Ian Jones

A simple definition of selling is persuading other people to do what you want them to do! We often talk about ‘power of persuasion’.

Observation of successful and unsuccessful sales behaviour over the past 40 years has taught me that the powers displayed by practitioners of ancient wisdom, and those demonstrated by ultra successful sales people, are identical. At the pinnacle of my sales career during the late 1980; when the small company I lead achieved profitable sales in excess of $100m annually, such talk would have caused the talker to become an instant outcast - and a candidate for admission to a care institution for the mentally deranged.

In those days we described ourselves as “captain of our own ships and masters of our own destinies” as apposed to victims of circumstance. We attributed our success to our qualities of near-genius, boundless energy, commitment to achieving goals and a vivacious appetite to work hard and play hard.

In recent times it has become more fashionable and certainly more intelligent, to look for the causes of sustainable high performance in more substantial and durable areas. This means going back into the history of the universe to find the primordial truth from which all human achievement has sprung and been nourished.

The 7 fold guide to super abundant sales sets out 7 distinct steps that need to be taken along a path that leads to more sales than any individual would possibly expect of themselves right now where they are. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have seen the film “The Secret” that everybody is talking about, you will know that it is built around the universal law of attraction. Simply stated they say that if you demonstrate with single minded concentration that you believe a certain outcome will occur then it will! Try it out! Think of your next big deal. Visualise yourself at the signing ceremony. See what the room looks like, who else will be there, what will they be saying. How will the signing party be seated, standing? How will you be feeling as you look into the camera that is recording the signing ceremony?

What will the after party be like? Who will you invite; what words will your boss use to congratulate you and the team that worked with you. And when you get home, what will be the reception from your family. How will they show their pride in you and their appreciation of the improved standard of living that will arise from your accomplishment?

When you have this visualisation clear and it has become familiar to you, give it substance.  Create a montage of pictures that depict the future occasion – a photo of your team – all happy smiling faces; pictures of the venue for your 100% or Target Club; a filled in contract with a pen in hand poised on the signature line; your new car; your next house in a more expensive suburb.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Sales Manager

Sales Management is one of the highest paid occupations in the Western world. It is also full of risk, complexity, opportunities for phenomenal success or crippling failure (often occurring one after the other). It requires high standards of living, long hours, and unrelenting stress on body, psyche and relationships. The work of a sales manager involves knowing a lot about many things and being able to communicate that knowledge clearly and authoritatively.

But hey, let me not theorise on the subject. What follows is a mail I received earlier this year from one of my clients. Read it – then carefully and truthfully ask yourself to what extent you relate to her story. If there is an echo from your own experience, the Institute of Sales and Marketing Development (ISMD) is where you will most likely find what you are looking for, visit us as www.insales.co.za .

“How did I become a Sales Manager ?

Good question – I was not born to it – my parents wanted me to pursue an academic career. I was not educated for it – my speciality was the classics. As I have discovered, there is very little about the sales management life that is classical, other than classic foul ups or classically optimistic, predictions from my sales people. I was not trained for it – whilst I was a sales person, I kind of knew that if I consistently exceeded my target, I would become a sales manager – presumably on the basis that since I know how to excel, I could transfer my wining ways to others.

In the 5 years that I have been doing the sales management bit, I have discovered that an effective sales manager needs to become an expert in the following skills and behaviours:

ü Select top-performing sales people.

ü Lead a band of prima donnas.

ü Motivate highly volatile characters.

ü Negotiate deals, internally and externally.

ü Provide knowledge on demand.

ü Connect sales peoples’ requirements, for themselves and their clients, to the resources of my organisation.

ü Represent the organisation’s performance standards to the sales people and vice versa.

ü Be a competitive employer – the one of first choice in my industry.

ü Be a supportive manager – to my sales people and my boss.

ü Be an effective representative of the sales function to my peers in the management team, individually and as a group.

ü Be an effective representative of my company to the executive management in my clients’ organisations.

ü Work closely and intelligently with the marketing people, sometimes doing the marketing work myself.

