FranklinCovey-The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Sales Leaders

HABIT 4: THINK WIN-WIN

with that person, the more attention you should pay to whether you’re making deposits or taking withdrawals. Here are six respectful behaviors that make deposits with your team and your clients. #1 Understanding the Individual With the Team: Sincere, persistent effort to understand another person is one of the most important, worthy deposits you can make. And it is the key to every other deposit. Otherwise, if you try to make a deposit that shows you don’t understand what’s important to them, it can turn into a withdrawal. As a sales leader, do you truly understand the priorities of the people on your team and why those are important? Do you

have a relationship that invites team members to share their mission and personal goals or ambitions with you? Do you know what they really care about, or are you guessing? If you do, what opportunity could you extend that would challenge them in an area they’re passionate about and, at the same time, indicate how much you trust and need their contribution? With a Client: Understanding a client’s needs is the first priority. Salespeople and teams often get it exactly backwards—they passionately promote their company’s offerings, intending to help, but they often do so with little more than a shallow understanding of what’s important to a client. When you first meet someone, if all they

talk about is themselves for most of the time you’re with them, what do you think after that interaction? For nearly 20 years, no matter what country I’m in, I’ve heard clients complain that salespeople don’t listen. What are they busy doing? They’re too busy talking, too busy ‘establishing their credibility’ by pushing a point of view, too busy ‘educating’, and too focused on their own need to ‘sell’ something. Ironically, they hurt their credibility and lose trust in the process. Stop talking and start listening to understand. Adding to that problem, on internal deal advancement templates I’ve seen within sales organizations worldwide, about 90 percent of the questions used to qualify opportunities are

focused on internal concerns, such as: “How much revenue is this deal worth? Did you consider throwing this asset into the mix? What’s our margin? When is this going to close? Who do we have staffed on the project?” Very little of it, and certainly not the upfront part, asks the salesperson to lay out what’s going on for the client—what’s the client’s situation and how well do you know their story? Perhaps you should create a policy that the first 20 minutes of a deal review is on making sure everyone is clear on the client’s situation.

#2 Attending to the Little Things

With the Team: Little kindnesses and courtesies are so important.

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