Heavy Hitter Sales Blog

Are You A Closer? TAKE THE TEST

 

Are You A Natural Born Closer? Take the following Test to find out

 

Harvard Business Review is arguably the most prestigious publication for business leaders and management thinkers. Here’s one of my recent Harvard Business Review articles titled “Are You A Closer? Take the Test”

 

The drive to take command of a situation is instrumental to a salesperson’s success.  Salespeople with a weak dominance instinct are never quite in control of an account. They operate under the direction of customers or are at the mercy of the competition. They also find it more difficult to close the sale because they are uncomfortable exerting their will over the customer.

Dominance is gaining the willing obedience of the customer. The customer listens to your opinions and advice, internalizes your recommendations and agrees with them, and when you close the sale call follows your course of action. Your personality greatly influences the way in which you establish dominance during sales calls. 

Nowhere during the sales process does dominance play a more important role than when closing. Take this short test to determine your natural tendencies to dominate group settings. Score your answer after each question with zero, one, or two points. 

 

1. Assertiveness within groups. Let’s pretend you are having a hallway conversation with three colleagues. Do you remain silent the majority of time letting others speak (0), speak an equal share of the conversation (1), or usually find yourself talking the majority of the time (2)?

2. Conformity within situations. Using the hallway example above, if someone said something you disagreed with would you typically remain silent (0), might challenge the person to explain themselves (1), or usually confront the person directly (2)?

3. Self-consciousness around people. If a colleague said one of your important ideas was stupid would your embarrassment cause you to remain silent (0), perhaps defend yourself (1), or would you reject the person’s comments outright and criticize their arguments (2)?

4. Candor around people. When speaking with colleagues are you someone who carefully edits your words (0), tactfully speaks your mind (1), or is completely open and honest with all your thoughts (2)? 

5. Humility around people. Are you someone who feels genuinely humble and respects all others (0), generally believes you are equal to others (1), or usually thinks you are better or superior in some way to people around you (2)?

 

Total your score for all questions. A score of six or below indicates you have a low natural tendency to establish dominance in group settings. Consequently, you may have a more difficult time closing. A score of seven or more indicates high natural tendencies. Most likely, you are a “natural” closer who is more comfortable in the uncomfortable position of asking prospective clients for their business.

There are two basic approaches to establish dominance during sales calls. The direct approach is based upon personal prowess, while the indirect approach is based upon finesse. The approach you should use depends upon attributes of your personality. If you scored a high level of dominance, you are typically well suited to use a direct approach. This approach is based upon first establishing yourself as the focal point of the purchase. In essence, the customer is buying your credibility, your personal experience, and your ability to help them accomplish their goals.

If you scored a low level of dominance, you are more likely better suited to use an indirect approach. This approach is based upon establishing your product and the capabilities of your company as the focal point of the purchase before you start selling yourself. For example, a salesperson with low dominance that transitioned his career from a technical position into sales can have an equally dominant presence as a seasoned sales veteran. However, he has to use a different approach. Instead of projecting a powerful presence in person, his deep-rooted technical understanding of his product draws customers to follow him.   

A salesperson’s goal is to gain dominance over a submissive customer. While dominance is commonly associated with brute force, this is not the case in sales. It’s simply how people judge others. People are continually sensing whether their position is superior to yours, relatively equal, or inferior in some way. In turn, this impacts what they say during the conversation and how they behave.

 

Other Articles That May Interest You:

 Closing Techniques Using Sales Linguistics

Personality Study of 1,000 Top Salespeople

Game Changer Provides FREE B2B Contact Data

Wow! There is Revolution Happening in the World of B2B Prospecting Data Providers!

I remember when I was VP of Sales and had to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for prospecting lists. At the time there were a couple of main data providers and they controlled the prospecting data marketplace so they were free to charge whatever they liked. Worse yet, negotiating with them was a frustrating ordeal and even after paying all them all this money, my inside sales teams and field reps would continually complain about the quality of the contact information.  Well, I am excited to tell you that times have finally changed…

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Ok, It’s Free… But How Accurate is the Data?

That was exactly the first question I had about LeadFerret so I conducted my own test. Of 1,000 random contacts I selected directly from LeadFerret, 83% were correct! This is an awesome accuracy rate that puts many other data providers to shame (and the price is right too!!!).

