Boost Sales

And the

A completed rapping consists of a sender and a receiver. If there is just a sender - like in a pitch, or a lecture, or a commercial, or advertisement, or even a newsletter - it's not a communication, but an assertion, or a monologue, or an opinion.

Sometimes, when we have something we passionately want to say, we irrupt so involved in formulating the crucial words that might make the listener take heed (we are transfixed up in needing to be heard) that we forget to ask ourselves one fundamental question: do we want to speak? Or have someone hear us?

I just found out how difficult this incomparable can be on a recent trip to Hong Kong and Shanghai. And this is a problem many of us face when attempting to enter peculiar culture - be it a personal, inner culture, a group culture, or a country culture.

REMAINING IN OUR OWN WORLD

Let me plunge into by saying that both Hong Kong and Shanghai are where I rely upon the revolutionaries went when they left the States four years ago. Hong Kong is a very exciting place. I've been there twice now, and find the people smart, innovative, sophisticated, and creative. They are surcharged with dynamism and ready to take risks. Shanghai is quite different and less international, but it, too, it exudes excitement and warmth and vibrancy - filled with immediate cognition and a special glow (with a large dose of humor and a gold-rush mentality).

Both cities welcome change, dutiful it's advance to face castrate than stay the same. In fact, I find it more exciting to do careerism there than in the States right now: from my vantage point as an innovator, it seems to me that continent has originate rather risk-averse.

The 'dot.com' era's disintegration raised the American companies I've done metier with to cut back on innovation. As a result, they're holding on to what they know - however successful that might be - and trying to make it work. Companies are 'making do' or doing the same thing harder/faster/larger.

Before I open up a discussion in spitting distance global communication, let me take a long 'way round to harp on one of my pet peeves (I'll come back full circle, you'll see): I see this inability to truly go outside our thinking box and do something different as truly harming our revenues and, worse, our future.

I see Hong Kong and Shanghai growing, innovating, changing, learning, creating, and barging full throttle into the unknown, and having the massive growth and expansion that comes with that type of risk. I'm scary that Europe will have a long road to hoe to grapple up when it's ready to attack innovating again. Not to mention that the innovators may not want to move back from Asia where the adventure is.

PUSHING PRODUCTS INTO EXISTING SYSTEMS The problem is most to be seen to me in the sales field, of course. It's the field I have known since the 70s and the field I've been innovating in since the 80s. Our risk-averse behavior is creating its own set of problems, and indeed holding back our revenue growth.

Here are the four main issues that I see as making sales more difficult in today's environment:

* Competition is global, and products can be easily purchased from anywhere in the world. Products have invisible competition, so pitching and presenting is often done in a vacuum.

* Decisions entail highly complex layers of consideration yet buyers make final shopping decisions. The sales cycle is elongated wherefore and the seller is left out of the loop in the process.

* Buyers' demands are pretty near ruthless: inasmuch as of the come up to of information they can get over the internet, they know exactly what they want, exactly what they can ask for and exactly how much they are going to pay. All of this, in the past they make a purchase.

* as products seem so similar when viewed on the internet or in marketing descriptions, buyers can't differentiate. They end up commoditizing products, and buyers are buy more on price than ever before.

Given the above, and the uniform revenue sluggishness, companies are attempting to populous the gap in sales cycles and product/price differentiation by trying to sell harder, or gather data differently, or offering more product information, or attempting to 'understand buyer's sale patterns' (a tip of the hat to my work over the past decade, but still not touching the heart of the issue), etc.

When this isn't working, they are estimation software (i.e. CRM), or using incentives to get sales folks to work harder, or using price as an incentive to latent deals. All of the before continue to be rooted in conventional sales thinking and are still predicated on the product as as long as the primary offering, rather than computation new, innovative skills to the sales process itself.

In fact, sellers still work hard at making their product fit the customer rather than the other way 'round. Even the newer form of selling methodologies are different forms of traditional sales, just with a customer focus axiom as a new 'angle'. Sales continues to be based on selling something. The certainty systems and the very fabric of the thinking has remained the same for a long, long time. And in this global market we're in today, the rules, the thinking, and the focus must vicar or there will be continued loss of revenues.

In the meantime, we'll continue to experience our current problems: Longer than necessary sales cycles. Difficulty closing. organization lost for unknown reasons. Profit margins slipping as prices get cut to their slimmest margins. Difficulty discovering how/why people are buying. Great presentations and proposals that don't win the business. Rambling excuses as to when deals might close.

With this organization of problems, supervisors - who are now hiring 'seasoned' sellers who know their product and market (as if were the magic bullet) - are perplexed, and end up firing the salespeople when they don't reduce in the expected results.

But while companies play musical sales people (firing one person and hiring the same person with a different name), they are not jerky the nature of the problems inherent in the very act of 'sales'.

ARE WE SELLING? OR HELPING FOLKS BUY? Indeed, the very act of the sales process causes the deficient results.

Before our modern mummery era, pushing information or gathering inferior data to help them solve problems was inefficient, but at least it worked eventually. But that's not happening today. Nothing is happening.

It's just not effective any more to push (with product or service) headed for a system (like a buyer's culture or environment) and mirror that the system (complex, global) will open enthusiastically for the product chap pushed.

