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Lessons from the Sales Master: Mahan Khalsa
March 28, 2008
Mahan Khalsa, VP of the FranklinCovey Sales Performance Group, rewrites the selling playbook
By Mike McCue
My first encounters with 20th-Century selling were painful. I was working my way through college and needed a job. I took a position as a door-to-door salesman. The person who trained me made it look easy. He had a great territory and when he knocked on the door, people would say, "John—good to see you. What do you have for me today?" I thought to myself, "I can do this!"
Of course, I was assigned to the worst part of town. I would knock on the door and people would pull down their shades or scream epithets at me. The routine was: knock on the door, get rejected, repeat 50 to 100 times to get a sale. That was my process. And then when I finally did make a sale, I would have to deliver it a week later only to find no one home, they didn't have the money, they didn't live there any more … whatever. It was brutal. It hurt bad.
That excerpt comes from the first page of Mahan Khalsa's successful book, Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play: The Demise of Dysfunctional Selling and the Advent of Helping Clients Succeed (soon to be published in a new edition by the Penguin Group). And having read it, you've probably surmised one of two things happened next: either the young Khalsa found a new way to make a living, or something changed the way he approached salesmanship.
Fortunately for all of those whom Khalsa's advice has helped over the years, he decided to improve the sales process rather than find another line of work. Based on the brutal way his career started, that speaks as much to his determination and courage as his creativity and intelligence.
As the founder of the renowned FranklinCovey Sales Performance Group in Salt Lake City (though he himself resides on Hawaii's Big Island), Khalsa is one of the leading agents for change in the sales world. "The Internet and global competition have completely changed the face of selling since the 1990s," he says. "Companies are no longer relying on a salesperson to get them information, because it's now readily available from a number of other sources. If you aren't directly helping the person in front of you by providing intelligence and insight that they can't get anywhere else, having a good relationship isn't going to get you sales anymore."
Today, Khalsa contends, successful salespeople need to have three characteristics: business intelligence (good IQ), the ability to create trust and rapport on a personal level (good EQ), and a good structure and methodology to the sales discussion (good execution, or XQ). Rather than advocating that sales teams work harder and do more, his mantra (which sounds as sweet as an angel's voice to the nation's harried and overworked sales professionals) is a simple one: Don't do more things—do fewer, but do them better.
The Recurring Bad Dream
Anyone who's ever seen a Dilbert cartoon knows that the typical corporate approach over the last few decades is to have employees do more with less. And indeed, Khalsa's advice is to do more … but to concentrate that additional work on fewer things. "There are two 'buttons' being pushed all the time by sales managers today: the More Button and the Panic Button," he says. "The big question is, how many times will sales leaders push the More Button before they push the Panic Button?
"Each year brings new products, new pricing, a new CRM system and new markets to tap, so that's the rationale for the first More Button," he continues. "If numbers aren't where the company wants them to be the following quarter, the next push of the More Button is correctional. The sales leader might take a look at a salesperson's pipeline and say, 'You're making five appointments a week; I need you to make eight. You're sending out four proposals a month; I need you to send 10 per month.'"
When sales leaders push their teams harder, the teams push their clients harder, and that strains relationships. When the results still don't improve, the next time the More Button is pushed, it's punitive and people start getting fired. Finally, executives push the Panic Button and get a new VP of sales or reorganize the company. At that point, the entire process reboots, because at the first meeting after the reorganization, the new VP of sales says, "Now that we've figured out the problems and fixed them, we think our sales teams can do … more."
Stress quality, not quantity
 The biggest problem with the More Button is that it tends to focus on activities and quantity, but rarely on quality: If 100 calls aren't getting the job done, make 125 calls.
Khalsa, however, replaces the More and Panic Buttons with a How Button. Here's how it works across the three big sales buckets:
I. New opportunities (filling the pipeline). Rather than making 100 phone calls to everyone in your database, prioritize the five potential customers who are most likely to need your solution. Invest the same time on the five as you would on the 100. Research those companies and their decision-makers in depth and build a business case hypothesis. Because your salespeople can now focus on five companies rather than 100, there should be no cold calling—ever.
The next step should be getting a referral for the sales call. Statistics show that getting an internal reference has an 84% probability of securing a face-to-face meeting with the customer. With a respected outside reference the number is 44%. Compare that to the low percentage of successful cold calls and it is worth whatever it takes to get a referral for the call. By doing this deep dive into the potential customer, your first call to them won't be a "cold" one, because you will already be addressing the right topics with the right people.
II. Qualifying and advancing those opportunities (decide which to pursue and which to drop). Khalsa cites research from the ES Research Group showing that, at any given time, 65% of salespeople are pursuing worthless deals. Equally alarming, the same research shows that 80% of deals are lost due to an inadequate or non-existent qualification process and sales planning. One popular military dictum holds, "He who defends everything defends nothing." Khalsa says it is critical that salespeople and sales organizations extract resources from low-probability opportunities and invest them in high-probability ones. Yet many are loath to give up on anything with even a slight chance.
