108 Selling Days Left in 2023!

With the end of the year fast approaching, now would be an excellent time to review the influence map with the team for each important deal and to take action now on your learnings.

• Have all the decision makers and stakeholders been identified?
• Have all the influencers been identified, including partners and service providers (the answer is always no!)
• For each of these individuals, how strong is the relationship? What direction is the relationship moving -- getting better, staying the same, getting worse?
• Who can say no...and why?
• When was the last time you significantly engaged with each of the important players on your influence map?
• What is your plan for improving relationships where necessary and getting commitments from each of those stakeholders and decision makers?
• If there is an incumbent to be displaced, what does their influence map look like and how much overlap is there with yours?
• What are your coaches telling you now?

The influence map is a key tool to help de-risk opportunities. If you leverage the influence map as part of your engagement and pursuit process, you are winning at a 20 to 40% higher rate and seldom, if ever, need to discount at the eleventh hour to close/win deals.

And if you aren't yet using influence maps, and would like assistance in implementing them, let me know!

While powerful, the influence map is just one part of a professional enterprise selling toolkit. I'll cover additional high value tools in coming days.

 

Thanks,

 

Lee

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

 

Practice, Practice, Practice!

I’m in the middle of rereading Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (link) and I was surprised at the common themes that help runners, artists, surgeons and sales people all excel at their craft.

If you’re interested in excelling at sales, follow these guidelines:

#1 Context is everything

If your intent is to get through 10 calls so you can check that box and go to lunch, the calls won’t be useful to you or the prospects. On the other hand, if your intent is to solve problems, make sense of the world, talk to interesting people, improve your craft…your calls will be much productive and fun. Your prospects will enjoy talking with you; they’ll share more, they will help you to help them.

Remember, your context (or intent) is obvious to your prospect, like it’s written across your forehead or broadcast in your caller id. You will always broadcast some context, either consciously or not, so ensure that it is a powerful, positive one. (Hmm, perhaps a topic for another posting…)

#2 Practice makes perfect

Athletes and musicians practice to ensure success. And they don’t just practice, they focus on specific skills, one at a time. A pro golfer will spend a week working solely on his putting game (but not from the same spot each time). An ultra-marathoner will focus on building leg speed. A top sales person will focus on practicing the pivot or bridge from one topic to another.

We practice to build “muscle memory.” When a prospect asks us a question out of the blue, because we’ve practiced, because we’ve built that muscle memory, we can pivot to addressing the question in a useful and meaningful way. Or maybe that question doesn’t catch us off guard…because we saw something on the contact’s LinkedIn profile and gave some thought to how that might be relevant…

#3 Learn from doing

Top performers always evaluate their performance. What went well? What could he or she have done differently? What’s the learning? What new muscle memory must be created?

After you talk with a prospect or customer, think about the flow of the conversation. Were you properly prepared? Did the conversation follow the path you expected? (Hint, it never does!) Did you accomplish what you intended? Were you open to solving different problems, uncovering and exploring different issues? Did you position yourself as a resource? Did you make a deposit in the relationship bank account? Did you reach agreement on a specific follow up?

This introspection is the single most powerful thing you can do each day to identify areas for improvement, to build your selling skills. For a deep dive into learning theory, spend some time with Make It Stick by Peter Brown (link). Peter also cites some pretty interesting research on new techniques for skill development (a topic for another post.)

Leverage your resources. Use the industry and persona information provided by your organization or public resources, the treasure trove of prospect information on LinkedIn, the call and conversation planning tools needed for thoughtful preparation. Corporate Visions cites industry knowledge as being critical to successful conversations, more important than company knowledge, and far more important than product knowledge. Prepare for success!

Practice, practice, practice. It might take you 30 minutes to fill out your first call planning template. It will take you 5-10 minutes to complete your 10^th. Role play with your peers or your manager. Fine tune your conversational skills in a “safe” environment, make the mistakes in a coaching space where you will get immediate feedback. Practice your opening conversation in front of a mirror until it feels and sounds natural.

  

And pick up the phone often. You will have far greater success in holding an enrolling conversation with someone if you reach them by phone, versus trying to engage them by email. 

Thanks!

