Dear Tony,

My career revolves around sales and getting customers to purchase my products.  I’m now leading teams of sales personnel in 4 states.  How can I become a better sales leader?

Sales in Sacramento

Dear Sales in Sacramento

I would recommend you focus on 3 aspects of sales leadership:  motivation, process, and essential elements.  Please allow me to explain.

Motivation

Every strong sales team has a high motivation to do well, close sales, attract new customers, and perform better year over year.  To get there, I would start with your individual sales professionals and apply Daniel Pink’s lessons from his book DRIVE:  Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.  Once you pay people enough money to live a good life, these 3 elements take center stage.   To learn more about this, check out this 10:47 min video: 

Process

There are as many sales processes as there are sands in the oceans.  My suggestion is to learn one well and become an expert at it.  A good one that helped me in my career was the LAER process. LAER stands for Listen, Acknowledge, Explore, and Respond.  You have to do it in that order! Poor performing sales professionals never listen, they “sell” whatever they have.  Long term success is in fulfilling needs, and to do this, you have to listen first.  To explore more check out Carew international:

https://www.carew.com

Essential Elements

Taking things a bit further there are essential elements to understand in every customer decision to buy your product.  One of the best models ever developed to understand this comes from Everett Rogers, a small-town Iowa kid who grew up on a farm and developed a theory of technology adoption in the 1950’s.  He is most famous for developing the technology adoption curve (laggards, early adopters, etc.) that he developed by studying why farmers were not adoption hybrid seed corn faster even through it had proven higher yields.  Decades later his theories would be made famous by Clayton Christenson and Geoffrey Moore in books about innovation. 

Many people have seen the technology adoption curve before.  What many people do not know is that when Everett Rogers created this curve, he also gave us the recipe to successfully navigate it! 

 

Innovation Adoption Model (Rogers, 1962)

Rogers called his model the “ACCORD” model, which can be used as a guide to today’s sales professionals to successfully close sales.

The model is as follows:

A – Advantage              

Whatever you are selling you must be able to clearly explain the advantage it offers. 

C – Compatibility             

Is what you are selling compatible with the customers current objectives/solutions?

C – Complexity               

Can you cut through the complexity to explain the benefits clearly?

O- Observability             

Can you observe the benefits, or must you wait years and have lots of faith?

R – Risk                         

If the customer purchases from you, does it place additional risk in their life?

D – Demonstration          

Can the solution be demonstrated?

By applying the above 6 criteria to any product or service you will have more success in sales.  To learn more about Everett Rogers and his very successful theories on adoption. To learn more:

The most successful sales personnel I have known ironically never focused on “the sale”. They focused on “the customer” and the sales just came along for the ride. 

Relationships in sales are critical for long term sustainable success.  By applying motivation, process, and Everett Roger’s ACCORD model to your sales career, there is no doubt you will be successful no matter what you are selling.