Meet Nikola Dabic in our top salespeople interview series.
In these interviews, Clive Miller seeks the unique methods, knowledge, habits, and practices of top salespeople.
Watch this interview with Nikola Dabic, explaining what he has learned about selling and how to achieve exceptional sales results.
Nikola found his way into sales through technical support in the field for St Jude Medical.
After migrating into a sales role, he joined Medtronic in 2015.
He is a reader, a sales leader, and an advocate of learning.
His mantra is 'prepare' and his preparation for the interview is apparent in his thoughtful, insightful, and inspiring responses to the questions.
Transcript of the Interview with Nikola Dabic
Clive:
Welcome, everybody. Thanks for your attention and for joining or viewing this video.
This is a project I started a while back, to interview top-performing salespeople and today I want to introduce you to Nikola Dabic, who is a sales leader at Medtronic. I'll leave it to you to share more, Nikola.
Nikola:
Yes thank you, thank you for the invitation it is really a privilege to be here with you and to discuss selling.
As you said I work for Medtronic which is the global healthcare technology leader and I have been with Medtronic for six years. For five years I serve as a business unit manager leading sales teams in southeast Europe in the range of cardiovascular therapies.
Before that, I also worked for another American company which was St Jude Medical.
Overall I have about 14 years of experience in the medical device industry, mainly in sales. Also, I did some technical support and worked as a field technical engineer.
In the current role I am a therapy development manager but most of the time I spent as a salesperson and also as a sales leader, as a business unit manager in Medtronic.
Clive:
That's excellent Nikola. Thank you very much for explaining.
My first question then, to jump straight in, what are the habits and practices that you consider to have been most productive for you in your sales roles or for your people if you like.
Nikola:
First, allow me just to mention that whatever I say here in this interview is just my personal belief and does not reflect the standpoint of my company. This is a very important disclaimer just to differentiate the things I say from official statements of my current employer.
Going back to your question, I think that the basic attributes are very simple and the first is preparation.
I think that preparation for a sale is very important, first because it helps you to make the best use of your time, so when you're on the field or if you're making a call by phone you will not have a whole day or one hour, you will have a very very specific time frame in which you have to catch the attention of the of the people to which you are going to speak with, so I think that good preparation allows you to plan that time in the best possible way and also to know a lot of things about your customers that you can briefly validate during the conversation. Then you can really focus on discovering the needs and explaining what the possible solution could be.
This is why I think preparation is very crucial.
The second thing is to focus on discovery of the need and my suggestion would be really to act as a person who is bringing solution and not the person who is going to make sales because this is something that people on the other side would like really to see you as a person who will help them to advance in the job they're doing or in their personal life.
So spend some good portion of time on discovery of the needs.
Now I reflect on what Albert Einstein used to say, "If I would have one hour to solve a problem I would use 59 minutes in understanding what that problem truly is and then only one minute to look for the solution".
Discovery of the need is important because our customers are not always aware of what their biggest problem is so we can really, with questioning, we can really help them to identify that.
And the last point, something that is more and more seen today, it is the importance of the customer experience, so how your customers feel during the conversation.
How you make them feel, are they excited, are they curious.
Or are they just waiting for you to finish the sentence and then to move on.
So this would be three topics I would say that are subjects, important for any sales conversation no matter of the industry you are in.
That's extraordinarily thorough Nikola. I can tell you've put loads of preparation into it already.
Yes indeed.
And more on that last point, you said that you don't want the customer waiting for you to move on or waiting to get to the next bit, what are your thoughts on getting the customer to talk?
Well, getting customers to talk you need to develop a technique of asking open questions.
This is the most important and good thing about this and also overall sales is that I think 99% can be learned, so natural born salespeople are not something that I believe in, although I have seen many many talented and gifted salespeople.
99% can be learned and the technique of asking open questions which actually provoke people to talk, is something that you want to learn, to avoid closed questions that they can answer with yes or no or especially the question why.
That is the question to avoid.
It is always good to ask instead of why, what are the reasons, so that will give them more motivation to to to open themselves and to speak.
I can recommend here a book because I also think this is important that we give a recommendation and advice to everyone who is listening to this, there is a great book. It is called 'Great Leaders Ask Questions' by Bob Tiede and I think it takes 45 minutes to read.
It takes a short period of time to read but it is very useful.
