In sales, should King of the Wing do his own thing?

In our business of coaching and training salespeople all around the world and right here in Colorado, we have the pleasure of seeing just about every selling style there is among the people we work with.

One of our clients has a salesperson named Karl, a successful veteran salesperson. Karl’s nickname on the sales team is “King of the Wing.” Karl can walk into a room and run a sales call without any preparation at all. He has the gift of gab, never really runs two sales calls alike but has a great personality and his clients like him.

Unfortunately for Karen’s ownership, there is only one Karl on their team. Most people don’t get predictable outcomes when they go about doing their job a different way each time — especially in selling, since there are so many variables out of the salesperson’s control; such as competitive and economic environment, product and service differentiation and, most importantly, communication and buying style of the prospective client or customer.

However, it can be tempting for an organization to have no well-defined selling process because it’s time consuming to develop one and furthermore requires such a high degree of discipline to execute that many organizations and salespeople are not willing to commit to doing it.

On the other hand, if your organization is highly focused on effective and effective systems throughout your organization, you might want to examine the pitfalls of not having a sell-defined selling process.

You can control the sale. Experience often can help us with what to do, but a process will keep control firmly within our grasp.  If we do not have a documented sales process that we follow, then we will default to the stronger system, which will be the prospects’ buying system.

You might not have a clear vision of the next step required to close the sale. When we are in the business-development role, we can easily wear ‘happy ears.’ If we use a sales process instead, it acts as an objective, non-emotional gut check for making a “go” or “no go” decision on the appropriate next step. It also prevents any surprises rearing their heads as we proceed through the process.

As a sales manager, you might spend an unnecessary amount of time adapting your coaching and management to various selling styles.

While we love to hire veteran salespeople, they typically bring their sales process (or lack of) to our organization. In the absence of our own company sales process, a de facto sales process develops that often is a combination of the best of the best that the salespeople bring with them, but also the worst of the worst.

To make matters even more challenging, when a sales leader is asking about a sales opportunity in the pipeline, she must ask where it has stalled in the context of that salesperson’s process, not the company process. Multiply this by a team of four or 44 salespersons and you have sales leadership that is wasting a lot of mental calories to adapt to the salesperson’s unwillingness to adapt their selling system to the companies’ selling process. You must also be clear that selling personalities and selling styles are independent of a selling process.

Try using this up-front agreement with your next sales hire: “Roger, we appreciate all of your years of selling experience and results. It’s one of the main reasons we’re excited to have you join us. However, we need to be clear about our expectations.

We have a sales culture here at ABC Co., and it’s important that we have your commitment that you will learn and adapt the style that has made you successful with the style our team members are committed to using. We’re also looking forward to learning from you as our sales process continues to improve.”

Often we don’t use a sales process because it seems like it might not be appropriate for us or take too much time to set up.

Hopefully, now you see it’s worth it! Winging it might be OK for an impromptu comedienne, but it’s a dangerous practice in selling if you’re looking for an efficient and effective way to deliver predictable sales outcomes.

Bob Bolak is president of Sandler Training. Contact him at 303-579-1939 or bbolak@sandler.com.

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