Sales is not a dirty word

‘Sales’ is not usually the first word chosen by professionals to describe how they acquire new clients. They prefer ‘marketing’ or ‘business development.’

For example, a professional colleague said to me recently, “Everyone else is out there marketing so hard, it is essential to be out there too.” Her firm recently hired a new associate who has energized their team because he “feels responsible to actually market,” as my friend put it.

This anecdote speaks to one of the dilemmas of operating a professional services business: to do what you are good at and love to do, you need work; work comes from clients; clients come from a regular, ongoing system of practices called marketing, sales, and business development, often interchangeably.

Dear reader, are you thinking, “Duh!” to yourself? I know it is obvious, but many professionals resist doing the sales and marketing needed to have thriving businesses.

The market is always changing. In the last two years, I’ve heard over and over again from business owners that after thriving for years on word of mouth marketing, their businesses are no longer busy enough. Or their tried and true system to maintain steady referrals and revenue no longer works.

In the period just before the recession, work and projects were plentiful and seemed to arrive by themselves. I believe it contributed to a lack of realism about what it takes to win new clients. It doesn’t help that many professionals chose their careers to avoid the s-word. While many young professionals never experienced a slower economy until now, and haven’t yet developed solid skills for networking, selling, and closing business.

As business owners, we need to continue to grow to meet the demands of the changing market. This year, I have been fortunate to get to know a Biznik colleague, Lori Richardson of Score More Sales. Lori takes a refreshingly practical approach to sales, based on years of experience. She delivers straightforward suggestions that make the sales process accessible and understandable.

And I’ve discovered something encouraging. Sales is not about manipulation or pressure. Sales is a discipline and a process.

And now for the obvious conclusion (drum roll): mastering the discipline of sales and marketing is essential for thriving in business today.

From Lori, I discovered that sales is a skill that anyone can learn to do well. It takes persistence, and the willingness to experiment (risk failure). By changing our attitudes about sales, we open the door to a new way of engaging with it—as a discipline with systems that produce results, as a skill that can be learned, even mastered to the point that it no longer produces dread, resistance, or procrastination. It becomes one more tool in the tool kit we use when marketing our businesses.

A sales system goes something like this: you generate prospective clients; through repeated contacts you weed through the prospects to find the ones most likely to become good clients or customers (qualified leads); with more contacts and the right offers, you gain some new customers or clients. This is an ongoing cycle called the Sales Pipeline or the Sales Funnel. I like the funnel because a funnel’s shape visually describes what happens during the sales process. The pipeline or funnel tracks the sorting process of the many prospects to find the few who are the right fit and who are also ready, willing, and motivated to buy now.

Lori Richardson says, “Most of our clients don’t prospect enough.” Most people dread the stereotype of sales: cold calling, but ‘prospecting’ (generating new prospects) happens many ways, not just on the phone. In fact, Lori says that cold calling is not necessary to be successful in sales. It does mean having methods to create new potential clients to keep the top of your funnel full.

It is easy to believe that to be successful in sales you must have a charismatic personality, be a natural extrovert, and be willing to make cold calls. The stereotype exists because those people exist, but the people who succeed at sales and business development are consistent. They consistently make time to telephone, network, and follow up. This is what keeps the Sales Funnel full of leads and moves those leads down through the funnel towards becoming billable work.

To close, I’ve excerpted a great quote from Lori’s blog about Jill Konrath a well-respected business-to-business sales trainer:

Konrath’s usual crowd for sales training are B2B sellers and this group was professionals who don’t identify with being in sales – therefore it was the very first hurdle to get over that took some time in this session, which was handled in a very strong way. Konrath admitted she was not a “born salesperson” and that what she is teaching are skills that nearly anyone can learn. For people not in sales as a profession, they need to “get” that what they don’t like about sales is bad sales experiences – not admirable ones.

How have you and your business embraced sales to meet the challenges of the new economy?

Photo by my friend Carolyn Hall Young of her foal Hope meeting the water trough for the first time. “What IS this?” she seems to say.