CHAPTER 1
Hey! What’s Going on Here?

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” —T.S. Eliot

The New Job

It’s a beautiful day. You wake up ready to conquer the world. And why not? It’s your first day selling for your new company. You pick out your best shirt and slacks. You look in the mirror and psych your-self up about this new opportunity.

“I’m going to make a mint at this place!” But there is also a little voice in the back of your head that has doubts. After all, you had a pretty good job before this one. Things were going well in the last place, but the thought of selling a different product and making more money were too enticing to pass up. You quell the little voice by reassuring yourself that this is a great opportunity.

Off to work you go, of course, with a pit stop at Starbucks first. Arriving in the parking lot at 7:58 A.M., you are ready to go. You check your hair in the rearview mirror and perform the age-old breath test: breathing into your palm and attempting to determine your breath status. It’s time to walk into the new office. Sitting in the lobby waiting for your new sales manager to greet you, butterflies stir in your belly. “This is going to be great, I hope.” After a few moments, the sales manager, with a big smile, welcomes you to the company.

Eager to learn how to sell for this company, you’ve got your pen out, poised to take notes. The sales manager takes you to her office. The ink is ready to fly out of your pen! Here they come, the words of wisdom you’ve been waiting for.

“Let me share a few things with you about our company,” she says.

First, we expect you to arrive at 8:00 A.M., and the day isn’t over until you hit your daily sales goal. By the way, your goal is to sell 20 units per day. Let me show you to your phone. Here is the phone book. Good luck!

“Good luck?” How is that helpful? Granted, I’m not a new sales-person. I’ve sold successfully for many of years, you begin to think. But every company and industry is different. How do I apply my skills here? Which companies are best to call? What’s different about this product? Who buys this stuff? What motivates them to buy it? And why from this company? All of these are very important questions that need to be answered in order to succeed in selling for this company.

You spend your first day dialing away. Rejection after rejection. At the end of the day, you’ve sold nothing. The butterflies from this morning are starting to feel like buzzards now. But tomorrow is going to be a better day.

Again, arriving at 7:58 A.M., you stop by the sales manager’s office and ask some of the questions that were on your mind the day before.

“Which companies should I call first?” you ask.

“The large ones,” she retorts.

“What’s different about this company versus the competition?”

“We are the best,” she proudly responds.

Somewhat convinced, but optimistic, you are off for day two of calling. You start calling the large ones. Today, you tell them you are the best at what you do. Day two ends, no sales. It feels as if those buzzards are now attacking your stomach. On the drive home, you

start to have some doubts. Maybe I’ll keep my options open. I’ll keep searching Careerbuilder and Monster and see what else is out there.

After a few more frustrating days, you return to the manager’s office.

“I’ve sold nothing so far,” you begin.

“I know,” she responds. “How come?”

“I don’t know,” you admit. “I’ve sold successfully before. You saw that on my résumé. I’ve been a top performer at every company for which I’ve worked.”

“Well, you need to hit your goals,” she admonishes. “You need to make yourself successful. Make today better.”

“I’ll do it!” you declare.

Off you go for another day in the trenches. More calls, no sales. Home you go, where your beloved asks how things are going with the new job. “Great!” you say, as you don’t want to create alarm. She buys it, but you don’t.

The next morning the sales manager asks to see you in her office, instead of the other way around.

“Where are your sales? You have to apply yourself. Make more calls. Push! Push! Push!” she implores.

You shuffle back to your desk hoping today will be better. It isn’t. No sales.

Home you go. Do you quit? Do you wait to be fired? Only time will tell.

It’s The Same Job…Isn’t It?

This scenario plays out in companies every day. “I don’t want to hear excuses. Where is the revenue? I hired you to hit your quota!” Ever heard this? If you have been in sales for a day, I’m sure you have.

Almost every sales manager in the profession utters this expression. It has been the mantra of sales managers since the beginning of time. The challenge salespeople have is that management wants the revenue, but does not necessarily provide the infrastructure and tools needed to achieve that goal. The overwhelming majority of sales managers do not and, quite frankly, cannot support their team’s selling efforts.

For a moment, let’s feel some sympathy for sales managers. After all, it isn’t their fault. In most cases, these sales managers were great salespeople who got promoted. They earned the next rung on the ladder, which is what most of you probably aspire to do as well. So there isn’t a problem, right? Wrong! The job of the sales manager is very different than the job of the salesperson, but most organizations do not appreciate the significance of this difference and leave this poor individual completely unprepared to lead a team.

