they are listening or not. They always are. The problems, in fact, are two:

what exactly are they listening to and,
if they are FULLY PRESENT at the sales meeting

And a great number of them are not FULLY PRESENT at their sales meetings and are not FULLY PRESENT at their selling careers. Lots of distractions, problems, situations (circumstances, says Bernard Shaw) are created just for the sake of not BEING THERE.

I ask them:

"Where are you when you are at a sales meeting?"
"Are you THERE?"
As a joke, I use sometimes a line from Pink Floyd's masterpiece 'The Wall': "Is there anybody in there?"

BEING PRESENT at a sales call allows a sales rep to use, fully, his sales repertoire but if not, if he's not there, how?

A situation
One of the most amazing things that are revealed in conversations with sales representatives is if they are THERE, PRESENT, at the sales meeting with their clients. Not only physically, but mentally as well.
In the case that I'm going to share with you, we, my client, E., and I, started analyzing how she was handling a particular set of tools previously designed for her to handle this part of her sales process. I asked her if she was asking the questions that were created for this 1st interview and in what order. She said that she was asking the questions, sometimes in a particular order and sometimes in other and that they were serving its purpose BUT suddenly she said:

"My problem is not if I'm asking questions, my problem is, and let me tell you an example, when one client was answering an open ended question, I started to 'think' in other things. I stopped listening to him. I noticed that I wasn't 'listening' when he stopped talking. Then he asked me something about my company and I was still drowsy, recovering from the trip that I made with my thoughts, so I couldn't answer completely. Then he said: let me review your information and I'll call you. Thanks a lot for coming. And he showed me the door."

Yes, I know that you might be thinking that:

"E. is not listening, her problem is that she is not listening to her client. In the moment that she starts listening, everything is going to change."

It can be as simple as that and everybody hopes it is but it isn't. The problem is that 'her not listening' has a cause. SHE is listening, and very clear, but not to the client.

What happens? The mechanics

When I was in Mexico coaching sales representatives, one of the most unnoticed but one of the most debilitating patterns that plagued my clients was that, indeed, they were listening but to the wrong guy, not the client when they were at the sales meeting. Some of them, several times left, more that once, mentally, the sales interview. Not all of them had this problem, they had others, but most of them, experienced this situation, so often enough, without being able to stop it, that their sales meetings were damaged in a way that they couldn't be closed positively.

So, what takes my clients out of their selling conversations with their clients? What makes them to stop 'listening' to their clients and what exactly they start 'listening'? What are these things called 'thoughts'?

The problems start is when a very sutil, tiny BUT powerful voice, that many people think are 'thoughts', begins to talk.
Returning to E., she started to listen, while she was with her client, this little voice saying to her ear:

"What the hell I'm doing here? He is not going to buy! I'll better be doing other things. Oh! Margie is coming today at the evening. What are we going to do? Lets see....

This comment was enough for her to take her mind out of the sales conversation and put her with Margie. Her body stayed there, of course, with that smile that some sales reps have, but tense, just pretending that she was WITH (listening) the client.
The comment made by her 'little tiny voice' opened a door for a whole private conversation and she started to listen to a discourse, a complete story, that she enjoyed of course because the 'little voice' has hypnotic powers and is better to be out, with her company, than to handle the tension with the client.
She started to feel relaxed and comfortable. He was still talking. Please don't think that this happens in minutes. It happens in seconds. One moment you are PRESENT, there, fully there and in other, you are planning your evening with Margie. And the content is irrelevant. The subjects are endless. The purpose is to take her out of the sales interview. To 'leave' the sales conversation with her client. What she listened is irrelevant. Whom she started to listen to was relevant and the consequences of leaving the sales interview the same.

How she returned to the sales call, with her client?
E. came back to the sales interview when the client asked her a question. E. noticed that she was drowsy, like awakening from a hypnotic trance and tried to make her mind up so she could answer him. It was hard to return but she did it finally. The client, of course, saw that she wasn't 'paying attention' to him. That she wasn't 'listening' so he took her brochure and promised to call her as soon as he read the info. She never heard from him again. And it's not common to sales reps that are not there, to have a lot of difficulties to close sales.

