LAYING THE FOUNDATION

Only a habit can subdue another habit. —Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World

Thanks, Phil!

My first sales manager job for IBM was in Indianapolis. My first unit comprised seven unmarried salesmen. I started the job with all the enthusiasm and cheerleading attitude that a new sales manager typically had.

In the first 90 days, I filled the role of chief sales cheerleader; making as many calls with my salesmen as I could; talking incessantly with them about every active situation in my unit (by the way, at any given time that was over a hundred!). Another major responsibility for me as a sales manager was to forecast monthly what the closed sales total for my unit would be. You can imagine what happened in those first three months: I so horribly missed my forecast that my boss started to wonder if he had made a big mistake hiring me. But he couldn't be harder on me than I was on myself. I was embarrassed. I feared my salespeople would start to see through my façade and realize I was over my head and struggling not to drown.

About three months into the job, I realized this situation was not getting any better. Not only was I not on top of the business but I was making wild guesses as to which out of the hundred prospects would close. Something had to change.

Because of the overwhelming number of so-called "prospects" my sales team claimed would close, I started looking at how many of those prospects were actually closing the way the salesmen predicted: very few of them. So I began to think that maybe, instead of trying to predict which prospects would close, there might be a better chance to focus on which ones were likely not going to close and stop focusing on them sooner.

I know that doesn't seem to be a logical way to approach the problem; and to others at first it didn't seem right either. The environment at that time was to see which sales units in our branch could earn the bragging rights for their sales production. Obviously that wasn't my unit, and if I didn't find a new way to produce more business, I would continue to be an ineffective sales manager, not be able to get my arms around where business was coming from and in the end leave the job a failure.

I became determined to drive my salespeople to stop working on prospects that wouldn't close. I actually focused more on this than on which prospects were closing. I also knew I had to come up with a shorthand way of assessing this "non-close-ability" with my salespeople so I didn't have to spend so much time letting the salespeople sell me, with their stories, on what great prospects they had.

To develop this shorthand method, I studied what really goes into a decision of any sort, whether it is a business decision or a personal decision. What I realized is there are really only four major components that are part of any decision we make, in business or otherwise:

First: What's in it for me? What is my vested interest in having this situation come to a conclusion?

Second: What's in it for my organization? What's the impact on the group or organization I'm a part of?

Third: What resources (in money, time or people) do I need to make sure this decision gets made and implemented?

Fourth: Who do I need persuade? Who do I need to get on my side and to support me in getting the decision made and implemented in my organization?

I introduced this Framework and told my team it was of equal importance to find there was no decision to be made in the current timeframe as to the price or content of the solution. I slowed them down from proposing a solution to the prospect. In fact, I made my salespeople convince me that they had talked to the prospect and had heard, in the prospect's own words, the answers to the four questions before I would let them propose.

At first they resisted, but I prevailed. And a strange thing happened: within the next three months, at any one time my sales team was working on less than 35 total "active" prospects, but they were closing about 25 percent more business and doing it more predictably month by month.

After facilitating these discussions and challenging my sales reps on what they had before thought were "hot prospects," they began to understand the power of this framework that I chose to call "Willing To Buy"—how to prioritize which prospects to work on, which had the best chance of closing. Every salesperson who worked for me told me they felt more in control of their territory than ever before and they were "having a ball!" In six months from starting to use this framework, we moved from the worst-performing unit in the branch office and region to become the best unit in the branch office as well as becoming the third best in the region out of 40 units.

Here I've given you a taste of how I developed the Willing To Buy Framework, which you will learn to use in this book. I hope it has whetted your appetite for this incredibly effective tool. When you complete this book, I also hope that you will use it, as my salespeople did, to close more business, to make more money and achieve results beyond what you could have ever imagined before using it.

Here's to your "successful disqualifying"!

OPENING THE DIALOGUE AND DEFINING THE TERMS

In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It's a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.

—David Bohm, American theoretical physicist, "On Dialogue"

Dialogue. That's the best way I can describe the professional relationship Dan Schultheis and I share. When we get together for a professional lunch, we invariably start kicking concepts around, sharing anecdotes and interrogating each other's ideas. It's fun, productive and at times frustrating, probably more so for Dan. You'll learn as we go forward that Dan is a big fan of asking why. So am I, and because I believe Dan is an innovative thinker, I tend to ask him why with some frequency. It's one way I learn from colleagues, clients and friends.

Because Dan and I have this ongoing dialogue and freely question each other's concepts, we have decided to allow this book to evolve as a dialogue unto itself. We are creating this in real time. We hold meetings and compare notes on the ways that the Framework has proven itself. As we work, we interrogate each concept and revisit every story we share to ensure that each of the four cornerstones is illustrated fairly and accurately. And we have agreed to...