You are not there to make a friend

Well, I mean, for New Zealand, so let's set a context. New Zealand has largely, or for a long time, been very focused on commodity, commodities. I'll keep this sort of generalist, but milk powder and wood and some other things. You know, we send them off and we trade and it's very price driven.

I don't know, there'll be some people who say, oh, that's not true. And it hasn't necessarily had the high value complexity of technology that we're now seeing. So we've now got this real growth area. And I know there's other products, I'm talking about technology and there's other high value products, but particularly technology and being able to sell that and talk to problems and solutions and go through that process.

That's a capability that's really emerging in New Zealand. And when you're selling into, as you are with technology, overseas markets where it's highly competitive and say you're selling a high-value solution, the sales capability has to improve. So So a lot of people thinking, oh, I've got to be liked and selling to these markets, they're the ones who are really, really struggling right now.

So it's needed a shift in sales capability, type of people, and a whole bunch of other stuff. So that's what's happening. That's— we can left— we'll be left behind if we don't change that.

And I suppose the other thing that feeds into that is over the last 2 and a bit years, we've accelerated from an environment of selling over coffee and selling over beer to virtual.

Yeah, it's the remote environment and those people who've been used to, or the salespeople who think it's about sitting in front of people, like you said, buying them a coffee, having a lunch, having a chat, when in reality they were actually probably more order takers, right? So when you, when you have these businesses which are emerging, and these, as a lot of these tech businesses are, They're not, they're not taking orders.

They're having to uncover demand and engage with potential customers in a completely different way and do it remotely. And that's, that's needed a shift for a lot of people, a lot of existing salespeople.

Yeah. And, you know, OMG actually did a big survey of sales reps that there's hundreds of thousands of sales professionals they surveyed. There was some interesting stuff that came out. And one of the interesting things was, is that all of the worst performers thought that being liked was the most important thing when selling to their customers.

And of all the worst performers, they rated their ability to build relationships as the— as their superpower.

Yeah.

Which was fascinating. And, and I suppose, you know, when we look at our sales DNA assessment tool, there's also some other interesting things that come out that you wouldn't necessarily, um, have, or that might challenge some of these preconceptions around being liked.

Yeah, and I, I remember that when I first started out. I, I remember, you know, being on, on the phones and, you know, days on the phones, and I really wanted the people on the other end of the phone to like me. I was literally you know, saying, hey, it's Scotty from this company, how you doing?

I remember bluntly this guy just went, what do you want? And it wounded me, it killed me. And I remember one of my trainers saying, hey, you ain't got to be their friend, all right? Stop trying to be their friend. So we're able to look at that. So the Sales DNA tool that we have, Ability Map, uncovers some really interesting things.

And one of the things that we can measure Which gives us this insight around, um, around— I suppose, um, it's, it's, it's on, it's on the same line as being liked, uh, is this, um, I suppose, capability or inherent, uh, preference of being able to handle authority. And what that is, is about being able to speak, talk to, and handle people who are hierarchically a level or 2 or 3 above you.

And so, you know, by the time we go into the workforce, we have a mixture of nature and nurture. We have these inherent preferences and motivations and capabilities. And we've seen that a good indicator of who might be good in a sales role is someone who's got this ability to handle authority. And you don't have to have been in business or you don't have to have any work experience to have this ability to handle authority.

We've seen people with it who have been 19 and 20. So that's one of the interesting things that we've been able to uncover. But there's some others as well, right?

Well, like there's one that we look for called personal selling. And what that translates to is the ability to ask questions to uncover someone's needs, and build rapport with someone and have kind of a level of charisma. And then another one is the ability to listen to others is really, really important. And I think depending actually on the complexity of a sale, that becomes more and more important.

In a more complex sale, it becomes even more crucial that you understand where the other party or parties are coming from and where their problems lie. So that's another key one.

Yeah. And linked with that one is the 4th one I'd say is then the ability or the preference to share knowledge because that really comes to coming across as an expert, coming across as being credible in your space and demystifying or sorry, changing some of the perceptions of salespeople as just, you know, talking and asking for orders.

