Fly's Friday Five: Recent Episodes

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I want to talk about some specifics around that, and I want to reference some ideas that Russ Sharer and Michelle Richardson pointed out in Chapter Six of their book, Agile and Resilient: Sales Leadership for the New Normal. There are a couple of ideas I think that really resonate with us right now. One is that sales teams need to be agile –not fragile. I love that term. And why do they need to be agile? Well, I think that we're all experiencing this, but 90% of business leaders believe that the rate of change and the rate of ambiguity is going to increase –not decrease –in coming months. We've just seen two years of ambiguity and unconventional times, and most business leaders see that continuing. So, that would speak to it right there. And what we've seen in the past is that companies that are disciplined are rewarded, and those that do not pivot or make appropriate changes are punished in the marketplace.

We want the friends of The Brooks Group to be rewarded and to hear from us what we believe are the keys to having a good end of the year, a good pivot, and an agile sales team. First, I think it's an appropriate time for companies to be thinking about the sales organization –the size of it, the makeup of it, the roles in it, and the KPIs associated with it. This is, I think, a natural time to really do a post mortem on the enterprise and on the organization, to see if you're lined up with the realities of today's marketplace.

There are five things that are going on that we think are causing significant shifts or a change in behavior from salespeople.

1. Team buying continues to increase. It's not just one person inside of an organization that are making the buying decisions. There's a team of folks associated with that. And in the book, Russ and Michelle talk about the idea of contact mapping (access our free Account Mapping download tool here). The idea is to understand who is actually making the decision? Who are the influencers? What's the process look like?

2. The C-suite continues to be involved. At least that's what we're seeing. What does that mean for a seller? Well, it means you need to be better prepared. You need to ask good questions, and you need to come across as knowledgeable about your business, but also about theirs. Don't waste the time of the folks in the C-Suite is really the bottom line there.

3. Purchasing is your friend, not your foe. They often feel like they're your foe because you feel like they're creating drag in the sales process. It's incumbent on the buyer to understand what's important to procurement. What is the process that they're using? How are they being judged? What's of value to them? If you understand that, frankly,you will make a friend out of them, and you'll have much more success and much less friction in the selling process.

4. Marketing and sales need to be aligned. We recommend that they meet weekly to talk about what they're experiencing. Marketing needs to understand the sort of challenges that the salespeople are being asked to solve. They need to be knowledgeable of what sort of trends are going on in the marketplace. And they need to develop content and collateral that supports the sellers in the real time environment that the sellers find themselves faced with.

5. Customers want a seamless experience. The way we believe you get there is to have team selling enabled with good technology so that if a potential client reaches the account manager or project manager as opposed to the salesperson, they still know what's going on inside of that account. The customer wants it to feel seamless. They want to be able to talk to anybody inside the account and get good information in real time that map's back to what they've been told before.

So, as we talk about an agile team, those are the sorts of attributes that we believe they need to have. Happy to discuss it, happy to debate it, happy to provide more information. As I mentioned you can access our Account Mapping download tool. And if you'd like a copy of the book reach out to me –my email is gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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Gergen posed a question –how do leaders navigate a world where their values and culture may not align with their followers? I don't know if that sounds familiar to anybody. But I've had a lot of discussions recently with leaders, and I think it's a challenge as we think about the multiple generations that we're all interacting with on a daily basis, and just the rapid change in the world today.And to that point, I think there are five things that we could work on, that really do help us ensure that we are providing good leadership to that whole wide spectrum of people that that are followers.

1. Understand the nuances of human behavior. What a great phrase that Gergan uses “the nuances of human behavior.” We at The Brooks Group talk a lot about this, and we actually have some great assessments to help with that –The Brooks Talent Index and the Emotional Quotient (EQ) Assessment. In addition, our training is really based on this idea of understanding those nuances, and that really starts with being self-aware. We all have to be aware of ourselves, I think, to really appreciate the nuances and others.

2. Recognize the importance of humility. This came out of the Good to Greatbooks by Jim Collins. Apparently, he started the book dismissing the importance of leadership by saying, how important could one person be? Or how important could a leader really be in the outcomes? He determined that it was critically important, and the one trait he found that was critical was humility. He also had a second thought that I thought was really interesting. Collins wrote that he was “surprised at the impact of leadership, and that the best leaders blended personal humility, with an intense personal will.” Again, I think as sales leaders, as company leaders, we have to have both of those –personal will and humility.

3. Watch out for self-derailment. Often leaders trip themselves up, and it comes from not doing what you expect others to do. It comes from not following through on your commitments. It comes from pretending that the rules don't apply to you. So, I think if you find yourself doing those sorts of things, you're going to struggle.

4. Learn from new models of leadership. We've seen organizations come to together very quickly over the last several years, and we see leaders communicating differently, we see leaders interacting with their teams differently. So, there's an entire genre of leadership out there that represents a new model. I think it's important to understand those and to take some best practices.

5.Seek guidance from the past. I just talked about the new model, but there’s value in both of these things. We all have experiences, we've all learned lessons over the life, we have to reflect back on those. We've heard this phrase about history and repeating itself. Mark Twain actually captured it very nicely. He said, “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” I think that's a great way to think about it –that it may not repeat itself exactly, but there's going to be some parallels. And we need to seek guidance from the past so that we can navigate those uncharted waters, using that experience.

I hope these things make sense. It was a it was a very interesting book, and there was one last quote Mary Oliver wrote, that really touched me:

“Tell me what you're planning to do with your one wild and precious life.”

I think that's a great sentiment for us all to be thinking about whether we think about it in the workplace as leaders or just as people. I hope this added some value to you and that you find some helpful hints in it. We'd love to discuss it or debate it. Always happy to answer more questions, feel free to reach out at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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*Side note: I don't know if you all are members of associations or groups like Vistage, but I find it to be hugely valuable, and they have great research that I use pretty regularly.

So clearly, CEOs are concerned about a few things, and that's been driven by these macro events. Inflation, interest rates, wage increases, the talk of recession, and all of the things that we keep hearing about as business leaders and sales people –these are things that we're being challenged with. And remember, the people we're selling to are also hearing these same messages. So, it's a really interesting time for salespeople and sales leaders.

