99 No's Get You a Yes!
| 22 | Aug |
| 2013 |
We're now putting the final touches on a Ferrazzi Greenlight bookshelf
offering, titled Everybody Sells, from which this is excerpted.
By Jeff Kaplan
Even if you’re just starting your sales career, you’ve probably been lectured on the Law of Large Numbers – the age-old belief that in sales, getting the keys to the President’s Club or winning this year’s trip to Bermuda is simply a matter of getting in front of more prospects more often – and to heck with whether those prospects are even real prospects. It’s quantity over quality.
If you have grayed a lot or even a little in your sales career, I’m virtually positive that you’ve come across the 99 “No”s Gets You a “Yes” philosophy in one manifestation or another. It’s the magical thinking that you earn a “yes” only through the hard work of getting a lot of “no”s.
I try to not be smug about the approach. Andrew Housden, the United Kingdom-based leader of a key account team for a global communicaton company, points out that in cold calling, 99 “no”s do get you a “yes.” It’s a natural response to a tough way of doing business.
And you global sellers with your pre-qualified leads and your long and storied working relationships with your top clients – please don’t get too smug, because the most sophisticated among us apply the same flawed principle. The difference is that we dress up the notion: we put it in a suit and tie.
For example, I started my consulting career at one of the world’s largest professional services firms. In those days, we never met a a request for proposal (RFP) we didn’t like. I used to jokingly say that if I was in a meeting and I wrote the letters RFP on the white board, someone would instinctively jump up, run down the hall and start forming a response team. We did this until our firm became more and more aware of the capital, human, and opportunity costs associated with the process.
To our credit, we wised up quickly and got very picky about the opportunities we bid on, lowered our operating costs, increased our win rate and profitability. Amen. Little did that room of MBAs know, we had succumbed to one of the many forms of the 99 “Nos” Gets You a “Yes” fallacy.
In some ways, the 99 “Nos” approach replaces discipline and craft with pure, eyes-clenched-closed, straight-ahead effort. And this influenced the types of people who came to our profession and who stuck with it, rewarding and retaining the brute-force operators and driving out (or driving crazy) many of those who desired more elegant forms of selling.
California-based Scott Gordon, who leads a sales team focused on Fortune 100 clients, thinks that fewer truly capable people get involved in sales as a profession because it is very difficult to define. There are so many different methodologies behind it. It doesn’t seem tangible. Many believe you either have the trick of the trade and the confidence and the luck or that you don’t.
Thirty-year sales veteran Chuck Martz agrees. Along with his duties as a global account executive, Chuck supports his organization’s college recruitment efforts. When asked what the greatest hesitation was among collegiate prospects considering a sales career, Chuck didn’t hesitate, “The first thing they ask is, ‘Will I have to make cold calls?”
One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed my work at Ferrazzi Greenlight is our approach to creating business solutions. We don’t just look at something from a systems perspective, we twist it and turn it to see the problem from sociological and anthropological points of view. We poke and prod the issue from psychological and economic perspectives and then put the problem in historical context to see how we got to the current situation. Once you understand a problem from that many angles, reality has a way of bubbling up.
By Jeff Kaplan
Even if you’re just starting your sales career, you’ve probably been lectured on the Law of Large Numbers – the age-old belief that in sales, getting the keys to the President’s Club or winning this year’s trip to Bermuda is simply a matter of getting in front of more prospects more often – and to heck with whether those prospects are even real prospects. It’s quantity over quality.
If you have grayed a lot or even a little in your sales career, I’m virtually positive that you’ve come across the 99 “No”s Gets You a “Yes” philosophy in one manifestation or another. It’s the magical thinking that you earn a “yes” only through the hard work of getting a lot of “no”s.
I try to not be smug about the approach. Andrew Housden, the United Kingdom-based leader of a key account team for a global communicaton company, points out that in cold calling, 99 “no”s do get you a “yes.” It’s a natural response to a tough way of doing business.
And you global sellers with your pre-qualified leads and your long and storied working relationships with your top clients – please don’t get too smug, because the most sophisticated among us apply the same flawed principle. The difference is that we dress up the notion: we put it in a suit and tie.
For example, I started my consulting career at one of the world’s largest professional services firms. In those days, we never met a a request for proposal (RFP) we didn’t like. I used to jokingly say that if I was in a meeting and I wrote the letters RFP on the white board, someone would instinctively jump up, run down the hall and start forming a response team. We did this until our firm became more and more aware of the capital, human, and opportunity costs associated with the process.
To our credit, we wised up quickly and got very picky about the opportunities we bid on, lowered our operating costs, increased our win rate and profitability. Amen. Little did that room of MBAs know, we had succumbed to one of the many forms of the 99 “Nos” Gets You a “Yes” fallacy.
In some ways, the 99 “Nos” approach replaces discipline and craft with pure, eyes-clenched-closed, straight-ahead effort. And this influenced the types of people who came to our profession and who stuck with it, rewarding and retaining the brute-force operators and driving out (or driving crazy) many of those who desired more elegant forms of selling.
California-based Scott Gordon, who leads a sales team focused on Fortune 100 clients, thinks that fewer truly capable people get involved in sales as a profession because it is very difficult to define. There are so many different methodologies behind it. It doesn’t seem tangible. Many believe you either have the trick of the trade and the confidence and the luck or that you don’t.
Thirty-year sales veteran Chuck Martz agrees. Along with his duties as a global account executive, Chuck supports his organization’s college recruitment efforts. When asked what the greatest hesitation was among collegiate prospects considering a sales career, Chuck didn’t hesitate, “The first thing they ask is, ‘Will I have to make cold calls?”
One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed my work at Ferrazzi Greenlight is our approach to creating business solutions. We don’t just look at something from a systems perspective, we twist it and turn it to see the problem from sociological and anthropological points of view. We poke and prod the issue from psychological and economic perspectives and then put the problem in historical context to see how we got to the current situation. Once you understand a problem from that many angles, reality has a way of bubbling up.
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