Sales Rep Quotes

Bast’s ears pricked at this news. Oh yes, this is good, she gloated inwardly. Felicity could be a useful tool if she was close to the Vanguard’s commanding officer. A plan began to form in her mind, an opportunity for some amusement and a chance to take down her target. Too good to miss. She laughed. “Lucky you. I don’t suppose he has any spare seats for us poor sales reps out here scrabbling to earn a living.” Felicity smiled. “I’d ask, but I suspect the answer would be only if I stayed here to free up a seat—and I’m not that self-sacrificial.” She laughed. “See you on the Dock, Yelendi. Mr Cardington, maybe I’ll be able to catch up with you soon. It’s been nice chatting with you both.

There’s something else about this list that really jumps out. Take another look at the top five attributes listed there—the key characteristics defining a world-class sales experience: Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes. Each of these attributes speaks directly to an urgent need of the customer not to buy something, but to learn something. They’re looking to suppliers to help them identify new opportunities to cut costs, increase revenue, penetrate new markets, and mitigate risk in ways they themselves have not yet recognized. Essentially this is the customer—or 5,000 of them at least, all over the world—saying rather emphatically, “Stop wasting my time. Challenge me. Teach me something new.

whenever I complained about my work as a sales rep getting boring, “Whose fault is it that it’s boring? And whose responsibility is it to make it fun again?

Like casino employees talking about an especially profligate gambler, the sales reps referred to these doctors as “whales.

Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.

The moral of the story: promote only those you would hire. Put your SDRs through the same hiring and evaluation process you would for external candidates. No one benefits—not you, your company, sales leadership, or the SDRs themselves—when a promotion sets reps up to fail.

The marketing department had cheaped out. Sure, they looked okay on the outside, and they mostly did the job you’d expect. But each pen had between thirty-five and forty-two clicks in it before the spring mechanism exploded. One of their more nervous sales reps had nearly lost an eye in the middle of a big pitch.

Identify your unique benefits. Develop commercial insight that challenges customers’ thinking. Package commercial insight in compelling messages that “lead to.” Equip reps to challenge customers.

customers aren’t looking for reps to anticipate, or “discover,” needs they already know they have, but rather to teach them about opportunities to make or save money that they didn’t even know were possible.

One of our recent studies revealed that while all reps start their sales efforts by mapping out stakeholders within the customer organization, core performers then move to what would seem like the logical next step—understanding needs and mapping solutions against those needs. But high performers do something very different. They extend this part of the sales process by digging into these individual stakeholders’ varying goals and biases, as well as business and personal objectives.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company   1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.   2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.   3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.   4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.   5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.   6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.   7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.   8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.   9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.

the sales reps walks by her office, taps on the glass wall and calls out, ‘Yo, Soph!’ She calls back ‘Yo, Matt!’ and waves a fist in the air like a homeboy. She is such a fraud. She taps quickly on the delete key, thinking with pleasurable horror of the reaction if she had accidentally clicked on ‘send’. Their hurt, earnest faces! What can Thomas possibly want, after all this time? She finds herself remembering a sugary-brown smell. It is the smell of cinnamon toast, frangipani blossoms and Mr Sheen –the smell of his Aunt Connie’s house. Sophie had been going out with Thomas for nearly a year when she decided to break up with him. The decision was the result of weeks of agonised self-analysis. Yes, she loved him, but did she love him for the right reasons? She knew, for example, that it was right to love a man for his kind heart, but wrong to love him for his bank account. It was fine to love him for his gorgeous blue eyes, but shallow to love him for his tanned muscles. (Unless, of course, they were uniquely his muscles,

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.

