It was one of the greatest drives in Super Bowl history. Down 16-13 with 3:10 left on the clock and the ball on the 8 yard line, Joe Montana and the 49ers methodically marched down the field to score the game winning touchdown. It cemented the 49ers legacy as a dynasty and Joe “Cool”, Jerry Rice, and Roger Craig as all-time greats.
However what most people forget was the struggle they had that season. The 49ers were fortune to even have a winning season. They were in deep with a brewing quarterback controversy, had crawled to a middling 6-5 record midway through the season, and had been embarrassed in the first round of the playoffs the previous two seasons. Their road was an uncertain, hard, and long.
While the sales and sports analogies are well-trodden ground, it makes sense to bring up the story of the 49ers magical, come from behind season. There is a lot of talk about how to comeback after COVID-19 and it is a common theme in many of my conversations of late. Startup founder, executives, and salespeople are all hoping for the bounce back effect where there are fast closes and quick wins.
We love is when a deal just lands on our laps. We think it is like some movie where deus ex machina falls from the sky to come to the rescue and save the day. Boom, there’s a big, juicy deal ready for us to snag and all will be right in the universe. Maybe that happens once in a while, but that is like relying on hope as a strategy.
Back in the days when you still had in person meetings, I met a salesperson who was just starting out in her career. We initially connected through a LinkedIn invite she had sent, and not more than ten minutes later, I get this message that is all product pitch. It immediately reminded me a recent post that had been making the rounds on LinkedIn. She immediately apologized after I replied with a strongly worded response and some corrective advice.
She had reached out several weeks later to ask fro some help. She was struggling with her job and as someone that mentors founders and salespeople on sales, I was happy to listen and see how I could help.
Her biggest fear was the big number she had to meet. It caused her to push hard, but she was going for the volume play. It seemed easier and less work. Use automation and leverage templates. Blast out messages to the world and see what sticks. I told her to stop looking at the big, hairy goal and forget the automation for now. Instead, personalize the hell out of her outreach, focus on getting one client, then keep repeating and learning and building out her book of business. Throughout our coffee chat though, I kept reiterating and emphasizing this one thing:
Focus intensely on the needs of the buyer first.
It is amazing what happens when you focus on the customer first and work backwards from there. You forget the stress of these far out sales targets, you forget about the competition, you ignore the noise and distractions to simply listen and bring value to the customer.
That probably sounds hard. My advice is definitely not very specific. There was no 3 steps to a winning pitch or top 10 cold email subject lines. Tactics and hacks won’t help though when the strategy is wrong.
Everyone wants shortcuts. Vendors promise miracles. There is some tool out there that will solve your pipeline issues and close more deals for you faster. That is the biggest flaw I see, particularly in startups. These are companies building shiny tools that gravitate to other shiny tools and sales methods that promise speed and scale. Everyone thinks “bigger” and “faster” when they need to start at “better”.
Social selling has been a thing for sometime now. The premise being if I connect to enough people on LinkedIn and Twitter and whatever social network du jour, then I can just blast out messages incessantly. They treat the platform like a billboard, but billboards are distracting. People eventually start to tune out. The channel gets crowded and noisy and the audience moves on.
Sales is a long game. This is especially the case for complex B2B sales where the sale relies on the currency of trust. There are no shortcuts to trust building. You can possibly shorten the time through credibility or market dominance or having the right timing. Again, that is predicated on hope, and hope is not a great basis for building a pipeline or committing forecast or surviving on commission.
Many have compared sales to a marathon, but I am not sure that captures the actual motion of managing deals. I like to think of the sale as a football drive. You will get blocked and tackled and pushed back. There are so many moving parts to monitor on your team and the opposing team. You may get penalized, fairly or unfairly, and there are dirty plays by the opposing side that never get flagged. Momentum has a huge impact and can swing widely.
To succeed in sales and win consistently, you need precision, patience, and poise.
Precision – You cannot chase everything. You need to be laser focused on your strategic objective and in the tactics you employ. That means being ruthless on the deals you work on and those you drop. Many salespeople entering a new territory or founders getting started tend to dilute their efforts targeting too many accounts, talking to too many people, and wasting cycles on middling opportunities. Sure you may miss some good deals that look ugly at the start, but you are not looking for exceptions, you are looking for repeatability in customer profile and the buying process. You are looking for why you win so that you can bottle that up to scale the sales team as the business grows. That will do way more to accelerate your growth than chasing after bad business and making poor guesses.
Patience – Not every indication of interest is an indication of intent. Prospects can show interest but have no underlying need at that time. That does not mean your simply wait till you get the RFP. By then it is too late. However you are building trust and learning more about the prospect and the company. You are gathering intelligence to connect the dots so that you can position yourself as the obvious choice when the opportunity arises. The opposite of patience is simply wasting time on spray and pray demos, pitch decks, and tire kicking conference calls. That is what the amateurs do. The professionals understand when to deploy their resources for maximum impact and build mini-commitments from their prospects. The scrubs straight up pitch and lay down the hard sell right after inviting a prospect to connect on LinkedIn. They smell of desperation. The pros add value in each interaction, freely share insights, establish credibility, and build a bridge of trust that eventually leads to a sale.
Poise – Sales has more ups and down than any other profession. It is easy to lose focus and let emotions drive, particularly when you are staring at a huge quota. Where are the deals going to come from? Will I have enough time to close the business? Are we getting squeezed in the marketplace? A lot of things you simply cannot control. You can only control you. Your ability to respond to the challenge is the grit that will prop you up when against the ropes. Grit is your forward momentum to drive to the first down and then some. The greats keep the situation in perspective and move ahead, sometimes using the playbook and sometimes improvising. The acknowledge mistakes and broken plays, but don’t get caught up in blame or regret. They stay in the game and find a way to win.
There are no easy formulas for sales. I do share tactics and tools and practices on occasion in these posts. That is because there are time when those things can be helpful to correct the more egregious errors. I am a big proponent for example of call recording and analysis software to use data for improving cold calling. The are some really great tools for building and cleaning up prospecting lists. Tools to facilitate remote collaboration with teammates, prospects, and customers has helped us stay productive in the middle of a pandemic.
Ultimately though, success in sales starts with the right mindset. The ingredients of the sales mindset are precision, patience and poise. Once you adopt that mindset, you can achieve much more consistent success and amplify the value of your successes.
What do you think has contributed most to your success? Please do share how you have found success in the long game of sales, I would love to hear your thoughts and share those with the Enterprise Sales Forum community!