I can also quote my favourite question from that book, the question goes "What is impossible but if it could be done it would make a great impact on our success?"
That's a great question.
Indeed, you know people will first ask you to repeat the question but for sure when they start thinking and speaking, it will make them speak and as they say it will make the wheels roll in their head. And I tried that on one town hall and it really made the effect that I wanted.
I think it was De Bono who said "A mind that expands to accommodate a new idea never returns to its original shape" and I absolutely agree with you about 'there's no such thing as a born salesman.
You wouldn't allow a born surgeon to operate on you, would you? Probably not but we have born salesmen out there all the time, don't we.
I think that the natural-born salespeople are the people who have developed emotional intelligence and especially empathy so they are empathetic in listening and understanding the needs of the person who is sitting on the other side.
They are not here to, come knock on the door, sell, and go out.
They are here really to understand or at least they present themselves as that kind of person. And this would be something I would call natural-born salespeople.
I think there are a lot of people who struggle with that aspect of communication and there are some that, for whatever reason, have become good at it.
I'm not sure it's a born thing but part of nature and nurture. A combination of nature and nurture isn't it.
So some people do have that kind of, let's call it a talent, and that is a valuable talent to nurture in sales certainly.
Yeah for sure.
What mistakes have you learned to avoid in your sales career?
Most important is don't push to close. You you have to be patient in this sales process and really don't push to the end, of course which is the the the objective of the process, but if you push too much the the person on the other side will feel that and actually backfire because at the end, they want to believe that you are there because of them and not because of your sales goal or for the bonus that is expected at the end of the quarter.
So I would say that my advice and mistakes I made were actually connected to this lack of patience and you know moving towards the goal. It doesn't go all the time like that.
Also advice would be, and something I learned is that it is necessary to think long term. So don't be a short term player and especially don't be a bonus addicted salesperson.
Not many salespersons would agree with me on that but I think that it is better to drive your decisions based on what makes most sense from the customer point of view, than what makes the most sense from your bonus point of view.
It was hard learning. I made some mistakes. I could have done some things better but I think if I share this openly then others could learn from that and avoid these methods that are usually thought of as shortcuts but actually, there is no shortcut to success.
I agree, not to push. It's very very tempting. A natural thing is to rush through the process, and something I've discovered myself over time, if you rush through the process then you tend to miss things, so you come away without critical information that makes a difference for you.
Tell me about the knowledge that you have that supports your success in your current role and how you came by it. That's not necessarily just sales knowledge, I mean, certainly, how do you do the selling, you're clearly an expert in that, but in this question, I'm interested in understanding what your supplementary technical, wider knowledge is, and how you came by it.
Very good question. I will just shortly touch base on the standard methodology, it is the sales integrity, something that I think in all corporations, is a standard method of training the salesperson so again it is the book written by Ron Willingham, How to Sell the Way People Want to Buy.
I've seen it in many homes when I visited my friends, working for different companies. We all have the same book on our shelves.
This is some standard thing, but what you said is actually more important.
What is more, what is the supplement, what else outside of our industry or our company that we can learn, and actually, I started to investigate that a lot on LinkedIn, and I was connecting to the persons who do sales but in totally different industries.
Especially the people who do cold calling.
So something that is quite opposite to what we do you know, we schedule a meeting, we say from which company we're coming from, and then we go on the meeting face-to-face and we do this but I was always intrigued how to catch attention if you have only two minutes to speak on the phone, so I actually wander into these different industries to see how they do the things, where their motivation is coming from, and I think it is very important to look elsewhere and not to be bounded to your industry because a lot of solutions to the problems are already there but you need to search for them.
Yes, and it's easy in a big organization, I think, to rest on the reputation, so Medtronic, you just ring up and say, 'Hi I'm from Medtronic' and they roll over and say come on in, right?
Exactly, this is a very good point and Clive, you're 100% right.
When you're working for such a brand like Medtronic or Coca-Cola or Mercedes, you just say the name of the company and the door is already open you know, but for the guys that are not coming from that side and still they are very successful, that was the part that I wanted to learn more.
Yes absolutely. There have been a few truly great salespeople. If you google 'the worlds greatest salespeople' you find some names and I'm desperately trying to think of one.
One of them, in particular, sold, I don't know, something like 200 times more cars than anybody else in the country. He's an American of course.