ü Walk across the lake in the park on the weekends – only joking !!

But it does often seem that the requirements of my job require supernatural capabilities.

I have built up an image that looks like what I should really be.

I can talk the talk, fake it till I make it – I can accommodate most of the cliches. Notice how many time “I” appears in this outpouring. My image says that I am a stand alone genius, a fountain of knowledge and expertise, but …….. it really is lonely out there. There is only my image that can communicate with me. My sales people and my boss expect me to just do it – whatever “it” turns out to be.

What I desperately need is someone who can support me; someone who is not

ü A competitor for my job, my deals, my reputation or my status.

ü A peddler of general information that I have to sift through to find what I need.

ü A professional trainer who knows how to deliver course material but is not a subject matter expert.

I need someone who is:

ü Practically knowledgeable and experienced in the business of sales management.

ü Able to talk about what works and what doesn’t, using proven methods.

ü Accessible when I need them.

ü Good at listening and asking me the right questions so that the real problem and the real solution emerges.”

My response to this cry from the heart was “Do I ever relate to your experience!!”

I lived there for 10 years. I did very well financially and in driving my career. I got to the top spot and stayed there until I started my own business which has run successfully since 1990.

The cost was horrendous to my health, my relationships and my peace of mind. In order to help others walk around the pitfalls we fell into, and enable you to achieve the heights we did – and more – without incurring all of the cost, my colleagues Darren, Ashley and I have founded the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management.

Visit us at www.insales.co.za and discover how you can upgrade not only your performance but also your quality of life. It doesn’t matter how you became a sales manager, or how difficult it is to be a really good one all the time.

What matters is, where can you find the support to get on top and stay there, whilst enjoying every minute of your life!

Mentoring has been with us since “Pa fell off the bus”.. In fact, it might have been that fall that gave birth to the mentoring process.

What “Pa” maybe needed was a bus-rider with greater experience and skill than himself to show him how to keep his balance on the steps going out of the bus. Or maybe just some knowledgeable person to tell him the minimum degree of sobriety needed before setting out on the journey!!

The mentor is a person whose knowledge and experience is specifically applicable to what the client is trying to do (By the way, I use the word “client” to describe the person at the receiving end of a service. It is more respectful and less clumsy than “mentees”, which always suggests to me some kind of toothpaste!) You would be unlikely to get much benefit from providing a web designer with a carpenter for a mentor – or would you??

Seriously, the mentor’s values comes from their ability to show the client how to do things more quickly and/or more efficiently, based on the skill that the mentor has and the experience gained in the long-time exercise of those skills. Thus mentoring frequently presupposes an unequal relationship, in that a senior person (the mentor) passes on specific information to a younger or less experienced person.

My observation is that mentoring is considered to be of little value in the 21^st century world of business.

How do I come to that conclusion? People say that they need it but do not want to pay for it! No sane person expects to receive a valuable service for nothing. So – what happened to mentoring

• Modern technology has raised the standard of communication expected from service providers. Many mentors are excellent at what they know how to do, but cannot communicate their knowledge and experience to the client in an interesting, understandable fashion.
• Clients are impatient, but demand patience from service providers. Highly skilled and experienced people are often perceived as slow and methodical whilst “not suffering fools (ie clients) gladly”
• The elements that cause the mentor to be successful, when they were doing the job ten years ago have been superseded by changes in technology and/or methodology. It is now no longer “how things are done around here”. Many mentors have not adapted and updated their experience and skills, to be relevant to the client’s environment.
• Mentors are sometimes seen as agents for authority figures; money lenders, managers, HR executives, and as such are viewed with some suspicion that erodes the mutual respect needed in any successful relationship.
• Hybrid mentors (these are managers who have mentorship as one of their key performance objectives, or owner managers who try to find time to mentor their key staff) often have other pressing priorities that make the process to become inconsistent in the quantity and quality of mentorship?

So… what’s good about mentoring?

It’s like chicken soup, it can’t do you any harm and it could do you a lot of good. If you can get it – go for it!! If it is good you should pay for it, and find a way of measuring the benefits you get from it, so that you can relate the cost to the value received.

