Master the Art of Selling: Top Strategies from Sales Negotiation Experts

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Sell us on the importance of sales skills.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that it's no secret I start really every semester, especially with newer students, that you're not going to offend me. In fact, I'd rather we get all the stereotypes of sales out of the way. So we typically start with when you hear the word sales, what do you think of? Inevitably, you hear things like sleazy, pushy, unethical. You're going to hear basically the worst version of the case, if you will. And then we usually ask the question that okay, when you think of the word service, what do you think about? And you think about helpful. You think about somebody who's trying to help a customer, help a client, help people. You think about somebody who's Asking questions, who's being empathetic. And that's really where for us as a program, what we think about is servant selling in the idea that can you have a very successful career and make a really healthy living selling? Absolutely you can. But if you start with that idea of I'm just here to make money, then yeah, you're probably going to do some pretty unethical, some pretty bad things. Rather, if you start with the idea that, hey, I'm here to help people, that's what I want to do. That's really why I'm here. That's what a salesperson inherently should be doing, is helping a customer, helping somebody discover problems, find a solution and ultimately push forward. That's really where I think that we start seeing the light bulbs. Kind of click on to your point. We're always selling whether you want to be a salesperson or not. If you go through a job interview process and there's interviews, it's a sales call. Realistically, it's a sales call for yourself, but you're still having that conversation and you're still following the process. It's interesting. One of the things that recently we took over in the sales program was enrollment, basically recruiting for undergraduate admissions here within the College of Business. And we started really with the mindset of, hey, it's a sales call. When you're sitting down and meeting with a 17 year old high school student, their family, their friends, maybe aunt, uncle, guardian, grandparent, whoever it may be, ultimately you're having a sales conversation. You're trying to assess, hey, what are you looking for in a university? What are you looking for in a business school education? What are you looking for those pieces? Then ultimately by asking those questions, you can identify what are the value propositions, what are the areas that you can actually deliver for the student or their decision making unit. And so that's really where for us we think about, hey, how can you really apply the sales process? Whether your title has sales in it or not, whether you consider yourself a salesperson or not. We really feel like the skills of being able to ask really good questions to identify what's most important, that skill's not going away. If anything, it's become more and more prevalent and important because it's one of the areas that realistically AI and other technologies can't really automate away very well. It's that human connection, it's the emotional connection, it's being able to have those conversations that we really feel like is fairly future proofed.

Yeah, you're spot on. And that's one of the things, when you think about the Turing test in artificial intelligence. Can the computer be smart enough to trick a human that it is not a computer? Right. Still haven't figured that one out. Which is great because you're right. Ultimately, it's job security. Your humanity and putting skills behind your humanity is the thing that ensures your viability in the professional world. So very well said and critical. And the reality is too, because we're all selling in different ways. And I think if you bring that healthy mentality around selling and then empower people to realize that selling is not a bad word and they are selling any every day, so you might as well learn how to do it well, I think that's really powerful. And you're putting the students in a good place to succeed in the long term.

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The dynamics of sales are changing. And so what may have worked five, 10 years ago, it's not working the same way now. So can you tell us a bit more about those changes?

Absolutely, yeah. I think when you really look at the broader sales landscape, you're seeing consultative sales approaches, relationship based sales approaches, really becoming the go to or the king. Ultimately, what we're really seeing is if it was able to be automated, it probably was automated away. And that's really where you started seeing your more transactional sales approaches. Or industries realistically don't have nearly the same degree of demand of salespeople they would traditionally have. Realistically, kind of the order taker, if you will, is going away because it's just inefficient, you know, paying somebody to sit, you know, and wait for a phone call to place an order is, you know, not necessarily that efficient. When you can, you know, set up a shopify for what, a hundred bucks a month and you have a really nice website and, you know, you're good, you know, what isn't going away and really, if anything is becoming Even more prevalent is a consultative seller, you know, somebody who's leading with insight, somebody who, you know, sees the overall marketplace, really becomes an expert in their, in their sector, in their industry and is able to provide value to their customers and clients in ways that aren't just what the product itself is even focused in on, but in ways that are truly a business advisor or trusted advisor. What we've really seen, and I think that's really the culmination of why for some of the audience that knows the Challenger sale that book came out in, but now it's close to 10 years old. I think the area that we've seen really take off within that book is the idea of insight selling. So the idea of you don't just go to your customer client with this idea of hey, here's what I have, what do you want to buy? You really go with the idea of we're going to do market research, we're going to look for ways that we can provide value to you. Maybe not even just with the product or service, but tangential to it. I think that you're starting to see even industries that have traditionally been commodity based industries shifting much more towards are there additional services that we could offer? There's this concept of servitization within marketing. So the idea of, and you're seeing in a bunch of the more even traditional manufacturing industries selling basically add on services, added on data services into their actual core product. I think about a Rolls Royce engine for planes. You know, they're now selling major data packages along with the engines themselves. And that really comes out of the fact of hey, you know, we want to protect the, protect our lead, but it's not just on the product side, it's on hey, what else can we actually help provide our customers with? So that's really one area where I think we're seeing more and more of that demand of really organizations that hire salespeople that can ask great questions and can actually listen to the answers to those great questions and use those answers to help ultimately everyone involved in the sales process.

