Two Saturdays ago my father-in-law, Steve, and I played a round of golf. Since the course was busy, they paired us with a married couple that we didn’t know: Donna and Robert. Donna was a Jekyll and Hyde type of golfer. As she worked her way through the fairway and approached the green, she was graceful and calm – methodically hitting the ball with the right amount of touch until she was positioned nicely on the green. Fairway shots, bunker shots, chip shots – she was in control. However, she was a different animal from the tee.
Donna would approach the tee box like Al Hrabosky, the Mad Hungarian, used to approach the pitching mound in the 1970s. Her swing off the tee was violent, and the results were awful. On every hole, Robert would remind her: “don’t try to kill it”. She knew he was right, but she tried to kill the ball on every single tee shot.
How many times have you heard the phrase “Sales people should listen a whole lot more than they speak.”? Millions of times is probably not an exaggeration. How many sales calls have you been on where the sales person doesn’t shut up? Millions of times?
This is hard. No matter how many times Donna reminds herself not to swing hard on the tee, she can’t help herself. It’s the same with most salespeople. They’re competitive and their nature is to talk. No matter how many times they’re told that they have two ears and only one mouth for a reason, they still jabber on throughout the sales meetings.
So, what can we do?
Idea: Create a list of items that must be discovered in every sales meeting – for yourself or your sales people. I’m not talking about a list of qualification questions – they’ll figure out a way around those and think they actually asked them. I mean a list of answers – decision-making process, factors leading to decision, current access control system, SLA expiration, etc. Turn your sales people into detectives looking for clues and digging for information. Don’t ever say “you need to listen more”. They’ve heard it billions of times. Give them something to do that’ll keep them from yapping. Give them a list of things to uncover and let them find the information in their own way.
Here’s why it works: Telling someone what they need to stop doing something hardly ever works with strong personalities – especially sales people. However, once you give a sales person a mission, they’ll do it. They’ll be so focused on finding the information that they’ll forget about dumping features on the customer. I think Robert needs to stop telling Donna “don’t try to kill it”, and start telling her “hit the ball less than 100 yards”.
Try it. Whether you try it for yourself or coach your team with this idea, try it. Remember, don’t tell them to “listen more”, but give them a list of things to discover and they’ll do it.
