How to Talk to Salespeople
I like talking to salespeople. Not the worthless ones who do zero account planning before sending me prospecting emails asking if I need offshore Adobe developers (seriously, people, did you even look to see where I work?), but the good ones like my friends and colleagues. It seems to me that many people enjoy this audience a lot less than I do. They feel like sellers don't listen, or if they do, they just go off and do whatever they were going to do anyway.
So, here's my secrets for talking to sellers. Salespeople are easy to understand and appreciative when you try to help them.
Their goal has to be your starting point. At the end of the day, sellers want to make their number. Unlike almost everyone else in the organization, they have absolute clarity about what will get them recognition, increase their earnings, and advance their careers. Unless their comp plan was designed very carefully, they may develop tunnel vision around maximizing this quarter's revenue, without regard to the cost of servicing the account or whether it's going to be possible to grow the account next quarter, next year, and into perpetuity. Don't start with who you are and why you are excited about the product or program you want a seller to care about. Show them how it puts money in their pocket in the near term.
They like simplicity. Every product manager bombards sellers with messages about why their product should be first out of the bag. Every operational group nags sellers with messaging about how ops would function so much easier if the sellers did their job differently. Even if your message is aligned to their goals, it has to cut through the noise of your twenty colleagues who didn't create a message that adds value to them. If they have to work to understand the point you're trying to get across to them, you might as well not send it.
They like action. Even if your facts are simple, don't assume that a salesperson will immediately understand how to build a plan of action around them. If there is a specific action you want them to take, tell them. If the information is broad information that could be applied in man different ways, at least give a couple of concrete examples of how they can use it in their sales process, and give them a way to practice it. They're smart people. From there, they'll come up with their own applications.
Don't try to do too much in one communication. Before you send an email to salespeople, or stand up in front of them, develop one clear objective that you can use to measure the success of your communication. Ideally, it will be some observable action (for instance, how many do the thing you suggested above during the following week). If you try to do too much at once, you'll end up doing nothing. Whatever you are trying to communicate to sellers is going to require multiple touch points, so break it down into steps and concentrate on moving people forward from one step to the next with each communication.
The irony is that the behaviors described in my four points above are often behaviors that enablement teams are trying to get sellers to embrace. You have to live the behavior before you can ask someone else to do it.