Proposition Selling: How to Create Extraordinary Success in Business-to-Business Sales

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PREFACE

John Sedgwick was my first sales trainer over forty years ago. I can still recall his lectures and how he kept a room full of sales neophytes mesmerized for hours at a time.

He has the capacity for understanding the complex, distilling it to the essentials, and communicating it to others so those without this gift can understand and put the lesson to good use.

He supported me with no collateral other than faith when I first went into training and consulting. He wrote training materials for me, found clients for me, and attended my presentations so he could give me valuable feedback and coaching.

Proposition Selling has evolved out of the sales philosophy, principles, and strategies that I have learned from John. As those who teach know, having to explain something and coach others through the learning process creates a deeper understanding of the subject. Over time, through these training and coaching experiences, the sales process described in the book has evolved and has been fine-tuned to today’s model. And it works.

Over a year ago, John offered to consolidate all of the updated materials into a book. I thought it was a marvelous idea, of course, and he went on to explain how this book could be used to launch a new series of training and coaching offerings that could help many businesses. It was agreed that I would carry this forward into the market, use the book as a credible resource for speaking and training, and ensure that others will have this roadmap to follow.

As I read through his initial manuscript, I saw that he’d done it again, turning the lessons learned from tens of thousands of customer interactions over these many years into fundamental concepts and processes that anyone can understand and follow. I’ve added examples to illustrate certain points and some wordsmithing that comes from actual dialog with customers. I’ve added a notes section to each chapter because I believe what I teach about the importance of writing down what you want to remember and use.

As you read, please keep in mind that the I and the We are mostly my and John’s collective voice and opinions. After forty years of learning and implementing John’s coaching lessons, from my perspective, the I and the We are the same.

Read, take notes, make commitments, implement, and learn. You will enjoy the journey. I look forward to seeing you on the road.

Onward!

Tom Piscitelli

EMPTY THE COINS IN YOUR PURSE INTO YOUR MIND AND YOUR MIND WILL FILL YOUR PURSE WITH GOLD.

— BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

INTRODUCTION

Most people, it seems, have a low regard for salespeople. I know I did. It took me a long time to realize that sales is a noble profession and it provides an important customer service. People buy what they need and want from someone or some source they trust, or hope they can trust, and when they find that person or source, they are exceptionally loyal. To sell is to serve. I love working with salespeople who have this thinking at their core and want to learn how to sell as a professional. I can’t imagine anything more fun, or more rewarding.

I started selling newspapers at age eleven. I didn’t see it as sales, of course, but it was. I learned to ask where the customer wanted his paper placed and was rewarded with a better tip when I did that. I liked the contests for the prizes when I sold new subscriptions. After a while, I liked the contests just for the winning, even if the prize wasn’t so important. I remember earning a contest for a trip to Miami from Philadelphia that required fifty new subscriptions. Can you imagine the prospect of taking a train trip with a bunch of thirteen to sixteen year olds for three days to what was essentially a foreign land? It remains as one of my favorite memories.

Much later, after college and a liberal arts degree, I realized the only career I was qualified for was sales. I took a sales position with a manufacturer of heating and air conditioning products and learned how to sell to contractors, distributors, and manufacturers. I wasn’t very good at it at first. I learned the products, met the customers, and practiced what to say. It took a while for me to understand how, consciously and deliberately, to make a difference. In hindsight, it is easy to see what I had been missing. With all of my success, I had not realized that I’d learned a process for creating success, and when that process was systematically applied, it created extraordinary results. I’m hoping your learning curve is much shorter.

Since I began training salespeople full-time in 1997, I have had the chance to interface with literally thousands of salespeople, some young, some old, some new, some experienced, some successful, some not so much. Here is my most important observation: the vast majority of these salespeople do what they do in a fairly unconscious way. In other words, the best salespeople are often unconsciously competent at what brings them success. They do their thing and it works for them, often as a result of great, natural personal interaction skills. The weakest salespeople are unconsciously incompetent. They really can’t analyze exactly what they are doing, or what they would need to practice to do better.

