Want to make more sales? Start by having better conversations. Think about it. You spent months chasing a senior decision maker or prospect, making calls, and sending e-mails, and they finally agreed to sit down with you. You invested significant amounts of time, effort, energy and—sometimes considerable—resources to win them over. And now you find yourself in a room with a senior executive. Now what? In this video, I explain my five-step process for ensuring you have great sales meetings that are virtually guaranteed to lead to a next meeting.      

After many months of significant effort, we launched What Sales Winners Do Differently this week. This report reveals data and insight from our in-depth sales research on what sellers do to win sales opportunities. The results are both surprising and fascinating. Where selling was just a few years ago, where it is today, and where it’s going: these are pretty hot, and hotly debated, topics. Quite a few people, most notably the authors of The Challenger Sale, have declared the death of solution selling. You know an idea has gained mainstream credence when the Harvard Business Review publishes an article that takes a firm position on it. In this case, the article in the July-August 2012 issue was titled "The End of Solution Sales." No hedging in that title. Story over. The end. We agree that sales is changing, but the question is how. When we started this research, our goal was to find out what’s currently working in sales. Is solution selling really dead? If so, what should replace it? If not, since we know selling is changing, what do sellers need to do differently in order to find themselves in the winner’s circle more often?      

Having spent two decades in the sales training and consulting world, I get asked all the time what I think about this or that sales approach or book. When I do, it tends to make for productive discussion and learning. Importantly, it helps people decide what’s right for them when it comes to selling. Until now, I’ve never been asked about the same approach and book on a regular basis. That approach and book is The Challenger Sale by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon. And now that we’ve published RAIN Group’s major research study, What Sales Winners Do Differently, we’re getting asked even more often. Since we get asked often—and since it’s getting a bit old copying and pasting the same emails to clients and colleagues—we thought we’d open up the discussion to everyone...      

Eighty percent of success is showing up. - Woody Allen Woody Allen’s advice is pretty sound for salespeople as well, assuming you show up prepared. We acknowledge that sometimes you do just show up (or—hallelujah—a prospect calls you out of the blue) and you haven't done any preparation for the sales call. It's reasonable to suggest that, on occasion, sales calls are appropriately deemed 'exploratory discussions'; the kind of discussion in which we just talk and 'see where it goes.' Take this approach in most business development situations, however, and you'll lose more than your share of sales that you should have won. Interestingly, whether you have a two-thousand- or two-million-dollar price point, to increase your odds of winning new clients, you still need to do the same basic planning and know the same essential information before your sales calls. Here are six sales call planning questions you can answer for yourself before every sales call that will help prepare you for business development success...      

Don't show your clients a windy, roundabout path to their goals. Make it easy. Like a Poor Marksman You Keep…Missing…The Target! - Admiral James T. Kirk If you don't know your destination, any road will get you there. When prospects ask for a formal proposal, they are telling you their desired destination: a business relationship with you. And they're asking you to answer the question, "What road do we take to get there?" Since it's your job to give directions, you want to tell them the straightest, shortest, and easiest route. After all, you don't want them to get lost along the way, or so tired on the path that they give up before they get to the end. Why is it, then, that so many new business proposals that cross my desk take the long and winding road? They start off in the wrong direction, take side-roads that lead nowhere, and take forever to get where they're going. It's no wonder the success rate of these proposals is so low.      

"Your fees are too high; can you do it for less?" In the highly competitive marketplace we hear dreaded phrases like this all of the time. The easy thing to do is to offer a discount, but that cuts into your profit margins and sets a precedent for the future. You don’t want to become a victim of discounting gone wrong. So what do you do when clients push back on your fees? The glib answer is: focus on your value. It's trite, but true. If it's worth it to the client they'll pay for it. But when faced with price pushback, many are at a loss for what to do at that moment.      