Selling and managing necessitate two completely different skill sets.

“Get them to do what you were doing,” is the only marching order given to this poor schlep. No training, no development, nothing! Except of course, other than the supportive pat on the back received from their superiors. The expectation is that these man-agers will execute “disciple selling” with the thought being that this manager has been successful selling and the sales team will just replicate their approach. Thus, huge sales will transpire.” Just have your salespeople copy what you were doing, and we’ll grow revenue six fold.” Nice try. This rarely works.

The challenge with executing the “disciple strategy” is that selling is personal. What worked for this top salesperson is not necessarily going to work for the group. Most top salespeople have their own creative style and approach that yields results for them, but it won’t work for the masses because it’s not a process and is not replicable. Sure, these managers can teach some tactics, or share some tools that helped them close a deal. They cannot, however, create the macro-selling environment needed for each team member to be successful, because that is a completely different skill.

It’s amazing how many business executives have not figured out that sales managers and salespeople perform vastly different jobs. They claim to understand the difference, but their actions show evidence to the contrary. Excellence in one position is not necessarily a guarantor of success in the other. For the most part, the sports world has figured this out. The best managers are not necessarily the best players. Don’t believe it? Just look at one of my favorite examples of this: Charley Lau.

In the 1980s, no other hitting coach was more recognized for his expertise than Charley Lau. His most famous protégé was George Brett who, under Lau’s guidance, almost reached the rare milestone of hit-ting .400 (he finished the season at .390). This was at a time when only about 1.5 percent of all players reached .300. George Brett is just one of the many baseball stars that Lau molded into a terrific hitter¹.

None of this would have happened if Charley’s player statistics were used in determining whether or not to hire him as a hitting coach. Why? Charely Lau was a mediocre hitter. Truth be told, “mediocre” is actually a compliment. Over 11 seasons, Lau only achieved a .255 batting average, which would not lead one to believe he would become a hitting guru. That said, this is not an endorsement for hiring mediocre talent for sales or sales management positions. It is a reminder, however, that different jobs require different skill sets.

Salespeople are hired for various roles such as prospecting, developing, and growing accounts. Sales management needs to create an environment that helps the salespeople identify where to prospect and how to prospect in their particular company. It is expected that sales management will help the salespeople to grow and succeed. But if no one trained them how to do it, how can any-one expect that of them? So it is left to you, the salesperson, to fill the void or fail. Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s just the way it is.

Another example of the skill difference between player and man-ager is Tony LaRussa who has won over 2,000 games as a baseball-team manager. Look for his statistics as a major-league baseball player, and there is nothing worth mentioning. However, he has been a successful manager for the Chicago White Sox, Oakland Athletics, and St. Louis Cardinals. As a player, he only accomplished a .199 career batting average which is subpar, to say the least. Would you think that Tony was a superstar manager in the making? Remember, he doesn’t need to hit a baseball as a manager. However, he does need to identify the best nine people to place upon the baseball diamond each and every day. According to majorleaguebaseball.com, he is ranked eighth in a list of the top 10 of winningist baseball managers. He has taken the St. Louis Cardinals to the post-season each of the last few years and won the World Series in 2006. He is best known as a data guru who uses statistics as part of his success strategy.

The converse has happened as well. Many superstar baseball players have been promoted to manager with little success. Their main responsibility is not hitting the homerun or striking out a batter, it’s building a cohesive group of twenty-five players focused on winning as many baseball games as possible. Top salespeople can become terrible managers. Mediocre salespeople can become fantastic managers. Different skill sets, different results.

My Gift to You

While I am sympathetic to sales managers who were either erroneously placed or poorly trained, this book is not written for them.

(The sequel to this book will be.) It is for you, the salesperson who was hired to generate sales, but not given the support system or tools needed to be successful. The title of this book is not intended to portray a negative image of sales managers nor is it meant to be a critique of them. The old expression of not knowing what you don’t know rings true here.

While you may have chuckled when you read the title, it wasn’t meant to be funny. This is a serious issue that has reached epidemic levels in business. Remember, dodos were not dumb, they were unable to adapt to their environment because they never learned to fly. In my mind, the converse of the dodo is the eagle that soars majestically across the sky. This beautiful bird depicts power, control, and independence. Throughout this book, you will see references to eagle salespeople which is my way of sharing with you what the best of the best do.

