Linda Richardson

Coach Gregg Popovich has won his third Coach of the Year award.  This comes  only one year after his Spurs’ devastating loss to the Miami Heat in the MBA finals. Despite the loss, he led his team to a league best 62-20 record, which has created an advantage in the play off.

How did Coach Popovich achieve such success after not only facing the defeat but at the same time losing his two long-time assistants to head coaching jobs and dealing  with nagging  team injuries?

What did he do to get his team back on the court with the will and ability to win? His secret of success is the courage to look around—and back. In the old Beatles song Yesterday, Paul McCartney sings “There’s a shadow hanging over me.”  Moving on means turning and facing that shadow.

I once witnessed a team leader who when confronted by executive management about unacceptable performance deflected responsibility with the comment “Let’s not look back …”  His tactic worked for a while.  Unfortunately improvement did not follow, and the past caught up with him.

Of course it’s important to look to the future and not get stuck in the past or play a blaming game.  But that is a far cry from not being willing to take a hard look  and accepting  responsibility.  Coach Popovich’s magic is his ability to understand the past to help chart the future.

Unlike the team leader, Popovich said,  “We decided that we needed to just face our own record right off the bat at the beginning of the season and get it out of the way.  Don’t blame it on the basketball gods or bad fortune or anything like that.”  He  faced what  fell apart  and  then put the pieces back together.

Whether the “defeat” you face is a championship, a missed quarter,  a critical deal in the pipeline that did not close,  or the loss of a high performing/valued team member, whether you are the sales leader or a member of the sales  or service team; before you look to the next step take the time to take a hard look back.  Facing yesterday  head on is the first step. It is about accepting personal responsibility.  We can’t change what happened but we can control how we respond and what we  make of it.  The key is to understand the hard experience and not bury it but instead using it to create something good.

Questions to ask yourself: What is,  as Coach Popovich calls it,   the elephant in the room?  How am I going to acknowledge it? To whom? How will I respond to it? What have I learned from it? What will I do?

Not every defeat turns  into success but facing yesterday’s shadow is the first step to a brighter future.

Presenting sales pitches can be a nerve-racking experience for anyone, even those who sell products for a living. Everyone says practicing the sales pitch will make things go smoothly. Yes, that may be true, but it is only half the truth. Practicing sales pitches not only requires practicing what you’re going to say, but it also requires you to receive feedback on the content, delivery, and structure of the pitch.

How you deliver insights, ideas, and solutions affects how your clients think about them. A study by Marie-Line Germain and Manuel Tejeda in the summer 2012 HRD Quarterly pointed to the importance of subjective factors such as self-assurance and confidence in whether clients see a presenter as an expert. To gain the advantage of a confident delivery, practice and ask for feedback not only on your strategy, content, and structure, but also on your delivery (e.g., demeanor, pacing, style, tone, dress, and body language). And this is especially important when you are delivering new or provocative ideas or selling high-ticket, high-visibility solutions.

Why This Matters

Clients want to hear and see what you bring to the table. They are not impressed by a pre-packaged set of slides or messages. Don’t use a deep stack of PowerPoint slides, especially in a dark room. Of course, well-developed and edited slides and technology can enhance presentations, but you, not they, are the presentation. Your clients must feel your recommendation comes from you and not a screen. Slide presentations often communicate to clients. To win, communicate with clients.

If you could magically peek in on a competitor’s presentation, how would you compare? Would you come across as professional, confident, and ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with the client to get the job done? While you can’t see your competitors’ presentations and make comparisons, your clients can and are doing precisely that as they make their decisions. This can be comparable to sales messaging as well. Customers nowadays might not pay attention to ordinary sales messages; instead, teaching customers something about the business and giving them a compelling reason to take the services can be quite effective. This may be the reason why some sales-focused businesses tend to hire professionals from firms like Challenger or other such sales solution providers that can assist them in building, positioning, reviewing and refreshing the pitch messages that can be converted to generate sales.

How to Practice

As you practice, pay particular attention to the pace and emphasis of your words. Separate your language. Move with a sense of direction. The best teacher captures the class not only with good, clear content but also with intonation, pacing, and movement. A senior executive wondered why the presentation he worked very hard on was received so poorly by his audience of corporate leaders. A review of the videotape of his presentation provided the answer: the content was strong and current, yet all but impossible to follow. There was no emphasis or pausing, and his arms seemed almost as if they were flapping.

