Sales management is one of the toughest jobs around—particularly that of the first line sales manager.  Fundamentally, our job is to maximize the performance of our sales teams–both tactically and strategically.  I read a post, How the VP of Sales can Inspire their Sales Team with 4 Simple Habits.  It got me reflecting on how managers maximize their impact, and where managers should spend their time, not just the Vice President of Sales, but all levels of sales management.

The post offers some interesting suggestions, frankly a number of them I disagree with very strongly.  Let’s start with the areas in which we are in real alignment.

The biggest impact a sales manager at any level can have is by being out with their people in front of customers.  Yet too often, exactly the opposite thing happens–managers spend too much of their time internally focused.  They are chained to their desks, conducting internal meetings, conducting internal reviews, spending time reporting on what’s going on.  Some of this is necessary-we need to communicate to the rest of the organization, we need to get resources and support for our people, we need to get help for our customers.  But too often, managers are consumed with this.  They stop visiting customers, they stop visiting their people.

Being chained to the desk, being focused on reporting, staying internally focused on internal politics do not produce revenue or improve the capabilities of sales people.

Without a doubt, the number 1 and the number 1 priorities of sales managers are Customers and Your People!  If the majority of your time isn’t spent in the field working with your people and visiting your customers, you are prioritizing things incorrectly.  Nothing trumps spending your time here–period.  A number of years ago, I was EVP of Sales for a large organization.   I was scheduled to do a presentation at our Board of Directors.  It was an “important” presentation.  As the day approached, a critical customer situation arose.  It was clear that my involvement was needed and, unfortunately, the only time available with the customer conflicted with my ability to present to the Board.  The decision was easy for me–I conveyed my apologies to my boss, the CEO, and to the Board Members, saying Customers and this situation were more important.  Fortunately, my boss and the board applauded that decision–and we did get the order.

So managers need to prioritize time with customers and with their people.  We need to unchain ourselves from our desks and spend the majority of our time in the field.  Take a moment right now and look at your calendar for the past 30 days.  If you haven’t spent a minimum of 50 percent of your time in the field with your people and with customers, you’re not maximizing your impact.

Now once we’ve committed to spend our time in the field, where do we have the most impact?  This is where I think the article is dead wrong.  It suggests that managers spend the bulk of their time with A players and calling on their customers.  I don’t want to ignore the A players, but this is not where the problems are, this is not where managers have the most impact—both in driving performance of sales people and in contributing to closing business.  By definition, the A players really don’t need your help, so it’s irresponsible to focus the bulk of our time with them, unless all you want is “feel good” meetings.

Where we as managers have the greatest impact and leverage is with our B and even C players.  Maximizing the performance of that huge middle range of our people—the B players has the highest return on a manager’s time.  Working with them, we have so much more impact, so much greater room for helping them improve.  Likewise, the impact we have working with them, on their deals, helping strengthen their competitive positioning and moving the deal through the customer’s buying cycle.  (For a different perspective the value of focusing on your B players, look at what the authors of Challenger Selling have to say.)

It may be more fun hanging out with A players and their customers, but that’s not our job as sales managers.  Our job is to maximize the performance of our organization.  We have to invest our time where it has greatest impact, and frankly where we’re needed.  By  definition, it won’t be with our top performers.

This doesn’t say we ignore our C players either.  Our job is to maximize performance, this includes dealing with performance problems.  Coaching our C players–either getting them to be B’s or A’s, moving them into roles where they can be B’s or A’s (and that may be out of the company) is our responsibility as managers.

Whatever level of manager you are, spend your time where you have the greatest impact–it’s always with customers and sales people.  Once you get out to the field, don’t hide out–head straight for the people and customers where you can bring the greatest value and impact, and where you are most needed.  Don’t ignore your A players or your great customers, but they don’t really need you as much.  It’s your B and C players that need you and your attention.  It’s the tough customers where you can help both your people and the customers the most.

Serve your people, serve your customers, the rest takes care of itself.

Related posts:

1. Sales Is Changing, Are You Maximizing Your Impact?
2. Performance Management And Accountability
3. Performance Management Friday — Sales/Management Alignment

“What are you talking about Dave?  Qualifying is the job of sales, why are you talking about customers qualifying opportunities?”  It’s absolutely correct, one of the most critical success factors in sales is qualification.  Sales people need to viciously disqualify opportunities that aren’t in their sweet spot.  It may be a real deal, but it’s not your deal–so don’t waste time on it.

