Comments on: Rainmaking Motivators http://www.hardingco.com/blog/2008/09/29/rainmaking-motivators/ Ford Harding's Blog on Rainmaking and Business Development Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:33:19 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 hourly 1 By: Ford Harding http://www.hardingco.com/blog/2008/09/29/rainmaking-motivators/comment-page-1/#comment-12839 Ford Harding Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:18:14 +0000 http://www.hardingco.com/blog/2008/09/29/rainmaking-motivators/#comment-12839 For those of you who don't know Peter Darling, he publishes a thoughtful blog on business development. Peter: Sales people do see the world differently. A friend of mine left consulting to start up a company to sell a product he had invented. Realizing his own limitations, he hired a salesman to take his product to market. After the salesman had been on the job for about a month, my friend spent a day making calls with him. At the end of the day my friend said, "Now I see why you're so good at this and I'm not. I couldn't handle all the rejection." The salesman responded, "What do you mean? I can't stand rejection." Where my friend had seen rejection, the salesman had seen something else. He wasn't simpler, shallower or dumber (or, as many professionals say euphamistically, "contentless"); he interpretted events differently and, no doubt, often correctly. One challenge when helping professionals learn to sell is helping them learn what unreturned phone calls, cancelled meetings, lost sales and the like mean. It's seldom true rejection. What the quota clubs do for sales forces needs to be done for professionals, too. The Florida junkets I described work for some. But if they don't work for your professionals (as they don't work for me), then, as your comment implies, you need to do something else to manage the emotionals swings of selling. Do you (or any other readers) have good examples of noncash incentives that professional firms use to help manage the emotional swings of selling? Thanks for the comment. Ford For those of you who don’t know Peter Darling, he publishes a thoughtful blog on business development.

Peter:

Sales people do see the world differently. A friend of mine left consulting to start up a company to sell a product he had invented. Realizing his own limitations, he hired a salesman to take his product to market. After the salesman had been on the job for about a month, my friend spent a day making calls with him. At the end of the day my friend said, “Now I see why you’re so good at this and I’m not. I couldn’t handle all the rejection.” The salesman responded, “What do you mean? I can’t stand rejection.” Where my friend had seen rejection, the salesman had seen something else. He wasn’t simpler, shallower or dumber (or, as many professionals say euphamistically, “contentless”); he interpretted events differently and, no doubt, often correctly. One challenge when helping professionals learn to sell is helping them learn what unreturned phone calls, cancelled meetings, lost sales and the like mean. It’s seldom true rejection.

What the quota clubs do for sales forces needs to be done for professionals, too. The Florida junkets I described work for some. But if they don’t work for your professionals (as they don’t work for me), then, as your comment implies, you need to do something else to manage the emotionals swings of selling. Do you (or any other readers) have good examples of noncash incentives that professional firms use to help manage the emotional swings of selling?

Thanks for the comment.

Ford

]]> By: Peter Darling http://www.hardingco.com/blog/2008/09/29/rainmaking-motivators/comment-page-1/#comment-12834 Peter Darling Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:18:58 +0000 http://www.hardingco.com/blog/2008/09/29/rainmaking-motivators/#comment-12834 Ford: Good post -- thanks. To outsiders, all the sales psychology stuff may look silly, and perhaps some of it is. However, salespeople know better. They take an emotional beating that almost none of their colleagues can appreciate until they've done it. They deal with rejection, hostility and setbacks every single day, and they also know that the key to performance is to develop strategies to manage the impact of this. Not a lot of, say, operations people approach complete strangers and hear different versions of "no", "go away" or "your product isn't any good" very often. Salespeople hear it every day. They don't do this stuff because they're simpler, shallower or dumber than everyone else. They do it because they know they need to. Ford:
Good post — thanks. To outsiders, all the sales psychology stuff may look silly, and perhaps some of it is. However, salespeople know better. They take an emotional beating that almost none of their colleagues can appreciate until they’ve done it. They deal with rejection, hostility and setbacks every single day, and they also know that the key to performance is to develop strategies to manage the impact of this. Not a lot of, say, operations people approach complete strangers and hear different versions of “no”, “go away” or “your product isn’t any good” very often. Salespeople hear it every day. They don’t do this stuff because they’re simpler, shallower or dumber than everyone else. They do it because they know they need to.

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