Awareness
She wasn't aware that a voice took her out of the client's office, hypnotized her and ruined her sales call. She thought that those were just 'thoughts' and a problem with listening, as her manager told her. E. was listening but to the wrong 'person'. Her ability to listen is undamaged. The problem is with her ability TO BE FULLY PRESENT AT THE SALES INTERVIEW. What she had was a very destructive pattern that was destroying her sales interviews.

At some point of our conversation she said: "I was thinking about other things."
Instead she could have said:

"I was telling to myself some more entertaining stories and is more comfortable."
"I was hypnotizing myself because I can't stand the fear that causes me to be with a client."
"I wasn't listening to the client, I was listening to me because I don't give a d... about him."
"I prefer to listen to me because I don't have ambition."

Her conclusions
I asked E. how many times this had happened. She was able to see that she was blaming other things outside herself without acknowledging that she was losing sales or not closing them, just because she wasn't PRESENT at the sales call. Because she choose to listen to the 'wrong guy'.

Being There
How she managed to be THERE all the time, with the client? How she came back to her sales interviews?
Several things were prescribed that were not easy to apply. First to catch the moment when this 'little voice' starts to talk. Second, make a list of the consequences of leaving. The most important was that this was costing money to her. Third, increase your level of ambition. Understand that there is money in every moment of the sales interview.

A problem
This problem is labeled as 'you don't listen'. As in the case of E., her manager told her several times that she 'wasn't listening' to her clients. He recommended a course, that she took, about 'active listening'. The course didn't work. Until E. came to me, she discovered that one 'little voice' was talking to her and that this 'little voice' was distracting her. Being fully present is an attention skill, not a selling skill.

Ramon Ruiz

How to sell outside of your 'ethnic silo'.

2009-10-21T11:43:00.000-04:00

November 5, 2009
Toronto, ON
ramon.ruizg@gmail.com

Introduction
I know that the term 'ethnic silo' can sound strange to people that live outside Canada. 'What's that?', you might say. I'm going to explain, among other things, the term few lines below. The purpose of this article is to describe one of the most important sales coaching conversations of the coaching process that a Financial Adviser of one of the biggest Canadian Insurance company and I had. This helped her to start selling outside her 'ethnic silo'. She is originally from one Latin American country and arrived to Canada few years ago. What happened in this conversation and in the whole process brought her more money, a bigger, much more bigger market and a lot more opportunities to sell.

A Brief Note About the Format of this article.
I wrote this article trying to be precise in the details of the coaching conversation that we had. Also, I added comments, where I judged appropriate, about the reason why I asked the questions I asked.

What's an 'ethnic silo'?
Briefly, when immigrants arrive to Canada, some of them, ''tend to live in 'ethnic silos' and use their native language'' (Here I'm quoting Naeem Noorani: this is his web site).

Regarding sales, they tend to sell only to people that are at their own 'ethnic silo'. Why? Several factors but the most important are fear and assumptions (false, most of them) about what is outside of it. In this case, this Financial Adviser, was only selling to Hispanics. She was selling only to Spanish speaking clients therefore, her market was very small compared with the size of the clients she could get outside her 'ethnic silo' in Toronto, ON.

The Coaching Conversation

When we started our coaching process, she told me that one of her main goals was:

-"To sell to Canadians, not only to Hispanics. They love me and they keep referring business almost all the time and I have built some important networks with them but I want to start selling to other cultures, particularly to native English speaking Canadians."

(She used that term, is not mine and I didn't start a conversation trying to explain to her that we are all Canadians, some are new, some are old and/or some are natural English speakers. I'm a sales coach, not an immigration expert. For me it was clear that what she was saying was that she wanted to sell to a bigger, much bigger market.)

Coach: - "And how do you plan to do that?"

(I always, as maybe you have read, ask this question. They come to me asking a lot of 'hows' but almost always they know them and when they don't we design together and when we don't I tell them exactly what to do.)

