The Adaptability Factor

More than a century ago Charles Darwin discovered the essential role adaptation plays in determining survival in the animal kingdom. If a species fails to adapt to a changing environment it will likely lose out to a “more fit” competitor. What determines the differences between successful salespeople and those who fall by the wayside? Many experts note that top performers recognize variations in selling situations and apply effective strategies more readily than mediocre performers. By remaining flexible and adjusting sales approaches to match individual customer’s needs, top salespeople close more deals with a greater number of clients. This skill, known as adaptive selling, accounts for survival in a competitive selling marketplace.

Yet while most sales professionals easily grasp the training benefits of, for example, increasing their product knowledge or improving closing skills, adaptive selling often presents a greater challenge. During more than 20 years of research into the topic, University of Florida marketing professor Barton Weitz has found that while some salespeople adapt to different situations and customers almost instinctively, others learn to be flexible only through repeated practice and diligent study.

To explain, Dr. Weitz uses a sports analogy. “Most top salespeople adapt to their surroundings without thinking,” Weitz says. “Just as a good athlete does. Clearly Steve Young as a quarterback has thought a lot about which receiver he wants to throw to in what situation. But when he’s out on the field it’s become so ingrained that he does it automatically. In the same way, good salespeople who are adaptive do it automatically too. For others, it takes time to learn these skills. Ideally both groups get to a place where they don’t have to think about it anymore.”

Group experience

For salespeople to practice adaptive selling successfully, Weitz has found that they must not only believe that different selling approaches will work in distinct selling situations but also have the confidence and ability to apply a variety of selling styles – even in the middle of a sales call. Research indicates that when trying to utilize adaptive sales methods, most salespeople struggle to match the correct approach to the right customer. To address this challenge Weitz recommends salespeople and sales managers exchange information to ferret out which approaches have worked the best with which customers.

“When sales executives and managers get together to discuss and swap experiences they can work on establishing some generalized principles,” Weitz says. “Let’s say, for example, that a pharmaceutical salesperson has a new product line he’s been selling for a month. In that time he notices that his customers who are primary care physicians care more than other doctors about one of that drug’s particular benefits. Or perhaps the manager has noted that small private-practice physicians have more concerns about one product’s costs compared to other customers. This is information that can benefit everyone on a sales team, but there has to exist some means to catalog and disseminate it to the other salespeople.”

To facilitate this information exchange some sales organizations break sales meetings down into small groups where representatives discuss their experiences selling a particular product or service. By analyzing which approaches have worked and which haven’t with what customers, sales teams can unlock likely motivators and hot buttons among a broad customer base.

Review experience

Outside the group context, however, there are additional methods for improving your adaptability. One tip Weitz suggests is to go over what happened on a sales call immediately after leaving the customer’s office.

“While you’re driving to the next call,” Weitz says, “think about what went right, what went wrong and what you would do differently the next time. What you want to do is figure out, ‘What was it that I did that worked and why did it work with this type of person?’ So then when you confront that situation again you’ll know to try the same approach.”

Using these tactics, top salespeople eventually create a list – either in their heads or on paper – of customer categories. By categorizing customer types and attaching a distinct sales approach to each category, effective salespeople find it easier to adjust to a wide range of customer types. Each new or unusual sales situation that then occurs presents the sales representative with the opportunity to step back and say, “This is something I’ve never seen before,” and add a new category. The more categories you add to your customer catalog, the more flexible you become.

Adaptive selling presents a greater challenge, Weitz says, to those salespeople who do not believe they have any control over what happens during a sales call.

“Some salespeople,” he explains, “will attribute their poor performance to something that’s beyond their control. They may blame the customer, their manager, the product, the weather – anything or anyone besides themselves. So then they say, ‘I don’t have to learn how to be better; it’s something I can’t control.’ This contrasts with capable salespeople who believe that they can always improve and that results are within their control. These salespeople always want to learn to do things better and deal with a variety of circumstances.”

Positive experience

While the main responsibility for adaptive selling falls to individual salespeople, Weitz emphasizes that sales managers also impact how salespeople approach customers. Managers who stress structure and short-term bottom line results over flexibility and experimentation produce sales teams that take few chances. Instead, Weitz argues, sales managers should tolerate a greater freedom of action while encouraging salespeople to examine the results of sales calls.

“As a manager,” Weitz says, “when you walk out of a call with a salesperson don’t say, ‘This is what you should have done,’ and then give your opinion of what he or she did wrong. Instead ask, ‘What do you think went well? What can we do better next time? Does this remind you of any sales situations you’ve encountered before?’ Good salespeople think about these things and good managers get their salespeople to think that way.”

While the benefits of adaptive selling may seem cut-and-dried, Weitz says that he often meets men and women in sales who challenge the idea that anyone can learn to be so flexible. Despite the protests, he insists it is possible.

“This gets back to the notion whether you think salespeople are made or born,” he says. “My belief is that salespeople are made, not born. To use another sports analogy, to be a major league baseball batting champion like Wade Boggs or Tony Gwynn you need to have natural skills that others lack. But then there are people like Pete Rose who without the natural athletic ability have learned and trained hard and managed to achieve at the same top level. My feeling is that any sales professional can develop his or her skills to break into the top quartile of selling. Think about these things, analyze what you’re doing, check with other people who are experts and constantly try to improve and eventually you will get to the point where you are great too.”