It's Not Just the First Meeting. The Process Is Broken.

Here's Why Last time I wrote about the fifth rep — the one seller out of five who earns a second conversation by guiding instead of pitching. But here's what keeps nagging at me: fixing first meetings won't fix your number. The first meeting failure is a symptom. The real issue is the system behind it. The Whole Chain Is Pointed the Wrong Way Think about the last pipeline review you sat through. What questions got asked? What stage is this? When does it close? Did they see the demo? Next steps? These are the questions that build your forecast — the number you commit upward, the number you never want to explain. So the pipeline review focuses on what makes the forecast feel solid: stage, next steps, close date, verbal commits, whether the rep is texting with the CFO. But here's what nobody asked: How will this customer benefit from what we're proposing? Who influences this decision and what do they care about? What happens to their business if they don't act? Is our rep connecting with these people — or running a process at them? When was the last time a manager asked a rep, "What is this buyer afraid of?" Not what objections they raised. What they're actually afraid of — the career risk, the political exposure, the possibility they'll champion this deal and it blows up in their face. This isn't soft thinking. Both sellers and buyers believe B2B purchasing is a rational process — collect data, analyze options, select the best one. Research from Google and CEB tells a different story: B2B buyers are actually more emotionally driven than B2C consumers. But they don't know it — and neither do your reps. So your reps address the rational concerns, because that's what buyers say matters. Meanwhile the deal is actually being won or lost on fear, trust, and confidence. None of which show up in the scorecard. That question doesn't come up. Not because managers don't care. Because nothing in the system prepares them to ask. And it's not just inspection. Enablement builds product experts — certifications, demo bootcamps, battlecards. Coaching centers on demos, objection handling, and positioning. Pipeline reviews track activity and deal mechanics. Enablement, coaching, and inspection all reinforce the same product-centric muscle. And then we wonder why reps show up and pitch. There's a deeper issue: the entire sales process is managed inside-out. Every question, every inspection, every coaching conversation is about what we're doing to the buyer. Did we demo? Did we send the proposal? Did we get the next meeting? None of it asks what's going on with the buyer — how their decision process is going, what they need from us, whether they're any closer to the confidence they need to say yes. I saw this on a deal I coached two years ago. Enterprise software, big logo, enthusiastic champion at headquarters. Every pipeline review looked great — demos completed, proposal sent, next steps confirmed. It was in the forecast as a commit. What nobody asked was whether the division leaders who'd actually use the platform were on board. They weren't — and nobody on our side had done the work to understand their world. The deal died. Not because we lost to a competitor. Because we were managing our process instead of understanding their decision. The dashboard said green. The reality was red. And someone had to explain why a committed deal just evaporated. It was a painful loss my coaching client still agonizes over. And frankly, I do too! We were both blindsided by the lack of support in the secondary divisions. We thoughtthat our champion at HQ had the ability to mandate. He didn't. Trust but verify. Or as Don Jose Ruiz says "Be skeptical. But be open." Traditional sales methodology drives the focus on inside-out selling, sales management and leadership. It dictates how you enable, how you coach, how you inspect — and what it dictates is inside-out. What's missing are the value selling components — the foundation of the Acelera Group Value Selling Framework — that flip the lens: the components that cause buyers to engage, to trust, to share what happens if they fail or succeed. Without them, the methodology produces reps who can present but can't connect, who can demo but can't discover, who can pitch but can't listen.

