Referral Selling: An Old Silver Bullet, Revitalized

Paul McCord's Book

If you visit the best sales blog sites, you’ll no doubt stumble upon Paul McCord.  Paul has a lot to say about an old silver bullet—referral selling. 

I call referral selling ”old” only because the practice of leveraging existing customer relationships has been around for decades.  In fact, not enough sales people build this potentially powerful lead generation strategy into their overall territory management approach.  (There are reasons for that.  Among them are unhappy, unreferenceable customers, fear and simply not knowing how to referral sell.)

I’ve been pretty tough on sales tips books and articles. With that in mind, referral selling skills (like presentation skills and typing skills) can be independent of any sales methodology. 

Paul’s book, Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income — Sales Success Through Client Referrals provides a comprehensive view of the subject.  His intent is to guide the reader into deploying a referral-based business model.  Although Paul’s background is in financial services, where referral selling is more widely used, his strategies and tactics can be applied across pretty much any industry. 

Paul’s PWWR (pronounced “power”) system is the key. Plant the seeds, Water them throughout the sale, Weed out any issues, and Reap the referrals.  This is Paul’s recommended process and it makes a lot of sense. Although I have not employed Paul’s PWWR process, I can envision it working very well in diverse situations.  He’s done a terrific job.

Here is my recommendation for sales leaders. (A full-fledged plan will contain considerably more detail—this is just a starting point….) 

1. If your sales team hasn’t been effectively leveraging existing customers for referrals, determine why. 
2. Benchmark the level at which referrals business is being converted to sales.
3. If the reason is that (you and) your salespeople don’t know how, invest in this book.
4. Take the time to study Paul’s referral process and his recommendations.
5. Set an objective.  For example, referrals will be the source of 10% of our business next year.
6. Devise a plan for adopting his process across your team.
7. Build appropriate coursework, tools, coaching mechanisms.  (This is a difficult proposition for a busy sales manager.  You probably don’t have either the time or the skills. I’m sure Paul would be delighted to engage with you on this…)
8. Train your team or get them trained.
9. Deploy the process, measure results against your benchmark and objective and refine.

We Live in a World That Requires Revenue

Back to “You Can’t Handle the Truth” from a few days ago…

I still run into some people that haven’t heard about (or seen) this.  I laughed again, for the 25th time.

If anyone knows where this comes from, please let me know.

The Future of Sales Effectiveness

This Wednesday (July 9) I’ll be presenting a webinar about how sales (in general) is not presently getting the job done and what needs to be done about it going into the future.   I’ll share relevant research and strong recommendations based upon what we’ve learned through ESR’s research and direct work with our clients. (The webinar is hosted by The TAS Group.)

This is a topic I’ve spoken about before.  I presented a similar webinar a few months ago for ISBM.  Last September I delivered a keynote on the subject in Dublin for a group of CEOs. 

This is serious business. I’ve said it many times before: Sales lags all other departments within corporations with respect to process, measurement and productivity.

Here are the five areas that we believe need immediate and long-term focus:

1. More discipline and process
2. New approaches to training
3. Sales and marketing alignment
4. Technology-enabled selling and Sales 2.0
5. Sales performance measurement

I’ll delve into each of these on Wednesday.

Sales Training RFPs

I want to share with you some more of my recent experience and related opinions regarding sales training vendors and RFPs.*  (See my May 23rd post about RFPs.  If you haven’t read it and are interested in how sales training vendors—arguably world-class experts in managing RFP response strategies—reacted to one RFP, you should.) 

Before I go into where they generally fall down when responding to our clients’ RFPs, you should know that most of the vendors that ESR targets for our clients’ long lists respond quickly and competently.  They’re a pleasure to work with.

What transpired and my opinion:

You Can’t Handle The Truth!

Geoffrey James writes a terrific sales blog.  He’s the rare journalist who really understands selling.  (One might argue that he’s the rare sales pro who can write really well.) I’ve mentioned him before, plus he’s in my blog role.

I was honored today to have him pick up on my A Few Good Men metaphor for those salesreps and their managers that don’t ask the tough questions because they don’t really want to hear the answers.   It’s one of the key reasons that many salespeople don’t qualify effectively—and why their managers miss so many forecasts.

Check it out.

Competing on Price

There are companies that must compete on price in many, most, or even all deals.  That’s a function of what they are selling, into what markets, and against which competitors.  With that being said, too many companies often wind up competing on price because they simply aren’t very good at selling.

The ”sales ineffectiveness” affliction that so many companies suffer from is apparent during my initial conversation with sales leaders and their marketing counterparts.  It takes about 30 seconds before the word “price” is uttered—and not by me.  As I dig deeper they tell me that their biggest challenge is “being forced to compete on price.”

