At its most basic level we’re taught a few simple acronyms. The first one I was taught was MANT.

MANT –  Money, Authority, Need, Timeframe. Absent anything more comprehensive, I suppose this is better than nothing. But if we rely on this as our forecasting checklist we will still come up short. These four areas are the macro picture; they are the very big qualification buckets. Inside each bucket are myriad more focused qualification criteria that vary by sales step and process stage.

Let’s take an example, Money. When I first started selling, and for years afterwards, I was satisfied with a simple yes to the question “Do they have budget?”. And I lost sales even though the answer was yes, as was the answer to the other three. If we dig deeper in the Money bucket we might create more revealing questions such as:

• Has our project got a better ROI than our customer’s other investment choices?
• Even though there is budget, do we meet or exceed our customer’s business case thresholds?
• They may have budget allocated, but do they have cash-flow to actually spend this month/quarter/year?
• Will our customer have payment terms that we will find acceptable?
• Do they pay their bills?
• Are they a good credit risk?
• Etc etc etc

The answers to all of these questions needs to be yes for our sale to go through. But how often do we consciously ask them and what are the risks to our sale if we don’t? Indeed, when should we be asking and getting answers?

It soon becomes clear that the simple MANT is not enough. What is needed are more qualification bucket questions for each stage of our sale and a process to review and find weaknesses that we can address.

Some time ago I carried out an exercise to create a series of qualification checklists and found that the four simple MANT questions ballooned to over 300 stage specific questions. Extreme? Maybe. Paranoid? Possibly. Good sales hygiene? Absolutely!

The upshot of this is that whenever I review opportunities for a client, no matter how strong or experienced the sales person or manager, I ALWAYS find risks to a sale and the sales person I coach see enough exposure that they invariably decide to take action to manage the risks.

Only the qualified survive.

There’s an old saying that a sign of madness is repeating the same action over and over and expecting a different result. Since the team were clearly not lunatics we concluded that a new strategy needed to be developed. One that would flip the business split. So we conducted a macro analysis, removed all constraints from our thinking, especially about what we could or couldn’t contemplate regarding the relationship with the customer. Soon we identified very significant potential value that out company held for the multi-national – but with an entirely different division who had zero use for our solutions. They could derive major incremental value from our customer base – if we helped them.

We made some estimates about the respective values to each company – if we could win the business we wanted, we could gain over $100m. For them, the potential was more than 20x that. Critically, they would take share from one of their major competitors.

On paper it would seem that that is a win-win opportunity, and it was. But the challenge was that the part of our customer who would need to buy from us would see little of the value that their related division would realize So there seemed to be a major problem. A major part of the problem was that there were two parties inside the customer who needed to collaborate and two parties inside of our company that also needed to collaborate to bring this evolving idea to fruition.

So the sales team needed to answer some basic questions:

1). Where did our organization come together from an organizational and power perspective?

2). What challenges did we anticipate internally and how would we overcome them?

3). Where did their organization come together from an organizational and power perspective?

4). What challenges did they anticipate internally and how would they overcome them?

5). How would this project satisfy the personal motivation of the individuals at these two convergent points?

6). How material would the concept be for each organization – the business motivation to act?

7). Who would coordinate and navigate the development of the concept from each side – someone with enough influence and motivation to get things done?

8). How could urgency be developed – to remove our competitor’s (the incumbent) opportunity to respond?

By consciously breaking down the tasks and building an executing a plan for each, a completely new business relationship was developed. One that marginalized the incumbent. We became a strategic partner. Over a three-year period more than $250m of our solutions were sold to our customer and over the same period they made significant inroads against their competitors with our customers.

This is an example of where superior strategy, as it usually does, negates a competitors current tactical advantage.

Imagine a young salesman. Straight off of closing the biggest deal in his company’s history. $5m of software in 1989. To say I was full of confidence and full of myself would be the understatement of the last millennium.

I was working for McDonnell Douglas, working hand in hand with our “Offset Business” group in London. McDonnell Douglas were one of the world largest defense contractors with aircraft such as the F15, F18, AV8B, Apache and C17 aircraft. British aerospace suppliers were always keen to secure business with McDonnell Douglas.

