How being polite in B2B sales resulted in 10 x quota

Kevin Dixon
Sep 4, 2018 · 7 min read

The title of this article sounds bloody ridiculous, or course it does, surely it’s just a dramatic headline to get you all to read it, well no it’s not, it actually happened, it’s an interesting, if not unusual and quirky story, and there’s a couple of useful business morals that come out of it. A word of warning for those that want or need some deep and meaningful career changing advice, you won’t find it, but you will find a habit that will stand you in good stead for building relationships.

Before I describe what happened it’s worth saying that after you’ve been in sales for a while most of you, if not all of you, will have had positive moments that will have defined and influenced your careers, or results that elevated you to the category of successful sales professional, at least for a while anyway, as many struggle to sustain success year after year. Well this story is one of my defining moments and one that added substance, experience and a pile of cash to my attainments that year. I was already a very successful sales person and a regular at the global performers club, something I never missed in my 20 years with the company. But this event resulted in me becoming the global Club President as the highest sales performer worldwide in a company of over 110,000 people. In addition to this I was the highest paid employee in the UK, just to reiterate that’s all employees’ not sales people, so it included all of the big wigs in their ivory towers. I couldn’t help myself, I was strutting around like a dog with two dicks, and my moment of politeness had paid dividends unlike anything I could’ve imagined.

Right, that’s the trumpet blowing and self-back slapping out of the way, on with the events that led to this.

During a phone call with this consultant prospect, who was enquiring on behalf of their client, I had done some usual qualifications about what they were trying to achieve, plus the why and when. It was borderline worthwhile, but it was not far away so we agreed to visit. As it was a more technical requirement I asked one of our pre-sales engineers to join me and off we went. On arrival at the given address, we were looking at each other in confusion, it was an end of terrace council house (I think this is called Public or Social housing in the US), in a less desirable part of the town, and in a town that was less desirable than most others. I won’t write what we said when we saw it, as that sort of language is more Facebook than LinkedIn, but you can imagine the air was turned blue. As we both sat there having a little chuckle at the broken refrigerator dumped in the garden (it’s true, this has not been added for dramatic effect), the curtain twitched at the front of the house, we’d been spotted. What to do now, that was the conundrum? Well the decision was made for us due to my small bladder, I needed the toilet, and there was no option. We got out of the car and rang the doorbell, what happened next only served to further position this as far removed from a typical business meeting as was possible. The door opened and the wife of our contact answered the door, young child under one arm and a hand rolled fag (cigarette) hanging from her bottom lip. As far as first and second impressions go this rewrote the rule book. We asked to see our contact and were told that he was working in his office around the back, so off we trotted. We were just about to get a third impression smack in the face, his home office was a small rickety garden shed, probably no bigger than 8ft square. The inside was luxuriously equipped with eggs boxes up each wall to provide both insulation and sound proofing, and his very friendly pet dog took a fancy to my right leg (once again there is no creative license here).

Following my quick trip to the facilities to make my bladder more comfortable, we sat down to have a chat with the contact, whilst also enjoying the cup of tea and biscuit provided by his lovely wife (how very British). The contact was currently sub-contracting for a company working for a famous Royal family in South East Asia, this made the conversation and requirements quite interesting, so we listened and advised professionally and politely. We finished after about 45 minutes (even politeness has its limitations) and returned to our office, it was pretty easy to put some technical information together that would be useful to them so I popped it in the post, job done. I never thought much about it after that.

About a year later I got a call from the contact asking if he could come and see us in our office as he had some business to put our way, music to a sales person’s ear, so a time and date was agreed. Our offices were on the ground floor of a multi-tenanted building and the visitor car park was located at the front. When the contact arrived our faces must have been picture to behold, he was behind the wheel of a gorgeous Ferrari, he parked it next to the less impressive array of visitors vehicles and exited the car, he was wearing a suit that probably cost more than the other visitors cars and adorned enough gold jewellery to fund a small start-up business in its first year! Things were looking up.

For some of you this might be dragging on a bit so let’s jump to the big finale. My contact had secured the position as the Technology Advisor for the Royal family (along with a huge salary) and was now responsible for all of their properties, which were plentiful and extensive. He now wanted to work with someone he respected and ‘knows and trusts’ (I know you’ve all heard that expression before), it’s funny what impact can be made after only a 45 minute meeting and a brochure follow up! It turns out that of the 6 people that meetings were made with two drove off after seeing the house, one told him he was a joke at his front door, one started the meeting but after 10 minutes stated it was a waste of his time and left and the fifth had a meeting with the prospect but showed little interest and never sent the information they promised. And that left little old me, the one who ended up with a massive contract that substantially contributed towards achieving 1,012% of profit target for the year, the one who was polite and respectful, even when circumstances suggested another course of action, the one with the big fat wallet.

There will be some sales purists who will say that I broke the sales rule book in even bothering with this opportunity, and in some respects, they are right, thank god I ignored the rule book on this one occasion, after all, politeness costs nothing. Now before you think I was a one hit contract wonder that year wallowing in the rewards of a single deal I should say that aside from this revenue and profit, I still achieved another 200% of quota from other contracts, with many moments of politeness in each of them.

I have always had looks that would suit radio rather than television, looks straight out of a photo fit from the weekly episode of Crime Watch, so most people made an assumption that my success must have come from being the typical hard nose, pushy, persistent and aggressive sales person, and the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. My sales approach has always been consultative and being respectful to a prospect has always been high on my agenda, including when I have declined opportunities or not been successful in winning them, so it is part of my sales persona. After all, you never know when you might meet these people again in your sales career or who they might talk to.

So if I can give anyone some advice from my experience it’s ‘Never judge a book by its cover’, if the competitors had taken the same approach they could have won this business, and someone else may have written this post. This was not a case of product differentiation or superiority; this was a case of sales person response and action differentiation.

‘What goes around comes around’, is normally an idiom that is associated with a negative behaviour that comes back to bite the perpetrator in the butt, but in this instance it was the opposite. My politeness came back one year later in the form of 10 x profit quota.

And my final piece of advice for anyone in sales is to ‘Treat people as you would expect and hope to be treated yourself’, even if there’s no business potential for you.

I will leave you with a final thought, if you ever see a refrigerator dumped outside someone’s house; maybe think about knocking on the door and see if there’s any business potential. (Or maybe don’t!)

Kevin Dixon

Written by

Kevin is the founder of Boxxstep, a SaaS Buyer Relationship Management platform that helps B2B sales people manage opportunities from the buyers perspective

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