Use your voice to drive home key points and emphasize what is important. There should be a beat to how you present. Pauses show you want clients to absorb what you have said. Two seconds of silences before answering a questions shows you are considering the question. Your gestures orchestrate how your clients should listen Use them to accentuate and delineate the points you make.

You sell with drive and rightly so.  But do you sell with heart?   I pose this question in the final chapter of my new book, Changing the Sales Conversation.  In that chapter I explore the difference between being client-centered and human-centered and why selling with heart and establishing trust are major differentiators today as knowledge becomes commoditized.

They say that there is a continuum from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. Where is your customer along this spectrum? Where are you?  Any client can go to the internet and get infinite amounts of data.  In this environment it is easy to think that that data rules  buying decisions.  But every sales decision is determined by emotions too.  How attuned are you to the emotional side, the “heart” side of selling?  If you are not you are missing an essential way to maximize your expertise.

I am a dedicated fan of the cultural commentator David Brooks.  In his New York Times February 4^th  column he explored how we are heading into an age of brilliant technology in which computers can fill in for people, whether it is driving our cars or beating human pros at chess …

Brooks is not alone in sounding this warning.  Jaron Lanier of Microsoft has written two books about it – You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future?  Erik Brynjolfsson and AndrewMcAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tell us that computers will increasingly perform important parts of even most cognitive jobs, which will make certain human mental skills less important.  We are seeing this happening in sales where knowledge has become a commodity and insights are on the agenda of sales organizations.  We know that we must bring insights and produce business outcomes to create value for clients and move them to buy.  But what else is needed to start or build the relationship and win the sale?

David Brooks has identified five human traits  that he believes will be rewarded in what he calls “the age of brilliant machines”:

Enthusiasm (voracious explanatory drive to make sense out of bottomless oceans of  information)

Extended time horizons and strategic discipline ( ability to provide a conceptual frame to give a broader context—a  computer can calculate a thousand options but only a person can do this)

Procedural architecture  (creating systems in which people can share ideas, i.e. Facebook rather than coming up with ideas themselves)

Collaborative management (organizing a decentralized network)

Creativity ( grasping the essence of one thing and then the essence of something very different and  smashing them together to create something very different  –a computer can’t do this).

In an IBM survey of 1,500 executives creativity was identified as the factor most crucial for success.  For the past two years the word creative has been the most frequently used buzzword in LinkedIn profiles. Rapidly changing content knowledge is easily accessed.  While a computer can feed creativity, a computer can’t be creative.

What I find most significant for those of us in sales is David Brooks’ conclusion that all of the above traits are dependent on emotive traits.  He states that is the emotive traits that separate humans from computers and therefore will be rewarded and valued in the  world of the “brilliant machine” and “that while humans cannot compete with computers in data and calculations, the best workers will come with heart in hand.”  

“Heart in hand” has important  implications for our profession and how each of us sell.   Selling with heart is a way to connect with clients in meaningful way.  It is the key to going beyond being client-centered to human-centered.   It is a key to building trust.

The word trust may not appear on clients’ score cards as they make buying decisions but trust is the constant factor in every decision to buy or not buy.  Research by Robert Putman, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard documents the decline in trust over the past 50 years.   The question is what are you doing every day with every client to build the trust you need early in the sale to help clients make their buy decisions.

Certainly by delivering on a promise you build trust but that often takes place after the sale. The goal is to build trust earlier and to build it at a deeper level. I see a solid connection between building trust and selling with heart.  To sell with heart, to build trust, ask yourself if you:

Respect your client’s time.

Respect your client’s knowledge.

Tolerate differing points of view.

Change your perception when appropriate.

Give first by doing something you don’t get paid for.

Be a giver—always be on the look out for ways to create value.

Learn about the client outside of business—children’s names, interests.

Bring expertise to add to what your client knows.

Create value for your clients.

Take the extra step.

Respond with empathy.

Let yourself be vulnerable—share information about yourself, acknowledge if you don’t know something (get the answer ASAP).

Show you care—express feelings of enthusiasm, concern

Trust is built in smaller moments; it is rarely in a heroic act.  One negative incident can eradicate  trust.  Salespeople who sell with heart invest more in their relationships.

Unfortunately there are two major obstacles to selling with heart:  1) the temptation to take for granted that you are already selling with heart and, therefore, not making the conscious effort it can require and 2) the mistaken view that “relationship selling” is a thing of the past.  Of course you must bring value that helps clients grow their business but when delivered with heart you create a connection with clients that is unbeatable.