Ask a roomful of people to toss out adjectives about salespeople, and people will suggest “cheesy,” “charismatic” and “slick.” Ask the same question about how to describe entrepreneurs, and you’ll likely get “driven,” “risk-taker” or “visionary.”
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But the traits and skills of successful sales and entrepreneurship are tightly linked, says Craig Wortmann, founder and CEO of Sales Engine and clinical professor of entrepreneurial sales at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Wortmann asked those questions in early December at Clean Energy Trust’s “Startup Sessions.”
“Enterpreneurs are ‘visionary, big.’ Salespeople? They get stuff done,” Wortmann told a group of entrepreneurs and investors at the event.” “There’s a difference between aggressive and annoying. I’ve crossed it. But you’ve got to find out where that is. You can be visionary and passionate in a cave.”
The first hurdles to getting past sales-call stage fright involve learning and employing the skills and discipline of successful entrepreneurial sellers, he said.
Research into selling
Wortmann and Booth clinical professor of entrepreneurship Waverly Deutsch have researched and broken the discipline of entrepreneurial selling into four phases: Select whom to target (among the things that distinguishes entrepreneurial sales); talk with potential customers to determine whether they’re empowered to buy (a process called “qualifying the sale”); match the entrepreneur’s product to what’s valuable to the specific customer; and close the deal with a polite question about whether the person is ready to move forward.
Moving from one phase to the next requires discipline and takes practice, Wortmann said. A natural inclination is to blather on about how cool you feel your product is, for instance. It requires discipline to listen to a potential buyer as they describe why your product might be valuable to them, he said.
It also takes skill to handle two of the biggest problems most new entrepreneurs face when selling for the first time: qualifying a potential customer as a buyer and handling their objections.
Qualifying questions
Among the questions entrepreneurs should ask early in a conversation with a prospective client are whether the person they’re talking to is the purchasing decision maker, whether he or she has the budget to make a purchase, and whether the person makes decisions in a time frame short enough to help you.
Wortmann added that you also should have more, industry-specific qualifying questions worth asking — such as technology questions, the buyer’s customization requirements and the market niche.
Seek out objections
New sellers also should prepare for common objections, Wortmann said. For new companies, this likely will include hurdles such as the innovating team’s small size and lack of business experience. This is where natural nerves and defensiveness can cause disasters as the finish line looms.
“Low performers answer the question with a direct answer,” Wortmann said. “High performers relax into a five-step process.”
Encourage the objection. Ask potential buyers more about what precisely concerns them.
Question the objection. Ask if they’d been burned by the objectionable aspect of your business in the past. And ask what helps other companies qualify for a contract under the system they now have in place.
Repeat and confirm the objection. “Say, ‘This has been helpful. Through this conversation it’s clear that for this reason, you have developed a policy over time to address this. Is that right?'” Wortmann said. The step shows confidence and establishes credibility.
Provide reasons you can overcome the objection. Build on your credibility by saying “I respect that. We’ve seen that before,” Wortmann said. “And then provide reasons why you can meet the objection. Shift the conversation to ‘Here’s how we’ve gotten over that objection in the past.'” It can convert a soft “no” into a qualified “yes.”
Seed objections. Wortmann said the most comfortable salespeople actually front-load possible objections earlier into conversations with potential clients by suggestion one or two of the most frequent objections they’ve encountered in previous sales discussions. This allows the seller to move into answering the objection more quickly.
The practice of selling your own product provides crucial information about how customers react, object, and which arguments overcome objections. That’s crucial information for any professional seller that only the founding entrepreneurs can provide.
“The entrepreneur needs to know how to lead the sale,” Wortmann said. “Otherwise, the first objection (a new salesperson) gets in the sales process, he won’t have the answer.”
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