Hey, Lets Do Value Selling

Over the past few months, a number of senior sales leaders have reached out for help, stating "we want to implement value selling."

They see value selling as a tool to unlock more value (revenue) or to improve their pipeline or to gain a competitive selling edge.

They are on the right path...value selling can certainly have a net positive impact on revenue, pipeline and competitiveness.

However, their perception of value selling and how it's implemented is a bit short sighted. Value selling is not a thing. You don't "implement value selling." 

Value Selling Is Not a Tool

First and foremost, value selling is not a tool; rather, it's a mindset. Value selling is a way of thinking about how to engage with customers and requires a broad organizational commitment to putting the customer first.

Value selling focuses on the customer's strategic business goals (not technology habits). It focuses on the firmagraphics (the culture) of the buying entity (first mover/late adopter, risk taker/risk adverse, etc). It considers the needs/wants/desires of the individual stakeholders and contributors to the buying process. Value selling requires a specific focus on the use of language to align with those entities.

As a result, value selling is not something easily boiled down to Step One, Step Two, Step Three...

Instead, a value selling approach should be baked into onboarding, selling preparation, communications, actions and activities. And it requires an organization-wide change management process.

Start With Opportunity and Account Planning

Opportunity planning and development, and its cousin, account planning, are great places to start. 

Traditional opportunity planning starts with a profile of the target customer (focusing on installed base and potential budget) and the questions "what can we sell them and how much share can we steal from a competitor?" As this approach is highly transactional and competitive, it leads to sales with low profitability and mediocre customer satisfaction ratings. Sound familiar?

Value centered opportunity planning also starts with a profile of the target customer, but with a focus on strategic business goals, the gaps between goals and capabilities and the motivations of the organization and the key stakeholders. Reps or teams consider how they can help the organization to achieve these goals, independent of any product or service offering (Solution development comes much later.)

Value selling involves co-creation with the customer, and in many, perhaps most cases, doesn't have much impact on existing vendor relationships. It tends to focus on net-new value creation, generating far larger impact and results than a simple vendor substitution might.

There's no comparison of vendors' TCO in value selling. It's just not relevant. That's pocket fluff in comparison to the impact true co-creation offers. Why focus on shaving 10% in operating costs if the project could lead to a 20% increase in customer satisfaction or manufacturing quality. Most of the senior executives, the decision makers in a strategic project, will focus on the latter.

The team must consider "are we well positioned to help the customer achieve their goals?"  Once the organizational goals are identified, the reps or teams develop an influence map that details the key stakeholders, the strength of the relationships, and an action plan to further develop those relationships.

Finally, the team develops powerful messaging that emphasizes alignment and ability of the team to help the organization achieve their strategic goals, and the ability of the individual stakeholders to meet their personal goals.

As with any strategic sales improvement project, the assistance of a knowledgeable sales enablement sherpa to provide direction and to carry the load is critical. If you don't get value selling right the first time, you won't get a second chance. Senior management...and the sales team...will move on to other shiny new objects.  

Thanks!

Lee

 

Abandoning the Hero Sale

When companies first get started, the founders may do most or all of the selling. They have the vision, the passion, the depth of knowledge of the service or product and connect well with early adopters.

At some point the Hero Sale risks becoming the Hero Fail. The challenge is that as the business expands, the founders (the heros) need to focus on running the business, managing the growth, courting investors, hiring managers, etc., and they have less time for selling.

So...they hire sales people. 

And they expect sales people to act and perform in their image, with the same depth of knowledge, passion, and ability to connect with mainstream customers.

I've seen and experienced it first-hand.

When I sold predictive analytics to some of the largest tech companies in the industry, the company president and founder expected the sales team to leverage his 100 page slide deck...to go deep into the technical details of the what and how of the platform. Much of our sales training focused on this technical deep dive, and only lightly touched on personas and messaging.

Conversely, my mainstream customers were only interested in the benefits of leveraging the platform - could they increase pipeline velocity, improve pipeline size and shape,  bolster their customer acquisition rates, meet their quota and revenue targets. The decision makers didn't care what was under the hood, only whether it would bolster their marketing results and how difficult it would be to integrate the predictive analytics platform and workflow into their existing marketing processes.

IBM wasn't even interested in the platform...they had their own...they were interested in our curated third party data. And we discovered this not through a detailed review of the CEO's slide deck, but in an extended white boarding session focusing on work flows. (White boards are my favorite selling tools.)

In talking with clients I hear many facing this same challenge...as the company grows, expected sales productivity fails to increase as experienced sales people are hired. And the founders question the new hires, the selection process, the target markets, everything but their own outsize influence in setting sales strategy.

Moving from a hero-driven revenue model to one that is sustainable and scalable requires a fundamental shift to a traditional selling model -- a formal selling methodology, selling processes, SFA and CRM platforms, formal onboarding activities. Dedicated sales managers will provide strong leverage for additional growth, particularly if a coaching methodology and mindset is part of the structure.

