Selling With Noble Purpose

How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud

Lisa Earle McLeod, Elizabeth Lotardo

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119700890
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Ventes

Don't let anyone tell you that you have to choose between making money and making a difference.

Selling With Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud, 2nd Edition is an update of the acclaimed book that changed the game in sales. Using real-world data, compelling stories and psychological research, Selling With Noble Purpose explains why salespeople who genuinely understand how they can make a difference to customers outsell those who only focus on internal targets and quotas.

Sales leadership experts McLeod and Lotardo reveal how a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP) can drive a team to outstanding sales numbers. Whether you're an executive, manager or aspiring sales leader, you'll discover how to find your own Noble Sales Purpose and create a sales force of True Believers. This new edition covers:

• How firms overcome ferocious competition and how you can do the same
• Why sales organizations with a clear NSP outperform traditional sales teams
• How to avoid the trap of behaving like a transactional salesperson
• Why well-intended leaders often unknowingly erode purpose and differentiation
• How to use your NSP to increase customer engagement
• Why an NSP gives you clarity during times of uncertainty

In an era where organizations often believe that money is the primary way to motivate salespeople, Selling with Noble Purpose offers and exciting and sustainable alternative.

PART 1
Sales: A Noble Profession?

In the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.

—Jim Collins, author of Good to Great

Making a living and making a difference are not incompatible. As a leader, you can do both. You must do both.

In Part 1, you'll learn how a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP) can reframe your sales narrative to create more competitive differentiation and emotional engagement. And you'll learn why an NSP is crucial during times of uncertainty and volatility. We'll explore what an NSP is and what it's not—and why it matters to you and your sales force.

We'll look at some surprising information about why overemphasizing profit has an alarmingly negative effect on salespeople and customers and how you can reframe the profit question inside your company. You'll learn the brain science behind NSP and where it fits within the structure of your larger organization.

You'll also learn why passion, despite its high value, is not enough to sustain performance. Finally, we'll address the leadership question that changes everything, and how you can use it to jump‐start your team.

If you're thinking, “We're just an average (accounting, software, landscape, furniture, fill‐in‐the‐blank) firm. I'm not sure our work is noble,” we'll tell you right now: if your customers are buying from you, then you are adding some value. You do have a Noble Purpose, and it's time for us to find it.

CHAPTER 1
The Great Sales Disconnect

I stayed the course … from beginning to the end, because I believed in something inside of me.

—Tina Turner, entertainer

Suppose you wrote the following goal on your office whiteboard: “I want to make as much money as possible.” Now suppose your clients saw it. How would they feel? How would you feel knowing that they'd seen it? Would you be proud or embarrassed?

What if you went over your prospect list, and the only thing written next to each prospect's name was a dollar figure and a projected close date? Would your prospects be happy if they saw that? Would they want to do business with you? Probably not; it reduces them to nothing more than a number. Yet that's exactly how most organizations talk about their customers on a daily basis.

Imagine a salesperson walking into a customer's office and opening the sales call by plopping a revenue forecast down on the customer's desk announcing, “I have you projected for $50,000 this month. Give me an order now!”

That rep would be thrown out in a second. Yet that's the kind of language most organizations use when they talk about their customers internally. It's like two different worlds.

Think about the typical conversation a sales manager has with his or her sales rep. It usually goes something like this:

“When are you going to close this? How much revenue will it be? Are all the key decision‐makers involved? Who's the competition? What do you need to close this deal?”

All the questions are about when and how we're going to collect revenue from the customer. These questions matter, but they aren't enough to create any kind of differentiated conversation (internally or externally).

Very few managers ask about the impact the sale will have on the customer's business or life.

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We expect salespeople to focus on customers' needs and goals when they're in front of customers, but the majority of internal conversations are about the organization's own revenue quotas.

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Although it's an unintended disconnect, it's a fatal one.

Unfortunately, the current sales narrative of most organizations is flawed, fatally out of sync with what really matters to salespeople and customers. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff articulates the transactional mindset that so many sales teams used to embody, describing it this way: “If you were meeting with a customer, your singular goal was to leave the room with a signed contract—in as short a time as possible.”

Benioff points out the flaw in this approach, writing in his book Trailblazer: “It didn't incentivize anyone to consider whether the customers on the other side of these transactions really needed the software or whether it helped them make progress on their business goals.”

In a traditional sales organization, the entire ecosystem surrounding the sales team—the customer relationship management (CRM) system, weekly sales meetings, conversations with managers, recognition, and everything else that influences seller behavior—are all pointed toward targets.

It's assumed that sellers will focus on customers when they're interacting with customers. But are we surprised when they don't? Everything in the ecosystem is driving them toward thinking about nothing but their own quota.

Most organizations want to have a positive impact on their customers' lives. It makes good business sense, and it appeals to our more noble instincts. Yet when managers are caught up inside the pressure cooker of daily business, their desire to improve the customer's life is eclipsed by quotas, quarterly numbers, and daily sales reports.

This results in salespeople who don't have any sense of a higher purpose other than “making the numbers.” It sounds fine enough in theory, but customers can tell the difference between the salespeople who care about them and those who care only about their bonuses. Sales targets are important, but they don't create a compelling narrative.

The great disconnect between what we want salespeople to do when they're in the field (focus on the customer) versus what we emphasize and reinforce internally (our own targets and quotas) results in mediocre sales performance.

What Lack of Purpose Costs a Sales Force

When the customer becomes nothing more than a number to you, you become nothing more than a number to the customer—and your entire organization suffers.

When you overemphasize financial goals at the expense of how you make a difference to customers, you make it extremely difficult for your salespeople to differentiate themselves from the competition. And the problem doesn't stop there. It has a ripple effect, causing salespeople who:

• Think only about the short term
• Fail to understand the customer's environment
• Cannot connect the dots between your products and customers' goals
• Cannot gain access to senior levels within the customer

Then the problem escalates:

• Customers view you as a commodity.
• You have little or no collaboration with them.
• Customers place undue emphasis on minor problems.
• Contracts are constantly in jeopardy over small dollar amounts.
• Salespeople's default response is to lower the price.
• Sales has a negative perception in the rest of the organization.
• Top performers become mid‐level performers.
• Salespeople view their fellow salespeople as the competition.
• Customer churn increases.
• Salespeople try to game the comp plan.
• Sales force morale declines.

It's not a pretty picture. When the internal conversation is all about money, the external conversation becomes all about money. And all of a sudden, that's the last thing you're making.

Companies have tried a variety of methods to solve this problem. Organizations spend millions on sales training programs teaching salespeople how to ask better questions and engage the customers. They spend even more millions on CRM systems to capture critical customer information. They host off‐site retreats to create mission and vision statements. They hire expensive consultants to craft lengthy slide decks articulating their value proposition.

The results are short‐lived at best. Salespeople abandon the training the minute a high‐stakes deal is on the table. No one updates the customer intel in CRM. The mission and vision are put on a meaningless placard in the lobby. And the value sto...