Do you know what people look for when making buying decisions on behalf of their company? Would it surprise you that it’s not just what shows up on a balance sheet or income statement? There are five things people look for when making a buying decision and The Five Abilities sales methodology helps you act on those five things.
The Five Abilities® makes the list of Top 50 must-read blogs on Consultative Selling for the third consecutive year.
http://www.docurated.com/all-things-productivity/top-50-must-read-blogs-consultative-selling
The Five Abilities is #19. The blogs are not in order of “quality or importance” as explained by Docurated.com below. It’s an honor to be included. Thanks Docurated.com
Top 50 Must-Read Blogs on Consultative Selling
Last updated 04:41h 15 Apr, 2016 in All Things Productivity by Cóbhan Phillipson
Consultative sales is a pretty niche topic in the blogging world – surprisingly so, given that it’s a popular sales framework that’s widely utilized by small businesses and enterprises today. Still, you won’t find many blogs dedicated solely to consultative sales. So we thought we’d investigate the far-reaching corners of the web to round up some of the top blogs with robust resources on consultative selling to help you build your reading list, we think you’ll like what we found.
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The following 50 blogs cover practically every spectrum of the field of sales, from blogs focused on the technology niche offering resources for high-tech sales consultants, to CRM tools with blogs chock-full of tips for sales professionals to fill and work their pipelines, to blogs from some of the world’s most recognized sales thought leaders – including some who have developed their own sales frameworks, some of which share many similarities to the consultative sales process, and much more.
Note: The following 50 blogs aren’t listed in order of quality or importance. In other words, we’re not trying to say that #1 is better than #50, but that these 50 blogs are the best blogs on consultative sales among the thousands of sales blogs in existence. But we used a numbering system so it’s easy for you to reference a specific blog later, or to point out a blog if you send this list to a friend or co-worker. If you’re looking to brush up your consultative selling skills, these 50 blogs are must-reads
In late January, I will be launching a book called Winning Lifelong Customers using The Five Abilities®. The book launch coincides with a demand generation push for The Five Abilities LLC. We’ll be updating our website, social media, consulting materials, and we’ll use The Five Abilities as our checkpoints to ensure we’re sales-ready on day one.
VISABILITY – We’ll start with 100 prospective clients all of whom I’ve done business with in previous corporate roles. Most are in the tech sector but they range from venture capitalists and start-up principles, all the way to Fortune 100 executives. Each outreach will include personalized value propositions intended to spark their own personal suspicion-of-value such that they want to learn more about The Five Abilities in regards to their business challenges. We’ll be sales-ready to earn VISABILITY.
CREDABILITY – We’re ready to demonstrate how The Five Abilities works, and how I benefited from it as a corporate salesperson, manager, and executive. Most importantly I can show how it’s helped clients and customers. I have knowledge, tools, blogs, and the book, to educate people about The Five Abilities framework. I have endorsements and I’m prepared to advocate for others should prospective clients need help beyond what we provide. We’ll be sales-ready to earn CREDABILITY.
VIABILITY – I have questions and criteria to confirm that prospective clients have need for what we offer along with the sense of urgency that accelerates decisions. I have qualifying questions to determine if clients have the experience necessary to assess our work and provide guidance on how we best help them. I’m approaching companies and people with demonstrated success and I’m prepared to help clients understand the time necessary for joint success. We’ll be sales-ready to establish VIABILITY.
CAPABILITY – Once I’ve connected with people who represent potential engagements we’ll look for signs that uncover the personal reasons people make business decisions. Does their business climate dictate need for safety in their decisions? Is their workload such that simplicity is their greatest need? Is personal and/or team reward driving the decision-maker? Are prospective clients mainly looking for recognition of great results? Will I encounter change-agents—people motivated by catalyzing an innovative revolution? We’ll be sales-ready to deliver CAPABILITY that addresses the personal reasons people make business decisions.
