|
What has the power to kill a sale faster than any other single factor?
A salesperson who doesn’t listen to their customer. When Karl and his family outgrew their house and started looking for a new one, he reached out to a realtor named Stephanie. Within weeks she found what, on paper, looked like the perfect house. It was the right size, their ideal layout, the style the family liked. It even backed up to a golf course - a dream for a family who loved to golf. There was one problem: it wasn’t in Boulder County, and Karl’s son desperately wanted to enroll at one of their high schools. Karl called the realtor. “Hey,” he said. “I think it’s worth seeing this house. It might even be our dream house. But I need you to do me a favor. At the showing, don’t tell my son that this house isn’t in Boulder County. He’ll immediately think he won’t be able to attend the high school he wants, and there’s no way he’ll look at it objectively. Instead, let’s just look at the house, see if it’s as good of a fit as we think it is, and figure the rest out down the line.” “I totally understand,” Stephanie said. And yet, when they arrived at the showing, before they even shook hands, she gave the family a smile. “Great news! I did some research and may have solved the high school problem. Even though the house isn’t in Boulder County, you might be able to open enroll and attend any of the schools!” She was beaming with delight, but a dark cloud had formed over the entire family’s heads. She thought that she had brought them a solution, but all Karl’s son heard was “high school problem.” And all Karl saw was a realtor who didn’t listen to his one request because she thought she knew better. Without realizing it, she poisoned the entire experience. This is why Iceberg Selling Matters. You need to understand the entire picture before you try to solve a problem, or you might end up causing one. Karl’s appearance on the Step Up Your Sales Performance with Iceberg Selling Episode of the Smart Agents podcast is packed with lessons and insights from both the perspective of the salesperson and the customer. You’ll learn:
Check out the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to learn more about why listening to your customers and working to understand their needs is the key to building lasting relationships.  Most companies, and leaders for that matter, view teamwork as a passive, almost accidental achievement. Your sales and marketing employees either work well in their respective teams or they don’t.
Not only is this sentiment untrue, it takes the away responsibility of fostering teamwork and a collaborative atmosphere. After all, if your marketing team is good at bringing in leads and your sales team is good at closing business, the system is working. If everybody is doing just fine working parallel to one another, why do they need to work together? While it’s true that sales and marketing organizations can function without working together, either within their departments or across disciplines, most leaders don’t want to scrape by with “good enough”. They want their teams to thrive. The answer is teamwork. When teams come together, they’re able to create outputs that are far better than they could have in their silos. Good teamwork creates an end result that is bigger than the sum of everybody’s parts. How to build that teamwork is the question. A few team building activities and endless meetings with no real purpose isn’t going to turn a bunch of people who happen to work in the same place into a group that’s playing on the same team, aligned behind the same strategies, working towards the same goal. What's Getting in the Way of Teamwork It’s usually pretty easy to tell if your team is working well together. Or, more accurately, it’s usually easy to see if they aren’t. The team seeming uninterested or disengaged, having ongoing negative attitudes, being late for meetings, never going to each other for help or advice, and rarely talking to each other during the work day are all red flags. People existing in a state of frustration are rarely going to work well together, and people who are working well together likely won’t be getting as frustrated to begin with. While the root cause of these problems can vary by organization, role, and individual preferences, the root cause of frustration often comes down to feeling like they’re being blamed or held responsible for circumstances outside of their control. If you really want to enable your team to work well together, the first step is making sure that you’re not standing in the way of their success, unintentionally making it more difficult for them to do their jobs, or pinning their challenges on each other. Create Solutions - Not Blame When something goes wrong, a natural instinct is to look for someone to blame. This partially makes sense: knowing how a problem happened can help you prevent it from happening in the future. However, it doesn’t do anything to solve the problem that’s in front of you. When you shift your focus from laying blame to finding a path forward, these challenges become opportunities to create a solution that not only solves the problem, but puts your team in a better position in the long run. This process is called co-creation, and it’s powerful in the way that it allows everybody on the team to leverage their skills and creativity. Here’s what it looks like: Several years ago, a company that frequently hosted webinars as a selling tool had an issue that caused the webinar to crash twice, with all of the attendees being kicked off the platform both times. The sales and marketing teams were both frustrated, especially given how much work went into the meetings and how much revenue they usually generated. Immediately, emails were flying, instant messages blowing up, cell phones were buzzing. Everybody was frustrated. Everybody wanted someone to blame. Everybody wanted to make it clear that they weren’t responsible. The sales and marketing leaders recognized the start of a toxic cycle and decided to turn it into an opportunity. The two leaders told everybody on both teams to get off of their computers and join a meeting, but warned them that blame would be left at the door. This meeting was about solutions. One by one, the team members stood up and shared ways that they could recoup the losses of the failed webinar. By the end of the meeting, they pieced together a plan of action that combined several ideas:
This solution involved both the sales and marketing teams working together quickly. Having a meeting where the solution was co-created meant that no time was wasted communicating the plan or convincing anyone of its merits. The scope didn’t creep to an unmanageable level. Everybody was able to take proactive steps instead of stewing in frustration. Short-term, the webinar ended up creating roughly the same amount of short-term revenue as the ones that went off without a hitch. Long-term, however, the impact was much different. Several of the people who were called scheduled follow-ups. Many of the folks who received a book and joined the email list reached out to schedule meetings months after the fact. Some of them even passed the book onto a friend or colleague. Over time, the failed webinar actually generated more income than previous ones. When it was time to have another webinar, the team didn’t go back to their old way of doing things. Instead, they proactively sent out the email with the link to request the book, which was also sent as a follow-up after the meeting. If somebody expressed interest but ultimately didn’t register, they received a call from the sales team. Every single person who attended the webinar was contacted within a week of it. The solutions that were created to handle a problem actually identified a major opportunity to improve their processes. It's a Team Sport Just because sales and marketing have different roles and strengths doesn’t mean they can’t work together. In fact, teams rarely all play the same position on the field (and they likely wouldn’t win if they did). When sales and marketing teams work together, communicate well, and focus on their shared goals, they play with strategy. They play with intention. They capitalize on each other’s strengths and support each other’s weaknesses. They don’t just become a stronger team - they become stronger individual players. Bringing out the best in your teams will bring out the best in each person on them - and vice versa. Learn More A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us.  The biggest hiring mistake every organization seems to make can be summed up as putting the right people in the wrong seats.
The very best hunter in the world won’t succeed if you’re primarily expecting them to expand existing accounts. The opposite is also true: a farmer that could really expand your footprint with loyal customers will be hindered by expectations of signing new customers each week. The answer is hiring the right people for the right roles. If you know you need a hunter, exclusively look to hire one. If your hunters are doing great, but you’re stalling with existing customers, make sure you target farmers in your hiring process. It sounds simple enough. So what’s the catch? Sales people are, by nature, good at selling themselves. When customers choose to work with a new company, they’re buying the relationship with the salesperson just as much as they’re buying the product or service. Being able to convince customers of their value is part of what makes them so good at their jobs. Of course, in a job interview, if you ask somebody if they’re a hunter or a farmer, this means you may not get a completely accurate answer - and you may not realize it. This happens for two reasons. First, the sales person themself doesn’t really know if they’re better at hunting or farming. Maybe they’ve been successful in the past without thinking too much about whether or not that success was coming from new contacts or existing contacts. And, of course, the second reason: they want to get this job. It’s only natural for people, in sales or other disciplines, to make themselves look like an attractive candidate during a job interview (who isn’t guilty of telling a hiring manager what they want to hear?) When asked if they’re a hunter or a farmer, or if they prefer starting new accounts or growing existing ones, is it really all that surprising that some folks will say they don’t have a preference? Or what they think you want to hear? Well, great. You’re probably thinking. Where does that leave me? Am I destined to only maybe hire the right person? Of course not. There are plenty of tools you can use to help you understand how prospective employees will best fit into your sales team. Namely, a sales assessment. There are a variety of sales assessment tools and tests that can help you cut through curated interview answers and understand how somebody will really fit into your team. At Improving Sales Performance, we use The Sales Achiever, as we believe the variety of personality dimensions and mental aptitudes is particularly effective. We’ve seen firsthand how sales assessments help leaders mitigate risks and get who they really need from the hiring process. Luckily, the hiring process isn’t the only way a sales assessment can boost the performance of your sales team. If your current team is full of sales professionals who just aren’t performing as well as you had hoped or think they are capable of, it’s not a bad idea to have your entire team take assessments as well. You may find that the problems you’re having might not be who is on your team, but with the roles some key players are in. The results may help you start to understand why your team is having challenges and start to fix them. Not to mention, when the time does come to hire new talent, it’ll be much easier to identify what gaps you need to fill. If you’re curious about how The Sales Achiever works and how you can apply it to your team, send us a note via our contact form and we’ll share some insights.  Let me share a scenario I’m sure you can relate to.