There is no fault that can’t be corrected [in natural wine] with one powder or another; no feature that can’t be engineered from a bottle, box, or bag. Wine too tannic? Fine it with Ovo-Pure (powdered egg whites), isinglass (granulate from fish bladders), gelatin (often derived from cow bones and pigskins), or if it’s a white, strip out pesky proteins that cause haziness with Puri-Bent (bentonite clay, the ingredient in kitty litter). Not tannic enough? Replace $1,000 barrels with a bag of oak chips (small wood nuggets toasted for flavor), “tank planks” (long oak staves), oak dust (what it sounds like), or a few drops of liquid oak tannin (pick between “mocha” and “vanilla”). Or simulate the texture of barrel-aged wines with powdered tannin, then double what you charge. (““Typically, the $8 to $12 bottle can be brought up to $15 to $20 per bottle because it gives you more of a barrel quality. . . . You’re dressing it up,” a sales rep explained.) Wine too thin? Build fullness in the mouth with gum arabic (an ingredient also found in frosting and watercolor paint). Too frothy? Add a few drops of antifoaming agent (food-grade silicone oil). Cut acidity with potassium carbonate (a white salt) or calcium carbonate (chalk). Crank it up again with a bag of tartaric acid (aka cream of tartar). Increase alcohol by mixing the pressed grape must with sugary grape concentrate, or just add sugar. Decrease alcohol with ConeTech’s spinning cone, or Vinovation’s reverse-osmosis machine, or water. Fake an aged Bordeaux with Lesaffre’s yeast and yeast derivative. Boost “fresh butter” and “honey” aromas by ordering the CY3079 designer yeast from a catalog, or go for “cherry-cola” with the Rhône 2226. Or just ask the “Yeast Whisperer,” a man with thick sideburns at the Lallemand stand, for the best yeast to meet your “stylistic goals.” (For a Sauvignon Blanc with citrus aromas, use the Uvaferm SVG. For pear and melon, do Lalvin Ba11. For passion fruit, add Vitilevure Elixir.) Kill off microbes with Velcorin (just be careful, because it’s toxic). And preserve the whole thing with sulfur dioxide. When it’s all over, if you still don’t like the wine, just add a few drops of Mega Purple—thick grape-juice concentrate that’s been called a “magical potion.” It can plump up a wine, make it sweeter on the finish, add richer color, cover up greenness, mask the horsey stink of Brett, and make fruit flavors pop. No one will admit to using it, but it ends up in an estimated 25 million bottles of red each year. “Virtually everyone is using it,” the president of a Monterey County winery confided to Wines and Vines magazine. “In just about every wine up to $20 a bottle anyway, but maybe not as much over that.

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.

Sales tasks are determined by a firm’s strategy and choices, and selling behaviors are driven by the sales control systems and culture—not by a generic selling methodology or what a rep has learned at a previous firm.

When we isolate decision makers from the rest of the sample, and then compare the impact of the overall sales experience with that of the individual rep selling into the account, what we find is that for decision makers, aspects of the overall sales experience are nearly twice as important as individual rep attributes.

The OS model has a natural overlap with much of the founding philosophy of 3D printing and is exemplified by pioneers RepRap. They have fully adopted the OS model and make their software available under a GNU license and include the .stl files for their devices with the sale of any printer. This allows the purchaser to reprint their device and pass it onto a friend.

What analyses could prove or disprove that belief? You could break out the sales by customer type for each region. If penetration of superstores in the Northeast is higher than in any other region and higher than for the other types of retail outlets, find out why. When you talk to the Northeast sales reps, you might find that they have a better feel for superstores than any other sales team. What if they were put in charge of all superstores across the country and achieved the same penetration? What would that mean for widget sales? The end product of this exercise is what McKinsey calls the issue tree. In other words, you start with your initial hypothesis and branch out at each issue. The result looks like the figure below. When you’ve completed your issue tree, you have your problem-solving map. That’s the easy part. The difficult part will come when you have to dig deep to prove your hypothesis.

As well, our recent research shows that the organization plays an important role in equipping reps to identify and properly engage with the right stakeholders on the customer side—an important part of taking control of the sale.

Loyalty isn’t won in product development centers, in advertisements, or on toll-free help lines: Loyalty is won out in the field, in the trenches, during the sales call. It’s the result of the conversations our reps are having with customers every single day. The entire remainder of customer loyalty—all 53 percent—is attributable to your ability to outperform the competition in the sales experience itself. Over half of customer loyalty is a result not of what you sell, but how you sell. As important as it is to have great products, brand, and service, it’s all for naught if your reps can’t execute out in the field.

Are we expanding our sales force appropriately to match needed sales growth and market penetration?   2. Are our reps properly trained, and what is the lag time between training and an effective rep?   3. Is our compensation package and awards program sufficient to attract and retain high performers?   4. Is our field sales forecasting system functioning properly to anticipate negative trends?   5. Can we continue to leverage the sales expense line without damaging sales?   6. Is our expense budget tracking system effective?   7. Are we accurately monitoring sales force morale?   8. Is our pay schedule competitive?

