Mastering the Art of Sales
ELEVATING SANITATION SOLUTIONS THROUGH DQ SALES TECHNIQUE.
Author: Mekdim Hailu, Project Communication Manager, PSI Ethiopia
In Ethiopia, USAID Transform WASH has been on a mission to achieve sustainable sanitation solutions. The activity has championed market-based approaches to tackle hygiene and sanitation challenges for over six years. Now, the focus has shifted towards institutionalizing these efforts through various activities, including a transformative training program centered around Decision Intelligence (DQ Sales®) technique. DQ is an abbreviation for decision intelligence, a term coined by WRP (Whitten & Roy Partnership), a sales consulting firm in the United States. A customer can make smart decisions about purchases. Thus, strengthening their customer’s DQ is a critical skill for business operators to become successful sellers.
“Sales in social enterprises and the development sector can be challenging due to the lack of suitable tools and approaches,” said Dagim Demirew, Business Development Associate Director for Transform WASH (T/WASH). “Initially, we faced this issue and experimented with different sales techniques, but we struggled to succeed. However, implementing the DQ sales technique in T/WASH over two years revolutionized our sales performance and management system, offering a working model for achieving sanitation goals.”
Recognizing the potential of the DQ sales technique in fostering sustainable and market-driven sanitation solutions, T/WASH joined forces with WRP, experts in transforming sales, management, and leadership for socially minded organizations. Starting in 2020, T/WASH and WRP partnered to improve sales and management approaches in WASH, subsequently enhancing coaching and management capabilities. This endeavor has dramatically enhanced sanitation access, contributing to 200,000 sales of sanitation products and services. To scale up and ensure the approach’s sustainability, USAID Transform WASH is expanding the sales and sales management capacity to other parties remaining after the T-WASH project ends.
To understand and decide the proper structure to embed and cascade the DQ Sales technique, T/WASH and WRP embarked on a discovery assessment. Based on the discovery results, the Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI), an autonomous institute reporting to the newly established Ministry of Labor and Skills, was identified as a potential skill holder to train health professionals and TVETS that supports coaching and managing community-level sanitation sales activity.
As part of institutionalizing the DQ® sales training program, professionals and trainers from diverse organizations, including the Ministry of Health and EDI, were actively trained for two weeks as super trainers. The training was conducted in two phases. The first phase focused on Basic DQ training, providing participants with a comprehensive understanding of the DQ sales approach. They learned how to empower end-users to comprehend their challenges and the benefits of available sanitation solutions. The second phase aims to train the trainers, ensuring knowledge cascades further and broader.
Pictured from left to right: Clemency Phir, iAlemu Kejela and Pie-Pacifique Kabalira-Uwase
Alemu Kejela, a WASH and Environment Health Expert at the Ministry of Health, who participated in the training, emphasized its significance for market-based sanitation. He said, “This training marks a groundbreaking initiative; it holds significant value for market-based sanitation. ‘DQ’ may be a new term, but its importance is already clear, extending even into our personal lives. It aids in comprehending challenges and devising effective solutions. If we disseminate these principles based on the pilot, we can significantly enhance sanitation coverage throughout Ethiopia.”
Clemency Phiri, a Field Coach from WRP, highlighted the transformational aspect of the DQ approach. “Usually, NGOs give products for free, but with this approach, we can change mindsets and increase decision-making power. We guide end-users to understand the problem, its costs, and its impact on them. This enables them to take full responsibility for utilizing sanitation products effectively.”
As the trainees return to their roles as change agents in the sanitation sector, the impact of the DQ sales training program is expected to be far-reaching. We will closely monitor its effects in the selected woredas of the Amhara, Sidama, and Oromia regions. Armed with insights from the discovery works results and equipped with the tools to promote the DQ techniques, these professionals and trainers are vital to transforming sanitation practices in Ethiopia.
Addise Derese, Sanitation and Hygiene Focal Person and Health Extension Worker Coordinator at Legdiya Health Center in the Amhara region, attended the training in Bahirdar. “In this training, we learned how to support the community using DQ, which increased my communication skills,” she explains. “Now, I can coach other health extension workers and work with mason installers to go on the ground and create awareness amongst the community. I now understand it’s better to teach them about prevention rather than health insurance coverage, which was our previous approach.”
Addise Derese
The DQ sales technique enables communities by promoting responsible ownership and usage of sanitation products. With a well-informed customer base, the sanitation market is set to evolve, offering tailored and sustainable solutions to meet the population’s needs. Pie-Pacifique Kabalira-Uwase, a Senior WRP Consultant, agrees, “The sales strategy and management help customers develop intelligence about problems and buying decisions. I am passionate about empowering the customer; if they know the problem, they will do what they need to solve it. If we send salespeople to the community to empower the customer, they must learn how to sell.”