 

Other Articles You Might Enjoy: 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Salespeople

Why Did We Lose the Big Deal? (5 Questions for the VP of Sales)

Book Review: Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics-101 Advanced Sales Call Strategies for Senior Salespeople

The editorial objective of Think Sales magazine is to empower, motivate and inspire sales leaders with strategic knowledge, tactical skills, and management insights. Below, is Think Sales Magazine Editor Andrew Honey’s review of Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics: 101 Advanced Sales Call Strategies for Senior Salespeople.

 

At first glance, the book Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics: 101 Advanced Sales Call Strategies for Senior Salespeople, by Steve W. Martin may not resonate with sales leaders. That is a critical mistake for one simple reason - competitive advantage. In 24 years of running my own companies I have seen how difficult it has become to not only win more sales, but also to retain customers who are continually searching for the best solution at the best price.  

What every sales leader should be looking for is a way to equip his/her sales force with tactical and strategic tools that will separate them from their competitors.This is where Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics: 101 Advanced Sales Call Strategies for Senior Salespeople comes into play. It’s a unique, researched look into how people use and interpret language during the decision-making process.

Written for senior salespeople it will help you, and therefore through coaching your team, to expand influence within the company and with prospects and clients. This will result in not only winning more business, but also being able to explain to others how and why you win.  XXX You’ll learn language-based strategies and tactics to secure customer meetings, what to say and do when presenting in face-to-face customer and prospect meetings and how to bond with customers using sales linguistics. Find out how the customer's mind uses language and perfect your sales intuition so you always say the right words at the right time.

The book addresses every step of the sales cycle and provides a paint-by-numbers process to approach, engage and persuade prospective customers. It’s easy to read, with short chapters, extensive examples, illustrations and exercises. This is one book every sales leader should have on their bookshelf.

Other Articles That May Interest You:

Sales Linguistics: The Seven Different Languages C-Level Executives Speak

Closing Techniques Using Sales Linguistics

Best New Sales Book of 2011

Why Did I Lose the Sale? 6 Win-Loss Analysis Questions

I’ve had the privilege of conducting “Win/Loss/No Decision Sales Cycle Analysis Studies” for leading companies including IBM, EMC, ATT, Acxiom, and PayPal. To accomplish these studies I have interviewed hundreds of C-level executives and countless mid-level managers and lower-level personnel. Click here to learn more about Win-Loss Analysis.

 

Losing is always hard. Learning you are the loser in the eleventh hour of a deal is a frustrating, humbling, and embarrassing event. In this circumstance, perhaps it’s time to honestly ask yourself the following six questions.

1. Did I take the customer’s word at face value?  For a moment, let’s put ourselves in the position of the customer. As the customer, you are going to meet with multiple vendors, watch their presentations, and read their marketing collateral. Each vendor, most likely, has equally talented, friendly, and professional salespeople who come to your office. However, you will select only one product. Given that, how will you behave with each vendor? Will you tell each one the truth? Probably not. 

It is basic human nature to want to avoid confrontation. This is particularly true when you are meeting in person, face-to-face. In addition, our society has implicit guidelines of behavior. We are taught at an early age that if we have nothing nice to say, then we shouldn’t say anything at all. Therefore, it is much more comfortable for the prospect to say something they think you want to hear than the actual truth. 

2. Did I have an internal Coach within the account?   In order to win every deal you need a constant, accurate source of information revealing the internal machinations of the customer’s selection process. For many years, the term “coach” has been used by all types of salespeople, selling every conceivable product, to define the person within an account who provides this privileged intelligence and confidential information.

Why would someone coach one salesperson versus another? To establish a relationship with a coach, Heavy Hitters (truly great salespeople) build a different type of rapport with the customer. At the foundation is a special relationship, a personal friendship between two individuals. True Coaches not only want you to win; they’re your friends and allies. Winning without one is next to impossible.

3. Did I recognize the turning point?   Every deal has a critical moment or turning point that determines the winner and the losers. In some cases, the turning point is easy to spot. For example, a salesperson may be presenting a solution and encounters a deal-breaking objection that he or she is unable to overcome. Even though the customer remains cordial for the rest of the meeting, a turning point has occurred and the deal is lost. In most cases, the turning point occurs when the salesperson isn’t present. It’s in casual hallway conversations or internal e-mails that selection team members share opinions that influence vendor’s futures. This proprietary information is only reveled when you have an internal spy.

