The Adult Daycare Center

Entrepreneurial selling also means less time spent in the office. Sales representatives love to hang out at the office. They tend to take refuge in the office, shielding themselves from the hostile sales arena of constant rejection. I refer to an office as an adult daycare center. Sales representatives go into the office, play with the other kids, play with the corporate toys, play on the Internet, retrieve e-mail (half of which are junk), swap stories of hardship at the coffee machine, and generally appear to be busy. They are often lulled into sedentary activities, pursuing the art of busyness. Some technologies even encourage the sales representative to hang out at the office—the fax machine is a classic. It's much easier just to fax over information and perhaps place a follow-up call—it will save a trip. In fact upon receiving a request for information, some salespeople will actually send a fax without so much as a follow-up phone call. My preference is to make a face-to-face appointment. If that fails, I will courier a professional, customized package containing the requested information. This method is professional and inexpensive—and courier packages still get attention. Give it a try. If I can't get in to see the person during my initial telephone conversation, I set up a telephone appointment to follow up my package. Don't get trapped in the adult daycare center. Your job is to get out there and sell. You can't hunt from a cave. I recently heard another great line that makes a valid point: "If you want to kill half a day, go into the office for an hour!"

Entrepreneurial selling goes far beyond core selling skills. As long as your customers continue to redefine their expectations, successful selling will depend on developing and managing a more sophisticated set of skills. Consider this: Your goal as a sales entrepreneur is to disrupt current thinking of customers. Challenge established buying patterns and facilitate change by way of relationships, trust, and conversational selling strategies, ultimately satisfying both customer and corporate objectives. In doing this, sales entrepreneurs are guaranteed a job for life, whereas sales representatives are quickly becoming dinosaurs. The sales force of the future will be lean and mean, equipped with an inventory of sophisticated skills, possibly representing a mini corporate profit center. The future will not be an option for sales representatives. Compensation will be heavily weighted toward performance, and success will be measured by the contribution your profit center delivers to the corporation.

The Sequential Model works only if you work it. Notice it is not available in pill form. There is no easy way, no magic prescription. The model must be applied and worked not once or twice, but during each and every sales call. It is a continuous loop, regardless of the type of customer you are working with. The model is timeless and works regardless of what you are selling or how long your sales cycle is. The ten steps can be compressed and applied in a 30-minute sales call or spread over a sales cycle of one year or longer. Consider this book as your prescription to a healthier, happier career as a sales entrepreneur.

Having just read this chapter some of you may be feeling a little anxious. You have suddenly realized your business card reads sales representative, the very title I have unceremoniously denounced. But, don't despair. Don't think that all your customers will hate you and stop buying from you. If they do it's not because of how your business card reads, trust me. My intent is not to discourage you, but rather to nurture an entrepreneurial philosophy. I don't want to read in tomorrow's paper, "Hundreds of distraught sales representatives were seen leaping from tall buildings as sales entrepreneurs looked on." Seriously, my objective is to foster a professional code of conduct guided by the qualities of a sales entrepreneur. You don't have to change your business card, simply change your outlook. Your customers are more concerned with your conduct than what your business card says.

As you work through the ten steps of the Sequential Model, I will continue to refer to both titles, sales representatives and sales entrepreneurs. By now I'm sure you can appreciate that there is a big difference. Sales representatives react, constantly playing catch-up, whereas sales entrepreneurs are proactive, always a step ahead of their customers. Sales professionals can no longer afford to just represent the business, they have to be in the business. We need to stay abreast of ever-changing customer expectations.

Common currency of a sales call includes trust, rapport, respect, commitment, and knowing that people buy from people. Success today and in the future means recognizing changes within the sales arena. Selling is more sophisticated today than it was even five years ago. Although the core competencies of selling have not changed, change is coming in the form of a longer list of responsibilities. We must manage and embrace change so that it doesn't manage us.