But I think sales people need to go further–I think sales people need to hold the customer accountable for qualifying the opportunity—is it real for them?

If we’re doing our jobs as sales people, we’re identifying lots of opportunities to improve their business, to help them grow.  Customers may want to do a lot of things.  They may be interested in engaging us on to discuss solutions.  But wanting to do something is different than having the ability to do something.  Customers need to qualify themselves—sales people need to help them.  Do they really have the ability to drive the change.

There lots of things that could cause a customer to disqualify themselves.  It may be something they want to do, but they have higher priorities.  Their organizations may not have the ability to do it–they need to focus on their readiness first.  It may be critical to them and their function, but it’s not important enough to the organization overall–they may have other priorities or strategic initiatives that take precedence.  They may not have the risk profile necessary to successfully manage the change.  The reasons can go on.

As sales people we can’t answer these issues for the customer and qualify them.  They have to challenge themselves on these issues.  Customers may not know how to do this, they may not even know they must do this.  After all, they may not buy these solutions that frequently, so while they may have the desire to change, the interest in doing something; they may not have the ability to do it.

It’s important to guide the customer through these discussions.  We don’t want to waste our time in  pursuing something that won’t happen–regardless of how compelling our case is.  We don’t want the customer’s expectations to be raised inappropriately–then dashed because they discover they can’t go forward.

Qualification is not just something sales people do.  It’s a shared responsibility, customers have to qualify the opportunity–their ability to do something (more than their willingness), and their desire to work with us in assessing the opportunity.

Are you helping your customer do the right job of qualification?

Related posts:

1. Customers Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
2. Our Customers Need To Do A Better Job Of Buying!
3. Those Damn Customers Just Get In The Way Of Doing Business!

I’ve written quite a bit about Challenger Selling and it’s many related concepts–it is after all a different articulation of the solution, customer focused, consultative, value based, provocative selling approaches we all know.  Every once in a while, I think–wouldn’t it be novel to look at things from the customer’s perspective?  What might Challenger Buying look like?

There are a couple of perspectives we might think about.  One is Challenger Buying has existed for a very long time–we, as sales professionals are waking up to the fact and addressing it.  The other is how difficult it is to do Challenger Buying–from a customer perspective.  I’ll talk about both in separate articles.

I’ll start with the second–we can’t underestimate the difficulty of doing Challenger Buying.  The premises of any kind of solution selling, including Challenger, is that we are bringing the customer new ideas.  We are challenging them to think about their businesses differently.  We are helping them to discover new opportunities.  There is no doubt, we create the greatest value for our customers when we are engaging them in this manner.  Customers don’t need us pitching our products, spewing all sorts of data about features, benefits, and so forth.

But Challenger Buying is, to say the least, very challenging for the customer—more so than it is for the sales person to do Challenger Selling.  At it’s core, it’s about risk, change, readiness, and priorities. 

As sales people, I think we often lose sight of what we are doing to the customer.  We’re doing the best that we can to help them discover ways of improving their business.  We get our customers excited about the opportunities, we show them how our solutions can help capitalize on the opportunities.

But then, from a customer point of view, reality starts to set in.  How do we (the customer) make this happen?  What are the risks?  How do we manage those risks–can we manage them?  What are the consequences of failure—or even a slight miss?  What does this mean to our organization?  What does it take for us to do this?  Are we ready and prepared?  How do we manage the change?  How does if fit into our priorities–often it may mean a complete shift in priorities.

The challenge of Challenger Buying became very clear in a conversation I had with a top executive recently.  He was struggling and called me for some advice.  It seemed that a sales team had done an awesome job in helping him see new opportunities for his business.  He shared with me how exciting the concept was, how clearly he could see the impact on the future of his company, and how he could see the value of the solution the sales team was presenting.  He said the business case was obvious and compelling.

I asked him, “So what’s bothering you?”

