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It's Only Common Sense: You've Got to be Great

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...Anything less than greatness will not work anymore. As I go around the country talking to salespeople, the challenge I hear the most is getting appointments with customers. Customers, especially potential customers, just don't want to meet with the salespeople I've spoken to. Live appointments are getting harder and harder to get and even when an appointment is finally made, there's no guarantee the person who made the appointment will keep it.

I read a book recently about dealing with the new generation of "millennials." I learned that in this electronically-connected age, the courtesies my generation grew up with are gone. I used to say that everything you needed to know about business you learned in kindergarten, but this is no longer the case. This new generation apparently didn’t go to kindergarten; they were probably learning to do their own thing in a Montessori school somewhere. They don’t like to answer the phone, they don’t like to make appointments, they don’t like face-to-face meetings, and they sure as hell don’t want to hear about anything--especially what you're selling--until they need to hear about it.

It used to be that if you made an appointment with someone, the risk of actually meeting with them was over; they had made a commitment and you could count on them keeping their word. Now, in many instances, a salesperson gets a customer on the phone by accident--he thought it was his friend calling about drinks later in the evening--and he's disappointed. To get you off the phone quickly, he agrees to whatever you want.

Now you think you have an appointment and you make your plans. You book a flight and reach your destination only to sit in the lobby and wait. Finally, the receptionist informs you that he doesn't have time to meet with you. Does this scenario sound familiar?   

This "new way of business" isn't going to change anytime soon and that's why we have to be great when we get the chance. Opportunities to get new customers are few and far between. Chances to get a quote are much tougher than they've ever been, so when you do manage to break through you have to do everything you can to win that quote. Once the quote is won, do everything in your power to perform with greatness. You’ve got to be great!

Gone are the days when meetings were easy and an appointment was routine: A good salesperson could get as many appointments as he needed; lunch dates were a given, golf dates even more so; and everyone wanted to attend professional sporting events. In the past there were ample opportunities to meet with customers.

Remember when you could have actual loyalty-creating relationships with your customers? Remember when you traded favors? If you helped your buyer out, she would remember and help you out when your company screwed up. It was that “everything you learned in kindergarten” thing again and life was good--much better than we realized at the time.

This gets me back to the subject we discussed last week about finding, appealing to, and hiring young people. We have to fight fire with fire: We have to find our own millennials if we want to compete in their world. We have to find those who have the ability to travel in the same circles as our new buyers and engineers, people who speak the same language, deal in the same cyber world, and are interested in the same things.

Here are a few tips for finding, attracting, and hiring younger salespeople:

• Treat the position as a career. Show them the path they can realize if they come to work for your company. Show them a future.
• Make them believe they are going to learn something--that working for you is actually getting paid for learning how to sell and how to do business.
• Along these lines, take on their business education--be their teacher and their mentor and they will follow you anywhere.

In short, show applicants what’s in it for them. If you can do that you can create a win-win situation that will make both of you successful. It’s only common sense.