Editors note:
Joseph Samuel Girard holds the Guinness World Record for being the greatest salesman in the world. He sold 13,001 cars at the Chevrolet dealership between 1963 and 1978.
It is always good to speak with the people about their sales experience. I remember one colleague told me he went to buy his first car and he had a budget for, I don't know, let's say a Ford and then he entered the dealer shop and the guy listened to him, opened the shelf, took the keys of Toyota, actually threw them over and said, 'I have a car for you' and he said 'that car was over my limit but you know the way how I caught these keys it created the emotion immediately and I wanted just that car to buy', you know. So, yes, lots of good examples.
Yes, that's good stuff to learn certainly for selling cars, although if you we're selling surgery equipment or something like that . .
Yes, you cannot throw it!
What do you see as the talents skills and methods that you consider important in selling? There there are three specific, well several specifically, we talked about talents already a little. Skills to me are things that you have to practice to do better, a bit like sports. Methods I think you've touched on this but I'm interested in hearing what methods you use within your teams, what processes they're supposed to comply with, so there are three separate things, talents, skills, and methods.
Well I don't know whether it is a talent but it is, I think, crucial and that is optimism.
I think for the salesperson, optimism is the key.
I learned a lot reading the book of Daniel Goleman on emotional intelligence. It is really a classic book that I recommend to everyone to read.
And there he actually describes the study that was done in the United States with salespersons working in MetLife so selling insurance and you can imagine what is the rejection rate when you're selling life insurance and actually, they did a study on how optimists perform and how pessimists perform and of course optimists were way better and actually they stayed longer in the industry.
They did an experiment on the optimists who didn't, who failed the initial test, so the study leader was selling him.
He convinced MetLife to hire these people although they lacked basic skills and then he was measuring their success in next two years and they were better than pessimists by 27% in the first year and 56% in second year, so and especially an explanation is something that really makes sense.
If you're an optimist you're dealing better with the bad situations with the failures because optimists will say, okay my approach is not good maybe I should change it, or this last person he had just a bad day I will call him tomorrow, while pessimists tend to think I'm a failure, I'm the loser, I cannot do anything right, and in sales, it will not be success every day, all the time and so how we deal with failure is important so I think that optimism is a key skill then, as I said, asking open questions as one of the methods and techniques to be learned.
And then, storytelling. I think that storytelling is also very important especially for the opening and the closing, you know in the opening stage when you need to establish a rapport and when you really need to break the ice and I would say to open this emotional door that we all have inside of us. Storytelling is very powerful and also for the closing when you are envisioning this future state and the solution that you are providing and the outcomes, storytelling is very important.
And as a last skill or talent again, as I said patience.
Patience to listen and really to impart empathy towards the customer on the other side.
Yes, perhaps I should add to that list, qualities, because things like patience, are more of a quality than a talent or a skill.
These things are equally important. That's really really good.
What about step-by-step methods?
Yes step-by-step methods actually go from opening of the conversation then of course discovering the need and identifying the problem then demonstrating how the solution or how what we have can help and then moving towards the closing where actually we expect to have the order.
It is very important to understand that in this method, in these small steps that you are doing, you see that the solution or the product is almost at the end, so you don't come and say I have a product, no, you should first come and identify the need and what is the true problem and then think if their is something that you are carrying in your bag can really help, to identify, to provide the solution to to the customer.
So I would say these four classic steps again that will run on a basic sales course, is something that that is very important and also, why it is important to have it really structured, as you said in a methodological way because in the case that the meeting didn't go well, you can go backwards and you can then think OK maybe I missed something in this discovery phase, maybe actually my solution is not the most adequate to this situation or maybe I should be more aggressive on closing to really exit the conversation with the order or with the commitment of the customer that they will do the sale. So this is why all these blocks are very important and actually will make you more successful in any additional attempt that you make with this customer.
I've found that, I've come across a lot of resistance among salespeople to frameworks but the research says, the research that I've seen anyway, suggests that using a method actually increases sales.
Of course and I refer back to the situation when the outcome is not what we desired, what are we going to do? So you have to look back. You have to look back at what you did but if you don't have a structure, how would you know what thing you should improve for the next conversation.
I agree with you. Salespersons that I have worked with, go away from this structured process but I always insisted with my team and I really put a lot of effort so all of us are trained on this because this is the only way how we can be better tomorrow than today.
