Transforming Sales Through Leadership: Mastering Consultative Selling and Effective Client Engagement

What if you could transform your sales approach by viewing it as a form of leadership? Discover how guiding clients through the buying process, while keeping the reins, can significantly boost your success. In this episode of Sales Craft Training, I, Graham Elliott, bring you wisdom from my 30 years in sales roles, shedding light on the universal techniques that can elevate your performance across industries. We discuss how ethical conduct and effective internal leadership are crucial for collaboration and support within your organization. Differentiating between management and leadership, I share strategies for inspiring and uniting your team towards common goals.

Do you know the art of identifying the right clients early in your sales process? Learn how to efficiently use your time and resources by being upfront and honest with clients about your capabilities, which builds trust and can lead to future opportunities. We explore the pitfalls of bad sales practices and their damaging effects on relationships and reputation. Additionally, this episode underscores the importance of audience engagement by addressing common listener issues, providing insights and solutions that resonate with a wider audience. Tune in to gain practical advice and strategies that will elevate your sales game and foster long-term success.

Chapters

• 0:00 Sales Leadership in Consultative Selling
• 10:31 The Art of Salesmanship Success
• 19:50 Podcast Collaboration and Problem-Solving

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hello and welcome to this first podcast for Sales Craft Training. Now the idea of the podcast is to share ideas and experiences that I've had with selling. And I guess, to introduce myself, my name is Graham Elliott and I've been in sales for more than 30 years and I've sold in various different industries. I started off as a salesperson, obviously, became a sales manager and more recently a general manager. I've also had my own sales training business, so I have trained salespeople in other companies who are in industries that I'm not necessarily familiar with. But what's come out of that is there are certain techniques that I think are reasonably universal, certainly for the bulk of people in sales, and those experiences and those techniques are what I have in my sales training course called Consultative Selling. So the idea of the podcast is not to share what's in the training course because, well, for various reasons, but partly because there's quite a lot of depth in those techniques. So they start at a fairly superficial level to give you some idea, and then they kind of go down deeper so that you've got more options as you get familiar with using them. So that, first of all, I don't think is appropriate for a podcast and secondly, I would like to get paid at some point. So the idea of the podcast is just a way of exploring different ideas around sales and, I guess, for people to get used to the way I approach sales. Now, how I approach sales might resonate with you. It might not, and if it doesn't, then I probably won't be sharing ideas with you again. But if it does, hopefully you'll find these podcasts useful and hopefully you'll also take a look at the course to see if that can help you.

Speaker 1: 2:22

So one of the big things about sales is that, as a job, if you like, is very visible if you're within an organization, if you're not on your own and there's no reason why you shouldn't be listening to this if you do work on your own, and there's no reason why you shouldn't be listening to this if you do work on your own, but if you're part of a larger organization, one of the characteristics of sales is that people know when things are going well. They also know when things are not going so well, and when things are going well, they probably don't want to know too much about it. But when things are going badly, it's often the salespeople who have to carry the blame for sales not happening, regardless of what's actually going on. So from that perspective, sales can be quite a stressful role, but it's also a leadership role, and that's really what I want to talk about in this podcast. And that is how sales is a form of leadership. Because what you're doing, particularly with your clients and your prospects, is you are leading them to a point where they will either buy from you or they won't, and you manage that whole situation, even though there are times when they feel that they're running the show. And this comes down to techniques in communication, techniques in leadership, techniques in sales, because for certain people, they want to feel that they are in control of the sale, even though you, as the salesperson, you have to hold that control throughout. So that fine line it can be with some people comes down to leadership how you manage yourself and how you manage the situation, how you manage those other people, how you manage the situation, how you manage those other people. And one aspect of that leadership is also internal leadership, and by that I mean the leadership that you display within the organization that you work in.

Speaker 1: 4:27

So, as a salesperson, you may need to meet certain deliveries in order to hit a delivery date or to keep an order and that means you may have to work with people within your organization and get them on side. And a lot of salespeople I've seen I've worked for good companies, I've worked with good salespeople, I've worked for bad companies and I've worked with bad salespeople and bad sales managers and I think one of the worst things you can do is take a fairly arrogant approach and that is to just say whatever you think you need to say to get an order, get the order, throw it back to somebody else and let them sort the mess out. You won't be getting too much support from people if you do that and also the chances are you'll lose credibility with your clients and obviously I don't know what kind of market you're in. My experience of them is that people tend to talk to one another. Word gets around about who the good salespeople are, who the bad salespeople are, who the reliable companies are, who the unreliable companies are, and I've always made it a positive choice to be ethical in my sales right from the beginning, and that has definitely paid dividends, because I've had people I don't know I've never heard of come to me because they've been recommended by one of my customers who's been very happy with how I've handled things and then the solution I provided for them, and they recommended me to other people they know in the industry. So there are definitely definitely benefits to be had by being ethical.

