Our thinking and visualizations of our sales processes, deal strategies, funnels, and pipelines often cause us to do the wrong things.  It’s because we have a “one way street” mentality as we think of our deal strategies.  Things progress–top to bottom, left to right (or right to left in certain parts of the world).

We prospect, qualify, discover, demonstrate, propose, close, implement. Everything moves in one direction, we’re always moving forward—-except when we don’t.

The other day, I was reviewing a critical deal.  You guessed it, it was large and critical to the quarter end.  The sales person had it moving from the proposing to closing stages of their sales process, but the deal had been stalled for some months.  The sales person was insistent that it would close when projected.

In reviewing the deal, the sales person had been using the sales process.  She’d been working on the deal for about 6 months, was executing the process step by step moving it through the stages until it reached its current point and it stopped.  She was trying to move it forward, but it just wasn’t working.

As we examined things, we started seeing there had been a major management restructuring, with new management at a couple of levels above the decision-maker.  This brought on a shift in corporate priorities, and as a result other projects were being cancelled.

I asked, “Is the deal still a priority, is it a real deal?  Should we re-qualify it?  Given all the changes just above the decision-maker, do we need to reassess the whole thing?  Should this be in the closing stages of our pipeline?”

That’s when I started seeing the nervous glances among the team.  They had worked hard to get the deal to this place.  They needed to close the deal.  They tried hard to argue, “We’ve followed our sales process, and we’ve done everything we needed to do to get it to the closing stage of the process.  So we just need to push it forward.”  They were trying as hard as they could to push the deal through, but it just wasn’t happening.

We agreed they would go back and explore the urgency of the deal with the customer, particularly given the changes.  They also found a way to meet with some of the new corporate executives.

They learned, there was some interest in the project, but it wasn’t a high priority and the funding for the project was being diverted.  With some of the shifts in the corporate strategies, the needs and requirements for this project were changing.  The good news was they were changing in a way that made the deal both bigger and made my client a much better fit.

As we examined all the information the team had gotten, we realized we needed to start the sales process all over again.  While much of the work they had done would probably be very valuable, things had changed.

The team needed to re-qualify the deal, and then go through all the sales process again.  All based on the changes that had occurred within the customer.

While the team intuitively knew all of this, they were blinded thinking things only go one way in the pipeline or in our sales process.  We always move forward.

Ideally, we do, but the sales process and the pipeline is a two way street.  Sometimes things go back to the beginning of the sales process, sometimes they pop back to the top of the funnel.

Not recognizing this means we are fooling ourselves and our managers in the expectations we set in our pipelines.  Not recognizing this means we are not aligned with the customer and where they are with their buying process.  As a result, we aren’t creating the value we should–in fact may be doing all the wrong things.

The team moved the deal back to the top of the pipeline.  They changed the projected close date–actually they left it open, since they needed to re-qualify the whole deal.  They started developing strategies to start the whole process all over again.  While it was disappointing, without doing this, they would have continued doing the wrong things with the customer and have been setting the wrong expectations for their own management.  They would have been wasting their and everyone else’s time.

We all have deals like that.  Deals we’ve worked hard on.  We’ve brought them to a certain place, but they stop.  Things change, we need to reassess, restart and go through our process yet again.  Perhaps we are a little smarter from having gone through it once before.   Perhaps we can accelerate the buying process, based on that knowledge, but we have to go back re-qualify, rediscover, re-demonstrate, re-propose and close again on the “new deal.”

Don’t think of your sales process or pipeline as a one way street.  Things can and should move backwards.  Denying it doesn’t help anything.

This article was originally posted to the Partners in Excellence Blog by David Brock on March 30, 2015.

“It can be stated, with practically no qualification,” Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens write in a 1957 HBR article, “That people in general do not know how to listen. They have ears that hear very well, but seldom have they acquired the necessary aural skills which would allow those ears to be used effectively for what is called listening.” In a study of thousands of students and hundreds of businesspeople, they found that most retained only half of what they heard — and this immediately after they’d heard it. Six months later, most people only retained 25%.

In this, I suspect the world has not changed much since 1957. So I dug into HBR’s archives for our best advice on the imperfect art of listening. Here’s what I found.

It all starts with actually caring what other people have to say, argues Christine Riordan, Provost and professor of management at the University of Kentucky. Listening with empathy consists of three specific sets of behaviors. First, there’s the actual intake of information — recognizing the verbal and nonverbal cues the other person is emitting. Then there’s processing, which is where we make sense of what the other person is saying. Finally, there’s responding. This is where you validate what they’ve said — and note that validating doesn’t mean you have to agree with it — by nodding, playing back what you heard, or otherwise acknowledging that you’re picking up what they’re putting down.

To help you stay focused on the most salient points of what someone else is saying, take notes as you listen. Ram Charan offers a tip he saw work especially well for Larry Bossidy when he was CEO of Honeywell. Bossidy would draw a vertical line down the page of his notebook and write general notes to the left, while keeping track of the most valuable nuggets on the right. This helped train his brain to listen intently and zero in on what’s most important.

