Two skills for salesmen to get good at

Sales is tough. You’re the rainmaker, the dealmaker, the person who makes things happen. No sales, no business. And if sales is your focus, it’s probably fair to say pressure is not far behind.

Hats off to anyone working in the tough world of sales. Here are two areas for any sales person to work on – get these right and you are much more likely to succeed.

A business partner of mine summed it up nicely – there are two things a salesmen needs to do: locate and generate movement.

Students of the Gazing Principle will know that people make significant decisions in predictable, understandable ways. We call this the Decision Making Cycle, DMC for short.

The great thing about understanding the DMC is that it forces you to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Selling is about understanding buying, and once you know where the customer is in the Decision Making Cycle you are half way there. We call this ‘locating the sale’, and it is the first thing a sales person needs to get good at. If you can successfully locate the customer in the cycle, your chances of success are significantly greater.

It’s a generalization, but I’d bet it’s not far wrong to say that usually the salesman gets ahead of the customer, and believes they are further round the DMC than they actually are. Proposals rushed out after an initial exploratory meeting would be a classic example of this.

Get good at locating and you’ll avoid this sort of time-consuming mistake.

The second skill is to generate movement. Some customers will move naturally through the DMC, and if you happen to be talking to them when they do, lucky you. But more often than not, it’s the salesman’s job to facilitate movement.

This requires a specific strategy at each stage of the cycle. But the great thing about it is that it fits very well with pipeline management.

Instead of focusing solely on ‘which ones can I close this week’, which is a self-centered approach to sales, how about seeing which customers I can bring into the DMC, which I can move from stage 1 to stage 2 and so forth? And ask yourself, ‘which blockers do I have to overcome at that stage?’

Get this right and you are much more likely to go though the cycle with the customer. And customers like that.

Aim to get better at these two skills. If you can locate the customer and then generate movement you will have happy customers.