Speaker 1: 6:18

And this comes back to what I believe is good leadership, and leadership isn't management, so that If you're not clear on that, it's important to be very clear. Management is simply running through a process. It's running through steps in a process and making sure that each box is ticked as it needs to be. That, to me, pretty much defines management. Now, I don't mean any offence to anybody by saying that, and in fact, nothing I'm saying here is meant to offend anybody. This is just a point of view. Leadership is about getting people behind you. To some extent, it's inspiring people to do maybe that little bit extra to make sure that you meet a date or a certain job gets done or we do something slightly differently for this client, because it will lead on to much better things.

Speaker 1: 7:10

Leadership is about pulling people together so that you're all successful. It's not just about the salesperson being successful by getting an order, but it's about the company that you're working for, the business that you're in, being successful, being able to make a profit in that particular sale, in being able to set up repeat business, that as long as you're servicing your client well, that business will just keep coming in. All of that stuff is really important from a business perspective because if the business is not making profit or you're having to go out and just fight for every sale, that is not really where you want a business to be Sure, if you're in a startup business, that's going to take time because you need to get established. But once you are established, you want people coming to you wanting to do business with you and profitable business. Once that's happening, then you have security in the business. You've got job security for the people within the business and that is a really healthy place to be because then people can get their rewards from being a part of whatever you're doing. That generally reflects in lifestyle, whatever that means to you. So leadership in sales is important and I would argue I do argue that every salesperson is a leader. Now, you might not feel very much like a leader at times, but this is where having I mean it's certainly where a bit of training can come in handy, just understanding exactly how to make that all work. But regarding yourself as a leader, I think is an important step to take when it comes to being successful in sales, because I believe it changes the way you look at your clients, the way that you look at your colleagues, even the way you look at your manager.

Speaker 1: 9:08

I've worked in roles that were very technical. I haven't always had all of the technical knowledge required to sell certain products and I certainly remember, in fact, my very first sales job. I worked for a guy who was very good technically in an area that I was weak, and I would bring him in to do demonstrations for me, a product, and obviously I'd chat to him before I did it and bring him in. But the point was, if we got the sale, I was successful. I got the sale, he was successful as my manager. There was a commission structure for sales managers so there would be a direct benefit for him, but also it was another sale of a product into the business, so the business as a whole became more successful.

Speaker 1: 9:54

So if you are in sales and maybe if you're struggling a little bit, I don't know. Obviously I don't know you, I don't know where you're at with your sales experience and your sales journey, for want of a better word, but take that step and start thinking of yourself as a leader and whatever situation you're dealing with, ask yourself how a leader would deal with that. Again, what's the leader's role? It's to get a successful outcome for the business and also for the client. Now, I said earlier that this may result in the sale to the client. It may not.

Speaker 1: 10:31

One of the things that I think is absolutely crucial is to get very, very clear as early as possible whether or not you can deliver the solution that that client needs. And that is very important, because if you can't deliver it, in my experience, it's far, far better to be upfront and honest about it and move on. And the reason it's important is that, first of all, from your perspective, you've got so many hours in a day. You have to make a certain number of sales every week, every month, every year, in order to make your target, in order for the business to succeed. So it becomes very important that you spend that time with the kind of people who are likely to buy from you. So, with that in mind, it's really important that you get good at identifying those people as early as possible, because you're going to get a lot of people who we used to call them tire kickers, but they'd come around, they were curious about what you were doing, about the products, whatever it might be, but they were never, ever going to buy. And it's really important that you don't spend time with those people, or you spend the absolute minimum, for sure. You're going to spend time with people who won't die. I mean, I won't buy. That was a Freudian slip. Okay, you're going to be spending time with people who won't buy, and that's just the nature of what we do. The important thing to do is to recognize who the people are who will buy from you, and make sure that that's where the majority of your time goes.

Speaker 1: 12:14

The other reason it's important to say no if you can't provide the solution the client wants and you've identified that you can't provide an alternative that will be equally successful for them is that those people and I've seen this with bad salesmen, sorry salespeople, old habits they'll sell to anybody and all they want is the order, and then they move on. They leave a mess behind them. So what then happens? Well, that client is going to be very high maintenance because they're constantly going to be coming back to the company with problem after problem because, basically, you have not got a good fit and it will not do what the client wants. So that will draw in support staff. It will draw in other people from the organization who, again, their time is much better spent with people who are the right fit. So it's going to burn resource within the company.