Lee

Leading Sales Indicators

Selling a complex solution is a lot like running a marathon. To be successful, you can’t just walk up to the starting line and start running. Success in the marathon takes months of preparation. For each mile of the marathon, a runner might run 20-30 miles in direct preparation. Similarly, a good enterprise sales person will dedicate 10-20 hours of preparation (research, discovery, planning) for each hour of face to face with the prospect or customer.

The successful marathoner will have a comprehensive race plan, mapping out the goal pace for each mile. Many apply these plans as temporary “race tats” on their arms, so that they can keep track of their plan while on the road. Similarly, good enterprise sales people develop detailed opportunity or pursuit plans that include both their actions and those of their teammates (other sales people on the account, sales engineers, etc.).

Marathoners carefully watch the leading indicators that help them to determine whether the individual race will be worthy of a Personal Record (PR) or perhaps just a long, slow run. For the runner, some of these leading indicators include their Heart Rate Variance (HRV) and sleep patterns in the days leading up to the race, the temperature and humidity on race day, how they feel at the start line and more.

If the racer sticks to their race plan (slower pace in the first half of the race, faster in the second), a good day is possible. Toss that race plan, run too fast in the first half of the race, and all the prep in the world won’t save you. Trust me…I know!

Similar dynamics exist in the complex enterprise sales environment. While sales management typically watches portfolio coverage as a primary indicator, it is not a leading indicator. Pipeline coverage will tell you that you are in trouble. It won’t tell you why you are in trouble…and it doesn’t give sufficient warning for early correction.

The Acelera Group Sales Productivity Framework incorporates ten rep-focused leading indicators, along with a single first line sales manager (FLSM) indicator. These indicators provide the early warning signs for a decline in sales performance, at the rep, group and region level, and point strongly to specific actions to be taken for course correction.

The ratio of prep time versus face time, as mentioned earlier, is one of these leading indicators. Depending on the specific business problem, level of prior customer intimacy and complexity of the environment, the sweet spot may be 5 or 10 to 1. When reps (or teams) diverge from the sweet spot, we can expect a looming drop in sales results.

A second leading indicator – whether a business value analysis (BVA) has been conducted – holds a similar power of predictability. Curiously, despite its significant positive impact on customer intimacy and satisfaction, deal profitability and overall sales results, the BVA is not widely used.

Complex enterprise selling should not be an ad hoc series of unrelated activities. Good preparation and effective plan execution will help the runner to complete the race and the sales rep to drive great sales results.

What are your leading indicators telling you?

Thanks!

Marketing Plans and Sales Executes

Marketing plans and sales executes.

Okay, so it’s not quite that cut-and-dry, but in considering the roles of the two organizations, we find some key distinctions.

Marketing - Step 1

Marketing sets the “tone” in the market before sales engages with individual prospects. Marketing identifies the “best prospects” based on market size, competitive environment, and product or service capabilities. Marketing establishes the overall value proposition – “our products solve this problem”, the positioning, pricing, etc. Marketing creates the sales assets used in developing individual opportunities.

Selling - Step 2

Sales follows through to establish the relevancy of the offering for individual prospects and converts prospects into customers.

I’m simplifying a bit…

In this model, step 1 naturally precedes step 2. You sand before you paint. You scramble the eggs before you cook. You date before you marry. Step 1 is necessary for the success of step 2.

A change in step 2 requires changes in step 1. Cooking paella requires different preparation than that for cooking an omelet.  To transform sales, you must create a new set of preparations in step 1 (marketing).

Results are what matter

We don’t actually care about sales transformation; instead we care about the results of sales transformation. In this conversation, we don’t even care much about the short term results of sales, what we’re focusing on is building a more robust, healthy business, a qualitatively better set of results.

Selling is a means to this end -- the creation of profitable, long-lasting relationships between buyers and sellers. These profitable, long-lasting relationships generate the highest shareholder value.  And what shareholders really care about is shareholder value (not this quarter’s sales).

