The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [35]
In my experience, there are three types of executives. A full 90 percent are what I call “tactical executives,” while 9 percent are what I’d call “strategic executives.” And only 1 percent—the most effective executives—possess the rare combination of both tactical and strategic abilities.
Tactical executives think only in terms of making the sale for today. They don’t understand strategy. If you tell them that it’s twice as difficult today as it was 10 years ago to get an appointment with a prospect, they will think of ways to make the sales team try twice as hard. Strategic executives will often look at the situation from a global perspective and see if they can develop some high-level strategy that might help to solve the problem. These executives are brilliant. They create concepts, ideas, and strategies that most would never develop. But strategic executives are not good at, or interested in, tactics. Hence, I’ve seen many big ideas that never come to fruition because strategic executives fail in the implementation of their big ideas.
Now let’s talk about the top 1 percent. The executive who thinks both tactically and strategically can develop the big ideas and the big strategies and also use discipline and determination to see those brilliant strategies implemented at the tactical level. And just for the record, the second type of executive, the strategist, can often be paired with a strong tactician and be very successful. However, the strategist may have to keep explaining and selling his or her ideas again and again to the tactical executive.
In my experience a purely tactical executive does not grasp strategy easily. Here’s a good example: I have a client who has just started a brand-new magazine. The salespeople find it nearly impossible to reach the advertisers they want in the magazine. This is a market with 80-plus competing advertising vehicles. To meet this challenge, I changed the titles of the salespeople to sound less salesy—for example, “director of corporate communications.” This enabled a salesperson to call a prospect and say something like: “Hi. I’m Jennifer Smith, the director of corporate communications here at XYZ Magazine. As part of our ongoing effort to continually serve the market, we like to learn more about other companies in our market. I also interface with the editorial staff here, and I’m always on the lookout for potential stories for our magazine. Tell me, how long has your company been in business?”
This approach enables the sales staff to achieve the strategic objective of establishing solid relationships within the market and getting into discussions that build rapport. After they build rapport, the salespeople are able to softly segue into talking about advertising. “One of the other things I do for the magazine is look for products or ser vices that our readers might be interested in.” This enables the salespeople to then get into dialogue about advertising and work their way into a technique you’re about to learn called “education-based marketing,” creating an opportunity to educate prospects. This is a long-term, strategic approach to the sales process.
But here’s the point: A tactical salesperson would say, “Why do I want to do all that when all I really want to do is sell them advertising?” The strategic executive would understand that this approach would get you into an actual conversation that can build some rapport and interest before trying to immediately sell the prospect an ad. The strategist looks at every challenge as an opportunity to out-think competitive approaches. This will be demonstrated 10 more ways during the upcoming pages.
Let’s go deeper.
When you or your salespeople get in front of a client, what do you want to accomplish? What are your strategic objectives?
When I ask executives that question, most of them reply tactically: “I want to make a sale.” Then I ask them to think strategically: “What else do you want to achieve?” And they say, “What else is there?” The conversation