Like King Midas, as I was told, everything he touched turned to gold. - Joseph Simmons and Daryl McDaniels "If I could just get a meeting with my target prospects I am certain I could close five (or six or eight) out of every ten." How many of you think the same thing? You know that when you get in front of the prospect you can wow them. Every time a lead comes into the firm and you go on the sales meeting, it's a slam dunk. Made-in-the-shade. Can of corn. You know you'll get the gig. Let's assume you set a meeting with someone you believe will be a good prospect. It's not from a referral - they neither know you nor have they heard of you beforehand. Thus there is no transferred trust as when you are referred in. It's also not from a client who's sought you out, thus there's no hot need. You targeted them, and you asked them for a meeting. You secure the meeting and drive off to the prospect as confident as ever only to sit down across the table from a buyer with crossed arms asking, "Who are you again, and what are you trying to sell me?" You leave with a sinking feeling; you've wasted your time.      

If you really do put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price. - Anonymous How many of us, as professional service providers, have heard from prospects, "Your fees are too high," "Someone else will do it for less," or "I don't see why I have to pay all that money just to have you do an audit, write a brief, create a marketing plan, etc.?" And, more important, how many resist the urge to simply lower our fees to get the work? The answer: all of us and few of us. The problem with lowering our fees for a particular piece of work is that we forever have established our value as that lower amount. As our anonymous friend said, if we ourselves put a low value on our work, certainly no one else is going to suggest our value is any higher. Why do so many of us fall victim to these worst tendencies? To answer this, we first have to look at objections in general and how they fit into the selling process for professional services...      

Date: Thursday, May 30, 2013 Time: 2 p.m. ET Duration: 45 minutes Presenters: Mike Schultz, President, RAIN Group Author, Rainmaking Conversations Jill Konrath, Sales Strategist Author, SNAP Selling & Selling to Big Companies You’ve likely been taught that in order to win the sale, you need to listen to your prospects’ needs and present compelling, effective solutions. But there’s a problem—everyone else has been taught the same thing. In today’s competitive sales landscape, you must take an additional step if you want to stand out from the crowd: you must collaborate. If you treat your prospects as partners, and work closely with them to find the best solutions to their problems, your success rate will be much, much higher. In this fast-paced and engaging session, RAIN Group President Mike Schultz and sales expert Jill Konrath will discuss why collaboration is so essential to your sales efforts and how you can use it to separate yourself from your competition. Click here to register (limited seats available).      

Most people think of prospecting as reaching out to people they don’t know, with an over-the-top approach, to interest them in buying something they’re not thinking about. This isn’t the only way to generate more leads. Prospecting isn’t just a cold activity, and you don’t need a sledgehammer approach to make it work. Key accounts are typically huge, untapped opportunities for more business, but the outreach tends to look very different. To generate more leads with key accounts, sellers often use the same tactics they do when cold prospecting. It’s not called "key account sales" just to use fancy words. It’s different. If you’re selling to a key account, you know them already. And they know you. You’re important to each other. You’ve built trust. That’s a very strong platform. One you should be careful to protect. At the same time, most realize they can and should be doing more work with their key accounts. Since no one else is going to make sure the client receives maximum business value from their relationship with your company, you must be proactive to make it happen.      

In this post we noted we often get questions about The Challenger Sale. Perhaps the most common question we get is, "What do you think of the five seller profiles?" The five seller profiles, as defined by the authors of The Challenger Sale in "Selling Is Not About Relationships," a Harvard Business Review blog post, are as follows. We list them in order by what they found in their study to be least to most likely to be a top performer in sales: Relationship Builders Reactive Problem Solvers Hard Workers Lone Wolves Challengers So here you are—our thoughts on the five seller profiles in The Challenger Sale...      

For our What Sales Winners Do Differently research, we studied over 700 major purchases from buyers who represented $3.1 billion dollars in annual purchasing power. One question we wanted to answer was, "Is it the company and offerings that make the biggest difference in the buyer’s purchase decision, or is it the seller and how they sell?" Guess what: it’s the seller and how they sell that most separates the winners of the sales from the rest. The following list reveals what buyers say are the top 10 areas where sellers who win outperform those who come in second place...      