We'd like to suggest to you that there are five things that you can do right now to help assuage some of these fears:

• See reality and take action. Acknowledge where you are. Acknowledge industries or verticals you're selling into. Look at who's being successful in selling and what they're doing, but see reality and take action based on that reality.
• Establish a trusted advisor relationship with clients and potential clients. Russ Sharer and Michelle Richardson talk about this in their book, Agile & Resilient: Sales Leadership for the New Normal. And it's not about just shipping a lot of information to folks; it's not about just giving them content; it's really around providing information that's helpful to particular clients at a particular point in time. So, it's sort of personalizing that information that you send to them.
• Understand and sell your value. We recently went through an exercise where we interviewed successful clients that we've worked with, as well as clients that didn't choose us. And we did some competitor research to really understand what makes us unique and why people are buying from us. Now we're selling on those points. It's important for our sellers to understand that and to be able to articulate it. It is a critical time, I think, to sell on value.
• Arm your team with training and tools. They need to be confident, and when they go to the marketplace, they need to be trained on what they're selling. They need to have the tools to help them be successful sellers. This is a critical time to invest in tools and training in your team.
• Support your sellers. I think that ranges for a lot of different things. It can be marketing and making sure your sales team and your marketing team are aligned. It can be ensuring that you're pointing them to the correct prime prospect –make sure that they're hunting in the right waters, if you will.

So, I think that those five things are critical to do right now, and I think that that's the way you're going to sell your way through these macro headwinds. Always happy to discuss, always happy to debate. We'd be happy to provide more information if you would like. Feel free to reach out to me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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One is around prospecting. The second is around talent. I will lump these together and talk about the basics of selling, the basics of leadership, and the basics of running a business. This week, I had a conversation with Courtney Collins and Sherry Stephenson of The Business Journal, and they were talking about prospecting, and how that has become different in their world.

Their issues really spoke to the items that we have talked about in last week's video. If you have some questions around prospecting, happy to refer you back to the last week's video here.

Also, here is a free resource that I hope you find to be a useful tool. It's a tool that we use in our training programs, and I think it could add value to your sales initiatives.

The other topic that keeps coming up is talent. We hear right now about difficulty in hiring good people. We talk about turnover; we hear about turnover. Retention is an issue, and so talent management really seems to be bubbling up in the sales world as an important issue, as well as just the general business world, I think.

I believe there are five things you can do to really impact your talent management strategy, or to improve what results you're getting on the talent side.

• First is when you hire people, I think it's critical to identify what a successful candidate really looks like – what skills, attributes, behaviors, and motivators do they have, what sort of relevant work experience, decision making skills, all those sorts of things. You need to understand really, what success looks like in the position. You need to identify the people that have those attributes. We use an assessment tool called the Brooks Talent Index to do that. We also use a benchmarking process to really identify the needs inside of a job, and what the critical attributes are. I believe that sort of rigor is the sort of rigor you ought to be applying in your own businesses to whatever position you're hiring.

• Second, we talked about basics. I believe that onboarding and training are critical elements in the success of your team. I'm amazed at some company's lack of attention to onboarding. I think about an employee's first day of work, they come in, they're excited, probably a little bit nervous, they've obviously made a commitment to the enterprise. I think the enterprise needs to be cognizant of that and reward it right, we need to welcome people, and we need to have a clearly articulated onboarding schedule and agenda with learning objectives that map back to their job, and help them be successful.

• Third, is you need to provide regular coaching. We've talked about that time and time again, in fact, Michelle Richardson and Russ Sharer in their book, Agile and Resilient: Sales Leadership for the New Normal – talk about this in chapters nine and ten. It's absolutely critical to provide regular coaching that's predictable and that maps back to a set of KPIs or expectations inside the job that the person is well aware of.

• Fourth is communication. You need to communicate regularly to your entire team, to the individuals, and be proactive in it, think about what's going on inside the enterprise and share that, think about what you're trying to convey to the marketplace and convey that to your team. It's critical to be proactive and open in your communication to your team.

• The fifth thing is a little bit different, I think it's important that you treat your coworkers like adults. We're all professionals. We're all out trying to earn a living, we're all trying to do the best we can do. It's not a parent-child relationship inside of an enterprise. It's truly a peer-to-peer, professional-to-professional, adult-to-adult relationship. You need to embrace that and all that you do as a leader inside of an organization.

I hope these things make sense. I hope they add value to what you're trying to do. I'd be happy to discuss or debate these with you to provide more information if that would be helpful. Always feel free to reach out to me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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I believe that there are companies that are not going to survive, and there are companies that are going to thrive. Those that will thrive will be the ones that figure out sooner rather than later how to sell in these current uncertain times. I want to share a number of resources with you today:

The reason I mentioned those upfront is, over the last two weeks, I’ve had a series of discussions and have been exposed to these articles and more things that created an “a-ha” for me – I keep hearing about some sales basics not being in place. At a recent client meeting, the one topic that came up time and time again was the idea of prospecting, and that their salespeople really did not know how to prospect. That got me thinking… What does that really mean? Why can’t they do that? What do they need to be able to do differently to be successful at prospecting? These articles and book that I mentioned, all came together in a way that helped me form what I believe are five things that sellers can do in today’s environment to help improve or up their prospecting game.

Before I get to that, I believe there are a few things that we as sales leaders or company leaders need to ensure are in place to really set the tone for success.

Our job is, I believe, to help build confidence with our salespeople or our leadership team. But we need to ensure that our team has the tools and training to do a good job, that they know what a good job is, and they have the basics in place to be confident about going about doing their job.

We need to provide clear direction. I think that helps build confidence. But without clear direction, I believe we’re never going to be successful.

We need to make sure that we are building human connections. These have been strange times coming out of COVID when we were physically distanced from one another. We’re now doing a lot more things virtually. And I believe that it really reinforces the need to remember that we’re humans talking about humans. And we need to have a human connection with each other.

With the stage set, I believe there are five things that you can do to help your sellers prospect better.

1.) Clearly define your ideal client. Find the target that they’re going after. Be very clear about who you’re trying to sell to, make sure your sellers understand that, and make sure they understand why you’re going after that target. Once they do, help them personalize their messaging around these different targets (remembering the idea that we’re selling to humans).