He responded, “I worry about our ability to make it happen.  There is so much more than just the solution the sales team presented.  We have to make it happen.”  He went on to talk about the risks of failure–he could see ways to manage those and accept those.  He was worried about the change and how to prioritize this initiative with the other priorities they faced.  He clearly understood he’d have to shift the priorities, but there was a very high risk in the short term (about 9 months) revenue impact.  These impacts were in other parts of his business–not related to the challenging idea, but in shifting his priorities the ripple through the organization had impacts far beyond the idea itself.

I asked, “What’s the sales team doing to help you find answers to this?” 

He said, “They can’t do much.  The things risks, shifts in priorities, and change management involves things far outside their ability to contribute.”

This example is pretty dramatic, it involved a fairly substantive shift in the company strategy.  Most Challenger Sales may not be that dramatic, but we have to understand Challenger Buying!  We aren’t doing our job and we won’t be successful unless we help our customer in their buying (funny how it always comes back to helping the customer buy).  We have to help them understand the risks, change, readiness, and prioritization issues.  We have to help the customer solve and manage these.

Challenger Buying is tough–if we are going to be successful with Challenger Selling, we need to shift our focus to Challenger Buying.

Related posts:

1. Sending Your Sales People Out Naked, The Problem With “Challenger Selling”
2. Buying Isn’t Important, It’s The Results Of Buying That Are Important!
3. Buying Has Nothing To Do With The Product We Sell!

One of the things I love the most about sales people is the eternal optimism.  It really takes a tremendously positive outlook to be a great sales person.  After all, we face rejection every day.  We face challenges and obstacles in every situation.  Some are challenges come from changing customer expectations. We always face market and competitive challenges.  Sometimes we face challenges from within our own companies.

It requires tremendous resilience and optimism to succeed in selling.

But sometimes that optimism hurts us.  Sometimes it prevents us from looking at reality, from seeing things the way they really are, not how we want them to be.  This is, perhaps, the most dangerous challenge sales people face.  It’s one of our own creation.  And it’s funny, it sneaks up on us–it never smacks us in the face, it kind of creeps in.  All of a sudden we find ourselves mired in a very difficult situation, struggling to understand and work our ways out.

It happens all sorts of ways.  Our pipelines aren’t as full as we want.  Our managers may be pressuring us to increase the numbers of deals in the pipeline.  We relax our qualification criteria to get more deals—but because they aren’t in our sweet spot, our ability to win is threatened.  All of a sudden our win rates go down.  This makes our pipelines look worse, we relax our qualification criteria further…. you know how this story ends.

Or it’s the deal we just can’t let go.  We’ve invested a lot of time and resource.  We believe if we just do a few more things, we can persevere.  We do those, it’s not sufficient, we do a few more…… it goes on forever.  The deal’s dead, but we can’t let it go.

Or we are busy, our days our filled with meeting after meeting, call after call.  But we aren’t making progress.  We confuse busyness with progress and accomplishment.

Facing reality is critical to our success.  If our pipelines aren’t full, we mask the real problem by filling them with junk.  If a deal just won’t move forward, continuing with wishful thinking doesn’t change things–it keeps us from really understanding what it takes to win–or even if it is winnable  And busyness masks everything.  We don’t have the time to reflect, to understand if we are making progress or just filling our time.

Facing reality is tough.  We may discover things we don’t want to confront.  We may not be as strong as we had hoped we were.  We may discover we need new skills to improve our ability to compete.  It may tell us we’re spending our time with the wrong customers–that we may have to find new customers.

Facing reality is important.  Good or bad, it provides the ability to understand the issues most impacting our performance.  It helps us identify and solve our problems.  It allows us to improve or fix things that keep us from achieving our goals.

It’s easy and tempting to fool ourselves, to the point of hiding our heads in the sand.  But that doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it worse.

If you aren’t achieving your goals, are you really looking at what’s happening.  Are you seeing things the way they are or the way you want them to be?  Facing reality is the only path to performance improvement.

Related posts:

1. What Are The Biggest Challenges Facing Sales VP’s In This Economy
2. No Grin-F#!?ing Allowed!
3. Are Your People Selling What They’re Supposed To Sell?

I started my career selling mainframe computers for IBM.  When I joined IBM, they were just coming off several years of an advertising campaign that presented a rather stark proposition, “What If…”  That was it, nothing else.