“Forced by whom?” I ask.  Most often the answer is “our competition.”  Sometimes it’s “the customer.”  When you think about it, both answers are pretty much the same.

The discussion goes on… “We do a great job building relationships, understanding the customer and selling our unique value,” they continue.  “Then, at the last minute the competition slashes their price and we’re forced to beat it or lose the deal.” They may have done a “great job” with a number of things, but competitive selling isn’t one of them.

Here are some sales leader-level questions for you to answer:

Perfect Selling

I was honored to receive an advance copy of Linda Richardson’s newest book, Perfect Selling.

It’s the best step-by-step book on sales call execution that I’ve seen.  Perfect Selling echoes the strong, skills-based approach that Linda’s company, Richardson, takes working with their clients on sales performance improvement engagements. 

If you’re a sales leader, order a copy of the book now.  Read it cover to cover—90 minutes or so the first time.  (Implementing Linda’s recommendations will, of course, take longer.)  Then ask a sampling of your salespeople to describe how they execute a sales call, step-by-step.  My guess is that there will be a gap the size of the Grand Canyon between how Linda lays out a sales call and the answers you get from members of your team.  If there isn’t, congratulations on your leadership position in your market.  If there is, then consider this an omen—you need a comprehensive assessment of your sales peoples’ skills and capabilities, now.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Short post today.  We’ve got a few clients who are pedaling hard (perhaps peddling hard as well), trying to wrap up Q2, and I’ve been on the phone… BTW If you’re a sales leader and reading this today, June 30, you either work for a privately-held company, are way ahead of your targets for the quarter or… we’ll leave it at that.

I read my first book about body language in 1991, when I was living in Europe.  To say it opened my mind is an understatement.  (Didn’t Woody Allen say that it’s great to have an open mind so long as your brain doesn’t fall out?)  In any case, I’ve been studying body language and other non-verbal cues ever since.  That skill has really paid off when it comes to assessing whether someone is being truthful or not (prospects, our clients’ sales VPs, my airplane mechanic, etc.). 

That’s one of the reasons I wanted to read A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.  Being a strong left-brainer, I wanted to understand why he asserted that it was the right-brainers that would thrive in the next decade.  He makes a strong case.

Among the many advantages of right-brainers, Pink writes, is being able to discern the real meaning behind facial expressions.  So I studied up a bit on real versus fake smiles.  Hint:  It’s in the eyes.  Then I took this test.  Pink was right.  It worked!  I scored 18 out of 20 on my first try.

So, You Want to Network with Me?

I regularly get calls from people that want to “network” or “pick my brain.”  (Translation: They’d like me to spend 30 to 60 minutes on the phone with them and provide feedback on their resume, or introduce them to people in my network, or give them sales leads, or coach them on what sales training companies might hire them and how to approach those companies, or provide advice on how to start a sales training company, or read their business plans, or give them my opinion on their new product or service, and the list goes on.) 

People who know me will tell you that I’m typically benevolent in situations like this.  I tend to follow the “pay it forward” philosophy.  I even do pro-bono work on occasion. This approach has paid big dividends for me over the years.  So, I take a lot of the calls and help where I can. 

But it’s not about these people that I am writing. 

Instead, I want to acknowledge the fine folks that really know what networking and business relationships are all about. 

I got a call the other day from a former VP of sales who wants to have a discussion about some job opportunities for him.  My name was given to him by the CEO of a sales training company.  At first I thought that this was another one-sided networking scenario.  (We’re scheduled to speak this afternoon.) But I was wrong. This morning he sent me this:

I was at a … SIG presentation yesterday morning…  At the end of the presentation, the organizer poled the audience for suggestions on future topics.  One was to bring in representatives of different sales training systems (Miller Heiman, Wilson, etc.) so the audience could compare and contrast. Of course, that got me thinking of a better idea - having you come in and make that (unbiased) presentation.   If that’s something you’d be interested in doing, let me know and I’ll make the connection. 

A breath of fresh air.  This guy “gets it.”

The same goes for those who come to a networking or business opportunity with some value up front for the other person.  Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index is like that.  So is Dan Seidman. Jeff Lehman, too.  And Donal Daly, Tom Martin, Kevin Madden, John Andrus, Brian Lambert, Randall Murphy, Olin Thompson, Steve Andersen, Brad Childress, Claire McBride, Susan LaPlante-Dube, LaVon Koerner, Jill Konrath, John Caddell, Gerhard Gschwandtner, Tony Parinello, Howard Stevens, Greg Brown, Jan Visser.  There are many, many more. They know who they are.

The Fear and Loathing of Sales Training

Two years ago I wrote an article entitled The Fear and Loathing of Sales Training.  It’s been reprinted again and again on the web (with permission, thankfully).  For those of you that haven’t read it, or would like to read it again, here it is.  Feel free to pass it around.