Your sales manager probably has good sales skills—darn-good sales skills—and is quite probably very intelligent. This is why she got hired or promoted to that position in the first place. (I will refer to the sales manager here as “she” for clarification purposes.) But, she just doesn’t know how to build a sales organization nor help others become successful, which is a vastly different skill set than selling deals themselves. Selling is for the individual. Sales management is about creating a scalable selling environment for the masses. Don’t kid yourself. Sales managers are not about to become extinct like the dodo. There is a tremendous need for them. Looking at successful teams, you will clearly see a pattern. Successful teams are comprised of a group of focused, motivated individuals that are well-prepared to win with a solid leader at the helm.

While I feel sympathy for the dodo sales manager, the fact remains that she is still holding you, the salesperson, accountable for achieving quota despite her inability to provide the structure and necessary tools. I’m not proposing that you contradict her directives unless you wish to be fired. Generally, she will not give any orders other than to go sell, which is obviously what you are there to do any-way. It is her responsibility to ask for results, as the company holds her accountable for achieving their goal. Few companies hold managers accountable for developing the plan to help their team achieve that goal. What is needed is a method of achieving that goal; what is needed is the development of your personal Sales Architecture^®. During my years of building and managing sales teams, the importance of creating a framework that helped salespeople be successful, yet still allowed them to be creative was the most important value I brought to my teams. I was so passionate about the concept of Sales Architecture that I trademarked it years ago.

It’s interesting when speaking to business owners about salespeople. Most feel they can hire the superstars and they should be successful with little contribution from the company or sales management in support of them. That couldn’t be further from the truth. To contrast, I’ve adopted two adult dogs from animal shelters. My first dog was like a dog in a box. He was perfectly trained, knew to sit, stayed away from the dinner table, and was completely docile with no train-ing. We came home from the shelter and somehow, he already knew the rules of the house.

Thinking that this could be easily replicated, we adopted another dog from the shelter. Well, this dog was more of what an owner should expect. She required training and development, and today is as well-behaved as my other dog. She had the ability to learn and grow, but needed training to be successful in our home. In nei-ther case did we know the history of the dog; they had both been strays. That made it incumbent on my wife and me (really, my wife gets the credit here) to develop them.

The same can be said about salespeople. It is rare to find a sales-person that is a salesperson in a box who needs no development or structure to be successful. If that were the case, there would be no need for sales management. Anecdotally speaking, 5 percent of all salespeople will be successful regardless of the support the company gives them. There is a term for these people: entrepreneurs. You don’t usually find them in a sales capacity within a company; they are business owners. Another 5 percent of all salespeople will fail regardless of what is done for them. These folks probably don’t belong in sales. After all, the sales profession isn’t for everyone. That means that 90 percent of the sales professional pool is in the limbo group. The limbo group, as I refer to it, needs to have a firm sup-port system in place to be successful: the aforementioned Sales Architecture.

Chances are that you fall within this group, since the large major-ity of salespeople exist within this category. Your sales manager is look-ing for results, but has probably left you without the systems needed to generate the success she wants. What do you do? You can pout beside the water cooler, which puts no dollars in your pocket. Or you can create your own structure, your own personal selling system. Sales Architecture is the framework designed to ensure your selling success. Granted, it would have been helpful if the sales manager developed this, but, as I shared before, she hasn’t been taught how to develop it either. Sales managers might put some pieces together, but not the overall roadmap, which is needed to be successful.

That’s where this book comes in. This work is designed to help those salespeople working for the dodo sales manager who wants results but is unable to create the necessary selling environment. For those of you now thinking that this environment is a synonym for micro-management, it most certainly is not. It is a support system leading you to success. It is a “how to” guide for selling which teaches you how to take control of your career and thus, your selling destiny. Don’t be fooled! It is not Sales 101. Many of the concepts presented in this book are sophisticated and conceptual. You won’t find scripts for memorization in here. As I stated before, selling is personal. How can I give you scripts if selling is personal?

It was very important to me when I wrote this book that I not write from the view of the famous “ivory tower” which is the lecture-style sales book written by CEOs that is so far from reality that it helps few of you. I also did not want to come across in an academic style. Not that I am not educated on this subject, but many books written by academics lack the real-world experience of doing it. The third key for me was to provide you with a plan you could implement. Many sales books and motivational speakers tell you to do various things, the right things, but they don’t walk you through how to implement them into your process.