1. You might want to perform an audit of the paperwork your sales team is required to fill out to determine whether it is actually needed to produce sales. If it does not directly contribute to sales, get rid of it. If the paperwork is providing the company with necessary information, analyze how you can go about obtaining that information without burdening the sales team. By removing that burden from the sales team, could you see a pickup in selling time that will translate to an increase in sales?   2. Have you had to reduce territories, products, or rep income? What was the effect on your team?   3. Do you allow your team members the right to fail? What constitutes too much failure for an individual, and where do you draw the line? How do you communicate your policy to maintain a consistent message that is seen as fair and reasonable by your sales team?

1. How would you rank the velocity of your sales team on a scale of one to ten, one being very slow and ten being very fast? What steps can you take to increase its velocity?   2. If your success requires new customer acquisition, what strategies can you put in place to increase sales efficiency?   3. Do you routinely develop strategies to block your competitors so that you do not have to rely solely on the effort of the sales team?   4. What could you do to increase the efficiency of your sales team? Will that translate into more sales dollars with the same number of reps?

The desire of the potential customer to buy the product or service should supersede the sales rep’s desire to sell it. Willingly walking away from a possible sale proves that the time line to take advantage of the discount is legitimate.

It will involve figuring out where in the country a product will work better, in terms of both efficacy and revenue. It will involve more than sending out an army of sales reps who often can’t get in the door anymore. It will take advantage of new digital promotion tools and targeting. It will harness big data for a far better understanding of competitive advantages, ideal patient populations, and how medicines can be personalized to the individual.

Common mistake sales reps make on the call they launch their pitch prematurely.

when a customer calls looking for a specific style of shoes in a specific size that we’re out of stock on. In those instances, every rep is trained to research at least three competitors’ Web sites, and if the shoe is found in stock to direct the customer to the competitor. Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time.

The single greatest contributor (53 percent) to customer loyalty was sales experience. This led to their reps being able to offer them unique perspectives, educate them, and help them to reduce risk and make tough choices. Notice that it’s nothing about the product, service, or price.

that does not make sense, see Warren Buffet’s explanation in the biography, “SNOWBALL”, by Alice Schroeder. In the book Buffet uses a medical analogy to describe the different roles between “advice provider” and “product seller”. He uses the analogy of the medical industry “advice prescriber” (a doctor), or the “pill salesman” (drug sales rep). Buffet worked in both investment salesperson and investment adviser roles during his career and he knows this difference better than anyone on the planet. The advisor or adviser vowel-movement trick, gives nearly one million financial “pill sellers” in North America a clever, yet deceptive way of influencing how the public invests. It allows 90-day-qualified sales reps, to pretend to be financial “doctors”. All it takes is a few thousand well paid regulators. (“say…did he say he was an “adviser, or an advisor?”) The public never asks their doctor whether their medical license is spelled “Doctor” or “Docter”, and the financial industry has learned to use that “vowel movement” trick to their billion dollar profit advantage.

Content is valuable: 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders. (B2C would be less due to a shorter buying cycle.) Buyers engage with content: 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. *DemandGenReport.com, 2016 Benchmark Report

Recently when working with a group of mobile device sales reps, I asked the question: “How many of you notice people using mobile phones in public?” All the hands went up. “How many of you notice people using outdated phones or phones with cracked and damaged screens?” All the hands went up. “How many of you think that most of these people would like an upgrade to the newest equipment or a phone screen that doesn't look like a kaleidoscope and cut their fingertips?” Most hands went up. “How many of you hand those people your business card and let them know that you can get them a new phone for little or no cost?” Not a single hand went up.​

Commercial Teaching equips reps to teach customers what they really need by challenging the way they think about their business altogether, providing them with new means to address their toughest problems in ways they would have never identified on their own.

Commercial Teaching choreography: Identify your unique benefits. Develop commercial insight that challenges customers’ thinking. Package commercial insight in compelling messages that “lead to.” Equip reps to challenge customers.

If an opportunity isn't effectively qualified, the sales rep will operate under the mistaken impression that the deal is theirs to win.

Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes.

In this sense, customer loyalty is much less about what you sell and much more about how you sell. The best companies don’t win through the quality of the products they sell, but through the quality of the insight they deliver as part of the sale itself. The battle for customer loyalty is won or lost long before a thing ever gets sold. And the best reps win that battle not by “discovering” what customers already know they need, but by teaching them a new way of thinking altogether.