Unfortunately, our current set of preparations (in marketing) doesn’t usually lead to that end. If measured using the Six Sigma scale, selling is at best a one sigma activity. Buyers complain that less than a third of their sales people show up “very prepared” for sales calls. Buyers cite a poor relationship with their vendor as a primary reason for switching vendors. More than 50% of all reps failed to make quota last year. (Source IDC 2010)

Vendors are failing miserably to meet the relatively low expectations of their buyers. In talking with senior executives at Global Fortune 500 companies, I repeatedly hear stories of sales people driving to a deal rather than building relationships. One executive at a global financial services firm described a storage rep who, despite being invited to coordinate a brainstorming session, essentially showed up with an order pad and an expectation of booking something that day. The damage to the relationship by his actions can be measured in the millions of dollars of lost revenue.

Most vendors mean well. They want their sales people to do the right thing. They hope that their sales people are doing the right thing. They need their sales people to be doing the right thing. But wanting and hoping and needing don’t constitute a strategy.

To create more productive, profitable relationships between buyers and sellers that actually drive shareholder value for both sides, both parties must commit to change. Both parties must invest in the relationship. If vendors do not make this investment, buyers will treat them as commoditized suppliers rather than value-adding partners.

Where to start?

A good place to start is to evaluate the needs of your best customers. What value do you provide these customers? What other organizations have similar needs? How should your engagement process change to enable more value creation and transfer? What else must change within your organization to ensure consistency?

If you undertake sales transformation with the goal of improving relationships with your customers and actually make the changes necessary to ensure this transformation, you will be rewarded with higher share of wallet, longer, more profitable relationships with your customers, higher revenues and profits, and increased employee satisfaction.

Seems like a no-brainer to me!

Thanks,

Lee

Buyers Don't Want Solutions

Given the amount of work spent on creating solutions this year, it seems that 2010 will be the “Year of the Solution Sale”.

Except we have two minor problems.

First, technology organizations have been talking about…and building…solutions as a marketing and sales strategy for several decades. In fact, John Patterson, of National Cash Register, may have invented the technique (or at least first published a solution-oriented sales Primer, see right), in the 1880s. So the concept of solution selling is nothing new.

Second, and more importantly, buyers don’t want solutions. They want whatever solves their problem. If a vendor’s particular bundle of products and services (their solution) solves the buyer’s problem, that’s fine. However, most buyers view solutions as “off-the-shelf” bundles of existing products that are convenient or profitable for the vendor to sell, but don’t necessarily solve the buyer’s business problem.

After all, how could a pre-configured bundle solve the unique problems of a given prospective buyer, with his or her unique set of challenges, internal issues, infrastructure, needs, wants, desires, timelines, budget constraints, goals, milestones, targets, partners, constraints and more?

In fact, buyers don’t even use the word “solutions” in their conversations. A few years ago at IDC, we analyzed buyers’ language and the word “solution” never appeared. Buyers just don’t think that way. And as one Fortune 100 CIO told me, when he hears the word solutions, he thinks “McDonalds’ happy meal”…a bundle of burger or chicken nuggets, fries, drink and toy that’s guaranteed to put a smile on every child’s face.

While happy meals may work in fast food, this formulaic approach to addressing buyers’ needs is simply not appropriate for engaging with buyers and addressing their complex problems.

Today, the savvy buyer wants an answer to the following question:

“Given what you know about my organization, with our specific set of challenges and opportunities, what should we do?”

Not what should we buy…but what should we do? The buyer wants assistance in co-creating the response to his specific problems. In a recent HBR article, Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart state that over the past decade, dozens of companies, including Cisco, Dell, P&G, Sony, Starbucks & Unilever, “have embraced ‘customer co-creation.’” (“Building the Co-Creative Enterprise”, Harvard Business Review, October 2010). Co-creation as a selling process warrants a separate conversation; stay tuned.

Fortunately, for the knowledgeable sales person, most senior buyers are open to learning…to discovering not only what they don’t know, but what they don’t know that they don’t know. They do know that this new awareness can help them avoid significant business challenges or problems, challenges that would otherwise catch them both unaware and unprepared.

So we’ve arrived at the next level of selling. Some call it consultative selling; others refer to it as provocation-based selling, or selling with a Point of View. The sales person must be well-informed about the customer’s individual and industry problems and be willing to take a stand for the customer, whether or not the result is a sale of that sales person’s offerings.

Thanks,

Lee