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 Time: 2 p.m. ET Duration: 60 minutes with Q&A Presenters: Mike Schultz, President, RAIN Group Author, Rainmaking Conversations Patrick Cahill, Principal, beep! Directed Voicemail & Rally Point Webinars "I can’t believe they didn’t see the value!" "I can’t believe they didn’t buy the whole package!" "I can’t believe they think they can do it themselves!" "I can’t believe they didn’t buy!" You think your ROI case is compelling, that you’ve differentiated your offerings from your competitors, and that you’ve established yourself and your company as experienced, but the buyer doesn’t buy (or doesn’t buy from you). So how do you convince buyers to buy? Get them to see what they didn’t see? In our newest research, we studied more than 700 buyers, who represented a total of $3.1 billion in annual purchases, to find out what the winners of actual sales opportunities do differently than sellers who come in second place. In this webinar, our own Mike Schultz, President of RAIN Group, will cover the key components of building desire and ultimately inspiring buyers to take action based on the preferences buyers indicated in the research. Patrick Cahill, Principal of beep! Directed Voicemail and Rally Point Webinars, will join Mike to provide insight into how your lead generation, nurturing materials, and approach can best position you to initiate more conversations with buyers. Click here to register (limited seats available).      

How you run a sales meeting depends fundamentally on who set it. Imagine for a minute you’re the COO of a mid-sized manufacturing company. You’ve been reading quite a bit about how to decrease costs in a supply chain. You do a little research and find supply chain consulting firms. You call a few that happen to be in your area and set up a series of sales conversations with them. In this case, you’re the buyer. You are driving the demand. Soon, a partner from one of the firms comes to your office. After pleasantries, he says things like: "So, what’s on your mind?" "Tell me what’s going on that brings me here today." "Before we get started, is there anything in particular you’re hoping to get out of this meeting before we’re done?" Then the meeting gets underway...      

When buyers buy something, one of two things must be true: 1. They are required to buy. 2. They want to buy. In the former, they have no choice. Get sued, hire a lawyer. Buying = required. The lawyer doesn’t need to convince the buyer why to buy legal services in general, only why to buy them from them. In the latter, the buyer has a choice. Buying = desired. They don’t need to buy, but if they want it badly enough, and have the money and authority to buy, they buy. Since the buyer isn’t required to buy when sellers drive demand, sellers must be able to take their priority of making a sale happen, and make it the buyer’s priority to make a purchase happen. It’s not that easy, though, because you’re nowhere near the buyer’s priority list when you start.      

It’s 4 PM on a Thursday. You’re about to meet the CEO of a large company you’d like to win as a client. The conversation starts as you walk into the office, approach the CEO, stretch out your hand, and say, "Nice to meet you, Jill. I’m Steve Webb." Fast forward 7 months later. It’s 3 PM on a Wednesday. You head into the office. Jill gets out from behind her desk and says, "Good to see you again, Steve. Here’s the signed contract for the initial $1.2 million. Let’s get started." Suffice it to say, a lot has to happen between "hello" and "let’s go." Yet two things are true. 1) This is how it happens. And, 2) how to lead sales conversations, influence your prospects to want to buy, buy from you, buy a robust solution, and pay full price for it confounds many people. But it doesn’t have to...      

Talking about the differences between men and women is a tricky thing. But we need to deal with tricky things if we want to be good sales managers. The recently published book, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, has a nugget of knowledge every sales manager should know. As the title suggests, it’s about the science behind why some people win and others struggle. This is not a sales book, but some of its findings relate to sales and have implications for how to manage a sales team. (Note: for detailed, sales-specific research on what makes a sales winner, take a look at RAIN Group’s recent research report, What Sales Winners Do Differently.) While Bronson and Merryman’s book covers a variety of topics, it’s what they have to say on risk and its implications for sales management that deserves attention, especially the surprising results when comparing men and women. While the authors struggled to accept these findings at first, the science pointed to differences too large to ignore.      