I’ve been in the trenches with salespeople for more years than I care to share, working side by side with them. We won a lot, lost some, but grew together on each adventure. My hope is that you take the concepts presented within this book in the spirit that I intended, which is as a fellow comrade. Look, I’ve made mistakes along the way. Why not help others avoid making those same mistakes? I’ve learned a few pearls as well. Why not share those too?

Where to Go From Here

This book is going to take you on a journey to help you build your own Sales Architecture. Once you know the company you are with is the best match for you, you will be able to apply the concepts in this book to help you do the following and much, much more like:

Change your perspective from selling a prospect to facilitating a buying process.

Develop a territory management approach so you invest your time wisely.

Differentiate your company, your product, and yourself so buying players can understand it.

Articulate a sound-byte, positioning your differentiated areas.

Formulate prospecting strategies.

Profile and analyze buying players in a unique way.

Formulate a needs analysis program to qualify an account and differentiate yourself.

Get deals unstuck.

◆ Resolve client concerns instead of overcoming objections. With these thoughts in mind, I look forward to you soaring like an eagle with success, career satisfaction, and financial rewards

firmly clasped in your talons. You will leave the dodo wondering how you became so successful.

Embrace your career and fly!

CHAPTER 2

Finding the Right Place
to Hang Your Hat

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.

If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”

—Herman Cain, American businessman

Money Can Make You Do Silly Things

Money! This is the traditional answer given by salespeople when the interviewer asks what motivates them. It is also the Achilles’ heel of many. Blinded by the potential earning opportunity, many join a company to sell in an environment that may not be best for them. It’s easy to fall prey to this. After all, money makes the world go around. This reminds me of the old Indiana Jones movies where the treasure looked like it was ten steps away, but those ten steps were lined with dead bodies. Those flawed individuals thought they could simply grab the treasure without consideration for the perilous environment. They ran for the treasure and got shot in the process. Indiana Jones, on the other hand, was always strategic, considered what it took to get the treasure, and ultimately got it.

Employers write ads to attract salespeople to apply for positions within their company. Many overstate the earning possibilities. Truth be told, they confuse “possible” with “potential.” Sure, you could potentially earn $100,000, but what does it take for someone to earn that at this company? What percentage of the salespeople actually earns this much money? This is a great question to ask.

Often, the company has one salesperson who has been with the firm since its inception and earns top dollar while the rest of the sales team has mediocre earnings.

As I mentioned, money is an easy lure, but it may not be attain-able. The question to ask yourself is, are you in the right place? You have to be honest with yourself. If you aren’t, you have a high risk of pursuing the wrong opportunity. I don’t know where you work today, but are you sure it is the right place for you? You may have a skill set that does not match your job responsibilities. In essence, let’s not force a square peg into a round hole. An individual’s needs, wants, and desires may not match the employer’s criteria. As you may know, many employers have job descriptions to which they compare their sales candidates. I’ve always recommended that sales-people do the same. There are assessments that will help provide some introspection. I emphasize this point because the concepts I share later in this book only work if you are in the best place for your skills. They have to match.

I’ve spoken with many salespeople and what I often hear is that many of them are mismatched to their job. For example, some are experts at cold-calling and truly love the hunt for a new client, the challenge of the chase! Others would rather work with existing clientèles, leverage those relationships, and sell more products and services to them. This is the contrast between the hunter and farmer salespeople. The skill set for each of these is vastly different from one another. Hunters rarely succeed as farmers and vice versa. This is just one of the elements to consider. Later, I will share with you how to screen a career opportunity while the employer screens you. In essence, this chapter will teach you how to create your ideal selling opportunity profile in much the same way as you would define an ideal client.

While it seems logical that employers will screen out those salespeople who don’t fit the profile, let’s remember that they aren’t experts at it either. Therefore, the responsibility lies with you, the salesperson, to control your own destiny. One way is to look at the analysis of employment in much the same way as one looks at pur-chasing a home. Think about all of the considerations when going through that process. How many bedrooms are needed? What is the layout of the kitchen? How many bathrooms are there? What is the quality of the school system? How far is it from work? How are the neighbors? This is just to name a few. It is a tedious process that requires interviewing the employer as much as they interview you. However, without a clearly defined profile specifying your requirements, this is not easily done. By the end of this chapter, you will be ready to create that profile.