Coaching is the new buzz word. Everybody who says anything to anybody else that is reputed to be helpful is a coach. In fact in the South African world of business we have so many coaches, all we are short of are some locomotives to take them away, and park them, in some far away, HR marshalling yard.

Coaching is a new profession. It does not yet have a global recognised set of qualifications or code of conduct or regulatory bodies for its practitioners. Coaching for business people was birthed out of recognition by leading American business schools that coaching played a significant role in the achievement of sporting individuals and teams. They decided to research the field of coaching and made those remarkable discoveries.

• Success has only something to do with the application of skill: the rest comes from internal mental and spiritual energy and strength.
• Success comes from within the individual or team; it’s not dependent on negative or positive external factors.
• Methodologies exist that enable and empower people to generate and sustain mental and spiritual energy and strength.
• Individual and team self-esteem and confidence can be kindled and nurtured to a point where it becomes self sustaining.
• COACHING IS THE VEHICLE THAT DELIVERS THESE POWERFUL ASSETS.
• THE WORLD OF SPORT COACHING CAN MIGRATE TO THE WORLD OF BUSINESS TO CREATE:

o COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

o ACHIEVEMENT OF TARGETS

o INDIVIDUAL AN TEAM GROWTH

Today, in South Africa, there are a number of reputable individuals and organisations (of which I am proud to be one) who are able to bring the benefits of coaching to the business community. Coaching is a collaborative relationship (like, we do it together!) between the coach and the client, for the purpose of generating high level performance in an individual or team.

Coaching is solution and goal orientated. You, the client, need to know where you want to be and when you want to get there. You need to know it specifically – what it will look like, sound like, feel like – maybe even taste like and smell like!

The coach will then take you through a process of examining the choices that you as a unique individual or team have, in deciding on the path that takes you from where you are to where you want to be. And then what challenges you need to face before you set out; in other words “In order to get to where I want to be, on my chosen path, what I must stop doing that I am presently doing and what must I start to do that I am not doing now?”

Then we hit the “New Years resolution syndrome”. In the euphoric glow of a new beginning, we are prepared to give up, and start to do, anything! “Whoa!” says the coach? “What about all those things that you value and all those things that you believe in – the product of your conditioning since you were knee high to a grasshopper.” Is the pastor’s son who respects and has internalised his father’s beliefs and values really going to open an escort agency, just because it is a quick way to make lots of money?

You, the client, are now given the opportunity to align your future path and your response to its challenges, with your inner value set and belief system. Once this is done you are ready to act.

The coach then works with you to co-create a strategy for following the path of your selection to the destination that you have chosen. Every two weeks for a suggested period of 6 months the coach will review progress with you and examine the feedback you are receiving from your business, family and social environments. This review and forward plan session usually lasts for two hours.

Coaches who are experienced will usually charge from R4000 a month per executive, owner manager or team.

FAQs

Q: What happens after the six month coaching assignment has been completed?

A: The individual or group should now have sufficient experience of the process to coach themselves. It is not desirable to create a dependency of the client on the coach. Alternatively a new goal may be set as the subject for a new coaching assignment.

Q: What happens if I don’t get where I want to be in the specified time?

A: The coaching guarantee is that you will either be where you wanted to be at the end of the coaching assignment or you will somewhere else!! Wherever you are, you will know exactly how and why you have come to be there.

Q: Can I not be coached for less money?

A: Not really, the cost is related to the value received. Think what you pay for telephones, rent, travel and wages. How do these relate to a service that offers to empower and enable you, by accessing and skilfully using your inner resources, to achieve your business and personal goals in a time frame set by yourself ?

So …..Mentoring is like chicken soup, coaching is the main course, meat and potatoes or 5 kinds of fresh vegetables if you prefer.

Select your coach carefully – this is probably the most valuable business partner you will find. Enter into the process positively and enthusiastically. Stay with it, experience the results, They will transform your business and your life.

Good luck and good hunting.