Most of my clients want to have better meetings with senior executives. Meetings that feel like conversations, not pitches. Meetings that build deeper relationships. Meetings that uncover more ways in which they can help their customers. Behind closed doors, when I ask what’s holding them back, many will tell me things like, "I don’t feel comfortable," "I have nothing to offer to them," or "I’m not at their level." Selling to the C-suite can be difficult, and getting a first meeting can be a real challenge. But in my experience, the most difficult part is not getting the first meeting. It’s getting the second one. Or the third one. It’s keeping the relationship going...      

In our 5 Keys to Maximizing Sales with Existing Accounts report, we noted a number of different ways that organizations can shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to maximizing account growth. Compensation alignment and accountability are two big ones. In our Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management, we found that high performers were more than twice as likely to have compensation and reporting structures aligned to support account growth. And, as well, high performers were much more likely to hold teams accountable.      

Ask 100 sellers at 100 companies why their customers buy from them, and you're likely to hear 100 answers with the same underlying theme: the value we provide. Sellers describe their value to us in a number of ways: we get results. Our relationships are very close. They get from us what they've always wanted (but never gotten) from other companies. We bring innovative solutions to the table. And so on. Pretty obvious, right? To win sales you have to maximize value. In practice there's no denying that sales winners are much better at getting buyers to perceive maximum value than the rest. In fact, in our research, only one factor—"overall value was superior"—was of top importance to buyers in all of the categories we studied (e.g. how winners win the initial sale, what drives repeat business, what drives referrals, etc.). Before you can learn how to communicate value, however, you need to understand some key concepts about value.      

How many times have you left a sales meeting and thought, "I should have said that..."? Or, during a meeting, as you listened to what a prospect was saying, you thought, "That's not right; he will be making a big mistake if he goes down that path," but you never voiced your opinion? Or, perhaps even more dramatic, you got the sense, "This guy is holding something back. I need to get to the bottom of this." But, again, you said nothing? In all of these examples, what usually keeps you from saying the things you want to (and should) say is a strong need for approval from your prospects. You want to be liked, and in some cases loved, more than you want to close the deal. Research1 that includes more than 500,000 sellers estimates that 47% of sales people have a need for approval to the extent that it can limit their ability to ask tough questions, disagree when appropriate, and advocate for a point of view that may be disruptive to the status quo.      

Lots of people lament the commoditization in their industries. They’ll say things like, "Buyers see us as commodities." Interestingly enough, the truth is lots of buyers agree. Now, given what I do, I’ve been a part of actually watching many buying processes from the buyer’s side and the buyers often say at the end, "Of the five companies we’re looking at, I actually think that three of them are well suited to do the work, but we still have to pick a winner," and, at least in my observation, the winner is not always on price and, in fact, it’s not usually on price. So what is it then that makes one company stand out enough to win the business versus the others that are also vying for it?      

CONVINCE con•vince 1.  Cause (someone) to believe firmly in the truth of something. 2.  Persuade (someone) to take action. Building confidence in the validity of an idea. Inspiring action. The sellers who do these best sell the most. While a few do insight selling naturally, many struggle. Sellers might know with great certainty that when buyers buy they’ll be better off as a result, but they just can’t get the buyers to believe it, too. What’s interesting, though, is that the sellers who are good at selling an idea and those who aren’t often both understand the idea and its importance. It’s just that some communicate it far better than others. Those that do insight selling well—whether they know it or not—satisfy the same basic criteria every time, following the same story format. And the great thing is this: the basic structure is simple and learnable. We call this basic structure a Convincing Story.      

You’ve worked on building rapport with your prospect and you’ve uncovered their aspirations and afflictions. The question then becomes, "So what?" If your afflictions don’t get solved, so what? What won’t happen? Will they get worse? How will they affect the bottom line of your company, division, or department? How will they affect your life? If your aspirations don’t become reality, so what? Will your competition get ahead of you if you don’t innovate? Will you lose market share if you aren’t aggressive in your strategy? Will you never be able to grow your business to a point where you can sell it and reach your personal financial goals? Will the promotion you desire continue to elude you? Your ability to quantify the impact and paint the ‘‘so what’’ picture is the foundation for how important it is for the decision maker to buy from you. If you don’t answer the "so what" question, the initiative will fall to the bottom of the priority list...