After 30 years of training salespeople, my lessons learned, by Mike Bosworth

Co-founder, Story Leaders™ & Author of Solution Selling® & CustomerCentric Selling®

When I first went into sales at Xerox Computer Services in 1974, I was frustrated by the lack of relevant sales training. At that time, I was trained on how to articulate the “benefits” of our product features, in order to “persuade” buyers to buy. In 1979, I had the good fortune working with Neil Rackham on the SPIN project. After studying thousands of seller-buyer interactions, those of us on the SPIN project concluded that we could model and teach a needs-development framework, but rapport would be left to the individual. We didn’t know of way to teach salespeople to get thru the veneer of discomfort and “on the same wavelength” with the person on the other end.

In 1983, I founded Solution Selling®. Rather than just promoting a product, we modeled a way for a salesperson to focus on the customer's pain(s) and how to address those with his or her offerings (product and services). This need-development framework became the roadmap for a salesperson to use once they developed a rapport and formed a connection. The use of the framework relied on the natural skills a seller possessed, in order to form that connection. An individual seller was left to deal with the buyer’s primary questions, on his or her own: “Who is this person?” “Do I trust him/her?” “Do I see myself doing business with him/her?” A small percentage of sellers were just better at addressing these questions and therefore, connecting than others and as a result, the “80/20 Rule” was alive & well.

Ten years later, in 1993, McGraw-Hill published my book: Solution Selling® and the Information Technology industry adopted. At this time, enterprise B2B sales forces were growing and companies needed process, controls and greater visibility into their sales activity. Solution Selling® (as well as other frameworks & automation) provided the structure to help manage this.

In 2001, my partners and I formed CustomerCentric Selling®, as a way to broaden the usability of my original needs-development framework by making the model more usable for the masses. Teaching salespeople how to connect and form relationships was still conspicuously missing. We just did not know of a way to model it.

2008 was a major turning point in the evolution of sales enablement for me. Sales Benchmark Index (SBI) declared that in enterprise B2B sales, the “80/20 Rule” had gotten worse: it was actually 87/13. With all the frameworks, trainings, methodologies, CRM systems and individual sales managers, it was the very best that has gotten better. I realized that thru the use of my framework, the naturals became conscious of what they were doing and therefore, got better. The bottom 80% still struggles to connect with their buyers and therefore, struggled to fill their pipelines. Most B2B sales organizations had implemented a sales methodology, but there was still a large gap between the top sellers and the rest. This was a huge disappointment to me, because despite my personal efforts to want to help the ‘bottom 80%’, they were the ones still having difficulty building relationships and getting opportunities on track. I personally, never had that problem. I had to ask myself, “What was I doing different than the 87%?”

At that same time, I had a close friend, and behavioral scientist, point out that he believed that when I was in selling situations, the sale was made before I even put the opportunity into “my process”. He believed that my prospects made a decision to do business with me – to be influenced by me, well before I did all these other ‘things’ I was teaching salespeople to do. He wanted to know if we could model and teach ‘that’ method of emotionally connecting with someone; getting on the same wavelength; getting ‘in synch” with them first. My partners and I then began to research various methods of transferring knowledge. We asked ourselves: Where is the decision-making part of the mind? How is trust formed? How do we decide to take a leap of faith? How do we let go of dogmas and allow ourselves to be influenced by others? This ultimately led me to discover that we can consciously activate another person’s hopeful, creative and imaginative mind when we meet someone for the first time, as opposed to the skeptical, analytical, thirst for more information side (which most sellers unconsciously activate). At this point, the ceiling had been lifted for me personally. No longer was connecting and relationship building just an art. We discovered a way to enable sellers (in fact any professionals) to emotionally connect with others – on purpose.

After 30 years of training salespeople, I have a clearer understanding of what separates the very few top performers, from the rest. They just connect better. The Sales Process is still important, but with most organizations already having an organizational sales process in place, my focus is now is applying my lessons learned: teaching salespeople to emotionally connect with their buyers.

- Mike Bosworth