RELIABILITY – We’ll be unreasonably accountable so that we earn each client’s confidence. We’ll engage in a predictable manner so that people know what they’re getting before we do business. My experience along with The Five Abilities framework gives me the means to anticipate challenges that affect our clients and us. I have a solid communication framework to engage with a no surprises culture that ensures clients get important information—good and bad—from us first. We’ll be sales-ready so that we exceed the mark of RELIABILITY that clients demand.
The Five Abilities checkpoints get me sales-ready. After 30+ years this framework still helps to ensure that I’m not just ready to generate leads but that I’m sales-ready when prospective clients choose to engage. Are you sales-ready?
© 2016 Rick Wong, The Five Abilities LLC
In spring of 1992, Lew Platt was named to succeed John Young as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Prior to becoming CEO, Lew was the executive sponsor for our Boeing relationship. Those of us on that team were lucky to work with Silicon Valley’s low key, genuine and self-effacing leader – highly respected across industry.
Before taking the reins from Young, Platt was in Seattle for his quarterly visit to Boeing. He could have cancelled but he valued customer visits and keeping commitments to his sales teams. I was responsible for one meeting that day, with a Boeing SVP who was leading a new secret project. We knew Boeing was going to invest a lot, make a significant culture shift, but we knew little else. I thought it would be a great meeting for Lew.
We arrived at a small building in Renton, WA, across from the Green River, where Boeing was renting space for the small launch team. The building wasn’t a typical Boeing executive office. We entered a room filled with mismatched furniture, five IBM PCs, and stacks of three-ring binders labeled “Boeing confidential” on cafeteria style tables. They had six dilapidated chairs in a circle with no table in the center.
Over the next 70 minutes we listened to Boeing’s SVP who covered everything from reduced airplane costs, airline challenges, Airbus, and that polo-shirts would be the new normal. In the few questions we were able to get in we tried to clarify his points but all we got was, “This is a very complex problem.” After 70 minutes we had no project details and the agenda I developed with the Boeing team was garbage.
I had just taken the new CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world, on a sales meeting that accomplished absolutely nothing. Worse, I was awarded the President’s Club award that year so my mind was racing with what Lew could be thinking.
We left the building to walk to our car which was across the street next to the Green River. We got to the car and instead of opening the door Lew said, “Rick, let’s see if the salmon are running.” We walked to the edge of the road, Lew glanced at the river and calmly said, “Did that go the way you expected?” I said, “No. I’m really sorry.” He said, “Whatever they’re doing must be really complex because I don’t know what they just said.” He chuckled and said, “However, complex problems usually have a simple explanation.” He went on, “If you can understand the simple core of what they’re trying to do I’m sure you’ll find the simple way to sell them something.” I agreed to give him updates.
Lew was an avid fly-fisherman and he knew I fly-fished so he spent a few minutes on small talk about fly-fishing. This was Lew’s way of loosening me up. Even so, I remained tense and he knew it. We walked to the car, opened the doors and Lew said, “Rick, Don’t sweat it. These things happen.” We got in the car, shut the doors, and he said, “But we don’t need it to happen again.” He laughed and continued the fly-fishing talk.
I learned two important lessons that day. I learned that even one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, broke complex issues into their simplest components in order to both solve problems and to sell better. I also learned that respect and compassion from a leader teaches an employee as much as any lecture or rant.
It was around then that I started developing The Five Abilities® and its first inception was complex. It was helping nobody but me and, at HP, that meant it wasn’t meaningful. That comment by Lew, along with coaching from my management, led to the simplicity that is The Five Abilities today.
(Note: We learned the simple explanation behind Boeing’s complex problems leading to HP being selected as the server provider for the program called DCAC/MRM. I was appointed to the IT board and had a cubicle in their program office.)
“Complex problems usually have a simple explanation.” – Lew Platt. The more we practice finding the simple explanation the more we’ll be able to solve complex problems for our customers, clients and partners. The Five Abilities helps us grow sales revenue by focusing on the simple explanations for complex problems faced by salespeople and their customers.
