Greg's Right FIT #372

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Selling
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Selling

• The wise man tells us the perfect salesperson has nothing to sell. They focus on the customer's desired outcome, then look for a way to help them get there. Though most of us have a thing to sell, we can use this perfect approach.
• A challenge to focusing on outcomes is when prospects come in with a solution in mind. "We want X." It's easier to assume they know what they're talking about than to recreate how they ended up on "X." Try to stay off the solution.
• A shortcut for checking your understanding of a prospect's outcomes is answering the question, "What do they want more/less of?" If they haven't described what they want more/less of, you may be focusing on the solution. 
• Once you recognize you're focusing on the solution without clear outcomes, getting off requires practice. Especially in large, complex sales. The prospect may only know, "It's my job to get this done. Now." 

Being Human - Coin operated

"Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet." – Rousseau

A salesperson's patience in understanding a prospect's opportunity determines the size of the sale. The enemy of a salesperson's patience is quota. The more desperate you are for a sale, the less time you spend developing the opportunity and understanding resources. 

In a way, it's this marriage of your sales team's opportunity and resources to the client's opportunity and resources driving the company's results. On both sides of the sale, if the juice isn't worth the squeeze, nothing big happens. 

A sales trainer I know says, "salespeople are coin operated," emphasizing the importance of incentives. In this sense, prospects are coin operated too. If they question the idea of your product getting them to their opportunity, negotiation happens. If your salesperson questions the opportunity's impact on their quota, negotiation happens. In either case, delivery problems are just around the corner. 

Next week, take a newly closed opportunity and ask a couple questions. If your salesperson were more patient, would the deal be bigger? If it weren't for quota, would future problems be averted? 

Random Stuff

“Life is a series of dogs.” – George Carlin

I'm going to complain my faithful companion today. Wilson has issues. This pup is the first of my dogs to fetch. He is an athlete extraordinaire. Without knowing a lick about physics or aerodynamics he will watch you throw a Frisbee and know exactly where it's going to land. If you are bouncing a ball to him, he takes in the first ricochet and positions himself perfectly. If you're kicking a ball he will intercept it right as it leaves your foot. It's uncanny. 

When it comes to smell, he's not quite as impressive as Louie the Beagle, but games of hide and seek are just as boring. I can walk about the house with the toy behind my back, depositing it in some odd location, trying to trick him my doubling back or covering it with pillows. He retraces my route and sniffs out the hidden object in less than a minute. 

So why is it when I give him table scraps, he approaches each morsel as if it's poisoned? Sniff, sniff. Contemplate. Accept. Mind you, he always eats it. For a decade now. If I throw some lunch meat at him, he sidesteps it and lets it hit the floor before considering whether to eat it. If I throw a ball he's never seen before he will leap up and grab it, but a piece of roast beef? Nope. 

It's kind of pissing me off just to type this out. Who does he think he is? Or, more importantly, who does he think I am? I have never tricked him in any way. His mother will try to pass off some plant based yogurt thing which he'll wisely reject, but everything from my hand is very natural, very yummy. 

He's here, on the little couch, having twitchy dreams about chasing squirrels or whatever. Or maybe he's thinking of how he'll disappoint me at lunch today, when I once again toss a generous piece of ham his way. Only to see his mouth stay shut as he sidesteps the gift, looking suspicious. I've done this like two-thousand times. What the hell. Who does that? 

Wilson. Mr. Wilson the Amazing Border Collie.