What’s the most important system in your car?

a. Engine
b. Steering
c. Braking
d. Drive train
e. Lubrication

Assuming you want to drive, “all of these” is the right answer. Subtract any choice, and your car won’t go around the block, let alone get out of the driveway.

Segue to sales processes. For reasons I don’t fully understand, people worship the Holy Grail of Most Importance. A question on LinkedIn asks “What is the most important step in the sales process?” Hundreds of people were moved to answer, contributing 508 responses (and counting). I read the comments until they began repeating like billboards on a highway. “Building trust. Establishing credibility. Pre-call planning. Determining need. The close. Collecting payment. Building a long-term relationship. Qualifying. Listen. Building rapport. Understanding requirements. Opening statement.” All are important.

Business development consultants are great opportunists. We never lack for innovative ways to develop business. And when the motivation to buy isn’t there, well, we just go right out and create it the American way—by inventing it! Last month, I knew it wasn’t déjà vu when I read

“Budgets are getting tighter.”

“Customers are more demanding than ever.”

“Competition is getting more intense.”

“We’ve never faced tougher sales challenges.”

Although I haven’t kept close track, I could swear that I’ve read these urgent statements before. If budgets are trending in a near-constant negative slope, when will we reach the nadir? Hopefully not soon, so we can keep playing the message. If customers are getting more demanding every year, are vendors at risk for buckling under the stress? And nowhere in my twenty-five year catalog of sales nostalgia do I remember any time when I could say “oh yeah, that was the period when competition wasn’t intense.” Finally, "tougher sales challenges" are just symptomatic of another problem: many companies haven't kept pace by updating tools and skills. The statement works into perpetuity!

Sales is a set of interconnected business processes.

Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh! Got that out of the way!

I hope the buzzword-encrusted sentence didn’t turn you off. And you’d be right to ask what it has to do with the title.

Everything. All business processes have risk. Stuff happens. Things go wrong. And because risks don’t walk up and say “Hi. I’m a risk,” asking questions can find them and keep them from accumulating. Risks that force you to say “we should have known better.”

Your organization’s future depends on questions because the questions your sales force asks—or doesn’t ask—have a huge impact on enterprise risk. But most CXO’s don’t have a clue about what gets discovered throughout the sales cycle. “It’s the sales rep’s job to qualify leads!” Wrong-a-mundo. If others in your organization don’t influence the planning and execution of what gets discovered in sales conversations, or if you’re leaving those decisions up to Sales, you’re adding risk by the bucket load every minute. Want proof? Next time you’re in a staff meeting, jot down (or type) a note for every comment related to:

“The forecasts sales sends us are way off.”
“Marketing sends sales useless leads.”
“We have a warehouse full of slow-moving inventory.”
“Our financial and production planning stink because Sales never hits their number.”

The administration is still wiping egg off its face after the social-media fueled Shirley Sherrod debacle. Bureaucrats demonstrated they’re human—whipped into a frenzy by unsubstantiated information to achieve a malevolent goal. But despite the government’s textbook missteps, there is growing sophistication in the government about social media, and more agencies are adopting the tools—something many Federal employees might not know.

Everyone in my family knows the one-adjective rule applies when I'm making the grocery run: if a product name includes more than one adjective, I'm not going to look for it.

Why? When product descriptions expand into “high fiber” / “low cholesterol, Frosted/unfrosted, Rounds, Squares, and other permutations, my shopping journey requires migraine-producing observation skills. The pain continues past the time I return, when the groceries are carefully stowed in the pantry. “Dad! I asked for heart-healthy organic fruit bars with blueberry filling. Not blueberry cream! I won’t eat these.”

Yesterday’s mission for low-salt rice cakes produced this text message exchange (I accepted the challenge only because I wrote lowsalt ricecakes.):

Me: looking at cakes at Harris Teeter. Have butter popped corn, caramel corn, apple cinnamon, white cheddar, salt free, cheddar cheese, kettle corn sweet and salty crunch. No lite salt. Any preference?

Wife: No just salted?