©2015 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities® LLC
A few existing and prospective clients have expressed need for a transactional sales process – A step-by-step method that motivates a prospective customer to move from “hello” to “yes” in a single phone call or face-to-face exchange.
To date, my main focus with The Five Abilities® has been to help clients with relational selling needs, which applies to longer sales cycles that require the development of complex business cases and personal relationships. However, the principles in The Five Abilities also apply to shorter-term, transactional selling so I wanted share a helpful example.
I started my selling career in transactional telesales for American Bank Stationery. I also did cold-call selling early in my HP career and helped to design our early telesales efforts at Microsoft. All these transactional experiences contributed to the development of The Five Abilities. The commonality is that customers look for VISABILITY, CREDABILITY, VIABILITY, CAPABILITY and RELIABILITY, whether we’re doing relational or transactional sales.
Transactional selling at American Bank Stationery
We sold checks. Since a check is a check, it was by definition a commodity. Selling a product that has no obvious difference was a blessing because it forced me to learn, early in my career, how to create value for prospective customers even when my product alone fell short.
I got an early lesson from a Credit Union President in Montana who chewed me out on the phone for wasting the time of his New Accounts Manager. I was sitting in a cubicle in Portland, Oregon, selling by phone in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Alaska. This was my third attempt, in three months, with this credit union. The President grabbed the phone from his manager with the intent of making sure I never called again.
Here’s a replay of that conversation:
“Look pal – There’s no difference between your s___ and the s___ we have. The only thing I care about is getting members to buy more services and you can’t help me. Quit calling!”
I was 22 years-old with all the naivety that goes with 22, so I plowed ahead.
“What if I could help your people sell more services?”
He responded, “You stupid son-of-a-_____. You don’t want to b___-s___ me, pal.”
“I’m not trying to BS you sir. I think I can help your people sell more services.”
“Now that would be something. (Suspicion of Value) I should call your bluff.”
Weeks before this call we had a sales meeting in Portland and this topic came up from our outside salespeople. We had research that showed two main barriers to better sales performance by new accounts people. The first challenge was that most people had negative perceptions of selling. They saw it as trickery versus helping people. The second barrier was simply that they didn’t know the benefits of what they were selling.
This discussion led our VP to buy the Xerox Professional Sales Skills course for our own training and an abbreviated version that salespeople could deliver to customers. My problem was that the class was meant to be delivered in person and had never been done on the phone. Even so, that 22-year-old naivety told me I could make it work so when the credit union president said, “I should call your bluff,” I told him about our research and how our training could help his people. He responded saying,
“How long would it take and what would it cost? (Buying Signs)
“I can do the training in 90 minutes and I’d do bi-weekly check-ins after that. It’s free if you buy our checks.”
“I’m calling your bluff. You asked for it.” (Close)
That credit union had great results from the sales training. I was also able to repeat this transactional process with other financial institutions over the next year which earned me Rookie of the Year and a promotion. More importantly, it was the start of me seeing sales as a repeatable process rather than an unpredictable act.
Summary of transactional selling
We have 10-15 minutes in which to:
Whether you’re doing transactional or relational selling, The Five Abilities® of Incredibly Successful Salespeople is what your customer is looking for.
©2015 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities® LLC
It’s been two years and many client engagements since I posted my first blog on The Five Abilities®. The concepts are the same but as always, experience enhances our communication efficiency and effectiveness. With that, I want to share an improved introduction to The Five Abilities.
What is selling? At the most fundamental level selling is the act of helping people buy something that benefits them and their organization, within the bounds of what the seller can successfully deliver. When people consider from whom they will buy they look for five things from the seller.
VISABILITY – Being seen in the right way, by the right people, at the right time.
We earn VISABILITY when we present a value proposition that creates a suspicion of value in the customer’s mind, such that they ask to know more. Once a customer asks for more information, we’ve turned a one-way sales pitch into a two-way sales engagement which is what we want.