Financial Adviser: -"Well, that's exactly why I'm talking to you, you are supposed to tell me how."
Coach: -"Right. We need to create a specific strategy that you can execute in order to start selling outside the Hispanic community, particularly to Canadians, as one of your main selling goal."
Financial Adviser: -"Yes"
Coach: -"Now, I must ask you this, lets say that you can start selling right now outside the Hispanic community, particularly to Canadians, do you know to whom exactly are you going to sell? Do you know where to start?"
Financial Adviser -"Yes. Our manager gave us several lists with qualified prospects. I can start calling them, you know, cold calling."

(In the moment after she said this, I noticed that she started to rub her hands, she crossed her arms and legs and started to breath faster.)

Coach: -"When does the manager gave you the list?"
Financial Adviser:-"He gave us the list more than three months ago."
Coach: -"And?"
Financial Adviser: -"Yes, I know but..."
Coach:-"What is your plan? How are you going to sell to this desired market?"

(I want you to notice two things. First, I repeat the question 'how' on purpose. My experience tells me that, frequently, the first time I ask, they want to keep their Ego protected and not to risk saying something useless and/or to be exposed: 'why, if I know how to do it, why I haven't started or done it?' Second: If I insist, they are going to tell me exactly what they are going to do and normally their plan is the one that's going to work. Third, it's a matter of appropriateness: if the solution comes from them, it belongs to them and them are going to use it.)

Financial Adviser:-"Let me tell you: I have the list so the thing is to start calling and that's it."
Coach: -''Now, what exactly is stopping you or has stopped you from doing it since you have those lists three months ago?''
Financial Adviser: -"I don't know. Could be fear. No, I don't know.

(All her non verbal communication tells me that she is experiencing the fear that stops her to call the prospects on those lists. She starts feeling exactly what she feels when she imagine herself doing the phone calls OR having sales meetings with her prospects. Are their assumptions and perceptions the ones that are scaring her not what she's going to do. Her interpretations about this new project are the ones that are keeping her from selling not what will happen in 'reality'. She's having a strong reaction. Also, she confessed later that one of her most scary thoughts was: 'What would happen if I discover that I can't sell but only in Spanish?' She didn't wanted to deal with that 'reality'. She was having a strong nonverbal reaction.)

Coach: -"I don't know, could be. Now, answer this, if that's the case, to what exactly are you fearful? What exactly do you fear?"
Financial Adviser: -"I don't know... (sighs)... no, I know: one is to froze in the middle of the phone call... to arrive to a point where I don't know what to say."
Coach: -'But a lot of other things could happen, besides frozen yourself, like positive ones, right?'
Financial Adviser: -'Yeah... sure...' (As if she hasn't ever consider the possibility of something different, besides freezing in that moment, could happen.)
Coach: -What other fear do yo have or has you? Yes, you don't have fears, fears have you, if not what's the whole point? Right now they have a grip on you that's why I have to keep asking: what other do you have?
Financial Adviser: -To freeze in the sales call, to freeze in front of my client during the interview because I don't know what to say next or because I can't find the right words in English.
Coach: -"Aand, how do you plan to solve them?
Financial Adviser: -"Mee?! OK, me. The freezing during the phone call can be solved with a telephone script specially designed for those phone calls... and (like an AJA moment) our manager gave us one when he gave us the lists. He said, 'don't improvise, only Beethoven improvise. (She feels relieved after she says this.) But, I have almost never used a telephone script, almost all my clients come from referrals, networking events. I have never or in very rare occasions used one. But well, it seems like I'm going to use one.

(These questions are designed to provoke precisely the answer that she gave me: to detach her to the only one possible outcome she thinks is going to happen. As she answers, she acknowledges that there are several other different outcomes that could happen and will happen. The other question, about the telephone script, belong to the domain of selling tools and skills. Later, she proved in action that using a telephone script helped her to get the positive results that she got.)