As a seller of mechanical design software I was well positioned to use the influence of the mother company. All doors were open to me. My big win was with a company in the south of England. A company part owned by Westland – now part of Agusta-Westland. I closed the deal with the Chairman at the Farnborough airshow. Yes, I was the real deal.

I set about ‘mopping up’ the rest of the Westland group of companies. My first target was an aero structures business on the Isle of Wight – off the south coast of England. I cold called and met with the CEO, spent time with the executives in charge of design, manufacturing and IT. I had our Offset team make supporting noises. Things were going well. Oh, I should mention, IBM were the incumbent. But they didn’t matter did they? After all, my technology was by common consent far superior. And Westland were a customer of McDonnell Douglas. Nobody at my company questioned me. I was golden boy. So confident was I that I bought the car. A lovely Jaguar it was. V12. Perfect.

There’s a saying that you never hear the bullet that kills you. This makes sense because a bullet is often travelling faster than the speed of sound, I digress. Of course IBM knew what was going on. They also realized that I had product superiority. They knew that in a direct feature vs feature fight, they would lose.

One day, all communication stopped. Something had changed. The phones went silent. Calls were no longer returned. Posted letters were met with non-committal responses.

What was it that IBM did?

Of course, as a young sales person I ‘knew’ it couldn’t be something I had done. There must be some questionable activities going on. No doubt about that. What had happened?

Personal value addressed? Imperative!!!!

Back in 2000, as there are today, there were several larger than life Silicon Valley personalities competing for the limelight. For this story, the players are Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems and Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard.

McNealy was/is a true visionary.

Aristotle authored a work called “The Rhetoric”. From this work comes a framework called the Rhetorical Triangle. Understanding and mastering the Rhetorical Triangle is foundational to our sales. In “The Rhetoric” Aristotle describes the three elements that must be present to make a successful argument. If we define sales as persuading people to make decisions in our favor, we are essentially mounting a form of argument and expecting our customer to buy it. The three elements are called Ethos, Pathos and Logos. For those of us who are a bit rusty with our Greek I’ll translate in very simplified sales terms. Ethos refers to our credibility (and our company and solutions), Logos is the logic of our argument. Finally, Pathos is the emotional impact on the buyer.

When we present, if we miss one of the three elements, we may fail to persuade. When we try to close, if we have only addressed two of the elements, the deal may stall. When we seek action, if we don’t have a complete triangle, we may fail to build momentum.

Each of Ethos, Pathos, Logos needs detailed, conscious development. How often do we do this? How often do we nail one or two, but ignore the third, to our cost? When we present, how much thought do we give to the development of a logical argument, or how we will emotionally effect our audience, or establish our own, solution or company credibility?

As a professional boxer, not much better. I’d likely need a brain surgeon. As a pilot, I’d hopefully be average or better. As a pilot, average would be good enough to safely complete a properly planned flight. Average pilots, fortunately, still have over a 99.9% success rate. We’ll come back to this later.

But as a sales person, is average good enough? Many Sales leaders would likely shake their heads and claim that average would mean failure. Looking at their sales league tables which often show over half their team falling short of their quota’s, they would have a point. They may feel that they need a team of Rock Stars if they are going to make their numbers. There is some logic to this thinking. After all, prior performance is usually a good indication of future results. So a team of Rock Stars would be a passport to riches, wouldn’t it? Well, maybe.

The ‘maybe’ is because there are a number of potential flaws in this thinking. For example, can these so-called Rock Stars perform in a new environment? (often they can’t). Can you actually recruit true Rock Stars? (maybe their current employer will have a say). And is there an unlimited supply of Rock Stars available? (unlikely).

Then there are a couple of other variables that will affect the performance of these new hires. As every sports fan knows, the coach has a heavy influence of the team performance, no matter what the raw talent. And then there is the matter of strategy, tactics and skills. If these are found wanting, so will the performance of the hired guns. So just how much of an impact should realistically be expected from the new hires? And how long might it take to find out if the Rock Star experiment works?