I would like to see every salesperson who leaves my training be more consciously competent. My training philosophy has always been that for people to perform a task, they first need to understand how and why the task is best performed in a certain way; then they need to practice the task, and then they need to apply that knowledge and practice on the job. As they practice using the new skill on the job, they gradually become consciously competent on this skill. They know why it’s done a certain way. They know how it’s done correctly. They have practiced enough to make the new skill their own. Now they can do the new skill correctly. If at some point they’re not getting the results they want, they have the underlying knowledge to go back and self-analyze what they are doing, and what needs to be done differently. They are consciously competent sellers.

So that’s what this book is about. I want you to do better. I want you to make more money. I want you to enjoy your work and get satisfaction from it. I believe the best way this can be done is to explain to you as clearly as possible exactly what the most successful salespeople do, why they do what they do, and to provide you with as much suggested practice as can reasonably be done in a book format.

There are a large number of salespeople who call not on consumers, but on businesses. All these businesses have one thing in common: they are not buying products for their own use. They are buying products that can be resold to consumers or to another business, or installed on other equipment or in buildings that will be resold. Regardless of the details of the distribution channel, all these businesses have a common need. They need to profit from the use of the products they buy.

To be successful in selling to a business, you have to show that business principal that you can have a direct impact on his or her ability to make money. That seems obvious, doesn’t it? It says, If you buy these products from me and from my company, that will help you increase your profits.

That’s what I’m going to try to do with this training, and to do that, I’m going to teach you a concept called proposition selling.

Just the name proposition communicates certain things. The word proposition implies a two-way interaction. I do something, you do something, and we obtain a mutual benefit. I propose to do certain things. In return, if you did certain things, we would both benefit.

It’s different from Here’s my product; here’s my price sheet…. I hope I can have your business.

This kind of sales approach, to be successful, would have to be built on some kind of trust-based relationship. How would one do that?

It would need to be a little more structured. How would one do that?

It might require some skills that are not needed for other kinds of selling. What might those skills be, and how would we use those skills?

These are the questions that we’re going to try to answer for you in this book. This will be a new approach to business-to-business selling for some readers. Most of us will not invest the time and effort required to change or modify what we’re currently doing without a really clear understanding of how this is going to help us. So we’ll start there. If that makes sense to you, then we’ll try to give you the knowledge and skills you need to make this part of your everyday selling.

Selling, in my opinion, is one of the most underappreciated jobs people do. Done correctly, it is as complex and challenging a task as any we can think of. The best salespeople are product experts, strategic planners, problem solvers, and experts in reading and influencing human behavior. Anyone who does this job should have a tremendous sense of accomplishment and personal satisfaction. It is my hope that this book can help you to be even more professional in your selling, and take even greater pride in your skills and accomplishments.

I sincerely hope that at some point I will have the chance to meet you personally in a training session. In the meantime, feel free to check out my website at www.propositionselling.com. You may email me your questions or comments, sign up for my monthly e-newsletter, or obtain copies of other training materials.

In the meantime, good luck and good selling!

INTRODUCTION EXERCISE

Please think through and answer these questions. By doing so you will help yourself identify what is most important to you as you read this book.

How did I become a salesperson?

What do I enjoy about selling?

What do I not like about being a salesperson?

What are my selling strengths?

What are my selling opportunities for improvement?

What would it mean to me if I were to become more comfortable and confident as a salesperson?

Important Terms to Remember

Unconscious Incompetent: I don’t know what I don’t know.

Conscious Incompetent: I know what I don’t know.

Conscious Competent: I am conscious of doing the right things.

Unconscious Competent: I do the right things without being aware of it.

THE WORLD WE HAVE CREATED IS A PRODUCT OF OUR THINKING. IT CANNOT BE CHANGED WITHOUT CHANGING OUR THINKING.

— ALBERT EINSTEIN

CHAPTER 1

Developing a Selling Mindset

The way you think about yourself, and about your customers, will have more impact on your selling success than any other single factor. Your mindset will determine how you judge things, how you behave, how well you listen, and what you say. Your mindset will ultimately determine your results. Everything in this book is intended to help you create a mindset that will maximize your potential.

I got into sales by default. There really wasn’t anything else I was qualified to do. Actually, I wasn’t qualified to be a sales professional either. It took a while, but I learned to appreciate and value what the responsibilities and the rewards of a sales career can be.