CREDABILITY – Showing superior knowledge and experience about your customer’s needs and how your company’s offering will help.
We earn CREDABILITY by sharing what is true that makes our value proposition true. We want to evolve that suspicion of value to an acknowledgement of value. Educating, sharing experiences and showing examples are ways we earn CREDABILITY.
VIABILITY – Products and services that fit the needs and readiness of customers, clients and our company.
Having no customer is better than having the wrong customer. The right customer has a real problem that we can solve, has the time to be successful and the experience to assess our deliverables. They become our best advocates for both new and repeat business. The wrong customer ends up paying for something that doesn’t help them, they demand a lot of our time and become our loudest critics.
CAPABILITY – Delivering what the customers/clients buy.
People make business decisions for personal reasons. Certainly decision-makers do the analysis to ensure they are doing something good for their company; however, every decision-maker is satisfying personal needs when making a buying decision. What do people really buy?
RELABILITY – Being there when the unexpected happens, because it always will.
Salespeople earn customer loyalty by being accountable no matter what happens. This doesn’t mean we’re necessarily responsible for the unexpected, but the customer has to feel confident that we’ll help them course-correct no matter who caused the problem. We also earn customer confidence simply by listening and learning when they’re angry. Being dressed down can dress you up because we often learn more from angry customers and we earn their respect by being accountable.
When we focus our actions on the five things customers need, we do more to help people buy things that benefits them and their organization, within the bounds of what we can successfully deliver. The common trait of incredibly successful salespeople.
©2015 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities® LLC
The best salespeople practice productive paranoia, and The Five Abilities guides that focus. They constantly ask themselves if they’re doing enough to beat the competition. “Have we done enough to win?” “Are we delivering better value?” “What have we left undone?”
One of the best salespeople I had the opportunity to work with is Richard Newman, at American Bank Stationery. Richard was consistently a top performer and he was one of the first people I saw practice productive paranoia. When he was training me he emphasized that “we can never let down because the guys at Deluxe outnumber us and they’re super aggressive.” (Deluxe was the industry leader with over 50% market share.) He said, “If you let up even a little they’ll walk right over you.”
During my training I traveled with Richard and he was always on. At days end after many hours with customers we’d sit down for dinner or drinks and he’d ask, “What haven’t we done?” He was asking a 22 year-old rookie for ideas because part of productive paranoia is believing that others, no matter who they are, might have better ideas.
I also had the opportunity to work with a great leader, Kevin Johnson, who was a Microsoft SVP and is now CEO of Starbucks – he had the same trait. Before any major review he’d walk the hallways asking people for feedback on his materials. It didn’t matter whether they were experts or not. People who practice productive paranoia don’t believe they have a monopoly on great ideas. This is healthy and it isn’t limited to sales. I had a coach who would chide us weekly saying, “Starters – somebody wants your job. Practice harder or you’ll be on the bench next game.”
A helpful habit of the best salespeople is that they organize their paranoia into a few simple questions that propel them forward in an organized way. The Five Abilities® sales framework reminds us of the five simple questions that enhance our execution with productive paranoia.
Getting to yes for each of these questions is a good indication that the customer favors us over our competition. Making these questions a part of our self-assessment habit is the act of productive paranoia, and it’s a valuable friend to the best salespeople.
©2016 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities® LLC
What do these things have in common?
– Asking that special someone for a first date
– Inviting a friend to join you on that dream, cross country bicycle ride
– Getting investors to take interest in your new venture
– Helping a student buy the right PC for college
– Making a CEO interested in learning more about your product
In all cases, we are convincing another human being to do something they might not otherwise do. As Daniel Pink says in his bestselling book “To Sell Is Human”, we are constantly trying to, “…coax others to part with resources.” We are asking people to spend time, effort or money that they might not have otherwise spent. People sell every day.
