Sandler Trainers: Steve Montague & Jim Stephens http://www.effectivesales.net/
Entrepreneur Radio: Steve Smith with Team Construction https://teamconstructionllc.net/
~~The Conceptual, or Philosophies Required to Work with Sandler Training~~
Steve Montague was a Western United States sales manager of an ultra-sound company who spent his early days in his career on a plane controlling a region of everything west of the Mississippi. Steve found Sandler through an ad while traveling and after going through the traditional sales methods and training, when he saw what Sandler had in a communication system and a system to development and implement a process, Steve immediately pursued and built a franchise.
He held his first-class March 1st, 1995. Steve experienced the rocky road of sales with his beginning with Sandler because he had to re-learn all his sales methods. Steve built the Six Philosophies in his experience of quantifying and qualifying prospects and he built this to find businesses he would work with. When all the philosophies are aligned, Steve finds the prospect is someone that he would like to do business with. This allows for him to avoid going into business with clients from the dark side.
For Steve, if they don’t qualify, or don’t agree with all six, then they might not be a good customer. If they agree then it could be a good set up.
The first philosophy is defining the ideal. The business needs to have an idea of the ideal way that a salesperson or sales manager thinks about sales. There’s a certain mindset that the ideal salesperson thinks and without having that ideal grounded and pursued, then a business might sabotage their efforts for building their business. When we have a way to measure how the owner thinks about the ideal and how they pursue it, then we can pursue business together.
Most people do not have the self-awareness to recognize a gap between what they see or think and what they experience. From Steve’s experience as a couch he is aware of the difference between an average team and a tournament team. This difference is grounded in how the team’s see themselves more so than how the teams perform. Without thinking through the process of success, there is little ability to technically execute.
The second philosophy is the belief that your people are your greatest assets. In an average PNL the number one cost is nine times out of ten the people. The question: what’s worse, training your people and having them leave, or not training them and having them stay? With tools to profile and examine employees from an inside-out perspective, the owner is empowered with a manual to work through the development of people. This shows how to communicate, how to motivate, what they like, what they dislike, where their competencies are. And this framework of the belief allows both employees and businesses to find new levels of success.
The third philosophy is there is no such thing as a finish line or good enough. The belief in a continued improvement process that is repeatable, reproducible, and scalable. What is the next best way to do things? The continuous pursuit of finding a new way to get a better job done that facilitates flexibility and empowers people to implement the system regardless of difficulty and competition. This requires people to understand a good process and then learn to deliver the process consistently over time.
Like in sports, you can watch tape and see what you could do, but actually doing it requires being in the game and learning to see new plays while having a good coach who facilitates its comfort while encouraging you to develop ways to exit your comfort zone. Even as a trainer of 20+ year its really to fall back into a habit from years before and face it when it creeps back up. The way to get out of those habits is an accountability process. Implement a process with humility and encourage buy-in and call-outs so that both owners, sales managers, and salespeople allow others to call them out when they’re not doing what they’re aiming to do. Transparency and vulnerability can help facilitate bringing everyone on the same page.
This sort of attitude allows the fly-wheel effect of continuous improvement. No such thing is good enough, we are always improving.
The fourth philosophy is the attitude of abundance and opportunity always outperforms the attitude of scarcity and limitation. Rather than focusing on why something doesn’t work, you should focus on how to get something to work. Rather than worrying about the bottom line, looking for the return on the investment and the best practices to see a return on investment that outperforms the itself.
When somebody tells Steve he can’t do something, he focuses on helping facilitate a new mindset to realize that coming back and doing it over is the most productive method to introduce a new thing. If someone doesn’t think they can do something, there needs to be an environment that facilitates, “Okay, I can do that, I just have to learn how.” This mindset allows for a production of growth. There are optimists and there are people who wouldn’t be happy if you hung them with a new rope.
When I have a continuous improvement process that reinforces the abundance mentality. Then we can work toward conversations that facilitate, “If we could do that, what might we try?” This pursuit of the right question allows for an entire team to figure it out. Even if you are hard-wired to think the glass is half empty, you can still ask, if it weren’t what could you do? This type of questioning and mental development really outpowers the performance of a limited organization that is hamstrung by an outlook of scarcity.
This sometimes ends up being a fight between excuses versus accountability. When you learn to recognize an excuse and can ask, “If you couldn’t use that excuse, what could you have done?” allows for push-back against the dependence of excuses that reinforces the outlook of scarcity and reinforces scarcity.
The fifth philosophy is that great employees and people are made, not born. Success is developed through understanding and coaching which enables individuals to rise up and beyond our own expectations if they have the ability to avoid personal limitations by attitudes of scarcity or less than. We can develop any individual or behavior style to be a high-performing salesperson in business. We need to reinforce the lessons of tenacity and practice.
The biggest companies tend to see people make mistakes and hold the bat against them for the rest of their career. Rather than supporting mistakes as they lead to success and growth. When people are willing to learn anything when an idea is put in front of them then you’ll see growth. If you find someone who believes that anything will work if they try it and can examine the mindset of the activity or competency that can be examined: “Where was the issue? Was it technical or conceptual related?” These specific questions allow for examining the activity and the role played as the culprit and facilitating a more thorough development for success.
The sixth philosophy, blindspots, once identified, can be dealt with. How many people even realize that the ideal situation may be dramatically different from the situation that they’re already good at. An apt aphorism for this is, “You can’t read the Label from Inside the bottle.” This requires us to be able to say, you know I don’t have all the answers.
How many times do we see video of what we’re doing and then watch the video of our experience and wonder how far are we from the thing that we think we’re doing to the thing that we’re doing? This immediate recognition of the difference between the proper and the outlier, or the current status quo, can lead to a disconnect unless there is consistent self-awareness.
The willingness to recognize a blindspot and work on developing it requires a willingness to evaluate it. Using tools provided by Sandler, such as the Devine Inventory and the Extended DISC assessments, allow for businesses to explore the current behaviors and look for a new behavior. The question then is, “If this could be your new behavior, how much better would your results be?” If you could change your behavior for the next six months in this location, how much more effective, efficient, and successful would you be with your business and your company?
The costs to core competencies in specific roles can cost up to 100s of thousands of dollars can lead to huge losses in business and by being aware of those competencies, where they are low, and where they are high, we can help facilitate much more money coming into the company.
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