For some reason that campaign had fallen out of favor with all the marketing and advertising types and was displaced by something that was frankly not memorable.

But from a sales point of view, the campaign was inspirational–it still is.

Today, so many of the great customer conversations begin with “What if….” or “Have you ever thought of…” or “Have you considered…..”

Engaging the customer in thinking, in considering new ideas, in helping them see new opportunities, in exploring is the start of all great sales opportunities.  It starts new conversations, it starts new thinking, it creates new engagement.  It drives change.  It creates opportunity for our customers and for us.

We talk a lot about engaging customers in new conversations, some of them are provocative, some of them are challenging, too many seem to be about “telling.”  There is tremendous merit in these approaches, but sometimes I wonder if we make these conversations more complicated than they need be.

We’re trying to engage our customers.  We are trying to help our customer discover opportunities to grow and improve–how they can leverage our capabilities to accelerate their ability to do so.  It’s a collaborative process.

Somehow, it seems more of our conversations should start with, “What if….”

No related posts.

I’ve got a terrible confession to make.  I cheat.  I don’t want to play fair and square.  I don’t like to play on a level playing field.  I do everything I can to tilt deals to my favor.  I do everything I can to stack the deck.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Our inclination as sales people is to do this.  We want our customers to prioritize the things that we do well and that our competitors do poorly.  Likewise, we want our customer to de-prioritize the things our competitors do well and we do poorly.  We do everything we can to shift the criteria and customer’s attitudes in our favor.

Unfortunately, in the new world of buying, it’s becoming more and more difficult to stack the deck.  Customers are determining their needs, requirements and priorities without us.  By the time they’ve developed a short list, their requirements are already locked in concrete.  The vendors on the shortlist—our competitors and us, are there because we all meet their minimum needs.  The customers have leveled the playing field for those they have invited to play.  Now we’re in an elimination match.

If we want to stack the deck, we have to change our approach.  We can’t wait for the customer to have a need, we have to be premptive.  We have to get in early–before the customer has a need, before they recognize they have a problem.  To stack the deck, we need to get them excited about a new opportunity for their company–a way to grow, a way to improve.  We want to create a sense of urgency around what that will do for them, and how we can help them do this.

If we want to stack the deck, we have to invest in them.  We have to earn the right to have them listen to our ideas about changing their business.  We have to have credibility and their trust. 

We have to create value–both in the ideas and interactions, and in the solutions we offer.  If we don’t we’re helping our competitors stack the deck for themselves.  We have to offer more than a product pitch, we have to do more than answer their questions, handle their objections and ask for the order.  Everyone else is doing that, we have to be different.

Some might say, “Dave that’s unrealistic, while we try to do that, the customer wants to create a level playing field.”  I’m not sure I agree.  I’m not sure that customers want to create a level playing field.  I think customers want to stack the decks in their favor—in favor of helping them achieve their goals, and produce results.  If we do our job right–we can align ourselves with the customer, stacking the deck to allow each of us achieve our objectives.

What are you doing to stack the deck?

Related posts:

1. Buying Has Nothing To Do With The Product We Sell!
2. Performance Management Friday — Win/Loss Analysis

I read a fascinating Op Ed piece by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, Average Is Over.  It’s a fascinating piece.  As I reflected on the piece it struck me how important this concept is to professional selling.

Friedman makes the point, “”…everyone needs to find their extra–their unique value contribution that makes them stand out…”   Friedman is not writing about organizations, he’s writing about individuals, each  of us.   It’s a profound concept, understanding it is like discovering the secret decoder ring for sales success.

In a buyer’s world, where too many products are undifferentiated, where the differences between the companies that stand behind the products are relatively small, where quality is similar, where everything balances out–and on average they are the same, there are two things that stand out as real differentiators:  price and what each of us contributes as sales professionals.  And in competitive situations, where pricing is roughly the same, the difference between winning and losing is each of us.

It’s no longer sufficient to be “average.”  Each of us has to find a way to stand out and differentiate what we do.  It might be our knowledge of what the customer is trying to do, it might be the confidence we instill about the new solution, it might  be the trust we have earned in working with them.

Just good enough is no longer a winning strategy (a number of years ago, I worked with an industry leading company that had that as their strategy–and they were remarkably successful.  We have to set ourselves apart, we have to create the value and differentiate ourselves.  As Friedman points out, it is ultimately what each of us contributes that makes a real difference.