2.) Teach sellers to sell on value. Your sellers need to be well grounded on the value that your solution brings to the marketplace. If they don’t understand their value – if they don’t understand why people buy from you, or why they buy from your competitors – I believe they’re going to struggle to develop a really good value statement to the client. And they’re also going to revert to price negotiations, which is not where you want to be.

3.) Train your team to ask good questions. Again, this will help build that human-to-human connection. It will also uncover your client’s real needs. So, if your sellers are well grounded in questioning skills and listening, I believe that they will start to build trust with the client, which is actually the fourth thing…

4.) Strive to build trust with your clients. Help your salespeople realize that their goal is to build trust. They want to be a trusted advisor, and they want to be a resource solution for their clients. They can do that by recognizing that the buyer journey for each of their clients is going to be a little bit different. They’re each going to have some different needs or will have some different questions. So, the salesperson needs to understand that their job is really to help their client navigate that buyer journey in a very personalized way that builds trust.

5.) Provide your team with consistent coaching. There are a few keys to good coaching. We need to make sure that we help our team plan and organize their work. We need to make sure that they understand the objectives. They need to receive consistent coaching, and they need to all be held to consistent standards that are well known.

Always happy to discuss. Always happy to debate. Always happy to provide additional information. Please feel free to reach out to me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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It’s mid-year, a lot of earnings reports have just come out, and there seem to be a lot of readjustment. We saw recently that Walmart has tamped down their expectations a little bit. So, I think it’s a natural time to think about where we are and what we need to be doing for the rest of the year.

As I have mentioned before, I think that the companies that are that are going to be successful have to sell their way out of this malaise that we’re in. We continue to see challenges from the economic headwinds that we’re facing. McKinsey did an interesting study on sentiment from business leaders, and there are a lot of things that are causing them to be a little more pessimistic than any of us were a year ago.

That being said, I want to talk about how to sell your way through this malaise. I just met with Sherry Stevenson from the Triad Business Journal, and we had an interesting conversation. She commented that she believes that most salespeople have a challenge with selling because they simply don’t know what their clients or their potential clients need. And that’s exactly what The Brooks Group helps work on. We have a six-step process called IMPACT, and the first three steps (where you spend 70% of your time) were designed to:

• Build rapport
• Understand what’s going on with the client
• How you could be of service – or if you could be of service

Today, I have some very specific ideas for how you might improve your sales going forward for the back half of the year.

1) Audit your closed won and closed lost deals. That will allow you to direct your team, inform your marketing messaging, help with your lead generation work. But really, understanding who is (and is not) buying from you and why should help you generate priorities for your sellers on the back half of the year.

2) Audit your leads in the pipeline. Then map that back to what you learned in your closed won/closed lost audit. If you have a lot of leads in your pipeline that you’ve struggled to close in the first half of the year, maybe those leads aren’t great quality – or maybe they are good quality – but you need to approach them differently based on what you’ve learned in that postmortem work.

3) Look at your talent. We recently went through a talent exercise based on the Traction Methodology called G.W.C. – Do your people get it? Do they want it? And do they have the capacity to do it? It helps you identify: Do you have the right talent? Do they have the tools necessary to do the job? Do they have the training necessary to do the job? And are you coaching them appropriately to be successful? Determining if you have the right people in the right seats, I think, makes sense. We’re not looking to get rid of people, we’re looking to make sure people are in their best fitting job and that they are set up for success.

4) Coach, reinforce, and realign. Coach your people. Make sure that they understand what your expectations are. Make sure you’re regularly talking to them and mapping back to that. And make sure you’re providing the resources necessary for them to be successful. Then reinforce what it is you’re trying to do, and if necessary, realign. This is also a good time of the year to make sure that folks are adhering to the process that you have. And if not, it’s time to rejig that and get people back in line.

5) Talk with clients. I can’t stress this enough. Find out where your clients really are, what their needs are, why they buy from you, and if they’re frustrated or disappointed in any way. Then it’s a natural time to talk to them about next year – understand what their strategic needs are and how you could be a piece of the puzzle to help them achieve their strategic goals.

Those are my five, very specific things you can do to improve your sales on the back half of the year so that you can sell your way through the pandemic and be one of the companies that actually prospers through these difficult times.

Always happy to discuss. Always happy to debate. Always happy to provide additional information. Please feel free to reach out to me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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So, what do you do when the seller comes to you with push-back around their targets? Is it a single seller who is pushing you because they’re missing their quota or target? Or are you starting to hear a drumbeat across the organization around it? If it’s a drumbeat across the organization, then you probably need to take some action, or at least dive in a little bit deeper. In our IMPACT Selling® training, we teach the idea of going three-deep in your questions. So, I am going to use that as the baseline for a lot of suggestions I’m going to make.

• If you are hearing this across the organization, I think you need to ask yourself, “Am I missing something?” Today, Michelle Richardson put our latest The Missing Sales Link Newsletter on LinkedIn, and in it, she had a Harvard Business Review article on listening. One of the challenges from that article was to ask yourself, “Am I missing something?” So, I think you need to start with that mindset and some curiosity.
• With that idea of “Am I missing something?” in mind, it’s important to do a postmortem on closed won and closed lost deals. We recently went through an exercise where we looked at deals that we lost (and why we lost them) and deals that we won (and why we won them). Now we’re going to use that to inform our marketing and the targets that we’re going after.
• Number three is talk. Talk with your sellers, understand what they’re hearing in the marketplace, understand what their challenges and frustrations are, just really understand what’s going on in their world. Talk to your clients. Again, I think the biggest thing you can do is understand how you’re solving their problems and what challenges they are faced with. Now that we’re halfway through 2022, I think it’s an appropriate time to start talking to them about their strategic initiatives for 2023 and how you might be able to solve for that. The third part of talking, if you have the opportunity, is talk with competitors. We’re part of a great association, the ISA, and in that I have the opportunity to regularly meet with our competitors. We have very open, candid conversations, and I find it to be hugely helpful to understand the attitude and atmosphere of the marketplace in our industry right now.
• Do some competitor research! What are your competitors doing? What are they saying in the marketplace? What are they promoting on their websites? Are they hosting events? Are they participating in industry events? You can glean a lot of information between websites, press releases, and just public information. So, I would encourage you to do some competitor research. It may inform your positioning in the marketplace and may highlight some gaps in what you’re doing – or it might show you where you’re really strong.
• Audit your funnel. Start at the very top – what’s working in terms of lead generation? Is it outbound activity from your sellers? Is it some messaging on your website? Is it industry events? What is it? What’s attracting people at the very top of the funnel? Once you understand that, work your way through the funnel, and see if there are breakdowns in the sales process (you do have a process, right?) so you understand what’s happening in each segment. We’re huge believers in a sales process. You have to have a process that you can coach back to so you can understand what’s happening. So, audit your funnel and map it back to your process. This will allow you to promote the things that are working, refine the things that are not working, create marketing and collateral that supports it, and to help your sellers if they’re stuck in one phase or having challenges moving deals through the pipeline.