Coach: -"Now you are aware that it's possible that instead of something negative, a lot of positive things could happen if you start selling to this list, don't you? I can bet that you felt nervous when you started selling so now you will going to have a new beginning so it's normal that you are there before you start. Just wait and see... I want to go back to your fear: can you find another reason behind it? How is your English? I know that 90% of your portfolio are Hispanic clients and most of your friends are Hispanics, do you think that your English level could limit you while you do your phone calls and handle your sales meetings?"
Financial Adviser: -"No, I don't think so. I speak English very well. When we meet with my manager and in other places I speak English and remember that I have been here for more than 8 years so I don't think the language could be a problem and I know that if at any moment I have problems with words they will help me. When I spoke to native English speakers and I can't find the word or the expression that I want to use, I explain to them what I want to say and they help me and no, I can't think in other reason rather to explore a new territory."
Coach: -"And you think you can do that while you are at the sales meeting? Because we have solved the problem, at least part, with the cold calling, now, do you know exactly what to do during the sales meeting to close the deal?"
Financial Adviser: -"No, but I don't think that it would be too different from the ones that I do in Spanish. I do my presentation, I ask the client several questions, I make rapport and at the end, I ask them for the business or they decide by themselves to sign."
Coach: -"...too different..." well no, you will find that too. (I smile.) That they are not 'too different' and I think that that's one of the causes of your fear. I don't know why you are making them "... too different..." from your Hispanic clients... they are just clients and you will find that they are alike, too alike I must add, with their differences but not too many."
Financial Adviser: -"Yeah, you are right! Just clients. I feel like it's going to be tested, like if I am going in search of their approval, not their business. Sometimes I see them too big and not, as you said, they are just clients (sighes and smiles).

(This part of the conversation reminded me a movie with Gene Hackman: "Hoosiers". This is the story of an always losing basketball team of a rural town in the US. Gene Hackman does the role of a coach that has had problems in other towns and cities and is hired to coach this team. To make the long story short, with his coaching, the team arrives to the State Finals but the players, as soon they enter the Indianapolis Arena, where the final is going to be played, the became panicked of the size of the place. Then, the coach started, with the help of his players, to measure the size of the basketball play zone, just to help them to understand that it's exactly the same size that the one in which they play at home. Just this exercise reduces a lot the fear in the players and finally they win this State Championship.)

Coach: -"So? What are you going to do?"
Financial Adviser-"Start calling to the prospects that I have on my list tomorrow and rehearse mentally the sales interview but now in English and write an agenda, in English too. Lets say, I'm going to build a template in English. I'm going to ask my manager if he doesn't have one. He gave us the telephone script but nothing for the interview. Also, I will use the telephone script, at least at the beginning. After some phone calls I think that I will be able to go on my own. (smiles)"
Coach -"Sounds good. Another question: I know that you have a long selling career and you have sold insurance for sometime ago (she nods) and I know that your portfolio is mainly 90% Hispanic and we know that there is nothing wrong with that but my question is: have you ever sold to an native English speaking prospect? And if yes, what happened?"

(I made this question just with the purpose to help her to see that she has been there before and that she closed those sales. I was searching a resource reservoir: experience, skills and emotions. She sighed and smiled.)

Financial Adviser: -"(Smiling) Yes, I have. I have some clients that are native English speakers and the sales meetings went well, they are still my clients and if I remember well, I was nervous BUT I closed them. I remember feeling relieved after I left their homes but almost all of them bought from me. You are right. It doesn't have to be a problem. (Sigh)"
Coach: -"So, what are you going to do?"
Financial Adviser: -"Again? OK, prepare the telephone script, take out the list, rehearse a sales meeting in English, take some notes and start calling. Other thing that I should do is to ask one of my colleagues to go with him and watch him selling, ask my manager if he has some tool or guide to handle the meetings and like you said (I never said this but it doesn't matter.) I just need to start. Thank you. Thanks a lot. I feel a lighter and excited!"
Coach: -"That's great!! See you next week."