Every sales organization will have stories of hot shots being hired who then failed to live up to their billing. It is indeed a rare sales animal who knocks it out of the park for each and every company they work for. So the net of all of this is that a strategy of hiring for results is fraught with risk and the result of that risk may end up being a mess the successor to the head of sales has to clean up. So what are the alternatives?

Well, we started the discussion thinking about a normal distribution. And we also observed that being average as a pilot means success. So if we take the pilot example and figure out how to make the performance of the average sales person acceptable, our results overall would carry less risk. For example, if we assume 20% are the failing sales people and 20% are the Rock Stars, that leaves 60% of the sale population – the element who could have the biggest impact if they could improve their performance.

The Sales Executive Council published an article that showed that an almost 20% gain in performance could be gained from implementing an effective coaching program. Note, that’s coaching, not a wholesale round of hiring/firing.

Taking another perspective, Entrepreneur magazine published an article in August 2015 titled “5 Things Millionaires Do That Most People Don’t”. They listed them as:

Millionaires work hard

Millionaires are focused

Millionaires are careful about risk

Millionaires are generous

Millionaires never stop learning

While logic may lead us to say most millionaires work hard and are focused, etc; we can’t make the reverse statement that everyone who works hard and is focused, etc, will become a millionaire. But we could probably show that the likelihood of becoming a millionaire (or a more successful salesperson) would increase if we concentrated on developing similar personal traits and worked in an environment where these traits were actively emphasized. So, how could we do that? Well one idea would be to translate the five traits in to actionable programs and processes for the sales team.

For example:

Creating an environment where people want to work harder – build the fun element.

Coach sales people to be laser focused on the important stuff – implement an end to end sales process that emphasizes operational excellence.

Continuously mitigate risk in sales situations – so we focus on the ‘real, winnable opportunities’

Share success with the team – sales is a team sport

Invest in our own skills and expertise – continuously. The moment we think we are the complete article, we’re obsolete.

Back to our ‘average’ pilot one last time. Since even the average pilot executes at near 100% we might struggle to separate the average pilot from the Rock Star. To my mind, every pilot who gets me to the gate safely, is indeed a Rock Star. Every one of them ticks their own version of those five traits. Pilots work a process, they have check pilots review them in the air, they regularly take recurrent training, they rabidly work to remove risk and they look after their crew.

So, hire Rock Stars or create a winning environment?

There would be a rush for the exit. We expect pilots, and other professions such as surgeons, to be expert and proficient in all aspects of their craft. After all, our lives may depend on it. Pilots, be they commercial or private, are all expected to undergo periodic proficiency checks to ensure they are safe for themselves and their passengers.

But in sales, how comprehensively proficient are we? How well are we prepared for each stage of every sale? How polished are our skills? How much do we ‘fly by the seat of our pants”? If the be truth be told, most of us have blind spots, most of us have skills that aren’t practiced regularly that are a bit rusty.

If Sully Sullenberger and Jeff Skilles hadn’t regularly practiced their emergency procedures would the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ have had the same outcome?

Most pilots are not a “Top Gun”. But we do expect our flight to land safely, every time. Pilots and top sales people have one thing in common. They do all the basics, all the time. Nothing is left to chance. Risk is identified and mitigated.

There is no magic potion for sales success. No secret formula is to be found in the latest best-selling how-to sales book. Not even two days in a classroom trying to concentrate on the latest super-duper sales process. Reading books and sitting in a classroom does have value, but to expect a radical increase in performance will lead to disappointment. No, the path to sustainable performance is to do what pilots do. They focus on improving and maintaining their skills for all phases of the mission; the big picture, weather avoidance, planning, navigation, ground operations, en-route, terminal procedures, emergency procedures, maneuvers, etc. All the basics, all the time.

Are you a sales pilot?

Now let’s pose another scenario which we won’t be familiar with. We’re still a pilot, we’re flying a small plane over the Rocky Mountains. We are 30 miles from the nearest airfield. We lose our engine and there are no roads nearby, just dense pine forest and at our height we will, in one way or another, be on the ground in 5 minutes. Are we still going to walk away?