It's really saying, yeah, here's some knowledge that's going to be of value to you, which lifts my credibility so that when you might be looking to buy, I'm the person that you think of. Or sharing knowledge to shine a light on problems that your prospects aren't aware of. That's the other part of it.

So again, so those 4 things, handling authority, personal selling, listening to others, and sharing knowledge are, um, you know, are more important than, um, you know, being liked.

It's, it's probably actually just worthwhile touching on or just mentioning at this point before we talk about why this is so important is that we are making a diff— a distinction between being liked and building trust. So you need to build trust in a sales process, which is crucial, but you don't have to— you don't have to make friends necessarily with your prospect.

Yeah, I think there's a continuum. We're talking about, you know, being like, it's not about, it's okay, you can be hated, right? And it's not right, you know, the other end of the spectrum is just this sickening, God, I'll just do anything for you and I'll love you and I'll send you gifts just to become a, you know, a client.

We've seen that happening. As you say, this is about being respected. You still need to be polite and professional. Um, but yeah, it's about being respected.

It's not— yeah, I think, I think what we're trying to say here is it's not the goal of the conversation to make a friend.

Yeah.

Um, well, you can't.

I mean, if you think about it, I mean, especially if you're in an entry-level sales role or you're in a sales development rep role, you've got literally minutes on the phone. You know, it's more important to gain respect, share knowledge, you know, ask the right questions Then you can't, you can't make them like you within that space of time.

So why is this so important? And there's a number of reasons. And we thought about, we've thought about this and spoken about this at length, you know, why is this an important area to consider? And I think the first one is buying experiences is, you know, in order to have a really good buying experience as a business-to-business buyer, you know, if you're looking for, you know, evaluating vendors, is if salespeople are solely focused on trying to just be liked and build friends in that process, you're probably not going to get the great, the best value out of that experience.

You know, you're, you might not have your perceptions challenged when you actually really need them to be challenged. Yeah. So, you know, that's one reason is it's really, really important that salespeople are actually focusing on the right things in order to give the best possible buying experience. To buyers out there. So I think that's the first one.

Yeah.

And I think, I mean, the other obvious one is just underperformance and high turnover. If people are trying to be liked versus trying to move a sales process along, they're 2 very different things. And to move a sales process along, you have to ask the right questions, direct questions, challenge people, know when to almost drop a relationship because you've got to go into negotiation and not try and give something away.

So I think it also definitely leads to underperformance, but also, you know, the wrong people being hired. It's the classic thing, this lovely engaging warm person turns up for a sales interview and we go, great, we had a great chat with them. But underneath, there's too much of a desire to be liked and that's wrong.

I think then the third area is ineffective enablement. And what I mean by that is because there's this misunderstanding of what's actually effective in business-to-business selling is oftentimes leaders or, you know, salespeople when they're doing their own learning and development are actually not focusing on the things that are crucial and that really drive performance.

And they're spending time on things that actually aren't really going to help them move the needle at all. So it's really important to understand actually what does drive success in a sales environment based on what does the data show us, you know, what are the, what are the top performers actually doing? And then reverse engineering, you know, any education program around those things rather than on, what's the word, like kind of fallacies like, oh, you need to be liked by your customers, you know, that's the most important thing.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, in terms of, okay, so this is all fine, right? We can unpack the problems and we can say, okay, so what do you, what do you do about it? Um, like, how can you make sure that, you know, this thing of being liked doesn't— isn't festering away in your team and affecting performance?

Um, and I think, like, the main thing is get the right people on board first of all. Like, understand at a deeper level what it is, uh, what it is you need in the team and, and what you need versus what you actually have. Might be 2 different things and there's ways to look at that.

In fact, I mean, there's some interesting stories. There was a large tech company who had an SME sales team and a new leader came into the team. It was a team of about 10 people and there are 3 top performers and 7 mediocre underperformers and the leader couldn't quite work out what it was.

Activity seemed about the same. And so went through, I suppose I call it a diagnostic uncovering through the DNA tool that we have. And found that the underperformers had a low ability to handle authority or low preference, low capability to handle authority. And so what was actually happening is they weren't able— they were wanting to be liked in the sales process.

