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Sales Hunting: How to Develop New Territories and Major Accounts in Half the Time  Using Trust as Your Weapon
Sales Hunting: How to Develop New Territories and Major Accounts in Half the Time  Using Trust as Your Weapon
Sales Hunting: How to Develop New Territories and Major Accounts in Half the Time  Using Trust as Your Weapon
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Sales Hunting: How to Develop New Territories and Major Accounts in Half the Time Using Trust as Your Weapon

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The first year of developing a new sales territory is a daunting task—especially in dog-eat-dog industries. The traditional advice is to train quickly on product, grab a customer list, start calling for appointments, discover opportunities, and close deals. In fact, almost every sales model out there is based on nothing more than "opportunity" management. But jumping straight to opportunity will have new salespeople—or veterans developing new territories—chasing their tails for the first year or two.

As Sales Hunting: How to Develop New Territories and Major Accounts in Half the Time Using Trust as Your Weapon details, there is a significant problem you must overcome when opening up new accounts and territories. No matter what you are selling, your prospect already has a trusted relationship with an incumbent vendor and will continue to buy from that vendor even when you have the better solution. The playing field is not level—and you’re on the wrong side. So how can you compete to win?

"Trust is the grease that makes business sales effortless," writes sales pro and trainer Dave Monty. Opportunity metrics are important, but trust—and a few sharp insider tactics Monty reveals—is the guidepost that leads to success. His sales model therefore incorporates metrics based on trust along with traditional sales measures. That is the fuel that helps you not just turn virgin territory into a consistent revenue generator, but helps you win over potential accounts that now use competitive products.

Sales Hunting helps you start establishing trust before you step foot in a prospect’s door, and it shows you the tactics necessary to penetrate new accounts. Once you gain access, trust can be used as systematic way to build long-lasting relationships that pay dividends well beyond that first sale you make. Among other things, this book explains:

  • Why most customers don’t want to buy from you . . . yet
  • Why trust-based relationships enable you to open up territories and bag the biggest customers quickly
  • How to qualify and rank customers based on traits
  • How to get in step with the customer’s buying cycle
  • How to establish trust-based and traditional sales metrics to guide your efforts

With advice based on Monty’s twenty years of IT sales and sales management experience—along with principles confirmed by academic research—Sales Hunting is an easy-to-read book that is packed with real-life examples and prescriptions for achieving sales success. It will prove a lifesaver for any salesperson or sales manager developing a new territory or trying to penetrate new accounts.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherApress
Release dateMar 5, 2014
ISBN9781430267690
Sales Hunting: How to Develop New Territories and Major Accounts in Half the Time  Using Trust as Your Weapon

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    Book preview

    Sales Hunting - David A. Monty

    Part 1

    Setting the Foundation

    David A. MontySales HuntingHow to Develop New Territories and Major Accounts in Half the Time Using Trust as Your Weapon10.1007/978-1-4302-6769-0© Apress 2014

    Setting the Foundation

    Because if you have a strong foundation . . . you can build or rebuild anything on it. But if you’ve got a weak foundation you can’t build anything.

    —Jack Scalia

    David A. MontySales HuntingHow to Develop New Territories and Major Accounts in Half the Time Using Trust as Your Weapon10.1007/978-1-4302-6769-0_1

    © David A. Monty 2014

    1. Hunting Misunderstood

    Sales Hunting Is a Science

    David A. Monty¹ 

    (1)

    North Carolina, USA

    Abstract

    Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.

    Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.

    —Jacques Yves Cousteau

    In the sales world, people often talk of farmers and hunters. Here’s what they mean:

    A sales hunter finds new customers. The hunter is aggressive. The hunter takes no prisoners. The hunter must be tenacious at getting in the front door, and be adept at closing business quickly.

    A sales farmer manages existing accounts. Sales farmers have strong relationships with the customers to the point where customers often seek them out as problem solvers. The customer often presents the opportunity to the salesperson. Since the farmer understands the procurement and decision processes of the customer, closing business is fairly easy.

    Put another way, the hunter has a slant toward the transaction, whereas the farmer leans more toward the relationship.

    But are these conceptions of sales professionals backward? Think of farmers. They have a long process they have to trust. They plant seeds, water, fertilize, and wait weeks for plants to germinate. They water more, fertilize, hope the weather cooperates, and wait months for the plants to grow before they can harvest the produce. When developing a new territory, the salesperson is primarily dealing with all new accounts. This is a long process as well; salespeople need to find a way to get into a customer, develop a relationship, find an opportunity, see the opportunity through to the end, compete against an incumbent, and hopefully close some business. The farming process therefore seems to correlate with developing a new territory.

    Salespeople with existing accounts—traditional sales farmers—are typically looking for new opportunities on familiar grounds. They know the customer, and opportunities pop up around them that they will easily take down. In my view, this seems more like the hunting.