Where is Your System Breaking Down? The problem shows up differently in every organization. Five questions to find where it's breaking down in yours: What are we actually enabling? Product training — or the ability to understand a buyer's situation well enough to be useful in the first five minutes? Buyers already have the product information. What they need is someone who can help them think. What are our coaching conversations really about? Demo execution and next steps — or whether our rep knows how this customer will benefit and what they're risking to get there? What are we really inspecting? Stage and close date — or whether a rep has mapped the influence network, built a real champion, and can articulate the buyer's problem back to them? We're inspecting the dashboard. The deal is happening somewhere else. What does our culture reward? The big close — or the rep who did the hard research, had the real conversation, and walked away from a bad-fit deal? Culture governs what reps do when nobody's watching. Are leadership and enablement pulling in the same direction? Enablement teams often know what reps need but lack the air cover to deliver it. When leadership defines "ready" as "knows the product" and enablement knows it should mean "understands the buyer," that gap becomes the gap reps carry into every meeting. Oh, and a bonus question -- what muscle memory are we building/reinforcing in role play? Sorry...that's not fair...most tech sales organizations don't bother to conduct role plays...or deliberate practice as I prefer to call it.  Most organizations can't answer "the right thing" on all five. That's not a failure — it's a diagnosis. Once you see where the system is misaligned, you can start fixing it. When all five point toward the buyer, "together we win" stops being a slogan and starts being how deals actually get done. See What This Looks Like in a Real Deal I'm building this out in a book called Together We Win and sharing draft chapters as I go. The full book will be available later this year. The first chapter — The Fifth Rep — puts you in the room where the system breaks down. Fair warning: your next pipeline review might feel different after you read it. Read Chapter 1: The Second Meeting Tell me where I'm wrong. I mean it! — Lee

Mindset Matters

 

If you think you can, you're right!

If you think you can't, you're right!

Mindset matters a lot, and whether we have a growth mindset or a limiting mindset, we have room for improvement!

We aren't born with limiting beliefs. The young person's mind is a blank slate. The child wants to know "why"; to make sense of the world, to explore, to grow.

Then someone tells the child to "shush", to speak only when spoken to, that they don't belong here, that they have to behave a certain way, or that they won't amount to anything. I learned to be the class clown. It was my way of both getting attention and to hiding out. And it took many years for me to learn to take that mask off.

These beliefs are reinforced over time. The programming takes a set and we carry the beliefs forward into school and our careers. So much of what we do day-to-day, now, is based on the programming we received as young children.

And...that programming was delivered without intent, good or bad...just a passing comment from another person, perhaps a parent or a teacher. Something someone said casually to a five year old, without thinking, or really meaning anything...

The first step is to acknowledge that inner voice, the critic, the judge or saboteur.

Yes, I hear you.

The next step is to recognize that it is just a voice, a simple program running in our mind that can be erased and replaced with programs that serve rather than constrain us.

It's not who we are.

Yes, I hear you. Thank you for sharing. Now...go away, I have important things to do.

That voice who says "we are not good enough" or "we can't do it" or "we don't belong here" or "we are not worthy"...is just a voice. It's just old programming that never was relevant and certainly isn't relevant today.

Let it go!

We have work to do. If we are clear on our purpose, that inner critic gets drowned out by the roar of our purpose. My purpose is to help people transform and anything that doesn't help me to accomplish that purpose is just noise, to be ignored.

Authenticity

In sales, authenticity is critically important, just as important as curiosity. If we are authentic and curious and listen, we become trusted partners to our customers.

I work with principals of service organizations who have difficulty being authentic. They believe that they cannot sell, they don't want to be the caricature of the sales person, to be that guy!

And this belief, this programming, this internal saboteur keeps them from authentically sharing the passion for their services. When they let that image, that programming go, engagement with prospects increases dramatically and revenues skyrocket.

Similarly, I find many sales people, from SDR to key account director, harboring negative programming:

SDR: "I have nothing to offer an executive...I hope they don't answer the phone!" (How will that conversation go?)

Field rep: "I don't know all the technical details." (Your job as Listener in Chief and choreographer is to guide the customer through the process and connect them with technical and other resources)

KAD: "My job is to fulfill demand." (If that were your job, you'd be a fax machine!)

As sales people, our job is to be curious, to listen, to develop a point of view, to help the customer to see new opportunities. A negative mindset constrains us from playing all out in the game of improvisation that is high level sales.