4. Did I misinterpret information?  The sales cycle is a formalized information-and-activity exchange. Customers are trying to gather as much information about vendors in order to determine if they are appropriate long-term partners. Meanwhile, salespeople are trying to gather as much information about the customer in order to determine if they can win the deal. Information is communicated back and forth, and each message that is sent must also be received and interpreted correctly.

However, an obstacle is inherent in this process. Each message is subject to a person’s interpretation and filtering. Some information is ignored, some information is misinterpreted, and some information is generalized. Therefore, do you really know if your arguments were interpreted correctly? More importantly, did you interpret your customer’s messages correctly?  

5. Did I truly know the decision-maker’s motivations and values? Heavy Hitters always delve beneath the surface, the technical and business criteria, to uncover individual motivations. Customers may have their “official” reasons for purchase decisions; however, there is also an “off the record” truth. The final decision is really driven by the desire to fulfill self-centered needs on the part of a few individuals. Therefore, like a psychologist, Heavy Hitters concentrate on eliciting the deep feelings and desires from the “patient.” In this case, they are trying to determine the principles, standards, incentives, and priorities of the key decision makers. Always in the back of their minds is the question, “What is driving this person’s behavior and how will my product help achieve their needs?” 

6. Did I listen to my sales intuition? Successful salespeople are continually cataloguing their successes and failures. They store patterns of individual and company behavior and link them to the sales process. From this base of intuitive knowledge they are able to decide which deals to work and create and execute account strategies. It’s your sales intuition that’s responsible for predicting the future.

While you have learned that you must be persistent and energetic to succeed, sometimes it is far more important to listen to your sales intuition so you don’t waste your time on non-winnable accounts in the first place.

A Salesperson's Most Important Competitive Weapon

Today’s customers are smarter and more sophisticated, and technology has become a way of life for them. For example, our cars have global positioning and mapping systems based upon satellite communications. The appliances in our kitchens turn themselves on and off. Our entire music collections are carried on digital devices the size of a deck of cards. We take pictures, play games, and send text messages to friends with our cellular phones. Over Nintey-five percent of all homes in the United States have personal computers. Via the Internet, customers can research products, prices, and opinions. Collectively, this has raised the level of sophistication of the customers we must converse with and sell to.

Perhaps the most interesting change is how people receive information. According to one university study, the world’s total yearly production of media content for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on the earth. Because of this information overload, customer attention spans are shorter than ever.

Information must now be packaged with the customers’ shortened attention spans in mind. For example, USA Today, the largest selling newspaper in the United States, was designed to stand out visually. The colorful newspaper always includes bold diagrams and numerous pictures so that time-pressed readers can pick up a story’s message with minimal effort. Even the racks used to sell the newspaper are colorful boxes with rounded edges as opposed to the black square boxes of other newspapers.

Shortened attention spans have changed the nature of information itself. USA Today distills and condenses the news into easy-to-read chunks. A paragraph is rarely longer than three short sentences. Every article is written with the reader in mind, using a “what’s in it for me?” style. USA Today’s style is best summarized by the newspaper’s tagline, “An economy of words, a wealth of information.” If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, USA Today is the most successful newspaper ever because newspapers everywhere have adopted its format.

But even USA Today has had to continue to change both their online and print editions to maintain readers… This Brings Us to The Main Point of This Article:         

Have You Changed The Way You Communicate to Connect with Today’s Customer Who is Smarter, More Sophisticated, But has a Shortened Attention Span?

Successful communication is at the foundation of all sales. “Sales Linguistics” is the revolutionary new field of study about how customers and salespeople use and interpret language during the decision making process.  The conversations you have with customers are quite complex, they consist of verbal and non-verbal communication that are sent consciously and subconsciously. Sales Linguistics will help you learn to say the “right” words at the “right” time to convince skeptical customers to buy.

You must be able to adapt your use of language to a customer’s thought process and personality. You need to understand the process of communication and how it determines the level of rapport that is established between people. Language can be directly linked to customer behavior. It can be deciphered to predict the future, determine truthfulness, and used proactively to influence a customer’s thinking and opinions. 

The salesperson’s most important competitive weapon is his mouth, and the winner is the salesperson who uses words to reduce the customer’s doubts, ease his fear and fosters his fantasy. That’s why it’s critical that you learn sales linguistics before your arch-rivals learn to speak more persuasively.

