Information Technology Sales: Selling More. Selling Faster.

By George W. Dudley, Author, The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance®

Want to sell more? According to our research, visibility management is now the eighth habit of highly effective people. It’s the one habit success gurus relentlessly practice but rarely reveal. When it comes to making money – and lots of it – it’s also the most potent. Problem is, most of us were not raised to draw attention to ourselves- even when we deserve it.

The hesitation most people experience when they try to stand up, step out and make their contributions visible is not pleasant. In fact, to some, it’s both gut wrenching and demoralizing. Left unchallenged in contact-dependent professions like IT sales, it’s a career-ender. Each year 80% of all new salespeople, across sales settings, leave the sales profession . The reason? They don’t sell enough. Why? It’s self-evident: They don’t have enough contacts to sell to. And they don’t have enough contacts to sell to because they make more excuses than sales calls, more complaints than new customer contacts. To them, prospecting for new business is more than uncomfortable. It’s emotionally un-doable. Predictably, with an insufficient number of prospects to sell to, their sales career soon withers and dies.

Visibility Management – The Missing Link?

Natural self-promoters, like Anthony Robbins and Madonna, instinctively exploit all the opportunities they can to make themselves visible. For most of us, however, visibility management triggers an emotional struggle between our desire to make our competence visible, and our reticence to appear too forward or immodest. Yet in today’s hotly competitive sales environment, it’s not enough to be merely good at what you do. Earning what you’re worth takes more. You have to practice “visibility management,” letting people know who you are and the products or services you represent.

Visibility management consists of all the ethical things you can do to make sure others know who you are and what you do well. It’s the underlying mechanism at work in all-modern definitions of success that include making money. Think about it. You hear it at work in the self-advertising presentations given by success gurus at sales conventions; television evangelists pandering for money; authors pitching their books on Oprah; scientists competing to publish their grant-seeking research; movie stars promoting their latest films; and infomercial pitch people “morally compelled to give something back to society.” Bill Weeks, Director of Baylor University’s innovative Center For Professional Selling says “visibility management is an integral component of modern career management for salespeople- and anyone else who wants to earn what they are worth”.

Visibility management is an unavoidable by-product generated by the Principle of Recognition and Reward (introduced and described in The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance). Here’s how it works. First, you have to make whatever competencies you have visible before they can be recognized. Second, they must be recognizable before they can be financially rewarded. In other words, you can’t expect to be rewarded for your competencies and accomplishments if people don’t know about them. Fail to honor this principle, and the recognition and rewards generated by your accomplishments and contributions will flow towards someone who may be much less deserving- but more visible. It happens every day, and it costs plenty. Unnoticed competence leaves you invisible.

In the last 30 years we have specialized in studying how fear influences the behavior at work. During that time we have done research and diagnostic assessments involving over 500,000 sales and non-salespeople in many companies, industries and countries. So far, we have identified and catalogued the common conflicts, hesitations and fears salespeople associate with making first contact with prospective buyers. Then we statistically amalgamated all the individual behaviors into clusters, which taken as a whole, we named “Inhibited Social Contact Initiation Syndrome” (ISCIS). ISCIS is an acronym used by technical experts for the street name we gave it, the “The Fear of Self Promotion.”

The Fear of Self-Promotion

When the Fear of Self Promotion affects salespeople, it goes by another name: “sales call reluctance®”. That’s because it imposes an artificially low ceiling on the number of first contacts, which can be initiated with prospective buyers on a consistent basis.

Some salespeople make only a small fraction of the sales calls they could make. Others make even fewer. Some don’t make any. They don’t, won’t or can’t. For them, comfortably prospecting for new business is emotionally out-of-bounds. Cut off from opportunities to sell, their sales careers soon sputter and gasp, until eventually they suffocate from a lack of prospecting oxygen. Maybe you know a salesperson like that. Maybe you manage one. Maybe you are one.

Early in our research, we investigated the statistical link between actual sales results and sales prospecting. Predictably, we found that as one goes up the other goes up, too. Then, we turned to the connection between sales prospecting and sales call reluctance® and found them to be inversely related. That means, as sales call reluctance® goes up, sales prospecting goes down. Again, that was expected. What followed, however, was not.

Looking for a non-selling group to contrast with salespeople, we decided to study administrative management personnel in a large corporate office. We studied the total salary increases and number of promotions received by each manager in the sample over a five-year period. The results were not mute statistics. They sounded a wake-up call.

We found those who were promoted most often and given the biggest salary increases did not necessarily turn out to be those judged as to be the most technically competent. It was those who were most willing to make whatever level of competence they had visible. We can draw two practical conclusions from the body of applied and theoretical call reluctance® research we have conducted: 1) like it or not, today everyone sells, not just professional salespeople; and 2) the first tell-tale signs of sales call reluctance® are not found in sweaty palms, rapid heartbeats, churning stomachs, or shallow breathing. You feel call reluctance® first in your wallet.