Again, the challenge that we’re hearing is that organizations are really struggling with the appropriateness of their KPIs and targets, and I really wanted to lay out a way to audit those. I’d be happy to debate it, happy to discuss it, and happy to provide more information. My email is gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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There are, however, some folks that have some good insights. I actually sat through a seminar with Chris Czarnik, and he had some interesting demographic information. Check him out online if you're looking for some of those answers, but I want to talk a little bit about people, talent management and recruiting...

As you may know, The Brooks Group is a sales training company. What you may not know is that our two largest clients use us for recruiter training. And we do a lot of work in that space. In fact, we are doing a series of workshops right now. I want to brag on the work that Michelle Richardson, VP of Sales Performance Research, did putting the workshops together and share a comment we just received from one of the recruiters: “This is the innovative training we need as it directly addresses the current challenges we're facing in a rapidly changing recruiting environment. ”I thought those were some nice accolades on what we've done.

1.The first idea I have for you, that really also comes from Chris Czarnik, is that we need to think about recruiting differently. I mentioned that we're a sales training company. And in sales training, we talk about how to sell more things. Oftentimes in the recruiting world, we just run an ad and wait for inbound leads, wait for people to express interest. Chris has challenged his clients. And I think it makes a lot of sense to think about recruiting the same way you think about sales, right? In sales, we're accustomed to competing for the customer. In recruiting,why don't we take that same mindset, and think about how we position our recruiting organization so that we're actually out there competitively looking for people.

2.Secondly, I think it's more important than ever to screen employees or potential employees. I want to go back to another conversation I had with a manufacturing client. They said they've removed all screens because they were preventing the hires from making it through the process. In the same breath, they also talked about, they were regularly being ghosted by these new hires, the new hires are only working a day or two, or maybe not even a full shift. I would submit to you that the way to prevent that is to actually increase your screening and use good screening tools during the interview process. We believe in our tool, The Brooks Talent Index, so much that we use it ourselves. Our clients use it not only screening, but for coaching and professional development purposes.

3.Third idea is to have a great on-boarding program. So many times people come to work, they're excited, they really want to learn, they've told their family about their new job. And then the on-boarding falls flat –it's a series of paperwork and legal forms and that's it. I think it's important to have an intentional on-boarding by up-skilling the new person in a proactive way and introducing them to the organization in a way that builds alignment and excitement.

4.Fourth, is to ensure that your new hires have the proper tools and training to do their job. Whether that's a well performing laptop, tools for the factory floor, or whatever it is, they need to have the tools and training to do the job with confidence and to feel like they have a chance for success. So, that's the fourth idea –ensuring that you're able to attract, hire, and retain good people.

5.The fifth idea that I have for you, is that you need to treat your employees like adults. Give them respect, give them the dignity, give them the ability to think and use their own talents in the job in a way that, again, builds confidence. I think that will build loyalty to the team and to the organization. I would love to hear your comments.

Always happy to debate or discuss these ideas with you. You know, my email is gfly@thebrooksgroup.com. Please reach out if you'd like to learn more!

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This idea of recession resilience came out of a Vistage meeting I was in yesterday. In fact, I think I'm a part of the world's best Vistage group, our chairperson, Sam Turner really does a nice job of creating a structured environment for us to talk about the challenges that we're going through.

This term, recession resilience, was one that was used quite a bit yesterday. In parallel, I also read an article from McKinsey called “Bubbles pop, downturns stop”, and I think that the article actually lays out some interesting things for us to be thinking about, and some very tactical opportunities for business leaders right now to ensure their businesses are prepared to not only survive, but thrive through the recession, and really emerge on the other side as a big winner.

There are a few very specific things that I believe we need to be working on, that will help ensure that you as a sales leader, and you, as a company leader, instill these basic practices inside of your organization.

1. The first of these is to focus on revenue, not just sales. Again, in the Vistage meeting, I had a really interesting a-ha, as a number of the manufacturing members talked about how their top line sales are up, but the number of units they're shipping is down. So, really, what they're seeing is the result of price increases, while the fundamental business is not as healthy as the top line might have indicated it would be. And so, they're really starting now to focus on revenue, they're starting to think about their pricing model. They're trying to understand what the long-term implications of the price increase is, inflation is, etc., but focus on revenue, not pricing.

2. Now is actually the time for you to be investing in your business in ways that will buttress you against the economic headwinds that you're facing.

3. Third is a bias towards action, understanding what kind of cause and effects are going on inside the marketplace, and course correcting in real time. There's a sense for agility, our need for agility right now, around course corrections based on gaps you see in your business versus the needs of the marketplace.

4. Setting effective KPIs, and measuring and coaching back to those KPIs. We talk a lot about this in our Sales Leadership Accelerator, which is our sales management program. With the ability to coach back to KPIs to identify where there are gaps in performance, and to measure effectively against KPIs that makes sense in the marketplace today, are all critical components to really making sure that as a sales leader, you're directing your sales team in an effective way.

5. Investing in skills. You need to be able to select or identify top performers. You need to be able to help them continue to be top performers. Investing in skills right now is absolutely critical, as it allows people to really gain confidence, gain competence, and become much more effective in their role.

These are ideas that really have come from a combination of sources with the McKinsey article, what I'm experiencing at Vistage, what I, as a sales leader and as a business leader, am experiencing and trying to do in our business. I'd be happy to discuss, to debate, always happy to provide additional information. My email is gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

https://brooksgroup.com/sales-training-blog/flys-friday-five/flys-friday-five-what-is-recession-resilience/

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Today I'm going to continue to talk about selling your way through current macro headwinds and the challenges that are unique to the environment that we seem to be operating in right now. If anything, it's dawned on me that it is not business as usual.