The DQ sales training program marks a pivotal moment in the journey of Transform WASH towards institutionalizing market-based sanitation solutions. Through collaboration with WRP and the insights gathered from the discovery works program, this transformative training equips professionals and trainers with the skills to drive positive change. As these change agents embark on their mission to enable communities to improve the sanitation situation in their communities with the DQ technique, we look forward to revolutionizing WASH practices and creating a lasting impact on sanitation solutions across Ethiopia.
The article was originally posted to Medium linked here.
10 Most Common Mistakes Sales Organizations Make
WRP’s Head of Design, Tyler Roy, gave this presentation in May at the All Systems Connect conference at The Hague.
Clean Cooking Alliance Cohort Success
WRP is proud of our work with three great social enterprises working in Kenya and Uganda to serve customers at the last mile. Though Bidhaa Sasa, ILF and Mwangaza Light provide different solutions for their customers, they were all facing the same challenge - how to sell without relying on traditional price based methods.
CCA contacted us to work with all three in a cohort from May to October, 2021. After spending a discovery period with each client to better understand their unique needs, we customized coaching for each company’s sales team, providing decision-based selling tailored to their organization, products, and customers.
As a result, all three organizations have already seen great results, from shifts in mindset and attitude to increases in sales performance across their teams. To read more, please visit the Clean Cooking Alliance website here.
Good Nature Agro Transforms Farmers’ Lives
Good Nature Agro increased farmers’ average annual income by 300% by partnering with WRP, tripling the number of farmers they are able to serve in just one year. To learn more about their journey, download the PDF here.
Building momentum with sales: Our CEO Scott Roy on the Mission to Scale Podcast
The use of sales tactics is often seen as an antagonist of social impact, when in fact it can be an ally. Our CEO Scott Roy recently joined Spring Impact’s Mission to Scale podcast to talk about how social entrepreneurs can become effective sales leaders.
In conversation with host and Spring Impact founder Dan Berelowitz, Scott shares how to become better at selling and managing a sales team, how to apply our method DQ Selling® when fundraising, and why becoming good at selling will enable organizations to scale and have a greater impact.
Touching on many aspects from his book Sell Well, Do Good, co-written with Roy Whitten, Scott appeals to leaders in the social sector to consider selling as a key tool to scaling their organizations. He says: “I just really want people to embrace selling for what it can be. If you sell well to do good, then what happens is that you build momentum. But if you sell poorly or just adequately, then it never helps you to create the momentum to carry you over the top, to cause people to just flock to you or invest money in you. With sales, if you do it really well, it will help you to go right to the moon!”
You can listen to the podcast episode here.
Sales Mistakes That Are Holding Back Africa’s Solar Enterprises
Selling to the base of the pyramid is tough, regardless of the product – and despite the sector’s growth, solar energy products are no exception. Solar enterprises face abundant and ongoing challenges.
Selling to the base of the pyramid is tough, regardless of the product – and despite the sector’s growth, solar energy products are no exception. Solar enterprises face abundant and ongoing challenges, including affordability, nightmarish logistics and security, payment default, money mishandling, shallow talent pools, high churn and low agent productivity, and ineffective line management. And of course, there is pressure from above to hit aggressive sales targets, which are often missed.
Given these challenges, it makes sense that company leaders should focus on making their sales departments as effective as possible. However, at our sales consultancy, Whitten & Roy Partnership, we find that the overwhelmingly majority of solar companies put more focus on the product and its technical capability, rather than investing in the people who sell it.
The myth that a product should nearly sell itself sets into motion an approach to selling that is rooted in building a better mousetrap, not in building people. Solar products with new or additional features may gain a competitive edge temporarily, but they are not the reason why companies generate and sustain growing sales. Yes, having a good, reliable product with responsive service to back it up are important. But companies make sales by engaging their customers – and their success is driven by how effective their salespeople and managers are in the field.
It has been our experience that ineffective customer engagement is absolutely central to the sales and retention problems faced by solar companies. Its impact is felt both in terms of customers who should have bought but didn’t – and buyers who fail to complete payments. In most instances, these companies’ sales approaches work for the “low hanging fruit,” but then they struggle to penetrate the next layer of the market. This results in hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa still lighting their homes with batteries, candles and kerosene – and a sector that continues to generate disappointing performance.