They weren't able to move a lot of the deals along for fear of offending or upsetting the prospect. So the leader created a new profile. It took a while to regenerate and bring in the right people. But once that happened, the team was off and away. So, you know, hiring and getting the right people and looking deeper is really important.

That's, for me, that's the first thing. Yeah.

And just on that, you know, sometimes the answer is change the people, but sometimes the answer is actually, now that we know that, let's just focus on addressing that inherent weakness within those people and give them some capability uplift. But we can't do that unless we actually know what the problem is. 2 other things that I think are really important and that would, as a sales professional or as a sales leader, if you're trying to, you know, coach your team, like these would be 2 areas to really focus on would be number one is know your space.

So make sure that your sales reps, make sure that they know their space.

Mm-hmm.

If you want to be a professional, you got to know the vertical, the area that you're working in better than everyone else you're talking to. Yeah. You know, like if you're selling HR and learning software, you better know more about the HR and learning space than your customer because otherwise, what use are you?

So I think that's the first thing is if you can be a genuine expert in your space, it can help people to trust you because you can actually start to add value in conversations. And then I think—.

Yeah, I'll just add to that. I think that's really important, especially for people getting into sales, because quite often when you get into sales, you don't have the knowledge. So therefore you're trying to rely on perhaps more your personality to connect and be liked and And also when you're younger, you know, and in sales, you do, you do have this fallacy.

Everyone says it's about relationships, right? So if you can become an expert as quickly as possible, understand the impact that the product and the solution makes, understand the problems, you know, really understand problems, then you have that as your, as your go-to, your confidence builder that you can use as opposed to I've got to be liked.

Yeah, exactly. And the confidence piece is a big one actually, because there's nothing worse than being in a meeting and feeling like you're pretending because you don't know anything. So, you know, starting a new role, that should be something that everyone focusing— focuses on is upskilling in the space. And if you're— if you've been in a role 10 years and you still don't feel like you're an expert in your space, let's change that tomorrow.

Then the second thing that's really crucial to building trust and credibility in a sales process is having a level of genuine curiosity, asking questions, listening, actively listening, and then asking more follow-up questions and really diving into problems and diving into, you know, where people are trying to go with their company. What are the problems they have right now that are stopping them from getting there?

So, you know, and the best analogy I have for this is You know, imagine you go to your doctor with a problem and they didn't ask you a single question and they just said, these are the pills you need. Would you trust them? Or would you hope that when you go to your doctor, they're going to say— they're going to ask you a number of questions, then they're going to diagnose the problem, and then they're going to prescribe you what they say is the best possible solution to the specific problem you have?

I mean, Because of that, you trust them and you go away and actually take your medicine. So, you know, think like a doctor. It's a far better way of selling than showing up and throwing up, as we call it. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think there's a whole bunch of things in there around this fallacy of needing to be liked. It's not about needing to be liked. It's perhaps we'll reframe it as a need to be respected. And to be respected, then A, you've got to be the right person in the role. So I think for sales leaders, it is first of all making sure you understand what you're looking for and look deeper, you know, use the tools that are available.

Training and getting people up to speed, especially people new into sales, really work on building confidence through knowledge. You know, how do we make them knowledgeable of the problems that we solve? I think, you know, a lot of young people worry that, oh, I'm phoning someone in the C-suite, they're a C-suite person, they know lots of stuff.

That doesn't matter. It's about knowing your area, knowing your space. And then, you know, the training part, the training on questionings and how to challenge in the right way and, you know, remove this relationship, not completely remove this relationship piece, but it's not the go-to for the sales profession. We're not going to move things along.

And if we're selling into markets which are highly competitive where people have, you've got very little time if you catch people, you know, even in Australia, the US certainly, then, you know, we have to be sharp. We have to be sharper.

Yeah. So, you know, Sales professionals who are listening to this, sales leaders, focus on being a trusted expert, not just liked. Being liked can help, and, you know, likability definitely has a place, but it's not the most important thing. And if you know, if you really want to up your game, focus on some of these areas that we've talked about today, and, you know, you'll see your performance increase.