Yes, it's a great point.
And also what is important it is not necessarily that you will, in all these phases, you will spend an equal portion of time. Sometimes you will run through something very fast. Sometimes you will spend more time.
Maybe you will have to break the meeting and then come tomorrow again, but at least you will know from where to start. It will not be some messy conversation. You will know exactly what is your next question and what you want to do next, what will be discussed.
I sometimes use the story about getting on an aircraft and hearing the captain say, 'we're a bit short of time so I'm going to skip the checklist this morning, all right everybody?
You get the point quite clearly.
Can you tell me a bit more about the character traits and qualities, we have referred to qualities, so this might be a bit repetitious but the character traits and qualities that you consider important factors in sales success? I think you perhaps alluded to a couple of these already but feel free to again.
Well I will bring in a new element that you and I already discuss about and that is honesty.
I think the honesty is the main character trait that salespeople should develop and honesty is the building block of trust and trust will bring great results in the long term and to put it very simply, what honesty means, it means that you tell the truth even when you don't have to.
The classic example is when your customer is asking you about the product that you know the competition has something better to offer but the customer is already expressing interest and you can close that sales very easily but you resist this temptation and you tell honestly about something that actually would bring more value and what is maybe better solution.
So this is a classic example where you build trust because next time when you come with a product that you are sure that it is the best on the market, for sure this customer will remember how it was last time and he will go for that very very easily, so I think this is very important and also, let's look at it in a broader context.
We know that the salesperson doesn't have the best reputation. They will do everything to make sales but if you're really honest you will differentiate yourself from everyone else on the market and this is what where you can build your competitive advantage by being different when we speak about honesty, I think it will bring success but also it will make you feel much better and your relationships with the customers will stay for a long time.
Yes, I think that's a great point to make. I talk about the trust hill. As you said, the starting point for customers is that this person is being paid to tell me what I want to hear, or tell me things that are positive and therefore I can't really rely on what they say.
And if you want to influence customers you've got to be able to get over that and you can only get over that by climbing what I call the trust hill.
Yeah exactly.
I think this is the most important trait and I think that we all have to work a lot in these times on being honest in all possible situations.
It's easy to say isn't it.
It's not so straightforward to deliver that honesty in a way that is acceptable, without demolishing your own position.
In those situations you have to think about the big picture about the long term. Not just about today but also about tomorrow.
Also about the situation when you're going to visit the same customer but you will change the company and you will come to that same customer so he will judge you by how honest you were not by the products you were selling at that time. This is really something that builds our personal brand, and we take that with us no matter which company we work for.
Yes, I agree. Exactly so. That's very good.
If you had to distil all of this into one piece of advice for a newcomer, what would it be?
I would say that for the newcomer that tomorrow is another day to close the sales, so what is important is to keep playing, and I recall one anecdote from basketball.
Basketball is very popular in in my country and neighbouring countries and there was one young player going to NBA. He was very successful and talented and one evening, he finishes the match with the 13 attempts and zero scores and he is sitting desperate in the locker room and then the NBA veteran comes taps him on the shoulder and says "Tomorrow is another game."
I think this anecdote brings lots of this perspective of the long-term process that we are doing, that sales also is not a football match that lasts for 90 minutes and that we have a clear winner and loser.
I think it is more as an infinite game.
Something that I took from Simon Sinek and how he is displaying this, that it is important to keep playing, keep playing with the good spirit, with the good intentions, and really to enjoy your work because sales brings solutions, sales is helping people, so you should enjoy it and really think that what you haven't achieved today you will make tomorrow.
That's really good advice, that's really good advice Nikola and, in particular, I like what you said about helping people.
What is selling all about? It's a good question and I pose it to people sometimes.
For me, the number one thing is helping people do what they want to do.
Exactly. I echo that, what you say. Exactly so and so it is a very nice job and people should really enjoy it and be proud that they are doing sales you know.
Very much so this has been a tremendous interview. I think you've produced some really really great material and some wonderful book recommendations. They should be apparent but when we do the transcript, I'll make sure that they're clear, and so I thank you for coming on this interview and I look forward to speaking with you again in the future.
Yes, thank you for the invitation and this was really great experience for me and I enjoyed it and learned a lot from you as well, so this is always my point, what can I learn more, so.
Brilliant
All the best and hope to speak to you soon.
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