    Learning to Hunt from My Barber

    I have to thank my barber of 10 years for showing me that hunting is exactly the right term for securing a new customer. It was in listening to him talk to his buddies about hunting over the course of many haircuts that I realized how much I misunderstood hunting. The term hunter perfectly fits the act of penetrating and taking first orders from new customers. The problem was my misconception of hunting as a sport, a misconception that I believe is shared by most of the sales community.

    Hunting is simple; you buy a hunting license, grab a gun, dress in camouflage or orange, walk through the woods, shoot the first deer you see, drag it back to the pick-up, and eventually eat it. This correlates perfectly with the advice given to most hunter salespeople. Grab a product presentation and wander through your territory. Find any customer who will listen to your presentation, put the opportunity on your forecast, close it, and cash your commission check.

    In either scenario, however, your chances for success are not good. If you walk through the woods looking for deer, they will hear you and run. The same is true with sales. Yet most new salespeople do just this—they stomp around in their territories scaring off customers—based on advice from their managers.

    The problem is, if you present your product or service to as many people as you can, you are selling at the most superficial level. Your customers might listen, but they will never allow you to fully engage in a real opportunity. Being focused on the initial opportunity, or your presentation, leaves you blind to the real opportunity: developing a long-term customer.

    My barber taught me that hunting is a science. It is a game of patience. It takes preparation, knowledge, experience, skill, and a lot of hard work to be successful. When he hunts, or plans to hunt, he takes into consideration ­temperature, phases of the moon, wind, scents, ammunition selection, and proper gear. And if the land where he is going to hunt is new to him, he scouts it out first. And while this may sound obvious, he also needs to know what hunting season it is. He can speak for hours on the details of his science.

    Let’s look at how closely sales hunting and game hunting parallel each other.¹

    The land on which you hunt is your customer at the company level. Your sales territory is made up of many hunting grounds, or many customers.

    Your prey, rather than an animal, is the opportunity or the deal.

    Getting in the door is much like finding property on which the owner will allow you to hunt. What is the best way to get permission to hunt?

    Camouflage hides hunters in the woods. Camouflage in sales is about looking different than your competition. Do you sound like every other salesperson and scare the deer away?

    Scouting a territory is parallel to qualifying a customer; what traits do you look for that indicate that there are deer here? What traits do you look for in your potential customers that indicate they are a match?

    Setting up your deer stand is equivalent to establishing trust with your customer. Do you try to shoot before your deer stand is set up? Are you even in the right ­hunting season? Do you know if you are wasting time working opportunities that have no chance to close?

    Selecting the right weapon and ammo is always critical. When you are ready to hunt for sales, which product should you lead with?

    You have to know when to squeeze the trigger and when not to. Do you have the sales skills necessary to build ­rapport, drive new opportunities, and then at just the right moment, pull the trigger and advance the sales cycle?

    You have to know who you are in the hunting party. Hunting parties can consist of landowners, guides, ­sharpshooters, and so on. If you are in partner sales, or work with technical experts on your team, you need to understand your role in the sale, and what your customer expects from each person on the team. A good, well-oiled team can bring home many more trophies than an ill-trained team working out of sync.

    Selling Is a Science

    Sales hunting is a science, just as deer hunting is. There is a method, and a consistent approach, to growing sales with new customers. Selling is not randomly looking for opportunities and then relying on luck for the final outcome.

    Although I will develop the hunting theme throughout the rest of this book—and point out where sales hunting takes its lead from deer hunting—I will not force the analogy on every concept discussed.

    As I stated in the introduction, the principles in this book are based on years of selling and marketing experience, along with an abundance of sales research. This book is more about establishing and growing trust with your customers, just as a hunter learns to navigate and understand his hunting grounds to be prepared for an opportunity.

    I believe that most people have trouble learning something when they don’t believe the underlying principles of the material. And in my experience, too many salespeople pursue the chase it down form of sales. So, I will spend the first part of the book understanding why true sales hunting is all about preparation and developing the more subtle aspects of the craft. Then, together we will develop strategies to create trusted business relationships that will ensure if any new sales are to be had, you will book them.

    Your success depends on developing a valued business relationship with your customer, not jumping on the first opportunity you find.

    It’s All About Trust

    Customers do business with vendors they trust. But what is trust, or what elements of trust are important in a business relationship? I will use the four core elements of trust to build the model for sales ­hunting—Intention, Capability, Dedication, and Results. Customers want relationships with ­salespeople who have the intention of helping them, who bring value through personal, team, and solution capabilities, who are dedicated enough to follow through, and who help produce results that move their business in a positive direction. I will spend chapters on that last sentence.

    Building trust gives you a position of strength with your customers. For example, you will learn when you have become the chosen vendor, which gives you the ability to hold firm in negotiations. It also gives you the ability to speak your mind with the customer. That’s especially important, because your customers crave help from vendors they trust. A successful salesperson becomes, in essence, an extension of the customer’s staff. You are there to help the customer drive success in their business. That means you have to accept responsibility. If you do not bring value, you will not be there very long, no matter how much a customer might like you.