Yeah, that's incredible. And it really helps to identify why it's so important to stay up on your training, whether it's sales or negotiations, because things change. We're living in a dynamic world, but a lot of our education is static. So most people are either under educated or completely uneducated when it comes to their specific field. So we just happen upon a career in sales or happen upon a career in procurement. And then now it's like, oh, I'm negotiating or selling for a living? Never got training, but I learned on the fly. That's good enough. That's what you want the pilot to say, too. It makes sense. We have to constantly update these skills. When you think about the people who are out there say, listen, thanks, Greg. This is cute and everything, this newfangled new school approach to selling. I was doing Challenger. I've been making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why do I need to change? What is the risk? What would you say to that person who's stuck in their ways of doing selling the old way?

Yeah, I think there's really that idea of we have choices, right? Really, at any given time, you have an inflection point, you have the opportunity to say, hey, do you want to stay the status quo or do you want to make a change? And if you stay the status quo, ultimately what we know is you're not really staying the status quo. You're actually declining relative to the people who say, take an alternative path. And so realistically, I hear this sometimes from typically more older school sellers, if you will, folks that say, hey, I've been doing this for 20 years, 30 years. I don't need to change. Somebody else needs to change. I hear that a lot from especially managers, leaders, as they were recruiting, especially millennials. I'm a millennial myself, but I would hear a lot of these millennials need to understand that the world isn't like how they think it is, and they need to adapt to us and make those changes. And certainly there's a kernel of truth there as well. I'm not going to completely discount the critique, but I also really have heard a lot around, look, the younger workforces, they want different things. In some cases, in all honesty, it's to the company's benefit of what they want. But it does require the idea of you will have to make some changes. I really think about it as if you want to take the status quo approach, then you're declining because someone else is out there and they are making changes. It's the same idea of when you think about the postmortems of these giant corporations, these S&P 500 companies, that ultimately they wake up one day and it's like the startup has eaten their lunch and they're like, oh, woe is me. How could this possibly happen? It's like, well, it didn't happen overnight. Honestly, it happened off of a bunch of small decisions, a bunch of small choices around. We don't want to adapt, we don't want to change, we don't want to continuously improve. That's really where I think that honestly, to some extent, a lot of, to our earlier point, a lot of the institutions of higher education have taken more of the status quo approach. I think the organizations that have not, the colleges and universities that haven't, honestly, the proof's in the pudding. You can take a look at the enrollment levels and you can see that a lot of the universities that have made adaptations and changed the way they have taught what they're teaching are more successful because your customers and clients aren't dumb. And you're really not going to get away with just say, hey, this is how it always is. So just trust me. I think that that's a big area where for us, we're seeing more and more of that idea of dividends because we made changes and made choices a few years ago. The program just continues to grow because of those choices.

Yeah, that's great. I think that's a fantastic answer because you're right, everything changes. And if you're just staying stagnant, you are slipping behind. When you think about who was on the Fortune 500 list 20 years ago, it looks very different from what it looks like now. And those people thought they were rock solid and now they're slipping be behind if they still exist, you know, so that's legit. So how about we just start off with identifying whether or not it's a good deal. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Yeah. So, I mean, when I was in sales, I did 10 years of corporate sales for Xerox and American Express. And at the end of the day, we lived in this, you know, kill and eat type of mentality. Right? You were always going after whatever was, was showing up. And. And as even entrepreneurs sometimes we often filter out whether a client is a good prospect or not as well. Do they have a CR credit card and a pulse? And that sounds like a really good idea. Only to find out that if we pursue every single opportunity like that, we can end up getting stuck in what I like to call the winner's curse. You can sometimes win the deal and then curse yourself every single day that you're dealing with this terrible client, the one that's taking up too much time, demanding way too much, doesn't understand the value. And so when we started the program, Kosales U, I wanted us to start looking at from a different complete mind shift, where it wasn't that we had to go out there and talk to every single person, but rather ask yourself, when I'm sitting In an opportunity with a client, is this the right person for me? Do they fit that ideal buyer Persona for myself? Do I want to work with them? When I understand what their goals and ambitions are, does that make me really excited? And if the answer is no, I think we need to be much more careful and respect ourselves a little bit more in the idea that we can actually walk away from those opportunities. We'll talk a little bit more about, you know, whether they have the budget and, you know, and other types of lead qualification aspects of this. But when we start to understand that, you know, we don't need to say yes to everybody that has that credit card and the pulse, we can actually hold ourselves as a higher ground and ultimately it will allow our prospects to want us even more.