It’s a tremendously powerful concept for sales people, partly because it’s a simple concept, partly because it puts success or failure squarely in our hands.  We can control and manage the difference we make with our customers.  We can control and manage the value we create to set ourselves apart.  Competing and winning becomes much more clear–we are in control because it is the differentiation that each of us create that separate us from the average.  It can actually be quite easy–particularly if everyone else is striving to be average.  In essence, we become the value proposition–or we can be one of the crowd, average.

Sales people–and the people they engage in working with a customer are the ultimate differentiators.  How we and our team work with the customer is what separates us from the rest–the average.

Do you know what separates you and distinguishes you from everyone else?  Are you demonstrating that in every interaction with your customers?

Do you know what distinctive value you create–for your customers, for the people you work with?  Do they understand that value?

Are you constantly looking to  set yourself apart?

Average is over.  Average is not a winning sales strategy.

No related posts.

Sales people are notoriously bad at writing things down and documenting things.  I talk to thousands a year.  When I start talking about documenting something–a deal plan, an account plan, territory, call plans, even a to-do list–all of a sudden you can see the resistance in their faces. 

They sit back, fold their arms.  Most say nothing, but a few courageous one’s will say, “Dave, you don’t get it.  I’m  too busy to do this.  I don’t have time to document these things–it’s too bureaucratic–I’ve got a plan, it’s in my head!”

I’m used to this.  I respond, “OK, I get it, let’s talk about your plan for this opportunity………”  It’s always the same, they start talking, they tell me about the deal, they tell me about what they’ve done.  I start asking questions, “Where are you in the sales process, how do you know you are aligned with the customer buying process, what are the risks to the customers in this project, what is your positioning vis a vis the competitors, ….. the list goes on.”  I get more data, but as we proceed, it gets sketchier and sketchier. 

We then talk about “What are the next things you need to do, who do you need to do it with, when are you going to do it?  What’s the positioning you need to win this deal?”   They respond, they outline action plans and strategies, I take notes, writing down the next steps.  Ususally they don’t.  They say, they’re under control, they can do the deal, they don’t need to document the plan.  I smile and thank them.

At the first milestone, I call or email, “How did it go?”  You know what happens–the majority of the time, the response comes back, “I forgot to do it, I’ll get right on it.”  The second milestone, “How did it go?”  You know…..

We sit down, I pull out my notes from the last meeting and ask “We developed these strategies to position ourselves to win.  We committed to these steps and actions to execute the strategies.  Where are we in executing the plan?”  The discussion usually involves a lot of hand waving, some apologies, a re-commitment to execute the strategy, then a quick escape.  This time they write a few things down, but too often, they’re forgotten.

Sales people are right, they are busy, they’ve got a lot of things to do, different deals, different accounts, different sales callse.  Changing customer requirements, shifts in our strategies.  It’s impossible to keep it in your head.  You lose most of it–you may remember one or two things, you may have jotted down a couple of reminders, but most of the time we’re busy with activities, responding customer requests, reacting to what may have happened in the last call.  We drift further and further away from our plans and strategies.  Sales cycles get lengthened, deals go away.

It is impossible to keep it all in our heads!  We need to document our plans, we need to use the plans to guide our actions, keeping us focused, on target, moving forward purposefully in the execution of our strategies.  We need to document our plans–they provide the basis for what we do every day.  They provide the foundation of taking our daily activities and transforming them into accomplishments.

Being too busy to  document your plans–whether it’s a deal plan, prospecting, call, territory, account or other plan–is just an excuse.  It’s an excuse for being less productive, it’s an excuse for winning less, it’s an excuse for not being accountable.

Writing it down, keeps us focused, having it documented, means we don’t have to remember and we never forget.  Many of us work with teams–a documented plan keeps the team focused, well coordinated and moving forward.

• Do you take the time to maximize your productivity, impact and effectiveness?
• Are you documenting and updating all your deal/opportunity plans?
• Are you documenting and updating your prospecting plans?
• Are you documenting and updating your account and territory plans?
• Are you prioritizing all of these in your day to day activities?