From Khalsa's experience, a strong predictor of sales success is the flow of meaningful information between seller and buyer. Probability is high when there is access to the buyers' key stakeholders resulting in an in-depth discussion of the underlying business opportunity and the resources necessary to achieve it. Probability is low when sellers must guess or tell. Qualifying rigorously based on the flow of meaningful information allows sellers to concentrate their time and energy on fewer deals and win more of them.
To get this free flow of information, Khalsa says, salespeople need the mindset, process and skills to create an open, honest environment where clients feel safe to share what they think and believe. "Salespeople need to get real and break through dysfunctional seller/buyer practices to become truly client-centered," he says. "They have to talk less and listen more by asking effective questions to really understand what clients value and craft solutions that exactly meet client needs. The more salespeople focus on their client's numbers, the more their numbers will go up."
III. Getting the sale (closing the deal). Khalsa contends that doing more with less also applies to winning presentations. He observes that the overwhelming majority of presentations are "packed with phenomenal amounts of information" and do a great job of showing how smart the presenter is. Unfortunately, that's beside the point.
"They're information-rich but still lacking when it comes to the true purpose of a presentation, which is enabling the customer to make a decision," Khalsa says. "Salespeople are adept at packing all kinds of phenomenal data into a slick-looking slide deck. What they typically aren't taught to do is create one that gives clients exactly what they need to know before they buy.
"What is the decision we want on the table at this meeting? What does the client need to believe, intellectually and emotionally, to comfortably and confidently make that decision? How do we address those beliefs?
"When you consider those questions, include the exact information needed to answer them—and no more. Any more or less and you make the decision harder and less likely."
For example, if Khalsa were coaching you on your presentation skills, he would advise you to start with the end in mind. Within the first few slides, the client should know exactly what decision(s) you want them to make. "You also have to make 'no' okay," he says. "If the customer feels you are trying to force them into a sale, they'll react aggressively in the opposite direction.
"If they feel they have a true yes-or-no decision, they will engage the discussion with an open mind," he continues. "You should always be scanning your language and messaging to ensure you're acting as a trusted advisor to the customer, rather than a pusher of products or services."
In addition to knowing where you want to be at the end of the presentation, you'll also be doing yourself and your customer a favor if you spend some time identifying the necessary stepping stones to that destination, Khalsa says. He recommends identifying three to five beliefs that the decision-makers need to check off (logically and emotionally) in order to make the decision at hand, then organizing what you say about your solution to address those beliefs. Gain a decision on each belief after addressing it rather than waiting until the end for Q&A. When the beliefs supporting the decision have been successfully addressed, the final decision is much easier. "You have given the client several easy steps to the decision rather than asking them to make one big leap," Khalsa concludes.
Doing fewer things better all ties together. "If we are skilled at questioning and listening, and if we only invest time where dialog is robust and not shut off, we better understand the clients' beliefs," he explains. "If we can demonstrate how we can meet those beliefs better than the alternatives—do nothing, do it themselves, do it with someone else—we have made it easy for the client to buy."
Say you followed the old model. By this time you've gone after 100 or more accounts … and closed two. By following Khalsa's "do less, better" model, you should have only contacted five companies, but because they are your five best opportunities, you should have closed three or four of those deals. You then begin again with the next top five.
One powerful advantage to Khalsa's approach is that both buyers and sellers simply like it better. Salespeople have less rejection and more success. Customers interact with more-knowledgeable and better-prepared salespeople who were referred by someone they know. Sellers and buyers work on equal footing; neither is willing to waste time on things that do not make sense.
Coaching: The "How Button"
 A logical question for Mahan is, "If the 'How' is so important, how do you develop it?" Training is certainly one option, and FranklinCovey is well recognized for its effectiveness in that field. But Khalsa offers a caveat: "One-time exposure—even to world-class training—is often necessary, yet insufficient, to produce sustainable results for an organization. Training needs reinforcement, repetition and reward.
"Combining training with ongoing coaching greatly magnifies and accelerates revenue growth today, and does it in a way that leads to even greater rewards in the future. The question is, who is going to coach?"
An outside coach is certainly one option. Khalsa's Sales Performance Group has tightly linked coaching to its sales training. Nonetheless, "Sales leaders are a great source of coaching, and yet are very underutilized in that role," he says. "They don't have the time, and while they are good as selling, they haven't been trained as coaches."
Many of today's sales leaders find themselves in management positions because they had a lot of success at selling. They are then burdened with reporting and administrative tasks that take them away from what they do best. Besides, having top-notch selling skills is not the same thing as having great teaching skills. "In most companies, sales leaders have never been trained to lead," Khalsa says. "They are just expected to magically transfer their successful sales methods to their teams somehow, and that's not a very effective approach.
"How much sense does it make when a company takes a person out of the field, saddles them with administrative work, and dramatically changes their responsibilities without coaching and assistance? All the company has done is quickly changed an asset into a liability."
Khalsa suggests the role of coaching not be held hostage by the necessities of managing. The goal is to help salespeople make more sales today in a way that will generate even more sales in the future. Either engage outside coaches to meet this objective or give sales leaders the training necessary to be talented coaches.
"Who coaches the coaches?" Khalsa asks. "Giving the sales leader a coach is extremely high leverage. Improve one sales leader and you impact many individuals—and huge amounts of profitable revenue."
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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