Selling in a Recession: Getting Back to Basics Is the Key

In their new book Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship, Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig write about how to transform sales into win/win situations for buyer and seller. But is that still possible when the economy is in recession? We talked to Illig about the new challenges facing small businesses when making a sale. Illig is a senior consultant with FranklinCovey's Sales Performance Group, which helps businesses including Fortune 100 companies make the sale. Excerpts:

A difficulty that small-business owners face as salespeople is that they can't just focus on sales. They also have to do almost everything else in the business.
They wear a lot of hats. Often when people sell—and this is especially true of small businesses because they are doing many things—in the time that they are selling they are underprepared. They are not what we call "in the zone." They just go do it. I was a small-business owner for many years. I realized how distracting it was that every sale was the difference between making payroll or going out of business. It's so easy to do something that you will later regret. But I'm glad that I stayed true to the commitment of helping my customers. That's what actually propelled the company from going to a handful of employees to 500.

Your book is centered upon that idea—that selling and buying should be a win/win relationship.
What it's about is getting customers what they truly want. It doesn't just mean you're only serving them—you're getting something out of it, too.

Think about the last five things you purchased. How many of the people you bought those from would you consider a trusted business adviser? Very few, or none. But if you flip it around—would you want to do business with a trusted business adviser? The answer is, of course. So if so many people want it but so few people get it, what makes it so hard? I think it's because this idea of win/win is simple to hear but actually hard to do.

What makes it so hard to do?
There's a lot of noise and interference when selling. Let's think about this economy. What kind of pressures are people who represent companies getting right now? They're under tremendous pressure. You're still going to have to hit your quota and pay your bills no matter the economy. These simple distractions become a high level of interference. It causes people to get distracted from serving their clients and too focused on serving themselves. Other human beings recognize that in a millisecond. There are a lot of distractions that prevent it from becoming win/win.

Earlier you said those distractions can make it possible for sellers to do something they later regret. What are examples of that?
Agreeing to terms and conditions that you can't meet. A schedule you can't deliver against. Saying yes to things that you just rationalize in your mind. These are not blatant unethical moves. These are the little things that people do that aren't in the client's best interests.

There are also things on the buyers' side. You may be talking to a potential client and realizing there is a fatal flaw in the client's thinking or assumptions. They might assume that they are getting some kind of result that you know is not going to happen. You might let those yellow lights go and just speed on right through them.

So how does the seller get beyond those distractions and focus on the best long-term sales strategy?
We have some exercises to get centered on your intent, so you are purposefully creating an environment where win/win can grow, and you can gain business and your customer can gain value from you.

We write in the book that intent counts more than technique. Serving your customer has to be your intent. So what is your statement of intent? One example would be: "My selling purpose is for people to get good feelings about what they bought and about themselves."

I've been in front of very senior people with these very simple approaches. One gentleman raised his hand and said, "I was a fighter pilot in the Navy. Do you know who the most dangerous pilots were? The most experienced ones, because they missed the basics. What you just reminded me of is how I often don't align my intent with my behavior."

What other simple things do people miss?

The second one is to make a committed effort to increase your personal ability to understand before being understood.

What are salespeople good at? Advocacy. They are fantastic at talking about their stuff.

If you ask small-business people what they do, they talk about themselves. What they don't do is communicate in the context of the customer. If you're selling business services, and a prospect asks you what you do, you might talk about yourself, instead of saying, "Can you tell me about what you're trying to do in your business that would relate to talking to me?"

World-class advocacy follows world-class inquiry. The best way to create a win/win relationship is to understand your customer's business before you advocate a solution.

That is so important in today's economy. Companies will not invest in something that they do not believe will get them a result they want. In this economy, they will put much more rigor around that.

What do you do about customers that are letting that rigor get in the way of wanting to buy from you?
The last point is about proactivity.

One of the problems we hear from people is that they're concerned that their prospective clients will delay purchasing in this economy or stop a current project. There's a reactive way to deal with that and a proactive way. The reactive way is to hope they don't do it and actually decrease communication. Believe it or not, a lot of people do that. But the proactive way to deal with that is to actually go to that customer and say, "In my business, the economy is causing me to question my investments. Is it that way for you?" So talk to them about it.

I was talking to a client the other day who said, "If I go open that conversation with a customer, what if they say no?" My answer is that they're going to jump to that conclusion without you ever talking to them. Would you rather be present for that conversation and be able to communicate the value they would receive by continuing, or agree with them that they should not continue? Either way you win, either by continuing the business or by boosting your credibility.