The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Cultivating to Close

In the first blog, I described the 5 areas of activity for successful salespeople, and everything outside of those 5 activity areas is wasted time, energy and potential. In the second blog in the series, I went into detail on how high achieving salespeople prospect effectively.

This blog, the 3^rd in the series, covers the critical activity area of “cultivation”. It is probably the activity area most salespeople are comfortable in because it comes natural to them, and it is likely their default activity.

Cultivation is key to long term sustainable success. I’ve previously written two specific blogs on why cultivation is important (links to them below), but in this blog, I’ll share examples and tips on how to do it well, and what to be aware of. Many salespeople are so comfortable in the cultivation activities, they miss opportunities to propose and present solutions unless the deal or opportunity is literally dropped into their lap.

Here are the basic stages and objectives of relationship and opportunity cultivation:

The best customers recognize value and make trust-based decisions. The goal, as a salesperson, is to be recognized as a trusted advisor that brings value into the relationship. This is done many different ways and is often an accumulation of interactions done well. High achieving salespeople don’t follow a script, or a scripted process, they follow their instincts, meet the customer where they are, have great listening skills and a finely tuned radar for problems, opportunities and solutions, and always follow up in a timely manner.

The best salespeople are genuine, but they know their role. Being everybody’s pal and buddy comes naturally to some people, and sometimes that translates to some sales successes, but that approach  also frequently brings disappointment when the salesperson didn’t get awarded business they thought they deserved because of favors they did or good times they shared. The bottom line is the best type of sales you can make are when your product or solution solves your customers’ problem with an understood and recognized value that they are willing to pay for. The opportunity to hear about the problem and gain insights to how it can best be solved, and the resultant value to the customer, is earned by the investments made in the relationship. 

Grow relationships with purpose.  Later in my career, I recognized that I didn’t have the bandwidth to foster every new connection I made in business into a successful business relationship, and trying to do so burned me out. I also found that relying on a structured lead generation and deal development approach resulted in a lot of “gold nugget” opportunities falling through my fingers or being plucked up by a more tuned in competitor. Developing an internal radar for people that could become a good opportunity champion for me or my company at some point, became a kind of “superpower” that I developed over time, that helped me zero in on the relationships that were most important to invest in. (There’s a link to explore this specific topic deeper, below). Some opportunities can be (and should be) escalated to the propose and close stage far earlier than others.

Escalate communications with intention. Since sales (for me, anyway) was still largely a person-to-person interaction, my objective was always to escalate the communication; from email to phone call; from voice mail to real contact; from virtual contact to live contact; from on-line to in-person. The ultimate point of contact for me was in-person, in their shop, walking their shop floor. If I got the chance to pitch or present in a boardroom, I always tried to make that happen after I got the shop floor tour, learned their language, heard what they’re most proud of, and gained insights into what bugged them the most. When I was able to communicate with them at this level, everything else (relative to making a potential sale) was easier. Not just a little easier, many multiple times easier.

Sometimes I hear stories from salespeople about how their manager discouraged them from traveling a couple hours to visit a potential customer. My opinion in that case is that manager doesn’t really know the true cost of customer acquisition, because if they did, they’d know that 2 hours of travel and a couple hundred dollars of mileage expense is a no-brainer relative to the cost of customer acquisition. It also shows the manager lacks confidence in the salesperson’s ability to detect and discern good sales opportunities. 

Successful salespeople have strong cultivation instincts and disciplines and need to be given the latitude to develop the relationships and opportunities they see as having the best chance for short term and long-term success. In their prospecting activities (as discussed in the previous blog, link below), they’ve already identified the relationships that they can grow with and the best 10 or 20 opportunities they can succeed with. At this point, they are already zeroed in and hot on the trail of a potential deal, and the worst thing a manager can do, is get in their way, or distract them. This was what I refer to in other blogs as my "bullseye" list; I always knew what and where those opportunities where, (even though they might be buried in the CRM funnel under a lot of other leads, deals and tasks assigned to me), and what one or two actions I might be able to take to close them. As a salesperson, this "bullseye" list was my radar and where I made most of my money.

In the next blog, we will look at proposing and closing activities of successful salespeople. At this point, they’ve done the prospecting and grown their networks (closely dialed in, without too much noise), found enough gold nuggets in the prospecting stage that they’ve cultivated to the point they’ve earned an opportunity to present, proposal, and hopefully close. That will be covered in the next blog.

Stay tuned!

Here's a link to the 4th installment:

The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Propose to Close

References, and further study on “why” cultivation is such an important skill for salespeople to master:

Entrepreneurial Epiphanies: "Relationship Trumps Technology"

Entrepreneurial Epiphanies: "the Company with the Best Customers, Wins."

Reference, and further study on developing a “superpower” for relationship discernment:

Entrepreneurial Epiphanies: "What's Your Superpower?"

Reference and review of how successful salespeople prospect effectively:

The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Effective Prospecting

For help and suggestions to build your "bullseye" list, contact paul@tpi-3.ca