Learning brings earning
We are approaching people to learn what would entice them to do what we are asking of them. In the process we are making it clear what we want (VISABILITY), we are earning their trust (CREDABILITY), we are helping them see how good something could be for them (VIABILITY) and we are giving them confidence that all of their expectations will be realized (CAPABILITY and RELIABILITY). We are selling and no matter what we call it, we do it every day of our lives.
In the B2B and B2C worlds, I define selling as the act of helping people to buy something that benefits them and/or their businesses, within the bounds of what the seller can successfully deliver.
In our day-to-day personal lives, I define selling as the act of helping people to do something that benefits them, within the bounds of what we can make happen.
The Ultimate Sale
To pay for college I played in bands and worked in the student cafeteria. I had just transferred back to Oregon State University after a brief stint at UCLA. It was the first day of winter term and the cafeteria manager was holding her obligatory all-hands meeting to welcome the student employees. She also introduced her new assistant manager who was responsible for managing the student workers.
The assistant manager was pretty, bubbly and had an infectious laugh. I knew instantly that I needed to convince her to go out with me however, there were many challenges ahead. She was my manager’s manager and I was just one of the 100+ students who worked in that cafeteria. At the time, she had other men chasing her including an executive at the university who could afford much fancier dates than a poor, guitar toting, college student who dreamed of being a recording artist. When the assistant manager finished her introduction, she ended by saying, “Let me know if you have any questions.” I took her up on that.
I knew she liked to laugh so I would point out funny things happening in the cafeteria and around campus. I also was naturally a hard worker and that left her with a good impression. I was slowly becoming visible and credible to her while at the same time showing her that I was a capable and reliable worker. My remaining challenge was to create viable reasons as to why she would want to date this younger student rather than that university executive.
As she came to know me better, she told me about how her dates would go with the other men. They would do the traditional dinners and movies, which she liked, but she was also into music and sports, which the other men were lacking. How convenient since I was big into sports and music so our conversations began to turn to those topics.
After two months of becoming more visible and proving my credibility, viability, capability and reliability, I just asked, “So when do I get to see you outside of this cafeteria?”
What was the result? I have been married to that pretty, bubbly person, with the infectious laugh, for almost 33 years.
The best sale I ever made.
©2014 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities® LLC
Since I started The Five Abilities™, people ask me how my sales methodology is different from the many well-known models. My answer:
In just a half-day session, not 3-5 days, attendees will have actions to complete, by tomorrow, which will advance their sales processes. Most importantly, they will have the tools to independently figure out their next best actions to drive any sales process. They will know why customers buy and how to apply the next best actions that help customers make buying decisions.
The Five Abilities™ is less a difference and more of an action amendment. It can complement existing models or it can be the model. It’s about understanding Why Customers Buy From You.
The Birth of The Five Abilities™
Over 30+ years in sales, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from both experience and training. At American Bank Stationery we used Xerox Professional Selling Skills. At HP, we used Miller-Heiman’s Strategic Selling. At Microsoft, we used Jim Holden’s Power Based Selling and later Nathan Steele’s Strategic Clarity. As good as all these programs are people would finish the course still unclear on their next best actions.
At HP I saw it in the questions at the end of training sessions. I’d been there long enough to become a mentor and would get questions after every planning session that started with, “What do we do next?” People knew their sales priorities, the key decision makers and how to present the offering, but it still wasn’t clear what next best actions were the most needed. I would coach what to do but I wasn’t helping them understand why. This left my mentees without the tools to identify their next best actions. I needed to improve my coaching skills, which became more apparent after a key win in the early 1990s.
We won a large contract at Boeing in partnership with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). This was the largest win HP had that year, within the manufacturing industry, so there were many requests for win reports. I was asked to give a 30-minute presentation to the Global Accounts leadership team with a focus on what others could repeat. I kept hearing from my management, “Just present what you did that is repeatable.”