Related posts:

1. Not Worth The “Paper It’s Written” On
2. Reacting!
3. Performance Management Friday — Wallet Share

I’ve been writing a lot about changing the conversation, about challenging our customers, about getting them to think differently.  A lot of readers have been sending me notes, asking for advice on how to do this.

While I agree with many of the principles outlined in Challenger Selling and Provocative Selling, I take a little different view on things.  The basic premise of many of these approaches is that we have to know our customers businesses better than they do, we have to have better ideas for their business or function than they do.

I tend to think of this as a little arrogant and misplaced.  I also tend to think this short changes our customer and us of some opportunities.

Don’t get me wrong.  To engage in these business conversations, we have to understand business—both business in general, but more specifically our customers and their businesses.  We have to analyze their businesses, we have to look at opportunities they are missing, things they can do differently, things they can improve.  It takes research, high levels of business acumen, and deep understanding of what’s going on in our customers.

Often, as I’m preparing to approach a prospect and engage them in these types of conversations, I think, “What would I do if I were running the business?  (or the function that we might focus on)  What would I change?  What new opportunities might I consider?”  I try to put myself in the customer’s place, seeing things through their eyes and develop some ideas on issues, opportunities, possible solutions.

It’s a great exercise, it gives you the opportunity to start to develop some premises around shaping the conversation.  Now here’s where it starts getting interesting.  First, customers tend to like these conversations–as long as you’ve gotten them at the right moment.  No one is having conversation like this with them.  No one is bringing them new ideas.  They’re hungry for ideas.

Here’s where I have a departure from many others writing about this topic.  Many say, you have to know your customer’s business better than they do, you have to have better answers than they do.  It strikes me a both a little arrogant and unrealistic.  If we truly knew better than they, then we should be looking to run the company, not sell to it.  But the real issue is we always view their businesses from the outside.  As much research as we do, as great as our ideas, we never have a perspective from the inside.

The real conversation starts at the intersection of these points of view–our outside perspective, experiences and idea–unhindered by “legacy experience,” and that of the customer who is, after all most knowledgeable about the internal dynamic of their companies.  It’s this combinatation where the real magic can happen.  It’s the combination of the best thinking from the inside and the outside that enables us to help the customer achieve more than they could ever imagine.

There’s an interesting dynamic that happens–the conversation no longer is challenging–it’s collaborative.  It’s the customer and us worling together to determine a solution that neither of us could have come up with separately.

It sounds kind of idealized, but I see these happening all the time.  I have them weekly with my clients–some of the highest performing executives in their functions in the world.  I see great sales people having these conversations about problems they can help their customers solve.  Clever sales people are working with customers to create solutions–leveraging the customer’s ideas and capabilities along with their solutions.  I’m working with a small company in the health services sector.  They support some of the back office functions in hospitals.  They are engaging their customers in some different conversations about their function.  Completely changing what how they deliver services and the services their customers acquire.  Another client, a company that sells commoditized electronic components is having conversations with some of the largest mobile telephone manufacturers in the world.  They aren’t talking about electronic components, but re-looking at the way mobile phones are designed and manufactured.  Another client in the bulk chemicals industry engages their customers in conversations about the future of detergent, or foods, or other things.  Still another, a provider of enterprise software is talking to their customers about a different way of running their companies.

These conversations are happening everyday, they aren’t idealized conversations, but they are sales people who want to talk about more than their products, and their customers who want to explore different ideas to grow.

I’ve written before about sales people as solution creators—but in reality solution creation is really the result of a collaboration between the customer and great sales people.

These conversations can be remarkable.  Whether it is looking at running a function more effectively, whether it is about something people have viewed as commodities, but changing the perspective of the customer.  We can have great ideas and great solutions.  We can challenge our customers and present things they should be doing. 

But the real magic is not having the customer buy our ideas, but engaging the customer in a discussion and collaborating to develop even better solutions and approaches.  To do something neither of us could have done individually.

Perhaps the real conversations need not be challenging conversations, but collaborative conversations.

Related posts:

1. What Conversations Are You Starting?
2. Challenging Idea
3. Sending Your Sales People Out Naked, The Problem With “Challenger Selling”

As I mentioned in the previous, What If We’re Not Important post, it’s always difficult to imagine what we sell and do may not be important.

