For young companies looking to grow their business, the most important thing they should know is that there is a process for winning sales and building sales teams, and it starts with mindset.
Putting mindset before process is what we call the Achievement Model. The Achievement Model establishes that, with the right mindset, almost any set of processes aimed at developing new business will work.
Create Long-term Relationships by Enrolling Clients
So how do you develop the right mindset that will help you win sales? Think in terms of enrolling clients, as opposed to closing deals. When you have the enrolling mindset, you are acting as their partner instead of their vendor. You are providing value because you understand their larger outcomes (their ultimate or ends needs), rather than just their immediate problem (the means to the end). By contrast, if you close the deal, you close the door on future opportunities.
The enrolling mindset allows you to differentiate your company in a very meaningful and personal way. Once you’ve discovered the prospect’s ends needs, you will be able to demonstrate that you have a solution that matches – or that you don’t. People will always respect you for seeing the issue from their side of the table, even if it means you won’t get the sale this time. If the opportunity isn’t there this time, you will have built trust for next time. And when you do have a solution that helps them toward their ends needs, your enrolling mindset will turn the potential one-off prospect into a long-term client.
Build Winning Teams by Enrolling Salespeople
The Achievement Model works for building sales teams, as well. That’s because hiring salespeople works exactly the same way as selling prospects. Only, when you are trying to attract talent, they are selling you as much as you are selling them. Why is it important that you sell them on you? Given the high cost of turnover, you want to hire people who have bought in to your company’s vision, who are not simply temporary. Likewise, you want to understand what they really need, so that you determine whether you can give them the opportunities to be successful over the long term.
The Process of Peeling the Onion
Let’s say you have the enrolling mindset. How do you go about discovering the ends need?
We refer to the process of discovering the ends need as “peeling the onion.” Peeling the onion is the ability to ask probing business questions that peel back the layers of what others first say they need, down to what they actually need, and why.
For example, let’s say you work for a computer hardware company. Your prospect tells you that he needs a new server because his old one is off-lease and at the end of its shelf life. While you might be tempted to pull out a quote for a new server, instead you take the time to ask a series of questions about the business and the ultimate goals of the business owner. You discover that several aspects of his core business functions run on an ASP model (he manages customer data, inventory and bookkeeping online), and he has been thinking about taking his company virtual, so that he can be home when his kids come home from school. Having peeled the onion, you can make a recommendation that he should not buy a new server from you. Instead, he should consider a hosted solution for all of his applications, eliminating the need for a server. If your company offers the hosted solution, so much the better for you. But if not, he will certainly welcome your call next time you have hardware recommendations.
Peeling the onion works in team-building as well. In our company, a major factor in hiring salespeople is how well candidates try to discover our ends needs. More than anything else, we want to see their ability to question. Do they go into rote presentation mode, or do they use the Socratic method to discover the deeper forces driving us, of which possibly we were not even aware? Do they accept what we say we want, or do they keep probing?
Life is Sales
In life, we trust those who can demonstrate that they understand what we need, and why. If they can make a good case for why they can help us reach it, we know we have a fit. Your prospects and your potential sales hires are no different. Develop an enrolling mindset, and back it with a process for discovering ends needs, and you will position your company for long-term, sustainable growth.
Be Your BEST,
Joe