A growth mindset allows us to take a longer view, to keep the customer's needs and goals in mind and to focus on helping them to be successful.

When they win, we win.

Our growth mindset allows us to connect with our customer's goals and initiatives.

When managing a key account team calling on Merck, I showed the team a "Merck for Mothers" banner displayed in the lobby at the company's headquarters. As part of this campaign Merck committed $650 million to ensure that no woman has to die while giving life.

We had a conversation about the banner, its impact on employees walking through the door each morning, and how the team can align to support that purpose. As a result, our conversations switched from the focus on middleware and CRM and databases to how we could better support the global Merck initiative.

Your intent is written on your forehead

When our intent (or context) switches from "we want to sell you some stuff" to "we understand and support your strategic initiatives," both organizational and personal, it's visible.

Our intent comes through every word, every statement, every body movement. Customers know exactly what we're up to, what we're working towards, how we'll treat them in the short and longer term.

Together We Win

My personal intent (or context) is usually "Together We Win."

As someone who runs partnerships, delivers global sales enablement, coaches sales people and teams...I must work in partnership with others to deliver impact. In that partnership, I find dramatic leverage.

Even if we don't consciously set our intent, we always have specific, visible intent or context. Sometimes it's a simple "I have no freakin' idea" or "I can't wait to be done with this." When we do consciously set our intent, it's much more powerful!

Do this next!

Step one is to actively listen for that limiting self talk, that inner voice, the inner judge/critic/saboteur. (There's also an inner sage; we'll leave that for another time.)

When you hear that inner voice -- the one right now saying "what inner voice" -- just acknowledge it. "I hear you." That first step reduces its power and allows us to begin reclaiming our own power, autonomy, and joy!

For some, it only takes a few moments to completely eradicate that negative programming. For others the programming is so deeply ingrained into our belief of who we are that it can take longer.

Step two is to begin the work on your Inner Game. I'd suggest reading The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. While it's not specifically a book on sales, it is one of the best regarding mindset.

If you've already read it, then please reread it. Each time you'll bring new context to the reading and take away new learnings. I've reread it twice in the past year alone!

Need help?

If you need help building your positive mindset and the accompanying practices and habits that drive better customer engagement and results, please reach out to schedule an initial conversation.

Schedule time to talk now!

Drive revenue and customer satisfaction with great account planning

If you want to deliver more value into your strategic or key accounts, effective account planning is foundational.

And…account planning is distinct from an account plan.

Account planning is an ongoing process, involving multiple players — the KAD or SAM or lead sales person, the CSM, other pillar reps, relevant SEs and key customer stakeholders.

I explored the topic of account planning with Ulrik Monberg, CEO of ARPEDIO, last fall, for the Thoughts on Selling Podcast.

We have similar views on the topic of account planning, including the value of relationship maps and action plans. I also recorded a “Short Bytes” session on account planning best practices. Both are available via Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Full disclosure…when I first launched the Acelera Group, focusing on account planning and pipeline development, I didn’t have an account planning platform strategy. In my prior experience, facilitating over 300 account planning sessions, and more than 30 key account planning sessions, at Oracle and Google, PowerPoint (and Google Slides) was my platform of choice. (Ulrik got a chuckle from that!)

It took only a few customers to ask “how do we scale this” for me to search for…and find…ARPEDIO as the answer to that question. Now customers can scale a highly effective account planning process across their entire organization, providing similar value and functionality for each sales team chartered with account planning.

By the way, late Q2 or early Q3 is a great time to conduct account planning sessions with customers to ensure a strong close to 2024. Let me know if you’d like assistance in developing a formal account planning framework or need facilitation for important customers.

Thanks!

Lee

Account planning as an ongoing process

When I joined an elite field enablement team at Oracle almost fifteen years ago, we formalized a facilitated account planning process, both for enterprise and key accounts. However, when sales leadership and corporate program management requested that account plans be submitted and tracked on a quarterly basis, we pushed back hard.