I was excited and built a 30-page presentation on specific things we did. I got feedback from my manager, Pat McNiff, who said, “Nobody will get that. It’s too specific to Boeing.” Rick Justice, VP Global Account Sales, gave me similar feedback and said, “I just want 7-8 slides that people will remember. Something clever and catchy that others can repeat with their customers.” I was preparing to tell this group “what” we did without telling them “why” which is what makes it repeatable. The same mistake I made with my mentees.
I talked with my partner from Andersen Consulting, Mike Gilkey, and during that conversation he said, “Well… we made more sales calls than any other project I’ve been on.” We had a standard presentation and met with over 200 Boeing executives, most multiple times. Up to then we were invisible compared to IBM and DEC so increasing our VISABILITY was important.
We also had a routine where Mike would present why Andersen preferred HP servers and software and I’d present why Andersen’s solutions were the best. We had to build up our CREDABILITY and felt it would be better for Andersen to be touting the benefits of HP and vice versa. It worked.
Through this reenactment of what we did and why, I was able to create a presentation that was just seven slides. My talk was about the five things customers asked us for, which drove the actions we took.
At the leadership meeting, I got many compliments on the presentation. On the flight home, I thought through past sales experiences to see if what I had just presented would apply to wins I had selling music, checks for American Bank Stationery and other wins I had at HP. Without exception, the answer was yes. Thus was born The Five Abilities™.
So back to the original question: How is The Five Abilities™ different from other selling models? For large companies with an existing sales methodology, The Five Abilities™ can be that last mile of execution with tools that allow sales managers and people to know their next best actions.
For small and medium businesses, who need a consistent model and can’t take their people out of the field for a week, The Five Abilities™ helps managers and sales people quickly identify actions that give customers what they need to make buying decisions. Why customers buy from you is the focus of selling.
©2013 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities™ LLC
As I write, we have come to the end of ‘Masters Week’ that kicks off the ‘Majors Season’ of the Professional Golf Association (PGA) Tour. Many golfers say this is the best week of the year. The Masters Tournament is the only major tour event played at the same course every year, Augusta National Country Club. It also marks the first time each season when the best male golfers in the world come together to compete for one of the most coveted championships in golf. Winning the “Green Jacket” defines a career.
Watching the tournament on television, you hear commentators talk about the different swings, of the players, taught by different swing coaches. While swings and players are different, the common goal among all coaches and players is to create a routine that serves as the foundation by which to choose and execute on the best next shot. The best golfers religiously practice and execute on those routines resulting in more wins.
There are many parallels between golfers and sales people. The best sales people have strict routines they follow to choose and execute on their best next actions. A good sales methodology adds structure to those routines to make them more repeatable and teachable. Having a methodology that narrows the focus around the best next things to accomplish simplifies the process of choosing the best next actions for the best sales people.
Another similarity is in how the best golfers and sales people prepare to win. The best golfers play a lot of golf. Similarly, the best sales people do a lot of selling. Certainly, golfers and sales people have a game plan but the best know that nothing advances their winning form more than doing it. A good sales methodology facilitates less planning and more selling. More focused selling means more wins.
There is current thinking that supports the notion that more focus on execution and less on planning is the winning way in the modern business world. This is the topic of Bill Conerly’s recent article in Fortune titled “The Death of Strategic Planning: Why?” The simple message from current CEOs is that more focus on solid and agile execution, rather than long-term, static plans, is the path to success with the accelerated pace of global business.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2014/03/24/the-death-of-strategic-planning-why/
The Five Abilities® is the methodology we use to teach sales people and companies how to do quick, real-time, agile planning that focuses daily sales execution on addressing the reasons customers buy. We minimize the classroom time and maximize the execution time. We educate, plan and enhance while you take your best next actions. The result is more wins that come from more time spent executing on the best next sales actions.
This year Bubba Watson chose his best next shots better than everyone else who played The Masters Tournament. Like Bubba, the best sales people create a routine that serves as the foundation by which to choose and execute on their best next actions. Congratulations Bubba and all of you winning sales people out there.
©2014 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities, LLC