The word we like to use here is “reframe.” What data, information, or insight can you put in front of your customer that reframes the way they think about their business—how they operate or even how they compete? That’s what your customers are really looking for. Remember what we saw in our customer survey? Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes.

Compare net-promoter scores from specific regions, branches, service or sales reps, and customer segments. This often reveals root causes of differences as well as best practices that can be shared. What really counts, of course, is how your company compares with direct competitors. Have your market researchers survey your competitors’ customers using the same method. You can then determine how your company stacks up within your industry and whether your current net-promoter number is a competitive asset or a liability. Improve

#8 Think about what running the business will mean on a day-to-day basis before you start. Every company has different challenges and different needs. A content site means writers, a distribution network, and ad reps. A shopping site means warehousing, customer service, and returns. A drop-ship site means managing remote vendors, outdated stocking information, and customer confusion. A directory site means lots of sales reps, a sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) system, recurring billing, and customer service people dedicated to helping vendors build their profiles. Manufacturing is its own can of worms. When you think about your company, think about the type of challenges you might face and ask if they are things you personally want to deal with. If yes, make sure you have a clear plan to overcome them and speak to other people in similar situations about their challenges and their solutions. #9

For A Sales Team I encourage clients to generally set up their dashboards in a three column format, including: Left: Current month activity (amount of stuff going on). Center: current month results/deals. Right: Long-term results (year-to-date). Example screenshot, blurred for privacy: Example Sales Development Rep Dashboard Every sales rep should set up their own personal dashboard, so they can see the state of their own business at a glance (and it makes it easier for their manager to coach/help them). Below, I have laid out a three-column dashboard

I encourage you to try the “so what” test. Listen to another salesperson on the phone attempting to earn an appointment with a tough prospect. Or accompany a rep on sales call. Every time the salesperson makes a statement, simply ask yourself, “So what?” It’s very convincing when we begin to realize how much of what we regularly say is self-focused drivel that has no real meaning to the customer.

We would have won, but the other guys gave the deal away.” “The customer selected us technically and thinks we are the better company, but our competitor just gave the product away. We would never sell so cheaply as it would hurt our reputation.” Anybody who has ever run an enterprise sales force has heard this lie before. You go into an account, you fight hard, and you lose. The sales rep, not wanting to shine the light on himself, blames the “used car dealer” rep from the other company. The CEO, not wanting to believe that she’s losing product competitiveness, believes the rep. If you hear this lie, try to validate the claim with the actual customer. I’ll bet you can’t.

But even in this early stage of the sale, Challengers know better. They sniff out these “foils” immediately and press the contact for expanded access in exchange for continued dialogue. When these contacts don’t grant the access Challenger reps know will be critical to completing the sale, their response is to cut the sales effort short and move on to the next opportunity.

One interview technique that I’d used to sort the good from the bad was to ask a series of questions about hiring, training, and managing sales reps. Typically, it would go like this: Ben: “What do you look for in a sales rep?” Candidate: “They need to be smart, aggressive, and competitive. They need to know how to do complex deals and navigate organizations.” Ben: “How do you test for those things in an interview?” Candidate: “Umm, well, I hire everybody out of my network.” Ben: “Okay, once you get them on board, what do you expect from them?” Candidate: “I expect them to understand and follow the sales process, I expect them to master the product, I expect them to be accurate in their forecasting. . . .” Ben: “Tell me about the training program that you designed to achieve this.” Candidate: “Umm.” They would then proceed to make something up as they went along.

The salespeople who scored in the top 10 percent for optimism performed a whopping 88 percent better in sales than the reps in the top 10 percent for pessimism. Dr. Seligman found that the power of optimism held in other professions, too. He concluded that in general, optimistic salespeople performed an impressive 20 to 40 percent better than pessimistic salespeople.

Is it really that surprising when sales reps you don't train, coach or support properly aren't successful?