Sales Call Reluctance®

No one is born into this world with genes for fearing the telephone as a prospecting tool or asking for referrals. What about personality? Personality does not cause call reluctance®, since so-called sales “hunters” and “gatherers” both have been found to struggle with sales call reluctance®. (That’s why personality tests for salespeople repeatedly fail to detect it.)

Sales call reluctance® is primarily learned – some one had to teach it to you. It may have started the day you were first trained and off-handedly explained ‘We don’t call ourselves salespeople here, we’re Software Consultants” Or, it could be due to someone saying ‘Oh you’re in sales (pause), that’s nice… so how long do you have to stay in sales before you can become a real technician?’ No matter. If you are responsible and paid for successfully advocating products or services, you’re in sales.

Careful, correct and comprehensive diagnosis is the capstone upon which any effective measures for overcoming call reluctance® is built. Problem is, though call reluctance® is the result of fear, prospecting fear doesn’t always look the way fear is supposed to look. As a matter of fact, our research has discovered twelve different ways call reluctance® can look. Can you relate to any off them?

Before taking an antibiotic for an infection, you need to know something about which kind of infection you have. The same is true for overcoming sales call reluctance®. Knowing type is essential. It’s from type that you forecast outcome and type tells you which of several countermeasures is likely to produce the biggest boost in prospecting activity, the fastest. In terms of sales prospecting, applying the wrong countermeasures to the wrong call reluctance® types is worse than doing nothing at all.

Sales Call Reluctance® In The IT Industry

Call reluctance® has 12 behavioral “signatures” or themes, one for each type. Each company has it’s own call reluctance® profile (a pattern of types usually influenced by management) and so does each industry. We find it in retail sales, financial services, capital equipment, psychologists, consultants, performance coaches- even in our own small, but growing international network of professional associates.

Example of a precise and comprehensive measure of new business contact problem areas. In this case SPQ*GOLD®, the only scientific assessment instrument ever developed to specifically measure sales call reluctance, was used to profile 333 salespeople in the IT industry.

Overcoming Call Reluctance®

Whether you’re an individual salesperson trying to grow your career, or a sales executive trying to manage a sales organization, there are four general steps which must be taken to launch a meaningful counter attack on sales call reluctance®. These steps are simplifications. They’re also starting points to help people who are serious about overcoming call reluctance® so they can earn what they’re worth. (More detailed information can be found in The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance: Earning What You’re Worth In Sales, Dudley & Goodson, Behavioral Sciences Research Press, available at amazon.com).

The following four steps provide a starting point for managing your visibility – and may help remove the hurdles that the Fear of Self Promotion places on your success:

Step #1: Know that prospecting fear exists. Awareness is the important first step. Sales call reluctance® (or the fear of self promotion in non-salespeople) is not another one of those lighter-than air marketing slogans. It exists whether you believe it does or not, and has measurable consequences.

Step #2: Admit it if you have it. This is extraordinarily difficult for some people- and entire companies- because it requires the boldness to acknowledge a weakness and the will to take responsibility for it.

Step #3: Assess it. It’s not enough to spot it. You also need to apply appropriate procedures to find out 1) how much you have; and 2) which types are making your career more difficult than it has to be. Special-purpose psychological tests like SPQ*GOLD® are available for this purpose. One free rating scale called the Prospecting EKG is available at http://www.bsrpinc.com/offerings/prospecting_ekg.htm. It gives a quick first look, but lacks the precision needed to construct an effective action plan. Alternately, you might simply ask your friends, colleagues and managers.

Step #4: Apply yourself. Rhetorical commitments are cheap. Do something that can improve your visibility. For example, map out a plan to tell others what you do well. Then, execute your plan. Or make your goal even simpler: Make one contact each day that you would otherwise have avoided making.

Visibility management is important and it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable for professionals in sales or non-sales positions. Admittedly, for some, step four as outlined above won’t be enough. They need specialized applications and resources that are readily available. Step four for them is a little different. They need to find and apply the procedures necessary to restore the emotional means required to let people know who they are, what they do well and the products and services they represent- comfortably. Does it make a difference? An introduction to some of the evidence is outlined in the charts below. But, ultimately you can only answer that question.

Hesitation to let people know about products & services represented is nearly universal. So is the probability of improvement when an accurate and precise diagnosis of type is paired with the most effective counter-measure. (Each country represents a different sample.)

Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Everybody lives by selling something.” He was right. By taking your foot off the visibility management brake, you can begin to draw the attention you deserve to the most valuable product you represent: yourself.

That’s the most important step you can take to earn what you’re worth.

1Dudley, G.W., & Goodson, S.L., The Psychology of Call Reluctance, Behavioral Sciences Research Press, 1986.

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George W. Dudley, is the world’s leading authority on sales call reluctance. He is co-author of the international best seller, The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance® and has conducted numerous scientific studies, both nationally and internationally on the nature and impact of sales call reluctance®. SPQ*GOLD, one of the online diagnostic and corrective applications authored by Dudley, is used by more organizations worldwide to spot sales call reluctance than any other procedures.