We were hopeful that coming out of the pandemic we'd get back to normal. We were hopeful that the supply chain stuff would resolve itself, that inflation would resolve itself. It dawned on me again today in the conversation with the client that it's just not business as usual. The rate of change continues to increase and we continue to be hit with things that we just don't anticipate.

So, I think there are a couple of reasons that sellers are struggling a little bit right now and that we can do some things to really unencumber them and help them be successful. Here’s what we're doing here at The Brooks Group.

First off, we're really getting focused on being back to the basics. I mentioned that in a previous video, but we really want to have the core selling pieces in place and we want to practice it, drill on it, and become operationally excellent at the basics of selling.

There are five additional things that we need to do, the sales leaders ought to put into place, that business leaders ought to be thinking about, to really ensure that we are thriving, not just surviving in today's environment.

1. The first is to get close to customers. I talk to multiple customers every week. We have a research center that's reaching out to customers with regularity. We've actually had our product person now calling customers multiple times a week. We need to be super close to customers right now to understand the pain that they're going through and the challenges they are facing.

2. Secondly, we need to be candid and transparent in our communication with our current clients, with potential clients, and with each other internally. There is uncertainty for sure. There is often challenging news that has to be delivered, and I think the only way through that is to be candid, transparent, and proactive in that communication with the idea of building trust. That's really what we need to be doing there.

3. The third thing that we can control and work on is being focused on positive change. What does that mean? What do we need to be doing internally, given the fact that our customers are faced with unusual challenges and that we may be focused on our challenge with unusual things? What do we need to be doing for our customers? How do we focus our team on positive change?

4. Fourth, I think we do all of these things with a mindset of how do we be of service? If we're close to our customers; if we're having candid and transparent conversations with our customers and with each other; if we're focused on positive change, then I believe how we can be of service will start to emerge from all of that work.

5. That really leads to the fifth thing, which is to review your products and services with those four things in mind and start to think about are your current service and product offerings appropriate for the marketplace? Are they missing the mark somewhere? Would your customers benefit from you doing something a little bit different? So, all of these are really easy things we can do to ensure that we are of service to our clients and we're adding real benefit.

The last thing that I challenge our team with is let's not make any unforced errors. What do I mean by that? Now’s not the time to make a lot of wholesale changes that we don't need to make. Every time we make a change, there's a learning curve and there are communication challenges. So, focus on changing the things that will add value to your client, changing things that will add value to your enterprise, and don't change just for change's sake.

I hope those are helpful. I would love to discuss or debate it with you. Always happy to share more information. Feel free to reach out to me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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Resources:

IMPACT Selling®

Brooks Talent Index

Today, I want to continue to talk about how companies can sell their way through the current malaise. As I’ve said before, I believe that the way companies are going to survive and thrive in these interesting times is to sell their way through all the current headwinds being caused by the macro events.

We as sales leaders and leaders of companies need to be mindful of what we can do to create an ecosystem that allows our sellers to be successful. So, I want to talk about that a little bit today. We get an awful lot of our leads through inbound traffic. We put a lot of effort into our marketing. What we’re seeing right now is there’s a particular interest in skills-based training, like “how do I how do I help my team negotiate better, how do they prospect better, or how do we do a better job of strategic account management?” So, what that tells me is there’s some acute pain that a sales leader is trying to solve.

Oftentimes these sales leaders that are searching for this have really misdiagnosed their problem. What we find out regularly is that the basics aren’t in place. Time and time again, we understand that if the basics were in place, sellers would be much more successful and this acute problem that a sales leader is feeling would go away. So, I want to challenge us to think about what’s really going on. How do we let sellers sell and how do we help the seller sell? It may not be just through the skills training.

So, what I want to talk about today are the basics, because I think the basics matter now more than ever. We see time and time again that companies have different personnel, sales teams have different makeups, or they’ve gone through a pandemic when they couldn’t sell the way they used to. So, now’s the time for us to recalibrate our sales organization.

For us, that starts with a methodology I’ve mentioned before. Our methodology is called IMPACT. It’s a six-step system and we really work hard to ensure that salespeople know how to move a deal through the pipeline. That’s it, right? That’s what a methodology does.

After you ensure that you have a clear methodology, you practice that. So as sales leaders, we need to ensure that those are in place and we create opportunities for our salespeople to practice. We might create some scenarios, we might do some role play, or we might share best practices, but we practice what we preach in terms of methodology.

The third thing a methodology does is it allows us to coach. It creates a common vernacular. It allows a sales leader to understand how successful people are being and it helps you understand what the deal movement looks like. So having a good methodology in place allows you to coach and as a sales leader, that’s what’s critical right now. We ought to be actively coaching our sellers day in and day out.

The fourth key is funnel management. A good methodology allows you to establish KPIs for each part of the funnel or each part of the methodology. So, you should know, is the top of your funnel healthy? Are you getting some friction mid-funnel that you may not understand, and are deals stalling? Or at the end of the funnel, are you not closing deals you thought you should close? So, having a good methodology allows you to establish KPIs, which allows you to coach the methodology and the KPIs. It also allows you to create practices for the salespeople and it creates a much more rigorous sales process.

The last thing right now in terms of basics, and this may be a little out of the ordinary, is I think it’s a critical time to really take stock of your human capital. Again, we’ve had different make-ups of sales teams or sellers are behaving differently and being forced to sell differently than they had in the past. Help your team win by truly understanding their talents, coaching needs, and skills.

So, now is a critical time to understand what your team makeup is like and is your team balanced? We have a great tool, the Brooks Talent Index, which helps with this. But we are seeing a real emphasis on ensuring that team make-up is good, especially in these interesting employment times. It’s still a tight labor market. We want to make sure that our sellers are successful. We’ve got a lot of competing demands and possibly other options for them. So, ensuring that they’re being well coached and that they have the tools for success will set you up for the ability to sell your way through these current challenging times.