The Story of the Rainmaker

The sales manager has a dream. She hires a salesperson requiring no training or management, and, in his first month, he closes the biggest deal in the history of the company. While dreaming this dream, the sales manager receives a résumé from someone with ten years of successful sales performance for IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft. She tells Human Resources to find a way to get this rainmaker on the payroll. Money is no object! The employer will guarantee him the world because success is imminent. No one with this pedigree could fail. How could he? The deal is made and the rainmaker is hired. Expectations are high as he goes out on his first sales call.

A month goes by with only a modicum of success. After three months, the manager starts to wonder why the company is paying this supposed rainmaker twice as much as the rest of the sales team. After six months of marginal success and a lot of paid salary (and I mean a lot), the company decides to let the rainmaker go. The assessment: he can’t sell. He’s cost the company a bundle, and worse, crushed the manager’s dream.

The company feels misled and that it was the employee’s fault. But what about this rainmaker who left a job with a major employer to take this risk and now is unemployed? How much responsibility did the salesperson have for this being a failure? Most of the time, the salesperson is as responsible for the turn of events as the employer. In essence, the blame is mutually shared. The exception is when erroneous expectations have been set by the employer, as in, “You will earn $100,000 in your first six months with the company.” Other than that, it is usually mutual. It comes back to the importance of interviewing the company while they interview you. Sometimes, this is difficult to do, but it is critical to avoid being the tragic hero in a rainmaker movie. By the way, there is not an Academy Award given for that role.

In the case of this particular rainmaker, he failed because his skillset did not match the environment in which he was hired to sell. He was used to working for a company with a million-dollar marketing budget, making it a household name. He never had to sell the company; corporate did that for him. When he made an introductory phone call to a prospect and mentioned his company’s name, a meeting was accepted with a sale not far behind. He benefited from the old bromide, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” In the new company, he found a number of hurdles that needed to be over-come before that initial meeting was accepted. He also found himself selling for a company with a limited marketing budget, and low name recognition in the marketplace. To be successful, the rainmaker had to sell the company as much as the product. Maybe he hadn’t considered that part of the job in his evaluation. His experience certainly had not prepared him for this challenge. In this scenario, a high level of creativity and persuasiveness was needed to position the company as credible and reputable, which was not ever needed when selling for companies like Microsoft.

Living in the Washington D.C.-Metro area during the turn of the century, I saw many of my friends leave great jobs with household name companies to pursue the dream of a dot-com income-rich life. In those new roles, these salespeople were selling for companies like ABC Technology, Inc. No name recognition. No brand recognition. Few marketing dollars. No prospects calling in. Few of these folks succeeded; few of those companies succeeded. These salespeople were thought to be rainmakers, but could not deliver. It wasn’t because they duped the dot-com. It wasn’t because they weren’t great salespeople. It was because there are a number of factors that affect a salesperson’s success and failure. They did not evaluate the opportunity in a way that led them to determine if they matched the company’s needs and vice versa. Blinded by potential income wind-fall from stock options, they rolled the dice hoping that their company would go IPO.

Needless to say, those who lacked the ability to sell company credibility quickly found trouble. Why? They were mismatched to the opportunity. The requirements to be successful in their new world were vastly different than those necessary in their past world. Never before did they have to sell a company to get in the door. They had been selling IBM or Microsoft or AT&T. People knew the brand and they were involved in every buying process. To effectively position a solution, credibility had to be developed first. It was very common for these salespeople to hear from buyers, “What company are you with again? I’m not familiar with the name.”

Earnings are very important. Make sure the suggested earnings are attainable.

The mismatch of salespeople to the company is one of the things that prohibited dotcoms from generating the revenue they needed to survive. In addition to the bottom falling out of Wall Street stock prices, many of these companies hired the wrong sales talent to drive their business. Salespeople were all too eager to jump on a dot-com train. Few asked where the train was going and thus, got on the wrong one.

The sales manager in this scenario is not without blame. Logic would say that they would be screening for the match in the interview process. Not often is this the case. When I talk about deficiencies in sales managers’ skills, evaluating talent is one of the first ones to expose itself. Sales managers have not been trained to evaluate talent, which is a skill that is learned over time with mentoring. These managers especially struggle when they are hiring someone who has worked in the industry, as they are blinded by the industry jargon. Candidates with great pedigrees also blind them.