When we will truly get it that it's not haphazardly our product but in connection with the buyer's environment? Not alongside the seller but as regards how the needs to manage their internal variables ere then making a decision? Not pertinent to how or why the needs our product but encircling the kind of solution that will proficiency all of the buyer's relationships, initiatives, and norms.

Even when sellers think they are 'gathering data' so they can do that mythical thing they now think they are doing by 'becoming a trusted advisor', they are only focusing on the specific bits of information they can use to support their sales pitch. So by pushing opposed to the system, giving information that will be relevant only adapted to the customer understands what their solution needs to contain, trying to differentiate themselves by giving 'good service', it's causing buyers to spend more time doing external research, taking longer to do their internal systems-change work, and making our differentiation process even more difficult to boot.

Now that I've complained heartily at hand the problem - the erroneous courage that we can convince someone to do what we want them to do by pushing product or solution ideas into an existent system that protects its status quo - let me encompass that I entered old paper doing the exact thing. I was selling the idea that there is a new sales paradigm, and that they would do well to learn it, by golly. And, of course, I was the One who would teach it to them.

This will come as a gleeful reminder to some: working from the overconfidence that we have some 'important' solution to share, and we know we're right and think everyone wants to hear us (cuz we're so right, of course) is a universal, alas, human, trait.

BUT AM I COMMUNICATING? For some reason, I entered house of cards sure that 'people are people', that given rapport, collaboration, mutual beliefs and needs, and a shared language, that I'd be able to have intercourse easily with anyone. I found that to be per se true in Hong Kong - a reputed high-level international militancy aping - but was shocked to find a Chinese (Shanghainese I fancy is the right word here) summit staring at me without notice or expression or agreement.

What an eye opener. I thought I was good, and smart, as well as 'right'. Just like a seller selling a product (um, I WAS a seller selling a product!) and positive that their product is needed by the buyer, I just went in and did a great job introducing all of the material that would get them to credit that, yes, I had the credentials to have the right answers, and that no, they weren't doing sales right, and yes, I could teach them that my way was better, and yes, they truly needed my material. Right.

I did what every sales person has been taught to do from day one: know my product and love it; know how to pitch it so the passion comes through at length with the features-functions-benefits; look great and present well; ask a few well-intentioned questions that get the pass holder to recognize how right I am; be solicitous and understanding so I'm trusted quickly… I did it all just right.

And there were these wonderful, eager-to-learn faces staring back at me blankly, as I continued on my own trip.

What I realized - too late for that audience, but mercifully in time for the next listening in - was that I had to do what I taught:

* discover how people in jug perceived their province and sales environments (Where are you, in sale Facilitation language);

* lead people through the discovery process to determine what, if anything, was missing;

* supporting them in fixing their problems with their own inherent policies, people, and skills (Systems with a missing segment tend to self correct wherever possible);

* and help them think through all of their internal systems that would have to shift if they were going to think a new way (Systems won't do something different if they can't manage the wildness that the inverse would bring).

GLOBAL COMMUNICATION

With the world getting smaller, and each of us micro-organism thrown into some form of global competition daily, I think we're going to need to learn how to get out of our own way. It's truly time to fall to getting out of our own passion, our own assurance in the 'rightness' of our messages and products, our need to have it our own way.

Our world is shrinking. The internet has made this a very small globe, and what affects us in the States is recognized and managed in major cities all by the world simultaneously. In fact, unless we Americans recognize that it's time to get into the pool with the rest of the world, we are going to be left by and by even more than we are already.

I remember one of the first thoughts I had upon entering Hong Kong for the first time: what is going ON here? They seem much smarter, their technology is forth of ours, and they are thinking in ways we haven't begun to think yet… I bet I could find what's wrong with this picture considering it can't be as wonderful as it seems. But I soon recognized that my orthodoxy that stateside is on the leading edge was faulty.

As an American, I (wrongly, goodness knows) alleged that we were the smartest, or the furthest advanced. I'm seeing now with new eyes: we're not the smartest, nor are we even advanced. We've retreated too far in the last few years to hold those titles. We can win it back, and it will be a great competitive field to play in, but we first must remember the following (and these are the same mistakes sales people use when trying to pitch a product):

1. we have no one to articulate with unless we are willing to enter into information theory where there is both a sender AND a receiver;

2. people decide together through collaboration. We cannot stand up, declare our nationality, and take command people will hear us cuz we're smart;

3. until or unless people are willing to reexamine their existing beliefs, and can power of attorney their internal composition while avoiding chaos, they will not be willing to change;

4. as people outside the 'other's' system, we will never understand all of the factors that are involved with a mature culture (country, group, person);

5. for those of us with messages (or products and services) to share, our jobs are to serve other systems by supporting them in recognizing, aligning, confronting, and shifting existent beliefs and behaviors so they might be willing to discover their best solutions should they seek to add new material to what they've until this time got.

By working with others as if we have the answers, by only finding out what they might need in the area our product serves, by overweening groups will refashion being as how we have a solution, by only desire questions that glean data to help us sell or position our product, we are senders with no receivers.

If we want to be successful in sales, in communication, in partnering, we've got to enter upon to enter with 'beginner's mind' and learn what the rest of the world has to teach us. Then we might have a shot at suiting howbeit the most innovative, successful country in the world.

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