Facebook built its foundation on a second lie, repeated thousands of times in early meetings between Facebook’s army of sales reps and the world’s largest consumer brands: “Build big communities and you will own them.” Hundreds of brands invested hundreds of millions on Facebook to aggregate enormous branded communities hosted by Facebook. And by urging consumers to “like” their brands, they gave Facebook an inordinate amount of free advertising. After brands built this expensive house, and were ready to move in, Facebook barked, “Just kidding, those fans aren’t really yours; you need to rent them.” The organic reach of a brand’s content—percentage of posts from a brand received in a fan’s feed—fell from 100 percent to single digits. Now, if a brand wants to reach its community, it must advertise on—that is, pay—Facebook. This is similar to building a house and having the county inspector show up as you’re putting on the finishing touches. As she changes the locks she informs you, “You have to rent this from us.

How did you wind up in Wayward Pines?” “I was a rep for IBM. Came here on a sales call trying to outfit the local school’s computer lab with our Tandy 1000s.

Entry-level reps and people who are bad at sales will love product training and then rely on it because regurgitating features and benefits is easier than selling.

Marketing for “Lead Generation” and “Lead Development” Market development rep (MDR) doing research and responding to inbound leads Sales development rep (SDR) generating leads via outbound prospecting techniques Account executive (AE) getting initial customer commitment Onboarder (ONB) to guide the customer to first value sits with a sales engineer Customer success manager (CSM) orchestrating the customer’s ongoing experience Account manager (AM) helping the customer grow the business When executed well, job specialization can increase sales velocity and improve effectiveness. Organizations need to ensure that specialization is paired with a well-defined, cross-functional process and job training for each role. Without a well-defined process, customers and win rates will suffer from poor handoffs between functions. We have seen it again and again: Without a well-defined onboarding and coaching program, the reps will fail.

One key concept that even some adults need to learn is that there's a big difference between being able to afford something and being able to afford the payments on something. Americans today tend to think about spending in terms of monthly payments instead of the actual cost of what they're buying. Ex.: Listen to the sales rep try to focus you on the monthly payment instead of the total cost of the car.

Personally, I believe that a customer relationship is the result and not the cause of successful selling. It is a reward that the salesperson earns by creating customer value. If you help customers think differently and bring them new ideas—which is what the Challenger rep does—then you earn the right to a relationship.

Can you give us some examples of the intangible benefits being conveyed by a salesperson? Absolutely. Here’s a partial list of some of the things you might bring to the table in a sale: • Integrity • Honesty • Thought leadership • Competence • Confidence • Capability • Responsiveness • Accountability • Follow-through • Comfort level • Humility • Attitude • Vision • Being forthright • Humor • Knowledge • Experience • Expertise • Understanding • Empathy • Caring …just to name a few. Of course, I can keep going. A successful rep is also hardworking, diligent, well prepared, credible, purposeful, professional, relevant, and customer focused, rather than self-serving. Are these intangible benefits important in the strategic sales process? You bet they are! In fact, your ability to convey many of these qualities in a short period of time is likely to be the difference between gaining the customer’s trust or losing the sale. The challenge for sellers is knowing how to convey this much intangible value without trying to personally claim it.

Coachability and Adaptability Multiple times, I've seen reps who are either too insecure to admit that they cannot perform a new function or too fearful of change. They won’t let anyone coach them. If you're not coachable, you won't learn. If you won’t learn, you won’t adapt. Adaptability is a critical trait in any rapidly growing company. As your product, market, competition, and company changes, you'll need people who are flexible enough to adapt to the changing environment. They'll need to perform new tasks, learn new products, and develop new skills.

Put new reps through some kind of training program that has them working in other parts of your company first, talking to customers, before they go on active sale duty. This will make them much more effective salespeople and actually ramp them faster. Slow down to speed up!

To cut through the noise, the company in question worked to arm its reps to teach physicians new insights—not about their products, but about how to improve their own effectiveness as medical practitioners. Relying on the company’s wealth of knowledge on disease management, their marketing team built a series of “patient journeys” that reps could share with doctors. These journeys looked at the entire cycle of an illness, from the time symptoms appear to treatment and, finally, follow-up.

when we ranked the list according to impact, we found seven in particular that rose way above the others in terms of importance: Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes. Supplier is easy to buy from. Supplier has widespread support across my organization. Now,

if you’re going to build Challenger reps to teach customers something new about their business, you’ve likely got some work to do in your own business first. Unless you can ultimately connect the insights you teach your customers back to capabilities only you can offer, you’re much more likely providing free consulting than Commercial Teaching. That’s a dangerous place to be unless you happen to also be the lowest-cost provider in that market (which is improbable since lowest-cost providers, by definition, can’t afford the added cost of teaching customers).