Click Here to Read More About Sales Linguistics

 

Closing Techniques Using Sales Linguistics

Harvard Business Review is arguably the most prestigious publication for business leaders and management thinkers. Here’s one of my recent Harvard Business Review articles about how to use Sales Linguistics to close sales calls. It is based upon my new book Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics: 101 Advanced Sales Call Strategies for Senior Salespeople.

Remember the last time you were being pressured into doing something you didn't want to do? Whether the pressure came from a boss, colleague, spouse, or child, your natural response was to resist and push back. It's human nature to resist high-pressure tactics. So, how should the closing of the sales call be structured? The answer is to create a primary closing strategy, utilize fallback positions, and select the appropriate technique to deliver the close.

Your primary closing strategy should be based upon securing the main objective for the meeting. The objective could be to be granted a follow-on meeting, have the customer start a product evaluation, receive approval to conduct a site survey, or negotiate final purchase terms. You also need fallback positions, alternatives you prepare ahead of time to present should the customer reject your primary closing strategy.

Your primary closing strategy and fallback positions are based on choosing to issue a command or presenting foreground and background suggestions. A command is an instructional statement that creates a binary type of yes or no response from the recipient. It is typically associated with a hard close and "take it or leave it" mentality. Foreground suggestions (medium close) are explicit, but they deflect the source of the request from the demander. Background suggestions (soft close) lead recipients to believe they are acting of their free will when in fact they have been directed to follow a message.

Let's pretend I am a passenger in your car and I feel you are driving too fast. A command would be "Slow down!" A foreground suggestion would be "You know the speed limit is forty five miles per hour and police ticket a lot of speeders here." A background suggestion would be "A speeder was in a horrible accident last week in this exact spot." While the background suggestion may be more subtle in its delivery, it can trigger a more profound reaction.

In a sales situation, a command might be "We always recommend you benchmark the products you are evaluating." A foreground suggestion might be "Consumer Reports gave our product the highest rating and recommended it as the best buy." An example of a background suggestion is "One of my customers tried the other company's product and recently switched to ours."

After you have determined your primary closing strategy and fallback positions, select the delivery technique to be used during the meeting. Here are some examples, assuming the main sales call objective is to close the business deal:

Time-based technique. This technique incorporates a time-based deadline.

            Command (hard close). "This is the last time we'll be able to extend this offer and we need your answer now."

            Foreground suggestion (medium close). "My boss told me that this pricing expires December 31 at midnight."

            Background suggestion (soft close). "Think it over tonight and I will call you at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning."

 

Linkage. This technique connects different events, subjects, or ideas.

            Command (hard close). "If we give you those terms, then you must have our contract signed by the end of our quarter."

            Foreground suggestion (medium close). "I'll talk with my boss and if he okays the terms, could we have the purchase order by month end?"

            Background suggestion (soft close). "Our implementation team will be fully booked starting in September, so to complete your project by year end, we'll need to have the contract signed in the next couple of weeks."

 

Power of Print. This technique leverages a document or printed company policy.

            Command (hard close). "Our new price list is coming out in thirty days, and I can't hold these current prices for you after that."

            Foreground suggestion (medium close). "Here's our volume discount schedule. If you spend another $100,000, you'll receive an additional 10 percent off the entire order."

            Background suggestion (soft close). "Should I send you a formal quotation that details the purchase price and terms?" 

Always maintain control of the sales call so you can employ your primary closing strategy and be prepared with fallback positions should your primary closing strategy fail. You can sequence your primary closing strategy, and fallback positions with commands (hard close), foreground suggestions (medium close), and background suggestions (soft close). For example, your primary closing strategy might be based upon a hard close; first fallback position, a medium close; and final fallback position, a soft close. Or, your strategy could be completely opposite depending upon the circumstances and the type of person you are meeting with. 

Read More About Sales Linguistics Here

Top 7 Critical Sales Trends for 2012

Top 7 Critical Sales Trends for 2012

What are the top sales trends for 2012? Here’s my list based upon my experience of studying and working with some of the world’s greatest sales organizations last year.

