1. Goals

I’m a great believer in goals but these are not the same as targets. Sales professionals are given targets to reach, but these can be de-motivating. If you fall behind your annual sales plan early in the year it can be incredibly hard to get yourself motivated. Conversely, if you smash your targets with months to spare, the temptation can be to ease off later in the year. This can have a knock-on effect the year after.
Getting-better goals are more motivating, rather than targets. Here you breakdown each aspect of selling and aim to improve them one by one. This seems to work, in that you are competing against yourself, to get better every day.

2. Agile Selling Learning Model

The biggest challenge for me, when I changed roles, was the amount of learning I had to cram in, in a short space of time. Konrath gives us a simple model to use in Agile Selling.

a. Chunking

First you map out everything you need to learn and then chunk similar things together. You can then chunk down into smaller chunks.

b. Sequence

You can’t learn everything all at once. This will fry your brain. Instead decide on the first skill or piece of information you need to learn and concentrate on that. Only when you have mastered that, should you go on to the next skill.

c. Connect

Are there any other things you already know, that you can link to the skill you need to learn? This can often give you a head start.

d. Dump

Get what you learn out of your head and onto paper. Therefore, practice dumping this information. Mind maps are a great tool to use here.

e. Practice

With any new skill, practice makes perfect. Doing something once or twice, will mean you never habituate the skill. The author recommends role playing and recording yourself on video. Do not fear this feedback, as it is priceless.

f. Prioritise

I agree with Jill Konrath, in that multitasking is a myth. Therefore, you should prioritise what you are doing and do the most important one-thing first.

3. Situational Credibility

The aim of all this learning is to reach situational credibility in 30 days. This means that within 30 days you should be able to sit in front of a customer and have a good productive conversation. The 30-day deep dive is long enough for you to get this situational credibility. It is also short enough for it to fit into your induction period, in your new job.

4. Dictionary

One of the biggest helps for me in my learning was setting up my own dictionary. As you learn unfamiliar terms and jargon, make a note of it to look up later. Once you have the definition, write this down in a dedicated notebook. I still use my dictionary all these years later as more new buzzwords and acronyms come into fashion. I now use an excel spreadsheet for this, so I can rearrange it alphabetically.

5. Fill out buyer’s matrix.

Konrath gives us some a lot of homework to do in Agile Selling, but it is well worth the effort. One of the tasks is to set up a Buyers’ Matrix. Here you list out each type of customer you have, for instance my list would be:

• Business owner, Owner, MD, CEO
• Factory Manager, Operations Manager/ Director, General Manager
• Engineering Manager/Director
• Project Manager

For each position, fill out their key roles, objectives and challenges. An example for a CEO is below:

1. Role/responsibility – oversee all company functions, maintain and improve profits, increase sales.
2. Business objectives – get new business, increase and maintain business, ensure profitability.
3. Strategic initiatives – sales drives, cost cutting, new product development, branding.
4. Internal challenges – labour costs,
5. External challenges – loss of business, unable to supply business.
6. Primary interfaces – Parent company directors/ managers, shareholders, owners, other business owners
7. Status quo – current profitability and sales are fine, don’t rock the boat.
8. How to overcome Status Quo: costs are rising, labour costs, labour market
9. Change drivers – sudden new business, loss of business, increased costs, pricing.
10. Change inhibitors – ongoing contracts, parent company group deal, other investments required, uncertain forecast.

6. Status quo

Looking back on my sales career, my biggest competitor is the customer not doing anything. Jill Konrath calls this the Status Quo i.e. the customer would rather do nothing. There are assorted reasons for this, for instance fear of making mistakes or the time required to make the change. However, we can still compete against this. Therefore, what are the weaknesses or gaps, for them to remain with the status quo? How can we exploit this?

7. Value Proposition

The author advises us to reverse engineer the business case, to arrive at our Value Proposition. This chapter was quite lightweight and Konrath points us to her website to download a Value Proposition Toolkit.

8. Customer Stories

During your first 30 days, start collecting customer stories. What are the stories of how your company got customers? How did you help them? You can ask other salespeople in the organisation or even interview the customers. You can then weave this into your own sales and marketing narrative.

9. Map out the buyer’s journey.

Mapping out the buyer’s journey is a useful exercise in sales and marketing. It can help you to craft the message you are putting out and to whom. Broadly speaking there are four stages to the buyer’s journey, but each industry and customer will have its own sub-stages:

a. Allow access.

The first step in the sales journey is the customer allowing you access to them. Here you need to be noticed by the customer and offer them a valid reason for starting a conversation.

b. Initiate change

The customer allows you access to them and you are now face to face. Your task now is to guide the customer to initiate change, i.e. to realise they might have a problem worth solving.

c. Select resources.

As the buyer now realises he needs to change something, he will now start to think about how he can change. I.e. to select resources. This is the research stage and hopefully you will be involved in it. Otherwise, the customer has already done their research and you are part of a quote gathering exercise.

d. Expand relationships.

You have been successful in gaining some business with this new customer. The next stage is expanding the relationship. This will be traditional account management and will involve selling more of your offering and dealing with the fulfilment side.

10. Create cheat sheets for everything.

I’m in agreement with the author here. Cheat sheets or checklists can help you to remember to do what you should do and they are a plan you can follow. For example, the book includes a cheat sheet for meeting preparation. (See below). I’ve written more about my checklists in the post Checklists and Daily Lists.