Purdue doubled its sales force during those years, from 318 to 767 pharmaceutical reps. In the trade, the reps are called detailers, and they’re typically good-looking, gregarious, and well-dressed. They remember the names of the clinic receptionists and secretaries and nurses. Purdue expected each drug rep to develop a list of 105 to 140 physicians within a specific sales region and call each one every three or four weeks.

Purdue paid its reps better than most drug-makers paid theirs—by 2001, an average salary of $55,000 and an average bonus of $71,500. Purdue spent a half-billion dollars on the one-on-one sales strategy between 1996 and 2001.

Hi, Candace, this is Jeb Blount from Sales Gravy. The reason I am calling is to schedule an appointment with you to show you our new sales onboarding automation software. Many of my clients are frustrated because it takes too long to get new salespeople ramped up to full productivity and find that it's holding their business growth back. Our software typically cuts onboarding time and costs for new sales reps by 50 percent, and makes it super easy to manage new rep onboarding, giving you the peace of mind that your new hires will start selling fast. I have 2:00 PM on Thursday open. How about we get together for a short meeting so I can learn more about you and see whether it makes sense to schedule a demo?

The Challenger rep wins by maintaining a certain amount of constructive tension across the sale. The Relationship Builder, on the other hand, strives to resolve or defuse tension, not create it. It’s

The book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, was written in 1986 by a minister, Robert Fulghum, and it’s full of simple-sounding life advice, like “share everything,” “play fair,” and “clean up after your own mess.” Chen believes that these skills—the elementary, pre-literate skills of treating other people well, acting ethically, and behaving in prosocial ways, all of which I consider “analog ethics”—are badly needed for an age in which our value will come from our ability to relate to other people. He writes: While I know that we’ll need to layer on top of that foundation a set of practical and technical know-how, I agree with [Fulghum] that a foundation rich in EQ [emotional quotient] and compassion and imagination and creativity is the perfect springboard to prepare people—the doctors with the best bedside manner, the sales reps solving my actual problems, crisis counselors who really understand when we’re in crisis—for a machine-learning powered future in which humans and algorithms are better together. Research has indicated that teaching analog ethics can be effective. One 2015 study that tracked children from kindergarten through young adulthood found that people who had developed strong prosocial, noncognitive skills—traits like positivity, empathy, and regulating one’s own emotions—were more likely to be successful as adults. Another study in 2017 found that kids who participated in “social-emotional” learning programs were more likely to graduate from college, were arrested

six of them showed up as statistically significant in defining someone as a Challenger rep: Offers the customer unique perspectives Has strong two-way communication skills Knows the individual customer’s value drivers Can identify economic drivers of the customer’s business Is comfortable discussing money Can pressure the customer

One CEB member described the problem solver as “a customer service rep in sales rep clothing.” As she put it, “They come into the office in the morning with grand plans to generate new sales, but as soon as an existing customer calls with a problem, they dive right in rather than passing it to the people we actually pay to solve those problems. They find ways to make that customer happy, but at the expense of finding ways to generate more business.

If you help customers think differently and bring them new ideas—which is what the Challenger rep does—then you earn the right to a relationship.

So let’s go down another level of niching and call our product…. “Time Management for B2B Outbound Sales Reps.” Following the same principles of specificity, now we know our sales people probably have very experienced deals and commissions. A single sale would easily net this salesman $500 (or more), so it would be easy to justify a $499 price tag. This is already a 25x increase in price for almost an identical product. I could stop here, but I’m going to go one step further. Let’s just niche down one last level…. “Time Management for B2B Outbound Power Tools & Gardening Sales Reps.” Boom. Think about it for a second, if you were a power tools outbound sales rep, you would think to yourself “This is made exactly for me” and would happily fork over maybe $1000 to $2000 for a time management program that could help you achieve your goal. The actual pieces of the program may be the same as the generic $19 course, but since they have been applied, and the sales messaging could speak so much to this avatar, they will find it more compelling and get more value from it in a real way.

Challenger sales reps make up about 40 percent of the high performers in leading sales teams. Only 7 percent of relationship builders are star performers.

Stop confusing activities with accomplishment. Stop pushing reps to rush through the sales process. Master the customer conversation with specific personas and use cases. Understand how to sell business value, using a repeatable process. Learn to qualify deal advancement issues in account situations. Coach reps on how to control an opportunity. Understand how to forecast accurately.