1. Sales Linguistics – For 2012, it’s not only what you say, but equally important, how you say it. “Sales linguistics” is the revolutionary new field of study about how customers and salespeople use and interpret language during the decision making process. If you are in sales, you make your living by talking. If you were a pilot, you would attend years of flight training school before you were allowed in the cockpit of a jumbo jet. If you were a lawyer, you would intensely study law for several years and have to pass your state’s bar exam to ensure your proficiency. If you are in sales, you need to study language and perfect your use of words because your most important competitive weapon is your mouth.  Read more about Sales Linguistics here.

2. Sales Force Verticalization – A “specialist” beats a “generalist” every time. Closely related to Sales Linguistics, is the accelerated trend of sales force language specialization based upon the following strategies:

     A) Industry verticalization (finance, government, retail, etc.) to promote domain expertise.

     B) Technical application segmented by different solutions to promote extremely deep technical knowledge.

     C) Business process improvement focus as opposed to the recitation of standard “generic” product features and functions to customers. 

3. Sales Force Behavior “Modeling” - Models are verbal descriptions and visual representations of how systems work and processes flow. Models enable repeatable and predictable experiences. More top salespeople will be studied in 2012 to understand how they formulate their winning account strategies based upon customer politics, evaluator psychology, and the human nature of decision makers that are unique to every account.  Read further about the Personality Traits of 1,000 Top Salespeople here.

4. Sales Process Ineffectiveness – Many companies have realized that their sales effectiveness didn’t improve even after spending a great deal of money and effort implementing a sales process methodology. The reason for this is because the “black hole” of the sales process is what happens during sales calls. Today, it’s the personal interactions with prospective customers that determines winners from losers, not the internal processes of the sales organization. In 2012 more companies will be studying and categorizing these customer interactions so they can improve sales force effectiveness. Read about 101 Advanced Sales Call Strategies here.

5. Organizational Buying Psychology – If you are involved in selling enterprise solutions, you already know the importance of understanding the inner workings of the various departments within the prospective customer’s company. Your solution might be purchased by the information technology department and used by accounting and human resources. Therefore, it’s critical to map out the interrelationships of the departments within an organization. The essence of successful enterprise sales is understanding not only who to sell to, but how to craft a message that appeals to various departmental constituents. Understanding organizational buying psychology becomes an even more critical topic in 2012.

6. No Decision as the Main Competitor – For sales forces involved with large capital expenditure sales cycles, never before has the mantra “Call High or Die” been so true. You must reach C-level executive decision makers early in the sales process because the default for organizations today is to do nothing and delay every major purchase.

7. Win-Loss Analysis Studies – Most companies are well versed on the logical arguments for selecting their product. However, the decision to make a major purchase is primarily based upon individual needs and desires, how the decision-makers receive information, and internal politics. Unfortunately many companies don’t do any type of win-loss analysis so they don't understand their customers in these regards. Because of the economy and relentless competition, 2012 will be the year that many companies have to re-discover the lost art of win-loss analysis. Read about The Three Critical Win-Loss Objectives here.

One final trend that bears mentioning is the accelerated move from field-based sales to phone-based internet sales. Many companies have quickly transitioned the majority of their field reps to be almost exclusively phone based. Therefore, these reps must now be able to create winning relationships with their voices as opposed how they sold in the past with their physical presence. Never before, has understanding and mastering the art of persuasion been so important. 

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Why Year End Deals Don't Close: THE CESSPOOL!

Here’s one of my favorite year end stories that you do not want to miss… READ BRIAN'S STORY BELOW!                       

Brian was presenting his forecast in front of his teammates and was explaining why a deal that he had originally forecasted to close in the fourth quarter came in three months later. Here’s his story.    

Brian was excited that the account he had worked on for nine months had selected his software solution. After several weeks of ensuing price negotiations, a $300,000 purchase order was submitted into the customer’s capital expenditure software system (referred to by the customer internally as the “CESS system”). Since several weeks were left in the quarter, Brian expected that he would receive the purchase order well before the quarter’s cutoff.   

In Brian’s mind the deal was done. The purchase order would be printed and signed and he forecasted the deal accordingly. However, Brian was quite surprised to learn that the rules-based CESS system required that a purchase of that magnitude be approved by twenty-one different people. The purchase order had entered the “CESSPOOL of Purchase Order Approval”.