The answer to that question, surprisingly is that it’s likely as long as you follow some simple rules. The first rule, every pilot knows, Sully knew, Chuck Yeager knew, is ‘Fly the plane’. That means don’t panic, try to keep the plane under control. And then comes the next set of crucial steps. And you can see these at work if you examine the “Miracle on the Hudson”. Those steps are Perceive, Process, Perform. In simple terms, identify what is going on. Then decide what options you have. Finally, choose the best option and execute as best you can.

Knee jerk reactions in sales can be as fatal to a sale as a panic action in a flight emergency. We must first analyze the problem, then assess alternative actions, then finally, make a choice and act. When I coach sales teams who are recipients of a sales ‘surprise’ my first question is “do you really have to do something right this minute?” Nine times out of 10, the answer is no. Especially if the bad news is received on a Friday. There is almost always time to spend finding out what is really going on, circling the wagons and calmly discussing options and weighing choices.

So, firstly, hurry up and do nothing. Assess the situation, identify and analyze your option, choose the best one and execute.

Oh, one final thing, if you are wondering about how you get to walk away from the ‘problem in the Rockies’, the pilot should, if they can’t restart the engine, and absent a clearing, visualize an airfield on the top of the trees and conduct a normal approach and landing at the lowest controllable airspeed. If they do that, they will invariably survive and often walk away.

When sales people negotiate with professional buyers we can be at a significant disadvantage. The buyer practices his/her craft every day. But we only negotiate periodically, so our skills may be rusty compared to the buyer.

Our goal is to close a good quality deal; their goal is often to extract every last penny of discount. There’s an old truism in negotiation that it’s only over once both sides feel there is no more value to be extracted. While this is particularly true in ‘positional’ (confrontational) type negotiations it also holds true to a certain extent in ‘interest’ (win-win) based negotiations. Whatever the negotiation type, it pays to know how to haggle effectively and it pays to help indicate to the buyer when they have reached the end of the haggling road for a particular negotiation point.

From a semantics point of view, I should point out that haggling is not the same as conducting a negotiation. Haggling is about getting agreement on a particular point in a negotiation. It is also separate from the give and take trading that goes on as we try to strike the overall agreement.

Let’s imagine a scenario. I’m trying to sell my piano. My target selling price is $1,000. I have advertised a sell price of $1,250. A buyer comes to view the piano. She likes the piano and offers me $900. I have options:

1. Take the offer
2. Reject the offer – it represents a discount of almost 30%
3. Counter and haggle

Taking the offer is quick but not without pain. So let’s assume we are going to haggle. Effective haggling uses a concept of ever reducing concessions. This means each time we make a concession; it needs to be smaller than the last concession. By doing this, we signal to the buyer that we have less to give – they then feel they are getting closer to the best deal possible.

So our haggling steps could be, assuming small counters from the buyer:

1. If they make a lower offer, listen to it and reflect back our understanding of what they have offered. Confirm.
2. Justify our current price, offer to reduce the price to close, state the new price of $1,100 and try to close ($150 discount)
3. If they counter again, listen, repeat back and confirm
4. Then, justify our current price, offer to reduce the price to close, state the new price of $1,025 and try to close ($75 discount)
5. If they counter again, listen, repeat back and confirm
6. Then justify our current price, offer to reduce the price to close, state the new price of $1,000 and try to close ($25 discount)
7. Finally, if they counter at a lower price, either take it or walk away

In between each offer and attempt to close, we anticipate a potential counter. Once we get above our target price we can choose to continue to haggle until there is no further movement from the buyer.

Again, the key to haggling, is offering ever reducing concessions, thereby showing that we are approaching our walk-away point.

Let’s make an obvious observation. With this scenario the seller is making concessions without asking for anything in return. This is clearly not best negotiation practice. So the above flow should be modified to take in to account any other sources of value that can be thrown in to the mix that will help the parties each realize more relevant value. For example, keeping the price at $1,250, but offering to deliver the piano if you happen to have a truck.

One final thought. There is much profit to be won and lost at the end of a negotiation –  in the final haggling. Professional buyers are expert hagglers, so level the playing field, build a haggle plan and haggle away!