External vs. Internal Customer Engagement
Over 90% of Whitten & Roy Partnership’s work is in emerging markets, where businesses are selling life-changing products to the poor. We help transform the way they sell and manage, generating better results and building more capable companies. Although we are sector agnostic, one of the larger segments we work in is solar. In fact, we have advised most of the companies that make up the majority of sales across Africa, including clients like Off-Grid Electric (now Zola), Greenlight Planet, M-KOPA, Barefoot Power, Orb Energy and others. Thanks to this experience, we possess a unique 360-degree overview of the solar market, with all its opportunities and challenges.
Based on this perspective, we believe there are two kinds of customer engagement upon which solar companies must place their attention: external and internal. External customer engagement is how well salespeople connect, define problems, confidently offer their solutions, and close sales. Internal customer engagement is how solar company managers treat their sales agents. We see sales agents as primary “customers” of the company who, when managed, trained and influenced correctly, will engage well with external customers. Companies must take very different approaches when engaging these two different types of customers.
External customers require much more engagement than a simple transactional pitch or a product demonstration. This is because they are being sold a product that necessitates behaviour change, both in terms of the product itself and the requirement that clients make consistent payments. Because of the depth of commitment that is required to make the commonly used “pay-as-you-go” payment model work, a consultative, problem-led buying experience is well-suited to the task.
Effective behaviour change-based selling requires sales teams to do the exact opposite of what most people think should be done. Rather than pitching the product based on its features and benefits, sales teams must listen to customers describe the lighting and power problems they have in great detail, and what it is costing them to have these problems. This selling method transforms a decision to buy solar from “nice to have some day” to “must have now”.
The Key to Creating an Effective Sales Team
A consultative, problem-led approach takes a little bit more time, but the result of higher sales and greater commitment to payment terms is worth it. However, simply telling agents to switch to this method doesn’t work - they must be trained to use it and then managed accordingly, so they break the automatic bad habit of pitching products. That’s where the management of these “internal customers” comes into play.
Sales agents are critical to their operation because they sell products to external customers. The more effectively company leaders and managers engage, train, manage and lead these agents, the greater their sales and loyalty will be – and the greater service they will provide to external customers. This example from one of our African solar clients illustrates the issue: Their self-proclaimed “great” five-day sales school consisted mainly of technical training - only four hours of the 40-hour training program were dedicated to the human-to-human selling experience that’s crucial to a solar company’s success.
But we don’t want to single any company out: Indeed, we have observed very poor management practices almost universally. Generally speaking, recruiting practices are weak, team sizes are too large, territory management is too lax and disorganised, and there is not an ethos of actively developing salespeople into better performers. In fact, what we see is downward pressure from managers to get results, with very little support to show agents how to do it. We couldn’t begin to count the number of times we’ve been told: “Once they have proven themselves then we will train them.”
How to Manage the Managers
In defence of most sales managers, we have found that few have been trained how to lead and manage others. They may know procedures and processes, but they don’t know how to deal with people and relationships – and most certainly don’t know how to truly empower a person to be their best. Our key advice is to train managers to treat these internal customers the same way their own managers want agents to treat the company’s external customers.
We often find that the better salespeople have been promoted to management with the operating assumption that they should naturally be able to manage salespeople. After all, if they are good salespeople themselves, the logic follows that they should be good sales managers who can teach people what they know. Right?
Wrong. The qualities that make a good salesperson (strong sense of self, discipline, no excuses) stand in contrast to what make a good sales manager – who needs to work with a wide range of personalities and problems, and deal with lots of excuses. Before becoming a manager, these salespeople were just responsible for themselves. Now they are responsible for a team of people, all with different personalities, all at different developmental stages, and all performing differently. This experience is completely foreign to a top sales performer, who now must navigate the very challenging terrain of people management. Instead of the cushy job it appeared to be, it’s actually an overwhelming experience for most people.
We believe the people and organisations we work with were doing the best they knew how to do at the time we started with them. But when they experienced what is possible – and began to understand the things “they didn’t know that they didn’t know” – the lights came on for most people, and they really want to learn how to foster this kind of engagement both with their internal and external customers.
A word of caution, though: It takes time to build the human systems of a sales organization, and the individual capacities of sales managers and salespeople – indeed, it often takes longer than investors and owners want to believe. But unfortunately, the pressure to move fast and accelerate sales can take its toll on the very sales machine these companies are trying to build, and can actually undermine their efforts to establish a flourishing business.
That’s why we encourage leaders take the time to think about the quality of engagement they want to build in their organisation – for both their internal and external customers – and then objectively assess the quality of engagement they are currently providing. Our message is: Find these gaps, fill them, and discover new levels of sales performance.