Tope Awotona, founder of Calendly, started three very different companies for three completely different communities before eventually building the scheduling software business in 2013. In 2020, Calendly posted nearly $70 million in annual recurring revenue, more than double its 2019 figure. But Awotona’s first company was a dating app that never really got off the ground. The second was projectorspot.com, which sold (obviously) projectors, but sales were poor and margins small. He tried again with a third startup, selling grills, but as he says, “I didn’t know anything about grills and I didn’t want to! I lived in an apartment, and never even grilled.” Not only was he not part of the grilling community, but he didn’t even want to be! He took a different approach to building Calendly. He had been a sales rep earlier in his career, and he knew the hassle of sending multiple emails to schedule meetings. He had even run into the scheduling problem while trying to sell his own products as an entrepreneur. As time went on and his other ideas failed to gain traction, he saw a gap in the marketplace and resolved to address it for the community of sales reps he cared about and understood. He says that “the journey to creating something that’s impactful, something that serves people, something that you know people are willing to open up their wallets and pay for—is not something that you can do just for money.” While lots of people have scheduling fatigue, Awotona focused on problems specific to sales reps, which helped him define a problem he could both solve and monetize. What does that mean for you? First, get involved in those communities wherever they are, offline and online. Then, contribute, teach, and, most important, listen. Finally, use the filters above to make sure you are picking the right community to serve. Then, your problem becomes: Which problem should I pick?

Purdue also explicitly instructed sales reps to target family physicians who were likely to be naive about opioids, “opioid naive”—doctors who had little experience prescribing this kind of medication. To

I’d never watched The Bachelor myself and was basing everything on preconceptions. But somehow the idea of all these intelligent young women competing pageant-style for the love of some blandly handsome pharmaceutical sales rep who kept talking about his “journey.

You’ll want to meet with the Champion for each of the forecasted deals to ensure your rep has a Champion and is in control.” Maniacally qualifying deals early in the quarter by visiting the Champions of your reps’ forecasted deals in the first month of a quarter is one of the surest methods of gaining a deep understanding of your forecast.

It helped us know exactly who we were speaking to at all times. And exactly whose problems we were solving. But simplicity and ease may not be enough to sway you, so let me illustrate why honing in on one niche will make you more money. Reason: you can literally charge 100x more for the exact same product. Dan Kennedy was the first person to illustrate this for me, and I will do my best to pass on the torch to you in these pages. Niching Product Pricing Example: Example Dan Kennedy taught me this (and it changed my life forever). Let’s say you sold a generic course on Time Management. Unless you were some massive time management guru with a compelling or unique story, it would be unlikely it would turn into anything significant. What do you think “yet another” time management course is valued at? $19, $29? Sure. Nothing to write home about. Let’s just say $19 for illustration sake. **Now we shall unleash the power of niche pricing in various stages on your product** So let’s imagine you make the product more specific, keeping the same principles, and call it “Time Management For Sales Professionals.” All of a sudden, this course is for a more specific type of person. We could tie their increase to even one more sale or one more deal and it would be worth more. But there are a lot of sales people. So this might be a $99 product. Neat, but we can do better. So let’s go down another level of niching and call our product…. “Time Management for B2B Outbound Sales Reps.” Following the same principles of specificity, now we know our sales people probably have very experienced deals and commissions. A single sale would easily net this salesman $500 (or more), so it would be easy to justify a $499 price tag. This is already a 25x increase in price for almost an identical product. I could stop here, but I’m going to go one step further. Let’s just niche down one last level…. “Time Management for B2B Outbound Power Tools & Gardening Sales Reps.” Boom. Think about it for a second, if you were a power tools outbound sales rep, you would think to yourself “This is made exactly for me” and would happily fork over maybe $1000 to $2000 for a time management program that could help you achieve your goal.

I’ve seen many sales reps who thought they were being productive by sending out mail. In fact, they were just busy.

In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.

Grainger then took those insights and built them into a conversation titled “The Power of Planning the Unplanned,” a world-class example of a Commercial Teaching conversation. This is the kind of content organizations need to provide the frontline sales force in order to make Commercial Teaching work beyond the star-performing Challenger reps.