Would love to discuss or debate it with you. Happy to share more information. Feel free to reach out to me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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Resources:

1. Being Liked Doesn’t Win Deals: We’ll Tell You What Does Webinar

2. BTI Assessments

Today, I’ll be talking with you a little bit more about how to sell your way through the pandemic. As you know, I believe, and we believe, that the way companies are going to really make it through these challenging times is to sell your way through it.

And there are some critical components to selling right now that I think are even more important or more heightened and that buyers are more sensitive to than they ever have been in the past.

One of those things that we’ve discovered is the idea of trust. Many sellers have a predisposition to being liked, and we have learned through surveys, work with clients, interviews with buyers, and in our own experiences that right now trust is much more important than being liked.

In fact, the most successful sellers we’ve seen time and time again don’t think about being liked, but they think a lot about being trusted. So, I want to unpack that a little bit. We recently did a webinar last week with Michelle Richardson and Dan Markin, and we’ll provide you a link to that because it really started to expand on this idea.

Following the webinar, we had some coaching sessions, and it was uncanny how this idea of trust came up time and time again. It wasn’t just what is trust, but it was how do you gain trust? In today’s world, where maybe you were having to deliver bad news or unexpected news around price increases and whatnot, how do you gain trust in that environment?

So, I want to talk about that specifically. I want to give you a couple of ideas around how we think people and salespeople can create trust. I think as a sales leader, as a company leader, we ought to think about this throughout our organization. And, you know, it’s something, frankly, that I have been paying a lot of attention to. My natural predisposition on our Brooks Talent Index, which is an assessment we use, is I’m a high I; I’m an influencer or a talker. So, verbal cues, having conversations, and understanding how you’re doing are important to me, but it drags on conversations. We’re finding that right now it’s important to have clear and concise conversations and relay good information. So, I realize that my own natural predisposition has to be moderated in this current environment.

So how do you as a salesperson, as a sales leader, as a company leader, gain trust? There are five things I wanted to talk about.

1. You need to ask good questions and don’t assume anything. Last Friday, I had a discussion with one of our clients and was having to deliver what I considered bad news. As the conversation unfolded, I realized that we actually had a solution that would match their needs, but we didn’t fully understand their needs. So, it was through an open conversation that I was able to understand that in this particular coaching situation, they wanted to have a lot of interactivity and they wanted to have real engagement tied back to some homework we’ve given. We thought they wanted to have familiarity with the facilitator, and that was not it at all. So, understanding and not assuming what’s really going on was the key.

2. Be proactive and tell what you know. Don’t pretend to know something you don’t and don’t elaborate if you don’t have the details but be proactive and reach out to the client. Don’t wait for them to reach out to you. Tell what you know and if you don’t know something, admit that, or give them the best information you can.

3. Make meetings and calls beneficial. Don’t just call to call. Don’t just show up to build rapport, like my tendency would be, but make the calls meaningful. I had a recent discussion with an SVP of sales of a brand I’m sure you’re familiar with, who’s a client of ours. He was very specific to say one of the things he does to ensure his team has good relationships with clients is that they have the cell phone numbers of the owners of the business or the senior sales leaders. The way he knows that the relationship is strong is when his team calls on the cell phone, the other person answers because that other person knows the information is going to be helpful, the call is going to be beneficial, and it’s not going to be a waste of time. So, the third thing is to make calls and meetings meaningful.

4. Really work to help clients succeed. We may not be the answer for everybody, and we need to admit that. You may not have a solution that your client needs at a point in time. But, if you understand through good questioning what their real needs are and you help them be successful then you’ll gain an awful lot of trust with them, both in the near term and the long term.

5. Understand your predisposition or your communication style. I mentioned that I’m an influencer or a talker and I know that doesn’t work well with certain communication styles. So, I have to moderate my behavior, my natural tendencies, to match the person I’m dealing with and how they like to receive information.

We do a tremendous amount of work on this idea of gaining trust and actually have a class around communicating bad news. I mentioned we have the Brooks Talent Index. I would be happy to provide you with more information for any of these items. Truly, I think that is a tremendous benefit if you do really understand your natural tendencies and you understand the tendencies of the person you’re dealing with.

So, I hope those five things help. We’re finding that trust and being liked are critical topics right now and the idea of building trust is how you’re going to win in this crazy environment. Happy to discuss it. Happy to debate it. Always happy to provide more information. Feel free to reach out to me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com

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Resources:

1. IMPACT Selling®

2. Our Book: Agile & Resilient: Sales Leadership for the New Normal

3. Information on the Meet and Probe Step

4. McKinsey Statistic

Today, I’ll be talking about current events. I'm wondering if you've heard the news because if you have, you've heard an awful lot about inflation, price increases, supply chain disruption, the baby formula shortage, and there's geopolitical unrest. Clearly the war in Ukraine continues to go on.

In fact, in a recent McKinsey article, this time last year, 83% of global executives had a positive outlook on the economy. That same study this year shows only 43% of the senior level executives have a positive outlook. The number one reason for that is the geopolitical unrest followed by the things I just mentioned. Why do I mention that? It continues to be this malaise that we're working through, and I believe the way companies are going to be successful is they are going to sell their way through it. It's going to be very intentional effort with a lot of focus on driving top line revenue.

There are some critical things that companies and sales leaders can be doing right now to position their sales team for success on the back half of this year. I had a recent discussion with one of our clients and he used our own vernacular, “now is the time to train sellers on the Meet and Probe steps,” which are two of our six steps. Really what he was saying is, in the Meet step, which is the initial interaction with clients or potential clients, it's really critical to have a very good first meeting. There's a lot of preparation and intentionality around what that meeting is all about. The Probe step is where you are working towards a needs analysis. So, if the Meet step goes well, it gives you the right in the Probe step to ask good questions as you build rapport.

So, I mentioned the news. Let's talk about five ways that the current events are driving behavior or things our sales teams need to be doing moving forward to be successful.

1. First, is to approach in neutral. We've all heard the bad news. The big A-HA is so have your buyers. They're operating under that same environment. So, they are hearing about all these same sorts of things and maybe changed their buying criteria. They may need to preserve cash; they may have excess inventory; they may have situations that you don't expect. So, we need to approach them with a neutral bias.

2. Secondly, I think we need to display a sincere interest. Let's really understand what's going on, be genuinely interested in their success, and work to understand their real problems.

