The Art & Science of Selling – Part 1: An Interview with William Bangert

The trend toward insight-led selling

One of the most significant trends in the last 10 years we’ve noticed, is the urgency in many sales organizations to integrate the more assertive, insight-driven selling methods that top performing salespeople use into the core sales process the entire sales team uses.  After the 2008/2009 economic crisis, researchers found that the consultative, relationship building selling style, that had been taught for decades, was not generating the best results. Salespeople using a more assertive approach that challenged the thinking of decision makers and reframed their buying criteria generated a lot more sales. This research changed the thinking of sales executives around the world. The difficulty was how do you train sales teams to be more assertive without turning them into pushy jerks that alienate prospects and customers?

William offers an insight into this paradox…

“There is an aspect of selling which is confrontational. Even if it’s very subliminal and low-key you still have to do the basics. You’ve got to ask for the sale, suggest the product, and handle the initial objection. You can’t be overly aggressive because that irritates people and they back off, but if you don’t have the basic raw material to make the suggestion in the first place then you never make the sale either.”

SalesGym research into this changing trend…

What we found, in working with thousands of salespeople on consulting and training projects over the last 20 years, is that what was not reported in the initial books about these more assertive sellers is that it isn’t just their more assertive approach that generates superior results. They’re able to be more assertive, in a helpful way because they do five things better than most salespeople:

Salespeople simply cannot be more effective by just asking more assertive questions and pointing out where prospects and customers are wrong or misguided in their thinking. It has to be done in conjunction with strong consultative, relationship building skills and fantastic sales messaging. Decision makers do not do business with people they don’t like. We wrote an entire book on the topic called Compete Selling but the reality is, salespeople need a lot of training and continued coaching to master this more effective approach.

Interestingly, many sales organizations are doing less real sales training and coaching than what was done by leading organizations in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s as William points out…

“There has been a decline in sales training and sales mentoring at the junior level across all Industries. It used to be that you could buy a book on selling in a bookstore in an airport and you wouldn’t have to read very far before there were references to how IBM, Xerox, or GE train their salespeople.  We just don’t have those same examples today, of companies that do a great job training people in sales skills at an early stage. For whatever reason there is not as much of an investment in this area anymore.”

What we hear from salespeople & sales managers

We survey salespeople and their managers extensively before we start new training projects and what we hear repeatedly, regardless of the industry or size of the organization is:

We’ve found that the best sales organizations approach training and coaching the way elite sports teams do with more attention on practice, rehearsal and how to perform under pressure.  There’s a time and place for going over game film and reading the playbooks, but it’s the time spent on the practice field rehearsing the plays and practicing with real pressure that improves performance.  This is what sales teams need more of. William makes an interesting observation related to this…

“Selling has become too theoretical. There has been a march of books for over 20 years, starting from the 80’s and 90’s, stuff like Miller Heiman and Strategic Selling, which have attempted to go from the original sales theory; open-ended questioning techniques, uncovering hidden wants and needs, pivoting and close ended question techniques leading to different types of closing techniques. these books say there is structure to these large Enterprise Organizations that you’re trying to sell to and you’ve got to understand that structure and where the money flows and who has the influence and so on in order to make this happen. Eventually we get to the point where selling has become this sort of theoretical pursuit where people read about it in a book, but no one sticks them behind the wheel and makes them spin around the parking lot to see if they can control the vehicle.”

The four critical questions…

Certainly, the buying process in many organizations has gotten more complex with a wide variety of decision influencers that have to be brought into the process in order to win the sale. We need to ask a lot of questions, do research, bring insights to the table and all of that, but at some point, the key decision makers need answers to some very basic questions:

When we start a new training project, we find it helpful to do some baseline testing with a cross section of salespeople in that company. What we do is ask these salespeople to identify a prospect they know reasonably well because they’ve done research, had several meetings, asked a lot of questions and understand their concerns.  Then we ask them to talk to us as if talking directly to that prospect and we ask them those four questions and record their answers and then play those responses to sales managers and executives for their evaluation.

95% of the time, what we hear is utter frustration and disappointment at how poorly the average salesperson responds to these most basic softball questions. It is at this moment they realize how critical it is to start the training with fundamental sales messaging, as in:

We find these to be the core ingredients of a great sales call. Just as a master chef needs fantastic process in their cooking method, they also need the highest quality ingredients. Sales messaging are the ingredients salespeople must use to win the credibility and differentiation challenge. When they get better at sales messaging, their results immediately improve because their confidence and ability to effectively manage the sales process gets better.  All too often, sales training today is focused on how to fly the plane in storm conditions before they’ve learned how to take off and land in perfect weather.

“The person who’s got the intellectual thought behind the sales process and is willing to challenge a customer a little bit actually turns out to be the most successful. Selling I think is an art form, it’s a performance, like acting. While there is a theory behind acting and you can go to acting school, you’re not going to learn to act by reading a book and turning in a written assignment. It is a necessary part of being in acting school to go up there on stage and do the part and get critiqued and do it again and again, which is the practice part of it.” — William Bangert

Steps to a faster improving sales organization

Sales leaders can quickly transform their sales organizations by focusing first on creating a dynamic practice culture that begins with mastery of sales messaging.  Here are 5 keys to rapidly improving your sales teams:

And, a final thought on the art of selling by William…

“Selling is nevertheless a performance and it is storytelling and a lot of the same skills are applicable to acting. Strong and effective sales leaders do some basic things like insist on having a rehearsal or role play around the client presentation that’s going to happen or  create breakout opportunities at sales meetings to actually have people deliver these kinds of practice experiences.”

The SalesGym is a research, consulting, and training company that works with and learns from sales teams all over the world and has refined a coaching and training process that trains sales teams the way elite athletes are trained.  More insights and articles from us can be found on our RESOURCES PAGE.