Final Comments:
Immediately after that session, she made several cold calls. She was surprised when two of her clients went to her office to buy the insurance. After several false starts she is now selling to new markets, earning much more money than before and finding more interesting markets for her selling career.

November 5th, 2009
Toronto, ON
info@salesconsciousness.com

Silence and questions as coaching techniques...

2009-04-17T09:45:00.000-04:00

Well, I think that that's what experience is all about.

Last week I was coaching, as I have done in the last year, a sales rep. He works in the manufacturing industry. He sells for a Sweden company, which I can't in this moment mention here. But, I can share our conversation dynamics and what happened on it.

He told me that his boss, the company CEO gave him a new strategy to follow. He is now going to approach clients that are already clients in other parts of the world for this company but still aren't his clients.

Then he said: "What should I do? How do you think we can approach this?"

(This question is brilliant and they are always going to ask it. The sales rep is always going to ask what to do to solve any situation but, I always apply the same principle... before telling them anything, ask... and ask... and ask and listen... you will be surprised that they already know what to do in order to get more clients. Not all the time but most of the time. And when they don't know, guess what, they discover the next step doing the previous one OR checking his own sales process.)

And I said: "-OK Do you mind telling me more?"

He said: "Yes of course. My boss told me that he and his sales team has observed that it takes less time to close a sales process when we are selling to those companies that are already our clients in other parts of the world except here. So what I'm going to do is to update the list that I have..."

I interrupted: "The list that you have is not updated?"

He said: "No, it isn't. I have to call the central office and ask the manager for the updated list."

I said: "And after that, what are you going to do?"

He said: "We have done this in the past but it didn't work."

I said: "Why?"

He said: "Because when I tried to ask the other sales reps for leads they didn't answered my calls."

I said: "Right, how many times did you ask for the info and for how many companies?"

He said: "Two... but, (bla, bla, bla, bla)."

(I didn't pursued more the why he didn't do more about this list in the past. Why? Because I noticed that he made consciousness about it and I'm going to be there to help him to complete successfully this job. What the CEO asked him to do.)

I interrupted: "Fine, then, what are you going to do?"

He answered: "Yeah, fine... In the moment that I have that list I'm going to contact the sales reps that have each account globally so they can help me with relevant information about a client: what we are selling to them, what is their relationship with ABC, Inc., if they are still our clients and if they have or can obtain for me the name of a contact here, in my country. Well, before that, I will review the list to find out if any of these clients are our clients here. Yes, that´s first. And then, well start calling them."

(Please notice that here, he is telling me what he is going to do. He asked me to help him with that but the one that is describing the first stage of his plan, is him. Not me. How? I only asked some questions.)

I said: -"Perfect... so you have a lot of work to do..."

He said: -"Yes, indeed! But I want to know how I'm going to approach them."

I said: -"Why don't we have the list updated first and then we act according to each case?"

(Sales reps always ask for the silver bullet. The one technique, strategy or tactic that is going to work in every sales situation or case. But sales coaching, at least the one that I do, doesn't work that way and experience have proved that to me. My client and I design each strategy, technique and tactic according the situation/client he is dealing with. It's a situational approach not a cookie cutter approach.)

He said: "Yes, you are right. I'll do that and we work with the list in our next call."

Me: "Yes, we work with the prospects that you are ready to call in our next call. Have a great week!"

Comments
Sometimes, when I asked them to describe more about their situation, they find the solution. One of the most important characteristics in my coaching process is not to arrive to conclusions too fast and say it. I prefer to go deeper and I have found that when I do that, in depth, there is the answer, the solution, the approach, the strategy and/or the technique that they are searching for.
Another point here is that this call lasted only 25 minutes. The more they work the less time is required.
The last comment is that besides depth, I prefer them to arrive to their own answers just because, yes they know them, even if they don't know that they know them but, if they arrive to their own answers, they are going to be the owners of them and they will keep the power, their power with them and the responsibility it comes with.

Toronto, ON

A TD Canada Trust Mortgage Broker Enlightened.

2009-02-08T20:12:00.000-05:00

Nice expression isn't it?