3. Third, we need to gain a mutual rapport. When I talk about the Meet and Probe steps, that's really what we're after. Let's gain a mutual rapport where I respect you, you respect me. How do we do that? Well, one easy way is to share information. It's not all one-way communication, but let's share information back and forth.

4. Fourth is to gain mutual respect. I talked about rapport. We also need to have respect in there and we need to really honor each other as human beings and to work to be of service to clients.

5. The fifth thing is, we're doing all those first four to gain a true needs analysis. The needs of our clients may have dramatically changed over the last two years. What we took for granted pre-COVID may not have any application now. So as sellers and sales leaders, we need to make sure our team is armed with these sorts of tools, thoughts, and mindset.

The last thing I want to talk about, which goes back into the idea of building rapport, is companies need to ensure that their salespeople have contacts all the way up the chain. Again, this client mentioned that the thing he's doing as a sales leader is ensuring that all of his salespeople have the cell phone number of the owner, the CEO, or the president of the companies they do business with. I thought that was an interesting directive that he issued and a great way to really understand the strength of the relationship you have with a client.

I hope these things make sense. I realize that the way we're going to grow through this and companies are going to survive is they are going to sell their way through. I would be happy to share information around our IMPACT selling® method, more information around the Meet and Probe steps, and I actually think that our book, Agile and Resilient: Sales Leadership for the New Normal is a great tool. So, if you would like a copy of that let me know.

Always good to be with you. I appreciate you watching. I’m happy to discuss or debate. Send an e-mail to gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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Resources:

• 5 Keys to Winning in Today’s Selling Environment
• IMPACT Selling Program
• Conversations with Confidence

Welcome back to Fly’s Friday Five.

Today, I’ll be discussing the fundamentals of selling. The reason I want to talk about the fundamentals of selling is because of what we are seeing out in the marketplace. A few weeks ago, I mentioned “5 Keys to Winning in Today’s Selling Environment.” The macros events occurring right now are really driving the need for sellers to have some key behaviors in their arsenal. One of the 5 keys is to return to the fundamentals of selling.

So, what are the fundamentals of selling and why does it make sense now?

We've seen several things going on in the marketplace, one is employee issues. Sales teams are different than they were two years ago. You have new players on the team, you may have new people in their roles or in different roles and they've been there for a short period of time. Sales leadership may have changed, so it’s possible that the whole dynamic within the team has changed. Oftentimes, they may not have been trained on their current responsibilities, or they may not be at the same point in their development. There could be confusion around the process inside of an organization.

Secondly, sellers have experienced whiplash. Most sellers that are in the manufacturing world had no product to sell for months or even years. Now, all of a sudden, they're starting to get the product. They're going back out in the field and there's been a change in behavior.

I recently had a conversation with a group of manufacturers, and they've noticed an interesting thing inside of their world. They said revenue is up, which sounds good, right? But the actual number of pieces they are sending out is down. While the top line looks good, it's just driven by price increases and inflation, which won't last so they've recognized the need to still sell more. All those things really come together in a way that I believe suggests that the selling fundamentals need to be in place and now is the time to win and sell through this current uncertainty with those fundamentals.

What does that mean? What are the fundamentals needed?

1. Every organization needs to have a sales process. This allows sales leaders to coach to the process, and it allows you to monitor progress towards the end goal. It gives your team a common way to discuss the status of a sale. Having a process in place is just half of the equation. Your team needs to understand it.

2. Each seller needs to understand their personal communication style and be able to bring that into the conversations they're having with their clients. And in turn, they need to understand their clients’ styles as well.

3. Sellers should be prepared. Pre-call planning is still important. Understanding your client in their current environment is still important. Reading public disclosures from your client is still important, but being prepared is critical.

4. Sellers and leaders need to communicate clearly. We've talked about the need to be able to deliver bad news, but you need to do it in a way that the client understands. You need to be proactive in your communication.

5. You need to work to understand your client’s pain. That's a point we've made time and time again. I'll go back to the example I just shared with the manufacturing friend of mine with increased revenue but a lower number of pieces. His problem is that his sellers need to sell more items. That's his real pain. I have another acquaintance from Vistage, and we were recently talking about his need to increase inventory levels so that they can have product on hand. What that has done is drive cash down. The cost of having product on hand leaves his cash balance down and that is his pain. Your clients may be experiencing a different pain than what you've experienced with them in the past.

I believe those five key selling fundamentals are critical right now as you work to sell your way through this current flux.

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RESOURCES mentioned:

Agile & Resilient: Sales Leadership for the New Normal

Wall Street Journal Article #1

Wall Street Journal Article #2

This week, I'm following up on the macro events that are influencing selling today. As I mentioned last week, one of the drivers that companies are seeing is that selling has just become harder. There's inflation, there's supply chain disruption. There are employee and staffing issues. The war in Ukraine, all of these things have created a series of macro events that have made selling harder. And Where does that leave us? Well, here at The Brooks Group, we believe that the way companies are going to get out of this is to sell their way through it. I've identified five key things that can help us get there. And today, I want to break down one of those in particular, and that is the idea of value selling.

Recently, we released a book coauthored by Michelle Richardson and Russ Sharer: Agile & Resilient: Sales Leadership for the New Normal, which mentions a trend that is happening. B2B buyers are really being influenced by the B2C world. I also read an article in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend written by Sarah

So I wanna bring in an article, I read this weekend in the wall street journal, Shoppers are Fretting. Stores are Listening. The author brought in some really interesting examples of what is happening in the B2C world. Specifically, there were three things that she referenced:

Walmart is changing its milk packaging and offering more half-gallon packages to make it more affordable.

Michael’s is now starting to promote less expensive tools in their marketing messaging.

Procter and Gamble is starting to talk about their packaging and innovating to allow you to use the very last drop of dish soap.

These examples of impact in the B2C world, such as product selection, pricing, and marketing have all been influenced by the realities of the world that we're living in.

So where does that leave us as B2B sellers and B2B buyers?

I think there are five things that sellers need to be thinking about.

Sellers need to identify the pain that their clients are going through. How do they do that? They can utilize good questioning and really listen well. They can prepare better with good pre-call planning.