Because of this elaborate sign off procedure, it would take another three months before all twenty-one signatures were gathered. In the meantime, Brian embarrassingly had to explain to his manager why a deal he had absolutely, positively, guaranteed would close wouldn’t. 

His assumption about the purchase order turnaround time was dead wrong. If only he’d had the foresight to ask about the details of the procurement process with the same diligence that he spent qualifying their decision making process before he committed the deal on his forecast. During tough economic times like today, you should expect every purchase approval to take two to four times longer than normal. Because, every organization exercises another excruciating level of diligence to ascertain whether or not the purchase is absolutely necessary.

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IT Sales Strategy: Software, SaaS & Hardware Sales

If you are involved in selling an enterprise software or technology solutions, you already know the importance of understanding the inner workings of the various departments within the prospective customer’s company. Your solution might be purchased by the information technology department and used by accounting and human resources. It might be selected by engineering (with the IT department’s help) and used by manufacturing. Or it could be selected by finance and bought by the IT department. Almost every enterprise software purchase decision requires multiple departments to become involved. Therefore, it’s critical to map out the interrelationships of the departments within an organization.

Over the past decade, I have performed win-loss sales analysis studies for a wide variety of software and hardware technology companies ranging from start-ups to companies with sales billions. To complete these studies, I conducted blind surveys of the senior IT executives, mid-level managers, and low-level technical evaluators who had selected or rejected the software from the company for which I was completing the study. While the purpose of these studies was to improve the sales force’s effectiveness, interesting patterns of IT organization behavior became apparent. These patterns supersede the standard hierarchical organization chart that salespeople and marketeers have grown accustomed to studying.

Four models can be used to define the information technology’s departmental interrelationships that will influence their buying behavior: departments are either consolidators, consulters, responders, or bureaucrats.  These departmental types (consolidators, consulters, responders, and bureaucrats) have different orientations toward the operation of their departments. Most importantly, they buy software, technology, and Softwaree as a Service (SaaS) in different ways and for completely different purposes.

1. Consolidators. Consolidators are IT departments that seek to increase their power, authority, or control within their organization. To grow their sphere of influence, they launch grand initiatives, major companywide projects that affect the operations of other departments.

The planning and creation of a grand initiative are at the direction of the department’s executive leadership (CIO, CTO, and VP of IT). This type of project does not percolate up from lower-level personnel through the chain of command; it is driven down from the top and out to the rest of the company.

The underlying motivation behind grand initiatives like this one is always power, whether it’s to gain more, consolidate it, or decrease that of other leaders and their departments within the organization. In the example above, the information technology department is exercising its power over engineering and finance.

2. Consulters.  Consulters are IT departments that take on the characteristics and attributes of a consultant to their organization. They seek to understand the problems of other departments and offer recommendations on how those problems can be solved using their services.

They proactively share their proprietary knowledge and departmental expertise or offer unsolicited advice to other departments in an attempt to show how they can improve efficiency. Therefore, they are continually polling the other departments, seeking opportunities to promote their services, and pushing out their ideas, philosophies, and opinions.  

Like a consultant hired on an hourly basis, consulters seek to continually validate their benefits and justify their existence to their customers. Selling to consulters differs from selling to consolidators because consulters enjoy the company of other consultants.

3. Responders.  Responders are weak IT departments that operate under the direction of other departments. Whereas consolidators seek power and consulters seek to proliferate their services, responders are just trying to survive. Many times, IT responders are literally under attack from other departments that are unable to meet their objectives because of the IT department’s ineffectiveness. In some cases, the other departments have been disappointed by the past IT blunders. As a result, IT responders tend to be treated disrespectfully and suffer from a lack of departmental esteem.

When selling to a responder, you must sell to the business unit as well as IT, whereas with consulters and consolidators, your main sales effort should be directed inside the IT departments. For example, let’s assume a powerful accounting department at a company is complaining about escalating phone costs and your company provides phone bill audit software. You need to make both the business unit (accounting department) and the responder (IT department) aware of your services.

4. Bureaucrats. The final category of IT departmental buyer is bureaucrats, faceless departments whose most important priority is to maintain the status quo through rules, regulations, and delaying tactics. The features of a bureaucrat department are secretiveness, a response system that reflexively rebuffs demands made upon the department, and administrative centralization around the departmental leader, the arch-bureaucrat.