Some considered account planning as an opportunity to inventory opportunities. Others viewed it as a way of checking in on the account team, without getting too involved. A successful completion of the process would result in a planning document being filed in a drawer somewhere.

Few thought of it as a co-creation and alignment process, one that is a nearly continuous mix of discovery, conversation, hypothesis building/testing, and value creation.

With formally trained facilitators, good supporting material (corporate backgrounder, footprint and SOW analysis, comps, etc.), the buy-in from an increasing number of sales teams, and a value selling mindset, we won over the skeptics. We demonstrated that an effective, ongoing account planning process drives deeper customer engagement, more customer intimacy, higher revenues and profitability and higher lifetime customer value.

We had the people and process part sorted. But...we were struggling with the documentation, the capture of tribal knowledge and the management of action items for the teams. PowerPoint just didn't cut it, nor did Revegy.

When Ulrik Monberg encountered similar challenges in account planning processes, he founded ARPEDIO to provide an advanced account planning/account-based selling platform.

Recently Ulrik, CEO of ARPEDIO and I spent some time on the Thoughts on Selling podcast discussing account planning and account-based selling best practices. The ARPEDIO team then published an article based on our conversation. The first is an easy and interesting listen; the second is a useful written discussion of the key topics.

What are you doing to ensure the effectiveness of your account planning activities?

If you'd like help ensuring success this year please reach out for an initial conversation.

Thanks!

 

 

 

Lee

 

244 Selling days left in 2024

Savvy sales leaders understand the rhythm of selling in a calendar year...in the first quarter (after territories and quotas are communicated to the field), sales people should be researching and prioritizing their accounts and planning their engagements.

In the second quarter opportunities should be developed, discovery conducted and value established. For larger accounts, account planning should be planned and held (with the customer's active participation. Your customers do attend your account planning sessions, right?)

In the third opportunities should be de-risked and customer commitments nailed down. Account planning should be continued. Executive briefings should be planned and hosted.

And...in the fourth quarter, deals should be closed.

There's only three challenges with this approach.

First, that's a lot of "shoulds."

With a formal structure in place, at the field level, and effective process facilitation, these important activities will happen, with effectiveness and impact.

Second, customers don't subscribe to the sales calendar...they have their own rhythm of business, whether their fiscal year ends in June, they have a fourth quarter freeze, or they simply have needs that aren't calendar bound.

Third, sales teams have a constant inflow and outflow of talent that requires retraining, new enablement and learning facilitation.

How much of this are you leaving to chance? Are you counting on a manager named Should to ensure the success of your team through the course of the year?

How did that work out for you last year?

What are you doing to ensure that these actions actually happen, with expediency and effectiveness?

If you'd like help ensuring success this year please reach out for an initial conversation.

Thanks!

Lee

Why all the buzz about Value Selling?

 

I had an interesting conversation recently with someone who has a deep sales, marketing and communications background. He's worked for a couple of household names. You'd recognize them. If you've been in finserv for a while, you would probably recognize him.

He asked an interesting question: "why all the focus on value selling on your Thoughts On Selling podcast? I don't get it."

When I started to explain value selling to him, he cut me off. "Doesn't everybody sell this way? In professional services we've always focused on the customer."

That got me thinking. What's the difference between selling a product and selling a service?

With a product, you can point to its attributes - size, color, horsepower, storage capacity, number of CPUs or circuits, whether the LEDs are surface mounted, etc.

With a service, you have nothing to point to. It's an intangible. It doesn't exist outside of the experience of the service delivery (except perhaps for the simple "Want me to cut your grass?"...and even there value prop there is pretty obvious.

So...why do we focus on product attributes of the product rather than its ultimate value to the user?

Frankly, we're lazy.

It's what engineering driven/led organizations focus on...because it's comfortable. It's what the founders understand.

