Serial Rejection Versus Tribal Power
| 15 | 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
From a sociological and anthropological perspective, humans are tribal creatures. The tribe was not only a form of communal support – it meant better food and better shelter. Members of the tribe relied on one another for their very survival. Other humans, people not of their tribe, were threats. It’s written on our DNA. As most every child is taught at an early age, “Stranger = Danger!”
From a psychological perspective, most would agree that an outgoing personality is one of the hallmarks of great salespeople. If you have a quick mind and a quick tongue to match – even if you aren’t a salesperson – someone, somewhere along the line has probably said to you, “Hey, you should be in sales.” But extroverts have the “Stranger = Danger” programming just like everyone else.
In a historical context, the notion of sales success through high-quantity, repetitive process is a throwback. Its roots date back to the long and storied success of the assembly line. That manufacturing model, promoted by Frederick W. Taylor and then institutionalized by Henry Ford’s production line, reached its logical apex some decades later by the post-World War II expansion of the mass market.
Starting in the ‘50s, a time when everyone who wanted something and could afford it, had it, high-pressure sales copied a page from the assembly-line book: If you put more in one end and run the line hard, it will give you more out of the other end. And voilà! 99 “Nos” Gets You a “Yes” was born.
Given our tribal nature and genetic predisposition to distrust strangers, coupled with our understanding of the historical context, what do we do?
We take a group of people predisposed to insecurity and shyness and we expose them to as many total strangers as possible – a mass of strangers genetically wired to guard against their approach. And then we tell them, “Sell, baby, sell!”
We put them in a job where they will be repeatedy rejected as professionals. Now there’s a recipe for success.
There’s the calculus of transactional selling.
I’ve been dealing with this issue since my first sales job as a teenager. The very notion that serial rejection forms the pathway to sales achievement has very real repercussions for sales professionals and the people who manage them. It not only degrades organizational efficiency, it also undermines the emotional well-being of the sales pro.
When I described my first consulting job, I explained how we turned around the company’s U.S. operations. We did this by responding with proposals for only the top 20% of RFPs, the ones we had the best chance of winning. This is not something you could, or would, do without changing your way of thinking about your customers and without knowing your customers. If you just tried to use the knowledge you get from traditional, transactional methods, you would have no idea with which 20% of RFPs you had the best chance. And that would mean that transactional sellers would be competing for 80% fewer RFPs and spending less, but winning 80% fewer, too.
To make the efficiency work, to win roughly the same number of contracts while bidding on only 20% of them, you need knowledge – the kind of knowledge that Everybody Sells methods deliver.
You can imagine the value of having established relationships in the company issuing the RFP. Yes, it may get you a marginal tie-breaker advantage, with a key associate on the buyer’s team thinking, “All else being equal, I’m going to give them the work.” And it might even work out that they’ll just buy from you and that you can have this effect work for you the same way I’m sure you’ve seen it work against you in the past.
But here’s the kicker. With relationship leverage in the buyer’s company, you can tap the invaluable richness of current information so that an insider will warn you, “Hey, look, the RFP's out, but this thing's wired for another vendor,” or even that another vendor wrote the darned RFP.
Now the old lesson they taught us in sales – that “’No’ means ‘Tell me more’” – would send us crashing against an immoveable object (the fact that this RFP is wired). We would be wasting our efforts because we didn't have a relationship that tips the scales in our favor.
If a buddy of yours in the shop has filled you in before you invested in a doomed effort, you've saved yourself six or eight weeks’ worth of opportunity cost, attention divided to no benefit – the dollar cost of responding with a proposal. The net benefit is that the information edge has given you an opportunity to pursue something else, maybe even within the same account, that you do have a chance to win.
By Jeff Kaplan
From a sociological and anthropological perspective, humans are tribal creatures. The tribe was not only a form of communal support – it meant better food and better shelter. Members of the tribe relied on one another for their very survival. Other humans, people not of their tribe, were threats. It’s written on our DNA. As most every child is taught at an early age, “Stranger = Danger!”
From a psychological perspective, most would agree that an outgoing personality is one of the hallmarks of great salespeople. If you have a quick mind and a quick tongue to match – even if you aren’t a salesperson – someone, somewhere along the line has probably said to you, “Hey, you should be in sales.” But extroverts have the “Stranger = Danger” programming just like everyone else.
In a historical context, the notion of sales success through high-quantity, repetitive process is a throwback. Its roots date back to the long and storied success of the assembly line. That manufacturing model, promoted by Frederick W. Taylor and then institutionalized by Henry Ford’s production line, reached its logical apex some decades later by the post-World War II expansion of the mass market.
Starting in the ‘50s, a time when everyone who wanted something and could afford it, had it, high-pressure sales copied a page from the assembly-line book: If you put more in one end and run the line hard, it will give you more out of the other end. And voilà! 99 “Nos” Gets You a “Yes” was born.
Given our tribal nature and genetic predisposition to distrust strangers, coupled with our understanding of the historical context, what do we do?
We take a group of people predisposed to insecurity and shyness and we expose them to as many total strangers as possible – a mass of strangers genetically wired to guard against their approach. And then we tell them, “Sell, baby, sell!”
We put them in a job where they will be repeatedy rejected as professionals. Now there’s a recipe for success.
There’s the calculus of transactional selling.
I’ve been dealing with this issue since my first sales job as a teenager. The very notion that serial rejection forms the pathway to sales achievement has very real repercussions for sales professionals and the people who manage them. It not only degrades organizational efficiency, it also undermines the emotional well-being of the sales pro.
When I described my first consulting job, I explained how we turned around the company’s U.S. operations. We did this by responding with proposals for only the top 20% of RFPs, the ones we had the best chance of winning. This is not something you could, or would, do without changing your way of thinking about your customers and without knowing your customers. If you just tried to use the knowledge you get from traditional, transactional methods, you would have no idea with which 20% of RFPs you had the best chance. And that would mean that transactional sellers would be competing for 80% fewer RFPs and spending less, but winning 80% fewer, too.
To make the efficiency work, to win roughly the same number of contracts while bidding on only 20% of them, you need knowledge – the kind of knowledge that Everybody Sells methods deliver.
You can imagine the value of having established relationships in the company issuing the RFP. Yes, it may get you a marginal tie-breaker advantage, with a key associate on the buyer’s team thinking, “All else being equal, I’m going to give them the work.” And it might even work out that they’ll just buy from you and that you can have this effect work for you the same way I’m sure you’ve seen it work against you in the past.
But here’s the kicker. With relationship leverage in the buyer’s company, you can tap the invaluable richness of current information so that an insider will warn you, “Hey, look, the RFP's out, but this thing's wired for another vendor,” or even that another vendor wrote the darned RFP.
Now the old lesson they taught us in sales – that “’No’ means ‘Tell me more’” – would send us crashing against an immoveable object (the fact that this RFP is wired). We would be wasting our efforts because we didn't have a relationship that tips the scales in our favor.
If a buddy of yours in the shop has filled you in before you invested in a doomed effort, you've saved yourself six or eight weeks’ worth of opportunity cost, attention divided to no benefit – the dollar cost of responding with a proposal. The net benefit is that the information edge has given you an opportunity to pursue something else, maybe even within the same account, that you do have a chance to win.
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