Speaker 1: 13:11

Now, bad salespeople and these people are not leaders. They just regard that as somebody else's problem. However, if you've ever been missold something, I'm pretty sure that you do not have a good opinion of the salesperson who sold that particular thing to you and you're hardly likely to recommend them, and possibly not even the company that you bought the product from. So again, we get back into this situation of reputation and you'll get a bad reputation that way. Conversely, if you're upfront and you're open to say look, I think I understand what you're trying to do. Maybe you recap your understanding of it and just say look, we can't provide a solution. The best I can do for you is this, and from what you've told me, that's not acceptable. Now, once you've laid that out, the best that you can do for your client they can choose whether or not they want to go any further with you, but by being upfront it allows you to avoid wasting each other's time and, in my experience, clients that you say that to will come back again later because they trust you. It's a statement of trust, or allows trust to be built by being upfront and saying I don't think that we can provide a solution for you, and this is why. So, and that probably for this first podcast, because my idea with the podcast is to keep them reasonably short. But to just summarize and I hope this has made some sort of sense for you as a salesperson we're all leaders.

Speaker 1: 14:51

Everybody who's in sales is a leader. You are a leader to manage yourself, first of all and that includes nerves, stress, everything else that goes on Making sure that you do the jobs you don't want to do and you get all of those things done as well. It's about self-leadership self-management, if you like, but self-leadership is where I'm going with this. It's about leading the client. It's about leading the client. It's about being professional and getting very clear on who your client is. Are they likely to be somebody who will buy from you or not? Are you clear about what they're trying to do? Have you been up front with them about how closely you can match that requirement? And then you go through the appropriate steps, which might be to step away from the sale, or at least tell the client that's your recommendation at that point, or to start to progress the sale through the various steps of your sales process, whatever that might be.

Speaker 1: 15:52

And also what you're doing is being a leader by working with people within your company. Now it's likely that that will primarily be your sales manager In most companies. I know that part of the role is to coach and support salespeople. Not everyone does that, but that, in theory, is the role. But also to liaise with, say, accounts people like that if you'd need to do some sort of a payment plan or whatever it is. So think about who the people are that you would talk to regularly within your organisation and how good are those relationships. Do you work in a professional way with those people? If something is coming up that might require a payment plan, for example, how is your company set up to do that? Do you need to give a heads up to the people in accounts, the finance people? If you run projects, how does that impact other people in the organization?

Speaker 1: 16:53

So what I used to do in that situation was sit down with the people who were involved, maybe once a month, and just talk about what I was doing, what was going on, what I expected to drop in terms of sales and then what the implications were for other people within the organization. Sometimes that would be as simple as sitting down with the finance people. It might be sitting down with a whole group of people, which happened in one organization where I ran a major account and we were having some pretty large orders come in from time to time. So I like to make sure that everyone was aware. In a company in Australia I worked at, we were doing a lot of foreign currency transactions so we would be selling usually in Australian dollars, but we might be buying because we were supplying products made by overseas companies, so we might have to buy in US dollars or UK pounds or something else. So for the accounting people, they need to buy dollars at a good rate or buy pounds at a good rate because currency fluctuations if you're in that sort of a situation they can also have a major impact on.

Speaker 1: 18:08

The intention of this podcast is not to overcomplicate things, but I do want you to step back and just look at who else is impacted by the decisions you make as a salesperson. When an order comes in, who needs to be aware of it? Do things need to be expedited? What needs to go on? So, do you have the relationships that you need? How's your relationship with your manager? Does your manager take on a lot of this? Do you have to do it? And then, how do you manage and lead people to a successful conclusion with each sale and lead people to a successful conclusion with each sale? So that was the first podcast. I hope maybe it's given you something to think about my recommendation.

Speaker 1: 19:15

Throughout my career, not just with sales but with other things that I've been really interested in, I've always bought courses, so hence there is a course online that you can explore and that goes into, as I say, a lot more of the detailed aspects of sales and different ways of overcoming well, not even overcoming objections, but eliminating objections how to handle a no, all these kind of things. So that's all in the sales course. Questions, how to handle a no, all these kind of things. So that's all in the sales course. But, as I say with the podcast, the intention of this is to look at issues that sit around that core sales activity.

Speaker 1: 19:50

Having said all of that, you are very welcome to get in touch with me and maybe there are things you'd like to see on a podcast or you have questions, and one of the things I like to do is to just talk about things that pop up with different people, because generally I would say almost without exception if it's a problem for one person, it is a problem for many, many others. So these things are very, very valuable. Okay, that is it from me. Thank you for your time and I hope to speak to you again in another podcast. Bye for now.