And we're swept up in the competitive leapfrog of "my widget is 10% shinier than the other company's widget."

We count on the prospect/buyer/user to make the jump from "high performance fabric" to "completing my analytics job this morning rather than tomorrow afternoon or next week." And that requires another couple of jumps..."if i can run many more analytics jobs (what-ifs) I can make better business decisions to improve product quality or employee retention or marketing efficacy or stock investments...which results in a higher bonus for me."

When I ran marketing, business development and sales enablement for an early cloud provider, we never talked about the technology behind our offerings. For our customers it was simply magic. Our focus was solely on helping clients to build scalable, performant environments so that they could provide up to date information to their subscribers. Major League Baseball didn't care how we did it, just that their subscribers would have a seamless experience from spring training to the last game of the World Series.

Most decision makers today don't care how things work, just that they deliver on their brand promise. The market is noisy and crowded, confusing buyers. Further, most buyers of larger ticket items (new ERP system, for instance) may have zero experience with evaluating and selecting a system and the details simply distract them, leading to "No Decision."

As sales leaders or sales enablers, we need to understand our buyers' challenges and opportunities, to empathize with them, and to shape our conversations and messaging accordingly.

One CIO told me: "I don't care how much better this is than our current environment; I'm not asking my team to learn another set of tools. They just don't have the bandwidth." Clearly we hadn't focused enough on the autonomous part of our Autonomous Data Warehouse offering conversation, describing how his team would not have to learn anything new.

Conversely, when I talked with the head of operations at a major airlines about the possibility of moving his analytics from a batched 24 hour look-back (what happened yesterday), to a realtime view of his operations (what's happening right now), he said this: "You can do that? I'll take two!" In this case, we had connected with his strategic goal of substantively improving his operational abilities.

Here's the jumping off point.

• If you're still "solution selling," you're losing 30-40% of your opportunities to organizations that have embraced value selling. Maybe more.
• And...if you've recently implemented value selling, most of your sales people are still solution selling, or worse yet, still pitching features. Been there, seen that.

Because...value selling is not a thing to implement. It's a mindset, one that has to be shared from the top down. When it's done right, I've seen individual sales people grow their individual deal sizes by an order of magnitude or two. And when as CSO I implemented it at a mature business services firm, we increased sales by 75% in just over a year.

Where are you in this journey?

Thanks!

 

 

 

Lee

Getting the most from your account planning investments

 

Account planning sessions are "sacred" events to me.

Never mind the staff cost of $20-$50K just for the sales team to show up and participate. Never mind the "interruption" to their normal responsibilities. Never mind the hours of research, planning and prep to ensure a great outcome.

It's the potential impact. We can substantively affect the outcome of a client's business when we conduct the proper research and planning. For a finserv account, perhaps it means that their customers will get loans rated faster and more accurately. For a manufacturing company, perhaps it means that we can help boost their production quality. And for a life sciences company, perhaps it means finding a cure for a disease more quickly.

Oh, and the team stands to benefit financially - making their numbers, receiving their commissions, going to Club.

When facilitating an account planning session, I always include three components:

• A CPR -- a statement of the Context, Purposes and expected/desired Results (which we co-develop at the beginning of the session
• A value selling mindset
• And finally and perhaps most importantly, the action plan

 Without the action plan, people leave the session thinking "that was great", now back to work. And everything learned, discussed and decided is quickly forgotten.

With a good detailed action plan, people leave the session with a strong understanding of their roles, responsibilities, next steps and expectations (Change Management 101).

Yet, even a good action plan does not guarantee success. Success requires ownership and follow up. I've facilitated three hundred or so account planning sessions over the years, and I always charge the sales manager or sales leadership with owning that follow up - ensuring that the commitments people make are actually completed.

But, to be honest, I still haven't cracked the code on this. That follow up just doesn't always happen.

How do you ensure follow up to account planning sessions? To the promises made by your sales people?