Over the last forty years, I’ve had the opportunity to sell to manufacturers, to wholesalers, to contractors, and to consumers. In addition to selling for others, I briefly owned a small business that went from boom to bust, teaching me some hard lessons about the cold realities of business. Even now, as a sales trainer and business coach, I still look at that as a form of selling: How can I help you to buy my ideas and put them to use to benefit your customers and you?

I’ve enjoyed it all, and I’m looking forward to many more years of the same. In some ways, I feel I’m just getting started.

I’ve given a lot of thought to why it is that I like selling. What is it that allows me to get up and treat every new day, every new customer, or every new trainee interaction with anticipation and enthusiasm? When so many people around me are not enjoying what they do, why the heck am I having such a good time?

It’s not just me either. Every week, I meet people who are equally engaged and enthusiastic about what they are doing. Why do so many of us love what we are doing, while so many others merely tolerate, or even dread, the daily grind?

Here’s at least part of the answer.

There are two fundamentally different kinds of work. In one type of job, we learn at the beginning how to do a task and then we are expected to repeat the task more or less the same way every time. We are trained how to cook the burger or assemble the machine, and then we’re supposed to cook the burger or assemble the machine the same way each time. Some people like this kind of work. They are comfortable with the predictable repetition and gain satisfaction from a job well done. I’m not just talking about fast food or assembly jobs. Many highly paid and complex jobs are like this. A pilot friend told me that flying airplanes becomes routine. I’ve watched maintenance technicians go through a precision tune-up with seemingly unconscious expertise while they chat away with me. These are important jobs, but they are characterized by having consistent and predictable on-the-job actions.

The second kind of work involves learning basic concepts at the beginning and then being faced with one unique and unpredictable situation after another. Selling is a great example of this kind of job. We can learn basic selling skills, but every customer interaction is going to be different. When we walk into the buyer’s office, or when we ring that customer’s doorbell, we have no idea what we’re going to run into.

There are many jobs like this, such as managing a business or a department, owning a small business, teaching or coaching a group of students.

The fact is that some people do much better, and are much happier, in jobs where the rules, procedures, and outcomes are very predictable, while others do much better, and are much happier, in jobs where there is continuous uncertainty.

Consultant and trainer Larry Wilson used to use the analogy of the trapeze acrobat. He said the most exciting part of the acrobat’s job is the time between when he lets go of one trapeze bar and when he hasn’t yet caught the other one.

Some people imagine that and think, Wow, what a rush! Other people consider it and respond, No way, man!

Two points.

First, I’m not being evaluative at all here. I know people who are really happy with a predictable job. I just wouldn’t want that for myself. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be comfortable doing what I do, facing unique situations every day. Anybody who does a job well can be proud of what he or she does, while some of us can be happy in more predictable jobs, and some of us like that unknown space between the trapeze bars.

Second, I understand that this distinction between more routine jobs and jobs that are less predictable is not always that clear. A lot of routine jobs have plenty of room for creativity, and a lot of more unpredictable jobs have their routine aspects. I have personally spent an awful lot of time sitting in tedious sales meetings and a lot of time just sitting and studying product specification sheets. I didn’t like it, but it had to be done.

I believe my general point is valid. I love selling because it is unpredictable. The more challenging the situation, the more I enjoy it.

If you are the type of person who embraces, who thrives on, unique challenges, then you can love selling even more than you do now. The effective mindset is to emphasize the uniqueness of each sales interaction and de-emphasize the routine aspects of what we have to get done.

I not only want you to be good at selling; I want you to love selling. I want you to be able to get up every day and say, This is my opportunity to get out and do something that I do well, and that I really enjoy.

If you do love a routine, and hate unpredictable situations, you’re less likely to enjoy a life in sales. As hard as it is for me to say it, you will probably be happier if you investigate other career choices.

If you love a challenge, and like not knowing exactly what’s going to happen next, then you can have a great and enjoyable selling career. The skills this book will teach you will not only make you more effective, but they will help you get greater joy and satisfaction from your career and your life.

So, why do customers buy?

That was the opening