I reached out to 2,500 salespeople to find the top 200 performers—Sales Blazers. These leaders had extraordinary revenue increases that averaged 31 percent annual sales growth, compared to 5 percent for the status quo. One of the eight strategies found common to these revenue leaders, I call Get the Express Pass.

The Express Pass
Most of us have been to a theme park and waited in long lines. And a group, with something called an Express Pass, walks right in front of everyone waiting in line and gets on the ride next. All the people in line are perplexed and ask themselves, "We’ve been doing what we’re told. Why do they get to do that?" Something similar happens in sales when we're politely waiting for an RFP or a returned phone call from our contact with all the other competitors. Then, someone with stronger key relationships and the inside scoop cuts in line and gets the business. It's like they have an Express Pass.

Well it's time for us to get the Express Pass. And we'll do it by extending something called a Chichen Itza Chat, discussed in my previous entry on The Customer Collective and in critical detail in Sales Blazers (McGraw-Hill). What’s a Chichen Itza Chat? In a nutshell, it’s a way of describing what you’re offering in terms of deep human motivation and also in terms of essential business drivers of key stakeholders within an account.

The Reasons We Loose and the Reasons We Win
The reason most revenue producers lose a sales opportunity is that although we may have a good relationship with our contact, we often don't have all the right information and relationships to preempt our competitors. The Sales Blazers we worked with and observed accelerate the right relationships by gaining a few essential pieces of information about key stakeholders to get the Express Pass.Getting the Express Pass doesn’t take exhaustive research, instead, it requires targeting information through simple conversations or specific research. These “chats” help us understand the business side of our prospects’ needs in terms of impact on strategic assets, cashflow, people needs, revenue increase, expense decrease, and fit within the organizational mission. If you look closely, these are the organizational versions of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. After all, an organization is nothing if it is not a group of people. The chats we have with various contacts of our prospect explore these needs. These needs are predictably present and critical no matter what prospect you’re targeting. If we can describe how our offering fulfills the business version of these foundational needs, we’ve expanded what prospects see us as offering; we’ve become a trusted business advisor not just a vendor.

Real Needs
Consider the essential needs of any company. The Physical layer of needs to a business is its strategic assets. What strategic assets can you find a way to affect for the better with your services? Next, consider that Security for any organization is its cash flow. How can our offering specifically improve cash flow?

Now, is there really a Belonging set of needs in an organization? Absolutely. How can we partner with the prospect to improve cultural, people and leadership issues? These are likely the largest expense category on their income statment. Also, nearly every organization gains Esteem in the market by increasing profit-by increasing revenue or reducing expenses. What real increase in revenue or decrease in expense will we affect? Finally, comes Self-actualization—the purpose, mission and vision of the business. If we can produce a dramatic impact on furthering this pursuit for our prospects, it will resonate much more with decision makers.

Timing is key; the priorities of our contacts move in and out of these areas all the time. Different needs spike at different times. This is why we stay aware, looking for Maslow’s needs through business lenses and by seeing the personal version of these needs for our contacts.

The Wall of Silence
One of my pet peeves is when “sales experts” pretend that this kind of information is simply available with easily had conversations—that executives are waiting for our call. John Maines, award-winning investigative journalist, gives us some sound advice in Sales Blazers about getting around the wall of silence in the toughest places. He tells us how to quickly get at the real story about these essential needs to broaden our own story, even when people aren’t dying to speak to us. When we have finally gotten around the silence and discovered the broader and essential business needs of the decision makers, magic happens. Our proposals, conversations, and even the initial phone calls start to ring true. We leave the realm of order taker and truly become a valuable business leader for our prospect’s initiative. They give us the express pass and we move to the front of the line.