By the way, if you don’t currently conduct formal account planning sessions, and want help in setting them up or facilitating them, let me know! (You do have to promise to follow up!)

Thanks!

Lee

 

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

 

 

Why People Buy

One of the most powerful attributes of value selling is that it should give you visibility on what people care about - how they're motivated, what their personal goals are, etc.

People think that they buy based on data and analysis.  But they don't. You don't. I don't. I buy the running shoes because they'll make me look faster on the trails or at Starbucks. You buy the solar panels or EV because it underscores your care for the environment. A coworker once told me that she was going to sell her 911 Cabrio to buy a Tesla (back when Tesla was cool)...because she wanted to save money on gas.

Um, no. She was going to lose thousands of dollars on the transaction, so the financial justification was weak. However, the new car was going to signal her care for the planet, which was her real motivation for the purchase.

Corporate buying is no different. Whether it's a new AI chatbot to improve the experience of your customer, or the repurchase of another thousand Chromebooks, at the base of the decision is feeling rather than data.

Here's a great quote on change management, and after all, selling is all about change management:

See – feel – change is more effective than analyze – think – change. The process used here is "See, Feel, and Change", as opposed to "Analyze, Think, and Change". The latter is all head, no heart, and often fails to motivate people to recognize the importance of a given problem.

 

As part of my enablement work, I leverage story telling, developing customer vignettes - the people, personas, their "care-abouts". I explore individual MBOs and what an MBO represents. To drive the point home for the sales people in the session, I show a jet ski, something that the lead purchaser intends to buy with their MBO. I actually get groups of sales people to yelll "jet ski" when I ask what motivates that individual.

 

They get it. 

 

Data is nice, but don't kid yourself. People don't make decisions based on TCO or ROI. Do you need to check those boxes? Absolutely. But a good ROI argument doesn't get you off BAU. Getting a customer to feel why different is better starts the real consideration process, otherwise the (perceived) RISK hurdle is just too great.

 

Lee

 

 

 

Is Value Selling a Methodology?

We designed and implemented a formal value selling methodology at Oracle and I was tangentially involved with another effort more recently.

Here's the thing about value selling. It's not just a methodology...an approach to selling. It is a mindset, a way that sales people (and others) think about preparing for, and engaging with customers. To be successful, the mindset has to be present in everything the sales person does, or the initiative fails.

Here's the rub -- everyone else  in the organization, and most of the practices and processes, is either product-centric or transactional in nature.

If you train your sales people to engage with customers focused on the business benefits of reducing risk and fraud, and your product managers focus on speeds and feeds, product/service attributes, a cognitive dissonance is created. Then the rep's manager focuses on inspection and forward movement of the opportunity, talking about pricing and contract terms. Obviously, the latter is important, but frequently it is delivered in opposition to the value selling approach/mindset.

At Oracle, the sales engineer was my primary line of reinforcement. I coached them to ask reps: "Do you have a business value hypothesis...". If the rep hadn't done the work to create a value perspective, I coached the SE to decline joining them on the sales call. The first line sales manager was my second line of reinforcement, providing a lot of coaching on business value.

We had the benefit of high level executive support for our value selling approach. It helped that many senior sales executives had risen from the ranks, had been trained on value selling and saw their average deal size grow dramatically.

Conversely, in a more recent situation, value selling was deemed a "good thing to do." And it was done.  Well done, by some very senior and knowledgeable people, people who have done it well elsewhere. But it was not supported in the field by sales management, it had little to no real executive support, and product management had to be coached, over and over, to recast their product enablement assets to be more supportive of a value selling approach.  It has not really taken hold and as a result has delivered little real value.

So...value selling is a mindset, one that has to be shared by all the relevant stakeholders, and actively supported by senior management. And as such, your primary challenge is that of change management. How will you to change the hearts and minds of the stakeholders so that your investment in value selling pays off, so that sales people can focus on the value to be co-created with customers?

Looking forward to your comments!

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

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!