Recognize your defaults. Are you gregarious and outgoing — a real extrovert? Then you have many wonderful qualities, but listening well may not be one of them. It’s tough to listen when you’re the one who does most of the talking. Or are you super-conscientious, your smartphone always in hand and your calendar always uber-scheduled? Again … listening is hard when you’re distracted by a screen, or rushing to your next meeting. Knowing yourself is a key part of being a good listener (and one of just many good tips in Sara Stibitz’s piece).

Pay attention when your mind wanders to figure out what’s stopping you from listening. This piece of wisdom comes from Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins, executive coaches and co-authors of Own the Room. When your attention flags, is it because you’re starting to plan your response to their comments? Or have you started listening to your own inner critic, instead of what they’re saying? But you can’t really listen fully at the same time you’re thinking about something else. When you notice something has blocked you from listening, simply make a note of it — don’t belabor it, or you’re just not-listening for even longer! — and shift your attention back to what the other person is saying.

Nichols and Stevens point out another factor that can stop us from listening: our own emotions. Feelings fog up a conversation. When you notice you’re having an emotional reaction, withhold evaluation and, with your judgment thus suspended, embark on a hunt for evidence that proves your own position wrong.  “If we make up our minds to seek out the ideas that might prove us wrong, as well as those that might prove us right” – which human beings tend to do without making a conscious effort – “we are less in danger of missing what people have to say.”

When someone is upset or venting, a lot of us “listen” by sharing our own experiences (note: that is actually just talking). Or we try to fix the problem. (Note: that is also talking.) Or, perhaps because we’ve been told, “Don’t try to fix it, just listen!” so many times, we clam up and say nothing, which doesn’t result in the speaker really feeling heard. So the best way to listen when someone is venting is to ask questions, writes Mark Goulston, a psychiatrist and author of Just Listen. Help them get all that anger and frustration out into the open, where they can start to make sense of it on their own. Pose questions like, “What are you most angry about?” and “What are you really worried about?” They’ll feel heard, and you’ll get to the root of the problem.

As Nichols and Stevens point out, the basic problem with listening is that we can all think faster than we talk. The human mouth plods along at 125 words per minute, while a neuron can fire about 200 times a second. (This helps to illustrate why it’s crucial to slow down difficult conversations.) So give your brain something else to do while you listen: note the key points that are coming up in the conversation, actively look for nonverbal cues, ask yourself what the speaker might be intentionally not saying, or weigh the evidence being presented.

“The effectiveness of the spoken word hinges not so much on how people talk as on how they listen,” Nichols and Steven write. Many decades later, that’s still true. You can’t necessarily turn the people around you into better speakers. But we can all make ourselves better listeners.

This article was originally posted to the Harvard Business Review blog by Sara Green on February 6, 2015.

When you get to a point in the conversation with a customer where you have to negotiate on price or some other issue, remember one thing: the vast majority of negotiations occur because you haven’t identified the value of doing business with you earlier in the conversation.

I have found that if you uncover the needs, wants, desires ad motivations of customers early on, the whole aspect of having to negotiate starts to change. Because you are aware of how the customer will value your offering before you present ideas, you know exactly where you may need to give more than take. Negotiations most often occur when the customer has not had all their needs dealt with, or the value of your offering has not been built up enough before presenting solutions.

Having said that, it may well be that you get into a negotiating scenario that requires you to give and take. How do you know exactly what will be important or valuable to the customer?

Well, it may be that the two most powerful words in any negotiation are “What if?”. Using this question works because it allows the other person to consider possible solutions without committing to them. This way you can avoid making an offer before they have signaled a willingness to accept it.

To put this technique into action, suggest a possible solution by saying, “What if our solution involved distributing to other warehouses? Is that something that might work for you?” Then listen closely to the response, and change the suggestion if necessary, remembering to phrase it as a hypothetical (”What if?”) and not a formal offer.

Don’t commit to a solution before confirming that it works for the other person. Ask, “What if?” to test ideas before making formal offers.

A good way to prepare for this stage might be to ask yourself what combinations of options would make an attractive solution to both you and the other person. Should you present options independently or package them as one solution? Also, ask yourself whether you, personally, are willing to accept the solutions you’re suggesting.

It’s important to position this technique in the customer’s mind before you try it out.  Saying something like, “We’re probably not ready to commit to an actual solution yet, but I have some ideas that we could discuss to see if we can get closer here. Would you like to hear them?” would allow the customer the chance to see if there were options that would be satisfactory to them.

The objective of this technique is to get the customer to see how different approaches might or could work for them, and offers opportunities for them to test out hypotheses before making decisions.

This article was originally posted to the MTD Sales Training Specialists blog by Sean McPheet on November 19, 2014.