My hope is that you recognize that you have as much to lose as they do by signing up for the wrong job. Job-hopping will ultimately hurt your résumé, and it becomes very difficult to explain in the interview process. Sales managers are looking for strong salespeople. If 100 sales managers were surveyed, 100 would say that they were looking for strong salespeople. The problem is that the term “strong” is vague. What does “strong” mean? There are a number of considerations for the profile. One qualification could be the ability to create demand for a product. In a different company, the sales need is for salespeople who are adept in selling environments in which the demand exists and the sale is based on persuading the client to buy from them versus the competition. Some refer to this as takeaway business. While both are versions of what is referred to as a hunter, each requires a different skill set to be successful.

The challenge of evaluating talent is not limited to large or small companies. It is an issue everywhere. It is costly and painful for all involved, but salespeople can avoid it by developing their ideal opportunity profile and using it to determine their match to a prospective employer.

Finding the Match Made in Heaven

The perfect match is possible to find. Maybe “perfect” is an over-statement. You can find the right match if you have taken the time to build your ideal opportunity profile. Money is not where you start, but it is an important consideration. It cannot be allowed to blind you in the evaluation process. I don’t undervalue the importance of money; it is very important, but it is an unattainable mirage if your profile does not match the opportunity. When searching for sales jobs, many sales people only worry about how much money the employer is willing to pay them. Equity, stock options, 10 percent salary increase. Don’t get me wrong—sales is about making money. That is why so many do it. But how long will you get to do it if you are not really what the employer had in mind? If you don’t have the requisite skills, will the commissions ever be earned? How long will you stay if you aren’t happy with the job?

I look at the job search in much the same way that someone looks for a spouse. Many people have a profile in their minds of their perfect mate, the things that they feel make for a perfect match. This profile may include religion, political views, interests, and even appearance. Dating becomes simply a matching game. In some respects, one could argue that it is arrogant to do this, but the counterargument is that you are simply being honest with yourself. Like the salesperson blinded by money, those who were blinded by one element, such as beauty, and forgot the others were often reminded later of the short-sightedness of their decision during an expensive divorce. It may explain why more than one in two marriages fail.

Being honest and thorough are the two biggest keys in determining your ideal sales opportunity profile.

Remember, every company is looking for their rainmaker, that salesperson who will bring a huge book of business that yields results on their very first day with the organization. Don’t fool yourself! This rarely happens. Most clients are not easily portable. The mistake often made is that a salesperson will paint a picture for a prospective employer that leads them to believe that they can bring a significant amount of business to the company, and the employer is all too eager to believe it. The clock begins to tick as the boss looks for the revenue. After ninety days with no revenue, the employer becomes doubtful. After all, the salesperson negotiated a great package based on this contribution. At the six-month window, the employer has forgotten about the skills and is solely focused on the feast that was going to be provided and never was. You’re gone! Or worse, you get yourself sued for violating a non-compete agreement or the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Either way, it’s bad news.

Here is something worth considering: if you represent that you can move clients, you are stealing assets from your current employer. Many prospective employers think about how you will leave their employment as much as how your tenure will be while you are there. If you will attempt to take your current employer’s clients, you will probably try to take theirs. This can cause a concern with the hiring manager and can eliminate you from consideration. Position this delicately, if at all.

Donning my humble hat for a moment, I recall a time where one of my competitors was struggling and their salespeople were leaving in droves. Quickly, I jumped out and hired five of their top salespeople without any consideration for a candidate profile. We had to move fast so no one else acquired this talent. Our thinking was that these folks knew the industry, and thus, they would be successful quickly. As you can probably guess, it didn’t work. Within four months, we had let all of them go. What I did not mention was that these salespeople were used to selling at the low-price level. We were a boutique. Not only were we a boutique, we were a start-up with no name recognition. Their company had a tremendous brand presence in the marketplace.

Not one of them was able to make the shift. At the time, we accused them of being poor salespeople. We felt misled, tricked, and duped. In hindsight, we actually shared the blame. Had we utilized our candidate profile, we never would have hired any of them. Considering their former success profile would have helped deter-mine the fit. On their end, they were left with a four-month stay with an employer on their résumé. We both lost.