You’ve prepared for a meeting as thoroughly as possible. You prepared a detailed proposal, rehearsed what you’re going to say, and walked through the agenda. When you arrived, you told the customer exactly what they can expect from the meeting, and they were impressed with your preparation. Your conversation is going smoothly. You have an easy rapport. You hand over a carefully curated proposal. It’s full of sample products, images, renderings, and other information tailored to precisely what they need. They take the proposal and smile. And then… Silence. The customer starts flipping through the pages. After some of them, they make a small noise. You start studying their face closely, noticing when their eyebrows wrinkle, when they smile, and when they frown. You want to know what they’re thinking. You want to ask - or better yet, explain your ideas in more detail. Resist the urge to jump in. Silence during a business meeting, especially one with a new customer, can be uncomfortable. It’s hard to watch somebody pour over something you’ve worked tirelessly on, struggle to read their mind, and not jump in. It’s only natural to want to break a (for you, at least) uncomfortable silence, volunteer more information (even if it wasn’t asked for), and prod for questions before the client has even had a chance to digest the information. Patience is critical. Try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You’ve just been presented with a business solution. Maybe the salesperson talked you through the ideas as you flipped through the proposal. Maybe they didn’t. Either way, you’ve been handed a lot of information, and you need a few minutes to take it in. If somebody continually distracts you, the work stops having an opportunity to speak for itself. You say you don’t have any questions before you’ve processed the proposal long enough to determine if you have any. The client learns just as much from your behavior as they do from your proposal. A salesperson who waits patiently and silently, focused on their customer, but not demanding their attention sends a message. They’re sharing what it’s like to work with them: they’re calm under pressure, confident in their work, and don’t needlessly badger their clients. On the other hand, a salesperson who is jittery and eager to jump in sends the opposite message. Are they impatient? Nervous? Are they in a rush from scheduling meetings too close together? Do they lack confidence in their abilities? Or are they trying to get me out the door because something (or someone) else is a bigger priority? The right kind of preparation sets you up for success, but staying present and patient for your customer allows them to envision what it will really be like to work with you. So next time you’re sitting in a meeting trying to discern exactly what “hmm” and a small nod means, take a deep breath, smile, and wait. You’re taking your son to his first ever baseball game. On the way to the stadium, he looks at you and says, “Dad, we’re gonna catch a baseball.” Naturally, you respond, “yes we will, son!” This exact scenario happened to Karl - but it had the best ending possible. He happened to be sitting in prime seats to catch a stray ball. During the third inning, his son turned and asked, “When are we going to catch the ball?” “How about now?” Just then, a ball gets hit their way and Karl’s eyes don’t leave it for a second. He catches the ball, hands it to his son, and starts thinking, man, am I the father of the year, or what?  By the end of the game, he realized a problem. He had two sons. And now, only one of them had a baseball.
Over the next couple of weeks, he started thinking about how he could catch a baseball for his younger son, too. He realized he’d need to:
They may have seemed like minor steps, but these seemingly small actions increased his odds of success. After all, you can’t catch a ball if you’re sitting in the nosebleeds, and a baseball player would be much more likely to toss a ball his way if he looked like a fan - and if that ball was going to a kid. What exactly does this have to do with sales? As it turns out, more than you’d think. One of the things that sets a good salesperson apart from a great salesperson is that, before every meeting they have, a great salesperson thinks about ways to increase their odds of winning the customer’s business. Whether it be mapping out their route to arrive early, making sure their car is clean and looks professional, anticipating and removing any possible distractions within their control, and clearly communicating next steps, a great salesperson knows that chance favors the prepared. Of course, great preparation is not a guarantee that what you’re working towards will go your way (although, in Karl’s case, once again, it did). But it does give you the best shot of achieving your desired outcome. On Karl’s appearance on the Global Sales Leader podcast, he shares what mentality salespeople need to have to succeed, why a good leader helps their team define what they’re playing for, and the power of bringing sales and marketing teams together. Check out the full podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to learn more about mastering the art of sales! |
Meet Me
Archives
October 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
We are headquartered in Colorado with domestic and international teammates and clients. Please use the contact form on this page to inquire about any of our books, podcasts appearances, speaking engagements and workshops, any of our offerings, or simply to connect.
|
|