    Successful game hunters build a trusted relationship with the land. They do not chase the prey. They know that the relationship with the land is as important as learning how to shoot accurately. Without the relationship, there is never a chance to shoot. This holds true for sales. Any successful salesperson will tell you that they value the relationships they have built with their ­customers more than any specific opportunity. However, nearly every sales book, sales process, and training class revolves around an opportunity. Although they also teach skills to create better relationships, they rarely tie the relationship ­specifically to managing an opportunity. Relationships, after all, cannot be ­plotted on a spreadsheet.

    (Well, as you’ll learn, they can in fact be plotted on a spreadsheet—eventually. And in bigger numbers than opportunistic hunters will ever tally.)

    To that end, I will define the tangible attributes of a trusted business relationship and discuss how to indicate the relative strength of each against your competition. These, too, are items you can put on a spreadsheet. I will also present clearly a structured map to develop valued relationships with your customers.

    Although this model can be used for an entire sales force, this book is aimed at new account managers with new territories and salespeople trying to penetrate new accounts. It requires a fundamental shift in how you look at your business, but that doesn’t mean you have to completely ignore ­everything you have been taught. I will build on a lot of basic sales processes, strategies, and techniques.

    Get Ready to Learn—and Win New Sales

    To make this a comprehensive book on new account selling, I am going to cover a lot of basic concepts in process, strategy, and tactics along the way. I believe that people learn better when they fully understand, and believe, the underlying foundation of the lesson. Put another way, You must understand algebra before you can learn calculus. Be patient, as the book builds slowly from a fundamental foundation in sales process, through the phases of planning, to more advanced concepts such as business trust and buyer psychology. Stick with it and I can assure you that your sales will grow.

    Summary

    Put away your misconceptions about sales hunting. Forget the macho connotations associated with hunting and realize that it is a patient science that requires work and planning. Understand that there is a method to ­penetrating new accounts. Know that there is a learnable method for bringing in your first orders, or for booking much more than you have until now. Just as a good game hunter puts the land before the prey, you need to put the customer before the opportunity. As a wise man once said, Opportunities at best will bring you a commission check; relationships build wealth.

    Opportunities at best will bring you a commission check; relationships build wealth.

    —Chris Daltorio

    Footnotes

    1

    Serious hunters reading this book will forgive me, I hope, for oversimplifying or misconstruing some aspects of hunting. The ignorance is my own—not my barber’s.

    David A. MontySales HuntingHow to Develop New Territories and Major Accounts in Half the Time Using Trust as Your Weapon10.1007/978-1-4302-6769-0_2

    © David A. Monty 2014

    2. Identify the Silent Sales Killers

    You Never Had a Chance

    David A. Monty¹ 

    (1)

    North Carolina, USA

    Abstract

    Status quo, you know, is Latin for the mess we’re in.

    Status quo, you know, is Latin for the mess we’re in.

    —Ronald Reagan

    Why are improved sales results so hard to drive in the first year? What are the root causes? To improve results, salespeople and management both grab onto tangible ideas like product training, working leads, work ethic, sales process, and sales skills training. But the difficulty in ramping (succeeding in) a new sales territory is often not rooted in the salesperson’s lack of experience or sales skills. There are many seasoned sales professionals who fail to succeed in new territories. The reasons fall into the category of status quo.

    There are many variations of the status quo:

    Potential customers are already doing business with an incumbent vendor

    Customers do not have a big enough issue to make a change

    Customers’ fear of change and the risks it brings is holding them back

    Customers have fallen into the rut of habitual purchasing—the automatic use of an incumbent vendor, without thought

    Customers have competing uses for capital—they have more important projects than than the one you are proposing

    Customers are not in the market—they buy what you sell only every few years, or longer

    Let’s look at how each of these items works against developing new business in more depth.

    We Have a Guy for That

    Customers have standing relationships in place for almost everything they purchase. Whether they buy that product or service every week or every four years, they have a vendor. You may be a better, more caring, and more competent salesperson than the incumbent. You may work for a better company than the incumbent. And, you might have far better products or services than the incumbent. However, the incumbent salesperson has the most important asset in sales: the trusted business relationship.

    Example

    Here’s an example. A reseller, VarTech, recently entered into a new relationship with a manufacturer, Brand Computer. Brand Computer has one of the largest product portfolios in the world, and they have resellers established in VarTech’s region. As seen in Figure 2-1, the customer base has the option to buy through a value added reseller, or directly from Brand Computer. Being a new reseller competing against incumbent resellers, VarTech needs a strategy for how to ramp with this new manufacturer.

    A978-1-4302-6769-0_2_Fig1_HTML.jpg

    Figure 2-1.

    Path to market

    Brand offers endless product training for VarTech’s sales teams and engineers. Marketing programs are developed to introduce this new relationship to VarTech’s customer base. Field sales teams from both companies conduct countless account mapping and territory planning sessions. Yet after six months, the reseller has very little sales traction. Looking for answers, sales management turns to the manufacturer for help. Brand Computer’s answer is, predictably, more product training. Still, results do not

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