Career Introspection

By now, you probably appreciate the importance of developing your specific opportunity profile. To do so, there are two concepts to review, traits and behaviors. You have probably heard those terms before. If you took Psychology 101 in college, you likely learned that these terms are polar opposites. Traits are the attributes of an individual that cannot change. He is who he is. In genetics, examples of traits are eye color, attached ear lobes, and hair color. These are typically thought of as genetic traits which are the result of the combination of the parents’ genes. They are classified as dominant and recessive. Traits are considered unchangeable (contacts, surgery, and hairstylists aside).

For purposes of developing the profile, traits are the unchangeable aspects of you. They are your experiences in selling such as company type, product or service type, sales cycle, etc. These are unchangeable aspects. At the opposite end of the spectrum is behav-iors. These are your changeable aspects, if you desire to change them. Needless to say, this can involve an enormous investment of time and energy. Are you up for that? Not everyone is. It also involves risk for both you and your employer.

From the employer point of view, it is important to know:

What do they expect of a salesperson?

What skills are they willing to teach?

What is their commitment to training and development?

What won’t they teach?

What do they feel can’t be taught?

It is also important to re-word those questions and ask them of yourself:

What do you expect of an employer?

What skills do you want to learn?

How committed are you to learning?

◆ What don’t you want to be taught? Putting those two sequences together allows you to better under-stand the match between your needs and those of a potential employer. I’m not suggesting that you directly ask potential employers these questions, but during the interview process, this information can be gleened. For example, if you have never cold-called, but desire to learn to, you want to understand the employer’s commitment to teaching this skill. If you have sold in a transactional sale,but desire a more complex one, will the employer teach you? How will they teach you?

At the other end of the spectrum, if a manager feels that cold-calling is a required skill to be hired, and you haven’t done it, you probably will not be considered even though you are willing to learn the skill. If you aren’t going to win, lose early. That is why it is important to understand the expectations of sales behaviors. It’s not a right-versus-wrong scenario, but a quest to understand the employer’s perspective in contrast with your own requirements.

A factor often not considered by sales candidates is what they have historically sold. Those who have been selling services are typically used to an environment that allows them to customize, configure, and create based on client requirements. However, those who have historically sold products have usually been limited to the proverbial box. What the gadget does, it does. What it doesn’t do, they hope the next version does. The fixed product is exactly that: fixed. It is the same every time. As a salesperson, you aren’t expected to create the solution. However, in many service sales, a core requirement of the salesperson is the ability to craft the ideal service solution based on the needs of the prospect. If you haven’t sold products before, is this something you want to learn? If you haven’t sold services, is this something you want to learn?

The best example depicting the extreme of the product/service conundrum is in the field of information-technology development. These firms don’t have a product. They don’t have a defined service either. They have coders, IT developers who build to a client’s specific requirement. But what requirement? Imagine selling for a firm in which you have no product, no defined service. Each time you call on a prospect, you figure out if there is something to be sold. If there is, what the heck is it? Some salespeople love that environment and thrive in it. They love the challenge of creativity. Others get frustrated very quickly and quit.

Hunters and Farmers

Another key area for review is the hunter/farmer relationship that I referenced before. In the graph, I have contrasted these in what I refer to as a need to win analysis. This analysis will help you to identify which side of the sales equation best matches you: hunter or farmer. Even within the hunter role, there are differ-ences. The transaction-sale hunter, the one who sells something one time to a prospect, has a different reading than the complex-sale hunter.

In a short, transaction-style sale, the drive of the salesperson is much higher than the need to be liked. In essence, this is a quick transaction with little future-selling opportunity. The salesperson, in a transaction sale, engages one or maybe two buying players. Their responsibility is less focused on building relationships and more on completing the sale. The buying cycle is usually short. Health-club sales and car sales are great examples of the transaction sale. Since the goal of this selling environment is to close the deal in the first meeting, the “drive” of the individual will be key to his success. If this person is more “likeable” than “driven,” most will like the salesperson, but will buy from someone else. It is not that these salespeople shouldn’t be likeable, just that they need to be significantly more predisposed to being driven.