Sorry, I can't tell you the name of this mortgage broker but the other day we had a coaching session.
She was a little nervous about her financial future. Of course, for almost everybody the global financial crisis is a big concern. But that's the wonder of coaching.

She started saying that she was very concerned about the financial crisis, her business AND by two personal situations.
I told her, "so your mind is occupied by thoughts that are not going to produce you any money."

She said that yes and that her main concern was that she wasn't seeing any people because she didn't know where to get them. Then, I asked her what were her financial goals for this year. She said, "I'll be happy with $3,500.00 a month."

Then my coaching question: "And from where is this money going to come?"

I love their faces. They put a face like saying: "That's why I hired you!"

I replied:

"OK, yes, so tell me, what are you going to do?"

And in that moment she was enlightened.
She said, with light in her eyes:

1. "I can visit the business at my neighborhood. I have lived here in the last 18 years. They know me so I can approach them. I will do a plan. Yes, yes."

But it was too easy and when the sales representative discovers that she/he has the solution(s) for their problem(s) she says to herself: "UUPPSS, that was too easy!!!" and suddenly resistance appears so I immediately asked the following:

"Do you mind telling me another two places where you can get clients for you?:"

Resistance: "Well I don't know, it's difficult... is going to be hard... bla, bla, bla..."
Suddenly her eyes lightened up, her face turned red, stopped breathing, put her hand in her mouth and said:

-"I run an office that has 30 Realtors and there are some regulars but there are a lot that I don't know or they don't go to the office so, maybe ... if I talk to them... maybe..."

This was solution number 2. And then, she was enlightened with solution number 3:

"-I have worked for the bank for the last 18 years. Since then I have made a lot of clients. In fact, I started my career as a Mortgage Broker calling them and telling them that I was leaving my position and starting my career as a mortgage broker and that I was going to sell for the bank. They gave me a lot of referrals which I translated into clients. So... I can do the same now...!"
And her face, selling career and life were enlightened. Why? Because she found what to do in order to get the deals she need in order to have an income of $3,500.00.

And she was enlightened by herself. She crafted the solutions for their own selling situation.
I just asked questions.

What else? The emotions expressed in her body language were congruent with the selling strategies that she created for her business. They came from deep inside, her experience and her own knowledge.

Normally, they know what to do.

A Sales Coaching Conversation... with a Financial Advisor 2

2008-02-25T10:41:00.001-05:00

Well, it happened.

And it happens with a lot of sales people that think they are their own bosses??, like this financial adviser.

What I wanted to write about was that she finally followed her sales consciousness... and that she was getting a lot of results and that I transformed her.... but not, not in this case.

In fact, it happened the other way around. She was asked to lead a project for another insurance company and this project has nothing to do with selling (she says that yes, that it has to do with selling... of course... but she has to sell hard to herself the project so she can quiet her own sales consciousness and be comfortably uncomfortable) so she will be "distracted" during the whole year from her main selling activities.

Besides being distracted by not selling and not working with discipline, she will be distracted doing a project that has nothing to do with her nature and her business.

Is that too bad?

Well, she complained about it. She told me that she has been an underachiever, this meaning that she knows can produce a lot more compared with what she was selling right now and/or the year before. Also she told me that during the last year she was distracted by a lot of 'things' including those that sometimes 'appeared' in her office and by people that 'drained her energy'.

And that she was "fed up" so she was willing to do whatever it was necessary to 'change' BUT we understood later, that in 'necessary' weren't included the basic things that an insurance sales person must (if she wants the results she says she wants) do:

find the hundreds of opportunities that she has in her own portfolio (remember that she has been selling for the last 8-9 years) by reselling to them or asking them for referrals (really, is that very hard action to take, really?)
make appointments, have interviews

Instead of doing these 'easy and practical things' she choose to do a completely different thing, so maybe she and I are going to be talking in a year.

And about sharing an unsuccessful case?