When I joined BAO, the outsourced inside sales organization, as its first sales leader, I implemented a formal selling methodology and spent a lot of time coaching my sales team on value selling techniques. Many had come from the delivery side of the organization and had been accustomed to a highly transactional sales approach...making up to 250 calls each day. The investment in time and effort paid off...we signed a number of key accounts that had been chased for fifteen years.

We also drove an increase in revenue of 75% over that first 18 month period.

Moving to this scalable selling model requires both support and patience from all of the key stakeholders. It won't happen all at once, and it does require a substantive shift in approach. The founders must step back and give the hired managers the space and time to do their job.

A formal approach to change management...and specifically...setting expectations with the key stakeholders will prove useful.

And maybe, just maybe, that hero can take their first vacation in four years.

Thanks!

Lee

BAU as Primary Competitor

When selling complex solutions to the line of business, your primary competitor is almost always BAU or “Business As Usual”, sometimes referred to as “the status quo” or “we’ve always done it that way.”

Unless you happen to reach someone actively evaluating new approaches or technologies, you will have to contend with the entrenched BAU. Your contact might have been told when they joined the company that “this is the way we do things here.” For better or worse, that’s how things get done. Business as usual.

The way things get done might be highly efficient. Or it might require McGyvering the process with baling wire and duct tape, lots of manual processes.

I talk with these customers every day, across all lines of business. For instance – marketing directors extracting information from Marketo and Salesforce, importing it into Excel, normalizing the data and trying to make sense of it, trying to plan new marketing campaigns to drive customer acquisition or retention. In fact, googling the phrase “use marketo and salesforce data in excel” results in more than 261,000 results, including both Marketo and Salesforce forums, and an unlikely domain “datahero.” So…lots of people are McGyvering this very important information mashup. I wonder how that’s working for them…

One analytics manager recently told me that he spends a full day each week extracting data from source systems and loading it into their analytics app. That’s 20% of his working hours, doing something manually that could be automated at nominal cost and with a dramatically lower error rate. He hasn’t been able to take a vacation in three years…

Why do customers continue to do it this way?

Why don’t they welcome our calls, offering to help them do things better, faster, cheaper?

Here’s the problem

BAU works, more or less. There’s little perceived risk in continuing to do things the way things have been done. They know what will happen. Sure, the BAU approach might not be optimal, it might not even be particularly effective, but it’s predictable. They know how to do it that way and they know what results to expect. And they’re too busy doing what they’re doing to be actively searching for different ways of doing things…

Change represents risk

Any change to current processes holds perceived risk. There’s the effort of evaluating and making the change. Then processes have to be modified…and there’s no guarantee that the new way will work better than the old way (BAU). Or that it will work at all. So there’s a built-in bias to do nothing.

How do we get past BAU?

Be aware that your prospect doesn’t want to do anything differently. And you need to honor the approach that they’ve developed. Somebody might be proud of it. Somebody pitched it to management and got funding for it. It might actually work.

Typically cost isn’t sufficient. Prospects won’t move to something new for a small incremental decrease in cost. The risk is too high. There must either be a large, demonstrable cost savings, or a significant capability improvement (ability to drive new business outcomes) to drive consideration. Incremental performance improvements are almost never worth the perceived risk to the buyer. And if a change was recently, the thresh-hold for change will be even higher.

So we focus on helping customers to achieve new, better business outcomes – improving customer retention, reducing customer churn, raising operational profitability…we align to their strategic organizational metrics. And remember, business customers don’t really care how they achieve their business outcomes as long as they do achieve them. The technology-centric sales approach doesn’t intrigue them as it might for a conversation with IT executives. (Five guys in a garage, two squirrels in a cage, cloud-based data warehouse? I don’t know…will it help me improve my customer retention rate…and receive my quarterly bonus?)

As a sales person, your job is to reduce the perceived risk of doing something new

You start to do that in the first few seconds of a new conversation, as you align to the contact’s language of value, you demonstrate that you’ve done your homework, and you steer the conversation to discussing strategic business metrics and outcomes.

In talking with customers, I start with a foundation of credibility. We’ve worked with similar customers on similar projects many, many times. We can help “derisk” the process for the customer, help them to understand that working with us to adopt a new approach potentially represents less risk than continuing to do what they’ve been doing.

Ask questions about consequential pain

• What are the challenges in doing things the current (BAU) way?
• How will they handle a dramatic pivot or increase in business requirements?
• How will they support new/different strategic decision making?
• How would their business outcomes be different if they could streamline their approach, potentially improve the process?
• What would it mean to them personally if they could improve their results? If they could deliver even better business outcomes (customer retention, product quality, financial performance, employee safety, etc.)

Help them to build awareness that continuing to do things the way they’ve been doing things (BAU) holds substantial risk. Don’t tell them…ask the questions and help them to draw the conclusion… Once you get there, they will be open to a deeper discovery call, providing you with more time and access, building the business case for making a change.

Then suggest that they start with a “bite size” (low risk) project to solve problems not well addressed with current processes or technologies.

And for fun, take a look at the Snopes page on “Grandma’s Cooking Secret.” Yes, we do it that way because she always did it that way (BAU), but nobody knew why!

How do you get past BAU?

Thanks!