In complex sales, this measurement is much more challenging. The complex salesperson deals with multiple buying players and the buying process is lengthy. Multiple phone calls and meetings usually occur during the course of the cycle. In this type of sale, the salespeople need to be likeable so that they can keep energy in the relationship. The challenging part of complex sales is that while the salesperson needs to be likeable, he still needs a slight dominance toward being driven to win. If the salesperson is not close to the middle of the scale, meaning that he is also likeable, he will struggle to be successful. He will not be able to build trusting relationships. Don’t get me wrong: If he is more likeable than driven, everyone will like him, but few will buy from him. It is preferred that this candidate be more driven, just not as dominant as the transactional seller.

The lengthy process associated with the complex sale also means that the salesperson will not win as frequently as he would with the transaction sale. Some salespeople need to win every day, or every week. The complex sale usually means that winning hap-pens a few times a year. Not everyone can handle that. Many sales-people need to experience the thrill of victory more frequently. Salespeople often try to fool themselves because they are again enticed by the almighty dollar. As this is a trait, the salesperson can rarely change this and failure occurs. Again, painful for all involved.

The big question to ask yourself is what type of buying cycle can you survive. Why do I call it surviving? By your very nature as a salesperson, you need the thrill of victory! Patience is not a virtue salespeople master. If patience is what we were after, we would all have become doctors. I’ve managed sales organizations that have had varying buying-cycle lengths. I’ve interviewed terrific salespeople who when they heard the buying cycle was twelve months or longer, discontinued the interview process. Imagine a sales cycle where it takes twelve months or longer to win. Granted, the win is about a half-million dollars in annual revenue, but still a long time for most to wait to taste success. And I appreciated that those candidates deselected themselves. They would have quit after three months of corporate investment and we both would have lost.

There are many salespeople who are accustomed to a longer process. They look at success at various intervals of the process rather than soley measuring themselves on winning the account. They use numerous metrics as part of their Sales Architecture to feel a more frequent win. If they scheduled an appointment with a key prospect, they felt a win. Others felt small wins as they moved through the cycle. This keeps them sane. It’s like winning battles en route to winning the war. It takes a certain personal approach to be able to do this. If you are not cut out for a long buying cycle, do not be tempted by the gold at the end of the rainbow. You probably don’t have what it takes to get there. I know that’s a pretty aggressive statement, but remember, this book is for you. My goal is to make sure you make the best career choices for your own personal success.

Where Are the Leads?

Hunters also come in different breeds. Some hunters have historically created their own leads. Maybe they went door to door. Some may have just used the phone book. Other salespeople have generated new business for their company through company-created leads. These salespeople may have been given lead lists or answered inbound calls from prospects. There is an important distinction between these two types of hunters. When you consider your historical success, did you typically generate leads from scratch or did the company provide you with leads? These are both hunter roles, but the skills needed to be successful for each one is different.

I’ve seen many salespeople describe themselves as hunters and use the term broad-brush. As a manager, a mistake I made early in my career was not asking enough questions to identify the type of hunter skills the candidate possessed. As a result, I hired people who did not have the lead-generation skills which were a job requirement. I heard “hunter,” and did not dig deeper to see what type of hunter they truly were. Many of these salespeople failed as they could not jump-start their pipeline. They hadn’t done it before and were not equipped to do it now. We both lost.

At the other end of the sales spectrum is the role of the farmer. For some reason, most salespeople think that the hunter is the sexy role. Quite frankly, many hiring managers do as well. They both miss the point. Farmers can play a key role in a sales organization. As a matter of fact, many salespeople are better suited to being farmers than hunters. Farmers have the core responsibility of selling additional products and services to existing clientèle. This important function helps strengthen the relationship between the client and their respective company. Why is this role so important? The deeper the relationship is between two organizations, the more difficult it is to sever it. In the sales-trait analysis, farmers straddle the line between being likeable and being driven. Since they provide both a service and sales function, this spectrum balance is necessary.

Flexibility: Do You Bend or Break?

For example, think about your tolerance for change. Some may call this your ability to adapt. In some companies, things are very fluid. Titles change often, compensation plan structures change regularly, and so on. Are you OK with that? Other companies offer a more stable environment. So how tolerant of change are you? Not everyone can handle the craziness of change. And you are fooling yourself if you think you can become more flexible. Yoga doesn’t help with this type of flexibility. I know that I personally do not respond well to change. I prefer to have a clear understanding of what is expected of me and what I will earn for that performance. Sure, I might be able to earn more money somewhere else, but would I ever see those dollars? I’d probably quit in frustration before I saw my spike in income.