Me: No. How about salt free. You can add the salt?

Put a big, fat glob of risk in your product pitch, package it as "excitement," and you have a powerful sales tactic. Even a disclaimer plays a crucial role, not that it would matter to a buyer to read one:

“Do not attempt. Really. Do not do this. Stunts performed at sanctioned events. Specially equipped rally vehicle. Professional driver. Closed course. Obey all traffic laws, always drive safely and wear your seatbelt.” Right! Where can I get one of these cars to test drive? Such statements are motivating when the target buyer is male, 18 to 29 years old.

In a different, far away sales universe, the B2B salesperson sells his or her product to an older, equally risk-aware buyer, but without testosterone’s helpful property of making risk seem wildly appealing. B2B buyers avoid stupid risks. But salespeople frequently toss all risks into the same negative bucket, and choose not to discuss them. Finding risk transparency in B2B sales is about as common as finding a teenager without a PDA.

Oil slicks, mine explosions, lost sales opportunities . . .

Risks? What risks? Woulda, coulda, shoulda! By now we know that engineering shortcuts and bad assumptions come home, biting executives in the backside. Serves them right! Apologies fly. If only the sickening results were confined to the perpetrators. But they never are. Ask a BP shareholder, coal miner spouse, or anyone whose business depends on the unperturbed ecology of the ocean. And images of oil-soaked waterfowl further remind us that risks aren’t only manifest in financial statements.

Thanks lately to BP, risky business practices have bubbled to the top of discussions. That’s healthy for sales executives, because selling strategy is all about risk—and how to manage it. But like BP executives, many sales executives aren’t ready to face it. Who wants to be branded a naysayer? “We want to know how we are going to make our revenue target—not how we’re going to miss it!” An optimistic demand that ignores one of the few certainties in sales: not every prospect becomes a customer.

Who do you want on your sales team? Hunter types with “street smarts,” and a “sales personality?” Salespeople who are motivated, hungry, and assertive? What about aggressive, driven, and relentless? Slobber and drool! How about overbearing, intimidating, and obnoxious? Oops! It’s hard to tell exactly where I strayed into the behavioral red zone. There’s no crisp boundary, and these behaviors don’t easily segregate.

How might a customer view a salesperson possessing this group of attributes? In a blog posted May 10, 2010, a man named JerseyFrank provides a poignant answer:

The brush-off all salespeople have experienced: “No thanks. We’re completely satisfied with our current provider.” Years ago, a sales trainer recommended this follow-on question: “Would you like to know if your loyalty is costing you anything?”

Logical. On target. Helpful, even. And I couldn’t properly deliver that question to save my life! Many of the answers I received can’t be repeated. I’m sure my prospects heard “would you like to know why you’re an idiot?”—but that’s another story, for another day.

Loyalty numbs the senses in a pleasing way. From The Brush Off, we know people selectively shun facts and information. There are real costs and opportunity costs, but that doesn’t stop customers from craving the loyalty chemistry. Similarly, vendors crave loyal customers, but the costs are less apparent.

My neighbor, who runs a media organization, recently cited a compelling example. He reviewed a sales proposal during a pre-call meeting with one of his salespeople. My neighbor shared that parts of the proposal were poorly written, and he was concerned how that would reflect on his organization. The salesperson’s response? “But they know me!” Does his client sound like one that’s ripe for competitive picking? It happens every day.

“That proposal you sent us last quarter . . . we need everything installed immediately! How quickly can you ship?” My prospect’s panic meant commission for me. Their large hardware and services order was the culmination of a spluttering two-year sales effort that began in 1995, and it wasn’t even on my forecast. What happened?

e-coli. In August, 1997, Hudson Foods announced the largest meat recall in US history. When the USDA couldn’t decipher the company’s production records, a small beef recall avalanched into 25,000,000 pounds. My prospect was a major supplier of hamburger patties to a large fast-food company, and the fallout from Hudson’s debacle spread faster than an oil slick. Ka-ching! Trigger events don’t get better than bacteria invading a food supply chain.