Sales Marketing
Whips and Chains Don’t Work Like They Used To
By Roxanne Emmerich, CSP, CMC

It used to be easy to manage sales people. All you had to do was chain them to their desks and whip them into making a targeted number of calls. It was a numbers game. The people who made the most calls tended to have the best sales. The more controlling and fear producing you could be to your sales people, the better the results you were likely to have.

Training sales people was easy. Simply teaching them how to say some rather catchy “closing statements” at the appropriate times and manipulating the customer to say yes was a sure win. Sales people didn’t have to think–they only had to be able to recite from rote memory.

And then came the enlightened consumer. They decided they wouldn’t come back to buy from a place that gave them a manipulated feeling. Even though they scored customer satisfaction as excellent, price became a determining factor.

It’s a new game. Providing leadership to sales people requires an extremely different approach from what had worked in the “good old days”. Here are some new approaches that motivate sales people.

• Change the focus from customer satisfaction to customer success
  Customers score customer satisfaction highly, like your speed and the way you recover from mistakes, and even find you friendly. But, as soon as your competitor has a better rate, they’re gone.
  Customer satisfaction is an illusionary target that most companies are shooting for. Customer satisfaction only gets you into the game. Xerox did a survey and found that only six percent of satisfied customers returned to do business again. However, sixty-six percent of extremely satisfied customers became repeat customers.
  
  That begs the question–What do you need to do to make sure you customer is extremely satisfied? The only way I know is to focus on making your customer successful. The target is far beyond where most organizations are shooting. If you sell software, it could mean including training in areas far beyond the scope of your product. If you sell a product to a grocery store, it means showing your store managers how to promote, market, and display for a maximum return on investment.
  
  With selling services, the demands and opportunities are exceptional. We can go above and beyond in many areas. When organizations ask me to speak, I always ask the person hiring me how they will judge if I did a good job for them. The answer is almost always that I will receive good evaluations. That’s what they want. What they need goes well beyond that. They need a change of behavior such as improved sales, management effectiveness, or a common direction for the team which is focused on results.
  
  If I were to stop at this initial response, I could easily deliver great evaluations after 8 years of speaking experience. Customers would be satisfied and approximately six percent would buy again. I set my goals higher. By asking extremely penetrating questions about what is really going on in the organization, I can find the deeper truth–what is getting in the way of them getting what they want. I then challenge this issue during the program, and challenge them long after the program, as a constant reminder to keep working at it. With a focus on results as opposed to good evaluations, I have found that the repeat and referral business has created enough demand that sales requires simply sending out the confirmations for dates and times.
  
  Focus beyond what the customer tells you that they want. Keep in mind, they often have no idea what they need. It’s your job to figure that out.
   
• Come to grips with reality
  Almost every bank CEO I’ve talked with has told me that they are creating a sales culture. When we surveyed banks by calling more than 100 of them to tell them we had $5,000 to invest in a certificate of deposit, there was not one attempt to ask for an appointment or one request for my business. I call this “CEO sales culture denial”.
  
  In each case, the person answering the phone offered me rates. People don’t want rates. They want a financial relationship where they feel they can trust someone to help them make good decisions.
  A bank called me to say that they hadn’t grown in two years and the new bank that just moved into town was paying substantially better rates. Money was leaving their bank like water over a dam. In one two-hour session, I simply insulted their people (in a nice way of course) that they weren’t helping people. I told them that even at an FDIC insured limit of $100,000, most rate differences account for a maximum $30 per year. I asked them if they really thought that mattered. I shared that when people are calling in, they aren’t really looking for rates, but for help. By showing them some questions they should ask people to find out how to help them and creating some systems to support follow through, they turned it around. Within two weeks, the bank had reversed the trend of money flowing out and had grown deposits over two and a half million dollars! They thought this was a miracle.
  
  Miracles are a state of consciousness. What holds us back is always our state of mind and our inability to see how we can help people and consequently help ourselves.
   
• Stop pushing and start pulling
  A CEO came to me after an association meeting and said, “We’ve been doing everything and it isn’t working. We’re incenting our people, we’re telling them they have to sell now and we’re teaching them how to sell. Our sales haven’t improved much. What are we doing wrong?” I simply asked him to name a time in his life when someone told him he HAD to do something and he felt great about it. The key is in “pulling” people to be turned on about helping others instead of pushing them.
  
  In a recent program, there was an individual who had “an attitude”. He had been an inside sales person for over 8 years with a progressive company with over 160 sales people. I noticed from his body language prior to the program that he was the drain–the leak in the bottom of the barrel that sucked the energy out of everyone. Half way through the program, I stopped everything, paused, and said, “I get a feeling that everyone is being nice, and that there is a deeper truth that no one is willing to risk saying.” I got them talking about what really wasn’t working, and challenged them to stop whining and blaming behind the scenes and start fixing problems. They had been spending countless hours on the phone to each other complaining about management, and weren’t doing anything to fix the problems.
  
  After fifteen minutes of truth telling and focusing on creating a vision for the way they want to do business, the man with the “attitude” rose up and with conviction and passion, proclaimed it was time to stop whining and to start taking the company forward. The place went crazy with excitement and they decided to take ownership of the problem and refocus outwardly to making their customers successful. It was an amazing transformation of spirit. They were pulled into wanting to make it happen as opposed to being pushed.
   
• Create a sense of play
  The Retail Marketing Institute survey found that seventy percent of people would go someplace else if it was “more fun”. Fun isn’t just a great way to be, it’s a huge bottom line issue. I have not yet found an exception to the rule that high performing sales organizations are playful and fun. Customers are treated professionally and with a human element of play.
   
• Create a profit center for each salesperson
  Let your people know that charity is a great thing, but it wasn’t the point of you hiring them. Tell them that they are their own business within a business. They need to manage their business as if they are an outside provider renewing a monthly contract. Or, maybe you want them to be an outside provider with a monthly renewal. 

Hire people who don’t have lots of “stories” and excuses. People who make things happen are accountable for their own behaviors and don’t live in the world of blame. When people are accountable for bottom line results, they change their focus from gossiping at the water fountain about how management is off track, to solving the problems and partnering with management to make things happen.
Replace the whips and chains with some human connection and commitment to human potential. By focusing on the extreme success of your customers and your salespeople, it comes your way as well. If you help enough people accomplish what they want, you will accomplish what you want.