What Personal Trainers Can Teach You About Sales
Frank Perkins, RVP of Enterprise Pipeline Programs, Salesforce
About five years ago I gave a chunk of my money — but more importantly, my trust — to a trainer in San Francisco. His new client process involved an intake methodology that I can only describe as exhaustive — and inspiring. Of course he gathered my basic stats like age, height, weight, body fat percentage, and so on. But he also asked questions like: How well do you sleep? What do you usually eat? Which foods work for you and which don’t?
Even as a lifelong athlete, I had never had anyone take such a hard look at my approach to physical well-being. By hiring him, I was flipping the model from being reactive to being proactive. This approach seems simple but I hadn’t done it before.
As I was executing the plan to take my fitness to the next level, I kept seeing many parallels to my selling career and the challenge of delivering value to customers while exceeding sales goals. The personal trainer metaphor just works — not as a tactic, but as a model of how to manifest the elusive “win-win” that makes sales a noble profession.
My prime directive became the following: “We must know our customers first, as deeply as possible. Any sales effort we attempt beforehand is, at best, well-intentioned guesswork; at worst, it’s self-serving, disrespectful of our customers’ time, and irresponsible.” I was on a mission to cut discovery time — the most time-consuming, if not the most painful part of the process for buyers — in half. And believe me, once you start looking, there is plenty of data available out there to help.
At Salesforce, we’re lucky. We are a web-based platform with the ability to know how our customers are using — or not using — any given Salesforce solution at any given time. If sellers wanted to, they could use that data the way the trainer used data about my physical well-being to create a “program” for their customers that will deliver the value they desire: “I am an expert at this. Follow this program to the letter, and it’s statistically inevitable that you will succeed. When you hit snags, call me.”
To me, he illustrated what being a trusted advisor is all about. In sales we must become those trusted advisors too; popping that “stress balloon” of the typical buyer-seller relationship where the worry is that the salesperson’s goals (get the deal, crush the number) aren’t in line with a buyers’ goals (getting the business value they need).
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