Best Sales Practices Breakthrough

Why do so many projects fail?

By Jacques Werth, President, High Probability Selling

Stumped as to why your top-notch reps continually outshine your lower performers? Both are probably following the same list of best sales practices and contacting the same caliber of clients—so what gives?

It seems obvious that if a company has their entire sales force doing what their top salespeople do, then it should greatly improve their sales productivity. Nonetheless, most companies that utilize best sales practices research are producing only small incremental productivity improvements at best. As it turns out, the majority of best sales practices research, SFA and CRM projects have failed because consultants automate what they believe are the "best sales practices" of their clients' salespeople. However, many of the best practices identified are largely fictional.

Current research begins with the assumption that the best salespeople are using the best combination of known sales techniques—in the right order—and that they are aware of how to apply those techniques.

The prevailing research methodology is to interview the top salespeople to determine how they sell. Then, those top salespeople meet to combine their techniques in a logical order and agree on an outline of their best sales practices. However, the current assumptions are flawed. As a result, they are producing flawed sales processes.

If you observe the top one percent of salespeople while they are selling, the methodology will quickly reveal the following points.

* 84 percent of the top salespeople do not use many known sales techniques in any order: They do not meet with interested prospects, persuade and convince prospects to buy, build rapport, identify needs, give presentations or overcome objections. They seldom understand, or can accurately describe, what they are doing.

* Most of the top one percent have learned their sales practices intuitively. Because they have little contact with other top salespeople, no common terminology has been developed to describe how they sell.

*When asked, they make an honest attempt to describe their methods in common sales jargon. However, when observed at work, they are not doing what they have described during interviews.

Interviewing the top sales producers and determining which known sales techniques they favored does not reveal what they were actually doing. The key then is to determine what the top salespeople are doing that the vast majority of salespeople are not doing.

The fact is that most of the top producers have developed entirely new sales behaviors, techniques and processes to take advantage of the communication, technological, psychographic, and business process changes in virtually every market. They have abandoned the basic premises of the 70-year-old Needs Selling paradigm—including its modern incarnations such as Consultative Selling, Spin Selling and Solution Selling.

These discoveries revealthe most significant paradigm shift in the history of selling—the beginning of a new "Wants Selling" paradigm. The process within that paradigm derives most of its power from the following factors.

1. The ability to devote most of the salesperson's time and resources to high probability prospects.

2. The ability to forge immediate relationships of mutual trust and respect.

3. The ability to obtain mutually beneficial agreements and commitments.

4. The ability to close more business in less time.

5. They establish long-term relationships of mutual trust and respect that tends to keep out their competition as long as their products and services are satisfactory.

The result is a step-by-step sales process that is radically different from those in use by the Fortune 1,000. It closely emulates the sales performance of the top one percent. Therefore, it is highly effective. Almost any industry can utilize the process. However, it is important to customize each step of the process based on how the top salespeople of client companies utilize them.

While this new sales process will not make the average salesperson as productive as the top one percent, it can enable most salespeople to increase their sales productivity by twenty to fifty percent.