Well, almost every coach that I have met has more that one stories of failures (more than one, are you kidding?). So, sometimes it is better to share some of them to help the readers (hoping that these are sales professionals AND coaches) to mirror themselves in them.

A Sales Coaching Conversation... with a Financial Advisor

2008-02-21T08:31:00.000-05:00

(I'm grateful with Laura McCann, lauramccann@sympatico.ca . She helped to make this article readable.)

Two days ago I met with a client. It was our first coaching conversation. Her own diagnosis of her situation was:

"I know I can do a lot more but I can get easily distracted with a lot of unproductive activities and despite the fact that I'm a very well known and respected person in the community, I know that I'm barely making my monthly quotas. I want to make the money that I know I can. Please tell me what I need to do."

First, some background. She has been selling financial products for at least 9 years. She is very well known in the Hispanic community in Toronto. She has a lot of clients in her own portfolio.

Here, I will try to reproduce the most important part of our conversation as closely as possible:

Coach: -"OK. So you know that you can produce a lot more, you know that you can sell a lot more and earn a lot more money, don't you?"

Financial Advisor: -"Yes, but I don't know what happens. For example (and this is important): I arrive at the office with a selling plan. I tell myself that it's time to produce more so I list some of the things that I should do in order to produce more, OK? That's easy, BUT, when I arrive at the office, I suddenly start doing other things, or even go out with my friend from another office to an event that has nothing to do with my business nor is the event in keeping or with what I've planned."

Coach: -"So you know what to do to sell more?"

Financial Advisor: -"Yes of course but I almost always end up doing a lot of other unrelated things."

Coach: -"OK. Let me talk to your intuition."

Financial Advisor: -"With my what?"

Coach: -"With your intuition. The little, soft voice that talks to you every morning and tells you exactly what you can do to get better results, because she talks to you everyday, doesn't she?

Financial Advisor: -"Yes, but as I told you, I end up doing things that go contrary to what my intuition tells me to do."

Coach: -"Perfect, so you have it! Now, what happens when, lets say that your intuition tells you: 'Sarah (not her real name) you need to clean up your list of clients and you need to do it today' and suddenly "something" distracts you from that and you end up in, lets say, at an event that does not lead to being productive. Does this intuition make claims to you about that?"

Financial Advisor: -"Yes, she tells me: 'What are you doing here? We are not going to get anything from here.'"

Coach: -"And?"

Financial Advisor: -"Well, I tell her that probably we might meet people that may eventually become clients and/or that could lead to future clients."

Coach: -"But you know that this isn't the case and when you say that to yourself you're sending to sleep, among other mechanisms and tricks that you use for that, this selling consciousness so she will stop bothering you with her questions about why you aren't doing what do you need to do to get the results you want."

Financial Advisor: -"What?"

Coach: -"Yes. Everyday, you know, because you listen to it from your sales consciousness, with precision, what to do so you can get the results that you want, don't you? (she nods) BUT (and it's a very BIG one), you almost always get distracted and end up doing something that has nothing to do with your selling plans. Am I correct?"

Financial Advisor: -"Yes..."

Coach: -"So, what we are going to do in this coaching conversations is to help you to simply obey your selling consciousness."

Financial Advisor: -"..."

Coach: -"Yes, you have two thoughts. One tells you to sell. The other destroys that intention and send you to do anything related with sales production. And while you are listening to both, you end obeying to the one that destroys your intentionality, your constructive efforts. The purpose of my coaching is going to help you to obey your sales consciousness and to do what she tells you to do so you can do what you know you must do to get the results that you want. Am I clear now?"

Financial Advisor: -"Am I destroying my career?"

Coach: -"Are you?"

Financial Advisor: -"OK, maybe, the thing is that I'm not getting results. So now, how can I change?"

Coach: -"Let me talk to you sales consciousness and let us hear what she wants to tell us..."

From here, her selling intuition or consciousness gave her exactly the same instructions. These strategies are neither magic nor motivational. They are simple and very common sense selling tactics and strategies that when applied, produce the desired results.

And my point is to help her in obeying it and applying them.