Sellers need to be able to quantify the value. What is the value they are bringing? Once the pain clients are experiencing has been identified, addressing how that pain can be fixed in today’s world. That might be as simple as on-time delivery or being able to predict when the delivery is going to happen. Another article Wall Street Journal published recently was addressing the rolling blackouts that are expected in the state of Michigan this summer. It had me thinking about the ability to solve these problems, and then sellers can start to position themselves as a value solution.

Sellers should be working to become trusted advisors. This also plays on the ability to ask good questions, but it really speaks to a longer-term relationship. It's doesn’t mean swooping in and becoming a trusted advisor. It's really knowing who the client is, what their strategic goals are and how you can start to solve those conundrums that they're in.

Companies should be working to develop marketing messaging that starts to speak to their value and the solutions that they create, solve or bring to bear.

Companies should examine their pricing. Walmart has shown us that going from gallons to half gallons is a pricing solution that works for their B2C world. We all have pricing decisions we can make that could help us solve and present ourselves as much more of a value solution in the marketplace.

Those five solutions or suggestions can help you position yourself as a value and begin to help your company sell its way through the current environment. As a value seller ourselves, I would love to discuss this, and I am happy to debate it as always, you can reach out to me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com.

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Greetings,

This week, I want to talk about the art and practice of selling, which has changed dramatically through the pandemic. Frankly, selling has gotten harder. We are seeing a level of exhaustion and fatigue in sellers and sales leaders that we hadn’t seen before. Michelle Richardson shared an article with me from the Harvard Business Review, which talks about change exhaustion, and I think just that expression emotes an understanding of what that concept is.

What we’re seeing is that sellers are faced with levels of uncertainty that they’ve never been faced with before. Most sellers take pleasure in pleasing, they like to be able to deliver what they promise, and they look forward to helping clients solve problems. That has all changed with inflation, supply chain issues, the employment issues. The world sellers live in today is much different than it was pre-pandemic, and it’s causing some of that change exhaustion, uncertainty, and a lack of confidence. We are seeing the impact right now. We’ve recently done a series of surveys with sales leaders. In the most recent one, we learned that 73% of sales leaders believe that they will miss their Q2 goals this year. This is having real-time impact on sales organizations and on companies.

So, what do we do about it?

I think that there are some tactical things we are starting to see that trace back to what we saw at the beginning of Covid. I believe, as sales leaders, here are five things that you can help your salespeople with today for a successful remainder of 2022.

• Teach sellers to sell on value. Value selling has become a buzzword we hear a lot, but it really is a core tenant to what a seller needs to be able to do.
• Sellers need to be able to have difficult conversations. I mentioned inflation and price increases, supply chain, and production delays. I believe a salesperson that is trained in having those kinds of conversations can actually use them to build trust with their clients right now.
• Salespeople need to be able to ask good questions. Good questioning also means they need to be good listeners. They can build rapport by asking good questions and they can get to the heart of the issue that a client is trying to solve.
• Sellers need to work on negotiations. We’re seeing that negotiation training is a critical skill that needs to be refined right now.
• Sellers need to practice solid fundamentals. Sellers need to have good pre-call planning exercises, and the ability to go into meetings well prepared. It may seem like those are really basic things, but when done right, that little bit of planning helps salespeople have the confidence they need to deal with the uncertain situations that they’re being faced with. They are better in uncomfortable situations.

I believe mastering these 5 things in today’s market will help salespeople be more successful and they can be implemented immediately. Good luck as you get ready for the rest of 2022.

Email me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com with any thoughts or comments.

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How to Sell Against Lower-Priced Competition

Value-Based Selling Tips

Our Book

Today I want to talk about current events in selling, specifically current challenges in selling as self-reported by sales leaders and salespeople.

Over the last several weeks, we have given away many copies of our new book, Agile and Resilient, by Michelle Richardson and Russ Sharer. As part of that giveaway, I asked people to send me what their current challenges are. In addition, we conducted an EQ webinar this week, where we also asked registrants to submit questions and let us know what they were thinking about. Those surveys provided over 250 responses by salespeople and sales leaders. I think this is valuable because it allows us as leaders to help upskill our team or understand where they feel like they need some help and I think it also helps salespeople audit their own behaviors and gaps in their sales techniques.

I hope that you find some value in these and can incorporate an understanding of them in your daily life.

• The first thing that sales leaders have been talking to us about is sticking to a process.
• The second thing is salespeople feel like they need help in rapport building. I’ve mentioned before that our methodology is a six-step methodology, but really the first three steps are all around rapport building and understanding the client, and being able to build trust with the client so that you can ask good questions and dive deep. This seems to be an area where salespeople feel like they need some additional training, and they want to know how to do it in a sincere way. Nobody wants to be the caricature of a salesperson. They really want to be a sales professional and they understand that rapport building is a critical part of that.
• The third thing comes from both salespeople and sales leaders, and it is the need to ask better questions. Questioning comes out of listening so listening skills are equally important. The ability to ask questions is really core to the sales process and sales success. We often hear that people don’t have the proper training for that or even the awareness, whether it’s self-awareness, or how to go about it. Asking better questions is on top of the pile for both salespeople and sales leaders.
• Current challenges such as pricing come up often. How you price things, how you talk about price and how you price in an inflationary market, also means that we need to help sellers sell on value and understand what their value proposition is and why buyers likely buy from them. I believe that wrapped up in this whole pricing discussion, is the opportunity to talk about value and to coach your people to sell on value. In the bottom of the notes,s I’ve included the link for a free download: How To: Sell Against Lower-Priced Competition, and a link for a resource addressing Value Selling.
• The last thing is important right now. We have had countless seminars, webinars, and workshops on it. How to have difficult conversations. Pricing is one of those subjects we have to encounter, supply chain and inflation are some of the things that we’re challenged with. The macro-environment we’re operating in is clearly something that salespeople need to be able to talk about in ways that they have confidence. If they build a relationship as a trusted advisor, having the ability to have these difficult conversations, can be critical to salespeople’s success right now.

I think as a salesperson, you can audit your own behavior against these and maybe map out an individual plan for improvement. As a sales leader, I think you need to be thinking about these challenges and notes as you move forward. You want to build your team and help them be successful in 2022.

I’m always happy to debate. We’d love to hear what you think about this, and please if you’d like more information, feel free to reach out directly to me at gfly@thebrooksgroup.com