11. What are the trigger events?

For the customer to realise they have a problem or initiate a change, there is usually a trigger event. To help you optimise your time, you can identify what these trigger events are and then target these as a priority. Trigger events could be anything from New Legislation or a new CEO overseeing the customer’s business. If you do your homework, you can find these events and get ahead of the game.

12. Gobbledygook test

How will you know if you have situational credibility and are ready to sit in front of a customer? You should be able to pass the gobbledygook test and be able to answers these four questions, off pat.

• What does your company do?
• What are your primary products and services?
• Why should I consider changing to you?
• Have you worked with any other companies like us? Name them.

13. Agile Selling skills

Your professional development should include developing your sales skills, but where do you start. The author tells us to start where you are. I.e. it’s pointless mastering closing skills if you have no prospects.

a. Prospecting

If you have just joined the company and are responsible for generating your own leads, then prospecting should be your first skill to master. These skills include phone use, email and networking etc. I’ve written more about this in my post My Prospecting Process, in which I go through my methods for getting in front of customers.

b. Opportunity creation

Once you have mastered prospecting or you are already provided with leads, then the next logical skill to practise is opportunity creation. Some sub-skills in this area include questioning, listening and needs analysis.

c. Winning business

Winning business will be the next skill to practise. This is a huge topic ranging from presenting the business case, through objection handling to negotiation. When choosing a subskill to work on, it is best to analyse what you are doing now and whether there are areas on which you can improve.

d. Account management

Account management is a whole different skill set. Once you have the business, this area is about keeping and developing that business. How are your customer service skills? Have you networked within the customer organisation to meet all the stakeholders?

14. Personal bests

Sales is a numbers game we are often told, but Konrath tells us to not focus on the number of calls we are making. Instead change your goals to, for instance, connection ratio. This means the percentage of calls that result in a conversation.
Once you’ve improved your connection ratio, to acceptable levels, you can then look at improving your initial meeting conversion ratio. I.e. the percentage of visits that result in a quote.
Again, once the meeting conversion rate is satisfactory, look to improve the closing ratio, otherwise known as the percentage of quotes that result in a sale. The corollary to this could be to look at the percentage of quotes, that are lost to no-decision and improve this.
When you are looking at ways to improve, or to highlight things that might be holding you back, find the root cause of the problem. For instance, your issue might be a lack of presenting the business case rather than closing skills.

15. Meeting preparation

One of the bad habits that seasoned sales professionals can sometimes slip into is trying to ‘wing it’ i.e. not preparing adequately for a meeting. As you become more experienced and your knowledge increases, this can be when danger can strike. You think that you can just turn up to an initial meeting and go with the flow.
In Agile Selling there is a Meeting Plan that you can use to ensure that you have at least done the minimum amount of preparation, before the meeting. Here are some of the questions you need to ask yourself before the meeting:

a. Outcome

At the end of the meeting, what will the next step for me be?
What will the prospect be expecting?

b. Opening

How will you open the meeting? E.g. Make intros, confirm times and review agenda.

c. Set the stage.

Share your value proposition, success stories, ideas or insights. Establish yourself as a credible source. What will you say?

d. Transition

How will you move the conversation into questions?

e. Focus on Business

Lead the conversation about the reason for the meeting. List ten questions you want to discuss, in a logical sequence.

f. Support materials

What will you need to take? Presentations, handouts, case studies.

g. Personnel

Who will to be present, both from your company and the customer’s.

h. Advance

How will you bring the meeting to a close, in a timely manner. Summarise your understanding, discuss open issues, and suggest the next steps.

16. Debrief meetings.

After the meeting, whilst it is still fresh in your mind, you should be having a debrief. I use a model called the Personal Improvement Grid (PIG). You can read up more about the PIG on my post Skills and Mastery. In this post I explain how I improved my cold calling skills.

17. The Agile Selling 90 days Plan

There is a lot of work to go through when you start your new post at a new company. Aside from getting yourself up to speed or having situational credibility in 30 days, the author gives us a useful 90-day plan. You can of course adapt this to your own situation.

18. Time management

Here are four useful areas to improve in your time management, which I took away from Agile Selling.

a. Prioritise daily.

At the start of each day, or the evening before, list what you are going to doing, with the most important item first. With me, I make sure I prioritise getting at least twenty customer contacts per day. I will do this first.

b. Chunk time

Try to group like tasks together, for example if you have a raft of phone calls to make, then block off a few hours to get through them all in one chunk of time.

c. Set deadlines.

We are beset with deadlines issued by customers, bosses etc, which means that these tasks are focussed on first. But what about the tasks we give ourselves, those things that could move our own performance and development forward. Give these deadlines too, so you make sure they are done.

d. Email scheduled.

Scheduling my email time was a big gain for me. Set yourself 4 or 5 times per day, when you will check your email messages and don’t deviate from it. If you have spaced these times throughout the day, you will not miss anything. For example, I now only check email at 9am, 11am, 1pm, 4pm and one last check at 7pm.

Summary

Reading Agile Selling by Jill Konrath and applying the recommendations, got me out of a potentially sticky situation when I changed from Account Management to Business Development in Capital Equipment sales.
If you are about to start a new role in sales or if you are floundering with the mountain of things that need to be done, then I can heartily recommend getting yourself a copy.

The post Agile Selling by Jill Konrath – my takeaways appeared first on Mike Holden Sales.