What Social Awareness Looks Like Alfonso J., pharmaceutical sales manager Social awareness score = 96 What people who work with him say: “Alfonso has a rare talent to be able to read the emotions of others very well. He adjusts to different situations and manages to build relationships with almost anyone. Good examples are dinners, meetings, and ride-alongs with reps.

3. Phone Interview The third step is a more traditional interview, but briefer and still phone based. It should take no longer than twenty minutes and, hopefully, end by scheduling an in-person interview. When it comes to hiring SDRs, phone interviews are as (if not more) important than in-person. Your reps will be making their living on the phones. They need to be articulate and able to make a connection without being face to face. These are the first two questions you should ask: 1. What do you know about our company? 2. What do you know about me personally? If the candidate doesn’t do an outstanding job in responding, you should proceed no further. Great candidates will come prepared. They’ll have used every means at their disposal to learn about your company, about your market, and about you the hiring manager. Not being prepared is a big red flag. In my experience, candidates who don’t prepare for this conversation won’t prepare for future conversations with prospects. And you need better than that.

On one such call, a salesperson described an account that he’d forecast in detail: “I have buy-in from my champion, the vice president that he reports to, and the head of purchasing. My champion assures me that they’ll be able to complete the deal by the end of the fiscal quarter.” Mark quickly replied, “Have you spoken to the vice president’s peer in the networking group?” Sales rep: “Um, no I haven’t.” Mark: “Have you spoken to the vice president yourself?” Sales rep: “No.” Mark: “Okay, listen carefully. Here’s what I’d like you to do. First, reach up to your face and take off your rose-colored glasses. Then get a Q-tip and clean the wax out of your ears. Finally, take off your pink panties and call the fucking vice president right now, because you do not have a deal.

Conversely, if you skimp on resources for lead generation, your sales reps will end up having only a couple of meetings a week.

Numerous studies show that no-load funds perform just as well (and as badly) as load funds. This stands to reason, because the load goes not toward superior management of the fund but to the sales reps who sell it. And they have no influence over its performance. Yet a big chunk of the investing public still buys load funds. As long as there are people out selling, there will be people in buying. Don’t be one of them.

The Warmer starts with the customer’s challenges. So the opening is, “We know you face a host of challenges every day, such as production line issues, workers’ comp costs, maintenance and safety issues. Especially those challenges that are critical to keeping your business open and running every single day.” After reviewing a couple issues and providing some general color from other companies, the rep then asks the customer to select for discussion one or two that are particularly pressing in their organization. The idea is to get the customer pulled into the conversation right away and talking about their challenges relative to what Grainger has already seen at other companies. Grainger has found that this one page can lead to an incredibly robust and valuable conversation—all because the rep led with a hypothesis of customer need rather than an open-ended question to “discover” customer need.

Susie, most people like the fact that they get a one-on-one coach; others like the fact they get to follow an online step-by-step course. What do you like best about the program?” Do you see what I did there? I laid out two positive answers for the prospect to choose from. This kind of questions allows me to get a positive response back about what they liked about the program. Ninety-five percent of the time your prospect will say one of the two things you list to start. We need to keep energy high here and make sure people are thinking positively about the offer. Next, once you have asked the choice of two positives, the next part of the process is to then ask a “tiedown.” A tiedown is to solidify the response of what they liked best about the offer. For example, if they responded, “Chad, I loved the coaching.” Instead of moving on and saying something like “Great, it’s super helpful” or some BS like that, let’s actually take the time to ask why they like the coaching so much or ask why the coaching program stands out to them. This allows them to tell you exactly why they like your product, but instead of hearing from you as the rep about why it’s so great, it’s important for them to tell themselves. We talked about this earlier in the book, but people believe 50 percent of what a salesperson says and 100 percent of what they say, so make sure to get them talking about the product in a positive way. So once we complete the tie-down, the next step is to then validate that they would be a great fit for the offer you are selling. Everyone needs validation to make a leap of faith to go after their goals, so tell them, “Gosh, Susie! I think you would be a great fit for our program no doubt.

when presented with options or a product with three sets, it feels complete and whole in our minds.5 Anything outside of that becomes overwhelming. Rule number one of explaining a product or offer is knowing that a confused buyer never buys. So if you overexplain and give way too many details, your prospect most likely is going to say, “I need to think about it.” The famous objection sales reps hear about 95 percent of the time.