I love this point, and it's a fantastic point because a lot of times when we are in those types of conversations, when we have the opportunity to close a deal, we feel almost obligated to do so. And whenever I'm working with people, I talk about the fact that negotiation isn't the art of deal making, it's the art of deal discovery, coming together with.

The other side to figure out whether.

Or not a deal even exists. And I really like the point that you made about determining whether or not it's a good fit by your level of excitement. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So, I mean, when we're going and getting to that lead qualification side, even determining if it's the right deal, old school sales was really focused on, well, what's your client's challenge, what's their problem and can you solve that problem? And, and this is really stemmed from, you know, Challenger really owned the space in this, the Challenger sales model, which was, you know, find out what the client's problem is, put a band aid on that problem, and, you know, it's all fixed. And so one of the things that we would say when I was working in corporate sales, I mean, this was an iconic question that we would ask is, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Customer, what is keeping you up at night? And we would like use that as the forefront of starting the conversation. Now here's the reality is that, I mean, in today's day and age, Dr. Google and WebMD have solved every problem for everyone that has ever existed. You know, there are no problems for our clients anymore. And anything that they feel that they have, they just go to Google, search and they find, you know, the top four vendors that can, you know, appease them and, or they're WikiHowing the solution and they find out the solution is just way too difficult. They're like, well, maybe it's not that much of a problem anymore. We don't want to be band aid solutions at the end of the day, right? We're not looking for the bleeding wound so we can throw a band aid on it. But rather we want to help our clients achieve more. We want to be the catalysts and the opportunities as, you know, partners in a lifetime of discovery. What more do you want to achieve, Mr. And Mr. Customer? Right. What are your goals, what are your aspirations and how do you align with them? And it's so important to understand what those big picture goals are because number one, if the deal goes south, hopefully their goals haven't dramatically changed. And you can always go back to that point and continue to recreate a good solution. The other thing behind this is that most people aren't looking for unless they're in a pain, like a seriously painful solution, which actually might be a red flag on the deals that we actually walk away from altogether. But I mean, when people are looking for romantic relationships and romantic partners, we don't choose the person that we're going to walk down the aisle with because they just solve us the pain of being single. Like, boo hoo hoo, I'm so sad, I'm so lonely, I'm so single, right? Like, I'm just going to find somebody that's going to solve that pain, but rather we marry the person that is going to help us achieve our goals and our aspirations better, faster with, with more fun and excitement than anyone else. Like, you know, I want to, I want to build my career, I want to go traveling, I want to, you know, start a family. And we're going to find somebody that aligns with that. And our clients are no different than that. I mean, we need to start looking at this. Not that we're going to be marrying every single client, but at the end of the day, if you want your clients to be lifetime partners with you, I mean, why don't we start looking at how we can help them achieve more? Not just, you know, can we solve quick pain all the way through?

This is brilliant. I think that's a really great approach because you're right, a lot of times we do focus on those pain points. How can I solve that pain? And I think when it comes to the human desire, we are more focused on getting toward comfort. So that might be a quicker way to get that sale. But it doesn't really help us determine Whether or not it's a good sale. Because like you said, we're, we're talking about long term solutions. Because once that pain is gone, you might not be the best fit at that point. Is, is that what I'm hearing?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, when you are goal and ambition and aspirational oriented, I mean, there's always something more the clients can use with you or they, they have the opportunity. Like, you know, listen, Kwame helped me get from here to here, right, because of what he did. I mean, you know, my business has grown. I mean, we're, we're more profitable than we ever have been, you know, Dot, duh. Whereas, you know, if you're just being pain oriented, you know, what, what's the challenge? What's the pain? What are you suffering from? It's like, well, you know, I went with them because my website sucked and now it doesn't suck nearly as much anymore. And you're like, well, that's fantastic. Like, what more can we do for you? We want our clients to get to a point where they would stand on a mountaintop and sing our praises. And we only do that for the partners and the vendors that we work with because we have helped us achieve that much more. We've moved ourselves, we punched through ceilings, and we are so much greater than we were before. So we need to have those bigger conversations with clients so that we can help align with what they will get after they are finished working with us. Not just what will they get once we're done. It's what do they achieve so much further beyond that timeline.

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