Argyris, Coaching, Power and Results

2007-09-20T14:19:00.000-04:00

Since I started my private practice as a coach, I have been aware of the present debate between the coaches that give advice (including myself, a lot of times) and the coaches that help the client to come with his own answers and solutions.
My friend Abiel, from Mexico, sent me, some weeks ago, two articles that were published by the Harvard Business Review written by Chris Argyris. He is a "hidden genius" about management, leadership, learning in organizations and communication.
I knew something about Argyris because some of his theories were used by Fernando Flores in the complete design of his model called Ontological Design and by Peter Senge, but I never explored in depth his ideas and theories.
Reading these articles and some other that I found by myself, I started to realize the importance of natural coaching: this means, the client creating, within the space created in the conversation with his coach, his own solutions, possibilities and answers in order, not only to solve his current situation, but, to create a new future.
I will leave you with a paragraph that I took from one of his articles.
In the next post, I will write an example of "natural coaching" of course, in the domain of sales.

To other coaches
Also, a lot of coaches that I know, can use the following text, if they read it, to argue in favor of "natural coaching". Because sometimes there is a debate about the type of coaching but they don't know how to support their assertions.

About my practice
And for me, this doesn't mean that I will quit the practice of giving advice to my clients. What they need to know sometimes, is not 'there' period. But, I will make them to think more and more before I tell them what to do.

Chris Argyris is the James Bryant Conant Professor Emeritus of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of "Good Communication That Blocks Learning" (HBR July-August 1994), a McKinsey Award winner. He is also a director at Monitor Company in Cambridge.

Two Kinds of Commitment

"To understand why there has been no transformation (in the work force), we need to begin with commitment. Commitment is not simply a human relations concept. It is an idea that is fundamental to our thinking about economics, strategy, financial governance, information technology, and operations. Commitment is about generating human energy and activating the human mind. Without it, the implementation of any new initiative or idea would be seriously compromised. Human beings can commit themselves in two fundamentally different ways: externally and internally. Both are valuable in the workplace, but only internal commitment reinforces empowerment. (See the exhibit "How Commitment Differs.")

Compare the following

External Commitment

-Tasks are defined by others.

-The behavior required to perform tasks is defined by others.

-Performance goals are defined by management.

-The importance of the goal is defined by others.

compared with:

Internal Commitment

-Individuals define tasks.

-Individuals define the behavior required to perform tasks.

-Management and individuals jointly define performance goals that are challenging for the individuals.

-Individuals define the importance of the goals.

External commitment -- think of it as contractual compliance -- is what an organization gets when workers have little control over their destinies. It is a fundamental truth of human nature and psychology that the less power people have to shape their lives, the less commitment they will have. When, for example, management single-handedly defines work conditions for employees, the employees will almost certainly be externally committed. That commitment is external because all that is left for employees is to do what is expected of them. The employees will not feel responsible for the way the situation itself is defined. How can they? They did not do the defining.

If management wants employees to take more responsibility for their own destiny, it must encourage the development of internal commitment. As the name implies, internal commitment comes largely from within. Individuals are committed to a particular project, person, or program based on their own reasons or motivations. By definition, internal commitment is participatory and very closely allied with empowerment. The more that top management wants internal commitment from its employees, the more it must try to involve employees in defining work objectives, specifying how to achieve them, and setting stretch targets."

Argyris, Chris. "Empowerment: the emperor's new clothes. " Harvard Business Review. 76.n3 (May-June 1998): 98(8). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Toronto Reference Library. 6 Sept. 2007

Selling Trucks With Outdated Selling Techniques

2007-08-27T14:40:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-27T14:37:00.000-04:00

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:

He selected his top five clients. These were those clients who provided him with 80% of his highly profitable total sales.
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?

2007-08-27T14:34:00.001-04:00

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

2007-08-27T14:33:00.001-04:00

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

2007-08-27T14:32:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-27T14:31:00.000-04:00

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

2007-08-27T14:24:00.000-04:00

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:

"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.
"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)