Practical Wisdom from Kahle Way Sales Systems

I call it the 'gap between idea and action,' and it is one of the largest chasms in the road hindering our path to personal and organizational improvement. The gap between idea and action describes the ubiquitous phenomenon that we, all of us, have ideas and intentions, and yet turning those into actions – habits and routines that enhance our skills and smooth out our lives, only happens a bit of the time. As a general rule, we're miserable at it.

If we can bridge that gap, we can supercharge our growth, feel less guilt and become more confident in our progression as a human being.

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Sooner or later, almost every professional B2B sales person comes to grips with the challenges of penetrating key accounts. Key accounts are different than the ordinary, and require some more sophisticated skills and strategies. Yet, they hold the secret to multiplying your income. In this podcast, I share four fundamentals for effectively penetrating key accounts.

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Our actions follow our attitudes. The relationship between actions and attitudes is so close, that the two go hand-in-hand, and our actions can be seen as outward expressions of our attitudes. While it is easy to connect the two in this example, the principle that it unveils – that our attitudes influence our actions – extends to every aspect of our lives, and particularly to our jobs, in even the slightest and most mundane portions of our work lives. And that leads us to one of the greatest principles of self-improvement.

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It's a common mindset. The field salesperson wants every communication with the customer to go through him/her. However, that idea costs both the company and the sale person dearly and frustrates the customers. It is an insidious hindrance to sales performance.

Occasionally, at a seminar or training program, I'll overhear one sales person mention this to another -- "I have my own style of selling."

From my perspective, that idea is more detrimental to that sales person's

success than almost any other. Not only that, but that idea holds down entire sales forces, renders sales management impotent, and dissipates the sales team's potential. Of all the ideas that detract from sales performance, this is the most malignant.

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Here are two questions about tricky customer issues that I respond to in this podcast:

1. If you dropped the ball with a customer, how can you redeem their trust again?
2. How do you know how far to push a sale without overstepping your bounds and threatening the sale and/or the relationship with the customer?

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Over my career as a salesperson, I sold a variety of products in a variety of selling situations. From suits and sport coats in a retail men's store, to capital equipment to schools, to surgical staplers to surgeons in the operating room, to 70,000 line items for a wholesale distributor. I always did well, and was the number one sales person in the nation for two different companies and two distinctly different selling situations.

I was always a bit perplexed by my success. I always worked hard; always tried to do well; listened to my boss and did what he told me to do; and constantly sought out ways to improve my skills. I bought the books, went to the seminars, listened to the audios, etc.

For almost my entire selling career, I could never understand why I was more successful than others in my company. Didn't everybody do it this way?

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In my twenty plus years of educating salespeople, I have encountered tens of thousands of sales people, and worked with literally hundreds of sales organizations. The vast majority of them want to do better. Yet, the vast majority of them remain at a level best described as "ordinary." They never make the transition to being a true master of their craft. In spite of their desire to excel, few do.

The reason, for the overwhelming majority of sales people, is that they take the wrong path to sales success. Only a few discover the hidden path to sales success.

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Does your dress matter in professional sales? What are the rules of manners that you should be aware of? These are two questions I was asked, and I respond to them both in this podcast.

There is not a salesperson in existence who hasn't repeatedly heard of the need to "close the sale." That advice is incredibly overdone. There is no one aspect of sales (at least in the B2B world) that undeservedly receives more disproportionate time and talk than the subject of "closing the sale."

In my experience, closing has never been the result of verbal gymnastics on my part. It's not my clever refrains, my slick tactics, my memorized "objection over-comers" nor my manipulative perseverance that has brought me business. Instead, it was the suitability of my offer to the needs/desires/values of the customer.