Don’t get me wrong, what we do is important to someone–after all if we were truly not important, then our companies would be out of business.  The issue is are we important enough for the customers to invest in now?  We may have great business cases, but regardless how compelling the business case, if we aren’t at the top of the hit parade of our customers’ strategic initiatives, we won’t get the order.

In the last post, I suggested we address this by trying to align ourselves with one of the top 2-3 strategic initiatives.  If we can do this and become part of something important to the customer, that’s ideal.  However, try as we might, sometimes we just can’t do this.  How do we move forward?  How do we continue to sell and grow?

While it may seem an unusual strategy, perhaps we can win by making ourselves “unimportant.”  Yes, I know, it sounds weird, if they won’t buy because we’re not important, how are we ever going to convince them to buy if we demonstrate that we’re unimportant?

Here’s the thought.  There are lots of things that have to get done within organizations to make them work.  They may not be important or strategic initiatives, but they have to get done because they can impact the ability to execute strategic initiatives.  Executives can’t ignore these things—but they shouldn’t be spending their time on these things—and that’s the “in” we have to exploit.

With due respect to some of my followers who provide Janitorial services or Waste Management services (actually every sales person can learn a lot from these businesses), clean offices and empty trash cans shouldn’t be on our customers’ minds.  Clean offices and empty trash cans are unlikely to ever be part of a strategic initiative in a company.

At the same time, it’s important to have clean offices and empty trash cans.  Without these, it could impact the ability of people to execute their strategic initiatives.  (Remember for the lack of a horseshoe, a kingdom was lost.).

I’m doing the people who sell these services a disservice–their strategies in dealing with this reality are quite sophisticated and successful.  Mostly because they don’t let their egos get involved in their self importance.

But for many of us, it’s difficult to put our solutions in the same category–even though our customers already have done that.

The opportunity here is to make it so unimportant to the management team that they just don’t have to worry about it or deal with it.  They should be focusing on the execution of their strategic initiatives–not worrying about if the offices are clean and the trash has been dealt with.  A very powerful sales strategy is to take the problem off our customers’ already overloaded plates.  “You shouldn’t have to worry about this or deal with it, let us take it off your hands so you never have to be concerned.”

Our customers want to and should be focusing only on their strategic initiatives.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of other things that may consume their time–making sure the offices are running smoothly, the cash is collected, the machines are operating, the computers are working, we can make copies of documents, payroll goes out, and the list goes on and on and on.  If our products and services fit in those categories, our value is “the customer just doesn’t have to worry about it, they don’t have to spend a nanosecond thinking about it, they can spend all their time dealing with the important issues.”

Once we start thinking about things this way, it opens new ways of thinking about our products and services.  Some impact our sales strategies, some impact our overall business and solutions strategies.  We see so many companies defining what they do based on being “unimportant” to the customer.  While the folks at Xerox may quibble with me, document production, copying is really not mission critical for most of us.  Xerox and it’s competitors used to sell copiers–but the company still had to worry about it, they had to make sure to order paper and toner.  They had to have people capable of dealing with simple problems like jams.  It’s not really on the critical path to anything at a company, but it’s something that has to get done.  So Xerox and it’s competitors are adopting new strategies–they’re not just selling copiers, they are selling managed print services.  They are saying, don’t worry about it, don’t invest any time in thinking about it, don’t train your people on how to fix jams, we’ll manage all of that for you.

Being “unimportant” to our customers opens a whole new range of opportunities for us, new problems to take off our customers’ hands, new things they don’t have to or want to worry about.  We can redefine our offerings and services to exploit this–in fact creating powerful relationships and solving important problems — giving management more time to focus on what’s really important.  (Isn’t it funny how this works?)

So maybe we should stop pushing ropes uphill.  If we can’t be strategically important to our customers, if we can’t be on their critical growth path, perhaps we should focus on being unimportant to our customers.  There are more opportunities than we realize to make money by being unimportant.

(By the way, if you are struggling with these issues, call us up. We’ve been working with lot of organizations on strategies to overcome this. We’d be glad to explore these with you.)

Related posts:

1. What If We’re Not Important?
2. Buying Isn’t Important, It’s The Results Of Buying That Are Important!
3. How Important Are “Techniques” To Sales?