Do you have Sales X-Factor?

In part 1 of my blog on what makes star sales professionals, I discussed the need to understand the human mind – how do they react under different situations and make decisions as key to being successful. While that’s important, its only one piece of a two part puzzle. The other is how do a set of human with different minds of their own interact in an organizational set-up and under different situations? What behaviors from you will drive an entire ecosystem to work alongside you and who/what will they depend on to make their decisions? The answer to this lies in a deep understanding of organization psychology and how different divisions come together to achieve various objectives.

Doing these things well will give you enough time to formulate your pitch, sharpen the articulation and leave behind those one or two key messages which will linger on & get you in the reckoning.

Let me give you an example

A large telecom provider is facing a tepid business environment which drives a radical change towards productivity and efficiency improvement. There is a huge focus across business and technology on cost reduction through rationalization of people, automation and process improvement. The organizational structure was streamlined removing several layers.

Understand the organizational context

There is huge sense of insecurity across the organization. Given the focus on productivity and efficiency, the historical operating model carries a negative context and everyone associated with that is perceived adversely. This includes the people within the customer organization as well as those outside linked to the legacy ways of working.  The new team is goaled with challenging the ways of working.

Take time to understand your key stakeholder’s current context of decision making

It’s very important to understand what objectives each organization unit within your customer serves. What is the current context of the key stakeholders within those divisions? What are their alignment and interaction mechanisms with other divisions?

What should be your strategy?

If you are the incumbent partner, how should your strategy change?

-          Acknowledge the change first

-          Understand the organizational structure, get a sense of individual measures of success

-          Critical to understand your customers new org culture since that will be a derivative of how and who they decide to go with.

-          Has the org culture changed? How are people rewarded? Is it conservative or taking risks is good

-          Depending on your understanding of how different divisions within your customer interact, your strategy and execution structures will need to vary.

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Star Sales Professionals - Are you wired right?

Many have wondered what makes successful sales professionals. What’s the key to this magic formula which can help companies unlock millions, even billions of dollars in value? Different personas come to mind - Successful sales people should have extrovert personality traits – outgoing, ability to make connections and sustain strong relationships or the consulting sales avatar.

All with the intent to get into the minds of the decision makers and the organization one is selling to. How do you do that? Ability to have a strong understanding of human psychology is perhaps now more than ever the most important characteristic in successfully converting sales opportunities.

Let me explain this with an example

I recently came across a scenario where a mid-sized retailer has gone through a major leadership change – new CEO who brings in a new leadership team to arrest sagging business performance and market share loss to larger Tier 1 players.  

Understand the decision context

The new CEO starts off aggressively addressing the market share issue –

·         Focus on acquisitions – makes select acquisitions in blue ocean market segment consolidating the retailer’s position

·         Places bets on few products – assesses the product value chain across operations and technology, identifying gaps like slower time to market, low business automation etc.

·         Change the culture to an inclusive one with greater ownership and accountability to employees and investors

Technology and operations has been seen as laggards and growth inhibitors. The new leadership team was tasked with a larger transformational agenda to make the business process efficient and change its own culture.  

Take time to understand your key stakeholder’s current context of decision making

Past context - In the previous role, this CIO has balanced risks with business model transformation – selectively taking risks in areas which required significant change, leaving others on existing models which were under acceptable levels of outcomes.

Current Context – The CIO had to bring in a new leadership team and create a culture of accountability and ownership. The mandate was to radically transform technology – deliver key business outcomes and ensure stability & resilience.

What clicked?

From analysis of human psychology, it was found that the CIO forms an own opinion rather than rely on the team, but takes them along on every step. Using the right language with the right words resonating with the CIO’s decision making philosophy was important. Also, engaging in conversations around the challenges which will come and how to prepare the organization to face them was critical. Analysis also showed that the CIO expected transparency and honesty, even if that meant compromising your organization’s revenue prospects in the short term.  

It’s important for sales professionals to have a strong understanding of human psychology of their stakeholders at various levels within the prospect organization – it’s a skill more important than anything else.

In my next post, I will reveal another key attribute in star sales professionals.

 

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