The structured environment, similar to a military command-and-control environment, stamps out innovative thinking within lower levels of the department and hinders the free flow of information from other departments. Instead, the bureaucratic monarchy considers other departments outsiders and issues edicts that must be complied with for fear of consequences.

Final Thoughts: Because IT executive leaders of consolidators, consulters, responders, and bureaucrats have different motivations, they have different perceptions of a product’s true value. The perceived value of a product depends on the psychological, political, operational, and strategic value it provides the executive decision makers. Every enterprise IT sale involves consolidators, consulters, responders, and bureaucrats. You must determine a project’s wellspring in order to know to whom and how to sell your solution.

The essence of successful enterprise technology sales is understanding not only who to sell to, but how to craft a message that appeals to consolidators, consulters, responders, and bureaucrats. And, this is the reason my new book (Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics: 101 Advanced Sales Call Strategies for Senior Salespeople) focuses on language-based strategies to secure face-to-face meetings and convince skeptical customers to buy. You can learn more “Sales Linguistics,” the revolutionary new field of study on my web site at http://www.stevewmartin.com/

Click Here to Learn More About Sales Linguistics

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Best New Sales Book of 2011

I am excited to announce that the newest book in the "Heavy Hitter" series is now available. HEAVY HITTER SALES LINGUISTICS: 101 ADVANCED SALES CALL STRATEGIES FOR SENIOR SALESPEOPLE is the first book that truly explains "sales linguistics," the revolutionary new field of study about how customers use and interpret language during the decision-making process. Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics provides communication strategies that enable salespeople to rise above their competition and impactful psychological suggestions that compel customers' rational intellect and emotional subconscious to buy. Here’s what sales leaders have to say about Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics: 

"Steve Martin's writing on sales dispenses insights of value to sales leaders up and down an organization. His considerable experience in the field and foundations in research give his recommendations heft and yet they're delivered in an inherently readable and easy-to-understand way.--Eric Hellweg, Editorial Director, Harvard Business Review

"This book explains the complex concepts of sales linguistics in ways that are actionable and will help senior sales professionals become more successful."--Tom Furey, President, Standard Register Industrial

"Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics lays out key (and often overlooked) components of winning versus losing that even the most seasoned sales professional should stop and consider."--Gary Staley, Vice President of Sales, Americas, Fluke Networks

"Steve Martin has captured the essence of the sale in so many ways--how to say the right thing, do the right thing, and react to the customer's concerns. A must read for the professional salesperson."--James G. Ellis, Dean, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California

"Steve Martin addresses every step of the sales cycle and provides a paint-by-numbers process to approach, engage, and persuade prospective customers."--George Bennett, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, Isilon Systems division of EMC

"Understanding sales linguistics will help you map out all aspects of interacting with customers—how to get the first meeting, what to say to differentiate yourself, and strategies to close the deal." --Scott Raskin, CEO, Mindjet

"Steve Martin provides practical everyday advice on how to take professional selling to the next level."--Monty Carter, President, TELUS Enterprise Solutions

"I see it every day. Salespeople come up with a product pitch and drop it on anyone who will pick up the phone. Spray and pray. This book outlines the correct approach to selling. It's about making a personal connection by truly understanding prospects' needs and speaking their language."--Michael Nelson, Vice President of Sales, ON24

"If your activity levels are high but your closing rates are low, it's time to change your thinking! By mastering the concepts in this book, you will learn to speak in a language your customer understands. Learn the art of harmonious communication and watch your sales and income soar!"--Mike Viola, Executive Vice President of Sales, Oasis Outsourcing, Inc.

"Another Steve Martin book that I couldn't put down. A truly different book that translates linguistics to the real world and will give you an edge."--Joe Vitalone, Vice President of Sales, Americas, LifeSize Communications, division of Logitech

"When it comes to sales, there are a lot of resources that teach selling. Only Steve Martin teaches SELLING and developing salespeople beyond the customary sales skills!"--Frank Maylett, Executive Vice President of Sales, inContact

"Salespeople reflexively fixate on demonstrations and presentations. Their companies also reinforce this behavior. Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics focuses on building winning relationships by structuring interactions based upon individual linguistic profiles. It includes entirely new sales concepts based upon the latest neuroscience, which make the book not only interesting to read but highly valuable to even the most experienced salesperson."--Peter Riccio, Vice President of Mid-Market Sales, Taleo

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